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April 27, 2008
A Century of Pictures
Melbourne's The Age newspaper has put together an excellent multimedia presentation to celebrate 100 years of photography in the publication. Entitled "A Century of Pictures", the slideshow brings together some of the most memorable images captured by The Age's photographers.
The presentation is divided into seven sections: War, Daily Life, Sport, People, Breaking News, Football (it says something about Melbourne's love for the game that it gets its own category) and Fashion. There are some brilliant photographs - my favourites include Neville Bowler's picture of floods in central Melbourne and Julian Kingma's portrait of Dylan Lewis (above).
Some readers will be aware that my own grandfather was at one stage pictorial editor of the newspaper. Although he died before I was born, I had the good fortune to meet some of his colleagues and hear (often apocryphal) anecdotes about life in the newsroom. A story by journalist Alan Attwood, "Being There" describes what it was like for young reporters to travel to assignments with older, wiser photographers:
"Photographers drove; some much better (meaning slower) than others. In return, our job was later to supply such tiresome details as the correct spelling of the names of picture subjects. For young reporters, such drives represented opportunities to absorb the wisdom of tribal elders. We listened to lectures that invariably began with a denunciation of the job in hand ("Why are we bothering with crap like this?"), moved on to pungent character assassination of newspaper executives ("What would they *&%#ing know anyway?"), then progressed to an update on the photographer's love-life or marriage, which weren't always the same thing."
Overall, the presentation and accompanying article are well worth your time. I've just one criticism, though. The music that accompanies the presentation is downright annoying, especially the second time round. I strongly recommend that you switch it off before viewing the slideshow.
Posted by Marcus at April 27, 2008 9:10 AM
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