Powerpoint about Cobb's documentary "Geisha"

1. Geisha
Jodi Cobb
The word geisha means quot;artist.quot; A geisha is not a prostitute, but an entertainer for the
richest and most powerful men of Japan. She entertains at parties, excelling in the arts
of song, dance, and music, but mostly in the art of pampering the male ego. –Jodi Cobb

2. Jodi Cobb
• BA in Journalism and Master of Art from University of Missouri
• Worked at News Journal in Wilmington and the Denver
Post, then started freelancing at National Geographic in
1975, became staff in 1977
• First photographer to enter the lives of Saudi Arabian women
• One of the first photographers to cross China when it
reopened to the west
• Went to Japan in 1994 to document the secret life of Geisha

3. Jodi Cobb, cont.
• Exhibited at the ICP and the Corcoran Gallery
• Taught at Eddie Adams Photographic Workshops
• First female White House News Photographer of the
Year
• Won multiple National Press Photographer
• Association Pictures of the Year awards, and World
Press awards
• US Presidential Delegate to the 1998 Winter Olympics

4. Geisha: The Life, the Voices, the
Art
• American Society of Media Photographers award 1996
• “I realized that I had never seen anything like it, had no idea what a
geisha was and what the life was like, and was just dying to go back
and do a whole project on it, and was able to get the funding and go
back. I ended up spending six months with geisha over a three year
period.” –Cobb
• I think in the West, there is a conception of geisha as
prostitutes, and one of the things that I wanted to show was that that
really wasn't the case. I wanted to show what their lives were really
like and what their art was composed of, and what the entertainment
was that they provided for these men. There are very few geisha left
in Japan. There's probably only 700 of them left, down from about
800,000 of them at the turn of the century. And I think this is
probably the last generation of true geisha, so I really wanted to
document this dying tradition.

5. • National Geographic
http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/p
hotography/photographers/photographer-jodi-
cobb.html
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/media/phot
ography/biographies/cobb.html
• The Master Series
http://pdngallery.com/cobrand/nikonnet/maste
rs/jodi_cobb/01.html