Scott Strazzante of the Chicago Tribune and Jenn Ackerman, a graduate student at Ohio University, won top honors as 2008 Southern Photographer of the Year and 2008 Southern Student Photographer of the Year, respectively, this weekend. Strazzante also won Best of Show with his diptychs entitled “Echoes from the Past” pairing his coverage of a disappearing family farm shot earlier this decade and new homeowners on the same land shot in 2007. The winners were officially announced today by yours truly on the closing day of the Southern Short Course in News Photography in Charlotte, N.C.
What has actually happened is many photographers have evolved beyond the wants and needs of the newspaper. We are shooting stories that don’t get published and shooting personal projects to keep our brains stimulated. The ‘cat sat on the mat’ images pay the bills. In many ways it is a sad reflection of photojournalism today, there are so few places where top end photojournalism can be seen.
I have made one of the hardest decisions of my life; I’m leaving the newspaper business — this Thursday, to be exact, when I will work my last day at the Daily Press of Newport News, Va. This is the first time a career decision has kept me up at night, because I am still passionate about photojournalism and love being a newspaper photographer. But the recent changes in the industry, and years of job instability, pushed me to explore other options.
Photographer Peter Krogh (author of the excellent The DAM Book, the Rapid Fixer extension for Bridge, and more) recently completed an ambitious & enormous digital imaging project: photographing all 58,256 names listed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, enabling the creation of an interactive online version of the wall. By stitching together some 1,494 digital images into a 400,000 pixel by 12,500 pixel monster, Peter & colleague Darren Higgins were able to help create a Flash-based presentation that enables you to search for names, read servicemen’s details, and add notes and photos to the wall.
Dith Pran, a photojournalist for The New York Times whose gruesome ordeal in the killing fields of Cambodia was re-created in a 1984 movie that gave him an eminence he tenaciously used to press for his people’s rights, died in New Brunswick, N.J., on Sunday. He was 65 and lived in Woodbridge, N.J.
An artist who was put on trial for her role in a controversial exhibition titled “Caution, Religion!” has disappeared in Berlin, where she had been living since November, German police said.
Anna Mikhalchuk, 52, left her home in the Charlottenburg district of the German capital on March 21 and has not been seen since, Berlin police said in a statement posted on their web site Wednesday.
That dream, a nightmare, really, flashed through my mind as I stood at the end of a filthy, pothole-riddled alley talking with a small-time deputy commander in the Mahdi Army, the militia that is the armed wing of Mr. Sadr’s political movement. Standing there with his arms folded over his potbelly as his fighters scurried about behind him, the man who called himself Riadh, 34 years old, was effectively deputy commander of an alley.
“We can’t face the armored tanks of the Americans face to face, because all we have is light guns,” he said. “So we just wait for a chance to attack something.”
The world’s most comprehensive collection and overview of photography from China is currently on display in a mammoth city-wide exhibition in Houston, Texas, as part of FotoFest 2008. This is a tremendously ambitious and successful presentation of the important roles that photography has played in the dramatic flux that has defined and re-defined China over the past 74 years.
any minute now, William Albert Allard will walk through my door….i have not asked him, but i will put him on the spot with any of you who happen to be “on” right now….he will probably be here for a couple of hours or so…since his name comes up quite a bit here, most recently on the previous post, i thought you might enjoy having a word with him…so ask the boy a question or two…i will try to keep him here as long as possible…..
My photo opportunities have now expanded without being tied to my ridiculously large collection of Yashica T4’s , Contax T2’s and Leica Minilux (plural) and the increasing expense of shooting film. Just deciding which one to use kills me every time.
John Moore of Getty Images was picked as the NPPA 2008 Best Of Photojournalism competition’s Photojournalist of the Year (Larger Markets) today at the end of the final round of judging in this year’s contest at The Poynter Institute for Media Studies.
He lives and works in Berlin Somewhere in a subway under neutral lighting Pablo Zuleta Zahr has set up his video camera in front of a monochrome wall and held out for ten hours. In such places, one can’t distinguish between day and night and it’s only through the frequency of passers- by that one can decipher whether it’s bedtime or rush hour. But the video that forms here is in no way the product that we get to see. What he gathered in two ten-hour sessions in Santiago de Chile serves solely as material. Everyone that passes the camera is separated out later. Filed away, the passers-by await a new ordering in the panorama, sorted by clothing criteria. In doing so, no one is forgotten, no one is manipulated, no one appears twice.
Matt Stuart photographs the unscripted drama of the London streets. Entirely spontaneous, his pictures are made possible by a combination of instinct, cunning and happy coincidence, revealing the beauty and significance of the everyday – what the rest of us see but don’t notice, moments that vanish faster than the blink of an eye.
For his efforts, Stuart has picked up a little collection of pink stop-and-search slips, souvenirs of practising a century-old art form in a city increasingly paranoid and authoritarian. After 11 years, Stuart is something of an old hand. Using the street photographer’s traditional tool of choice – the discreet and near silent Leica camera – he knows how to make himself invisible, make an image and move on. He rarely runs into trouble; when he does, he knows his rights.
In between battles, fighters spoke about politics and war. There was no sign of dread, or grief, or fear. Death was a matter of honor, a shortcut to some divine place.
As the two sides exchanged fire, Thahabi’s mother, Um Falah, clutched a Koran and began to recite a prayer to Imam Ali, Shiite Islam’s most revered saint. Her eldest son, Abu Hassan, a Mahdi Army commander, was fighting this day.
“May Ali be with you,” said Um Falah, who wore a black abaya and round eyeglasses. “I pray that all the bullets will not affect you.”
Half the history of Converse is about basketball, and the rest is about something far more complicated, about the ways a plain sneaker is consistently adored by anticonsumer consumers. A Converse on a teenager now is about remaining authentic and cool, while selling out in every possible way. It is perhaps the neatest trick in footwear history, and who would have thought it, when Marquis Mills Converse first started making simple, rubber-soled work shoes at a factory outside Boston in 1908?
You have heard by now that Polaroid film is dying. Rightfully, no, but inevitably, yes, and we have few words to appropriately state our reaction (of the few we have, the following do share company: appalled, mystified, f*cking pissed).
Of course, while we are all justified in experiencing some emotion over this unnecessary loss, there are those among us who have even more right to mourn (see also: picket, riot, send death threats, etc.). One of them is Grant Hamilton, an Iowa City-based professional photographer who cites a 1975 Polariod SX-70 as his camera of choice – and who will, come next year, be to find a new medium.
Join us as we A) Take a moment of silence for a great thing lost; and B) Chat with an artist who is approaching some serious changes.
Travel represents one of the most popular content submission areas for the PhotoShelter Collection, and as such, we are becoming increasingly more selective about the types of images that we accept. The following guidelines are prescriptive for travel photography, although some concepts will extend into the general realm of stock photography.
