According to the lawyer behind a new class-action suit, every image that a generative tool produces “is an infringing, derivative work.”
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/is-ai-art-stealing-from-artistsAccording to the lawyer behind a new class-action suit, every image that a generative tool produces “is an infringing, derivative work.”
For those of you who may remember the days when your elementary school teacher instructed you in the “Duck and Cover” air raid drill triggered by a lonely siren where you dove under your desk, covered your head with your arms and were instructed not to look out the windows of your classroom, the book,
via LENSCRATCH: http://lenscratch.com/2023/02/countdown/Michna-Bales takes us on a visual tour of decrepit fallout shelters, some public and others private, with shelves still stocked with unopened cans of foodstuffs and “survival crackers” from the 1960’s.
The boom — or glut — in streaming documentaries has sparked a reckoning among filmmakers and their subjects.
via Vulture: https://www.vulture.com/article/tv-documentaries-ethical-standards.htmlDocumentary-making has never been ethically pure or entirely subjective. (“I’m working on a project that is the kind of documentary where you do six takes of the person putting a boat in the water to get the right one,” one editor told me.) Every shot and every cut is a choice, and even its practitioners have never agreed on whether the medium is closer to journalism or to cinema. One of the earliest popular documentaries, Robert Flaherty’s 1922 film, Nanook of the North, was about a man supposedly living in the Canadian tundra, untouched by the wider world — and it was full of lies. Nanook’s real name was Allakariallak. His wife in the film wasn’t his wife. (She was, according to another local, one of Flaherty’s multiple wives.) Allakariallak hunted with a gun, but that didn’t fit the story Flaherty wanted to tell, so the director asked him to use a harpoon. In defense of his methods, Flaherty said, “One often has to distort a thing in order to catch its true spirit.”
“Why New Jersey? Because people make such a funny face when you mention New Jersey.”
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/02/13/the-lost-new-jersey-photographs-of-henri-cartier-bressonIn 1975, the renowned photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson received an invitation to travel from Paris to America for what would become one of his final photographic projects. Choose any subject, anywhere, he was told. His choice? New Jersey. New Jersey? He seemed delighted by his own provocation. “Why New Jersey?” he said. “Because people make such a funny face when you mention New Jersey.”
As the publishing and awards director/senior editor at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, I first met Will Warasila when he was a graduate student in Duke’s MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts (MFA|EDA) program (he graduated in May 2020) and immediately became acquainted with the energy, commitment, and intelligence that he brings
via LENSCRATCH: http://lenscratch.com/2023/02/will-warasila-quicker-than-coal-ash/Quicker than Coal Ash his is not only a compelling series of imaginative and artful photographs but also a reflection of Will’s deep engagement in long-term fieldwork, relationship-building, and advocacy work in Walnut Cove. He continues to be connected to the people he met there. Additionally, he did research into the science around coal ash, environmental law, and governmental policy making and collected oral histories. He also contributed materials from the project to grassroots organizers and to the legal team representing community groups who sued Duke Energy to excavate six coal ash sites in North Carolina (and won).
In 1973, she was the first woman hired by The New York Times to be a full-time staff photographer.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/02/business/media/joyce-dopkeen-dead.html
Ms. Dopkeen roamed widely with her camera for The Times, whether capturing Muhammad Ali squaring off against Joe Frazier, female prison inmates training puppies to be service dogs, exuberant children enjoying summers in urban parks, or the aerialist Philippe Petit pausing during an eight-and-a-half minute tiptoe across the Great Falls gorge in Paterson, N.J., before 30,000 gaping spectators.
I met Argus Paul Estabrook through a mutual friend in my last year of undergrad at Virginia Intermont College back in 1997 or 1998. We didn’t reconnect until the invention of social media when I became much more aware of his work. Back in 2021, I attended the opening of his exhibition at Emory &
via LENSCRATCH: http://lenscratch.com/2023/01/argus-paul-estabrook/I’m a Korean American, lens-based artist working in South Korea and the USA. I use candid moments and chance encounters to share a personal journey that often explores the intersections of identity, race, and politics. Artistically, I consider myself a street photographer that sometimes takes the camera inside to tell private stories. -Argus Paul Estabrook
One of America’s leading photographers offers his insights about making great photographic portraits
via LensCulture: https://www.lensculture.com/articles/todd-hido-advice-for-portrait-photographersTodd Hido is one of the most interesting artists using photography today. We asked if he would be willing to share some insights and advice for photographers who are interested in the photographic portrait. Here are the thoughts and images he shared with us.
A new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum showcases the terrific physical presence of a trio of the photographer’s large-scale works.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/richard-avedons-overwhelming-muralsA new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum showcases the terrific physical presence of a trio of the photographer’s large-scale works.
The idea of cruising is/was a national past time in small towns and big cities. I well remember the cool night air as a carload of girlfriends and I drove down Sunset Strip night after night in someone’s family station wagon, air thick with adolescent perspiration and teen spirit pheromones, looking for something not quite
via LENSCRATCH: http://lenscratch.com/2023/01/rick-mccloskey-van-nuys-blvd-1972/Los Angeles has always been about car culture and what better project to go back in time and experience those nights of freedom and friends, laughing and looking for love (or trouble) than Rick McCloskey’s series from 1972, Van Nuys Blvd. Filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson celebrated this world in his movie, Licorice Pizza. In the summer of 1972, Rick McCloskey went to Van Nuys Boulevard, near his parents’ home and for three months, every Wednesday and sometimes Friday and Saturday evenings photographed the action.
There is a symmetry between Corky Lee’s passing and the rise of Stop Anti-Asian Hate: the departure of Asian America’s greatest documentarian and its most visible recent efflorescence. Years earlier, the brief window of postwar Asian American radicalism seemed to have already swung shut. Today, our most notable figures are corporate CEOs and conservative politicians, the eponymous Asians rich and crazy, so the artists, revolutionaries, and workers preserved in Lee’s prints can feel as elusive as their author. No matter how distant an Asian American poor people’s movement may seem, his prints still vibrate with radical temporality and potential.
via n+1: https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/corky-lee-and-the-work-of-seeing/I DID NOT REALLY BELIEVE that Corky Lee would pass away. I heard early reports that the radical photographer had contracted Covid-19 and stayed overnight at the hospital, but then he began to recover. We weren’t close, but he was so ubiquitous, such a fixture at seemingly every Asian American civic event, that he came to feel more familiar than many of my friends. A secretly shy person, he dodged his introversion by simply taking your photograph, or he’d pounce on you with a harangue, his manner paradoxically imposing and self-effacing
…it comes natural to me, as I try to get to know this country walking through the deserted alleys of Santa Monica, to notice these little clues, and to take pictures of them. I recently met Francesca Forquet while reviewing portfolios at the Palm Spring Photo Festival. It was like meeting an old friend who
via LENSCRATCH: http://lenscratch.com/2023/01/i-love-l-a-francesca-forquet-santa-monica/I recently met Francesca Forquet while reviewing portfolios at the Palm Spring Photo Festival. It was like meeting an old friend who shared a similar sense of humor and joie de vivre, who happened to be Italian. I have always loved the small, absurd details of city life, not unlike what the brilliant television show, How to with John Wilson has done for New York.
“Communism(s): A Cold War Album” by Arthur Grace When I landed at West Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport just over 43 years ago, it marked the beginning of a 12-year exploration of life behind…
via burn magazine: https://www.burnmagazine.org/essays/2023/01/communisms-a-cold-war-album-by-arthur-grace/When I landed at West Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport just over 43 years ago, it marked the beginning of a 12-year exploration of life behind the Iron Curtain. As a photojournalist for Western news outlets, I had unique access to both daily life and historic events across what was then known as the Soviet Bloc.
Jeremiah Ariaz was looking for signs of democracy.
via Poynter: https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2023/jeremiah-ariaz-photographer-newspapers-kansas/Leading up to the 2020 presidential election, photographer Jeremiah Ariaz wanted to make images that showed what democracy looked like in rural America. So he traveled across the country, from swing state to swing state. He visited campaign offices, main streets, protest sites and sometimes, newspapers.
She brought a narrative eye and a social consciousness to her work, whether covering refugee crises, celebrities or fashion. But much of it might have been lost.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/24/arts/marilyn-stafford-dead.html
Ms. Stafford retired in the 1980s to learn Mandarin, write poetry and support human rights initiatives. Or maybe her razor-sharp photographic vision had lost a bit of clarity. “Many years ago,” she said, “a photographer in New York told me, ‘Photographers don’t grow old, they just grow out of focus.’”
The front page of Monday’s Los Angeles Times featured a photo of the shooter dead in his van.
via Poynter: https://www.poynter.org/commentary/2023/los-angeles-times-front-page-newspaper-photo-mass-shooter/The photo, taken by Times staff photographer Allen J. Schaben, is not gory, and was taken from a distance. But the shooter is dead and the caption reads, “Officials investigate after the suspect died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in Torrance on Sunday.” (If you want to see the front page of the Times, click here.)
Los Angeles or La Puebla de Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles (The City of our Lady the Queen of the Angels) was founded by the Spaniards in 1781 and passed into American possession in 1846. It was however of no great importance until the ninth decade of this decade of the present century,
via LENSCRATCH: http://lenscratch.com/2023/01/i-love-l-a-aline-smithson-lost-la/The work today represents the past and present of my life, places I knew as a child and places I have come to know as an adult, with some levity added in.
Former LensCulture Award winners share their best creative advice as well as tips for advancing your career as a portrait-maker and photographer
via LensCulture: https://www.lensculture.com/articles/lensculture-editors-great-portrait-advice-from-award-winning-photographers-part-2As the deadline approaches for the LensCulture Portrait Awards (closing soon — February 15, 2023), we reached out to dozens of former winners and finalists from prior editions of the LensCulture Portrait Awards to ask them for their advice on how to make a great portrait.
Getty Images says it is suing Stability AI, creator of Stable Diffusion, alleging intellectual property right infringement.
via Hyperallergic: http://hyperallergic.com/794294/ai-art-platform-hit-with-copyright-lawsuit-getty-images/Getty Images says it is suing Stability AI, creator of Stable Diffusion, alleging intellectual property right infringement.
“You’re sitting there with thirty or forty contacts books all over the floor, and you find yourself staying up late into the night thinking ‘there has to be something there’ and finding nothing at all. And the people on Instagram write to you and say, ‘oh my God, I’d love to look at your contact sheets’ and I tell them quite honestly, probably not, because they’re gonna disappoint the shit out of you!”
