When I made images documenting the mourning period after the passing of Queen Elizabeth II there was a complexity to the situation that I wanted to convey. I wrote about navigating different manifestations of grief, as well as that grief in the context of the wider political relationship between the deceased and the citizens of the UK.
The 66th parallel north is a circle of latitude that is 66 degrees north of the Earth's equatorial plane, about 61 kilometers south of the Arctic Circle. It crosses the Atlantic Ocean, Europe, Asia and North America.
This year marks 50 years since Susan Sontag’s essay "Photography" was published in the New York Review of Books. Slightly edited and renamed In Plato’s Cave, it would become the first essay in her collection On Photography, which has never been out of print.
2012 was a helluva year for film photographers and a crossroads for me personally.
In what has become a year-end PetaPixel tradition, photographic artist B.A. Van Sise—who has the unusual practice of making one, and only one, photograph on film every single day— looks back on the past year and towards the next. His previous entries can be found for 2018, 2019, and 2020. More images from this series, titled The Infinite Present, can be seen on the artist’s website.
Going out with your camera on a regular basis is an important part of expanding your personal growth, creativity, and mental health. During this worldwide pandemic, it means exploring the world close to home.
Do non-human beings have a need for privacy? And if so, is it comparable to that of human beings? Does wildlife photography invade privacy? This essay seeks to explore these questions by comparing paparazzi photography with wildlife photography regarding the concept of privacy invasion. To do so, two images will be studied in detail and compared to each other.
On January 20th, 2021, I stood on the press risers at the Presidential Inauguration in Washington, DC, photographing Joe Biden taking the oath of office. It had already been a busy and chaotic month. Two weeks prior, I’d stood on these same press risers making photos as tear gas clouded the air and violent insurrectionists broke through overwhelmed police lines to gain entrance to the Capitol. The dissonance between these two events was head-spinning.
My father Ohno Tsuneya (Oct 9, 1937 – Dec 23, 2017) was born into a peaceful small town in the hilly countryside of Saitama prefecture, a few hours by train from Tokyo.
The girl with the sunglasses has been one of my favorite images since the day I took it. It’s very photo 1 and is literally from my first semester of art school. Taken with my first camera a Canon EOS 630 I bought for class, I shot it on Kodak Tri-X and printed it on Ilford Multigrade Glossy Fiber Base paper.
I'm Martin from the All About Street Photography channel. In this 6-minute video and article, I am going to talk about the photo essay "Country Doctor" by W. Eugene Smith. We'll be taking a closer look at the story behind some photographs.
Walking past booth after booth at the PhotoPlus Expo in New York, I often heard camera company presenters explaining to their uncomfortably-seated, yet nonetheless-enraptured, audiences how they shot the “perfect” photo.
It was an early Tuesday morning, and I was sitting in a car with a friend of mine. We were going over some papers for a project I had in mind. While my friend had his eyes buried in the papers and text, mine started to wander outside.
In the 1950s, early color photography was widely scorned. Now it’s the default. What happened?
For a photographer with so many memorable quips to his name, Garry Winogrand didn't leave much of a paper trail. The four books he made during his lifetime (five if you count the 1976 Grossmont College booklet) consist almost exclusively of pictures. Although they also include some great essays, none are by Winogrand. Nor did he write for any outside books or sources.
Lately, the photography sphere has been inundated, not with the gazillions of photos everyone is talking about, but with article after article proclaiming that photography is dead/over/irrelevant/trash.
My parents bought this chair and a matching couch not long after they were married in 1951. This was my dad’s chair. If you were sitting in it when he walked into the room he gave you the friendly thumb twist, which simply meant: get up.
At the eastern end of the island of Java lies the active volcano of Kawah Ijen. Here men work in perilous conditions to extract suffer from the bottom of the caldera.
40 years ago, Bob Khoury and Warren Steinberg started selling used photo equipment out of a showcase in an Atlanta, Georgia, flea market. Soon they moved to a brick and mortar store which, to incorporate their earlier experience, they called Showcase. The store grew to be the largest in Atlanta and sold photo and video equipment to amateurs and professionals alike and last year they celebrated their 40th anniversary.
Moving down the aisles that are carved between each row of seats, the line slowly edges on. A choir of no more than three people -- woman and two men -- expel their voices gently and slowly, serenading the churchgoers as they inch forward toward the pulpit where they receive their bread and wine.
My name is Trevor Gavin and I'm a photographer based near San Francisco. I'd like to share a very personal story of my darkest time. It’s a part of my healing and a part of moving on. It’s the only way I know how to express my emotions.
You have no doubt heard of the Golden Ratio, which is somehow or other connected to the Golden Mean and the Fibonacci Spiral, which is oft-touted as the basis of all great compositions. It is less likely that you have heard of the Diamond Ratio.
"Yet to an obsessive his obsession always seems to be of the nature of things and so is not recognized by what it is." Those words, written by art critic John Berger in his book Ways of Seeing, annotate one part of his understanding of the history of oil paintings: it’s obsessive tendencies toward showmanship of what one has, and the relationship between property and art.
A week and a bit ago I was in Falmouth, on stage, in front of maybe a bit less than 100 or so students. It was Tuesday, around 2pm. I felt oddly calm and eager. They looked expectedly unenthusiastic.
A dark reality exists within photography that few photographers are willing to discuss and many refuse to even recognize. In the name of purity, we tend to see photography as a medium that couldn’t -- shouldn’t be able to -- do harm.
I just got back from a trip to Yellowstone National Park to test out the Nikon D500, Nikon D5, and Pentax K-1 DSLRs and I wanted to share my experience, specifically my frustrations with visiting and photographing this amazing location, which has been my top spot for many years for photographing both wildlife and landscapes.
If all journeys are teachers, it may well be that a journey to India is the greatest teacher of all. As Kurt Vonnegut said, "Bizarre travel plans are dancing lessons from God," and it was in search of a new dance that I purchased a one-way ticket on the longest train in India.
Maya’s calm and thoughtful features hover kindly over her father’s hollowed face. David’s prominent cheekbones are exaggerated by the Chiaroscuro effect of a bare-bulbed lamp. Strings of dark hair frame Maya’s profile in the windowless bedroom. Propped up on an elbow, she is beautiful, yet the role reversal is obscene.
Nestled at the base of a red rock cliff just north of the Utah/Arizona border, Goulding’s Trading Post offers a commanding panorama of Monument Valley -- it’s every photographer’s dream vista. It also invites travelers, through prominent signage, to visit “John Wayne’s Cabin”. Now, to a sucker for kitschy Americana like me (who also just happened to be moseying through on a recent 1700 mile southwestern photography trip), that sign was magnetic.
In August 2014, photographer Zhenia Bulawka and her boyfriend Christian took their three dogs on a special trip to the beach. One of their beloved dogs, an 11-year-old American Staffordshire Terrier named Mr. Dukes, was dying of cancer, and Bulawka wanted to give him a vacation of a lifetime before he passed away.
It’s a stark divide. In front of me, a man snores softly among a pile of beer bottles, yet somehow manages to sit upright on the edge of a slab of broken cement, not far from the edge of the crumbling bridge I’m standing on. Just beyond the bridge and barely 30 feet below lies a line of townhouses; each easily sold for over half a million. They stand sentinel-like, crowding each other, overlooking an old, unused elevated railroad embankment. Between the snoring man and I lie old rails, overgrown grass, and gravel. To the east, Chicago’s downtown skyline towers over the flat Midwest expanse. Welcome to The Bloomingdale Trail.
(I won’t lie to you, I have no sources I can cite for the positions I intend to take in this post. These are simply my opinions from having lived on this planet. And, of course, you know what they say about opinions…)
I think we can all agree that photography is an art form. (At least I hope we can, because that’s one of the central premises with which I’m working.) But what, then, is art? Why do we aspire to make it in the first place?
We photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again. We cannot develop and print a memory.
-- Henri Cartier-Bresson
We exist on a treadmill of forgetting and anticipating. We labor to preserve what we treasure of our past, even while the present shotguns us with a thousand new options, one of which must become our future. One of which we must choose.
In this maelstrom of time it is hard to be calm; to understand what warrants attention, and what can be ignored. This state of tranquility and presence has been the essence of the modern photographic act, best characterized in the popular mind by Cartier-Bresson's concept of the "Decisive Moment."
Capitol Hill 60 Minute Photo closed its doors at the end of last year. Given the transformation photography has gone through over the past decade, it hardly came as a surprise. At its core, the success, survival, and eventual demise of 60 Minute Photo is just another familiar story of a business fighting against the moving current of technology. It’s closure, however, reveals something important, something personal. It represents a shift in how we create and preserve our memories and a deepening of the divide between customer and proprietor.
I used to care. In fact, I used to care a lot. It’s actually sort of embarrassing, in retrospect, how much it mattered to me.
Have you ever wondered how Leica chooses its pricing for its high-end cameras? J Shin has written up …
Hyperallergic has published an essay about a project titled …
Design director Wayne Ford has written up a great piece on the career of American photographer Arnold Newman, who was in the vanguard of the "environmental portrait" movement that emerged in the early 1940s.
Back in the spring of 1980, Magnum photographer Bruce Davidson began to photograph the subway system in NYC for …
Photo editor Michael Davis on why clichés win photo contests: I think one …