The American Photography 25 winners have been announced and this year there’s a slideshow to see everyone’s work (here). It’s really worth the time to sit down and look at all of it, there’s some fantastic images in there. I think judges did a great job of including all the “magazine” style photography that was shot in 2008. I have a pretty big collection of these books and it really is a snapshot of that year in photography.
“I was furious that my reputation, and that of the three other photographers, was apparently being used to sucker in amateur photographers to spend the summer filling the hard drives of a new National Trust picture library – all of which the Trust would be able to reuse and resell to generate profits.”
— Simon Norfolk
via EPUK
Did you know that writer Dan Baum once turned down $90,000 to write a 30,000 word story for Rolling Stone to instead take a contract with The New Yorker where he wrote 30,000 words a year for that same $90,000. The contract was up each year and after 3 short years Editor David Remnick called to say it would not be renewed. Dan thinks this has less to do with his skills as a writer and more to do with good old fashioned office politics. Dan didn’t work in the New Yorker office, where he discovered they whisper all the time in his several times a year office visits from his home in Boulder, CO, but he failed to integrate himself into the culture that is the New Yorker and blames his demise on that sad reality of magazine life.
You can read the fascinating “inside baseball” account of writing for the New Yorker (here). It was first published as a series of tweets over a week ago and seems to break some kind of code of silence that surrounds the publication. They don’t publish a masthead after all.
Even more interesting and certainly educational for photographers will be his list of successful story pitches (here). Photographers have great stories all the time but I’ve rarely seen a passable pitch from one, so most of the time if I really wanted to get something made I would write the pitch myself. As a side note it’s even worse when photographers take their excellent ideas and give it to a writer who’s not qualified to write for the publication.
Wired, another Condé magazine was written up Sunday in the NYTimes (here), because they have the dubious of being both award winning and advertising losing. I was pointed to this discussion over on Boing Boing Gadgets (here) by Scott Bauer where a former wired.com editor uses that story to take a few digs at the print magazine and then a whole bunch of writers chime in on the comments. EIC Chris Anderson even drops a couple comments one in particular where he attributes the problems between online and print at wired to Condé HQ decisions. More “inside baseball” but interesting nonetheless.
Wintour is involved in every detail of the magazine: the clothes, editing the pictures and articles. She is decisive, impatient and bears a look that says “I’m the boss, and you’re boring.”
“We’ll make it through this short-term economic crisis—but it’s only with your help “
Under the deal, Allen will receive $5m in damages for the unauthorized use of his image in a billboard advertising campaign for American Apparel last year.
via guardian.co.uk.
1. Members of the service are reminded that photography and the videotaping of public places, buildings and structures are common activities within New York City. Given the City’s prominence as a tourist destination, practically all such photography will have no connection to terrorism or unlawful conduct. […]
2. Members of the service may not demand to view photographs taken by a person absent consent or exigent circumstances. […]
Full Order is (here). via, Gallery Hopper.
New technologies will always demand and deserve careful navigation and difficult readjustments. But the weakening or de facto abolition of copyright will not merely roil the seas, it will drain them dry. Those who would pirate what you produce have developed an elaborate sophistry to convince you that they are your victim. They aren’t. Fight back.
via WSJ.com, thanks Bobby T.
I saw this piece several months back (here) about how authors and publishers have taken to creating movie trailers for their book in hopes or reaching the web-addicted demographics and thought it seemed like a cool idea. I think the key is to have content available that can travel around the internet and snag potential readers. That means commissioning videos, author pictures and making excerpts available.
Will a trailer like this actually sell more books?
I’m not so sure, but if someone is a fan of the book and they want to write something online, it gives them more content to use and overall I think that’s a powerful thing.
So, when Andrew posted this video (here) of Dan Winters new book I immediately thought of the book trailer story and how this kind of thing really could sell more photo books. I think magazines could benefit from this kind of preview as well. Flipping through the book or magazine is exactly what you would do if you were standing in a bookstore or at a newsstand contemplating a purchase, so if you’re going to buy something online why not recreate the experience for the consumer. The added benefit is that it’s portable and can be passed along to reach even more people. I think ideally the book publishers are serving up these videos so when you click on them you’re taken some place where you have a buying opportunity. I think we will see more of this in the near future because I didn’t even know Dan had a new book coming out until I saw the video and now he sold one more book.
Bonus: Here’s an interview with Dan about the new book and a slideshow with high quality pictures (here) that someone left in the comments of Andrew’s post.
Photographer Jonathan Saunders found out like most people (I know we’ve covered this ground before) that Blurb Books are completely hit-or-miss in the quality of the final product. Much of this can be chalked up to blurb trying to find the point where acceptable cost meets acceptable quality. I had an interesting conversation last week with the Modern Postcard dudes where they said that the business started because they couldn’t find any reliable printers for their high end photo heavy real estate brochures, so they built their own printing facility and suddenly discovered the immense challenge of gang printing photographs and working with photographers who have an eye for detail and color. They told me the majority of their employees work in customer service.
So apparently after he saw some extremely high quality books at the Photography Book Now party in the fall of 2008 Jonathan decided to give Blurb another shot even though he had tried their service previously and been disappointed with the results. Then “Blurb banned me when I pointed out to Blurb the books at the Photography Book Now party in the fall of 2008 are of a higher quality then I was able to receive when placing an actual order with Blurb. So instead of helping me achieve that quality, Blurb “disabled” my account for me without my permission since Blurb could not achieve the quality Blurb advertises or actually support the B3 system I paid for.”
You can read the full story (here), but it looks like Jonathan did everything within his power to get a book that matched his expectations including paying for a higher quality product, contacting customer service and complaining and submitting frequent lengthy emails. I was thinking that I might say to him “too bad buddy” you got advertised to. It happens all the time where the marketing pushes your expectations beyond what the product can deliver but I think in this case it’s blurb that’s making the mistake by pushing very hard to be a print on demand book company for professional photographers and failing to meet the bare minimum of consistency and quality. A photo book that’s printed right is only as good as the photography on the pages and if Blurb would like to use professional photographers as their marketing vehicle they need to step up to the plate and meet their expectations. Banning someone from ever using your service again is headed the wrong direction.
Good to put some faces with names (here). I think David Curcurito is a genius magazine designer.
I’ve just heard from a photographer that bluehost.com is lying about the unlimited hosting and bandwidth they advertise on the front page and “they have placed a limit of 50,000 files” which mostly effects photographers using it for proofing.
“Bluehost is shutting down everything….website, blog, email until the owners remove enough of the files to be under their new limits.”
You can read reviews of the downhill slide in service (here).
It looks like CBS is realizing that people can’t navigate all that gray and they’ve decided to add more pictures in their latest redesign. It may be baby steps but at least we know they’re headed in the right direction. Let’s see if this becomes the redesign trend of the summer. I’m hopeful.
“We had a few key goals with this CBSNews.com redesign — make the site easier to navigate, more visual, faster and highlight our unique content.”
via i can read.
NYPH’09 kicks off today and I’m stoked to see that Andrew Hetherington will be blogging about all the happenings from What’sTheJackanory?.com. The potent cocktail of exhibits, parties, lectures and famous photographer spotting that seems to make up the photo festival (I’ve never been but read coverage from last year) is what I always love to read on his blog and it can’t be found anywhere else. I’m going to put an rss feed from his coverage on the sidebar so if you’re like me and not attending we don’t miss anything interesting.
Freelens, the largest group of photo journalists in Germany issued a notice a few weeks back that Jahreszeiten Publishing was forcing all photographers to sign a contract without the possibility for negotiation that would grant them ownership rights to all photographs taken in the course of an assignment.
“Should photographers sign the agreement, they will be left with absolutely nothing – not even the possibility of marketing their works later in the form of archive photographs. This is because the contractual clauses are intended to secure free-of-charge use in all print and online objects of the publishing house. This would make untold publications possible for many years, in return for only a modest work fee that merely covers single, non-recurring use.”
You can read more on their blog (here).
Or better yet sign the petition (here).
