• 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.

    Check it out here.


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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

    Check it out here.


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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.

    Check it out here.


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    hey, diary and others.
    i did these nine paintings for the Crazy 4 Cult show at Gallery 1988 in LA tomorrow night. They depict nine great movie showdowns. you might remember these great moments in movie history.

    Check it out here.


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    I really, really like Nathan Ota’s paintings. His work contains characters such as eyeless birds, cyclops robots, and tree stump men

    Check it out here.


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    Photographer Martin Kollar and filmmaker Peter Kerekes have been documenting Army Cooks from all over Eastern Europe and beyond, as part of an ongoing project that started in 1991. In his brilliant introduction to the project, Kerekes begins: “They are ordinary men in aprons worn over their uniforms, whose task is to feed the army. They take care of the operation of a giant stomach, a big hungry child with its moods – the Army.”

    Check it out here.


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  • A group of top news and sports editors is planning to meet with Major League Baseball this week to discuss a string of new restrictions on media credentials that editors contend are an unfair limitation on Web-related reporting.

    The new restrictions, which take effect later this month when the 2008 season begins, include: a 72-hour limit on posting photos after games; a seven-photo limit on the number of photos posted from a game while it is in progress; a 120-second limit on video length from game-related events; and a ban on live or recorded audio and video from game-related events posted 45 minutes before the start of a game through the end.

    “I am really unclear about what they are trying to accomplish with that one,” John Cherwa, Tribune Company sports coordinator and sports special projects editor at the Orlando Sentinel, said about the 45-minute rule.

    Check it out here.


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    Gabriele Stabile for The New York Times

    JEN BEKMAN’S apartment is hardly what you would expect from a woman who has made herself a force in the art world in the last five years, building a photography and fine arts Web site that draws international collectors and earning an innovator-of-the-year title from American Photo magazine.
    Then again, her narrow studio in the East Village vividly reflects the many unusual twists in her life — a testament to a talent for reinvention.

    Check it out here. Via PDNPulse


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    Los Angeles, California’s Flogging Molly have posted a full stream of their new album Float which is due out March 4, 2008 via Side One Dummy. It is the follow-up to Whiskey on a Sunday [CD/DVD] which was released in 2006.

    Check it out here.


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    As newspapers struggle with changing times, one young Davis entrepreneur has cast his lot with the printed word.

    Finnegan O’Toole Boire founded his own paper in September. He writes, takes photos, sells ads and handles printing and circulation.

    “I’m the editor-in-chief,” he said. “I’m also the delivery boy. I do pretty much everything all by myself.”

    Finn is 7 years old. His paper is called The Weekly Block and covers his own small part of the world in central Davis.

    Check it out here.


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    One thing that never changes on a White House trip, no matter where in the world we are travelling, are the extremely long days on the go. You are running off planes and into the back of deafening military helicopters which sometimes spew hot oil all over your clothes, and then jump into the motorcade. Repeat three more times in one day and you start to get the picture. Actually I love all of it. It’s definitely an adrenalin rush and sometimes it’s adrenalin alone that will get you through a tough day. We normally assemble at 6-7am and sometimes finish at midnight if there is a state dinner or such. On one of the days, we awake in Tanzania, fly to Rwanda for a full day’s schedule, then get back on the plane and fly six hours to Ghana. On the last day, we leave Ghana, cover Bush’s historic trip to Liberia, then overnight on Air Force One back to Washington. The long days working in unfamiliar environments, hoping you don’t have to break out the satellite phone to transmit your pictures (we never did), and constant time zone changes eventually take their toll on everyone and thankfully most trips don’t last more than a week. But the longer it goes, the more “silly” things start happening to people, sometimes with painful consequences.

    Check it out here.


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    I’m not a huge gear head but the nice folks at Nikon Professional Services sent me a new toy (Nikon D3) to use for a while. So far, I think it’s the best camera I’ve ever shot with…yes…even better than the Leica M6…well..maybe.

    Check it out here.


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  • It was meant to be merely a slightly expanded edition of an out-of-print classic of photojournalism, Paul Fusco’s RFK Funeral Train, first published in September 2000 by Umbrage Editions. Fusco, a photographer for Look magazine in the 1960s, had been assigned to ride the train carrying the body of Robert F. Kennedy from New York City to Washington, D.C., for burial, on June 8, 1968. Only one of Fusco’s photographs from that day, when mourners all along the Northeast train corridor assembled at trackside to pay their respects, appeared in Look; dozens more were included in the Umbrage edition, which Aperture decided to update with a few others taken from the photographer’s own collection. Publication was set for this June, the 40th anniversary of Kennedy’s death. But all that changed when Lesley Martin, Aperture’s publisher, while researching another project at the Library of Congress, followed up on Fusco’s contention that the Look archives located there might contain a few more of the images he had taken during eight continuous hours of shooting on that dark Saturday 40 years ago.

    There they were,” Martin tells PW, “in pristine condition having been in cold storage for the past 30 years. Paul had mentioned that there were ‘some’ images at the Library of Congress, so in good conscience and due diligence, I checked it out.” Martin was amazed to find a trove of more than 1,800 Kodachrome slides. The problem was that Martin’s find occurred in December, and the spring title was already in proofs. “It was a big decision to pull back the book. But Paul’s body of work on that single day—already so unique, impressionistic, emotionally powerful—was so much more.” The new book, retitled Paul Fusco: RFK ($50), will now be published in September, in a first run currently set at 10,000 copies. Included are essays by Evan Thomas, Norman Mailer and photography scholar Vicki Goldberg.

    Check it out here.


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    Lawrence Looi, 31, who has been a staff photographer with news agency News Team for the last three years, had been sent to cover a protest on public roads outside the International Conference Centre on Thursday morning when he was approached by a police constable who objected to having been photographed.

    According to the written complaint, a copy of which has been seen by EPUK, the officer held Looi by the upper arm and asked him to delete any photographs that had been taken of police officers. The officer also asked Looi to identify himself, but refused an offer to see Looi’s NPA-issued National Press Card.

    Check it out here.


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    Detroit Free Press photographer Rashaun Rucker was named Photographer of the Year by the Michigan Press Photographers Association Saturday in its 55th annual Pictures of the Year contest.

    Rucker, 29, is the first African American to win the award, which celebrates a year’s worth of exemplary visual storytelling.

    “I almost cried,” Rucker said. “Even though I won, this is recognition for all the people at the Free Press who helped me throughout the year.”

    Check it out here.


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    I’ve always considered myself a serious photojournalist. I’ve covered hard news and social issues, documenting the history of Utah through grief and pain, joy and wonder. Throughout my career as a documentary photographer I never thought I would ever have to ask a subject, “Do you want to take your shirt off?”

    Check it out here.


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  • One video in particular caught the attention of the Red Sox. On “picture day,” when players wear home whites and have official photos taken, some Sox are asked to cut public service announcements. Papelbon was one such player.

    Papelbon’s PSA was in Spanish, which proved difficult for the closer. He was struggling and swearing, getting more than a few laughs from the people around him, so Lunsford decided to shoot video rather than photos. We used the clip on CapeCast, our daily Web report, and the Papelbon video became, as they like to say on ESPN, an instant classic.

    Fan sites, such as the Boston Dirt Dogs, linked to it. About 25,000 people had seen it on YouTube by Friday.

    The Red Sox PR staff at first didn’t seem too pleased that a photographer was shooting video. Understandably, they like to know who is doing what around the players. It proved a minor misunderstanding but speaks to how the media world is changing.

    Check it out here.


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    Mike Conley, former vocalist of Orange County punk band MIA was found dead yesterday in Chicago. According to the news report, Mike was found unresponsive at 5:40 a.m. by a person staying in the hotel in the 2300 block of North Mannheim Road, sheriff’s police spokeswoman Penny Mateck said. He appeared to have suffered head injuries.

    Check it out here.


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    This was the summer of 2006, and Melanie Blanding, a photographer from Roanoke, was in the Democratic Republic of Congo to take a series of portraits of women scarred by war. The women are victims of violent, often monstrous sexual assaults, and their numbers appear to be growing.
    Picture a photographer in Africa to document wartime casualties and you might envision a strapping, grizzled veteran loaded down with cameras. But that’s not Blanding.

    Check it out here.


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