Friday Link Love

Palm Springs Photo Festival has a free photo contest (here). [Your work will be seen by thousands of retirees! Kidding, important people will be in attendance.]

PhotoShelter has an image buyers survey with lots of powerful information (here). [Is it me or do the image buyers–PE’s included–sound like a bunch of whiners… don’t make us do this, don’t make us do that, we’re busy, we have no time… do you want cheese with that?]

Facebook does an about face on their TOS changes (here). [Imagine how long that would have taken if we needed newspapers to react to this shit.]

Photographer Zack Arias spills his guts in this video (here). [Who knew Avedon sucked at one time ; )]

Five Papers named the world’s best designed (here). Money Quote: The rising trend of strong photography in the 1980s and 1990s seems now a distant memory. Often, photo departments and staff shooters are the first to go during management cutbacks. Yet, as the global culture becomes more visual, newspapers must keep pace, even lead. Publishers must recognize that the core value of their product is good journalism — the integration of writing, photography, graphics and design. [So you’re saying publishers should pull their heads out of their asses? At this point they need to just cut a window in their stomach.]- [Whatever you do don’t watch the video they made you’ll want to claw your eyes out part way in… stick to making newspapers people!]

The HCB (Henri Cartier-Bresson) Award is a prize to stimulate a photographer’s creativity by offering the opportunity to carry out a project that would otherwise be difficult to achieve.It is intended for a photographer who have already completed a significant body of work, a talented photographer in the emerging phase of his or her career, with an approach close to that of reportage. The prize is of 30 000 Euros and is awarded every other year (here). [You are sooooo dreaming… but click anyway.]

Sir Mix-A-Lot’s Photoshop via the Adobe blog (here).

On the Set with Mary Ellen Mark

[Mary Ellen] Mark had earned his trust a year before by simply enduring some subtle abuse during the making of The Missouri Breaks, for which Brando’s rule was that set photographers must always ask permission before shooting him. Every time. And the answer was always no.

via Los Angeles Art+Books.

Mikhael Subotzky on Conscientious

I do believe in the power of bearing witness, but I see it more as responsibility to ourselves… I do have a real problem with the assumption that photographers can change the world by telling these “truths”.

More (here).

Choosing Photos

I got an email from a photo editor this week asking for advice in a situation that he’s found himself in at a magazine. His Art Director is an “old-schooler” where you pick your images based on physical qualities like focus and level horizons. He also has a penchant for sunny blue skies. The editor on the other hand wants the literal translation of the story in pictures and will pick the worst image of the bunch as long as it contains the who, what, when, where, why or how of the story. Top that all off with the fact that the two of them have been around for a long time and tend to use the length of their experience as a way to push their same as it always was agenda.

This situation is a little unusual in that it’s usually only the editor that favors literal images and uses things like the meteorological conditions in the image as a point of argument for or against using something. In the past I’ve always had good luck teaming up with the Art Director to get things past the editor and I made a post awhile back about my techniques for getting new photographers past them for assignments:

1. Gang up. Get the Creative Director to back you in the meeting. “Oh yeah he’s great, I worked with him at my previous magazine and he always delivered.”

2. Shiny Objects. Toss out important people or magazines they’ve shot for. “He shot a feature in Vanity Fair recently.”

3. Padded Portfolio. Print the portfolio shots that back your case. “See, she really gets what we’re trying to achieve here.”

4. Play Dumb. Assign and feign telling them about it recently. “Oh, I thought we discussed that she was shooting this earlier.”

The same sort of ideas work well for getting the images you want published.

1. Stall- I used to find myself in a situation where the editor would end a layout review with “Let’s see if we can top that.” To which I would spend the rest of my time that month not trying top it, because I was perfectly happy with the images we had picked. I also recall a separate situation near the end of my tenure where I had commissioned a heavy hitter to shoot a portrait for the opener of the story. The editor was not pleased with the results because he was expecting… something more literal, so I was tasked with dredging up every little bit of stock that might work instead. I didn’t completely phone-it-in, so as not to arouse suspicion, but I did find it handy to read blogs instead of scour Getty for hours on end.

2. Withholding- The classic technique is to simply leave out the obvious choices. This is like playing chicken: “Is this all there is?” “Well, these are the best.” “Can I see all the images?” “I’m still working on it, can we try these first?” “Ok, but then after this I need to see the rest of the images.” “I have a doctors appointment so it will have to wait.”

3. Showdown- First, you need to lean on the Art Director to include your images in the layout choices for the editor. Looking at pictures in the layout is so much better than on your screen or the light table (sadly only used for printouts now) and brings you one step closer to the final OK. When your variation comes up on screen or is presented you need to fight tooth and nail to defend it. This is where reading books that talk about photography comes in handy. Defending an image by saying “I like it a lot” will get you nowhere. Sometimes, honestly it comes down to a fight where telling them they’re making a huge mistake and the picture they picked blows is your only choice.

4. Build Your Case- Changing someone’s mind about the photography they think is “good” can take months and possibly years of laying a foundation with examples of work you think is important. You need to provide examples and reinforcement of quality imagery in the field. I used to have a huge bulletin board where I would rip pages out of magazines, tack up promo cards and prints of the images they didn’t pick as sort of a massive mood board to the direction I wanted the photography to go. Also, buy plenty of magazines that are using photography well and show them to the editor whenever you get a chance. Anything redesigned by Luke or DJ at Pentagram is always a sure bet.

None of this is easy. Expect your stomach to be doing back flips and your hair to tingle as you try to steer the Titanic away from the ice.

Finally, I will say this about the future of magazines and photography. There is no future for magazines that don’t challenge and surprise their readers with original sophisticated imagery. The internet has set the ground floor and if you can’t rise above it, you will disappear.

Photographers Are Now Terrorists In The UK

Under an idiotic new law, photographers in the UK can be stopped and their cameras, memory cards and film seized:

“If officers reasonably suspect that photographs are being taken as part of hostile terrorist reconnaissance, a search under section 43 of the Terrorism Act 2000 or an arrest should be considered.” More here.


Photographers Rights UK.

This seems to be part of a continuing fear the police there have of photographers. Here’s a poster from last year asking the public to look out for suspicious looking snappers:

photogterrorist
Thanks, Sarah Ewing.

Enormous And Fragile Egos

In journalism, my workplaces often felt like rooms filled with balloons, enormous and fragile egos rubbing and squeaking up against one another until, inevitably, several burst with a bang.

In journalism, all too often perception helps people get ahead. One editor’s star performer is another’s nightmare.

via  NYTimes.com.

Mark Zuckerberg Added You As A Friend On Facebook…

UPDATE: The Zuck backed down and returned to the previously shitty TOS that is not nearly as horribly shitty as the new one. They say they’re going to rewrite the whole thing so maybe there’s a chance they can come up with something besides a lazy ass rights grab. Story on CNN.

In order to become friends with Mark you need to grant him rights to whatever you upload to their servers forever.

The story about facebook’s revised TOS  is making the rounds (I think the consumerist broke the story) and even garnered a response from the Zuck hisself (here) that I discovered on Harrington’s blog. In general all these sharing sites use similar language for their Terms of Service and User License Agreements because most of them have no clue how to handle the situation they’ve created for themselves with copyrighted material and figure it’s just easier to grab a license and sublicense.

I hope all the attention this issue is getting will force Facebook and other companies that allow you to upload images (pretty much everyone) to figure out better ways to restrict how content is used, where it’s displayed, where it’s stored … translated, cropped, scanned, edited…, so they don’t have to be so lazy and grab all the rights instead. After all none of these sites are worth a damn without the content people add to them.

Jim Goldstein has a good post all about the terms (here).

NY Times Article Skimmer

This new article skimmer for the NY Times is pretty sweet (here). They could improve the thing 1000% if they just added original photography to each of the story excerpts. I don’t actually expect them to value photography above headlines and text (it’s still the NY Times after all), but someone out there will finally wake up and realize that photography is the fastest way to communicate online.

articleskimmer

Magazines Try To Save Newspapers

Time Magazine’s former managing editor, Walter Isaacson wrote a heroic hail-mary cover story a week or two ago (here) endorsing a system of micro payments for journalism in an attempt to bridge that fast approaching cliff.

I like a couple of the ideas he brings up, namely clicking buttons to make payments instead of entering credit card information and charging micro payments to access day, week, month, year and lifetime subscriptions to media organizations.

Eventually there will be a brilliant solution hammered out (hammered as in media organizations are going to endure a serious ass whupping first). This quote says it best: “driving revenue while trying to re-invent a business model is a difficult thing to do, it’s like changing the tires on a moving truck.” Found that in the comments of a foliomag.com story.

I have several thoughts to contribute:

1. The monopoly is over. The cost of delivering advertising to to consumers along with words and pictures is now nearly zero. Advertisers paid whatever you told them to pay because the delivery method was expensive and complicated. Nobody gives a rats ass if the billionaire owners go somewhere else. Turning journalism into a break even industry is perfectly fine with editors, writers and photographers. I could go on and on about the decisions that are made by owners that put advertising and attracting easy readers first. My reasons for not reading Time Magazine anymore is certainly tied to their attempts to attract more readers (to serve to advertisers) at the expense of the quality of the product.

2. The cost to deliver the exact same product electronically should be a fraction of the printed version (I’m thinking 1/10th). If you’d like to buy me a computer (or other hand held delivery device) and pay my ISP bill each month then I’ll agree to the normal cost. Otherwise pass the savings I just gave you back to me.

3. Get off your high fucking horse. You’re no longer in control of the flow of information. Your sources have blogs, your readers have tweets and stories don’t end once you hit the publish button. Participation is mandatory.

There’s plenty of good punditry to read as well:

By Mark Fitzgerald, Editor and Publisher:

… Time itself looks more in need of saving than even newspapers that symbolize the industry’s troubles, like the Chicago Tribune or Chicago Sun-Times, both of which dropped pretty hefty packages on my doorstep Sunday.

By E&P’s count Time sold all of 14 pages of ads in the slim issue. Alan Jacobson of Brass Tacks Design puts it nicely at his blog with a trenchant piece that is far more worthy to be at the center of industry debate than Isaacson’s sort of obvious observations: “But its ‘Modest Proposal’ is delivered in a form that is remarkably modest itself — its 56 pages are barely thick enough to shim a coffee table, let alone support an entire industry.”

Bill Wyman on Hitsville:

But papers didn’t make money from subscriptions; the price basically covered the cost of getting multi-pounds of newsprint delivered to your door at 5 a.m.

… the more I think about it, the biggest problem the press has is that the evaporation of advertising has meant that the news it publishes has to stand on its own two feet.

Sure, back in the day there was some foreign news, some local reporting, some great reporters and editors sprinkled across the country. But let’s face it, most newspapers sucked in all sorts of ways, and one of the main ways was opting toward blandness and timidity wherever possible, as as not to offend the older folks subscribing to the papers.

Mark Hamilton on Notes From A Teacher:

So this is where my belief that micropayments offer at least a partial solution to the who-will-pay-for-the-news question runs up against cold reality. If you accept my idea of the three stumbling blocks, we need to devise a system that (1) allows for single registration for everything, (2) opens up the pot to everyone creating media with potential value, and (3) puts the user in control of establishing the value.

Mike Masnick on Tech Dirt:

… a piece by James Warren in The Atlantic, which you would hope would be a bit more intellectual — but instead makes the same old errors. Warren seems to imply that investigative journalism can only be done by newspaper reporters — apparently not realizing that the investigative reporting he’s talking about is a very new concept, rather than true “traditional journalism.”

Michael Turro, In Plain Sight:

newspapers cannot be saved. They are big bloated, convoluted corporate anachronisms that derive their strength and power from an economic model of news information that is in rapid and steep decline. These corporate entities were built and grew powerful in an age when new information was remote, precious, scarce, capital.

That age is over.

Today fresh information is immediate, cheap, abundant, available. News happens and is distributed in real time – worldwide – before lumbering outfits like the New York Times even have a chance to think up a catchy headline.

Finally Walter Isaacson on The Daily Show:

And finally the World Press Photo of the Year Award goes to Anthony Suau from a series of pictures he shot under contract for Time Magazine but they refused to print (story on PDN).

The Future Of Advertising Is On Main Street, Not Wall Street

Public clients hire public agencies who go through rounds and rounds of strategy and rounds and rounds of creative. 50% of the time (a best guess based on my own experience), projects die. The other 50% results in garbage that any agency could have come up with in an hour (again, a best guess based on my own eyeballs).

I believe we’re about to embark on a new era of entrepreneurial marketing. Yes, it is out of necessity. But frankly, I’m excited about it.

via Please Feed The Animals.

Simon Norfolk On World Press Photo

My advice? Get re-skilled. Keep your photographic aspirations but try to get a trade like film editing, web-design or accounting.

Soon we’ll all be amateur photographers with real money-making jobs on the side that we don’t tell our colleagues about. We need to get over the snobbery attached to that.

Honestly I think he’s kidding… he tells the WPP off for not paying him to write the piece as well.

via World Press Photo.

Photo Collectives On The Rise

I like this trend where photographers form groups and publish their work on a website or print something for sale. It certainly gives those looking to hire another resource to check out and like some agencies there’s often a thread between all the work so if you’re looking for a specific style you can spend some time exploring. Seems like a good way to build a fan base too.

The Collectors Guide To Emerging Photography– is an invite only, unique 180–page source book distributed to collectors, art dealers, gallery directors, photo editors, museum professionals, and independent curators. Published biennially, The Collector’s Guide aims to further Humble’s mission by bridging the gap between ambitious early-career photographers and often-unapproachable photography professionals and art institutions.

Lay Flat— a new print publication devoted to promoting the best in contemporary fine art photography and writing on the medium. Each issue is assembled by Shane Lavalette in close collaboration with a co-curator

Expiration Notice— will serve as an online gallery for those who’ve already lived a life, continue to do so, and have the quality goods long denied the glory of the the glossy magazines or gleaming white gallery walls.

Fjord— is a project that showcases the photography of young, up-and-coming photographers. The drastic shift in the way work is being presented today has become especially noticeable in the more technologically adept generation. Fjord’s goal is to bring together a collection of notable photographers from the internet and showcase their work in book form.

The Exposure Project— is a collection of emerging photographers taking an active approach in exposing and promoting new talent through exhibition, publication and online exposure. Formed in the fall of 2005, the goal of the project is to provide support, inspiration and community-based collaboration to emerging talent. Since its inception, The Exposure Project has hosted numerous exhibitions, has had online showcases, and has self-published 3 photo books.

Luceo Images— is a collection of photographers creating a space for fresh visual narratives. Luceo offers documentary, portraiture, and commercial photography as well as new media production on an assignment basis.

Aveum — Life, Time, Age.

The Society of Photographers — serves as a forum where members share photography as an art form. Select members are invited to submit work for review by all members of the Society on a monthly basis.

Piece of Cake — European network for contemporary images.

Image Works –Founded in 1998 by a group of large format photographers in the greater Phoenix area with a common interest in making the highest quality fine art photographic images, Imageworks is an organization committed to excellence in this art form.

Iris Photo Collective — Documenting people of color and their relationship to the world.

MJR — represents the next wave of great image makers. We are staking our claim in the future and will do our best to make this a cornerstone for everyone who finds themselves waiting to take the next big step towards becoming the next big thing.

Camera 80 — online photography gallery showcasing the work of young Romanian photographers

Photo Drifting — is a New York City based collective of creative professionals who document and share their lives via photographs. These photographs don’t relate nor do they have any concurrent theme or style. Instead, Photo Drifting represents different views of life in NYC.

This Is A Photoblog — We are a group of photographers who take turns giving each other creative assignments and have fun doing it.

Slate Grey Media — It is our mission to incubate, generate and deliver creative imagery for a global array of discerning clients in a friendly, fair and professional manner. We encourage and support each other’s creativity, inventively market ourselves and share resources in a spirit of cooperation and collaboration.

GAIA Photos — Your global team of local photojournalists. Follow the flow of new documentary photo features from a selected group of the world’s leading freelance photojournalists.

tendancefloue.net

Alphabet Project — It involves 26 photographers from around the world. Each photographer has a first name that begins with an unique letter of the alphabet. Every two weeks the person whose letter of the alphabet it is sets a photographic task for both themselves and the other 25 photographers. The task that the photographer sets can be an adjective, a noun, a specific instruction, a verb etc but it must start with the same letter as the first letter in their name.

Burn Magazine — is an evolving journal for emerging photographers.

International League of Conservation Photographers — Our mission is to translate conservation science into compelling visual messages targeted to specific audiences

Unseen Photography — is a collective of contemporary photographers based in the UK

Remain In Light — This small group of select Bay Area photographers was originally formed to provide an agency which presents simple, reliable and artistic documentary images.

Shado Collective — is a group of photographers based in Tokyo.

The Range — is a New York based Non-Profit Organization of artists united by a common goal: We aim to pair the accomplished artist with their current subversive counterpart in the hopes of establishing a diverse networking outlet.

Statement Images — is a collective of photographers with a curiosity for the world which they wish to explore through imagery, whether still or moving. The collective started in late 2008 as members became disillusioned at the quality, style, impact and the direction photography in the mainstream press was heading.

I know there are many more, so add any you know about in the comments and I’ll get them listed.

Photo Editors Organization

Moya Mcallister and I have formed an organization for Editorial Photo Editors with the hopes of strengthening the community and providing a place where photo editors can share resources and ask questions. We already have 140 members.

If you’re interested in joining send an email to myself or Moya (moyamcallister (at) mac (dot) com) with information on where you work as a photo editor and we will let you know all about it.