Consider photography. As art-school photographers continue to shoot on film, embrace chiaroscuro and resist prettiness, a competing style of picture has been steadily refined online: the Flickr photograph. Flickr, the wildly popular photo-sharing site, was founded by the Canadian company Ludicorp in 2004. Four years later, amid the more than two billion images that currently circulate on the site, the most distinctive offerings, admired by the site’s members and talent scouts alike, are digital images that “pop” with the signature tulip colors of Canon digital cameras.
I am back in Afghanistan for the fifth time in two years. I have a lot in common with the British, Canadian and American soldiers deployed in the country. Like many of them, I have been here before and I have been under fire. And, dubious though the honour is, I am a member of an even more exclusive club: I have been shot during a gunfight.
There are differences between us, too. I am a photojournalist, not a soldier. I carry cameras and a notebook, not a gun. In the heat of battle, I am trying to stay alive, not trying to kill. The biggest difference – the one that surprises all the soldiers I meet – is that more than volunteering to be here, I overcome many obstacles to be an observer in this war zone.
BACK in the 1970s, a gutsy blond named Jill Freedman armed with a battered Leica M4 and an eye for the offbeat trained her lens on the spirited characters and gritty sidewalks of a now-extinct city.
Influenced by the Modernist documentarian André Kertész, with references to the hard-edged, black-and-white works of Weegee and Diane Arbus, this self-taught photographer captured raw and intimate images, and transformed urban scenes into theatrical dramas.
Her New York was a blemished and fallen apple strewn with piles of garbage. Prostitutes and bag ladies walked the streets, junkies staked out abandoned tenements, and children played in vacant lots.
“The city falling apart,” Ms. Freedman said one day recently in recalling that era. “It was great. I used to love to throw the camera over my shoulder and hit the street.”
The next day Dad’s stubborness crept back – a sign of recovery. He kept pushing his Nikon D70 (that he got used for a great deal from KEH he said) on me. Take it, he said. I don’t have the breath to walk around and shoot anymore. I kept refusing.
Several months ago, we about lost our crap when we heard that Beautiful Losers – the museum exhibit-turned-most brilliant coffee table book ever bound by mechanical means – would soon be joined by another extension of arty rectitude. Beautiful Losers, the documentary, would relate to the book and exhibit by way of subject matter, but would differ from the previous installments through one defining characteristic: The punk, skate, hip hop and graffiti subcultures it traced would take the literal form of the men and women that led the movement
Being weird is really trendy in the entire Pacific NW right now. Glad I don’t have to travel all the time to Seattle – Portland is nearly on par.
After some confusion (the 1st tee was changed at the last second… ???), I found the group of about two dozen golfers roaming the “greens” in North Portland.
There is a saying that the rivers of Columbia are the world’s biggest graveyard.
Columbian artist Erika Diettes is creating a light-filled memorial to the many thousands of the “disappeared” who are dead or missing as a result of armed conflicts in Columbia. Personal objects or clothing from people who have disappeared are photographed in turbulent water.
Last night at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Manhattan, the Overseas Press Club handed out its awards for journalism from abroad. The OPC awards include four very coveted photojournalism prizes.
Tonight senior staff photojournalist John B. Moore of Getty Images is being presented with the prestigious Robert Capa Gold Medal award from the Overseas Press Club of America at the organization’s sixty-ninth annual awards dinner in Manhattan.
The Capa award is given by the OPC in recognition of the “best published photographic reporting from abroad, requiring exceptional courage and enterprise.” It honors the legacy of the great war photographer Robert Capa of Magnum Photos.
Lt. Col. Billy Hall, one of the most senior officers to be killed in the Iraq war, was laid to rest yesterday at Arlington National Cemetery. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the Pentagon doesn’t want you to know that.
The family of 38-year-old Hall, who leaves behind two young daughters and two stepsons, gave their permission for the media to cover his Arlington burial — a decision many grieving families make so that the nation will learn about their loved ones’ sacrifice. But the military had other ideas, and they arranged the Marine’s burial yesterday so that no sound, and few images, would make it into the public domain.
When Zoo York asked Mark Owens and Matt Owens to design six decks for their artist series, we knew we’d be in for some of their standard-issue graphical, collage-esque awesomeness.
Earlier this month the Indian Premier League drew much heat for attempting to impose accreditation terms on photographers that required all material shot to be uploaded to IPL’s webserver, for their free use forever.
The second annual National Geographic magazine photography grant has been awarded to Jonas Bendiksen, a Magnum photographer who is working to document urban population growth.
The grant offers a documentary photographer $50,000 to work on a long-term project. Bendiksen proposed to document the population explosion in Chongqing, a city in western China that is considered the fastest growing metropolis in the world.
This video is of a man filming a cop who parked illegally in front of a fire hydrant. He follows her, asking questions, and she mostly ignores him. Then something truly disturbing happens.
A retired police woman comes by and informs the first cop, and the man filming that citizens aren’t allowed to film anybody who works for the police department “’cause of the terrorism.”
Two weekends ago I was out running errands and I stopped at the light at Franklin and Cahuenga which is pretty much the most northern end of Hollywood. I stop in the left hand turn lane, and dead ahead of me I see a billboard that shocks the crap out of me. It’s a Coca-Cola Zero ad with Evan Hecox-esque artwork. I studied it for as long as I could, and as I turned left I said to myself, “There’s no way Evan did that.”
In the world of photography, if you want to start an argument, just mention the 55-year-old English photo-documentarist Martin Parr. Parr’s passion for recording everyday frailties and humdrum tawdriness – a larkily colourful social panorama, taking in the unappealing scrum of mass consumerism, the curious rituals of the middle class and the messy indulgences of the super-rich – elicits a very traditional English reaction: it is not everybody’s cup of tea. Parr is a tremendous polariser. He’s either a pin-sharp satirical genius who tells uncomfortable truths with comedic flair – a view enthusiastically endorsed by subscribers to the trendy online photography site Flickr, which carries a message board dedicated to him entitled Martin Parr We Love You. Or he’s that heartlessly cynical smartarse whose pictures were once condemned by the late great Henri Cartier-Bresson, the father of modern photojournalism, as coming “from another planet”.
