During my last visit a few weeks ago to the Portland Art Museum I found myself captivated by this Eugene Goldbeck photograph. Perhaps it had been there before and I’d never noticed, or maybe it had been freshly circulated out of storage. In any case it held my attention for quite a while. There are 21,765 servicemen in the picture, each looking directly at the camera, and each face clearly visible. Not only were the logistics of such a theatrical shot unfathomable to me but the photo itself was very finely made, with beautiful tonality and clarity.
On where he got the human skulls, he claimed he got them from a cemetery, adding: “I did not kill anyone. I just got them from a burial ground. I swear, I did not kill them.”
The camera allows us access to the lives of our community everyday – sometimes it’s the sidelines of a football game, other times it’s following a candidate around the country. Then there are the times we get to witness the worst day of someone’s life. I had that opportunity recently for The New York Times a few weeks ago when I met the Hall family and watched as they said goodbye to their son, brother, and Marine.
In the last month or so I have judged four multimedia contests. After watching a bushel newspaper-produced video, I began to see a lot of patterns in the productions. Unfortunately, not all of it was good.
Now, three decades later, I certainly couldn’t see what remained of our house. From the air, it was all bush and sea, like a set for some movie of Africa 100 years ago. My hands clenched into fists. For 23 years I hid in America, remaking myself into a nondescript black American woman. I polished up my American accent so that I sounded as if I were from New York. I dumped my Liberian passport, got a job as a journalist, covered the Florida presidential recount and the Sept. 11 attacks and even embedded with the Third Infantry Division to cover my country’s invasion of Iraq. And with each new accouterment of my ever-evolving image, I further shed Liberia.
The Photojournalist Society of China (CPS) has stripped a photographer of a top award given for his picture of a vet vaccinating pigeons in front of Sophia Cathedral in Harbin, saying it was a fake, Beijing Youth Daily reported on Friday.
So our person-in-the-know this week is Åsk Wäppling. She is the Art Director (in addition to main muse and CEO) of Adland the commercial archive. So she looks at ads all day. In fact, she originally suggested a totally different ad campaign for this column, but couldn’t stop talking about this photographer Arthur Mebius; she wrote me back twice to sing his praises. So I decided to take a look at this fellow’s site, and I thought it was pretty fun. Here’s what Åsk says about him:
Police and state officials have been involved in a raid or a siege at the FLDS Church compound near El Dorado, Texas where polygamous followers of Warren Jeffs live.
Several police and state agencies are involved in the raid which began Thursday night, including Texas child protection service workers. Witnesses say an armored personnel carrier vehicle is also involved.
“Bra Boys” is a film about the cultural evolution of the inner-Sydney beachside suburb of Maroubra and the social struggle of its youth – the tattooed and much maligned surf community known as the Bra Boys. Central to the story is the true-life struggle of the Abberton brothers – Sunny, Koby, Jai and Dakota … one charged with murdering a Sydney standover man, another pursuing a professional surf career but charged as an accessory in his brother’s legal fight, another trying to hold the family together and a young brother whose inheritance is his siblings’ notoriety. The story is narrated by Academy Award-winning Australian actor Russell Crowe, and is told through the eyes of members of the Bra Boys.
“So, how is it that you managed to be on the roadway that night?” The question was posed by a reporter from the Dallas Morning News. This was in 1988, during an interview about my recently released film, “The Thin Blue Line.” I had decided for the first time as a documentary filmmaker to use slow-motion re-enactments in my account of the wrongful conviction of Randall Dale Adams for the murder of Dallas Police Officer Robert Wood.
The question seemed insane. The film was released in 1988. The crime occurred in 1976. Was this reporter suggesting that I had been out on the roadway with a 35-millimeter film crew the night of the murder, and just happened to be at the right place, at the right time to film the crime – over a decade earlier? Indeed, he was.
Just so there is no doubt about this: I wasn’t there.
Think back to the year 1981, some of us were still pissing ourselves, or not even born. Rick Springfield was singing Jesse’s Girl, Blonde was rapping to Rapture, Regan was doing some acting in the White House and Blek Le Rat was painting the streets of Paris. Unknowingly becoming one of the first pioneer stencil artist of the modern street art movement. Often overlooked by more well known media savvy stencil artists, Blek Le Rat was clearly behind many of the styles we see in the streets today. Although much of Blek’s early work was in the streets of Paris, It was not long before he was traveling the globe and leaving street pieces at every stop, and he still is today. -Manuel Bello
George Pitts is an industry mainstay, and a classy, classy gent. I mean, look at him!
He was kind enough to answer some questions I had for him about this crazy photosphere we live in. Listen to him, he knows some stuff.
In contrast, Viewfinder, which is not yet a commercial service, is intended to make it simpler for users to manually “pose” photos in services like Google Earth — to place them in the proper location and at the original angle at which they were taken. It is already possible to insert photos into Google Earth, but the researchers said their goal was to make the process an order of magnitude simpler.
“We specify that a 10-year-old should be able to find the pose of a photo in less than a minute, and we are convinced that this goal is achievable,” the researchers noted in a progress report today.
