Andrew Bush’s “Vector Portraits” – a series of pictures taken while driving alongside his subjects on the freeways of California – was one of the signature photographic series of the 90s. Original, perceptive, and with a fresh conceptual twist, it explored the culture of Los Angeles as well as issues of privacy, danger, and the American dream
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I’m out pounding the pavement from 6am to 6pm every day, learning about the culture through observation and interaction. Many photojournalists cover their assignments as quickly as possible so they can remove themselves from the elements, but I revel in the elements. I don’t have any technical or artistic preconceptions to my photos. The whole idea of spending an hour setting up a shot and then photoshopping it to death afterwards is not what I’m about. I just capture life as it is, then move on. If the picture turns out crooked, so what! Life is crooked!
I have no desire to make something palatable, even if it means not getting on Getty. On the other hand, any of my photos that are considered beautiful I credit entirely to my subjects. They are the ones who deserve the compliments.
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Thank you all for your support, emails and comments. I have had received a lot of emails about my project, Trapped: Mental Illness in Prison, with similar questions so I decided to answer them here.
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I believe that there are two camps of philosophy when it comes to sports photography.
One side likes action photos and the other prefers reaction shots.
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With his first feature, Dawn of the Dead (a remake of the classic zombie film), on the horizon, Zack Snyder was reading a 2001 story in American Photo about fashion photographer Bruce Weber’s use of the Littman 45 Single, a new camera designed for handheld 4×5 shooting. He bought one of the first Littmans off the line. The camera appealed to him not just because of its parallax-corrected rangefinder focusing — it is fundamentally a re-engineered, rebuilt Polaroid 110 — but by the bigger image it produced. “Shooting individual sheets of film was a bit of a deal, but the transition was really easy for me,” says Snyder. “The camera became second nature.”
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Like a number of people without a ticket to the Nationals’ game Sunday, Mark Butler stood outside the left field gate and watched some of the historic event from a distance. The Minnesota man carried a digital camera to capture the memories. For a member of the Uniformed Division of United States Secret Service, Butler captured too much.
9NEWS NOW photographer Greg Guise was rolling when an officer approached Mark Butler. Butler said the officer demanded he delete any pictures that showed the security checkpoints set up to screen fans for the visit by President George Bush.
“It’s kind of like not being in America,” Butler said. Butler said he was not interested in the security but in the part of the stadium you could see beyond the gate.
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Kevin German
Now I want to preface this graph by saying this is not a slam on newspapers or the photojournalists who work for them. I can name one hundred newspaper photographers who excel at their job and more importantly make incredible contributions to communities all over the world. The fact is that newspapers were a comfort for me.
I could go years without ever coming up with my own projects. The assignments kept pouring in like clockwork. Then one day it hit me. I didn’t care any more. Didn’t care about the people I was photographing. Didn’t care about the issues that were important to them. I didn’t care. I had sold my soul to be comfortable and I couldn’t look myself in the eyes any more.
Check it out here.
Matt Brown is the team photographer for Cal State Fullerton. Thirty years ago the Titans were the darling of the NCAA Tournament, making an improbably march to the Sweet 16. He accompanied the team to their 1st Round game against Wisconsin in the Omaha Regional
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Shana Wittenwyler sort of fell into covering the primary season. That is to say, she started off in Florida shooting Ron Paul at the Republican debates for the Irish rag Mongrel Magazine, and ended up a few months later on assignment for the New York Times in Missouri. In between, she was in Iowa and South Carolina.
A freelancer, Shana didn’t mean to cover politics in particular. Since her graduation from the Photojournalism program at ICP in 2005, she has shot all sorts of features for Fortune, The Chicago Tribune, Rolling Stone, and others. But she found herself hooked on the excitement of the Ron Paul campaign when in Florida, and didn’t want to stop taking pictures. So, as a photojournalist, and a broke one at that, Shana started to contact politics editors. But you can’t call up the Times and tell them you want to shoot a campaign for them; it’s a hell of a process.
Check it out here.
I’m delighted to announce that the beta of the 64-bit-native Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.0 has been posted to Adobe Labs. Everyone is free to download the beta build and try it for 30 days, while customers of Lightroom 1.x are free to use it for the duration of the beta program. (This build expires Aug. 31.)
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At the recent Sports Shooter Academy V, one of the most discussed items during the Digital Workflow Class was the use of Photo Mechanic’s code replacement. Sports Shooter asked Camera Bit’s Kirk Baker to explain this cool, time-saving feature.
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New Catalogue’s latest series, Tiger Afternoon, has been described as “a quasi-gothic narrativization of American Suburbia” and “a Jean-Luc Godard version of a John Hughes film… less homage to cinema than an attempt to question the idealization of youth as the paradigmatic protagonists of our age.” I’m not sure how I feel about it, but it has me intrigued.
Check it out here.
German photographers Walter Schels and Beate Lakotta have a show of their extraordinary before-and-after-death photos
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By Elizabeth Becker
So how did Dith Pran, a sophisticated journalist, survive when the Khmer Rouge was rooting out and killing most intellectuals?
A Cambodian banker I know survived by playing the village idiot. Pran survived by reading character. His brilliance as a journalist for figuring out chaotic situations in war was critical during the revolution. He, of course, hid his background, but he read people the way he had read all of us, foreigner and Cambodian alike. He knew what we were good for and where we were hopeless. During the Khmer Rouge revolution, he had to rely on those finely honed instincts to survive.
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Quote “I’m known for taking pictures very close, and the older I get, the closer I get.”
Bruce Gilden joined Magnum Photos in 1998 and became a full Member in 2002.
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When asked how he first became interested in photography—and photojournalism in particular—Jay Dickman replies, “I think a lot of it was the product of growing up in the 1950s and ’60s when we had LIFE and National Geographic as our ‘windows’ to the world; they were our TVs.” This brought coverage of the Vietnam War, moon missions, civil rights issues and world stories into people’s living rooms. “Looking back, I didn’t realize how this was forming my direction and energy.”
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Bill Armstrong: I don’t think of my imagery as soft focus, in fact, I call it extreme blur to distinguish it from soft focus. My concern is not to make “soft” or impressionistic images of the real world, like the early pictorialist photographers, but to make de-materialized or ephemeral images that represent a completely different world—a spirit world, if you will, or a parallel universe.
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By Luciano Noble II
The first book by the world’s premier Polaroid portraiture photographer.
IT IS FINISHED.
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Serious pranksters take today off, but I guess there are a few good posts worth pointing out. I’ll update this throughout the day, quarantining the fake stuff to this post alone.
Online Photographer: Canon 4D Official Leak
Apparently our posts on the possible costs of the Canon 5D replacement attracted some attention at Canon. I have an old friend high up in Canon USA who frequently travels to the home offices in Japan, and he contacted me yesterday with some “allowable leaks.” The news is good for Canon fans. The 5D replacement, which will be called the 4D (even Canon balked at the implications of “3D,” apparently), will be out by August. It is slated to have an innovative full-frame 31-MP CMOS sensor with switchable IS in-the-body. But the real news is that the full 31-MP is reserved for a “big print” mode, usable only up to ISO 800; the real meat is a half-rez 15.5-MP mode in which the camera gives it highest image quality and best high-ISO performance. In this mode, the camera is said to better the sharpness and resolution of cameras that have no anti-aliasing filters (think Leica M8).
A Photo Editor: ANNIE LEIBOVITZ INKS MASSIVE DEAL WITH FLICKR
The NY Times has the details on the reported 25 Million dollar deal that would move her entire collection to Flickr with a Creative Commons License (!).
EPUK: Met Police to relax London photography restrictions in pilot scheme
A pilot scheme set to begin next month will see the Metropolitan Police taking a less restrictive approach to street photography in the capital by agreeing not to approach registered photographers.
PhotoShelter: BUYERS SEEKING! CALL FOR PHOTOS!
Due to overwhelming response from the photographic community to our calls for content, we are issuing this urgent call for specific areas where our collection is deficient. This request is based on our extensive research conducted in March 2008 with advertising agencies, publications, graphic designers, magicians and Canadians.
To celebrate the reopening of groundbreaking gallery SUBLIMINAL PROJECTS in its new location on 1331 W Sunset Blvd this Saturday nite, April 5th, founder SHEPARD FAIREY has chosen none other than Parisian street artist BLEK LE RAT as the subject of the hotspot’s inaugural exhibition. Blek’s “Art is Not Peace but War,” a show of new spraypaint on canvas works by the pioneering artist whose work predates that of followers
Check it out here.