Kodak this morning said it would soon phase out its longstanding Kodachrome film, putting an end to a significant era of film photography. The company says it plans to end the 74-year production as sales of the classic film now make up less than one percent of its film camera business, which itself is in the minority at Kodak. About 70 percent of the company's income is from digital photography.
If you were a serious photographer in the 1960s, you traveled the country documenting social change (Garry Winogrand, Robert Frank) or pursued technical perfection in the studio (Richard Avedon, Irving Penn). Photography had to be pure, true to itself and its subjects.
This was unfair, because other artists were allowed to incorporate bits of photographs into their paintings, drawings and prints, or work from photographic sources. Yet any attempt by a photographer to dabble in older art forms was suspect. It smacked of deference or, worse, manipulation.
Armin Linke has a studio in a humdrum part of Milan, but if one wishes to do more than catch a glimpse of this peripatetic photographer, one needs to travel with him. He packs his bags whenever something grabs his attention. At first this has nothing to do with the camera, but everything to do with his eye and a disarming intelligence. Linke quietly scrutinises his chosen location, selecting a view that is of a scope and depth to warrant taking a picture. One day in Iraq, before the last war, he did just that, some distance from one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces on a slope of asphalt and sand. While he set up his camera, a group of men uniformly dressed in black walked into his view. They were leaving the palace after bearing birthday wishes for the president. The resulting photograph is really composed of two images: one is premeditated, taking in the sweep of a symbolic site (with few or no symbols, apart from the tall lamp posts, as if it were an airport); the other is created by coincidence. It is precisely the accidental that endows the picture with an uncanny meaning: men are leaving the site of power, as if the place were to fall vacant at their departure. By dint of its dual nature, the image enfolds a brief moment within a static frame. Linke caught an instant (gone the moment he snapped the picture) whose symbolic time had not yet come, but whose enduring backdrop ceased to hold any significance. Instead of fading into obsolete reportage as the years go by, the picture continues to acquire incalculable references.
The year was 1903 and, less than a decade after they'd invented cinema, Auguste and Louis Lumière were once again down at the Paris patent office claiming a breakthrough in photography; this time, a practical system for recording the world in glorious true colour.
They named their radical technique the autochrome, identified its innovative component as potato starch - millions of granules of the stuff, dyed red, yellow and blue, and pressed between two plates of glass - then, with their typical sense of drama, retired to the laboratory for four years to perfect their invention.
Phase One has announced the P40+ medium format digital back. The new system incorporates the company's Sensor+ technology that offers both a full 40MP resolution capture mode and a second 10MP 'Sensor+' mode for faster image capture. The Sensor+ mode also increases maximum sensitivity from ISO 800 (in full resolution mode) to ISO 3200. The camera has started shipping at approximately €14,990 for the digital back and €16,990 for the camera system.
When the three weathered cardboard boxes — known collectively, and cinematically, as the Mexican suitcase — arrived at the International Center of Photography more than a year ago, one of the first things a conservator did was bend down and sniff the film coiled inside, fearful of a telltale acrid odor, a sign of nitrate decay.
But the rolls turned out to be in remarkably good shape despite being almost untouched for 70 years. And so began a painstaking process of unfurling, scanning and trying to make sense of some 4,300 negatives taken by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David Seymour during the Spanish Civil War, groundbreaking work that was long thought to be lost but resurfaced several years ago in Mexico City.
“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.
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?”
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."
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.
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.
"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)."
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.
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.
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."
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.
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."
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.
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.
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