Lumix TS1

By matt buchanan @ gizmodo

This is what I picture when I think of a camera that doesn't take any shit, like a Marine. (There's an army green and charcoal, not just orange, speaking of.) It's a no BS block of brushed metal that's slim enough to actually slide into your pocket.

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One tough camera!

Helen Levitt, Who Froze New York Street Life on Film, Is Dead at 95

By MARGARETT LOKE @ New York Times

Helen Levitt, a major photographer of the 20th century who caught fleeting moments of surpassing lyricism, mystery and quiet drama on the streets of her native New York, died in her sleep at her home in Manhattan on Sunday. She was 95.

Her death was confirmed by her brother, Bill Levitt, of Alta, Utah.

Ms. Levitt captured instances of a cinematic and delightfully guileless form of street choreography that held at its heart, as William Butler Yeats put it, “the ceremony of innocence.” A man handles garbage-can lids like an exuberant child imitating a master juggler. Even an inanimate object — a broken record — appears to skip and dance on an empty street as a child might, observed by a group of women’s dresses in a shop window.


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14 Rare Color Photos From the FSA

@Photo District News

"Even today, many documentary photographers will tell you they are influenced by the works of the Farm Security Administration in the 1930s and 40s. Under the direction of Roy Emerson Stryker, the FSA sent photographers to document the plight of the rural farmer during the Great Depression and the progress of New Deal programs. When the U.S. entered World War II, the photography program continued under the Office of War Information (OWI)."

PDN

Art of the iPhone impressionist

by Jonathan Jones @ The Guardian

In the early 20th century, the photograph still seemed new. The German intellectual Walter Benjamin tried to understand how photography changed art: it replaced the "aura" of the masterpiece with a new, democratic way of making pictures. Going on for a century later, we're living in the midst of a technological revolution that has left photography itself behind. Here's the latest: artist Jorge Colombo makes pictures of New York street life using the Brushes application (bought for $4.99 - "a great leveller") on his iPhone. The results are impressively delicate and lively.

Lots of people take photos on a phone - the casual record of what you see is fun to share. Colombo's pictures are a creative extension of that: he sketches what he sees in New York, and these fast, fragmentary glimpses of a car park entrance, a pizza joint, a view between buildings have an impressionistic immediacy. He can "draw in the dark", working on the illuminated screen to depict the city by night. They are not pretentious, they do not claim to be more than a sort of visual diary. But they show that a sensitive eye can use any medium to respond to the beauty of the world - whether it's a brush or Brushes.

View Images

Happy Birthday WWW

On March 13th 2009 the web became twenty years old.

How to read a photograph

Photographs can create illusions, communicate arguments or document a changing world. Learn how to look at them here

by Ian Jeffrey @ The Guardian

Understanding photographs has never been straightforward. Not all photographs – including some of the best known – were taken with a clear idea in mind. Even if they were, the idea was soon overlooked or forgotten. An outline history of photography would be easy enough to write, taking into account a symbolist phrase around 1900, followed by abstract "graphic" photography in the 1920s, replaced in its turn by humanist documentary in the 1930s. The would-be historian, however, would soon be puzzled by anomalies: false starts, anachronisms and examples of uneven development. It is almost as if photography took place in a perpetual present in which, for instance, William Fox Talbot (the inventor of the negative-positive process in the 1840s) remains an interesting contemporary. Under these terms of reference it is probably best to look at photographs one at a time, which is what I concentrate on in How to Read a Photograph.

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Visions and Images

Frederick Sommer

Visions and Images was part of a series on the arts done in the late 1970's and 80's. Interviewies include: Garry Winogrand, Elliot Erwitt, Frederick Sommer, Harry Callahan, Joel Meyerowitz, Arnold Newman, Duane Michals, and Cornell Capa + Burk Uzzle.

"The Diamonstein-Spielvogel Video Archive features interviews Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel conducted with prominent artists, musicians, architects, designers, photographers, directors, actors, writers, and art collectors, documenting the arts world during the nineteen seventies and the nineteen eighties. This collection includes interviews from several programs: American Architecture Now, About the Arts, Barbaralee Diamonstein and, Handmade in America, Inside Fashion, Inside New York's Art World, Interior Design: The New Freedom, and Visions and Images."

Duke University Digital Archives

Visions and Images on YouTube

Rodchenko & Popova: Defining Constructivism

by Rachel Campbell-Johnston @ The Times Online

It's a good thing that that wobbly bridge got fixed because you can almost feel the stamp of the military boots as Rodchenko and Popova march into Tate Modern. Here is the art of the Russian Revolution: clear, strong, insistent and iconoclastic. As you walk through this show, it takes over your imagination - a bit like Bolshevik troops once took over Red Square.

Are you going to fall into rank? At first it feels pretty hard not to. Rodchenko & Popova: Defining Constructivism is a big, powerful exhibition with the pull of an unstoppable force. Although prevailingly intellectual, it has a hard, bold, determined aesthetic that works a bit like a blow from a rifle butt. It smacks itself down direct on the retina.

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Suzanne Mooney

On another note there was an interesting little blurb about Suzanne Mooney's new work at SEESAW Magazine. "I photograph the diagram itself. The work denies the erotic charge that the photographic images may have, and becomes a humorous but disturbing comment on glamour photography."


Interesting work.
"The camera simultaneously offers us access to the view whilst denying us the full appreciation of the scenery."

I like the way she thinks....

Suzanne's website

"Park Life" - An Interview with Tod Papageorge

by Aaron Schuman @ SEESAW Magazine

AS: Aaron Schuman
TP: Tod Papageorge

AS: You’ve often said that you were originally inspired to pursue photography because of Henri Cartier-Bresson. Where did you find his work in the first place?

TP: It was totally by accident. I was taking an introductory photography class at university, and I guess I was curious enough to go to the library and look at some bound periodicals. And there was this photograph by this man I’d never heard of; it was totally shocking to me. It provoked me to literally do everything I could in that library to find any other pictures by him. I think I found one more. But those two pictures inspired me to become a photographer.

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Photography and the eyes of the beholder

by Liz Jobey @ The Guardian

For anybody interested in the changing nature of photography over the last 30 years, Michael Fried's Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before is an important book. The reputation of its author – one of the leading art historians and critics of the past half-century – is guaranteed to capture the attention of photographers and artists alike. Its size and thoroughness, over 400 well-illustrated pages in a large art-book format, distinguish it from the many volumes of critical theory that contemporary photography has spawned in recent years. And the title unambiguously states that photography matters as art, which settles one long-debated question at a stroke.

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Twilight of the color photo

As printed snapshots vanish, we're losing more than shoe boxes full of mementos

By Dushko Petrovich @ Boston Globe

ONE HUNDRED YEARS ago, one of Paris's richest men had a quixotic dream. Returning from a personal trip to China and Japan, the banker Albert Kahn decided to build a huge visual archive of the planet. Kahn believed that mutual misunderstanding was the source of world conflict, so in 1909, he began funding scores of photographers as they set out across five continents. By the time the Great Depression finally bankrupted him 22 years later, Kahn's intrepid op??rateurs had managed to document almost 50 countries, returning to France with 120 hours of film footage and 4,000 black-and-white pictures. This alone would have been a remarkable legacy, but the real jewels of the collection were printed on glass, in a full spectrum the world had never seen. The recently invented technique of the autochrome - which made portable color photography possible - meant that Kahn's emissaries could also amass a staggering total of 72,000 color plates.

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A haunting memorial in 'Library of Dust'

Photographer David Maisel became fascinated by canisters of cremated remains at the Oregon State Hospital. They spoke to him of secrets, transformation and loss.

By Leah Ollman @ LA Times

The first photograph in David Maisel's new book presents a view into a storeroom that clearly doesn't get a lot of foot traffic. An old wooden desk with no chair is parked in the corner. Bits of debris have gathered on the stained linoleum floor. The walls are what give this room, and Maisel's book, its name: "Library of Dust."

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In Photography, What Puzzles the Eye May Please the Mind

By KEN JOHNSON @ New York Times

NEW HAVEN — Photographs are shameless. They’ll do anything to get your attention. They’ll show you celebrities in and out of their clothes, exotic creatures and objects, places and events that you would never otherwise see.

Another, paradoxical strategy for captivating viewers is to show them something they can’t immediately understand. Whether because of its visual complexity, its oblique perspective, its lighting, its degree of abstraction or the unfamiliarity of its subject, it’s the kind of photograph that makes you stop and think, “What the heck is that?” And it keeps you looking until you’ve figured out what it is you’re looking at.

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'Why am I making this picture?'

by Liz Jobey @ The Guardian UK

Ever since 1971, when she was a student at Harvard and decided to take portraits of the people who shared her boarding house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the American photographer Susan Meiselas has questioned the motivation behind her pictures and their relevance to the wider world. She has been a member of the international co-operative Magnum Photos since 1976, but her work has developed far beyond the role of a photojournalist. She spent the end of the 1970s and most of the 1980s in Central and South America on the front line of the people's revolution in Nicaragua and the civil war in El Salvador, documenting the "dirty war" in Argentina, human rights abuses in Columbia and the end of the Pinochet regime in Chile. During that time, and since, working with her own photographs and with other people's, she has expanded her role to that of curator, film-maker, teacher, historian and archivist.

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Double Exposure: William Eggleston and Enrique Metinides

Buckle up for some curious photo road trips

By Leslie Camhi @ The Village Voice

'Life is in color, but black-and-white is more realistic," director Samuel Fuller once said. Two exhibitions—a retrospective devoted to the sumptuously hued visions of a decadent Southern gentleman, and a show of vintage black-and-white prints, south-of-the border tabloid fodder by a man of the people—suggest he was only partially right.

Both artists were given Brownie cameras as 10-year-old boys. But William Eggleston deferred picture-taking until after he'd left the family plantation, when in college and later, as a restless young man-about-Memphis in the 1960s, he began honing a color aesthetic that was part Cartier-Bresson, part visitor from another planet.

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Photograph of Jesus

301 Inkjet tips wins award

As a contributor I am happy to announce that 301 Inkjet Tips and Techniques: An Essential Printing Resource for Photographers by Andrew Darlow was chosen as the winner in the "Photography: Instructional/How-To" category of The National Best Books 2008 Awards, sponsored by USA Book News.

Press Release

Photo Ops: Josef Koudelka Revisits Prague 1968

By Megan Buskey @ The Nation

One afternoon in early September, the Czech photographer Josef Koudelka was administering a bottle of cognac to a group of well-wishers at the Pace/MacGill Gallery, two placid, spacious rooms on the ninth floor of an office building on Fifty-seventh Street in Manhattan. The occasion was the opening of an anniversary exhibition of photographs Koudelka had taken forty years earlier, during the invasion of Prague by Warsaw Pact forces tasked with extinguishing the Czech spirit of political reform. At the time, Koudelka was 30 and a relative newcomer to his art. He had never taken photographs for the purpose of reportage (his portfolio at the time mostly featured pictures of Gypsies and the theater), but he turned out to have a natural gift for documentary photography.

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Interview with Henry Wilhelm

Michael Reichmann interviewed Henry a month or so ago and has put the interview up on the Luminous Landscape site.

Click here to view

Random Image

Aardenburg Imaging & Archives

I must applaud Mark on the development of his site! It has come a long way and continues to develop nicely. There is a load of information on the permmenance of digital printing.

"Aardenburg Imaging & Archives was founded in 2007 by Mark McCormick-Goodhart. It is located in the historic Hyde House in Lee, Massachusetts. AaI&A collaborates with serious amateur and professional print makers, photographers, and artists who work with digital printing processes. We are carefully building an archive of digitally mastered photographs and fine art prints. Our goal is rigorously to document the late 20th and early 21st Century digital printing technologies used to make photographs and fine art prints. Aardenburg's collecting policy emphasizes the materials and processes rather than any specific genre of artists or subject matter. "

Aardenburg Imaging & Archives

The Expansive Lens

Peter Campus, Douglas Gordon and David A Ross in conversation @ TATE Etc.

Peter Campus was one of the first artists to explore the formal possibilities of film and video technology. Douglas Gordon, who admires Campus's work, is best known for his iconic video installation 24 Hour Psycho. The two artists talk to curator David A Ross.

DAVID A ROSS : Both of you have worked in the medium of video, but starting in different decades and different cultural environments. For example, Peter, when you showed your video installations at the Bykert Gallery in 1975 there wasn’t much cable television. However, what you have in common is a deep and serious engagement with cinema. I know you are both fans of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, a film that underscores the idea of looking, the psychological complexity of being looked at, the gaze of the camera, but also the obsession of recording and filming – all aspects that relate to both your bodies of work.

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Adobe CS4

Adobe's SVP of the Creative Business Unit - Johnny L and Photoshop Product Manager John Nack show off some upcoming CS4 technologies as well as technology Adobe is working on beyond CS4.

Podcast

Indecisive moments

Australian and Japanese artists explore the ambiguity of time, memory and reality

By ASHLEY RAWLINGS
Special to The Japan Times

Henri Cartier-Bresson's legacy of the "decisive moment" had a profound impact on photography. As a cofounder of the photographic cooperative Magnum Photos in 1947, his philosophy influenced a whole generation of photojournalists, and, for decades, Magnum photographers were instrumental in constructing the popular impression of reality. They crafted a collective memory of history as a set of succinct narratives told through images captured in the briefest of instants.

echnology and developments in "photomedia" since the '80s, contemporary artists have rethought the role of time in photography. With this in mind, the curators of "Trace Elements: Spirit and Memory in Japanese and Australian Photomedia" have brought together 10 artists from Australia and Japan for a heady exhibition that is meant to address the notion of photomedia as a "memory- creation device."

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Layers to Comment on Layers of Imagery

By KAREN ROSENBERG @ New York Times

As it sifts through the riches of the extraordinary Gilman Collection of photographs, acquired three years ago, the Met is slowly bringing its holdings of contemporary photography up to speed. In the fall the museum dedicated a new gallery, the Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall, to the exhibition of post-1960 photography.

“Photography on Photography: Reflections on the Medium Since 1960” is the second installation in this space. It is better than the first, largely because of its variety of works (by artists male and female, young and old, American and European, famous and fledgling). Thomas Ruff and Hiroshi Sugimoto are here, but so are Janice Guy, an artist turned dealer who is benefiting from a sudden interest in her early self-portraits, and Mark Wyse, a young photographer who is also active as a curator. The 21-artist mix isn’t perfect, but the curator, Doug Eklund, deserves credit for taking a few risks.

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Photographer Sam Abell talks about Richard Prince

A MONTH!

Wow. Things have been very hectic this Summer and it has been a month since my last post. I have assumed new responsibilities at the school here and have been on the run.


I did however escape for 10 days to do a little unwinding. I packed up the mountain bike and drove to the mountains of Pennsylvania east of Scranton to visit a long time friend, Brian, on his farm. Excellent riding and fishing at his family cabin.


Then on to the Finger Lakes of New York and my family's cottage on Cayuga Lake. The fresh air and fresh water was just what I needed!

Then there is the wine trail. It has been a while since I made the rounds by bike and I had forgotten how fun it can be.



Tiffany's friend Rob decided to do some spearfishing and viola he landed a nice carp (if you like carp!)

Aristocracy of Talent for an Egalitarian Art

By Roberta Smith @ NY Times

From the daguerreotype to the cellphone snapshot, the history of photography has unfolded as a series of miracles, each of which has profoundly altered our understanding of the time-space continuum. As the innovations become familiar, the photographs become miracles in another way, as connections to a past we’ve never seen.

“Framing a Century: Master Photographers, 1840-1940,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, manages to operate in the gap between both kinds of miracles, innovative and talismanic. It presents the history of a medium as well as history itself.

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Access All Areas

By Christy Lange @ FRIEZE

Taryn Simon’s photographs of restricted locations reveal an unsettling side to the American Dream

‘It’s 3am and something is happening in the world […] There’s a phone in the White House, and it’s ringing.’ So began the narration of a recent television advertisement for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, unleashing a flurry of discussion about the White House telephone and the candidate best suited to answer it in case of a global emergency. The folklore of the White House ‘red phone’ was, in fact, first exploited during the 1984 presidential campaign, when it represented the tenuous hotline between Washington and Moscow. It’s telling that the Clinton campaign was so eager to revive this anachronistic symbol: though Barack Obama accused Clinton of exploiting ‘the politics of fear’, Clinton had in fact tapped into a deep-seated American fantasy about the backstage operations of the United States government and its national security apparatus, at a time when that backstage is probably more expansive and dimly lit than ever. Americans, apparently, are still intrigued by the ‘red phone’ as a potent symbol of national secrets and the intricate bureaucracy hidden behind them. The country operates not only on freedom and transparency, but also on things that are unseen and unknown to most of us. Perhaps that’s what makes Taryn Simon’s 2007 publication of her photographic series ‘An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar’ so timely and appealing.

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"For want of a new territory..."

Philip-Lorca diCorcia "Head #06 2001"

Max Kozloff on Street & Studio: An Urban History of Photography @ TATE Etc.

The camera has always been a socialised instrument, well equipped to describe shifting behaviour, environments and manners. Of course we rely on it to give a specifically factual account of them. Inevitably, situations change, but this testimonial function of photography remains constant. Before the advent of Photoshop, whatever the circumstance or event, be it impromptu or staged, there could be little doubt that the camera recorded it through an act of witness. Its observational power would appear to have served as a fixed, credible reference to realities that fluctuate indefinitely. Over the past few decades, however, we’ve come to understand that a scene may be filtered through photographic motives other than, or at odds with, the purpose apparently intended. The facts are delivered, but their content has to be reckoned with freshly, and on uncertain terms.

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Cornell Capa 1918-2008

"...as the founder of the International Fund for Concerned Photography, and the founder of ICP in 1974, Cornell was a singular force in the world of photography, opening our eyes to the power of the photographic image as an agent of change."

May he rest in peace.

ICP tribute

DIY film

Pretty ingenious!

FLICKR page

Billion-pixel panoramas — from your own camera

by Jonathan Richards @ TimesOnline

A device that lets a camera take pictures with 100 times the resolution of the most advanced models on the market is poised to revolutionise amateur photography.

The Gigapan allows people to take pictures which are more than a gigapixel - or 1,000 megapixels - in size, effectively turning a single photograph into a panoramic experience, around which the viewer can navigate on a computer.

Yet the actual camera used is no more specialised than a regular digital model.

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Gigapan website

Robert Rauschenberg

A touchstone for all of us... Rest in Peace..

New York Times article

Robert Frank: melancholy and menace

@ The Telegraph

Catching his subjects off-guard with a camera peeking from his jacket, the photographer Robert Frank 'captured a sad poem right out of America on to film', as his friend Jack Kerouac put it. As Frank's masterpiece, The Americans, is reissued after almost 50 years, Michael Shelden looks at his work

On patrol near the Mississippi river one afternoon in November 1955, Lt RE Brown of the Arkansas State Police spotted a suspicious, 'foreign-looking' man driving down the highway in a battered old Ford and pulled him over.

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Life Before Death noch mal leben: portraits of the dying

by Beate Lakotta @ Lens Culture

Few experiences are likely to affect us as profoundly as an encounter with death. Yet most deaths occur almost covertly, at one remove from our everyday lives.

Death and dying are arguably our last taboos – the topics our society finds most difficult. We certainly fear them more than our ancestors did. Opportunities to learn more about them are rare indeed.

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Starn Twins @ 20x200

20×200 has been getting all sorts of press lately (NY Times, Houston Chronicle, WIred Magazine just to name a few), and they’ve featured some well known artists. They now have added to their accomplishments an edition by two people in the highest level of art stardom, Mike and Doug Starn. Unfortunately the work went almost immediately.

20x200

Conservators face issues in preserving video

By Hugh Hart, Special to The Times

"Video is a fugitive medium," said Getty Research Institute's Glenn R. Phillips, and he should know. As curator for "California Video," running at the Getty through June 8, he enjoyed the luxury of a massive archive produced during the '60s, '70s and '80s. The challenge: Most of the tapes, recorded in obsolete formats, were crusted with oxidized crud that made the work unwatchable and threatened to ruin any playback deck hardy enough to play them.

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

@ Eric Etheridge

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

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An Image Is a Mystery for Photo Detectives

By RANDY KENNEDY @ NY Times

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

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

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

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Keeping His Eye on the Horizon (Line)

By PHILIP GEFTER @ New York Times

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

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

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2000 frames per second

LightZone Promo -Today only!

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

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

LightZone website

MacUpdate Promo

Run, Don't Walk!

Apple Releases Aperture 2.1

@ APPLE

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

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

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Robert Frank’s Unsentimental Journey

by CHARLIE LeDUFF @ Vanity Fair

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

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

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

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Sony DSLR

WARS

Once again Magnum in Motion has created a powerful piece.

Magnum in Motion

Coin. Smile. Click!

By JOHN STRAUSBAUGH @ New York Times

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

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

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The Indecisive Image

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

by Eric Bryant @ ArtNews

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

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Take Your Pic

by R.C. Baker @ Village Voice

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

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

Classic Polaroid

Recovering the Complex Legacy of the Photographer Jacob Riis

by VERLYN KLINKENBORG @ The New York Times

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

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

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