Category: Photography

  • Heroes of Photography

    Heroes of Photography


    (Thanks to A Photo A Day for pointing this out to me.)
    From American Photo, “a tribute to ten photographers who inspire us”:

    Not one of the photographers featured on the following pages wanted to be called a hero. We sympathize: The word is immodest and certainly overused these days. Nonetheless, we can’t help but consider them heroic, and when you read their stories, we think you’ll understand why.

    The photographers are:
    Phil Borges, John Dugdale, Timothy Fadek, Stanley Greene, Chris Hondros, Yunghi Kim, Joseph Rodriguez, Fazal Sheikh, Brent Stirton, Hazel Thomspon

    The photo above is from Stanley Greene. His book on Chechnya, Open Wound, sits on my bookshelf. It’s too powerful to go through in one sitting.

    Links:
    American Photo’s Heroes of Photography
    A Photo A Day

  • Cerealism – Ernie Button

    Cerealism – Ernie Button

    PhotoEye:

    So, there sat King Vitamin next to a new version of Cap’n Crunch, Choco Donuts, on a recent trip to the grocery store. Looking at the rest of the cereal aisle, it is clear that breakfast cereal has changed. The cereal aisle has become a cornucopia of colors with marshmallows that resemble people and objects and characters from movies. It’s apparent that cereal is not just for breakfast anymore; it’s playtime. In keeping with the playtime theme, I began to construct landscapes that would utilize the natural earth tones of certain cereals. I placed enlarged photographs of actual Arizona skies (e.g. sunsets or monsoon clouds) in the background of the cereal landscapes giving the final image an odd sense of ‘reality’. Other cereals that were more vibrantly colored or made to resemble people and objects were calling out to have their portraits taken, to be the center of attention. Cereal has transformed into cultural pop objects instead of just corn pops.

    Here.

  • The Studio Episode 1

    J. Garner Photography:

    GUYS, THIS IS A JOKE! Please don’t take these episodes literally. “Image” is NOT everything. For JGP, humility, character & professionalism are the real virtues. We’re just simple wedding photographers, having a GREAT time!

    Here.

  • Interview: SCOTT STRAZZANTE

    Interview: SCOTT STRAZZANTE

    A Photo a Day:

    Since October 2001, besides a couple studio shoots, I have not used a strobe once. Why? First, I want to document reality and that includes the light, If something happens in a dank dark room, I don’t want it to look pretty, I want it to look dank and dark.

    I also am very confident in my ability to find light in low light situations. I shoot a lot of photos and if 98 out of 100 have motion blur, it always seems that the two sharp ones are the best moments.

    Another reason is that I hate using a strobe in a situation where I am trying to be stealth. The less attention I get the better.Here.

  • Innovator and Master, Side by Side

    Innovator and Master, Side by Side

    NYT:

    In 1932 the young Henri Cartier-Bresson, lately returned from Africa, saw a photograph of African children charging into waves on a beach. “I must say that it is that very photograph which was for me the spark that set fire to fireworks,” he recalled years later. “I couldn’t believe such a thing could be caught with the camera. I said, ‘Damn it,’ took my camera and went out into the street.” What Cartier-Bresson produced during the next few years, as the curator Peter Galassi once wrote, became “one of the great, concentrated episodes in modern art.”

    How much the African photograph actually shaped this work is debatable, but it struck a chord. It epitomized the combination of serendipity and joie de vivre that Cartier-Bresson admired: three naked boys, their silhouettes against white spray and sun-drenched water, making a perfect geometry.

    The man who shot the picture was Martin Munkacsi. Hungarian-born, a star of Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, the leading illustrated German newsmagazine, Munkacsi was then one of the most celebrated photojournalists. He reached a pinnacle of fame and fortune in New York later that decade, claiming to be the highest-paid photographer in the world (he was notoriously self-mythologizing), revolutionizing the American fashion magazine under Carmel Snow and Alexey Brodovitch at Harper’s Bazaar.

    Here.

  • Thinking in Terms of Collections

    Thinking in Terms of Collections

    Thomas Hawk:

    Another project I’d like to create is a some kind of a page of portraits that I’ve taken of people with blogs. The page would be a giant collage of thumnails and as you hovered over every small thumbnail it would zooom and pop up a larger portrait of that person with a link to their blog underneath. A pictorial directory of blogs. A way to humanize blogs to some small degree.

    I’d like to fill an entire men’s rest room with images of women, an entire women’s rest room with images of men and a unisex restroom with images of women and men. I’d like to cover interiors and exteriors of buildings with 8×10 photographs. Plastering every inch. I’d like to use my collection of macro images of children’s toys to cover a child’s play room.

    One thing above all that is important in my own personal collection of images is that each image must alone and by itself be interesting. It must be processed and presented with love and care to the world and suitable to exist alongside the other images in the master collection. Anyone can take one million photographs by setting the camera on rapid fire and shooting the same thing over and over and over again and dumping random shots onto the internet. I want to keep the quality of my images consistently high allowing only processed images that I feel meet a high enough quality bar to present.

    Here.

  • Apple employee photo series

    Apple employee photo series

    Photographer Joshua Brown:

    Selection from a portrait series of 50 (of about 300 that I have photographed so far) of my coworkers in a conference room.

    Here.

  • Gursky's "99 Cent" Prints Fetch Millions At Auction

    Gursky's "99 Cent" Prints Fetch Millions At Auction

    PDN:

    Most recently, an anonymous bidder paid $2.48 million – with a sense of irony, one hopes – for Gursky’s “99 Cent II Diptychon” (2001), which shows the cluttered interior of a discount store.

    The sale, made at a Nov. 16 auction at Phillips de Pury & Company in New York, set an auction record for a work by a living photographer. It fell short of the record for the highest price ever paid for a photo at auction, which was set in February when a 1904 Edward Steichen print sold for $2,928,000.

    The work sold at Phillips consists of two chromogenic color prints displayed as a diptych that measures over 22 feet wide. The work is one of an edition of six.

    Here.

  • Scanning, Safety, M8

    Joe Reifer:

    I’d rather go to the dentist than spend hours scanning negatives. This evening I remembered why I got interested in digital SLRs 5 years ago. I hate scanning. After watching volume 1 of Contacts, I decided to shoot a roll of Tri-X over the Thanksgiving holiday. Even though I own a bunch of fancy SLR gear, I would way rather shoot with a Leica rangefinder. I’m not going to wax poetic about how the Leica M6 is the most perfectly pleasing 35mm camera I’ve ever used, or how the 35mm f/2 ASPH lens has microcontrast and bokeh to die for, I promise. But it’s true.

    What I’m going to say is one $4 roll of film, a $12.50 develop and contact sheet, two trips to the lab, and hour and a half of scanning my favorite images later, I remember why I gave this process up. What a pain. Not to mention the cost per shot is about 45 cents (Hey, I’m too lazy to soup my own negs anymore).

    Here.

  • Art flaps fade away, but Sturges and his nude photos thrive

    SF Chronicle:

    The photographs themselves, to my eyes, are more troublesome. The bodies on view, to a one, are all youthful, fit and lean. A warm bronze light prevails. But, somehow, in all this celebration of the body beautiful, there’s a nagging vacancy — in the models’ abstracted expressions and a slack structure and framing of the scenes. The elaborate picnic table shot seems artily contrived. So does the one of the two boys on the deck. Sturges’ photos have always looked a little stagey and arch to me, a little too studied in their bucolic innocence — of doorframe poses, riverside sun bathing or dogs casually flopped down at the feet of statuesque nudes.

    Color presents fresh complications. Color literalizes, as it spells out every limb, hair and nipple in realistic, high-resolution detail. It challenges a photographer even more to discover an essence, to make us see the thing that’s plainly there but that we might not otherwise have registered. Sturges’ photographs just don’t do that very much. There’s something coy, whether by intention or not, about the way they invite us to puzzle out their meanings and then so consistently resist that kind of looking.

    It’s not that Sturges exploits his subjects. Nothing in his work or history proves it. But he does expose them, without exposing much of anything about them. You don’t feel drawn into the mystery and wonder of the nudes he photographs. You see them and move on to the next and the next. Maybe Sturges just isn’t an especially good photographer — a possibility that he himself readily acknowledges. That doesn’t make him a pornographer by default. But it might make him a kind of poster boy for the dilemmas of photographic imagery in the Internet age. In the forthright yet strangely blank nature of his work, in its uncensored volume and digital technologies, Sturges presents the reflective image of a computer screen. Here, here it all is, his photographs say to us. Make what you will of them. That’s your private business, not mine.

    Here.

  • studio

    Alec Soth:

    Curious about my studio. Have a look here.

    *pictured are Phillip Carpenter, Eric William Carroll, Linda Dobosenski, Brian Lesteberg and Josh Grubbs.

    Here.

  • What’s Wrong With This Picture?

    What’s Wrong With This Picture?

    NYT:

    If this sounds confusing, that’s the nature of chaos, which can be as hard to photograph as it is to describe. Fortunately, Robert Polidori is a connoisseur of chaos, and the beauty of his pictures — they have a languid, almost underwater beauty — entails locating order in bedlam.

    The X of wires and the diagonal thrust of that green house, extending horizontally across the photograph, are vertically anchored by the telephone pole, creating a tranquillity in the composition that belies the actual pandemonium. Given bearings by this geometry, a viewer is set free to find details like the teetering stop sign on the street corner where the green house landed: a black-humored punch line.

    All artists, as best they can, make sense of a world that is often senseless. Mr. Polidori’s work, from Chernobyl to Havana — in sometimes dangerous, topsy-turvy, out-of-time places — generally bears witness to profound neglect. A photojournalist’s compulsion and problem is always to contrive beauty from misery, and it is only human to feel uneasy about admiring pictures like these from New Orleans, whose sumptuousness can be disorienting. But the works also express an archaeologist’s aspiration to document plain-spoken truth, and they are without most of the tricks of the trade that photographers exploit to turn victims into objects and pictures of pain into tributes to themselves.

    Here.

  • Photographer Corey Arnold

    Photographer Corey Arnold

    Corey Arnold, 30, is a Freelance Photographer and Alaska Crab Fisherman. During October, January, and February you will find him working and photographing aboard the f/v Rollo in the Bering Sea. The rest of the year he lives in Norway or San Francisco and spends the working hours photographing for exhibitions, art projects, books, magazines, bands, and advertisments. Recently, Corey has been focused on making pictures aboard fishing and whaling vessels in Northern Norway and Alaska (His so-called “life project”) You might have seen him as a deckhand aboard the f/v Rollo in the Discovery Channel’s emmy nominated series “Deadliest Catch”. He is also the co-founder and editor of Fisk Magazine, a new international “Cultural” fishing magazine which will launch in September 2006.

    Here.

  • Arnold Newman, Portrait Photographer Who Captured the Essence of His Subjects, Dies at 88

    Arnold Newman, Portrait Photographer Who Captured the Essence of His Subjects, Dies at 88

    From the New York Times:

    Mr. Newman photographed so many of the world’s most prominent and accomplished men and women that it sometimes seemed as if there was no public figure that his lens had left untouched. But there were subjects he generally steered clear of: actors, actresses, rock stars and anyone he considered, as he put it, “famous for being famous.”

    “I hate the whole idea of celebrity,” he said.

    Here.

  • A picture is truly worth 1000 words

    From The Spectrum:

    My life, though, is about to get a lot easier. The Daily News finally has a “real” photographer on staff.

    A month after I introduced you to our new-look reporting staff, I’m happy – thrilled, actually – to introduce you to Garrett Davis, who has more photography talent in his right index finger than I have in my entire body.

    Just look at his photo on this page. The one of the American flag on the rooftop at Steve Giger Auto Sales. Cool, huh?

    Here.

  • Henry Wessel: Capturing the Image, Transcending the Subject

    Henry Wessel: Capturing the Image, Transcending the Subject

    From The New York Times:
    MOST musicians I know don’t just play music on Saturday night,” Henry Wessel explained. “They play music every day. They are always fiddling around, letting the notes lead them from one place to another. Taking still photographs is like that. It is a generative process. It pulls you along.”

    Here.

  • Andrew D. Bernstein at the Sports Shooter Academy (video)

    Andrew D. Bernstein at the Sports Shooter Academy (video)

    From SportsShooter:

    This is video from NBA senior photographer Andrew D. Bernstein’s presentation at the Sports Shooter Academy 2, held April, 2006 in Southern California. Bernstein has been shooting the NBA since 1981 and has photographed every NBA Finals and NBA All Star game since 1983. His company, Bernstein Associates, Inc., has served as the official photographer for most of Los Angeles’ professional sports teams, including the Lakers, Dodgers, Clippers and Kings. In addition, Bernstein holds the position of Director of Photography for STAPLES Center, the sports and entertainment complex in Los Angeles.

    Here.

  • C-Heads Magazine #2

    C-Heads Magazine #2

    Make sure you look at photographer Adriano Avila’s images from Brazil, in C-Heads issue #2.
    From Creative Heads:

    We proudly present the second issue of C-Heads!

    This issue contains great artists, touching and amazing pictures and music for the soul.

    Here.

  • Hamburger Eyes Magazine

    Hamburger Eyes Magazine

    From Hamburger Eyes:

    When opening Hamburger Eyes Photo Magazine you enter a pictorial history of both the unseen and iconic moments of everyday life. It is organized in such a way that it has become many things to many people. As a photo journal, we share our travels and experiences. As a photo diary, we share our accomplishments and heartaches. And as a photo album, we share our families and friends and reach people on a level they have been familiar with since their first birthday party. Our publication is currently composed of black + white photography. We have contributions from photographers of all levels. Inspired by the traditions that began with National Geographic and Life Magazine, we hope to revitalize the sensation of photography as a craft as well as a tool to record and document.

    Here.

  • Staying Sharp: veteran news shooter seeks new challenges

    Staying Sharp: veteran news shooter seeks new challenges

    From RobGalbraith:

    “You have to set a goal for yourself every year,” Dresling says, explaining what that experience taught him. “I do it partly because it’s fun, but also to keep myself on my toes because if you let everything roll over you, you’ll be out of business in a short period of time.”

    Here.