Boy, those Germans sure are ahead of their time - it’s not even 2010, yet. Anyway, amongst the winners of the German Photo Book Prizes 2010: American Power by Mitch Epstein (gold) and No Direction Home by Andrej Krementschouk (silver). Congratulations to the photographers and publishers!
Read more »

Fred Ritchin: “Unfortunately in the last twenty-five years we have done very little to establish and publicize guidelines, and now photojournalism is devolving into yet another medium perceived as intending to shock, titillate, sell, distort. My sense is that if we are truly serious about preserving at least some of its credibility […] we need to take strong steps. I am still of the opinion, as I expressed in the After Photography book last year, that a special frame placed around the photograph (perhaps a thicker one) indicating that a photograph is “non-fiction” - meaning that it is subjective, interpretive, but the image itself has NOT been manipulated beyond accepted darkroom techniques such as modest burning and dodging - would be helpful.”
Read more »

“Two eighteen-wheel trucks delivered 44,000 pounds of his [W. Eugene Smith] things there when he died in 1978, at fifty-nine, according to his doctors of ‘everything’ (cirrhosis, diabetes, high blood pressure, an enlarged heart). There are hundreds of 10,000 word letters to friends as well as people he barely knew, 25,000 vinyl records, as many as a million negatives and contact sheets, thousands of 3x5 cards filled with chicken-scratch notes to himself, along with brilliant fragments from the unfinished Pittsburgh project and 1,600 reels of tape from his Manhattan loft” - excerpt from Gene Smith’s Sink
Read more »

Yesterday, I found a quote over on Ed Winkleman’s blog and . Today, Ed has an update, pulling things apart a bit.
Read more »

“Evelyn Hofer, a photographer whose searching, exactingly composed portraits imparted a grave serenity to her human and architectural subjects and who collaborated on a renowned series of travel books with eminent writers in the 1950s and 1960s, died on Nov. 2 in Mexico City.” - obit
Read more »

I found an interesting quote on Ed Winkleman’s blog. What struck me about it was that while Ed emphasized the first sentence in a paragraph of a review by Roberta Smith (this, of course, because of his subject matter), I thought the last sentence needs to be looked at, too (independent of subject matter): “Ms. Horn’s work has both benefited and suffered from being what might be called “curators’ art.” Curators’ art is indisputably, even innocuously, elegant — with clear roots in Minimal and Conceptual Art and not much else. It tends to be profusely appreciated by a hermetic few, curators, artists and theorists, who fetishize its refinements and often take its creators pretty much at their word. Ms. Horn has always had a lot to say about what her work means and how it is to be viewed, and some of it is quite interesting, but artists don’t own the meaning of their artworks.”
Read more »

Recently, German magazine Photography Now approached me for an interview. To give me an idea of such interviews, they sent me an older issue, which featured a long and very interesting interview with Gerhard Steidl. Unfortunately, the interview was in German and not available online - so I asked the makers of Photography Now whether I could translate the interview and re-publish it here. With Photography Now having a whole cache of such interviews, we agreed on a series of translations - which are due to appear here, every two weeks or so (depending on, for example, how long it takes me to translate them), provided the interviewees agree to it. The following is the first such interview, published in Photography Now 1.2009. My thanks to Marte Kraeher, Claudia Stein, and the staff at Photography Now, and, of course, to a Gerhard Steidl. - JMC
Read more »

“Germany’s most popular women’s magazine is banning professional models from its pages and replacing them with images of “real life” women instead.” (story, via).
Read more »

Here’s a creative idea: “Graphic Intersections is a collaborative project loosely based on the old Surrealist and Dadaist game The Exquisite Corpse. Designed to unite disparate artists in an interconnected photographic relay of images inspired by one another, this project strives to emphasize a system of response entirely rooted in unmediated visual reaction. The first photographer made a photograph, which was subsequently forwarded to the second in line. The 2nd then, based solely on their own visual, emotional, intellectual or philosophical response, in turn made photographs in artistic reaction to the one they were given. The artists involved were not given any written material to accompany the photograph, nor did they know whose image they were responding to. This was designed to propagate chance, or as the Surrealist’s put it, exploit ‘the mystique of accident.’”
Read more »

“This site contains the American (1950’s through 1980’s) vintage and vernacular photograph collection of Doug Rickard, Founder of American Suburb X. Also contained are select archives from the Documerica Project (1971-1977) which was sponsored by the Environmental Protection Agency.”
Read more »

I keep coming back to the question what it actually is that I’m looking for in photography (and art), in part because people ask me - and usually, as the other day in a conversation with Anne-Celine Jaeger, I don’t have a good (which here means snappy and simple) answer. Well, until I figured it out: What I really love is transformative photography (in part I owe this insight to Chris Anderson, with whom I had an email discussion). Transformative photography is photography that changes you as a person, that asks questions (instead of answering them). You’re not the same person any longer after you’ve looked at it - and given the nature of this experience, it usually cannot be depleted (even though it might become weaker with time).
Read more »

There is an excerpt from After Photography by Fred Ritchin “on technology’s potential to make the photographic image less controlling and more revealing” over at Design Observer.
Read more »

Photography consultant Mary Virginia Swanson just shared a handout from a seminar she gave, Presenting your work to the Fine Art Community. There also is Finding Your Audience: An Introduction to Marketing Your Photographs. Have a peek. A lot of the stuff sounds very obvious, but you’d be quite surprised to see the various things I’ve run into over the past years…
Read more »

DLK just published a very relevant post: How Should We Evaluate Digital Craftsmanship? I’m actually a little bit surprised how little people talk about the issue of quality when it comes to digital processing and printing. And I could be mistaken, but I’ve always been a bit under the impression that when dealing with digital prints, people don’t mind overlooking problems that would cause quite the stir in the analogue case.
Read more »

“Thomas Ruff is explaining the enduring concerns that have animated the work that has made him one of the most innovative and distinguished art photographers of recent decades: ‘I always want to take the medium of photography into the picture, so that you are always aware that you are looking at an image - a photograph,’ he says, before continuing, ‘so, in the picture I hope you can see two things: the image itself, plus the reflection - or the thinking - about photography. I hope it’s visible. I’m an investigator, and it is as if I am investigating the grammar of photography.’” - from an interview with Thomas Ruff (my emphasis)
Read more »

Tim Wu explains the “fair use” clause in American copyright (found via), discussing Shepard Fairey’s Obama poster (it just won’t go away). In a nutshell: “Fair use […] is all about justification, and this is a key to understanding it. Fair use allows use of a work that would ordinarily constitute infringement, if that use is justified (or excused, if you like) with some compelling reason.” (emphasis in the original)
Read more »

If you want to know what it’s like to take photographs backstage at some concert, here’s Andrew’s account of his adventure with “Creed” (bonus: no talk of how wonderful the latest digital cameras are).
Read more »

Via Tyler Green’s blog I found this post, in which seven photographers explain why they work in photography.
Read more »

I usually don’t advertize competitions or portfolio reviews, for the most part simply because I don’t see such announcements as what this blog is about. That said, I am happy to make an exception and announce that registration for the Hyeres 2010 Festival is now open. If you’re unfamiliar with Hyeres, it’s a little town in the south of France, which holds a rather big fashion and photography festival every Spring. I had the chance to see the festival twice - once as a jury member - and I think it’s by far the best opportunity for young artists I am aware of.
Read more »

Martha Schwendener has some questions for photographers: “why, at this moment, when the world is awash in vernacular images and consumed by geopolitical, eco, and economic crises, are artist-photographers holed up in their studios and darkrooms, interrogating the medium? Why not pick up a camera and document the collapse?” And then, at the end: “So does it matter how either of these artists made their photographs? Or has process become the new (or revived) fetish of photography, something to occupy us now that the bickering over whether photography is art has died down? Except that another question looms, both on the pages of Words Without Pictures and elsewhere. Actually, it’s an old one, but it’s carrying new, post-digital baggage: What, in 2009, is a photograph?”
Read more »

This article provides addresses some of the issues that enter the discussions surrounding Pieter Hugo’s work, and it’s an important read.
Read more »

Here’s an interview with Ivan Vartanian that you don’t want to miss, especially if you’re interested in photo books.
Read more »

Issue #5 of Proximity Magazine contains a piece by Bert Stabler entitled I Don’t Like Photography. It’s a remarkable piece that starts out asking why “fine art photography is so frequently dull and distasteful, so paralyzed by moribund subjects and forms?”
Read more »

“I collect second hand tourist guides. Within the century of printed photographs that they contain, I search for plates that have been printed at similar scale, taken from a similar view point. When I find a near match between book plates, I cut and fold the pages into a new single surface.” - Abigail Reynolds
Read more »

Following up on this earlier post, here’s On The Media reporting on ‘Ruin Porn’ (btw, that’s not photographs of naked women in abandoned buildings - the supposed appeal of which escapes me, but that’s another topic). Jerry Redfern, a photojournalist, sent this to me, pointing out the major shortcoming of On The Media’s report: They make it sound as if photographers are sent to Detroit with unlimited budgets and the general instruction to take photos of whatever they want (my way of phrasing this, not Jerry’s). Obviously, that’s not the case. Of course, there are photographers who go to Detroit just because it’s something they want to do, but the photography you see in, for example, Time Magazine was done for that magazine, to illustrate some story. So making it sound as if ‘Ruin Porn’ was just the photographers’ fault really doesn’t cut it: In the world of Time et al. ‘Ruin Porn’ might just be a symptom of larger problems in the world of journalism.
Read more »

Here is a classical case of ridiculous Photoshopping meeting the fashion industry meeting corporate bullying: “Last month, Xeni [a boing boing writerer] blogged about the photoshop disaster that is this Ralph Lauren advertisement, in which a model’s proportions appear to have been altered to give her an impossibly skinny body (‘Dude, her head’s bigger than her pelvis’). Naturally, Xeni reproduced the ad in question. This is classic fair use: a reproduction ‘for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting,’ etc. However, Ralph Lauren’s marketing arm and its law firm don’t see it that way. According to them, this is an ‘infringing image,’ and they thoughtfully took the time to send a DMCA takedown notice to our awesome ISP, Canada’s Priority Colo. […] So, to Ralph Lauren, GreenbergTraurig, and PRL Holdings, Inc: sue and be damned. Copyright law doesn’t give you the right to threaten your critics for pointing out the problems with your offerings. You should know better.”
Read more »

Sometimes, you ask some questions, and then some time later something is happening: POC now has an American branch. Having known about what the previously European-only POCers do, I’m very glad to see this. And hopefully, it will not only create a lot of new opportunities for the photographers involved, but maybe also inspire others to set up their own, new networks.
Read more »

I won’t pretend I find the photography featured in this presentation very interesting, but I do like the combination of text plus images plus multimedia. This might be the future of magazines - where you “flip through” a magazine online, and if there’s anything that interests you, you can watch some movie or hear some audio file.
Read more »

Even if an edition of New Yorker magazine might contain nothing of real interest (which has been the case more often than not recently), I always make sure to read movie reviews by Anthony Lane, who even on a bad day will always outwit each and every one of the other authors. So I was thrilled to discover a piece by Mr Lane about Robert Frank’s “The Americans” in the recent edition of the magazine. Move over, Peter Schjeldahl!
Read more »

After having looked through 575 submissions, plus 25 ten-image portfolios for the second round, I managed to pick the three winners of this year’s (first) Conscientious Portfolio Competition. The second round was tough - I could have easily picked more winners; and I am very impressed by the amazing quality of the work that I received. I will introduce and interview the three winners in much more detail over the next weeks; here are their names (in alphabetical order) and the portfolios they submitted: Lydia Panas, “The Mark of Abel” Bradley Peters, “Home Theater” David Wright, “Alebtong, Uganda” Congratulations to the winners! I’m looking forward to very interesting conversations!
Read more »

PhotoQ managed to unearth the essay that AP forced the Noorderlicht Festival to remove - now you can see what the fuss was all about.
Read more »

I have been noticing that there are some pretty wild ideas about how much to charge for a photograph in the fine-art market out there. So I was pleasantly surprised to find an article entitled back to that discussion about pricing, written by photographer Chris Rauschenberg. Key quote: “The decisions that you make about price and edition size will determine how many of your prints are out in the world, being seen, thrilling people, and eventually flowing into museum collections.”
Read more »

David Campbell offers a smart take on AP’s censorship of part of the Noorderlicht Festival: “I think both [Noorderlich curator] Franklin and AP are naïve in their view that photographs themselves speak, as though they could construct a larger meaning without text or other related media that put them in context. However, in addition to their censorship of Franklin’s views, AP are especially naïve because the professional Palestinian photographs from within Gaza […] have already been widely circulated and read with a variety of texts creating various meanings. To suggest that these AP photographs should now be stripped of prior associations and rendered ‘apolitical’ is itself the most political stance one can take.”
Read more »

Just found on Mrs Deane’s blog: “Noorderlicht, for the first time in twenty years, has been forced to remove an essay by a curator, under threat of reprisal by Associated Press, one of the largest photo-agencies in the world. Having always worked on the cutting edge of photojournalism, not fearing to take a stand for the disenfranchised and the oppressed, we have found out the hard way that financial restraints (in view of possible legal action) can even force an organization like ours over the border between the powerful and the disempowered.” - Ton Broekhuis (director of the Noorderlicht Photography Foundation); find the press release with all the relevant information here
Read more »

This is a great little documentary about Curtis Mann, made by Alan Del Rio Ortiz.
Read more »

Photographer Simon Roberts has a so-called micro-site for his upcoming book We English, which comes with a blog. The blog is a great example of how photographers can use blogs by creating what one could call “added value”, all the while - directly or indirectly - promoting their work. Today, Simon published the notes for his work; earlier this Summer, he talked about his experiences at the printer (day 1, and then simply look at the following days).
Read more »

Via Tomorrow Museum I found this article, written about photographers flocking to Detroit: “After suffering through the nation’s worst and most concentrated examples of racial violence, industrial collapse, serial arson, crack war, and municipal bankruptcy following years of municipal kleptocracy, Detroit is being descended on by a plague of reporters. If you live on a block near one of the city’s tens of thousands of abandoned buildings, you can’t toss a chunk of Fordite without hitting some schmuck with a camera worth more than your house.”
Read more »

You have probably seen Matt Mendelsohn’s The Lessons of Lindsay over on Rob’s blog already (where I found it). I’m re-posting it here for a large variety of reasons. First, it’s a story that I think needs to be seen. Second, as Rob writes the photographer “shopped it around to several publishers but they all turned him down. At one big national newspaper the publisher said ‘advertisers wanted happier stories, not ‘depressing’ ones.’” And there is a very important point: Magazines and newspapers are losing a lot of readers because many people are sick and tired of reading irrelevant fluff about celebrities and pseudo-news about how, for example, drinking coffee in the morning is good for your health (I’m making this one up, but I’m sure there is some research that will say this). Photographers like Matt deserve massive credit for working on stories like The Lessons of Lindsay, especially given that pitching those stories to magazines and newspapers - and thus giving a voice to people like Lindsay - has become so hard.
Read more »

On September 15th, 2009, “Proud Flesh”, a series of new photographs by Sally Mann, will open at Gagosian gallery. Coinciding with the show, Aperture is going to release a monograph containing the photography. In the following essay, prepared for this blog, Sally Mann reveals her thoughts behind “Proud Flesh”. The essay and images (which are part of “Proud Flesh”, and which were photographed by Rob McKeever) are © Sally Mann; the images are courtesy Gagosian gallery and Aperture. Click on the images to see larger versions. - Jörg Colberg
Read more »

Previously announced and now on its way to book shops: Hellen van Meene’s new book Tout va disparaitre (note: Amazon has the title and cover wrong). The book contains new photography, taken over the past few years in The Netherlands, Russia, and the US.
Read more »

“One rainy night eight years ago, in Watertown, Massachusetts, a man was taking his dog for a walk. On the curb, in front of a neighbor’s house, he spotted a pile of trash: old mattresses, cardboard boxes, a few broken lamps. Amidst the garbage he caught sight of a battered suitcase. He bent down, turned the case on its side and popped the clasps. He was surprised to discover that the suitcase was full of black-and-white photographs. He was even more astonished by their subject matter: devastated buildings, twisted girders, broken bridges — snapshots from an annihilated city. He quickly closed the case and made his way back home. At the kitchen table, he looked through the photographs again and confirmed what he had suspected. He was looking at something he had never seen before: the effects of the first use of the Atomic bomb. The man was looking at Hiroshima.” - story
Read more »

Tyler Green posted some comments on the National Arts Journalism Program’s National Summit on Arts Journalism (as did Ian Aleksander Adams). After Ian’s post I looked at the project, and Tyler’s commentary matches what I thought, in particular: “however well-intentioned, the NAJP project is a lost opportunity. It fails to address significant recent developments and the realities of contemporary journalism, especially as they apply to niche topics such as art journalism. […] NAJP’s decision to focus on profit-generating models is the result of a misreading of the current media environment. Not even the wealthiest, smartest legacy-media companies have figured out how to be profitable in the fast-emerging digital-first environment. […] for the foreseeable future, it is not realistic to expect advertising and traditional, for-profit revenue models (such as those focused on subscribers) to sustain niche journalism.”
Read more »

J. B. Mollitt sent me the link to an article entitled Seeing Is Not Believing (thank you!): “To be sure, photographic alterations have existed about as long as photography itself. But before the digital age, such deceptions required mastery of complex and time-consuming darkroom techniques. Today anyone with a modicum of computer skills can call on powerful and inexpensive software to alter digital images. And as sophisticated forgeries appear with alarming frequency, people’s belief in what they see has been eroded.”
Read more »

I keep hearing and reading people asserting that somehow, colour photography has completely overwhelmed b/w photography and that b/w is “dead” or that it is time for b/w to “come back”. Is b/w really dead? If anything - to paraphrase Frank Zappa - it might smell a bit funny. But joking aside, I simply don’t see any evidence that b/w is dead. Of course, we do see way more colour photography now than, say, thirty or twenty years ago - but what does that prove?
Read more »

Using the headline Pictures that please us, Lucy Danziger, editor-in-chief of the women’s health magazine Self openly admits and defends her magazine’s retouching transformation of singer Kelly Clarkson for their cover. Before you read on look at this page to see images of what Ms Clarkson looks like on the cover and in reality.
Read more »

This article about retouching photographs for magazines contains some pretty revealing stuff, for example Amy Dresser, a retoucher, explaining that “When it comes to notable people […] I feel like embracing the details of that person’s face is what I’m supposed to do. Obviously a person wants to have a nice picture of themselves, and the photographer doesn’t want to look bad, and I don’t want to look like a lazy retoucher, and the magazine wants an appealing image, so you have to find that middle ground.” Someone will have to explain to me how you “embrace the details” of someone’s face by removing many of those details on the computer.
Read more »

“since its beginning, photography hasn’t been able to shed its rivalrous position to painting, and […] contemporary photographers like Bialobrzeski and countless others with him still take painting as a point of orientation or departure. Apparently, this is an issue which we cannot leave behind so easily, however persuasive the pleas of reason are made to sound. Perhaps more may be gained by making the persistence of this rivalry the focus of study rather than trying to raise our awareness of the dividing abyss.” - Mrs Deane
Read more »

A recent series of photographs depicting the Polish city of Krakow by Supanit Riansrivilai, who was born in Thailand and lives in France, caused a bit of a kerfuffle over at The Black Snapper. Much to their credit, the Black Snapper folks made this the topic of a post. This is the old problem with insiders seeing other things than outsiders: If you visit a country, your perception of that country will depend on your own cultural background, which could be very different. If you live in that country you will inevitably notice different things - and seeing a foreigner show things that you might consider to be unflattering only adds to your discomfort. So unlike the Black Snapper folks I don’t see the problem necessarily in how Central Europe is perceived (even though this might play a minor role), and I also don’t see it as a question of photographic style. Instead, the main issue seems to be that there simply is no realistic versus an unrealistic or a true versus a false depiction of Central Europe or any other place. A photographer will see things based on his or her background, and while we can disagree with it and claim that “no, that’s not a good depiction of this place”, it still doesn’t automatically mean that that photographer’s view is less valid than ours (the lack of smiling children or whatever else notwithstanding). And really, if we only wanted flattering views of any given place, we’d be stuck with brochures produced by tourist information offices, wouldn’t we? (updated below - twice)
Read more »

Today, Eyecurious is featureing a post about Japanese photographers dealing with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which ended up killing over 200,000 civilians, many of them women and children.
Read more »

It is probably fair to say that blogs have become an established way to talk about photography. There are blogs published by photographers, writers, curators, critics, book publishers, newspapers, and photography agencies. The most notable omission appear to be photography museums and galleries. I’ve always thought that a blog would be an ideal tool for a museum/gallery to not only generate interest in their shows, but to keep the buzz going while the shows are up. (Updated below)
Read more »