I spent two hours on a tour of the Sacramento County Jail today. They are beginning to open the facility up to public tours.
I’ve been in the booking areas before and I have had quick visits to different prisons. But here I had this intense feeling of solitude as I walked from floor to floor taking pictures.
Check it out here.
A fun, weird, extended photo trip started nearly a month ago with an unlikely beginning: midget wrestling.
Check it out here.
The State newspaper’s photography staff has been named Staff of the Year by the South Carolina News Photographers Association.
Based on points awarded in the still photojournalism portion of the SCNPA annual contest, points for first, second and third places and honorable mentions are divided by the number of staff positions.
Check it out here.
At first, I only looked at Francesca Romeo’s portraiture (especially “Series 1”), but her work from a cemetary (“Series 3”) has grown quite a bit on me now.
Check it out here.
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.
I needed some time to recover from my marathon road/plane trip covering the presidential campaign of Rudy Giuliani before posting anything here. I spent a week from sunrise to sundown with his campaign criss-crossing every corner of South Florida, where he spent most of his campaign rhetoric and dollars trying to secure the state, which he lost.
People always ask if it’s fun work following around a campaign, and to be honest, as tough as it was physically and mentally, it was fun. There is an aspect of witnessing history that I truly respect and admire I have the opportunity to do in this field.
Check it out here.
The post election violence in Kenya has killed nearly 1,000 and displaced 270,000. It is the most devastating violence to hit Kenya since its independence. Whilst politicians try to find solutions in Nairobi, the ethnic tensions in the Rift Valley reach new highs. Ethnic cleansing has led to killings and houses being burnt in a movement to shift different tribes out of their non-ancestral homes.
Huge parts of different cities across the valleys have been razed to the ground and the inhabitants forced to flee. In the villages, warriors from opposing tribes battle with bows and arrows, rocks and occasionally guns to gain or regain control of their land.
While the politician’s talk, the future of Kenya will depend, not on the final results of the discussions in Nairobi, but on the ability of Kenyans to forgive and live together again. That will take much longer.
Check it out here.
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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.
I got sent to Miami for three days for The New York Times for a piece on the Miami art scene post Art Basel. I can’t really say much more than it was an amazing time, met some really chill people and got a chance to just wander and make photos I wanted to make. We don’t get to do nearly as much of that these days in our business, so I took full advantage of making wrong turns, finding random wi-fi spots (thank you Denny’s), and taking in some spectacular shows.
These are only a fraction of the 80-picture edit I sent, but I’ll drop a few more on this blog in a few days when I get around to editing my stuff from my random side-trip to the fashion district – which is about as close to painted wall heaven as I have ever been.
Check it out here.
One of the most striking new bodies of work I’ve seen recently is a series of photographs made by the 30 year old photojournalist Jehad Nga. Taken in a Somalian café and lit only by a single shaft on sunlight, the images illuminate their subjects in the clandestine manner of Walker Evans’ subway pictures or Harry Callahan’s “Women Lost in Thought”.
Nga was born in Kansas, but moved soon after, first to Libya and then to London. In his early 20s he was living in Los Angeles and taking courses at UCLA, when he came across the book “Digital Diaries” by Natasha Merritt. The book, a collection of sexually intimate photos made with a digital point-and-shoot, convinced Nga that he could become a photographer. One year later he was traveling through the Middle East taking pictures.
Check it out here.
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Tom Rankin began photographing the sacred landscapes and spiritual traditions of the Mississippi Delta in the late 1980s when he moved there to teach at Delta State University. He returns to Mississippi regularly to photograph some of the same churches and cemeteries as they evolve and change over time, reflecting the ongoing life of these holy spaces. Rankin expresses his deep connection and attraction to the Delta and its religious practices in his book Sacred Space.
Check it out here.
I think we’re all aware that the portfolio website is a very important tool for photographers and I’ll go so far as to predict that it will soon replace printed portfolios (bold, I know), so I wanted to create a quick reference guide for photographers looking for templates or designers or examples of portfolios that I like.
Check it out here.
Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris
29 January – 13 April 2008
Photography project on world power inspired by the history of classical painting. Each part refers to painting by its subject and format and tries to explore in a conceptual way the mechanisms of power and history.
Most things come in three. A trinity structure has occurred during many reigns, empires and organized religion. 1. The leaders or gods, 2. the army or avenging creatures and 3. the people or representatives.
Figurative painting or drawing was for a long time the source for historical reflection and reporting. Format, color, glorification, imposing frames, mise en scene were elements of persuasion to create an overwhelming feeling of history and testimony.
Now, television and printed media have taken over this concept. 30 images per second and millions of pictures per day determine and influence in a direct or indirect way the global opinion and give a thin notion of reality and opinion. World leaders like CNN are the perfect example.
By going back to the idea of one large image representing a situation I try to reintroduce the element of time in dealing with images of reality. The viewer, in the museum, is forced by the sheer size of the image to look at it in a way some people do with paintings. Standing still, sitting or even kneeling in front of an image is encouraged like in less abundant media times.
The world ‘order’ changed after the atomic ‘Trinity’ project of the US.
Check it out here.
Richard Barnes has three interesting projects on his website. I absolutely love Murmur, which I originally came across on Mrs. Deane. It reminds me of Nicolai Howalt and Trine Søndergaard’s series Dying Birds, but I like how Barnes has captured the mysterious patterns that the birds make.
Check it out here.
For most people the word gypsy evokes a romantic image of a nomadic lifestyle. Although the traditional gypsy way of life was common all over Europe several decades ago, their number has dwindled during the past century and now they are mostly found in remote areas of Romania. Due to environmental and economic circumstances as well as governmental pressure, their way of life is threatened and facing inevitable extinction. The end of socialism marked the beginning of Roma/Gypsy decline from relative well being to extreme poverty. Low skills, discrimination, and the collapse of many state-owned industrial and agricultural enterprises during the transition period have contributed to their mass unemployment, along with rising illiteracy rates and deteriorating health, infrastructure, and housing conditions.
Check it out here.
Korengal Valley is among the deadliest pieces of terrain in the world for U.S forces. The six-mile long strategic passage is located in northeastern Afghanistan surrounded by treacherous mountain ridges, which are held desperately by the Taleban and al-Qaeda. Nearly one-fifth of all combat in Afghanistan occurs in this valley, and nearly three-quarters of all the bombs dropped by NATO planes target the surrounding area. The Valley is the first leg of a former mujahideen smuggling route that was used to bring in men and weapons from Pakistan during the 1980s
Check it out here.
Every photographer is limited by certain constraints—the subject of a story, an art director’s vision, a client’s directives—so the images he produces are not truly his own. You might say, then, that his most genuine work, the work that best reveals the clarity of his eye, is that which he produces just for himself. In this spirit we approached longtime Texas Monthly contributor Dan Winters—a California native and Hill Country transplant whose portraits of marquee-name celebrities also appear in such publications as the New York Times Magazine, Esquire, and Rolling Stone—and gave him an assignment unlike the dozens of others he’s completed for us since his haunting photo of a Huntsville prisoner graced our cover in August 1991: We asked him to sift through a career’s worth of unpublished shots (last year he processed 250 rolls of film he’d accumulated over some twenty years) and select a few of his favorites. The ten assembled here, most of which Winters had not even printed until now, were all taken with a handheld camera, available light, and for no other reason than to capture the beauty of a particular moment. “Even when I’m doing a color assignment and it’s a big dog-and-pony show with a lot of lighting and a lot of crew members, I’ll just take people aside and do a little bit for myself,” he says. The results are as intimate as they are revealing. Jordan Breal
Check it out here. Via A Photo a Day.
