Toronto artist Robert Burley is currently documenting the fate of chemical photography, recording the abandonment and demolition of various Kodak plants. The films, papers and processing chemicals these factories produced will soon be obsolete, although Burley himself is still physically printing images from negatives, albeit ones he edits digitally. The most notable of Burley’s large, highly detailed colour photographs shows the implosion of buildings 65 and 69 at Kodak Park in Rochester, N.Y., where a crowd that includes people who worked in the plant busily snap pictures of its demise on their digital cameras. Whatever sacrifices it may demand, technology is irresistible.
-
in Photography
-
Airbrushing celebrity and model photos has become so common that it’s a popular pastime for magazine readers to spot the digital manipulations. But have photo editors gone too far?
-
It’s the biggest toy store in the world. But this one is for adults who won’t blink an eye at dropping a couple of million bucks on the latest satellite truck or news helicopter. PF Bentley and Dirck Halstead spent four days trudging the miles between the four huge halls at the Las Vegas Convention Center looking for the newest, the most impressive, and even the most bizarre items on display. Here is our report:
Check it out here.
-
10.65 GB.
That’s what I have to show after being laid off after five years at The Gazette in Colorado Springs, Colo.
While transferring files from the newspaper’s archive system to a 500 GB external hard drive it became painfully clear that only a fraction of the hard drive would be used to store my work that appeared in print.
Check it out here.
-
Mark Harmel reports that he was detained last Friday by the Beverly Hills Police Department after taking the above photo while standing on a public sidewalk
Check it out here.
-
Here are some new images the I recently shot in my family’s now closed business. Comments always welcome.
Images © Adam Marcinek
Check it out here.
in Photography
-
Almost eight years after al-Qaeda nearly sank the USS Cole with an explosives-stuffed motorboat, killing 17 sailors, all the defendants convicted in the attack have escaped from prison or been freed by Yemeni officials.
Check it out here.
in News
-
Over the last ten years, the art of photography has undergone a sex change. The rather masculine act of capturing or “shooting” a moment (“the hunt”) with a sound subject and composition has evolved into one where the real art comes in the editing, not the capturing. The initial “kill” gets skinned, dressed and prepared for a meal by the wonderful witchy post production tool known as Photoshop. The photographer, like a woman putting on make up at her vanity before going out for the evening, edits reality: the best features and colors are enhanced and sharpened, and a new, hyper-realistic art form, with a nod to surrealism of last century, is born.
Check it out here.
in Photography
-
so tonight is the Cute Hunter show at Secret Headquarters. you must come to it! or view it virtually..
Check it out here.
in Art & Design
-
The photojournalism award, which honors John Stanmeyer’s photographs in the “Bedlam in the Blood: Malaria also names Senior Editor David Griffin, Deputy Director Susan A. Smith, Design Director David C. Whitmore and Senior Photo Editor Sarah Leen. The article ran in the July 2007 NGM.
Check it out here.
in Contests
-
VII Photo hosted an intimate and emotional gathering in New York Thursday for friends and family of Alexandra Boulat, who died Oct. 5.
Boulat, a conflict photojournalist and a founding member of VII, suffered a brain aneurysm last June while working in Gaza and never recovered. She died in Paris, where she was with her family, and many attended her funeral last year in France. Today would have been her 46th birthday.
Check it out here.
in Obituaries
-
To people who work in television, this development is known as “the viewer plunge.” Last spring at the upfronts, a chilling number was widely whispered: 2.5 million fewer people were watching NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox than had in spring 2006. TV executives repeatedly reassured ad buyers that everything was A-O.K., but they also took to kitchen-sinking to explain away the plunge. Daylight Savings Time had come too early. Everyone was using TiVo and the Internet. The rating system is unfair. The war. The economy. The toxins. The bees. But things were going to be great in ’08.
And then came the writers’ strike. Combined with the viewer plunge, it was like the Depression and the Dust Bowl — a double whammy for television and its audience. The strike “orphaned” viewers (as the jargon has it) without their favorite shows, which gave viewers a reason to leave network television entirely. And they did. Sayonara. According to The Hollywood Reporter, most returning shows lost between 10 and 30 percent of the viewers they had before the strike, when ratings for the networks were already low.
It’s not immediately clear what all this means for the upfronts. How do you celebrate your wedding anniversary the year that divorce is imminent? Do you drink alone? Toast to old times?
Check it out here.
in Film & TV
-
The video ads on the Brawndo site, commissioned by Hottelet, feature members of Picnicface, a Canadian comedy troop, shouting hilariously over-the-top pitches: “It’s like a monster truck you pour into your face!” (The pitches actually owe quite a bit to videos Picnicface has made for a drink called Powerthirst — which doesn’t exist. I don’t think.)
Check it out here.
in Art & Design
-
In fact, “Guest of Cindy Sherman,” which was co-directed by Tom Donahue, feels more like three or four docs fused into one entertaining (and sometimes squirm-inducing) concoction. We get a sidelong view of the art world and its symbiotic relationship with commerce and celebrity, as well as an exploration of the awkward life of a famous person’s “plus one.” (H-O’s own complaints are bulked up by an amusing interview with Elton John’s companion, David Furnish.) At the center of it all is Sherman, in a fragmented portrait of a woman H-O calls “the most famous mystery girl of art,” a photographer who has used her own image as the basis for a hugely influential body of work.
Check it out here.
in Film & TV
-
The photo op.
Sen. Hillary Clinton had another one Wednesday. They’re usually staged before 1 or 2 p.m. to give crews time to edit the film and prepare their stories for the dinnertime news.
What TV viewers eventually saw was Clinton at a South Bend, Ind., gas pump with high prices. (See how she’s perfectly positioned so you can also see the prices? No accident. Although, truth be told, $3.75 a gallon looks pretty good to many Californians).
Clinton had along as a human prop commuter Jason Wilfing, allegedly on his way to work at a sheet metal factory. A real normal guy, no doubt, recruited by a Clinton advance worker for 12 of his 15 minutes of fame.
Check it out here.
-
After years of being out of production, the Diana camera has recently been reintroduced to the market, this time with pinhole and 6 x 6 format capabilities
Check it out here.
in Equipment
-
I met Kristen Ashburn in 2002 when she guest lectured at a class I was taking at the International Center for Photography with Andre Lambertson. She had been self-financing trips to Africa to photograph the effects of poverty and HIV/AIDS in Zimbabwe in black-and-white with her Rollei, and the images were stunning.
Check it out here.
-
If you were to invite John Gossage to photograph your neighborhood he could probably create an entire book’s worth of work within a few city blocks (or rural lanes). He is a photographer who could probably work anywhere more so than most in that the small details that he asks us to pay attention to are common in our landscape where ever we live.
Check it out here.
in Books
-
A Baltimore teenager was arrested early Wednesday morning and accused of assaulting a photographer from the Baltimore Examiner working on a story about school violence outside Reginald F. Lewis High School.
The 18-year-old male is being processed at Baltimore City’s Central Booking facility on charges stemming from the April 24 incident involving photographer Arianne Starnes, 24.
Check it out here.
-
Microsoft has today released Expression Media 2 for Mac and Windows, an update of the program formerly known as iView MediaPro, as well as a metadata editing and geotagging application called Pro Photo Tools for Windows.
Check it out here.