Take A Photograph: Lange could make a deserted farmhouse, abandoned in acres of machine-plowed land, an eloquent definition of the phrase "tractored-out," which was on the lips of hundreds of dispossessed farmers. Her photograph of a migrant mother surrounded by her children, huddled in a tent, became the most widely reproduced of all the FSA pictures. She wrote:
My own approach is based upon three considerations. First—hands off! Whatever I photograph, I do not molest or tamper with or arrange. Second—a sense of place. Whatever I photograph, I try to picture as part of its surroundings, as having roots. Third—a sense of time. Whatever I photograph, I try to show as having its position in the past or in the present.
illustration work is a third major area of commercial photography, but one that is usually limited to cities with a heavy concentration of magazine and book publishers. The commercial studio is asked to take a photograph a story, book, or even a concept and create a photograph that captures its essence in a single visual image. This could range from a damsel-in-distress photograph for the cover of a crime magazine to something more abstract, like illustrative photographer Robin Perry's much reproduced photograph for an article on a terrorist who was killed while in her early twenties. |
