POCZERNIN, Poland — This wind-swept village is bracing for an invasion of demons, thanks to a priest who believes he can defeat Satan.
The Rev. Andrzej Trojanowski, a soft-spoken Pole, plans to build a “spiritual oasis” that will serve as Europe’s only center dedicated to performing exorcisms. With the blessing of the local Catholic archbishop and theological support from the Vatican, the center will aid a growing number of Poles possessed by evil forces or the devil himself, he said.
I needed some time to recover from my marathon road/plane trip covering the presidential campaign of Rudy Giuliani before posting anything here. I spent a week from sunrise to sundown with his campaign criss-crossing every corner of South Florida, where he spent most of his campaign rhetoric and dollars trying to secure the state, which he lost.
People always ask if it’s fun work following around a campaign, and to be honest, as tough as it was physically and mentally, it was fun. There is an aspect of witnessing history that I truly respect and admire I have the opportunity to do in this field.
GridIron Flow, a new workflow management technology designed to work with Photoshop, the Creative Suite, and other tools. Since then the product picked up a Best in Show nod at Macworld, and now you can see it in action in a video on their site. In it company CEO Steve Forde shows Flow managing a workflow spreading across Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, and InDesign.
My first day on the ground in Kenya, I went into Mathare with a group of photographers after hearing that there had been some problems. Two mobs were facing off on the main street leading into the Nairobi slum. Once the dust had settled, I met an Italian photographer by the name of Enrico Dangnino. He was pretty shaken up. He had blood stains on his clothes and told me that earlier in the day they had witnessed a near lynching but were able to save the man’s life.
The tale of the warehouse-turned-loft building by the banks of the East River in Brooklyn seemed a familiar one, at first.
Artists move into a decrepit building, quietly rehabilitate it, live and work there. The city eventually catches on and issues a flurry of violations, forcing the artists into the streets. Developers circle, landlords yield and sell. Condos ensue.
The roughly 200 residents of 475 Kent Avenue in South Williamsburg were determined that their story have a happier ending. After all, the landlords were on their side — an unusual alliance. So the residents tackled every violation they could at the building, an 11-story warehouse that had been home to artists, photographers and musicians for more than a decade.
this modern day “revolution cliche” also hangs (or rather hung) on my living room wall….mine is an original, signed, full-frame fiber print given to me by Korda himself after we had both consumed i do not know how many Havana Club mohitos…we went long into the night after the opening of my “Cuba” exhibition in Havana in 2000..Alberto died just a few months after our Havana “all-nighter” , in Paris during the opening of his own retro exhibit…
Alberto Korda was a motivated photographer…..”my main aim was to meet women”, Korda confessed in a New York Times interview towards the end of his life…and his second wife (but not his last) was a top fashion model……hmmmmmm… well, motivations aside, Korda is represented by prestige galleries throughout the world and was Fidel Castro’s personal photographer for 10 years after the revolution…you may see an interesting film by Hector Cruz Sandoval titled “Kordavision” which was released after Alberto’s death..this film and the above photograph are not so popular in Miami where many of the “non- recipients” of the Che/Fidel revolution have lived for the last 40 years…
Jorge Lewinski was a tireless and vivid chronicler of the world of modern art. If he never quite achieved the public acknowledgement he deserved, this was in part the result of his steadfast – some would say stubborn – vision for his remarkable collection of more than 300 photographic portraits of British artists.
For the past couple weeks I’ve had Kim Høltermand’s site bookmarked, and I’ve been checking in on it every few days. Kim is from Frederiksberg, Denmark, and takes some of the moodiest, most beautiful photos I’ve seen. He has an incredible knack for extreme lights and darks, muted colors, and an affinity for the the sun. It’s also kind of interesting that’s he’s updated his site 3 times in the last week
The times they are a-changing. So, we at SWINDLE want to evolve, too. Issue 15 marks the unveiling of our newly redesigned layout. We’ve made the text more engaging, we’ve standardized the fonts, and added two regular columns: James Gaddy’s Classic Graphics delves into the history of iconic logos, and Henry Rollins gives us Dispatches from the Territories. We’ve got a feature on stunt doubles, who risk their lives in anonymity to make movie stars look badass; Doug Pray’s first-person account of making his latest feature documentary, Big Rig; the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s “School of Popular Painting,” an elite group of artists who showcase the thriving urban culture of their country’s capital, Kinshasa; and a fashion spread that is an ode to ‘80s group Strawberry Switchblade. Only SWINDLE can scour the cultural landscape of the globe to give you a mash-up of content this sweet!
The Ones We Love is a project highlighting young and talented photographers from around the world. Each artist contributed six photographs of the person(s) who is most important to them, taken outdoors in a natural setting. The goal of the website is to portray the people who are loved, cherished, and inspirational to these artists, and also showcase the differences and similarities in the photographs each of them took within the same guidelines.
I’ve been trying to write about some sport images that caught my eye while trawling through the Reuters file but I keep getting hung up on our pictures from Kenya.
They are so raw, so powerful and uncompromising that even the most accomplished images of cossetted sportsmen performing in completely controlled circumstances seem insignificant in comparison.
The Prix de la Photographie Paris (Px3) jury has chosen Daniel Cima’s entry, 2006 Drought in Ethiopia, as a winner in in the Human Condition competition.
Select winning photos, curated by the director of the Farmani Gallery, will be exhibited at a group show in Los Angeles from March 6-31. The show will travel to New York later in the year, and potentially overseas.
Ask photographer Arlene Gottfried if she thinks the New York characters she’s shot for 40 years from Coney Island to Times Square and Harlem are freaks, and she bristles. “I don’t think they’re freaks, because then I’d be a freak, too.” With her little-girl Coney brogue (she and her brother, manic comic Gilbert, grew up there), old-soul eyes, and longtime avid membership in the Jerriese Johnson East Village Choir (she occasionally solos, she boasts), she’s a quiet defender of the grimily vibrant denizens of an older New York that’s disappearing daily. Now she’s their enshriner, too: Due out this week from powerHouse Books, Sometimes Overwhelming compiles images Gottfried took of the city in the seventies and eighties. An exhibit of Gottfried’s later work is also opening March 5 at the Alice Austen House Museum on Staten Island.
We interviewed Gottfried about some of her most striking images. An exclusive preview of photos from her book, and her memories of taking them
The international jury of the 51st annual World Press Photo Contest selected a color image of the UK photographer Tim Hetherington as World Press Photo of the Year 2007. The picture was taken 16 September 2007 and shows a US soldier resting at “Restrepo” bunker, named after a soldier from his platoon who was recently killed by insurgents.
The 2nd Battalion Airborne of the 503rd US infantry is undergoing a deployment in the Korengal Valley in the Eastern province of Afghanistan. The valley is infamous as the site of downing of a US helicopter and has seen some of the most intense fighting in the country. Hetherington’s photograph is part of a picture story that was also awarded 2nd Prize in General News Stories. He had traveled to Afghanistan on assignment for Vanity Fair.
“This image shows the exhaustion of a man – and the exhaustion of a nation,” says jury chairman Gary Knight, and adds “We’re all connected to this. It’s a picture of a man at the end of a line.” Fellow juror MaryAnne Golon commented: “I use all my energy to have people notice bad things. There’s a human quality to this picture. It says that conflict is the basis of this man’s life.”
The post election violence in Kenya has killed nearly 1,000 and displaced 270,000. It is the most devastating violence to hit Kenya since its independence. Whilst politicians try to find solutions in Nairobi, the ethnic tensions in the Rift Valley reach new highs. Ethnic cleansing has led to killings and houses being burnt in a movement to shift different tribes out of their non-ancestral homes.
Huge parts of different cities across the valleys have been razed to the ground and the inhabitants forced to flee. In the villages, warriors from opposing tribes battle with bows and arrows, rocks and occasionally guns to gain or regain control of their land.
While the politician’s talk, the future of Kenya will depend, not on the final results of the discussions in Nairobi, but on the ability of Kenyans to forgive and live together again. That will take much longer.
Chris Hondros has seen the world at war first hand – and so has his camera lens.
Working for Getty images as a war photographer for almost a decade, he has captured militiamen crying out in battle in the Second Liberian Civil War, American soldiers on raids in Iraq and children in the arms of their mothers in Sierra Leone’s refugee camps.
Hondros brought these images, his experiences and his personal comments to Pitt yesterday afternoon in a lecture facilitated by the global and film studies departments, PittArts and Pittsburgh Filmmakers. About 70 people crammed into room 501 in the Cathedral of Learning for a slideshow of Hondros’ work and to hear his commentary.
This episode features an interview with Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, co-director of the law school’s Center for Internet and Society, author of “Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity” and founder of Creative Commons. In this conversation Professor Lessig, with a focus on photography, discusses the purpose & objective of Creative Commons, his perspective on copyright law, addresses the question “How if at all the adoption of Creative Commons is hurting photographers? and shares more information about the recently announced CC+ license.
Polaroid Corp., the Massachusetts company that gave the world instant film photography, is shutting down its film manufacturing lines in the state and abandoning the technology that made the company famous.
“The Norwood plant is shutting down, and we will soon be winding down activities at the Waltham facility as well,” said Kyle MacDonald, senior vice president of Polaroid’s instant photography business segment. The closures, set for completion during this quarter, will eliminate about 150 jobs. In the late 1970s, Polaroid employed about 15,000 in Massachusetts.
The Norwood and Waltham plants make large-format films used by professional photographers and artists. Polaroid also makes professional-grade films in Mexico, and its consumer film packs come from a factory in the Netherlands. All these plants are slated for closure this year. Polaroid chief operating officer Tom Beaudoin said the company is interested in licensing its technology to an outside firm that could manufacture film for faithful Polaroid customers. If that doesn’t happen, Polaroid users would have to find an alternative photo technology, as the company plans to make only enough film to last into next year
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