“Today we reflect on all of the people that are infected with HIV, to educate people about this disease, to inspire through the courageous leadership of others, and to honor those that have died in this horrible pandemic. I myself have been HIV+ for over twelve years now. I am what I once considered others to be a long term survivor. To deal with some of my fears and anxieties about this disease I embarked on a project a few years ago to make portraits of people living with HIV/AIDS for ten years or more called Long Term Survivors. These are just a handful of faces that have been affected by a disease that has affected millions and millions of lives but it is my intent that in these photos the viewer will see hope and promise for healthier and longer lives for all those affected by HIV.” - Richard Renaldi
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I’m sure by now you’ve seen the NY Times “multimedia” piece of video-game players. When I watched the piece my first thought was that I had seen still photography of video-game players where each image delivered vastly more than seeing the players “in action”. I want to highlight (again) Shauna Frischkorn’s work. I’m sure lots of people will now disagree and flood my inbox, but I think despite of what many people want to believe, photography, when done well, can have a quality that moving images don’t have.
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The Big Picture published its ‘collection of some of the best photos of President-Elect Barack Obama over the past several months’ and what a collection of visual clichés it is! It’s quite interesting to see that once you stumble upon an image that’s very clearly different (like numbers 13 or 19) you stop for a while because there really is something to be seen. Make no mistake, I have no doubt that it is very hard to produce new images from a campaign that basically looks the same wherever you go, but still…
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“Covering Photography is a web-based archive and resource for the study of the relationship between the history of photography and book cover design.” Great site, nicely designed, too!
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A little while ago, Alec Soth asked his Magnum colleagues what advice they would give young photographers and posted the results over at Magnum’s blog. As could be expected, the post generated a lot of excited responses, but there were also some rumblings to be found all over the web (see an example here). I admit I was a bit surprised by the discontent the Magnum post created, and it made me think about what people were actually expecting (I initiated a bit of a discussion about this here). But I also started to think about something else, namely about photography collectives and their paucity.
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“Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google.” Google is really going the extra mile: Photography all the way back to the 1750s! But seriously, this is great. If you have work to do don’t visit the site, since looking for images is highly addictive.
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“Pornographer Ben Westwood has been protesting outside parliament against a bill that could outlaw the kind of extreme images he makes. He tells Emine Saner why he thinks his work is worth defending and what it was like growing up as Vivienne Westwood’s son” - story (oh, and here is the same writer’s most recent piece on Vivienne Westwood)
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Alec has been working hard to create some great contents for the Magnum blog, and his latest post, Wear Good Shoes: Advice to young photographers is a must read. 35 different photographers tell you their secrets of success - there’s gotta be something for everybody…
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One of these people is a survivor of the genocide in Rwanda, the other one is a confessed genocidaire (who admitted to killing an old woman, his neighbour, because he “heard that those who confessed would be released”). But how can you tell which one is which?
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I learn something new every day. Today’s nugget is German photography collector F.C. Gundlach’s claim that Germany needs a Photography Foundation because: “It’s also about recognition of German photography as a whole, which is not happening in the international context.” (quote translated from the original German, to be found in this article) This latter claim (“not happening in the international context”) makes me wonder what planet Herr Gundlach is living on. German photography not recognized in an international context?
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Simon Roberts, currently working on a portrayal of England is totally underwhelmed by Martin Parr’s much heralded photographic portrayal of ten British cities, and he explains why.
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… in a lengthy article by Broomberg and Chanarin, and a response by (Tim) Hetherington.
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I thought it would be interesting to pick up a thread from especially my latest post on the visual language of photojournalism and ask “What is photojournalism anyway?” I’m not being facetious here, I’m serious. (Updated below)
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My earlier post about the visual language of photojournalism needs to be clarified in many different ways, and I hope to be able to add a post here and there that will talk about some more aspects. I thought I’d start off by giving an example first.
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A little while ago, I received an email that told me about a project photojournalist James Nachtwey had been working on, which was going to get unveiled at a later date. The email contained the request to write a post that included some piece of code, which would automatically reveal the new project on the day in question. Since I prefer to have full editorial control over this blog, I decided not to post about it. But I was also uncomfortable with how this then secret project - something supposedly very important and completely underreported - was being handled. I thought that generating a lot of suspense could easily be somewhat damaging to whatever it was Nachtwey wanted to talk about: What if on the day in question people would think “Well, this is it?”
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By now, everybody probably knows that Alec Soth has returned to blogging, over at Magnum’s blog. Today, he posted a conversation with Alex Webb about Alex’ work for InSight America.
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“Who are the people of America? What are we thinking? What makes us angry and frustrated? What gives us hope? Are some of us really all blue and some all red? Or are we mostly shades of purple? What is the American Dream today? InSight America is an innovative documentary project that aims to explore these questions on the eve of one of the most important elections in American history. Calling on the talents of some of the world’s most respected photojournalists, using the Web to update their observations daily, InSight America is a collage of personal investigations and reflections that attempts to capture the things preoccupying Americans during the weeks leading to Election Day.”
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Geoff Dyer discusses war photography (or maybe more accurately: what we think war photography has to look like for us to accept it as such).
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The October 2008 issue of Modern Painters magazine has a lot of its very noteworthy contents online, such as a long interview with and Polaroids by Catherine Opie, Alec Soth’s ‘The Last Days of W.’, an article on Shepard Fairey (whose name you might not know, but whose work you will be very familiar with), and an article on Jake and Dinos Chapman’s remade ‘Hell’. Not to be missed!
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As I mentioned earlier, this past weekend, I was a reviewer at Atlanta Celebrates Photography’s portfolio reviews. Apart from seeing a lot of interesting photography, it gave me the opportunity to see lots of different kids of promotional materials handed out by the photographers.
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I found a good series of posts on the work of Edward Burtynsky here, here, and here.
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German magazine Der Spiegel has a fairly critical look at photos used in the media to illustrate the recent financial/economical problems. For example: “Ambulance. Times Square. News ticker announcing the US bailout. Get it?”
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This past weekend, I went to Atlanta to be part of Atlanta Celebrates Photography’s portfolio reviews (photo above courtesy Michael David Murphy). I thought it was quite amazing what Amy Miller and Michael David Murphy had managed to come up with - how do you even go about organizing a photography festival with just two people? Given I was only in town for two days I just caught a glimpse of all the different events, with the Public Art Program being the very obvious personal favourite: A multimedia installation inside an old water tower (thus making every Becherite happy). Check out this clip, which gives you an idea of the project.
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There appears to be fairly wide-spread consensus in the blogging community that there’s a dearth of critical discussions of photography online. You wouldn’t really know this from reading blogs, because nobody posts about it. However, the many email exchanges and conversations I’ve had with people tell me that there are lots of people who would actually like to see photography being discussed in a more critical manner. (updated below)
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“Art for Obama is an online auction of photographs to benefit the Obama Campaign. Fifty of the country’s most prominent artists and photographers have donated their work for this cause. The auction will launch on October 1st and will run for one week. All proceeds from the auction will go to the Obama Campaign, to the Democratic National Committee and to non-profit organizations such as MoveOn.org, which are currently devoting their energy to helping the Obama campaign. Proceeds will be distributed in strict accordance with Federal Election Commmission regulations.” (source) Participating artists include Tim Davis, Larry Fink, Katy Grannan, Lisa Kereszi, David Maisel, Richard Misrach, Alec Soth, Larry Sultan, and many more (seems like some were added since I first posted this). Note (updated 3 Oct): According to the organizers (they sent out an email), “In order to abide by FEC regulations, we will not be donating our proceeds directly to Obama or the DNC . Instead, the proceeds will go to MoveOn.org; one of the most effective advocacy groups for the Obama campaign, who is also involved in respectful, and progressive issues that concern us all as Americans.”
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In a recent post, Ofer discussed a portfolio of work by Platon done for and published in New Yorker Magazine. Rob picked up on it; and it’s actually quite an interesting topic, because, as far as I can tell, there are different aspects to it, which, when being confused with each other, might complicate things (as you can see in some of the comments under Rob’s post).
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Berlin, 1948, a now unknown photographer starts to survey Berlin, using a plate camera, eventually compiling 1,500 photographs. Attempts to learn about the identity of the photographer have so far not been successful. You can see a selection of the photos here (the text is in German, but it’s straightforward to look through the images, which, btw, go on display at a Berlin museum later this year).
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“Avedon never made any pretence to objectivity; the notion of the dispassionate lens he wrote off as delusion. His work, he said, was at least as much about him as his subjects: a vast collective self-portrait of the compulsions he projected on to America’s faces and figures. […] As hip as he mostly was, Avedon was, at root, an old-style Jewish moralist whose texts were written in freckles and furrows, pits and pocks. Sometimes those marks and blemishes, which stood out so sharply in front of the white sheet against which his subjects posed, were lit as poetic expressions of the persona. Avedon took delight in tweaking - or annihilating - the expected icon.” (story)
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This just in, from Hasted Hunt gallery: Martin Schoeller’s portrait Barack Obama, 11” by 14” archival pigment print, edition of 500, signed and numbered by Martin Schoeller, $250 (plus shipping and handling [$18 in the US]), 100% of the proceeds go to the Obama campaign. 212.627.0006 or info@hastedhunt.com
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One of the things that people like to ask me is how to get their photography out for people to see. Having a website is a good idea, but then how do you actually make sure there are actual visitors to the site? And how does one go about finding people who will look at one’s work? Obviously, this is quite a complex problem to tackle, and the answers are not simple and straightforward. One competition that I like to tell people about is Critical Mass, which has just opened registration for this year’s round (it’ll be open until 6 October 2008).
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“What is censorship? Censorship is a form of prohibition and punishment. Ever since the 15th century products of the printing press have been subject to censorship and since the 20th century the same has applied to film, radio, television and the Internet. Censorship thus relates to public communication and content in word, image and sound.” - An excellent overview from the Persmuseum in Amsterdam. Many of the examples are from Holland, but that doesn’t take away from a look at censorship from 1600 until today.
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While this presentation of photos from North Korea offers nothing new really (in terms of the kinds of imagery it presents), I did, however, learn one thing: I always thought of those cards that people are holding to create large-scale mosaics as pixels. In fact, I was so convinced that there were pixels that I never bother to look more closely at Andreas Gursky’s photos. However, as you can see above (I cut out a small region and blew it up), these cards (or pieces of paper or whatever they are) contain smaller units! So creating those mosaics doesn’t just require someone pixelating some image and then producing uniform cards, it means producing quite a few very specific cards that can only be used in their correct positions. That’s a mind-blowingly absurd effort in a country where most people don’t even have enough to eat!
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The story: Photographer Jill Greenberg is hired by the magazine The Atlantic to take a portrait of Republican presidential candidate John McCain for the magazine’s October issue. “After getting that shot, Greenberg asked McCain to ‘please come over here’ for one more set-up before the 15-minute shoot was over. There, she had a beauty dish with a modeling light set up. ‘That’s what he thought he was being lit by,’ Greenberg says. ‘But that wasn’t firing.’ What was firing was a strobe positioned below him, which cast the horror movie shadows across his face and on the wall right behind him. ‘He had no idea he was being lit from below,’ Greenberg says. And his handlers didn’t seem to notice it either. ‘I guess they’re not very sophisticated,’ she adds.” (source; let’s keep the “not very sophisticated” in mind!).
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I just came across a tremendous collection of historical German photography, bpk. Its images can be downloaded for a fee, but you can look at samples for free (those come with a watermark, though). Here’s are some noteworthy sets by various photographers.
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There was a moment in the Sally Mann documentary recommended here earlier that I found very striking: After having finished her series “What Remains”, and after having agreed on getting the work shown at some very prestigious New York gallery, Sally Mann is being informed that the gallery decided to cancel the show. Of course, she is very upset about this (who wouldn’t be?); and then while she’s trying to understand what might possibly be the reason, I noticed that one obvious possible explanation is never brought up: Maybe the work simply isn’t that good. She never entertains that idea. I found that striking.
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What John McCain is now learning the hard way right is that properly vetting the pick for vice president is a very good idea (just as an aside, his pick of an ultra-conservative governor with basically no experience and a whole bunch of scandals despite her young age is extremely amusing). Proper vetting is also a good idea for people who just want to forward an image that supposedly shows Sarah Palin, posing with a gun and an American flag bikini: A two-second Google investigation reveals it’s not real.
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In an earlier post, I looked into the kinds of problems one can get with “on-demand” book publishing - where you send off your book (actual the electronic version of it) to be printed somewhere else (only to then get it back with strong magenta casts on thin paper, for example). What appears to be somewhat forgotten is that before on-demand publishing existed, photographers published their own books simply (or maybe I should write “simply”) by printing photographs and then by binding the pages into a book (or getting this last bit done by someone with the necessary skill set).
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You know, this latest Vogue shoot in India, where, for example, “an old woman missing her upper front teeth holds a child in rumpled clothes - who is wearing a Fendi bib (retail price, about $100)” is just the tip of the iceberg called the “fashion” industry. The shoot is basically the logical continuation of a philosophy (big word for something so measly, I know) that will do just about anything to push clothes that basically nobody needs (and the photography is usually as disposable as the “fashion” product, because once it’s shown it already loses its luster, and something new has to be found).
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A wonderful documentary about Sally Mann that can only be recommended to anyone interested in photography (despite its horrendously soppy soundtrack and its omission of some questions that could be asked). Get the DVD, which features many extras (incl. an earlier movie about her family photographs - which, as far as I am concerned, are vastly better than the work discussed in the main documentary).
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I don’t watch TV so I’m “only” following the Democratic Convention online (which in itself is probably as absurd as watching it on TV: Whereas on TV, you can only see what you get, online the tiniest morsel is presented by somebody somewhere, and you’re left out to wonder whether that tiny morsel could have any relevance - how this is preferable to TV escapes me). Needless to say, the Democratic Convention is sheer political theater, geared at people who are not like me. I’m saying this first and foremost because I did not grow up in the US, and lots of those buttons that are being pushed in Denver I simply don’t have (of course, I have other, dormant, ones, which a German party convention could easily push).
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Given all the brouhaha over self-published books (or, more accurately, books on demand) I thought I’d give it a shot myself. I have been taking Polaroids for quite a few years now, and finding them sit in some box somewhere the other day I thought I might as well take the best ones (my personal favourites that is) and compile them into a little book, just for my own entertainment and maybe to give it away to close friends. (Updated on 23 25 26 Aug 2008 - scroll all the way to the bottom for the latest update)
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… when there’s pixlr. No, seriously, check it out.
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While looking for something entirely different today I found an archive with unedited scans of the Hasselblad cameras used aboard the Apollo 7 till 17 mission: Go here, and then click on “Full Hasselblad Magazines.” That way, you can look at the contact sheets of the Apollo space missions.
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“The Exposure Project is a collection of emerging photographers taking an active approach in exposing and promoting new talent through exhibition, publication and online exposure.” You might be familiar with the group’s blog - if not you might want to check it out. The group has just published the third issue of The Exposure Project Book (featuring photography by Ben Alper, Anastasia Cazabon, Lauren Edwards, Kate Emerson, Adam Marcinek, Fran Osborn-Blaschke, Justin James Reed and Eric Watts), available via Blurb.
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Registration for PHOTONOLA (now in its third year) just opened - this year, I’m going to be one of the reviewers of the Portfolio Review.
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After reading this article about camera equipment I remembered this recent article about the internet and the brain; and I couldn’t help but wonder whether it’s the tools that change our brains, or whether it’s our brains that change themselves by deciding how to use the tools. That’s quite an important distinction, and I’d be quite happy to argue for the latter.
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Regularly, people ask me what I think about portfolio review events. This page has a nice summary of why one might want to attend one - read this carefully (and note that attending such an event might cost quite a bit of money).
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There’s a very good interview with Elizabeth White over at The Girl Project.
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It’s worthwhile to comment on this interview with Martin Parr.
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“Blurred and deliberately flawed, Miroslav Tichy’s snatched photographs of women capture the frustrations of desire. At its best, his work has the delicacy and poise of a smutty Vermeer” - Geoff Dyer (I find myself increasingly torn about this photography, for reasons that I might outline later)
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