'Best experience'
I cannot recommend Hannah and her team enough! We had the best experience at our shoot with our newborn and the photos (which I wanted to capture our little one as naturally as we could) are just unreal. Hannah captured...
Workshop Wednesdays Vol.43
Workshop Wednesdays vol. 43
Our family has reunited! Olivia and Angela have been working remotely for the last 6 weeks and today, they returned to the studio and the HP Team are finally back together again! We had plenty to do to keep busy throughout isolation, however, we were all very excited to be back in the swing of things and have our cameras charged and ready to go! I am so grateful for their support and dedication and feel very lucky to have found such wonderful people to help HP on its journey. So thank you Olivia and Angela – Charlie and I have missed you! Now that we are all back in the studio, we will be reopening our doors for family portraits and business portfolios (yay!!)… Weddings and events are still on the horizon but not too far off, we are sure… And we are gearing up for a very exciting milestone for HP that we’ll announce at the end of the month. In the meantime, this workshop is simply a celebration of our craft and life in general. We are feeling recharged, motivated and excited to share our joy with the world!
Photo For Thought
Dancing through the chaos.
Image: REUTERS/Andrew Kelly
“Streets and famous landmarks are deserted as cities go into lockdown. Ballet dancer and performer Ashlee Montague dances in an empty Times Square in New York, which has become an epicentre of the disease.”
In The News
Tiefenort, Germany
Residents, nurses and children release balloons carrying messages during a church service at a nursing home in Tiefenort.
Photograph: Jens Meyer/AP
The Best Of… Animal Photography
“National Geographic photographers have always captured animals in nature at their most beautiful, fascinating, and mysterious. In 2019, a different theme dominated our photojournalism: animals, as they’re affected by us.
In the Bolivian Amazon, John Paul Ampudia photographed a man soothing an injured armadillo rescued from a forest fire. In Vietnam, Brent Stirton captured a pangolin’s little face peering out of a wooden box as his caretakers bring him to a remote mountainside, where he’ll have a second chance at life after being rescued from poachers. At a clinic in South Africa, Nichole Sobiecki photographed a veterinarian as she crawled with formerly neglected lion cubs, patiently helping them learn to walk again.
The photos illustrate just how much animals’ lives intersect with our own—how some humans hurt them, and how others try to undo the damage.”
Iconic Photographer
“The work of a photographer is to reveal hidden things “
– Matt Black
MEXICO. San Miguel Cuevas, Oaxaca. 2006. Saint's Day celebration.
“Matt Black is from California’s Central Valley, an agricultural region in the heart of the state. His work has explored the connections between migration, poverty, agriculture, and the environment in his native rural California and in southern Mexico.
He has traveled over 100,000 miles across 46 U.S. states for his project The Geography of Poverty. Other recent works include The Dry Land, about the impact of drought on California’s agricultural communities, and The Monster in the Mountains, about the disappearance of 43 students in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero. Both of these projects, accompanied by short films, were published by The New Yorker.
He received the W. Eugene Smith Award in 2015. In 2016, he received the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and was named a Senior Fellow at the Emerson Collective. In 2018, he again received a Robert F. Kennedy Award for his work in Puerto Rico. His work has also been honored by the Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the Center for Cultural Innovation, and others. He lives in Exeter, a small town in California’s Central Valley.”
Color portrait of Elizabeth Taylor, Oct. 1948. Philippe Halsman Halsman Archive
Interesting Read
“Philippe Halsman, the prolific 20th-century portrait photographer, was assigned by LIFE Magazine to photograph Elizabeth Taylor for a profile story. Halsman had previously captured figures such as Marilyn Monroe, Alfred Hitchcock and Winston Churchill.
In October 1948, Taylor, who was only 16, arrived in a low-cut dress at Halsman’s New York City portrait studio, which still exists and is home to the Halsman Archive. “In my studio Elizabeth was quiet and shy. She struck me as an average teen-ager, except that she was incredibly beautiful,” Halsman reflected in his book Halsman: Sight and Insight.
Halsman had his one-of-a-kind hand-built 4×5 view camera ready to go with both black-and-white and color film.
“On a purely technical level, he pointed out that two sides of my face photographed differently,” Taylor would later recall. “One side looked younger; the other more mature. In posing for Halsman, I became instantly aware of my body.”
Taylor had worn her own dazzling earrings, but she didn’t wear a necklace. During the sitting, Halsman borrowed his wife Yvonne Halsman’s blue triangle pendant necklace and placed it around Elizabeth’s neck. This subtle decision added a level of impact to the portrait. The necklace was later passed down to Halsman’s daughter Irene.
In Taylor’s 1988 autobiography, Elizabeth Takes Off: On Weight Gain, Weight Loss, Self-Image, and Self-Esteem, she described the effect the portrait session had on her self-image: “[Halsman] was the first person to make me look at myself as a woman… After my session with Halsman, I was much more determined to control my screen image. I wanted to look older so I insisted on cutting my hair. In 1949 I went from portraying Amy in Little Women, another child-woman to playing a full-fledged romantic lead in The Conspirator. At barely seventeen, I grew up for all America to see.“
Halsman ran into Taylor a few weeks later in Hollywood and when approached by him, she couldn’t remember where they had met.
“She could have not hurt me more,” he would later reflect. “Her words showed again how important a photograph can be and how unimportant the photographer who made it.” …..
Story of the week
Dad recently sent me an article about the famous Keukenhof gardens in Holland – completely empty of tourists! I was very lucky to visit the gardens as a tourist myself in 2008 while I was living in Ireland. It was an incredible experience but overcrowded and all of my photos are close-ups to avoid the people! I had only just rediscovered the photos from this trip (one of the many photo projects over the last few weeks: exploring my travel archives was FUN!!!)… I hope to set up a gallery soon where we will offer limited edition prints of some of the more artistic travel shots that I think are worthy of wall art. Did anyone else rediscover some favourite photos as well? Or try any photo projects with the family? I could do with another 6 weeks to look through even more!
Best Wishes From HP!
Thank you for getting this far! And thank you to Skye, Simon and Aniah for the cover photo this week… It’s still one of our all time favourites and has been on our A Frame for the last few months… Has anyone seen the A Frame displayed on Ipswich Road? We love it! Please stay safe out there everyone and we hope to see you all again very soon!
Best wishes,
Hannah, Olivia, Angela, Nic and Charlie
The Hannah Photography Team
