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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