The Visual Student
My photo editor, Chris Clark, does a great job of keeping the photo department organized and making sure everything runs smoothly. One thing Chris was always reinforcing to me was the importance of being both a journalist and a photographer. I sometimes tend to get caught up in visual aesthetics, so it was good to have someone reminding me to get good information as well.
Guido Steenkamp is a member of the street photography collective Seconds2Real. Beginning initially as a Flickr group aimed at promoting street photography in both Germany and Austria, it has since grown from an online organization to a real-life collective with the first exhibition to be opened on October 14th in Berlin. Guido Steenkamp shares more about the collective from its beginnings to what is planned in our interview with him.
Feature Shoot
Henry Rollins, frontman for both Black Flag and Rollins Band, has been traveling the world for more than a quarter century. In recent years, he has decided to document his travels, which have taken him to countries such as Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Iran, and North Korea to name a few. His first photo book, Occupants, has just been published by Chicago Review Press.
Mel Rosenthal, an impassioned photographer and a mentor to many, is retiring from his teaching position at Empire State College. Michael Kamber, a former student, talked to him about his career.
via Lens Blog: http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/11/a-mentors-passion-for-pictures-and-social-justice/
I said: “I’m not an artist; I’m a messenger.” I go to a place to see what’s going on, bring it back for people to see, then I go to the next place. So I decided I would do half-shooting and half-teaching. It was great. I was able to teach and mentor and make my photos too.
dvafoto:
David Kasnic shared his work with me a few months ago, and we had a beer at a nice seedy Ukrainian bar in New York when I was last in town. He’s from the Pacific Northwest originally, like myself, and he is finishing a degree in photojournalism at Western Kentucky University. I wanted to ask him a few questions about this moment in his career and the pictures he has made lately.
Roadside stand near Birmingham, Alabama, 1936
“I didn’t like the label that I unconsciously earned of being a social protest artist.”
“The Thing Itself is Such a Secret and so Unapproachable”
George Eastman House, Image Magazine, Vol. 17., No.
via AMERICAN SUBURB X: http://www.americansuburbx.com/2011/10/interview-walker-evans-with-students.html
Walker Evans: I guess I’m the only survivor of my age of the school of non-commercial and extremely self-virtuous young artists that I was when I was your age. We wouldn’t do anything we were asked to do, and we fought around it. Of course that kills most people. For some reason or another it didn’t kill me. And I feel that since I’ve progressed rather slowly, I still have a long career ahead of me.
MW What inspired you to start taking photographs, and what is the primary inspiration for you to keep working in this field? NT I was intr…
Link: http://2waylens.blogspot.com/2011/09/nick-turpin.html
I have made mistakes a long the way of course, my biggest lesson was when I started to get Advertising work in New York and allowed myself to be bullied into working in a different way to my usual approach, the pictures where not good so the next time I shot for a big US Agency I behaved like a Prima Dona, ignored the client, demanded to use my usual little cameras with no tripod making spontaneous observations like I do on the street…..it was the best commercial Ad campaign I’ve ever shot.
by Jonathan Blaustein Jonathan: For good or for bad, I think it’s helpful to start at the beginning. I haven’t yet gotten into the Tarantino-style, Reservoir Dogs-type narrative. So how did you get started? How did your photography practice begin? Jesse:
via A Photo Editor: http://www.aphotoeditor.com/2011/09/27/jesse-burke-interview/
Do you need a graduate degree to become a good photographer? No. To be successful, or famous? Not necessarily. I certainly think it can help in many ways. It makes you a better photographer, a smarter individual, more worldly, more experienced. So all of those things will help you in your life, and your photo career.
The show in California, “More American Photographs,” is being organized by the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts. The idea was to commission a number of photographers to produce new work about America in the spirit of the Farm Security Administration photography of the ’30s and ’40s. I decided to use the most famous F.S.A. picture as my reference point: Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother (1936).” I’m fascinated by the whole notion of iconic pictures. Of the 80,000 F.S.A. pictures, why is this one so memorable? This is a particularly interesting question for a photographer working in the age of Flickr. So just as a painter might go to a museum and sketch from one of the masters, I attempted to make my own migrant mother picture. It was a fascinating exercise.
feature shoot:
In 2004 I started the Doppelgänger project. I was interested in exploring the concept of the Doppelgänger in a broader way. Doppelgänger in German means ‘double walker’, it is a ghostly double of a living person, an omen of death and a harbinger of bad luck. The idea of the Doppelgänger also allows me look the alter ego, the conscious mind vs the unconscious mind, inner conflicts, the duality between good and evil and split personalities – the concept gives me plenty of material to think about and work with
Pete Brook is taking his Prison Photography blog on the road.
via Lens Blog: http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/focusing-on-prison-photography/
Pete Brook is the writer and editor of the Web site Prison Photography and the lead blogger for Raw File, the photography blog from Wired.com. Mr. Brook, 31, is undertaking a 12-week journey across the United States to interview photographers who have focused on American prisons. For more information, see Kickstarter. This interview has been edited and condensed.
Last month the New Yorker Photobooth ran a sneak preview of Michal Chelbin’s tentatively titled Locked series. At the time, I responded with some personal frustration that her portraits didn&…
via Prison Photography: http://prisonphotography.wordpress.com/2011/09/18/worlds-without-smiles-prison-portraiture-by-michal-chelbin/
Last month the New Yorker Photobooth ran a sneak preview of Michal Chelbin‘s tentatively titled Locked series. At the time, I responded with some personal frustration that her portraits didn’t tell me enough of the subject’s experience. Having invited Chelbin to answer a few questions it is clear she uses ambiguity and mystery as tactics in her photography.
We were so taken by Damon Winter’s photo essay in the New York Times Magazine that we recently featured on The Daily Edit (Where Steel Meets The Sky) we decided to ask him a couple questions about it: Heidi: How long did the project take? I was given acce
via A Photo Editor: http://www.aphotoeditor.com/2011/09/15/damon-winter-where-steel-meets-the-sky/
We were so taken by Damon Winter’s photo essay in the New York Times Magazine that we recently featured on The Daily Edit (Where Steel Meets The Sky) we decided to ask him a couple questions about it:
Read the latest stories about LightBox on Time
via Time: http://lightbox.time.com/2011/09/09/smells-like-teen-spirit-tavi-gevinson-interviews-olivia-bee/#1
At 11, Olivia Bolles started shooting when she was enrolled in a photography class by accident. Now 17, the precocious Portland-based photographer’s portraits of teen life have appeared in campaigns for Nike and Converse, as well as American Photo magazine. Bolles—who goes by Olivia Bee professionally—spoke to fellow teen, Style Rookie fashion blogger Tavi Gevinson, to talk about her images and inspirations.
Noor photographer Yuri Kozyrev probably has one of the most coherent and comprehensive bodies of work on the Arab Spring. Hours before winning the Visa d’Or News award, he spoke with BJP’s Olivier Laurent about the sacrifices he had to make to document four revolutions in nine months
Stanley Norman Greene, one of this year’s winners of the Getty Images Grants for Editorial Photography and a celebrated photojournalist, speaks with BJP about his “E-Waste Trail” project and how film remains an important medium for him.
Chase Jarvis interviews Pulitzer Prize winning photographer Vincent Laforet and discuss photography, filmmaking, career, gear, and more.
via Chase Jarvis Photography: http://blog.chasejarvis.com/blog/2011/09/conversation-with-vincent-laforet-transcription/
The following is a transcription excerpt from a conversation a while back on #cjLIVE between yours truly and my dear friend, Pulitzer Prize winning photographer and filmmaker Vincent Laforet where we discuss gear, professional career, creative vision and more. We’ve got it on video (link at end of this post), but I think the transcript is nice because you can skim the conversation in just a couple minutes. And there are some nuggets in there from Vince…
The F Stop:
Imagine living by yourself in the middle of nowhere — not a living creature in site – and all you have to keep you company is a camera and a good book. This is what photographer Murray Fredericks did sixteen times for up to five weeks each time to create an epic body of work titled SALT. The series is a wonderful collection of still photographs and his journey to create the images was turned into an award-winning documentary.
In the past, Alain Dupuis would bring us five ready-to-be-published subjects, and edited. Today we receive 15,000 photos a day which don’t interest us. Not to speak of the 35,000 to 40,000 photos which arrive the day of a marriage in London or in Monaco. But those 15,000 images that arrive on an ordinary day have not been selected for us. They haven’t been targeted. There’s been a decline in professionalism all along the line of production. Everyone wants to go quicker, but there’s a loss in that.
Pivotal midterm elections in the United States are taking place on Tuesday November 2nd. President Barack Obama is under increasing pressure from the Republican Party and the Tea Party to maintain control of the U.S. Congress. We thought it would be interesting to look at an exclusive interview with Christopher Morris about the three videos he has done about the President and the difficulties he faces.