Zemni Images

Linda Mayoux Notes for Creative Activism

Beginnings of Photography

Tag: black and white

  • Beginnings of Photography

    (edited from Wikipedia various)

    The word “photography” was created from the Greek roots φωτός (phōtos), genitive of φῶς (phōs), “light” and γραφή (graphé) “representation by means of lines” or “drawing”, together meaning “drawing with light”.

    Wikipedia links:  History of photography History of the camera

    Several people may have coined the same new term from these roots independently. Hercules Florence, a French painter and inventor living in Campinas, Brazil, used the French form of the word, photographie, in private notes which a Brazilian photography historian believes were written in 1834. Johann von Maedler, a Berlin astronomer, is credited in a 1932 German history of photography as having used it in an article published on 25 February 1839 in the German newspaper Vossische Zeitung. Both of these claims are now widely reported but apparently neither has ever been independently confirmed as beyond reasonable doubt.

    Credit has traditionally been given to Sir John Herschel both for coining the word and for introducing it to the public. His uses of it in private correspondence prior to 25 February 1839 and at his Royal Society lecture on the subject in London on 14 March 1839 have long been amply documented and accepted as settled facts.

    Precursor technologies

    Photography is the result of combining several technical discoveries.

    Pinhole camera or camera obscura: The camera obscura literally means “dark chamber” in Latin. It is a box with a hole in it which allows light to go through and create an image onto the piece of paper. The discovery of the camera obscura that provides an image of a scene dates back to ancient China.  Chinese philosopher Mo Di and Greek mathematicians Aristotle and Euclid described a pinhole camera in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. In the 6th century CE, Byzantine mathematician Anthemius of Tralles used a type of camera obscura in his experiments, Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) (965–1040) studied the camera obscura and pinhole camera. Renaissance painters used the camera obscura which, in fact, gives the optical rendering in color that dominates Western Art. Leonardo da Vinci mentions natural cameras obscura that are formed by dark caves on the edge of a sunlit valley. A hole in the cave wall will act as a pinhole camera and project a laterally reversed, upside down image on a piece of paper.

    Methods of reproducing and fixing the image: Silver Nitrate and Silver Chloride: Albertus Magnus (1193–1280) discovered silver nitrate,[12] and Georg Fabricius (1516–71) discovered silver chloride. Techniques described in the Book of Optics are capable of producing primitive photographs using medieval materials. Daniele Barbaro described a diaphragm in 1566. Wilhelm Homberg described how light darkened some chemicals (photochemical effect) in 1694. The fiction book Giphantie, published in 1760, by French author Tiphaigne de la Roche, described what can be interpreted as photography.

    The first success of reproducing images without a camera occurred when Thomas Wedgwood, from the famous family of potters, obtained copies of paintings on leather using silver salts. Since he had no way of permanently fixing those reproductions (stabilizing the image by washing out the non-exposed silver salts), they would turn completely black in the light and thus had to be kept in a dark room for viewing.

    First camera photography (1820s)

    Photography as a usable process dates to the 1820s with the discovery of chemical photography. The first permanent photoetching was an image produced in 1822 by the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce, but it was destroyed in a later attempt to make prints from it. Niépce was successful again in 1825. He made the View from the Window at Le Gras, the earliest surviving photograph from nature (i.e., of the image of a real-world scene, as formed in a camera obscura by alens), in 1826 or 1827.

    Earliest known surviving heliographic engraving, 1825, printed from a metal plate made by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce with his “heliographic process”. The plate was exposed under an ordinary engraving and copied it by photographic means. This was a step towards the first permanent photograph from nature taken with a camera obscura, in 1826.

    Because Niépce’s camera photographs required an extremely long exposure (at least eight hours and probably several days), he sought to greatly improve his bitumen process or replace it with one that was more practical. Working in partnership with Louis Daguerre, he discovered a somewhat more sensitive process that produced visually superior results, but it still required a few hours of exposure in the camera. Niépce died in 1833 and Daguerre then redirected the experiments toward the light-sensitive silver halides, which Niépce had abandoned many years earlier because of his inability to make the images he captured with them light-fast and permanent. Daguerre’s efforts culminated in what would later be named the daguerreotype process, the essential elements of which were in place in 1837. The required exposure time was measured in minutes instead of hours. Daguerre took the earliest confirmed photograph of a person in 1838 while capturing a view of a Paris street: unlike the other pedestrian and horse-drawn traffic on the busy boulevard, which appears deserted, one man having his boots polished stood sufficiently still throughout the approximately ten-minute-long exposure to be visible. Eventually, France agreed to pay Daguerre a pension for his process in exchange for the right to present his invention to the world as the gift of France, which occurred on 19 August 1839.

    A latticed window inLacock Abbey, England, photographed by William Fox Talbot in 1835. Shown here in positive form, this may be the oldest extant photographic negative made in a camera.

    Meanwhile, in Brazil, Hercules Florence had already created his own process in 1832, naming it Photographie, and an English inventor, William Fox Talbot, had created another method of making a reasonably light-fast silver process image but had kept his work secret. After reading about Daguerre’s invention in January 1839, Talbot published his method and set about improving on it. At first, like other pre-daguerreotype processes, Talbot’s paper-based photography typically required hours-long exposures in the camera, but in 1840 he created the calotype process, with exposures comparable to the daguerreotype. In both its original and calotype forms, Talbot’s process, unlike Daguerre’s, created a translucent negative which could be used to print multiple positive copies, the basis of most chemical photography up to the present day. Daguerreotypes could only be replicated by rephotographing them with a camera.[21] Talbot’s famous tiny paper negative of the Oriel window in Lacock Abbey, one of a number of camera photographs he made in the summer of 1835, may be the oldest camera negative in existence.[22][23]

    John Herschel made many contributions to the new field. He invented the cyanotype process, later familiar as the “blueprint”. He was the first to use the terms “photography”, “negative” and “positive”. He had discovered in 1819 that sodium thiosulphate was a solvent of silver halides, and in 1839 he informed Talbot (and, indirectly, Daguerre) that it could be used to “fix” silver-halide-based photographs and make them completely light-fast. He made the first glass negative in late 1839.

    In the March 1851 issue of The Chemist, Frederick Scott Archer published his wet plate collodion process. It became the most widely used photographic medium until the gelatin dry plate, introduced in the 1870s, eventually replaced it. There are three subsets to the collodion process; the Ambrotype (a positive image on glass), the Ferrotype or Tintype (a positive image on metal) and the glass negative, which was used to make positive prints on albumen or salted paper.

    Many advances in photographic glass plates and printing were made during the rest of the 19th century. In 1884, George Eastman invented an early type of film to replace photographic plates, leading to the technology used by film cameras today.

    In 1891, Gabriel Lippmann introduced a process for making natural-color photographs based on the optical phenomenon of the interference of light waves. His scientifically elegant and important but ultimately impractical invention earned him the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1908.

  • Laura Grace Ford Inspiration

    Streets are indelibly marked by moments of socio-political intensity – uprisings, occupations and raves, trauma, anxiety and militancy – as well as the tremors and faultlines of your own past. The purpose of my walks is to identify something lingering, fizzing in the present. I’m not thinking about memory as a sanitised image, but as a texture in the moment, the sense that a place is crackling with agency. For me, this spectrality allows for a revisiting and reactivating of emancipatory currents.

    Savage Messiah as “a series of stories; broken narratives that articulated a certain moment, a certain relationship with the city. It was about transience and impermanence, but also about the bonds that form in those moments: kinship, comradeship and love.”

    Ford 2018 quoted Wikipedia

    I think a lot of what is called psychogeography now is just middle-class men acting like colonial explorers, showing us their discoveries and guarding their plot. I have spent the last twenty years walking around London and living here in a precarious fashion. I’ve had fifty addresses. I think my understanding and negotiation of the city is very different to theirs.

    Laura Grace Ford. Savage Messiah 2011 pxvii

    “Collided into a great block, the catalogue of urban rambles takes on a new identity as a fractured novel of the city…In the end, it’s about walking as a way of writing, recomposing London by experiencing its secret signs and obstacles.”

     Iain Sinclair reviewing the Savage Messiah for The Guardian, quoted Wikipedia

    Laura Oldfield Ford (also known as Laura Grace Ford born 1973) is a British artist and author.

    Her work explores political themes and focuses on British urban areas. This draws on her experience of growing up in Halifax, West Yorkshire in a community hit by the decline of the textile industry. In Leeds and later in London, she became involved in the punk, rave and squatting scenes and produced zines and posters influenced by Raymond Pettibon, Linder Sterling and Jon Savage. She took her Bachelor of Arts at the Slade School of Fine Art and her Master of Arts at the Royal College of Art (RCA. At the RCA’s graduation show in 2007 she exhibited a four-section painting depicting herself in each panel against a backdrop of urban chaos.

    She works in ballpoint pen, acrylic paint and spray paint.

    Her zine Savage Messiah, which centres on London, was published from 2005 to 2009 and collected as a book in 2011. Her more recent work continues her focus on areas of urban dispossession including East End of London and the new towns of Harlow, Hatfield and Stevenage where regeneration and ‘gentrification’ seeks to concrete over city wastelands with old tower-blocks and bleak ‘recreational’ open spaces.

    Other Links

    https://bubblegumclub.co.za/art/savage-messiah-by-laura-grace-ford/

    https://www.somersethouse.org.uk/blog/appendix-005

    https://vimeo.com/525457679

    Savage Messiah

    Savage Messiah takes its name from H. S. Ede’s biography of the French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Each issue focuses on a different London postcode. Ford uses the Situationist technique of the dérive: “urban drifts”, or walks, during which Oldfield Ford collected images which were then placed alongside both original and found texts, with the purpose of describing places, people and events.

    Savage Messiah was self-published from 2005 to 2009 before being published by Verso in 2011. A new edition of Verso’s Savage Messiah was published in 2019, featuring a new zine about west London in the wake of the Grenfell Tower fire and an introduction by Greil Marcus that identifies Walter Benjamin, Surrealism, the Situationist International and work by Nan Goldin and Andrea Arnold as precursors to Ford’s work.

    Later work

    !! to work on further. Here cut and paste from Wikipedia

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Oldfield_Ford

    Ford’s work subsequent to Savage Messiah tends to move beyond the zines’ focus on London and beyond the zine from, concerning other geographical spaces and adopting other forms including paintings and installations.[38] Her work was also featured in Urban Constellations, a 2011 collection edited by Matthew Gandy.[39] As of 2019 Ford was writing fiction and collaborating with the musician Jam City on work continuing the themes of the Savage Messiah project.[2]

    From January until March 2009, a collection of her work entitled London 2013, Drifting Through the Ruins, including all ten issues of Savage Messiah, was featured in London’s Hales Gallery.[22] Ford was one of three artists whose work was exhibited as part of Slump City at SPACE in London in June 2009.[23] Another exhibition, Britannia 2013–1981 ran in Hatfield from November 2009 until January 2010.[6]

    In February 2011, Ford’s work was on display in Bristol as a part of Poster Sites, a project commissioned by Arnolfini.[3] She created 11 posters based on dérives in the city; though Arnolfini produced a map and Ford led a walk between them, they were primarily left to be casually witnessed by the public.[10] Also in 2011, her work was featured in Orbitecture, an exhibition at the Grundy Art Gallery in Blackpool.[3]

    In 2012 her work was exhibited as part of There Is a Place… at The New Art Gallery in Walsall.[24] Also in 2012, work by Ford inspired by El Raval and protests in Barcelona were featured in Desire Lines at the Espai Cultural Caja Madrid in Barcelona.[25]

    In 2014 Ford’s work was featured in Soft Estate at The Bluecoat in Liverpool.[26] The same year, her work was included in Ruin Lust at the Tate Britain.[27] Later that year a solo exhibition of paintings and collaged drawings entitled Seroxat, Smirnoff, THC ran at the Stanley Picker Gallery in Surbiton.[28]

    Her solo exhibition Chthonic Reverb ran at Grand Union Gallery in Birmingham in 2016. Featuring audio and visual work, the exhibition focuses on Birmingham, where Ford lived in the early 1990s, including Herbert Manzoni‘s impact on the city and the Big City Plan.[29]

    In 2017 Ford’s solo exhibition Alpha/Isis/Eden ran at The Showroom in London. The exhibition focused on the effects of urban regeneration in the neighbourhood surrounding the gallery near Edgware Road in central London, and included audio recordings of the area.[1][30][31]

    Themes and practice[edit]

    Skye Sherwin of The Guardian writes that Ford’s work “focuses on areas haunted by an urban dispossessed, which regeneration seeks to concrete over: city wastelands where fortress-like old tower-blocks rise, with their Escher-like walkways and bleak ‘recreational’ open spaces.”[3] These include the East End of London and the new towns of Harlow, Hatfield and Stevenage.[6] Her work on the East End is critical of the 2012 Summer Olympics, held in London, and the associated development program,[22] in particular the regeneration process surrounding the Olympic Park.[23] Christopher Collier has argued that Ford’s work utilises “semi-fictionalised settings of dilapidated blue-collar and immigrant districts of a post-Thatcherite London increasingly ghettoised, defunded and threatened by the state.”[32]

    Her work also engages with architecture. In a 2009 interview Ford reiterated the centrality of a critique of urban regeneration, and expressed an interest in brutalist architecture (referring specifically to Broadwater Farm in Tottenham and Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar.[33] Ford has argued that brutalism is significant due to “the collective ideals inherent in it: the rethinking and radical reshaping of public space, the idea of cities being conducive to an endless ‘derive‘, the postwar idea that everyone is entitled to a publicly owned house.”[1] She also critiqued “an obsession with friendly looking architecture, curved lines, outgrowths of green roof tops, panels and balconies in Scandinavian wood or brightly coloured aluminium”, describing these trends as “playschool architecture”.[33] In 2018, Ford noted that her recent work was concerned less with inner cities and more with suburbs and urban peripheries: “That’s mostly where you have to go now if you want to encounter the former intensity of zones 1 and 2 … It used to be the inner cities that were sacrificed, ruled by slum landlords, starved of investment and surrounded by circles of unreachable affluence. But in the past decade or so there has been an accelerated reversal of this process.”[1]

    In the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Andrew Harris wrote that London 2013, Drifting Through the Ruins (2009) “attempts to reactivate more conflictual architectural, political and aesthetic strategies that have been largely erased by the widespread gentrification of London since the 1970s” and is an example of an intervention which offers “an important and neglected resource for complicating, disrupting and re-visioning understandings of urban change”.[34] Paul Gravett describes Ford’s work as being fuelled by a longing for a past incarnation of the punk subculture and a “recovery of punk’s provocation and politicisation”.[5]

    Contemporary archaeologist James R. Dixon set Ford’s February 2011 Arnolfini exhibition against the April 2011 Bristol riot. Dixon saw in her work “the material conditions that can be identified as a contributing factors” in the riot, and noted that rather than being immediately apparent, those conditions are identified by Ford through the dérive technique and her use of found images. Dixon argues that, like the riot itself,

    Oldfield Ford’s work exposes what is hidden by the veneer of respectability … [it shows] just how thin that veneer is, how beneath the fake harmony of consumerism and happy lives there is a “truth” of hardship, decay, and violence that will, on occasion, reveal itself. It is … observed not easily, but by durational engagement with places, both in the form of the drifts and “off-site” in the forming of the juxtapositions of images and text that most accurately represent the potential of a place to experience civil unrest.[10]

    She describes her practise as centring on walks through London and the creation of “emotional maps”.[6] Ford has said “I regard my work as diaristic; the city can be read as a palimpsest, of layers of erasure and overwriting. The need to document the transient and ephemeral nature of the city is becoming increasingly urgent as the process of enclosure and privatisation continues apace.”[22] Discussing Alpha/Isis/Eden in 2018, she said “I walk around London to gauge what’s happening, to tune into the affective shifts. This is how I think about walking and memory, as a process of piecing fragments together to resurrect something, to stop them being erased, and to will something into being.”[1] She also said, in the same interview:

    While Ford’s work has been described as psychogeography, Mark Fisher suggested that it be understood instead in terms of Jacques Derrida‘s account of hauntology, in order to better understand the ways the urban spaces she depicts represent “ghosts” or political paths not taken.[35] Christopher Collier, conversely, has proposed that Ford’s work be understood as both hauntology and psychogeography, and that such an approach allows a reappraisal of the politics of psychogeography.[35] Collier argues that “Savage Messiah is psychogeographical in that it involves drifting through the city, exploring the effects of the environment upon behaviour and emotion”,[36] but also draws on hauntology as a means of engaging “the failures of social democracy and post-war Modernist urban planning, but also … the collapse of the psychogeographic revival” of the 1990s.[37]

  • Daido Moriyama

  • Fay Godwin

  • Erik Sousanis inspiration

    Use of symbolic metaphor

    leaps of imagination

  • Zentangle

     

    Zentangle website

    Anything is Possible One Stroke at a Time
    At first glance, a Zentangle creation can seem intricate and complicated. But, when you learn how it is done, you realize how simple it is . . . sort of like learning the secret behind a magic trick. Then, when you create a piece of Zentangle art, you realize how fun and engrossing the process itself is.

    We love presenting to a class or seminar full of people who are convinced they can’t draw the Zentangle art we show them. Then, within 15 minutes, they have easily accomplished what they thought was impossible. This is one of our favorite Zentangle moments, because then we ask, “What else do you know that you can’t do?” You can transfer that insight and experience of success and accomplishment to any life experience. Something may look complicated, but you now know that you can do it, one simple stroke at a time.

    Deliberate Stroke
    In our Zentangle way, you draw each stroke consciously and deliberately. We are always making “strokes” (thoughts, words, deeds) in our life. By practicing the Zentangle Method’s suggestion to make each stroke deliberate, you understand how those apparently small and insignificant “strokes” of our moment to moment lives contribute to an overall life pattern. This is another reason that we say that life is an artform and everyone is an artist. Indeed, everyone draws.

    Deliberate Focus
    As you make a deliberate pen stroke on your Zentangle tile without concerning yourself of what it will look like when you are done, that very act of putting your pen to paper focuses your attention in a special way. As your eye follows your pen strokes your attention shifts to a state that allows fresh thoughts, new perspectives, and creative insights to flow unhindered by anxiety or effort.

    No Eraser
    There is no eraser in life and there is no eraser in a Zentangle Kit. However, in creating Zentangle art (and in living life), you will discover that apparent mistakes can be foundations for new patterns and take you in unexpected and exciting new directions.

    Unknown Outcomes
    Unlike much art, or most activities, you start out intentionally not knowing what your Zentangle creation will look like. The Zentangle Method allows you to discover new possibilities that you might not have anticipated when you began. We can most always tell when we’ve preplanned a specific outcome when using our Zentangle Method. It almost always looks forced and stiff.

    No Predetermined Solution
    With no predetermined correct answer, the Zentangle method offers both a freedom and a challenge. Unlike crossword, jigsaw, or Sudoku puzzles, there is no one predetermined solution. You cannot fail to create Zentangle art. At first this freedom might be a bit unnerving, as many of us have been trained to look for the one perfect solution. Soon however, this becomes a freeing and uplifting experience as you realize you can create never-ending, ever-changing “solutions” in your Zentangle creations.

    Elegance of Limits
    In seeming contradiction the limits established by a Zentangle string frees up your creativity. As you use the Zentangle Method, you’ll understand.

    Abstract
    You always succeed when you create Zentangle art because you always create a pattern. A Zentangle creation is meant to be nonrepresentative with no up or down. Since it is not a picture of something, you have no worries about whether you can draw a hand, or a duck. You always succeed in creating a pattern in a Zentangle way.

    Portable
    A Zentangle tile is 3 1/2 inches (89 mm) square. A Zentangle tile is designed to be completed in one sitting. Keep some Zentangle tiles in your pocket or purse. You can finish one in as little as 15 minutes. You get an immediate sense of accomplishment by completing your work of art. Of course, you can spend as much time as you like on a tile. Time melts as you focus on and enjoy your penstrokes.

    Inspirational
    The Zentangle Method’s non-verbal language of patterns and proportions can open doors to insights which seemed locked before. Creating in a Zentangle way opens those doors, not because they were locked, but because those doors swing on non-verbal hinges. When you create in a Zentangle way you can enter a state of relaxed focus in which intuitive insights flow freely. Get inspirations, ideas and answers unhindered by expectations or worries.

    High Quality
    Out of respect for yourself and your craft, we always encourage people to use the best tools and materials possible. We designed our Zentangle Kit with that in mind.

    Ceremony
    Like a Japanese Tea Ceremony, when you create Zentangle art you also create a personal environment. You can use our Zentangle approach as a tool to deliberately focus your thoughts.

    Gratitude
    Gratitude is our foundation. It also informs our product design and our teaching method. Whether its appreciating the texture of these wonderful paper tiles, becoming aware of the patterned beauty around us or thankful for the opportunity to put pen to paper, we always return to gratitude.

    www.zentangle.com

    Zentangle basics

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=30ZjgmV3YOQ

    Introduction to traditional approach.
    No rulers, 0.1 pigment liner

    More advanced variations

    Alternative from art geek. Uses ruler, brushes and thicker marker

    20 patterns Art Geek

    24 patterns speed up art

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SW7-uVzhavs

    Paradox

  • Shirley Baker

    Images on Mary  Evans Picture Library

    Google Images

    Shirley Baker, (1932-2014), was one of the rare female photographers who chronicled life in the north of England from the 1950s onwards. Her street photography was in the ‘flaneuse’ tradition of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, whom she named as influences. Unposed snapshots of people going about their business were juxtaposed with telling graffiti. She had a great eye for composition that has been under-appreciated next to her compassionate documentation and concern for social injustice, with a particular focus on women and children.

    From the 60s, Baker taught photography at Salford College of Art and would always carry her camera modestly stowed in her handbag. In free periods, she began a body of work, spanning 15 years, of the social housing in the area that was being demolished as people lived in semi-derelict slums. Shirley’s work in Salford and Manchester (shot mainly between 1960 and 1973) captured a time of rapid social and economic change in the lives of working class people in Manchester and Salford.”It was a time of much change: people were turfed out of their homes and some squatted in old buildings, trying to hang on to the traditional life they knew.”

    Slum clearances, started in the 1930s, resumed in earnest in the 1950s, and in the twenty years between 1955 and 1975, around 1.3 million homes were demolished nationwide. When Shirley Baker began photographing the streets of her native Salford, it seemed that no-one was interested in recording the human story of these soon-to-be demolished communities. Old ladies sitting on doorsteps in a row of condemned houses, men with handcarts searching for refuse to be recycled, children playing inventively among rubble and abandoned cars. That she chose to preserve these moments on film, now seems like the only perceptive response to a vanishing environment. It was not until 1989 that her first book, Street Photographs: Manchester and Salford, was published and Baker began to be more widely appreciated.

    In addition to her work in Manchester and Salford, she spent a considerable amount of time capturing Camden Market at the height of punk. Her work was often humorous and she added over the years to collections such as owners who look like their dogs and people falling asleep in public.

    Remembering the work of Shirley Baker Phil Coomes  BBC

    Life

    (from Guardian Obituary)

    Born in Salford, to Alec, a furniture maker, and Josephine, a housewife, Shirley had an identical twin, Barbara, who would also become an artist. They both went as boarders to Penrhos College, in Colwyn Bay, from where during the second world war they were evacuated to Chatsworth House, in Derbyshire. Their parents were unfazed by their daughters pursuing the arts professionally after they left school.

    Baker married Tony Levy, a GP, in 1957, and the couple eventually settled in Wilmslow, Cheshire, where their daughter, Nan, was born in 1963. Baker never displayed any of her photographs around their home, although she did like to take pictures of the family. This perhaps summed up the private, almost secretive, nature of her work.

    When Baker studied  photography at Manchester College of Technology, there was only one other woman on the course. On finishing, Baker’s plan was to work in-house at a company, recording processes and producing promotional images. She started at Courtaulds fabric manufacturers before freelancing for other businesses and doing some journalism, including for the Guardian. Baker encountered difficulties getting a press card, so was unable to pursue photojournalism seriously, and believed she was only given the assignments deemed unsuitable for men. From the 60s, Baker taught photography at Salford College of Art.

    Baker kept photographing in later life and completed an MA in critical history and the theory of photography at the University of Derby in 1995. She joined the Mary Evans Picture Library in 2008, and in 2012 had solo shows in Oldham and Salford, with another planned for 2015 at the Photoraphers’ Gallery in London. She was always pleased when people who featured in her work came along to exhibitions. At the opening of the Lowry Gallery in 2000, the Queen not only viewed Baker’s photographs but met some of Baker’s subjects, too.