Expert Advice: Photo Editing in MoodShare

by Paul Stanek, Wonderful Machine

Some of you may recall Sean’s Oscar-worthy performance in a stop motion piece we did together: The Portfolio Edit: Sean Stone Style. Well, I’ve been working with a modification of Sean’s photo editing process utilizing a new online platform, currently in beta form, called MoodShare.

MoodShare was not developed with photo editing specifically in mind. In fact, their team was quite pleasantly surprised and intrigued when I first reached out to them about my success using their site in my photo consulting. Regardless, if the shoe fits….

You may be familiar with the term “mood board.” From Wikipedia:

A mood board is a type of collage that may consist of images, text, and samples of objects in a composition of the choice of the mood board creator. Designers and others use mood boards to develop their design concepts and to communicate to other members of the design team.

MoodShare set out to create an online, interactive space where anyone given access to the same “digital mood board” could log on (all at once if desired) and easily toss in whatever images, videos, text, etc., that they felt was useful to a project. Multiple boards can be created for the same project, which is a helpful bonus in many ways. The live element—where you can literally see an image moving or a word forming—is really where MoodShare is making the most out of some of the ever-evolving technological capabilities available to us. It’s a natural augmentation to brainstorming conference calls of creatives scattered across cities, or even countries.

Where does photo editing come into the picture? First, I have to give props to Austin-based WM photographer King Lawrence for emailing me my first invite to a MoodShare board when we were working on his photographic identity. I found myself in a moveable and scalable grid with several of King’s images grouped together, with notes added. Along the left and top were navigation and tools, and along the bottom was an augmentable pool of resources he’d uploaded. I immediately knew I’d found the perfect digital complement to Sean’s table of “tiiiiiny prints.” After some tests, I decided to try it out on my next editing project, Mark Weinberg‘s print portfolio.

As usual, I used Adobe Bridge to perform the initial trimming down from several hundred images to a smaller group of selects. At that point, instead of printing these selects, I started a MoodShare project and uploaded them to a fresh board. I could drag my uploads from a library along the bottom into the manipulatable grid space, and once they were there, I could easily size and arrange them however I pleased. I found the broad range of the space’s scalability to be a real plus: I could get up close & personal with a couple of images to see if they were the perfect pair, or zoom way out on a large body of imagery to get the big picture. I began experimenting with pairings and sequences, and eventually had laid out a clean presentation of an edit draft that I was ready to share with Mark. I had the choices of exporting the board as a PDF, sharing it as an un-editable link, or give him full access to the guts of the board. I went with option C, wanting to give the real-time interaction a whirl. He accepted the invitation, reviewed my work, and added a couple images and notes for consideration. What would follow was one of the most fruitful series of phone conversations I’d ever had, as we’d both logged into the board and navigated/manipulated it simultaneously while talking. Here’s a snippet of the final result:

moodshareweinberg

And here’s a video of the finished portfolio:

I also used MoodShare while working on a print sequence for for Matthew Rakola. Here’s a brief time-lapse of the process:

As I’ve mentioned, MoodShare is currently in beta, and will be free as long as it remains so. So grab up an account and start checking it out while it’s on the house! Let me know if you have any questions regarding this process, or if you’re interested in working with myself or one of our other photo editors on a consulting project through a platform like this. I’m in continued talks with MoodShare about potential tweaks with editing in mind, and about a possible discount for Wonderful Machine members, so stay tuned!

We’ve seen an incredible run in art sales in the last decade

“What’s driving the art market globally is that certain people have a lot of liquidity and are looking for places to put it,” said Suzanne Gyorgy, head of Citi Art Advisory, a service of Citigroup’s private bank. “For many people art is an interesting alternative investment. It’s seen as a hedge against inflation and a safe haven in the high end of the market.”

via As Money Props Up Art World, Prospects Are Mixed – NYTimes.com.

The Daily Edit
Seattle: Thomas Barwick

I wanted to showcase some great work done by regional and city magazines over the next few posts.

Tuesday: 4.30.13

Art Director: Stephanie Mennella

Production Designer: Amy Wallace

Photo Editor + Staff Photographer: Haley Young

Photo Intern: Andrea Coan

Photographer: Thomas Barwick

Altering Photographs Deemed Fair Use In Landmark Case

A closely watched copyright case involving photographer Patrick Cariou and appropriation artist Richard Prince has taken an unexpected turn in favor of Prince on appeals. To recap: In December of 2008 photographer Patrick Cariou filed suit against Ricard Prince, Gagosian Gallery, Lawrence Gagosian and Rizzoli International Publications in federal district court (here). The suit came about after Prince appropriated 28 images from Patrick’s Yes Rasta book for his Canal Zone exhibit at the Gagosian gallery. In March of 2011 US District Judge Deborah A. Batts ruled on the cross-motions for summary judgment and found that the use by Prince was not Fair Use and Patrick’s issue of liability for copyright infringement was granted in its entirety. In other words, Patrick won.

According to many of the sites covering the case this caused quite a stir in the art world, because of the way the judge interpreted fair use. I liked the interpretation, because it offered guidance to artists wishing to appropriate work and claim fair use for transforming it. Essentially you had to comment on the original work to qualify. Simply using it as source material, as Prince admitted to doing, does not transform the work. Or as the judge put it at the time: “If an infringement of copyrightable expression could be justified as fair use solely on the basis of the infringer’s claim to a higher or different artistic use . . . there would be no practicable boundary to the fair use defense.”

The appeals court heard the case last May and wrote that a majority of Mr. Prince’s work manifested “an entirely different aesthetic” from Mr. Cariou’s pictures. “Where Cariou’s serene and deliberately composed portraits and landscape photographs depict the natural beauty of the Rastafarians and their surrounding environs,” the decision stated, “Prince’s crude and jarring works, on the other hand, are hectic and provocative.”  The court found that most of the works by Mr. Prince under consideration were permissible under fair use because they “have a different character” from Mr. Cariou’s work, give it a “new expression” and employ “new aesthetics with creative and communicative results distinct” from the work that Mr. Prince borrowed. (source NYTimes.com)

The court is essentially saying that someone must look at the new work and determine that it has a different character than the original to know if the work is transformed by the artist. And, if that weren’t bad enough they sent 5 of the works back to the lower court (one can be seen below) because they were so minimally altered they may not be considered fair use by a reasonable observer. Using the new appeals court standard the lower court will determine if they are in fact a “new expression”. What a mess.

(You can download the decision here)

Not sure what options Patrick has left but it seems that the courts have no interest in clarifying fair use so that people can make reasonable decisions without resorting to lawsuits to sort it all out. Given the variety of opinions on what constitutes art, relying on reasonable observers to determine if alterations to copyrighted photography constitute a “new expression” with “distinct creative and communicative results” seems absurd.

This Week In Photography Books – Arthur Grace

by Jonathan Blaustein

A friend of mine ran the Boston Marathon last week. I only found out yesterday. She was six blocks from the finish line when the bombs exploded. Her daughter and parents were just a block from the carnage. What is that? A hundred yards from the jaws of Fate?

She told me almost as an afterthought, as we sat, chatting, on a blue velvet couch in Santa Fe. She lacked clear marks of psychological trauma, which was disconcerting. Is it possible to live through something like that and emerge healthy? I don’t know.

But the odd thing was it didn’t take long for us to both express our secret shame at feeling sympathy for 19-year-old Dzhokar Tsarnaev. We each admitted we’d thought how lonely and horrible he must have felt, alone, bleeding from the neck, waiting to die in someone else’s pleasure boat. Are we crazy?

My friend, a mother, suggested that as parents, we’re hardwired to feel for the trauma of someone’s suffering child. Perhaps that’s true. (My intestines ache just thinking about the murdered and maimed last week, especially the kids.) But I feel like it might also mark a different phase in America’s development, young as we are as a nation. I doubt there was a soul in this country who wouldn’t have pissed on the ashes of Mohammed Atta’s incinerated corpse, if given the chance. (What an -sshole that guy was.) But, twelve years later, perhaps we’re weary of the black and white politics of the War on Terror?

This would probably be a good moment to say that, like everyone, I deplore the actions of the terrorist brothers. What a pointless sh-tstorm they created. But, unlike 9/11, this event seemed slapdash; not entirely thought through. (Here, I have to link to the brilliant Onion piece that riffs on that phenomenon.)

The whole thing just felt more American; more of its time. One brother wanted to be an Olympic boxer, failed, and then seethed under the chronic underemployment that has befallen his generation. (And I can’t imagine it was easy to be a Muslim immigrant in famously-white Boston, either.)

The other: younger, more impressionable, was a well-liked wrestler, and was meant to be more assimilated. But his older brother, whom he must have idolized, led him down a hateful and horribly-destructive path. Then, in what might have been the ultimate act of last-minute revenge, or a conscious attempt to save him from police clutches, Dzhokar ran his brother over with a stolen German SUV. (Cain and Abel much?)

Where is this all headed? These guys are a figment of our collective consciousness. Car chases and shootouts with the police straight out of a Bruce Willis movie? Surfing the Internet, in spare hours, geeking out on arcane information? Bullshitting with a neighbor about religion at the local pizza joint? Lashing out at “America” for no real reason at all, just to let loose accumulated rage?

This is a country founded upon violence. Our radical DNA surfaces from time to time, and our addiction to firearms will unlikely abate. Ever. Aren’t we all wondering where these guys got their guns, and if even a terrorist attack will slow down the NRA anti-background-check juggernaut?

What else emerged from the gore last week? Strength of community and spirit. Resilience. Generosity. Determination. And a city that was shut down tight just to catch the bad guys. (Like it or not, we’re a nation of, and by Hollywood.)

It’s a huge country, America, and our cities, towns and rural outposts are so far-flung that we’ve had only myth and common language to keep the experiment together. Personally, I love the place. It’s hard to put into words, but photographs often do justice to this disparate reality.

Photographs, like the ones I saw in “America 101,” a monograph by the aptly named Arthur Grace, published late last year by Fall Line Press. The photographer has been a long-time photo-journalist, working for the biggest media outlets, but I’d not heard of him before. (Honestly, these are some of my favorite types of book-experiences: when I get to discover someone that has been out there making great work all along.)

The collection of images is entirely black and white, and spans the better part of four decades. It opens, pre-essay, with a photograph of police securing a school bus route in 1976, in…you guessed it…Boston, MA. There were many places in the US that reacted poorly to enforced integration, but this book, coincidentally, focuses on the scene in Boston, back in the day.

The narrative is non-linear, the pathos balanced with humor, and the range of people and cultural experiences is as vast as the Great Plains in Winter. The use of repeating symbols is a highlight, in particular the depiction of guns, and references to violence.

The real magic here comes in runs. The book develops momentum, like a good football game, and then inevitably loses steam, only to come back strong again. The first group that caught my attention is as follows: a diptych of Vermont hunters from 1976, followed by another diptych of violent protests in South Boston in 1974, a scene of carnival goers shooting fake guns at water balloons, a man pointing a rifle at a live raccoon at his feet, a couple of Hispanic taxidermists holding a stuffed cougar head in Albuquerque, circa 1986, John Wayne riding with soldiers in a tank in Cambridge, MA in 1974, and, finally, a group of pretend dead historical soldiers, lying in a field for a Revolutionary War re-enactment in Charlestown, MA, 1975. (Got that? If not, just read it again. Brilliant sequencing.)

There are several odes to Boston’s racial strife in the 70’s, but the book is not exclusively glum or intense, by any means. There are farmers and beauty queens, Evil Kenevil jumping vans on a high school football field, Al Gore looking like a robot in 1988, Jimmy Carter splayed out on an car roof in Ohio like a buxom model in Low Rider Magazine, and a young boxer, looking pensive, in Oahu, 1983. (I wonder if his dreams were ever fulfilled?)

The second suite of pictures that I can’t not share is sports related, that other American and Bostonian obsession. It starts with the Westminster Dog show in 1991, moves to what may be the best sports photo I’ve ever seen, in which a Cincinnati Reds outfielder is frozen in a mid-air catch, looking more than a little like a Black Jesus, followed by a no-neck, tatted-out arm wrestler in Kansas, circa 2004, and then a monstrous Texan corn-dog-eating contestant stuffing his face in Dallas, 2003. (Ah, the Bush years. So much less complicated. The government was totally incompetent, and the terrorists were perfectly unsympathetic.)

I could describe more of the photos here, many more, but then you’d stop reading. Most people would rather look at a picture than read a description of it. (Understandable.) So I’d recommend you consider buying this book, if you’d like to be reminded of the wonder and complex magnificence of the American experiment. Mr. Grace has done a terrific job, and I commend him.

Lastly, I’d like to end by stating the obvious. I have no ambivalence as to the evil of what the Tsarnaev brothers did last week. I have hugged my children more tightly since I returned from NYC the day of the bombing, and recommend you do the same. Cliché or not, we never know what awaits when we step out the front door each day. My thoughts and prayers go out to the innocent victims, their families, and all the citizens of Boston.

Bottom Line: Powerful views of America, over time

To Purchase America 101 Visit Photo-Eye

 

Full Disclosure: Books are provided by Photo-Eye in exchange for links back for purchase.

Books are found in the bookstore and submissions are not accepted.

 

Art Producers Speak: Holly Andres

We emailed Art Buyers and Art Producers around the world asking them to submit names of established photographers who were keeping it fresh and up-and-comers who they are keeping their eye on. If you are an Art Buyer/Producer or an Art Director at an agency and want to submit a photographer anonymously for this column email: Suzanne.sease@verizon.net

Anonymous Art Producer: I nominate Holly Andres

From a personal body of work that was based on my unique experience growing up in rural Montana, the youngest of ten children. By creating a fictitious group of siblings loosely based on archetypes of my own family, each image is constructed to enact a specific moment and depict a psychological portrait.
From a personal body of work that was based on my unique experience growing up in rural Montana, the youngest of ten children. By creating a fictitious group of siblings loosely based on archetypes of my own family, each image is constructed to enact a specific moment and depict a psychological portrait.
This image is from my series, Sparrow Lane, which comprised of 14 photographs presenting an elliptical narrative of young women on the verge of adulthood. Drawing on the formal and thematic conventions of Nancy Drew books, the series depicts girls in search of forbidden knowledge. By employing suggestive and symbolic iconography, literal narratives are suspended to suggest psycho-sexual metaphors.
I had an opportunity to do a fashion shoot in a Victorian mansion in Salem Oregon that was presumed to be haunted.
Often times the narratives presented in my work are abstractions of real-life events that were relayed to me by the actual participants in the photos. From Anna’s Birthday Party, I was recreating specific memories from their childhoods in which their mothers performed heroic acts in an attempt to protect them.
Often times the narratives presented in my work are abstractions of real-life events that were relayed to me by the actual participants in the photos. From Anna’s Birthday Party, I was recreating specific memories from their childhoods in which their mothers performed heroic acts in an attempt to protect them.
I made this photograph after an experience where I was riding my bike and happened upon a group of young boys huddled around something in the grass. As I got closer I discovered that they were inspecting a dead squirrel. I was moved by how this rather gross and tragic, though common, occurrence created a moment of tenderness and closeness between these boys, which inspired me enough to recreate it.
From The Fall of Spring Hill I continued to examine the complexity of childhood and fleeting nature of memory. Through a suite of 13 photographs the series illustrates an incident from a summer church camp in which a child injures himself by falling from a dilapidated wooden play structure and the mothers’ fierce reaction to deconstruct it in retribution.
From The Fall of Spring Hill I continued to examine the complexity of childhood and fleeting nature of memory. Through a suite of 13 photographs the series illustrates an incident from a summer church camp in which a child injures himself by falling from a dilapidated wooden play structure and the mothers’ fierce reaction to deconstruct it in retribution. Serving as a proxy for the boy’s wound is the stillness of a blood red punchbowl.
I was shooting a portrait of animal trainer/photographer, Carli Davidson, and I had heard that the Wildlife Safari in Oregon had a cheetah program. I called them up and asked if we could stage a portrait there. Clearly a composite, I locked my camera off on its tripod to photograph the daily training session, which consisted of rewarding the cheetahs with hunks of raw meat for commands such as sitting, crouching and following. I then shot Carli in the same location and later pieced several files together in post-production.
In this portrait of Executive Director of the Columbia River Maritime Museum, Samuel E. Johnson Ph.D., I wanted to simultaneously reveal his traits as an academic historian as well as his interests in restoring and sailing wooden boats.
A self-portrait made with the help of my assistants (and beautiful Siamese felines) to subvert the notion of a “cat lady” as a spinster animal hoarder for more glamorous and alluring existence.

How many years have you been in business?

While I have only been shooting commercially for a few years, I have a strong foundation in the fine art photography realm with representation from prominent galleries in NYC, Atlanta, San Francisco and Portland Oregon where I live and work. I’ve also taught photography at the college level for several years.

Are you self-taught or photography school taught?

My educational background is in painting and drawing, and it wasn’t until after graduate school when I was studying cinema and I became curious about the potential of freezing a narrative as a single frame, that I discovered how photography could best aestheticize my concepts. While I primarily consider myself a photographer, my foundation in painting and cinema continues to inform my photographic practice and aesthetic.

Who was your greatest influence that inspired you to get into this business?

I decided to get into the business, after frequently being told that my fine art photography may have commercial application. The realm of constructed narrative photography has greatly influenced me, where artists such as Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson and Cindy Sherman are the pioneers. I also feel a strong connection to Edward Hoppers paintings and the work of many mid-century female surrealists, such as Dorothea Tanning, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, and Maya Deren, particularly because of their interests in psychoanalysis and their metaphoric depictions of fears, desires and impulses.

How do you find your inspiration to be so fresh, push the envelope, stay true to yourself so that creative folks are noticing you and hiring you?

Being a photographer has transformed the way that I experience life. When I’m in a prolific period of shooting and am feeling exceptionally perceptive, I tend to see the world with more wonder, beauty and appreciation. This resulting impact, in and of itself, is actually the most fulfilling and powerful aspect of photography for me. When I made the transition into the commercial sphere, I decided that I had to find a way to make it as fulfilling and meaningful as making art.  I entered the commercial world with a relatively strong and varied portfolio of personal work, work that was not made under the influence of commercial application, and this is the work that has garnered the most attention of photo editors, art directors and art buyers.

Do you find that some creatives love your work but the client holds you back?

Fortunately I haven’t come up against this much.  I think because my work is so specific in its aesthetic, commercial clients know early in the process if I am an appropriate for their brand.

What are you doing to get your vision out to the buying audience?

I’m repped by the photo agency Hello Artists, and in the company of a roster of great talent, my work is constantly being exposed to potential commercial collaborators. I also continue to invest in my own fine art endeavors. For example, I will be having a mid-career retrospective at the Hallie Ford Museum in Salem Oregon this summer, followed by the premiere of a new body of photographic work at my Portland-based gallery, Hartman Fine Art, in the fall. I find that when these arenas intercept it results in the most exciting commercial opportunities. Additionally, I accept many speaking invitations and try to have an active and current online presence, by maintaining my website, blog and other social media threads.

What is your advice for those who are showing what they think the buyers want to see?

Andy Warhol famously said, “ Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.” It seems artist’s creativity is often stunted by an internal voice that tries to predict what the external world wants to see. If you can engage in the joy and practice of consistently making art, inevitably you will develop an individual voice, a unique way of seeing – both in content and style. I think that this is what art buyers are most interested in.

Are you shooting for yourself and creating new work to keep your artistic talent true to you?

Yes. As I mentioned earlier, I am consistently developing new work and fortunately through the representation of my galleries am always preparing work for future exhibitions. I find that there is a strong symbiotic relationship, one that is constantly evolving, between my commercial and personal work.

How often are you shooting new work?

All the time.

Holly Andres is a fine art and commercial photographer. She has had solo exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Atlanta, Istanbul, Turkey and Portland Oregon where she lives and works. Her work has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, Time, Runner’s World, W, Art in America, Artforum, Exit Magazine, Art News, Modern Painters, Oprah Magazine, Elle Magazine, The LA Times, Glamour, Blink and Art Ltd. – which profiled her as one of 15 emerging West Coast artists under the age of 35.

Andres’s work was also selected for Go West! Cutting-Edge Creatives in the United States, a book surveying the best creative minds in architecture, design, art, fashion, photography and advertising – published by German-based, DAAB Books, 2011.

She has commercial representation through Hello Artists, and gallery representation through Robert Mann Gallery (New York City), Charles A. Hartman Fine Art (Portland), Jackson Fine Art (Atlanta), Robert Koch Gallery (San Francisco).

APE contributor Suzanne Sease currently works as a consultant for photographers and illustrators around the world. She has been involved in the photography and illustration industry since the mid 80s, after founding the art buying department at The Martin Agency then working for Kaplan-Thaler, Capital One, Best Buy and numerous smaller agencies and companies. She has a new Twitter fed with helpful marketing information.  Follow her@SuzanneSease.

Forging Relationships Was The Key

That’s what would hurt me now if I still wanted to do this work. Today the young art directors want to have the control – they don’t want a photographer who has a relationship with the talent. That’s the last thing they want. For me, the relationships with the talent that I developed were far more important than the relationships with the clients because clients come and go – but the talent are going to be around for a while.

I realized that I was bidding jobs that I wasn’t getting, and I said to myself – this is getting old! I really didn’t enjoy it anymore and there’s people out there that are a lot hungrier than I was by that time.

via A rambling conversation with Greg Gorman | Le Journal de la Photographie.

The Daily Edit
GQ: Eric Ray Davidson

Thursday: 4.25.13

Design Director: Fred Woodward
Creative Director: Jim Moore
Director of Photography: Dora Somosi
Senior Photo Editor: Krista Prestek
Photo Editor: Justin O’Neil
Art Director: Chelsea Cardinal

Photographer: Eric Ray Davidson

“Light from the Middle East: New Photography” at the V&A

by Jonathan Blaustein

Syria is a wreckage, its people bombarded by a psychotic former ophthalmologist. Egypt’s economy is in free-fall. The Arab Spring’s optimism has faded faster than a photograph bathed in the sunshine of a portrait studio’s front window.

Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Afghanistan, and other countries in the Middle East live with the constant threat of violence and terror. When stories flood media outlets, dead bodies boost ratings. (I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.) Given that language barriers exist, even in an age of Google Translate, it’s not so easy to just throw out a couple of friend requests to get the real story from Tehran. Or Tel Aviv.

Fortunately, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London has come to our collective rescue. “Light from the Middle East: New Photography” displayed photographs from North Africa through Central Asia, until it closed on April 7. It was the most dynamic photo exhibition I saw on my recent visit to Europe.

The show was broken down into three component parts: Recording, Reframing, and Resisting. The first referred to documentary work, the second to images that attempted to subvert existing photo traditions, and the latter section dealt with more original or innovative art practice. Surprisingly, given my predilections, I mostly preferred the initial grouping. But there were strong projects throughout; a fantastic exhibition, really.

Walking through the entryway, I was confronted with a group of photos by Abbas, from the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79. He managed to capture anger and passion pulsing through the frame, as in the grouping of women in abayas, toting machine guns. Another image featured a heap of dead old men on morgue beds, slid out of the cooler. (While some revolutionaries looked on, gloating.) The message from the curators was clear: We mean business.

Just down the way, Tal Shochat, an Israeli, exhibited a triptych of contemporary images that seemed to emanate from a different planet, as well as century, than those of Abbas. Three trees: persimmon, pomegranate, and grapefruit. Each had been meticulously cleaned and buffed, then shot in the landscape with strobes, against a black backdrop. They looked artificial, like corporatized nature. Smart and odd-looking, they referenced the intersection of agriculture and genetic engineering in the 21st C.

Cruising the room, I saw pictures from Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Kurdistan.

“Bodiless 1,” by Mehraneh Atashi, another Iranian, was an absolute favorite. A burly wrestler, in a mens’ only gym, throws around a chain of weights. (Old school equipment, for sure.) He had a serious head of hair, resembled Erik Estrada, and rocked a sexy-time mustache as well. The text tells us women are always excluded from such establishments, but the artist was, in fact, female. She received special permission, and included her own image as a little subversive shout to rule-breaking, reflected within a mirror.

A Mitra Tabrizian photo, again from Iran, was also amazing. (I’m just now realizing I like Iranian photography.) A long, horizontal panel depicted an obviously-staged scene filled with a host of “regular” people. Old and young, men and women, all stood, moved, talked, gesticulated, in a field outside of a generic apartment building. Up above, a pair of grumpy-looking clerics stared down, disapprovingly, from a billboard. (I wonder what they would approve of? Disemboweling Barack Obama?) Though I assumed it to be a digital composite, given how much was going on, the wall text assured that it was actually one exposure. Righteous people-wrangling.

In general, the Reframing section, which featured artists who appropriate or imitate images from the past, was the least successful. Most of the artists’ symbol choices were heavy-handed, so things were just off. (Close, but not quite right.)

Shadi Ghadirian’s project, yet again from Iran, typified this. Her series, “Qujar,” from 1998, featured women in portraits, shot in the historical style from the Qajar period, 1786-1925. The verisimilitude was spot on, but then the women held modern symbols, like a Pepsi can, a boom box, or a mountain bike. I wanted to love them, but kept getting stuck in the clunky juxtaposition. The one exception was the image of shrouded women holding a mirror that reflected blankly back to the photographer, and by extension, the viewer.

Youssef Nabil, an Egyptian, exhibited work from his project “The Yemeni Sailors of South Shields,” a series of hand-colored black and white portraits. The style aped mid-20th Century Egyptian studio portraits, and focused on the large ex-pat population in North England. I loved the hand-colored effect, and the guys were funny, but also poignant, like Gene Hackman’s sidekick in “The Royal Tenenbaums.” (Yes, I’m aware Pagoda was Indian.)

One last project here deserves a mention, but not in a good way. Taysir Batniji, a Palestinian, had pictures included from his “Watch Towers: West Bank/Palestine” project. The structures were blatantly shot in the insanely-famous Becher style. Basically, they were knock-offs, meant to create controversy. When the first sentence in the wall text admits that the work is derivative, I wonder if it actually belongs in the show?

Moving on, my brain slowly wearing down, I entered the last room: Resisting. The collected photos were meant to examine the manipulation of truth in photography. The quality ranged, here, but there were some memorable projects.

Atiq Rahimi’s work, from Afghanistan, featured plastic box camera pictures, called “The Imaginary Return,” from 2001. The artist played with scale and temporal dislocation, so my eye wondered if the pictures were from the 19th Century. A tree branch looked like it was about to topple a building, little men at the base of a wall look like toy soldiers, and a lonely clothesline suspended above the chaos seems like it might be holding up the world.

Amirali Ghasemi’s series “Tehran Remixed: Party Series” was also terrific. We’ve all heard stories of what goes on behind the closed, locked doors of Tehran’s youth. (I’m guessing they love Ecstasy, but what do I know?) Here, we see the good times rolling, but big white sections have been cut out of the subjects, censoring their identities. It was a perfect use of digital technique, and reminded me why I was less enthralled with the exhibition’s mid-section, which placed less emphasis on stylistic innovation.

There was a bit more hand-coloring in the last room, but nothing that really impressed. Nermine Hammam, an Egyptian, had a project where she photographed soldiers who were ubiquitous during the aforementioned Arab Spring. Rather than keep them in their natural surroundings, however, she digitally removed them, and dropped them against the technicolor backdrops of the Swiss Alps. (I’m guessing the soldiers would have preferred to frolic in the mountains, rather than tote guns around Tahrir Square.)

As I said at the outset, this was a really stellar exhibition. We often struggle, here in the West, to remind ourselves why art matters. A few rooms such as these, packed with photographs that attempt to codify uncertainty, document upheaval, and share stories with the World outside, are an excellent reminder.

Robert Capa Gold Medal Awarded To Fabio Bucciarelli

The Robert Capa Gold Medal is awarded to a photographer producing “photographic reporting from abroad requiring exceptional courage and enterprise.” This year, Italian photojournalist Fabio Bucciarelli was recognized for Battle to Death, his project recording the harrowing battles in Aleppo in late 2012. “The battle for the conquest of Aleppo is a real massacre,” he told TIME.

Read more: http://lightbox.time.com/2013/04/24/2013-overseas-press-club-winners-announced

Reporter Beats Out Lumberjack For Worst Job Of 2013

CareerCast.com has an annual ranking of 200 best and worst jobs for 2013 (here) and Reporter takes the bottom spot over last years Lumberjack. Ouch. Maybe we will see Discovery and History channels making a new reality series around reporter like the other worst job staples of Lumberjack, Commercial Fisherman and Mining. Of course rounding out the bottom 20 below Dishwasher but above Corrections Officer is Photojournalist at number 188, so I guess photographers are the best in the newsroom. In the catch-all category of Photographer, which usually includes heavy weighting on positions like cruise ship and theme park photographer, the ranking is 172 just below construction worker but with a positive job growth outlook. Strangely, their description of photographer reads: “Uses shutter-operated cameras and photographic emulsions to visually portray a variety of subjects.”

We Had Amazingly Open Expense Accounts

I’ve had a love interest in wine since the early seventies. It’s actually a great story and few people know it. It dates back to photography, obviously. In the early days, studios had a lot of money and working on all those assignments and movies, we got paid a reasonable fee in the day for what we were doing – but we also had really amazingly open, no-questions-asked-expense-accounts. This included everything being first class; the airfares, the hotels and… of course, most importantly, the dining!

via A rambling conversation with Greg Gorman | Le Journal de la Photographie.

Nearly Naked Women + Tumblr + Excellent Photography = Success

I’m always on the lookout for photographers who use social media to build an audience and then leverage that audience to success by selling them something or attracting commercial and editorial clients who are interested in the audience. There are lots of examples where photographers attract other photographers by talking about the business or their process for making pictures, but the real potential lies in attracting consumers outside this industry.

I’ve been lecturing about social media marketing for artists for several years and my go to examples of this are: The Sartorialist, The Cobra Snake and The Selby, all three of whom built their careers (in varying degrees) using social media. A few years back I was happy to add to this list an established photographer (Michael Edwards) who took a tried and true formula (nearly naked wormen plus tumblr), but added in his skills as a pro picture maker, and watched the whole thing go viral: http://meinmyplace.com. But, the success in the whole endeavor lies not in his ability to attract hundreds of thousands or horny college kids to his site, but to leverage the whole thing into a monthly column at Esquire, which he did for a year and a half and has since moved it to Playboy.

PDN has an interview with Michael (here) where you can get the full story.

If you want to study success in social media with photography these 4 are excellent case studies and pioneers in the industry.

Who would you recommend because we don’t want to use the same person

the producers here are very open to using new talent. I can honestly say that, because every day, I’m approached with the question “Who would you recommend because we don’t want to use the same person.” I think it’s important to present many creative options to get those firewalls torn down, or the work becomes predictable and stagnant, and makes for an unhappy Client.

— Michael Bilbrey, senior production consultant at Leo Burnett USA

via ASMP: American Society of Media Photographers – National Page.