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Creative Review issues its new Photography Annual

Kristina Feliciano — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 18:33:15 +0000

The November issue of Britain’s Creative Review is also its Photography Annual, with 85 of its 196 pages featuring work singled out for recognition by the magazine’s editors. Among those chosen for this year’s photo annual is Nadav Kander, for his portrait of rapper Tinie Tempah, originally taken for The Observer (see more here).

Tinie Tempah. Photo by Nadav Kander.

From the CR blog: “The Photography Annual is our showcase of great commercial images produced during the past year. We have some fantastic selected work this year including images from the likes of Nadav Kander, Dean Chalkley, Nick Meek Julia Fullerton-Batten and many, many more. As ever, the Photography Annual comes as a special double issue of CR with all the content from the regular magazine included.”

The front and back covers of the photo annual, incidentally, display lovely photograms by John Ross. Here’s a look at those. And for more details, visit “CR November: The Photography Annual.”

The front cover of Creative Review's November issue features a photogram by John Ross.

The back cover.

Corbis Silver Iris Competition honors John Midgley’s Brooklyn Circus project

Kristina Feliciano — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 17:46:13 +0000

John Midgley and his Brooklyn Circus project were honored in the 2011 Silver Iris Competition, sponsored by Corbis and Creative Review. The brief for the contest was “Urbanization,” and the judges were looking for “imagery inspired by the common consciousness of urban dwellers” as well as “the personality of the city itself.” John was one of the competition’s three winners (the others were Michael Whelan and Alex Bland).

“John Midgley’s series takes us back in time,” the judges wrote, “and also reminds us that our vibrant urban culture has been growing for quite some time. The real-feel aesthetic grabbed our attention but it was the cast and detail in the styling that impressed us most.”

Photo by John Midgley, from his series "The Brooklyn Circus."

Photo by John Midgley.

John is presently shopping around a book based on this body of work. In the meantime, he’s posted a collection of the images at issuu.com. Click the image below for a look.

Click image to view folio.

“Women Laughing Alone With Salad”

Kristina Feliciano — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 14:11:25 +0000

This witty post from Creative Review‘s CR Blog is a perfect perk-up for this gray and snowy New York day:

“Few things are as evocative of fresh and fun good times as a woman clearly enjoying a decent salad. The excellent Hairpin recently posted a range of similarly-themed stock photos, partly as an ironic reminder of the resolutions we make in early January, but also as a nod to some of the more amusing fictions inherent within image libraries…”

Click on the image below to read more.

New work: Nadav Kander’s St John Ambulance campaign is a matter of life and death

Kristina Feliciano — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 13:00:19 +0000

St John Ambulance is a U.K. charity dedicated to teaching people first aid so that everyone might be equipped with the knowledge to save a life. “We believe that it’s absolutely unacceptable that so many people die needlessly—because no one could give them first aid when they needed it,” the organization states at its website. “St John Ambulance teaches people first aid—about 800,000 last year alone—so that they can be the difference between a life lost and a life saved.”

The difference between a life lost and a life saved—that idea is at the center of a breathtaking campaign Nadav shot for St John, which features sublime black-and-white (fictional) “death” portraits of people whose lives were lost because they were in need of aid…and no one knew how to help them in time.

This is the first major campaign by St John Ambulance in 15 years, reports the Creative Review blog. “As part of the campaign,” writes Creative Review‘s Eliza Williams, “St John Ambulance has created an iPhone App that gives potentially life-saving advice. A free pocket-sized guide featuring first aid skills can also be downloaded from sja.org.uk.”

The agency was BBH. The creative directors were Alex Grieves and Adrian Rossi, and the creatives were Victoria Daltry and Will Bingham.

Creative Review embraces the moving image; British creative director names David Drebin “one to watch”

Kristina Feliciano — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 17:28:47 +0000

For its 30th-anniversary issue, Creative Review asked various industry figures to talk about “one thing, person, idea or place that they are excited about for the future, in order to create a list of 30 exiting prospects for the future.” The RED camera was one of those things, and the magazine uses a recent Prada campaign shot with a RED by Steven Meisel as an example.

As Gavin Lucas writes in a post CR’s blog, the fashion magazine LOVE is advertising its new issue with a 60-second film called The LOVE Thing that was shot with the RED and directed by “CG specialist” James Lima, who has worked on projects for Madonna, James Cameron, Steven Spielberg, and others.

A still from "The LOVE Thing."

“I’m very excited by the idea of [fashion embracing] moving image,” LOVE’s Katie Grand told CR’s Lucas. “Clothes and bodies look better in motion. The new technology surrounding the iPad is also very interesting to me, and it’s thrilling to try and find a new way of working with fashion that isn’t just two-dimensional. Adding sound and movement to fashion is a huge and very exciting challenge.”

Also in CR‘s anniversary issue, Brett Foraker, creative director of Britain’s Channel 4, names our own David Drebin as one to watch. “I chose David Drebin because I like the cinematic quality in his pictures,” Foraker told the magazine, which published this photo of David’s:

"Yellow Pool," by David Drebin.

“Chances are you’ve seen some of his photos without quite knowing who made them,” Foraker continued. “His work references predecessors like Crewdson, LaChapelle and diCorcia but perhaps possesses an even greater sense of place. It is hard to find a photographer who is equally comfortable with personal and commercial work, but Drebin’s attention to detail on both fronts gives him a real edge.”

Photography + Google Maps = unusual band promo

Kristina Feliciano — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 13:52:47 +0000

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We’re always hearing about how Twitter and Facebook and the like are being leveraged for marketing purposes, but Google Maps? I hadn’t seen that trusty navigational resource identified it as a promotional tool until today, when I read a story at Creative Review‘s website about Sony’s promo for In This Light and On This Evening, the new album from British indie-rock band Editors. The concept for the unusual online promo was to allow fans to visit, via a hacked version of Google Maps, the London streets that inspired the various songs on the record. The promo also includes panoramic photos of the band.

“The images feature the band and a group of their fans performing surreal activities which have cryptic meanings relating to the songs,” Phil Clandillon, creative director at Sony Music, tells Creative Review. “The locations are normally unavailable on the regular Street View. Our modified version of Google Maps allows users to enter into these locations and make the transition from light to dark so fans can explore the band’s atmospheric vision of London at night.”

The promo starts here, and you can click around—as you would with the real Google Maps street view—to find your way. In this case, to tracks from the Editors' new CD.

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The photographer for the project was James Royall, who shot the panoramas using a 180-degree fisheye lens, stitching together the parts using software. (The story doesn’t indicate which program, but I recall that the Israeli photographer Yuval Yairi used Photoshop for his painstakingly constructed panoramas, which consisted of thousands of images that he shot with a Sony DSR-PD150 video camera set to “still” mode. I wrote about his process for the November 2008 issue of PDN, and Yuval has posted the story here.)

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One of James Royall's stitched-together panoramas.

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You can read Creative Review‘s behind-the-scenes story here. To check out the promo, visit Editors’ website. Oh, yeah, and the album? It’s good. Dark in that arty ’80s way, melodic, not too ironic. It already came out in the U.K. It comes out on this side of the pond on October 27 January 19 on the FADER label.

The debate over CGI

Kristina Feliciano — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 15:05:41 +0000

The Creative Review has published a provocative article titled “The Traditional Studio Photographer Is About to Die,” on the increasing popularity of CGI and what it means for photographers. If you’re a commercial photographer and haven’t added CGI to your repertoire, you might want to read it. “We’re fast approaching the tipping point,” car photographer Carl Lyttle tells writer Diane Smyth, who is the deputy editor for the British Journal of Photography. “Those photographers who aren’t moving into 3D won’t be around in three or four years.”

Smyth says art directors are drawn to CGI because it gives them greater control, while Chris Christodoulou, managing director of British CGI specialists Saddington & Baynes notes that it also enables ad agencies to avoid model-release fees. “You would think that with all the people in the world it would be easier to shoot someone but we get asked by agencies all the time, eager to avoid the issue of model release fees,” he says. “With CGI you could design exactly the person you wanted.”

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“Those photographers who aren’t moving into 3D won’t be around in three or four years.”

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CGI doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing proposition, though. Back in May, I wrote about how Jim Fiscus—who has always made it a priority to be at the cutting edge of photographic tools and technology—combined straight photography with CGI to create a personal project called “The Unfortunate Moment of Misunderstanding.” The project, which Jim conceived as a sort of photographic novella, is highly moody, brooding, and psychological. Not, in other words, an exercise in technology for technology’s sake. As the industry grapples with how to integrate CGI, we’re betting that the photographers who use it well and wisely will have one thing in common: old-fashioned creativity.

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From Jim Fiscus's "The Unfortunate Moment of Misunderstanding," a personal photo project that incorporated CGI.

Giving stylists their due

Kristina Feliciano — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 12:42:36 +0000

In a post at Creative Review’s blog, Satara Achille highlights an exhibition of fashion images with an uncommon curatorial bent: the show celebrates the stylist rather than the photographer. “When You’re a Boy: Men’s Fashion Styled by Simon Foxton,” at the Photographers’ Gallery in London, surveys the work of this noted British stylist, who got his start styling for i-D in the ’80s and went on to establish his own design label and work as a consultant to various fashion brands.

“As Brett Rogers of the Photographers’ Gallery says in her intro to the accompanying catalogue, ‘Though acknowledged as trendsetters and visionaries within the fashion world, the creative contribution of stylists to the construction of the fashion image goes largely unrecognised,’” writes Achille. “She contends that stylists, far from being ephemeral figures, have effectively ‘co-authored some of the most iconic fashion images of our time,’ hence the show.”

“When You’re a Boy: Men’s Fashion Styled by Simon Foxton” is on view at the Photographers’ Gallery through October 4.

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From the exhibition "When You’re a Boy: Men’s Fashion Styled by Simon Foxton." Photo by Nick Knight.

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