person:eliot elisofon

African-American Life, Double-Exposed - NYTimes.com
▻http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/17/african-american-life-double-exposed/?_r=0#

http://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/04/16/blogs/20150416-lens-race-slide-8XES/20150416-lens-race-slide-8XES-superJumbo.jpg

The late 1930s image by Eliot Elisofon shows Zack Brown taking a picture of two dapper African-American men on a Harlem street. It challenged the then-dominant view of black urban life, focusing on dignity instead of suffering, self-possession instead of defeat, happiness instead of sorrow. Mr. Elisofon’s picture also reminds us of the powerful role of photography in African-American life, how the medium — and black photographers — helped reshape the image of a people.

This evocative photograph appears in “Through the African American Lens,” the first in a four-volume series, “Double Exposure” (NMAAHC/Giles), devoted to the collection of more than 15,000 photographs compiled by the Earl W. and Amanda Stafford Center for African American Media Arts at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington.

#Etats-Unis #Africains-Américains #photo

#Eliot_Elisofon’s Africa: Old, Updated, Worse
▻http://africasacountry.com/eliot-elisofons-africa-old-updated-worse

Eliot Elisofon did not cast “new light” or “refine Africa in a new and a complex way for American audiences,” as claimed in Susan Stamberg’s “‘Life’ Photographer Showed Africa Through a New Lens” on NPR (February 10, 2014) about an exhibit of Elisofon’s work at the Museum of African Art in Washington D.C. His subjectivity […]

#PHOTOGRAPHY

#Eliot_Elisofon’s famous portraits of a young #Chinua_Achebe
▻http://africasacountry.com/eliot-elisofons-famous-portrait-of-chinua-achebe

When the great Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe died this April, one of the photographs used repeatedly to illustrate stories or obituaries was a portrait taken of him in 1959 by the American photographer Eliot Elisofon. It is useful to unpack the image, a conventional portrait of Achebe leaning on a desk with two copies of Things Fall Apart in front of him. A photograph, a snapshot, the filtering of the lost moment, is always more than the visual graphics and the intended ’message’ it (...)

#PHOTOGRAPHY