This just in: The entire wholly-owned shoot program at Getty Images has been shut down and the producer and digital tech person at Getty have been laid off.

My source (here).

I’m told: “Wholly owned is when Getty Images would commission photographers for shoots in their creative division. It may also include photographers who were on salary at Getty Images who created content for them.”

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“Capa photographed his soldier at a location where there was no fighting,” wrote Barcelona-based newspaper El Periodico which carried out a study of the photograph taken in September 1936, the third month of the war.

The so-called “falling soldier” photo was not taken near Cerro Muriano in the southern Andalusia region, as has long been claimed, but about 50 kilometres (30 miles) away near the town of Espejo, the newspaper said.

via Yahoo! News thanks Mike.

UPDATE: Great narrated video from the Guardian (here).

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Top ten reasons managers become assholes:
2. They are insecure in their role. The psychology of opposites goes a long way in understanding human nature. Overly aggressive people are often quite scared, and their aggression is a pre-emptive attack driven by fear: they attack first because they believe an attack from you is inevitable. Management makes many people nervous since it’s defined by having have less direct control, but more broad influence. A huge percentage of managers never get over this, and micromanage: a clear sign of insecurity and confusion over their role and yours.
via scottberkun.com.

Review: Milton Rogovin: The Making of a Social Documentary Photographer
Milton Rogovin is one of those underappreciated photographers. His work could maybe be termed the photographic equivalent of Studs Terkel’s radio shows: Rogovin took photos of people who worked hard for their money and who often were very poor.
via  Conscientious.

Dear Designer, You Suck
Sometimes I wonder, then: given that everyone in design seems to more or less know everyone else, are we really having the kinds of meaningful, constructive, critical discourses that we really should be having? Are we pulling our punches too much when discussing the merits of the work that our peers turn out? To put a finer point on it: are we being honest with one another?
via Subtraction.com

Ten Graphic Design Paradoxes
05: For designers, verbal skills are as important as visual skills. Since graphic design should be self-explanatory, designers might be forgiven for thinking that the need to provide a verbal rationale for their work is unimportant. Surely the work should succeed on its own merits without requiring a designer’s advocacy? True. Except there never was a client who didn’t want an explanation for every aspect of every piece of creative work they commissioned.
via Design Observer.

The Photographer as Scientist
The April 2009 issue of Modern Painters is completely devoted to photography. The cover story is about Hiroshi Sugimoto and profiles his recent work and experimentations.

I had not heard about this before but Sugimoto has been buying up early negatives made by William Henry Fox Talbot in the 1830’s and is now using them to make his own work from them. I’m not exactly sure how I feel about that.
via Horses Think.

Magazines Blur Line Between Ad and Article
David Granger, the editor in chief of Esquire, a Hearst magazine, included advertisers in cover compositions he produced for February and May, which the magazine society said it did not object to.

When he and his publisher began working on the projects, Mr. Granger said, “we came to an agreement on certain principles, and one was that there had to be real, viable reader benefit to any of the things we did.” He said that other cover treatments, like ESPN’s and Entertainment Weekly’s, “are pure advertising iterations.”
via  NYTimes.com.

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It’s the same with photography. There are loads of books on how to photograph. They will tell you how to use long exposures, how to be creative using fancy things like multiple exposures (double the exposure and double the meaning), how large format will really bring out the detail, and so on and so on. In other words, the simple functional How to… books of photography pretty much cover the heady world of art photography from top to bottomus.

It’s simple stuff, but simple is good, especially in photography, which is basically a monkey art.

[from a new series on Colin's blog called How Not To Photograph, each post is great]

via Colin Pantall’s blog.

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“If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place.

via Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky.

————–

the most a portrait photographer can hope for is to make a portrait that reflects where the sitter is with the photographer.

Steve Pyke on Conscientious

————–

one of the goals behind developing Google’s Chrome browser is to “make the web as fast as turning the page in a magazine.” That is still one advantage paper has over the Web: zero load times.

Marissa Mayer is the vice president of search products and user experience at Google

Marissa Mayer: …you’ll be able to say give Google an image and say find other images like this or find me images of a monkey, those types of things.

Charlie Rose: When will it happen?

Marissa Mayer: … I think the vision will probably happen in more than a 10-year timeframe, maybe 15. Those are of course guesses just off the top of my head…

via TechCrunch.

————–

Once the economy revives, however, a panel of Wall Streeters predicted it will be up, up and away for M&A. [Media and Advertising]

“All companies are tightening their belts … they are sitting on a lot of cash. So at one point M&A will come back,” said Jonathan Miller, co-founder of investment fund Velocity Interactive Group and a former chairman of AOL.

via Media biz in coin catch – Entertainment News, Business News, Media – Variety.

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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).

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Photojournalist David Burnett (Contact Press Images, New York) shows you the ups and downs of what it was REALLY like to try and photograph the Games of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics.

American Suburb x is an incredibly interesting photography blog I found via Conscientious.

Over on Publishing 2.0 (here): “Every conversation about reinventing a business model for newspapers begins, it seems, with a question about how to find a way to pay for what we value in the current product. In other words, how do we find a way to keep doing what we’ve always done and make as much money as we’ve always made?”

“I’ve rarely heard anyone start by asking what the market values. Where are the pain points in the market? How can we solve problems for people?”

“You know, business 101.”

William Eggleston at the Whitney (here) via NYMag (here): “Eggleston’s 1976 MoMA show launched his career and proved a turning point in the history of photography. Scorned at the time for being vulgar and banal, the show has since been revered for exactly those reasons.”

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When I saw these Obama rally photos (here) I thought, how can you not believe in the power of photography to deliver a message. I was told by someone who used to help politicians with photography for a living that the way you get images like this is make the photographers stand in a certain place so the only photograph they can take is that one.

Good Morning America ran this picture (here) yesterday morning with Diane Sawyer saying “what a photograph.”

Folio Mag, Covers of the campaign (here).

Powell cites a Platon photo when endorsing Obama (here).

If the intersection of politics and photography interests you visit this site: http://www.bagnewsnotes.com

Side Note– Over on FiveThirtyEight.com: “Ever since Brett Marty started taking photographs for the site, our traffic has skyrocketed (here).”

Thanks Allison, Ryan.

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I seriously hope Nachtwey does something amazing tomorrow but surely he can’t be the only one. Can he?

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Here’s an interesting idea. Someone from within a stock photo agency is anonymously posting gems from the collection as they run across them (here). The splash page at a stock agency website is always incredibly valuable real estate, so maybe there are other ways to get images from the collection in front of potential buyers.
Via, Swiss Miss.

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A new Channel 4 series, Picture This, takes six wannabe snappers and sets them assignments over the course of three weeks, eliminating the unsuccessful contestants until just two remain to battle it out for the prize. Martin Parr, the acclaimed photographer best known for his colourful pictures of British seaside life, is one of the three judges on the show.The documentary photographer became involved with Picture This because he believes that photography is not given the prominence it deserves in the UK, whereas in other European countries and in the United States it is celebrated as an important art form. -The Independent Story

Neil Leifer still acts like he has something to prove. Some of it’s the plight of the news or sports photographer, even if you’re the best. Leifer recalls how even Sports Illustrated sometimes sent him out with a snot-nosed reporter who’d introduce him by saying “This is my photographer.” -LA Times Story

Artists are drawn to de Wilde in part because the tedium that’s typical of photo shoots is transformed into a facet of the creative act when she’s at the helm. De Wilde insists on long conversations, in person, with young artists prior to taking their picture. She’ll hunt for ideas but also memorize the way a person’s eyes move and the way they smile at a joke, so that when she’s standing behind the camera she’ll be able to recognize what’s real, no matter how surreal the setting or high the concept. -Boston Globe Story

‘Harry Potter’ star Daniel Radcliffe is to play the late British war photographer Daniel Eldon in a new biopic.

Best photography related headline of 2007: Britney Spears and Photographer Suspected of Making Quick F-Stop At Beverly Hills Hotel. -Defamer Story

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Photographer launches global campaign to save infrared film.

Fees proposed for photography on public lands. 

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Here’s what I found interesting:

AMPTP insiders said they’re convinced WGA West exec director David Young is trying to make the WGA battles a part of a larger, more global struggle against corporate “greed.”

[...]“For them, this is not a writers strike. It’s about changing society,” one exec said. “We are so frustrated. We’re dealing with people who don’t care about this community. They care about making social change in America.”

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London editor to Anne Geddes “If I can give you some advice, just photographing babies is never going to work for you. You need to broaden your portfolio to include adults and animals.”

Photographer Lynn Blodgett has a demanding day job: He’s president and chief executive officer of Affiliated Computer Services, Inc., a Dallas-based Fortune 500 company… [but he still found time to create a] ..remarkable monograph, Finding Grace: The Face of America’s Homeless (Palace Press, $55), which American Photo included in its January/February portfolio of the Best Photo Books of the Year.

College photographer of the year awards.

In exchange for the right to sell action shots of athletes to a hungry audience of parents, boosters and relatives, IHSA (Illinois High School Association) receives a virtually limitless library of images from the Cedarburg, Wis. company (Visual Image Photography Inc.) for its own promotional material. IHSA, which values the deal at tens of thousands of dollars, in turn prohibits credentialed media from selling their own pictures from championship events.

Corbis, the stock photography company controlled by billionaire Bill Gates, is close to being profitable for the first time ever…

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Portraying love and loss in black and white, a group of photographers gives parents cherished images of their dead or dying newborns

Photographer Ashley Gilbertson Gets Personal in Iraq

Another writers strike video photographers will like

One more writers strike video

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Alison Jackson shoots fake tabloid photos and lands a book and gallery exhibit.

Obituary, Fred McDarrah, 81, photographer of Beat Generation.

Interesting story on new Magnum Photographers book.

Everyone wants to be taking pictures story in the New York Times.

Sony uses a photo taken in 1965 to sell their latest DSLR Camera.

AP photographer held in Iraq without charges for over a year.

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