Land Grab

by Francesca Levy @ Forbes


Bollywood superstar Shahrukh Khan and fashion giant Vivienne Westwood have an unlikely common muse: a 33-year-old Polaroid instant camera. Make no mistake--this isn't one of those handheld gadgets that became ubiquitous in the 1970s.

The so-called 20x24 Land Camera is a 235-pound behemoth, producing prints nearly 2 feet square. Edwin Land (1909-91), founder of Polaroid, built just seven of them, and only four are still in commercial use. (Two are on exhibit, at MIT and Harvard; the last has been lost. Mammoth Cameras has replicated the original.) Each one-of-a-kind photograph retails for upwards of $3,500 per print--a professional might spend $1,750 a day to rent the camera and $200 on a print--and few but the wealthy and famous can afford to be snapped by the contraption.


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Larry Sultan: The king of colour photography

By Michael Collins @ The Independent

Photography tends to deliver an exaggerated account, revealing the familiar with an unfamiliar and unsettling degree of detail – like the experience of listening to a recording of your own voice. When the late American photographer Larry Sultan made a series of pictures of his parents in their home, he was presented not only with the distortions made through the camera lens, but by his lens onto their life
, too.

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Ansel Adams controversy: Will Fresno State's art gallery show disputed photos?

by Mike Boehm @ LOs Angeles Times

Did Ansel Adams take this picture?

And if the answer is in doubt, under what conditions should it and others like it be the subject of an exhibition in a university art gallery?

The question of whether the photos are by Adams has been unanswered since 2000, when Rick Norsigian found a trove of old-fashioned glass-plate negatives of nature scenes from Yosemite and coastal California at a garage sale in Fresno. Then Norsigian started trying to prove that they were lost Adams images from the 1920s or 1930s.

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