Philip Jones – Griffiths, a great friend of Viet Nam, who is suffering from cancer, is struggling his last battle in London to grasp the very last breath of his life.
Check it out here.
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tagged Philip Jones-Griffiths
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Cai Guo-Qiang says his favorite artistic moment is the pregnant pause between the lighting of the fuse and the detonation of the gunpowder. “There is a pressure in it to be preserved, and then it explodes,” he says. “This moment belongs just to the artist and the work.” On a breezy afternoon last September, in a large A-frame shed at the Grucci fireworks plant on Long Island, he was setting the stage. With the help of his wife, Hong Hong Wu, he cut a long green fuse into segments, then laid the pieces carefully on eight contiguous panels of handmade Japanese rice paper.
After three young female assistants placed stencils in the shape of an eagle’s wings, head and beak onto the panels, Cai, a onetime serious student of martial arts, moved gracefully as he sprinkled different grades of gunpowder, some custom-made for him. “I don’t know what the result will be, even though I preplan,” he told me, speaking through an interpreter in Chinese. “It is like making medicine — a little of this, a little of that, watch it and taste it a little and see how it is working. My work is like a dialogue between me and unseen powers, like alchemy.” (In Chinese, the word for gunpowder is literally “fire medicine,” an allusion to the eighth-century Chinese alchemists who accidentally invented it while searching for a magic elixir.) The assistants lifted the stencils, and Cai scattered and rubbed gunpowder in the white space that had been covered. Then the women put the stencils back on the panels, and he tossed on more gunpowder. The entire process was repeated for another image, this one of a pine-tree branch below the eagle’s claws.
Check it out here.
tagged Cai Guo-Qiangin Art & Design -
American photographer Larry Sultan takes time out of his hectic schedule to talk inspiration, achievement, and Charlotte Rampling with wallpaper.com…
Check it out here. Via Brian Ulrich.
tagged Larry Sultan -
Przemysław Pokrycki’s “Rites of Passage” is a wonderful series showing family gatherings for baptisms, first communions, weddings, and funerals – kind of like a social typology.
Check it out here.
tagged Przemysław Pokrycki -
Recently, this point was brought home on the Magnum photo site when Christopher Anderson’s bare-bulb approach to photographing presidential candidate Mitt Romney came under fire from some viewers. Anderson’s approach was the “anti-photo op.” Tired of making the same stale and banal images that most of the press pack gets of the candidates, Anderson blasted Romney through what appears to be a rain-splattered lens.
Check it out here.
tagged Christopher Anderson -
Larry Clark is entertaining company, but it’s hard to know what to make of a grandfather who still puts such stock in his street cred. Likewise his new photographs, which are saturated in colour but oddly drained of meaning. They are not reportage or photojournalism, but sit somewhere between a street fashion shoot and a series of well-taken snapshots. As seen through Clark’s lens, Hispanic teen life in South Central looks neither as dangerous nor as transgressive as he insists it is.
‘They’re kind of like punks,’ Clark says of the scrawny kids from Compton, ‘with the tight jeans and painted shoes. They have a style that they call “dressing young”. Basically, they wear the same clothes they wore when they were 12, but now they’re 15 or 16.’
I’m tempted to say that Clark himself invented the ‘dressing young’ concept, but I let it pass.
Check it out here.
tagged Larry Clarkin Photography -
The Chicago Tribune, chicagotribune.com and ChicagoSports.com will not publish news photographs of this weekend’s girls gymnastics and wrestling state finals because of a legal challenge the Tribune, the Illinois Press Association and other state newspapers have filed against the Illinois High School Association.
Check it out here.
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In or out? With 45,000 images to get through, there’s barely enough time to capture a frame in the dimly lit room before judges decide whether an image stays or goes. It’s raining outside at the University of Missouri, but in Tucker Forum it’s sunny, cloudy, hot and cold as each image has its moment to shine on the big screen.
With fewer than a dozen spectators in the audience, the rain kept most from attending the first day of public judging during the 65th annual Pictures of the Year International competition. But that will change over the next three weeks, as students and professionals from across the country will join a group of 12 judges from around the world as they select winning images in each of this year’s 48 categories.
Check it out here.
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The Berlinale film festival in February opens the annual season in the winter cold of the German capital. Paparazzi stalk stars outside restaurants and hotels all looking for exclusive pictures. We concentrate more on the daily photo calls, press conferences and the red carpet premieres at the festival cinema. I have covered the festival nearly every year since 1991 and things have changed a lot in that time. Where there used to be only a couple of dozen of us at press conferences and premieres but today in the digital age there are at least 100 accredited photographers producing tens of thousands of images every day from the Berlinale.
Check it out here.
in Paparazzi -
Today, 17 February. at 15 hours Kosovo province unilaterally declared its independence from Serbia. It been ten years now since I wrote my “Diary of a Political Idiot,” a book that started with riots in Kosovo. Although I’ve tried to stop writing that book, I have never been allowed to. The Balkan disorder became the model of world disorder.
I can hear the voice of my dead mother, who passed away in 1999 after the NATO bombings, with her last words: “take care of Kosovo.” She didn’t mention her granddaughter, my daughter, whom she loved more than herself or me. She instead scolded me, the traitor, severely: Kosovo is not yours and you cannot give it away. You and your similar traitors don’t have pants on their asses and you are giving Kosovo, our heritage, away.
Check it out here.
in News -
I remember covering a fire once and the home owner came over to me and a TV journalist and demanded that we leave and stop taking advantage of him. You will run into that. This man was very mad at us for just being there. We tried to explain our job but his emotion made him unreasonable. I had a friend who was attacked at the scene of a fatal accident when a family member literally assaulted him. Thankfully a deputy was nearby and came to his aide. I was shoved by a drunk and enraged family member while covering a house fire. I have been at other scenes when the family members were very accepting of my presence and understood what I was doing. There is just no way to predict how people will react under pressure.
Check it out here.
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Pointless job in a failing industry led by ignorant people with no creativity. And photographers, who are all stuck-up, selfish bitches who think they are better than everyone else.
Check it out here.
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Flipping through the latest issue of Vapors I came across this Lomo ad and it immediately made me smile. But as I was reading it, I noticed that this wasn’t just the regular old LC-A, this was the LC-A+, meaning they’ve made it better!
Check it out here.
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Back in the PCP days of the 1970’s, James Brown hosted his own television show. Future Shock was filmed in the pre TBS studios of WTCG in Atlanta. It could have been lost forever, but a few episodes managed to slip out of the vaults.
Check it out here.
