Author: A Photo Editor

Alexx Henry and Greg Williams are making names for themselves as Red magazine photographers.

Alexx has an Outside cover this month (here):

And Greg Williams has Esquire’s sexiest woman alive cover (here):

So, what did these two magazines do with all the awesome technology they employed in these forward thinking cover shoots. Nothing. That’s right as far as I can tell Outside made their normal cover (the photographer made all these cool futuristic looking living covers and inside spreads in his BTS video) and Esquire made a video to go with their normal cover. It’s sort of like buying a Ferrari and hitching a team of horses to it. Beyond idiotic.

Condé closes Gourmet and others

Condé Nast plans to announce this morning that it will close Gourmet magazine, a magazine of almost biblical status in the food world; it has been published since December 1940.

In addition to Gourmet… it will also close Cookie, Modern Bride, and Elegant Bride.

via Media Decoder Blog – NYTimes.com.

E-blasts are out, and direct mail is back in

Well, that’s how the panelists first explained their take on the efficacy of email marketing. They eventually acknowledged that they all still send out e-blasts, but they weren’t very enthusiastic about them as a marketing tool. Everyone talked about how art buyers and creatives spend half their day just deleting emails from their inbox without reading them because they are overwhelmed. A print piece that shows up in their stack of snail mail, on the other hand, at least guarantees that the recipient will see the image and the name.

via Stockland Martel blog.

A Cautionary Behind-The-Scenes Video Tale

This cautionary BTSV story was submitted by a reader:

On a recent national advertising shoot we used our back-up camera, my new 5D MKII, to shoot some behind-the-scenes footage of me at work. We edited it down into a 3-minute video that we posted on my Facebook Group page. It wasn’t particularly exciting, but it did the job of showing me directing models and assistants. About 4 weeks after posting it, the ad agency I worked with called outraged, demanding all the fees and expenses back from the shoot, and then threatened to sue me.

At first we weren’t sure what we did wrong–we put it up well after the campaign had come out and after the agency gave us the go ahead to use shoot images for self-promotion. We had retained copyright and owned all the images. We didn’t show any video of the agency or client discussing strategy or anything like that. Although I did not announce that we were shooting video footage, the assistant who was shooting walked around in full view of everyone on the set, with a camera quite close to most people on the set. He shot quite a lot and it is evident that the AB and AD at least knew we were shooting stills.

The agency claimed that we violated the Confidentiality Clause of the Purchase Order because the entire shoot was secret, that they did not know I was shooting video and that I had no right to shoot video. We disagree with all of this, but we took the video down. Even after we took it down, they kept demanding the money back, and we spent weeks going back and forth with lawyers. Eventually they just dropped it, presumably because they knew they had no case. We think what happened was that the client found it on YouTube since we had included their name in the title, and was upset at the agency failing to control their brand. The agency was trying to make amends, and wanted to use us a sacrifice.

We were at first concerned when they argued that we didn’t “have the right” to shoot video. In other words, was it our shoot and set or theirs? In our view, a client does not own a set unless the agreement is work-for-hire. In this case, we were the production company, we hired everyone else, we rented the location, we carried the insurance (i.e. it was our production). No one could tell us what we could and could not shoot on our set.

We also amended the P.O. to give us copyright to “All images created as part of the shoot” and the right to use them for self-promotion.Tip: Always ensure in writing that you retain rights to all “Images” with an “s” or better yet, put “All images, whether moving or still.”

We left their Confidentiality Clause intact, but as it was written, it did not make the shoot itself confidential – just trade secrets and the like. The shoot itself was our work product, not theirs, and its mere existence wasn’t a secret. Tip: Just because the agency says you violated the contract, doesn’t mean you did.

However, in the future I do think it is a great idea to talk to the A.B. about behind-the-scenes video and whether it is OK with them if you shoot it and if you can use it for self promotion on your website. You may have the right to shoot it and post it, but if a jittery client doesn’t like what they see, you may lose a client and any relationship you had with the agency.

The history of a great deal of twentieth century art could be told as a history of theft

Armand Bartos Fine Art’s latest show is focused on celebrating that history of the rip-off, showing art works next to the pieces from which artists brazenly stole their ideas.

via ARTINFO.com.

Untitled – The Movie

This movie looks funny as hell. “What attracts me to his work is how uncomfortable it makes me feel.”

Here is how I define success

A successful artist is a person who is able to create something that manifests their truth…a perception that they feel they need to bring to the world. A successful creative person is someone who continues to create no matter what happens. I respect many artists. They are not all extremely successful in the art market, or in the art status structure. Some are, and some aren’t. Some of the ones I respect have been overlooked. But I still consider them to be successful, because they have succeeded to give the world their vision, even though the world does not always acknowledge their worth…In other words, I define a successful career as much more than just external validation.

— Jan Harrison

via Black Sheep Pen.

Bradley Peters – CPC 2009 Winner

Joerg Colberg had a contest this summer and Bradley Peters was one of the winners. The prize was an interview and it’s really a great read:

Jörg Colberg: In your “Home Theater” statement, you’re describing your work as “allowing a ‘staged’ photograph to break down and […] then [to] spiral into the spontaneous.” I just have to ask – especially given your Yale background: What’s wrong with staged photography? Why have it break down?
Bradley Peters: It’s not an issue of something being “wrong” but rather my interest in something that no one seems to speak of much these days… luck. I’m not interested in coming up with a really well defined idea and then making a picture that illustrates that concept. My photographic foundation was built in small camera, black & white street photography, I mean that’s basically the only way I shot for nearly ten years, and I’m still really interested in letting the world reveal itself in ways that I can’t imagine by myself. Without the breakdown there is very little surprise, which is important to me. I need to feel as though I learned something from the image and if the picture turns out exactly the way I wanted, I probably didn’t learn anything that I didn’t already know. In a way, I probably didn’t even need to make the picture in the first place. There was a really good interview in LA Weekly a couple years ago with John Szarkowski that I think speaks to this point:
“Some photographers think the idea is enough. I told a good story in my Getty talk, a beautiful story, to the point: Ducasse says to his friend Mallarmé — I think this is a true story — he says, ‘You know, I’ve got a lot of good ideas for poems, but the poems are never very good.” Mallarmé says, “Of course, you don’t make poems out of ideas, you make poems out of words.’ Really good, huh? Really true. So, photographers who aren’t so good think that you make photographs out of ideas. And they generally get only about halfway to the photograph and think that they’re done.”

I am really ambivalent about theory, I think it is important to learn to think, to express yourself…

Teaching is about creating awareness, there is an analogy with Buddhism and meditation and really doing art is about trying to understand life.

–Peter Bialobrzeski

via A Photo Student.

Robot Photographers Can’t Catch A Break

Thx, Matt Walford for the tip.

The Aftermath Project – War Is Only Half The Story

The Aftermath Project was the winner of the humanitarian award at last year’s Lucie Awards (here). I was there that night live blogging the event for fun and Sara Terry’s speech was certainly one of the highlights for me. Not only because of the gravitas of the Aftermath Project but also how well she conveyed the importance of photography and projects like this.

“I was a writer but had a personal crisis and words failed me for the first time in my life so I picked up a camera to communicate…”
“… the stories we hold up define who we are as a society.”

The book from last year’s project is out now (here):

In addition to that they are now accepting applications for their fourth year of granting (2010); and will be giving out two grants, for $20,000 each. The application deadline is Nov 2nd (here).

How to Compete

It’s a dodgy game to compete on price. It’s always a race to the bottom. It’s never fun to compete by name-calling or bragging over your competitors. Instead, really earn it with us by competing in ways that will empower both you and us.

via How to Compete.

The Future Of Accountability Journalism In A World Of Declining Newspapers

Clay Shirky is fast becoming one of the top thinkers on the future of journalism and if you listen to a talk he gave at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, you will understand why. The Nieman Journalism Lab has an mp3 (here) and the transcript (here).

Some of the major points he makes if any of you want to discuss:

The marriage of advertising and accountability journalism was an accident – “There was a set of forces that made that possible. And they weren’t deep truths — the commercial success of newspapers and their linking of that to accountability journalism wasn’t a deep truth about reality. Best Buy was not willing to support the Baghdad bureau because Best Buy cared about news from Baghdad. They just didn’t have any other good choices.”

Advertisers were overcharged and undeserved– “Not only did they have to deliver more money to the newspapers than they would have wanted, they didn’t even get to say: ‘And don’t report on my industry, please.’”

Consumers want to aggregate their own daily media lineup – “he New York Times is being torn apart right now by its own readers. The number of people who go to the Times’ homepage as a percentage of total readership falls every year — because you don’t go to the Times, you go to the story, because someone Twittered it or put it on Facebook or sent it to you in email. So the audience is now being assembled not by the paper, but by other members of the audience.”

The immediate future is not good -“Every town in this country of 500,000 or less just sinks into casual, endemic, civic corruption — that without somebody going down to the city council again today, just in case, that those places will simply revert to self-dealing. Not of epic, catastrophic sorts, but the sort that just takes five percent off the top.”

Newspapers will not survive – “So I think we are headed into a long trough of decline in accountability journalism, because the old models are breaking faster than the new models can be put into place.”

The solution or at least his thoughts on what the future holds for journalism is that the bulk of what newspapers do in regards to the public good will be taken up by a multitude of smaller entities that are crowdsourced, commercially funded or non-profits. Basically all media will be broken up into many vertical channels with all kinds of different business models. The idea that an advertiser has no influence over a media company that reports on their industry is total BS so much of the accountability journalism will shift to crowdsourced and non-profit business models. Commercial works as long as the advertiser is in a different industry than the media company is reporting on and so it works really well in the smaller vertical channels. Overall–I’ve said this many times before–content providers are not in trouble it’s the content packagers who are going down.

Nothing Is More Common Than Unsuccessful People With Talent

Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.– Calvin Coolidge

via swissmiss

Terry Richardson Talks About The “Snapshot” And Connecting With People

I don’t remember seeing these videos when the big Terry Richardson, Belvedere Campaign came out several years ago so I’m posting them now. Even though I know there are plenty of haters out there I still think it’s fascinating when any photographer at the top of their game talks about their craft.

Hiroshi Sugimoto Shout Out at U2 Concert

…when was the last time the biggest rock star on the planet interrupted one of his signature songs in a stadium full of screaming people to give a shout out to a fine art photographer? There can’t be any equivalent moment in the entire history of photography.

via DLK COLLECTION.

2009 Photographer Social Media Survey

Photographer Jim M. Goldstein is looking to compile data on how photographers are currently using and receiving benefit from social media web sites such as Twitter, Facebook and others. Won’t you help him out by filling out his survey:
2009 Photographer Social Media Survey

Data from this survey will be shared by Jim M. Goldstein (www.JMG-Galleries.com) October 22 at PDN PhotoPlus Expo in NYC as part of the “Twitter Revolution: Changing the Photographic World, 140 Characters at a Time” (http://bit.ly/3FHUl) discussion panel with Seshu Badrinath, Jack Hollingsworth, and Rosh Sillars. The data from this survey will also be made available later to all who are interested.