The “pool,” a White House staffer once told me, is a “thing.” If the thing is sitting in the briefing room for hours or in vans outside a restaurant, it doesn’t matter. It’s a thing, like the Secret Service or the Truman balcony. Give the thing a picture or two each day, preferably scripted. If the president is meeting with a head of state, the pool is part of the ceremony.
via Lens Blog.
Burned by the recession, clients are loath to greenlight risky work and bottom-line pressures are driving them to wring costs from their shops. To grow, independents are selling to public holding companies and succumbing to the balance-sheet demands that can dull a free-spirited culture. Often, the result is chasing business they might once have scorned while private.
I think the thing that makes photographs most interesting, and which most fundamentally challenges any notion of a photographic language, is their total ambiguity.
Most actors are hard to take good portraits of. You have access to the biggest actors and think, great, a chance to do an intimate portrait. Then you look at the contact sheet and you realize that they totally played you. They are aware of the camera in each single frame. They raise an eyebrow just so. They are very good at making it look natural, but then you look back and nothing is off-guard.
via Martin Schoeller’s Tips on How to Take the Perfect Portrait – WSJ.com.
“The biggest problem facing curators and historians of photography,” Mr. Bajac said, “is the overflow of images.”
— Quentin Bajac, the Museum of Modern Art’s new chief curator of photography
via NYTimes.com.
Editor’s have to think beyond themselves. Their primary motivation has to be to help others grow, to tell stories and make systems work – outside of their egos. Editors have to be able to conceive of and communicate ideas that are about things outside themselves. Photographers, on the other hand, for the most part have to be so self involved that they can envelop what they photograph from a completely personal perspective. The more dimensional a person who makes pictures is, the more dimensional her photographs will be, the more they will connect with a subject. We are the photographs we make, they are us.
via APAD blog.
While it’s a magnificent outlet for all of us to share the way we see the world and all that, Instagram is mostly a gigantic contest to see who’s the best at being a lying liar pants. If you can make a dog look good in Mayfair, if you can make a sunset look like a Picasso when it’s doused in Brannan, all of a sudden, you’re a professional fucking photographer. And that’s really, really insulting to photographers.
Social media is impacting our work in so many ways it’s hard to know how to pinpoint any single aspect of the changes that we’re experiencing. But fundamentally, everything has changed with the emergence of a visually sophisticated population that uses imagery as easily as conversation to exchange ideas and to express themselves.
via Photo Expert Stephen Mayes on the Changing Future of Photography.
“Every artist here has 5 year careers,” a dealer told me, “These galleries are plucking kids straight out of art school and forcing work out of them like a Chinese labor camp. The next thing you know: they’re not hot anymore. They reach the age of thirty and no one wants to work with them. This is why grad school got invented: to give ‘has-beens’ a thing to do.”
via Artparasites
still find that the pictures I connect to the most are the most subtle, the ones that ask more questions rather than give answers.
—Moises Saman
For me, pictures like this are so troubling because they ask core questions about the contradictory nature of photography. On the one hand, the photo is a tremendously disturbing representation of evil and chaos. On the other, it is such a perfect and unique example of this evil that it transcends the constant, predictable, numbing pictorial representations of equal or greater violence that usually just slip away unseen. These are such troubling thoughts to think. Ten years ago, I would have felt some of the violence before I could acknowledge my respect for the photograph. Now I feel them both simultaneously. Perhaps that’s the great achievement of the photograph. But what do I know anymore? I guess I’m in too deep.
—Peter van Agtmael
With every conflict it is very difficult to show the enormity of the suffering. You have all these statistics, 4.5 million people killed, 30,000 women raped. To get through to people you have to show individuals touched by the conflict. Thats how you engage people, how you shock them to maybe change their behavior. I want to repeat, though: Its difficult for photographs to do this work on their own. You need an advocacy group to partner with who can knock on the doors of Congress and corporations. This advocacy work is as satisfying to me as taking a photograph.
“Photographer charges by the day + one assistant. Shoots are usually two days and we expect to get 10 – 20 final images.
In architecture we usually pay $10,000 per day because of variables… time of day, weather, time of year, harder to schedule.
Coffee, emails, more emails, Photoshop, Photoshop, Photoshop, rest. Somewhere in there I eat.
Everyone seeks survival in this business in many ways shapes and forms, now that many of the tried and true channels of assigning, selling and shipping pictures have morphed into something else or disappeared.
Try to do some good work this year. Be straight up with all concerned. Be fair and decent to all the folks around us.
via, Joe McNally’s Blog
Molhem Barakat, a 17-year-old Syrian photographer who took pictures for Reuters as freelancer, was killed Friday, December 20th as he took photographs of a battle over a hospital between rebels and forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad in Aleppo.
Why is Reuters paying an unexperienced 17-year-old kid to photograph for them in one of the bloodiest civil wars in modern history?
Good photography, or any other manifestation in man, comes from a state of grace. Grace comes when you are delivered from conventions, obligations, convenience, competition, and you are free, like a child in his first discovery of reality. You walk around in surprise, seeing reality as if [it is] for the first time….
Art Start & Gerstein Fisher present
The Family Portrait Project
Portraits & Stories Celebrating the Strength of New York City Families Navigating Challenging Times
Opening Reception Thursday December 19, 6 – 10 PM
West Chelsea Arts Building 508 West 26th Street, Loft 5G, New York City