John burke photography biography samples

In 1907, the San Francisco Call printed a full-page collage that evocatively mingles drawings, half-tone photographs, and text to present “The Indian and the Auto: A Meeting of Extremes” (fig. 1). Implying an uneasy clash of old and new, a large central sketch depicts an Indian figure sitting on a blanket wearing a war bonnet and trailer, facing the front grate of an automobile. His chin rests meditatively in one hand, and he holds a wrench, with his sleeve rolled up in anticipation of work. The scene implies that the horse, seen in the background, has been rendered obsolete. While this figure is not captioned, the photographs reproduced around the drawing represent Siŋté Máza (Iron Tail, c. 1840s–1916), a longtime Lakȟóta “chief” in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West who appeared frequently in early twentieth-century mass media. In the oval photograph to the left, Siŋté Máza leans against the hood of the car wearing regalia, cranking the handle to start the vehicle’s engine. At right, a photographic silhouette of Siŋté Máza in the driver’s seat is reproduced with a note that he “actually drove the machine for ten miles with a load of yelling braves.” The text expands on the ensuing test drive at a Toledo, Ohio, automobile factory: “Soon the ‘noble red man’ was flying over the highway, breathless, speechless, but incidentally having his first ride in an auto, and, incidentally, the time of his life.” Popular photographic technology of the era was unable to capture such rapid motion, and the event is rendered with a drawing in a long horizontal box, imagining the car speeding across the landscape with a trailing cloud of dust. The bottom photograph implies the future, with three children seated on the hood of the car with the confident caption, “Who’s Afraid cried the Papoose.” From the horse to the children, the image builds a trajectory that imagined Indians’ slow but ine

Victorian and early 20 Century travels.

Journeys and travelling have been associated with photography from its very early days, well before Jack Kerouac’s work On the Road was conceived. In the Victorian era it was common to take a Grand Tour, and not unusual for the tour to be accompanied by a photographer.

One of the most famous of the tours was that of Queen Victoria’s son, the future King Edward VII. He took a major journey around the Middle East and was a accompanied by the photographer Francis Bedford (1815-1984). A book of images from this tour has recently been published Cairo to Constantinople (Gordon et al., 2013) which shows many of the images accompanied by a travelogue and short excerpts from the Prince of Wales diary. One typical example shows the mosque Hagia Sophia alongside the comment, [the Prince thought Hagia Sophia] ‘the finestI have seen in the East. It was formerly a Xtian church’ (p.199). It is interspersed with maps showing the journey and gives a real feel for how the wealthy English found the Middle East in that era. Some of the pictures include people, although, unless famous they are rarely the focus of the image and may well have been included simply to show the massive scale of the monuments. On return to England the pictures were made into a portfolio produced by Day & Son and were also published more widely. This was definitely a commercial venture by Bedford, given extra kudos by the presence of the Prince.

John Burke (1843 – 1900) traveled widely in Afghanistan where he took many images of the British forces during one of their earlier invasions of that land. Burke took pictures of the landscape, (devastated by war), some rather beautiful images of the countryside and portraits, both of the English soldiers and the local people. In From Kashmir to Kabul (Khan, 2002)Khan shows many of the images but also points out the the attribution of many of the images is unclear as another photographer, William Baker, wa