I was all set to post about something international and expansive, and I will, but today I found myself looking instead at the work of a few photographers whose work is very circumscribed: a town, a daughter, a life. And despite these seeming limitations, I found them to be just as expansive as anything else I could have found.
This past fall, the International Center of Photography hosted the exhibit Bill Wood’s Business, organized by Marvin Heiferman and Diane Keaton (yes, that Diane Keaton). The ICP site describes the exhibit nicely:
Bill Wood’s business was photography—and he produced tens of thousands of images over the course of his career. From 1937 (the tail end of the Great Depression) through the boom years that followed World War II and until his death in 1973, the Bill Wood Photo Company… provided commercial photographic services: using large format cameras, and shooting mostly black-and-white film, Wood offered studio portraits and professional photographs, taken on location. The variety of subjects and situations he captured provide an in-depth photographic record of life in Fort Worth, Texas, a post-World War II American city just hitting its stride.
I especially love this image of a Pontiac convertible filled with a year’s supply of kleenex: your incentive to buy!
Like so many parents, photographer Jack Radcliffe started taking photographs of his daughter Alison soon after she was born. Unlike most parents, though, he turned his photographs into a fine art project. His camera follows Alison as she grows from a small child into a troubled adolescent into a complicated adult. The black and white photographs are lovely and troubling.
Finally, Jamie Livingston’s Photo of the Day serves as a memorial to Livingston, a cinematographer who took a photograph of something or someone every day, from March, 1979, until his death in 1997. Taken together, the images provide a glimpse into how Livingston saw the world: what mattered to him, what amused him, what caught his eye every day for almost twenty years.
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