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I’ve been trying to write about some sport images that caught my eye while trawling through the Reuters file but I keep getting hung up on our pictures from Kenya.
They are so raw, so powerful and uncompromising that even the most accomplished images of cossetted sportsmen performing in completely controlled circumstances seem insignificant in comparison.
Check it out here.
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The Prix de la Photographie Paris (Px3) jury has chosen Daniel Cima’s entry, 2006 Drought in Ethiopia, as a winner in in the Human Condition competition.
Select winning photos, curated by the director of the Farmani Gallery, will be exhibited at a group show in Los Angeles from March 6-31. The show will travel to New York later in the year, and potentially overseas.
Check it out here.
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Ask photographer Arlene Gottfried if she thinks the New York characters she’s shot for 40 years from Coney Island to Times Square and Harlem are freaks, and she bristles. “I don’t think they’re freaks, because then I’d be a freak, too.” With her little-girl Coney brogue (she and her brother, manic comic Gilbert, grew up there), old-soul eyes, and longtime avid membership in the Jerriese Johnson East Village Choir (she occasionally solos, she boasts), she’s a quiet defender of the grimily vibrant denizens of an older New York that’s disappearing daily. Now she’s their enshriner, too: Due out this week from powerHouse Books, Sometimes Overwhelming compiles images Gottfried took of the city in the seventies and eighties. An exhibit of Gottfried’s later work is also opening March 5 at the Alice Austen House Museum on Staten Island.
We interviewed Gottfried about some of her most striking images. An exclusive preview of photos from her book, and her memories of taking them
Check it out here.
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The international jury of the 51st annual World Press Photo Contest selected a color image of the UK photographer Tim Hetherington as World Press Photo of the Year 2007. The picture was taken 16 September 2007 and shows a US soldier resting at “Restrepo” bunker, named after a soldier from his platoon who was recently killed by insurgents.
The 2nd Battalion Airborne of the 503rd US infantry is undergoing a deployment in the Korengal Valley in the Eastern province of Afghanistan. The valley is infamous as the site of downing of a US helicopter and has seen some of the most intense fighting in the country. Hetherington’s photograph is part of a picture story that was also awarded 2nd Prize in General News Stories. He had traveled to Afghanistan on assignment for Vanity Fair.
“This image shows the exhaustion of a man – and the exhaustion of a nation,” says jury chairman Gary Knight, and adds “We’re all connected to this. It’s a picture of a man at the end of a line.” Fellow juror MaryAnne Golon commented: “I use all my energy to have people notice bad things. There’s a human quality to this picture. It says that conflict is the basis of this man’s life.”
Check it out here.
By Marcus Bleasdale:
The post election violence in Kenya has killed nearly 1,000 and displaced 270,000. It is the most devastating violence to hit Kenya since its independence. Whilst politicians try to find solutions in Nairobi, the ethnic tensions in the Rift Valley reach new highs. Ethnic cleansing has led to killings and houses being burnt in a movement to shift different tribes out of their non-ancestral homes.
Huge parts of different cities across the valleys have been razed to the ground and the inhabitants forced to flee. In the villages, warriors from opposing tribes battle with bows and arrows, rocks and occasionally guns to gain or regain control of their land.
While the politician’s talk, the future of Kenya will depend, not on the final results of the discussions in Nairobi, but on the ability of Kenyans to forgive and live together again. That will take much longer.
Check it out here.
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Chris Hondros has seen the world at war first hand – and so has his camera lens.
Working for Getty images as a war photographer for almost a decade, he has captured militiamen crying out in battle in the Second Liberian Civil War, American soldiers on raids in Iraq and children in the arms of their mothers in Sierra Leone’s refugee camps.
Hondros brought these images, his experiences and his personal comments to Pitt yesterday afternoon in a lecture facilitated by the global and film studies departments, PittArts and Pittsburgh Filmmakers. About 70 people crammed into room 501 in the Cathedral of Learning for a slideshow of Hondros’ work and to hear his commentary.
Check it out here.
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This episode features an interview with Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, co-director of the law school’s Center for Internet and Society, author of “Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity” and founder of Creative Commons. In this conversation Professor Lessig, with a focus on photography, discusses the purpose & objective of Creative Commons, his perspective on copyright law, addresses the question “How if at all the adoption of Creative Commons is hurting photographers? and shares more information about the recently announced CC+ license.
Check it out here.
Polaroid Corp., the Massachusetts company that gave the world instant film photography, is shutting down its film manufacturing lines in the state and abandoning the technology that made the company famous.
“The Norwood plant is shutting down, and we will soon be winding down activities at the Waltham facility as well,” said Kyle MacDonald, senior vice president of Polaroid’s instant photography business segment. The closures, set for completion during this quarter, will eliminate about 150 jobs. In the late 1970s, Polaroid employed about 15,000 in Massachusetts.
The Norwood and Waltham plants make large-format films used by professional photographers and artists. Polaroid also makes professional-grade films in Mexico, and its consumer film packs come from a factory in the Netherlands. All these plants are slated for closure this year. Polaroid chief operating officer Tom Beaudoin said the company is interested in licensing its technology to an outside firm that could manufacture film for faithful Polaroid customers. If that doesn’t happen, Polaroid users would have to find an alternative photo technology, as the company plans to make only enough film to last into next year
Check it out here.
It is rare for a photographer that came of age in the 1960’s and 70’s to not cite Robert Frank’s The Americans and Walker Evans’ American Photographs as the two books that inspired them to take up a camera and explore the world. It is lore that gets repeated so often it almost seems disingenuous in the retelling. I have often thought that it isn’t possible that so many people could be so instantly enamored since, as much as it may be embarrassing to admit, both of those books took a while for me to warm up to them and see their true greatness. I’ve come around, probably in the same way that an early critic of the first edition of The Americans had when he described Frank as one who “produced pictures that look as if a kid had taken them while eating a Popsicle and then had them developed and printed at the corner drugstore.” That critic failed to specify which flavor of Popsicle would have fueled such a remarkable feat. If he had, maybe photographers would have flocked to have given it a taste.
Check it out here.
From Allison V. Smith:
Superficial Snapshots Zine 2: An Issue With Lomos
29 pages, 34 photos
limited edition. 250 signed copies.
(first 20 get signed 5×7 print–sold out)
$22.50 (add $3. to ship out of country)
Check it out here.
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Armed with only a hand-held 35mm film camera, and using available artificial light, Russian photographer Alexei Vassiliev has created a series of stunning portraits of anonymous 21st century urban dwellers. A very slow shutter speed allows him to capture rich colors and blurred human gestures to create iconic images that evoke the essence of modern humanity without much of the detail.
Each image seems to speak of a different near-archetypal story to everyone who experiences them. Some see angels or auras or mythic mother-goddess figures. Others see souls trapped in a man-made cage and fluttering to escape. Others talk of Francis Bacon and the plight of 21st century life, or about the elusive similarities between these images and many 19th century painted portraits.
Check it out here.
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One of the most powerful photos of the tornado damage in the southern U.S. is by photojournalist Gary Cosby Jr. of The Decatur Daily in Alabama. Cosby’s shot was picked up by the AP and ran as today’s lead photo in the USA Today and The New York Times, among other newspapers.
The photo shows one man, James Devaney, searching through the flattened debris of the home where his daughter, along with her son and her husband, were killed early Wednesday morning.
Check it out here.
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Two Swiss museums are hosting the most comprehensive retrospective ever on one of the icons of 20th-century photography.
American photographer Edward Steichen, who died in 1973 two days short of his 94th birthday, had a career spanning 70 years, during which he never ceased to innovate.There certainly is a contrast between the 19-year-old who appears as a sharp silhouette in an early image and the “monument” who was responsible for a “photographic epic”, to use the title of the retrospective devoted to him by Lausanne’s Musée de l’Elysée.
Preparing the exhibition was an epic in itself. “The issue of copyright took ages to sort out,” said William Ewing, the museum’s director, at the preview. Most of the works of art belong to the world’s largest galleries and private collections.
If the exhibition reveals one thing about Steichen, it’s not his talent, but the abundance and diversity of his work
Check it out here.
Jeff Mermelstein walks around New York with his Leica taking pictures. Great commentary on his style and process including his work on 9/11 below.
Check it out here.
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Lockport came from six runs down to beat Oak Park 8-6, and Banks headed onto the field to take the “jubilation shot”—the photo of ecstatic teenagers hugging and tumbling and screaming. It’s the shot that goes on page one of tomorrow’s paper and into the photo albums of every player on the team.
But a volunteer from the Illinois High School Association blocked Banks’s way at third base. “She knew who I was and she said, ‘I can’t let you out,’” he says. “I asked why. She said, ‘This is my instruc tion.’” Banks looked around. He spotted the photographer from Visual Image Photo graphy, the firm under contract with the IHSA to take pictures of its major events, heading for the field from the first base side. Banks trotted after him and got his picture.
Banks also calls the jubilation shot the “money shot,” and that’s not just a metaphor. Papers point out that for 100 years they’ve sold copies of their pictures for a nominal rate to readers seeking mementos. Now a lot of papers have digitized the process—their photographers post pictures and readers order them online. An outside company that handled the order and made the print took a cut and Banks and the Southtown split the balance. Banks says his yearly take was something under $2,000.
The revenue stream is pretty small—it didn’t come close to sparing the Southtown its recent drastic economies, merging with the Star papers and laying off a lot of people, Banks included. But visit the Web site of what’s now the SouthtownStar and you’ll see the paper means business. “Welcome to Southland Photo Shoppe,” it says. “Your shopping choices range from traditional prints to T-shirts, mugs, computer mouse pads and other items on which our photos are imprinted.” A simple eight-by-ten is $25.
Check it out here.
Photographers captured the devastation from killer tornados that wreaked havoc across five southern states. We found galleries from National Geographic News, the New York Times and The Tennessean.
Check it out here.
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For the longest time, I’ve wanted to figure out the best way to add keywords to my extensive library. I know in theory how to do it, but I have never actually made a concentrated effort to use this very important and powerful feature in Aperture.
Keywording gets even more important as your archive grows, making it easy to find specific images years down the road. Stock shooters will tell you that efficient keywording will make them money, since buyers will search for specific images by keyword, and if your image fits the bill but does not contain the specific keyword, it will never be called up for consideration.
Check it out here.
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What’s it like to photograph somebody famous? Or to be that famous person, posing for a photograph? Leo Benedictus picks three great portraits – and hears both sides of the story
Check it out here.
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The talk of newspapers’ demise is older than some of the reporters who write about it, but what is happening now is something new, something more serious than anyone has experienced in generations. Last year started badly and ended worse, with shrinking profits and tumbling stock prices, and 2008 is shaping up as more of the same, prompting louder talk about a dark turning point.
“I’m an optimist, but it is very hard to be positive about what’s going on,” said Brian P. Tierney, publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Philadelphia Daily News. “The next few years are transitional, and I think some papers aren’t going to make it.”
Advertising, the source of more than 80 percent of newspaper revenue, traditionally rose and fell with the overall economy. But in the last 12 to 18 months, that link has been broken, and executives do not expect to be able to repair it completely anytime soon.
Check it out here.
