“Sometimes you can overdo the prep. I realise this when Republican wives, mobilised to do their duty for the cameras in the primaries circus, all begin to look like Cindy Sherman in light disguise. The doll-like gestures; the inhumanly exquisite coiffure; the lip-glossed smiling; the desperation behind the adoration; all seem to leap shrieking from a Sherman show yet to be posed, shot and exhibited. No living artist I can think of has more exactly nailed the masquerade we perform when we go about our business, public and private, social and erotic.” - Simon Schama
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Crowdfunding platform Emphas.is just added a book-publishing option. Here is an example.
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As a photographer, you won’t get around bringing your desire to photography, just as a viewer you do the same thing. You have no choice. As I have argued before, photography must fail if that desire is denied. But desire does not automatically create good photography. An equally crucial factor is trust. As a photographer, you have to trust your photographs. You have to trust that they say what you want them to say. Or more accurately, you have to realize that your subconscious mind is bringing more things to photography than your conscious mind might realize. Continued here.
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Kickstarter uses an all-or-nothing funding model, which, I think, doesn’t make as much sense as they probably think. Let’s say you want to raise $5,000. If you need the $5,000 to buy something that costs exactly $5,000 then you really need all the money. But for many photographers (I’m going to focus on just those for obvious reasons) this often is not how this might work. A photographer might be not overly happy, but still quite content to get “just” $4,000 instead of the $5,000. (more)
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As a reaction to my earlier post on crowdfunding, Pete Brook just published The Etiquette of Crowdfunding: A Recipient’s View. I’m a supporter of Pete’s ‘Prison Photography’ on the Road: Stories Behind the Photos, and I think his frequent updates have been nothing but amazing. To see that there will now even be an exhibition really just adds the icing to the cake.
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The other day, a friend of mine sent me an email to talk about crowdfunding. He had supported various projects on Kickstarter, but the overall experience had left him jaded (his word, not mine). He wrote that while he had essentially received what had been promised, a couple of nice surprises notwithstanding he still felt disappointed. He also wrote that he would not fund future projects by some of the photographers he had given money to because he felt he had been “treated like a cash cow”. (more)
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There is a very moving piece entitled Lost and Alone Under Tokyo’s Red Rain by Hiroyuki Ito over at Lens that you want to don’t want to miss.
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There’s a very good article in The Economist about why Kodak is failing, while Fujifilm is doing well.
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At the core of all photography lies desire, our longing to connect, not to forget, to express love, to reach out to someone else (even if it is just our future selves) and say “Here, look at this! I want you to see this!” Full article here
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There’s a great conversation between Tanja Lažeti? and Joachim Schmid at the ABC Artists’ Books Cooperative that’s well worth your time.
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You’ve probably seen this image, since it was discussed a little while ago in major media outlets. It’s a manipulated photograph of the burial of the North Korean leader. So we’re talking about manipulation again. I’ve written about this extensively (you can find lots of posts in the archives), and I don’t know how much I want to add to that. (more)
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Hans Gremmen took a ride down Route 66 - The Mother Road (“66 is the mother road, the road of flight.” John Steinbeck, in The Grapes of Wrath,1939), using 151,000 screenshots, with the final trip now lasting “only” 5hrs 11min 49 sec. If you’re interested in seeing the whole piece, you can now buy the book plus 2 DVD set.
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Really, just watch the video.
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There’s a very good article over at The British Journal of Photography’s website: Post-processing in the digital age: Photojournalists and 10b Photography. Go and read it!
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“The story of Grozny, the city, which was the most destroyed on Earth in 2003 and has been rebuilt in pursuit to hide the war atrocities and political games, must not remain untold.” writes Oksana Yushko (one of the winners of the 2010 Conscientious Portfolio Competition - find my interview with her here). “The headlines had long ago moved on, but we stay dedicated to this place.” “We” here means Oksana along with her colleagues Olga Kravets and Maria Morina. Their project is called Grozny - Nine Cities, and you can now support the photographers via their emphas.is project page.
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“I maintain that photographs are ultimately unreadable. The seeming representational nature of the medium is misleading because we will not find any real truth. As viewers, we should recognize how much subjectivity we bring to understanding images. We act like prisms. So I have to remind myself that my reaction to or reading of a photograph is mine alone. It is only my truth.” - W.M. Hunt (in: The Unseen Eye, Thames&Hudson/Aperture, 2011, p. 60)
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I’m out of town, away from my computer (and, as it turned out so far, away from functioning simple internet access). But I wanted to point out a couple of things. Bryan Formhals included this site in his list of Top Photography Websites of 2011, for which I’m incredibly grateful. Thank you so much, Bryan! Also, Jonathan Blaustein and I are talking about why art isn’t used to change the world over at A Photo Editor or maybe more accurately what we could do to make a change. It’s an old debate, and we don’t have all the answers, but we both believe it’s a question that needs to be addressed.
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Behind the smokescreen by Rocco Rorandelli deals with the global reach of tobacco corporations. For his emphas.is project, the photographer writes: “I want to visit the US next year because 2012 marks the 400th anniversary of the first successful tobacco plantations on American soil. […] I plan to document various aspects of the industry: from farming issues including child labor and immigration, to the facilities of the tobacco giants like Philip Morris, to the cultural links that persist in American society between people and the tobacco industry.” Given the media industry’s continued cuts to quality journalism - CNN just laid off 50 editors and photojournalists (don’t miss Stephen Colbert’s take on this!) - supporting quality journalism is becoming more and more important every day.
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There is a lot to be said for photography online, but there is even more to be said for photography on the printed page. Here are two new(ish) magazines you might want to treat yourself to: Foam Magazine’s special issue What’s Next? is the culmination of the museum and magazine working for a year on trying to find out what might be next for photography (full disclosure: I’m a contributor to the magazine). Plus, there is Daylight Magazine’s Issue 9: Cosmos. What with the “holidays” coming up, these magazine also make for great gifts!
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This might be the most poignant photograph showing the effect of cluster bombs (or land mines) I’ve seen in a long time. It was taken by Laura Boushnak as part of her work on cluster-bomb survivors in Lebanon. (related, just a few days ago, UN rejects US-backed cluster bombs regulation bid)
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A recent work related trip took me to San Francisco, where I saw an installation of Jim Goldberg’s Raised by Wolves at Pier 24. Earlier this year, I had already come across an installation that was part of the Deutsche Börse exhibition in Berlin. I had one big impression that I took away from these two exhibitions. Here is a photographer who is really struggling with the medium photography, trying to make it tell the story he wants to tell. To make this clear, by “struggling” I mean a very creative struggle. Maybe “wrestling” would be a better word (if a grown man could wrestle with an abstract concept): Trying to make the medium express something, by bending and twisting and augmenting it. Find the rest of the article here.
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“Much of our media operates within the limits of official discourse, with journalists working on the field of perception through commitments to their national frames […]. Although we still harbour a belief that journalism is indebted to the ethos of the Pentagon Papers or Watergate, fearlessly investigating government failings, much contemporary war coverage directly or indirectly supports military strategies.” - David Campbell (please note that David’s website appears to have some technical issues)
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We are all sinners. Lest you wonder, I have not had a religious epiphany. However, organized religion can offer surprising insights into the human condition. For a while now, I have been fascinated by the Catholic concept of Indulgence, in particular by abuses in the Middle Ages: People were promised they could buy themselves out of all kinds of sins if they only paid enough money. It’s a bit of a stretch, but an entertaining exercise nonetheless, to ask to what extent looking at - and buying - photography in effect is a contemporary version of just that. (more)
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These photographs of Americans living in poverty, a Time Magazine commission for Joakim Eskildsen, are very much worth a visit. A companion read: 57 members of Congress among wealthy 1%.
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“The making of art has very little to do with galleries. These places are, in the sense that they are commercial galleries, interested in a particular and very narrow kind of art that can be displayed within a space in a particular kind of way, they are interested in people who can produce work that galleries can show. And so people produce the kind of work that they can show, they kind of work that sells, the kind of work that wealthy people like - which is problematic. It’s a symbiotic relationship where what galleries, gallery consumers, and gallery feeders produce is intricately linked in an unbalanced but self-replicating chain.” - Colin Pantall
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A few thoughts on yet another auction record for a photograph.
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The other day, Aaron Hobson sent me an email with the subject line of this post, asking “I was wondering if art galleries, blogs, and magazines will soon only be filled with socially outgoing, marketing driven artists that also enter competitions?” If the social-media cheerleaders are to be believed the answer clearly would have to simply be “Yes.” (more)
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When you buy a photobook do you ever look “under the hood”? Do you ever look what’s under the dust cover? I’m guessing most people don’t do that because what’s there to see? Well, as it turns out, there could be quite a lot to be seen. Here are two of the most recent examples I’ve come across. The first is Ian van Coller’s Interior Relations, published by Charles Lane Press. The second is Safety First by The Sochi Project.
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It was Tod Papageorge who said “If your pictures are not good enough, you aren’t reading enough.” (ref. via) That’s not what photographers like to hear, is it? They’ve just got used to the fact that they have to spend a lot of time on “social networking” and PR (something that clearly is taking away a lot of time from photography), and now they’re supposed to read? What’s that all about? But maybe writing has more in common with photography than one might think. Maybe looking at photographs has more in common with reading a novel than one might think. (more)
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There’s a big debate over at Alec Soth’s blog about the best creative years of photographers. He writes “taken as a whole, photographic greatness seems to me to be a young person’s game” and provides evidence in the form of research/writing done by Dean Keith Simonton. Who would argue with smartly presented graphs? Well, I would but I will spare you my concerns. But even if Simonton is correct I just can’t get myself into a state of worry. I would now be in the declining phase of my creative life. Somehow I must be too busy working on many things to realize that I am not supposed to be doing that any longer. (more)
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Still in his mid-twenties, Matt Eich has an impressive list of achievements under his belt already. I had a general sense of curiosity about his work, and I figured the best way to learn more about it - and the person behind the camera - was to ask some questions. Find our conversation here.
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“Perhaps instead of setting aside money for competitions, photographers can re-distribute some of that money toward purchasing independent books and zines. It’d be great to see those niche verticals flourish and grow. It would a wise investment too because at some point I’m sure you’ll end up putting out a book and searching for an audience.” - Bryan Formhals
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“Commit! Buy the fucking thing and keep moving. Look, react, COMMIT! Keep breathing.” More here.
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After months of fighting in Libya, the news just arrived that Muammar Gaddafi is dead (notice the James Bond villain detail here: A golden gun). As is probably inevitable, footage of the corpse is making the rounds. If you’ve seen stills - and how could you get around it given it’s being shown almost everywhere - you might not have watched the actual “footage”: a video (or videos? I only watched one), shot with a cell-phone camera. I want to think I’m pretty good at visual pattern recognition, but it was pretty tough. It was very hard to see anything, what with the camera moving so quickly. Mind you, this is not the first time we’ve seen such imagery emerge (remember Neda?), and it had me thinking. (more)
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Find out about your rights as a photographer right here. Example: “When in public spaces where you are lawfully present you have the right to photograph anything that is in plain view.” Or: “Police officers may not generally confiscate or demand to view your photographs or video without a warrant.” (via)
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Yaakov Israel’s The Quest for the Man on the White Donkey, complex, multi-faceted project, featuring portraits and landscapes, was my personal pick as a winner of this year’s Conscientious Portfolio Competition. For me, the project captures seemingly disjointed moments in time, offering many hints and as many red herrings. The viewer is invited to come back and re-look at these photographs, to find a slightly different world each time. New details reveal themselves, while old details change their meaning ever so slightly. Instead of pointing at something and saying “This is the way it is” the photographs ask their viewers to discover what is to be found and to ultimately come to their own conclusions. Find my conversation with the photographer about his work here.
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If you love looking at functional photographs outside of their original context, this page is probably going to entertain you for a while.
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You can pre-view the entire recent (Talent) issue of FOAM Magazine online. I think that’s a brilliant idea. There is no way that leafing through the magazine online can possibly replace looking at the actual object, but if you don’t know what to expect or if you’re curious you can get an idea what the magazine looks like. (more)
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Mirjana Vrbaski’s Verses of Emptiness was picked by Caroline von Courten as one of the winners of this year’s Conscientious Portfolio Competition. About the work, Caroline writes “These very simple and yet dense complex photographs invite me to look more closely and to have a conversation in my mind with these photographs and the persons portrayed.” and “Here the limitation and the concentration of the photographic medium reveal themselves at once in an extraordinary way.” I talked with Mirjana about her work in a conversation that you can find here.
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We Are the 99 Percent is a Tumblr blog, where photography, social protest, and the internet have come together in an amazing way. Here is an interview with the people being the blog, this article talks about why Tumblr was used.
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In my final post about this year’s Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal (part 1, part 2) I want to talk about their portfolio reviews. I love talking with photographers about their work. Yet I intensely dislike portfolio reviews, or, more accurately, I dislike those events where you get 20 minutes with a photographer and where you typically are treated like cattle. Of course, I’m fully aware of the fact that my complaints are extremely unlikely to change what has become an industry (which, let’s face it, is quite lucrative for some people). (more)
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“Photographer and rioter doing their job” - that’s the one line that stuck with me in the video posted here. Make sure to watch the whole thing to see some very cliche photographs and to see how they were produced. This is related to a private project I started earlier this year: Using the war in Libya as a basis I started to investigate cliches of photojournalism, filling various folders on my computer with images. It’s extremely disheartening for me to see how easy it has been to add photographs almost on a daily basis. I don’t know what I’m going to do with this collection, I suppose at some stage there’ll be a post about photojournalistic cliche images.
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Am I the only one who finds this really sad? There are so many things one could talk about, in terms of art. But you can be certain that the one thing many people will remember hearing for a while is how a famous gallery is selling - let’s face it: pretty bad - paintings done by a famous singer that look like they’ve been copied off of other people’s photographs.
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Nigel Bennet’s Silence Has an Echo was picked by Michael Mazzeo as one of the winning entries to this years Conscientious Portfolio Competition. Michael wrote: “This portfolio offers enough information and ambiguity to elicit countless narratives. Nevertheless, the mood of the work is certainly unsettling and, I believe, very appropriate given the current state of the world.” I talked with Nigel about the series in an extended conversation that you can find here.
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Part of the future of photography on the web might be people discussing photography using video. Things really get interesting once you have more than one person, and voila, there’s In the Loupe, where Stella Kramer, Julie Grahame, and Allegra Wilde talk about photography in short video segments (via dvafoto).
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Right here. Well worth the read, for a variety of reasons.
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“WARCO: The News Game is a first-person shooter video game in which the player is a photojournalist gathering footage for television news stories on subjects similar to revolutionary conflict in Africa and the Middle East.” - Scott Brauer
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There are two web photo magazines that I wanted to point out. There’s Landscape Stories (which has been around for a while), and there’s FK Magazine (now in English). Have a peek!
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If you have sixteen minutes, you might want to watch this talk by Hans Aarsman about photography (via). It’s incredibly refreshing and at times very funny.
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Marc Feustel has a wonderful interview with Yannick Bouillis, founder of Offprint Paris, “a project space for contemporary photography and a book fair for independent publishers.” A quote that struck me (and that I fully agree with): “The focus on the so-called ‘collectible’ aspect of photobooks, which is reinforced by the endless ‘best photobook’ awards (are there not enough competitions in daily life already?) masks the importance of the photobook within photography.”
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