Hine believed his images of children, some as young as 8, laboring in mills, meatpacking houses, coal mines and canneries would force demands for change. He was right. Regulations and legislation cut the number of child laborers nearly in half by 1920. Editors of Time Magazine selected Hine’s photo of Sadie Pfeifer as one of the 100 most influential images of all time.
Firearms enthusiasts like shooting snapshots of their guns almost as much as shooting the guns themselves. And a cell phone photo is worth a thousand tweets … and a thousand bucks to an illegal gun dealer. Brian Ries explains:
“Users of Instagram, which has no explicit policy prohibiting the sale of firearms, can easily find a chrome-plated antique Colt, a custom MK12-inspired AR-15 tricked-out with ‘all best of the best parts possible,’ and an HK416D .22LR rifle by simply combining terms like #rifle or #ar15 with #forsale. These are handguns, shotguns, assault rifles, and everything in between being sold in an open, pseudo-anonymous online marketplace. With no federal law banning online sales and differing, loophole-ridden state laws, many gun control advocates are concerned about the public safety consequences of this unregulated market.”
The iconic 1932 photo of construction workers eating lunch on a steel beam high above Rockefeller Center, attributed to Charles C. Ebbets, is considered a documentary classic. There are many tributes (like the Sergio Furnari sculpture above) and parodies. Corbus, which owns the photo rights to “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper,” says it’s licensed more often than any of the snaps in the firm’s 20-million-image catalog.
Photographs by Bonita F. Bing, Benson Blake, E. Carol Burns, Danita Delaney, Bruce Fagin, Lisa A. Fanning, Sharon Farmer, Michael Gross, Gail Hansberry, Donnamaria R. Jones, Gloria Kirk, Lionel Miller, Otis P. Motley, and Michael G. Smith.
“The Kodak has been a sore calamity to us. The most powerful enemy indeed…. The only witness I have encountered in my long experience I couldn’t bribe.”
— Quotation from Mark Twain’s bitter satire “King Leopold’s Soliloquy” (1905) about the Belgian monarch behind unspeakable atrocities in the Congo.
Eastman Kodak introduced Kodachrome photographic film in 1935, and ceased production in July 2009. The beloved color reversal film was a mainstay of magazine photojournalism and family snapshots (confidentially, some of us preferred Ektachrome and Fujicolor). The Kodachrome development process is complicated and requires professional handling and proprietary chemicals.
Now that the stock of film and chemicals is exhausted, the last Kodak-certified processor, Dwayne’s Photo of Parsons, Kansas, will stop developing Kodachrome film at the end of this month. National Geographic photographer Steve McCurry bought the last roll of Kodachrome ever produced; Dwayne’s Photo developed it in July.
That’s not the end of the story, though. The last decades of the 20th century will always look like Kodachrome.
Photographer Roy Lewis began his professional career in 1964 when Jet magazine published his photo of Thelonius Monk. Mr. Lewis was with Jet and Ebony before leaving Chicago for Washington in the 1970s to work for the Afro-American Newspapers, the Washington Informer, and as a freelance photographer.
Roy Lewis has captured images of the African-American experience for a half century, across the country and beyond. In 1974, when Muhammad Ali fought George Foreman in Zaire, Roy Lewis was there with a camera. No wonder his current exhibit at Gallery 110 is called “Everywhere with Roy Lewis.”
Everywhere with Roy Lewis
Gallery 110, Gateway Arts Center
3901 Rhode Island Avenue Brentwood, MD. 20722 (map) Tuesday – Saturday: 10:00 am – 6:00 pm & Thursday 10:00 am – 7:00 pm
Free. For more information call (301) 209-0592
