Every couple of years, husband-and-wife photographers Michael A. Smith and Paula Chamlee pack up their Bucks County, Pa., photography lab into a 1978 Land Rover with a tent on the roof and send it in a shipping container to Iceland.
The rocky, open, dramatically lighted terrain has been an artistic inspiration for the couple, now in their 70s, on excursions since 2004. They spend eight weeks roaming the remote lagoons and farmlands as well as the rugged shorelines and small fishing villages, lugging their hulking, 8-by-10-inch-view cameras until something calls to them visually. Then they work side by side, each capturing the landscape in large-format, black-and-white photographs — specifically, gelatin silver chloride contact prints, something of a lost art.
Their work — featured in more than 140 museums worldwide, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art , the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York — is on display this weekend at the Photo L. A. art fair.
Smith and Chamlee’s images are closer to abstraction than landscape photography. Each picture is emotionally resonant, not necessarily a literal reflection of the subject but an expression of what inspired it — the geometric lines, shapes and shadows giving the image a new narrative.
“I like to say we photograph space, not things,” Smith says, adding that he and Chamlee feel a kinship with photographer Edward Weston.
“We just look and try to be open to new visual discoveries,” Chamlee says, “and you do that by exploring and just responding when it feels right. Because every day is different, the light is different. That low arc of the sun makes magical, arctic light.”
Stateside, the couple is just as prolific. Chamlee is also a painter who recently has been combining sumi ink drawings with watercolors. She spent a year documenting a Bucks County woman’s idiosyncratic holiday lawn decorations. Smith photographed inmates in solitary confinement at Maricopa County 4th Avenue Jail in Phoenix. One portrait was exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D. C., as part of the 2009 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. They’ve also traveled the globe, making photographs from southern Oregon to the Atchafalaya Basin in Louisiana to the Tuscan countryside.
But Iceland’s natural and city landscapes are a hallmark of their joint photography practice.
“Iceland was for both of us a revelation — unexpected and beautiful and energizing and surreal,” Chamlee says. “Though we work in different ways, we both photograph things we feel deeply connected to, things we want to know on a more personal level just by being deeply observant and being with it, so we can respond to it. Iceland was just a great adventure.”

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© Source: http://www.latimes.com/la-ca-cm-iceland-photographs-20170114-htmlstory.html
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January 14, 2017
— The first thing to remember about Donald Trump’s Great Wall: It’s not a fence.
So said the president-elect at his first post-election news conference on Wednesday, correcting a reporter who inquired about whether Mexico would pay for the “border fence,” as promised on the campaign trail.
“On the fence – it’s not a fence. It’s a wall. You just misreported it. We’re going to build a wall,” said Mr. Trump.
The exchange came as House Republicans continue to hash out details with the incoming administration on a plan to resurrect parts of a border-control law passed by George W. Bush, according to Politico.
But it may have also underscored how outsized symbols of national and cultural sovereignty, like border walls or Islamic veils, have become prominent as political hot buttons in US and European immigration debates.
In the United States, immigration dialogues often revolve around the southern border. Imagery and rhetoric staged there resound well beyond it, many policy experts believe.
Where politicians take a hard rhetorical line on letting in new arrivals – and take conspicuous steps to keep them out – fewer immigrants are likely to attempt the journey, says Demetrios Papademetriou, president emeritus of the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D. C., and a former member of the Labor Department under the elder President Bush.
“The more people think you’re serious about controlling the border, the fewer among them are likely to try to come illegally,” Dr. Papademetriou tells The Christian Science Monitor in a Friday interview.
The 2006 law to be taken up by the House called for about 700 miles of double-layered fencing – a kind that leaves space for Border Patrol vehicles to drive between them. Only 36 miles of that was ever built, after the Department of Homeland Security protested against it, instead building hundreds of miles of other kinds of barriers, leading President Obama and some other Democrats to conclude that the spirit of the 2006 law had effectively been carried out.
Neither type of fence is stone and mortar, exactly. But the double-layered kind could get a rebranding under a Trump-sponsored plan.
“What he needs to do is build a mile or two or five, and I expect that he will,“ says Papademetriou. „After that, he’ll say, ‘I promised you we’d do that, look how beautiful the wall is!’,” before the more complicated work of military-style border enforcement begins, with modern tools of surveillance and control.
For critics on the left, border walls are sometimes viewed as mere pageantry: as capital flits across borders, so too will labor, no matter how many physical obstacles are constructed. And some analyses of the build-up along international boundaries in recent decades found that most of the walls have been put up by rich countries to keep out their poorer neighbors.
„Not long ago, theorists argued that the nation-state and its borders were vanishing,“ the Monitor’s Simon Montlake wrote in 2015 , continuing:
Papademetriou agrees. “In terms of rich countries trying to do border controls, this is a phenomenon of the past 25 years,” he says. “These are very, very new.”
Across Europe, governments have begun to take up barriers as a response to the influx of refugees and migrants. Most recently, Britain and France agreed to share costs for a $23 million concrete wall at the border town of Calais.
But Europeans have turned to another, even more symbolic response: legislation to restrict the wearing of Islamic veils in public spaces – even where, as in Germany, very few women actually use it, and where a tide of refugees from Syria and other war-ravaged countries was initially welcomed.
For European Union leaders pursuing such laws, „the symbolism of that is even more important,“ says Papademetriou. „This is something that appeals to people in Europe who are really deeply concerned about the fact that their country is changing in front of their eyes. “
The United States is no stranger to anxieties over the integrity of its cultural makeup, either. And Trump’s support among the “alt-right,” with its calls to „make America white again,“ may have contributed to the wall’s decline in popularity, as measured by several surveys.
But his other controversial proposals on immigration, like the ban on Muslims or citizens of Muslim-majority countries, link the issue explicitly to national security. And the culture wars of recent decades, like English-only laws for schools, haven’t yet seen a renaissance during Trump’s rise, meaning the Mexican border remains the main stage, at least for now.

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© Source: http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2017/0114/From-the-wall-to-the-burqa-why-the-politics-of-immigration-is-all-about-big-symbols
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Lord Snowdon was a talented film maker and photographer whose marriage to Princess Margaret fed the gossip columns for over a decade.
His career was punctuated by lurid tales of extra-marital affairs, alcohol and drugs, but throughout it all he maintained a close contact with the Royal Family.
His body of photographic work featured the cream of British society, although he was usually dismissive about his work.
He was most proud of the stunning aviary he helped design for London Zoo.
He was born Anthony Charles Robert Armstrong-Jones on 7 March 1930, into a family of minor gentry.
His father, Ronald, was a barrister while his mother, society beauty Anne Messel, later became Countess of Rosse, following her divorce from his father.
In his teens, he contracted polio and had to lie flat on his back for a year. It left him with a permanent limp.
But visits by such luminaries as Noel Coward and Marlene Dietrich, arranged by his uncle, the theatre designer Oliver Messel, helped alleviate the boredom.
He was educated at Eton, where his passion for photography began. He went on to Jesus College, Cambridge, and was cox of the victorious eight in the 1950 Boat Race.
He never completed his course on architecture, and at 21 took up photography as a career, setting up a studio of his own in London.
It was his flair for taking less formal photographs that earned him the commission, in 1956, for the 21st birthday pictures of the Duke of Kent.
Later he was invited to Buckingham Palace to photograph the Prince of Wales and other members of the Royal Family, including Princess Margaret.
Unlike some photographers, he did not set out to create a rapport with his subjects.
„I don’t want people to feel at ease,“ he once said. „You want a bit of an edge. “
His engagement to Princess Margaret was announced in 1960.
At the time there had been no recent precedent for anyone so near to the throne marrying outside the ranks of royalty or the British peerage.
The wedding took place on 6 May 1960, and after a honeymoon tour of the Caribbean in the royal yacht Britannia, the young couple moved into Kensington Palace.
Early in 1961 Armstrong-Jones was raised to the peerage as Lord Snowdon, and he took his seat in the House of Lords a year later. A son, David, Viscount Linley, was born in 1961, and their daughter, Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones, three years later.
In 1963 the Queen made him Constable of Caernarvon Castle, and as such he took a leading part in the arrangements for the investiture of the Prince of Wales in 1969.
He was scathing about the ceremonial surrounding the event, claiming that most of the procedures used were „completely bogus“.
Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon went to Jamaica together in 1962, when the princess represented the Queen at the independence celebrations, and they made an official visit to the United States in 1964.
In the early years of their marriage, he and Princess Margaret were treated almost as Hollywood stars. The press relished incidents in which the Snowdons donned leather jackets and raced motorbikes along London’s North Circular Road.
They consorted with celebrities of the day, and provided a marked contrast to the more conservative Queen and Prince Philip.
But the marriage quickly experienced the sort of difficulties that were destined to plague royal relationships over the following 20 years.
Snowdon’s womanising was part of the reason for the break-up. A natural charmer, he had a string of relationships throughout his life and seemed incapable of remaining faithful.
One close friend was quoted in a biography of the earl as saying: „If it moves, he’ll have it. “
Margaret’s own predilection for late-night partying, and the desire of both of them to be the centre of attention, also fuelled the breakdown.
By then, Snowdon had embarked on a varied professional career – acting as adviser to the Council of Industrial Design, and working for various publications, including the Sunday Times.
The aviary he helped design for London Zoo opened in 1964. It was regarded as cutting-edge in its use of new materials, providing the maximum amount of space for birds to fly.
He helped to make several television documentaries. The first, Don’t Count the Candles, from 1968, was about old age and won seven international awards.
In 1975 he directed two programmes in BBC television’s Explorers series, and in 1981 he presented two programmes on photography, Snowdon on Camera, for which he was nominated for a Bafta Award.
Snowdon designed an electrically powered wheelchair, called the Chairmobile.
It was during a debate on the mobility of people with physical disabilities that he had made his maiden speech in the Lords in April 1974.
In March 1976, it was finally announced that he and Princess Margaret would live apart.
When Margaret had a relationship with Roddy Llewellyn, Snowdon was able to play the part, though not very convincingly, of the cuckolded husband, and the divorce became final in 1978.
Snowdon always refused to speak about the marriage but he regularly saw the children and continued to photograph the Royal Family.
In December 1978, he was married again, to Lucy Lindsay-Hogg, a researcher on a BBC television series on which he was working. They had a daughter, Frances, the following July.
In June 1980 Snowdon started an award scheme for disabled students. The money for it came from the reproduction fees he had received over 20 years from his royal photographs.
The following year the Snowdon Council was formed, of which he was president. It comprised 12 members co-ordinating a dozen different bodies concerned with helping disabled people.
Also in 1981 a compromise was reached in his long-running row with Lord Aberconway, president of the Royal Horticultural Society, who had said that disabled visitors to the Chelsea Flower Show were not encouraged.
It was agreed that guide dogs would be admitted, and a special garden was created for those with disabilities.
While married to Lucy Lindsay-Hogg, Snowdon had a long affair with journalist Ann Hills, who took her own life in 1996.
Two years later, at the age of 68, he fathered a son, Jasper, with 33-year-old Melanie Cable-Alexander, a journalist on Country Life.
This proved the final straw for Lucy, and the couple divorced.
By then Snowdon had lost his seat in the Lords, following Labour’s clear-out of hereditary peers. Instead, he took a life peerage as Baron Armstrong-Jones to enable him to remain in the House.
Despite an increasing disability as a result of his childhood polio, Lord Snowdon travelled widely, doing work for the theatre and fashion houses as well as portraits and travelogues.
A friend once said of him, „It’s impossible to imagine a gentler, more cultured man. „

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© Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11483331
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