Tuesday, February 27, 2007

The Luminist


By ARTHUR LUBOW @ New York Times

On a damp winter morning, 20 weather-beaten men waited at a bleak corner in east Vancouver. You can find scenes like this in most cities: places where laborers gather, hoping that a van will pull up with an employer offering cash in return for a day’s work. This scene, however, was riddled with curious anomalies, starting with the middle-aged figure dressed in black who stood behind a tripod-mounted camera and patiently watched the men wait. And what were the men waiting for? Not a job. That they already had, courtesy of the photographer, Jeff Wall, who had hired them at the actual “cash corner” where they normally congregated and then bused them to this spot he preferred a half-hour’s drive away. No, they were waiting for Wall to determine that the rain had become too heavy or the light had grown too bright or the prevailing mood had turned too restless for him to obtain the feeling of suspended activity and diffused expectancy that he sought in the picture. He was prepared to come here, day after day, for several weeks. On any given morning, typically after three hours elapsed, he would adjourn until the next day, authorizing the men to receive their paychecks of 82 Canadian dollars and get back into the bus. Until then, all of us — the men, Wall and I — waited for something to happen that lay outside our control.

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Yet another Epson printer!


-A3+ prints on a variety of media for high impact photographs
-MicroPiezo print head and Advanced Variable Sized Droplet technology, for ink droplets as small 1.5 picolitres
-Direct printing to CDs and DVDs
-Six individual ink cartridges, so users only replace the colour they need to
-USB 2.0 Direct Print from digital cameras and Epson Multimedia viewers
-Claria Photographic ink - for Ultra High Definition photo printing

"This Ultra High Definition printer creates high impact A3+ prints, providing stunning enlarged images that are ideal for framing. It can also print a variety of other sizes BorderFree, including 4"x 6" photos.

The Stylus Photo 1410 is suitable for offices and small businesses that are looking for a cost efficient option to produce professional-looking catalogues and other materials in-house without sacrificing high-quality output.

The Stylus Photo 1410 uses Epson's Claria Ultra High Definition Photographic ink which has a wide colour gamut and bright, vivid colours. Claria ink is smudge and scratch resistant as well as being resistant to fading that is caused by light and ozone.

Claria Photographic ink adds richness, depth and clarity to your printed photos. When combined with genuine Epson paper, your photos can last up to 200 years when stored in an album, therefore exceeding the life of silver halide and lab photo prints. "

Epson site

Monday, February 26, 2007

The Parent Trap


by Leslie Camhi @ Village Voice

Photography is in a family way again. Recent gallery shows include Gail Albert Halaban's pseudo-photojournalistic stagings of alienated, über-chic moms at Robert Mann and Tierney Gearon's bowel-churning portraits of her schizophrenic mother, at Yossi Milo. Justine Kurland recently traveled cross-country in a van with her infant son, photographing other mothers and their children, naked amid seemingly virginal landscapes; the pictures go on view at Mitchell-Innes & Nash this week. And the money shot in Global Feminisms, the hotly anticipated survey opening at the Brooklyn Museum next month, promises to be an up-to-date Madonna—Catherine Opie's Self Portrait/Nursing (2004). It shows the hefty, tattooed photographer (faintly scarred with the word "pervert" carved in cursive script across her chest) cradling a blond baby boy who feeds at her breast, each gazing upon the other with rapt attention.

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Friday, February 23, 2007

Chris Jordan


I really like the conceptual nature of Chris Jordan's photographs. It's a numbers game and those numbers add up to massive consumption and waste in a very poetic manner. He states:

Running the Numbers
An American Self-Portrait

This new series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics tend to feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or $12.5 million spent every hour on the Iraq war. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs.

My only caveat about this series is that the prints must be seen in person to be experienced the way they are intended. As with any large artwork, their scale carries a vital part of their substance which is lost in these little web images. Hopefully the JPEGs displayed here might be enough to arouse your curiosity to attend an exhibition, or to arrange one if you are in a position to do so. The series is still in its early stages, and new images will be posted as they are completed, so please stay tuned.

~cj, January 2007


I also really thought the book "In Katrina's Wake" was stunning.




Chris Jordan website

Interview with FlashFilm

Monday, February 19, 2007

AfterCapture


Launched in January 2007, AfterCapture Magazine is the premiere monthly publication for photographic post-production work.

AfterCapture.com provides online multimedia resources for the photographic professional. In addition to archives of AfterCapture’s print articles, AfterCapture.com provides original online content, tutorials, blogs, and audio and video podcasts.

View website

Friday, February 16, 2007

He Is a Camera


by R.C. Baker @ The Village Voice

Elliot Erwitt, still active at 78, has a knack for delivering theatrical spontaneity within sharp and inventive compositions. In one black and white image, a silhouetted man with a huge umbrella leaps high off the ground, his legs in an achingly wide, pointy split; at stage right, two lovers embrace, their own umbrellas crumpling in the wind as the Eiffel Tower rises in the gray distance, a tumescent exclamation point to this narrative of exuberant love. Compare this posed 1989 shot (a clear homage to Cartier-Bresson's Paris pedestrian leaping across a puddle) to Erwitt's iconic photo from the Cold War: Nixon's ski-slope nose thrusts almost as belligerently as the finger he's using to poke Nikita Kruschev's chest during the famous 1959 kitchen debate in Moscow.

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Thursday, February 15, 2007

General Electric enters digital camera market

General Electric has partnered with General Imaging Company. They have brought some pvery good players to the table as well, Hiroshi “Hugh” Komiya former President of Olympus Imaging Corporation and Takeyoshi Kawano former Design Division Manager for Olympus Corporation and Executive Design Division Manager, Sony Group – Aiwa Co. Ltd.

The new cameras will preview at the PMA show in early March and be available in mid April."Entry-level GE digital cameras will start with 7 megapixels of resolution and 2.5-inch LCD screens. Higher-end GE cameras will offer up to 12 megapixels of resolution and 3-inch LCD screens. A photo printer will also be included in the line."

More Information
Splash page
Press kit (zipped PDF)

Monday, February 12, 2007

Even in the Digital Age, a Strong Case for Printmaking

By MARTHA SCHWENDENER @ New York Times

Printmaking has suffered a crisis in recent years, with art schools closing their printmaking departments and giving the space and resources to digital equipment and instruction. In this country fine-art printmaking has always occupied a hazy zone, somewhere between painting and drawing and photography. The European model — with artists like Dürer and Goya producing woodcuts, etchings or aquatints that rivaled or outstripped their best paintings, and apprenticeships developing new printmakers — has never been successfully duplicated in the United States.

"Two Maps II" (1966), by Jasper Johns.


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Friday, February 09, 2007

An Explanation of the Color Rendering Process, “Digichromatography”


I just ran across this and was intriqued. Yes, it was published in 2003.

"We know that Prokudin-Gorskii intended his photographic images to be viewed in color because he developed an ingenious photographic technique in order for these images to be captured in black and white on glass plate negatives, using red, green and blue filters. He then presented these images in color in slide lectures using a light-projection system [right] involving the same three filters."

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Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Kodak may pull down the shutters on film business

by James Doran @ The Times Online

Kodak is considering hiving off its traditional photographic film arm and selling or spinning off the business it created more than a century ago.

The business, which has long been in decline, could raise as much as $1.5 billion (£664 million), according to Wall Street analysts.

Antonio Perez, the chief executive of Kodak, who came in three years ago to turn around the ailing company, believes that the traditional film business has just a decade of growth ahead of it.

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Tuesday, February 06, 2007

Orphan Works Revisited

from PhotoAttorney.com (Carolyn E. Wright, Esq., )

"It appears that Orphan Works legislation will soon rear its head again. The word from Washington is that it will again be fast-tracked and its sponsors will resist "any significant modifications to the existing draft."

Last year, visual arts groups came together as an informal coalition. We shared information and coordinated a letter writing campaign. Monday, Jan. 29 these groups are scheduled to meet in Washington to discuss a unified strategy. The groups (listed below) will formally be called The Imagery Alliance."

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Saturday, February 03, 2007

Looks Like Teen Spirit

Rineke Dijkstra's young subjects meet our gaze head-on

by Leslie Camhi @ The Village Voice

The gap between intention and effect" was what Diane Arbus said she aimed for when, facing a person, she raised her camera and clicked the shutter—the distance (at times considerable) that separates someone's self-image from the way they look to others. In a transvestite's heavy chin or the jauntily painted eyebrows of two elderly coquettes at the Automat, she found a pathos linking them to a broader humanity.

The Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra focuses on something a bit different: those unguarded moments when the inchoate longings and the realities of youth collide.

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