I’m optimistic because the shift to digital is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to rethink media business models. Once rich content can be distributed globally at virtually no cost on platforms that have billing relationships already established (iOS, Android, Kindle, etc.), we can experiment wildly with who pays and how much.
Chris Anderson, EIC at Wired via Advertising Age.
This is why I became a photographer in the first place, to create a beautiful artifact, the print.
Rodney Smith, The End Starts Here.
I should have been on the phone continuing to make calls to prospective clients. I should have been working on the two book projects I have in front of me. I should have been swimming or running. But instead I was writing a piece about a $499 camera that will be obsolete in a few months and lost to nearly everyone’s memory in a year.
For a little while I was exhausted. Tumblr, Facebook, Flickr and so on. … I felt like I was drowning in images. As a consequence, even work outside of that digital stream – the work I was seeing in books and exhibitions – started looking all of the same. More important, my own pictures started feeling the same. I was burned out. So I started experimenting. I made little videos and used disposable cameras. I played. I stopped making big, formal, large-format pictures.
–Alec Soth
via NYTimes.com.
Art buyers are very interested in seeing personal work and learning as much about who the photographer is. This is directly related to how much more we share more of who we are on blogs and social media, and particular to photographers—where they can discuss their inspirations, their process and stories behind their shoots. Art buyers recognize that this helps them know more about what a photographer would bring to a job and what they would be like to work with. Some art buyers have even said they are very open to being ‘friended’ by photographers they have a relationship with.
You can’t always have the camera at your side, or up to your face – part of photography is missing things. That’s a very difficult lesson to learn as a photographer, our pursuit is dedicated to controlling and stopping time. I remember hearing a well known photographer that I respected say that “you miss photos all the time, and that’s part of photography” – it came as a real relief. We’re human, the pursuit should be rooted in pleasure and sometimes it’s good to just acknowledge that you saw the moment, framed it and captured it and stored it on your personal harddrive of neural networking.
via Tim Soter… blog..
In the early 1950′s, LIFE Magazine decided that the pictures that were shot for them by many wonderful photographers were their property and therefore, they had the right to re-license them. The photographer’s thought otherwise, and insisted that the photographs were their property to resell at their discretion.
This went to court and after a long heated battle with TIME-LIFE the photographers won the battle. The courts decided that the copyright remained with the photographer and the magazine had just licensed reproduction rights. The original property, after the contract was concluded, returned to the photographer along with the negatives.
via The End Starts Here.
We went from film to digital to CGI to video. We are always trying to learn about the next best thing and how we need to adapt to meet those changes.
via Interview with Lisa Matthews, Managing Art Buyer at Team One | Wonderful Machine Photography Blog.
“It’s 105 degrees outside. [Baldwin] calls me over: ‘Sit down, sit down. Umm,’ he said, ‘I’m not going out on the boat. It’s too hot. It’s 20 f—ing minutes to get out, and you have to go 2 f—ing miles an hour. . . . I’m not doing it.’ It’s like, What do you mean? But you can’t argue with him — he’s not going to change his mind. So I’m thinking on my feet and I say, ‘Okay, what about we go to my friend’s pool?’ He looked me up and down — I’m pretty scruffy — and he said, ‘Your friend doesn’t have a f—ing pool.’ And I’m like, ‘Trust me, my friend has got a pool, and it’s about half a mile away from here.’ So he kind of looks at me and goes, ‘Yeah, all right.'”
via Celebrity Portraits by Jake Chessum – Photo Gallery – LIFE.
You must have something to say. You must be brutally honest with yourself about this. Think about history, politics, science, literature, music, film, and anthropology. What effect does one discipline have over another? What makes “man” tick? Today, with everyone being able to easily make technically perfect photographs with a cell phone, you need to be an “author”. It is all about authorship, authorship and authorship.
–David Alan Harvey
via ideastap.com.
Forget about the profession of being a photographer. First be a photographer and maybe the profession will come after. Don’t be in a rush to pay your rent with your camera. Jimi Hendrix didn’t decide on the career of professional musician before he learned to play guitar. No, he loved music and created something beautiful and that THEN became a profession. Larry Towell, for instance, was not a “professional” photographer until he was already a “famous” photographer. Make the pictures you feel compelled to make and perhaps that will lead to a career. But if you try to make the career first, you will just make shitty pictures that you don’t care about.
— Christopher Anderson
via ideastap.com.
…photography rarely has the ability to change the system, but it has a great ability to change the way people think about the system.
— Pete Brook, Prison Photography.
via NYTimes Lens Blog.
At the Art Institute of Pittsburgh campus alone, there were reportedly about 600 photography students pursuing a bachelor of arts or associates degree as of last summer, says Kathleen A. Bittel, the whistleblower whose testimony before a US Senate committee last fall helped trigger the federal lawsuit against EDMC.
[…] “Where are 600 photography graduates going to go? You cannot absorb that many in one city. How are they going to make money?” she says.
via PetaPixel.
An oil painting of a burning bank that sparked a pair of Los Angeles police investigations also ignited an international auction frenzy. Artist Alex Schaefer has sold the 22-by-28-inch canvas depicting a Chase Bank branch in Van Nuys going up in flames to a German collector for $25,200.
via latimes.com, thx, Charles
Taking photographs of things that are plainly visible from public spaces is a constitutional right – and that includes federal buildings, transportation facilities, and police and other government officials carrying out their duties. Unfortunately, there is a widespread, continuing pattern of law enforcement officers ordering people to stop taking photographs from public places, and harassing, detaining and arresting those who fail to comply. Learn your rights here >>
via @pollerphoto
‘Most of the photographs in your paper, unless they are hard news, are lies,” says Martin Parr. “Fashion pictures show people looking glamorous. Travel pictures show a place looking at its best, nothing to do with the reality. In the cookery pages, the food always looks amazing, right? Most of the pictures we consume are propaganda.”
— Martin Parr
via Telegraph.
[Larry] Price, who has served as the director of photography for the Dayton Daily News — the largest daily newspaper in the region — on Aug. 29 surrendered his job in a rare move of self sacrifice. Only three days earlier, Price was asked by management to lay off up to half of the paper’s photographers, a move he simply couldn’t support.
“It didn’t take me long to make the decision. Before I turned out the lights Friday, I knew I couldn’t go through with it,” Price said.
via Dayton Business Journal thx, David B.