When I was a kid, my school had an end of the year event all students were expected to participate in. They called it “Field and Track Day,” which was a fancy way of saying, “Okay kids, we’ve got to kill a mandatory school day, so we’re going to ship you all out to a local park, make you run around in the hot May sun for about 6 hours until you feel like passing out or puking, or both, and then send you home. Have fun!”
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Once upon a time, in the days of old, when photographers still used those light sensitive plastic strips in the back of their large black cameras — cameras with funny names like Hasselblad and Mamiya — there were photography workshops. They are not a new invention. They’ve been around for a very long time. But, back in the days of film and cameras with odd names, these workshops were a little different.
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(I’m not saying this is how the conversation went down at the Chicago Sun-Times last week, but I’m saying it could have.)
Good morning, everyone.
Is the entire photography staff here? …26, 27, 28…yes, it looks like everyone is present and accounted for, so let’s begin.
We don’t need you.
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I was a kid in the early 90s and my brother would often drive me around. One day, on the radio, a song came on by the Squirrel Nut Zippers. My brother turned to me and asked, “Can you believe how popular this song is?” I didn’t understand what he was asking. “I like this song,” I said. “Yeah fine, but it sounds like it’s from the 40’s.” This was one of the first times in my life that I had become aware of time.
Not time, like wristwatch time. The grand idea of time. That long incomprehensible string that was here before me and that’d be here after I’ve gone. A pretty heavy concept to be born from listening to a Squirrel Nut Zippers song.
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This appears to be a big week for Yahoo! with their $1 billion Tumblr acquisition announcement followed by a number of changes to their Flickr service. Exciting stuff in the tech world. However, amid the Yahoo! hoopla, CEO Marissa Mayer managed to insult the entire professional photography community with her comments, being widely interpreted as “there’s no such thing as professional photographers” anymore.
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It’s hard to fathom the effect that Photoshop and digital retouching has had on our world. Limitations placed on artists and photographers in particular have systematically been stripped away as terms like “‘shopped” made their way into our vernacular.
In this short video, PBS Arts examines that effect. From the artist, to the photographer, to the everyday citizen who has something to say, nobody has been left unaltered by Photoshop. Read more…
Take a quick look at Chinese photographer Yao Lu’s “New Landscapes” photos, and they may look to you like old Chinese paintings of misty mountains, green hills, and choppy brown rivers. Each one even bears a red seal stamp that artists use as signatures on finished works.
Look a little closer, however, and it becomes apparent that something isn’t quite right. “Those are some strange looking mountains, you think to yourself.” Well, they aren’t actually mountains, but rather mounds of garbage covered with green construction netting.
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Watermarks are commonly used by photographers these days to protect their work from unauthorized use and distribution. However, they’re not very popular among photo viewers, since they do a lot to detract from the content of the photographs. Photographer Kip Praslowicz was thinking about this earlier this week, and writes,
[...] it seems like many amateur [photographers] spend more time putting elaborate watermarks on their images than they do making images worth stealing [...] I don’t really recall ever seeing the photographs of famous art photographers with a gaudy watermark.
He then decided to see what famous photographs would look like if the photographers behind them had slapped obnoxious watermarks onto them.
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Everyone is a photographer these days, and it is estimated that 380 billion photographs were taken last year, with a huge percentage of them created with the 1 billion+ camera-equipped phones now floating around. The New York Times’ James Estrin has some interesting thoughts on where this radical-shift in the practice and definition of photography is taking us:
Just as access to pens and paper hasn’t produced thousands of Shakespeares or Nabokovs, this explosion of camera phones doesn’t seem to have led to more Dorothea Langes or Henri Cartier-Bressons. But it has certainly led to many more images of what people ate at lunch.
[...] A photograph is no longer predominantly a way of keeping a treasured family memory or even of learning about places or people that we would otherwise not encounter. It is now mainly a chintzy currency in a social interaction and a way of gazing even further into one’s navel.
He thinks the strengthening torrent of digital images will have one of two possible effects: a culture that is more aware and appreciative of photography, or a society in which it’s impossible for any photo to rise above the flood of images.
In an Age of Likes, Commonplace Images Prevail [NYTimes]
Scott Lamb of BuzzFeed created this exceptionally moving video that asks the question, “what makes a great photograph great?” Lamb’s voice narrates a slideshow of some of the most powerful photographs captured throughout history — photographs that capture life, love, death, sacrifice, joy, and suffering. Captions accompany the images, so we recommend watching the video twice and pausing on each photo to make sure you catch all of them (otherwise it may be hard to know what’s actually happening).
In case you’re wondering, the background track is “Hypnagogia” by Andrea Rossi.
