Bert Hardy was the star troubleshooting photojournalist on Picture Post, Britain’s most influential picture magazine. But a story he shot in 1950 during the Korean war seemingly precipitated its decline and fall. On the eightieth anniversary of the launch of the mass-market weekly Graham Harrison turns back the pages of photographic history and looks forward to a reassessment of Hardy’s career.
Check it out here.
Released late on Friday, it sharply criticised a campaign in February and March by Democratic Republic of Congo’s security forces against the ethnic-based political and religious movement Bundu dia Kongo (BDK) in western Bas-Congo province.
From bases in the province the BDK has waged a campaign to re-establish the pre-colonial Kongo kingdom in parts of Democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo, Angola and Gabon. Authorities accuse its members of violent protests and killings carried out in the name of popular justice.
The U.N. human rights investigators’ report said police used heavy machineguns, grenades and small arms against BDK members armed mainly with wooden weapons and “magical” talismans. It put the number of people killed at least 100, much higher than the death toll of 27 given by the Congolese government.
Check it out here.
Alexey Titarenko’s “City of Shadows” is a series of haunting, gorgeous long-exposure shots of street-scenes in St Petersburg, Russia
Check it out here.
Aficionados of Los Angeles street art might recognize the now-familiar work of one “Mr. Brainwash,” a.k.a. MBW, a.k.a. Thierry Guetta, a French filmmaker turned graffiti provocateur. Over the past few months, Mr. Brainwash images have become ubiquitous in greater Hollywood, evolving from the Banksy-style black-and-white stencils of a guy wielding a movie camera to repurposed reproductions of Elvis, Hendrix, Gandhi and other cultural icons, including the giant spray-paint can rebranded, à la Andy, as Campbell’s Tomato Spray. These MBW specials are wheat-pasted up and down the La Brea corridor, the Miracle Mile, Melrose, Fairfax . . . anyplace with an unadorned utility box or blank wall.
Check it out here.
It turns out this photo of Tiger Woods in the Washington Post, which Photoshop Disasters fingered for being a doctored image, is actually not a photo editor’s bungled work
Check it out here.
Aren’t newspapers supposed to not do things like this? (I mean real newspapers, not National Inquirer or the British tabloids.) Isn’t there some sort of oath of journalistical ethics that they have to swear or something?
Check it out here.
PhotoShelter photographer Andy Biggs is passionate about African Safaris and animal imagery, and it shows in his work. Biggs recently landed a big deal with Banana Republic; they’re using his images in stores, on billboards and in window displays as part of their Summer 2008 advertising campaign. The images are all black&white, and are calm and classy; this is a thinking-man’s safari. Biggs was lovely and cooperative and answered all my questions about his work, and gave me the dirt on the Banana Republic deal.
Check it out here.
The Weakerthans have posted the new video from their acclaimed 2007 album, Reunion Tour.
Check it out here.
Of all the strange and short-lived periods in the history of experimental music in New York, no wave is perhaps the strangest and shortest-lived.
Centered on a handful of late-1970s downtown groups like Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, DNA and James Chance’s Contortions, it was a cacophonous, confrontational subgenre of punk rock, Dadaist in style and nihilistic in attitude. It began around 1976, and within four years most of the original bands had broken up.
But every weird rock scene — and every era of New York bohemia — eventually gets its coffee-table book moment. This month Abrams Image is publishing “No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980,” a visual history by Thurston Moore and Byron Coley.
Check it out here.
Student photojournalist Jeff Giraldo of Western Kentucky University is this year’s top winner in the William Randolph Hearst National Photojournalism Championship held annually in San Francisco, CA.
Check it out here.
Ziv Koren is a world-renown combat photographer whose coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has vaulted him to international acclaim. Now, he’s helping invent a whole new visual aesthetic that digitally combines still photos with moving images, seamlessly.
Check it out here.
Reading E. Annie Proulx’s story the other day with Richard Renaldi’s photograph as an illustration got me thinking about words and pictures, and how the two collide. I was thinking of doing a “what’s burning a hole in my bookcase” post anyway, so when I pulled Andrea Modica’s Treadwell off the top shelf yesterday, it felt like kismet; E. Annie Proulx wrote the introductory essay.
I’ve often wanted to post about Treadwell, which is one of my favorite photo essays ever, but the images available online are all pretty small and of poor quality. So we fired up the PhotoShelter scanner, and voila!
Check it out here.
Manhattan commercial photographer Simon Lund loves Coney Island so much that he treks out there 10 to 20 times each summer to take pictures. But it was only on his latest venture that Lund encountered something he’d never experienced in all his trips there over the years: an unwanted photo editor from the NYPD.
As if he were in a police state, Lund was intimidated by a cop into giving up his film, even though he was doing nothing wrong and wasn’t formally accused of anything.
For the past 19 years photographers and photo editors have gathered near the Spanish border in Perpignan, France for a grand festival to celebrate photojournalism. This years festival from August 30th to September 14th will mark the 20th such meeting and I have been handed an interview with Jean-François Leroy the festivals founding and current director, where he tackles a few of the hard questions facing photojournalism and acknowledges completely missing the boat on the internet.
Check it out here.
I have used three different M8’s over the past year in Iraq. The first M8 was a loaner given to me by Leica in the spring of 2007. My second M8 I purchased new in September of 2007. The third was given to me as a replacement when the second M8 malfunctioned.
I will try to make this review as comprehensive as possible with samples of the work I have done with the three M8’s that I have used. This will allow others a detailed look at my experiences with the M8, most of which have been negative. Please keep in mind that there are many other photographers who like the M8.
I have no axe to grind against Lecia–quite the opposite. I have made my living with Leica’s for most of the past 20 years; I depend on them. I still have several Leica M’s with which I shoot film on a daily basis
Check it out here. Via Snapper Talk.
Anyone who has taken a road trip through the American Southwest has passed through towns like Higley: unlikely tough-scrabble little communities that crop up like weeds and cling to inhospitable territory, lingering, lonely, and surviving like a desert cactus.
Towns like Higley start out not even on the fringe of a larger metropolitan area. They exist seemingly in the middle of nowhere, and few people take notice that they are there at all.
Check it out here.
I have been placed in an unfair position. Stephen Shore is a photographer that deservedly enjoys a place of some stature in the history of photography. At the age of 14, three of his photographs were acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and in 1971 he gained the distinction of being the second (the first had been Alfred Stieglitz) living photographer to have a one-person show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In subsequent years he has exhibited widely, notably being included in The New Topographics exhibition of 1975 (curated by William Jenkins) at the George Eastman House, and seen numerous volumes of his work published to critical acclaim. What this means is that much has been written about him. In fact, I dare say that all of the good sentences have already been taken
Check it out here.
