Modern Photography in a Brand-New Space

By Karen Rosenberg @ New York Times

Since its 2003 survey of Thomas Struth, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has been getting serious about photography. In 2005 it presented a Diane Arbus retrospective and, in a stunning move, acquired more than 8,500 works by absorbing the Gilman Paper Company Collection. Last spring it offered a glimpse of video and new-media works from its holdings. (Who knew the Met even had video, let alone a David Hammons?) Now the museum has designated a gallery exclusively for the exhibition of photographs made after 1960.

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Uta Barth (American, born Federal Republic of Germany, 1958)
Untitled (98.2) (detail), 1998
Chromogenic print

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Model Photographer

Successful successor: Larry Fink's Hungarian Debutante Ball, 1978
by R.C. Baker@ Village Voice

Photographer Lisette Model once told her students at the New School, "Photography is the easiest art, which perhaps makes it the hardest." How true—painting and drawing demand specialized training, but everyone takes snapshots, so the Vienna-born Model (1901–1983) instilled in her pupils a search for beauty beyond the surfeit of information that even banal photographs deliver.

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Aperture Foundation

A Wartime Photographer in Her Own Light

By FELICIA R. LEE @ New York Times

Sometime in the spring of 1936, the lovers and photographers André Friedmann and Gerta Pohorylle changed their names and, in the process, the history of photography. To distinguish themselves from other Jewish émigrés in Paris at the time, Mr. Friedmann, a Hungarian Jew, took the name Robert Capa; Ms. Pohorylle, also Jewish and born in Poland, became Gerda Taro. Working at times as “Capa,” an imaginary American photographer, they began documenting the Spanish Civil War, capturing the ruined towns and devastated civilians and soldiers on the Republican side.

Mr. Capa went on to become one of the world’s greatest war photographers. But Ms. Taro, seen by many as the first woman known to photograph a battle from the front lines and to die covering a war, survived in the public eye mostly for her romance with Mr. Capa.

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International Center for Photography

Candid Camera

The cult of Leica.

by Anthony Lane @ The New Yorker

Fifty miles north o Frankfurt lies th small German town o Solms. Turn off the mai thoroughfare and yo find yourself drivin down tranquil suburba streets, with detache houses set back from th road, and, on a war morning in late August not a soul in sight Nobody does bourgeoi solidity like th Germans: you ca imagine coming here fo coffee and cakes wit your aunt, but that woul be the limit o excitement. By the tim you reach Oskar-Barnack-Strasse, th town has almost petere out; just before the railway line, however, there is clutch of industrial buildings, with a red dot on the sig outside. As far as fanfare is concerned, that’s about it But here is the place to go, if you want to find the mos beautiful mechanical objects in the world.

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A Conversation with Mitch Epstein

The photographer talks about his latest epic series, "American Power," and how he struggles to keep the act of picture-making fresh and meaningful.

By Jörg Colberg @ Pop Photo.com

hroughout the last three decades Mitch Epstein has made his mark on the photography world with his wry depictions of everyday life tinged with transcendent beauty and irony. His large-scale color photographs tackle a variety of subjects, ranging from a personal look at his family's business and its relationship to the town he grew up in (Family Business) to American habits of energy consumption (American Power). In order to get a better understanding of Epstein and his work, American Photo contributor and blogger Jörg Colberg conducted the following Q&A with the artist.

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Adobe Photoshop & the Art of Photography

An Interview with John Paul Capinegro
by Steve Weinrebe

SW: Please talk a bit about your journey into digital photography, especially since you were well aware of the art of traditional photography growing up.

JPC: I grew up in an artistic family. My father is a well known photographer and my mother is a painter, turned graphic designer, and she often oversaw the production of artist’s monographs. The first time I saw digital imaging was in the mid 1970’s when she was overseeing production of Eliot Porter’s Intimate Landscapes book. The printing press had a Scitex machine that she called ‘the million dollar coloring book’. The minute I saw what it could do I asked the question: ‘What would happen if artists got a hold of these, rather than a corporation trying to produce a clever ad?’

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Photo Husbandry

by Leslie Camhi @ Village Voice

JoAnn Verburg Voyages Through the Realm of the Domestic

The decay of private life is nothing new, though its accelerating decline has come to seem all but inevitable. It's tempting to blame this state of affairs on technology, on all those devices—iPods, BlackBerries, etc.—that interfere with our ability to focus on the present moment and the person standing before us. But surely the responsibility lies also with a society of unfettered materialism, inclining us to view people through the utilitarian filter of their functions, so that each new encounter becomes another point to be connected on a career trajectory.

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Sony's A700

"The camera’s new 12.2-megapixel Exmor™ CMOS sensor conducts analog-to-digital (A/D) signal conversion and dual noise reduction right on the sensor itself. Noise reduction is applied to analog signals before A/D conversion and the resulting digital signals are then subject to a second round of noise reduction.

According to Lubell, “These digital signals are virtually immune to external noise and interference.”

Clean, noise-free digital signals are then sent to the newly developed BIONZ™ processing engine. Lubell said this engine has been optimized to process data-rich picture information at high speeds, and to reduce picture noise in the RAW data stage before final image compression and encoding. The results are high-resolution, detailed images with rich tonal reproduction."

I WANT ONE!

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The Bizarre Story of Joe O'Donnell

by Marianne Fulton @ The Digital Journalist

It all started with an Aug. 14 New York Times obituary by Douglas Martin for photographer Joe O'Donnell. Martin praised his exceptional work and took special notice of a picture made during President Kennedy's funeral cortege: "And the O'Donnell photograph of John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting his father's coffin became the most reproduced version of that memorable scene." Martin goes on to note that, because he was on the government payroll, Mr. O'Donnell got no personal credit for those photos, although he signed and sold copies of them after his retirement from the White House in 1968.

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