Category: Photography

How do you go tackle writing about your photographs? This question poses possibly the most vexing challenge for most photographers. I keep coming back to it because I write about other people’s pictures, and I listen to or read what photographers say or write about their own work. In some ways, the preceding is going to be a variant of older pieces (you can find them here and here). However, now I feel that I have more clarity about the subject than before.

In October of 2017, the photographer Jeff Mermelstein, who has been taking pictures of New York City street life since the early nineteen-eighties, was walking in midtown, on one of his near-daily shooting expeditions, when he encountered something he had never thought to capture before. “It was somewhere around Eighth Avenue and the mid-Forties,” Mermelstein told me from his home in Brooklyn, when I called him the other day. “I noticed that a woman was sitting there, tapping something out on her phone.” Operating on half-conscious instinct, as he often does when photographing, Mermelstein raised his own phone, went up to the woman, and took a picture, focussing not on her, as he might usually have done, but on the screen of her device. “She was doing a Google search, and it was something about wills, and a line came up about finding six thousand dollars in an attic. It was just a couple of lines there, but I suddenly felt, This could be the germ of a short story. It was a galvanizing moment.”

While we typically bring you a list of 40+ workshops to consider, we’re changing that approach this year. Below, you’ll find details about how popular workshops have pivoted due to the pandemic. Predictably, many have adopted online models while a handful of others have chosen to cancel their plans altogether.

I am excited about the new Google Image Licensing program, and you should be too. Let me explain why.

Powerful work cannot be rushed, and the slow, decisive approach to producing and sharing such images ensure that their relevancy goes beyond simply grabbing the front page – the intent is not to break the story but rather to tell it holistically and conscientiously.

The See in Black collective, a coalition of 80 Black photographers dedicated to uplifting and advocating for Black visibility, is hosting a limited, two-week print sale, with support from Artifact Uprising. Launched on Friday, Juneteenth, also known as Freedom Day, it will remain open until July 3rd, the day before Independence Day.

I recently spoke with Scruggs and three other Black photo editors and photographers about covering this moment and what needs to change: Lynsey Weatherspoon, a photographer based in Atlanta; Wale Agboola, a photographer based in Minneapolis; and Brent Lewis, photo editor at the New York Times and cofounder of Diversify Photo. They talked about the inherent subjectivity of photojournalism, the racist distribution of power and opportunity in the industry, and their demands for a sustained commitment to make photography more Black, far into the future.