"The crawlers" is a well-known picture of the book Street life in London by John Thomson and Adolphe Smith(writer and social activist). Shows a homeless widow that earns money by taking care of working women's children. This image is the first sample of journalism combined with photographs that shows London's poor population. His work is impressive from the fact he is using photography to record without outshine the reality. His work is a research for counting down the population of homeless in London.
Jacob Riis, American photographer
“Police Station Lodgers”,
Jacob Riis (1849-1914) Born in Denmark and emigrated to United States where he worked as a journalist, editor and then owner of South Brooklyn News. He was a self-taught photographer. In 1878 he enrolled as a police reporter at Tribute where he was influenced by the slums of East Side of Manhattan and specifically in the Mulberry Bend. He only photographed as a police reporter from 1888 to 1898. During these years, he felt the need to criticize the living conditions through his art and prove with his photographs the truth of his words. To highlight his images he used Magnesium Flash as a tool. The photographs that were taken by using flash, a technique that photojournalists still use, helped him to make strong images in the modern age of photography (1880-1918). With his picture "Police Station Lodgers" he wanted to blame the government for the conditions of poverty in the streets of Manhattan. He emphasizes his photo by importing a finger pointing the woman's situation so the readers of his journals would understand the needs of those people and to shut down the police lodging houses.
Henri Kartier-Bresson, French Photographer
FRANCE. Paris. Place de l'Europe. Gare Saint Lazare. 1932. "There was a plank fence around some repairs behind the Gare Saint Lazare train station. I happened to be peeking through a gap in the fence with my camera at the moment the man jumped. The space between the planks was not entirely wide enough for my lens, which is the reason why the picture is cut off on the left."
Henri Kartier-Bresson "For me the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which, in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously. In order to “give a meaning” to the world, one has to feel involved in what one frames through the viewfinder. This attitude requires concentration, discipline of mind, sensitivity, and a sense of geometry. It is by economy of means that one arrives at simplicity of expression.To take a photograph is to hold one’s breath when all faculties converge in a face of fleeing reality. It is at that moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.
To take a photograph means to recognize – simultaneously and within a fraction of a second– both the fact itself and the rigorous organisation of visually perceived forms that give it meaning.
It is putting one’s head, one’s eye, and one’s heart on the same axis."
In 1986 Sebastião Salgado began a series of reportages on the theme of manual labor, throughout the different continents. This work was conceived to tell the story of an era. The images offer a visual archaeology of a time that history knows as the Industrial Revolution, a time when men and women work with their hands provided the central axis of the world.
The highly industrialized world is racing ahead and stumbling over the future. In reality, this telescoping of time is the result of the work of people throughout the world, although in practice it may benefit few. The developed world produces only for those who can consume-approximately one-fifth of all people. The remaining four-fifths, who could theoretically benefit from surplus production, have no way of becoming consumers.
The destiny of men and women is to create a new world, to reveal a new life, to remember that there exists a frontier for everything except dreams. In this way, they adapt, resist, believe, and survive
GB. England. Blackburn. Yates's Wine Lodges. Although well priced in comparison to their competitors, these wine lodges acquired a distinctly dismal reputation with typical characteristics of a working class customer, elderly and often female with overdone make-up. But the unspoilt, original wine lodges, with their high ceilings and bare floorboards, their pillars and rails for propping yourself upright, seem clearly designed for the determined and joyless business of taking the quickest route to oblivion. Peter Yates insisted that, in the interests of sobriety, food should be available throughout licensing hours and every lodge still boasts “something good to eat at any time of the day†(though it maybe often no more than the ubiquitous pork pie!). 1983
GB. ENGLAND. In Blackburn, girls of Pakistani origin, learn the Koran by heart in Arabic, a language they do not understand. The evening class is held in a mosque, after their English school. 1989.
