Blast from the past! I ran into Tait Simpson in my inbox the other day, and was very excited to hear his career updates. I’d previously chatted with Mr. Simpson last year on Earth Day about some work he made in the desert for TOTO High Efficiency toilets. Tait’s an up-and-comer; he’s just made some big moves, both with his photography and with his person. Here- you can hear him tell it. Q&A below…
Damion Berger’s work is interesting to me precisely because has so little in common with the majority of his contemporaries. When I first saw it, we just had to talk. So talk we did, about everything: his early mentors, the photographic rat race, form and content, and the ubiquitous debate of large versus small format. He was born in Britain and presently divides his time between Monaco and New York. This summer, he’ll begin a new series about the public ritual of fireworks. His work is currently on display at the Bonni Benrubi Gallery in New York through September 5, and both of his major projects, RSVP and In the Deep End, will be published by Mets & Schlit in the spring and fall of 2010.
Stock Photography: It’s all gone a bit Pete Tong | Verbal Hmmm.:
In the case of Time Magazine, they decided to use a stock photograph for the cover of their latest issue. Well as I said, nothing new there, but this time we discovered who the photographer was and how much they paid. A rather paltry 30 US.
Behind the Scenes: In a War Zone, With Film – Lens Blog – NYTimes.com:
All you need to process film, besides the chemicals, is clean water. However, near the Iraq frontier in 1991 — convulsed as it was by the Kurdish uprising — clean water was in short supply. And it certainly didn’t come from the tap. So I washed my film in the toilet.
photo-eye Bookstore | Ralph Gibson: Nude | photobooks:
A decade after his first TASCHEN book, Deus ex machina, master photographer Ralph Gibson returns with an exquisite collection of nudes, combining the best of his recent work with an in-depth interview by Eric Fischl. Strikingly graphic, meticulously composed, and loaded with subtle provocations, Gibson’s mysterious, dreamlike images pay homage to greats such as Man Ray and Edward Weston, while continually pursuing new frontiers.
AMERICANSUBURB X: INTERVIEW: “Extending the Frame: An Interview with Susan Meiselas (2006)”:
Susan Meiselas has represented difficult issues with innovative approaches throughout her thirty-year career as a documentary media artist. Her awards include the Robert Capa Gold Medal (1979), the MacArthur Fellowship (1992), and the Hasselblad Prize (1994). A self-described “human rights” photographer and filmmaker, Meiselas works with the images, voices, and histories of everyday people in global situations of conflict. Whenever possible she has stayed in the affected communities after her photojournalist colleagues are pulled away to another story. This long-term approach allows her work to reflect the complexity of issues in a way rarely permitted by the news media.
Jay Mark Johnson’s opening at the Ace Gallery in Beverly Hills was on the check list of many Angelenos this summer. The exhibition, Spacetime, runs through August 29th.
Photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans: America exposed |guardian.co.uk:
In 2001, Henri Cartier-Bresson reflected on the long moment in the early 1940s when he had briefly considered turning from photography to film-making. “If it had not been for the challenge of the work of Walker Evans,” he wrote, “I don’t think I would have remained a photographer.”
It’s this quote that provides the epigraph for Photographing America 1929-1947, a fascinating book that focuses on these two masters of 20th-century photography.
If Stephen Shore were known just for the iconic photos he shot as a teenager at Warhol’s original Silver Factory, he’d probably still get a place in the history of photography. But galvanized by a road trip from Manhattan to Amarillo, Texas, in 1972, Shore went on to pioneer the use of color in fine-art photography. Over the intervening years, his photos have also documented America and Americans in a way that presaged the straight-on deadpan vibe of much current image-making—this includes streetscapes and architecture shot to reveal them as abandoned film sets, and cryptic vérité portraits of people he meets.
The fundamental problem facing the news industry is simple: As the shift from print to the web accelerates, their revenues are no longer covering the cost of their operations. It’s not that they aren’t making money online, it’s that they aren’t making enough to cover their operations.
What worked for HBO won’t work for news (Scripting News):
David Simon wrote a remarkable piece in the Columbia Journalism Review, saying that the NY Times and Washington Post must charge for their work the way HBO charges for shows like The Wire.
With all due respect, putting up a “pay wall” is exactly what these organizations don’t need. They need to decentralize, get further out into the world, not hole-up behind a wall and try to tough it out.
Why Did No One Inform Us Of The Imminent Death Of The American Newspaper Industry? – America’s Finest News Source:
Disloyal Americans! You have aided these treasonous snakes in their plot against Yu Wan Mei. First you refuse to ingest our coagulated octopus paste at a fast enough rate, and now you hold a dagger to the throat of the printed word itself! Your obsession with personal liberty has been a burden on your nation’s success for generations, and now you sit there like livestock as an entire industry falls to dust around you—the very industry upon which you construct your imaginary foundation of free speech!
Apple’s new Final Cut Studio is out (short version: I am impressed). – Boing Boing:
Bottom line: normally I wouldn’t be so jazzed about an application update, but as someone who’s spent the better part of the last two years working on web video production, this struck me and other web video grunts in the room as “workflow-changing” (some said “life-changing!”) and a nice big leap forward.