You’re probably all familiar with The Great Leap Sideways, which has a lot of great content. If not, head right over and check it out!
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Pete Brook is taking his blog/project Prison Photography on the road. For a 12-week road trip, during which he will meet up with photographers and journalists who have covered prisons, he is looking for financial support via Kickstarter. Head right over either to the post over at Prison Photography or to the Kickstarter page to find out more.
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What do 500 Photographers, A Photo Editor, aCurator, American Suburb X, The Atlantic’s In Focus, Bagnews Notes, Burn, Feature Shoot, Joe McNally’s Blog, La Lettre de la Photographie, the New York Times’ Lens blog, NPR’s The Picture Show, PDN, Photojojo’s Tumblr, Pictory, Prison Photography, The Sartortialist, TIME.com’s Lightbox, What’s the Jackanory?, and this website have in common? They all have been selected as winners of LIFE.com’s 2011 Photo Blog Awards : “the Web’s 20 most compelling, most consistently insightful and surprising photography blogs.” Exciting company to be in!
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I’m going to be on the road for parts of this week, so posting might get slightly patchy. I figured it would be fun to feature some more collage art.
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If you’re interested in videos of photographers talking about or doing their work there’s a blog for that, it’s called Shooting Gallery.
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I’m still finding new blogs to add to my ever growing reading list. The latest edition is Monsters & Madonnas, the ICP Library’s blog. Go and check it out!
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Wired Magazine’s photography blog, Raw File, features profiles of their favourite photobloggers, which you want to check out if you’re curious about the people behind those blogs. I’m honoured to be included in the list, created by Pete Brook of Prison Photography fame, who also blogs for Wired. Thank you, Pete!
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Those who love interviews with photographers can find a lot of them (with new ones being added on a regular basis) at Mull It Over. Check it out!
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If you haven’t seen and/or visited The Independent Photo Book now might be a good time. New books and zines are constantly being added (at the time of this writing, there are 85 up), and Hester and I have heard of many that sold through the site. So if you have an independently produced photography book or zine to announce please send it to us. The Independent Photo Book is not “curated”: Any book or zine that cannot be bought at a chain book store (or Amazon.com) will be listed. Also, you can comment on posts there (which nobody has done so far; strictly no anonymous comments allowed). Maybe you own one of the books/zines and want to review it as a comment?
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With 56 - at the time of this writing - listings (in just over two weeks!), The Independent Photo Book is clearly showing that there are lots of independently produced photo books and zines to be found, and I’ve already heard from various sources that the site has generated sales. To repeat: If you send us a book/zine that falls into this category (please stick by the format outlined on the blog so listing the book/zine is a breeze), we will list it. If you don’t have your own book but are curious about independently produced ones and haven’t visited the site go and have a peek!
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Wishing all my readers a very happy, healthy, and successful New Year 2010!
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It’s that time of year - so from my homestead in chilly Western Massachusetts Happy Holidays and all the best wishes for the New Year 2010!
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I’m sure that those who follow this blog regularly have noticed that I don’t cover fashion photography all that much. If you miss seeing fashion photography on the blog, here’s a little fix. This year, Mallard/Janvier published “Steven Meisel, three hundred and seventeen and counting”: “For over two decades, Steven Meisel has created every cover and lead editorial story for each issue of Italian Vogue. There may be no other photographer-magazine relationship in any other field of such long-lasting commitment and innovation.” A copy of the book could be yours - as part of an exclusive Mallard/Janvier Conscientious Christmas Giveaway!
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Paddy Johnson just announced a year-end fundraiser for Art Fag City, a blog I’m sure you’re very familiar with. Support for independent sites like Paddy’s is crucial if we want to keep the blogging landscape what it is - and allow it to grow.
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By now you’ve probably seen that Alec Soth has returned to blogging. Check out his Top 10 Photobooks!
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Unless you have been living under a rock, you will be very familiar with Lens Culture, Jim Casper’s truly wonderful site dedicated to contemporary photography. Just like Conscientious, Lens Culture has been self-funded, and as Jim notes it has been content-rich and clutter-free. He is now asking for donations so Lens Culture can stay the way it is.
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A.D. Coleman, the NY Times’ first photo critic and author of, for example, Light Readings: A Photography Critic’s Writings, 1968-1978, now has his own blog.
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There is going to be a re-design of this blog coming up, so I won’t be updating the side links until then (the re-design will involve organizing the whole links section away from a simple alphabetical list). Since today is dedicated to photo books, have a look at the blog The PhotoBooK, with lots of reviews.
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“Art magazines and art blogs are the journalistic equivalent of studio art, while an art review in a newspaper is like public art. Anyone from any background might happen upon it. Where I write now does not exist in a generalized public sphere. A street sweeper on coffee break will not happen upon a leftover copy of this blog and be drawn into a review. A woman getting her heels buffed won’t find it on the empty seat beside her and be motivated to see an exhibit of which she might otherwise not have heard. For an art critic, the death of newspapers is the death of potential connection to wider worlds. Everyone who reads this blog has a preexisting condition, otherwise known as an interest in art. On the other hand, there are notable benefits. Where I’m writing now, nobody tells me what to do and nobody derides my blog just because it’s a blog.” - Regina Hackett
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You can certainly wonder whether blogs should really be called blogs, but they are here to stay. To a large extent, this is due to the efforts of a few truly outstanding individuals whose blogs have become beacons of quality. People like Josh Marshall come to mind, or Ed Winkleman, and, of course, there is Geoff Manaugh and his blog BLDGBLOG.
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I mentioned a few days ago that there will be a redesign of this blog coming up, part of which aims at making the archives more easily accessible and at making it easier to browse the list of links. The current list contains what I had before the crash and is already missing some stuff. Given the upcoming redesign I will refrain from updating it. One blog/photography site that needs to be pointed out, though, is Fabiano Busdraghi’s Camera Obscura. Fabiano wrote me that the “idea of the site is avoid simple quotation and link to other blogs or sites, but always produce original and detailed content.”
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I don’t even know why I didn’t realize this earlier, but most blogs (at least those similar to Conscientious) are being organized in a temporal way - new posts are sorted by when they were published - but, in fact, their contents usually is not temporal at all! I do post one photographer per day, but the reason why I post one is so that people have enough time to look, so that the photographer’s work is done justice. This might make it look like yesterday’s photographer is “old news”, but that’s just because the blogging software makes it look that way. I mean I could post thirty photographer at the beginning of every month and then remain quiet for the rest of the month - but that would obviously reduce the experience of seeing the work. I guess what this really comes down to is a need for a better way to organizes the “archives”… (thinking out loud) But it’s good for people to realize this: The fact that you here see one photographer after the other, day after day, has reasons that have little to do with showing something new every day.
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A little while ago, the folks over at DLK Collection posted Comment, Curate and Promote: The Art Blog Triangle, which placed art and photo blogs into a triangle with the corners “Comment”, “Curate”, and “Promote”. A blog dedicated entirely to “Promote”, for example, would thus be placed in that corner; one with 50% “Curate” and 50% “Promote” would find itself right in the center of the line that connects those two corners etc. Reading the triangle takes a bit of getting used to, but once you get the basic principle it’s quite instructive. (Here is a description of how this kind of diagram works)
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Before I started compiling this blog, I was reading other people’s blogs for a while, and the one blog that inspired me the most was James Luckett’s consumptive. Since then, consumptive changed shape occasionally; and now James has a Blurb book out.
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Paddy is having a year-end fundraiser over at Art Fag City, so have a peek and think about contributing. As she notes “Considering how traditional media is currently gutting arts coverage, sites such as my own are not only important, but essential to the field of art criticism.”
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Reading this blog will make you smarter.
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Time to update the old blogroll again, with new additions bildwerk3 (a German blog, German language only [of course!], though), fugitive vision, american suburb x, andrew phelps’ buffet; and then there’s wassenaar, a new online photography magazine.
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I set up a Google group called “Conscientious” for discussions about posts seen here and about photography in general - so if you want to comment on anything you can do it there. There are various reasons for a Google group (some of the mundanely technical). The most important one might is that I am interested in a spirited and civil discussion, and that simply excludes both anonymity and members with generic first names only (“Joe” or “Jill”) or non-names (“aphotographer”). Anyone can view the group; but if you want to post, you’ll have to ask me for an invite (simply email me). Anyone will get an invite from me - provided there’s a real full name and a valid email address - with no other restrictions. There’s no moderation of posts. So, again, email me if you want to become a member, and you’ll get the invite. As of right now, there are 54 66 76 91 members with some very discussions already happening. Oh, and I’ll also post items at the group that for whatever reason would not show up here, incl. something I’m calling “Impressions”. (Updated post)
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It’s hard to keep up with all the new photo blogs that have been started recently (It seems photo blogs have become a bit of a craze in the commercial/editorial photography sector now). Many of you might already know these following two, but since I haven’t mentioned them here it’s about time: My friend Mark Tucker just started his own blog, and I wish it was me egging him on for a couple of years that finally did it. But alas… In any case, I hope he’ll publish some of the observations concerning contemporary photography he has shared with me via email over the past four years. Plus, Vincent Laforet just started his blog - I’m sure you’ve all seen his photography from the Olympics in Beijing.
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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!
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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.
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I just came across the blog Verve Photo (“The New Breed of Documentary Photography”) - it features a lot of work that you might not necessarily find here, and it’s well worth the visit.
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I updated my “blogroll” a little, so if you haven’t seen the following blogs you might want to check them out: Boston Photography Focus, Dawoud Bey’s blog, digressions, Hee Jin Kang’s blog, Nina Corvallo’s blog, photographylot, uncommons, and the we can’t paint blog.
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This article is extremely interesting for a large variety of reasons, one of which is that it is very well and intelligently written and honest. It’s maybe the most useful and detailed discussion of comments on blogs I have seen in ages, with the money quote being “The real danger confronting criticism on the web is that, in the name of ‘anti-elitism’ and ‘the voice of the people’, real dissent (which looks elitist because it is rare) will be drowned out by posturing mobs.”
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This found over at bloggy: “Due to our previous coverage of ‘photography not allowed’ policies, blogger and artist Mark Barry forwarded an email he just received from 303 Gallery regarding 2 images on Flickr from his set from the 2006 Armory Show. […] ‘this is simon at 303 gallery. i noticed you had an image of Maureen Gallace’s work up on your flickr page - please be aware that 303 Gallery owns the copyright to the work and all public display of images, including web content. if you could kindly remove this image from your page, it would be most appreciated.’” Seems like some galleries are working very hard on making sure their artists won’t get unnecessary publicity.
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Zoum Zoum is the latest addition to the photography blog scene, and a most welcome one: It’s from France (as part of the online presence of the newspaper Libération). Currently, most of the contents - apart from the interviews - is French language only, but hopefully, there might be short English summaries in the future.
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“Women In Photography contains a simple concept: -To showcase work, news and ideas from women in the contemporary photo world. -To create a collection of strong work by women actively creating work. -To reach new audiences collectively. […] Email submissions to womeninphotography at gmail dot com” (Update 8 April): There also is Nymphoto, which “shares news & issues relating or relevant to women in photography.”
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Liz Kuball just started posting her own series of interviews, which you might want to check out. So far, she got one with Jennifer Loeber and one with Kate Hutchinson. Update: Now the interview with fellow bloggers (and personal friends) Mrs. Deane is up!
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Rob Haggart’s new offer might be what many people have been hoping for for a while: “I’ve wanted to do this for awhile and my thinking on the future of photography and photo contests and other things I’m cooking up has gotten me inspired to offer everyone the chance to promote your best work for free by submitting a couple images for a slide show. There’s plenty of photo editors and art buyers who are readers and I know they will find it extremely beneficial to view a quick slide show with hundreds of different photographers featuring their best work and I can’t think of any other examples where this exists […] There will be a bar for entry and I will edit out any photographs that are a waste of time for potential buyers to look at. I know there are a lot of top shooters who may be wary of submitting their photographs so I’m going to make sure all the work displayed is top notch.” Flickr, combined with actual quality control - it will be interesting to see the results.
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Yesterday, The Sonic Blog has celebrated its first birthday - congratulations, Peter! And, wow, you look so happy in that photo! In any case, I’m looking forward to many more great posts!
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Find the (a) list here. To answer Internazionale’s question (“E poi dov’è Conscientious, che ogni mattina mi stordisce con la sua raccolta di foto incredibili?”), if you use Technorati to rank blogs by the number of sites linking to them - which one might think of a fairly good measure of how widely read a blog is - this one is at position 9564 (at the time of this writing). Note that their Top 100 differs a bit from the other list (especially since using links leads to the inclusion of blogs like Beppe Grillo’s, which most non-Italians probably have never heard of).
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“Mr. Marshall does not shy away from the notion of blogging. ‘I think of us as journalists; the medium we work in is blogging,’ he said, something that can involve matters as varied as the tone of the writing or the display of articles in reverse chronological order. ‘We have kind of broken free of the model of discrete articles that have a beginning and end. Instead, there are an ongoing series of dispatches.’” - story
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Just back from NYC where I went for the constituting meeting of the Photo Blog Mutual Admiration Society (pictured above the first board of directors; from left to right: myself, Andrew Hetherington - who also took the notes - and Robert Wright).
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No but yeah but no but1… It won’t come as a surprise to anyone that I’m on Cara’s side, for similar reasons (even though I don’t quite see the elite aspect). I personally would like to add some of my thoughts to this complex.
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The makers behind the Pause to Begin competition - centered on “the process of art-making/working/living/seeing/being.” - have started a blog, which already contains quite a few interesting posts. Check it out!
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Andrew Hetherington just published his first interview - check it out!
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“John was a long time contributor to the news of the weird, coconspirator and eventually primary blogger behind spitting-image.net, and the author of the original and brilliant overheard starbuck. Readers of this blog and anyone who had the pleasure of receiving John’s e-mail knew him as a generous sharer of information, a keen observer of American culture, and a wise and honest friend. John was proud of the accumulation of this site, which shall remain, a spark of light among the constellations.” (source)
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I think one of the biggest attractions of the photo blog scene is not this blog or that blog, but the simple fact that there is so much variety. We have long known about the many different voices in the art photography community, and now plenty of them are making themselves heard, offering their personal take/angle. It can’t get any better than this! The latest addition is James Danziger’s The Year in Pictures, “a record of photographs that have captured his imagination.” Already up are some outtakes from the Milton Rogovin show, currently up at James’ gallery and a must-see (the exhibition will show you why size does not matter, but quality does).
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If you haven’t visited the blog A Photo Editor, yet, you should. The blog is being written by “a Photography Director based in New York City” who “would like to remain anonymous so I can keep my job and blog” - so “editorial” (or “commercial”) photography it is. I have severe reservations as far as anonymous blogs are concerned (for a large variety of reasons), but I have to say that A Photo Editor has been consistently interesting, and it has attracted a devoted community of photographers who comment regularly on the various topics. Now, there even is a side project called Photo Rank, where you can submit your work, comment and vote for your favourites.
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Mrs. Deane made it into one of Holland’s largest newspapers, De Volkskrant, which published a nice review. Congratulations!
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