The MIssing Criticism: Papageorge on Robert Adams and 'What We Bought'.

@ Eric Etheridge

In 2000, the Yale University Art Galley acquired the 193 prints that comprise Robert Adams' book What We Bought: The New World (cover right). Two years later, Tod Papageorge wrote this critical appraisal, which also includes a significant amount of details about Adams' working method, derived from conversations with the artist. The essay originally appeared in the Yale University Art Galley Bulletin.

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An Image Is a Mystery for Photo Detectives

By RANDY KENNEDY @ NY Times

The phone call was routine, the kind often made before big auctions. Sotheby’s was preparing to sell a striking rust-brown image of a leaf on paper, long thought to have been made by William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the inventors of photography. So the auction house contacted a Baltimore historian considered to be the world’s leading Talbot expert and asked if he could grace the sale’s catalog with any interesting scholarly details about the print — known as a photogenic drawing, a crude precursor to the photograph.

“I got back to them and said, ‘Well, the first thing I would say is that this was not made by Talbot,’ ” the historian, Larry J. Schaaf, recalled in a recent interview.

“That was not what they were expecting to hear, to say the least.”

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Keeping His Eye on the Horizon (Line)

By PHILIP GEFTER @ New York Times

The soft-colored photographs of Sze Tsung Leong capture contrasting landscapes: the verdant green of Germany; the mirage of shimmering towers in Dubai; the urban geometry of Amman, Jordan; the red tiles roofs of Italy. But always the eye is drawn to the distinct line where sky meets earth.

In Mr. Leong’s panoramic photographs of major cities and rural landscapes around the world, the horizon line consistently falls in the same place. So when his images are hung side by side — as 62 of them are now at the Yossi Milo Gallery in Chelsea — they create an extended landscape of ancient cities and modern metropolises, desert vistas and lush terrain.

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2000 frames per second

LightZone Promo -Today only!

MacUpdate is running a 1?2 off promo of LightZone today.

LightZone: built for photography
"LightZone fully embraces fearless visual experimentation. LightZone provides a unique visual approach to digital photo editing, allowing you to focus on what you want to do with your photos, not how you do it. All operations are live and have an immediate effect upon which you can make new editing decisions. No more guess work. The software allows you to enhance photos in a simple and natural way, without the steep learning-curve found in many other software programs."

LightZone website

MacUpdate Promo

Run, Don't Walk!

Apple Releases Aperture 2.1

@ APPLE

CUPERTINO, California—March 28, 2008— Apple® today released Aperture™ 2.1, which introduces an open plug-in architecture that makes it easy for photographers to use specialized third party imaging software right from within Aperture. Available today as a free software update, Aperture 2.1 includes the Apple-developed plug-in, Dodge & Burn, which adds brush-based tools for dodge (lighten), burn (darken), contrast, saturation, sharpen and blur. Over the coming months, third party software developers will deliver image editing plug-ins for localized editing, filters and effects, noise analysis and reduction, fisheye lens correction and more.

“The image quality in Aperture 2 has won over the most demanding photographers,” said Rob Schoeben, Apple’s vice president of Applications Product Marketing. “Now, thanks to our open plug-in architecture, users can access an entire industry’s worth of imaging expertise without ever leaving Aperture.”

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Robert Frank’s Unsentimental Journey

by CHARLIE LeDUFF @ Vanity Fair

Published in 1958, Robert Frank’s photographic manifesto, The Americans, torched the national myth, bringing him such comrades as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and—for a controversial documentary—the Rolling Stones. On a trip to China, the 83-year-old rebel of postwar film still defies expectations.

Robert Frank, the photographic master, the last human being it’s been said to discover anything new behind a viewfinder, collapsed in a filthy Chinese soup shop and no one had thought to bring along a camera.

He looked like something from a Kandinsky painting—slumped between a wall and stool—sea green, limp, limbs akimbo. It would have made a good, unsentimental picture: a dead man and a bowl of soup. Frank would have liked it. The lighting was right.

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Sony DSLR

WARS

Once again Magnum in Motion has created a powerful piece.

Magnum in Motion

Coin. Smile. Click!

By JOHN STRAUSBAUGH @ New York Times

ON a recent sunny but frigid morning, I strolled up Broadway through Times Square with Näkki Goranin, a visitor from Vermont making a pilgrimage through the swirling crowds and the sensory overload of all the signage. We stopped on the west side of Broadway between 51st and 52nd Streets. It looked nondescript to me, with the usual fast food, souvenir shop, gym and drugstore.

But Ms. Goranin, a photographer whose book “American Photobooth” (W. W. Norton) has just been published, declared it “a landmark in photo history.” Because, she said, in 1926, roughly where the gym is now, a Jewish inventor from Siberia named Anatol Josepho (shortened from Josephewitz) opened a photo-booth concession, the first Photomaton in the world.

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The Indecisive Image

A detail from Marco Breuer’s Untitled (C-498), 2004, made with scratched chromogenic paper.

by Eric Bryant @ ArtNews

In Marco Breuer’s recent photographs, black specks dance across a white surface, leaving faint trails that mark the passage of time. Sensuous blocks of yellow glow like crystals lit from within, and drippy parallel lines that seem to sit on top of the paper call to mind Action Painting. Made without camera or film, these lush, textured works, collected in Breuer’s 2007 book Early Recordings, defy our basic notions of what photography can be. Breuer achieves his effects by burning photographic papers, scraping their emulsions, and experimenting with chemical formulas that were popular in the 19th century.
Breuer is one of a wave of photographers now gaining recognition for work that abandons recognizable subject matter. “Abstraction goes back to the very beginnings of photography and has come back in different revivals,” says Roxana Marcoci, photography curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “There were the New Vision people in the 1920s and another group in the 1960s, and it is here again right now.”

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Take Your Pic

by R.C. Baker @ Village Voice

Someone had a blast putting together this show of photographs taken between 1945 and 1960. First off, many of these 55 pictures are simply great images. An untitled shot from Robert Frank's "The Americans" captures one man closing huge double doors on another man; the rough grain in this 1956 photo hones the feeling that something shabby has transpired in this high-ceilinged space of wall sconces and heavy molding. The geometric composition of cobblestones and a pedestrian crosswalk in Toni Schneiders's 1952 view of a sedan speeding past two American soldiers in Frankfurt, Germany, conveys the sense of a victor's imposed order beginning to wane, as the natives start hustling again. But the juxtapositions are what really get the juices flowing:

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Post War Perspectives @ Laurence Miller Gallery, NYC
Lawrence Miller Gallery

Classic Polaroid

Recovering the Complex Legacy of the Photographer Jacob Riis

by VERLYN KLINKENBORG @ The New York Times

If you have seen any of Jacob Riis’s photographs, you have probably never forgotten them. Riis was the Danish-born police reporter who in the late 1880s brought magnesium-flash photography into some of the darkest and most troubled spots in New York City — the tenements near Mulberry Bend, where Columbus Park now stands. New immigrants were crushed together there in some of the worst squalor and highest population densities ever recorded on this planet

By Riis’s time, social and political reform efforts had been going on for half a century, but to little effect. What made the difference was his photographs, which Riis used in popular lectures and in his best-selling book, “How the Other Half Lives,” published in 1890, five years before the Mulberry Bend tenements were finally torn down.

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The Modbook

The One and Only Tablet Mac®
by Axiotron
The Axiotron Modbook™ is a revolutionary slate-style tablet Mac that enables users to draw and write directly on the screen.
Axiotron’s innovative design and manufacturing process integrates an Apple® MacBook® computer, state-of-the-art Wacom® pen-enabled digitizer technology and Axiotron's own proprietary hardware and software components into a complete tablet solution, the Axiotron Modbook.
Built for artists, mobile users, students and professionals, the Modbook’s condensed form factor and integrated pen-based user experience offer unprecedented flexibility and control over the creative process.

Read more about it

NICE! and not a bad price $2290

Big Shots

by R.C. Baker @ The Village Voice

The San Francisco–based photographer John Chiara grew up with a large tumor hanging from his chin; for medical reasons, it couldn't be removed until he was 15. The artist says that, as a kid, he was "really outgoing" until the benign growth was excised, after which he suddenly "got all shy." Something similar is going on with his large, one-of-a-kind landscapes shot with a ridiculously ungainly camera the size of a U-Haul trailer, which he tows around the Bay Area in search of resolutely unspectacular vistas. You won't see any inspiring shots of the Golden Gate here, just self-effacing images of serpentine curbs fronting scrubby hills or rooftops fringed with jagged foliage. Each photo is named after a different intersection, such as Sunnydale at Russia. The titles heighten the deadpan allure of these dark prints, as does Chiara's working method: He crawls through a trapdoor into his mobile camera, focuses the lens, tapes up a five-foot-wide sheet of Ilfachrome paper, then uses his hands to dodge and burn the image during the typical 20- to 40-minute exposure.

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Canon’s Iris Registration Mode - Biological Copyright Metadata

@ Photography Bay

Canon is using Iris watermarking to take photographer’s copyright protection to the next level.

. . . to provide an imaging apparatus that makes it possible to protect the copyright of photographic images by reliably acquiring biological information of a photographer . . . - US Patent Application No. 2008/0025574

Stories like the recent discovery of Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir’s stolen Flickr images that surfaced on iStockphoto make all photographers cringe. Many photographers go to great lengths to protect their images. Past attempted solutions include watermarks on the front of images. I can recall this practice from my childhood years with the Olan Mills studio gold embossing in the bottom corner.

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RAW Support upgrade!

With the recent 10.5.2 update to Leopard, Apple applications now support the Sony a700 RAW format!! I didn't think it would bother me much when I first purchased the camera, but it has grown to be a major pain to have to preview the jpg files, write down the image number, then open the RAW file in Adobe Camera Raw. Now I can even scroll through the RAW files using QuickLook. EXCELLENT!

Apple camera support page

Hollywood, without the songs

By Peter Conrad @ The Guardian
In trying to praise revolutionary communism, Alexander Rodchenko captures the contradictions of the Soviet system

Mechanically augmented by the hyperfocal lens of his Kodak camera, his eyes were able, like those of a far-seeing prophet, to look into the future. The stepped balconies of his apartment house climb into the sky, and a fire escape on the side of the building - forgetting that its function is to help evacuees get down to the ground - speeds impatiently upwards, bound for the secularised heaven promised by socialism. A thin, shaved, pine tree, seen from a low angle, looks like a prototype of the pylons that wired the sky and distributed energy to dynamise Russia. Rodchenko admired the agitated reconstruction of reality in Dziga Vertov's film Cine-Eye; he too made the eye a kinetic agent, not just a passive receptor of impressions. The still image is mobilised in the jittery chaos of the photomontages he designed for Mayakovsky's poems, and a visual art strives to make a verbal noise in his poster for a campaign to democratise literacy: Lili Brik widens her mouth to proclaim the good news about the availability of books, and a silent photograph turns into a loud-hailer.



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SEE ALSO: Making strange by Craig Raine @ The Guardian

Lobster

I have been investigating the "demo" version of this tool and like it.


From their website:
What does Lobster do?

Lobster works inside Photoshop to accurately separate the tonality and colour of your image using the Layers palette.

Lobster creates four new layers from your RGB image: Luminosity (a very specific type of tonality) and Red-Green-Blue Chromaticity Set. (Covering Hue and Saturation).

This separation allows a "divide and conquer" approach to the editing of your images, where for example changes can be safely and accurately made to your Luminosity layer without affecting the Hue and Saturation of your file - an action not possible in Photoshop.

Lobster gives you new uses for and insights into the following elements of Photoshop:
Levels, Curves, Selective Color and all other Adjustment Layers.

Lobster website