I found a nifty website that has an excellent Photoshop tutorial.
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The winners of this years College Photographer of the Year have been announced; and it is quite interesting to look at the winning portfolios. As can be expected, there is a correlation with the topics that people are obsessed about (sex, religion, and violence). Needless to say, that’s just how most photojournalism works. In any case, here is a list of the people/projects that struck me the most - I think you definitely want to look at all the other stuff, too (especially since there is a large “sports photography” section - I think sports photography is even less interesting than for example still lives, but that’s just me). Elyse Butler’s “Sexual Tension” won gold in the “documentary” category. In this category, it’s hard to pick a winner given the quality of the different projects. Check out Uwe H. Martin’s “Tales from Bangladesh” and especially Evan Semon’s untitled project (you need to scroll down for that on the page - this particular page isn’t set up very well). I think my favourite in this category is Evan Semon’s project. The story of a married couple where the husband is undergoing sex change surgery alone is very interesting; and Evan Semon did an amazing job to portray what they’re going through. In the “picture story” category, I was impressed with Krisanne Johnson’s “The Old German Baptists” and Denis Rochefort’s “Scene of Identity”. Lots of interesting photos can also be found on page that shows the winning images in the personal vision and the portrait categories.
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If you’re looking for a book that discusses contemporary photography- incl. many of the photographers that I already mentioned here - your search has come to an end. Charlotte Cotton’s The Photograph as Contemporary Art, part of Thames & Hudson’s utterly excellent World of Art series, is exactly the book that anybody interested in contemporary photography needs to add to his/her collection. PS: Having just looked through the book I realized how many of the leading contemporary photographers can already be found here. But get the book anyway!
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There is a fairly large community of photographers who focus on taking photos of nude women in abandoned buildings/ruins. I am baffled! And I will be grateful for any explanation as to why this subject matter is so fascinating.
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If you don’t have the money to buy a digital SLR you inevitably have to deal with digital noise (digital SLRs have vastly larger and better imaging chips). So far, I used to work with Neatimage, which I recommended here a while back. The other day, John P. brought Noiseware to my attention. Having processed about three dozen photos I think Noiseware is indeed a bit better. Update: Mark T. told me about another tool called Noise Ninja.
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You found a cool old camera but, unfortunately, it only takes 620 film. What is to be done? Well, you either buy 620 film; or you use 120 film and do a little trimming yourself. Now that’s neat!
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The Andrew Dickson White Architectural Photographs Collection at the Cornell University Library contains “approximately 13,000 nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographs of architecture, decorative arts and sculpture.” (thanks, John!)
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Doing Photography and Social Research in the Allied Occupation of Japan, 1948-1951, which contains photos taken by anthropologist John W. Bennett in occupied Japan (with comments by the photographer), contains an outstanding amount of information. (seen at wood s lot)
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A while back, I heard that there existed a few colour photos, taken during World War I. So far, I failed to find out more, but today, I came across a few samples. I know nothing about the actual photographic process etc. To navigate click on the numbers (or use “vor” for “next” and “zurück” for “previous”). Update: I wasn’t too satisfied with the state of this post so I did some research. I came across this site that contains explanations and many photos/samples. The actual colour photos - there are many colourized b/w ones - were done using Auguste and Louis Lumi鑽e’s autochrome process. There are some more samples on this site. And if you really want to get some of those photos - plus the actual history of World War I - check out this book. And Simon Smith just sent me the link to the French archives that contain the photos (thanks!). If you don’t speak French: you access the photos at the top right-hand side. The photos are sorted by location. For each location, there is a list of the photos; on those pages without thumbnails you view the photos by clicking on the icon that looks like an eye.
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The other day, Stacy of the space in between wrote about the life and fate of Masahisa Fukase, and there is nothing to say about it for me other than: Go and read it.
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I’m not a big fan of street photography: If you want street photography take a walk! But be that as it may, other people like it, and I thought I’d share the link to iN-PUBLiC.com (yes, that’s how they write it!). (Many thanks to Tobias H., who has been sending many links, incl. this one, over the course of the past months)
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The idea behind Democratic Books is simple: Create a book and allow people to download it (as a pdf file) and assemble it (aka print and glue) themselves. At the time of this writing, they got five books up, amongst those work by Andrew Buurman and David Klammer.
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If you’re interested in photographs of abandoned industry Industriekultur-Fotografie is where you want to go. The site is mostly in German, but they added enough English keywords for you to find your way around if you do not understand German. (thru gmtPlus9)
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I’m aware of the fact that the film vs. digital discussion has reached the levels of the LP vs. CD discussion: it’s getting immensely annoying and nerdy, and the discussion is becoming increasingly irrelevant for what most users can actually see (or hear in the case of audio). But while I was looking for something completely different I came across a couple of pages that I want to share. They’re all very technical but they contain a wealth of information: This page has a fairly detailed comparison of film and digital, without containing too much information. A good starting point. If you want to know more than anybody would realistically ever want to know, you might want to look at this page. On the same site, they got an introduction to resolution, which is also quite detailed. Oh, and there is this page that also compares film and digital cameras. The interesting bit of information to take away from that - if I understand the page correctly - is that Fuji Velvia 35mm film has something like 21 Megapixels or so (provided you use the same lens they used).
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With Agfa-Gevaert just having announced it would stop producing film, today’s news of Ilford’s business problems might look as yet another piece of shocking news for photographers. If indeed Ilford, the maker of supplies for black-and-white photography, was to disappear that would be quite a disaster. However, it remains to be seen what the actual outcome will be. A while back, Polaroid filed for bankruptcy protection, but now it seems the company will survive.
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The Littmann 45 Camera is basically an old Polaroid camera converted into a 4x5 rangefinder, available at what I’d consider a ridiculously horrendous price. As they like to say here: We report, you decide.
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The idea that you can say something about the relationship between the US and Europe by comparing photos of their respective upper classes is utterly preposterous.
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“It’s hard to say just when the word ‘hero’ went bankrupt. But in the aftermath of 9/11, America became, to its own mind, a nation of heroes. We spread the word around like butter on toast. […] The men in these photographs are soldiers who were wounded in Iraq. […] No one has the right to say that these men are not heroes. But I also suspect that few people understand the contemporary hollowness of that word better than they do.” Verlyn Klinkenborg in the introduction to The Damage Done. (Thanks, Stan!)
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This entry doesn’t really contains anything new for regular visitors of this weblog. I just thought it would be interesting to look at how different photographers work with panoramic photography. I’m going to exclude all those photographers who use a camera that allows taking panoramic photos - such as the Hasselblad Xpan. Instead, I will focus on more unusual ways to produce panoramas. I do not intend to say that it’s easy to take a good panoramic photo with the Xpan. It’s actually quite hard as composition has to be re-learned. But often, I find that such a panoramic format doesn’t really add anything to what you see. Panoramic landscapes are like normal landscapes; you just see more of the scenery. And I think those people who try to go beyond that usually use different ways to get their panoramas. It’s almost like what makes me like certain cover versions of known songs better than others: If an artist just re-plays the song, it’s boring. If the artist interprets the song and makes it sound different it’s getting interesting. Curiously enough, digitally stitching doesn’t necessarily produce interesting results - unless the photographer is willing to exploit the digital process and manipulate the results. The most well-know photographer doing this is probably Andreas Gursky even though most people probably think his photos are just huge. In a similar fashion, Tom Bamberger’s digital panoramas are quite interesting and somewhat disturbing. Making the decision not to stitch and to just go with imperfect overlaps or connections usually is fairly bold but the results can be quite stunning. Susan Bowen produces her panoramas using toy cameras, by overlapping “frames” inside the camera. Her photos are almost the exact opposite of those of the digital stitching camp but they’re equally if not even more interesting. David Hilliard and Joachim Knill don’t use overlaps but, instead, put photos next to each other to achieve panoramas. If you compare these two, you’ll find some differences in how they achieve their respective effects. Joachim Knill’s panoramas don’t match up that well so his panoramic sceneries get additional tension that ordinary panoramas of the very same scenes would not have. David Hilliard, on the other hand, involves people closely and thus has to work somewhat differently. In his panoramas, optical distortions are almost unavoidable and he uses them to great effect.
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Following up on my Nicholas Nixon entry, Joey Harrison sent me an email and told me that he and his sisters have been doing the same kind of series since 1968. And you know what? I like Joey’s series much better.
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This entry is somewhat of an exception to what I usually do. I’m sure you have noticed that fashion photography hardly ever shows up here. There is a simple reason for that: I am not interested in fashion photography. It’s not even the utterly commercial aspect of fashion photography that bothers me - obviously, photographers have to make money somehow. It’s simply that in most cases, fashion photography falls into the category “sweet but forgettable”. And looking at too much fashion photography gives you the same feeling that you get when you eat too much candy: You’re on the equivalent of a sugar high that will inevitably leave you with with a feeling of nothingness soon after. Needless to say, that’s just my personal preference, and it doesn’t say anything about the photographers who do fashion/commercial photography. They are doing excellent jobs, and I have often wished more of them would do non-commercial photography. As it turns out, some of them do. Art Department Photography features a large group of commercial photographers with lots and lots of portfolios to look through. There are some photographers whose work struck me as interesting. Richard Phibbs has portraits of “real people” (aka non-celebrities); I do like these better than his regular portraits, which look way too posed to me. Tim Evan Cook has a very nice “ballet” series. Robert Maxwell’s portraits are nice, too, as are Jeremy Murch’s.
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Don Brice explains how the toycamera.com book was made.
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There’s a fairly active community of people doing wet-plate collodion photography. See, for example, Robert Szabo’s website for lots of examples of this photographic process. What I personally find somewhat disappointing is that so many photographers try to re-produce or re-create photos taken about one hundred years ago - why anyone would want to re-create photos from the grisly US Civil War completely escapes me. And don’t even get me started on those people who dress up to re-stage it (do people learn anything from historical disasters?). I think it would be way more interesting to take photos of contemporary subject matters using these techniques. (thanks, Mark!) Update (7 July 2004): Quinn Jacobson emailed me to tell me about his own collodion photography. Make sure to check these photos out!
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I don’t think I ever linked to toycamera.com. Toy camera enthusiasts often are as snobby as Leica camera or digital fanatics. Needless to say, the correlation between camera quality and photo quality is non-existent. Having said that, there are quite a few nice galleries on toycamera.com. They recently had a panorama theme there - I don’t think any one of the photos there reaches Susan Bowen’s perfection, though.
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Otto - whose last name is not given - was a German soldier who participated in World War II at the German-Russian front and who wrote his own photo diary. (thru The Cartoonist)
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Krista Päffgen she was a model - before she became The Velvet Underground’s Nico. (thru The Cartoonist)
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“Mike Epstein is not a terrorist, but if a proposed ban on photography on New York trains and buses goes into effect, he might very well find himself treated like one.” - story
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“Photographers working for the Farm Security Administration Historical Section […] were encouraged to document continuity and change in many aspects of life in America during the years the unit was in operation. They were particularly encouraged to photograph billboards and signs as one indicator of such developments. Although no documentation has been found to indicate that photographers were explicitly encouraged to photograph racial discrimination signs, the collection includes a significant number of this type of image.”
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“To live is to be photographed, to have a record of one’s life, and therefore to go on with one’s life oblivious, or claiming to be oblivious, to the camera’s nonstop attentions. But to live is also to pose. […] The expression of satisfaction at the acts of torture being inflicted on helpless, trussed, naked victims is only part of the story. There is the deep satisfaction of being photographed, to which one is now more inclined to respond not with a stiff, direct gaze (as in former times) but with glee. The events are in part designed to be photographed. The grin is a grin for the camera. There would be something missing if, after stacking the naked men, you couldn’t take a picture of them. “Looking at these photographs, you ask yourself, How can someone grin at the sufferings and humiliation of another human being? […] And you feel naive for asking, since the answer is, self-evidently, People do these things to other people. Rape and pain inflicted on the genitals are among the most common forms of torture. Not just in Nazi concentration camps and in Abu Ghraib when it was run by Saddam Hussein. Americans, too, have done and do them when they are told, or made to feel, that those over whom they have absolute power deserve to be humiliated, tormented. They do them when they are led to believe that the people they are torturing belong to an inferior race or religion. For the meaning of these pictures is not just that these acts were performed, but that their perpetrators apparently had no sense that there was anything wrong in what the pictures show. […] “Shock and awe were what our military promised the Iraqis. And shock and the awful are what these photographs announce to the world that the Americans have delivered: a pattern of criminal behavior in open contempt of international humanitarian conventions. Soldiers now pose, thumbs up, before the atrocities they commit, and send off the pictures to their buddies. Secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamor to be invited on a television show to reveal. What is illustrated by these photographs is as much the culture of shamelessness as the reigning admiration for unapologetic brutality. “The notion that apologies or professions of ‘disgust’ by the president and the secretary of defense are a sufficient response is an insult to one’s historical and moral sense. The torture of prisoners is not an aberration. It is a direct consequence of the with-us-or-against-us doctrines of world struggle with which the Bush administration has sought to change, change radically, the international stance of the United States and to recast many domestic institutions and prerogatives. The Bush administration has committed the country to a pseudo-religious doctrine of war, endless war - for ‘the war on terror’ is nothing less than that. Endless war is taken to justify endless incarcerations. Those held in the extralegal American penal empire are ‘detainees’; ‘prisoners,’ a newly obsolete word, might suggest that they have the rights accorded by international law and the laws of all civilized countries. This endless ‘global war on terrorism’ […] inevitably leads to the demonizing and dehumanizing of anyone declared by the Bush administration to be a possible terrorist: a definition that is not up for debate and is, in fact, usually made in secret.” whole article by Susan Sontag
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On the BBC’s website British photographer and documentary filmmaker David Modell discusses the torture photos from US prisons in Iraq. His conclusion is quite upsetting and provocative but well worth to be quoted in full length: “The pictures from Abu Ghraib are […] not snatched, clandestine images, taken to uncover the truth and disseminate it. In the almost perfect compositions it is obvious that they were taken in a perversely relaxed atmosphere - emphasised by the demeanour of the troops. And this reveals an appalling reality - that photographs are a deliberate part of the torture. The taking of the pictures was supposed to compound the humiliation and sense of powerlessness of the victims. The photographer was the abuser. When we view the pictures, we are forced to play our part in this triangle of communication. […] By looking at the images we become complicit in the abuse itself. It is this that makes them intolerable for the viewer and why they are so destructive to a war effort built on the spin of ‘liberation’.” (thanks, Philip!) Update (13 May): A couple of days ago, Luc Sante in the New York Times discussed the images and compared them to photographs of lynch mobs: “Like the lynching crowds, the Americans at Abu Ghraib felt free to parade their triumph and glee not because they were psychopaths but because the thought of censure probably never crossed their minds. In both cases a contagious collective frenzy perhaps overruled the scruples of some people otherwise known for their gentleness and sympathy - but isn’t the abandonment of such scruples possible only if the victims are considered less than human?” (story - thanks, Todd!)
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It is just a coincidence that I am reading the book Gulag by Anne Applebaum while we are learning all the gruesome details of what happened in that prison in Baghdad. As I am very interested in photography I went online to look for photographic records of the Gulag. There’s a fairly large collection of images at the The Andrei Sakharov Archives and Human Rights Center. I also found a photo story about the Solovetski Islands - one of the first Gulag camps. Looks all very nice and scenic. What they don’t tell you on that website is that most of those buildings were prisons/camps of the worst sort - incl. the monastery. You can find lots of details about that in Anne Applebaum’s book. If you’re interested in more information this page has tons of good links to all kinds of materials.
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You can’t be picky if you live in Pittsburgh and are interested in photographic art. If there’s a show in town you’ll have to go and see it. So I went to see “Terrain Vague” at the Carnegie Museum of Art’s Heinz Architectural Center. I should have saved the $10 admission. It must have been one of the worst photography shows I’ve ever seen. If you ignore the fact that the word “vague” in the title quite accurately describes the concept behind the whole exhibition itself the setting was an absolute disgrace for the photography. Cramming the photos - some of them quite large prints by Edward Burtynsky - into pretty small, badly lit spaces is just grotesque. And badly lit there are: Todd Hido’s photos all had pretty large shadows from their frame on them. Somebody else’s prints were quite heavily warped in their frames. But if you really want to go and see the show make sure you’ll also get to see the dinosaurs to get your money’s worth. Too bad I had seen them already. And don’t get annoyed by the grumpy staff of the museum.
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“Last year’s US-led war in Iraq presented a showcase for the Pentagon’s superior military technology - but as the occupation drags on, gadgetry is increasingly showing another side of the American armed forces.” - reports the BBC, ending with a very powerful and obvious statement to keep in mind: “Technology may change, but the morality of war will always pose the same dilemmas.”
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Some people claim that digital sucks but those people haven’t seen or used the fabulous Argus DC1512, yet. This camera definitely is the digital equivalent of those plastic (film) cameras that have such a ardent (and oftentimes fundamentalist) fan base: It’s cheap and flimsy, being all plastic, and the lens is a joke. Only thing is the photos (whose maximum size is 352*288 pixels) are digital. So this is almost like having one of those cellphone cameras except that you can’t annoy other people by yelling into it (well, technically, you could but that would be *very* odd). PS: It’s still a tremendous mystery to me why people always yell when they’re ona cell phone. First, the sound is actually being transported electronically so yelling is not necessary. And second, no, I don’t want to listen to whatever they have to say, thankyouverymuch.
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“Lensbabies are the hybrid love children of an old-fashioned bellows camera and an up-tight tilt-shift lens. The photographs have the same soft, roughed-up look produced by a Holga, but using a Lensbaby with your SLR gives you tremendous versatility and the ability to take lots of experimental shots. ” There are so many things simultaneously wrong about this that I don’t even know where to start. So let me just say that this thing costs a whooping $96 and then let’s forget about this nonsense.
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I find it somewhat surprising that you so few people do photographic collages. David Hockney’s collages are probably the only really well-known examples. Here are some more: Noel Myles has done some (more examples here), as have Cal Smith and Simran Singh Gleason.
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“It’s fascinating when sex is used to sell something that otherwise has intellectual high standards. Why, however, are the naked people shown in newspapers and magazines never men? This is blatant inequality. If people are equal, why would the sight of a naked man be undesirable - or, worse, obscene?” - full text
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Polli Marriner emailed me to tell me about chemigrams: “This technique uses photo paper or film, primarily in conjunction with chemistry to create pictures. The silver gelatine is mainly modified not by light but by different chemicals to create an image.” For different examples, look at Mark Roberts’ or Pierre Cordier’s work.
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A pretty odd sounding name but it’s actually photography: “Bromoil was one the favorite and beloved processes of the pictorialists and salon exhibition photographers during the first half of the twentieth century. No show of the photographic art of the pictorialists was without lovely, soft and painterly bromoil prints.” There are lots of nice examples in the society’s gallery.
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Manabu Yamanaka’s photos remind of me what would happen if Richard Avedon and Bernd and Hilla Becher decided to morph their personalities into one. But maybe one should resist such categorizations even if for a contemporary photographer it is almost impossible to avoid copying or using elements that some other famous photographer has already used. In any case, Manabu Yamanaka adds his own approach to his series of portraits. His subjects - grouped into the four Buddhist pains ‘birth’, ‘age’, ‘disease’, and ‘death’ - make his work unsuited for viewing at work.
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Mal Ojo is an online photography magazine from Chile (if I’m not mistaken). It takes a while to get used to their navigational elements (Flash really is the Powerpoint of the web!) but there are lots of interesting photos to be found in their galleries.
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Check out f-stop - a photography magazine.
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What do you do to people that you want to outsource but whose jobs you can’t export to China? Check out what the New York Times is doing with its freelance photographers. And find some photographers’ response here.
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“The Omniscope is a pinhole camera that produces anamorph images. An anamorph image is produced when the axis of the lens or pinhole is not perpendicular to the film plane. The axis of the Omniscope’s pinhole is parallel to its film plane.” (I’m so totally biting my lip here about the pinhole being “parallel to its film plane” part…)
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“These pictures and the individuals will haunt me forever. I cannot imagine what it must be like for the victims.” - Nick Danziger
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Get your daily dose of war porn: Photos from the war in Iraq. I’m sure people will email me and tell me they need to see war photos because such photos make war more unlikely. That’s like argueing that sexual pornography will make it more unlikely that women are being degraded. (seen at thingsmagazine.net)
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I look at a lot of photography sites every day. Often, professional who do mostly editorials, advertizing, or whatever else there is have this funny section “Fine Art” in their portfolios. When you look at it it usually turns out that that’s the corner where they put their nice (or often not even that nice) photos that don’t fit into any other category. I don’t want to start a discussion about art here but I think there’s a bit more to “Fine Art” than just everything that doesn’t fit anywhere else. I wish people would just call those “Fine Art” sections “Hodgepodge” - what they usually really are.
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Last time I linked to Ghost Town the bandwidth limit was exceeded fairly rapidly as everybody and their grandmother was also linking to it. So if you want to see somebody’s photos from a motorcycle ride through the Chernobyl area go and look now (before it’s down again).
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You can find thousands and thousands of amateur and semi-pro photographers online who exhibit their naked people, so-called nudes. There’s a whole weblog devoted to them, called art nudes. Some of them are noteworthy. For example there’s one who introduces one of his ideas saying “it was about the only truly creative idea I had ever had” (he’ll always have my sheer admiration for writing that!). Terry Donovan decided to “deliberately adopt the same poses as the females that he had shot before”. This might be one of those very rare occasions where’s the ubiquitous and utterly annoying teenage phrase “Oh my God!” is quite appropriate. Enjoy!
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In The Guardian, David Hockney argues that “that painting can do things photography can’t, even when it comes to telling the truth about war. […] Photography, with its claim to truth, is a discipline, he thinks, and he’s glad digital technology is ending the rule of the one-eyed monster that never lied. ‘I suppose I never thought the world looked like photographs, really. A lot of people think it does but it’s just one little way of seeing it. All religions are about social control. The church, when it had social control, commissioned paintings, which were made using lenses’ - as Hockney has argued in his book Secret Knowledge - ‘and when it stopped commissioning images, its power declined, slowly. Social control today is in the media - and based on photography. The continuum is the mirrors and lenses.’” Wrong, retorts Joel Sternfeld, winner of the Citigroup photography prize: “Photography has always been capable of manipulation”.
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