We are all sinners. Lest you wonder, I have not had a religious epiphany. However, organized religion can offer surprising insights into the human condition. For a while now, I have been fascinated by the Catholic concept of Indulgence, in particular by abuses in the Middle Ages: People were promised they could buy themselves out of all kinds of sins if they only paid enough money. It’s a bit of a stretch, but an entertaining exercise nonetheless, to ask to what extent looking at - and buying - photography in effect is a contemporary version of just that. (more)
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These photographs of Americans living in poverty, a Time Magazine commission for Joakim Eskildsen, are very much worth a visit. A companion read: 57 members of Congress among wealthy 1%.
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“The making of art has very little to do with galleries. These places are, in the sense that they are commercial galleries, interested in a particular and very narrow kind of art that can be displayed within a space in a particular kind of way, they are interested in people who can produce work that galleries can show. And so people produce the kind of work that they can show, they kind of work that sells, the kind of work that wealthy people like - which is problematic. It’s a symbiotic relationship where what galleries, gallery consumers, and gallery feeders produce is intricately linked in an unbalanced but self-replicating chain.” - Colin Pantall
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A few thoughts on yet another auction record for a photograph.
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The other day, Aaron Hobson sent me an email with the subject line of this post, asking “I was wondering if art galleries, blogs, and magazines will soon only be filled with socially outgoing, marketing driven artists that also enter competitions?” If the social-media cheerleaders are to be believed the answer clearly would have to simply be “Yes.” (more)
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When you buy a photobook do you ever look “under the hood”? Do you ever look what’s under the dust cover? I’m guessing most people don’t do that because what’s there to see? Well, as it turns out, there could be quite a lot to be seen. Here are two of the most recent examples I’ve come across. The first is Ian van Coller’s Interior Relations, published by Charles Lane Press. The second is Safety First by The Sochi Project.
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It was Tod Papageorge who said “If your pictures are not good enough, you aren’t reading enough.” (ref. via) That’s not what photographers like to hear, is it? They’ve just got used to the fact that they have to spend a lot of time on “social networking” and PR (something that clearly is taking away a lot of time from photography), and now they’re supposed to read? What’s that all about? But maybe writing has more in common with photography than one might think. Maybe looking at photographs has more in common with reading a novel than one might think. (more)
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There’s a big debate over at Alec Soth’s blog about the best creative years of photographers. He writes “taken as a whole, photographic greatness seems to me to be a young person’s game” and provides evidence in the form of research/writing done by Dean Keith Simonton. Who would argue with smartly presented graphs? Well, I would but I will spare you my concerns. But even if Simonton is correct I just can’t get myself into a state of worry. I would now be in the declining phase of my creative life. Somehow I must be too busy working on many things to realize that I am not supposed to be doing that any longer. (more)
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Still in his mid-twenties, Matt Eich has an impressive list of achievements under his belt already. I had a general sense of curiosity about his work, and I figured the best way to learn more about it - and the person behind the camera - was to ask some questions. Find our conversation here.
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“Perhaps instead of setting aside money for competitions, photographers can re-distribute some of that money toward purchasing independent books and zines. It’d be great to see those niche verticals flourish and grow. It would a wise investment too because at some point I’m sure you’ll end up putting out a book and searching for an audience.” - Bryan Formhals
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“Commit! Buy the fucking thing and keep moving. Look, react, COMMIT! Keep breathing.” More here.
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After months of fighting in Libya, the news just arrived that Muammar Gaddafi is dead (notice the James Bond villain detail here: A golden gun). As is probably inevitable, footage of the corpse is making the rounds. If you’ve seen stills - and how could you get around it given it’s being shown almost everywhere - you might not have watched the actual “footage”: a video (or videos? I only watched one), shot with a cell-phone camera. I want to think I’m pretty good at visual pattern recognition, but it was pretty tough. It was very hard to see anything, what with the camera moving so quickly. Mind you, this is not the first time we’ve seen such imagery emerge (remember Neda?), and it had me thinking. (more)
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Find out about your rights as a photographer right here. Example: “When in public spaces where you are lawfully present you have the right to photograph anything that is in plain view.” Or: “Police officers may not generally confiscate or demand to view your photographs or video without a warrant.” (via)
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Yaakov Israel’s The Quest for the Man on the White Donkey, complex, multi-faceted project, featuring portraits and landscapes, was my personal pick as a winner of this year’s Conscientious Portfolio Competition. For me, the project captures seemingly disjointed moments in time, offering many hints and as many red herrings. The viewer is invited to come back and re-look at these photographs, to find a slightly different world each time. New details reveal themselves, while old details change their meaning ever so slightly. Instead of pointing at something and saying “This is the way it is” the photographs ask their viewers to discover what is to be found and to ultimately come to their own conclusions. Find my conversation with the photographer about his work here.
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If you love looking at functional photographs outside of their original context, this page is probably going to entertain you for a while.
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You can pre-view the entire recent (Talent) issue of FOAM Magazine online. I think that’s a brilliant idea. There is no way that leafing through the magazine online can possibly replace looking at the actual object, but if you don’t know what to expect or if you’re curious you can get an idea what the magazine looks like. (more)
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Mirjana Vrbaski’s Verses of Emptiness was picked by Caroline von Courten as one of the winners of this year’s Conscientious Portfolio Competition. About the work, Caroline writes “These very simple and yet dense complex photographs invite me to look more closely and to have a conversation in my mind with these photographs and the persons portrayed.” and “Here the limitation and the concentration of the photographic medium reveal themselves at once in an extraordinary way.” I talked with Mirjana about her work in a conversation that you can find here.
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We Are the 99 Percent is a Tumblr blog, where photography, social protest, and the internet have come together in an amazing way. Here is an interview with the people being the blog, this article talks about why Tumblr was used.
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In my final post about this year’s Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal (part 1, part 2) I want to talk about their portfolio reviews. I love talking with photographers about their work. Yet I intensely dislike portfolio reviews, or, more accurately, I dislike those events where you get 20 minutes with a photographer and where you typically are treated like cattle. Of course, I’m fully aware of the fact that my complaints are extremely unlikely to change what has become an industry (which, let’s face it, is quite lucrative for some people). (more)
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“Photographer and rioter doing their job” - that’s the one line that stuck with me in the video posted here. Make sure to watch the whole thing to see some very cliche photographs and to see how they were produced. This is related to a private project I started earlier this year: Using the war in Libya as a basis I started to investigate cliches of photojournalism, filling various folders on my computer with images. It’s extremely disheartening for me to see how easy it has been to add photographs almost on a daily basis. I don’t know what I’m going to do with this collection, I suppose at some stage there’ll be a post about photojournalistic cliche images.
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Am I the only one who finds this really sad? There are so many things one could talk about, in terms of art. But you can be certain that the one thing many people will remember hearing for a while is how a famous gallery is selling - let’s face it: pretty bad - paintings done by a famous singer that look like they’ve been copied off of other people’s photographs.
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Nigel Bennet’s Silence Has an Echo was picked by Michael Mazzeo as one of the winning entries to this years Conscientious Portfolio Competition. Michael wrote: “This portfolio offers enough information and ambiguity to elicit countless narratives. Nevertheless, the mood of the work is certainly unsettling and, I believe, very appropriate given the current state of the world.” I talked with Nigel about the series in an extended conversation that you can find here.
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Part of the future of photography on the web might be people discussing photography using video. Things really get interesting once you have more than one person, and voila, there’s In the Loupe, where Stella Kramer, Julie Grahame, and Allegra Wilde talk about photography in short video segments (via dvafoto).
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Right here. Well worth the read, for a variety of reasons.
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“WARCO: The News Game is a first-person shooter video game in which the player is a photojournalist gathering footage for television news stories on subjects similar to revolutionary conflict in Africa and the Middle East.” - Scott Brauer
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There are two web photo magazines that I wanted to point out. There’s Landscape Stories (which has been around for a while), and there’s FK Magazine (now in English). Have a peek!
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If you have sixteen minutes, you might want to watch this talk by Hans Aarsman about photography (via). It’s incredibly refreshing and at times very funny.
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Marc Feustel has a wonderful interview with Yannick Bouillis, founder of Offprint Paris, “a project space for contemporary photography and a book fair for independent publishers.” A quote that struck me (and that I fully agree with): “The focus on the so-called ‘collectible’ aspect of photobooks, which is reinforced by the endless ‘best photobook’ awards (are there not enough competitions in daily life already?) masks the importance of the photobook within photography.”
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Tom Winchester conducted an interview with the curator of Boris Mikhailov’s Case History at MoMA, which you can find here. It’s a very interesting piece, tackling the various issues around that body of work.
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It is time to reveal the winners of the Conscientious Portfolio Competition 2011. This year, the jury consisted of Caroline von Courten (FOAM Magazine), Michael Mazzeo (Michael Mazzeo Gallery), and myself. Find more information about Caroline and Michael here. Without further ado, the winners are… (more)
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I remember then when I saw portraits from “Mona Lisas of the suburbs” by Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler for the first time, I was blown away. Seemingly very simple photographs, the portraits reveal enormous depth, while at the same time they are incredibly beautiful. To make a long story short, there had been some plans to make a book, so after some discussions Ute and Werner decided to do it with Meier & Müller, the photobook publishing venture I’m part of. The book is now out (in Europe, US copies are in transit), so I asked the photographers some questions about this very special project - their first together, as a married couple, after each being a photographer for almost forty years. Find the piece here.
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“This idea that everything has been done is a sign of the limitations of our own imaginations.” - Colin Pantall And: “More important than knowledge and research is passion and conviction. You need to invest something in what you photograph - the Bechers had a passion for water towers and smelting plants. And it shows, in a good way. Too many people photograph what they think they ought to. That shows too, but in a bad way.”
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“I had heard about the mummies of Guanajuato in Mexico, mummified cholera victims from the 1830’s.” writes Steve Pyke. Find his account of getting access to and photographing them here.
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The newly launched online photography magazine timemachine is off to a good start with its first issue, “Home.” Check it out!
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Have a peek at Gaddafi’s family album, found by Tyler Hicks (Gaddafi? Kadafi? Qaddafi?).
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Parents of teenager sue fashion photographer. I don’t want to comment on those photographs in question, and I also don’t want to comment on parents who allow their underage child to be photographed that way. You can come to your own conclusions. But it’s pretty obvious that having a model release is a good idea.
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Blake Andrews just published a post, writing “reinterpretation threatens to overtake generation as the dominant creative act in photography.” Should we be worried? I don’t think so. Looking over the many, many submissions for the Conscientious Portfolio Competition this year, only a miniscule fraction - a handful maybe - involved reinterpretation. The rest - the vast majority: Plain “good old” photography. Of course, that might mean very little. But I think if somehow reinterpretation was about to overtake generation as the dominant mode in photography I would see many more submissions based on albums, old photos, or screen shots of webcams or Google Street View. (more)
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In a couple of recent posts, Pete Brook addresses what I think is the key issue of all Google Street View (GSV) work: Authorship. The first post, Navigating the Puzzle of Google Street View ‘Authorship’ investigates two recent project, which has a curious overlap of imagery. Perhaps not surprisingly, both Jon Rafman and Michael Wolf consider the images in question “completely different images, altered by their own hand.” (more; updated below)
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This week’s photobook presentations are: 101 Billionaires (2nd ed.) by Rob Hornstra, One Mississippi (One Picture Book) by Alec Soth, The Polaroids by Sibylle Bergemann, Italia (One Picture Book) by Mark Steinmetz, The Day-to-Day Life of Albert Hastings by Kaylynn Deveney.
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Donn Zaretsky reports: “Janine Gordon’s copyright infringement suit against Ryan McGinley has been dismissed on grounds of ‘utter lack of similarity.’” Update (19 August 2011): More
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Here is a crazy (or maybe not so crazy) thought I had the other day, sitting in a crit, listening to somebody talking about “the other”: As photographers, we love to think of ourselves as being incredibly aware of that problem. We love to think that if there’s one thing we need to avoid it is to picture someone or a group as “the other”. And there are very good reasons for that. The thought I had: We’re still doing it, though. There still is “the other” in photography. Politically correct as we are, the way a group is turned into “the other” has changed, though. Instead of us treating a group as “the other” and thus separating them from our own group it now works the other way around: There are those who for whatever reason decide they don’t want to be part of our group, and it is those groups that we can - and in fact happily will - depict as the other. As someone pointed out to me, the currently most prominent such group might be the (US) Tea Party, whose resentment-based politics makes them a pretty easy and simple target. Unlike in the case of the earlier other - where “the other” had no say in being excluded - exclusion now works to cement the view points of both sides: The Tea Party sees the way it is being treated photographically as confirmation of their ideas, whereas we get photographic confirmation that they’re crazy (see, for example, the kerfuffle around the latest Michelle Bachman cover).
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Benjamin Lowy’s new book Iraq | Perspectives is due to be released later this year. Given photojournalism has been in the news (again) recently, I approached Ben to talk about his book, his work in general, and about photojournalism. Find the full piece here.
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“Police Chief Jim McDonnell has confirmed that detaining photographers for taking pictures ‘with no apparent esthetic value’ is within Long Beach Police Department policy.” (full story, via)
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At the time of this writing, Congress is still debating whether or not to ruin the economy by defaulting. A short while ago, Will Steacy went out to take photographs of dollar bills removed from circulation, before they were destroyed. Writes Michael Mazzeo: “The faces which once exuded confidence, security, and self-reliance, now, upon close inspection, appear distressed, disturbed, and disfigured, not much unlike our economy.”
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“The Hampshire College community mourns the loss of Professor Emeritus Jerome Liebling, who died Wednesday at Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton, Massachusetts.” - obituary
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I found a very interesting thought about photojournalism in a short essay written by Daido Moriyama, which can be found in Setting Sun - Writings by Japanese Photographers. Thinking about why Horst Faas and Michel Laurent’s photographs from Bangladesh don’t take him “anywhere beyond the scenes they depict,” Moriyama writes “Perhaps it’s this: Perhaps the cameramen lost themselves in the Bangladesh photographs and became an intrinsic part of the recording device, so that the only effect that the photographs could have was illustrations of the misery of war. Photographs such as those by [Robert] Capa and [William] Klein, on the other hand, contain the living pulse of the human being behind the camera. The former is nothing more than a journalistic photograph of an atrocity, while the latter is a framed portion of the world that bears a poignant relationship to the world as a whole.” (p. 36, emphases in the original) I can’t help but think that in this short passage Moriyama captured the essence of the problem.
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There’s a great interview with Raimond Wouda here.
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As an update to this: Team Gallery owner José Freire’s personal statement (via).
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Ever since writing about at what stage some photograph might be too similar to some other photograph (also see this follow-up), I have been thinking about how to approach the topic in a more productive manner. In part, this is for slightly selfish reasons: I’m a bit tired of these kinds of debates (“Did photographer X rip off photographer Y?”), and I’d love to have a better answer when asked. So I thought a good approach might be to start from the idea and not from the images. Find the whole piece here.
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“Concerned about security problems, the East German communist regime ordered border guards to snap photos of the Berlin Wall in the 1960s. The images, which were top secret, were lost in an archive for decades. Now a new exhibition will reveal hundreds of the photographs, digitally spliced to create remarkable panoramic views of the infamous landmark.” - story (with lots of pictures)
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