Research photographers

KOEN WESSING

Koen Wessing was a Dutch photojournalist best known for his work photographing Chile’s 1973 mititary coup.  Wessing was first attracted to photography after reading Weegee’s Naked City. He started as freelance photographer in 1963. In the 60′s he served a stint as a printer for Magnum. He first won recognition for his own pictures of the May protests in Paris in 1968 and the occupation of the Maagdenhuis of the University in Amsterdam in 1969. His images of the 1973 coup in Chile against the progressive government of Salvador Allende, taken with a Leica M4, made him an internationally renowned photographer.

Roland Barthe, in his seminal work Camera Lucida, discusses at length one of Wessing’s 1979 photos from Nicaragua that depicts two nuns walking past armed soldiers. The juxtaposition — or duality, as Barthes calls it — is noteworthy to Barthes; it is this duality that creates the picture’s punctum, the thing that makes the viewer pause and look again.

Koen Wessing passed away in Amsterdam on February 2, 2011. He was in the process of hanging prints for an upcoming retrospective of his work in Santiago.

Wanda Wulz

Italian photographer, from a family of portrait photographers in Trieste; her grandfather Giuseppe had founded the Studio Fotografico Wulz in 1868. Taught by her father Carlo, she photographed Trieste's cultural notables. In 1931 she met Filippo Marinetti and subsequently joined the futurist movement participating in their exhibitions. Her experiments with photodynamism employed superimposition and rhythmic scansion to create studies of bodies in motion, multiple portraits, and Futurist still lifes. Wulz's self-portrait Io+gatto (I+cat; 1932) is one of the best-known Futurist photographic images. But by the late 1930s she was focusing again on commercial work

The following is one of Wul'z most famous piece of artwork and is linked to duality, which of course is related to our brief. This particular image has been edited well and merged to different faces into one: a cat and a human leading to the artwork being called I + Cat. Personally I find this work inspiring yet mischievous as i struggle to find a deeper meaning to this piece apart from the fact of a person being close to their pet.