Shadow & Light Monthly #44

Shadow & Light is a list of curated photography stories, features, techniques, news and inspiration that I’ve come across this month.

In this edition we take a five decade journey through Hip Hop and visit Oregan’s only locked psychiatric facility for women. We look at 50 photographs that reshaped sport and see one couple’s amazing discovery in an abandoned storage unit.

So, with no further ado, I give you this month’s Shadow & Light Monthly. Go grab yourself a cuppa and enjoy this month’s selections below. Please let me know in the comments what you think.

Pick of the month – Hip Hop’s Golden Anniversary

Over the past 50 years, hip hop has grown from a grassroots culture from the South Bronx to a billion-dollar global industry that continuously reinvents itself. Although it’s gone pop, it continues to innovate, reinventing itself both sonically and visually. Since its earliest years, photography has created a space for artists and musicians to collaborate on images that have captivated the public imagination for decades. 

In a new exhibition, Hip Hop: Conscious, Unconscious, curator Sacha Jenkins creates a luxuriously layered visual history of hip hop’s evolution and elevation on the world stage. The show brings together the work of 60 photographers including Jamel Shabazz, Janette Beckman, Joe Conzo, Martha Cooper, Charlie Ahearn, and Sophie Bramly, providing a fascinating look at photography’s contributions to the culture. 

As a jazz fan (I have a particular love of collecting Blue Note records) I’ve always considered Hip Hop to have a lot of similarities with then pioneering jazz musicians of the late 50s and early 60s in terms of pushing boundaries of what’s possible with music. I don’t think it’s a surprise that so many jazz samples appear across Hip Hop music.

“When my parents played records, they put the covers on top of the deck, and I would be looking through their collections at the covers and it just became a part of me. An album cover is a portal into that universe so it has to be momentous. The bebop era, those cats always looked sharp and dignified. When I started to create, I gravitated towards those classic images. Every shot has to stand alone like an album cover.”

Jamil GS

Head on over to Blind Magazine to read more about the exhibition and see more fantastic images from this series.

Additional reads

Inside Oregan’s Only Locked Psychiatric Facility for Women

Ken Kesey’s groundbreaking novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was adapted for the silver screen in 1975, captivating audiences worldwide with its unflinching look at life inside the high security ward of a state mental hospital. That same year, American photographer Mary Ellen Mark was commissioned to do a story on the making of the film, which was shot on location at Oregon State Hospital. While there, she met the patients at Ward 81 – the state’s only locked psychiatric facility for women.

“I wanted to do an essay on the personalities of people who are locked away – to show a little bit of what they’re like, especially the women. I didn’t want to show them as exotically crazy,”

Mary Ellen Mark

As you might expect, the resulting series of images is incredibly powerful. You can read the article in full and see more of Mark’s incredible images over on Huck.

‘We Could Feel The Gravity of It. It Was Electrifying’: 50 Photographs That Reshaped Sport

Photography and sport have always gone hand in hand. Whether it be a boxing ring, a football pitch or an Olympic track, you’ll always find photographers bumping shoulders and jostling to capture the ONE iconic that’ll be remembered for years.

Over on The Guardian, you can see their selection of 50 iconic sporting images and the moments they immortalised.

And finally – Couple Discovers a Trove of 2,000 Vintage Cameras in an Abandoned Storage Unit

A Massachusetts couple were asked to clear out a storage unit in return for being able to keep whatever was inside. What they discovered was a veritable museum of photography.

It was filled with approximately 2,000 vintage cameras and lenses. For Kristen, who studied film photography in high school and loved it, the discovery has been overwhelming but illuminating. Not only has her apartment been overtaken with camera equipment, but she’s also invested a lot of time in organising the collection and learning about the cameras.

As the owner of a modest collection of vintage film cameras this is the stuff of dreams. I mean, they didn’t stumble into a unit full of Leicas but even so, it’s exciting if you’re a camera geek like me.

Head on over to PetaPixel to read more.

Until next time…

I hope you enjoy the articles above. Don’t forget you can follow my Shadow & Light magazine over on Flipboard if you’d like to see more of what I’m reading if you like what you’ve seen here.