At 81, Bill Cunningham is probably the hardest working photojournalist in New York. Richard Press and Philip Gefter tried to keep up.
via Lens Blog: http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/23/behind-38/
the miracle of “Bill Cunningham New York,” a new 88-minute documentary about the photographer of “On the Street” and “Evening Hours,” is that its subject agreed to participate in the first place.
“Stripped: Greg Friedler’s Naked Las Vegas,” a documentary film based on the fourth and final iteration of photographer Greg Friedler’s long-term project making clothed and unclothed portraits of people in major cities, premieres tonight on Showtime.
Link: PDNPulse: Documentary About Greg Friedler’s “Naked Las Vegas” Premieres Tonight on Showtime
Breaking News from North Korea’s state media:
Pyongyang, March 17 (KCNA) — The Korean Documentary and Science Film Studio has recently produced new scientific films giving scientific and technical information and common knowledge about the greening of cities.
“Soilless Cultivation of Turf in Humus-cakes” offers an explicit explanation of the new turf cultivation method and its advantages.
By this method, it is possible to cultivate turf two or three times a year and raise the productivity three or four times higher than the existing methods.
“Let’s Plant Many Large Tara Vines” gives a scientific and technical solution to problems arising in extensively propagating large tara vine or Actinidia chinensis useful in different aspects.
The films are helpful toward garbing streets and villages in green in spring.
CLICK QUESTION: At what date can I get “Let’s Plant Many Large Tara Vines” from Netflix?
“These people were speaking a language that was my language,” says Aaron Rose in the intro for his widely acclaimed 2008 film, Beautiful Losers.
Link: Juxtapoz Magazine – Beautiful Losers Full Length Film Now Online | Current
“Every Sunday at my house we had … dinner early … and watched The Ed Sullivan Show. Whether we wanted to or not. Whether we enjoyed it or not. That was my first lesson in show business. I don’t think…
via WFMU’s Beware of the Blog: http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2010/03/the-late-night-hosts-before-they-were-big.html
NBC President Fred Silverman was so impressed with David’s performance that an exclusivity contract was penned soon after. Silverman started brainstorming immediately. An afternoon show was conceived called Leave it to Dave. “The whole project was just a disaster,” says Letterman, “I was supposed to sit on a throne and the set was all pyramids. The walls were all covered in shag carpet … At one point I was in New York and I got a phone call from the West Coast. They said, ‘We’ve come up with a great idea. Your guests will all sit around on pillows.’ And I hung up the phone and I turned to my manager, Jack Rollins, and I said, ‘This moron wants us to sit on pillows. What’s the matter with chairs?’ You could just see the elements kind of – I hate to say it was like dominoes toppling, but it was like dominoes toppling.”
BANKSY’s subterranean screenings of his new documentary, “Exit Through The Gift Shop” in a makeshift pop-up theater in an unused subway tube beneath London’s Waterloo Station kicked off this week to queues of rabid fans.
Link: Super Touch Art » Blog Archive » FILM///BANKSY’S “EXIT THORUGH THE GIFT SHOP” POP UP THEATER OPENS
After years photographing in Iraq, Michael Kamber saw “The Hurt Locker.” He barely recognized the war that unfolded on screen.
via Lens Blog: http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/essay-15/
One of the greatest disservices of “The Hurt Locker” is the impression that soldiers in Iraq were masters of their destinies. If they snipped the right wire, made the right shot, cleared the right room, they would stay alive. In fact, the opposite was true. Certainly there were firefights, but the vast majority of U.S. deaths were from I.E.D.’s.
This is what was so absolutely terrifying about the war. A faceless enemy was catastrophically destroying U.S. vehicles every day with I.E.D.’s (and I can assure you the enemy did not stand in the open, as per several scenes in the movie). Regardless of your training, if you were in that vehicle when the button got pressed, you were dead.
“One guy got so upset that he physically assaulted a camera guy,” Cindy says. Another one fainted.
The winner of this bizarre and cruel stunt found out that Cindy was indeed alive and well when he was taken into the ambulance to donate his kidney. Cindy turned around revealing “her sexy nurse costume.”
Link: HEAVY DISCUSSION
In the November/December issue of American Photo, we scooped the story of how fashion and celebrity photo tag team Markus Klinko and Indrani are venturing into reality TV with their own Bravo network series. Called Double Exposure
Link: State of the Art: Two For The Show: Fashion’s Top Tag Team Hits Prime Time
Photography is f$cked. From Tony Sleep. Originally on the EPUK list. “The quaint notion that the author has prime and…
via duckrabbit: http://duckrabbit.info/blog/2010/02/photography-is-fcked-this-is-not-a-joke/
The end game is now in sight. The Digital Economy Bill introduces orphan
works rights, which – unless amended, which HMG says it will not – will
allow the commercial use of any photograph whose author cannot be
identified through a suitably negligent search. That is about 90% of the
photos on the internet.
“Restrepo,” a film made by photographer Tim Hetherington and writer Sebastian Junger about a platoon of US soldiers in Afghanistan, was shown on the opening night of Sundance Film Festival on Thursday.
Link: PDNPulse: Hetherington’s Afghanistan Film Opens Sundance Festival
The influence is not limited to photographers. At the opening of the Museum of Modern Art’s 1971 Walker Evans retrospective, Robert Penn Warren spoke of the first time he had seen Evans’s work: “….Staring at the pictures, I knew that my familiar world was a world I had never known. The veil of familiarity prevented my seeing it. Then, thirty years ago, Walker tore aside that veil; he woke me from the torpor of the accustomed.”
Link: AMERICANSUBURB X: THEORY: “Walker Evans: Public Photographs (1998)”
Alec Soth shot to notoriety before I dipped my toes in photography appreciation. He also terminated his treasured blog before I could jump aboard. I missed the early boat on Soth’s work and h…
via Prison Photography: http://prisonphotography.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/alec-soth-and-the-art-of-the-interview/
Alec Soth shot to notoriety before I dipped my toes in photography appreciation. He also terminated his treasured blog before I could jump aboard.
I missed the early boat on Soth’s work and have always felt quite maudlin about that. Really there is no need for my malaise; Soth has travailed the papers, the cameras and the blogs as widely as he has the American Interstates. He has left a busy legacy of interviews.
Link: lenscratch: Arlene Gottfried:
I’ve been seeing Arlene Gottfried’s name (and book titles) for sometime, but really didn’t know that much about her. So I thought I’d dig a little deeper…
Link: At Toronto Film Festival, Cautions on Documentaries – NYTimes.com:
The report found that documentarians, while they generally aspire to act honorably, often operate under ad hoc ethical codes. The craft tends to see itself as being bound less by the need to be accurate and fair than by a desire for social justice, to level the playing field between those who are perceived to be powerful and those who are not.
Movie Studios See a Threat in the Growth of Redbox – NYTimes.com:
Redbox’s growth — it started with 12 kiosks in 2004 and now processes about 80 transactions a second on Friday nights — has Hollywood’s blood boiling. Furious about a potential cannibalization of DVD sales and a broader price devaluation of their product, three studios (20th Century Fox, Warner Brothers and Universal) are refusing to sell DVDs to Redbox until at least 28 days after they arrive in stores.
Mellow actor gained intensity for gritty photojournalist
story:
And now he’s in Cannes to promote something a little less hunky and a little more serious: The Bang Bang Club, an upcoming movie, which may not be released for a year or so, about four real-life press photographers whose pictures of African suffering helped bring an end to apartheid in South Africa.
Kitsch plays Kevin Carter, a legendary photojournalist who took a picture of a starving child in the Sudan, dying, while a vulture perched nearby.
“By far the most challenging role I’ve ever had in my life,” he said, and for several reasons.
Apple – Movie Trailers – An Unlikely Weapon:
1/500th of a second to get the shot… a lifetime to forget it. Eddie Adams photographed 13 wars, 6 American Presidents, and virtually every cultural and historical figure of the last 50 years. History would be changed through his lens. But the photo that made Eddie famous would haunt him for his entire life.
AMC – Blogs – SciFi Scanner – John Scalzi’s Guide to the Most Epic FAILs in Star Wars Design:
Stormtrooper Uniforms
They stand out like a sore thumb in every environment but snow, the helmets restrict view (“I can’t see a thing in this helmet!” — Luke Skywalker), and the armor is penetrable by single shots from blasters. Add it all up and you have to wonder why stormtroopers don’t just walk around naked, save for blinders and flip-flops.