The upcoming New York Photo Festival is being widely anticipated as… well, nobody really knows, since it’s going to happen for the first time - which, of course, makes it all the more exciting. Here’s a nice introduction to the people behind the festival, plus some sample images from the different shows.
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“The Robert L. Capp collection at the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University contains ten photographs purportedly showing the immediate aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing. Mr. Capp was assigned to the occupation forces outside Hiroshima after World War II. According to to Mr. Capp’s oral history (available along with the photographs in the Robert L. Capp collection), he found these photos among rolls of undeveloped film in a cave outside of Hiroshima. Since making these photographs publicly available, I have received reliable proof that at least two of these photos are actually of the 1923 Kanto earthquake. While I cannot speak for the entire collection, this evidence raises doubts about all of the photos and raises the strong possibility that the identification provided by the Hoover Archives is incorrect. I take full responsibility for my own failure to take additional steps to verify that the original archival designation was correct. I have removed the photographs until and unless their source can be verified by further research.” - source (updated entry)
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“A Soviet soldier heroically waves the red flag, the hammer and sickle billow above the Reichstag. Yevgeny Khaldei photographed one of the iconic images of the 20th century. But the legendary image was manipulated to conceal the fact that the Soviet soldiers on the roof had been looting.” - story
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I’ve long been a fan of Bill Henson’s work; and today, Rachel showed some of his “Paris Opera” photos along with an interview. Extremely beautiful portraiture!
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It’s not that I really thought something unexpected would happen as far as the photography bits of the National Magazine Awards are concerned, but… Oh boy! If you look at the photos (some of them posted by Rachel) it would seem to me that what they are actually giving awards to is not photography but entertainment.
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This is the final installation of my brief series of posts on Hyères 2008, with no clear focus, to give you an idea who else was there, what happened, etc.
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With the fashion bit of the Hyères Festival International de Mode et de Photographie in its 23rd year, the photography part is a bit younger. For ten years now, photographers have been coming to Hyères to meet up with a jury to show and discuss their work. The masterminds behind the photography competition are Michel Mallard (pictured above) and Raphaëlle Stopin (who was so busy organizing that she managed to avoid getting caught by me for a photo).
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See, this is what happens when you leave the country: You just miss the most important stories. Like this one, for example: Miley Cyrus Bare In Vanity Fair: Tells Fans She’s ‘Embarrassed’. Update: “For her photograph of the teenage celebrity, Leibovitz chose a palette strongly redolent of the dirty postcards of yesteryear, sepia embittered with black, a suggestion of eye-blue and lip-red, as if retouched by hand, with never - thank our stars - a hint of pink. […] It is Disney, after all, that is merchandising this child, and the suggestion of pimping will cling to it. Leibovitz may be cynical, is obviously cynical. She is also, as usual, justified.” (Germaine Greer; make sure to also read the final contribution, at the bottom of the page) “Never mind what a ludicrous system this is that chooses young women for their sex appeal and then expects them to act as role models for the chastity of the rest of the population. It’s the insincerity of everyone concerned that really chokes me. Not one person involved can seriously think Miley Cyrus had any kind of influence over this, or any other, image-building decision.” (Zoe Williams)
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I cannot think of a better way for a photography competition than having ten photographers meet ten jury members for two full days, to allow detailed discussions of the work and the kind of interaction that allows both sides to get a deeper understanding of one another. This, in a nutshell, is how the photography part of the Festival International de Mode et de Photographie in Hyères works. This year, I was fortunate enough to be a member of the jury, and I thought I’d present glimpses of the festival here. In this first of a series of posts I’ll briefly introduce the ten photographers who made it to Hyères (out of an initial field of 400+ who applied). In alphabetical order, they are…
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I’m probably going to get a lot of flak for this, but I think every once in a while I want to talk about something that I don’t like (if this were “American Idol”, the booing would now commence). There has been a lot of fuss about Ryan McGinley’s new show (see, for example, James Danziger’s post), all the while I received quite a few emails where people told me in no uncertain terms how much they disliked the show.
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“The U.S. military released Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein on Wednesday after holding him for more than two years without filing formal charges.” - source
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Picking up a thread from my earlier discussion, I occasionally get email telling me about a photographer who has done the same work (or something very similar) as someone featured on the blog, often with the implication that someone is ripping someone else off. For me, the issue usually is not about whether there is a rip-off going on (especially since two people, in different countries and without actual contact with each other, can easily create the same kind of work), but, instead, which of the work is more interesting. I think it might help if I gave an example.
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A common complaint about a photographer’s new work is that it’s a mere repetition of older work. As an illustration, I am using a photo from Gregory Crewdson’s new work, but that’s really just an arbitrary choice. I could have easily picked something from Andreas Gursky’s latest work, say - whose Chelsea show got attacked in the press for that very same reason: We’ve seen this before, we want something new.
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“Now I know interns do get all the grunt work.. but when you see the gallerina above you on a smoking break, clicking her shoes, and fondling over her blackberry, and you’re compiling the represented artists on file.. and there are 10 male artists and 2 females.. you wonder, where the hell are we?” - more over at Jane Tam’s blog. BTW, Jane is also selling some of her photography to raise money for her BFA thesis show.
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Excellent news in a case I reported on earlier: “AP Photographer Bilal Hussein has been in American detention since April 2006. As the second anniversary of his captivity approaches, Bilal has achieved a major breakthrough. Yesterday in Baghdad, an Iraqi Judicial Commission reviewing his case took ten days to reach a conclusion: No basis existed for the terrorism-related charges which had been brought against him. The conclusion was a sweeping repudiation of accusations U.S. military figures have brought against him, backed by no evidence, but by a handful of strangely motivated American wingnut bloggers.” (story)
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I was invited to be a member of the jury of this year’s Hyères Festival International de Mode & de Photographie (see the photo part here), and of course I agreed to it. If you make it to the festival please say hi when you run into me!
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Given that I was looking for the most wanted photo on Flickr the other day it seems only logical to point out the ‘amateur’ winners of the Sony World Photography Awards. It is quite interesting that the chosen images are extremely similar to the usual editorial/commercial stuff…
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On his blog, James Danziger today discusses Kate Hutchinson’s project “Why Am I Marrying Him?”, and he publishes an email exchange between himself and Kate. Intrigued by the series, James had emailed Kate to ask about “a few biographical details, largely to do with the identity and reaction of her fiancé to the pictures and the status of their marriage plans.” Check out James’ post for Kate’s reply, with the key sentences “I wish to leave the viewer wanting more. I want them, like you, to be intrigued by this character. I hope that this intrigue will lead them to create their own fictionalized story about the character in the photos. Then they can then make it their own and relate it to their lives and the people that they know.”
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After having read the article about “gallerinas” (that I got so angry about here), I talked to a couple of female friends about how the article described the role of women: Smart is good, but looks are more important. Even though my friends live on different continents - one in the US, one in Europe, they both basically wrote the same thing, namely (paraphrased) “We’ll, we women are quite used to be being treated like that.” For me, that’s unacceptable; even though one could point out that it’s easy for me to say that since I’m a man, and I don’t have to deal with it. But then sexism - just like racism - can (in fact: should) be offensive also for people who are not subjected to it. In any case, on her blog, Cara Phillips (the American friend I had talked to) just published a long discussion of this general topic - a very recommended read! Update (6 April): Check out this follow-up post!
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I don’t know how many people have ever heard of this, and I think it might serve as an interesting example for what people think photography can do and what it then turns out being unable to do. In 1924, German pacifist Ernst Friedrich (who had refused to participate in World War I and had gone to jail for this) published Krieg dem Kriege, which was eventually translated into 40 different languages. It contained photos taken during what people to this day call “the Great War”, with the most gruesome photos being included on purpose. The idea was that viewers would be so shocked by what they saw and that thus war would become a thing of the past. It was a noble idea.
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Check out this very moving photography series about the final days of terminally ill people.
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Having just started to look at Komar and Melamid’s Most Wanted Paintings - paintings created based on actual polls, where people could say what they liked - I thought finding the photographic equivalent couldn’t possibly be that hard. I went to Flickr, which I use only very occasionally (and thus don’t really know all that well), and went looking for the photo that had the largest number of people calling it a “favorite”. The utterly unscientific results: 4,967 people call this photo a favourite (with 1,308 comments), followed by this photo (2,464 favourite votes), this photo (2,238), and this photo (1,935). Over at photo.net, the all-time favourites (based on all-time average ratings) are this photo, this one, and this one.
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“There’s the war photographer who dodged bullets abroad only to be beaten up in his own South London backyard by a paranoid parent who (wrongly) thought his child was being photographed. There’s the amateur photographer punched prostrate in the London Tube after refusing to give up his film to a stranger; the case of the man in Hull, swooped on by police after taking photographs in a shopping centre.” - story
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Another must-read: The woman behind the camera at Abu Ghraib. Noteworthy this description of why the most well-known Abu Ghraib photo is iconic: “The image […] achieves its power from the fact that it does not show the human form laid bare and reduced to raw matter but creates instead an original image of inhumanity that admits no immediately self-evident reading. Its fascination resides, in large part, in its mystery and inscrutability - in all that is concealed by all that it reveals. […] The picture transfixes us because it looks like the truth, but, looking at it, we can only imagine what that truth is: torture, execution, a scene staged for the camera? So we seize on the figure […] as a symbol that stands for all that we know was wrong at Abu Ghraib and all that we cannot - or do not want to - understand about how it came to this.”
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“The concept of what constitutes a derivative work seems to elude far too many courts, particularly in the photography context.” Yes, it does. No, it doesn’t. I don’t think we’ve seen the last of this, so stay tuned for more from the argument clinic. But seriously, this is a tremendously important issue.
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“In the hallway of a hospital in Kirkuk I am photographing Mahmood al-Obaidei, who has a hive of hospital workers battling to keep him breathing after his body was devastated by a roadside bomb detonated near his shop. Though I am making photographs it is not the images I remember from this moment. I remember hearing Mahmood trying to breathe. The hospital workers throw the paddles of a defibrillator on him. Two shocks to the chest and his pulse again give a weak beep on the monitor. There is a brief sign of life. The paddles are readied again. Then darkness. The power in the hospital has gone out. The staff members groan as they stand in place waiting for the power to return. In a moment the generator kicks on and the machine has to be recharged. A jolt blasts Mahmood’s chest. Nothing. The moment to save his life has passed. And I remember hearing only my own breathing.” - Max Becherer
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Is Britain turning into the perfect surveillance society, where photographers not working for the police or other authorities get routinely harassed by the police when taking photos outside? Of course, it’s hard to tell from the distance, but the number of reports like this one has been rapidly increasing lately (note how the cop merely dismisses the sheet the photographer printed out about photography rights!). Also see this clip.
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“It is with great sadness I have to write that Philip - a monumental, irrepressible force in photography and in life - and a courageous fighter against the cancer that finally defeated him - passed away early this morning. […] It was Philip’s consummate skill as a picture maker, carefully able to draw the viewer closer and closer to his subjects through his emotionally-charged compositions that lent such power to his work. Philip was always concerned with individuals - their personal and intimate suffering more than any particular class or ideological struggle. And the strength of his vision, that inspired so many of us, led Henri Cartier-Bresson to write of Philip: ‘not since Goya has anyone portrayed war like Philip Jones Griffiths.’” - story
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For me, Hellen van Meene’s portraits of adolescents are exceptional. There’s a very nice interview/feature with/of her here - also not to be missed by people who are interested in the relationship between a portrait photographer and her subject.
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I think my main problem with Jock Sturges is that I tend to ignore the usual ‘controversies’ (which, given their predictable nature, are nothing more than some sort of weird and pointless ritual) or ‘issues’ and that when I look at his photographic work I see… well… nudes that more often than not simply border on kitsch. You might disagree. In any case, there’s a video interview with Jock Sturges here.
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Leave it to the five anonymous photographers behind You call this photography? to point out How To Photograph Nude Women, For Free. Lots of good things to know: “Being pretentious doesn’t hurt” or “It’s a nude shoot, not a gynecological exam. That means working up to the spread shots by asking her to do relatively harmless stuff, such as run up the beach and back. While she’s running, you can scheme how you’re going to get her to open her legs. If you need more time, tell her to run up the beach again.”
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First, there’s this kitschfest, “20 beautiful HDR Pictures”. And then there’s Photoshop Disasters, such as, for example, the woman whose belly button disappeared.
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“They met on a train and fell in love. Then [photojournalist] Jason P Howe discovered that his girlfriend Marylin was leading a secret double life - as an assassin for right-wing death squads in Colombia’s brutal civil war.” - story
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Editorial portraiture isn’t portraiture in the simplest sense (with a photographer, a subject, and a viewer). Instead, if contains an additional component: The person who commissions the portrait, who has the intended meaning/use in his/her head before the portrait is even taken, and who thus deprives the viewer of the true experience of a portrait. So we see this portrait in a story about an author writing about her tough life in gangs and this portrait of the same author after it all was revealed as a fabrication (I found this on subjectify). So the New York Times did not commission a portrait, they commissioned photographic illustrations. (to be continued…) Earlier parts: one, two
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“Tensions are running high in Democratic circles between the supporters of senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama - and nowhere is that more evident than on the internet. Some of the more explosive blog posts making the rounds today concern a charge from a couple of diarists on the Daily Kos that the Clinton campaign deliberately darkened Obama’s skin color in a recent television ad.” (story) As an update, “Daily Kos” (a site that I usually find extremely irritating) now posts a comment from an anonymous reader: “I work in advertising (copywriter, [Big national advertising firm]). […] Nothing in advertising is accidental. It is over-thought and then subjected to second thoughts and second guessing then over-thought and re-looked at again. I’ve been doing this ten years. It is my professional opinion that the film was made darker, and it has obviously been stretched. I will not comment on their reasons, as I can’t offer an informed case for that.”
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Announcing its annual list of “new and emerging photographers to watch” has become a tradition for Photo District News, and this year’s list was just published. Congratulations to all those who made it into the list! You might recognize some of the photographers in the list from seeing them on this blog, in particular Shen Wei, one of my Photographers of the Year 2006.
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I mentioned Britain’s love with extreme surveillance before (see this story), which turns every citizen into a would-be criminal. If you decide to spend your vacation in London, say, you’ll find it next to impossible to miss the ubiquitous surveillance cameras, installed, as the story goes, to prevent crime (an almost unprovable and thus politically very useful assertion). And indeed the cameras are extremely useful to identify suspects in those very crimes they didn’t deter in the first place.
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There’s a wonderful Gregory Crewdson feature over at Aperture’s website -incl. interviews, production stills etc. Not to be missed!
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“Photoshop,” was my immediate response, followed by “I wonder what crap Hollywood movie this is from”, when I saw this photo (note this is quite a disturbing photograph!). And then I read the caption, and it turns out it’s a real photo, it’s a real person: “A French woman badly disfigured by facial tumours caused by a rare and incurable disease has appealed to President Nicolas Sarkozy to allow her to die by euthanasia. In an interview with the Agence France-Presse news agency, former school teacher Chantal Sebire, 52, begged for the right to end the ‘atrocious’ suffering inflicted on her by the disease which has rendered her face unrecognisable because of growing tumours.” (story)
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I used to read quite a bit of philosophy when I was younger. The one thing that I noted about philosophy is that regardless of who you read, at some stage you’re bound to stumble upon the philosopher’s definition of what good philosophy really is and/or which human activity is most preferable, and quite inevitably, you’ll “discover” (assuming that even running into this repeatedly does not turn you into a cynic, who’ll actually expect something like this) that of course each philosopher thought that his (needless to say, the canon is all male) philosophy is by far the best and only valid one, and the crown of all human activity is… wanna guess?
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People often tell me that Thomas Ruff’s portraits are boring. What does that mean: “boring”? How can a portrait be boring?
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… two very noteworthy posts. First, via Colin Pantall comes The Greatest Art Photograph Ever, with a list of photography clichés. And photographylot posts Tips on entering a call for entry/contest.
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“Staff at the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office discovered arrest logs and photographs from the time of the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-56) and the Freedom Rides (1961). Selected pages from those volumes have been scanned by ADAH [Alabama Department of Archives & History] staff and are available at the links below.” (source)
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I almost saw my breakfast again this morning when I came across this article, so I was glad to have Colin Pantall point out this antidote, which rightly talks about the “soft, luxurious, creamy air of contented image-pampering Vanity Fair ladles out so generously” and, in passing, trashes the latest Annie Leibovitz “documentary”, calling it “embarrassingly emollient hagiography”.
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I’m sure by now you have seen Richard Mosse’s Air Disaster Simulations over at bldgblog.
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Regardless of what you may think about the recent NY Times Magazine spread shot by Ryan McGinley, Rob’s comment is spot on: “I think their attempt to wrestle the Hollywood photoshoot beast away from it’s [sic!] recent hyper-produced overwrought incarnation is a welcome relief.” (full post)
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Robert Wright wrote a two-part piece on The Sartorialist and his current show (part 1, part 2). I haven’t seen the show, yet (so I obviously can’t say anything about it), and I haven’t been following his blog, either (it looks like a street version of Go Fug Yourself, with models and commentary provided by the general public). But it seems to me that maybe a good way to exhibit his work would be to show the photos along with some of the comments. It almost appears as if the photos are somewhat incomplete without the comments - and then the whole package somehow says something about our current times. Or maybe not. Probably best to leave it up to the theorists to decide and elaborate on that.
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I remember a while ago, I was writing a post about my favourite classic portraits, and I wanted to include Richard Avedon’s portraiture of his father - which I couldn’t find online. I suppose the obvious did not occur to me, namely to look on the Richard Avedon website (in my defense, it appears as if the website has been expanded quite a bit since my prior visits). So it took Miguel’s post to remind me of that work, and to tell me where to look.
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“My first day on the ground in Kenya, I went into Mathare with a group of photographers after hearing that there had been some problems. Two mobs were facing off on the main street leading into the Nairobi slum. Once the dust had settled, I met an Italian photographer by the name of Enrico Dangnino. He was pretty shaken up. He had blood stains on his clothes and told me that earlier in the day they had witnessed a near lynching but were able to save the man’s life. […] a Luo mob got hold of a man from the Kamba tribe whom they now consider to be an enemy. He was simply trying to cross through the neighborhood to get to his home. The mob attacked him with weapons, kicked him and began dousing him with gasoline, presumably to set him on fire. Enrico, and his colleague, Luc Delahaye, decided to intervene and managed to spare his life.” (story, with a slide show here)
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Via Chase Jarvis’ blog I found this audio interview with Lawrence Lessig - if you want to learn about “Creative Commons” check it out!
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