The Man Who Made Mapplethorpe

By PHILIP GEFTER @ New York Times

Tall, handsome and rich would be one way to describe Sam Wagstaff, a legendary figure in the international art world of the 1970s and ’80s. Urbane is another. Iconoclastic, certainly. And glamorous, without a doubt. But the word that keeps cropping up in “Black White + Gray,” a new documentary about Mr. Wagstaff by a first-time director, James Crump, that will be shown at the Tribeca Film Festival next week, is “visionary.”

Mr. Wagstaff was one of the first private art collectors to start buying photographs as early as 1973, long before there was a serious market for them. His photography collection came to be regarded not only for its scholarship. It was also original and unorthodox, and turned out to be extremely valuable. Mr. Wagstaff sold it to the J. Paul Getty Museum in 1984 for $5 million, a fortune at the time, establishing that institution’s collection of photographs, now among the finest in the world.

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Why did a cowboy sell for $1.25 million?

Prince is not the only contemporary artist to have taken so-called "found photographs" - a loose term which encompasses everything from discarded prints discovered in a junk shop to old advertisements or amateur snaps from a stranger's family album - and reframed them as art. Two new exhibitions at London's Photographers' Gallery reveal how widely the trend has already spread.
@ The Telegraph

In 2005, Untitled (Cowboy), a photograph by the American artist Richard Prince, sold for $1,248,000 - the first time a photograph had broken the million-dollar barrier at auction. The work is nothing more than a picture of a Marlboro cigarette poster; a photograph of a photograph.

Prince is not the only contemporary artist to have taken so-called "found photographs" - a loose term which encompasses everything from discarded prints discovered in a junk shop to old advertisements or amateur snaps from a stranger's family album - and reframed them as art. Two new exhibitions at London's Photographers' Gallery reveal how widely the trend has already spread.

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AN UNCOMMON INTERVIEW WITH STEPHEN SHORE

by BEN SLOAT @ Big, Red and Shiny

BRS: In an early article by Walker Evans, published in Hound and Horn in 1931, of the work of Eugene Atget, Evans writes: “it is not the poetry of the streets’ or the ‘poetry of Paris,’ but the projection of Atget’s person.” If that is the case, I wonder if that is something that can be taught, or expressed in a book?

SS: I think so. My book does not deal with the content of the pictures, it deals with what might be called the visual grammar of photography. That is not separate from what you’re asking, the projection of personality. I think personality expresses itself in these choices that a photographer makes, because of the choices the tools present. But a photographer’s vision is expressed though these tools, as well as through the choice of subject matter.

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The Ars guide to inkjet printers for photographers

By amadou diallo @ ars technica

Within the $50 billion inkjet printer industry is a small but very profitable subset of printers designed around the needs of advanced amateur and professional photographers. If your tastes lean towards fine art photo papers, long-lasting prints, and output beyond letter-sized dimensions, count yourself among this demographic. And if you find yourself in the market for a new printer, you've got significantly more options today than were available just a year ago. In this guide we'll go beyond the marketing hype and look at the features and performance issues you need to consider when navigating through this suddenly competitive field.


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Final Cut Studio 2 announced

"Final Cut Studio 2 helps take you beyond mere editing. Discover the intuitive power of new creative tools designed expressly for Final Cut Pro editors. Rapidly move through editing to motion graphics, audio editing and mixing, color grading, and delivery — all as a natural extension of the work you already do.

Final Cut Studio 2 puts a powerful new version of Final Cut Pro at the center of an integrated post-production workflow. Final Cut Pro 6, Motion 3, Soundtrack Pro 2, Compressor 3, DVD Studio Pro 4, and Color — a brand-new application for professional color grading — are all included in Final Cut Studio"

Final Cut Studio 2

Final Cut Server

Shedding Light on America’s Dark Recesses

“Nuclear Waste Encapsulation and Storage Facility, Cherenkov Radiation,” taken at the Hanford Site in southeastern Washington State.
By BRIDGET L. GOODBODY @ New York Times

There’s something quintessentially American about the way Taryn Simon’s photography exhibition “An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar” examines the culture’s irreconcilable differences. Ms. Simon couches the show in the intellectual, power-to-the-people oratory of leftist politics. Yet she clearly delights in exposing, in a quasi-tabloid fashion, America’s underbelly.

Ms. Simon comes naturally to documenting places average citizens can’t access. For the State Department her father photographed Soviet cities during the cold war, restricted sites in Southeast Asia during the war in Vietnam and out-of-the way locations in Afghanistan, Israel and Iran in the 1970s.

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Art’s Audiences Become Artworks Themselves

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN @ New York Times

Thomas Struth’s show at Marian Goodman — rapturous, magisterial photographs of museum visitors standing before Velázquez in Madrid and looking at Leonardo at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg — culminates one of the memorable art projects of the last 20 years or so. For nearly that long, Mr. Struth has been making these pictures of people in museums. They’re looking at art, although you might say the real question is what they, and we, are seeing.

The beauty of these pictures is almost a given by now. This current show forms a coda to one lately at the Prado, where Mr. Struth insinuated a dozen or more, some nearly life-size, photographs among the paintings and sculptures. It took some gall and guile. Come upon irregularly and unexpectedly, his pictures punctuated galleries of nearly unrelenting greatness.

Sometimes they intruded. Occasionally, they seemed irrelevant. Mostly they were jarring. I found myself later recalling photographs I had thought forgettable at the time, in the way you may recall somebody you just glimpsed at a museum more vividly than the art.

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Josef Koudelka talk at Aperture

Koudelka at the Magnum meeting in London 2006, photo by David Alan Harvey
A rare interview with Josef by photography writer/critic Vicki Goldberg.

WARNING : This is a 68mb file, 1hr, 14mins long in Mp3 format.

Koudelka.Mp3

Josef Koudelka, Czechoslovakia 1968

Mastering Digital B & W Photography

Amadou Diallo has released a new book with very favorable reviews

"Mastering Digital Black and White, by Amadou Diallo, is like a laser beam illuminating the rapidly changing world of digital photography. And, like a laser it doesn't waste any strength, focusing all of its considerable energy on clear and concise explanations of almost every topic that the contemporary photographer needs to understand. Not withstanding its title, this book explores the needs of the color photographer as well as the B&W specialist. I know of no current book that covers as much as comprehensively and concisely as Mastering Digital Black and White, by Amadou Diallo."

--Michael Reichmann, The Luminous Landscape

The companion website

What's unique to Photohop Extended?

John Nack, one of the developers of Photoshop, reports some of the new features in Creative Suite 3. Check out the "disappearing tourist" demo and the 32 bit HDR improvements. Looks like some fun ahead!

John Nack on Adobe

3D morphable model face animation

Epson announces improved piezo print head

- TOKYO, Japan, March 27, 2007 -

Seiko Epson Corporation ("Epson") has succeeded in developing a thin-film piezo element that boasts the world's highest* degree of distortion. Volume production of next-generation Micro Piezo print heads that feature these elements as actuators will be launched in April 2007.

The Micro Piezo print head is an inkjet print head which utilizes Epson's original Micro Piezo technology. This technology uses electrical signals to change the shape of piezo elements and then fires ink droplets according to the physical force generated by the change in shape of these elements. Epson's Stylus Photo and Stylus Pro inkjet printers, which utilize Micro Piezo print head technology, are photo-quality printers that have consistently played leading roles in the Japanese inkjet printer market and earned high approval and trust from customers.

Epson Press Release

Distant Relations

Collier Schorr’s photographs and collages question what we look at – and why

by Dominic Eichler @ Frieze

Collier Schorr’s immersion in the photographic – not just as an artist but also, during the 1990s, as an art writer and occasional curator – could perhaps be construed as being about a desire to make difference visible, possible and appealing. No stranger to the art of photographing people not like her, Schorr seems unabashedly fixated on the idea of what might constitute a compelling image, and doesn’t shy from implicating herself in the process. Her images tempt us to share what we might surmise to be her emotions, opinions, motives, reservations, internal debates and sensibilities. And given those preliminaries and fruitful doubts, I imagine pictures come to her as a relief.

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World’s Cruelty and Pain, Seen in an Unblinking Lens

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN @ New York Times

If this were a perfect world, everybody would see the photographer James Nachtwey’s astonishing shows at the United Nations and at 401 Projects in the West Village.

Sadly, as Mr. Nachtwey knows, this isn’t a perfect world, a point he brings home in the work shown here. “Inferno,” the title of a 1999 book of the photographs he shot in Kosovo, Rwanda and other hellholes, aptly describes the horror in these two exhibitions.

For years, in Time magazine and elsewhere, he has demonstrated the good uses to which art can be put. Since 2000, he has crisscrossed Southeast Asia and Africa, documenting the resurgence of tuberculosis related to the global AIDS epidemic. (The show at the Visitors Center at the United Nations was timed to coincide with World TB Day last Saturday.) He has also photographed the war wounded in Iraq, where he himself was injured by a grenade a few years ago, and traveled with Medevac units to field hospitals and emergency rooms.

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Aperture Users Professional Forum

"Dedicated to providing information, education, training and support for Apple-based photographers."

Visit the site

Joel Peter Witkin Imagines Bush's "Ship of Fools"

"The Raft of George W. Bush" © Joel Peter Witkin, 2007
by David Schonauer @ PopPhoto.com

The art world has come to expect any number of grotesqueries in the work of Joel Peter Witkin. The Albuquerque-based fine-art photographer built his reputation with images containing cadavers, hermaphrodites, and various human and animal organs, all of which, somehow, were transformed into profoundly beautiful (if shocking) compositions. So the Witkin image here may come as a kind of revelation. As far as we know, this is the first time it’s been seen in the United States. I present the image with a warning, however: Supporters of George W. Bush may want to look away. Witkin’s image is one-sided and ruthless in its sarcasm. But, while Tony Snow might disagree, we think it is brilliant political allegory. It’s also informed by art history, so perhaps it’s not as much of a departure for Witkin as one might think.

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Jim Johnson responds

Memjet Printing Technology

There seems to be a new player in town, and it's a speedster! Silverbrook Research of Australia has perhaps made a huge improvement in digital printing. Memjet Technologies, a division of Silverbrook has announced this new technology which apparently employs a huge print head that covers the full width of the print area and lays down ink at a superfast rate.

Read the LYRA press report

Read the TechnaBob report

Memjet media files

Update :PC Magazine has picked this up now

Photography is no snap decision for collectors

James Bond Island III by Andreas Gursky. Photograph: © The artist/courtesy Jay Jopling/ White Cube (London)

By Ana Finel Honigman @ Gaurdian Art Blog

Collectors are still shying away from investing in photography, reflecting the medium's ambivalent status in the contemporary art world.

Susan Sontag's seminal essay On Photography famously asserted that "To collect photographs is to collect the world." Yet within the world of collecting, photography is too often set apart from other forms of art.

The existence of the newly conjoined photo fairs, Photo-London and Paris Photo, raises an interesting question - is photography being spotlighted or ghettoized?

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Color Space Extravaganza

From the British Journal of Photography:
Hewlett-Packard has linked with DreamWorks Animation to deliver a new cross-platform colour standard. Simon Bainbridge reports

Hewlett-Packard is calling on the industry to back its DreamColor technology initiative, claimed to deliver unparalleled colour consistency across multiple devices such as home printers, minilabs and display screens.

In a keynote speech last week at the Photo Marketing Association's annual trade show, Vyomesh Joshi, executive vice president of HP's Imaging and Printing Group, called for the abandonment of complex calibration systems in favour of its new system, developed in collaboration with DreamWorks Animation in Hollywood, and first publicly unveiled on the first day of the event in Las Vegas.

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From Creative Pro:
Microsoft Corp. formally announced HD Photo, a new file format for end-to-end digital photography that offers higher image quality, greater preservation of data, and advanced features for today's digital-imaging applications.
This new, next-generation digital image format offers the best solution for digital image editing and storage and unlocks the potential for digital photography on devices, applications and services. Microsoft also announced that it intends to standardize the technology and will be submitting HD Photo to an appropriate standards organization shortly.

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The New Color: The Return of Black-and-White

by CHARLOTTE COTTON @ Tip of the Tongue

The way I look at and think about black-and-white photography has shifted profoundly since the early 2000s. The words to describe my changing perspective are on the tip of my tongue. Let me set the scene for you.

I was living in London, researching a book about contemporary art photography and, given the climate of the time, looking mainly at color and increasingly larger-sized photographs. I was working as a curator for a national collection of photography, curating exhibitions on the history of photography for a dedicated photo gallery, and thrilled that we were going to be a tour venue for the Diane Arbus exhibition. Over at the Tate Modern, their first exhibition dedicated to photography, Cruel and Tender, had opened up a series of debates about the nature and genealogy of contemporary photography. New market heights for photography both old and new were just beginning to be set - and readily broken.

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Coming soon: Two editions of Photoshop CS3

Adobe® Photoshop® has always been at the forefront of digital imaging innovation, and we've given you a taste of things to come with the Photoshop CS3 beta. Today, we want to share the news that spring 2007 will bring not just one, but two editions of Adobe Photoshop CS3 software: Adobe Photoshop CS3 and Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended.

Adobe announcement

Celebrating the Views That Others Looked Past

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN @ New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — In its quiet way, the Henry Wessel show here at the Museum of Modern Art is a revelation, one of the season’s sleepers.

For the last 30 years or so, Mr. Wessel has been photographing the American West. Not the mountains and redwoods, but the parking lots, body builders, nude beaches and absurdly trimmed shrubbery. And the light.

He is having his moment. There have been shows lately at the Robert Mann and Charles Cowles galleries in New York. The exhibition here has about 80 mostly black-and-white prints that cover his whole career, one whose arc may make you scratch your head yet again at how distracted and fickle the art world can sometimes be.

He’s a photographer’s photographer. Born in 1942, he grew up in suburban New Jersey, then studied psychology at Penn State, borrowing a Leica one day from his girlfriend’s brother. “It really knocked me out,” he has recalled. “I had never really seen how a camera could describe something."

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Scientists and Photography

Sean McHugh is a chemical engineer from Cambridge University (UK) and very knowledgeable about the intricacies of digital image making. He has written many tutorials on everything from colour perception to high dynamic range post processing of images.

"As a scientist by training, I am fascinated by the interaction between technological developments and the range of creative options available to photographers. Improvements in sensitivity, ex post facto white balance control and real-time feedback from digital imaging are providing photographers with unprecedented low-light capabilities. Much of this fascination has been channelled into finding unique times, perspectives and techniques for capturing many of these low-light scenes in Cambridge."

Visit Cambridge in Colour

Nash Editions—The Evolution of Digital Printing

by Lynne Eodice @ Double Exposure

"I was the tour manager for Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young for many years,” Holbert begins. “In that job, I became very involved with utilizing computers during the late 1970s—everything from word processing to spread sheets for financial management of the tours and projecting profits.” Then in the ’80s, Holbert began experimenting with early imaging software, which he used in conjunction with scanners to create covers for tour itineraries. Nash saw what Holbert was doing and wanted to utilize some of this technology for his photography. “We both share a love of taking pictures and probably spent the better part of the 1970s in a darkroom at his house in San Francisco,” Holbert states. “We were heavily steeped in photographic processes.” Graham Nash says that to this day, “I’m always taking pictures. I want to document my world from the way I see it.” He advises, “Always carry your camera around. You never know when the world is going to change right before your eyes.”

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The Luminist

By ARTHUR LUBOW @ New York Times

On a damp winter morning, 20 weather-beaten men waited at a bleak corner in east Vancouver. You can find scenes like this in most cities: places where laborers gather, hoping that a van will pull up with an employer offering cash in return for a day’s work. This scene, however, was riddled with curious anomalies, starting with the middle-aged figure dressed in black who stood behind a tripod-mounted camera and patiently watched the men wait. And what were the men waiting for? Not a job. That they already had, courtesy of the photographer, Jeff Wall, who had hired them at the actual “cash corner” where they normally congregated and then bused them to this spot he preferred a half-hour’s drive away. No, they were waiting for Wall to determine that the rain had become too heavy or the light had grown too bright or the prevailing mood had turned too restless for him to obtain the feeling of suspended activity and diffused expectancy that he sought in the picture. He was prepared to come here, day after day, for several weeks. On any given morning, typically after three hours elapsed, he would adjourn until the next day, authorizing the men to receive their paychecks of 82 Canadian dollars and get back into the bus. Until then, all of us — the men, Wall and I — waited for something to happen that lay outside our control.

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Yet another Epson printer!

-A3+ prints on a variety of media for high impact photographs
-MicroPiezo print head and Advanced Variable Sized Droplet technology, for ink droplets as small 1.5 picolitres
-Direct printing to CDs and DVDs
-Six individual ink cartridges, so users only replace the colour they need to
-USB 2.0 Direct Print from digital cameras and Epson Multimedia viewers
-Claria Photographic ink - for Ultra High Definition photo printing

"This Ultra High Definition printer creates high impact A3+ prints, providing stunning enlarged images that are ideal for framing. It can also print a variety of other sizes BorderFree, including 4"x 6" photos.

The Stylus Photo 1410 is suitable for offices and small businesses that are looking for a cost efficient option to produce professional-looking catalogues and other materials in-house without sacrificing high-quality output.

The Stylus Photo 1410 uses Epson's Claria Ultra High Definition Photographic ink which has a wide colour gamut and bright, vivid colours. Claria ink is smudge and scratch resistant as well as being resistant to fading that is caused by light and ozone.

Claria Photographic ink adds richness, depth and clarity to your printed photos. When combined with genuine Epson paper, your photos can last up to 200 years when stored in an album, therefore exceeding the life of silver halide and lab photo prints. "

Epson site

The Parent Trap

by Leslie Camhi @ Village Voice

Photography is in a family way again. Recent gallery shows include Gail Albert Halaban's pseudo-photojournalistic stagings of alienated, über-chic moms at Robert Mann and Tierney Gearon's bowel-churning portraits of her schizophrenic mother, at Yossi Milo. Justine Kurland recently traveled cross-country in a van with her infant son, photographing other mothers and their children, naked amid seemingly virginal landscapes; the pictures go on view at Mitchell-Innes & Nash this week. And the money shot in Global Feminisms, the hotly anticipated survey opening at the Brooklyn Museum next month, promises to be an up-to-date Madonna—Catherine Opie's Self Portrait/Nursing (2004). It shows the hefty, tattooed photographer (faintly scarred with the word "pervert" carved in cursive script across her chest) cradling a blond baby boy who feeds at her breast, each gazing upon the other with rapt attention.

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Chris Jordan

I really like the conceptual nature of Chris Jordan's photographs. It's a numbers game and those numbers add up to massive consumption and waste in a very poetic manner. He states:

Running the Numbers
An American Self-Portrait

This new series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics tend to feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or $12.5 million spent every hour on the Iraq war. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs.

My only caveat about this series is that the prints must be seen in person to be experienced the way they are intended. As with any large artwork, their scale carries a vital part of their substance which is lost in these little web images. Hopefully the JPEGs displayed here might be enough to arouse your curiosity to attend an exhibition, or to arrange one if you are in a position to do so. The series is still in its early stages, and new images will be posted as they are completed, so please stay tuned.

~cj, January 2007


I also really thought the book "In Katrina's Wake" was stunning.




Chris Jordan website

Interview with FlashFilm

AfterCapture

Launched in January 2007, AfterCapture Magazine is the premiere monthly publication for photographic post-production work.

AfterCapture.com provides online multimedia resources for the photographic professional. In addition to archives of AfterCapture’s print articles, AfterCapture.com provides original online content, tutorials, blogs, and audio and video podcasts.

View website

He Is a Camera

by R.C. Baker @ The Village Voice

Elliot Erwitt, still active at 78, has a knack for delivering theatrical spontaneity within sharp and inventive compositions. In one black and white image, a silhouetted man with a huge umbrella leaps high off the ground, his legs in an achingly wide, pointy split; at stage right, two lovers embrace, their own umbrellas crumpling in the wind as the Eiffel Tower rises in the gray distance, a tumescent exclamation point to this narrative of exuberant love. Compare this posed 1989 shot (a clear homage to Cartier-Bresson's Paris pedestrian leaping across a puddle) to Erwitt's iconic photo from the Cold War: Nixon's ski-slope nose thrusts almost as belligerently as the finger he's using to poke Nikita Kruschev's chest during the famous 1959 kitchen debate in Moscow.

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General Electric enters digital camera market

General Electric has partnered with General Imaging Company. They have brought some pvery good players to the table as well, Hiroshi “Hugh” Komiya former President of Olympus Imaging Corporation and Takeyoshi Kawano former Design Division Manager for Olympus Corporation and Executive Design Division Manager, Sony Group – Aiwa Co. Ltd.

The new cameras will preview at the PMA show in early March and be available in mid April."Entry-level GE digital cameras will start with 7 megapixels of resolution and 2.5-inch LCD screens. Higher-end GE cameras will offer up to 12 megapixels of resolution and 3-inch LCD screens. A photo printer will also be included in the line."

More Information
Splash page
Press kit (zipped PDF)

Even in the Digital Age, a Strong Case for Printmaking

By MARTHA SCHWENDENER @ New York Times

Printmaking has suffered a crisis in recent years, with art schools closing their printmaking departments and giving the space and resources to digital equipment and instruction. In this country fine-art printmaking has always occupied a hazy zone, somewhere between painting and drawing and photography. The European model — with artists like Dürer and Goya producing woodcuts, etchings or aquatints that rivaled or outstripped their best paintings, and apprenticeships developing new printmakers — has never been successfully duplicated in the United States.

"Two Maps II" (1966), by Jasper Johns.


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An Explanation of the Color Rendering Process, “Digichromatography”

I just ran across this and was intriqued. Yes, it was published in 2003.

"We know that Prokudin-Gorskii intended his photographic images to be viewed in color because he developed an ingenious photographic technique in order for these images to be captured in black and white on glass plate negatives, using red, green and blue filters. He then presented these images in color in slide lectures using a light-projection system [right] involving the same three filters."

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Kodak may pull down the shutters on film business

by James Doran @ The Times Online

Kodak is considering hiving off its traditional photographic film arm and selling or spinning off the business it created more than a century ago.

The business, which has long been in decline, could raise as much as $1.5 billion (£664 million), according to Wall Street analysts.

Antonio Perez, the chief executive of Kodak, who came in three years ago to turn around the ailing company, believes that the traditional film business has just a decade of growth ahead of it.

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Orphan Works Revisited

from PhotoAttorney.com (Carolyn E. Wright, Esq., )

"It appears that Orphan Works legislation will soon rear its head again. The word from Washington is that it will again be fast-tracked and its sponsors will resist "any significant modifications to the existing draft."

Last year, visual arts groups came together as an informal coalition. We shared information and coordinated a letter writing campaign. Monday, Jan. 29 these groups are scheduled to meet in Washington to discuss a unified strategy. The groups (listed below) will formally be called The Imagery Alliance."

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Looks Like Teen Spirit

Rineke Dijkstra's young subjects meet our gaze head-on

by Leslie Camhi @ The Village Voice

The gap between intention and effect" was what Diane Arbus said she aimed for when, facing a person, she raised her camera and clicked the shutter—the distance (at times considerable) that separates someone's self-image from the way they look to others. In a transvestite's heavy chin or the jauntily painted eyebrows of two elderly coquettes at the Automat, she found a pathos linking them to a broader humanity.

The Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra focuses on something a bit different: those unguarded moments when the inchoate longings and the realities of youth collide.

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So where does painting start and photography end?

by Pedro Meyer @ zonezero

In the picture above we are in front of a painting that was presented at the Shanghai Biennial of Art in 2006. The painting is based on the perceptions associated with photography, to the extent that the men depicted in the painting appear in a pose usually associated with portrait photography. If we have any doubts about that, just behind these three Chinese gentlemen, you will find another painting depicting a man in the process of taking a photograph of precisely those same three men in the foreground of the painting. Now mind you, you are in fact looking at all of this through a photograph which is the one that is looking at the overall painting. We have the back and forth echoes between photography and painting that is the subject of this editorial.

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Deborah Turbeville

The Wapping Project, London, UK

by Brian Dillon @ Frieze

Deborah Turbeville, you might say, is the anti-Helmut Newton. Her most abiding images, the ‘Bath House’ series, produced for Vogue in 1975 (and reprised in the similar ‘Steam Room’ photographs of 1984), present models whose misty lassitude is the antithesis of Newton’s athletic automata. Turbeville’s early career as a fashion photographer depended precisely on a degree of suggestive blur (first spotted by Richard Avedon) that rendered her subjects – not to say the clothes that were the ostensible pretext for the pictures – so many excuses for conjuring an alluring haze. ‘I say yes to style,’ she said, ‘yes to mood, yes to ambiguity.’ But Turbeville also says yes to Art, and ‘The Narrative Works: Photographs 1975–1997’, the first UK exhibition of her photographs, continued her use of a wide variety of print sizes, rough or unfinished surfaces and scraps of attendant text. ‘I am’, Turbeville has also announced, ‘very avant-garde and extreme.’

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Camera Armor

They are elastometric cases that protect the camera from all of the bad stuff the earth has to throw at you. The camera armor will also come with Made's palm strap and ergonomic shoulder strap. Sounds like worthy investment if you like to take that big, bad DSLR out in the nature where it can easily get its ass kicked. No word on what models will be supported, but expect all of the popular models to be supported.

Camera Armor website

World’s first 18x optical zoom takes photography to the next level

from dpreview:

"London, 25 January 2007 – Get up close and personal in a whole new way. With the world’s first wide 18x optical zoom, the Olympus SP-550 UZ accepts no limits, bringing photographers closer to distant subjects than ever before. Capture candid street scenes from a discreet distance, grab the detail of your favourite sport from way up in the stands – then even use the wide angle lens to take in the whole game – as this model’s focal length spans an amazing 28mm-504mm (in 35mm camera equivalent terms)! Enjoy double protection against camera shake with Dual Image Stabilization. Even at high magnifications or when capturing fast-moving objects, this technology ensures results are significantly sharper. Packing 7.1 Megapixels of detail-capturing power, the SP-550 UZ opens up a new realm of creative possibility."

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The 'best' of Mexico's bravest barrio

By Reed Johnson @ Los Angeles Times

MEXICO CITY — They call it el barrio bravo, which more or less translates as "the brave 'hood." But it takes more than courage and a certain ferocity of spirit to survive in Tepito, this tough metropolis' most Darwinian precinct.

Humor probably helps. A sense of camaraderie too. Above all, caution.

Then there's the tremendous pride that Tepito residents feel about their much-stereotyped and stigmatized neighborhood just north of the capital's historic center. Tepito lacks many things — clean streets, decent housing, honest cops — but it doesn't want for a strong self-identity.

"They think they're the best of everything," says photographer Francisco Mata Rosas, 47, "the best dancers, the best boxers, the best cooks."

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Francisco Mata Rosas website

Rosas' .Mac page

How To Choose CD/DVD Archival Media

By Patrick McFarland @ Ad Terras Per Aspera

Ahh, I’ve been planning to write this one for awhile: an entire article on archival quality media. As I do professional software development as well as professional photography (what a weird combination), I need archival quality CD and DVD media to store my data on.

However, one of the hardest things to is actually find good media, or even understand why it is good media. This article focuses on the history of Compact Discs, writable CD/DVD media, and why DVD+R is superior to DVD-R. If you want to just know what media is worth buying, skip to the summary at the bottom.

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Stephen Shore

Jay Cornelius directed this movie about Stephen Shore. Definitely a good watch.

"Stephen Shore is an influential American photographer. Selling his first photographs to the curator of the MOMA at age 14, and photographing Andy Warhol's factory at age 17, he has had a long and distinguished career, pioneering the art of color photography."

Director of Photogrphay: Jay Cornelius
Editor & Writer: Donna Golden
Associate Producer: Coryander Friend
Producer: Tim Smith
Music: J.J. McGeehan
Produced by Docere Digital Studios
for the Joy of Giving Something, Inc

Watch the movie

Innovator and Master, Side by Side

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN @ New York Times

In 1932 the young Henri Cartier-Bresson, lately returned from Africa, saw a photograph of African children charging into waves on a beach. “I must say that it is that very photograph which was for me the spark that set fire to fireworks,” he recalled years later. “I couldn’t believe such a thing could be caught with the camera. I said, ‘Damn it,’ took my camera and went out into the street.” What Cartier-Bresson produced during the next few years, as the curator Peter Galassi once wrote, became “one of the great, concentrated episodes in modern art.”

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Digital Sample Book

The online alternative to the inkjet paper sample book. This is a project of the Image Permanence Institute at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). It was just set up and is in a developmental stage, but this may become very handy in the future.

The Digital samplebook

Interview with Bill Jay Part 1

Part two

The hands-on revolution

@ The Guardian

The mouse and keyboard are getting old - but new touch-sensitive screens could give us a whole new way to work with computers. Charles Arthur reports

It's more than two decades since the last computer interface revolution - the mouse - and now the next one is just around the corner. Slightly less than a year ago, Jeff Han, a researcher at the computer science department at New York University, stood up in Monterey at the annual TED (Technology, Engineering, Design) conference, a showcase for interesting new products and ideas, and began demonstrating his new big idea.

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The Objective of the Objective Objective

Single-pixel camera takes on digital

@ BBC News

Researchers in the US are developing a single-pixel camera to capture high-quality images without the expense of traditional digital photography.

Being developed by a lab at Rice University in Houston, Texas, the single-pixel camera is designed to tackle what its developers see as the "inefficiencies" of modern digital camera.

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An Interview with Stephen Perloff, Editor, The Photo Review and The Photo Collector

By Michael Jason @ Manhattan Arts

Stephen Perloff is the founder and editor of The Photo Review and editor of The Photograph Collector. He has taught photography and the history of photography at numerous Philadelphia-area colleges and universities and has been the recipient of two grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts for arts criticism. His articles have been reproduced in dozens of other journals and he has been called on as an expert to comment on the state of the photography market for publications such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

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The Bruce Fraser Legacy website.

Stephen Johnson is putting together a tribute website for Bruce Fraser who passed away last month. Bruce didn't invent color management but certainly understood it better than most of us and had the ability to clearly explain it. He has written many articles and books. He will be missed.

Legacy Site

Mike Russell's notes on the Macworld tribute

A MATTER OF TIME

Essay by TJ Demos @ TATE, ETC.

Tacita Dean’s moving film Presentation Sisters (2005), which portrays the quiet daily rituals of elderly nuns living in the South Presentation Convent in Cork, Ireland, unfolds gradually, tracing a gentle slowness. Their routine comprises communal meals, domestic labour, recreation and devotional prayer, each of which Dean spent months observing. One shot shows a nun ironing sheets, pressing out wrinkles with a determined focus and concentrated thoroughness unknown in the frenetic modern world outside. Used to our culture of light-speed pace and miniscule attention spans, multi-tasked distraction and attention-deficit disorders, one discovers an oasis of clarity in the darkened environment where Dean’s film plays. Capturing the unhurried cyclical time of Catholic spirituality, the piece emphasises the sense of prolonged duration through its anamorphic widescreen format, which widens the 16mm colour film’s image. Time stretches out.

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Inkjet Prints and ASTM Testing

By Mark Gottsegen @ AMIEN.org

""This long article is an attempt to address the multitudes of attitudes that have developed over the last six years regarding the use, longevity, and testing of inkjet inks. The first section briefly introduces those products and why it’s important to think about them as art materials. The second section provides an overview of ASTM International’s art materials standards-writing activities compared to those of the International Standards Organization. The last portion of the article discusses the testing of inkjet products, proposes reasons why current methods will not satisfy artists, and how ASTM’s methods will work."

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Mastering Digital Color: A Photographer's and Artist's Guide to Controlling Color

A new book by David Saffir and part of the "Matering Digital" series edited by Harald Johnson.

“Here is a great, new book for the serious color digital photographer. It not only covers how color works, but what you need to know to use it to your best advantage. This isn’t a “how-to shoot color pictures” book. It is a color course on how color works in the digital workspace, how you can use it, how to correct and manipulate it, and finally, how to store it in order to work with again later on. This is a great guidebook for both photographers and artists alike. It covers a lot of what you do not find in many other digital photo books. I Rate it: A ” Review quoted from Apogee Photo.

Excerpts From Chapter Three

New Imaging Sensors That Can Do It In The Dark

By Terry Sullivan @ PC Magazine
LAS VEGAS—At this year's CES show, the Korean company Planet82 Inc., which produces a number of nanotechnology products, have been promoting a new type of sensor that can capture images with almost no visible light. By combining features of CCD and CMOS sensor—two of the most commonly produced forms of imaging sensors—the company claims that its single carrier modulation photo detector, or SMPD, sensor functions as an artificial eye by applying silicon photodiode technology and connecting it to nanotechnology. In doing so, it's able to distinguish images in the dark, without a flash. The names of two of the most recently manufactured chips are the PLP-2033B and PLC-3033C.

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"DARKROOM" magazine launch

"Darkroom® written for professional photographers who want to get the most out of Adobe’s groundbreaking Photoshop® Lightroom™ workflow application, and published 8 times a year by the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP). Each issue features in-depth tutorial articles, innovative digital photography techniques, and timesaving shortcuts written by the creative experts behind Photoshop User and Layers magazines."

More info at Darkroommagazine.com

Kodak - Winds of Change

Hilarious !

Self-Portraits That Obscure the Self

By GRACE GLUECK @ New York Times

Photographers and painters have always made self-portraits; doing your own likeness is part of an artist’s franchise. But sometimes the camera’s potential nudges photographers further, encouraging a theatrical impulse: to portray themselves as a clown, or a person of the opposite sex, or even, say, Jesus. That was the case with F. Holland Day (1864-1933), a wealthy and eccentric Bostonian influenced by artists like Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. Starting out as a publisher of belles lettres, in the late 1880s he began making photographs, and rather exotic ones, at that.

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Bruce Davidson's best shot

@ The Guardian

I always had a feeling for Britain. We would listen to the BBC during the war, when I had an uncle Herb who was flying a bomber, which I believe may have been from England.

In 1960, I purchased a Hillman Minx convertible, which wasn't a very expensive car in those days, and drove around England with the top down. It was an American-drive car, which was an advantage because I could snap people on the sidewalk more easily. I also had a sports coat made with the side pockets larger, so I could fit my Leicas in them.

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