In photography, trust and doubt are like yin and yang: You cannot have one without the other, you have to balance one against the other. Trust and doubt exist in a complex relationship. They don’t just have to balance each other, they also have to drive each other.

Do you know that feeling? The one when you’re showing images to someone (perhaps an editor that you were hoping to work with) and you get to that picture, the one that looked perfectly acceptable moments before, but as soon as you show it, you’re filled with regret.

Photography is a small attempt at immortality — a way to preserve some aspect of your identity, your time and your consciousness; communicate it to others and bring it forward into the future. You can say that about virtually any art form of course, but photography is unique in being able to do more with less by employing an effective lever, a technologically based visual recording medium

“These ARE great.” Then he added a four letter word, poured us another glass, lit another cigarette and after a long pause looked up and said, “Never explain your work.”

Just like the music industry, with which it shares many similarities, the photo licensing world is ripe to be iTuned.

Link: AMERICAN SUBURB X

I’ve been photographing the American cultural landscape for the past twenty years. Utilizing different series that I’ve done involving the everyday urban and suburban places we encounter, I’ll strive to make visual and verbal connections between these overlapping territories of American life while sticking to our theme of how sprawl has affected inner city environments.

I’ve found that a small percentage of magazines I’ve worked with over the years have no contract at all. In those cases, I send them mine. Of the rest, about half have a contract that governs assignments into the indefinite future, while others, like AARP, send out a contract for each assignment. When I do get contracts with no time limit, I tend to add an expiration date. Here’s the AARP.org contract (click to enlarge):

An apparent administrative slip-up has unleashed an uprising at celebrity photo agency Retna, with photographers complaining that the agency is failing to report sales, pay royalties, or respond to calls and e-mails from frustrated contributors.

Link: The Photo Society

The yellow border yields a power, which extends far beyond physical geography. It reins in the mythological, transporting its readers back to their wide-eyed childhoods, to their parent’s bookshelves and basements made up of solid yellow blocks, while simultaneously influencing some of our generation’s greatest visionaries and iconographers. Who hasn’t made a collage like David Lachapelle?

Kodak has reaffirmed that film remains a profitable business for the company, a day after it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection

And so I became an acolyte in the Temple of Kodak. Like a convert, I embraced the rituals, spending hours under the soft amber lights, holding beakers like chalices, head bowed over trays in worshipful anticipation. There was a Zen-like comfort to these processing and printing sessions, which calmed me. I would go in after dinner and not emerge sometimes until sunrise — often with a few rolls of bulk-loaded Tri-X jangling in my makeshift camera bag, ready for new adventures.

Getty Images and iStockphoto have confirmed that 30 employees have been made redundant at the microstock company as part of an integration of the two brands

While it’s never a good time to have one’s MacBook Pro, Canon 5D, Zeiss lens and iPad stolen, Theron Humphrey was in the middle of a project that required him to post a photo every day to his website, where thousands of readers check in every month to follow his journey.

The image in question, for La Redoute, a French clothing company, shows happy kids frolicking on the beach in bathing suits–with a naked man emerging from the water in the background. The company removed the image from its Web site and apologized publicly after some shocked customers complained.

Duncan Davidson

I went to join friends and family and see this amazing country with a bit of inside perspective. I went because Myanmar is in a time of transition and I wanted to see it before everything changes.

Breaking from tradition, their new exhibition “Greater Than The Sum” combines a broad curation of each photographers work into one 163′ run that spans the entire gallery. Rather than selling individual prints, LUCEO is selling CUTS which give guests the opportunity to hand-cut a 24×24″ section of the print they most want

The Russian Photos Blog

Welcome to the Photo Follies 2011 Awards, the Premier Photo Industry Contest In This Universe Or Any Universe Yet To Be Discovered™. Entries were judged by a jury consisting of leading industry figures, including a school of Barbary macaques, and senior Google Street View operators on loan from World Press Photo. Judging was overseen by the Russian Central Election Commission to ensure fairness.

without further ado, here are the First Annual “Fails of the Year”…