This photograph, gorgeous in its’ tragic sadness, depicts a lone black woman in a bonnet standing near a slave pen, a structure used by slave dealers to hold enslaved people temporarily before they were moved futher south for sale.
Taken in Alexandria, Virginia
Derived from a glass negative.
“Rex Theatre For Colored People”
Leland, Mississippi
June 1937
Photographer: Dorothy Lange
Photographers working for the Farm Security Administration Historical Section were encouraged to document continuity and change in many aspects of life in America They were particularly encouraged to photograph billboards and signs as one indicator of such developments, and that search produced haunting photographs of signs enforcing racial discrimination.
Two Girls In A Snowy Garden
Photographer: George Hendrik Breitner
Breitner is known primarily as an eccentric painter of cityscapes, nudes and genre studies. However, he was also one of the most interesting photographers of his day, recording life in Amsterdam and other large cities such as Paris and Berlin in a style that was singularly personal and modern. He created many snapshot-style photographs on the streets as well as informal images of people’s home life. The photographs he took were less static than the typical professional photographs of his contemporaries. Breitner digressed from standard practices and experimented with technology. He opted for extremely high or extremely low perspectives, photographed into the light and managed to portray scenes of urban vitality using deliberately blurred images.
Breitner began to take photographs about 1889. He was one of the first to explore the potential offered by hand-held cameras, which had only just been introduced at the time. The several thousand photographs emerged from obscurity only in 1961 and might plausibly have been lost forever. He is now regarded as a forerunner of street photography. He may have taken some photographs to inform his paintings, loosely executed, heavily impastoed canvases often of outdoor scenes in Amsterdam and other cities, but most of his pictures have no bearing on his other works.
In making photographs Breitner could adopt a less formal attitude toward the world than demanded by the conventions of fine art. Occasionally the revealed moment yields a fleeting discovery — a passerby shoots a fuzzy smile at the camera or a man is caught urinating against a wall — but what is most striking about these works is not the instances of serendipity but the drama of a tentative formal vocabulary working itself out, with varying success. Breitner forged a kind of anti-pictorialism by making aesthetic decisions that his contemporaries would have frowned upon. Blotchy silhouettes and off-kilter viewpoints distinguish the mysterious glimpse of two girls in the snow shown above; poor contrast results in images suffused in hazy scattering of grayish light. His experiments with exposure and his tolerance for blurs and other awkward effects are like the notebook drafts of a poet who has let himself drift into uncharted waters. Those waters were later navigated by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank and continue to be investigated by photographers to this day.
