May 2006 Archives
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Todd Heisler - 2006 Pulitzer Prize Winner
Interview by Mark Hancock: Part A B C
From the website: I do it because I want people to notice things about their own lives and their own communities. I really do it because I want to tell stories, and I want people to notice things that are happening in the world so maybe they'll stop - it's such a fast-paced environment right now, where people are bombarded with so many images - but if I can make somebody stop for just a short time and really reflect about something, then I've done my job.
From the website: That's what keeps me going: knowing that I can make people look at an everyday thing in a different way.
From the website: The same might be said of the story Final Salute by photographer Todd Heisler and reporter Jim Sheeler of the Rocky Mountain News. Of course, Todd's photographs stand on their own. As do Jim's words. Separately, they were recognized by the American Society of Newspaper Editors as the best examples of photojournalism and non-deadline writing in 2005. But together, these two talented journalists created something more complete and more powerful than either could have done alone.
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John Divola - When dogs are in hot pursuit
From the website: The grainy, large-scale black-and-white prints he shot in the desert between 1996 and 2001 were made by sticking his camera-wielding arm out the window of his pickup truck whenever a dog began to chase the passing vehicle and snapping away blindly with high-speed film. Their ancestry is in Eadweard Muybridge's 19th century scientific photographs of animal locomotion, but without the sober veneer of orderliness.
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Danny Lyon - The Destruction of Lower Manhattan 1967
From the website: Thirty four years ago Bleak Beauty's photographer [Danny Lyon] recorded the demolition of mostly 19th century buildings located below Chambers street in Lower Manhattan. On the east side of the island, near the fish market, room was being made for a new ramp onto the Brooklyn Bridge and for the expansion of Pace College. On the west side, over 12 blocks of buildings were brought down to make way for the future World Trade Center. In 1967, the year these pictures were made, sixty acres of buildings in these two areas were demolished. The photographs were published as a book, sadly called, "The Destruction of Lower Manhattan."
More Lyon
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Layers of style build 'Assemblage' show
From the website: The distinct styles of six artists are vibrantly displayed in "Collage and Assemblage" at Inquiring Mind Art Gallery in Saugerties.
From the website: The exhibit features work by Loel Barr, who uses everything from digital images to pages of old medical textbooks and maps to the metal and electric light "fake machines" by Don Ervin, and brings in everything in between, including photography, textured transfer images and painting.
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Pattern Recognition - Dana Hoey
From the website: For this body of work, Hoey has combined original and appropriated images and arranged them into kaleidoscopic patterns, juxtaposing the nudes with more simple portraits. Initially inspired by Judith Butler to enact satirical, imitative performances of social patterns, Hoey quickly saw the limitations of such a practice. Noting that there is no way around the "tissue-thin reduction of the female form to sexual viability," Hoey departed from the main themes of her previous work and did away with the picture plane, pictorial narrative, and any semblance of photographic perfection. New participants, these champions of the first wave of feminism, entered the work and not only demolished, but restructured their "pornification." They left messes, carefully ordered into misaligned, dusty, and gluey flat patterns. All dirt and dust was then buried in the ultra-flat picture plane, and laminated over to complete the sealing and erasure of the hand. The result of this grotesque process is a large, vibrant collage that plays with geometric patterns and twisted social norms.
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From the website: Matsue photographs landscapes from all over the world, flattening them by adopting a distant, non aerial view and eliminating the sky. He then introduces a further layer of homogeneity by printing them in a high-key tonality, so that the individual textures of such features as rock or foliage are ironed out. This produces a landscape devoid of much of its individuality, with no sense of scale or context, so that landscapes situated continents apart look remarkably similar. Only the captions reveal the location of sites so drained of life and atmosphere that we might be looking at a book of moon landscapes.
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From the website: The artist executes her compositions using a combination of photography, painting and digital manipulation, favoring simple backgrounds over the more elaborate backdrops that characterized her earlier work. Trained as a painter at the Munich Academy and influenced by Old Masters such as Goya, Bronzino, Runge, and Velasquez, Ms. Lux works the entire surface of the photographic image in the computer over the course of many weeks. Props and vintage costumes are carefully selected, as are her subjects.
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When Portrait Was Memory: A Matter of Lives and Deaths
From the website: Another photograph, "Fading Away" (1858) by H. P. Robinson, even caused a scandal in its era because of its deliberate confusion of these issues: it shows a young woman on her deathbed, her sister gazing down in sorrow, her mother sitting in anticipatory mourning at the foot of the divan, her father, his back turned, brooding at an open window. The image, it turns out, was entirely staged [made from several negatives].
Group Dynamics is at the New-York Historical Society.
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Henry Wessel: Capturing the Image, Transcending the Subject
From the website: "The process of photographing is a pleasure: eyes open, receptive, sensing, and at some point, connecting. It's thrilling to be outside your mind, your eyes far ahead of your thoughts."
More Wessel
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Essentially Public - Peter Haakon Thompson
From the website: I have always worked in a process-based way with photography: I go out and make pictures, look at the results, and make more pictures. It is through this practice that I determine where I am going. The pictures that I make now are different from when I started exploring ideas of self and place. I still find these things compelling so it will probably continue and slowly change. I don't so much envision a project and then begin, at least with photography.
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From the website: Today Weegee is credited with ushering in the age of tabloid culture, while at the same time being revered for elevating the sordid side of human life to that of high art. Here is a rare interview with Weegee, recently discovered at the Recorded Sound division at the Library of Congress. It was conducted in July, 1945, by nationally-syndicated talk show host Mary Margaret McBride on WEAF in New York, soon after the publication of Naked City.
More Weegee
More master photographers
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Do a project!
From the website: Between January 1st, 2004 and December 31st, 2004 Roark Johnson photographed strangers, people he doesn't know once a day, every day. He used an 8X10 Deardorff. Unlike Roark, it's a camera that commands attention, respect and awe.
More projects
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Rephotography is returning to the location of an earlier photograph, and using the same focal length lens, taking another photograph.
The Third View has rephotographed western landscapes taken during the 1980s, once in 1970, and again in 1999.
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How to Photograph Lighting - Joseph Matthews
From the website: For me, lightning sums up all that is exciting about watching weather. It's the climatic fireworks at the end of the process as cumulus builds to nimbocumulus and becomes a storm. It often continues to accent the finale of the storm as the rains slack and the clouds open back up. It is accessible but untamed nature, both beautiful and dangerous. Most of us live in areas that have thunderstorms with lightning, unlike rarer climatic events, like tornadoes. But be warned; storm chasing to capture images of lightning is as dangerous as chasing tornadoes across the Midwest. Lightning kills.
More about lightening photography
Be sure to read the two links about safety!
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There are many different light sources, including x-rays.
Floral Radiographs: The Secret Garden
From the website: My name is Albert Richards and I am a University of Michigan Professor Emeritus. I have been creating floral radiographs for over 40 years.
More x-ray photography
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Victoria and Albert Museum: Exploring Photography - Theme Tours
There are many gallery and museum websites on my website, www.photokaboom.com, in the Explore section.
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creativepro.com has great articles, reviews, and Photoshop tutorials.
There are also many tutorials at my website, www.photokaboom.com, in the Learn section.
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Joerg Colberg's blog is the best one about photography.
From the website: Conscientious is a weblog about photography, art, and life in general. Predominantly, you will find contemporary photography, but I am not going to try to define what future or past posts will or did contain other than saying that it's photography or art that I like(d) or stuff that I was/am interested in. I am no professional photography critic, and I do not aspire to be one; hence there will be no long words. I think good photography doesn't need making too many words.
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Rick McGinnis - Frustrated Artist
From the website: CoC: If someone asked you to explain to them in fifty words or less what photography means to you, what would you say to them?
From the website: RMG: Light. The same thing that inspired Turner, who was supposed to have died saying "The sun is God", or something like that. It's all about light. That's about it.
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From the website: PS: If you're starting a new project, how does that work? Do you just start shooting and see where it takes you?
From the website: AS: No. I did this project recently in Niagara Falls, and it started before I'd ever been to Niagara Falls. I had these pictures in my head of things I'd hoped to find. I have a list of things I want to shoot. One thing is "men in pajamas." I've yet to find a man in pajamas, but it's something I'm looking for. Why is that? That's the way I go out into the world, is looking for certain things.
More Alec Soth
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The Armchair Photojournalist: The Future of Photojournalism
From the website: I would summarize some of the trends influencing professional photojournalism today as not only the increase in the availability of amateur images made by shutterbugs, as well as the all-consuming and insatiable appetite of our culture for sensationalistic imagery, but also the insidious decline in the Fourth Estate's interest in and access to making images that have any value beyond the commercial, ideological, and political interests of the powerful in society via government and corporate stakeholders.
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A window into photojournalism's prime time by Mark Feeney
From the website: Although Magnum still exists, the world in which it was born does not. That was a black-and-white world, one not yet inundated with images. Photojournalism had more than just cachet. It had a special and compelling purpose. It enabled average people to witness great events, distant places, and grand personages. Now there's TV, the Web, and cameras on digital phones. Color is the norm. If anything, we give ourselves up more than ever to the sheer intoxication of seeing. Yet no longer do we believe in the power -- or even the necessity -- of showing. Who needs visual mediation in an age of instant access?
Exhibit at the Portland Museum of Art
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Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt cite the research of K. Anders Ericsson, at Florida State University, showing the relationship between talent and practice.
Talent is less nature, and more, nurture.
From the website: Deliberate practice entails more than simply repeating a task — playing a C-minor scale 100 times, for instance, or hitting tennis serves until your shoulder pops out of its socket. Rather, it involves setting specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome.
Photography talent is similar.
Practice trumps waiting for the muse, or waiting around for the great subject.
Quantity begets quality.
Read more in my free online book, PATH: Ways-of-Working in Photography.
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I first thought, yet another essay about whether photography is art.
But Smee makes some good points, not that I agree with them all.
From the website: At which point along came Robert Frank, whose great book, The Americans, showed images congested with unknowns, with a sense that something was about to happen or had just happened, but one couldn't be sure which (or even what). Rather than the decisive moment, Frank showed the moments on either side of it. The effect, as Schjeldahl observed, was trippingly poetic, sorrowing and, excruciatingly just short of fulfilment.
Via Conscientious
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