Just a short post today, to mention two articles I’ve seen in the last week or so that I think deserve reading. The first, in the New York Times, is very relevant to something I mentioned a couple of weeks ago in Women in Photojournalism, and article reminding younger photographers and writers about photography that women have played an important part in photography for many years.
For news photography, it was really the period from the 70s to the 90s that really brought women into the industry in large numbers – and when ,as the ultralong title states The First Female Photographers Brought a New Vision to The New York Times. And to go with that long title is a long sub-title “The generation of talent brought in from 1973 to 1992 changed the paper’s look.”
Of course there were women who came before that, such as Christina Bloom, the UK’s first female press rhotographer in the early years of the 2oth century, and Margaret Bourke-White and many more, but they were in a sense exceptions and it was only in the 70s or later that it really became quite normal. Not to say of course that there are not still areas of inequality and prejudice.
On a quite different subject, I was reminded a few days ago of something I’ve written about before and went again to look at the powerful images produced by Raymond Depardon in Glasgow in 1980, available on Magnum with an essay from the book by William Boyd. I’m reminded of when Picture Post sent Bill Brandt to Glasgow and were shocked at the images he sent back, cool and detached cityscapes reminiscent of de Chirico. Immediately they recalled him and sent up Bert Hardy to get his hands dirty on the street, producing a remarkable image of boys on the Gorbal streets. Depardon seems to me to to combine the best of both, surrealism and reality, in his pictures.