Conscientious

"Familial Ground is the product of a process that started several years ago when my son was born. I gradually realized that my new role as parent included the responsibility to pass on to my son a familial and cultural inheritance, and that such inheritance would need to be gathered and delivered gradually in a manner appropriate to his age. My attempts at articulating histories, cultural and familial, public and private, made me acutely aware of how much I knew of the former, and how little of the latter..." Following this reasoning, Rafael Goldchain took pictures of himself posing as members of his own family.

The Nocturnes is a web site about night-time photography. There's a lot more to night-time photography than just the same old cliched pictures of city skylines and of traces of driving cars' lights. Two of the galleries there caught my eye, Troy Paiva's and Bill Schwab's.

I spent some time trying to find interesting macro photography work online. As it turned out, that was much harder than I had thought. It seems that everybody is so concerned about the shallow depth-of-field that in the end, pretty much all the photos look alike and the same. The same old flowers (not too close) etc. The most interesting work I could find is Barry Massoni's website. There are lots of flowers plus black-and-white close-ups which all have a somewhat disturbing quality.

David Levinthal has been shooting photos of dolls and toys in various settings and sizes - soldiers, cowboys, girls. Somebody told me about him when I started doing my "Naked Doll" series. Yesterday, I did more of those. Now, I am divided about whether or not I should digitally edit the joints in the photos (you can't see the joints in the old sample shots on my web site). The funny thing about my "Naked Doll" is the overwhelming positive response I've got so far. Maybe I should check out legal issues and then try to get them into a gallery? If David Levinthal can do it...

PS (22 August 2002): Now I am disappointed. A friend of mine told me to check out Nerve.com because he had seen David Levinthal's "XXX" series there (this is not the disappointing bit - in case you were wondering - but here it comes). In their introduction to Levinthal's work, they say that he has his model dolls custom-made for him. He doesn't even do it himself. And that I find disappointing. That takes away whatever message there would be in those photos.

Music photography is fairly popular but I think its signal-to-noise ratio is abysmally small. Which is unfortunate because music moves people, as does photography, so photography of musicians... Today, I stumbled upon Steve Gullick's photos. I like his style.

Even though I was assuming the outcome of a search for "abstract nudes" would not return what I was looking for I did it anyway. And, sure enough, I got a lot of the usual stuff. I don't have to go into the details here. Some people seem to think it's abstract to take a photo of a woman who is spreading her legs wide open and then to change the colours in Photoshop. However, I managed to find a page with abstract black and white photos by Will Sherwood - and that was what I really had been looking for. Check it out.

I came across Jean Miele in "Black and White" magazine. He does all his darkroom work digitally which, I am sure, will make many if not most black-and-white photographers belittle his work. I've said it before, it's not at all clear to me why one shouldn't do on the computer what is usually done in the darkroom. Selling prints might still be a different issue - computer-generated prints are potentially less interesting than hand-printed ones. On the other side, it is hard to see why somebody like Jean Miele wouldn't limit the editions of his prints to milk the market in the same fashion hand-printers do. I'm convinced once more people sell digital prints the difference in price between hand-printed photos and computer-printed ones will disappear.

Two new very nice web exhibits on ZoneZero: Our Culture Is Our Resistance and Girl Culture.

PS: If you watch those two exhibits right after each other or, maybe, in parallel I think you'll start asking yourself what kind of world we live in. Well, at least I did.

Gonzalo Ruffat's website has lots of blurry nudes, presented as if they were Polaroids. I'm always very appreciative of people who dare to move beyond the usual glossy anorexic implant stuff and in this case, it's really something. I mean at least it's not the same old you-know-what. BTW, there are also lots of toy-camera like shots to see.

Lots of good photos taken in China and Mongolia.

"Panoramas of the 21st Century Taken with a Camera of the 19th Century"

Nice Photography
(found on the fabulous thingsmagazine.net)

"These images are my journal. They reflect my everyday life, thoughts, events and moments. Living in the United States at this time is an incredible experience, I believe it is like living in Rome at the peak of the Roman Empire, it holds the world power and technology of our days. I come from a very different country and culture, Brazil, I had a model in my mind of what USA would be like from what I've seen on TV and magazines and previous short visits. But the everyday life revealed to me another place and I started to see and notice things I was not expecting. Under the shiny surface there's homelessness, ignorance, insane people on the streets, hypocrisy, a certain coldness and strong individualism in people in general. Opportunities as well as freedom have attracted an incredible amount of people that seek a decent life quality."
from Rafael Dabul's statement on his fascinating photo essay Limit Horizon

Mike Perkowitz went on a tripto Japan and took lots of photos. Certainly interesting to look at, even though I personally find the presentation a bit messy.

Update (11 June 2003): The same photos in an exhibit on digitaljournalist.org.

At the Tate Modern an exhibition which investigates the relationship between documentary photography and art, showing works by Diane Arbus, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Rineke Dijkstra, and many others. The magazine has an article about it.

A very nice collection of colour patterns from everybody's immediate environment - coincidentally part of which I'm working on myself (in b/w and panoramic, though).
(thru esthet.org)

RJ Muna's site has lots of very cool photos. I especially like the ones where he uses movements.

Panos Pictures offers photojournalism which, I think, is much better than what you usually see. There's way too much stuff to link to here. Tim Dirven's Afghanistan is just one excellent example.

Japanese photographer Tokihiro Sato adds extra elements to his photos using a mirror (more photos).

Sebastiao Salgado is a photojournalist and a social critic. His website shows his work in its intended context.

zonezero.com has a very nice collection of images up called Voyeurism, covering [no anti-pun intended] many different photographers.

PS: I tried to find more about Hiroshi Kamakura online. There's an article on Digital Pros but the link to the artist's website wouldn't work. Too bad.

On the WHO's website, there's a page with photos to download. It's a very odd page because on the left-hand side it shows WHO officials and on the right-hand side it shows some amazing photos of Mental Health Patients. And as if this combination wasn't odd enough when you click on those thumbnails you get huge versions of the photos (by 'huge' I mean huge). The photos are very moving - and I'm not talking about the officials' ones.

For her new album "Bare" Annie Lennox decided to bare it all. I don't know why she thinks she has to compete with the likes of Cristina Aguilera. But then what do I know about music and the music industry? Maybe female singers who want to reach large audiences have to strip. Anyway, in Mrs Lennox' case some of that photography she got done went horribly wrong. When I ran across the cover of "Bare" - by chance - I almost couldn't believe how unflattering and bad the photography is. She looks like an unwrapped mummy. The fan page Eurythmistan has more photos from the session some (but not all) of which are grotesquely bad (especially this one and this one). And this hasn't anything to do with Mrs Lennox herself. Whoever decided on that makeup must have been on crack.

Update: There's an extensive site with tons of photos by Daniele Buetti here.

Tod Seelie is a photographer from Brooklyn. I especially like the Road 02 gallery. He also has a fotolog which I only mention for the sake of completeness.
(thru the re-designed 990000.com)

Update (17 July 2003): The book "The Innocents" is available through Umbrage Books. And there also is a website for The Innocence Project with a lot of background information. The new image and the two links were kindly provided by Andrea Dunlop (Umbrage Books).

"Find your state of mind," a voice says before some non-threatening "downtempo" music plays and you get so see a photo of a woman and a somewhat obscure menu. Ah, and all that after a woman comes walking towards the observer, carrying nothing but a bikini and a camera. You know, the kind of cat-walk where you're constantly worried she might dislocate her hip joints. I guess I'm not really cool enough for this kind of stuff. But the presentation is nifty - even though it's quite annoying that it's constantly loading something. Well, then go and find your state of mind (whatever that is supposed to mean).
(thru Oink!)

Update (27 June 2003): As pointed out in the comment (many thanks!) there's another site (which I personally like much better).

A fotolog using Polaroids.
(also thru oink!)

In his series of New York photos, Julien Goldstein uses a panoramic format - horizontally and vertically.

... Amy Arbus, Tillman Crane, Michael Kenna, and many more on John Paul Caponigro's website.

I refuse to pick a sample photo from Roxann Arwen Mills' portfolio - simply because there are so many different styles, all of them done very elegantly, that picking one at the expense of others just doesn't seem to be fair. Go and browse! Oh, if you're a Polaroid SX-70 fan you'll be quite amazed!
(thru iconomy)

Update (20 July 2003): Elena Kachuro-Rosenberg sent me a few more links for those who want to see more photos by Uta Barth: 1, 2, 3. Thanks, Elena!

Christopher Wray-McCann's site Rotten Oasis has a bunch of very good galleries to look through.
(thru eye-imagine.co.uk - a new weblog - check it out!)

Greg Friedler's portraits are very revealing (lame pun intended). If you click on "Art" you get to see his pairs of photographs where one photo shows a person dressed and the other one the same person naked.

Douglas Levere uses strange colours for some his portraits. That works especially well for his portraits of drag queens.

Erik Refner's photography is mainly black and white, using stark contrasts. I especially like the "Rockabillies" section.

Chris Strong has quite a modern looking portfolio. Nice mix of portraits and unusual scenes. And you got enough time to make yourself a tea while the page is loading...

Peter Funch has some very nice photos in his portfolio.
(thru photo-generic.com)

Ami Vitale has some very interesting photojournalistic work on her website. For each subject she offers a brief introduction to explain the circumstances people are living in. Her "Kashmir" project has some stunningly beautiful photos.

Mark L. Eshbaugh creates large images by piecing together strips of film. His website doesn't work with all browsers; use "Internet Explorer 6" (that worked for me) or check out his portfolio on photo-eye.com.
(thru eye-imagine.co.uk)

It somehow escapes me who and/or what is behind negativ3 but the photos are really quite nice.

PS: I feel somewhat funny because that's so close to what I say in my statement about my Lomo work...

poLaroid imAge features photos taken with Polaroid 600 and SX-70 cameras. It's by far the best website dedicated to Polaroid photography I've seen in a long time. Totally amazing. (Note it uses Flash and, unfortunately, it loads a lot of stuff before you can finally look at it)