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    I have no images to show, because I live in the past, and I still shoot film. I cannot instantly stream them to you, in real time. Today was intense — the Easter Parade got a little packed for me. There were people everywhere, packed in on Fifth Avenue, around 50th. Everyone and their brother had a camera with them, and most of them were very fancy expensive 35mm DSLRs, which somewhat surprised me. The odd thing is that people were just snapping away, even from a distance. I have no idea what those people were actually going to do with all those photographs once they got them home. Would they process them and actually show them to someone, or was just the act of snapping the actual act? Very hard to tell, but I’d guess the latter.

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  • A Closer Reading of Roman Vishniac (Published 2010)

    He was the foremost photographer of prewar Eastern European Jewish life. But how real was the image he created?

    Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/magazine/04shtetl-t.html

    the collection is also a gold mine. Not only do the unpublished photographs offer a kaleidoscopic view of prewar Jewish life — women in modern dress and men without hats, religious people comfortably consorting with secular people, shopkeepers with plenty of wares — they also convey a fuller sense of the photographer’s artistic abilities. The result is surprising: Vishniac, who often strained to present himself as superior to others, in fact never showed the world some of his best work. He shot in a variety of styles, not simply the plaintive perspective for which he became famous. Benton cites a picture of two houses in a Carpathian mountain town. “No one would look at this and think Vishniac,” she said. “There’s a compositional acuity about this photo that is just tremendous — and shocking.” As far as Benton is concerned, she has stumbled upon an artist who deserves to be in the canon of great 20th-century social-documentary photography, on par with Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange.

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    Weyman D. Swagger, a Baltimore Sun news photographer who became the paper’s first photo editor, died of cancer Wednesday at his Halethorpe home. He was 66.

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    The New York Times’ photography blog lens is launching a global project called A Moment in Time. The goal is for thousands of photographers – amateurs and professionals – to capture the same moment on Sunday 02 May at 15:00 UTC.

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    Eliza French and Jeff Charbonneau’s exhibition of their new series, Playground, was the must-see exhibition on the opening night of The Month of Photography in Los Angeles, at the Robert Berman Gallery in Santa Monica’s Bergamot Station. The exhibition is on view until May 5, 2010.

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    It’s one thing to pick your strongest pictures. It’s another to sequence them. The two actions are either side of a coin. If both aren’t done well the result sucks. Ok. Maybe it doesn’t suck, but the result won’t be what it could be if you pick lesser pictures or don’t put them in a sequence that sings.

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    In this essay by Paolo Pellegrin, young Iranian-Americans whose parents fled the Iranian revolution in 1979 and started a new life in the USA remember Iran and imagine how their life would have been if they had never left their country.

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    The Zorro of street art talks about his new film, Los Angeles and, of course, Mr. Brainwash

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  • A Timely Global Mosaic, Created by All of Us

    On Sunday May 2, at 15:00 hours (U.T.C.), we hope you’ll be taking a picture that will help us build a marvelous global mosaic; a Web-built image of one moment in time across the world. We extend the invitation to everyone, everywhere. Amateurs. Students. Pros. People who’ve been photographing for a lifetime or who just started yesterday.

    via Lens Blog: https://archive.nytimes.com/lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/08/about-3/

    Where will you be on Sunday, May 2, at 15:00 hours U.T.C. ?

    Wherever you are, we hope you’ll have a camera — or a camera phone — in hand. And we hope you’ll be taking a picture to send to Lens that will capture this singular instant in whatever way you think would add to a marvelous global mosaic; a Web-built image of one moment in time across the world.

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    Thank all that is good for San Francisco, home of the 10th annual BYOBW (Bring Your Own Big Wheel) race.

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    A photographer once told me that a picture is not art unless you create exactly what you intended from start to finish.  I fought him on this statement.  It’s about the unknown, the surprise.  The extra lens flare that you didn’t expect.  The roll of film that didn’t advance all the way.  The bird that suddenly flew into your frame at the moment of exposure.  It’s the unknown details that help form greatness.  

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    Photographer Marco Vernaschi has gotten himself into quicksand, and taken the otherwise respectable Pulitzer Center On Crisis Reporting with him. And all I can think about are the forces, commercial and personal, that compel individuals to transgress boundaries of common decency, and institutions that celebrate these by publishing them.

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    Donald C. “Clint” Grant developed a national reputation for the humorous feature photos he took of animals during his long career with The Dallas Morning News.

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    From the day he died until his burial on April 18th, Poland was enraptured with mourning ceremonies. In the end the Kaczynskis were entombed at Wawel Castle, where kings and national heroes have been traditionally buried. No other modern figure lies in its catacombs. This decision went largely uncontested aside from a few protests.

    Strangely, as I went around to different memorials I noticed very few tears or obvious grief. The atmosphere was respectful, but from my experience Polish culture seems reserved in daily life relative to other cultures. Without  prior knowledge, a tourist may have thought he was approaching a cultural festival in the center of Krakow.

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    IA: Since photography in Latin America encompasses all types of aesthetics including documentary, conceptual and experimental formats, among others, heterogeneity is probably its only unifying element. What is clear to me is that Latin American photography moves in multiple ways; in some instances the works reflect the contextual realities of their site production while in others they reference global issues. Certainly Latin American Photography today does have a multicultural character and moves beyond local artistic circuits.

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    The workshop is FREE throughout the 3 day stream.

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