A Salute to the Masters: Barkers (A Tribute to Jack Delano)

This is tribute to the Farm Security Administration photographer, Jack Delano, and his photographic series dedicated to barkers. For this article, I chose a series of photos I took this year at the traditional Easter Fair in my city, Como, using a classic rangefinder camera loaded with a roll of black and white film.

Jack Delano (1914 – 1997) was an American photographer and composer who was a member of the Farm Security Administration, an important New Deal agency designed to assist rural America during the Great Depression. Born Jacob Ovcharo in a Russian village, Delano left his country in 1923 together with his parents and his younger brother. In the U.S.A. he began his studies in photography, graphic art, and music at Settlement Music School, where he graduated from in 1932.

A multifaceted individual, he was not only a photographer, but also a great composer of Puerto Rican music. He was also a film director, and his film “Los Peroteros” , which was about rural kids and their love for baseball, is considered a classic in Puerto Rican cinema. In addition, Delano, together with his wife, wrote a classic children’s book, “The Child’s Gift: A Twelfth Night Tale.”

After graduating, Delano was awarded with a Cresson Traveling Fellowship that allowed him to travel across almost all of Europe,where he had the opportunity to visit the most important museums in the world like Prado in Madrid and British Museum in London. When he returned to the U.S.A., he received a grant from the Federal Arts Program. He began his photographic work with a reportage about Pottsville mines, where many workers were employed with illegal contracts. He sent some of these photos to the F.S.A. where he found a position in 1940, replacing the outgoing Arthur Rothstein.

With the F.S.A. Delano made some reportages about workers in many small towns along the American Eastern Coast. After spending a few years in Puerto Rico, where he worked again for the F.S.A., he returned to America and took many photos of the railroad industry and workers. Between 1943 and 1946, he served the U.S. Army as a photographer in the Pacific and South America. After the war, he returned to Puerto Rico where he worked as a Puerto Rican TV director (he was the creator of the Puerto Rico television public network), filmmaker, composer, and writer. In the New York Times blog, you can read a very interesting article about this important artist (links to the first and second parts here and here, respectively).

Among Delano’s many humanistic photos, I chose a series dedicated to barkers in public fairs taken in 1941, like this one taken in Georgia, and two in Vermont here and here. All these photos may be found in the archive of the Library of Congress.

In writing this tribute, I chose a series of my own photos of barkers at the traditional Easter Fair in my city, Como. Every year, nice sellers make entertaining demonstrations of tools for the home, for example, for cleaning, the kitchen, or for DIY. Among them was a stall that demonstrated magical tricks for children, as you can see the last set of photos. Despite the street barker profession slowly disappearing, this fair is always enjoyable to photograph. All these photos were taken with my Olympus 35RC camera loaded with an Ilford black and white roll of film, which I developed myself.

A Salute to the Masters is a series dedicated to great photographers that I like. I posted other tributes for Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, Helen Levitt, Ernst Haas, Stephen Shore, Gabriele Basilico, Robert Adams, Thomas Struth, J.H. Lartigue, Elliott Erwitt, Robert Frank, Gianni Berengo Gardin, André Kertész, Willy Ronis, Brassaï, Rodchenko, Dan Graham, Henry Grant, William Eggleston, Dennis Stock, Juergen Teller, Martin Parr, Peter Mitchell, Mario Giacomelli, David Burnett, Michael Williamson, Bernard Cahier, Harry Gruyaert, Bruno Barbey, Paul Strand, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Lothar Rübelt, David Goldblatt, Henry Cartier-Bresson, Raymond Depardon, Aaron Siskind, Mario de Biasi, Sabine Weiss and Izis Bidermanas. I especially love street photography and urban architectural photography.

written by sirio174 on 2015-05-02 #lifestyle #fair #italy #como #regular-contributor #a-salute-to-the-masters #easter-fair #barkers #jack-delano