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THINGS I READ
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This is a selection of articles from several blogs and on-line magazines I read regularly. Hope you find them interesting too. Please note that this page changes constantly so check it out regularly if you don't want to miss updates, also you can subscribe to the RSS feed by clicking in the icon below.
» Review: Eastward Bound by Marco van DuyvendijkRead on 21 May 2010 | 10:39 pmVia Joerg Colberg
Whatever it is that can happen between a photographer and another person whose portrait is being taken might be undefinable (though one can try), but when it's there you can see it in the picture: It is as if somehow the viewer is becoming an accomplice of sorts, someone who is entering a very intimate space to which access usually is denied. And you can't pull back the curtain - so to speak - to reveal how it's done, because the levers and smoke and noise are not the essential parts needed to get that good portrait (even though pretending you need all that bits makes for a colourful narrative). Marco van Duyvendijk's Eastward Bound (which you can order via the artist's website), a retrospective of ten years of his work, beginning in 1999, offers a few cases in point. (more) Retrospectives, of course, are just that: Collections of photographs that were taken in some period of time, which usually means they contain good work plus, well, the other stuff. Which parts of Eastward Bound you will end up liking probably depends at least in part on your personal preferences. I mostly gravitated towards the portraits - of which there are lots in the book. Eastward Bound covers photography taken in places such as Romania, Mongolia or China. In many cases, the photographer revisited a location year after year, which produced some very interesting results. For me, the clear center piece of the book is a series of portraits of a very young woman called Oana, who lives in Romania. Over the period of ten years you get to witness Oana being pregnant and/or nursing or tending to young children. Of course, photographers have done this before, producing a series of photographs of the same person over a long period of time, but (sorry Rineke and Nick!) I've never seen it done so well. And by "so well" I don't mean the technical aspects, I mean the emotional quality of the images. They're just stunning. Unfortunately, I can't find the images on the photographer's website. In terms of the portraiture, in most cases the one-on-one portraits in Eastward Bound for me clearly stand out. For those alone, you want to buy the book. If you didn't have those portraits, the book still would be something I could easily recommend. As I said, it's a retrospective, so some work you might not find that exciting. But all in all, Eastward Bound is filled to the brim with great photography. The book can be ordered through the website, but it seems larger parts of the site are only in Dutch. It's pretty straightforward to go through the process (but then I can read Dutch very well, so I might not be the best person to say something about this). It's probably easiest to email the photographer if you have trouble finding your way around... » TPP TEN!Read on 21 May 2010 | 9:59 pmVia Kate Steciw 1. If you are in NY, check out the AdiCup where on Saturday, teams made up of New York creatives/football enthusiasts will be squaring off for the chance to compete with teams from Tokyo, Berlin and London at the finals in South Africa, which coincides with the World Cup. 2. Marina Abramović people. The days are numbered! *Note: Bjork smiled while all you other wimps wept!
3. Take a moment to reflect on the accomplishments of the The NYMPHOTO Collective. They are closing shop and shutting down their blog. (very, very sad but best of luck to you ladies!) 4. Get printing because The Exhibition Lab will host a portfolio review on June 27th and submissions are due June 12th. 5. This should be a good one: Out of The Box: Analogue Methods to Bridge the Digital Divide at the School of Visual Arts. Monday, 6 – 8pm. 6. Machotaildrop, A film by Corey Adams and Alex Craig premiers tonight at Tribeca Cinemas with showings at 7:00, 7:30, 9:00, 9:30. 7. I always say that all you need to be free in NYC is a five bucks a bike and a camera. I know you all have camera’s and likely a coule of bucks but if you need a bike or a tune up, go here. They are the best. 8. If allergies have got you home bound this weekend, spend some time pondering this. 9. Scattered Light, a participatory photography project opens at the Minneapolis gallery Art of This – this Saturday May 22nd.
10. If you find yourself here, GO OUTSIDE AND GET SOME SUN!! » Prashant PanjiarRead on 21 May 2010 | 3:02 pmVia Geoffrey Hiller
Prashant Panjiar (b. 1957, India) is a self-taught photographer. His first self-financed project that received acclaim was his work for the book “Malkhan – the story of a bandit king”. The same year his work in Cambodia was published as “The Survivors – Kampuchea 1984″. He has worked as photographer and editor in mainstream Indian media and more recently returned to independent photography. He divides his time between working as a photojournalist on assignments often collaborating with non-profits, and working on his own projects. His most recent exhibition “Pan India, a shared habitat” has just completed its tour in India. Panjiar has served on the jury of the World Press Photo Awards in Amsterdam in 2002 & the China International Press Photo Competition in 2005. About the Photograph: “Arun Tupatkar’s suicide on 23 March 2010 was the 14th in the village of Pimpri Kalga. It was late in the evening when we, the writer and I, arrived there to meet with his widow Rajni. Relatives and neighbours were visiting the family to offer their condolences – amongst them were a few other farmers’ suicide widows of Rajni’s locality. I asked Rajni if I could photograph her with them. The rubble of an aborted construction in the courtyard of the home became the setting. The failing light, the shallow depth of field, the anonymity of the other widows all helped focus on Rajni’s stoic grief. Though shot in a regular 35mm format I knew, even as made the image, that I would need to crop it almost square.” “Over seven thousand farmers have committed suicide in the Vidarbha region of the Indian province of Maharashtra since 1997. Economic liberalization with no safety net, higher costs of genetically modified seeds & agricultural inputs, truant monsoons & depleted water-tables are some of the reasons for these suicides. Coming after two failed harvests, over 200 farmers have already killed themselves in the first three months of 2010. As the sowing season approaches, more will follow. I prefer to speak about the larger social issues through environmental portraits, telling the stories of ordinary people. I believe having people look into the camera makes the viewer confront them directly, removing the photographer. The unsaid is left to be interpreted by the viewer.”
      » Navy Oarsmen: 1896Read on 21 May 2010 | 11:44 amVia Dave  Aboard the U.S.S. New York circa 1896. "A champion boat crew." 8x10 inch dry plate glass negative by Edward Hart, Detroit Publishing Co. View full size. » A Conversation with Yann GrossRead on 20 May 2010 | 9:00 pmVia Joerg Colberg
Yann Gross is one of the two winners of this year's Hyères Photography Festival. In this conversation, Yann and I talk about the background of his work. » THEORY: "Paul Graham - Sliding Sight, Setting Suns" (2008)Read on 20 May 2010 | 12:30 pmVia Doug Rickard  Excerpt from 'A Thing There Was That Mattered', from the book 'Paul Graham' published by steidlMACK, 2009By David Chandler ‘He is not heroic, he is aware that modern life is full of nondescript melancholy, of discomfort, of queer relationships which beget emotions that are half-ludicrous and yet painful and that an inconclusive ending for all these impulses is much more usual than anything extreme.’ Virgina Woolf, on the short stories of Anton Chekhov I’ve said it before, I do not credit the epiphanic, the seeing through that reveals all, triggered by a mastering of detail…Life’s moments truly come at us heedless, not at the bidding of a gilded fragrance.’ Richard Ford, The Lay of The Land Paul Graham’s route-less journeys around America that had begun back in the summer of 2004, went on during 2005 and for most of 2006. He continued driving, to and from places, visiting and not visiting; the locations, towns and cities becoming less and less relevant and more and more representative. He would drive, and stop, and walk, sometimes for a few minutes, at other times for hours, maintaining an unstructured and intuitive itinerary, and photographing all the while, keeping restraint in mind, never dwelling too long on any one subject or being drawn too far beyond that initial point of fascination. It is from these underlying principles that A Shimmer of Possibility emerged in 2007, its monumental 12-volumes spanning the nation with single or interlocking narratives of life as it passes by or as it is happened upon by Graham and his camera. The volumes range between relatively extended passages of more than twenty photographs over sixty pages, to a book that cradles just one picture, a story with no beginning and no end. We might take his four hour drifting walk along Everett Avenue in the Chelsea district of Boston on 26th August 2006, near the end of his work on Shimmer, as in some ways representative of Graham’s evolved approach. Over seventeen photographs his attention is taken here and there, his eye is flitting around, alighting on something: a hesitation, a picture, and then moving on. People cross the street, they get into their cars; the American flag hangs in the background; a street corner outside the Chelsea Trial Court coheres momentarily as a tableau, a brief mirage of American photography’s past; signs declare Cheques Cashed, Dunkin Donuts, 7 Eleven, the Elegance Salon. Graham takes a few steps to follow a young mother carrying a child back to her car: two pictures and then across the street to notice… well, not very much, a non-descript slice of time, an unanswered question. Then in the Boston book, in large pictures at each end of this sequence a butterfly floats up in solid blue space, as if to speak of the lightness of everything, this ephemeral watching, and perhaps also to let us know there is a season behind it all, that despite the strange docile weight of everything on the ground, Spring is in the air. Graham has said that A Shimmer of Possibility was in part inspired by Chekhov’s short stories, which achieve the greatest atmosphere from ordinary situations, the most vivid sense of time, place and character, with the most minimal of means, and with plain words beautifully arranged often in long lilting sentences. Whilst too literal a comparison would be unhelpful, Graham’s photographic sequences do have a Chekhovian pace and phrasing, one that makes effective use of the pause – in Graham’s case blank pages between images – and that strikes a balance between formlessness and structure. In the Shimmer books, formless photographs, or perhaps more accurately photographs where form is incidental, are variously sized and irregularly placed on the page but in carefully planned succession. The sudden shifts of subject and viewpoint and the use of repetition deliberately dislodge the narrative flow but also allow us to share in Graham’s watchful fascination. Virginia Woolf, in her essay ‘Tchehov’s Questions’, noted something similar in Chekhov’s ‘choice of incidents and endings’ that unsettle the reader, giving the impression ‘that the ground upon which we expected to make safe landing has been twitched from under us.’ But somehow, she argued, things imperceptibly ‘arrange themselves, and we come to feel that the horizon is much wider from this point of view; we have gained an astonishing sense of freedom.’ In much of this freedom, this opening out of photographic seeing, however, the forlorn presences of American Night reappear, the poor and the destitute who inhabit the streets that Graham came to walk along almost everywhere he went. Now, as the significance and importance of the single image falls away into what has been referred to as a ‘filmic haiku’, the desperate circumstances of these people is elaborated and reinforced as Graham unravels the visual threads of his various encounters. Typically in Washington an African American woman with dyed red hair sits eating a take-away on the street. The first picture, a profile portrait, registers discomfort, both hers and now ours as onlookers. Graham then notes the meal on her knees in its polystyrene tray, hands cupped around it; then a similar picture, though larger, and shifted very slightly to the left. Two photographs of discarded bones and a soda can follow, thrown randomly onto the sidewalk and similarly framed by the camera but in shifting focus, and then Graham moves back, to the woman smoking after the meal, her fingers, the cigarette, her inhaling cheeks, crystal clear to us as we look over her shoulder. Throughout this Shimmer volume, interlacing pictures from Washington and South Broad, New Orleans (2004-06), Graham leads us through these dispiriting details, in which a melancholy languor persists, rising in three pictures into an extraordinary louring sunset and then down onto a New Orleans sidewalk again where some fluorescent red glace cherries seem to be melting away in the sun. Graham’s intention here is ambivalent. So much of what we see seems to suggest critical social observation, but then the atmosphere lifts for a moment and Graham diverts the attention away on a tangent as things occur and are seen. Nothing seems resolved, no particular side is taken, everything is inconclusive but there are constantly questions. Again Graham’s photographic attention here seems rooted in something Katherine Mansfield said about Chekhov: ‘What the writer does is not so much solve the question but…put the question. There must be the question put. That seems to me a very nice dividing line between the true and false writer.’ .jpg) Louisiana (Camarro), 2005In American Night we might say that those questions were more emphatically put, and that the structures of the work prompted resolution. Here, amid the irregular cadences of Shimmer, ideas are framed with pellucidity and lightness; photographs are the conscious form that ideas then permeate. John Szarkowski was fond of quoting a conversation between Ducasse and Mallarme, where Ducasse says to his old friend: ‘You know I’ve got a lot of good ideas for poems, but the poems are never very good.’ To which Mallarme says: ‘Of course, you don’t make poems out of ideas, you make poems out of words.’ In thinking of this we might look at Graham’s photograph from a liquor store in Washington, that shows worn shelves of bottles, mostly spirits, aligned in a slight diagonal across the picture, but which, with blurred objects breaking the frame and the foreground, is not conventionally ‘well composed’: again a casual thought quickly noted. The photograph is packed with information about what liquor is on offer and what it might cost. We learn, for example, that a bottle of Captain Morgan Spiced Rum is $3.99, or that you can buy a similar sized bottle of 100 Pipers Scotch Whiskey for $4.99. Set within pictures of those depressed and torpid streets, the sense here, of course, is of cheap liquor as a kind of last gasp remedial help, the store might just as well function as a chemist amid all this social fracturing. And yet there is something less accountably compelling about this image, given some emphasis in its Shimmer volume. When Walker Evans took pictures of grocer’s stores in the 1930s it was not just the visible index of goods and the delineating of a local culture from that which held his attention, but the formal arrangements therein, the sculptural form and collaged signage holding such a wealth of accumulated detail that he knew would accord so well with the facility of the camera to describe and to preserve it. In Graham’s photograph there is an echoing of Evans, indeed the ‘vintage’ character and labelling of the bottles gives the whole image a scent of the past. The fascination here for the photographer, though caught up in the general conditions outside on the street, is equally in information so compacted and richly coloured, the textures of a threadbare reality appearing so momentarily concise and tangible. Again in American Night, Graham was at pains to expose the flip side of this reality in a form of visual collision, murky fragility against too perfect clarity. In a shimmer of possibility those collisions, while still there to be negotiated, are less forcefully directed. When some semblance of that suburban idyll appears again, for example, as it does in Graham’s tree-green volume of photographs from New England taken in 2006, the tone is more ambiguous. The atmosphere in the wooded streets and in the grounds of substantial residencies is exactly balanced on that line between cloying sweetness and something more sturdy and genuinely beautiful that Richard Ford used to set the scene of his novel Independence Day: ‘In Haddam, summer floats over tree-softened streets like a sweet lotion balm from a careless, languorous god, and the world falls in tune with its own mysterious anthems.’ Again it is a spotless world but now lurking here are also notes of doubt and uncertainty. As Graham walks and seems to set his camera adrift in that balm of light and air, he meets an elderly woman retrieving her post. Three photographs ensue: a full figure, a close-up portrait – the woman, eyes closed, with a vaguely haughty expression – and then Graham’s camera angles down to her feet, in old pink slippers against the grey concrete drive. The photographs undermine the woman’s place, her real-estate security, and we are left more with the sense of her vulnerability and the shared indistinctness of ageing. Now the impenetrable time-locked poise of these New England houses and lawns has become invested with fragility, and as Graham moves on another question hovers in front of the lens. As Lawrence Weschler once wrote on Robert Irwin: ‘Seeing is forgetting the name of the things one sees.’ For Graham a shimmer of possibility embodied this kind of forgetting, but it is also a remembering, a rediscovery of and a reattachment to photography’s essential mechanism, and a letting go of the desire to mould that to an inordinate artistic will. As a form of new maturity in his work Shimmer allows the world to cohere and fade in all its diversity, it does not shy away from the hard and harsh words, the inconsolable moods that it may never brighten, but neither does it self-consciously avoid what is plainly inspirational, both within and beyond human scale. The matter-of-factness of Graham’s democratic, inclusive seeing simultaneously reactivates and expands the tired, over-used formulas of the photographic language, introducing a new syntax and disarming the cliché with bare economy and unflinching emphasis. ‘He sinks shots one-handed, two-handed, underhanded, flat-footed, and out of the pivot, jump and set. Flat and soft the ball lifts. That his touch still lives in his hands elates him. He feels liberated from long gloom.’ John Updike, Rabbit, Run Sometime during the Autumn of 2005 Graham found himself wandering in the suburbs of a town in East Texas. The streets were like those you might find anywhere in America, modest clap-board housing, simple back lots, a few cars; a poor district but not constrained by space, with lawns and trees and its own sense of order lightly applied. It had been a fine day, but the sky was now growing pale and translucent with the fading light. Stopping to look between the houses, across some unkempt grass and through the almost bare trees, Graham photographs the setting sun, a disc of white light rapidly drawing heat from the last of the day as it hides itself beyond the horizon. The trees blacken into silhouettes, laying a filigree pattern over the grey blue sky and its glowing ember hearth in the distance. The scene is deserted, a quiet evening, there are no lights on anywhere and nobody seems to be about. It is this darkening stillness that registers in the photograph we see reproduced in a shimmer of possibility. The image is printed large on the page, about 15 x 12”, but peering into it is hard on the eye. Then turning the page a very similar picture appears, taken from a few steps back, though now printed smaller, producing a frame on frame, a doubling as if for emphasis, but also it is a form of checking, as if something may have been missed, the image as a kind of premonition.  New Orleans (Woman Eating), 2004.jpg) American Night #41, 2002 What Graham at first didn’t see and what can easily be overlooked in his photographs, even turning back to the larger picture, is that some way across the grass below the sinking sun are two figures in white tee-shirts appearing either side of a basketball stand. Once he notices this Graham goes to investigate, following this human connection into the next street. And in his subsequent picture we find him looking at two teenagers, brother and sister, shooting hoops on a broad road in the shading of twilight. Graham has already been seen and they know he has begun to photograph them, but they carry on playing regardless. He moves closer, watching and photographing their leaps and turns, the boy jumping and touching the hoop. It’s an athletic display but not a performance, and not dramatised by the camera; this is something fleeting, it happens and Graham responds. Then he stands alongside the girl, the younger one, and photographs her as she prepares a set. She makes the shot, arms raised, feet planted, perfectly balanced. And then in the next picture we see her, ball gone, watching, peering herself in that murky light, the success or failure of her shot is unknown and unseen to us, and maybe that is the perfect point to leave her. ‘They went on living. They would grow old. A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved…’ Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway A few minutes has passed and Graham has made five pictures. The results are a pleasure to see, as this scene evidently was for the photographer, a slice of life that materialises and then subsides, and we go on. But the thought of that energy, the joy of that movement lingers like the sunset itself. Then in the same book, after another blank page pause, Graham relocates us to North Dakota. It is twilight again and we are looking at a gas station, free standing in the open landscape, reflecting the late sun, an orange and red canopy on six tall narrow pillars, a kind of magical stage set complete with its own grid of spotlights. Graham stands back to take in the scene, to isolate and bear witness to the gas station as a vision and to underscore its status as an icon of the American landscape, the familiar trope of artists from Hopper to Ed Ruscha, and a something of a photographers’ totem, from Walker Evans onwards. Through several hours and seven pictures Graham watches as this theatre of nowhere plays out in the setting sun. His main subjects are still and in turn his thoughts and photographs are less incidental, more measured and reflective, as if tracing over the contours of a familiar map but one that he has rediscovered in a dream. Cars pull in and leave, a gleaming red and white pick-up parks and Graham takes an admiring portrait, and then he sees another, they appear like the figments of the road, of a particular kind of American mobility that trails across the continent and back in time. In the last two photographs the sky’s hues deepen; the dying sun gives a last magenta glow to the thinning clouds, and the gas station, deserted now, takes on a painterly softness and an air of mystery in the night. Then for the final image, Graham tilts the camera upward to catch the risen moon, half shadowed by the earth but with its own landscape faintly seen in the expanding atmospheric space. It is a significant connection and another minor crescendo, one of the many in A Shimmer of Possibility; recalling that same sense of affirmation that elevated Graham’s first pictures of the man mowing in Pittsburgh, that same sense of wonder and transcendence. In the linking of these pictures with those of the young basketball players, Graham makes more of their vigour, building a kind of poetic energy that is understated yet finally unrestrained. At the end of his short story The Student, in a paragraph that is also one long winding walk of a sentence, Chekhov similarly raises his hands in unapologetic celebration: ‘And when he was crossing the river on the ferry, and then when he was walking up the hill, looking down at his own village and across to the west, where the cold crimson sunset was glowing in a narrow band, he realised that truth and beauty, which had guided human life in that garden and at the high priest’s, had continued to do so without a break until the present day, and had clearly always constituted the most important elements in human life, and on earth in general; and a feeling of youth, health, and strength – he was only twenty two years old – and an inexpressibly sweet expectation of happiness, of unfathomable, mysterious happiness, gradually overcame him, and life seemed entrancing and miraculous to him, and full of sublime meaning.' Anton Chekov, The Student http://www.paulgrahamarchive.com/ ASX CHANNEL: Paul Graham For more of AMERICAN SUBURB X, become a fan on FACEBOOK and follow ASX on TWITTER. For inquiries, please contact American Suburb X at: info@americansuburbx.com.  » Christopher SimsRead on 19 May 2010 | 3:02 pmVia Geoffrey Hiller
Christopher Sims (b. 1972, USA) has an undergraduate degree in history from Duke University, a master’s degree in visual communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a M.F.A. in studio art from the Maryland Institute College of Art. His work has been exhibited at the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Houston Center for Photography, the Light Factory, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, and the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art. His recent project on Guantanamo Bay was featured in The Washington Post, the BBC World Service and others. In 2010, he was selected as the recipient of the Baum Award for Emerging American Photographers. Christopher currently teaches photography at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. About the Photograph:
“In 2007, I made a series of portraits at the “Virtual Army Experience,” a traveling road show and recruiting event the U.S. Army takes cross-country to NASCAR races and air shows. Participants wait in line to enter a large tent, where they play video games produced by the army and meet decorated soldiers who have returned from service at the fronts in Iraq and Afghanistan. These portraits remind us of the computer and television screens through which most of us have lived the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The army reveals itself to be a keen reader of American adolescent emotions and passions, and employs this understanding through a brilliantly designed and bloodless simulation of the thrill of the fight. The portraits also offer us a glimpse into a future that some leaders and strategists have begun calling “the long war,” and suggest to us the young people who will enlist in the coming years in the real army.”
      » New exhibition in Barcelona: DomesticRead on 18 May 2010 | 5:44 pmVia Zoe
Thanks to Arianna Rinaldo for informing us about this expo - Arianna is consultant photo editor at D-La Repubblica delle Donne, the weekend supplement of the newspaper La Repubblica in Milan and director of Ojodepez, the documentary photography magazine published quarterly by LaFabrica, Madrid. Arianna also judged the World Press Photo awards in 2009. She'll be reviewing portfolios at Lens Culture FotoFest Paris 2010.
» Serkan TaycanRead on 18 May 2010 | 5:42 pmVia Joerg Colberg
About his series Homeland Serkan Taycan writes "With the passage of time I have, of course, changed a lot. But my homeland of Anatolia, which I left behind, has also changed. During my recent travels in Anatolia, I have encountered many images, situations, and people that aroused both feelings of intimate familiarity and great distance in me. These contradictory feelings have forced me to dwell on the issue of 'belonging'. From this, new questions about 'Homeland' have emerged." (source) » Panos PicturesRead on 17 May 2010 | 9:45 pmVia Tim Clark  © Yann Mingard & Alban Kalkulya / Panos Pictures I´ve long been an avid admirer of Panos Pictures. Both the breadth and quality of the photography they champion, as well their steadfast commitment to the most important social issues of our times is unparalleled. As part of their ambitious new development plans, Panos recently launched a new look agency, building on its reputation and commitment to global social photography and positioning itself as a leader in visual communications. As it prepares to celebrate its 25th anniversary in 2011, Panos has invested in a series of innovations aimed at securing the continued growth of the agency and providing a superior service to its photographers and clients. A key development is the creation of Panos Profile, a fluid collective of around 20 photographers at any one time, allowing the agency to represent these photographers more comprehensively during key moments in their careers. Panos Network will represent the wider group of professional photographers working on assignments and stories around the world. Joining the agency as director of Panos Profile is Francesca Sears, former director of Magnum Photos in London. She says, "Panos Profile represents some of the best of what the agency has to offer – a dedication to quality, independence and ingenuity. It is an opportunity to work more closely with our photographers, building their profiles as authors in their own right but at the same time communicating our strengths as a photographic brand to new and wider audiences." Peruvian photographer Moises Saman, one of the first cohort of Profile photographers, writes "For me, being part of the Profile group will bring a sense of community and a positive influence to our creative process within the agency as a whole. I look forward to seeing current projects by other photographers and drawing inspiration from the diversity of their work." Other changes at the agency are showcased in the newly launched website. As well as the archive, the site is a platform for the hundreds of photo stories, exhibitions, multimedia, video and long term documentary work produced by Panos photographers. "With this new site we wish to clearly identify what Panos stands for and promote our full range of visual communications services," says agency director Adrian Evans. "It is designed to reinforce our commitment to our clients, providing them with the very best photography and production values, pursuing stories beyond the media agenda." The revamped site has improved functionality, with easy to view photographer portfolios and story slideshows, news feeds, interactive multimedia, and a live location map allowing clients to keep track of the whereabouts of Panos photographers. Take a quick tour of what the new website has to offer:
 » Electronic MagazinesRead on 17 May 2010 | 9:26 pmVia A Photo Editor If you’re interested in how magazines are approaching the e-reader market (iPad for now) this exchange between Josh Quittner, editor at large for digital development at Time Inc and Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine is pretty interesting. Jarvis was critical of the Time app (”I think the TIME Magazine app is the most sinful piece of shit ever“) for how walled in it was. Quittner responds on The Third Screen:
In the comments someone asks Quittner about the price which in my mind is something that needs to be ironed out quickly in the early stages of e-readers.
To which he responds:
On the pricing front I was surprised to see National Geographic going for fifteen bucks because I know they’ve got a lot of interactive stuff baked into their Zinio offering. It turns out all the Zinio magazines are priced the same as the print subscriptions (Esquire is eight bucks for a year) and that the newest release of their app has solved a ton of issues and is running quite well now. Most of the magazines seem to be about a buck and issue which is not bad even if they are only scanning the pages.
Based on the number of titles at Zinio it will be difficult for other magazines to charge more for their electronic version. Will be interesting to see how this plays out. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Looking to buy a new website? » Fulvio Bonavia, MilanRead on 17 May 2010 | 8:37 pmVia Alison Zavos
 » Livia CoronaRead on 17 May 2010 | 3:01 pmVia Geoffrey Hiller
Livia Corona (b.1975, Mexico) is a graduate of Art Center College of Design and a recent Guggenheim Fellow. Corona’s photographs have been exhibited nationally and internationally. Her photography and texts have been featured in numerous publications. Corona was winner of the Architecture Category of the Sony World Photography Award in Cannes, winner of the Architecture Category of the Paris Prix de la Photographie, a finalist for ING’s REAL Photography Award in Rotterdam and nominated by the jury of the Lucie Awards in New York as “International Photographer of the Year. Her books include: Of People and Houses (HDA, Austria, 2009) and Enanitos Toreros (PowerHouse Books, New York, 2008). She lives in New York and Mexico City. About the Photograph: “Since 2006, through my project “Two Million Homes for Mexico” I’ve explored the circumstances related to massive housing developments in Mexico. In remote, agrarian lands throughout the country, from 2000 to this date, almost three million nearly identical homes have been built in groups of 100 to 80,000. When driving through these neighborhoods, one sees endless rows of 100 to 200 square foot homes where constructions have reduced what is actual community building to the mere construction of housing. This type of urbanization prototype, now prevalent in Mexico, marks a profound change in the shaping of our experience as citizens of a broader world. In my photographs I am particularly interested in the effects of these neighborhoods as cultural backdrop, and their role in forming the perspective of the younger generations who live in these neighborhoods through key formative years. This photograph is of a neighborhood of over 47,000 nearly identical homes.”
» On the Beach: 1904Read on 17 May 2010 | 12:00 amVia Dave  Old Orchard, Maine, circa 1904. "Beach in front of Sea Foam House." 8x10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company. View full size. » Eric Bouvet multimedia slideshow: Into The Valley Of The BeastRead on 16 May 2010 | 10:14 pmVia Jim
© Eric Bouvet / VII Network The latest multimedia slideshow from VII The Magazine: Members of the French Operational Mentor and Liaison Team, O.M.L.T., and the Afghan National Army share a base in the Alasai Valley, some 50 kilometers east of Kabul. The Alasai Valley is a stronghold for the Taliban and various other allied insurgent groups. The O.M.L.T. soldiers live with and train Afghan forces here. » Boru O’Brien O’Connell, New YorkRead on 14 May 2010 | 6:52 pmVia Alison Zavos
 » Sol NeelmanRead on 14 May 2010 | 3:02 pmVia Geoffrey Hiller
Sol Neelman (b. 1970, USA) is a failed athlete turned sports photographer living in Portland, Oregon. A journalism graduate from the University of Oregon, he began his newspaper career soon after not being selected in the 1994 NBA draft. Three years photographing at a small, community paper in McMinnville, Ore. led to seven years of service at a major metro, The Oregonian. In 2007, he was part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team recognized for Breaking News Reporting. Soon thereafter, he left his staff position at The O to pursue a photo book project on sports culture around the world. His work has appeared in National Geographic, ESPN the Mag, SI, Rolling Stone, People, Newsweek, and TIME. About the Photograph: “Frankly, this image is me trying to put my personal spin on a killer photo I saw taken by my good friend Tom Boyd. The Portland Timbers soccer team has a small but fiercely loyal following, known as The Timbers Army. After a home goal, someone will drop a smoke bomb as fans go nuts. My back to the action for the entire game, I simply focused on fans and waited, hoping that the Timbers would score. When they did, the scene was instantly berserk. I love emotion and layers in photos. While I travel around the globe looking for fun sports, there are also many great photo ops here locally in Oregon. Boyd’s photo of The Timbers Army was so great, it ran as a double-truck in SI this past fall. Inspired, I marked my calendar and attended the next home game. I wasn’t trying to replicate it his photo – not that I could. I just saw potential at a local event and made a point to cover it for myself. I love sports and I love people that love sports.”
      » Oscar Ciutat, BarcelonaRead on 13 May 2010 | 11:35 pmVia Alison Zavos
 » The Naked Truth. And Crying Wrestlers.Read on 13 May 2010 | 9:12 pmVia Rachel Hulin Man-about-town Ruben Natal- San Miguel reminded me via Facebook last night about the show he’s curated for hous Projects. There’s no one in it I’ve ever really heard of,* but I liked the Luke Smalley picture he posted and thought I’d share. *this is me making a joke.  Luke Smalley, Tattooing, 2008 Check it out, it opens TONIGHT!! THE NAKED TRUTH- Curated by Ruben Natal- San Miguel. Opening May 13, 2010@ hous projects gallery in Soho, NYC. A photographic and video visual survey of 50 years of Voyeurism, Nudity and Sex.
OPENING NIGHT -6:30-10:30PM -OPEN LATE! Artists include: Robert Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton, Susan Meiselas, Nan Goldin, David Wojnarowicz, Herb Ritts, Mark Fields — Ok- seemingly unrelated but nice to look at nonetheless: Khuong Nguyen’s Crying Wrestlers.
» Salva LopezRead on 13 May 2010 | 9:11 pmVia Joerg Colberg
Salva Lopez's website contains a beautiful project entitled Roig 26. (via) |
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