Author: Trent

  • Utah Newspaper Photo Sparks Tighter Court Policy

    A newspaper photo of evidence in last year’s high-profile Warren Jeffs trial has prompted a new statewide rule in Utah against photographing non-public evidence in courtrooms, the Salt Lake Tribune reported.

    The newspaper reported that the Utah Judicial Council, which sets policy for statewide courts, approved a rule “prohibiting news photographers from taking courtroom pictures of exhibits or documents that are not part of the official public record.

    “The rule, which becomes effective Nov. 1, stems from a photo taken March 27, 2007, by a Deseret Morning News photographer during the rape as an accomplice trial of Warren Jeffs, leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints polygamous sect.”

    Check it out here.

  • Shelby County, TN Sheriff: watch out for photographers and radical greens, they might be terrorists – Boing Boing

    The Sheriff’s Office in Shelby County, Tennessee, is warning locals to turn in anyone who takes too many pictures of bridges or shopping malls, because they might be scouting for Al Qaeda, who are clearly slavering at the opportunity to make a gigantic media splash by getting up to some serious naughtiness on the “iconic Hernando DeSoto Bridge.”

    Check it out here.

  • State of the Art: Ballad of the 'Tween Angel

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    “You can’t just say no to Annie.” That was part of the explanation given by 15-year-old superstar Miley Cyrus after photographs were made of her “backless” and clutching a blanket by Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair. (A VF behind-the-scenes shot is above.) “I think it’s really artsy,” she told the magazine at the time. “It wasn’t in a skanky way.”

    But by yesterday, Cyrus was backtracking. “I took part in a photo shoot that was supposed to be ‘artistic’ and now, seeing the photographs and reading the story, I feel so embarrassed,” she said in a publicist’s statement. She further criticizes the magazine in a People article, as the more financially minded press mulls over the fallout  expected to hit Cyrus’s Hanna Montana phenomenon and its parent company, Disney.

    Check it out here.

  • What better mentor for a 10-year-old than Charles Manson? Little Billy seeks life advice, and America's most notorious killers are happy to oblige

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    In the late ’90s, pop-culture historian Bill Geerhart had a little too much time on his hands and a surfeit of stamps. So, for his own entertainment, the then-unemployed thirtysomething launched a letter-writing campaign to some of the most powerful and infamous figures in the country, posing as a curious 10-year-old named Billy.

    Check it out here.

  • The Peddecord Show: My First Rule of Photography

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    Why’s that you ask? To distance myself from my work and constantly ask myself, “What is art?” Is dance an art? Is the dancer or choreographer the artist? Is a landscape painting an art? Is photojournalism an art? Is portrait photography an art? I struggle with these questions constantly and the answers are usually, “No.” Though occasionally, “Yes.”

    Check it out here.

  • Photo Attorney: Q&A – Is Your Photography a "Work for Hire?"

    Q. I currently am a “freelance” photographer (without pay) with a newspaper. I have not signed anything with the newspaper. Am I subject to work-for-hire provisions?

    Check it out here.

  • What Ansel Adams Saw Through His Lens – New York Times

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    WAWONA TUNNEL is a passageway from civilization to natural splendor. The tunnel, dug through a hill on the south side of Yosemite National Park in the 1930s, hides the coming view like a mile-long blindfold.

    And then you’re there. Pale, curvaceous granite rocks dance in the skyline. Dozens of people stand along the edge of the pull-off, called Tunnel View, trying to capture the scene. Some snap two quick shots with disposable yellow cameras, and others set up their tripods for hours, watching the light strike Yosemite’s monoliths. On the left, El Capitan, a rock climbers’ mecca, appears the tallest. The Half Dome and Sentinel Dome arch upwards in the center. And the two Cathedral Spires sit on the right next to the sometimes gushing Bridalveil Fall.

    Many people know these sights by name, but more know them by sight alone, as captured through the lens of the legendary American photographer Ansel Adams.

    Check it out here.

  • In printing graphic photo, instinct guides editors — not hard rules

    The different photographs that The Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald ran this week of a Vietnamese girl with a massive facial tumor raise questions of when a picture is exploitive of its subject or offensive to us as readers.

    Check it out here.

  • State of the Art: Seven Photographers Win Guggenheim Awards

    The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announced the recipients of it Fellowship grants for 2008. Among the 190 awards, seven went to photographers

    Check it out here.

  • Virginia Heffernan – The Medium – Television – Internet Video – Media – Flickr – Photography – New York Times

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    Consider photography. As art-school photographers continue to shoot on film, embrace chiaroscuro and resist prettiness, a competing style of picture has been steadily refined online: the Flickr photograph. Flickr, the wildly popular photo-sharing site, was founded by the Canadian company Ludicorp in 2004. Four years later, amid the more than two billion images that currently circulate on the site, the most distinctive offerings, admired by the site’s members and talent scouts alike, are digital images that “pop” with the signature tulip colors of Canon digital cameras.

    Check it out here.

  • I was hooked on the story in Afghanistan

    by John D McHugh

    I am back in Afghanistan for the fifth time in two years. I have a lot in common with the British, Canadian and American soldiers deployed in the country. Like many of them, I have been here before and I have been under fire. And, dubious though the honour is, I am a member of an even more exclusive club: I have been shot during a gunfight.

    There are differences between us, too. I am a photojournalist, not a soldier. I carry cameras and a notebook, not a gun. In the heat of battle, I am trying to stay alive, not trying to kill. The biggest difference – the one that surprises all the soldiers I meet – is that more than volunteering to be here, I overcome many obstacles to be an observer in this war zone.

    Check it out here.

  • Raymond Depardon – Magnum Photos

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    Quote: “The photographer is filled with doubt. Nothing will soothe him.”

    Raymond Depardon joined Magnum Photos in 1978 and became a full Member in 1979.

    Check it out here.

  • Through Weegee’s Lens – New York Times

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    BACK in the 1970s, a gutsy blond named Jill Freedman armed with a battered Leica M4 and an eye for the offbeat trained her lens on the spirited characters and gritty sidewalks of a now-extinct city.

    Influenced by the Modernist documentarian André Kertész, with references to the hard-edged, black-and-white works of Weegee and Diane Arbus, this self-taught photographer captured raw and intimate images, and transformed urban scenes into theatrical dramas.

    Her New York was a blemished and fallen apple strewn with piles of garbage. Prostitutes and bag ladies walked the streets, junkies staked out abandoned tenements, and children played in vacant lots.

    “The city falling apart,” Ms. Freedman said one day recently in recalling that era. “It was great. I used to love to throw the camera over my shoulder and hit the street.”

    Check it out here.

  • the fragility of it all at uncommons

    The next day Dad’s stubborness crept back – a sign of recovery. He kept pushing his Nikon D70 (that he got used for a great deal from KEH he said) on me. Take it, he said. I don’t have the breath to walk around and shoot anymore. I kept refusing.

    Check it out here.

  • Naoya Hatakeyama: Blast – SHANE LAVALETTE

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    Japanese photographer Naoya Hatakeyama’s Blast series is quite remarkable.

    Check it out here.

  • Speartalks: Aaron Rose

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    Several months ago, we about lost our crap when we heard that Beautiful Losers – the museum exhibit-turned-most brilliant coffee table book ever bound by mechanical means – would soon be joined by another extension of arty rectitude. Beautiful Losers, the documentary, would relate to the book and exhibit by way of subject matter, but would differ from the previous installments through one defining characteristic: The punk, skate, hip hop and graffiti subcultures it traced would take the literal form of the men and women that led the movement

    Check it out here.

  • Punknews.org | Punk's Not DVD released in May

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    The documentary Punk’s Not Dead has been set for release on DVD on May 01, 2008.

    Check it out here.

  • The Wild Weird World of Sports: Urban Warfare

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    Being weird is really trendy in the entire Pacific NW right now. Glad I don’t have to travel all the time to Seattle – Portland is nearly on par.

    After some confusion (the 1st tee was changed at the last second… ???), I found the group of about two dozen golfers roaming the “greens” in North Portland.

    Check it out here.

  • Drifting Away: a photo-based memorial for Columbia's disappeared

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    There is a saying that the rivers of Columbia are the world’s biggest graveyard.

    Columbian artist Erika Diettes is creating a light-filled memorial to the many thousands of the “disappeared” who are dead or missing as a result of armed conflicts in Columbia. Personal objects or clothing from people who have disappeared are photographed in turbulent water.

    Check it out here.

  • Solved!: Time Cover Is A Basketball Ad

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    Kind of sad. Come on, Time, we know you’re better than this.

    Check it out here.