Editorial

Week 1 - In our first lesson we discussed what the editorial brief actually entails for this year, we will have to produce 10 images that tell a story about a current or historical issue, the only stipulation is that the story is based on something in Lancashire.

Research suggestions:-

• Magnum photographic agency
• Black star agency
• The black and white spider awards
• AOP

Photographers:-

• Donovan Wylie
• Simon Norfolk
• Kevin Carter
• Bang Bang club
• Lee Friedlander
• James White
• Peter Turnley
• Thomas Zewski

Editorial photography refers to the pictures in a magazine that are not advertisements.

We can also use dialog with each image to help tel the story that we are trying to get across.

We then watched a video on you tube about an estate called shadsworth estate in Blackburn, Lancashire. It was to do with what happens on this estate, what problems occurred on the streets, why people dont have jobs and why kids got kicked out of school, these are the issues that we came up with:-

• Education
• Alcohol
• Unemployment
• Drugs
• Vandalism
• Anti social behavior
• Family breakdown
• Industrial decline
• Immigration
• Bored
• Responsibility
• Benefits
• Diet
• Health
• Austerity cuts
• Policing cuts
• Prison overcrowding
• Aspirations
• Addictions

This is the link to the Shadsworth estate documentary:-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Sm5VSo43JM

In my work that i will be creating i can try and use some of this issues to tell my story but i can also choose to tell a story about something a bit more pleasant.

Week 2 - This week we took a look at Life magazine, this was a magazine that was published throughout America for 75 years, it was set up in 1936 and it closed in 1972, it was Americas most dynamic decade.

The main people we looked at was:-

• Robert Packa
• Thomas Mcavoy
• Peter Stackpole
• Alfred Alterstate - he had over 2000 assignments
• William J summits
• Ralph Morse
• Burke
• Bill Epridge
• Manny Milan
• Larry Burrows - (son(Russel Burows))
• Charles Moore
• Benson
• W.Eugene Smith

Why are people now a days interested more in the life of celebrities than the life of everyday people? Is it because celebrities are a talking point?

Illuminati - modern illuminati

In editorial photography you don't have to obsess over technique, it is more about capturing the perfect moment not about making sure you have the correct settings and because you are messing around with your camera and settings for too long you will miss the shot.

Week 3 - If we are looking for inspiration we should look at Magnum, the main people to look at on this website is:-

• Peter Marlow
• Ian Berry
• Martin Parr
• Abbas

 When I searched Blackburn UK on Magnum, this is what I found:-



Establishing shot:-

• Opens your story
• Literal description of location or subject
• Image which includes a roadsigns

We then watched a documentary on you tube about peoples life on the streets in Glasgow, here is the link as it is a must watch.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dzAglwzetY


In a digital age — when so so much of what we see, hear and act upon is comprised wholly of incorporeal ones and zeroes — the physical world can sometimes seem insubstantial. The games, apps, videos, news articles, photographs and other media we use and “consume” each day might be produced by live human beings occupying real space — but much of what we consider genuine and urgent does not, in some very fundamental ways, actually exist.

If you’re reading this on a handheld or a monitor, the letters that you’re reading right now and the words that make up the sentence that’s conveying this thought are perhaps more accurately conceived of as impulses, or bits of energy, rather than as things.

Old photographs that have been scanned and digitized, meanwhile, occupy a complex place in any discussion of what’s “real.” Obviously, a print, a strip of negatives or a contact sheet that one can hold in one’s hands are objects that have a place in the world. They occupy space. And because a roll of film developed in, say, the mid-1940s had a physical presence, it would also be heir to the perils that all other tangible objects, living and inanimate, happen to share: damage, corrosion, decay, dissolution.

Read more: http://life.time.com/history/stalingrad-1947-a-world-in-pieces/#ixzz28VsIKb5N

Thomas Mcavoy - 
Consider the images in this gallery — photographs made by LIFE’s Thomas D. McAvoy in Stalingrad in 1947. Strong, accurate representations of a city struggling to rebuild and to regain some sense of normality after suffering unspeakable destruction during the Second World War, the images are, in fact, far removed from the film that McAvoy must have pulled from his camera after shooting the roll (or rather, the photos from many rolls) depicted here.
But it is the damage to the images — the spots created, in all likelihood, by mold eating away at the film’s emulsion — that not only gives many of these pictures an eerie, discordant beauty, but provides yet another way to consider the nexus of the real and what we might call the seemingly real.
The scenes that McAvoy captured, after all, did happen. Stalingrad was reduced to rubble. Years after war’s end, the only things one could find in abundance there were hunger, cold and a rough pride in their Pyrrhic victory over the Reich. And then, by some accident or mischance or plain old human ineptitude, McAvoy’s physical, photographic record of Stalingrad in 1947 suffered damage itself. The images were, in turn, transformed into near-abstract, ghostly works, within which one can still see remnants of the robust photojournalism that McAvoy consciously, intentionally created.











Peter Stackpole - he was one of Life Magazine's first staff photographers. He won a George Polk Award in 1954 and taught photography at the Academy of Art University. He also wrote a column in U.S. Camera for fifteen years. He was the son of sculptor Ralph Stackpole. Stackpole was one of the “original four” — the celebrated quartet of staff photographers (along with Margaret Bourke-White, Alfred Eisenstaedt and Thomas McAvoy) on LIFE magazine’s masthead at its launch in November 1936.

During his 24-year career at LIFE, Stackpole covered stories as varied in scope and tone as the construction of great bridges, from the Delaware River to the Golden Gate; dance marathons; film directors and movie starlets; and the struggle in the Pacific during World War II. (He worked side by side with a younger but soon-to-be-legendary photographer, W. Eugene Smith, during the Battle of Saipan in the summer of 1944; Stackpole’s name appeared above Smith’s when their graphic, chilling pictures from Saipan were published together in LIFE during the war.)

Jokingly nicknamed “Life Goes to a Party Stackpole” by his colleagues, because he so frequently covered parties and the Hollywood set for the magazine, he spent more than 10 years in LIFE’s Los Angeles bureau reporting on the mystifying universe known as California.

In 1941, Stackpole was assigned to photograph the notoriously hard-partying Errol Flynn, which later came back to haunt him when he was called to the stand as a witness in a 1943 statutory rape case against the movie star. (A nightclub dancer named Peggy Satterlee claimed that, when she was 15 years old, Flynn attacked her on his boat around the time Stackpole was shooting his feature for LIFE; Flynn was acquitted of that charge, and of a similar charge involving another underage girl.)

Read more: http://life.time.com/photographers/photographer-spotlight-peter-stackpole/#ixzz28Vuc8rMw

Ralph Morse - LIFE photographer Ralph Morse was among scores of journalists who descended on Princeton, hoping to find and report on something, anything, that might offer insight into what Einstein’s passing meant to his friends, family and peers, as well as to countless strangers around the world who, for myriad reasons, felt a kinship with the man.

No one but Morse, however, finagled his way into Einstein’s office that day. No one but Morse came away with a photograph that, six decades later, serves as a haunting reflection of both the man and his life’s work: a seemingly simple picture of Einstein’s desk, cluttered with notebooks, journals, a pipe, a tobacco tin; behind the desk a blackboard covered with equations and formulas that, to the untrained eye, possess an almost runic power.

The story of how Morse got the picture, meanwhile, is an object lesson in tenacity and a reminder of the invaluable skill of thinking on one’s feet.

After getting a call that April morning from a LIFE editor telling him that Einstein had died, Morse jumped into his car and sped from his house in northern New Jersey to Princeton.

“I headed to the hospital first,” Morse tells LIFE.com, “but it was chaos — journalists, photographers, onlookers. So I headed over to Einstein’s office [at the Institute for Advanced Study]. On the way, I stopped and bought a case of scotch. I knew people might be reluctant to talk but that they’re usually happy to accept a bottle of booze, rather than money, in exchange for their help. Anyway, I get to the building, find the superintendent, offer him a fifth of scotch and like that, he opens up the office.”

Read more: http://life.time.com/culture/albert-einstein-death-photo-of-his-princeton-office/#ixzz28Vvss6cf

Larry Burrows -  By early 1963, the number of American military personnel in Vietnam had grown from several hundred to more than 10,000 in a few short years. The ramifications of the United States’ direct involvement in a conflict halfway around the globe — less than a decade after the ceasefire in another brutal war in Korea — were certainly part of the national conversation, but in ’63 America’s growing role in Vietnam was not even close to the all-encompassing, divisive issue it would become by the middle of the decade.

Vietnam was on people’s radar, of course, but not as a constant, alarming blip. Military families were learning first-hand (before everyone else, as they always do) that this was no “police action; but for millions of Americans, Vietnam was a mystery, a riddle that no doubt would be resolved and forgotten in time: a little place far away where inscrutable strangers were fighting over … something.

All the more remarkable that in January of 1963, LIFE magazine published the powerful cover article, “We Wade Deeper Into Jungle War,” and illustrated it with not one or two photos but with a dozen pictures — most of them in color — by the great photojournalist, Larry Burrows.

  Burrows, seen at left in Vietnam in 1963, worked steadily — although not exclusively — in Southeast Asia from 1962 until his death in 1971. His work is often cited as the most searing and the most consistently, jaw-droppingly excellent photography from the war, and several of his pictures (“Reaching Out,” for example, featuring a wounded Marine desperately trying to comfort a stricken comrade after a fierce 1966 firefight) and photo essays (like 1965′s magisterial “One Ride With Yankee Papa 13″) both encompassed and defined the long, polarizing catastrophe in Vietnam.

He and three fellow photojournalists died when their helicopter was shot down during operations in Laos. Burrows was 44.

Read more: http://life.time.com/history/vietnam-1963-america-wades-deeper-into-war/#ixzz28Vwlid1U

  

 

 I have looked at the majority of photographers that are part of the LIFE magazine, I find it very interesting and also inspiring so i bought the LIFE magazine 75 years book, it also has the first every magazine in the back from November 23rd 1936.

These are just a few of photographs that inside the book, the story's behind these images are life changing, maybe this is why the magazine was named LIFE.

These are all the front covers of the LIFE magazines that where ever made. I have found this book very helpful, it has given me quite a few ideas as to what i want to do for my editorial brief, i want to tell a story that will have relevance in many years to come.

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Today we had Mark Thistlethwaite to show us how to create a double page spread for a magazine. First of all we depicted a magazine called "your cat" we made up a life of someone that might actually buy this magazine.

Mark then put us in groups and gave us a genre that we had to go an photograph, we got urban planner. Once we had been out an got all the images that we wanted, Mark showed us how to create a magazine layout in, INdesign, we then had to use our images and create our own double page spread.

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I have known since the brief was given to us what I wanted to do. I wanted to show how people can still be happy even though they could have been through the most horrendous ordeal. With something like this you have to be careful on how you approach it as some people may get offended. To make the people I used to feel more at ease I would just chat with them and they would open up in their own time, that way it was less upsetting for them. I wont be going into what they have gone through or are going through, this is why I have called my work, "Putting on a brave face :)" this title gives it away that the people I have photographed may be going through something mentally and physically draining but it leaves some confidentiality there also.

I have edited these images while sat with them as I wanted them to be 100% happy with the output. Obviously some of them are of children, this is also why no names are being enclosed, their parents where present when they where taken and also the parents where the ones that decided if they looked respectable enough. Everyone that I have photographed know what I am doing with these images are they are happy enough for me to show them.

I have enjoyed doing this brief for editorial, when I look back on these images in 10 years to come I will feel proud to be the owner and to know that each and every person has a copy of the photograph and can also look back on it and say "I still managed to be happy when that was happening, I can cope with anything".