Image Text Ithaca is leading the way in experimental and hybrid image-text photobooks.

As much as I appreciate whenever someone compliments or expresses admiration for my photography, there’s no shying away from the fact that in order for this to work as a business, I have to sweat the details, the dollars and all of the cents. Because my staff, my clients and my family depend on this.

The National Geographic Your Shot website and community is about to come to an abrupt end. According to a pop-up message posted on the Your Shot website, the site will be “discontinued” on October 31st, 2019, and “all engagement, assignments, and promotion of photos” will shift to the Your Shot Instagram account.

On a recent, sunny Friday morning, a group of journalists and photographers gathered on the roof deck of the Surfrider Malibu, a boutique hotel that looks out over the iconic surf break for which it’s named. We were there for a demo of a new feature from Surfline, an iPhone app best known for its surf forecasts. Called Sessions, the feature captures the waves surfers ride and downloads the videos to their phones. “The pro guys have their personal filmers documenting their every ride,” Dave Gilovich, Surfline’s chipper, sixty-seven-year-old brand director, said. “Well, Surfline Sessions is for the everyman.”

We’re gearing up for the second weekend of Photoville and couldn’t be more excited to wrap up one of our favorite photo events of the year. Produced by our friends at United Photo Industries, this free event in beautiful Brooklyn Bridge Park features a modular village made from repurposed shipping containers. It’s oozing with masterful photography, business tips, workshops and opportunities to meet the who’s who of the industry. It’s also in its eighth year, which inspired us to switch things up a bit for 2019. Instead of hosting our customary one-day educational panel discussions, we decided to fully dive in, exhibiting incredible PhotoShelter member imagery in a 40’ shipping container while also recording episodes of our podcast Vision Slightly Blurred nearby.

The real goal of a photo-a-day shouldn’t be a photo a day, but rather a tangible improvement at the end of a prescribed period of time. So shoot and Instagram all you want, just don’t expect your audience to share your enthusiasm.

The Guardian’s photography critic selects his top photobooks and exhibitions of 2019

The human body is an unusual sort of Instagram subject: it can be adjusted, with the right kind of effort, to perform better and better over time. Art directors at magazines have long edited photos of celebrities to better match unrealistic beauty standards; now you can do that to pictures of yourself with just a few taps on your phone. Snapchat, which launched in 2011 and was originally known as a purveyor of disappearing messages, has maintained its user base in large part by providing photo filters, some of which allow you to become intimately familiar with what your face would look like if it were ten-per-cent more conventionally attractive—if it were thinner, or had smoother skin, larger eyes, fuller lips. Instagram has added an array of flattering selfie filters to its Stories feature. FaceTune, which was released in 2013 and promises to help you “wow your friends with every selfie,” enables even more precision. A number of Instagram accounts are dedicated to identifying the tweaks that celebrities make to their features with photo-editing apps. Celeb Face, which has more than a million followers, posts photos from the accounts of celebrities, adding arrows to spotlight signs of careless FaceTuning. Follow Celeb Face for a month, and this constant perfecting process begins to seem both mundane and pathological. You get the feeling that these women, or their assistants, alter photos out of a simple defensive reflex, as if FaceTuning your jawline were the Instagram equivalent of checking your eyeliner in the bathroom of the bar.

But if lower prices have benefited Getty’s customers, they’ve also meant less money for stock photographers, who have seen their earnings steadily fall — in some cases to as low as a few pennies per image.

The app’s recent decision to get rid of ‘likes’ has been celebrated as a positive move for our collective wellbeing. But does it really make a difference?

We largely comprehend this world through pictures, whether we’re taking selfies or photographing a very distant celestial body with a satellite that’s rushing past it with a speed of 16.26 km/s (10.10 mi/s). Every photograph is an attempt to make sense of the world, even if only a few are acknowledged as that — those that we all could easily agree as being documents more than anything.

Patrick Hall from Fstoppers and Pye Jirsa from SLR Lounge recently sat down for an in-depth conversation about how photography is changing in 2019. In a fascinating and insightful discussion that lasts almost 45 minutes, they ultimately try to tackle one question: is photography as we know it dying?

Carmen Winant, the guest editor of the latest issue of The PhotoBook Review, is an alchemist when it comes to books—her practice as an artist is one of creation and transformation, an Ouroborus in which printed material is both created and destroyed. In the following conversation, I am joined by my colleague and contributing editor Brendan Embser, who has worked closely with Winant on other projects for Aperture. We spoke to her by phone as this particular issue developed, to talk about how her thoughts about bookmaking have been informed by her deeply held commitment to feminism and a critical approach to the depiction of women via the photographic image.—Lesley A. Martin