March 10, 2021 The Family Business Touching story by Alix Strauss in The New York Times about the 80 year history of Fred Marcus Studios. Now run by a third generation, they’ve done more than 30,000 weddings since opening in 1941. Categories At Work/Business & Industry/Good Work/Thoughts & Theory
February 17, 2021 On Gordon Parks We can never learn enough about Gordon Parks. R.C> Baker at The Village Voice wrote up a brief on an exhibit of his work and included this, in talking about one of Parks’ iconic images: “That’s the photograph I made of her, in the government building, in front of the American flag, with a broom in her hand and a... Categories Advice & Learning/Good Work/Photojournalism
February 17, 2021 An American Project Arghhh … the High Museum in Atlanta has an exhibit of Dawould Bey up according to an NPR piece by Karen Michel. Only running through March 14 and I’m not sure how comfortable I’d be – unless they’re doing private showings … Categories Good Work/Photojournalism
February 14, 2021 What Inspires You? Great thread started by Lewis Bush on what, outside of photography itself, inspires you. For me, it’s music and one painting. I want to make photos like that painting, lost in the moment, on the edge of the space. Categories Craft/Good Work/Thoughts & Theory
November 23, 2020 Making the Invisible Visible This NPR piece by Richard L. Harris, ostensibly a review of a new monograph of Mary Ellen Mark’s lifetime of work, may have given me a theme for my spring Documentary Photojournalism course. As journalists, we are charged with shining light into the dark corners of our world – to make the invisible visible. Given how dark our world has... Categories Advice & Learning/Good Work/Photojournalism
August 12, 2020 Road Trip Portraits I love this idea to do portraits through a truck’s windows. That Brian Bowen Smith ended up putting 11,000 miles on his 1958 Ford F100 while criss-crossing the country this summer … well, that just makes it so much cooler. Time to tune up my 66 Mustang, I think … Categories Craft/Good Work/Photojournalism
July 16, 2020 Color in a Dark Time You can look at this post on the Leica blog two ways: with lust over the newest Leica rangefinder or with lusciousness at the images Huw John created with it. I, I choose both. Categories Good Work/Photojournalism/Tech Talk
February 23, 2020 Looking Back at Joe Rosenthal’s Iwo Jima Photo Seventy five years ago today, Joe Rosenthal made made, perhaps, the most iconic photograph – the flag raising over Iwo Jima. There have been many stories written and told about what happened that day, from how he heard about the planned flag raising to whether he posed the photo (he didn’t, let’s be clear). I’ve talked about this photo almost... Categories Business & Industry/Good Work/Photojournalism
February 16, 2020 Dorothea Lange and Her Role Developing Modern Photojournalism Well worth reading: Alice Gregory at The New York Times’ Style Magazine takes a look at the role of Dorothea Lange in the growth of photojournalism as the Museum of Modern Art opens their second retrospective on her. Sigh … I may have to go to New York again … Her contemporary Ansel Adams called her pictures “both records of... Categories At Work/Craft/Good Work/Photojournalism
January 15, 2020 A Sense of Interiority There are many great quotes in this interview with Dawoud Bey, but this resonated deeply with me: African-Americans in photographs have very often been viewed through a lens of social pathology. So, I wanted to respond to that kind of representation by making photographs that conveyed a deep, complex humanity. I want there to be real sense of interiority, to... Categories At Work/Craft/Good Work/Photojournalism