May Mirin
May Mirin (1900-1997) was an American photographer who documented life in Mexico.
Biography
[edit]May Mirin was born in New York in 1900. She first visited Mexico in 1937, then returned to the country frequently for long periods until the 1980s.[1] There she produced documentary and travel series,[2] contemporaneously with fellow Americans Jasper Wood, Wayne Miller and Canadian Reva Brooks,[3] at a time when pictures by few significant Mexican-born photographers, other than those by Lola and Manuel Alvarez Bravo, were known outside the country.[1]
Mirin's images and writing featured in popular mid-century American photography magazines.[4][5]
Recognition
[edit]In 1955, two of her photographs - one of a candlelit religious devotion in Mexico and a second of a graveyard in New York[6] - were chosen by Edward Steichen for the exhibition The Family of Man that he curated for MoMA, and which toured the world and was seen by over 9 million visitors.[7] She was among the numbers of its participating photographers remembered by Helen Gee as frequenting her Limelight gallery, New York City's first important post-war photography gallery (1954-1961).[8]
Later life
[edit]During the 1970s she took up painting and volunteered for the American Museum of Natural History.[9]
Collections
[edit]Examples of May Mirin's photographic work are held in the permanent collections of the Museum Folkwang in Essen, MoMA and Clerveaux Castle, Luxembourg.
References
[edit]- ^ a b Rodríguez, José Antonio (2012), Fotó-grafas en México, 1872-1960, Turner, ISBN 978-84-939478-5-9
- ^ Travel and Camera, Volume 16 U.S. Camera Publishing Corporation, 1953, p.58
- ^ Hopkinson, A. (2001). 'Mediated Worlds': Latin American Photography. Bulletin of Latin American Research, 20(4), 527.
- ^ May Mirin "Poetry with a Camera" Classic Photography #5 (Autumn 1957)
- ^ Photographers Showplace, v.1, n.2, Dec 1956.
- ^ Córdova, Carlos A. “Steichen: Retratos de familia”. Luna Córnea. 23 (2002): 130-137. See also: The Family of Man, created by Edward Steichen, proloque by Carl Sandburg. The Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.) (1983) ISBN 978-0-87070-341-6.
- ^ Steichen, Edward; Steichen, Edward, 1879-1973, (organizer.); Sandburg, Carl, 1878-1967, (writer of foreword.); Norman, Dorothy, 1905-1997, (writer of added text.); Lionni, Leo, 1910-1999, (book designer.); Mason, Jerry, (editor.); Stoller, Ezra, (photographer.); Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.) (1955), The family of man : the photographic exhibition, Published for the Museum of Modern Art by Simon and Schuster in collaboration with the Maco Magazine Corporation
{{citation}}:|author6=has generic name (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) - ^ ”I was so happy so many were coming around, some in fact making Limelight their ‘home’; Arthur Lavine, Lew Parrella, Leon Levinstein, May Mirin, Louis Stettner, David Vestal, Hella Hammid, Simpson Kalisher, Morris Jaffe…” Helen Gee (1997) Limelight: a Greenwich Village Photography Gallery and Coffeehouse in the Fifties: A Memoir. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico. ISBN 978-0826318176.
- ^ mentioned in American Museum of Natural History in-house magazine Grapevine Vol XXIX, No.3 as “May Mirin-photographer of merit and Sunday painter”