Q: What does this show? A: OutKast know nothing about photography and Polaroid has no sense of humour. (thanks, Tobias!)
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Jean-Marc Bouju, Frankreich (The Associated Presse):An Iraqi POW consoles his son.
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A while back, I got quite a bit of flak when I compared war photography with pornography. The harsh reaction by some people indicated that I must have had a certain point there. Over at rhinoblog, Paul Roylance discusses this photo that has become quite famous and that now fetches a lot of money.
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Studio 360 this week has a show about Soviet Nostalgia. Part of the show is a segment about the Lomo LC-A (Real Audio link) that was written and produced by a friend of mine.
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Gordon Coale - whose weblog is well worth the visit - sent me an email with comments about a recent entry. I didn’t disagree with anything he wrote but I thought that maybe I could just post some of my thoughts about digital photography. Some of them might be a bit provocative but sometimes, you don’t anywhere if you just take what they call “conventional wisdom” for granted.
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How about some photography using a neat do-it-yourself pinhole camera? Too lazy to work it out? Well, look at the Dirkon paper pinhole camera. How cool is that?! And while you’re at that site, there also is some technical info about pinhole cameras.
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Funny how what little respect I had left for Adobe just went out of the window (and I’m talking about the real window - just in case you were wondering): Proper use of the Photoshop trademark.
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While the BBC boldly declares that “digital cameras don’t only eliminate the cost and hassle of film processing, they should help do away with bad holiday snaps and see us all become better photographers.” (dream on, BBC; find the whole story here), NPR ponders The Fate of Photography in a Digital Age. (thanks, Stan, for telling me about the NPR show!)
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After my ill-fated short venture into the mysterious world of (more or less non-existing) reader interaction I decided to keep the idea but changing the way it is done. What I’m presenting here are my three Photographers of the Year 2003. Of course, there is no objective criterion for picking three persons over all the other people out there. But then, this weblog contains my very subjective choices anyway and I would be lying through my teeth in a very presidential manner if I claimed that I got equally excited about all the photos I linked to. I do like them all. But I also remember a few instances where I was thrilled to find some photos. So my three Photographers of the Year 2003 are the top of that list. Without further ado, here they are (in alphabetical order). Herbert Böttcher This choice might come as a little surprise to purists (and photo fundamentalists) as Herbert Böttcher uses combinations of pinhole cameras and digital manipulations. I have never been squeamish about using digital techniques to enhance photos where I think it’s necessary and I think Herbert is able to achieve fantastic results. Gregory Crewdson More somewhat unconventional photography. Gregory Crewdson uses elaborately staged sets for his Hollywoodesque photos. Mark Tucker Mark Tucker’s various Road Trip portfolios are simply gorgeous. Not that this is some real competition - no prizes and such - but I want to honorably mention Thomas Ruff for his Nudes. I still can’t decide whether they are completely idiotic or genius.
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The falsification of photographs in Stalin’s Russia
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The Salt Mine is an online photography magazine with a lot of interesting stuff.
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There are thousands of galleries online that show photos taken with Holga toy cameras. I have a couple of those, too, but I personally don’t like them as much as the older Diana. Anyway, those plastic cameras can yield some pretty amazing results… and, of course, also some pretty bad ones. In the end, it’s always the photographer who’s most responsible for the photo and not the camera (the photographic industry is going to hate me for this statement). Some people might feel that there has been somewhat of a shortage of Holga photo links here. Is is tempting to conclude that the author of this weblog thinks that most Holga photography does not fall into the “amazing” category but into the other one. He might also think that many Holga photographers spend too much time on trying to be cool. And maybe he’s convinced that many people who scream “Digital sucks!” would gladly trash their plastic cameras if they had the money to buy a Leica. Who knows? Anyway, I recently received a huge list of links from Tore Halvorsen - thanks so much! - who discovered this weblog and thought he’d share his treasures. From these, I pulled a bunch of fairly nice Holga work. The above photo is from Bill GrimshawÂ’s pemichangan.com. There are some really nice photos there. Millicent Harvey also needn’t hide her photos - somewhat different subjects. And the same goes for Craig Sterling whose galleries page features the utterly modest quote “A master-printer in the tradition of Ansel Adams and George Tice.”
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“The goal of this essay is to explore the challenges posed to our sense-making apparatus by three stages in the life of found photographs: their original context in the family photo album, their loss and discovery, and their recontextualization in the museum exhibit.” - The Found Photograph and the Limits of Meaning (thru consumptive.org)
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Well, that was then. But what do we get now? Karen Lehrman argues fashion photography is in decline. And she can prove it. PS: Funny, I thought I had linked to this already…
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A Picture’s Worth is a website/project by David Chin ” that aims to highlight the inspiration that can arise from a photograph and to capture it in the form of words which in turn can reveal the true beauty of a photograph”. It’s an interesting idea and you can participate by emailing David. Check it out, it’s a nice idea.
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Stan Banos sent me the link to a very nice animation that the viewer canactually control him/herself. It shows a couple of spots during the day and you can make the time pass. Thanks, Stan!
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“Award-winning war photographer James Nachtwey and another Time magazine journalist are in hospital after being wounded when a hand grenade was thrown at U.S. forces they were with in Baghdad, a U.S. military official says.” story I’m not a big fan of war photography - the pornography of violence - but I do wish Nachtwey will be well again.
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Here is a tutorial on how to do huge digital panoramas. (thru 990000)
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One of those highly specialized niches of photography used to be taking very detailed photos of very small things. With the advent of cheap high-quality flatbed scanners some of these problems disappeared. But things aren’t as straightforward as you’d think. Take coins, for example. Many people collect coins and taking a good photo of a coin is more than just non-trivial. Here’s an article about this.
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The other day, I was browsing through “American Photo” magazine - a somewhat glorified “special advertizing section”: It’s very hard to tell where the ads start or end. The latest edition has a special about pop star Britney Spears, featuring a series of photos taken by Mark Liddell. Have a look at the product. You get all the ingredients of the fabricated human body - incl. missing nipples (2001) and changing breast sizes (compare the earlier 2000 with the newer 2003).
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The current edition of Colors Magazine is all about photo studios where people can have their portraits taken. They went to nine different studios and, after introducing them, show samples.
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In Flak Magazine, Noam Lupu argues that “the [ICP’s] first triennial is a missed opportunity to bring to the fore questions about the nature of photography and, more importantly, how artists use the medium to evoke a range of contemporary issues.” (article)
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Seems like there’s a new website dedicated to the Diana Camera. So far, there are three galleries up - Dominic Turner’s is my favourite.
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Look At Me might be the nicest collection of found photographs I’ve ever seen. And you can submit photos, too!
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If you’ve ever seen a Minox camera and you haven’t gallen in love with it something is wrong with you. Seriously. It’s the photographic equivalent of Bang-Olufsen audio equipment: Nice design and technology but quite expensive and more or less… well… useless. The negative is tiny which makes grain an issue. And who wants to fiddle with a camera that is so small that loading the film requires a *lot* of patience and pretty small fingers? Minox cameras are still made by the company. Actually, Minox makes more than just the little spy camera but when people say Minox they’re talking about the “spy” camera. You need special processing because of the size of the film; an easy way to deal with that is to buy film and processing mailers through BH Photo. More infos about the various Minox models can be found on the Minox Encyclopedia of the Minox Historical Society.
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Frequent readers of this weblog will have noted that I usually don’t link to sites with tutorials on how to manipulate digital images. I’m going to make an exception today. This morning, my wife asked me how I’d restore old, faded photos. Even though I more or less knew how to do it I went looking for something online: Needle in a haystack! The signal-to-noise ratio of the web has become quite abysmal. For every useful page you’re flooded with tons of ads and pages where people try to sell you some crap. Anyway, after a while I found this page and I thought I’d link to it here coz it might come handy.
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It probably can’t get any more complicated than this: Should there be a book with photos of what German cities looked like after they were destroyed by bombers during World War II? “‘We’ve all seen the pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But these (new) images are not part of the iconography of the war,’ says historian Joerg Friedrich, who compiled the book. […] Mr Friedrich collected the photos from town archives across Germany while touring the country last year presenting a book about the Allied bombing. That book, The Fire, caused controversy both here and in Britain by suggesting the air campaign may have been a war crime. ‘Can you show the body parts of bomb victims collected in bathtubs? The charred corpses of women, who crouched to the floor in a desperate search for oxygen?’ asked Die Welt newspaper. […] a cultural magazine programme on ARD public television wrote it off as a ‘provocation’ that sought to ‘compare the air war with the Holocaust’. Mr Friedrich says the decision to publish the photos was not easy. In the end, the former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl played a part in convincing him - with the proviso that British, Dutch, Polish and other civilian victims of air warfare also be portrayed.” (full story; images)
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Soviet-Russian cameras has a lot of information about cameras made in Russia or the former Soviet Union (incl., unfortunately, a silly rant about “Why I don’t like LOMOgraphy”: “It’s a capitalist conspiracy.”). (thru consumptive.org)
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Dublog, which appears to be hopefully only in sleep mode right now, featured Carbon Dust Illustrations of Beetles a while back. Insect Tectonics is the high-tech equivalent: Electron microscope images of insects. Stunning.
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“Madonna is being sued by the son of a French fashion photographer [Guy Bourdin] who has accused her of imitating images created by his father.” (story) If you want to judge for yourself, check out this comparison of stills from Madonna’s video and of photos by Guy Bourdin. The similarities are quite obvious; in particular since the poses of the models in Bourdin’s photos are not your everyday poses. Needless to say, this lawsuit is particularly spicy in the light of Madonna’s attacks on people who copy here music illegally. Nothing but some good old hypocrisy, eh?
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Stahl Art is a website by Harald Finster that shows photos of old industrial sites. (thru what a few days ago was called a most curious marmoset)
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There’s an amusing article on The Luminous Landscape about what all you need in your photo bag.
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What is street photography? I had a look at the “about” section of in-public.com: “Street Photography is about seeing and reacting, almost by-passing thought altogether. For many Street Photographers the process does not need ‘unpacking’, It is, for them, a simple ‘Zen’ like experience, they know what it feels like to take a great shot in the same way that the archer knows he has hit the bullseye before the arrow has fully left the bow. As an archer and Street Photographer myself, I can testify that, in either discipline, if I think about the shot too hard, it is gone.” (this one recommended by fiatvera’s Albert Song)
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“In 1907 Japan enacted the Leprosy Prevention Law. Under this new segregation policy, and despite the fact that a cure had been developed, Japanese authorities forced thousands of patients to be confined in sanatoriums. Japan’s lepers remained quarantined until the law was repealed in 1996. […] Since the law was revoked […] very few have left the sanatoriums, most have no place to go and no families awaiting their return. These islands are still home to the majority of Japan’s lepers.” (story and photos by Luc Novovitch)
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Berlin Mitte - Explorations of an Urban Conversion shows the transformation of what used to be the death strip, dividing West and East Berlin during the Cold War, into the center of a re-united modern Berlin.
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photo-genetic.com is a very cool photo site which has its own online magazine plus lots of links.
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Having looked at many hundreds of websites of professional (advertizing) photographers I made an interesting observation: Lots of European, especially German photographers have sections with cars in their portfolio. Lots of Americans have sections with what they usually call glamour - girls in bikinis. What an amusing world it is!
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“The London Photographic Awards reveal an exciting, new program of web-based photographic competitions open to photographers world wide. […] Now in its sixth year the 2003 London Photographic Awards (LPA) is faster, more transparent and easier to enter. What’s more the competition format has been designed specifically to enable photographers’ work to be seen by curators, commissioning editors and art buyers. The London Photographic Awards is unique inasmuch as EVERY ENTRANT, unlike any other awards, will have their work displayed in the entrants gallery within 24 hours of entry, making it visible to an international audience. At the end of the competition the entrants’ gallery will be archived and used as a picture resource for industry professionals.” And they mean it! Check out the gallery of the PhotoArt competition.
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“Seamless City is a continuous visual image of the city made up of sequential photos of a walk through the city shot from a pedestrian point of view.” (thru j-walk) The most interesting aspect of this is to see how boring those streets, in fact most of those cities we live in, really are!
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I did a little search for photos shot with a Polaroid SX-70 camera. The film you use for those allows you to manipulate the photos while they develop. As with most photographic techniques, mastering the technique is the easy part. It is much harder to create an image where the actual technique adds another dimension and is not just some technical gimmick. Anyway, earlier I posted a link to Chris Usher’s site. Cynthia Davis has a nice gallery., as have Michael Going and Gordon Montgomery. Klaus and Elke Wolfer’s website is partly German and partly English but, you know, you really just want to click on the images coz the translation is not that great.
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“Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher’s lifelong commitment to photographing the vanishing rituals and customs of tribal African cultures culminates in their monumental masterwork, AFRICAN CEREMONIES. Ten years in the making, this definitive work contains nearly 850 full-color photographs covering dozens of ceremonies that span the human life cycle.” (gallery) (thru dublog)
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iconomy has a large collection of links for photography done with “Gameboys”. As a little appetizer, check out The Game Boy Camera, especially Airstrike. Oh, and while you’re at it keep browsing through iconomy’s stuff. There are lots of gems to look at.
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I know lots of amateur photographers1 who complain about a lack of inspiration or about a lack of ideas what to take photos of. Here’s an idea. It’s called 26 Things - The International Photographic Scavenger Hunt. The idea is very simple. 26 things are twentysix subjects, some of them fairly obvious (“a sunset”), some of them less so (“new”). The idea is to take a photo for each of the subjects throughout the month of July 2003 and then, on 1 August 2003, to send them the link with the page that contains the photos. For anybody looking for a project this is ideal: There is a deadline which is not too tight (procrastination, be gone!), there are topics to shoot, but the topics are defined broadly enough for everybody. I already started working on mine - I’ve got eight so far. 1 Amateur photographers very often aren’t really amateurs. Maybe it would be better to call them non-professional photographers.
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Boring postcards are actually not that boring at all! (thru thingsmagazine.net)
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iconomy has a link to Binh Danh’s Chlorophyll Art . Seeing that I remembered having read an article about this before called Why didn’t the Romans invent Photography? In that article, there is a little modification to what Binh Danh does: The article suggests to put the leave into a dark box for two days. Given it has been so sunny over the past few days I might even try this kind of photography!
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Very nice gallery of colourful night-time photography at thenocturnes.com (also see previous entry).
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“Do photographs bring us closer to the ‘real’ or push it further away? When is a photograph a document and when is it art?” asks Peter Conrad in an article for The Observer. The exhibiton he refers to I mentioned earlier. (thru esthet.org)
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A photo essay about drag queens in Tokyo by Kyle Sackowski. (thru consumptive.org)
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African Aperture has some very nice galleries of photos taken in Africa. There are so many photos and photographers on there that it literally takes forever to look at all of it.
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Exhibition with photos taken in defeated Germany in 1945. Unfortunately, the number of photos which can be found online is pretty small. But they’re quite stunning.
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