Over at the National Press Photographers Association’s web site, Jim Colton has put together a series of posts on building the perfect portfolio.
In the third part of the series, he quotes MaryAnne Golon of the Washington Post:
You need to care deeply about every image in your portfolio. If you don’t care about your pictures, why would anyone else?
Damn straight …
The International Center of Photography has announced their Infinity Awards recognizing outstanding achievements in photography. Eight awards were given and MediaStorm produced films on each of the winners.
David Guttenfelder’s is a great look into how his work out of North Korea has come about. If you mouse over the right side, you can see the play list and watch his. (Of course, the Jeff Bridges one is worth watching, too.)
That quote at the end, about building connections, is why we do this work.
From a few days ago, but worth a few minutes of your time …
It’s a little past 5 p.m. and I’ve just closed up the Photo Cave. Spring semester 2013 is essentially done.
Well, except for the grading.
And conducting exit interviews early next week.
And then I’ll start teaching a Maymester class in a little over 10 days … still, the first-semester students have pixel-peeped and clicked their way through final projects and portfolios.
So, for them, I want to point them to a few photos by Carl Weese, who we were lucky enough to have visit us in the fall. Mr. Weese is not a photojournalist so much as a documentary photographer – and he’s a damned fine one at that.
As I’ve been catching up on his galleries (which you should spend some time with, especially frames 24 and 25 in this one) and absorbing his latest set of drive-in movie theater images, I came across this simple scene from near his home in Connecticut.
And that, to me, sums up a lot of this past academic year. At first glance, there were many not-so-great moments, students I did not connect with, leaving potential unrealized. But with a closer look, I am starting to see the structure, starting to see the little gestures and movements that I missed.
I’ve seen the barn all along, but I think I’ve been missing the duck.
One of these summers, I’m going to make the run up to Charlottesville, Virginia, for the Look3 photo festival I’ve never heard anything but praise for this … and I always have a conflict, it seems.
I need to put it on my 2014 calendar …
(Thanks to Justin Ide for the reminder.)
Over at The New York Times’ Lens blog, Whitney Richardson has a story up about Paul Kwilecki and his photographs of Decatur County, Georgia. Well worth a read and a walk through the gallery.
But it raises a couple of question that, probably, only I can answer … why did Mr. Kwilecki reach out to Duke University to help with his archive? I guess I know that answer – because the University of Georgia doesn’t have a photographic reputation. I want to change that so badly it hurts.
His work is exactly the sort of thing I want housed here, that I want to work with, that I want to help people see and discover.
“I am frequently asked by people who have not seen my work why I spend my life documenting one simple place like Decatur County, Georgia,” he wrote. “People confuse simple with small; they’re not the same thing.”
We may be a small program, but I certainly hope we are not simple.
Read the piece to see what happened.
(Thanks to Sean Elliot for the link.)
Info is now up on the 2013 LUCEO Student Project Award competition. The winner gets $1,000 and a year’s worth of mentoring from the group.
And that last part is probably worth more than the first part …
Word filtered out yesterday that two alums from my program here at the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication sort of, well, won all of the things in the Georgia Press Association’s January clip contest.
Sara Caldwell, a 2011 grad, and Jon-Michael Sullivan, a 2010 grad, are both on staff at the Augusta Chronicle and about to get knee-deep in the Masters. But here’s what they did:
So, by my count, of the 15 photo awards for the month, the two of them won 10. In a state wide contest.
And as if that wasn’t enough, they also each had a photo in the Zuma Press Photo of the Day this past weekend.
What a great way to end the week, eh?
