Epson 3800 Interview

HUNTER S. THOMPSON : GONZO

M+B gallery and AMMO Books are pleased to present GONZO, the debut exhibition of photography by famed American author Hunter S. Thompson. The exhibition coincides with the release of Thompson's final book, of the same name, and chronicles his life through his own photographs and memorabilia.

GONZO began as a personal collaboration with Thompson prior to his untimely death, and has since come to completion with the support of his family and estate. The show will feature many never before seen photographs from Thompson's personal archive, including shots from his early days as a foreign correspondent in Puerto Rico, living in Big Sur in the 1960s, time on the road with the Hell's Angels, illuminating self-portraits, and many personal moments with friends and family throughout the years.

M+B Gallery

AMMO Books

NOBUYOSHI ARAKI

NOBUYOSHI ARAKI
Intimate photography: Tokyo, nostalgia and sex

By C.B. LIDDELL
Special to The Japan Times
Usually reviews of Nobuyoshi Araki's work start by pointing out the contradictions "monster," "genius," "pornographer," "artist," etc. The greatest negative routinely cited is his attitude toward women, photographed smeared with paint or bound in bondage ropes, images that reflect attitudes rooted in Edo's ancient past or Tokyo's modern sexual underworld.

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Interview: Tom Waits

Interview by Amanda Petrusich | Photo by Danny Clinch

Tom Waits' latest endeavor, Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers, and Bastards, is a three-disc compendium of 30 new tracks and a mess of hard-to-find soundtrack pieces, all organized into three categories that manage to accurately encapsulate more than three decades of brutal noisemaking. Like most of America, I'm so convinced that Tom Waits exists in a world populated only by freight trains and barmaids, rodeo clowns and shortwave radios, that to hear him say "Chamillionaire" is about as jarring as a car crash: Here, Waits opens up about his songwriting, Scarlett Johannson, and his own glorious artifice.

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Happy birthday to TOP

Well it has been one year since Michael started "The Online Photographer" - HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

Luminous Landscape had me interview Mike on the occasion and you can read the interview here

Duane Michals Foto Follies: How Photography Lost Its Virginity on the Way to the Bank

Amazon review:

Of this satirical look at contemporary photography, Duane Michals has said, "The more serious you are, the sillier you have to be. I have a great capacity for foolishness. It’s essential." Whether parodying Wolfgang Tillmans or Andres Serrano, Sherrie Levine (A Duane Michals Photograph of a Sherrie Levine Photograph of a Walker Evans Photograph) or Cindy Sherman (Who is Sydney Sherman?), Michals uses his ferocious wit and keen eye to create images at once humorous and penetrating. As The New York Times described Gursky's Gherkin, the work "explores as never before the sense of picklehood, or what it means to be a pickle." The Times also testified that "this high-humored sendup of arty photography should be required viewing for all art-world heavies, particularly critics, curators and collectors." Michals takes aim at pretensions that are often perceived as deliberately obscuring contemporary art, and in doing so he exemplifies his mastery of both the visual world and the written word, while providing the elemental pleasure of a good laugh.

Could well be a good read over the holidays.

Amazon

Adobe unveils "KULER"

"allows users to quickly create harmonious color themes based on predefined color formulas, or by mixing their own color themes using an interactive color wheel. Color themes can be created in multiple colorspaces including RGB, CMYK and LAB. Themes can be tagged, shared and commented on. Users can search the kuler online community for top rated colors, or search for schemes by tag word or date created. Users of Adobe Creative Suite 2 applications can download any color theme as an Adobe Swatch Exchange (.ASE) file that can be imported in their preferred creative application and can be applied on their artwork."

Photoshop News

Jack Nack Blog

Check it out

Album covers

Photo by Lee Friedlander

Christian Patterson posted album covers by some great photographers on his blog.

check it out

Investors zoom in on photography

Despite record prices for photographs at this year's auctions, it is still cheaper to corner the market in Leibovitz than Lichtenstein. Here's how to get started.

By Stephen Milioti @ Fortune

If you had wandered into the New York location of Christie's auction house in 1996, you could have purchased a print of Helmut Newton's "Two Pairs of Legs in Black Stockings, Paris" for about $2,300.

Then you could have spent the next decade eating, sleeping or lounging beneath the image of two models wearing only black lingerie and black spiky heels.

Had you decided to sell that 1979 photograph at Christie's for $38,400 (as its owner did last month), you would have enjoyed better price appreciation than a comparable investment in an S&P 500 index fund, General Electric stock, or ten-year Treasury bonds. And Newton isn't the only photographer whose prices are on the rise.

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Photographs of an Episode That Lives in Infamy

By DINITIA SMITH @ New York Times
During the winter of 1942, in the first heated months of America’s war with Japan, the United States government ordered tens of thousands of people of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of them American citizens, to report to assembly centers throughout the West for transfer to internment camps. The infamous episode has been widely chronicled in books and memoirs, as well as in famous photos by Ansel Adams.

But now close to 800 new images from the period by the photographer Dorothea Lange have been unearthed in the National Archives, where they had lain neglected for a half-century after having been impounded by the government.

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Where We Live: Photographs of America from the Berman Collection

Burning Oil Sludge North of Denver, Colorado by Robert Adams, 1970
The Getty Center has put together a very nice web site for its current exhibition including photographs, artist biographies, and audio commentaries from collector Bruce Berman and some of the photographers.

Overview:

"The Getty Museum's photographs department was created in 1984 with the acquisition of a number of exceptional American and European private collections. More recently, a new generation of visionary collectors—exemplified by Nancy and Bruce Berman—has left its mark on the Museum.

Since 1998 the Bermans have donated nearly 500 photographs to the Getty, transforming the Museum's collection of contemporary American color photography. Bruce Berman is also a founding member of the Photographs Council, a group that supports the Museum's contemporary photography programs."

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Visit the main site

Tod Papageorge

by Richard B. Woodward @ BOMB

"It is a shame that Tod Papageorge's black-and-white photographs are not better known. While many lesser figures have enjoyed sold-out shows during the ongoing boom, Papageorge has been absent from New York galleries for more than 20 years (though his work can be found in numerous surveys and histories of contemporary American photography). A pivotal figure in making a street-savvy, elegant, hyperkinetic, 35 mm style the dominant aesthetic among a generation of American artists during the '70s, Papageorge at the same time established himself as an articulate and occasionally biting critic of others' work. Later, as professor at the Yale School of Art, where he has directed the graduate program in photography since 1979, he became a force in the lives of countless students, many of whom have gone on to become eminent artists and teachers themselves, among them Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Abelardo Morell, Gregory Crewdson, An-My Lê, Anna Gaskell, and Katy Grannan."

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The Universal Photographic Digital Imaging Guidelines

Version 2.0 released recently.

"These 12 guidelines — provided as a Quick Guide plus an in-depth Complete Guide — aim to clarify the issues affecting accurate reproduction and management of digital image files. Although they largely reflect a photographer's perspective, anyone working with digital images should find them useful. The guidelines have three primary goals:

Digital images should look the same as they transfer between devices, platforms and vendors.

Digital images should be prepared in the correct resolution, at the correct size, for the device(s) on which they will be viewed or printed.

Digital images should have metadata embedded that conforms to the IPTC standards, thereby making the images searchable, providing usage and contact information, and stating their creators or copyright owners."

View Guidelines

Those Who Face Death

A very well done piece of Citizen Journalism by Christian of
Northamptonshire, United Kingdom, he states:

"Last year I took a trip with a friend, to one country sliding into civil war and another that isn't allowed to exist.

We crossed into Iraq from Turkey, over the internationally recognised border, moving from the fringes of Europe to the Middle East. But southern Turkey is a Kurdish area, and so is northern Iraq. Ask any Kurd and they'll say you've been in the same country all along; Kurdistan....."

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PASSION AND PHOTOGRAPHY

by N.F. Karlins @ Artnet

"Mexico as Muse: Tina Modotti and Edward Weston," Sept. 2, 2006-Jan. 2, 2007, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third Street, San Francisco, Ca. 94103.

Edward Weston (1886-1958) was born in Illinois, studied photography in college and moved to California, opening his own portrait studio in 1911. He married Flora Chandler, a member of a prominent Chicago family, in 1909, and had four sons (including the photographers Brett and Cole Weston). By 1913, he was involved with the photographer Margrethe Mather, both professionally and romantically, an association that introduced him to a more bohemian world.

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Review: Off Limits.

David D'Arcy reviews a documentary about why photography may become a less potent art form than it was in the 20th century.

@ Green Cine Daily

If the restrictions on freedom of expression are just behind Iraq as a concern for people these days, the news in a new film from Canada will not be encouraging. Off Limits looks at "image rights" (droit de l'image) that are being asserted by people who have their pictures taken on the street. The film begins to write the obituary of a rich field of photography.

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Digital spells red ink for Kodak

From BBC News

Struggling US camera company Eastman Kodak has returned its eighth quarterly loss in a row as it battles to fully adapt to the digital age.

However its shares climbed 4% as July-to-September losses narrowed to $37m (£18.4m) against $282m in the previous three months.

Kodak now expects a $400m-$600m loss from its continuing business in 2006, including restructuring costs.

These include the axing of 27,000 jobs - largely in film manufacturing.

Not enough?

Despite the cutbacks - which will see Kodak employ 50,000 people globally, against a peak of 145,800 staff in 1998 - some analysts say not enough is being done.

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