Augenblick, Blog on Photography , Article : Paul French on the Newsreel Wong Bombed Boy

I love to read Paul French Blog China Rhyming, Paul is a great writer and great connoiseur of China and in particular Shanghai. An old article i found is about the famous photo of a Baby in a bombed South Station in Shanghai in 1937 done by H.S. Newsreel Wong , the photos published by Life Magazine and had a profound impact on American Society . Was taken during the Sino-Chinese war when Japanese invaded China. The article of Paul French discovered that the photos might have been staged. Paul French describe the fact on his book "Through the Looking Glass", here a small note from the article which you can view it here : In my book I included the famous photo but did not get release rights for the other photo that indicates the shot may have been staged somewhat – not that a baby wasn’t caught in the raid and left distraught in the Station but that the baby may have been repositioned or encouraged to stay in place while a photo was taken.

I include the famous photo and also the photo where is possible to see how the child has been placed in that position .

Article : Matsushige Yoshito

Yoshito Matsushige was the only person/photographer who took photos of his native Hiroshima soon after the first atomic bomb was dropped in 1945. Here an extract of the story from Japan Focus :
Inscribing Hiroshima: The Photography of Matsushige Yoshito
There are dozens of brilliant war photographers, but there is only one Yoshito Matsushige.
For many years, Matsushige, 92, worked for a major metro daily called Chugoku Shimbun. He may not have been the greatest war photographer ever but he is unique: he took the only photographs in Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, the day the first atomic bomb was detonated over the city, killing 150,000 people.
Photos of war are very much with us today, with fierce debates over whether we are seeing too much of one kind (Americans getting mutilated or strung up on bridges) and not enough of another (civilians dying in Fallujah and other cities). On Aug. 6, 1945, Matsushige wandered around Hiroshima for 10 hours, carrying one of the few cameras that survived the atomic bombing and two rolls of film with twenty-four possible exposures. This was no ordinary photo opportunity. He lined up one gripping shot after another but he could only push the shutter seven times.
When he was done he returned to his home and developed the pictures in the most primitive way, since every dark room in the city, including his own, had been destroyed. Under a star-filled sky, with the landscape around him littered with collapsed homes and the center of Hiroshima still smoldering in the distance, he washed his film in a radiated creek and hung it out to dry on the burned branch of a tree.
Five of the seven images came out, and they are all the world will ever know of what Hiroshima looked like on that day. Only Matsushige knows what the 17 photos he didn't take would have looked like.

Article : Was Caravaggio the first photographer?

Interesting article from by Tom Kington of the Guardian where he is referring to Caravaggio as one of the first "photographer"..... here the article shared from the Guardian:
Revered as the baroque master of lifelike portraits and light and shadow, the 16th-century painter Caravaggio is now being touted as the first master of photographic technique, two centuries before the formal invention of the camera.
The Italian artist has long been suspected of turning his studio into a giant camera obscura, punching a hole in the ceiling to help project images on to his canvas. But new research claims that Caravaggio also used chemicals to turn his canvases into primitive photographic film, "burning" images he then sketched on to for works such as St Matthew and the Angel.
"We were already sure Caravaggio projected images of his sitters, but we have now found mercury salt in his canvases, which is light-sensitive and used in film," said Roberta Lapucci, conservation chief at Florence's SACI institute.
Lapucci said she investigated the use of chemicals after building a camera obscura with artist David Hockney. The technique of using lens and mirrors to project an image was written about by Leonardo da Vinci, and Caravaggio was reputedly inspired to use one by the philosopher Giovanni Battista della Porta.
"You get the image by turning the whole studio into the camera obscura, but you need darkness, and the problem is you cannot paint in darkness," she said. "X-ray fluorescence shows the presence of the mercury salt in his canvases. That is not uncommon because it was used in glue, but we are awaiting proof he was using it on the surface, in his primer."
The image burned into the primer would last about 30 minutes and only be visible in the gloom. "Therefore he used a white lead paint to sketch, mixed with barium sulphate which was luminous, and which we have found traces of. That way he could see where he was sketching."