Photoshop CS3

Adobe posted a beta version of Photoshop CS3 last week and the reviews are streaming in. It certainly adds a great deal of speed to the application on my MacIntel desktop, others running PPC G5's have lackluster reviews.

Photoshop CS3 download page

Martin Evening's "What's New in Photoshop CS3" (PDF)

John Nack's Adobe Blog

Scott Byer's Adobe Blog

Adobe Photoshop CS3 Forum

Wayne Crosshall's review of Bridge CS3

Wayne Crosshall's review of Adobe Camera Raw CS3

Late breaking news of problems @Macfixit

Alexey Titarenko

a book review @ Lens Culture

I met and interviewed Alexey in 1996 and actually have a signed copy of the print above from that experience (and he has a piece of mine). Very interesting guy. In fact, here is an image of me filming Alexey in St. petersburg, Russia.


Read the review @ Lens Culture

A Trail of Diamonds

Photographs by Kadir Von Lohutzen

I ran across this and thought it appropriate for both the time of year and the current selection at the theatres. What is it about diamonds, besides their value, that is so attractive?

View Photo Essay @ ForiegnPolicy.com

War/Photography: An Interview with Simon Norfolk

Simon Norfolk. Ascension Island, South Atlantic

Geoff Manaugh interviews Norfolk on his blog.

Geoff's blog

Talking Pictures

John Szarkowski on the good, the bad and the flat in American photography
By HOLLY MYERS AND TOM CHRISTIE @ LA Weekly

There are few people alive today with more stories to tell about American photography than John Szarkowski, and probably none capable of telling them with quite the same charm. Born in Ashland, Wisconsin, in 1925, Szarkowski took up photography himself at a young age, secured two Guggenheim fellowships and published two books of his own before being tapped by Edward Steichen to take over the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in 1962. His tenure at the museum lasted nearly 30 years and spanned a decisive period — perhaps the decisive period — in the institutionalization of the medium, a process in which Szarkowski himself played no small part. As U.S. News and World Report proclaimed in 1990, “Szarkowski’s thinking, whether Americans know it or not, has become our thinking about photography.”

READ ON

Peter Fetterman Gallery

TEDTalks: Ed Burtynsky

Photographer Ed Burtynsky accepts the 2005 TEDPrize, and presents a stunning slideshow of his work, which explores human impact on the natural world in eerily beautiful large-scale landscapes. He also unveils his three wishes: To use his artwork to encourage a worldwide conversation about the planet; to launch a ground-breaking competition that motivates kids to invent new ideas in sustainable living; and to create a IMAX movie of his work.

View at Ted Talks

What’s New in Photography: Anything but Photos

By PHILIP GEFTER @ NY Times

In New York City, a vast number of commercial galleries show photographs. Many of them represent photography exclusively; some show photo-based art that incorporates other mediums; others are galleries that represent painters and sculptors primarily but also include a handful of photographers. But in the last few years, some of the most famous and long-standing photography galleries have begun mixing nonphotographic work in with their primary offerings.

It may not be a revolution, but it is a significant change in the gallery landscape. These are the places that helped to establish photography’s viability as an art form as well as to create a business model. Having proven their point, they are now at liberty to experiment.

There is an unofficial hierarchy among photo galleries, and the oldest tend to be at the top of the heap. Many of those have featured photographers who over the years have earned a place in the medium’s canon — sometimes because of their dealers’ efforts.

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Forensic Traces of War

photography by Simon Norfolk @ Lens Culture

Simon Norfolk is a very talented driven young photographer who is pursuing one of life’s big questions with intensity and focused intention. He is studying war, and its effects on many things: the physical shape of our cities and natural environments, social memory, the psychology of societies, and more.

He is examining genocide; imperialism; the interconnectedness of war, land and military space; and how wars are being fought at the same time with supercomputers, satellites, outdated weapons and equipment, people on the ground, intercepted communications, and manipulated and manipulating media.

READ ON @ Lensculture.com

Charlie Rose interviews Henri Cartier-Bresson

As the title says Charlie talks with Henri.

Video at Google

New media storage viewers for digital photographers

Canon today launches the portable devices, designed with EOS and other digital photographers in mind. The Canon Media Storage M30 and Canon Media Storage M80 devices feature a large ultra-bright 3.7” TFT screen with 160º viewing angle for image and video review, and a 30Gb/80Gb hard disk to store digital images, movie and sound files of various file formats. Both units feature a USB 2.0 Hi-Speed interface and slots for CF and SD cards.

30/80 Gb hard disk
3.7” ultra-bright TFT screen with 160º viewing angle
CF and SD card reader
USB 2.0 Hi-Speed connection
Support for multiple image, video and sound file formats, including Canon RAW, MPEG, MP3 and WAV.
Extended PictBridge functionality
4 – 8 digit image file password protection
1/8” audio-out headphone jack

Press Release

Do not adjust your screen

We know the American Depression through black and-white photographs. Now you can see it in colour.

By Blake Morrison @ The Guardian

If you have an image of the 1930s, the odds are it will be in black-and-white. This was the decade of the Great Depression and in both Britain and the United States, photographers worked almost exclusively in monochrome. Many books, songs and documentaries of the era - from The Grapes of Wrath and The Road to Wigan Pier to Woody Guthrie and John Grierson - are suffused with the same austere spirit, exacting a full look at the worst (hunger, poverty and oppression) with the aim of changing conditions for the better. The work isn't uniformly grim, but even the more hopeful images seem to be filtered through a lens of dusty grey - like the cold, post-apocalyptic ash that overlays the landscape in Cormac McCarthy's gruelling new novel, The Road.

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Slide Show

Thin Ice

Photographers take on the current environmental crisis

by Leslie Camhi @ Village Voice

It was an uncannily balmy day in late November when I visited Ectopia, a lively survey of work by some 40 artists from 14 countries who address, at times obliquely or through local case studies, the current environmental crisis. Take Shishmaref, for example, a small village on an Alaskan island, home to 491 Inupiat Eskimos whose way of life is threatened by global warming. In Gilles Mingasson's photographs (included here in a deeply affecting slide show of work by photojournalists on the front lines of ecological catastrophes) they hunt for seal on ever thinning ice, beside a coastline that is rapidly eroding.

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Ectopia: The Second ICP Triennial of Photography and Video
International Center of Photography
1133 Sixth Avenue
Through January 7

Epson 3800 Interview

HUNTER S. THOMPSON : GONZO

M+B gallery and AMMO Books are pleased to present GONZO, the debut exhibition of photography by famed American author Hunter S. Thompson. The exhibition coincides with the release of Thompson's final book, of the same name, and chronicles his life through his own photographs and memorabilia.

GONZO began as a personal collaboration with Thompson prior to his untimely death, and has since come to completion with the support of his family and estate. The show will feature many never before seen photographs from Thompson's personal archive, including shots from his early days as a foreign correspondent in Puerto Rico, living in Big Sur in the 1960s, time on the road with the Hell's Angels, illuminating self-portraits, and many personal moments with friends and family throughout the years.

M+B Gallery

AMMO Books

NOBUYOSHI ARAKI

NOBUYOSHI ARAKI
Intimate photography: Tokyo, nostalgia and sex

By C.B. LIDDELL
Special to The Japan Times
Usually reviews of Nobuyoshi Araki's work start by pointing out the contradictions "monster," "genius," "pornographer," "artist," etc. The greatest negative routinely cited is his attitude toward women, photographed smeared with paint or bound in bondage ropes, images that reflect attitudes rooted in Edo's ancient past or Tokyo's modern sexual underworld.

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Interview: Tom Waits

Interview by Amanda Petrusich | Photo by Danny Clinch

Tom Waits' latest endeavor, Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers, and Bastards, is a three-disc compendium of 30 new tracks and a mess of hard-to-find soundtrack pieces, all organized into three categories that manage to accurately encapsulate more than three decades of brutal noisemaking. Like most of America, I'm so convinced that Tom Waits exists in a world populated only by freight trains and barmaids, rodeo clowns and shortwave radios, that to hear him say "Chamillionaire" is about as jarring as a car crash: Here, Waits opens up about his songwriting, Scarlett Johannson, and his own glorious artifice.

READ ON

Happy birthday to TOP

Well it has been one year since Michael started "The Online Photographer" - HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

Luminous Landscape had me interview Mike on the occasion and you can read the interview here

Duane Michals Foto Follies: How Photography Lost Its Virginity on the Way to the Bank

Amazon review:

Of this satirical look at contemporary photography, Duane Michals has said, "The more serious you are, the sillier you have to be. I have a great capacity for foolishness. It’s essential." Whether parodying Wolfgang Tillmans or Andres Serrano, Sherrie Levine (A Duane Michals Photograph of a Sherrie Levine Photograph of a Walker Evans Photograph) or Cindy Sherman (Who is Sydney Sherman?), Michals uses his ferocious wit and keen eye to create images at once humorous and penetrating. As The New York Times described Gursky's Gherkin, the work "explores as never before the sense of picklehood, or what it means to be a pickle." The Times also testified that "this high-humored sendup of arty photography should be required viewing for all art-world heavies, particularly critics, curators and collectors." Michals takes aim at pretensions that are often perceived as deliberately obscuring contemporary art, and in doing so he exemplifies his mastery of both the visual world and the written word, while providing the elemental pleasure of a good laugh.

Could well be a good read over the holidays.

Amazon

Adobe unveils "KULER"

"allows users to quickly create harmonious color themes based on predefined color formulas, or by mixing their own color themes using an interactive color wheel. Color themes can be created in multiple colorspaces including RGB, CMYK and LAB. Themes can be tagged, shared and commented on. Users can search the kuler online community for top rated colors, or search for schemes by tag word or date created. Users of Adobe Creative Suite 2 applications can download any color theme as an Adobe Swatch Exchange (.ASE) file that can be imported in their preferred creative application and can be applied on their artwork."

Photoshop News

Jack Nack Blog

Check it out

Album covers

Photo by Lee Friedlander

Christian Patterson posted album covers by some great photographers on his blog.

check it out

Investors zoom in on photography

Despite record prices for photographs at this year's auctions, it is still cheaper to corner the market in Leibovitz than Lichtenstein. Here's how to get started.

By Stephen Milioti @ Fortune

If you had wandered into the New York location of Christie's auction house in 1996, you could have purchased a print of Helmut Newton's "Two Pairs of Legs in Black Stockings, Paris" for about $2,300.

Then you could have spent the next decade eating, sleeping or lounging beneath the image of two models wearing only black lingerie and black spiky heels.

Had you decided to sell that 1979 photograph at Christie's for $38,400 (as its owner did last month), you would have enjoyed better price appreciation than a comparable investment in an S&P 500 index fund, General Electric stock, or ten-year Treasury bonds. And Newton isn't the only photographer whose prices are on the rise.

READ ON

Photographs of an Episode That Lives in Infamy

By DINITIA SMITH @ New York Times
During the winter of 1942, in the first heated months of America’s war with Japan, the United States government ordered tens of thousands of people of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of them American citizens, to report to assembly centers throughout the West for transfer to internment camps. The infamous episode has been widely chronicled in books and memoirs, as well as in famous photos by Ansel Adams.

But now close to 800 new images from the period by the photographer Dorothea Lange have been unearthed in the National Archives, where they had lain neglected for a half-century after having been impounded by the government.

READ ON

Where We Live: Photographs of America from the Berman Collection

Burning Oil Sludge North of Denver, Colorado by Robert Adams, 1970
The Getty Center has put together a very nice web site for its current exhibition including photographs, artist biographies, and audio commentaries from collector Bruce Berman and some of the photographers.

Overview:

"The Getty Museum's photographs department was created in 1984 with the acquisition of a number of exceptional American and European private collections. More recently, a new generation of visionary collectors—exemplified by Nancy and Bruce Berman—has left its mark on the Museum.

Since 1998 the Bermans have donated nearly 500 photographs to the Getty, transforming the Museum's collection of contemporary American color photography. Bruce Berman is also a founding member of the Photographs Council, a group that supports the Museum's contemporary photography programs."

READ ON

Visit the main site

Tod Papageorge

by Richard B. Woodward @ BOMB

"It is a shame that Tod Papageorge's black-and-white photographs are not better known. While many lesser figures have enjoyed sold-out shows during the ongoing boom, Papageorge has been absent from New York galleries for more than 20 years (though his work can be found in numerous surveys and histories of contemporary American photography). A pivotal figure in making a street-savvy, elegant, hyperkinetic, 35 mm style the dominant aesthetic among a generation of American artists during the '70s, Papageorge at the same time established himself as an articulate and occasionally biting critic of others' work. Later, as professor at the Yale School of Art, where he has directed the graduate program in photography since 1979, he became a force in the lives of countless students, many of whom have gone on to become eminent artists and teachers themselves, among them Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Abelardo Morell, Gregory Crewdson, An-My Lê, Anna Gaskell, and Katy Grannan."

READ ON

The Universal Photographic Digital Imaging Guidelines

Version 2.0 released recently.

"These 12 guidelines — provided as a Quick Guide plus an in-depth Complete Guide — aim to clarify the issues affecting accurate reproduction and management of digital image files. Although they largely reflect a photographer's perspective, anyone working with digital images should find them useful. The guidelines have three primary goals:

Digital images should look the same as they transfer between devices, platforms and vendors.

Digital images should be prepared in the correct resolution, at the correct size, for the device(s) on which they will be viewed or printed.

Digital images should have metadata embedded that conforms to the IPTC standards, thereby making the images searchable, providing usage and contact information, and stating their creators or copyright owners."

View Guidelines

Those Who Face Death

A very well done piece of Citizen Journalism by Christian of
Northamptonshire, United Kingdom, he states:

"Last year I took a trip with a friend, to one country sliding into civil war and another that isn't allowed to exist.

We crossed into Iraq from Turkey, over the internationally recognised border, moving from the fringes of Europe to the Middle East. But southern Turkey is a Kurdish area, and so is northern Iraq. Ask any Kurd and they'll say you've been in the same country all along; Kurdistan....."

View the Blog

PASSION AND PHOTOGRAPHY

by N.F. Karlins @ Artnet

"Mexico as Muse: Tina Modotti and Edward Weston," Sept. 2, 2006-Jan. 2, 2007, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third Street, San Francisco, Ca. 94103.

Edward Weston (1886-1958) was born in Illinois, studied photography in college and moved to California, opening his own portrait studio in 1911. He married Flora Chandler, a member of a prominent Chicago family, in 1909, and had four sons (including the photographers Brett and Cole Weston). By 1913, he was involved with the photographer Margrethe Mather, both professionally and romantically, an association that introduced him to a more bohemian world.

READ ON

Review: Off Limits.

David D'Arcy reviews a documentary about why photography may become a less potent art form than it was in the 20th century.

@ Green Cine Daily

If the restrictions on freedom of expression are just behind Iraq as a concern for people these days, the news in a new film from Canada will not be encouraging. Off Limits looks at "image rights" (droit de l'image) that are being asserted by people who have their pictures taken on the street. The film begins to write the obituary of a rich field of photography.

READ ON

Digital spells red ink for Kodak

From BBC News

Struggling US camera company Eastman Kodak has returned its eighth quarterly loss in a row as it battles to fully adapt to the digital age.

However its shares climbed 4% as July-to-September losses narrowed to $37m (£18.4m) against $282m in the previous three months.

Kodak now expects a $400m-$600m loss from its continuing business in 2006, including restructuring costs.

These include the axing of 27,000 jobs - largely in film manufacturing.

Not enough?

Despite the cutbacks - which will see Kodak employ 50,000 people globally, against a peak of 145,800 staff in 1998 - some analysts say not enough is being done.

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Happy Halloween !

Route 5, St. Mary's County, MD 2006

Snap Judgements

Hala Elkoussy, Peripheral Landscape #5, Al Warraq, 2004

By James Meyer @ ARTFORUM

AFRICA AND PHOTOGRAPHY have a tangled history. Can the medium that has depicted Africa for the West since the moment of the camera’s invention, during the colonialism of the nineteenth century, escape this troubled past? The thesis of “Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography” was that this possibility exists not only in theory but in practice among contemporary African artists, who are all too often ignored beyond their homelands. In his impressive introduction to the catalogue, curator Okwui Enwezor states that Western photographic depictions have either aestheticized and exoticized Africa (he cites the work of Leni Riefenstahl and Peter Beard) or represented it as a place imprisoned in a never-ending cycle of famine and political mayhem. “Afro-pessimism” is Enwezor’s term for imagery of the last category, typified by Kevin Carter’s ghastly 1993 photograph of a starving Sudanese child stalked by a vulture (published in the New York Times). According to Enwezor, Afro-pessimistic pictures construct an Africa that is the West’s entropic double, deserving of charity and piteous regard, even as they mystify the West’s long-standing exploitation of the continent’s human and natural resources.

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Twelve Undervalued Photographers

Robert Heinecken, "Space/Time Metamorphosis #1," 1975

by Missy Sullivan @ Forbes Collector


Photography is one of the most steeply rising markets in the collecting world right now. In the New York spring photo auctions, the number of lots that sold for six figures rocketed from 25 last year to 85 this year. And auction records have been shattering at a neck-snapping pace. The world record for a 20th-century photograph hit $822,400 last October, rose to $1.2 million in November, then soared to $2.9 million three months later.

Funny, that only 30 years ago, photography was the art market’s poor stepchild. Since then, more museums have built photographic collections. Scholars have identified the masters of the medium. Art dealers figured out how to successfully market multiples. Conservators have learned much more about materials, techniques and fakes. And as the history of the medium is fleshed out further, more work is being done to identify worthy, lesser-known artists.

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Antonin Kratochvil

In 1996 I spent a month in Russia, during which time I met and hung out with Antonin, indeed an interesting guy.

"As photojournalists go, Antonin Kratochvil has sunk his teeth into his fair share of upheaval and human catastrophes whilst going about his documentation of the time in which he lives.

As people go, Kratochvil's own refugee life has been much in the way the same as what he has rendered on film. Kratochvil's unique style of photography is the product of personal experience, intimate conditioning and not privileged voyeurism."

Visit his site

Read the Russian Chronicles (PDF) - the story of my trip

Different views

@ The Guardian

War, poverty and terrorism, or everyday intimate moments - the camera captures both global events and ordinary lives. Blake Morrison reflects on the history of 20th-century Europe as told in photographs.

As a student, like other students of the era, I stuck photographs of war atrocities round my bed. There was one in particular, which I'd cut from the Sunday Times colour magazine, depicting the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, when US soldiers led by Lieutenant William Calley murdered hundreds of civilians: the photo showed a heap of bloody corpses lying in a ditch. The photos attracted odd looks from less political-minded peers and they didn't do much for my sex life. But though the piety and ghoulishness of having them there now embarrasses me, they weren't merely right-on, in the way a Che Guevara poster would have been. The display was an expression of astonishment that something like this could have happened in our time - out there in the killing fields, away from the sanctuary of the campus. We weren't witnesses, as the photographer had been, but this was history and we were living through it and no one must be allowed to forget.

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In the Face of History @ Barbican

Sune Jonsson, Farmer and Gravedigger, Hjalmar Nyberg, Nyåker, Normaling Parish, 1956

"From the First World War to the Cold War, the sexual revolution to the Velvet Revolution, communism to capitalism, the 20th Century was marked by sweeping historical events and changes. In the Face of History brings together the work of many of the greatest photographers of this period, whose works collectively map out a century of European experience.

One of the first major exhibitions to chart European photography from 1900 to the present day, In the Face of History features classic photographers such as Eugène Atget, Josef Sudek and Brassaï , alongside contemporary artists such as Boris Mikhailov, Jitka Hanzlová and Wolfgang Tillmans. The exhibition includes a number of photographers from the former Eastern bloc, with many works shown in the UK for the first time. "

13 October 2006 - 28 January 2007
Barbican Art Gallery

Description
List of Photographers

"A Secret History" work of Emmy Andriesse reviewed by Alice Rawsthorn @ The Guardian

The Still-Life Mentor to a Filmmaking Generation

By RANDY KENNEDY @ New York Times

For much of a half-century of taking quiet, subtly powerful pictures that demand and reward long looking, Jerome Liebling has been known as a photographer’s photographer. The label is both a high compliment and an acknowledgment that Mr. Liebling, now 82, has not enjoyed the acclaim accorded to many of his contemporaries who first took their cameras to the streets of New York after World War II.

But a more fitting way to describe Mr. Liebling would be as a documentarian’s photographer. And judged by that standard, his work has rarely suffered from a lack of attention. In fact, spend any time watching the films of Ken Burns, or those of the legions of documentary makers he has inspired, and you will see Mr. Liebling’s work, in a sense, even if you have never laid eyes on one of his photographs.

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FourThirds System lens catalogue launched

Olympus Imaging Corporation, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. and Sigma Corporation have jointly compiled a detailed catalogue of exchangeable lenses for their digital single-lens reflex camera systems based on the Four-Thirds standard. Supporting companies of Four-Thirds include:

Eastman Kodak Company, Fuji Photo Film Co., Ltd., Leica camera AG, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd., Olympus Imaging Corp., Sanyo Electric Co., Ltd., and Sigma Corporation,

"The core design concept of the Four Thirds system is to facilitate optimization of the size, performance, and extendibility of digital cameras and lenses. In addition, a standardized lens mount allows photographers to freely combine interchangeable lenses and cameras from different manufacturers. This is the key feature of the Four Thirds system, the one that makes it possible to explore the full potential of digital photography."

Four-thirds.org site

For Photography, Extreme Home Makeover

By PHILIP GEFTER @ New York Times
Los Angeles

When the J. Paul Getty Museum decided to quadruple its exhibition space for photographs, the obvious goal was to trumpet the breadth of its holdings in the medium: some 31,000 works acquired in a mere two decades.

Yet at a museum best known for Greek pots and old master paintings, the move was also a way of proclaiming the Getty’s relevance to the here and now — and more broadly, affirming photography’s global importance as an art form.

“Photography is our bridge to the modern world,” said Michael Brand, the director of the museum, whose new Center for Photographs opens to the public on Oct. 24. “It’s our only link to the 20th century.”

Photography has become a churning art-world industry: more Chelsea galleries are devoted to photographs; the number of photography books published has dramatically increased; the value of photographs sold at auction annually has doubled since 2001; and even the average size of photographic prints has grown.

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The witching hour

Gregory Crewdson's eerie photographs of suburbia at dusk require set-ups as elaborate as a film shoot. He tells Edward Helmore why the world makes sense at twilight

@ The Guardian

The photographer Gregory Crewdson is something of an anomaly in the lunchtime crowd that packs Pastis restaurant in Manhattan's Chelsea district. In dark shorts and T-shirt, he looks more like a top-heavy bicycle courier than a leading figure in America's art scene. But then, Crewdson is an idiosyncratic character given to some fairly idiosyncratic activities: lately he has taken to swimming long distances in the sea off Long Island.

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Rogues' Gallery

Floating in a historical limbo without past or present

by Leslie Camhi @ Village Voice

Years ago, when pictures of missing children were still being printed on milk cartons in New York City, a friend and I shared a macabre preoccupation; we would imagine them morphing into the faces of wanted criminals hanging in the post office. In our fantasies, these two continents of the lost were joined together, each providing the key to the other's mystery. No such closure awaits the unwilling subjects in Least Wanted: A Century of American Mugshots, a show and catalog (published by Steven Kasher/Steidl) of some 200 police photographs of suspected criminals drawn from Mark Michaelson's extensive collection. These alleged shoplifters, car thieves, forgers, and hookers float in a historical limbo without past or present, preserved in shame like flies in amber.


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Single-pixel camera could simplify imaging

by Jeff Hecht @ New Scientist

A single-pixel camera that captures complete images by taking many snaps with an array of micro-mirrors could consume less power and produce more compact image files than conventional imaging devices, researchers say.
A conventional digital camera focuses light onto a rectangular array of sensing elements, called pixels, which measure light.
The single-pixel camera developed by researchers Richard Baraniuk and Kevin Kelly at Rice University in Houston, Texas, US, takes a completely different approach. It reflects light from 1024 x 768 micro-mirrors onto a single photodiode. Then it changes the arrangement of micro-mirrors and repeats the process – all in a split second.

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Yang Yong

Tang Gallery, Bangkok, Thailand

by Brian Curtin @ Frieze

The initial impression Yang Yong’s photographs make is one of self-consciousness. All the photographs are of women ostensibly posing in a variety of urban settings, and the images generically reflect different types of representation: snapshots, fashion photographs and stills from over-styled art films. Most were taken in artificial light, both exterior and interior, and some are nearly monochrome, glowing with a vivid orange or green light. For the installation at Tang Gallery light-boxes stood or hung alongside conventional wall displays. With the gallery’s black floor, grey walls and dimmed lighting Yong’s photographs were luminescent glimpses of a mediated but essentially indistinct urban environment. Temporary and fleeting, it seemed as though the scenes could disappear at any moment.

Read on

The Paris of Brassaï Goes on Sale

By ALAN RIDING @ NY Times

PARIS, Sept. 29 — Along with the likes of Andre Kertesz, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau and Willy Ronis, the Hungarian-born photographer who went by the name of Brassaï helped to create the black-and-white images that to this day define mid-20th-century Paris as a city of romance and mystique.

Brassaï’s specialty, developed in the late 1920’s and 30’s while roaming the city’s streets with his fellow flâneur Henry Miller, was Paris by night, both the wintry, misty solitude of the walkways beside the Seine and the intense, oft-decadent social life of the city’s bars, nightclubs and brothels.

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Eye-Fi coming soon

The much-buzzed-about Eye-Fi SD WiFi card is set to go into beta testing later this month. The card doesn’t require specialized drivers and will supposedly work with any camera that’s been “qualified by Eye-Fi,” letting you wirelessly transfer photos directly from your camera to your PC or to select websites.

EYE-FI website

Henry Wilhelm Interview

Henry talks to Vincent Oliver (photo-i) about advances in inkjet printing at Photokina in Cologne.

View the video (Quicktime)

Magnum in Motion - Elliot Erwitt

Magnum in Motion is a great venue/project with essays, interviews, portfolios and more. A new essay has been posted on Elliott Erwitt. "Elliott loves dogs, beaches, nudists and religion as "interesting photographic topics". He says: "I have to do books – I've been around so long, most editors think I'm dead." Personal Best, a book of 350 images, is coming out in September."

Elliot Erwitt on Magnum

The Art Market

An arts degree, some experts claim, is now one of the most desirable qualifications in the world of business. Yet cross-pollination comes with a high risk of failure – is it worth it?

by Ronald Jones @ Frieze

A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.
R. Buckminster Fuller
Ideas and Integrities (1963)

Five years ago the newly appointed vice-chair of Global Product Development at General Motors, Robert Lutz, described the strategic shift he envisioned for the company to the New York Times: ‘I see us as being in the art business. Art, entertainment and mobile sculpture, which, coincidentally, also happens to provide transportation.’ Whether Lutz’ remarks stirred their intended audience of car buyers may be in doubt, given that GM lost $10.6 billion last year, but they did please the cultural pundits, who heralded his bravado as the harbinger of a trend where artistic talent is trumping business acumen as multinationals adjust to a global economy.

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Jeff Brouws : Approaching Nowhere

Currently at the Robert Mann Gallery (NYC)
excerpt:
"In Approaching Nowhere, Jeff Brouws surveys the evolving cultural landscapes of rural, urban and suburban America, from secondary highways to strip malls to decimated industrial sites and inner city housing. Combining bleak beauty with anthropological inquiry, he seeks the significance behind the cycle of construction, decline and renewal. Brouws' photographs go beyond mere description and gather layered meaning, often functioning as antipodal metaphors or asking sociological questions. When captured by his lens, deserted streets and freeways evoke the restlessness of an uncertain nation, and communicate a low-lying foreboding. On another level, these same images remind us that roads are part of a vital infrastructure, central to a consumer society's dependency on the conveyance of goods and services, as well as being essential components of economic development and national security."

Robert Mann Gallery release

Hasselblad H3D

"The Hasselblad H3D is the world’s first 48mm. full-frame, large-sensor, medium-format DSLR camera. The H3D has been developed around a brand new digital camera engine producing increased lens performance and a new level of image sharpness. By focusing solely on digital camera architecture, Hasselblad is able to offer photographers the full benefits of professional medium-format digital cameras as well as the ease of use of the best 35mm DSLRs"

Hasselblad site

Leica buys 51% of Sinar

"Leica Camera AG, Solms, takes over 51% of the shares of Sinar AG, Feuerthalen/Switzerland, from JENOPTIK Laser, Optik, SystemeGmbH, Jena ("JENOPTIK"). JENOPTIK and Leica Camera AG have signed corresponding acquisition and transfer contracts on September 25, 2006. Confidentiality was agreed concerning the transfer price.

The existing technical cooperation between JENOPTIK and Sinar AG concerning digital camera backs will be continued.

Sinar AG serves professional photographers with leading solutions in medium and large format cameras, both with analogue and digital technology. Leica Camera AG will continue and develop the Sinar business with the Sinar brand and company structure, based on the shared values of excellence and innovation.

Both companies will benefit from synergies in technical collaboration as well as marketing and sales. Leica Camera AG is confident that the acquisition will bring positive developments for customers, employees as well as shareholders of both companies. This is a first step on the strategic path towards growing the business of Leica Camera AG"

Press release here

Epson 3800 Pro

"Designed from the beginning to exceed all expectations in the area of photographic image quality, the Epson Stylus® Pro 3800 incorporates a brand new, compact, 17-inch wide printer design, a radical, new, photographic screening technology and Epson UltraChrome K3 Ink.

Epson UltraChrome K3 Ink technology has produced some of the world’s greatest images. Inspired by our past generations of pigmented ink technology, Epson UltraChrome K3 incorporates a three-level Black, along with new color pigments that raise the bar dramatically for professional color and black-and-white prints. The standard has been set."

InkjetArt.com review

daguerreotype of 9/11

9/11
Jerry Spagnoli, untitled, september 11 2001, daguerreotype , 41/4 x 5 1/2 inches

scanned from the book :

Rexer Lyle, Photography’s antiquarian avant-garde : the new wave in old processes, New York, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2002, p. 46

And now for a little humor....

From the website:
Aaron Johnson is to blame for What the Duck. WTD originated as a ‘blog filler’ for the vacationing Carol Kroll and has since continued at the demand of tens of people. If you would like to contact Aaron, he can be emailed here. FAQ’s can be directed here. And complaints can be sent here.