On The Media just published the transcript of a 2008 broadcast on editorial portrait photography. It’s a worthwhile read, even though some of the questions asked in the piece are not nearly as clear-cut as the author makes them look. What exactly is “fairness” in the context of portrait photography? That’s not as a simple question as it seems. What is more, when a photographer is hired to do her or his job, why would s/he then not do just that, namely what s/he is well known for? Shouldn’t we instead be talking to the photo editors who decide to hire a photographer known for, say, taking photographs from way below the waist line? Needless to say, with a photographer bragging “I went to art school, so I don’t know what those canons and ethics are.” you can be sure what people will be really talking about.
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“The visual story that needs to be told about ‘Africa’ is not a single story. It is a series of stories assembled to end the idea of a singular ‘Africa’. We need accounts of complexity, contrasts, and diversity that are drawn from the everyday as much as the exceptional. We need reports that are aware of their own construction and understand how they either affirm or challenge stereotypes.” - David Campbell
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Matt Lutton just published a great interview with Molly Landreth that you don’t want to miss.
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Matthieu Lavanchy is one of the two winners of this year’s Hyères Photography Festival. In this conversation, Matthieu and I talk about the background of his work.
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Updating a post I published recently, the book The Permanence and Care of Color Photographs: Traditional and Digital Color Prints, Color Negatives, Slides, and Motion Pictures (link) by Henry Wilhelm is available online in its entirety, as a pdf (it’s almost 80MB). It’s 700+ pages, and no, I haven’t read it, yet.
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Round three of the ping-pong chats with Daylight Magazine’s Michael Itkoff centers on what comes - or might come - out of the impact of technology, the web and the Great Recession on photography. (image courtesy Douglas Ljungkvist)
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“All colour photographs fade, but some are fading more quickly than others. At a recent seminar for new photography collectors at the Photographers’ Gallery in London, audience members were warned of the risks of purchasing c-prints dating from the early 1990s by artists such as Andreas Gursky because of the works’ inherent instability.” - story (via)
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Yann Gross is one of the two winners of this year’s Hyères Photography Festival. In this conversation, Yann and I talk about the background of his work.
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After I linked to Dalia Khamissy’s work earlier this year, she emailed me, and we ended up talking about her work. Its background intrigued me, and I asked her whether I could interest her in doing an interview for the blog. Find the whole piece here.
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They didn’t have any bowl hair cuts, and they also weren’t sporting matching suits and goofy grins, but boy, the combination of DutchDoc!Space (no, really, this is how this was spelled) and Erik Kessels’ magnificent Use Me, Abuse Me at this year’s otherwise sadly forgettable New York Photo Festival showed that photography is more alive (and maybe even more fun) than ever. It also proved that if you bring a can-do attitude and combine it with playful creativity then, well, you will make things happen. (more)
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A little while ago, I asked an assorted group of photographers and gallerists What Makes A Great Portrait? It’s one of those questions where it’s fairly straightforward to point to a portrait and say “Now this is a great portrait!” - but explaining what it actually is that makes the portrait great is quite a different story. I am infinitely fascinated by portraiture, and I decided to continue my little quest, trying to find out what made some portraits great, so I asked a different group of people the same question: “What makes a good portrait? Could you provide us with an example of a portrait that you really like - either from your or someone else’s work - and say why the portrait works so well for you?” Here is what I got back. (image above taken by Paul Stuart)
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Yann Gross, one of the winners of this year’s International Fashion and Photography Festival in Hyères, told me about the background of his project Kitintale while we were looking through his portfolio. I invited him to share the story on Conscientious Extended. Read all about the skateboarders in Uganda here.
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We have recently witnessed a steep increase in the number of cases of (presumed) plagiarism. I don’t think the issue will go away; but I also do think that we need to think about plagiarism itself - what it means and how we can approach it. I spent quite a bit of time thinking about the subject matter, and I just summarized my current thinking in a longer article entitled Photography, Copyright, Plagiarism, and the Internet. While I’m sure that I overlooked some aspects, I’m hoping to advance the debate a bit by suggesting a set of four criteria that all have to be met in a case of plagiarism.
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“A cultivation of a narrative imagination is essential for moving past documenting pathos and helplessness, to see past victims and dependents, and see the humanity and individual autonomy of even the most seemingly desperate of peoples. This for me is the next great adventure in photojournalism. A sustained, humane voice that brings ‘the other’ into our lives as an equal to ourselves, with ideas and aspirations, and solutions and agency, inviting us to collaborate, and not begging us to save.” - Asim Rafiqui
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I received a somewhat late response to the post about my experience with the Fotofest portfolio reviews. This response mirrors reactions/sentiments people have told me in person many times. (more)
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I had the opportunity to attend this year’s Hyères Festival of Fashion and Photography, and yet again I came back thoroughly impressed. (more)
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I’m literally just back from the International Fashion and Photography Festival in Hyères. As I mentioned before (and I will again, in another post hopefully tomorrow), if you’re one of the ten invited photographers you are already a winner (please don’t take this as some shallow statement; more on this later, too). But, of course, everybody wants to hear about the person - or in this case persons - picked by the jury. Here they are. (more)
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You might have heard of the ongoing legal battle between photographer Daniel Morel and Agence France Presse. There are a lot of details, and the best way to read up on everything is this post, which, as far as I can tell, contains all the relevant information.
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In a new guest article, Seba Kurtis talks about the history behind Shoe Box. Find the whole piece here.
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In a new installment of the ongoing series of “ping-pong chats” with Michael Itkoff, we’re talking about whether or how photography can initiate change and the role multimedia might play. Read the piece here.
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If you’ve followed the discussion of photographer Marco Vernashi’s story about child sacrifices in Uganda, funded and promoted by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting (see my earlier posts here and here), there is a new response by the photographer, published on the Pulitzer Center’s website (via). As I noted earlier, what truly matters here is the issue Vernashi was trying to cover - child sacrifices in Uganda - and hopefully, the way some of the photographs were obtained is not getting in the way of that story. For that to happen, the facts have to be made available (there are various videotaped interviews now available), as seems to be happening now. Update (28 April 2010): Anne Holmes responds
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Those interested in street photography might want to head over to Nick Turpin’s site and read his What was the Subject?
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Seems like sometimes you can’t get past topics by calling them “side discussions on blogs.” You’ll remember my earlier post about Benjamin Chesterton raising a couple of important issues about a Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting (PCoCR) project. The PCoCR did react, after all: “Vernaschi’s photographs are gut-wrenching, black-and-white portraits of pain and abuse. We share his belief that photography can play a powerful role in mobilizing public opinion, in Uganda and beyond, to stop this abuse. But we now believe — and Vernaschi agrees — that we were wrong in the way we handled the cases of Mukisa and Babirye.” (more; updated)
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My collection of (vintage) tintypes contains a steadily growing number of smiling people. I pulled one out for Colin, who has been writing about how portraits are always so serious. He does have a point, though, doesn’t he? Colin just posted a new article entitled Death, Disease and Misery, asking “Do we like all those obscure photographers with their off-kilter shots and joyless examinations/explorations and investigations because we have something of the snob about us”? (more, updated below)
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You want to take a little time and read this article by Benjamin Chesterton (of duckrabbit fame). In a nutshell, Benjamin looked into a story done in Uganda by photographer Marco Vernashi, to come across a couple of very worrying, if not outright disturbing findings: Some of the photographs probably violate the UK’s Protection of Children Act 1978. What is more, the photographer persuaded the mother of a dead child to have her daughter’s body dug up so he could take pictures. He then interviewed the woman and afterwards gave her money. Yes, you read that right. Benjamin contacted both the photographer and Jon Sawyer, Executive Director of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, which funded and promoted the project. (more)
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In a new guest article, Phil Toledano talks about his project about plastic surgery, A New Kind of Beauty. Read the full piece here.
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Remember this? What fun we had! But all joking aside, there is are a couple of important lessons to be learned here: First, people will occasionally manipulate images. And second, if you look carefully (or use computer software that looks for repeated - aka cloned - image patterns) you can spot these manipulations. But these obvious cases aside, there have been a lot of discussions - and various scandals - about image manipulation in the context of what we call the news lately, and it just occurred to me that instead of telling people what not to do I better come up with a suggestion what to do. (more; updated)
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You usually don’t get to see fine-art photography on billboards. Here’s an image by Mitch Epstein, from his American Power project (reviewed here), used to advertize the What Is American Power? website. Excellent.
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David Campbell has an excellent post about what he calls ‘famine photography’: “The photographic reporting of famine, especially in ‘Africa’, continues to replicate stereotypes. Malnourished children, either pictured alone in passive poses or with their mothers at hand, continue to be the obvious subjects of our gaze. What should drive our concern about this persistent portrayal?” You want to read the whole piece; but I can’t refrain from posting the following quote: “One of my refrains for how we should understand photographs in these situations is that the problem lies with the absence of alternatives as much as it does with the presence of the stereotypes.”
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Actually, it isn’t. But when you read articles like this one by Stella Kramer it really sounds as if it was. Where to begin? (more)
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I had “known” Michael Itkoff, one of the editors of Daylight Magazine, for a while, having exchanged a few emails. We met in person and got to know each other at this year’s Fotofest in Houston, and we decided to collaborate to produce contents together. After a bit of brain-storming, we came up with “ping-pong chatting” - an online conversation. We decided to talk about the Fotofest portfolio reviews, and things took off from there. It’s a bit of an experiment, and we’re both very happy with it. Check it out here.
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Christopher Rauschenberg sent in his thoughts about the Paul Graham article that has been discussed in the photo blogosphere recently: “The way that I see it, the actual problem is that the art world, as a whole, only understands half of photography’s dual nature.” (more)
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I received a bunch of emails after writing about my experience with the Houston Fotofest portfolio reviews, and I thought I’d share some of that feedback. (more)
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When seeing the Paul Graham article that caused such a stir in the photo community recently (see my reactions here and here), I thought that having the debate only amongst photographers would be less than ideal. So I emailed a couple of art bloggers, and today, Ed Winkleman published his response. (more)
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“Charlotte Rampling gave an interview in which she talks about how she has no idea what’s she’s doing with her face or her body when she’s acting. There’s that sense that she’s completely outside herself. I often feel that way when I make a photograph. I prefer photographing emotional things. Maybe they don’t appear emotional at first glance…” - James Welling
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Following up on my summary of my Fotofest portfolio review experience, Jeremy Moore sent me a post he wrote about it. His summary contains some aspects that I had omitted from my summary, but that I experienced in just the same way. Update (9 April 2010): There’s a follow-up.
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Blake Andrews comments on my two cents about the Paul Graham article. What I find interesting is that fundamentally, Blake and I aren’t even that far apart, even though we disagree about quite a few things. (more)
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It is hard to sum up an event like the Houston Fotofest portfolio reviews, but I will try nevertheless. I had never been to these reviews before, but of course I was aware of their significance. When I got invited I was excited about the idea of seeing things with my own eyes, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to talk to photographers there and find out what people (photographers and reviewers alike) got out of it. (more)
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No Caption Needed look at some recent images coming out of Afghanistan, pointing out their sheer kitsch value. Glenn Ruga’s comments on Miroslav Tichý’s work might be the most perceptive about the artist I’ve seen in a long time. Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento continues his debate about whether “fair use” really stands in the way of creativity, looking at communication scholars think and commenting on an op-ed written by Marc Aronson. Mrs. Deane has some choice words about an artist who Photoshopped celebrity portraits into Auschwitz photos: “I feel there is some­thing very wrong about mutat­ing the actual Auschwitz mate­r­ial to a prod­uct of the enter­tain­ment industry.”
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I’ve seen various bloggers quote from this article by Paul Graham, and I felt I needed to add my two cents. (more)
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Last night, I looked through the many conversations that can be found on Conscientious Extended, and certain lines would strike a chord with me. I ended up compiling them, to present them here and link back to the original interviews. Just like I did you might re-discover something, or maybe you haven’t even seen some of the “older” conversations, yet. They’re listed in the order I found them. (more)
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Massimo Vitali is one of the photographer who had been on top of my list to talk to for a while. I finally approached Massimo, and much to my delight he found the time to have a conversation about his work and his influences. You can find the piece over at Conscientious Extended.
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“I want to disturb people’s oblivion; like I’ve pointed out before, I want to make people feel something. It’s easier to turn to the sport channels when news about the war comes up. It’s easy to talk about how depressed we are as a rich nation, and we do this even though 1.4 billion people live at the poverty line or below. Many of us in the West live in a bubble, but I still believe we can shake people up from their daily routines.” - Izabella Demavlys in a conversation with Paul Schmelzer
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I came across a whole set of great morning reads; so here they are as a good start into a new week: Colin Pantall compares the fashion industry with the Catholic Church, writing “the real reason I despise the fashion industry is because of the way they inflict their distorted, degraded insecurities on us, the way they try to devalue our minds, our bodies and our values in a way we can’t escape.” Over at No Caption Needed, Robert Hariman uses a satirical (fake) magazine cover to debate some conventions of photojournalism: “Communication depends on conventions of representation, but it can become trapped in them. As much as humanitarians rightly insist on the value of the individual person, there may nonetheless be times when we don’t need to see another face. Given the scale of the humanitarian disasters now and to come, more thought might be given to how even things can speak.” And lastly, Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento asks Are We Really Headed Toward Permission-Based Art Making? Not so, he argues: “This fear would be true only if artists continue to give up on the challenges posed by creativity and gave in to facile and lazy intellectual hyperbole.”
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Given my general lack of interest in fashion photography, I might not be the best person to write about the following. That said, since that lack to a pretty large extent is based on exactly what has been gaining quite a bit of exposure across the internet over the past few days I don’t think I should remain silent. See Rob’s take on it here. (more)
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Images are in the news - not just literally, but also as a topic themselves. In a day and age where image manipulation has become very simple to do, hardly a day goes by without yet another “scandal” about some manipulated image somewhere. As I indicated on this site before, I think without a proper understanding how images work this situation will not change. Introducing very unspecific - if not unrealistic - rules about the amount of manipulation that is acceptable totally misses the source of the problem. When Michael Schäfer sent me the link to his new work, I thought talking with him about his images and what they mean might be a good idea. Of course, here we have an artist, not a news photographer; but I see a lot of his work as a good way to start investigating how images work and how they are being used. Find the conversation over at Conscientious Extended.
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Shawn Records talks to Richard Renaldi about book publishing.
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The Spring 2010 edition of Nieman Reports focuses on “Visual Journalism: Fresh Approaches and New Business Strategies for the Multimedia Age” - photojournalism in the age of the internet. As a contributor I’m in very illustrious company. The articles are all online, have a peek!
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The Houston Center for Photography (HCP) is currently showing RE: groups - American Photographs Before 1950, selected from W.M. Hunt´s Collection Blind Pirate. HCP approached me about doing an interview with Bill for the current edition of SPOT Magazine, and of course I was thrilled about the idea. The outline was to produce “a 1,000 word dialogue on the subject,” and at the end of the day, we only overshot the target by 500%. The current edition of SPOT Magazine contains an abridged version of the conversation, you can find the full piece on Conscientious Extended.
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For all your questions about copyright there now is The Copyright Corner (via).
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