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    Jason P Howe:

    Sitting naked on the edge of the bed in a cheap, sweltering hotel room in the heart of a war-torn, drug-producing region of Colombia, I lit a cigarette and listened as the girl I had just made love with told me a secret dark enough to shake anyone from their postcoital bliss.

    I had been in Colombia for a few months to learn how to become a photojournalist. Not by attending some theoretical university course, or taking portraits in a cosy studio, but by pitching myself in at the deep end.

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  • Camera Bits has recently released Photo Mechanic 4.5.3.1, a maintenance update to its pro photo browsing and transmission application for Windows and Mac

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    In this charming and captivating volume, National Geographic photographer Annie Griffiths Belt discloses the secrets of a peripatetic life, revealing in often hilarious detail how she managed to juggle two children, bulky cases of camera equipment, and everything needed for a nurturing family life as she traveled to far-flung destinations around the world.
    Belt was one of the first female photographers hired at the National Geographic Society. When her children were born, she kept right on going—and this book is a loving compendium of the wisdom she gained. It chronicles three decades of international travel, a moveable family, and the art she created along the way.

    Check it out here. Via Rob Galbraith.

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    A mid-career retrospective, this exhibition explores the issues of land and landlessness in two parts. The first section reveals Larry Towell’s family and their relationship to their land in Ontario. Most of the photographs in this section were taken within 100 yards of his front porch. The second section reviews Towell’s work over the past twenty years documenting the crisis of human landlessness throughout the world, from Central America to the Middle East. Writes Towell, “We must address these crises in order to achieve a more stable and peaceful world.”

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    Here’s the plan: I’ll be releasing one desktop wallpaper every Wednesday morning (California time) until I run out of wallpapers. They’ll be free to download, and come in a multitude of monitor sizes, as well as iPhone and PSP versions just for the fun of it. As of writing this, there are 60 artists involved with the project, some of them providing multiple wallpapers. Who are these 60 artists that are participating? Well I’m not telling because I really like secrets and surprises, and I want you all to be surprised and excited come Wednesday.

    To get things started though, I’m releasing three wallpapers by three amazing artists, Tim Biskup, Mcbess, and IMAKETHINGS.

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    Responding to the London Metropolitan Police’s new anti-photographer snitch campaign, wherein posters urge Londoners to turn in people who might be taking pictures of CCTV cameras, many people have taken a crack at redesigning the posters to point out the absurdity of them.

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    Nearly ten years ago, towards the end of 1998, we here at Photo District News embarked on an endeavor we called PDN’s “30 Under 30.” Sitting in a small room in our then Times Square offices, Holly Stuart Hughes, Darren Ching, former photo editor Mackenzie Green and myself gathered together a large pile of promising portfolios and an even larger pile of slides (yes, slides) and began the process of choosing a list of 30 gifted photographers we felt would make an impact on the photographic industry. I can still remember the excitement we all felt at the start of this enterprise. With some assistance and advice from peers in the photo community, we were very pleased to present among that first congregation such future luminaries as Taryn Simon, Jason Fulford, Jonathan Kantor, Guy Aroch, and Norman Jean Roy. We were off to an excellent beginning

    This year’s 30: Ian Baguskas, Aya Brackett, Michael Christopher Brown, Michal Chelbin, J. Bennett Fitts, Taj Forer, Emiliano Granada, Katie Kingma, Andreas Laszlo Konrath, Adam Krause, Eamon Mac Mahon, Tiffany Walling McGarity & John McGarity, Mike McGregor, Domingo Milella, Graeme Mitchell, Morgan & Owens, Ed Du, Christina Paige, Birthe Piantek, Espen Rasmussen, David Rochkind, Jennifer Racholl, Dustin Snipes, Brian Sokol, Mikhael Subotzky, Daniel Traub, Munem Wasif, Donald Weber, Shen Wei.

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    At exactly three forty-five on September 19, 1957, unemployed organ grinder Bob Hannon entered RCA Studio 4 and made monkey history with this two-sided tribute to Today Show Animal Editor Kokomo, Jr. the Talking Chimpanzee.

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    Check it out here. Via Rob Galbraith.

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    liveBooks, Inc. (www.livebooks.com), a leading provider of customized portfolio websites and marketing software for professional photographers, today announced the Spring 2008 release of liveBooks Professional. Research has shown that more than 80 percent of Internet users first find websites through organic search. To address this need, this latest release adds new features to enhance the search marketing functionality integrated into every visually rich, custom Flash website built by liveBooks.

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  • Newsweek has announced that photographers Vincent Laforet, Donald Miralle and Mike Powell will be on exclusive assignment for the magazine to cover the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games.

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    Geoffrey Kloske, publisher of Riverhead Books, the unit of Penguin Group USA that released the book, by Margaret Seltzer, under a pseudonym, Margaret B. Jones, said on Tuesday that there was nothing else that he or Sarah McGrath, the book’s editor, could have done to prevent the author from lying.

    “In hindsight we can second-guess all day things we could have looked for or found,” Mr. Kloske said. “The fact is that the author went to extraordinary lengths: she provided people who acted as her foster siblings. There was a professor who vouched for her work, and a writer who had written about her that seemed to corroborate her story.” He added that Ms. Seltzer had signed a contract in which she had legally promised to tell the truth. “The one thing we wish,” Mr. Kloske said, “is that the author had told us the truth.”

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  • According to a post on Troll Lord Games, the company that had published his most recent work, Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons & Dragons, has passed away

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    Police deny that their latest anti-terror campaign will encourage harassment of photographers taking pictures in public places.

    Last week police chiefs issued fresh warnings over the potential dangers posed by people carrying cameras for surveillance purposes.

    The news comes amid growing reports of clashes between police officers and photographers taking pictures in public places in the UK.

    Check it out here. Via Conscientious.

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    “It’s the archive that’s at stake,” Angelo Grima, senior vice president and deputy general counsel for the National Geographic Society, said during a panel on digital rights at the Magazine Publishers of America’s Magazines 24/7 conference at the Hearst Tower Thursday. “We’ll go to the Supreme Court if we have to, because our archive is that important to us.”

    The litigation, now entering its 11th year, has seen more twists than a John Grisham novel. The 11th Circuit first ruled in 2001 in favor of Jerry Greenberg, a freelance photographer whose work had appeared in National Geographic (in 1962, 1968 and 1971) and then on CD. Subsequent cases in the 2nd Circuit ruled in favor of National Geographic. In 2004, a Florida judge awarded Greenburg $400,000 in damages; National Geographic appealed. Last year, a three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit overruled the 2001 decision in favor of National Geographic, but Greenburg asked for—and was granted—a full court review.

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  • Join Al Tompkins to learn what impressed the judges, what ethical issues arose in this year’s entries, and how the backpack journalist trend is affecting photojournalism.

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    “I think it goes without saying that a major international photo festival in New York is long overdue,” said Frank Evers, managing director of the VII Photo Agency and one of the founders of the New York Photo Festival. Evers and other show organizers spoke at the Dumbo headquarters of powerHouse books; publisher Daniel Power is the other founder of the festival. Two Trees Management, which owns most of the real estate in Dumbo, is another supporter. (PDN is one of the festival’s media partners.)

    Four main curators will each oversee a pavilion: British photographer Martin Parr; Kathy Ryan, picture editor of The New York Times Magazine; Lesley A. Martin, book publisher at the Aperture Foundation; and Tim Barber, former photo editor for Vice magazine and editor of tinyvices.com.

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  • Documentary photographer Eugene Richards – who famously quit Magnum twice – has now left the VII Photo Agency. Speaking to PDN today, he said he left about a week ago and the choice was “personal preference,” motivated by the agency “going in a different direction.” He said he wishes VII well. “Sometimes you don’t fit,” he added. Richards said he has no plans to join another agency. Richards was voted into VII in 2006.

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  • Apple has released Aperture 2.0.1 for Mac, a maintenance update to the latest version of its pro photo management and RAW conversion application

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    In “Love and Consequences,” a critically acclaimed memoir published last week, Margaret B. Jones wrote about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods.
    Margaret B. Jones is a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, who is all white and grew up in the well-to-do Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley, with her biological family. She graduated from the Campbell Hall School, a private Episcopal day school in the North Hollywood neighborhood. She has never lived with a foster family, nor did she run drugs for any gang members. Nor did she graduate from the University of Oregon, as she had claimed.

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