Mark Tucker sent me the link to The Ones We Love, “a project highlighting young and talented photographers from around the world. Each artist contributed six photographs of the person(s) who is most important to them, taken outdoors in a natural setting. The goal of the website is to portray the people who are loved, cherished, and inspirational to these artists, and also showcase the differences and similarities in the photographs each of them took within the same guidelines.” The individual contributions are well worth the time it takes to look through all of them.
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Shame - there’s something about a Polaroid photo that no other film (and obviously not digital) can match. Probably someone else will license the technology, but I’m sure it’ll be the end of buying a case of 10 Polaroid photos on a whim, somewhere in a grocery store or so, and shooting to see what happens.
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About the What makes a great portrait? post, I found this following comment (can you guess what very popular photo site this is from?): “Some good observations, but the sheer length of the post and diversity of the responses seems to argue that there can be no consensus on this question.” Anyway, here is something about “what’s it like to photograph somebody famous”, with three one great portraits and both sides of the story.
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When discussing what “makes” a great portrait with Exposure Compensation’s Miguel Garcia-Guzman, we quickly realized that we couldn’t really agree on much. So we figured we might as well ask some other people, and we sent out an email to a large number of photographers, fine art and commercial, bloggers, curators, editors, and gallerists: “What makes a good portrait? Could you provide us an example of a portrait that you really like - either from your or someone else’s work - and say why the portrait works so well for you?” to publish what we would get back on our blogs, as a collaborative effort to get a little bit closer to understanding the topic. Below is what we got back from those who managed to find the time to write something. Our thanks to everybody who contributed!
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Recently, two books appeared that portray American teenagers (an age group that - to use the well tested jargon of US journalism - “some say” might not necessarily be in dire need of even more attention). The first is Dawoud Bey’s Class Pictures, the second Robin Bowman’s It’s Complicated: The American Teenager. In both cases, the photographers spent a lot of time traveling and assembling the work, photographing their subjects and collecting their voices - both books contain how the teenagers describe their lives. Dawoud Bey’s website contains samples from the book, Robin Bowman’s unfortunately only appears to offer a tear sheet.
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“Thousands of negatives of photographs taken by Robert Capa during the Spanish Civil War, long thought to be lost forever, have resurfaced.” - story
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“Why doesn’t Spencer Tunick get any respect?” asks Mia Fineman. Yeah, I really wonder why…
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… come photos of the Public Schools Book Depository (ignore the somewhat kitschy HDR look of some of the photos if you can, and find a text about this here). I haven’t been to this country long enough not to be appalled when I see stuff like this.
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This is an updated version of a post I wrote almost five years ago, I updated it a little. I must have looked at hundreds thousands of websites lately, trying to find good links for this weblog. And it’s quite amazing to see how many web pages suffer from very simple problems. I’m sure there are web sites devoted to design aspects of web pages. From my personal experience I compiled a list of my personal do’s and do-not’s. Needless to say, you might disagree with me here and there.
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Scott Klag sent me this following story (thank you!), which contains quite a few interesting aspects: “A single newspaper photograph has triggered a debate over logging practices in the Northwest. The photo shows a clear-cut hillside that slid into a creek during last month’s Pineapple Express storms. Mud and debris in streams and rivers helped contribute to devastating record floods in Southwest Washington. A University of Washington professor and timber giant Weyerhaeuser faced-off Thursday at a legislative hearing.” (source)
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Oh really?
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Over at Exposure Compensation, I found this very interesting interview with Sze Tsung Leong.
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This article has an interesting - and quite uncomfortable - comparison to make: “If there’s an irony here, it’s that the photographers who lie in wait for the latest celebrity smash-up probably aren’t that different to the young photographers who headed off to Vietnam almost 40 years ago. Whereas once South-east Asia was the Wild West for ambitious thrill-seekers eager to make their names, now it’s the streets of Beverly Hills. But it’s not just the location that’s changed; attitudes have, too. When he saw Kim Phuc running towards him out of a cloud of smoke 35 years ago, Ut’s first instinct - after he’d taken her photograph - was to save her life.”
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For a while, Noah Kalina’s time-lapse self portraits were all over the web, and now I found what I’d call the ultimate time lapse, done by photographer Hiromi Tsuchida (found via Heading East). Now that we’ve seen that can we please move on, there wasn’t all that much to see here in the first place.
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“‘The UNICEF Photo of the Year 2007 raises awareness about a worldwide problem. Millions of girls are married while they are still under age. Most of theses child brides are forever denied a self-determined life’, says UNICEF Patroness Eva Luise Köhler” - story/list of winners. Find large versions of the images here.
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“The MPAA has rejected the one-sheet for Alex Gibney’s documentary “Taxi to the Dark Side,” which traces the pattern of torture practice from Afghanistan’s Bagram prison to Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo Bay. […] The image in question is a news photo of two U.S. soldiers walking away from the camera with a hooded detainee between them.” (story)
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It appears to be popular now to publish a list of “photo books of the year”, so in case anyone is interested, here is mine. Easily the best book published this year is Bert Teunissen’s Domestic Landscapes. Other books I enjoyed are (in no particular order): The Day-toDay Life of Albert Hastings by KayLynn Deveney, Welcome to Pyongyang by Charlie Crane, LS/S by Beate Gütschow, Baxt by Andrew Miksys, Motherland by Simon Roberts, Topography of the Titanic by Kai-Olaf Hesse, and Mother of All Journeys by Dinu Li.
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It’s that time of the year again, and with “best of” lists (books etc.) already upon us, without further ado, here are my Photographers of the Year 2007, as always in alphabetical order. Simon Roberts - of course for his wonderful book project Motherland. Find a conversation with him here. Bert Teunissen’s long-term project Domestic Landscapes still has me coming back to the various images. It’s particularly interesting to me to see how a photographer would spend years on a single project - in a world where photo projects/books are often treated like CD releases and where many photographers worry about getting work out quickly. For me, Peter van Agtmael’s work from Iraq and Afghanistan (and from the US) is by far the strongest photographic statement (photojournalist or otherwise!) about the so-called war on terror and its consequences. Find a conversation with him here.
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Go to this website, click your way forward to the fourth image (the lady in the bathing suit), and then click on the before-after switch multiple times. No comment. There’s another example a little bit later…
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While the title of Errol Morris’ response to some of the questions about his Roger Fenton pieces (which, as was pointed out elsewhere, if taken together with the comments has a larger word count than the novel “Moby Dick”) reminds me of both incredibly obscure German existentialist philosophy and avant-garde comedy, his article left me wondering what he’d tell a flight attendant when being ask “Chicken or pasta?”
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I came across a couple of interesting interviews: Hippolyte Bayard (actually two Italian photographers) has an interview with Fulvio Bartolozzo (scroll down for the English version!). And 2point8 published a long interview with Joel Meyerowitz: part 1, part 2.
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I recently came across Keira Knightley’s portrait on the cover of “Interview” magazine (find an interview and some photos, incl. the cover, here), and I was amazed that someone would put such a horrible photo on the cover of a magazine. What were they thinking? My wife loves the site Go Fug Yourself, and over there, they had a fairly accurate description of that look: “a moderately depressed topless mime-clown”.
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Last night, a fully loaded tanker truck exploded a few blocks away from where my parents-in-law live (story - my in laws are fine, btw, as is everybody else). Needless to say, I have spent a significant amount of time online today, looking for updates. Just out of curiosity, I looked at the Submit your photos section at boston.com, and I found this following fine print: “By submitting your photo(s) to Boston.com, you agree that such photo(s) and the accompanying information will become the property of Boston.com and you grant Boston.com, The Boston Globe, Boston Metro and their sublicensees permission to publicly display, reproduce and use the photographs in any form or media for any and (all editorial and related promotional purposes) purposes.” (my emphasis) There’s a lot of talk of citizen journalism - but who in his right mind would sign away all rights to his or her photos? So as a citizen journalist you get to work for free?
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The photography book market has been steadily expanding, and people know it. As far as I know, most photo books were always printed in small editions (a few thousand maybe), simply because the demand for them was so small. But interest in photo books appears to be increasing, just like interest in fine-art photography. And then there are the collectors, whose number also must have gone up: We now have books about photo books, with the photo books discussed in those now being even more desirable; and we also have, say, a book by photographers who get a book published under fake names, marketed heavily as limited edition (and strictly divided by the two big markets Europe and America), and everybody makes sure people know who the photographers are - as if we weren’t able to tell from the photos.
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“Bilal Hussein began his Associated Press career with a burst of jarring pictures from Fallujah. The first photo with his credit on it, dated Sept. 12, 2004, shows masked insurgents holding RPG launchers and posing with a downed U.S. military drone. The next day, he photographed the wreckage of a Red Crescent ambulance, identified in the caption as being destroyed in a U.S. air strike. Later that week, he took photos of wounded children said to be victims of a U.S. attack. ‘His pictures were stunning and honest, but completely at odds with the U.S. government portrayal of conditions in Iraq at the time,’ says Jim MacMillan, a former AP photographer who, like Hussein, was part of the Iraq photo team that shared the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography.” (story) Also see this story: “Under U.S. military interrorgation, Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein was blindfolded for nine days, given an offer to become a paid informant within the AP, and told, ‘Your photos pose a threat to us,’ according to a report by his attorney.”
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“It is said that the camera never lies, but according to new research published in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology, the camera not only lies, but those lies can lead to the creation of false memories. In the study […] participants viewed photographs of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest in Beijing or the protest against the Iraq war which took place in Rome in 2003. Some of the participants were presented with digitally altered photographs, while others were shown the unaltered, original images. It was found that manipulation of the photographs influenced the participants’ memories of the events very strongly. […] The findings have important practical implications. They demonstrate clearly the power that the mass media has over how we perceive and remember public events, and the ease with which misinformation and propaganda can be used to manipulate public opinion.” (source)
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You might remember my post about AP photographer Bilal Hussein, or you might have seen his case mentioned elsewhere. The Digital Journalist just published an editorial Help Free Bilal Hussein, providing further information about the case here. There also is a website, which already shows an impressive list of photojournalists from all over the world petitioning for Mr Hussein.
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There’s an interesting interview with Philip Jones Griffiths here.
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“The U.S. military says it will turn over an award-winning Associated Press photographer to an Iraqi court, accusing him of having links to terrorist groups. The military is refusing to disclose what evidence or accusations would be presented, and an AP attorney on Monday strongly protested the decision, calling the U.S. military plans a ‘sham of due process.’ The journalist, Bilal Hussein, has already been imprisoned without charges for more than 19 months.” (story) Regardless of whether Bilal Hussein is guilty or not, it’s very hard to disagree with what AP President and CEO Tom Curley has to say about the case: “The steps the U.S. military is now taking continue to deny Bilal his right to due process and, in turn, may deny him a chance at a fair trial. The treatment of Bilal represents a miscarriage of the very justice and rule of law that the United States is claiming to help Iraq achieve.” (my emphasis) Update (21 Nov): Scott Horton adds more information: “A Pentagon source who requested anonymity advised me that the Pentagon has prepared a total of nine charges against Hussein. All but two of the charges are ‘make weight,’ the source said. The two ‘more serious accusations’ are that Hussein promised to help an individual suspected of involvement in insurgent activities to secure a false I.D., and that his photographs - disseminated internationally by the A.P. - demonstrate that Hussein is a propagandist for insurgents. The source said all of these allegations, excepting perhaps the claims about the I.D., were ‘extremely weak’ and ‘lacked any meaningful evidence to support them’ but noted that ‘after more than a year and a half of holding this man in prison, it was not possible simply to release him, because that would mean admitting that a mistake was made.’” (source)
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It’s no secret that big prints are all the rage these days, and it’s not hard to see why that would be the case. It’s an entirely different matter whether bigger is really better - that’s a discussion that I’ve seen here and there, and people often ask me about this when meeting me. One aspect of big prints that is rarely discussed is the actual quality of the prints. A badly printed photo is a problem. A badly printed big photo is a big problem, especially since it allows you to see a lot of detail if you get close.
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“Every moment we are confronted with new technologies to master and comprehend. This is the reality of modern live, so should art not also be challenging? Artists can choose how they wish to reflect the world. I personally am not as interested in work that is exclusively reliant on form, and at this moment, photography should concern itself more with how it can capture the enormous changes in world, and not focus so much on itself. However, being so quick to dismiss a typology of larger color prints which may indeed have something new to say, is just as wrong as those who dismissing [sic!] Thomas Demand & Jeff Wall for ‘making’ their images.” - from a very interesting post over at Cara Phillips’ Ground Glass.
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Somehow, it seems as if attaching ever simpler labels to things has become today’s modus operandi. It certainly makes life easy for journalists: German photography = deadpan (here’s a most recent example - my old Latin teacher usually called something like that the drilling of a hole in a particularly thin board of wood: something that doesn’t require much of an effort). I’m planning to explore this whole complex - German photography and its aspects - in much more detail over the next few months. But just to give people an idea of what I’m after let me take the prevalent stereotype of German photography and transpose it into the American context: Imagine someone said that American photography basically was little more than snapshot photos of tricycles in a suburban setting. Somehow, that doesn’t feel very satisfactory, does it?
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“Photographers in the Group M35 documentary agency were fed up with unpaid bills, missing prints and failed plans. It was time to storm the castle. On the morning of May 18, 2007, five photographers, along with the agency’s main investor and a friend, rode an elevator to the fifth-floor Manhattan apartment of Group M35’s founder and managing director, Charles Clark. Clark made them wait in the hallway, according to several people who were there. From inside the apartment […] Clark handed the photographers their prints through a crack in the door. […] Group M35’s collapse is a cautionary tale for anyone involved in a small photo business. A sense that money was secondary, with agreements made on a handshake, left the start-up agency vulnerable.” (story)
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As a comment on my rant about unbelievably badly designed websites Eugene Scherba provided a link to an article entitled How Not to Display Your Artwork on the Web, which - if you haven’t seen it already - you might want to check out.
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I get a link, think “Oh, great, new photos to look at!”, click on it. First thing, the browser is re-sized to fit the screen (how annoying!), so I revert that, then look. It’s the front page that is largely empty except for, smallish somewhere, the word “Enter”. Wow! Zen! Let go yee who enter here! Click! - another window pops up, about a sixth of the size of the screen [if you watched this whole process on TV, at this stage the bleeping over the audio would have to kick in]. The little screen is empty, except for a little wheel-like thing that appears to be rotating: I better wait. Who knows what for. The little wheel disappears. Now the screen is really blank. Oh wait, there’s a name slowly appearing somewhere. OK, now I got a little screen with a name. Having been through this before, I know I now have to move my mouse all over the little screen [*bleeeeeeeep*] until I find something. Oh wait, there’s something, I don’t know what it is, but let’s click. OK, I get a photo. Not bad. Now I want to see another one. But how? I move the mouse over the photo. No reaction. I click. No reaction. [*gratuitous bleeping*] Another photo appears. I must have done something. But what? There’s no way to tell. Eventually, I discover that if I move my mouse to a certain location, there’s a tiny “+”. Apparently, “+” means “next image”. How would I not know that: I must be getting old. OK, I’ve had enough, how do I get back to the main window? I start to wiggle the mouse all over the screen [*bleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep*, my cats start running from the room, and my wife comes in to ask whether everything is alright], in the end, I decide to close the window and click on “Enter” again (well, only on a good day really, but let’s just assume…). The same photo as before. However, I’d like to see something else. Is there anything else? In fact, what does it all mean? How do I find out? Will I ever find out? Apparently not, since finally I give up.
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An interesting (ab)use of an iconic image was pointed out to me by Tom O’Doherty, who found the following in a lengthy New York Times Magazine article about the American religious right: “Later, as a choir in stars-and-stripes neckties and scarves belted out ‘Stars and Stripes Forever,’ a cluster of men in olive military fatigues took the stage carrying a flag. They lifted the pole to a 45-degree angle and froze in place around it: a re-enactment of the famous photograph of the American triumph at Iwo Jima. The narrator of a preceding video montage had already set the stage by comparing the Iwo Jima flag raising to another long-ago turning point in a ‘fierce battle for the hearts of men’ - the day 2,000 years ago when ‘a heavy cross was lifted up on top of the mount called Golgotha.’ A battle flag as the crucifixion: the church rose to a standing ovation.” What a weird mix of photography, propaganda, and kitsch! A better person than me to comment on this would probably be Jim, though.
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“Amateur photographers and independent filmmakers looking to chronicle bird life, take snapshots in Times Square or capture the distinctive thrum of New York’s streets will not need to obtain permits or insurance under new rules being proposed by the Bloomberg administration. […] The proposal, drafted as part of a settlement in a lawsuit, was revised after a passionate outcry over the summer from fine-art photographers, independent filmmakers and civil libertarians concerned that the original rules would have restricted unobtrusive video recording.” (story)
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Over the past decade, German photographers have been extraordinarily successful. Some of the most prestigious museums had large shows entirely devoted to photographers whose names non-Germans struggle to pronounce. But with just a few notable exceptions (and I have to add much to my own personal frustration), Germans have nicely conformed to the stereotype of being detached, overly organized, and unbelievably hierarchical. There is just one German blog that covers contemporary photography in a way accessible to non-Germans (by offering English text), Peter Feldhaus’ excellent The Sonic Blog. And more established German photographers simply don’t use blogs.
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Over at Exposure Compensation, Miguel shares some thoughts about portfolio editing.
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Several people told me about this long article by Errol Morris about which of Roger Fenton’s “Valley of The Shadow of Death” photos came first. I have to admit that while I usually don’t mind reading long articles, I didn’t make it through this one (neither did my sources - I’m in good company!). When I read the Susan Sontag quote he starts of with (“Not surprisingly many of the canonical images of early war photography turn out to have been staged, or to have had their subjects tampered with. After reaching the much shelled valley approaching Sebastopol in his horse-drawn darkroom, Fenton made two exposures from the same tripod position: in the first version of the celebrated photo he was to call “The Valley of the Shadow of Death” […], the cannonballs are thick on the ground to the left of the road, but before taking the second picture - the one that is always reproduced - he oversaw the scattering of the cannonballs on the road itself.”) the most important point is contained in the first part: “many of the canonical images of early war photography turn out to have been staged, or to have had their subjects tampered with”. I might be entirely mistaken (as always), but which photo was taken first is of very little - if any! - consequence for the main point here. It’s not like Sontag’s argument completely falls apart if what she thought was the second photo turns out to be the first. I think talking about the consequences of the staging - if we want to call it that - would have been somewhat more interesting (and important) than discussing which photo came first. Update (two articles later): “I suppose he is deadly serious, but I can not help reading Errol Morris’s New York Times investigation into Roger Fenton’s Crimean photographs without wondering if it is all some elaborate parody. A sort of CSI: Photography with laughtrack. […] More than one thousand comments have been left on the saga. […] Morris appears to launch into a journey to catch Sontag out. How could she know which image came first? Thousands of words later we know that Sontag was correct. She was ‘Right’, says Morris, ‘but for the wrong reasons’. Given that she gave her reasons in two sentences rather than several essays, I think she did a fine job.” (story)
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There’s a nice New York Times feature in which Simon Norfolk discusses his editorial work for that newspaper.
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A little while ago, Alec Soth got in touch with Doug DuBois to talk about his work. As is sometimes the case with interviews, things took their time. When the piece was finished, past the point where Alec had decided about his blog’s hiatus, he approached me and asked whether I was interested in posting the interview on Conscientious, along with his introduction and the images showcasing Doug’s work. Of course, I was. Find everything below. My thanks to Alec and Doug for sharing! - Jörg Colberg (Alec Soth:) The most influential exhibition during my college years was Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort (MoMA, 1991). The show made domestic life seem like a worthwhile subject for photographers. Especially exciting was that the show introduced me to a bunch of new photographers. Until then I’d never heard of Gregory Crewdson or Philip-Lorca DiCorcia. But the greatest discovery, and the star of the show, was Doug DuBois. More than anyone else, his family pictures lived up to the thrilling title of the show.
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There’s a nice article entitled “Candida Höfer - Architecture of Absence” available here.
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I’m very excited to see that the show FOTO: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918-1948 has just opened at the Guggenheim.
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“I want my images to go more than skin-deep. I want the viewers to feel the vulnerability of their existence and how it relates closely to the sensitivity of the world’s glaciers.” (Spencer Tunick on his latest “installation” for Greenpeace) - Puhleeeeeze!
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Chris Jordan was on The Colbert Report last night, click here to watch the segment (there is a truly annoying commercial before the actual video).
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“A lot of what I learned in [art]school had to be unlearned once I got out into the real world. Most importantly I don’t think I learned enough about myself and my needs as an artist.” - Ofer Wolberger on Art Education
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“Around 3:30, half an hour before closing time, four vandals wearing black masks stormed into a space known as the Kulturen Gallery while shouting in Swedish, ‘We don’t support this,’ plus an expletive. They pushed visitors aside, entered a darkened room where some of the photographs were displayed and began smashing the glass protecting the photographs and then hacking away at the prints. […] Officials at the local police station said Monday that the vandals had not been caught but that they were believed to be part of a neo-Nazi group.” (story)
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There is a wonderful post about four self-published books - incl. a brief discussion of self-publishing - over at 5B4.
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“Tony Penrose, son of Lee Miller and Roland Penrose, introduces some of his mother’s work and remembers life with her at Farley Farm, Sussex.”
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