Weegee

 

Weegee was the pseudonym of Arthur Fellig (June 12, 1899 – December 26, 1968), a photographer and photojournalist, known for his stark black and white street photography. Weegee worked in the Lower East Side of New York City as a press photographer during the 1930s and ’40s, and he developed his signature style by following the city’s emergency services and documenting their activity. Much of his work depicted unflinchingly realistic scenes of urban life, crime, injury and death. Weegee published photographic books and also worked in cinema, initially making his own short films and later collaborating with film directors such as Jack Donohue and Stanley Kubrick.

In Gordon Theisen’s book, Staying Up Much Too Late, he analyzes Fellig’s work as an example of art as a craft: “They [the photos] glisten with anguish and, taken as a group, provide a powerful vision of the most modern of cities as a modern inferno, where anything but especially death – whether accidental or resulting from passion or ruthless calculation – can happen anywhere, on any corner” (Theisen 50).

Pasolini, “Uccellacci Uccellini”

Death in the making

 

 

‘Death in the Making‘ is the first book by Magnum photographer Robert Capa, published in 1938. The book contains photographs of the Spanish Civil War taken by Capa and his lover and fellow photographer, Gerda Taro.

The book started as a collaboration between Capa and Taro, until Taro was badly wounded in a tank accident and later died. When the book was published, Capa dedicated it to her with this message, ‘For Gerda Taro, who spent one year at the Spanish front, and who stayed on. RC‘.

The photograph used for the front cover is one of Capa’s most famous works ‘Falling soldier’, formally ‘Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death, Cerro Muriano, September 5, 1936′.

Original title Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death, Cerro Muriano, September 5, 1936

The Falling Soldier is a famous photograph taken by Robert Capa, understood to have been taken on September 5, 1936 and long thought to depict the death of a Republican, specifically an Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth (FIJL) soldier during the Spanish Civil War, who was later identified as the anarchist Federico Borrell García. The full title of the photograph is Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death, Cerro Muriano, September 5, 1936.

There had been falangist allegations from the beginning that the picture was staged, but outside Spain the picture was believed to be a true documentary image until the 1970

Recent research indeed suggests that the picture was staged. It was definitely not taken at the battle site of Cerro Muriano, but at Espejo, some thirty miles away.Doubt has also been cast on the identification of the photograph’s subject: Federico Borrell García is known to have been killed at Cerro Muriano, shot while sheltered behind a tree, and he did not greatly resemble the subject of the photograph

Female homicides in Ciudad Juárez

Artemisia Gentileschi

Artemisia Gentileschi, “Judith decapitating Holofernes”, 1618

Suicide: In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden, Reiner Werner Fassbinder

Suicide: Mike Kelly

Mike Kelley (October 27, 1954 – January 31, 2012 or February 1, 2012) was an American artist. His work involved found objects, textile banners, drawings, assemblage, collage, performance and video. He often worked collaboratively and had produced projects with artists Paul McCarthy, Tony Oursler and John Miller.

Tatort Effekt 1

(c) connie mendoza

Tatort (English title: Crime Scene) is a long-running German/Austrian/Swiss (ARD (since 1970), ORF (since 1972) and SF (1990–2001, again since 2011)), crime television series set in various parts of these countries. The show is broadcast on the channels of ARD (DasErste, (reruns on regional ARD stations)) in Germany, ORF 2 in Austria and SF1 in Switzerland. The first episode was broadcast on November 29, 1970. The opening sequence for the series has remained the same throughout the decades, which remains highly unusual for any such long-running TV series up to date.

Each of the regional TV channels which together form ARD, plus ORF and SF, produces its own episodes, starring its own police inspector (or team of inspectors), some of which, like the discontinued Schimanski (played by Götz George), have become cultural icons.

The show appears on DasErste (ARD) and ORF 2 on Sundays at 8:15 p.m. (SF1 starts 10 minutes earlier) and currently about 30 episodes are made per year. As of May 2011, 800 episodes in total have been produced. [Wikipedia]

Die Stolpersteine

Stolperstein is the German word for “stumbling block”, “obstacle”, or “something in the way”.  The artist Gunter Demnig has given this word a new meaning, that of a small, cobblestone-sized memorial for a single victim of Nazism. These memorials commemorate individuals – both those who died and survivors – who were consigned by the Nazis to prisons, euthanasia facilities, sterilization clinics, concentration camps, and extermination camps, as well as those who responded to persecution by emigrating or committing suicide.

While the vast majority of stolpersteine commemorate Jewish victims of the Holocaust, others have been placed for Sinti and Romani people (also called gypsies), homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Black people, Christians (both Protestants and Catholics) opposed to the Nazis, members of the Communist Party and the Resistance, military deserters, and the physically and mentally disabled.

The list of places that have stolpersteine now extends to several countries and hundreds of cities and towns.

As of June 24, 2011, Demnig had installed 30,000 stolpersteine.

Berlin: there are about 2,950 stolpersteine.

Hamburg: as of April 15, 2009, there are 2,600 stolpersteine. There’s another stolperstein in memoriam of a former senator, 15 paces to the right of the entrance of Hamburg’s town hall. Many papers report about the project and expand the research. Between 1941 and 1945 10,000 Jews were deported from Hamburg.

Cologne: by the beginning of 2005, 1,400 stolpersteine had been placed.

Kostnice (The Ossuary) 1970 by Jan Švankmajer, 1970

Director: Jan Švankmajer
Year: 1970
Music: Zdenek Liska

Kostnice Sedlec is a small Roman Catholic chapel, located beneath the Cemetery Church of All Saints (Czech: Hřbitovní kostel Všech Svatých) in Sedlec, a suburb of Kutná Hora in the Czech Republic. The ossuary is estimated to contain the skeletons of between 40,000 and 70,000 people, many of whom have had their bones artistically arranged to form decorations and furnishings for the chapel.

During the Black Death in the mid 14th century, and after the Hussite Wars in the early 15th century, many thousands were buried there and the cemetery had to be greatly enlarged.

Around 1400 a Gothic church was built in the center of the cemetery with a vaulted upper level and a lower chapel to be used as an ossuary for the mass graves unearthed during construction, or simply slated for demolition to make room for new burials. After 1511 the task of exhuming skeletons and stacking their bones in the chapel was, according to legend, given to a half-blind monk of the order.

In 1970, the centenary of Rint’s contributions, Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer was commissioned to document the ossuary. The result was a 10 minute long frantic-cut film of skeletal images overdubbed with an actual tour-guide’s neutral voice narration. This version was initially banned by the Czech Communist authorities for alleged subversion, and the soundtrack was replaced by a brief spoken introduction and a jazz arrangement by Zdeněk Liška of the poem “Comment dessiner le portrait d’un oiseau” (“How to Draw the Portrait of a Bird”) by Jacques Prévert. Since the Velvet Revolution, the original tour guide soundtrack has been made available.

Official website (cz, en, de)