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Contemporary Art Photographers Mess With the Medium

By Martha Schwendener @ The Village Voice

The question of why certain practices thrive at particular moments feels like the art world equivalent of asking why honeybee populations have collapsed in the last decades or mussels have started growing in the Hudson. Why, for instance, are contemporary photographers—or, if you like, artists working with photography—obsessed with abstraction, materiality, and process?

First, the evidence. A good place to start is "Processed: Considering Recent Photographic Practices" at Hunter College (East 68th Street and Lexington, through December 12). The show includes artists like Marco Breuer, whose spectral abstractions, made by scratching and scuffing chromogenic paper, are hung across from Josh Brand's photograms that look like muted Josef Albers paintings.

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The Restless Medium

By Jed Perl @ The New Republic

Michael Fried,who shot to intellectual stardom in 1967 with an essay in Artforum called "Art and Objecthood," is an intimidating writer. He looks very closely. He has passionate feelings about what he sees. And he shapes his impressions into a theory that fits snugly with all the other theories he has ever had. Whatever his chosen subject--Diderot, Courbet, Manet, Kenneth Noland--he comes up with an interpretation that is as smoothly and tightly constructed as a stainless-steel box. His writing amounts to a set of matching stainless-steel boxes. He puts potential critics on notice that the best they can hope to do is leave a few fingerprints or scratches on these perfectly polished surfaces. And so many people back away. Fried wants us to feel that we could as easily demolish the Great Pyramid of Giza with a pick-axe as successfully question his interpretations of his chosen themes--which now include the art of the camera, in his new book, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before.

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Roy DeCarava, Pioneering Photographer, Dies at 89

By Randy Kennedy @ NYTimes

Roy DeCarava, the child of a single mother in Harlem who turned that neighborhood into his canvas and became one of the most important photographers of his generation by chronicling its people and its jazz giants, has died. He was 89.

His death was announced by Sherry Turner DeCarava, his wife and an art historian who wrote frequently about his work.

Mr. DeCarava trained to be a painter, but while using a camera to gather images for his printmaking work, he began to gravitate toward photography, in part because of its immediacy but also because of the limitations he saw all around him for a black artist in a segregated nation. “A black painter, to be an artist,” he once said, “had to join the white world or not function — had to accept the values of white culture.”

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Atlanta 9/09

Lumière Brothers - The Serpentine Dance (c.1899)

America, Captured in a Flash

By HOLLAND COTTER @ NY Times

Like probably a zillion other school kids, “My country tears of thee” was the way I understood the first line of “America.” Maybe that’s the way the Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank heard it too when he came to the United States from Europe in 1947, at 22, with English his second, third or fourth language.

Sadness seems to trickle through the 83 photographs in his classic 1959 book, “The Americans,” his disturbed and mournful song-of-the-road portrait of a new homeland and the subject of a 50th-anniversary exhibition now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.


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DCC Digital Classic Camera 5.0

The Minox re-invented!

"The new digital Classic Camera from MINOX comes in a really stylish format! On the outside it features a miniaturized shell, designed in great detail, and inside it is packed with innovative technology in the form of a powerful digital camera. A unique harmony of classic design and state-of-the-art features. This new edition of the wee camera is a logical and up to date further development of the previous DCC model, and features a color monitor and a memory card slot, making the miniature camera geared to continue a success story."


Minox

The Digital Print

"This invaluable resource demystifies the complex, rapidly changing, and sometimes confusing world of digital print technologies. It describes the major digital printing processes used by photographers and artists over the past forty years, explaining and illustrating materials and their deterioration, methods of identification, and options for acquiring and preserving digital prints. A removable poster provides a ready reference for identifying specific processes and materials."

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Bass String dance

stunning bass-string shot from urbanscreen on Vimeo.

André Kertész: On Reading, at The Photographers' Gallery

By Alastair Smart @ Telegraph UK

An urchin on the streets of Manila; a demoiselle in a Parisian café, even a Trappist priest in his study – all were caught in the act by André Kertész. Caught in the act of reading, that is. A pioneer of snapshot photography, Kertész always saw pictorial potential in folk absorbed by a good book, newspaper or letter.

Thriving on the paradox that even in the most crowded, public space one can enjoy such a solitary, private activity, he snapped some 200 readers over his career. Forty of these photos feature in On Reading, a new Kertész exhibition at the Photographers' Gallery.

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Wrong place, wrong man? Fresh doubts on Capa's famed war photo

By Giles Tremlett @ The Guardian

New evidence has emerged that one of the most famous war photographs, shot during the Spanish civil war by Robert Capa, was taken well away from the battlefield, reopening the debate as to whether it is a fake.

Capa's dramatic "The Falling Soldier", the photograph of a Spanish militiaman being killed by a bullet as he charges down a slope, was taken miles away from where the civil war was being fought at the time, according to a university lecturer, José Manuel Susperregui.

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Jan Saudek animated

Jan Saudek. Animated Photographs. from Tadas Svilainis on Vimeo.

Kodak to retire Kodachrome film

@ Electronista

Kodak this morning said it would soon phase out its longstanding Kodachrome film, putting an end to a significant era of film photography. The company says it plans to end the 74-year production as sales of the classic film now make up less than one percent of its film camera business, which itself is in the minority at Kodak. About 70 percent of the company's income is from digital photography.

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A Photographer Who Refused to Think Like a Photographer

By KAREN ROSENBERG @ New York Times

If you were a serious photographer in the 1960s, you traveled the country documenting social change (Garry Winogrand, Robert Frank) or pursued technical perfection in the studio (Richard Avedon, Irving Penn). Photography had to be pure, true to itself and its subjects.

This was unfair, because other artists were allowed to incorporate bits of photographs into their paintings, drawings and prints, or work from photographic sources. Yet any attempt by a photographer to dabble in older art forms was suspect. It smacked of deference or, worse, manipulation.


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The History of Now

by Kurt W Forster @ TATE Etc.

Armin Linke has a studio in a humdrum part of Milan, but if one wishes to do more than catch a glimpse of this peripatetic photographer, one needs to travel with him. He packs his bags whenever something grabs his attention. At first this has nothing to do with the camera, but everything to do with his eye and a disarming intelligence. Linke quietly scrutinises his chosen location, selecting a view that is of a scope and depth to warrant taking a picture. One day in Iraq, before the last war, he did just that, some distance from one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces on a slope of asphalt and sand. While he set up his camera, a group of men uniformly dressed in black walked into his view. They were leaving the palace after bearing birthday wishes for the president. The resulting photograph is really composed of two images: one is premeditated, taking in the sweep of a symbolic site (with few or no symbols, apart from the tall lamp posts, as if it were an airport); the other is created by coincidence. It is precisely the accidental that endows the picture with an uncanny meaning: men are leaving the site of power, as if the place were to fall vacant at their departure. By dint of its dual nature, the image enfolds a brief moment within a static frame. Linke caught an instant (gone the moment he snapped the picture) whose symbolic time had not yet come, but whose enduring backdrop ceased to hold any significance. Instead of fading into obsolete reportage as the years go by, the picture continues to acquire incalculable references.

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The red, yellow and blue planet

by Benjamin Secher @ The Telegraph

The year was 1903 and, less than a decade after they'd invented cinema, Auguste and Louis Lumière were once again down at the Paris patent office claiming a breakthrough in photography; this time, a practical system for recording the world in glorious true colour.

They named their radical technique the autochrome, identified its innovative component as potato starch - millions of granules of the stuff, dyed red, yellow and blue, and pressed between two plates of glass - then, with their typical sense of drama, retired to the laboratory for four years to perfect their invention.

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Phase One Launches P 40+ with Sensor+

@ dpreview

Phase One has announced the P40+ medium format digital back. The new system incorporates the company's Sensor+ technology that offers both a full 40MP resolution capture mode and a second 10MP 'Sensor+' mode for faster image capture. The Sensor+ mode also increases maximum sensitivity from ISO 800 (in full resolution mode) to ISO 3200. The camera has started shipping at approximately €14,990 for the digital back and €16,990 for the camera system.

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New Works by Photography’s Old Masters

By RANDY KENNEDY @ NY Times

When the three weathered cardboard boxes — known collectively, and cinematically, as the Mexican suitcase — arrived at the International Center of Photography more than a year ago, one of the first things a conservator did was bend down and sniff the film coiled inside, fearful of a telltale acrid odor, a sign of nitrate decay.

But the rolls turned out to be in remarkably good shape despite being almost untouched for 70 years. And so began a painstaking process of unfurling, scanning and trying to make sense of some 4,300 negatives taken by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David Seymour during the Spanish Civil War, groundbreaking work that was long thought to be lost but resurfaced several years ago in Mexico City.

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Stubbornly Practicing His Principles of Photography

By RANDY KENNEDY @ New York Times

“LISTEN, do I have time to feed my pig?” the photographer Danny Lyon asked, picking up the telephone one morning at his home in rural New Mexico. “It will only take about 10 minutes. I’ll call you back,” he said, adding: “That way I can start the day with a clean conscience.”

Among a group of revolutionaries whose work rose to prominence in the late 1960s and ’70s and transformed the nature of documentary photography — a group that includes friends and colleagues of Mr. Lyon’s like Mary Ellen Mark and Larry Clark — the idea of conscience has been imbedded more deeply in Mr. Lyon’s photographs than in those of all but a few of his contemporaries.

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