365cameras.com

Today’s Photography Site of the Day (which, if you haven’t noticed, isn’t published daily) is photoethnography.com. This site is the work of Karen Nakamura, an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and East Asian Studies at Yale.

On her site, Ms. Nakamura says “Photoethnography can be considered both an applied methodology of an academic social science discipline (Visual Anthropology) as well as a form of artistic expression and social critique, akin to street photography or documentary photography.”

While not necessarily always dealing with photography, you will get a good sense of the person and photoethnography by reading her blog. As would be expected, she has photography and covers social justice issues. This is the part of the site that continues to be actively updated. The rest seems to not be updated often, unfortunately that includes the gallery. That’s OK though. There’s still some great info here.

She has a good, though short, links page.

I like her Equipment page. In it she recommends inexpensive equipment, mostly film based cameras, to get into photoethnography. There are some great recommendations here. I’d give you direct links, but the site is frame based so I’ll just mention some of the content available here.

-Buying classic cameras
-Recommendations
-SLR vs Rangefinder
-35mm vs. MF
-Instruction Manuals
-Batteries / Books
-Camera Bags / Tripods
-Light Meters / Finders
-Repairs / Humidity & Fungus

A few of the links are broken and most of the content is a few years old. But I think it’s still valid. There is a lot of information on this site.

She has a set of pages devoted to her camera collection. These include pictures and text describing the camera. Very nice work. Again, this is a link on the equipment page.

She talks about her favorite street cameras:
Canon P
Yashica Electro 35 GX
Olympus XA
Nikon FE
Nikon S2
Leica M3
Leica M7

and her favorite cameras overall:
Bolsey C22
Canon P
Canonet GIII QL17
Kodak Retina
Leica M3
Leica lenses
Nikon S3
Olympus XA
Pentax 6×7
Spotmatic II
Yashica GSN

While she lists these as her favorites, she has information on about a hundred cameras.

One thing that I wish she would promote more, is her video work. She has films available on Amazon that she mentions in her blog, but she doesn’t seem to have good pages devoted to them on her site. She might get more sales and bring more attention to the issues she has covered with some better marketing.

Her videos are:
Bethel: Community and Schizophrenia in Northern Japan
and
A Japanese Funeral

I’ve spent hours here and will spend some more. I’ve only touched on a bit of the site. I recommend that you check it out.

This video is a nice audio of news photographer Weegee with his accompanying photographs.

This pioneer of news photography talks about getting into the business, his subject matter, and his techniques.

This is a must watch video for anyone interested in news or street photography.

Weegee on wikipedia

Weegee on ebay

Today’s video is a conversation with the great Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado, UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism adjunct professor Ken Light and Photo Critic and Curator Fred Ritchin. Series: UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

The video loosely revolves around the work of Sebastiao Salgado documenting the famine in the Sahel in Africa, but the underlying theme is the need for and the responsibility of documentary photography to establish the state of environmental conditions and the human condition within it. In Salgado’s case, there is also a need to not just document for someone else to notice and improve the condition, but to try to improve conditions himself.

Regardless of one’s religious, political, or scientific beliefs, it has to be understood that there is a world of people living a very harsh life who have not been able to take advantage of the advances and political structure of the West who have been brought nearly to the brink of existence. His photography challenges us to greater social consciousness by presenting a reality that few in the West can ever experience. It challenges us to more than debate the marginalization of these people but to bring about change.

This video is rather long, but it is well worth watching not because it presents so much of his photography. It does not. Rather it presents issues and opinions about society, ecology, and modern day photojournalism that demand real discourse rather than the overly simple, party-line discussion that dominates these matters.

Sebastiao Salgado on Amazon

Here are a few sample videos of his work.