Riley “Blues Boy” King (1925 – 1915). Rest in peace. We know Heaven knows how to sing the Blues. B.B. King performs at Sing Sing Prison in the video above. He later said he thought this was one of his best performances. The entire performance is available on YouTube if you’re interested. Below, he performs…
Today, 1 May 2015, R&B great Ben E. King, born Benjamin Earl Nelson in North Carolina, died of natural causes in New Jersey. King initially found success as a member of the doo-wop group The Drifters, whose biggest hits were “Save the Last Dance for Me” and “There Goes My Baby,” which he co-wrote. The…
Part 8 – The Rule Making Epoch: Izis Israëlis “Izis” Bidermanas (Lithuania) – 1911 to 1980 Israëlis Bidermanas, who worked under the name Izis, was a Lithuanian-Jewish photographer who made his mark photographing Paris from the 1930s through the 1970s. He was part of the French humanist movement, a clever term for mostly street shooters…
Playing for Change, according to their website “is a movement created to inspire and connect the world through music.” It began in 2002 when its co-founders, Mark Johnson and Whitney Kroenke toured the street of America with a mobile recording studio and cameras looking for “inspiration and the heartbeat of the people.” They found it,…
On this day, 8 April, in 1871, Clarence Hudson White was born in small-town Ohio in the United States. White was a teacher and self-taught photographer, but within a few years of his beginning in the art form at age 22, he’d achieved some measure of international fame. His photos were emotional pieces that reflected…
1. Savion Glover: Rhythm (Did you make it all the way through?) 2. Gregory Hines: Flair (Crappy picture quality – just listen to the riddim.) 3. Hines and Sammy Davis, Jr.: Homage 4. Sammy & the Will Maston Trio: Freedom (There was no one better than Sammy, except …) 5. Savion “Mr. Bojangles: Good stories…
Alfred Eisenstaedt was a German-born Jewish photographer who reached fame for his street shots and work for Life Magazine. (See our series on the History of Street Photography, Part 5, for more on “Eisie” and his work.) Although he was a German World War 1 wounded veteran, by 1933, Shitler’s Nazis had risen to power,…
“We Wear the Mask” by Paul Laurence Dunbar We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,– This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties. Why should the world be overwise, In counting all our tears and…
One of the things that pains Maria and me is the number of people who are enamored with a single shot by Henri Cartier-Bresson (“Behind the Gare Saint Lazare“). You know the one, the “Defining Moment” shot. But here’s the thing: it’s a shitty photo. It’s underexposed, details are lost because of the lack of…
Read Part 6 or view Index to start at the beginning. Part 7 – The Rule Making Epoch–Siskind to Cartier-Bresson As I stated in Part 4 of this series, there is substantial overlap between the street photography epochs we describe. Rather than being purely sequential time periods, as the word epoch might suggest, they are…
The Artists' Sanctum 