Edward Quinn - A Day's Work

Rita Hayworth driving with her daughters, 1951
© Edward Quinn
Vintage silver gelatin print

@ Michael Hoppen Gallery

"We are delighted to announce the first UK exhibition of vintage prints by Edward Quinn. Best known for his photographs of celebrities on the French Riviera in the 1950s, to label Quinn a celebrity photographer would be to reduce both him and his work. The exhibition will also include his later portraits of artists, writers and politicians along with documentary work on the gypsies in the Camargue and evocative portraits of his native Dublin. The similarity between all of Quinn’s work is that his subjects were never consciously posing –these are all true, unguarded portraits."

Michael Hoppen Gallery

The Man Who Made Mapplethorpe

By PHILIP GEFTER @ New York Times

Tall, handsome and rich would be one way to describe Sam Wagstaff, a legendary figure in the international art world of the 1970s and ’80s. Urbane is another. Iconoclastic, certainly. And glamorous, without a doubt. But the word that keeps cropping up in “Black White + Gray,” a new documentary about Mr. Wagstaff by a first-time director, James Crump, that will be shown at the Tribeca Film Festival next week, is “visionary.”

Mr. Wagstaff was one of the first private art collectors to start buying photographs as early as 1973, long before there was a serious market for them. His photography collection came to be regarded not only for its scholarship. It was also original and unorthodox, and turned out to be extremely valuable. Mr. Wagstaff sold it to the J. Paul Getty Museum in 1984 for $5 million, a fortune at the time, establishing that institution’s collection of photographs, now among the finest in the world.

READ ON

Why did a cowboy sell for $1.25 million?

Prince is not the only contemporary artist to have taken so-called "found photographs" - a loose term which encompasses everything from discarded prints discovered in a junk shop to old advertisements or amateur snaps from a stranger's family album - and reframed them as art. Two new exhibitions at London's Photographers' Gallery reveal how widely the trend has already spread.
@ The Telegraph

In 2005, Untitled (Cowboy), a photograph by the American artist Richard Prince, sold for $1,248,000 - the first time a photograph had broken the million-dollar barrier at auction. The work is nothing more than a picture of a Marlboro cigarette poster; a photograph of a photograph.

Prince is not the only contemporary artist to have taken so-called "found photographs" - a loose term which encompasses everything from discarded prints discovered in a junk shop to old advertisements or amateur snaps from a stranger's family album - and reframed them as art. Two new exhibitions at London's Photographers' Gallery reveal how widely the trend has already spread.

READ ON

AN UNCOMMON INTERVIEW WITH STEPHEN SHORE

by BEN SLOAT @ Big, Red and Shiny

BRS: In an early article by Walker Evans, published in Hound and Horn in 1931, of the work of Eugene Atget, Evans writes: “it is not the poetry of the streets’ or the ‘poetry of Paris,’ but the projection of Atget’s person.” If that is the case, I wonder if that is something that can be taught, or expressed in a book?

SS: I think so. My book does not deal with the content of the pictures, it deals with what might be called the visual grammar of photography. That is not separate from what you’re asking, the projection of personality. I think personality expresses itself in these choices that a photographer makes, because of the choices the tools present. But a photographer’s vision is expressed though these tools, as well as through the choice of subject matter.

READ ON

The Ars guide to inkjet printers for photographers

By amadou diallo @ ars technica

Within the $50 billion inkjet printer industry is a small but very profitable subset of printers designed around the needs of advanced amateur and professional photographers. If your tastes lean towards fine art photo papers, long-lasting prints, and output beyond letter-sized dimensions, count yourself among this demographic. And if you find yourself in the market for a new printer, you've got significantly more options today than were available just a year ago. In this guide we'll go beyond the marketing hype and look at the features and performance issues you need to consider when navigating through this suddenly competitive field.


READ ON

Final Cut Studio 2 announced

"Final Cut Studio 2 helps take you beyond mere editing. Discover the intuitive power of new creative tools designed expressly for Final Cut Pro editors. Rapidly move through editing to motion graphics, audio editing and mixing, color grading, and delivery — all as a natural extension of the work you already do.

Final Cut Studio 2 puts a powerful new version of Final Cut Pro at the center of an integrated post-production workflow. Final Cut Pro 6, Motion 3, Soundtrack Pro 2, Compressor 3, DVD Studio Pro 4, and Color — a brand-new application for professional color grading — are all included in Final Cut Studio"

Final Cut Studio 2

Final Cut Server

Shedding Light on America’s Dark Recesses

“Nuclear Waste Encapsulation and Storage Facility, Cherenkov Radiation,” taken at the Hanford Site in southeastern Washington State.
By BRIDGET L. GOODBODY @ New York Times

There’s something quintessentially American about the way Taryn Simon’s photography exhibition “An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar” examines the culture’s irreconcilable differences. Ms. Simon couches the show in the intellectual, power-to-the-people oratory of leftist politics. Yet she clearly delights in exposing, in a quasi-tabloid fashion, America’s underbelly.

Ms. Simon comes naturally to documenting places average citizens can’t access. For the State Department her father photographed Soviet cities during the cold war, restricted sites in Southeast Asia during the war in Vietnam and out-of-the way locations in Afghanistan, Israel and Iran in the 1970s.

READ ON

Art’s Audiences Become Artworks Themselves

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN @ New York Times

Thomas Struth’s show at Marian Goodman — rapturous, magisterial photographs of museum visitors standing before Velázquez in Madrid and looking at Leonardo at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg — culminates one of the memorable art projects of the last 20 years or so. For nearly that long, Mr. Struth has been making these pictures of people in museums. They’re looking at art, although you might say the real question is what they, and we, are seeing.

The beauty of these pictures is almost a given by now. This current show forms a coda to one lately at the Prado, where Mr. Struth insinuated a dozen or more, some nearly life-size, photographs among the paintings and sculptures. It took some gall and guile. Come upon irregularly and unexpectedly, his pictures punctuated galleries of nearly unrelenting greatness.

Sometimes they intruded. Occasionally, they seemed irrelevant. Mostly they were jarring. I found myself later recalling photographs I had thought forgettable at the time, in the way you may recall somebody you just glimpsed at a museum more vividly than the art.

READ ON

Josef Koudelka talk at Aperture

Koudelka at the Magnum meeting in London 2006, photo by David Alan Harvey
A rare interview with Josef by photography writer/critic Vicki Goldberg.

WARNING : This is a 68mb file, 1hr, 14mins long in Mp3 format.

Koudelka.Mp3

Josef Koudelka, Czechoslovakia 1968

Mastering Digital B & W Photography

Amadou Diallo has released a new book with very favorable reviews

"Mastering Digital Black and White, by Amadou Diallo, is like a laser beam illuminating the rapidly changing world of digital photography. And, like a laser it doesn't waste any strength, focusing all of its considerable energy on clear and concise explanations of almost every topic that the contemporary photographer needs to understand. Not withstanding its title, this book explores the needs of the color photographer as well as the B&W specialist. I know of no current book that covers as much as comprehensively and concisely as Mastering Digital Black and White, by Amadou Diallo."

--Michael Reichmann, The Luminous Landscape

The companion website

What's unique to Photohop Extended?

John Nack, one of the developers of Photoshop, reports some of the new features in Creative Suite 3. Check out the "disappearing tourist" demo and the 32 bit HDR improvements. Looks like some fun ahead!

John Nack on Adobe

3D morphable model face animation