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Highway 160, Arizona, 2013, © Rob Hann

Road-trip addict and now aCurator's most-published, Rob Hann has kindly been out west again, satisfying my own near-constant hankering to be on the highway. 

"Since October 2001 I've been taking photographic road trips throughout America, mostly in the western states, building a large body of work under the title of 'I Dream a Highway.' I head out whenever I can, usually for about two weeks. On my latest trip I flew into Las Vegas and wandered through eight states before heading back to Vegas and flying home to NYC. I have no fixed route but drive from daybreak to dusk each day before finding a cheap motel to lay my head for the night." Rob Hann, June 2013.


View Rob's previous trip, Lone Star State of Mind.

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Felix Rodriquez, San Francisco Giants © Rita Rivera

'Speak English! The Rise of Latinos in Baseball' (Kent State University Press. Text by Rafael Hermoso) is a new book featuring images by Rita Rivera. Rita was introduced to me by my friend and colleague Mary Engel whose mum, Ruth Orkin, Rita used to assist. Mary works hard to maintain the archive of both her parents - her dad was Morris Engel - and I'm thrilled she hooked me up with Rita and introduced me to this project about the important role Latinos increasingly play in league baseball and the prejudice they still face. 

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Manny Ramirez, Boston Red Sox

Here's the blurb for you baseball fans.

"'Speak English! The Rise of Latinos in Baseball chronicles how much - and how little - has changed since the first Latino played in the big leagues in the nineteenth century. By the middle of the next century, the Alous, Vic Power, and Rico Carty worked to earn their place in the game amid taunts and ridicule. Today, even established players and stars may be told to speak English in clubhouses, eliciting cringes or shrugs from individuals who are seemingly still hurting."

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Vic Power

"Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig offers a foreword full of nostalgia and pride. The afterword by Omar Minaya describes his experience playing ball in Queens and being the first Hispanic general manager in baseball. Speak English! selects the stories of 45 players to illustrate the collective history of Latinos in baseball and is illustrated with photographic portraits of many of them."

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Wilton and Vladimir Guerrero

"Today, more than a quarter of all major leaguers are Latino, and most began as outsiders. Globalization unearthed baseball in San Pedro de Macoris, Caguas, and Maracay. American teams looked abroad for talent and cheap wages, carving baseball diamonds out of sugarcane fields. Players in their teens left their families. Those from Cuba knew they were possibly leaving for the rest of their lives, just for the chance to play in a country still struggling with diversity in the 1950s and 1960s.

Yet many Latino players still speak as if not much has changed. Far from perfect, their no-rules journey to professional contracts has increased the risk of taking improper shortcuts. Several players were implicated recently in the use of steroids and performance-enhancing drugs. Others admitted to shaving years off their ages, allowing them to compete with an advantage against younger players."

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Ed Figueroa, The Yankees

"The great Latino story is also one of glory, as some of the best players in major league history tell of their hard voyage to baseball's mainland. The tale is likewise one of realists, and readers will not find anything in these stories that does not exist in other walks of life. The story is not clean, but it is compelling. Like baseball, there's enough to love in it to keep coming back to it as generations learn from the ups and downs of the Latino role in baseball, and its rightful place in history."


Felipe Alou, San Francisco Giants

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Albert Pujols, St.Louis Cardinals

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Luis Tiant played with Boston Red Sox

All images © Rita Rivera

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Stephen Tomasko stopped by to see me in my offline world at ClampArt and told me his good news: his project 'First Place and our Congratulations' was awarded an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award for 2013. Here are some new images from the series, and a link to my previous post.

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All images © Stephen Tomasko

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Join aCurator favorite Michael Massaia on a trip down memory lane with this new series, 'Saudade.'* 

In my youth I loved amusement arcades, as did Michael Massaia. I guess my UK experience would have differed from the US - not much actual gambling allowed here in the States, so no 'fruit machines' as we knew them, and I'm sure British pinball machines featured far fewer semi-clad women... weren't they all based on American TV shows? 

These machines were produced in the 1960s and '70s. Michael told me "I started working on this a few years back but I ran into all these technical problems when it came to shooting them. I had to modify one of my view cameras so it could get better depth of field at lower f-stops. I also had to use multiple polarizers to get all of the glare off the glass. It was actually very hard to take these. They are shot on large format black and white sheet film developed in pyro, and I'm making the finals selenium toned silver prints."

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. 


* a feeling of longing, melancholy, or nostalgia that is supposedly characteristic of the Portuguese or Brazilian temperament. - Dictionary.com



This is just wonderful, you're all going to love it and fund it. Watch the video - it features the delicious Bruce Davidson.

Short version from Rachel Seed, whose mum died in the same year that Rachel was born:

"I am making a documentary film, A Photographic Memory, that revisits some rare interviews and films that my late mother, Sheila Turner-Seed, produced in the early 1970's with ICP's Cornell Capa called 'Images of Man.' She interviewed Henri Cartier-Bresson, W. Eugene Smith, Lisette Model, Don McCullin, Bruce Davidson and several others, and Cartier-Bresson often said it was the best interview he ever gave. I have revisited those photographers still living and am weaving together our interviews in a posthumous collaboration."

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Rachel with her mum, Sheila, 1979.

Long version from the press release:

In the early 1970's, filmmaker and journalist Sheila Turner-Seed interviewed several influential photographers and produced, with International Center of Photography (ICP) founder Cornell Capa and Scholastic, the 'Images of Man' series: eight audio-visual programs that paired a photographers' images with their philosophies and motivations in their own words. Her roster included Henri Cartier-Bresson, Bruce Davidson, W. Eugene Smith, Lisette Model, Cornell Capa, Roman Vishniac and Don McCullin. Of Turner-Seed's interview with Cartier-Bresson - a notoriously elusive interview subject - Martine Franck, Cartier-Bresson's widow, said to Rachel in their 2011 interview, "The final result certainly was one of the best.... not so much interviews, but she managed to get Henri to talk about the way he photographed and to talk about his photographs. That was quite an achievement."

After Turner-Seed's sudden death in 1979, her husband, Time-Life photographer Brian Seed, sent the raw film materials to ICP for safekeeping. In 2012, Rachel, now in her 30's, rediscovered the work, which had been sitting like a time capsule at ICP, and digitized more than 70 reels, hearing her mother's voice for the first time since she was young while uncovering her rare interviews with the photo moguls.

Rachel has since traveled to France to interview Cartier-Bresson's widow, Magnum's Martine Franck (who passed away in August 2012); spent the day with Bruce Davidson in his Upper West Side studio; caught up with Don McCullin at his War/Photography exhibit opening in Houston and filmed National Geographic's William Albert Allard at work and at leisure in Afton, Virginia.

In 'A Photographic Memory,' outtakes from Turner-Seed's interviews are revealed for the first time, woven into a posthumous mother-daughter collaboration with Rachel's follow- up photographer interviews, reconnecting the women through their shared passion for photography.

From May 21- July 2, 2013 'A Photographic Memory' will hold an all-or-nothing fundraising campaign on Kickstarter with a goal of $25,000. Funds will support the completion of film production, including Seed's upcoming interviews with contemporary photographers that will bring Turner-Seed's legacy to new audiences.

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Rachel being photographed by Martine Franck.

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After a successful Kickstarter campaign, Robert Herman has just released his monograph 'The New Yorkers.' The book is full of character and characters with a focus on the colourful 1980s. Born and bred in New York, Herman has been shooting on the street since the 70s, when he was studying at NYU.

The book has notes by consultant, editor, and native New Yorker, Stella Kramer and a foreword by Sean Corcoran of the Museum of the City of New YorkGet your copy now!

Robert will be speaking on Tuesday, June 18th, 2013, at the Apple store on Prince St, NYC, at 7 pm.


View Robert's previous aCurator feature, a road trip in South Africa.

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Dima Gavrysh is a blast from my agency past, one of many photographers who I ran into through being at my day job, ClampArt. Dima has a completely and wonderfully different photojournalism life than that with which I associate him. Graduating from Rhode Island School of Design in 2012, Dima has been photographing multiple projects around the globe, including collaborations with Doctors Without Borders and the United Nations Population Fund. Dima has also been embedded several times with the US Army in Afghanistan. Here are some of his Soldiers of Zerok, "a portrait series exploring personalities of the US soldiers stationed at a remote combat outpost on the Afghan-Pakistani border."

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All images © Dima Gavrysh

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© Statia Grossman

You're allergic. I get it.

Totally worth a second entry, Statia Grossman's heart-rending yet entertaining project catalogs a bunch of the shit her partner left behind when he walked out. Head over to her Tumblr and show some support.

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See no ex. Hear no ex. Speak no ex.

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This Lacie underwear

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How you gonna manscape now Mr. Metrosexual?

Click here for the previous post.

All images © Statia Grossman

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Buckminster Fuller, 1980 © Yousuf Karsh

Life.com published a piece about Buckminster Fuller today and I fancied showing this gorgeous Karsh portrait of the fascinating architect, inventor and futurist. In the 'Life' article it quotes Bucky saying "I did not set out to design a geodesic dome, I set out to discover the principles operative in Universe. For all I knew, this could have led to a pair of flying slippers."

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Patrick Fraser emailed to tell me about his 'Parada' series which "came about from a road trip through Uruguay earlier this year. I started noticing different structures along the roadside and seeing the sign 'Parada' nearby - paradas are bus shelters.
 
Then I noticed people waiting and decided that this was a story about transience, character, patience, and landscape. Documenting paradas became a way of seeing the country and its inhabitants in a simple photographic essay." 

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Patrick has an anthropological eye - among several projects on his website, check out the series 'This is Britain.'

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All images © Patrick Fraser

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