The photographic realm has just lost two giants with the deaths of Popular Photography’s Burt Keppler and, now, of Henry Froehlich, former head of medium-format mainstay Mamiya America. Though less visible than Burt to readers of photography magazines, Henry was just as influential in the photo industry, and in many of the same ways. Influence aside, he was a lovely, kindhearted man.
A refugee from Nazi Germany, Henry did much to promote Japanese cameras in the U.S. after World War II, distributing the Konica line. Eventually he merged that business with Berkey Photo, a key distributor that had previously absorbed the German photo importing business of Paul Klingenstein, a fellow refugee and future Mamiya partner. Henry went on to create a film-to-video conversion business with Jan Lederman, now head of the MAC Group, and the three men later founded the highly successful Mamiya America.
In his role at Mamiya, Henry was a hero and friend to some of our best photographers, including Annie Leibovitz and Douglas Kirkland. If they or other Mamiya RZ or RB users had any job-threatening trouble with their equipment, Henry would hop to it, getting stuff fixed in a flash and often loaning out replacement gear in the interim. It seemed beyond the call of corporate duty, but reflected Henry’s deep affection for photography and photographers. Yet he was a consummate businessman, famous for driving a hard bargain — with absolute pleasantness.
This month we focus on Brian Skerry, an underwater photographer with National Geographic Magazine. Skerry has been on nearly 10,000 dives throughout his career, visiting dive sites around the world. Skerry’s incredible talent for capturing marine life has led not only to his career at National Geographic, but has helped his work stand out among others in the field, with magazines such as U.S. News and World Report, Audubon, Sports Illustrated and many others publishing his work. Skerry takes some time during a recent National Geographic Society Expedition in Mexico’s Sea of Cortez to provide a glimpse into his life under the sea.
I chose not to photograph people smiling in portraits. I too am always searching to reveal the inner silence within a subject. Posed smiling is a learned reaction and does not provide insight to subject’s being. Instead it blocks the viewer from studying a vulnerable face.
I ask a lot of the people I photograph. I ask them to trust me. Trust my vision as an artist. Trust me to make an image as honestly as I know how to. Sometimes they do not like the image. Sometimes they hate the image. I don’t always know how to feel about that. It is an intimate process. I almost always feel a bond between my subjects both during and after.
Thirteen years ago, Chicago Tribune photographer Scott Strazzante began visiting a family farm. Over the years he took thousand of pictures of the couple and their land and all the creatures that lived there. In 2002 he chronicled the farm’s end. Call it death, if you will. Call it progress, if you must
“…I was determined to one day go back to their land and see what happened to it…
He found, on what had been the farm’s 119 acres, a subdivision called Willow Walk. The results are a photographic wonder, as the past bleeds into and is reflected in the present.
Egyptian security forces tried unsuccessfully Friday to end the Palestinian exodus. Police cars drove through Egyptian border towns blaring the message: “Dear Palestinian brothers, when you have finished buying your goods, please return to Gaza. The border is closing.”
For those not familiar with DNG, it’s the archival raw format that Adobe created to address the proliferation of proprietary raw formats. With hundreds of undocumented formats introduced since the advent of raw capture, it’s no wonder that the concept of a raw standard has elicited quite a bit of discussion. Much of the discussion revolves around the topic of file format obsolescence: Will I be able to open my raw files in 50 to 75 years from now? This is a good question and a valid reason why photographers choose to use the openly documented DNG format but there are other more immediate benefits to using a DNG workflow:
To my eye, there’s something integral to photography that’s not translating from film to digital. This isn’t to say that I think that digital is crap, but there’s definitely something missing.
I also think that a photographer’s relationship with shooting is quite different when it’s film and when it’s digital. If I buy fresh Polaroid film for my pinhole camera, it’s roughly $3.75 a shot. Shooting with an SX-70 is roughly $1 a shot. The choices that I make are an important and necessary part of my process.
With digital, you pretty much shoot ‘til your card’s full. I guess, I miss the ongoing interior editorial conversation that happens in my head.
Even if you’ve never heard his name, chances are you know the work of David Rubinger. For roughly six decades he worked as a Time-Life photographer, documenting Israel’s tumultuous history. Some of his photographs, such as the 1967 shot of Israeli paratroopers reaching the Western Wall, have become icons. In 1997 he was awarded the Israel Prize, the country’s highest award for achievement in the arts and sciences. Rubinger has now written a memoir, Israel Through My Lens, Sixty Years as a Photojournalist, just out from Abbeville Press.
VII photographer Christopher Morris is trailing the U.S. presidential candidates as they crisscross America during the state primaries and caucuses. In Iowa, which held its caucus January 3, 2008, he followed the Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, and captured her supporters out in full force. The New York senator came in third in the Iowa caucus, behind Barack Obama and John Edwards.
Over the past couple of months, I spent quite a bit of time thinking about this, and I now want to offer portfolio reviews. Needless to say, I have no idea how much interest there is in something like that, so this is going to be quite interesting. Also with time there might be modifications to the whole process, we’ll see.
So if you are interested have a look at the description first and then send email to the address given there.
Sensitive, reflective, intimate. These are not words normally associated with the oeuvre of Pablo Bartholomew, best known for his stark World Press Photo award-winning images: morphine addicts shooting heroin up gnarled forearms in cheap Paharganj hotels, and the glassy-eyed dead baby that came to symbolise the Bhopal gas tragedy in 1984. But it was the feeling of having become “a hard-boiled egg” inured to historic images”this riot, that PM”that prompted Bartholomew to dredge up 35,000 black-and-white negatives of his “personal, collective history” that had gathered dust over a quarter of a century. And are now on exhibit at the National Museum as part of India Photo Now ’08, the French Embassy festival coinciding with French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s India visit.
The Utah Supreme Court has adopted a rule that allows reporters to refuse to identify confidential sources if called to testify in court, a protection described as one of the most sweeping in the country.
“It provides near-absolute protection for confidential sources,” Jeff Hunt, an attorney for a Utah media coalition, said yesterday.
The only exception to the shield rule would be in cases where the information could prevent substantial injury or death, he said.
The rule also protects non-confidential, unpublished information — notes, photographs and videotape — collected in the reporting process.
Lots of buzz online about the termination of editor Dave Seanor over this cover, which refers to a thoughtlessly stupid remark by golf anchor Kelly Tighman.
It’s worth noting that the controversy over this cover is inextricably wrapped up in its conceptual quality. The insipid stock image brings nothing to the package that isn’t explicit in the headline. The noose may be a loaded cliché, but that doesn’t mean it’s not just as tiresome on a magazine cover as any other over-used icon.
Illinois lawmakers have joined in the fight over whether the Illinois High School Association can prevent newspaper photographers from covering public school academic and sporting championship events games, and whether they can regulate the secondary use of photographs and videos that come from the events.
A new state law proposed this week comes in the aftermath of a dispute between the IHSA and the Illinois Press Association, a disagreement that reached a boiling point last November when several Illinois newspapers were prevented from photographing the state’s high school football finals and championship games.
And now Illinois lawmakers have proposed legislation intended to resolve the current conflict and to keep it from happening again.
Rep. Joseph M. Lyons (D-Chicago) has introduced House Bill 4582 which, if voted on and signed into law, will provide open access to all competitions, from elementary school to high school levels, including sports and academic activities.
And Sen. James A. DeLeo (D-Chicago) has agreed to file an identical bill in the other chamber of the Illinois General Assembly.
When Leon Kaufman’s (Bradley Cooper) latest body of work – a collection of provocative, nighttime studies of the city and its inhabitants — earns the struggling photographer interest from prominent art gallerist Susan Hoff (Brooke Shields), she propels him to get grittier and show the darker side of humanity for his upcoming debut at her downtown art space. Believing he’s finally on track for success, Leon’s obsessive pursuit of dark subject matter leads him into the path of a serial killer, Mahogany (Vinnie Jones), the subway murderer who stalks late-night commuters — ultimately butchering them in the most gruesome ways imaginable.
His alleged offense was distributing to classmates a report, printed from a Web site, commenting on a Muslim woman’s right to multiple marriages. The article, written in Farsi, which is close to the Dari language spoken in Afghanistan, questioned why men are allowed to have four spouses in Islam while women are denied the same right.
Without a lawyer to represent him, Kambakhsh was hustled Tuesday into a small hearing room where three judges and a prosecutor conducted a five-minute proceeding, according to his older brother.
He was then handed a piece of paper saying he had acted against Islam and should be executed, said the brother, Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi, who visited him in prison Wednesday night.
Photography is a medium that feels natural to me. Once you place the camera in front of the eye, it constructs the world. The camera foregrounds the power of temporal and spatial affectivity as seen and thought. In fact, you could say that what I do is create frameworks. I frame the space within each image but also within the installation space. I devise a spatial montage that marks a rupture with the single moment in time and the one-point perspective.
The camera fiends at Vision Research have trotted out the Phantom V12, a crowd pleaser said to be capable of grabbing 1MM images per second (if you can live with 256×8 resolution; resolution goes up as frame rate goes down). Their gear is “targeted at industrial applications ranging from biometric research to automotive crash testing,” they say. “Essentially,” opines Engadget, “this little bundle of joy is meant to be strapped into daredevil-type situations in order to grab as many photos as possible within a split second.”
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