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Elizabeth 8 © 2009 Joshua Yospyn

DC Photographer Joshua Yospyn is one of the eight photographers exhibiting at Glen Echo Park’s Photoworks Second Annual group exhibition of documentary photography curated by author, photographer and teacher Frank Van Riper.   Be sure to check out the photographers’ websites:  Sean Bowie, Timothy Hyde, Praveen Mantena, Mark Silva, Sonia Suter, Frank Turner, Joshua Yospyn, and Jonathan Zuck.  The show opens with a reception, 6 to 9 pm this Friday, March 19, and runs through Sunday, April 18, 2010.   The photo below is from Yospyn’s film and polaroid series shot at the 2009 Maryland Renaissance Festival.

Zilda © 2010 Frank Turner

DC Photographer Frank Turner is one of the eight photographers exhibiting at Glen Echo Park’s Photoworks Second Annual group exhibition of documentary photography curated by author, photographer and teacher Frank Van Riper.   Be sure to check out the photographers’ websites:  Sean Bowie, Timothy Hyde, Praveen Mantena, Mark Silva, Sonia Suter, Frank Turner, Joshua Yospyn, and Jonathan Zuck.  The show opens with a reception, 6 to 9 pm this Friday, March 19, and runs through Sunday, April 18, 2010.   The photo below is from Frank Turner’s series Z.  (Some images in the Z series NSFW) 

© 2009 Sean M. Bowie

Eight local photographers are exhibiting at Glen Echo Park’s Photoworks Second Annual group exhibition of documentary photography curated by author, photographer and teacher Frank Van Riper.   Be sure to check out the photographers’ websites:  Sean Bowie, Timothy Hyde, Praveen Mantena, Mark Silva, Sonia Suter, Frank Turner, Joshua Yospyn, and Jonathan Zuck.  The show opens with a reception, 6 to 9 pm on Friday, March 19, and runs through Sunday, April 18, 2010.  Sean M. Bowie’s photo is from a series on Baltimore Skate Parks. 

Photographer Mike Hicks shot this with a Leica using black and white film.

Danny Harris is a DC-based photographer, DJ, and collector of stories. In September, he launched People’s District, a blog that tells a people’s history of DC by sharing the stories and images of its residents. Every day, People’s District presents a different Washingtonian sharing his or her insights on everything from Go Go music to homelessness to fashion to politics.

“I grew up in Lansdowne, Maryland, in a house that I believe to be haunted. I was about 11 when my parents and I started noticing a lot of activity there. The cat would attack things that weren’t there. We heard hammering noises in the basement. I would go to the top of the basement stairs and it would stop. As soon as I left, it would start up again. The one that really pushed me over the edge was hearing a large crashing noise coming from the basement that sounded like broken glass. I went downstairs and there was nothing there. That pretty much convinced me that the house was haunted. I asked my neighbors about the former tenants of our house. One was a carpenter who died, which is probably where that hammering sound come from. That was my first investigation.

“I then joined the military and did 20 years of service. I got out at age 38 and was not ready to retire. The experiences from my childhood really stayed with me, and I contacted the head of the D.C. Metro Area Ghost Watchers (DCMAG), Al Tyas, about joining the team. He was retiring and ended up giving me the team in 2006 after we did a few investigations together. The D.C. area in particular has a lot of folklore and history around hauntings. Some people believe that Abraham Lincoln haunts the White House. There is also supposedly a demon cat near Congress that predicts doom. Since joining DCMAG, I’ve had some pretty intense investigations. Getting my hair pulled by a ghost was my first physical encounter with a spirit. You just don’t believe that it is happening, but, after a while, you get used to it. Each spirit has something that he or she can do particularly well. Some can pull hair, some can talk, and some can make footsteps. I even played hide-and-go-seek with the ghost of a child once.

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Yesterday’s LOOK photo has been deemed too controversial for this blog and was removed yesterday afternoon.  Be sure to check out the complete award winning photo essay about autisim by photographer Gihan Tubbeh.   Last week, a photograph  of two men kissing caused some people to cancel their WAPO newspaper subscriptions.  

Photographer Gordon Parks took this photograph titled “American Gothic” in 1942 while working for the Farm Security Administration in DC.     His editor, Roy Stryker, said that the photo was “an indictment of America” and would get all the FSA photographers fired.   Read the March 2006 obit from NYT photography critic Andy Grundberg.  Excerpt below.

Perhaps his best-known photograph, which he titled “American Gothic,” was taken during his brief time with the agency; it shows a black cleaning woman named Ella Watson standing stiffly in front of an American flag, a mop in one hand and a broom in the other. Mr. Parks wanted the picture to speak to the existence of racial bigotry and inequality in the nation’s capital. He was in an angry mood when he asked the woman to pose, having earlier been refused service at a clothing store, a movie theater and a restaurant.
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Mr. Parks credited his first awareness of the power of the photographic image to the pictures taken by his predecessors at the Farm Security Administration, including Jack Delano, Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein and Ben Shahn. He first saw their photographs of migrant workers in a magazine he picked up while working as a waiter in a railroad car. “I saw that the camera could be a weapon against poverty, against racism, against all sorts of social wrongs,” he told an interviewer in 1999. “I knew at that point I had to have a camera.”

Ojo Latino is a series by Néstor Sánchez Cordero. Nestor writes, “I’m working on a new project with my friend María Alejandra and her beautiful creations. She weaves outstanding and unique necklaces, gloves and scarves…” You can see part 1 here.

Arthur Blecher, Rabbi. © 2010 Matt Dunn

Arthur Blecher is an ordained Rabbi, author, practicing psychotherapist and advocate for marriage equality in DC.  Arthur was present at the DC Superior Court yesterday to witness some of the 151 same sex couples applying for marriage licenses.   More photos from outside the courthouse are here.

Untitled from the Chicago photographs © 1961 Yasuhiro Ishimoto

The Spring 2010 issue of Aperture Magazine has a feature on Japanese-American Photographer Yasuhiro Ishimoto.  The photo below was taken in Chicago between 1959-1961.  Yasuhiro Ishimoto was born in San Francisco and raised Kochi City, Japan. In 1939, due to concerns of him being drafted he returned to the US where he studied agriculture at the University of California (1940-42). He moved to Chicago in 1944 and began to study architecture at Northwestern University in 1946 when he met photographer Harry Shigeta and took up photography seriously. Two years later Ishimoto transferred to the Institute of Design where he studied with Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, and Gordon Coster(1948-52). In 1961 he returned to Japan (Tokyo), where he has lived ever since. Ishimoto showed his devotion to his adopted city, Chicago, in his book, Chicago, Chicago (Bijutsu Shuppan-sha, 1969). This book is often regarded as Ishimoto’s most personal statement – his bold use of contrast, the design of the frame, and the influence of his studies in architecture define his Chicago. Ishimoto has published many books and exhibited widely throughout Japan and the US. In 1999 he was the subject of a career retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago.