Conscientious

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The short answer is "Of course not." A somewhat longer and more detailed answer is provided by an expert from the reality-based science community, Brian Cox.

Continue reading "Will our planet be destroyed by the LHC?" »

Continue reading "A Conversation with Charles Fréger" »

Cara Phillips' Ground Glass is one of my favourite blogs, and I was so certain it that I had added it to the blogroll a long time ago that it never occured to me that in fact it was still missing! That's nuts (and proof that I really am getting old)! So check out Ground Glass if you haven't done so already!

Richard Prince has a big show in London, and the critics are not amused (plus this review, the logic of which in part escapes me).

Chances are you have heard of CERN's LHC experiment, or maybe not. It probably is the most ambitious science experiment ever done ("One of the LHC's detectors - Atlas - weighs as much as 100 Boeing 747s. Looking like a cross between some improbably big communications satellite and the largest electric dynamo you can imagine, Atlas is the work of 1,900 scientists drawn from 164 universities in 35 countries." [source]), and if you want to find out more about its goals etc. this is the place to go. Oh, and it's not going to blow up the planet.

PS: It does say quite a bit about the state of affairs of the US media to see something like this, doesn't it? No serious, self respecting scientist expects the collider to create a doomsday; just like no serious, self respecting scientist denies that global warming is a reality and a gigantic challenge for humanity.

I just found - via PDNPulse - that Peter van Agtmael, one of my Photographers of the Year 2007 has become a Magnum nominee (find the conversation I had with him here). And Alec Soth is now a full member (find the conversation I had with him here). Congratulations to both and to the other new nominee Olivia Arthur and full members Jonas Bendiksen and Antoine d'Agata!

It's time to update the 'blogroll' again. The latest two additions are Chas Bowie's eloquently written that's a negative and the blog of 1000 words photography magazine, which I mentioned here earlier.

"Two narratives bound our era and, by degrees but unmistakably, our predicament: the story of consumerism and the story of globalization. In recent years, the two have combined to produce a single and singularly corrosive narrative. Consumerism has meant the transformation of citizens into shoppers, eroding America’s sovereignty from within; globalization has meant the transformation of nation-states into secondary players on the world stage, eroding America’s sovereignty from without. In collaboration, the trends are dealing a ruinous blow to democracy - to our capacity for common judgment, citizenship, and liberty itself." - Benjamin Barber

I'm going to play devil's advocate here, because I think there is something to be learned from looking at a topic from as many angles as possible. Richard Prince recently gained further notoriety when one of the photographs from his Cowboys series sold for 3.4 million US$. These Cowboys, of course, are photographs of other photographs, namely of sections of Marlboro cigarette ads, and that's where - according to many people - the problem is to be found: Not only is it quite shameless to take a photo of someone else's work and then pretend it's one's own, but it's even more shameless to sell it for 3.4 million dollars.

Continue reading "Thoughts on Richard Prince" »