It appears there will be a Hipstamatic Foundation for Photojournalism. Is that a good idea? The British Journal of Photography asked a diverse group of people, which yields a predictable range of opinions. There’s one interesting nugget, near the end, where Chris Anderson notes “There is a reason I read The New York Times. Sure they may make mistakes, and I may not always agree with their editorial page, but they make an attempt at accuracy and objectivity. They may not always get it right, but their reputation - indeed their business - depends on doing every thing they can to be as accurate and objective as possible.” And this might really where it truly gets interesting. (more)
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In a new follow-up Edward Rozzo appears puzzled by me stating that “the vast majority of people trust photography in the vast majority of cases perfectly well” (source) and that “We all know that all photography is fiction: as a photographer you make choices, which influence the photograph enough for it to be more of a fiction than a fact.” (source) How can this be? Isn’t that a contradiction? The answer is: No, it isn’t. That’s the beauty of photography, that’s how photography works. Under most circumstances most people are perfectly happy to suspend their disbelief1 in the artifact “photograph,” to take it for what it is not, at least theoretically. (more)
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Last week, a flurry of articles and commentaries about Instagram/Hipstamatic was published, many of them bemoaning the apps’ popularity, arguing, in some way or another, that the apps were bad for photography. Two articles appeared to be breaking out of the circles most of the other ones seem(ed) to be running in. Jon Anderson wrote about ‘democratization’ and what that might really mean. And David Campbell asked for the conversation to move forward, instead of incessantly focusing on aesthetics. For that to happen, I think we need to realize that context matters. Find the full piece here. (image by Andrew Hetherington - thank you!)
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“The vehement opposition to these apps [Hipstamatic, Instagram - JMC] commonly operates in terms of ideas of ‘legitimate photography’ versus ‘illegitimate photography’, in which a supposedly new realm of popular manipulation is undercutting the cultural status of established photography, all infused with a professional anxiety about the influence of ‘amateurs’. We’ve got to get beyond this frame. I’ve long argued that we have to reposition debates about photography so we recognise the inherent and unavoidable place of aesthetics and representation in the production of each and every photographic image, not [sic!] matter who is making them.” - David Campbell
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“Techno-aesthetic changes have nothing to do with ‘ruining’ photography, and the so called ‘democratization’ of the medium, insofar as it entails more people taking pictures, is not a threat to anyone who wishes to devote him or herself to a serious exploration of the medium. […] If you look at digital technology from the perspective of individual creative freedom and editorial control, it certainly looks like a good deal; but if you look at it in terms of the collective effects, and the market forces that are shaping up to profit from it, then the bargain is at best Faustian. On the one hand, you have greater independence, but on the other there is increasing fragmentation of information sources which bewilders the consumers instead of enlightening them, and forces the independent producer more and more into an information ghetto that is deprived of cultural heft.” - Jon Anderson
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The British Journal of Photography features a great article about the use of newsprint by photographers. My favourite quote comes from Rob Hornstra: “That’s the problem we’re facing, people are still thinking about the idea of it being an actual newspaper. You shouldn’t. You should think about it as being a series of pages with which you can do whatever you want. Most of the newspapers I’ve seen are still fairly conservative. But you can turn it in all directions; readers can create their own layout and sequence. You can fold it in two or in four. You can print images across several spreads to make posters.”
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Edward Rozzo wrote a response to my Photography After Photography? (A Provocation). I’m very much interested in continuing the debate, because I think there is something to be gained here. Rozzo and I seem to be in agreement about various things, but of course it’s always much more interesting to first talk about what we can’t (yet?) agree on. Find the full piece here. (image courtesy Andrew Hetherington - thank you!)
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Noah Kalina has been producing little pieces that at first look like animated gifs, but that then turn out to be something else, a perfect cross between a photograph and a movie. There’s Pool, for example, probably a good first one to look at. Others include Kevin or the magnificent Fire.
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Great piece by Blake Andrews about the object and photography, using Fuji Instax photographs as examples (image: July 4th, 2012, by Blake; via Instax Gratification)
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“Recently, I had an abortion, which I documented with a hidden mobile phone camera and then shared the images on the internet. […] My hope is this project will help dispel the fear, lies and hysteria around abortion, and empower women to make educated decisions for their bodies. […] Experiencing my own abortion and photographing the result was a sobering experience. As a woman, I reckon with the power of images every day. But after my abortion, I realised images are literally being used as a weapon to petrify and assault viewers into fear, shame, and isolation. The protesters’ heartless use of lifeless foetus images made me feel cheated, lied to and manipulated. It was just propaganda: intended to shake the core of my deepest biological, intellectual and emotional foundation.” - an anonymous photographer, who wrote about her experience on The Guardian’s website and who set up thisismyabortion.com
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Over the past decades, the photograph itself, the object on the wall, has become more important. Why is that? I actually think there is no simple answer. Instead, we seem to be witnessing several developments coming together at the same time. Find the full piece here.
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In the July 12, 2012 issue of The New York Review of Books, there is an article by Zadie Smith entitled “North West London Blues.” In it, the author mentions a small independent book shop, run by a woman named Helen. Helen, we learn, is “an essential local person,” with the “essentialness” defined as follows “Giving the people what they didn’t know they wanted.” Isn’t that a fantastic description of what a good curator should do? It also is the perfect antidote for Eli Pariser’s “Filter Bubble,” the observation that the internet is making us less smart since it increasingly gives us what we want (more accurately: what we know we want, we know we agree with).
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“MediaStorm has introduced a Pay Per Story scheme, asking viewers to pay $1.99 to watch its latest photographic and multimedia productions,” writes Olivier Laurent in an article for the British Journal of Photography. David Campbell published his thoughts on the subject matter here. I find it interesting that people are still pussy-footing around the very simple fact that you cannot run a business on free. Someone has to pick up the tab. (more)
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The last thing anyone needs is rehashing the old debate about analog and digital in photography. I never found that discussion so interesting in the first place. I am perfectly comfortable with both analog and digital photography. Cameras are tools, and I’m personally not necessarily interested in talking about tools. That said, this might be too simplistic a description of my view. So let me try that again. Find the full piece here.
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Very important page with a lot of details about copyright and fair use. For example “Fair use is a right that you employ simply by accessing material, copying it and incorporating it into your project within an appropriate context. You do not need to get anyone’s permission to do that, and you do not even need to let them know that you did it.” (my emphasis) Btw, you will want to keep in mind that the concept of “fair use” used here applies to US copyright. Depending on where you live, your mileage might vary.
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My post Photography After Photography? (A Provocation) resulted in quite a few readers sending in comments. I didn’t expect so many people to agree with me. It seems there is quite a bit of discontent with the medium or at least with the current state of affairs. (more)
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Photography liberated painting from the existential burden to depict. With the advent of photography, painting was finally able to move sideways and forward, blossoming in all kinds of directions. Who - or what - is going to do that for photography? Read the full piece here (slightly updated 13 June 2012).
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I was away from my desk for a few days, which resulted in quite a few things piling up, metaphorically speaking, in my mind. As silly as I feel talking about yet another photo scandal, being away, which involved a lot of walking and of traveling, reminded me that often enough, when dealing with a photo scandal we’re losing track of what is at stake - and what is not. I suppose it’s the medium that dictates the message - the internet, with its incessant flood of relevant and mostly irrelevant little snippets of stuff, bombarding us day in, day out (this website, despite the fact that it’s not being updated more than once or possibly twice a day of course being part of the problem). (more; updated below)
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OK. Photography is memory. Photography is a construct, just like our memory. Photography is a great tool to serve our purpose of constructing our memory. We’re our own propagandists who, just like all propagandists, know that what we’re saying is not necessarily true. But what matters is that we make ourselves believe it is true. Or rather we treat our memories just like we treat announcements in advertizing that always come with the asterisk and all the fine print. We know that “certain restrictions apply.” But photography allows us to try to make those restrictions go away, or at least to reduce the amount of exceptions. Read the full piece here.
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John of Salisbury: “Bernard of Chartres used to say that we are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any sharpness of sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size.” Brook Jensen: “For artists, history is particularly important — perhaps more so than for the average human experience. You see, history is slightly more alive for us than it is for others because we have, as a part of our ‘now, the artifacts that have been left behind by the artists who preceded us. Their lives may have preceded us, but their artwork is still with us, here, available for each generation to understand and learn from.”
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Photography is memory. Memory is photography. If it only were that simple! Maybe we need to be more precise. It’s never a good idea to begin an article with nitpicking, but in this case there is no other way. According to Collins English Dictionary (accessed via dictionary.com) memory, the word, can stand for somewhat different things, including “the sum of everything retained by the mind” and “a particular recollection of an event, person, etc”. Let’s focus on the latter here, the particular recollection of something. We can hope that once we’ve figured out how photographs work as such recollections, we will be able to say something about how photographs relate to the whole, the sum of everything retained in the mind. Find the rest of this essay here.
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Duckrabbit’s Benjamin Chesterton just published an article about photographs by photojournalist Ron Haviv being used for the arms industry. The ads can be found on the photographer’s website. On his own blog, Haviv responded. What are we to make of this? (more; updated below)
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I thought it might not hurt to address the thoughts I recently outlined in Photography and Place, using a specific location as an example. Given the photographic representation of Appalachia has been very heavily discussed over the past few weeks (c.f. the Perpetuating the Visual Myth of Appalachia posts on Roger May’s blog) I figured this particular region might provide a good jump-off point. Find the full piece here.
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I wasn’t really going to delve into the issue, not even with my very short post last week about the recent kerfuffle around the portrayal of Appalachia. But Colin Pantall just published some thoughts about it (scroll down, past the images of sick people). He asks “Who wants to know what Appalachia really looks like? Especially when that ‘really looks like’ is up for negotiation in the first place.” There we are, right at the source of the problem. (more)
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It’s safe to assume Appalachia doesn’t look like what CNN made it to look like (the edit on view here might be different than the original one - c.f. the article linked to below), editing a series of photographs by Stacy Kranitz. This edit caused quite the uproar. Roger May just published an article about it, in which he quotes the photographer’s reaction to the edit: “I feel ashamed and humiliated for trusting CNN. I am stunned that they would take my work out of context.” There also is an interview with the photographer here. This will not make it any better, but this story isn’t new. I’ve heard the exact same thing from photojournalists working with newspapers and magazines. I think there are two things we can learn from this. First, the internet can serve as a corrective when it comes to these kinds of events. Second, this story can also teach us a valuable lesson about stories that come from places outside of the US. It’s very important to keep the mechanisms that created the CNN story in mind when viewing, for example, photography produced in places like Africa.
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There is a presentation of Ben Lowy’s iPhone photos over at Lens blog, which includes an interview with the photographer (you can find my earlier interview with Lowy here). Jon Anderson wrote an article commenting on the Lens post, which is well worth the read. (more)
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Over at Fototazo, Tom Griggs wrote a follow-up piece on a couple of articles by Colin Pantall and me about the above photograph, taken by Thomas Hoepker on September 11th, 2001. Griggs’ piece is a great read, and I want to add some more thoughts to the whole debate. (more)
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Colin Pantall has a great post up about two somewhat recent news photographs that made a bit of a splash. In both cases, the public reacted aghast at what they saw. Colin writes (my emphasis): “The idea is that one should look a certain way in the face of tragedy, part of the simplistic narrative that is expected of people when they are part of a photograph - a simplistic narrative that does not have an equivalence in writing. Here it is easy to explain the contrast between the glorious sky and the casual dress, the trappings of the picnic and the relaxed poses. These are all allowed to happen, but when it comes to a photograph, God forbid if anybody is caught doing anything that lies outside a very narrow band of expected responses.” (more)
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Christian Patterson’s Redheaded Peckerwood (also see the publisher’s website and my review) made it onto so many “best of 2011” lists that it was by far the most popular book last year. A body of amazing depth and sophistication, it is a shining example of what the contemporary photobook can do. There now is a second edition, and I used the occasion to talk with Christian about the book. Find the full piece here.
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“Trade divided over production of large prints of some of the photographer’s best known works, but buyers love them” is an apt description for what just happened: Reprints of some of William Eggleston’s most well-known images raked in the jumbo juice, almost $6m, while there were rumblings about whether or not this was such a good idea. These rumblings then erupted when a collector, Jonathan Sobel, filed a lawsuit against Eggleston. In an opinion piece, Felix Salmon tried to explain what was really going on, and there are many valuable details in his argument. I’m not sure I buy (pardon the pun) Salmon’s dismissal of the lawsuit as merely some bruised ego, though. That seems to be a tad simplistic, especially if you read this interview with Mr Sobel. In part, it centers on limited editions and on the fact that when Mr Sobel bought his prints, there was no word of a possible larger edition. You definitely want to read the interview, since I have the feeling that some of the points raised in it we will hear a lot more about in the future.
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The Sochi Project - makers of Sochi Singers, Safety First, and Empty land, Promised land, Forbidden land - just released statistics of their first three years of crowdfunding. The findings might surprise some people - they did surprise me to some extent. (more)
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Now here’s a picture for our times: A photograph taken by Alexander Gardner in 1865, a portrait of Lewis Payne, one of the men involved in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. If there ever was defiance, here we’d have it, and we love that kind of attitude, even (especially?) if it is on display by a soon-to-be-convicted (and hanged) criminal. It’s a handsome face, too, oddly out of time: You wouldn’t be surprised to meet someone looking, even dressing like this, in a local coffee shop. But Payne also looks like the hero in every movie - the dashing main figure who will escape into the night even if all his accomplices get caught or killed, the ruthless killer or violent lunatic that we still root for (think “Doug MacRay” in The Town). Find the rest of the piece here.
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Read this story to get an idea of the factors that now determine which news photographs you might get to see. (via)
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About his project United We Were Strong Pierre Terdjman writes: “Traveling from Lod to Be’er-Sheva, going through Dimona, I discovered one of the hidden parts of the country [Israel], the part of the promised land forgotten and forsaken by everyone, the land of promises never kept, a land of cities ruined by poverty and unemployment, leaving nothing but a few hovels as squats for drug dealers, and with prostitutes hoping for as many customers as possible so that they could spend their earnings a few hours later shooting up heroine. The people living there, whether Russian, Ethiopian or Arab, have all become ‘sabras’ or humble workers. In another life, some of them were doctors or engineers, but now they do housework, making a few shekels an hour. How did the Israel of kibbutzes with its founding fathers defending socialist Zionist ideals come to forget these men and women who, when united, were strong?” You can now support this project here.
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Here’s (in part) why portrait photography is so hard: “research by psychologists at the Universities of California and Harvard finds that the same people are rated as more attractive in videos than in static images taken from those videos.”
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The other day, I went to New York City to, among other things, see the Cindy Sherman exhibition at MoMA. I’m a fan. I do realize that one is not to use the word “fan” in an art context. But since I want to spend a few thoughts on exactly that, context, I’ll happily use it regardless. (more)
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Anouk Kruithof is one of the recipients of this year’s ICP Infinity Awards. Over the past few years, she has produced a string of cutting-edge books, many of them self-published. So there were many reasons why I wanted to talk to her about her work. Find the conversation here.
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I’m honoured to be the guest juror of the 2012 Light Work Student Invitational. If you find yourself in Syracuse, NY, make sure to check out the show! The above photo is by Dan Wetmore, my best-of-show pick.
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Some things first: I have not seen the Cindy Sherman retrospective at MoMA, yet, so I don’t (can’t in fact) have an opinion about it. I have been a fan of Sherman’s work for quite some time. I don’t think every body of work is equally strong, but that just adds to the mix: After all, why do we always expect every artist to produce one “hit” after the other? There’s go to be some risk, and risk always includes the risk of failure. Regardless, I found this article by Adam Lindemann interesting: “I will never cease to be amazed by how much consensus I find among New York’s leading art critics as they all hail and salute the same things, or for that matter, as they all gang up and bash the same things […]. The unanimity bothers me; I wish someone would offer some counterpoint to the prevailing view, bring some fresh air into the dialogue.” (more)
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John Edwin Mason just posted the first part of a series of articles on African stereotypes, paying particular attention to the continent’s photographic portrayal. The article concludes as follows: “I shouldn’t make it sound like the burden rests entirely on photographers. Viewers — that means all of us — have a responsibility to be aware of the visual culture in which we live and to understand how images can reveal truths and still tell lies.”
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In what looks like the first of a new series of posts, Darren Campion wrote a piece on a photograph by Roger Ballen. Well worth the read!
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Find an interesting conversation between Andreas Schmidt and Elisabeth Tonnard here. If you’re curious about the Joseph Selle Collection mentioned in the piece, it has a website.
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A while ago, there was general hand-wringing about photojournalists using the Hipstamatic app, now there’s a debate about Instagram. I personally couldn’t care less about any of that stuff, because it omits all kinds of more important problems the news media have to struggle with these days. That said, most people would probably vehemently oppose manipulation of news images. So how then does that not apply when we’re talking about Hipstamatic or Instagram images? To give just one example, you can’t make a big fuss about how photographers are not allowed to manipulate their images (“Images in our pages, in the paper or on the Web, that purport to depict reality must be genuine in every way.” - my emphasis) and then happily use Hipstamatic images as if there was no problem. The same applies for Instagram images. You either allow image manipulation, or you don’t. You can’t have it both ways. Of course, this all points to the underlying problem here, which I’ve addressed ad nauseam before: Instead of talking about what images look like, in a news context we should really be talking about how images are used and what they say (and don’t say).
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“It is time to remove this myth [“compassion fatigue” - JMC] as an obstacle to understanding how photographs of extreme situations can and do work.” - David Campbell
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The other day, the New York Times’ Lens blog introduced a series by photographer Stephen Crowley, entitled “Smoke Filled Rooms,” with a first installment here. The series intent is to “examine the processes and consequences of contemporary American politics.” The essay caused BagNews’s Michael Shaw to ask How Far Into the Smoke Can Stephen Crowley Go? As far as I can tell, this question separates into two different aspects. (more)
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First there was Facebook. Then, there was Twitter. Then Tumblr. Then Google+. Now Pinterest. Maybe I’m getting the order wrong here. But whatever it might be, photographers are told they need to actively pursue so-called social networking, because that’s the game in town now. I can’t escape the feeling, however, that we need to put an end to the madness and say that enough is enough. How many more social-networking accounts does one need? Things have become so bizarre by now that often clicking on a Twitter link takes you to a Tumblr page linking to some other site linking to… (You might know the same game from Facebook or Google+) What’s the point of posting the same stuff on five, six, seven different sites? (more)
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Fridays are reserved for photobooks, but once I’ll make an exception. I just updated my article The Problem with Western Press Photo (scroll down to the bottom) to respond to some criticism.
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“When in public spaces where you are lawfully present you have the right to photograph anything that is in plain view.” And more about your rights as a photographer.
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This World Press Photo of the Year 2011 was taken by Samuel Aranda. There are many categories and as many winners, but there is only one big winner, and Aranda’s photo it was. A post on the New York Times’ Lens blog noted that the image “has the mood of a Renaissance painting” - which, of course, is true. And that’s exactly one of the problems here. Jim Johnson already noted that the image in fact does not just reference Renaissance paintings in general. It assimilates Christian iconography (which was produced before and after the Renaissance as well): The Pietà, “depicting the Virgin Mary cradling the dead body of Jesus” (I’m including just a few examples in this post). If you have followed the news over the past decade even just tangentially, you might realize that using a visual language that could not be more Christian to depict an event in a Muslim country might pose a problem. (more; updated below)
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In photography, trust and doubt are like yin and yang: You cannot have one without the other, you have to balance one against the other. Trust and doubt exist in a complex relationship. They don’t just have to balance each other, they also have to drive each other. Trust has a lot to do with one’s photographic instincts: To see the photograph, to take it, and to then know that what was there to be taken has in fact been taken. But doubt interjects, knowing that while what might have been taken has been taken, what was seen could have been seen in a different way. Trust is centered on the realization that one is a good photographer. But there is the doubt, the constant asking whether one might not become a better photographer. Find the full piece here.
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