This guest post is written by Elizabeth Fleming. Last month I had the pleasure of joining friend and fellow photographer Jonathan Blaustein on a tour of the Chelsea gallery scene as he conducted research for an APE article, which can be read in its entire
So with all that in mind I’ll throw out the following question: is it fair to expect any artist to recontextualize his or her work if the original frames of reference have changed due to technological advances and/or societal shifts? Is it fair to take into account an artist’s persona in general and, if there is a model involved, the specificities of the artist/subject relationship?
I am being asked to to support photographers who message me on FACEBOOK to ask for contacts in Ethiopia because they want to ‘photograph malnutrition’. Wankers.
To support photographers who have their cameras stolen whilst grave digging for awards in Africa. Mentalists.
To support photographers who will end up offering their pictures to charities for free. Charities that won’t be able to use them anyway because the fetishization of suffering through aesthetic is a turn off to audiences.
Aaron Lim Bon Teck of Singapore has won the $10,000 grand prize in the 2010 National Geographic Photography Contest with an image of the eruption of Indonesia’s Gunung Rinjani volcano. It’s an impressive shot, but it’s hard to believe this panoramic image
Today, my office at the Portland Tribune got a call from the Oregon State Police inquiring about the identity of a man I photographed at the Civil War game this past weekend. Fans rushed the field after the Ducks won, and a group set fire to an Oregon State Beavers shirt. I was moving through the crowd to get at the center of the pack and was surprised to see the small fire at the center. I started taking photos, as people cheered and lit cigarettes and cigars from the burning shirt. The unidentified man then picked up the shirt and flung it into the air as everyone else cheered.
The distribution and publication of photos of dead servicemen and women can be controversial because some people feel it disrespectful. Others feel such images reflect the realities of combat.
A former photographer for The Times-Picayune (Alex Brandon) witnessed a “contentious situation” between three men and police officers after Hurricane Katrina, telling a federal jury Wednesday that he was ordered by police not to snap pictures of the scene.
Donald Weber’s latest series is Interrogations (in the current issue of the BJP). It’s portraits of petty criminals confessing in police interrogation rooms – where they don’t have the good cop, bad cop routine but the “bad cop, really bad cop” routine. Interrogations is special, a case of the photographer distancing himself from the subjects at hand, and having difficulty doing so. Maybe the project raises questions of complicity – on the part of us, the viewers, Weber and the police and subjects themselves. So with that in mind, I put a few questions to Donald which he was kind enough to answer.
Not all of the human subjects of documentaries enjoy enduring relationships with the filmmakers. Errol Morris, Andrew Jarecki and other directors explain.
IN 2002, while he was making “Capturing the Friedmans,” his investigation of a notorious child-abuse prosecution on Long Island, the director Andrew Jarecki received a piece of documentary wisdom. “When this is over,” Sheila Nevins, the president of HBO Documentary Films, told him, “you will have had one of the most amazing experiences of your life. You’ll understand your subjects in a way you don’t understand your own family.
“And when the movie comes out, you’ll never talk to them again.”
Getty Images and photographer Stefano de Luigi have teamed up to create a brilliantly hillarious parody of the worst journalistic stereotypes and cliches about Africa, something that they call (with tongue firmly planted in cheek) “T.I.A — This is Africa
There’s been a bit of chatter about town debating the winning image (above) in the 2010 Moran Contemporary Photographic Prize worth $80,000. There’s universal agreement that the winner, Dean Sewell is an exceptional photographer and that the sole judge, Stephen Dupont is also extremely well credentialed both as a photographer and as someone suitable to judge this kind of award.
“We are a news organization that exists to serve the First Amendment,” she said. “The issue, again, was, Juan Williams, on several occasions — with the thing that happened earlier this week being only the most recent — violated our news code of ethics, to which he is beholden as a news analyst. And it happened again and again. And this time, we decided that enough was enough. That is not a First Amendment issue.”
Reading the NYT’s stories about the Iraq War logs, I was struck by how it could get through such gruesome descriptions — fingers chopped off, chemicals splashed on prisoners — wit…
Reading the NYT’s stories about the Iraq War logs, I was struck by how it could get through such gruesome descriptions — fingers chopped off, chemicals splashed on prisoners — without using the word ‘torture.’
“Though it appears to the rank and file in the newsroom that Randy, Lee and the boys attempted to destroy and desecrate the place, there are a lot of great journalists here still doing great work,” he said.
In the last week, I’ve gotten a very clear view of two things — the male physique purported to belong to Brett Favre and the inner workings of modern media. I wish I could un-see both.
Earlier today the New York Times printed a correction for a series of photographs Fred R. Conrad took of the galleries at the Museum of Modern Art. The images accompanied a review by Roberta Smith, published on September 30, of the recently opened “Abstra
people who were pictured in the photographs looking at the exhibition “were museum staff members, who were asked by museum officials to be present in the galleries to provide scale and context for the photographs
The head of Pakistan’s military has ordered an investigation into a video, circulating on the Internet, that depicts the country’s soldiers executing blindfolded men in civilian dress.
