American Legion Analysis

American Legion Convention  Dallas, Texas 1964

Busyness, is the first word that comes to mind upon initial viewing of the "American Legion Convention".  The photograph has a sort of surreal quality to it. It is a perfect moment frozen in time, it almost evokes the feeling of watching something happen in intense slow motion.  Two things that stick out immediately to validate this idea are the stepping man in the far left corner, and the man gazing upward to the far right hand corner.  The man in the left is in the act of putting his left foot down while the man on the right has head fixated toward the sky.  Our eyes travel in a circle starting at the amputee in center focus of the frame, to the "stepping man" on the left then clockwise through the line of people waiting alongside of the wall, to the gazing man on the right and finally back to the center amputee veteran.  Another aspect pointing in favor of surrealism is the amputee's eyes, they are locked into ours. We see his pain and maybe even a little frustration. The taller man in the foreground to the "gazing man's" left is also gawking back at us, reinforcing a sort of reverse voyeuristic quality in such instances in movies where everyone seems to be staring at the main character.  The print is actually quite cinematic and expresses vibes of an alternate reality.  The attire of the elderly woman standing just above the amputee's right shoulder is a signifier that the photograph was taken in the 1950' to 1960's.  The hats on the soldiers heads is also a signifier of the ending of the second World War.

Creating To Cope

This is my wonderful mother. I documented her for many reasons other than practicality. My father passed away no more than a week ago and I wanted to convey our turmoil. Creation is a coping method, it is a way for us to muffle the inner commentary that is so prevalent in times of sadness. I recognized that just as she was manufacturing this for her solitude, I was developing images for my own cognitive therapy.

I shot this photo above with a speedlight tucked inside of a 50 in. soft box. I am really trying to master off-camera flash photography, but many reasons I couldn't think clearly enough to get my ratios right, so I had to keep using trail and error. I finally came out with something of a decent exposure but I am not very happy with the way it turned out. I really wanted to direct the light to get a good even highlight on her forehead and the tip of her nose. Her grey shirt didn't really help to set her apart from the chair either. 

Bias or No Bias

In modern photo-journalism, and all journalism for that matter, there is a professional staple attached to keeping an unbiased approach in order to maintain the historical integrity of the information. I believe that before you are to represent someone through visual imagery, one must inform themselves of the context in which they are shooting, and most importantly a clear message to direct. I think the disconnect apparent in the Feature Group's work was that people were seeing it as work, and shooting the things that seemed interesting to them visually but didn't really align with focus of the whole campaign. They failed to view their work from the perspective of the indigent black people they were representing. They didn't seem to realize that the work they were exhibiting was just further the ill-perceptions of the community in mainstream media.