A federal court in New York has dismissed a $28 million defamation lawsuit against photographer Jason Lee Parry on a legal technicality: He’s a California resident, the court said, so he’s not subject to jurisdiction under New York law.
via PDN Pulse.
As it happens, the television networks that actively supported SOPA and PIPA didn’t take advantage of their broadcast credibility to press their case. That’s partly because “old media” draws a line between “news” and “editorial.” Apparently, Wikipedia and Google don’t recognize the ethical boundary between the neutral reporting of information and the presentation of editorial opinion as fact.
via NYTimes.com.
I wish I could scale back the amount of time I spend in front of a screen. It’s beginning to define what “being a photographer” is like these days.
There’s nothing wrong with not being any good at photography. Everybody started out bad and none of us does all aspects of it well. But it’s a crying shame to want to be good at it, to spend time and money trying to be good at it, and not getting any better.
This isn’t like teaching a child to read. Positive reinforcement is your enemy. Your Facebook friends, your Twitter followers… hate you. Instead of taking ten seconds to say. “This doesn’t work. You need to do better”. They readily push that “like” button, because it’s easy and they hope to get the same from you, but also because they’re cowards.
via Mostly True.
One thing I can say is that having every photographer’s website at my fingertips is wonderful. We have many shoots all around the country in small towns. The Internet is the only hope I have in finding photographers in these areas of the country. There’s also nothing that impresses me more than when I meet with a photographer to review his or her book and an iPad is pulled out. It just makes viewing a photographer’s work so much easier and it shows that the photographer likes to keep things simple.
— William Morel, Photo Editor at Country Living
…[newspapers’] race for added sales is reflected editorially in the production of journals which more and more represent, not an editor’s notion of a good paper, but a circulation manager’s notion of a good seller.”
via Brain Pickings.
We now live under the hybrid tyranny of middlebrow. No serious person believes the Oscars are a list of the best films, or the Grammys the best music. Charitably one could say they represent a kind of averaging out, an index of the taste of a group of informed people. At worst, critics acting en masse, with one eye on what’s popular and one eye on what’s good, end up praising work that doesn’t upset them. That’s why there’s so much stuff that looks like art, smells like art, but when you bite into it, it just tastes of cardboard.
— Hari Kunzru, writing in The Observer, via The Great Leap Sideways.
Over the last couple years, I have seen the number of photographers attempting to shoot liquids has exploded, some good, and some bad, but mostly very inspiring. I truly believe that there is room for everyone in the industry. The competition and creativity only inspire me to create better work.
…she continues to identify as an amateur, or at least retains certain amateur tics. Her portrait subjects are centered in the frame and square to the camera. She shares details of her working process on her blog and eschews tightly edited, gallery-style installations.
[…] It’s fair to say that Ms. Strauss has accomplished more in the past decade than many artists do in a lifetime. With more gumption than wherewithal, she spun a single idea into a magnum opus.
via Review – NYTimes.com.
People told me I wouldn’t find a true style for five or ten years, if not a lifetime. It’s held true. Just when I think I have it where I want it, I look back and think it’s crap. I would stress patience and not paying too much attention to other people’s work. Shoot because you love it; shoot the stuff that resonates with you.
I try to shoot in a way that pleases me and hope to connect with art directors and photo editors who resonate with the same things. Those are the relationships that will be fruitful and the jobs that will turn out well.
via The Great Discontent: Eric Ryan Anderson. thx, Charlie
Part of an artists job is to edit during their lifetime. The fact that she made the decision not to allows full exposure. And the rarity of this collection is that it’s a complete archive: the good, the bad, the learning curve, the thematic themes that cropped up. So it’s actually very fortuitous she didn’t edit. Artists are known to be their own worst editors.
One of these assignments was to photograph the Russian composer, Igor Stravinsky, which resulted in one of Newman’s most iconic images, although at the time it was rejected for publication.
Almost any half-decent reproduction of the Game of Madness or Blind Woman conveys their power. A photograph by definition is a reproduction rather than an original, a reproduction that carries and confronts us directly with an actual chemical trace of a human being in a particular place at a particular time. If we pause to think about that for a moment, we must admit that this is awesome, but it is an awesomeness of a totally different order to the painterly wonders of a Holbein or a Rembrandt.
The day’s final presentation was eagerly awaited. David Lachapelle! Everyone was expecting slightly pretentious extravagance. We were going to show him, the King of Photoshop, what a “real” photo was. Every one was nicely surprised. Lachapelle was very much himself. Humble, funny, immensely cultivated, he shocked everyone! At the end of his interview, he showed us the making of his Pieta. When spectators realized there was NO photo manipulation involved, he triumphed!”
Jean-François Leroy via La Lettre de la Photographie.
The opening-night film comes to Sundance with the kind of publicity for which Harvey Weinstein would pay dearly. However, Lauren Greenfield’s genius move lay not in PR strategy but in her choice of subject. David Siegel’s the kind of guy who not only thinks it’s sensible to build a 90,000-square-foot mansion (just before the real estate bubble burst, as it happens), but also thinks it’s a good idea to file a lawsuit threatening Greenfield and Sundance the week before the film premieres, complaining that the movie makes him look bad. (Never mind that the attendant press attention and public record about his $11 million foreclosure in May 2011, serves to make him look… well, bad.) All that aside, Greenfield also has an eye for candy-colored disaster that is never anything less than incisive and entertaining.
via indieWIRE.
A lot of what you do at National Geographic is you’re an arbiter or taste. And of course what we want to do, I don’t want to be elitist, unapproachable, inaccessible, but I want this to be an experience of high taste. That you can’t get any place else, and of course when you tap into that gut reaction knowing that there are times you’re going to be wrong, admit your wrong, move on, learn. It’s very analogous to being a photographer in a field, and everyday making decisions.
via Interview: Chris Johns, Editor, National Geographic Magazine | burn magazine.
It may take several years for a beginner to earn a living as a performer. You must have a substantial cushion of savings to fund your quest and/or secure consistent alternate work to support you during the early stages of your career.Even the most talented performers may do everything right and still not end up with acting jobs. Success in this business is an unpredictable combination of talent, training, residence, “look”, energy, attitude, and the completely uncontrollable factor — luck!You must not take rejection personally! Even a working professional may not earn their income performing in just one medium.
I don’t like to hurt people. I go after something and I start pointing the camera at somebody, looking for those hard, edgy things I know I am going to find. My pictures will be out of bounds in terms of the convention of how this person wants to be represented. It gives me pause. I don’t feel I have the right to do that. But I do it nevertheless. After all, a picture is not a murder. It is simply a moment which suggests so many things.