In evaluating photography’s newly-conferred academic respectability, then, it is important to take note of the implicit premises thereof. Wrapping the mantle of scholarly approval around a medium which has received the cold shoulder from birth is surely a significant attempt at redefinition. […]
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I’m pleased and proud to announce that this ongoing investigative project, with its working title of “Alternate History: Robert Capa on D-Day,” has just received the 2014 Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi (SDX) Award for Research About Journalism. As its website indicates, “The Society of Professional Journalists, founded 1909, is a professional organization […] The surrealist photocollages of Allen A. Dutton began to circulate in the 1960s, linking him to a cohort in photography that, collectively, challenged the photo establishment’s dictates regarding acceptable subject matter and content while, simultaneously, extending the range of approved craft practices. This put him in the company of Jerry Uelsmann, Les Krims, Arthur Tress, Bea Nettles, and other transgressive spirits expanding the definition of photography. […] Looking at John Szarkowski’s photographs and Cornell Capa’s, asking myself — based on that early evidence of personal tendency and taste — which of the two had surprised me most as advocates for photography by transcending the narrow-mindedness to which performers in any medium are prone in order to create an institutional environment with an atmosphere of tolerance and encouragement for all, the unequivocal answer that came was Cornell Capa. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |
Time Capsule 1974: Collier’s Encyclopedia Yearbook
I took the assignment of writing this annual round-up of events in the photo world as an opportunity to create a time capsule of sorts for users of Collier’s Encyclopedia. I just came across the one that appeared 40 years ago in the 1975 edition of the Yearbook, synopsizing the year 1974 (and the last months of of 1973). Here it is. […]