Not to be missed, right here.
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Remember how I talked about Mark Steinmetz’s South Central, the third book of the (actually not a) trilogy that also includes South East and Greater Atlanta? You can’t really get South Central any longer - or so I thought. Not so, several readers told me via email (thank you!): Light Work still has some signed copies!
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One of America’s finest social documentary photographers, Milton Rogovin, is celebrating his 100th birthday today - Happy Birthday!
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Just before the Christmas Eve Mass 2009, a woman with apparent mental problems jumped a barrier and tried to reach Pope Benedikt who was moving towards the altar at St. Peter’s Basilica. Bodyguards managed to tackle the woman, but in the ensuing scrum, the Pope ended up falling to the ground. It was probably inevitable that video footage of the event would make the news - taken by someone a few rows away from the event. Stills from the low-resolution movie were used in news articles to show the event, and I was struck by the similarities with the famous Zapruder film.
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A while ago, I was wondering why there weren’t more collectives of photographers working together. Today, I came across Dream Boats Collective - four photographers, based in four different cities, pooling together resources.
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Here’s an interesting post by DLK Collection, with a lot of statistics and this general intro: “According to our tally, we wrote in-depth reviews for a total of 173 photography shows at galleries and museums this year. With the notable exception of the tireless Vince Aletti of the New Yorker whom we doubt we can ever match, we likely reviewed more photography shows in the past 12 months than any other publication on the planet.” (I personally wouldn’t compare Mr Aletti’s typically rather short reviews with DLK’s way more detailed ones, but then that’s just me). Clearly, DLK have made an invaluable contribution to the photo-blogging scene, and I’m looking forward to more to come!
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I’m hearing more and more complaints about pretty badly done digital postproduction of large-format photographs, often by very well-known photographers. Just this morning, I received another email with such a complaint. Those who follow this blog closely will remember a recent exhibition review where I bemoaned it myself. (updated below)
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I’m sure everybody else noticed this, too, but Greater Atlanta by Mark Steinmetz is the only book you can find in Alec Soth’s, 5B4’s and my list of the best photobooks 2009.
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A complaint I hear a lot about contemporary photography is that the sizes of photographs are inflated. I think a discussion about print sizes certainly can be - maybe should be - had, but it might disappoint all those bemoaning large sizes. I thought I’d write down some of my thinking about this; hopefully, someone will disagree and publish her/his thoughts.
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The first (and only) time I went to the New Museum, and of course I was snapping some photos with my little digital camera (mind you, not of the utterly forgettable art on display, but of the building). A “security” guard approached me and told me “You can’t take pictures here,” and I almost responded “Oh yeah? I just did.” But I ended up being a good boy and put my camera away. This experience will be familiar to many people taking photos, and a new post over at the Smithsonian talks in length about the various cases (the UK seems to have become a particularly bad place for photographers; see Michael’s new post).
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Incredibly sad news this morning: “Larry Sultan, a highly influential California photographer whose 1977 collaboration, ‘Evidence’ - a book made up solely of pictures culled from vast industrial and government archives - became a watershed in the history of art photography, died on Sunday at his home in Greenbrae, Calif. He was 63.” - full obit
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Marc wrote a response to my post about photo books, so this seems like a good opportunity for me to expand what I was thinking about a little.
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“A new collection of images by Manhattan photographer Yasmine Chatila is causing quite a buzz throughout the city. […] Seems as thought Chatila sees an open window as an invitation to snap what’s going on in front of it; she doesn’t get permission to take the photos.” PDNPule writes. Gasp! Oh, no, she didn’t! Well… Wasn’t there something just like this, about ten years ago maybe? Also b/w, a bit grainy, if I remember it correctly… Problem is I can’t remember the name of the photographer (anyone?), but I’m really certain it also had something to do with naked people shot through their windows. Which, unless I misremember things, would make these kinds of buzzes appear once a decade, almost as if they’re art-world cicadas… Update: Readers Don Hamerman, Mike Lim, and David Simonton reminded me what I was thinking of (thank you!), it’s Merry Alpern’s Dirty Windows (many photos here). Update: And here is a broader look at “Voyeuristic art photography”. I would probably add Alison Jackson to the list.
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Having just published my list, here is Jeff’s.
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It’s that time of the year again, so without further ado, these are the photo books that impressed me the most this past year. I’m listing them in no particular order, with the exception of the very first one: jpegs by Thomas Ruff. Cutting-edge work, challenging the way we think about photographs, presented beautifully in a large (but not too large) book, maybe in the best possible way (since I don’t think the work gains anything from blowing it up even larger and hanging it in a gallery or museum). It’s tempting to dismiss this work as too simple or too obvious or too cerebral, but I don’t think it qualifies for any of these dismissals.
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Todd Walker has a response to my post about photo books. Magazines as the answer to why photo book publishers shun experimentation? I’m not convinced at all. I’d like to think there are publishers (or photographers) who want to aim a little higher.
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I talked about doing something good while shopping for photographs the other day. Turns out, if you want to get a truly unique photo book and contribute to a good cause, there are options, too. Alec Soth just produced Allowing Flowers, designed to exclusively support CommonBond Communities, which is raising money to create “4,000 affordable living spaces that over 6,000 people can call home sweet home.” There an interview with Alec about the project (and more) here.
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I have been thinking about photography books a lot lately (for various reasons), and I have been noticing that there isn’t much of a variety in photo books, is there? Basically, you have monographs - bodies of work by one artist, and you sometimes have books about collections or museum shows. As much as I love looking at the books produced these days (not all of them, of course), it’s just amazing to see that there does not look as if there was a publisher willing to take a risk (at least not one of the big ones), willing to do something completely different. I know, it’s a tough and expensive business - but in principle, the medium photo book could offer so much more than, well, just monographs or books about collections/shows.
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It’s that time of the year again, and if you’re thinking that there surely must be some affordable photography around to get for someone, here are a couple of suggestions. Why not combine buying original art works with doing something good? collect.give is a new site whose photographers “have pledged to donate 100% of the profits from their print sales to worthwhile causes they support.” And there is Fraction Magazine’s print sale - see the individual posts on their blog - where “one hundred percent of the sale goes to the photographer.”
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There’s a great interview with Jon Edwards here.
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W. Eugene Smith was one of the greatest photojournalists of the 20th Century, but I think he would probably have a hard time if he was still alive and decided to enter World Press Photo, which just decreed that only “retouching which conforms to currently accepted standards in the industry is allowed.”
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Here’s part two of my personal selection of Ostkreuz work (find part one here).
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This just in via PDN’s blog: “Amsterdam-based World Press Photo has announced the call for entries for its 2010 contest, adding an interesting new rule: ‘The content of an image must not be altered. Only retouching which conforms to currently accepted standards in the industry is allowed. The jury is the ultimate arbiter of these standards and may at its discretion request the original, unretouched file as recorded by the camera or an untoned scan of the negative or slide.’ […] Now, the hard part: What does ‘Currently accepted standards’ mean?” Just like Daryl, I’d like to know, too!
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Today, I took the time to look at German photo agency Ostkreuz’s re-designed page, and I noticed that it is very easy to look through the different stories, on a photographer by photographer basis. So I thought I’d go through the lists and select my person favourites, stories with great images or stories that, well, tell an interesting story. Here’s the first part (the second part will follow probably early next week).
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I’m very impressed by Zed Nelson’s Love Me, a body of work centered on our idea of beauty and the various consequences, in particular since the work was done not just in one country, but across the world.
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Wonderful set of posts by Tyler Green about Edward Burtynsky’s ‘Oil’ at the Corcoran; here’s part 2.
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“Every year, Black Friday rings in the yearly holiday shopping season, with hundreds of thousands of people getting up before sunrise to queue for bargains and deals, and stores being besieged by their own customers. […] With Picture Black Friday, we’re hoping to get a wide array of images that tell the full story of this ‘Only in America’ event and not the image that is cultivated and packaged by the media to perpetuate the frenzy and sell more advertising. We will be accepting submissions for one week, beginning on Sunday November 29th through December 6th. We ask that photographers submit up to 5 of their best images of and about Black Friday. […] Our jurors will then choose from that selection the best image(s) and the chosen photographer(s) will be featured on the Conscientious photoblog as well as toomuchchocolate.org.”
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(© Ute Mahler/Ostkreuz) Twenty years ago, the Berlin Wall fell - an event for which there has been no shortage of coverage. The fall of the Wall also effectively meant an end for the GDR (East Germany), which soon would re-unite with West Germany to form today’s Germany. Berlin’s city magazine Zitty used the occasion to speak with Ute and Werner Mahler, two photographers who had lived and worked in East Germany, and who co-founded the photography agency Ostkreuz in the early 1990s. Photography from four East German Ostkreuz members has recently been published in Ostzeit. When I read the interview I thought it would be of interest for more people than just the Germans. In the interview, Ute and Werner talk about life as photographers in East Germany, and what photography meant for them - and their audience. However, there was no English version of the interview, so I approached Ostkreuz and Zitty and asked whether I could translate the interview and re-publish it here. My thanks to everybody who made this possible, in particular to Ute and Werner, but also to Ostkreuz’s Jörg Brüggemann, Andrea Schewe, Christoph Wilde, and Zitty’s Daniel Boese and Claudia Wahjudi. The original piece, an interview by Daniel Boese and Claudia Wahjudi with Ute and Werner Mahler, was published in Berlin’s city magazine Zitty, 23/2009.
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Boy, those Germans sure are ahead of their time - it’s not even 2010, yet. Anyway, amongst the winners of the German Photo Book Prizes 2010: American Power by Mitch Epstein (gold) and No Direction Home by Andrej Krementschouk (silver). Congratulations to the photographers and publishers!
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Fred Ritchin: “Unfortunately in the last twenty-five years we have done very little to establish and publicize guidelines, and now photojournalism is devolving into yet another medium perceived as intending to shock, titillate, sell, distort. My sense is that if we are truly serious about preserving at least some of its credibility […] we need to take strong steps. I am still of the opinion, as I expressed in the After Photography book last year, that a special frame placed around the photograph (perhaps a thicker one) indicating that a photograph is “non-fiction” - meaning that it is subjective, interpretive, but the image itself has NOT been manipulated beyond accepted darkroom techniques such as modest burning and dodging - would be helpful.”
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“Two eighteen-wheel trucks delivered 44,000 pounds of his [W. Eugene Smith] things there when he died in 1978, at fifty-nine, according to his doctors of ‘everything’ (cirrhosis, diabetes, high blood pressure, an enlarged heart). There are hundreds of 10,000 word letters to friends as well as people he barely knew, 25,000 vinyl records, as many as a million negatives and contact sheets, thousands of 3x5 cards filled with chicken-scratch notes to himself, along with brilliant fragments from the unfinished Pittsburgh project and 1,600 reels of tape from his Manhattan loft” - excerpt from Gene Smith’s Sink
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Yesterday, I found a quote over on Ed Winkleman’s blog and . Today, Ed has an update, pulling things apart a bit.
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“Evelyn Hofer, a photographer whose searching, exactingly composed portraits imparted a grave serenity to her human and architectural subjects and who collaborated on a renowned series of travel books with eminent writers in the 1950s and 1960s, died on Nov. 2 in Mexico City.” - obit
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I found an interesting quote on Ed Winkleman’s blog. What struck me about it was that while Ed emphasized the first sentence in a paragraph of a review by Roberta Smith (this, of course, because of his subject matter), I thought the last sentence needs to be looked at, too (independent of subject matter): “Ms. Horn’s work has both benefited and suffered from being what might be called “curators’ art.” Curators’ art is indisputably, even innocuously, elegant — with clear roots in Minimal and Conceptual Art and not much else. It tends to be profusely appreciated by a hermetic few, curators, artists and theorists, who fetishize its refinements and often take its creators pretty much at their word. Ms. Horn has always had a lot to say about what her work means and how it is to be viewed, and some of it is quite interesting, but artists don’t own the meaning of their artworks.”
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Recently, German magazine Photography Now approached me for an interview. To give me an idea of such interviews, they sent me an older issue, which featured a long and very interesting interview with Gerhard Steidl. Unfortunately, the interview was in German and not available online - so I asked the makers of Photography Now whether I could translate the interview and re-publish it here. With Photography Now having a whole cache of such interviews, we agreed on a series of translations - which are due to appear here, every two weeks or so (depending on, for example, how long it takes me to translate them), provided the interviewees agree to it. The following is the first such interview, published in Photography Now 1.2009. My thanks to Marte Kraeher, Claudia Stein, and the staff at Photography Now, and, of course, to a Gerhard Steidl. - JMC
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“Germany’s most popular women’s magazine is banning professional models from its pages and replacing them with images of “real life” women instead.” (story, via).
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Here’s a creative idea: “Graphic Intersections is a collaborative project loosely based on the old Surrealist and Dadaist game The Exquisite Corpse. Designed to unite disparate artists in an interconnected photographic relay of images inspired by one another, this project strives to emphasize a system of response entirely rooted in unmediated visual reaction. The first photographer made a photograph, which was subsequently forwarded to the second in line. The 2nd then, based solely on their own visual, emotional, intellectual or philosophical response, in turn made photographs in artistic reaction to the one they were given. The artists involved were not given any written material to accompany the photograph, nor did they know whose image they were responding to. This was designed to propagate chance, or as the Surrealist’s put it, exploit ‘the mystique of accident.’”
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“This site contains the American (1950’s through 1980’s) vintage and vernacular photograph collection of Doug Rickard, Founder of American Suburb X. Also contained are select archives from the Documerica Project (1971-1977) which was sponsored by the Environmental Protection Agency.”
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I keep coming back to the question what it actually is that I’m looking for in photography (and art), in part because people ask me - and usually, as the other day in a conversation with Anne-Celine Jaeger, I don’t have a good (which here means snappy and simple) answer. Well, until I figured it out: What I really love is transformative photography (in part I owe this insight to Chris Anderson, with whom I had an email discussion). Transformative photography is photography that changes you as a person, that asks questions (instead of answering them). You’re not the same person any longer after you’ve looked at it - and given the nature of this experience, it usually cannot be depleted (even though it might become weaker with time).
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There is an excerpt from After Photography by Fred Ritchin “on technology’s potential to make the photographic image less controlling and more revealing” over at Design Observer.
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Photography consultant Mary Virginia Swanson just shared a handout from a seminar she gave, Presenting your work to the Fine Art Community. There also is Finding Your Audience: An Introduction to Marketing Your Photographs. Have a peek. A lot of the stuff sounds very obvious, but you’d be quite surprised to see the various things I’ve run into over the past years…
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DLK just published a very relevant post: How Should We Evaluate Digital Craftsmanship? I’m actually a little bit surprised how little people talk about the issue of quality when it comes to digital processing and printing. And I could be mistaken, but I’ve always been a bit under the impression that when dealing with digital prints, people don’t mind overlooking problems that would cause quite the stir in the analogue case.
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“Thomas Ruff is explaining the enduring concerns that have animated the work that has made him one of the most innovative and distinguished art photographers of recent decades: ‘I always want to take the medium of photography into the picture, so that you are always aware that you are looking at an image - a photograph,’ he says, before continuing, ‘so, in the picture I hope you can see two things: the image itself, plus the reflection - or the thinking - about photography. I hope it’s visible. I’m an investigator, and it is as if I am investigating the grammar of photography.’” - from an interview with Thomas Ruff (my emphasis)
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Tim Wu explains the “fair use” clause in American copyright (found via), discussing Shepard Fairey’s Obama poster (it just won’t go away). In a nutshell: “Fair use […] is all about justification, and this is a key to understanding it. Fair use allows use of a work that would ordinarily constitute infringement, if that use is justified (or excused, if you like) with some compelling reason.” (emphasis in the original)
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If you want to know what it’s like to take photographs backstage at some concert, here’s Andrew’s account of his adventure with “Creed” (bonus: no talk of how wonderful the latest digital cameras are).
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Via Tyler Green’s blog I found this post, in which seven photographers explain why they work in photography.
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I usually don’t advertize competitions or portfolio reviews, for the most part simply because I don’t see such announcements as what this blog is about. That said, I am happy to make an exception and announce that registration for the Hyeres 2010 Festival is now open. If you’re unfamiliar with Hyeres, it’s a little town in the south of France, which holds a rather big fashion and photography festival every Spring. I had the chance to see the festival twice - once as a jury member - and I think it’s by far the best opportunity for young artists I am aware of.
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Martha Schwendener has some questions for photographers: “why, at this moment, when the world is awash in vernacular images and consumed by geopolitical, eco, and economic crises, are artist-photographers holed up in their studios and darkrooms, interrogating the medium? Why not pick up a camera and document the collapse?” And then, at the end: “So does it matter how either of these artists made their photographs? Or has process become the new (or revived) fetish of photography, something to occupy us now that the bickering over whether photography is art has died down? Except that another question looms, both on the pages of Words Without Pictures and elsewhere. Actually, it’s an old one, but it’s carrying new, post-digital baggage: What, in 2009, is a photograph?”
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This article provides addresses some of the issues that enter the discussions surrounding Pieter Hugo’s work, and it’s an important read.
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Here’s an interview with Ivan Vartanian that you don’t want to miss, especially if you’re interested in photo books.
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