cloze passages

Photography in Print: PHOTOJOURNALISM

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Newspapers during the 19th century were illustrated with wood engravings or  lithographs . Honore` Daumier, for example, drew his powerful lithograph “Murder in the Rue Transnonain” for a __general_NEWSPAPER___.Winslow Homer earned his living for many years as a freelance illustrator, supplying drawings and paintings that were translated into wood _____engravings_____or lithographs.

The most important event that Honore` covered as a visual reporter was the American _______civil war_____ ______. Mathew Brady and other photographers also went to the war, which became the first major conflict to be ______documented__________ in photographs. Yet Brady’s photographs also had to be translated into wood engravings to appear in the news, for the _technology did not yet exist to print photographs _____commercially on ordinary paper. Then, around 1900, the first process for the photomechanical reproduction – high speed printing of photographs along with type – came into being.

Today nearly every event that might remotely be considered ______newsworthy_________ is covered by __photojournalists________, from the carnage of war to the escape of a pet snake in a residential neighborhood. News photographers must depend to a certain extent on _____conditions,_LUCK__. Their best pictures result when they are in the right place at the right time, when some ____extraordinary___________ event occurs. Nevertheless, it is the photographer’s skill that turns a record of event into a great picture.

Photojournalism quickly became about more than just getting a photograph to illustrate a ____point,________. While a single photograph may be all the ___general_public sees at the time, photojournalists often create a significant _______stories ___body of work_ ______ around an event, place or culture. A historical episode that brought out the best in many of the finest photographers of the day was the _______great depression__ ___________ in the United States. The Great Depression, which began in 1929 and lasted until the onset of World War II, caused hardships for photographs as well as the _______community___as a whole. To ease the first problem and document the second, The Farm Security Administration (FSA) of the U.S Department of Agricultural subsidized _____miners_____PHOTOGRPAHERS_____ and sent them out to record ______television__conditons______ across the nation. One of these was Dorothea Lange.

Dorothea Lange’s travels for the FSA took her to nearly every part of the country. In one summer alone she logged 17,000 miles in her car. Lange devoted her attention to the ____migrants________ who had been uprooted from their farms by the combined effects of Depression and ______drought______. “Heading West, Tular Lake, California” (9.14) shows a mother and her two children dirty and disheveled, in a battered truck. Despair is written on all three ___faces______, as their eyes stair off at some distant __beauty______ that may offer no relief from misery. Lange’s masterful _______structure________ gives an importance, a universal quality, to the tragedy of one family. The pictures basic _______composition_____ is a triangle, with the boys head at the apex, one side running through his leg, the other diagonal through the mothers head and the younger child, and the base resting on the bottom of the photo. FSA photos like this one were offered free to newspapers and magazines.

During the 1950’s and 1960’s a series of popular large format periodicals brought photojournalism to a broad public. Editors, art directors, writers and photographers _______collaborated___________ closely on  ________newspaper____ that were told equally through photographs and words. The rise of ____photographers__________ put an end to these magazines and today while photojournalists still provide images for news stories they rely principally on museums and galleries and books to reach the public with a more extended body of work.

One of the most respected photojournalists working today is Brazilian – born Sebastiao Salgado. His photograph of gold ____luck______ illustrated here (9.15) is from his book “Workers: An archeology if the industrial age”. In Workers, Salgado explores and exposes the persistence of hard physical __labour______ in an age when the machine is thought largely to have made such grueling work obsolete. The photographs are at once a tribute to the workers themselves and an expose` of the often harsh conditions of their lives. “I don’t want anyone to appreciate the light or the palette of tones,” the photographer has said. “I want my pictures to inform, to provoke discussion – and to raise money.” The formal _____point_______ of Salgado’s photographs is undeniable, however, and it raises a central paradox (self contradictory or absurd yet expressing truth) of art, and especially of photojournalism.

1. Complete cloze passage
2. Answer the following questions:
1. Explain what the first major event was to be recorded visually using photography?  
2. List 5 major events you have seen published extensively recently. Also include how you have seen each particular news story published e.g.: Television, newspaper, magazine, etc…
3. Discuss in detail what a photographer’s Body of Work might be, give an example.
4. Outline what Dorothea Lange’s role was as a photographer, who did she work for?
5. Using the subjective frame (description on class blog if you have forgotten!) briefly evaluate this artwork in point form. List 8 main subjective qualities that you can see in the artwork.  
6. Do you think Dorothea Lange’s images would hold our attention and speak to us so strongly if they were not also beautiful?  Why/Why not?
7. Explain how the rise of television had an impact on photojournalism.
8. Evaluate the photographic practice of Sebastiao Salgado. What was his aims as a photographer?
3. Extended response -  answer the following questions:
1. Look at the composition of the work by Lange, “Heading West, Tulare Lake, California” (1939). On the worksheet, label the photograph using the structural frame (description on class blog if you have forgotten!).