Adobe Photoshop & the Art of Photography

An Interview with John Paul Capinegro
by Steve Weinrebe

SW: Please talk a bit about your journey into digital photography, especially since you were well aware of the art of traditional photography growing up.

JPC: I grew up in an artistic family. My father is a well known photographer and my mother is a painter, turned graphic designer, and she often oversaw the production of artist’s monographs. The first time I saw digital imaging was in the mid 1970’s when she was overseeing production of Eliot Porter’s Intimate Landscapes book. The printing press had a Scitex machine that she called ‘the million dollar coloring book’. The minute I saw what it could do I asked the question: ‘What would happen if artists got a hold of these, rather than a corporation trying to produce a clever ad?’

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Photo Husbandry

by Leslie Camhi @ Village Voice

JoAnn Verburg Voyages Through the Realm of the Domestic

The decay of private life is nothing new, though its accelerating decline has come to seem all but inevitable. It's tempting to blame this state of affairs on technology, on all those devices—iPods, BlackBerries, etc.—that interfere with our ability to focus on the present moment and the person standing before us. But surely the responsibility lies also with a society of unfettered materialism, inclining us to view people through the utilitarian filter of their functions, so that each new encounter becomes another point to be connected on a career trajectory.

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Sony's A700

"The camera’s new 12.2-megapixel Exmor™ CMOS sensor conducts analog-to-digital (A/D) signal conversion and dual noise reduction right on the sensor itself. Noise reduction is applied to analog signals before A/D conversion and the resulting digital signals are then subject to a second round of noise reduction.

According to Lubell, “These digital signals are virtually immune to external noise and interference.”

Clean, noise-free digital signals are then sent to the newly developed BIONZ™ processing engine. Lubell said this engine has been optimized to process data-rich picture information at high speeds, and to reduce picture noise in the RAW data stage before final image compression and encoding. The results are high-resolution, detailed images with rich tonal reproduction."

I WANT ONE!

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The Bizarre Story of Joe O'Donnell

by Marianne Fulton @ The Digital Journalist

It all started with an Aug. 14 New York Times obituary by Douglas Martin for photographer Joe O'Donnell. Martin praised his exceptional work and took special notice of a picture made during President Kennedy's funeral cortege: "And the O'Donnell photograph of John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting his father's coffin became the most reproduced version of that memorable scene." Martin goes on to note that, because he was on the government payroll, Mr. O'Donnell got no personal credit for those photos, although he signed and sold copies of them after his retirement from the White House in 1968.

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Imaging heavy hitters join Adobe

From John Nack's blog:

A number of rock stars from the world of image science have recently joined Adobe:

That crazy-cool image resizing demo I mentioned last week continues to get all kinds of attention. I was therefore happy to learn that co-creator Shai Avidan joined the Adobe office in Newton, MA (just down the 'pike from MIT) last Monday.

Wojciech Matusik began work at Adobe in May. He's done some really cool work in the emerging fields of multi-aperture photography, 3D TV, and much more. Like Shai, he works from the Newton office.

Sylvain Paris is due to join Adobe in a couple of weeks. He's worked on techniques for matching tones across photos ("Make my image pop like Ansel's"), generating 3D data from 2D captures, and more. His paper on bilateral filtering was written with MIT colleagues Jiawen Chen (who interned this summer at Adobe) and Fredo Durand.

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The Treacherous Medium

Why photography critics hate photographs

by Susie Linfield @ Boston Review

In 1846, Charles Baudelaire wrote a little essay called “What is the Good of Criticism?” This is a question that virtually every critic asks herself at some point, and that some have answered with hopelessness, despair, even self-loathing. Baudelaire didn’t think that criticism would save the world, but he didn’t think it was a worthless pursuit, either. For Baudelaire, criticism was the synthesis of thought and feeling: in criticism, Baudelaire wrote, “passion . . . raises reason to new heights.” A few years later, he would explain that through criticism he sought “to transform my pleasure into knowledge”—a pithy, excellent description of critical practice. Baudelaire’s American contemporary Margaret Fuller held a similar view; as she put it, the critic teaches us “to love wisely what we before loved well.”

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Interesting development

World's Largest Photograph to be exhibited

from The Legacy Photo Project

On September 6, 2007, The Great Picture will be unveiled at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA. This is not an exhibition of a series of photographs—only one will be displayed. The title sounds like a grand claim until the particulars are considered: The Great Picture has been declared the world's largest photograph by The Guinness Book of World Records. Measuring three stories high by eleven stories wide, this gelatin silver print cost $65,000 to produce.

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Thoughts on Large Format Photography

@ WGBH Forum Network

Julian Cox addresses the prevailing taste for large scale images, and considers the choices that photographers make when determining the size of their prints.

Julian Cox is the Curator of Photography at the High Museum of Art (Atlanta). Some of his ideas and thoughts I agree with, some I do not, but he presents an good overview of the history of photography and the print. Worth a view

View or listen here
RealPlayer required.

EPSON's Next Generation

by Joseph Holmes

One has to wonder if there will soon be an end to printer development, as the quality of the machines is getting to be so good that further improvements would seem to be impossible. Nevertheless, the printer companies continue to give us more of what we want, at a rapid rate, coming ever closer to perfection with respect to ink and the application thereof to paper.

In a departure from the routine, news about the latest generation of professional, wide format printers from Seiko Epson Corporation is emerging over a period of many weeks, rather than all at once. The worldwide announcement date was apparently July 17th, but Epson America will follow with their own announcement on August 31st. In any case, the news is good.

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No Exit

by R.C. Baker @ Village Voice

A high sun paints a receding chevron of blacktop with light; the title of this 1938 silver print, The Road West, by Dorothea Lange, adds resonance to the flat, desolate horizon in the distance. One destination in this collection of photos traversing America is William Eggleston's Store Parking Lot—shot through a car's windshield, a pair of shoppers seems targeted by fluorescent lights that plunge in perspective, the diagonals echoed by reflections in the shiny hood and painted stripes on the macadam. Robert Frank uncovered '50s existentialism in his images of a Brylcreemed cafeteria patron somberly surveying his half-eaten meal, and a cityscape in which massive tail fins poke over the wall of an elevated parking garage—these angular flanks of Detroit steel are mirrored by vertical concrete supports that glow like a Precisionist cathedral. Reversing Eggleston's view, Lee Friedlander got in front of a pickup truck to photograph a man gripping the steering wheel, his grim expression as hollow as a rural serial killer's.

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Creative Method: Edward Steichen on Photography

@ WGBH Forum Network

An interesting audio interview with Steichen in the 1950's

Listen here You need RealPlayer installed.

Back from another vacation

Ah! Glorious Cayuga lake in Upstate New York. I had a very refreshing break. My family has had this cottage for 32 years now.


Stopped off on the way home at Brian's garlic farm in Pennsylvania too!

Cut-and-Paste History

By KATHRYN SHATTUCK @ New York Times

More than any other genre or medium, photomontage was the pre-eminent symbol of Modernity in the 1920s and ’30s, according to Matthew S. Witkovsky, the curator of “Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918-1945” at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. “It was the ultimate symbol in the play between the singular artist and mass media that defines the times, in terms of photography,” he explained.


Marianne Brandt's 'Untitled"

Using newspapers, magazines, advertising and books, artists in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary and Poland turned to cutting and pasting to forge an art that helped explain the crumbling of Central Europe’s four great empires and the new society that was evolving after the devastation of World War I.

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Photographs of Italy

@ Vincenzo’s Mediterranean Grill

Random Image

Cherry Creek Shopping Center Denver, CO

Accounting for Days

Lynne Tillman on Stephen Shore @ artforum

NOT LONG AGO, diaries housed private thoughts and feelings too intimate or shameful to reveal. Virginia Woolf wrote in hers daily, expatiating on yesterday’s parties, ideas, and dinner conversations. Some believe remembering can keep us sane, but Woolf succumbed to madness, and remarked on its approach in her diary.

Blogs are, oxymoronically, public diaries, where bloggers play with exposure, others’ and their own. Some use handles for anonymity, but with fingerprints in cyberspace and with erasure near impossible, nothing’s lost and everyone can be found. Billions of disclosures light up the Internet with electric abandon. While “private” and “public” have for years been theorized as permeable spaces, even illusory divisions, people once lived those separate realities. Now they have actually blurred, and privacy and secrecy are becoming quaint ideas. IDs and personal information are hacked and jacked constantly, and individuals adjust their desires, needs, and aims in sync with technology’s capabilities. In this electronic revolution, as written and filmed self-reportage and confessions choke the virtual highways, voyeurism and exhibitionism are just normal.

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The cleanest place on earth - and the dirtiest

@ The Guardian

The air quality at Cape Grim in Tasmania is officially the best on the planet - a world away from the grime and filth of Linfen in China. Photographer Angela Palmer set out to capture the essence of both places

In March, I dreamed that I went to the most polluted place in the world and then to the cleanest. In the dream, I wore identical white outfits, which were then exhibited side by side in a stark white gallery. When I awoke, I resolved to enact my dream. It seemed like madness: I was preparing for my final show at the Royal College of Art in London and was intending to show work based on CT scans of an ancient Egyptian mummy. But the sense of "mission" was overwhelming. I jettisoned my original plans: this was to be it.

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John Szarkowski, Curator of Photography, Dies at 81

By PHILIP GEFTER @ New York Times

John Szarkowski, a curator who almost single-handedly elevated photography’s status in the last half-century to that of a fine art, making his case in seminal writings and landmark exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, died in on Saturday in Pittsfield, Mass. He was 81.

The cause of death was complications of a stroke, said Peter MacGill of Pace/MacGill Gallery and a spokesman for the family.

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Rendering the Print: the Art of Photography

by Karl Lang

Digital Raw photography—the use of raw sensor data instead of a camera-processed JPEG as a starting point for photographers—is often a topic of controversy. Photographers make statements such as “my prints look good, I don’t see any need for Raw” and “I adjust my images in Photoshop®; it works just fine” or “all those controls are too much work, I just want my software to match the JPEG.” Somewhat complex and widely misunderstood, the Raw workflow was created to return control of the print to the photographer. With traditional film, years and even lifetimes were spent learning the techniques of printing in the darkroom. Modern Raw photography provides even more control with less effort, but some education is still required.
This paper will provide a foundation for the understanding of scene rendering. It will introduce the concepts, history, and tools of printmaking, and express their bearing on modern digital photography. It will demonstrate why you should invest the effort to learn the tools of Raw photography, and most importantly, it will prove there is no single “correct” way to render a print.

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A World of Scissors and Paper That’s Captured in Photographs

By ROBERTA SMITH @ New York Times

Daniel Gordon’s large color photographs, the subject of a solo exhibition at Zach Feuer Gallery in Chelsea, have several things going for them. They operate in the gap between collage and set-up photography, which is a lively place to be at the moment. They benefit from an impressive if not entirely original way with scissors that involves creating figurative tableaus from cut paper and cut-out images that Mr. Gordon then photographs.In addition, he seems motivated by a deeply felt obsession with the human body and the discomforts of having one. Not for nothing is this show titled “Thin Skin II.” He likes to depict the body in extreme situations: a woman giving birth, for example, or a man cowering under a table in a work titled “Quake.” A certain interest in crime scenes is indicated, as in the pile of little girls, seemingly dead, in “Rock Garden” and the body twisted in the corner of a suburban house in “Headless Man.”

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Seen on the Street: Photographers’ ‘Everyday Epiphanies’

Alex Webb
By MARTHA SCHWENDENER @ New York Times

When artists talk about “training the eye,” they generally don’t mean doing exercises to maintain 20/20 vision. They mean honing a set of instincts, learning to see relationships among colors or objects or spaces. The title of this small but potent collection of contemporary photographs from the Metropolitan Museum’s collection describes this kind of vision another way: seeing what is “Hidden in Plain Sight.” The show focuses mostly on versions of street, rather than studio, photography.

The artists here discovered “found still lifes,” as the wall text puts it, which resulted in “everyday epiphanies.” These are prefaced by an epigraph from Henry David Thoreau, written in his diary in August 1851: “The question is not what you look at but what you see.” Thoreau may have been speaking of nature or writing, but his dictum works well enough for photography. (It’s still an odd choice for a show focusing on 20th- and 21st-century photography, but never mind.)

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Photos show everyday life amid catastrophe

Karin Apollonia Müller,
Art reviews: Karin Apollonia Müller, Hirsch Perlman, Jimmy Baker, Bill Komoski

By Christopher Knight @ LA Times

For at least a decade, Karin Apollonia Müller has been making savvy photographs that consider the disquieting contradictions of ordinary experience, a project for which Southern California has been her muse. Müller divides her time between Los Angeles and Germany, where she was born (in Heidelberg) in 1963. Perhaps it takes an outsider to see a place with fresh eyes, because she understands the perplexing city in ways that deeply resonate.

Her seven recent large-scale photographs at the Karyn Lovegrove Gallery are as fine as any she's made. One reason is that she begins with an array of events — wildfires, mudslides, freeway catastrophes and such —that are L.A. clichés and that also make the city the nation's reigning symbol of imminent apocalypse. (Had there been a recent earthquake, it no doubt would have figured in her pictures.) But the resulting work is less journalistic or documentary than cinematic, even though she doesn't stage the scenes.

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Wolfgang Tillmans, Paying Attention

By Michael O'Sullivan @ Washington Post

The last thing you're likely to see on your way out of "Wolfgang Tillmans," a touring retrospective on the 38-year-old German contemporary photographer at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, is a photograph called "You're Not Paying Attention." Lifted from the slogan on an American flag decal shot by the artist, it could be taken as the show's rallying cry.

It's a message that could therefore more properly have been delivered at the beginning of the show, rather than at the end. If a viewer can make it all the way through the show -- idiosyncratically installed by the artist throughout 10 galleries on the museum's second floor -- without having changed the way he or she looks at these photographs, maybe even photography in general, there's little hope that Tillmans's parting shot is going to get through. Through the course of the show itself, on the other hand, the artist does his damnedest to subvert (or at least question) the very way we pay attention to pictures.

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Wish Hue Were Here

by Daniel Kunitz @ The Village Voice

For decades, people saw color photography in black and white: It was for amateurs or crass commercialism; it was emphatically not for art. Kodacolor, considered the first true color negative film, was introduced in 1942. As late as 1997, the Oxford History of Art volume on the photograph still claimed, "Color photographs remain problematic. They are central to the snapshot, but are still invariably rejected by the professional and art photographer . . ." By then this assertion was already moldy, yet it gives a sense of how reluctant people were to embrace color. In fact, by 1997, color had become utterly central to photography, in large part because of a renewed appreciation for several American photographers who came to prominence in the '70s. Two current shows presenting work from that decade suggest why our reception of color has been so blurry.

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New Life for Bruce Davidson's Classics

By Miki Johnson @ PopPhoto.com

In the early '90s, Magnum photographer Bruce Davidson suggested a project on Central Park to the National Geographic editors he'd been working with in recent years. They hadn't done a piece on the park in decades, so they agreed, but insisted Davidson shoot in color, a thorn in the predominantly black-and-white photographer's side.

"But I was a good boy and I exposed about 500 rolls of Kodachrome," Davidson says. "And they hated it." Upon hearing that National Geographic had decided to give the Central Park story to another photographer, Davidson says he "went right back into the park and worked in black and white for three more years."

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I'm back

Just returned from a week in Colorado, hope you missed me. Posting will resume now!

cheers

d

HERMAN LEONARD : Jazz Giants

Duke Ellington, Paris, 1958
@ Jackson Fine Art (Atlanta)

Press Release : Great music inspires listeners to feel. We emotionally react when we hear the hook or melody of an exceptional song. Rarely, however, are listeners given the opportunity to witness the experience of the musician as great music is being made. Distinguished photographer Herman Leonard has captured these moments in his photographs of the some of the most imaginative and expressive musicians that have ever lived. Jackson Fine Art is thrilled to exhibit Jazz Giants, a selection of Leonard's photographs of jazz's biggest legends, including Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong. Leonard's personal love of jazz music drew him to the New York nightclubs in the 1940s and 50s, but his camera was his ticket inside. He wanted "to make people see the way music sounded." The result was a simultaneous unleashing of creative power released through sound, song, and the click of Leonard's camera. His creative use of lighting, profiles, and camera angles were surely inspired by jazz's own experimental nature. Leonard's personal admiration for his subjects is evident in the photographs taken in between moments on stage. His visual record of jazz music is, in concert, the personification of a musical epoch as well as a profound body of art. The Smithsonian Institution owns the entire Images of Jazz series in its permanent collection. Devastatingly, Leonard lost over six thousand photographs as well as his New Orleans studio during Hurricane Katrina. His efforts to salvage his life's work and the story of jazz are documented in the film Saving Jazz. Leonard claims "to be present when the artist actually creates his work is a profound privilege." It can be assumed that the jazz legends in Leonard's photographs feel the same way about him.

Jackson Fine Art

James Nachtwey: TED Prize wish: Share a vital story with the world

@ TED

"Accepting his 2007 TED Prize, photojournalist James Nachtwey talks about his decades as a war photographer. A slideshow of his photos, beginning in 1981 in Northern Ireland, reveal two parallel themes in his work. First, as he says: "The frontlines of contemporary wars are right where people live." Street violence, famine, disease: he has photographed all these modern WMDs. Second, when a photo catches the world's attention, it can truly drive action and change. In his TED wish, he asks for help gaining access to a story that needs to be told, and developing a new, digital way to show these photos to the world. Help grant James Nachtwey's wish "

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The Online Photographer

The Online Photographer has moved! Apparently Mike had some issues with Blogger and has moved TOP to a new home. There are still some bugs to work out, but Mike is dilligently setting up the new space and things will get back to normal.

The NEW Online Photographer

Garry Winogrand with Bill Moyers, 1982

@ 2point8

"When I’m photographing, I see life. That’s what I deal with. I don’t have pictures in my head. I frame in terms of what I want to include, and naturally, when I want to snap the shutter. And I don’t worry about how the picture’s gonna look - I let that take care of itself. We know too much about how pictures look and should look, and how do you get around making those pictures again and again. It’s one modus operandi. To frame in terms of what you want to have in the picture, not about how - making a nice picture. That, anybody can do."

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They Needed to Talk

And family friend William Eggleston, his camera at his side, felt compelled to shoot

By Emily Yellin @ Smithsonian Magazine

The details are a bit sketchy now, but everyone agrees the picture was taken in Memphis, Tennessee, on a late summer night in 1973. Karen Chatham, the young woman in blue, recalls that she had been out drinking when she met up with Lesa Aldridge, the woman in red. Lesa didn't drink at the time, but both were 18, the legal age then. As the bars closed at 3 a.m., the two followed some other revelers to a friend's house nearby. In the mix was a 30-something man who had been taking pictures all night. "I always thought of Bill as just like us," Karen says today, "until years later, when I realized that he was famous."

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Blaise Aguera y Arcas: Photosynth

@ TED

"Using photos of oft-snapped subjects (like Notre Dame) scraped from around the Web, Photosynth creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation. Its architect, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, shows it off in this standing-ovation demo. Curious about that speck in corner? Dive into a freefall and watch as the speck becomes a gargoyle. With an unpleasant grimace. And an ant-sized chip in its lower left molar. "Perhaps the most amazing demo I've seen this year," wrote Ethan Zuckerman, after TED2007. Indeed, Photosynth might utterly transform the way we manipulate and experience digital images."

View demo @ TED

Photosynth Lab

Think of England

The Burry Man (Homer Sykes, 1974), which is on show at a new photography exhibition at Tate Britain

@ The Guardian

From gardening, carnivals and dog shows to more eccentric pursuits such as bottle kicking or body painting, Blake Morrison reflects on what our photographic heritage reveals about our changing national character

A photograph seeks to capture the present, but by its nature can only contain the past. However alive or "gritty" or imbued with a sense of instantaneity, the photo can't help but be nostalgic, since its subject (whether a face or a landscape) is frozen in the moment the shutter clicked - a remembrance of things past. When Philip Larkin, writing lines on his girlfriend's photo album, said that photography is "as no art is, / Faithful and disappointing", this was the paradox he tried to pin down - that on the one hand photos seem immediate and "empirically true", but on the other they commemorate "just the past":

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Major Low-light Digital Photography Breakthrough Inbound from Korea

By Nirav Sanghani @ DailyTECH
Our eyes will possibly get some relief from the blinding flash of cameras in low-light scenarios. South Korea's Electronic Technology Institute announced the development of a new image sensor chip that allows digital cameras to capture vibrant images without a flash in dark spaces.

The digital camera equipped with the chip will be able to take high-resolution photos or video-recordings at 1 lux. The camera will be able to snap pictures in places such as theaters, underground traffic tunnels, or dark-lit bars and clubs. The chip promises clear pictures with light as bright as the lighting from a candle 1 meter away in a dark room and is said to be 2,000 times more light sensitive than other sensor types. The will initially be used for camera phones, CCTV cameras and vehicle rear-view cameras.

Institute officials stated that state-run Korea Electronics Technology Institute has developed the single carrier modulation photo detector (SMPD) chip using nanotechnology.

The institute already spent roughly 11 billion won ($10.5 million USD) on the development of the SMPD chip over the past four years. The expected earnings from the chip exportation is about 2 trillion won ($2.2 billion USD) annually

No news has been released yet about the production details of the chip, nor has there been any pricing estimates on the chip.

Source : DailyTECH

Passing Mile Markers, Snapping Pictures

Second Street, Ashland, Wisconsin, July 9, 1973 © Stephen Shore
Courtesy Aperture Foundation

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN @ New York Times

In 1973 Stephen Shore set out from New York to photograph the United States for what became a book called “Uncommon Places.” He shot his motel room in Idaho Falls. He shot a pancake breakfast at the Trail’s End Restaurant in Kanab, Utah. He shot a rainbow arching over a rain-soaked parking lot in Lovell, Wyo.

And, out of his rearview mirror, while driving along U.S. 97 in Oregon, south of Klamath Falls, he spotted, against a magnificently clouded sky, a billboard with a painting of a snow-peaked mountain. So he stopped to photograph that too.

He was in his mid-20s and already a star. A dozen years earlier, at 14, he had sold some of his photographs to the Museum of Modern Art. Then he started hanging out in Andy Warhol’s Factory, where he lighted shows for the Velvet Underground and absorbed Warhol’s general deadpan aesthetic, with its embrace of serialism and its fixation on banal, everyday things.

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ICP Slideshow

A Splash of Photo History Comes to Light

This century-old Edward Steichen autochrome, probably of Charlotte Spaulding, has been discovered after decades in storage.

By RANDY KENNEDY @ New York Times

At first glance the two pictures seem to be gorgeous anachronisms, full-color blasts from the black-and-white world of 1908, the year Ford introduced the Model T and Theodore Roosevelt was nearing the end of his second term.

But they are genuine products of their time, rare ones, among the few surviving masterpieces from the earliest days of color photography, made using a process developed by the Lumière brothers in France and imported to the United States by the photographer Edward Steichen a century ago this year. They were taken by Steichen, probably in Buffalo, and are thought to be portraits of Charlotte Spaulding, a friend and student who became his luminous subject for the portraits, which resemble pointillist miniatures on glass.

Almost as intriguing as the pictures themselves, however, is the story of how they recently made their way from a house in Buffalo, where they apparently sat unseen for decades, to the collection of the George Eastman House in Rochester, one of the world’s leading photography museums, where they will be exhibited for the first time this fall.

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ARTISTS AT WORK: LYNNE COHEN

Military Installation, 2000, courtesy of In Situ-Fabienne Leclerc, Paris.
Interview by Mona Hakim @ After All Journal

MH: All of your photographic work, dating from the 1970s to today, concentrates on semi-public interior spaces. You began with domestic interiors but since the 1980s the primary subject matter has been observational or institutional rooms. These are strange, disturbing places, sometimes even menacing. Where does your interest in such places come from?1

LC: It's difficult to say, except that I seem drawn to interiors that are strange as well as familiar. I sometimes think they find me rather than the other way around. But what you say is true. Pretty much everything I've photographed has an air of strangeness. This is curious, because the subject matter is quite banal – a living room, a classroom, a spa… The strangeness is partly due to the fact that the ordinary is often more menacing than the blatantly bizarre, which can be easily dismissed as impossible. Perhaps it is also because the places are so familiar that they are a bit too close for comfort. In a 1992 exhibition catalogue essay 'The Scene of the Crime'2, Jean-Pierre Criqui links Freud's notion of the uncanny with my work. The idea is that the familiar, far from being benign, has the potential to be far more unsettling than the unusual. In the same essay, Criqui points to a similar phenomenon in a Kafka story where an inanimate object takes on human qualities in the way that furniture and paraphernalia in the rooms I photograph assume human characteristics.


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A Cindy Sherman sells for $2.1 million

Cindy Sherman, Untitled No. 92 , 1981
$2,112,000 @ Christie’s New York
May 16, 2007
CHRISTIE’S $384.6 MILLION CONTEMPORARY SALE
The evening sale of post-war and contemporary art at Christie’s New York on May 16, 2007, was certainly dramatic, if higher and higher bids coming one after the other almost without end is your idea of drama. The sale totaled $384,654,400, a new record for a contemporary auction, with 74 of the 78 lots finding buyers, or 95 percent. Gee, looks like the bulls still rule the art market.

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FOTO : Modernity in Central Europe

Karel Kašpařík
Why?, before 1935
gelatin silver print, 38.5 x 28.9 cm (15 3/16 x 11 3/8)
Moravská galerie, Brno

"This groundbreaking exhibition of some 150 photographs, artists' books, and illustrated magazines examines how photography developed into an immense phenomenon in central Europe during the 1920s and 1930s. It is the first exhibition to pair recognized masters like László Moholy-Nagy or Hannah Höch (active in Germany) with their immediate contemporaries, such as Karel Teige and Jaromír Funke (Czechoslovakia), Kazimierz Podsadecki (Poland), Károly Escher (Hungary), and Trude Fleischmann (Austria), who are less well known today. Organized thematically, the exhibition explores such topics as photomontage and war, gender identity, modern living, and the spread of surrealism. This major loan exhibition, which draws on several dozen American and international collections, is unprecedented in its focus and scope. A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition." - National Gallery of Art

National Gallery of Art

It’s Boring at the Top

Is Andreas Gursky—the highest-priced photographer alive—running out of ideas?

By Jerry Saltz @ New York Magazine

The German über-photographer Andreas Gursky was the perfect pre-9/11 artist. He excelled at portraying the border-to-border, edgeless hum and busy obliviousness of modern life, what Francis Fukuyama ridiculously declared “the end of history,” George W.S. Trow called “The Context of No Context,” and Rem Koolhaas dubbed “Junkspace.” Not only did Gursky seem to be critical of all this, but his handsome images of trading floors, hotel lobbies, raves, and landscapes were charged with a visual force and intellectual rigor that let you imagine that you were gleaning the grand schemes and invisible rhythms of commerce and consumption. His amazing picture of a convenience store brimming with goods, 99 Cent II, Diptych (2001), which recently became the most expensive photo in history when it was auctioned for over $3.3 million, fizzed like cherry cola but packed the formal power of a Monet.

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Images @ Matthew Marks Gallery

Amazon.com acquires dpreview.com

From BusinessWire "Leading online retailer Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced it has acquired www.dpreview.com, the web’s most comprehensive site for digital camera information and reviews. Founded in 1998 by Phil Askey, dpreview.com provides unbiased reviews and original content regarding the latest in digital cameras, and offers a host of features and forums designed to make it easy for consumers to find the camera that’s right for them. With its unique voice and in-depth technical reviews, dpreview.com draws millions of unique visitors each month."

Let's hope dpreview will remain unbiased and comprehensive!

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We Are Here

Viktor Kolár Palace Bonaventure at 5pm, Montreal, Canada 1972

@ TATE, ETC.

Since Joseph Nicéphore Niépce made the first photograph of his neighbour's building in 1826, this mechanical art has transformed the way we look at the world. To coincide with Tate Britain's first ever photographic survey of the nation's social history, Tate Etc.asked a selection of writers, curators and photographers to reflect on some memorable images

David Campany
Nigel Shafran
Homer Sykes
Martin Parr
Anna Pavord
Viktor Kolár
Kathryn Hughes
Brett Rogers
Tessa Codrington
Jesse Landberg

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Stranger a Day

"Stranger a Day" is back after a two year hiatus.

Essentially Roark Johnson photographs a stranger everyday for a year. He started this project in 2004 for a year and you can also see those images at the blog.

Stranger a Day

Photoshop Re-Creates Aging Impressionists' Eye on the World

by Randy Dotinga @ WIRED

For decades, art historians have wondered what made Claude Monet and Edgar Degas evolve from landmark impressionist painters to what some consider to be shadows of their former selves. Now, a Stanford University ophthalmologist has used the Gaussian filter and other Photoshop wonders to replicate how the artists saw the world later in life.
The verdict: The painters couldn't paint the same way anymore because they couldn't see the same way.
"It's no secret that both Degas and Monet had failing vision. What's never been clear is what did that mean for them," said Dr. Michael Marmor, who studies how the brain processes sight. With the help of Photoshop, "we realize how this limitation may have influenced their style."

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We all helped to speed the demise of professional photographers

by Andrew Brown @ The Guardian

Half a dozen lurid and splodgy pictures in the local paper brought home to me the death of an honourable profession this week. I took them. I am in my small way responsible for impoverishing an old friend, because he, not me, is a professional photographer, and his living has been more or less abolished by the changing world. Just as film has been replaced by digital, professionals are being replaced by amateurs. The changes are partly technological and partly economic, but the final blow to his profession has come from Flickr and similar Web 2.0 sites.

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What to do with Invidious Distinctions?

Sebastião Salgado, “Meeting for the Land’s Occupation”, 1996
Courtesy of Sebastião Salgado/Amazonas images

By Jim Johnson @ Art Signal

Critical discussion of contemporary photography is shaped by a largely unchallenged distinction between “documentary” and “art”. We expect photographers practicing the former to concentrate on the realism, veracity, and accuracy of the images they produce, while those engaged in the latter are freed from such preoccupations, and so given license to experiment stylistically and substantively. We define the poles of this distinction relative to one another. Thus, while introducing a recent issue of PRIVATE (No. 33. Summer 06), critic and curator Roberta Valtorta announces that “the strongest and truest photojournalism today is that which outlives itself without straining to be ‘beautiful’. It stays truthful to its ‘primitiveness,’ its leanness, and far from aesthetics.” Her comment perversely echos photographer Luc Delahaye who, having spent considerable energy over the course of several years justifying his distinctly not ‘primitive’ or ‘lean’ depictions of war-torn Afghanistan, felt compelled to “officially” declare himself an artist.

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Edward Quinn - A Day's Work

Rita Hayworth driving with her daughters, 1951
© Edward Quinn
Vintage silver gelatin print

@ Michael Hoppen Gallery

"We are delighted to announce the first UK exhibition of vintage prints by Edward Quinn. Best known for his photographs of celebrities on the French Riviera in the 1950s, to label Quinn a celebrity photographer would be to reduce both him and his work. The exhibition will also include his later portraits of artists, writers and politicians along with documentary work on the gypsies in the Camargue and evocative portraits of his native Dublin. The similarity between all of Quinn’s work is that his subjects were never consciously posing –these are all true, unguarded portraits."

Michael Hoppen Gallery

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