Capturing Souls Through Camera Lenses
By Isabel Piazza
This article was inspired by Ohanga Creative Rick Catallozi’s photography.
You can browse more of Catallozi’s artwork in the Ohanga Market.
Here’s a SPECIAL THANK YOU for being an avid reader and supporting ETCH!
The beauty and rhythm of cities and people are captured most vividly by a photographer’s 50mm camera lens. The New York school of photography produced groundbreaking artists such as Gary Winogrand, Joel Meyerowitz, and Vivian Maier. These visionaries molded people’s perceptions of everyday life in New York City. Their compositions perfectly represent the city’s constant movement and the rich cultural life that blooms from the cracks in its concrete sidewalks.
Winogrand’s work consists mostly of black and white photography. He captured a diaspora of life and cultures in shades of gray that teem with life and emotion. His camera lens snapped moments of love, friendship, and unadulterated joy. From his position in the street, he could catch people being their truest selves, out in the world and unencumbered by tall-walled expectations and norms. Through his viewfinder, Winogrand became a spectator of humanity in its truest, most authentically beautiful form. Over three decades of street snapshots, he captured a wider picture of the city’s growth and the development of street culture. He transformed photography with his famous phrase, “all things are photographable.” Even if you do not know him by name, you definitely know his work; he took the iconic photo of Marilyn Monroe and her flying skirt in the set of The Seven Year Itch in 1955.
A fellow street photographer, Joel Meyerowitz, broke the trope of black and white and started capturing the streets in their glorious colors. Meyerowitz’s balance of tones and hues in his work are present today in every vintage store’s color palette. His manipulation of light and shadows capture a world far-gone in time yet ever-present in modern media’s depiction of city life and street culture. Meyerowitz’s use of color defied art critics’ belief that only black and white photography could generate artistic meaning. His work challenged expectations and shattered the rules of the game.
Another photographer who redefined photography and the city was the incredibly talented Vivian Maier. Immersed in a boy’s club, Maier stands out as one of the few women who were recognized as part of the New York school of photography movement. She excelled in capturing little pockets of joy in the city: miling mothers and dancing children, couples kissing and friends messing around. Maier preserved laughter and tears before they could evaporate into the ether or get lost in the city’s ever-constant cacophony. She would find joy and hold on to it to emphasize that the city that never sleeps is also the city that never stops loving.
Photography has evolved tremendously since the era of the New York school of photography, and many of its members have since passed. However, street photography’s artistic heart has not changed, even through the transition from medium format film cameras to digital cameras to iPhones,. Artists then and artists now seek the same photographic subject and maintain the same objective: to capture the sweet intricacies of everyday life in the city’s streets.
To view Ohanga’s own collection of street photography, check out Rick Catallozzi’s catalogue.
Works Cited
Works CitedVivian Maier photography:
http://www.vivianmaier.com/gallery/street-2/
Joel Meyerowitz photography:
https://www.joelmeyerowitz.com/street-photography
Garry Winogrand photography:
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/113230
Images:
Exhibition - Vivian Maier. Wikimedia Commons. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
Marilyn Monroe photo pose Seven Year Itch. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.