E&P announced today the winners in its 9th annual Newspaper Photos of the Year competition. The grand prizerwinner is freelancer Shiho Fukada, who is based in New York City and China, for her remarkable series of photographs following last spring’s tragic earthquake in China.
My old friend Michael P. King sent me a link to this preposterous tv show on ‘war photographers’ yesterday.
Bruce Gilden photographed and interviewed scores of people in South Florida who have lost their homes and are already suffering through hard times. Later this week, Magnum in Motion will present a multimedia package of Gilden’s work.
Elliott Erwitt and Alec Soth, two great photographers widely separated by their vision, style, and generations–but sharing a sense of irony, self-effacing wit, and a photo agency (Magnum)—took the stage at New York’s Javits Center last night to talk to a packed audience about their work and careers.
Capa said that he would rather have “a strong image that is technically bad than vice versa”. He realised early on that a little camera-shake created a dangerous air of bullets whirring overhead. In certain circumstances, then, technical imperfection could be a source of visual strength. When his pictures of the D-day landings were published in Life magazine, a caption explained that the “immense excitement of the moment made Capa move his camera”. The blurring actually came later, as a result of a printing error at the lab in London. In the excitement of receiving Capa’s films, most of the 72 pictures were completely ruined. Eleven survived, all wounded, maimed, but the darkroom accident imbued them with sea-drenched authenticity and unprecedented immediacy.
Five years ago Time photographer Callie Shell met Barack Obama backstage when she was covering presidential candidate John Kerry. She sent her editor more photographs of Obama than Kerry. When asked why, she said, “I do not know. I just have a feeling about him. I think he will be important down the road.” Her first photo essay on Obama was two and half years ago. She has stuck with him ever since.
I also knew that even though those good photos would be found in the crowd, my newspaper would only be interested in running one photo of Taylor Swift singing.
I guess I could have just shoot what was expected and leave it at that but the day I do that will be the day that the paper is looking for something different.
XDRTB.org is an extraordinary effort to tell the story of extremely
drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) and TB through powerful photographs
taken by James Nachtwey. XDR-TB, or extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis,
is a new and deadly mutation of tuberculosis. Similar in creation to
multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) but more extreme in its manifestation,
it arises when common tuberculosis goes untreated or standard TB drugs are
misused. James’ photographs represent these varying strains. Learn more about TB, MDR-TB and XDR-TB, and learn how you can take action to stop this deadly disease.
James Nachtwey is preparing to reveal his photographs, which highlight a shocking
and underreported global crisis. Over the past 18 months, the TED community
have been working with James to gain access to locations he wished to photograph,
and to prepare spectacular plans for unveiling these pictures.
Here’s the video from 2007 setting the scene in case you missed it:
Twice, over 24 years, Aditya Arya tried to open the boxes that photojournalist Kulwant Roy delivered to him, bit by bit, on his Lambretta scooter before he died, anonymous and impoverished, in 1984. But each time, he gave up. There was just too much in those boxes, explains Arya, an advertising photographer with a busy schedule.
There is still too much. On the eve of the first exhibition of Roy’s work, which opens at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) on October 3, thousands of Roy’s negatives, in neatly labelled boxes, remain unseen.
But the 7,000-odd that Arya has digitally scanned since December 2007—when he finally began to unpack the legacy that Roy, a family friend, had bequeathed him—are glimpses of a historical treasure house.
Last week I went to the opening of the new shows at the ICP museum but as always with openings it was difficult to take in the work properly, so today I went back to check them out, specifically the Susan Meiselas retrospective. I call it that because there is work from the most famous projects of her almost 40 year career on the walls and the accompanying catalogue is a weighty tome featuring beautifully reproduced photographs, essays and interviews, pages from her published books and all manner of notes and clippings which cover a lot of the work she has done so far.
Jean Francois does not believe photojournalism is dying or in turmoil. Instead, he believes that magazines and other media outlets have lost their way.
“They like to print Britney Spears. Angelina Jolie has twins isn’t that amazing news, oh my god. Michael Phelps wow what a star, I don’t give a s***,” is how he put it.
Now to all aspiring photographers, high school students with cameras, former and current chronicle staffers with cameras and other people just amused by me who read this blog. I will tell you the secret to my rise from lowly chrony photog to mediocre editor and photographer at a bi-weekly paper.
Last year, I was lucky enough to have some amazing students on my team at the Eddie Adams Workshop. When watching the final slideshow at the end of the weekend, it was hard not to take pride in the fact that our show was the best because their pictures were the strongest. That final night, you realize the entire weekend – headaches, no sleep, stress, juggling 10 things at once – was totally worth it and that it was rewarding in so many ways.
IN early 1968 Josef Koudelka decided to give up his job as an aeronautical engineer and devote himself full time to photography. It was a luminous moment in Czechoslovakia: the political reformist Alexander Dubcek had just come to power and lifted some of the Soviet-bloc-style restrictions on political freedom. The country teemed with excitement as the government ended press censorship and broached democratic reforms.
The final conference Saturday was probably the most interesting (and inflammatory) of the week. It focused on a photo that was made in South Africa by photographer Kim Ludbrook, who sent it to his agency, European Pressphoto Agency, which in turned pushed it to the wires. Jean-Francois Leroy explained that the photo had made it into one of the “year in pictures” slide shows for Visa before he found it and removed it. He reacted strongly against the image because of its content
we have read quite a bit in the “comments” about the “a good time was had by all” at this year’s Visa Pour L’Image (Perpignan)…and surely this was true….at least by most…however, this year’s photo fest, which celebrates conflict photography above all, was in fact, in itself, a scene of violence and death…
