Why’s that you ask? To distance myself from my work and constantly ask myself, “What is art?” Is dance an art? Is the dancer or choreographer the artist? Is a landscape painting an art? Is photojournalism an art? Is portrait photography an art? I struggle with these questions constantly and the answers are usually, “No.” Though occasionally, “Yes.”
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WAWONA TUNNEL is a passageway from civilization to natural splendor. The tunnel, dug through a hill on the south side of Yosemite National Park in the 1930s, hides the coming view like a mile-long blindfold.
And then you’re there. Pale, curvaceous granite rocks dance in the skyline. Dozens of people stand along the edge of the pull-off, called Tunnel View, trying to capture the scene. Some snap two quick shots with disposable yellow cameras, and others set up their tripods for hours, watching the light strike Yosemite’s monoliths. On the left, El Capitan, a rock climbers’ mecca, appears the tallest. The Half Dome and Sentinel Dome arch upwards in the center. And the two Cathedral Spires sit on the right next to the sometimes gushing Bridalveil Fall.
Many people know these sights by name, but more know them by sight alone, as captured through the lens of the legendary American photographer Ansel Adams.
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The different photographs that The Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald ran this week of a Vietnamese girl with a massive facial tumor raise questions of when a picture is exploitive of its subject or offensive to us as readers.
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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.
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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.
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Quote: “The photographer is filled with doubt. Nothing will soothe him.”
Raymond Depardon joined Magnum Photos in 1978 and became a full Member in 1979.
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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.”
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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