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Olaf Otto Becker is one of my favourite landscape photographers. Given his new book Broken Line has just been released, I asked Olaf whether he would be up for a conversation, and I was very excited when he agreed to one.
Check it out here.
Category: Photography
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A Conversation with Olaf Otto Becker (Conscientious)
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The Master of the "Freeze-Frame" – The Digital Journalist
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I don’t know if Douglas Kirkland has ever thought of becoming a director, but all his images contain the rich, contradictory synthesis of the stills from a successful film. If he had become a director instead of a great photographer, he would have told stories of men and women on the run from reality, reckless lovers considered mad by the world around them, exalted in their attempt to make sense of the events in life which nobody around them can understand. The perfect stills in his book, Freeze Frame, in my opinion, make up his film. It does not matter that the story refers you back to other famous films; all directors quote the colleagues they love and Douglas uses them to narrate his film. The camera (let’s call it that) focuses on the central characters – isolated, laughing, tired, concentrated, in thought, arm in arm, in a trance, but always detached and far from the universe surrounding them, the universe to which they seem not to belong. A world which looks at them with indifference, as though they were misfits desperately searching for a connection, for an impossible story.
Check it out here.
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Freeze Frame: 50 Years of Fun and Fame – The Digital Journalist
Douglas Kirkland:
My first encounter with a movie star was with Elizabeth Taylor in Las Vegas. I looked directly into her violet eyes and said, “I’m new at this magazine. Could you imagine what it would mean to me if you gave me an opportunity to photograph you?”… A beat of silence, then she said, “Come tomorrow night at 8:30.”
The photo session was a great success and was published worldwide. Thus, my career working in the movie industry was launched.
All doors seemed opened to me and everyone around me vigorously encouraged all forms of experimentation. I carried my camera through this period with a child’s wide-eyed wonderment and exhilaration. I was living a fantasy and I felt my mission was to record everything, from the beat of the flower children and the fashion of the day, to the brightness and shadows in the lives of movie stars.
Check it out here.
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My Lover, My Life – The Digital Journalist
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We have fun, don’t we?” Douglas Kirkland calls from downstairs after a long day of working on this book, arguing and laughing. Editing thousands of images to create “Freeze Frame” was both an emotional and exhilarating process, watching our life through the work, discovering images we didn’t remember existed, seeing ourselves through the 40 years of our marriage.
Our relationship began in 1965 in Paris on the film set of “How to Steal A Million,” with Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole. I was a 21-year-old student at the Sorbonne; my mother worked for the film company. Douglas came to take pictures of the movie stars and romanced me by the Seine. We fell in love, continued our love affair while meeting in London, Rome, Venice and Madrid. It was my first taste of working together and it was wonderfully exciting and romantic. We eventually got married in Las Vegas late one night.
The Sixties and early Seventies were a period of abundance for photojournalism and we enjoyed the best of it. We lived like millionaires without the responsibility of being rich, staying in the best hotels of Europe and mingling with the “aristocracy” of the cinema. It was all very unpretentious, full of joie de vivre, and we embraced it heartily.
Check it out here.
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andreas weinand photography · straight photography with a personal view · © copyright : all rights reserved
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long-term photographic documentations, reflection on social identities
within the private and public spheresCheck it out here.
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+KN | Kitsune Noir » Kim Høltermand
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For the past couple weeks I’ve had Kim Høltermand’s site bookmarked, and I’ve been checking in on it every few days. Kim is from Frederiksberg, Denmark, and takes some of the moodiest, most beautiful photos I’ve seen. He has an incredible knack for extreme lights and darks, muted colors, and an affinity for the the sun. It’s also kind of interesting that’s he’s updated his site 3 times in the last week
Check it out here.
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The Ones We Love
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The Ones We Love is a project highlighting young and talented photographers from around the world. Each artist contributed six photographs of the person(s) who is most important to them, taken outdoors in a natural setting. The goal of the website is to portray the people who are loved, cherished, and inspirational to these artists, and also showcase the differences and similarities in the photographs each of them took within the same guidelines.
Check it out here.
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Ghosts of New York: Photographer Arlene Gottfried Captures Disappearing Gotham — Vulture — Entertainment & Culture Blog — New York Magazine
:Ask photographer Arlene Gottfried if she thinks the New York characters she’s shot for 40 years from Coney Island to Times Square and Harlem are freaks, and she bristles. “I don’t think they’re freaks, because then I’d be a freak, too.” With her little-girl Coney brogue (she and her brother, manic comic Gilbert, grew up there), old-soul eyes, and longtime avid membership in the Jerriese Johnson East Village Choir (she occasionally solos, she boasts), she’s a quiet defender of the grimily vibrant denizens of an older New York that’s disappearing daily. Now she’s their enshriner, too: Due out this week from powerHouse Books, Sometimes Overwhelming compiles images Gottfried took of the city in the seventies and eighties. An exhibit of Gottfried’s later work is also opening March 5 at the Alice Austen House Museum on Staten Island.
We interviewed Gottfried about some of her most striking images. An exclusive preview of photos from her book, and her memories of taking them
Check it out here.
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SUPERFICIALsnapshots: release
From Allison V. Smith:
Superficial Snapshots Zine 2: An Issue With Lomos
29 pages, 34 photos
limited edition. 250 signed copies.
(first 20 get signed 5×7 print–sold out)
$22.50 (add $3. to ship out of country)Check it out here.
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Shimmering 21st century anonymous portraits – lens culture photography weblog
:Armed with only a hand-held 35mm film camera, and using available artificial light, Russian photographer Alexei Vassiliev has created a series of stunning portraits of anonymous 21st century urban dwellers. A very slow shutter speed allows him to capture rich colors and blurred human gestures to create iconic images that evoke the essence of modern humanity without much of the detail.
Each image seems to speak of a different near-archetypal story to everyone who experiences them. Some see angels or auras or mythic mother-goddess figures. Others see souls trapped in a man-made cage and fluttering to escape. Others talk of Francis Bacon and the plight of 21st century life, or about the elusive similarities between these images and many 19th century painted portraits.
Check it out here.
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Photographer Edward Steichen at the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and Kunsthaus in Zurich – swissinfo
:Two Swiss museums are hosting the most comprehensive retrospective ever on one of the icons of 20th-century photography.
American photographer Edward Steichen, who died in 1973 two days short of his 94th birthday, had a career spanning 70 years, during which he never ceased to innovate.There certainly is a contrast between the 19-year-old who appears as a sharp silhouette in an early image and the “monument” who was responsible for a “photographic epic”, to use the title of the retrospective devoted to him by Lausanne’s Musée de l’Elysée.
Preparing the exhibition was an epic in itself. “The issue of copyright took ages to sort out,” said William Ewing, the museum’s director, at the preview. Most of the works of art belong to the world’s largest galleries and private collections.
If the exhibition reveals one thing about Steichen, it’s not his talent, but the abundance and diversity of his work
Check it out here.
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Leo Benedictus asks what's it like to photograph somebody famous? | Art & Architecture | Guardian Unlimited Arts
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What’s it like to photograph somebody famous? Or to be that famous person, posing for a photograph? Leo Benedictus picks three great portraits – and hears both sides of the story
Check it out here.
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One Image – 17 Amazing Interpretations at CameraPorn
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Several weeks back, I posed a challenge to CameraPorn readers. Take an image I dug out of my archives in the form of three bracketed exposures and retouch it into the best final image possible. The “Revisit & Retouch” project was meant to be an exercise in compositing these bracketed exposures into one image, taking details from each, but what it became was an interesting and educational view into the personal style of each of the entrants.
After the jump we have 17 different interpretations and the best part, everyone gets to vote for their favorite image…
Check it out here.
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PDN's World in Focus: The Ultimate Travel Photography Contest 2008
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The more than 80 images showcased on the following pages were submitted by photographers who found picture-worthy moments in places as diverse as Antarctica and the Libyan desert, as well as locations that hit a little closer to home. So whether it’s Faisal Almalki’s snapshot of a man and his camel in Cairo or Ramin Talaie’s photograph of more than 2,500 Lubavitcher Rabbis in Brooklyn that catches your eye, these entries will give you a glimpse of the world.
The contest was judged in six categories: Human Condition, Extreme Exploration, Urban Landscapes, Snapshots, Wilderness and Open Series. The judges’ choices for Grand Prize and First Place in each category are shown on the followin
Check it out here.
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A Photo Editor – How to Manage People
I consider myself a pretty good people manager but it took me a long time to become one. I’ve always been good at working with photographers but it took quite a bit of work to become good at managing the people under me and I only really figured it out in the last year or so.
The greatest piece of advice I ever read (out of 20 or so business books) goes something like this: Taking someone else’s idea and increasing the quality by 5% occurs at the price of a 50% decrease in their commitment to execution (here’s a recent explaination on the Harvard Business blog).
Check it out here.
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5B4: The Cows by Larry E. McPherson
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Most of the books that I have written about contain within their photographs an implied metaphor or meaning that provokes the viewer into different frames of mind. One of the pleasures in looking at work for me is to tease out these meanings that derive partly from the work and partly what my own history enables me to see in the work. There are other photographs that excite but with an innocence steeped in the purest pleasures of looking and examination of a subject clearly and interestingly described by an artist and camera. Larry E. McPherson’s The Cows published by Steidl is such a book that I enjoy for just these reasons.
Check it out here.
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PDNPulse – Picapp, Making it Legal
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I’ve been playing around with the beta version of PicApp, a service that promises to let bloggers publish high-quality professional photos online for free. Bloggers do this anyway of course, but PicApp aims to make it legal. To start, PicApp has a deal with Getty Images to make Getty photos available through the service. Bloggers use a string of code to embed the image, a process familiar to anyone who has ever published a YouTube video. The photo appears with caption and credit information and contextual advertising.
Check it out here.
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Photo Attorney: Tax Time for Photographers
Taxes are taxing enough, but photographers often have more challenges, such as how to depreciate equipment and account for part-time income. Advice from a CPA is the best way to address your specific needs. But if you go it alone, here are some resources for help.
Check it out here.
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SHANE LAVALETTE / JOURNAL » Blog Archive » Inagural New York Photo Festival Launches in May, Promises to be Awesome (and Probably Will Be)
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The New York Photo Festival seems to have started on the right foot with a very solid line up of curators for 2008: photographer Martin Parr, Aperture publisher Leslie A. Martin, photographer Tim Barber (aka Tiny Vices) and photo editor for the New York Times Magazine, Kathy Ryan
Check it out here.
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Virginia Beach police seize photos from Abercrombie store | HamptonRoads.com | PilotOnline.com
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Police, saying they were responding to citizen complaints, carted away two large promotional photographs from the Abercrombie & Fitch store in Lynnhaven Mall on Saturday and cited the manager on obscenity charges.
Adam Bernstein, a police spokesman, said the seizure and the issuance of the summons came only after store management had not heeded warnings to remove the images.
The citation was issued under City Code Section 22.31, Bernstein said, which makes it a crime to display “obscene materials in a business that is open to juveniles.” He did not say what was being done with the pictures and when the manager, whose name was not released, is scheduled to appear in court.
Check it out here.