A Conversation with NYC Art Producers. Part I: The Appetizer

My agency just became award crazy. If it’s in Communication Arts, that’s it. They want to work with anyone who has won an award. It is a wave. Now they hear that another creative used someone and won an award and they want to work with them. Five years ago when I started in art buying, I heard ‘we don’t want to use the same as someone else.’ It’s interesting that they don’t want a different look and the benefit of that. But I guess the answer is no. I hope the award thing is a phase. All of them are different though.”

Trish McKeon, The CDM Group

“Don’t you think there’s been a backlash though? With digital, everyone wanted real and authentic, flash on camera, snapshot. But things are shaking out and people seem to want something more. It’s moving back to an appreciation for craft and production. The movement was to move away from an over-produced look.”

Lisa Oropallo, Digitas

via Heather Elder Represents Blog.

You Don’t Need What Other Artists Have

…the important point here is not that you have—or don’t have—what other artists have, but rather that it doesn’t matter. whatever they have is something needed to do their work—it wouldn’t help you in your work even if you had it. their magic is theirs. you don’t lack it. you don’t need it. it has nothing to do with you. period.

Art and Fear via MULL IT OVER.

Iwan Baan’s New York Magazine Cover Shot

Baan made the image Wednesday night after the storm, using the new Canon 1D X with the new 24-70mm lens on full open aperture. The camera was set at 25,000 ISO, with a 1/40th of a second shutter speed.

“[It was] the kind of shot which was impossible to take before this camera was there,” Baan said.

It was more difficult to rent a car than a helicopter in New York the day after Sandy, Baan said. And because there was such limited air traffic so soon after the storm, air traffic control allowed Baan and the helicopter to hover very high above the city, a powerful advantage for the photo.

via Poynter..

The Visual Conservancy’s first annual Sunset Competition

“We realized that there was a viable niche that was not being filled.  We did some informal research and concluded that it was possible to launch a contest for very little investment, charge a fee and then see if you get enough participation to make it worthwhile.  We will, of course, have all works judged by a panel.”

“The glory is, the photographers who win our various categories will have to pay for their own shipping, framing and a special fees relating to their show.  We haven’t decided where we’re going to have a show, but it could be New York—or Hudson.  We have a pretty nice community center.”

via L E N S C R A T C H: Things to submit to…..

This could spell the end of many galleries small and large

Many ridicule Chelsea galleries as flesh-eating pariahs. I think they’re part of our life blood; the collective organism that in many ways makes New York one of the most thriving centers for art on earth. These ridiculed and reviled galleries are places you can go for free, run by strange people with visions who want to help artists by showing and selling their work. It’s become an international pastime to attack these galleries simply for being what they are: large and commercial. I love them. All. More than ever.

via Saltz’s Devastating Visit to Chelsea Galleries — Vulture.

Why digital magazines are thriving

While business models, pricing strategies and monetisation continue to work themselves out, it remains clear that consumers are happy to pay for content on tablets and digital magazines are no exception.

via MediaTel: Newsline.

All Young Photographers Want To Be Famous

The students are less curious about things now. It’s that trophy generation that wants everything handed to them. “Can you tell me who to contact?” Instead of going out and making contacts themselves.

[…]some of them are very, very good. And the ones that are tend to be multi-talented with interest in photography, design, fashion, art. But the people that just want to make pictures and work for National Geographic, they’re not interesting people.

–Dennis Darling

via I Love Texas Photo.

Peter van Agtmael Awarded 2012 W. Eugene Smith Grant

The Board of Trustees of the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund announced that Brooklyn, New York photographer Peter van Agtmael is the recipient of the prestigious 2012 W. Eugene Smith Grant for Humanistic Photography for Disco Night September 11, an American view of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The project earned Mr. van Agtmael a $30,000 grant to continue focussing on these wars, subjects that otherwise would be difficult to finance.

Photos Are Considered The Killer App Of Any Platform, Web Or Mobile

They’re the driving force behind Facebooks social success, and the reason for its blockbuster acquisition of mobile photo-sharing app Instagram, which recently surpassed Twitter in U.S. smartphone engagement. They’re why Marissa Mayer is said to be rethinking Flickr as she takes up the reins at Yahoo; why Google recently bought Snapseed; and why a slew of hot Internet startups from Tumblr to Pinterest to Camera+ have gained popularity. Even Apple introduced photo-stream sharing capabilities in its latest version of iOS.

via Fast Company.

Editors And Designers Should Sit Next To Each Other

“I have always believed that the old magazine-manufacturing assembly plant, where you get some words, you send them over to the art department and they send it over to photo, just didn’t make any sense. So I made a conscious decision that editors, photo editors, writers and designers should all get mixed together — and particularly editors and designers should sit next to each other — because they influence each other’s thinking.”

via Josh Tyrangiel Is Editor of the Year | Media – Advertising Age.

Art vs. Craft

I am not, in fact, an artist at all. At best, assignment photographers are craftsmen, not artists, solving other people’s problems and putting other people’s ideas into effect in the most timely and cost-effective way possible; to think otherwise is delusional. Sure, part of the job is bringing a personal point of view to the party, in fact that’s often the reason you’re hired, but a point of view is not art, and there’s never the degree of autonomy and self-direction that I think of as a precondition for something to qualify as a truly artistic endeavour.

via Art vs. Craft | planet shapton.

Poshlost: fake emotion, unearned nostalgia

All bad photos are alike, but each good photograph is good in its own way. The bad photos have found their apotheosis on social media, where everybody is a photographer and where we have to suffer through each other’s “photography” the way our forebears endured terrible recitations of poetry after dinner. Behind this dispiriting stream of empty images is what Russians call poshlost: fake emotion, unearned nostalgia. According to Nabokov, poshlost “is not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive.” He knows us too well.

via The New Inquiry.

Why Polaroid Was the Apple of Its Time

Eastman Kodak jumped into instant photography in 1976, and Polaroid sued; the two spent 14-and-a-half years in court, and Polaroid won $925 million, the largest patent settlement ever paid out. Or rather, it was the largest amount until last month, when Apple v. Samsung overtook it. And I’ll tell you, in both cases, the vigor of the lawsuit was in part driven by outrage on the part of the founder. Land wanted to go hard against Kodak because its system was, he felt, a less elegant ripoff of Polaroid’s.

via Wired Design | Wired.com.

2012 MacArthur Foundation Winners

An-My Le, 52, Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. Photographer at Bard College who approaches the subjects of war and landscape from new perspectives to create images rich with layers of meaning.

Uta Barth, 54, Los Angeles, Calif. Conceptual photographer who explores the nature of vision and the difference between seen reality and how a camera records it.

via The Associated Press.