Ten percent of all of the photographs made in the entire history of photography were made last year — an astounding figure. More than ever before, thanks in part to cell phone technology, the world is engaged with photography and communicating through pictures. Nonetheless, a great photograph will rise above all the others.
via Time-LightBox.
She’s the fine-art photographer whose inventiveness, palette, charismatic way with her subjects and extemporaneous picture-making promised to whip up the magic.
(“I can get anybody to do anything, and most of the time they don’t even know they did it,” Gearon says.) O.K., kids, now climb into these colored Plexiglas boxes. (“I have thousands of creative thoughts and ideas sprouting through my head,” she says. “There is a whole city living in my head.”) This wouldn’t be her first time at the circus, as they say.
Nor, in conceptual terms, will it transform a bad idea into a good one. For that you would still need to possess a rare set of creative gifts that are still to do with seeing, with deep looking.
Whatever upheavals it has witnessed, photography has endured. It continues to do so, even as we drown in a sea of uploaded images whose sheer quantity mediates against their meaning. Photography, in more ways than one, thrives on a crisis. The instant endures.
I love NY. I’m in love with this place. I enjoy visiting LA, but I don’t miss it all. I have been there three times this year for jobs. Some of my best friends are in LA. I got tired of living there, it turned out to be a very easy life. I found myself slacking when I was there, I felt like I was getting out of touch. I came to NY and something happened here. I embraced this whole idea of networking in a healthy and respectable way, and loved the sense of community among artists and creatives here.
via SHAUN FENN in Conversation with Photographer JOAO CANZIANI | POP | Photographers on Photography.
When everyone has access to the same tools then having a tool isn’t much of an advantage. The industrial age, the age of scarcity, depended in part on the advantages that came with owning tools others didn’t own.
Time for a new advantage. It might be your network, the connections that trust you. And it might be your expertise. But most of all, I’m betting it’s your attitude.
via Seth’s Blog: When everyone has access to the same tools.
Sometimes it is really nice to sit and look at books. Let’s be honest, images look different printed. You can really get a sense of how an artist sees his/her images. While we love the ease of searching for photographers and illustrators online and being able to send creatives links…there is just something more intimate about a printed portfolio.
We like to take our time and talk about each book and about the individual images. We discuss the pagination, composition, consistency, palette, last night’s date, weekend plans, printing quality…you get the idea.
“If the Court rules in favor of Wiley, libraries may be unable to lend books, individuals could be restricted from donating items to charities, and businesses and consumers could be prevented from selling a variety of products, from electronics, to books, to jewelry, to used cars.”
via Huffington Post.
The U.S. Supreme Court Monday left in place a lower court ruling that prevented Illinois from prosecuting people under its Eavesdropping Act if they recorded police officers. A federal appeals court ruled the statute “likely violates” First Amendment rights.
via Poynter..
I think of a photograph as a receiver of sensations. Sensations are intangible. I try to organise them though the act of photography.
–Tom Wood
via wayneford’s posterous.
He said, “Listen, thank you for sending me the magazine. It looked great. You’re the first photographer on his own to send me photographs. I can’t tell you how nice that was, what a gesture it was on your part. Anytime you wanna come back to the Fillmore East, you call me. Here’s my private number. No matter who the act is, you call me.” For the rest of my career, Bill became my surrogate brother and opened up doors to Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, whoever I wanted to photograph.
“I wanted to develop my own desert look,” said Mr. Hoagland, 43. “I was unsure how the journalistic community would take it. It was a form of manipulation. They’d say, ‘That’s not how things look.’ But to me, the way things felt kind of trumped that concern.”
via NYTimes.com.
All photographers have sh*t. Most have lots of it. The trick is never to show it.
via The Online Photographer: The Difference Between a Photographer and an Artist.
An arbitrator has awarded the paper $266,000 to cover the costs of defending itself against a suit by the longtime Hollywood editorial photographer [David Strick].
via LA Observed.
“I’m new to New York so I’ve had a very positive experience with this because it allowed me to meet with a lot of photographers I hadn’t met before because I was primarily a West Coast art producer. I’ve been doing a lot of FotoWorks and was paid $100 for 3 hours. For every terrible photographer you meet, you meet someone you think you might be able to use for something. It could be someone you would never have come in contact with or ignored on email or promo and actually had a face-to-face with them. And I thought it was a good event. The more you can face-to-face with an art buyer or producer I think it’s a win/win. And it’s a good way for artists to connect and get feedback on their portfolio, especially those with no rep.”
–Hilary Jackson, Saatchi & Saatchi
It has always been important for me to wrestle with my influences. In college I studied under Joel Sternfeld. At the time, I was sort of embarrassed by his influence, so I made work that was as different as possible. But that was a waste of time. It was only when I worked through his influence that I really started to grow. Over time, you begin to understand influences and the nuances of what makes your own work different.
Photography is a language. To communicate, you need to learn the language. The history of photography is like the vocabulary and influence is like a dialect. One shouldn’t be embarrassed about having an accent. That said, it has been important for me to reevaluate those influences as the years go by.
Alec Soth via Aperture Foundation.
When it comes down to executing a print campaign, it comes down to cost. Everyone comes to me and asks how we can do it really cheap. I just got a request to do a BMW campaign for 14 shots in 14 locations for $50,000. My boss said ‘we can do that’ and I said there’s no way we can do it unless I’m shooting it.
“We had a shoot with a difficult cost consultant a few years ago and I said I would cut the budget if they came on the shoot so they could be there for the cut catering and all the stuff the client would be upset about and they would have to be there to justify it and they backed down.”
…there were not a lot of great print producers. So we started a list so we didn’t all get burned. It was that bad. I’ve been burned twice and had other people who’ve been burned. They weren’t thorough, not detailed oriented. So yes, we do request producers because there are so many bad ones.
Like for the bear hug picture, which also went viral, I just happened to be in exactly the right place with exactly the right lens, which doesn’t always happen. And sometimes, embarrassingly, I don’t even notice that something is happening until afterward, like with the kissing kids picture that Gawker covered. I would love to say that I saw that happening, but I totally didn’t.
Finally, cast a wide net. I’m not saying to lean on the motordrive, which I think is kind of weird and alienating (you don’t want your subject to feel like they are being machine gunned), but the more pictures you take, the more often you are going to get something great.
via Gizmodo – The Story Behind the Internet’s Most Popular Photo.
Canteen magazine is holding our second photography contest because of our general disdain for photography contests. They tend to be opaque affairs that stifle dialogue—the winners are chosen, no one quite knows why, and 99% of the participants are left without their entrance fee or an explanation. The real winners are the organizations1 that run and profit exorbitantly from them.
We are trying to do something different. Namely, treat our participants as partners. We aim to be fully transparent about the entire selection process, placing the judges’ criteria, biases, and disagreements on full, naked display. The result, we hope, will be an honest and provocative conversation about photography.
via L E N S C R A T C H.