A sample of the categories of images in the Documerica Project.

A treasure trove of images from a 1970s documentary project that brings to mind the work of the WPA photographers has been uncovered and is now available to view online at the National Archives’ site: “For the Documerica Project (1971-1977), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) hired freelance photographers to capture images relating to environmental problems, EPA activities, and everyday life in the 1970s.” Not only are the photographs a compelling historical document, they’re also a compelling reminder of the unique beauty of film.

Link: http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/04/a-photographic-blast-from-the-past/?hp

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In her roundup “In With the New: A Look at 2012,” Women’s Wear Daily writer Amy Wicks touches on the design and/or content changes at Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, Brides, and Wired. She also wonders whether there will be changes at Vanity Fair, given the magazine’s recent hiring of former New York Times Style Magazine photo editor Judith Puckett-Rinella as VF’s photo director. And she takes note of American Media Inc.’s December launch of Reality Weekly magazine.

Link: http://www.wwd.com/media-news/fashion-memopad/in-with-the-new-5449209

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Good news for independent filmmakers: Sundance has made a deal with distributor New Video to make films that screen at Sundance available to stream online at Netfllix, iTunes, YouTube, Amazon, Hulu, and SundanceNOW.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/movies/sundance-offer-new-video-streaming-for-films.html?hp

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The recently redesigned Photographers on Photography blog (or, POP) did a Q&A with Town & Country design director Edward Leida, who led the venerable magazine’s redesign last year. Excerpt:

POP: Has the role of photography in the pages of Town & Country changed with the redesign?


We are trying, not unlike the history of the magazine, to hire some of the best photographers. When trends started changing, it was like the empereror’s new clothes. Town & Country had lost sight of celebrating adventure and what the planet and the world has to offer. The beauty within it. Nature, food and the inhabitants of our great planet. All of these things we’re all dying to look at and experience in a way that makes us feel good.

The idea has been to find photographers who show us that we should be celebrating the planet and the beauty it embodies. Intrinsically good, and beautiful and very simple. Portrait and food photographers who show objects for the beautiful things that they are.

Link: http://www.popfoto.net/2012/01/04/edwardleida/

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And The New York Times paid tribute to photography legend Eva Arnold, who died on Wednesday at the age of 99. Arnold was one of the first female photographers to work for Magnum and is an inspiration, creatively and personally, for all time.

Full obituary: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/06/arts/design/eve-arnold-photographer-dies-at-99.html?hp

Lens blog tribute: http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/parting-glance-eve-arnold/?ref=design

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Feature Shoot spotlighted Mahesh Shantaram’s photos of “the colorful remains of over the top Indian weddings.” Excerpt: “I have been documenting wedding sets and little associated details at weddings because I find them to be fascinating metaphors of my country’s penchant for order and chaos; colour and noise; and the peculiar sense of taste and design or the lack thereof.”

Link: http://www.featureshoot.com/2011/09/mahesh-shantaram-photographs-the-colorful-remains-of-over-the-top-indian-weddings/

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La Lettre de la Photographie reviewed the book Proud Flesh, a collection of Sally Mann’s photographs of her husband, who suffers from muscular dystrophy. Excerpt: “Sally Mann has had her husband Larry pose for her for six years, documenting at the same time the evolution of his illness, a dystrophy brought about by the progressive weakening of the patient’s muscular cells until they die. In these elliptic compositions, each part of his body appears: a back and a hand, a seated bottom, puny thighs, a sex, an imperial torso, a dangling arm, a quiet face which evokes that of someone who has died. It seems that Sally Mann wanted to immortalize the charms of each of his members before the illness took them away.”

Link: http://lalettredelaphotographie.com/entries/4135/sally-mann-proud-flesh

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Conscientious showcased Andrew Emond’s photos of defunct industrial facilities in Canada and the U.S. The images, though of bleak subject matter, are quite beautiful.

Link: http://jmcolberg.com/weblog/2011/10/andrew_emond/

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Bryan Formhals of LPV Magazine, an online and print magazine featuring contemporary documentary and fine-art photography, posted my photo essay about my grandmother’s struggle with dementia. He noted that it’s a difficult subject, and he’s right: It is. Painful, too.

Link: http://lpvmagazine.com/2011/09/kristina-feliciano-claudina/#1

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Savannah Spirit, who writes the blog for the New York chapter of the ASMP, posted this terrific bit of advice from Dorothea Lange: “One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind.”

Link: http://sharpernewyork.blogspot.com/2011/10/one-should-really-use-camera-as-though.html

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As part of the Louisville Photo Biennial, which will be going on all next month, photographer Richard Bram has curated an exhibition of contemporary street photography from around the world. The show, called “From Distant Streets,” looks intriguing, based on the image he chose to promote it.

Link: http://blakeandrews.blogspot.com/2011/09/cities.html, via Blake Andrews‘ B blog

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Photo by Brassai, as seen at American Suburb X.

American Suburb X posted a 1970 interview with Brassai, conducted by Tony Ray-Jones. Here’s an excerpt:

T.R-J: Would you say that it’s more important for a student to get a general education in art and painting than it is to get an education solely in photography?

B: Yes, I think education and intelligence is important, but not art. Not artistic education, because when you take a photograph you may be very influenced by what you have seen in paintings and this happened to me often. Unconsciously I did something like Toulouse-Lautrec or Degas or perhaps Van Gogh. It was not voluntarily but because we have a culture in painting. It would not happen to a young American perhaps, who had never seen paintings and who did something with his or her sight absolutely fresh. It’s possible. But I think that it’s certain that one doesn’t only photograph with the eyes but with all one’s intelligence.

Link: http://www.americansuburbx.com/2011/08/interview-brassai-with-tony-ray-jones.html

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TechCrunch is not a photo blog, but this news will surely be of interest to photogs who license their work:

“Stipple, a technology that allows you to tag people, products, advertisements and more in images no matter where they reside on the web, is debuting a new product today—image licensing platform Stipple Marketplace. Instead of paying to license images and then running ads to hopefully offset the image’s cost, publishers can now license photos pre-loaded with revenue and interactive, searchable content. … Marketplace, which launches with more than 1 million images, allows publishers to search for and find real-time news, sport, celebrity, entertainment, and stock photos. Any semi-professional photographers can request access to connect their photos to the Stipple Cloud and make them discoverable by publishers in Marketplace.”

Link: http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/20/stipple-debuts-image-licensing-marketplace-for-publishers/

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Click to view slideshow.

Reuters photographer Jason Lee wrote an account of his visit to the “Masked Boy,” who lives in a village outside Beijing. The child, who is just 6 years old, was severely burned and has to wear a surgical mask to prevent infection. His family is poor and has been struggling to pay for his treatment. The skin transplant surgery he needs, for instance, costs close to a million yuan, writes Lee in “Unmasking the masked boy.” “Wang Shouwu said his son didn’t gain enough support and proper treatment from the local community, most of the help came from ‘netizens’ who live in big cities,” Lee writes. “I was shocked to see that despite China becoming the world’s second largest economy, the insurance and social security system were still falling behind.” As for Lee’s photos, they are truly haunting.

Link to Lee’s post: http://blogs.reuters.com/photo/2011/09/15/unmasking-the-masked-boy/

Link to the slideshow: http://www.reuters.com/news/pictures/slideshow?articleId=USRTR2R1DS#a=1

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From the exhibition "Beyond Words: Photography in The New Yorker."

The New Yorker’s Photo Booth posted selections from the exhibition “Beyond Words: Photography in The New Yorker,” which opened at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York last week. The show was curated by Elisabeth Biondi, who was the New Yorker’s visuals editor until recently. “In the magazine, the photographs often play second fiddle to the words they accompany,” Biondi tells Photo Booth. “This has been an opportunity to show that these images can stand by themselves—that they are strong enough to have their own identity and power.”

Link: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/photobooth/2011/09/beyond-words-photography-in-the-new-yorker.html

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Sean O’Hagan of The Guardian penned a thought-provoking column on rock stars and photography asserting that “photography has often spoken louder than words when it comes to enshrining a performer in the public eye.” His piece was inspired by the exhibition “20th Century Icons” at Proud Galleries in the Chelsea section of London. “The show,” O’Hagan writes, “provides ample illustration of photography’s power to help construct, perpetuate – and occasionally puncture – the image of the rock star as demigod.” He homes in on three examples:

“Terry O’Neill’s arresting image of an imperious Frank Sinatra and his bodyguards strolling along a boardwalk in Miami in 1968; Elliott Landy’s portrait of a bucolic Bob Dylan at home in Woodstock in 1969; Ethan Russell’s picture of Keith Richards posing beside an airport customs sign proclaiming a drug-free America in 1972. In their separate ways, each photo raises questions about fame: about the presence that certain performers have, even offstage, and their willingness to play up to, or subvert, their own status.”

Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/aug/23/20th-century-icons-photography-rock

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Rob Haggart at A Photo Editor wondered, “Is Lürzer’s Archive Worth It?”  “My opinion, based on just listening to people, not actual experience, is that none of this is worth it unless it’s part of an actual campaign to reach potential clients,” he wrote. “A general rule that a client must see your work in around 5 different places before they will place you on the ‘to hire someday’ list seems smart. That means if your work appears in Archive it should also hit their desk in a mailer and their email box then possibly on a blog or magazine they check out and finally at a portfolio showing.”

Link: http://www.aphotoeditor.com/2011/08/17/is-lurzers-archive-worth-it/

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John Midgley (center) on a 2009 shoot for his Brooklyn Circus project.

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John Midgley is looking rather prescient, with his decision two years ago to begin a photo project on the Brooklyn Circus, a clothing boutique in Boerum Hill that has become a trendsetter in “black dandyism,” as The New York Times dubbed it in yet another feature to namecheck the BKc and its dapper founder, Ouigi Theodore.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/18/fashion/pushing-the-boundaries-of-black-style.html?_r=1&hpw

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Intrigued by a panel discussion titled “Social Getworking,” sponsored by the San Francisco branch of the American Photographic Artists (APA), Alison McCreery of the Photographers on Photography Blog arranged a follow-up interview/discussion among the panelists: APA board member Josh Bobb, online branching coach Miki Johnson, photographer/blogger Timothy Archibald, and Heather Elder of Heather Elder Represents, who invited Jill Hundenski, an art producer at TeamOne, to join in. The first half of the conversation was devoted to asking Hudenski about how she sources photographers and what she looks for. Here’s one of her answers:

For the most part, consistency in the work is pretty big. We understand a photographer can shoot a lot of different things and the quality can be great. We like to go to a specific photographer for a specific project or style. We like to think “that’s the guy who shoots like this.” If the work is all over the board, it’s more work on our end to narrow down some of their images to sell to our client. So consistency is really big.

I actually also like to look at their personal or fine art work. We look at so much commercial work that we get it. We like to see personal or fine art work to see the creativity of the photographer. We understand they are a really good shooter, but what are they thinking? Or what are they doing on the side? What personal project are they working on? It shows us who they are as a person and some of their personality.

Most importantly is that their site is easy to navigate. If there’s too much flash and I can’t get an idea of what the style is, it becomes frustrating and makes me want to move on. The simpler that it is, the better. This is very important. The point is to get the work across and for us to see it as fast as possible.

Link: http://blog.apasf.com/?p=3099

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From the book "To the Moon," published in 1969 by Time-Life..

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The WhiteLoupe Photography Blog featured photos from To the Moon, a 1969 Time-Life publication on NASA’s Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo projects. The images, which WhiteLoupe picked up from the blog Sci-Fi-O-Rama, have an innocence to them. They’re not at all heroic, which if you ask me makes them all the more appealing.

Link: http://thewhiteloupe.com/post/To-The-Moon

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At her eponymous blog, photographer Amy Stein wrote about “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Sharing My Work Online.” Excerpt: “I fully support the proper attribution of images and have done so on my blog since day one. In the age of Google Image Search, there is absolutely no excuse for not crediting an artist. But, I’m also a realist and long ago I fully embraced the idea that my images will travel and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it’s mostly a very good thing. If someone is moved to share my work or inspired to use it to create something new, that’s kind of cool. I know the free flow of my images has certainly helped my career and I often tell my students to swim with the current and make their work as shareable as possible.”

Link: http://amysteinphoto.blogspot.com/2011/07/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love.html

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Lost at E Minor featured Sacha Goldberger’s “Before and After Shots of Joggers.” Goldberger “created an outside studio at a park in Paris called Bois de Boulogne and asked random joggers if they would sprint, pose for a photo, then come back to his professional studio a week alter for a follow-up shot: ‘I wanted to show the difference between our natural and brute side versus how we represent ourselves to society.’” The series made me think of Claire Felicie‘s triptychs of Dutch marines, as seen at the Lens blog earlier this month, and of the putative validity of the before-and-after conceit as a form of revelation.

Link: http://www.lostateminor.com/2011/07/26/before-and-after-jogging-photo-series/

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A monograph of Ruth Harriet Louise's work published by the University of California Press.

The Telegraph’s Culture section profiled “star maker” Ruth Harriet Louise. “As the photographer could transform a ‘pretty, frizzy-haired’ nobody into Greta Garbo, a nameless chorus girl into Joan Crawford, Ruth Harriet Louise was a force to be reckoned with in golden-age Hollywood.”

Link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/8652691/Star-maker-the-photographer-Ruth-Harriet-Louise.html

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Shots magazine issued a “Call for Work” for its autumn issue. The images must be on the theme of self-portraiture. Shots is, in its own words, “a well-established, independent and reader-supported photography journal currently celebrating its 25th year of publication, SHOTS Magazine reaches an international community of photographers, educators, galleries, museums, collectors and other fine art photography enthusiasts.”

Link: http://shotsmag.com/shotssubmission.htm

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David Schonauer of The Big Picture interviewed Matthew Rolston about his racy True Blood cover for Rolling Stone. Excerpt: “There are differences between stage bloods,” he says. Rolston acquired his  familiarity with the fake stuff several years before, while shooting a portrait of Jack Nicholson, who was appearing as a particuliary homicidal gangster in Martin Scorsese’s The Departed. (The character, by the way, was based on the recently arrested mob boss Whitey Bulger.) “What you don’t want is the stuff that stains the skin, because you don’t do the actors any good with that. They turn pink. Basically you want washable and non-toxic, because it gets all around their mouths, the way I do it.”

Link: http://davidschonauer.wordpress.com/2011/07/13/113/

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Among the people/entities I follow on Twitter is Photojojo, who tweeted a link to a piece on how Google’s image-search engine is now showing EXIF data, such as camera, settings, focal length, and flash usage, and exposure.

Link: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/07/google-image-search-shows-more.html

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Photo by Tom Ryaboi. Courtesy Resource magazine's blog.

Resource magazine’s blog wrote about a new “major trend” called rooftopping, in which shooters take vertiginous photos from on high. (Maybe it’s photography’s answer to planking.) Photographer Tom Ryaboi, whose image is included in the post, has been rooftopping since 2007.

Link: http://resourcemagonline.com/blog/people-we-love-tom-ryaboi/

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And PhotoShelter presented part two of its “All the Photographer Promos in One Week to Travel + Leisure,” in which they look at all of the “good” promos that Travel+Leisure photo editor Whitney Lawson received in that period of time. “It’s a great way to see the diversity of design and content (and skill and talent) that you need to contend with to get on the radar of a major magazine,” writes PhotoShelter’s Allen Murabayashi.

Link: http://blog.photoshelter.com/2011/07/all-the-photographer-promos-in-one-week-to-travell-1.html

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Julie Grahame at aCurator featured Leland Bobbé’s gritty b&w photos of “New York City’s Seamy 70s”—specifically, of the Bowery and Times Square. The images had been tucked away in Bobbé’s archives and are, writes Julie, “virtually unseen.”

“The Bowery was the end of the line for many,” Bobbé says in the blog post. “Some of these shots were taken shooting from the hip, pre-focused to 6′, with a 28mm lens without looking through the viewfinder so I wouldn’t be noticed. My intention was to capture the grit and personality of a unique period in New York City history.”

Link: http://www.acurator.com/blog/2011/07/leland-bobbe-new-york-citys-seamy-70s.html

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LIFE.com posted a gallery that looks back at the early days of Betty White.

Link: http://www.life.com/gallery/62931/betty-white-back-in-the-day?xid=liferss#index/0

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Joerg Colberg announced the latest Conscientious Portfolio Competition.

Link: http://jmcolberg.com/weblog/2011/07/announcing_conscientious_portfolio_competition_2011

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Britain’s The Telegraph reports that the Victoria and Albert Museum in London is adding a photo gallery that “will chronicle the history of photography from its invention in 1839 up to the 1960s. It will be refreshed every 18 months with emphasis on different themes each time. Photographs Gallery launches this autumn with two exhibitions, one will trace the career of Victorian portraitist Julia Margaret Cameron and the other will show the significant works of street photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.”

Link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/photography/8647528/VandA-to-open-photography-gallery.html

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Feature Shoot presented selections from Bronx Boys, a new monograph by Stephen Shames. Published as a “photo ebook” by FotoEvidence, it features Shames’ photos, taken from 1977 to 2000, of a group of boys growing up in a tough NYC neighborhood.

Link: http://www.featureshoot.com/2011/07/stephen-shames-bronx-boys/

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Aperture’s Exposures blog reports that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art named Zoe Crosher one of its Art Here and Now artists and has acquired nine images from the LA-based photographer’s “The Reconsidered Archive of Michelle duBois.” Each year, LACMA chooses two artists for this prestigious prize. This year, Mark Flores was also chosen.

Aperture link: http://www.aperture.org/exposures/?p=11242

LACMA’s blog, Unframed: http://lacma.wordpress.com/2011/07/07/art-here-and-now-new-acquisitions-by-zoe-crosher-and-mark-flores/

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PhotoShelter wrote about “Social Media for Photographers.” An excerpt: “After interviewing about 30 photographers about their social media use over the past year or so, I’ve noticed that there are two camps: people who use it effectively and are seeing real results, and people who don’t really know why they’re wasting so much time on something that doesn’t seem to be working.”

One photog, for example, uses Twitter “to connect mainly with publishers and other photographers. Facebook is a place where he initiates dialogs with people with the goal of establishing a trusting relationship with existing and potential clients. LinkedIn, he says, is a regular source of assignment work.”

Link: http://blog.photoshelter.com/2011/07/social-media-for-photographers-lets-get-real-for-a.html

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Inside Facebook is not a photo blog but is still worth a look, if only for fun. This week, for instance, it listed “The 25 Most Liked Pages on Facebook, Summer 2011” and Vin Diesel not only made the list but ranked higher than Beyoncé (!).

Link: http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/07/20/the-25-most-liked-pages-on-facebook-summer-2011/

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Photo by Bieke Depoorter, as seen at Verve Photo.

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Verve Photo, which is devoted to documentary photography, highlighted the image by young Belgian photographer Bieke Depoorter, along with a story about it written by Depoorter. Here’s an excerpt:

“I took this picture during my second trip through Russia in the winter of 2008/2009. I met the woman a few days before, in the train, on my way to Vladivostok. We managed to meet again when I crossed her little village. As always, she didn’t speak English and I didn’t understand Russian but the moments with her were very quiet, intense and powerful.  I spend the night on her coach in her small old house. We watched pictures from the past and she invited me for a walk in her neighborhood. It was dark and freezing cold. We had to walk arm in arm because of the ice. She gave me one of her old bags to put my camera in, to protect me against thief’s.  In a little cold cafe that looked down over a frozen lake where some people where doing slipping tricks with their cars, we drank tea and walked back home.  Back in the warm house, she gave me a flowered pajama, watched the Russian The bold and the Beautiful and went to sleep.”

Link: http://vervephoto.wordpress.com/2011/07/08/bieke-depoorter/

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Le Lettre de la Photographie interviewed Kathy Ryan, director of photography for The New York Times Magazine, about “Photographs of the New York Times Magazine,” an exhibition that is debuting at Les Recontres d’Arles and that will be published as a book this fall.

Link: http://lalettredelaphotographie.com/entries/3243/kathy-ryan-thirty-years-of-new-york-times

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At Dodge & Burn, Qiana Mestrich wrote of purchasing Photography’s Other Histories. The book explores “the extraordinary diversity of nonwestern photography,” to borrow a phrase from the volume itself, and is a reminder that the Euro-American lens is not the only valid one through which to view the world.

Link: http://dodgeburn.blogspot.com/2011/07/my-wishlist-of-photography-books.html

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Longtime photo consultant/marketing guru Mary Virginia Swanson highlighted “Five important deadlines between July 13-17!,” including the Photobook Now self-publishing competition and Photolucida Critical Mass 2011.

Link: http://mvswanson.com/calendar-five-important-deadlines-between-july-13-17.html

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Photo consultants/bloggers Stella Kramer, Julie Grahame, and Allegra Wilde announced that they’re launching an online TV show called In the Loupe that is dedicated to photo news and opinions. The initial episodes were shot at Doug Menuez‘s Menuez Archive Projects headquarters in Chelsea, and the trio have posted a trailer—shot at the WIN-Initiative studio—so you can get a taste of what’s to come.

Link: http://intheloupetv.tumblr.com/

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Photo by Manjari Sharma, via The Photography Post.

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The Photography Post featured New York City–based photographer Manjari Sharma’s
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Link: http://thephotographypost.com/blogs/post/rachel/breaking-boundaries-manjari-sharmas-darshan-1954

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An image from Phaedra Call's "I Was Emily Dickinson," a photo project that includes quotes from her elderly subject.

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At Conscientious, Joerg Colberg rightly praised Phaedra Call’s series of portraits of an elderly woman, titled “I Was Emily Dickinson,” calling it “one of the most memorable photography projects I’ve seen in a while, shot and presented beautifully.”

Link: http://jmcolberg.com/weblog/2011/07/phaedra_call/

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“‘Starting out online was financially easier and I was able to reach a wider, international audience, but it has become more difficult to compete online with so many other blogs and websites.”

Which drew the following comment from a reader: “With the business (audience, advertising) shifting to digital media will paper publishing become a field for real amateurs (in its noble meaning)? Fast and interactive media vs slow and collectable media?”

Link: http://magculture.com/blog/?p=11303

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Noting that “applications to the Orange County High School of the Arts, the alma mater of Glee star Matthew Morrison, have been soaring,” the Los Angeles Times’ Framework blog posted a photo essay by LA Times shooter Jay L. Clendenin on the seniors at the school performing their season finale.

Link: http://framework.latimes.com/2011/06/24/glee-effect-pictures/

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British magazine Professional Photographer interviewed Lorraine Candy, the editor of Elle U.K. about the magazine’s approach to photography and what she seeks in prospective Elle photo contributors. An excerpt:

“I think the lighting and emotional feel of a photographer’s book is the most important thing. I’m looking for something unusual; someone with a slightly different take on things. Photography in print can convey a sense of emotion. There are a lot of good technical photographers out there, but you can’t get anything out of them.”

Link: http://www.professionalphotographer.co.uk/Frontline/Editors/Lorraine-Candy-Editor-ELLE-UK-magazine

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Another Los Angeles Times blog, All the Rage, reports that Smashbox Studios is hosting an exhibition of work by photo assistants. “The idea behind the show is to introduce emerging photographers to top working photographers, photo representatives and  producers.”

Link: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/alltherage/2011/06/up-and-comers-smashbox-studios-hosts-the-annual-la-photo-assistants-show.html

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Cover Junkie posted the latest in its “Great Art Directors About Their Favorite Covers” series, which asks creatives what covers (from any time in publishing history) they wish they’d designed. This week, it was Eric Capossela, design director at Atlanta magazine. Among his picks was the above July 1966 Esquire cover designed by George Lois.

“This list wouldn’t be complete without the inclusion of Mr. George Lois,” writes Capossela. “This DiMaggio cover carries a certain sadness, elegance, AND the grandeur of Yankee Stadium. And that iconic swing!”

Link: http://www.coverjunkie.com/blog/coverjunkie-eric-capossela/15/6505

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La Lettre de la Photographie spotlighted photos of Mexico by Larry Cwik. Explains Cwik, “The work in this series results from a cumulative total of six months spent photographing for this project in Mexico, visiting annually since 1983, to a different large city each year, and walking an estimated 900 miles to date through the streets of Mexican cities, looking for images.” He adds, “Andre Breton, a founder of surrealism, said that Mexico is ‘the surrealist place par excellence,’ and I agree.”

Link: http://lalettredelaphotographie.com/entries/the-mexico-of-larry-cwik

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PDNonline posted an article on how best to stay in touch after a portfolio review that included a few other interesting portfolio-review nuggets, like this…

Too often, photographers will attend reviews with just one body of work and then show up with the same set of images. Christopher Rauschenberg, co-curator of Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, Oregon (and co-founder of Photolucida), recommends photographers bring at least two or three different series for review. “We all say it, but not everyone listens,” says Rauschenberg. By bringing more than one project to show, “you minimize the chances of having work that someone won’t care anything about or has no feeling for.”

…and this, from curator Anne Wilkes Tucker of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston…

“During the review I want to see between 20 to 30 pieces max. I also prefer an artist not go on and on about the work before I see it. Don’t tell me who has bought the work and where it was shown. Either the work will speak for itself or it won’t.”

Link: http://www.pdnonline.com/pdn/features/Benefiting-from-Port-3091.shtml

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British newspaper The Telegraph illustrated its “Photography Sites of the Week” with the above pair of images by Jocelyn Allen, whose work was on view all last month as part of the Guernsey Photography Festival.

Link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/photography/6515582/Photography-sites-of-the-week.html

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We Can Shoot Too was taken with Kevin Scanlon’s photos and video of people living off the grid in Southern California’s high desert, and the county’s crackdown on them. The images accompanied a piece in the LA Weekly.

Link: http://wecanshoottoo.blogspot.com/2011/06/la-countys-war-on-desert-rats.html

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And AnOther magazine’s Kasia Bobula writes of finding a 1966 copy of Photography Annual containing an interview with Irving Penn. Among the quotes she posted from the “brutally honest yet very educational interview” is this one on commercial photography:

“The ideal commercial photograph is one that is highly sensual. It is however a controlled and used sensuality. (…) As a matter of fact, advertising clients of successful companies seem to value the sensual picture more than editors of magazines do, because they know that is a way to get at buying the public.”

Link: http://www.anothermag.com/reader/view/4001/IRVING_PENN_IN_QUOTES

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At The New York Times‘ Lens blog, Kerri MacDonald talked about Nancy LeVine‘s poignant series on aging canines…

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A Photo Editor interviewed Vincent Laforet about the future of photography:

APE: …Eventually, there’s going to be no shutter to press.

VL: Precisely. The cameras can now be recording all the time.

APE: So doesn’t that just transfer the job of capturing the decisive moment to editing the decisive moment?

VL: Editing is going to become one of the most important, sought after skill sets in the next five to 10 years. I think we’re going to see such an incredible amount of data coming in, to the likes of which we’ve never seen before that editors are going to become one of the most important job positions out there.

APE: So there will be a need for a photographer to pair up with an editor?

VL: I don’t see how a photographer/videographer can do all this on their own. They would never sleep.

(Read more: “Vincent Laforet – The Future Of Photography Is Convergence”).

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We Can Shoot Too rightly posted the following excerpt from art critic Jerry Saltz‘s Venice Biennale review as “Quote of the Week”:

“I went to Venice, and I came back worried. Every two years, the central attraction of the Biennale is a kind of State of the Art World show. This year’s, called “Illuminations,” has its share of high points and ­artistic intensity. (Frances Stark’s animated video of her online masturbatory tryst with a younger man hooked me; Christian Marclay’s The Clock, which captivated New York earlier this year, rightly won the Gold Lion Prize for Best ­Artist.) Yet many times over—too many times for comfort—I saw the same thing, a highly recognizable generic ­institutional style whose manifestations are by now extremely familiar. Neo-Structuralist film with overlapping geometric colors, photographs about photographs, projectors screening loops of grainy black-and-white archival footage, abstraction that’s supposed to be referencing other abstraction—it was all there, all straight out of the seventies, all dead in the ­water. It’s work stuck in a cul-de-sac of aesthetic regress, where everyone is deconstructing the same elements.”

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Resource magazine took note of a new photography magazine from India called PIX…

Click image to access PIX's site.

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Reuters‘ Photographers blog posted a beautiful story on a Ping-Pong therapy program in L.A. for people suffering from dementia and Alzheimer’s. Among the benefits, apparently, are relieving depression…

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Also at A Photo Editor, Bill Cramer, the CEO of Wonderful Machine, broke down the details of negotiating a contract for a Fast Company assignment. Lots of good info here for photogs who find the process vexing and unsettling. An excerpt…

“Photographers should be aware that there are some unscrupulous clients out there who will intentionally withhold sending a contract until after a shoot, thinking that the photographer will have diminished leverage to negotiate at that point. The fact is that both parties are equally disadvantaged in those cases. After all, the client can’t publish the pictures without the photographer’s permission and the photographer won’t get paid until they have reached an agreement with the client.”

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Wired‘s Raw File showcased Wolfram Hahn‘s project “Into the Light,” for which Hahn scouted “profile portraits of people in his home city of Berlin. When he found a worthy self-portrait, he sent a message inquiring about why the user took the photo. Then, if the user was game, Hahn schlepped his a tripod-mounted Hasselblad over to the subject’s apartment and re-enacted the original picture-taking scene.”

Click image to see more.

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And Pictory Blog tipped us off to Linka Odom‘s “Coming Home” series with this telling photo of Odom’s mom. “If only an image could describe a 33 year marriage gone sour halfway through. Perhaps this one does.”

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