Link: Patrick Chauvel : a living legend | La Lettre de la Photographie
“Let’s go.” These words sum up Patrick Chauvel’s life. For him, journalism is a way of life. It’s not some a Taliban of information. Photography? The obligation to be the first in line, where it’s really happening. “I’m not a great photographer,” he says to those who will listen. “But now and then I do take great photos.”
“This is where John White preached,” he said. “This is where Alfred Eisenstaedt and Joe Rosenthal stood. This is where Gordon Parks would walk down the halls of the Days Inn with a girl on either side when he was in his 80s. This is where photographers like Bill Frakes would get kids up at 3 in the morning to go out and make pictures so theirs would be better than everyone else’s. This is the place where passion pulses through everyone’s veins 24 hours a day — where sleep is not important.”
because Gannett’s US Presswire team will be shooting there
My first thought was, “I hope he means John H. White.”
Several weeks later, he confirmed, that indeed, he was looking for me to hang out with John a bit for a cover story honoring John on the 30th anniversary of his Pulitzer Prize.
Reed noticed that, while his fellow photographers often spoke of that urge to give back, they lacked a platform to do so in an organized and sustained fashion. In 2008, he and some art- and business-minded friends founded Nuru Project—“Nuru” meaning “light” in Swahili—to fill that void. The business now has relationships with well-known photojournalists, including TIME contract photographer Yuri Kozyrev, and the group is looking to grow with an upcoming Kickstarter drive aimed at funding a marketing campaign. Reed says that response to the project has been positive, but he’s aware of the deeper questions of journalistic integrity that are raised by his brainchild.
This is a business of bounces, sharp turns, unexpected events, lean times, occasional joyous celebrations, and bouts of euphoria measured in slices of seconds. No matter what, be it an excellent day in the field, or a humdrum day filing pictures or doing billing, it is punctuated almost incessantly with the intrusive reality of just how difficult this is to do, over the long haul. Wonderful, but tough at the same time.
And so a day that began at a stable ended in a top-secret meeting. Mr. Mills and a group of journalists were told they were about to embark upon a secret mission, to Afghanistan.
The problem here is that using a Hipstamatic/Instagram app is not at all “a different aesthetic than people are used to seeing” – everybody and their grandmother are now using those apps or filters. On top of that, these apps mimic old film cameras. So it’s not a different aesthetic at all – it’s a trendy aesthetic. In fact it’s so trendy and popular that Facebook just paid $1b to buy Instagram – a site centering on those kinds of images!
It’s the emphasis on style that makes me hesitate, as if it were all about finding some visual quirk that lends distinction to the photograph
Tim Rasmussen expects your best work. And he’ll push you until he gets it.
“Some people just come at you hard, and Rasmussen is definitely a guy who comes at you hard,” says Andrew Innerarity, a former staff photographer at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel where Rasmussen used to be the director of photography. “If you are a weak person he is going to eat you up.”
