A lot of early Dungeons & Dragons module-plots were more about scavenging then conquering. It wasn’t about beating one central bad guy, but getting in, scoring some loot, and escaping with your lives to brag about it back at the tavern. So many of the classic modules — The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, The Ghost Tower of Inverness, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks — have a wealth of minor bad-guys to wade through, but not one central villainous focus. On the other hand…some modules did. And when they did, it got nasty. Here are a host of the best bad guys of the original D&D modules–the ones who every party wanted a shot at.
After a lot of editing, toning, retoning, printing, reprinting, reordering(repeat a few more times for good measure) my print portfolio is finally finished. The beautiful or perhaps the ugly thing with a portfolio is that it’s never truly done. Your portfolio just like your mind will continue to grow and evolve. There’s a good chance the work you like today you’ll hate tomorrow.
I thought I’d share a few things about the process. Here are 11 random thoughts about the experience in no order.
One of the top questions photographers ask me is “how do I get an agent” but since I’ve never been a photographer I really have no clue how you get an agent. Recently a photographer in LA with some nice work emailed me after getting zero response from the agents he’d been contacting and I started to wonder what it takes, if you’ve got good work, to land an agent, so I called up Deborah Schwartz (dsreps.com), an LA agent I used to work with and asked her a few questions.
Terril Jones had only shown the photograph to friends.
While working as a reporter in Beijing during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, he shot many photographs and recorded several hours of video. It wasn’t until weeks afterwards, when he had returned to Japan, that he discovered the magnitude of what he had captured — an iconic moment in history from an entirely unique angle.
His version of the tank man has never been published until now.
All this is the familiarly messy, philosophical heart of photography, and it’s also the subject of a show that just closed here, itself a mess. “Controversies: A Legal and Ethical History of Photography” was organized by Christian Pirker and Daniel Girardin, a lawyer and a curator from Switzerland, where the exhibition originated. Louvre-length, two-hour lines daily snaked out the door of the Bibliothèque Nationale here until the end of last month. (The show moves on to South America.) Inside, scrums of visitors clustered before 80 or so pictures, more or less famous troublemakers, spanning the era of the daguerreotype through Abu Ghraib.
Now showing on the home page of the Big Sur Land Trust of Carmel, California, for instance, is a four-minute mini-documentary about the historical, physical and emotional connections Big Sur residents have with the land they live on. It’s a promotional and fund-raising video with the look and feel of a newspaper multimedia story. And no wonder: It was produced by Geri Migielicz, Richard Koci Hernandez, and Dai Sugano, the Emmy Award-winning multimedia team employed until recently by the San Jose Mercury News.
It doesn’t matter what body of work Lori Waslchuk put forth to win the Aaron Siskind Fellowship, her numerous bodies of work all require our attention.
One of the best things about the internship was how closely I got to work with Harley Jessup, whose work had already had a big influence on me. The most valuable lesson I learned from him was how to get work done even on days where you don’t “feel it.” He made us fill up giant bulletin boards with artwork and I got used to pinning up drawings I wasn’t totally comfortable with just to fill the space. The funny thing is that once the artwork is pinned up you feel less bad about it, and it’s easier to visualize what else needs to be done and what holes should be filled. Right when I got back from Pixar, I bought a big bulletin board for my studio and I still pin up as much work as I can to keep myself moving forward all the time.
With ‘Thirst for Grit’ I offer a vignette of modern-day, small-town rodeo cowboys in Texas. I traveled endless hot and dusty miles crisscrossing this oft-lonely expanse, following the itinerant ways of these men who live a life of legend and little. They share a special bond, a camaraderie with one another that seems to center on respect, loyalty and toughness. While mostly well-mannered gentlemen, rodeo riders can also be as wild and rough as the beasts they ride, and sometimes skate the edge of social rule when it comes to the bottle and women.
Düsseldorf-based photographer Andreas Gefeller deftly manipulates viewers’ perceptions of visual “truth” in discrete yet complementary series that reflect a multiplicity of themes and concerns—nuclear disasters, mankind’s environmental hegemony, and global transformations of public and personal space, to name but a few. In so doing, he reveals intellectual and spiritual truths about ourselves and or relationship with the environments we adopt and adapt. His latest series, titled “Supervisions,” pushes this aesthetic to a surprisingly disorienting degree.
Photomonth in Krakow is one of the leading European photography festivals and one of the largest ongoing cultural events in Poland. In May 2009 the 7th edition presented over 30 individual and collective exhibitions throughout the charming city, in galleries, museums, cafes and post-industrial spaces. I got there late this year, and decided to stay three extra days, and I still didn’t get to see everything I wanted to see.
Is the current style of photojournalism stale? Does the current trend for commenting on the aesthetics of photojournalism detract from the stories that photographers want to communicate? What can photojournalists learn from the art world?
–
Comments from Gary Knight, Tim Hetherington, MaryAnne Golon, and Ashley Gilbertson.
Filmed on 22 May 2009 at VII Gallery, Brooklyn
My current excitement for street photography continued but instead of exploiting the color of day, I felt in a black and white mood leading to most of my photographs depicting the loneliness of the night.
Facing perhaps 10 years in a labor camp, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, TV reporters accused of illegally entering North Korea and committing unspecified “hostile acts,” go on trial Thursday in Pyongyang in a case that has become part of a nail-biting face-off this spring between North Korea and much of the rest of the world.
