Stubbornly Practicing His Principles of Photography

By RANDY KENNEDY @ New York Times

“LISTEN, do I have time to feed my pig?” the photographer Danny Lyon asked, picking up the telephone one morning at his home in rural New Mexico. “It will only take about 10 minutes. I’ll call you back,” he said, adding: “That way I can start the day with a clean conscience.”

Among a group of revolutionaries whose work rose to prominence in the late 1960s and ’70s and transformed the nature of documentary photography — a group that includes friends and colleagues of Mr. Lyon’s like Mary Ellen Mark and Larry Clark — the idea of conscience has been imbedded more deeply in Mr. Lyon’s photographs than in those of all but a few of his contemporaries.

READ ON

Cindy Sherman: I'm every woman

by Waldemar Januszczak @ London Times

The iPod is on. And Chicks on Speed are howling in my ear. “They say I’m vermin,” growls the singer. “Got more faces than Cindy Sherman.” A quick flick of the iPod wheel and I’m with the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies. In Grand Mal, their singer runs through the problems he’s having with a girl. “She takes Cindy Sherman pictures/And she cuts herself,” admits the poor wretch. Ouch. Back to the wheel. How about Billy Bragg? He, too, is mixed up with a girl who flummoxes him, and his lament stutters like an echo in a tunnel: “Cindy of a thousand lives… Which one of them is you?”

READ ON

Photographer Sugimoto Strikes a Stone Age Deal with U2

By EDAN CORKILL @ Japan Times

Just two minutes into an interview with artist Hiroshi Sugimoto, it became clear why the famously discreet 61-year-old had agreed to talk about rock band U2's use of one of his photographs on the cover of their latest album, "No Line on the Horizon."

"The first thing I want you to let people know," he said, seated in an office at Ginza's Gallery Koyanagi, "is there is no commercial aspect to my relation with U2. No cash is involved."

READ ON

Lumix TS1

By matt buchanan @ gizmodo

This is what I picture when I think of a camera that doesn't take any shit, like a Marine. (There's an army green and charcoal, not just orange, speaking of.) It's a no BS block of brushed metal that's slim enough to actually slide into your pocket.

Read On

One tough camera!

Helen Levitt, Who Froze New York Street Life on Film, Is Dead at 95

By MARGARETT LOKE @ New York Times

Helen Levitt, a major photographer of the 20th century who caught fleeting moments of surpassing lyricism, mystery and quiet drama on the streets of her native New York, died in her sleep at her home in Manhattan on Sunday. She was 95.

Her death was confirmed by her brother, Bill Levitt, of Alta, Utah.

Ms. Levitt captured instances of a cinematic and delightfully guileless form of street choreography that held at its heart, as William Butler Yeats put it, “the ceremony of innocence.” A man handles garbage-can lids like an exuberant child imitating a master juggler. Even an inanimate object — a broken record — appears to skip and dance on an empty street as a child might, observed by a group of women’s dresses in a shop window.


READ ON

14 Rare Color Photos From the FSA

@Photo District News

"Even today, many documentary photographers will tell you they are influenced by the works of the Farm Security Administration in the 1930s and 40s. Under the direction of Roy Emerson Stryker, the FSA sent photographers to document the plight of the rural farmer during the Great Depression and the progress of New Deal programs. When the U.S. entered World War II, the photography program continued under the Office of War Information (OWI)."

PDN

Art of the iPhone impressionist

by Jonathan Jones @ The Guardian

In the early 20th century, the photograph still seemed new. The German intellectual Walter Benjamin tried to understand how photography changed art: it replaced the "aura" of the masterpiece with a new, democratic way of making pictures. Going on for a century later, we're living in the midst of a technological revolution that has left photography itself behind. Here's the latest: artist Jorge Colombo makes pictures of New York street life using the Brushes application (bought for $4.99 - "a great leveller") on his iPhone. The results are impressively delicate and lively.

Lots of people take photos on a phone - the casual record of what you see is fun to share. Colombo's pictures are a creative extension of that: he sketches what he sees in New York, and these fast, fragmentary glimpses of a car park entrance, a pizza joint, a view between buildings have an impressionistic immediacy. He can "draw in the dark", working on the illuminated screen to depict the city by night. They are not pretentious, they do not claim to be more than a sort of visual diary. But they show that a sensitive eye can use any medium to respond to the beauty of the world - whether it's a brush or Brushes.

View Images

Happy Birthday WWW

On March 13th 2009 the web became twenty years old.

How to read a photograph

Photographs can create illusions, communicate arguments or document a changing world. Learn how to look at them here

by Ian Jeffrey @ The Guardian

Understanding photographs has never been straightforward. Not all photographs – including some of the best known – were taken with a clear idea in mind. Even if they were, the idea was soon overlooked or forgotten. An outline history of photography would be easy enough to write, taking into account a symbolist phrase around 1900, followed by abstract "graphic" photography in the 1920s, replaced in its turn by humanist documentary in the 1930s. The would-be historian, however, would soon be puzzled by anomalies: false starts, anachronisms and examples of uneven development. It is almost as if photography took place in a perpetual present in which, for instance, William Fox Talbot (the inventor of the negative-positive process in the 1840s) remains an interesting contemporary. Under these terms of reference it is probably best to look at photographs one at a time, which is what I concentrate on in How to Read a Photograph.

READ ON

Visions and Images

Frederick Sommer

Visions and Images was part of a series on the arts done in the late 1970's and 80's. Interviewies include: Garry Winogrand, Elliot Erwitt, Frederick Sommer, Harry Callahan, Joel Meyerowitz, Arnold Newman, Duane Michals, and Cornell Capa + Burk Uzzle.

"The Diamonstein-Spielvogel Video Archive features interviews Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel conducted with prominent artists, musicians, architects, designers, photographers, directors, actors, writers, and art collectors, documenting the arts world during the nineteen seventies and the nineteen eighties. This collection includes interviews from several programs: American Architecture Now, About the Arts, Barbaralee Diamonstein and, Handmade in America, Inside Fashion, Inside New York's Art World, Interior Design: The New Freedom, and Visions and Images."

Duke University Digital Archives

Visions and Images on YouTube

Rodchenko & Popova: Defining Constructivism

by Rachel Campbell-Johnston @ The Times Online

It's a good thing that that wobbly bridge got fixed because you can almost feel the stamp of the military boots as Rodchenko and Popova march into Tate Modern. Here is the art of the Russian Revolution: clear, strong, insistent and iconoclastic. As you walk through this show, it takes over your imagination - a bit like Bolshevik troops once took over Red Square.

Are you going to fall into rank? At first it feels pretty hard not to. Rodchenko & Popova: Defining Constructivism is a big, powerful exhibition with the pull of an unstoppable force. Although prevailingly intellectual, it has a hard, bold, determined aesthetic that works a bit like a blow from a rifle butt. It smacks itself down direct on the retina.

READ ON

Suzanne Mooney

On another note there was an interesting little blurb about Suzanne Mooney's new work at SEESAW Magazine. "I photograph the diagram itself. The work denies the erotic charge that the photographic images may have, and becomes a humorous but disturbing comment on glamour photography."


Interesting work.
"The camera simultaneously offers us access to the view whilst denying us the full appreciation of the scenery."

I like the way she thinks....

Suzanne's website

"Park Life" - An Interview with Tod Papageorge

by Aaron Schuman @ SEESAW Magazine

AS: Aaron Schuman
TP: Tod Papageorge

AS: You’ve often said that you were originally inspired to pursue photography because of Henri Cartier-Bresson. Where did you find his work in the first place?

TP: It was totally by accident. I was taking an introductory photography class at university, and I guess I was curious enough to go to the library and look at some bound periodicals. And there was this photograph by this man I’d never heard of; it was totally shocking to me. It provoked me to literally do everything I could in that library to find any other pictures by him. I think I found one more. But those two pictures inspired me to become a photographer.

READ ON

Photography and the eyes of the beholder

by Liz Jobey @ The Guardian

For anybody interested in the changing nature of photography over the last 30 years, Michael Fried's Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before is an important book. The reputation of its author – one of the leading art historians and critics of the past half-century – is guaranteed to capture the attention of photographers and artists alike. Its size and thoroughness, over 400 well-illustrated pages in a large art-book format, distinguish it from the many volumes of critical theory that contemporary photography has spawned in recent years. And the title unambiguously states that photography matters as art, which settles one long-debated question at a stroke.

READ ON

Twilight of the color photo

As printed snapshots vanish, we're losing more than shoe boxes full of mementos

By Dushko Petrovich @ Boston Globe

ONE HUNDRED YEARS ago, one of Paris's richest men had a quixotic dream. Returning from a personal trip to China and Japan, the banker Albert Kahn decided to build a huge visual archive of the planet. Kahn believed that mutual misunderstanding was the source of world conflict, so in 1909, he began funding scores of photographers as they set out across five continents. By the time the Great Depression finally bankrupted him 22 years later, Kahn's intrepid op??rateurs had managed to document almost 50 countries, returning to France with 120 hours of film footage and 4,000 black-and-white pictures. This alone would have been a remarkable legacy, but the real jewels of the collection were printed on glass, in a full spectrum the world had never seen. The recently invented technique of the autochrome - which made portable color photography possible - meant that Kahn's emissaries could also amass a staggering total of 72,000 color plates.

READ ON

A haunting memorial in 'Library of Dust'

Photographer David Maisel became fascinated by canisters of cremated remains at the Oregon State Hospital. They spoke to him of secrets, transformation and loss.

By Leah Ollman @ LA Times

The first photograph in David Maisel's new book presents a view into a storeroom that clearly doesn't get a lot of foot traffic. An old wooden desk with no chair is parked in the corner. Bits of debris have gathered on the stained linoleum floor. The walls are what give this room, and Maisel's book, its name: "Library of Dust."

READ ON

In Photography, What Puzzles the Eye May Please the Mind

By KEN JOHNSON @ New York Times

NEW HAVEN — Photographs are shameless. They’ll do anything to get your attention. They’ll show you celebrities in and out of their clothes, exotic creatures and objects, places and events that you would never otherwise see.

Another, paradoxical strategy for captivating viewers is to show them something they can’t immediately understand. Whether because of its visual complexity, its oblique perspective, its lighting, its degree of abstraction or the unfamiliarity of its subject, it’s the kind of photograph that makes you stop and think, “What the heck is that?” And it keeps you looking until you’ve figured out what it is you’re looking at.

READ ON

'Why am I making this picture?'

by Liz Jobey @ The Guardian UK

Ever since 1971, when she was a student at Harvard and decided to take portraits of the people who shared her boarding house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the American photographer Susan Meiselas has questioned the motivation behind her pictures and their relevance to the wider world. She has been a member of the international co-operative Magnum Photos since 1976, but her work has developed far beyond the role of a photojournalist. She spent the end of the 1970s and most of the 1980s in Central and South America on the front line of the people's revolution in Nicaragua and the civil war in El Salvador, documenting the "dirty war" in Argentina, human rights abuses in Columbia and the end of the Pinochet regime in Chile. During that time, and since, working with her own photographs and with other people's, she has expanded her role to that of curator, film-maker, teacher, historian and archivist.

READ ON

Double Exposure: William Eggleston and Enrique Metinides

Buckle up for some curious photo road trips

By Leslie Camhi @ The Village Voice

'Life is in color, but black-and-white is more realistic," director Samuel Fuller once said. Two exhibitions—a retrospective devoted to the sumptuously hued visions of a decadent Southern gentleman, and a show of vintage black-and-white prints, south-of-the border tabloid fodder by a man of the people—suggest he was only partially right.

Both artists were given Brownie cameras as 10-year-old boys. But William Eggleston deferred picture-taking until after he'd left the family plantation, when in college and later, as a restless young man-about-Memphis in the 1960s, he began honing a color aesthetic that was part Cartier-Bresson, part visitor from another planet.

Read on

Photograph of Jesus