Sep 2, 2010 0
Meghan Lyden is just one of the best picture editors around … she puts together the Denver Post’s Plog (photo blog) and has collected a great set of images looking back at the summer that was.
I want to live in about two thirds of those images …
Aug 11, 2010 0
Over on the NPPA listserv, Mark Hertzberg posted links to a pair of stories that come out of England about a soccer team that is not credentialing photographers this season, instead telling them to buy them from the official photographers.
Which lead one paper to, brilliantly, have an illustrator draw the key action moments from the game. A new market for courtroom sketch artists, perhaps?
Aug 3, 2010 0
Jennifer Cisney, Kodak’s Chief Blogger, linked, indirectly, to this collection of photos done by Jamie Livingston and it’s worth spending some time on. Actually, she linked to Chris Higgins’ post about the story behind the images, so I’d start there.
It’s an awesome collection – for 18 years, Livingston shot one Polaroid photo every day. Right up until the day he died of cancer in 1997. As a visual record of a life, it’s fascinating. More than 6,000 photos of friends, family, things and moments in his life. A great record.
Jul 31, 2010 0
No, really – use a cell phone to shoot a full-size magazine cover. Pixel-peepers the world over are cringing right now, but Peter Belanger shot the current Macworld cover with his new iPhone 4. And didn’t retouch it, either.
See, it isn’t the camera, is it? As Ansel Adams said, “The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it.”
Jul 31, 2010 0
I’ve posted links to some similar collections, but the Denver Post has, again, eclipsed everyone else with their collection of color images from the 1930s and 1940s. Maybe it’s just me, but these images are fascinating because we’re so used to seeing the subjects in black and white.
Jul 30, 2010 0
Time managing editor Richard Stengal explains why
they made the decision to use a portrait of a young woman who has had her nose and ears cut off by the Taliban. The photo, by Jodi Bieber, is an arresting image – the soft light and simple composition draw you in before you realize what it is that you’re looking at.
Jul 29, 2010 0
Kodak has taken the massive backlit displays it used to feature in New York City’s Grand Central Station and sent them to the Eastman House Museum. If you’re in e Rochester area, I would highly recommend taking a look.
Jul 4, 2010 0
National Public Radio has a piece up this morning about fine arts photographer Jennifer Karady and her series of photos on visualizing memory, “Soldiers’ Stories of Iraq and Afghanistan.” It’s an interesting idea, trying to integrate the interpretation of memories in the daily lives of returned troops.
Thoughts?
Jun 28, 2010 0
This is one of those posts that probably won’t make any sense, even if I wrote it, sat on it and re-wrote it a dozen times. Sorry, sometimes that’s the way it is …
Backstage before the holiday ballet in Centreville, Virginia, December 1992. (Photo/Mark E. Johnson)
The New York Times Lens blog has an entry up on Bruce Davidson that promotes his new, three volume book set. Davidson is one of those people who my peers talk about but I’ve never looked that deeply into. (There are a lot of people like that, I’m afraid to say – I have years of work left to catch up to my friends.) The interview with him is … well … weird.
I don’t know him well enough to know if this is normal or not, but it’s just pretty disjointed overall. But it got me thinking about what kind of “photographer” I have been, what I am and what I’d like to be.
Traditionally, I always labeled myself as a photojournalist – I told the story of today, showed you what happened and, maybe, on a good day, I even put it in context and gave you some deeper meaning. At the very least, I tried to build a connection between my subjects and my readers, help one understand the other. With that understanding came knowledge about our shared community and the ability to make decisions, to make changes.
But that understanding was always about the right now. Much of my work, while I’d like to think it had a daily impact, wasn’t designed to be studied years later for an understanding of what my communities were like while I was there.
What I would like to become, I think, is more of a documentary photographer – a term I privately despised for many years because I didn’t really understand it until the last decade or so. The decade, not coincidentally, that I moved away from event driven photojournalism. I’ve never had a great working definition of “documentary photography” which has been one of the things I’ve wrestled with. Davidson hints at what it may be, for me, when he says, “I just photograph the human condition as I find it. It can be serious. It can also be ironic or humorous.” That’s getting close to it, but that’s not it just yet.
Which leaves the question of what am I now? Probably closer to the documentary side than the pure photojournalist, I suppose. More of what I’m attracted to shooting is about my community on a daily basis, less about the transformational events that go on within it. Although I do still like the event-oriented assignments, they are fewer and further between.
And now I could go wandering off into my daily struggles to document my life and how, while I’m better equipped now than I’ve ever been, I don’t feel like I have a camera that works for me. But I’ll save that for another post.
May 26, 2010 0
These pop up from time to time – lists of photographs that changed the world – and, someday, someone should start analyzing these lists to see if some sort of consensus can be calculated on what are the greatest/most important/most influential/insert-other-platitude-here images ever shot/printed/published/lost/imagined.
Today’s list is of dubious origin (lists two authors from two different publications), but the 13 chosen include some that I would list but there are some major omissions. (For those looking forward to our Advanced Photojournalism course this fall, you should start thinking about these things because you have a paper on what you think is the most important photograph ever made due in December.)
So, what’s on your list?
