Imaging heavy hitters join Adobe

From John Nack's blog:

A number of rock stars from the world of image science have recently joined Adobe:

That crazy-cool image resizing demo I mentioned last week continues to get all kinds of attention. I was therefore happy to learn that co-creator Shai Avidan joined the Adobe office in Newton, MA (just down the 'pike from MIT) last Monday.

Wojciech Matusik began work at Adobe in May. He's done some really cool work in the emerging fields of multi-aperture photography, 3D TV, and much more. Like Shai, he works from the Newton office.

Sylvain Paris is due to join Adobe in a couple of weeks. He's worked on techniques for matching tones across photos ("Make my image pop like Ansel's"), generating 3D data from 2D captures, and more. His paper on bilateral filtering was written with MIT colleagues Jiawen Chen (who interned this summer at Adobe) and Fredo Durand.

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The Treacherous Medium

Why photography critics hate photographs

by Susie Linfield @ Boston Review

In 1846, Charles Baudelaire wrote a little essay called “What is the Good of Criticism?” This is a question that virtually every critic asks herself at some point, and that some have answered with hopelessness, despair, even self-loathing. Baudelaire didn’t think that criticism would save the world, but he didn’t think it was a worthless pursuit, either. For Baudelaire, criticism was the synthesis of thought and feeling: in criticism, Baudelaire wrote, “passion . . . raises reason to new heights.” A few years later, he would explain that through criticism he sought “to transform my pleasure into knowledge”—a pithy, excellent description of critical practice. Baudelaire’s American contemporary Margaret Fuller held a similar view; as she put it, the critic teaches us “to love wisely what we before loved well.”

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Interesting development

World's Largest Photograph to be exhibited

from The Legacy Photo Project

On September 6, 2007, The Great Picture will be unveiled at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA. This is not an exhibition of a series of photographs—only one will be displayed. The title sounds like a grand claim until the particulars are considered: The Great Picture has been declared the world's largest photograph by The Guinness Book of World Records. Measuring three stories high by eleven stories wide, this gelatin silver print cost $65,000 to produce.

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Thoughts on Large Format Photography

@ WGBH Forum Network

Julian Cox addresses the prevailing taste for large scale images, and considers the choices that photographers make when determining the size of their prints.

Julian Cox is the Curator of Photography at the High Museum of Art (Atlanta). Some of his ideas and thoughts I agree with, some I do not, but he presents an good overview of the history of photography and the print. Worth a view

View or listen here
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EPSON's Next Generation

by Joseph Holmes

One has to wonder if there will soon be an end to printer development, as the quality of the machines is getting to be so good that further improvements would seem to be impossible. Nevertheless, the printer companies continue to give us more of what we want, at a rapid rate, coming ever closer to perfection with respect to ink and the application thereof to paper.

In a departure from the routine, news about the latest generation of professional, wide format printers from Seiko Epson Corporation is emerging over a period of many weeks, rather than all at once. The worldwide announcement date was apparently July 17th, but Epson America will follow with their own announcement on August 31st. In any case, the news is good.

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No Exit

by R.C. Baker @ Village Voice

A high sun paints a receding chevron of blacktop with light; the title of this 1938 silver print, The Road West, by Dorothea Lange, adds resonance to the flat, desolate horizon in the distance. One destination in this collection of photos traversing America is William Eggleston's Store Parking Lot—shot through a car's windshield, a pair of shoppers seems targeted by fluorescent lights that plunge in perspective, the diagonals echoed by reflections in the shiny hood and painted stripes on the macadam. Robert Frank uncovered '50s existentialism in his images of a Brylcreemed cafeteria patron somberly surveying his half-eaten meal, and a cityscape in which massive tail fins poke over the wall of an elevated parking garage—these angular flanks of Detroit steel are mirrored by vertical concrete supports that glow like a Precisionist cathedral. Reversing Eggleston's view, Lee Friedlander got in front of a pickup truck to photograph a man gripping the steering wheel, his grim expression as hollow as a rural serial killer's.

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Creative Method: Edward Steichen on Photography

@ WGBH Forum Network

An interesting audio interview with Steichen in the 1950's

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Back from another vacation

Ah! Glorious Cayuga lake in Upstate New York. I had a very refreshing break. My family has had this cottage for 32 years now.


Stopped off on the way home at Brian's garlic farm in Pennsylvania too!

Cut-and-Paste History

By KATHRYN SHATTUCK @ New York Times

More than any other genre or medium, photomontage was the pre-eminent symbol of Modernity in the 1920s and ’30s, according to Matthew S. Witkovsky, the curator of “Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918-1945” at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. “It was the ultimate symbol in the play between the singular artist and mass media that defines the times, in terms of photography,” he explained.


Marianne Brandt's 'Untitled"

Using newspapers, magazines, advertising and books, artists in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary and Poland turned to cutting and pasting to forge an art that helped explain the crumbling of Central Europe’s four great empires and the new society that was evolving after the devastation of World War I.

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