The giant “GRIT” seen in this photograph wasn’t added in post-processing. The secret? Blue painters tape.
Artist Stephen Doyle created the installation for a series of photographs that appeared in a recent New York Times Magazine article titled What if the Secret to Success is Failure?
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After Bang-Bang Club photographer Joao Silva lost his legs to a land mine in Afghanistan in October of last year, NYTimes executive editor Bill Keller stated, “He will be missed until — as I have no doubt he will — he returns to action, cameras blazing.” Keller predicted correctly — Silva has returned to work less than a year after suffering his horrific injuries:
[...] as the Times correspondent Sabrina Tavernise rushed uphill on Wednesday to cover the closing ceremony at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, she spotted a very familiar face in the crowd. Mr. Silva, wearing a T-shirt with the exclamation “Pow!” written across the front, was already on the scene. He was smiling. He was walking on his prosthetic legs. And he was taking pictures.
One of those photos, of soldiers and visitors watching a parachute demonstration during the ceremony, was chosen for Page 1 of The Times on Thursday. [#]
Silva tells the NYTimes, “It was a matter of making the best of what I had. There will come a time when I can run, but now I can walk.”
Back in Action and Back on Page 1 [NYTimes]
Earlier this week the New York Times was lent a mysterious photo album that contained 214 photos of Nazi Germany, including images taken just feet away from Hitler. There was no indication of who the photographer was, so the Lens blog decided to publish some of the photos and crowdsource the task of solving the mystery.
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If you’ve been out of the loop when it comes to emergence of mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras (MILC, AKA EVIL), David Pogue over at the New York Times has an interesting article introducing them:
That’s why, for years, there were two kinds of cameras: pocket models, with tiny sensors that produce blurry or grainy photos in low light and S.L.R. cameras, those big-sensor, big-body, heavy black beasts used by professionals.
In the last couple of years, though, things have changed. There’s a new class of camera whose size (both body and sensor) falls in between those two time-honored extremes. They represent a rethinking of every single design element, a jettisoning of every nonessential component, in pursuit of a tiny, big-sensor camera. Because that, after all, is what the world really wants.
Do you think these cameras are “what the world really wants”?
The Holy Grail: Small Cameras, Big Sensors [NYTimes]
Image credit: Sony NEX-5 w/ Minolta 55mm f/1.7 by pabuk
New York Times photographer Lynsey Addario was recently released along with three male journalists after being taken captive in Libya. After details of her abuse was reported in the news, there were immediately reactions from those who believe that female journalists shouldn’t be assigned to war zones because of the risks. Addario responded yesterday, saying:
If a woman wants to be a war photographer, she should. It’s important. Women offer a different perspective. We have access to women on a different level than men have, just as male photographers have a different relationship with the men they’re covering.
[...] when I was in Libya, I was groped by a dozen men. But why is that more horrible than what happened to Tyler or Steve or Anthony — being smashed on the back of the head with a rifle butt? Why isn’t anyone saying men shouldn’t cover war? Women and men should do what they believe they need to do.
I don’t think it’s more dangerous for a woman to do conflict photography. Both men and women face the same dangers.
You can read the rest of her post over on the NYT Lens Blog.
Image credit: 038 by Nasser Nouri
A movie about the Bang Bang Club isn’t the only photography-related movie to grace theaters in recent days. Bill Cunningham New York, an acclaimed documentary film about the New York Times fashion photographer, is also arriving in theaters around the US. The film is 94% fresh on RottenTomatoes, and is said to be a beautiful and inspiring movie.
Check this page to see if it’s playing in a theater near you.
(via A Photo Editor)
Here’s an interesting snippet from an article published today by David Pogue of the New York Times that describes a trick one photographer uses to overcome the megapixel myth:
A few years back, one of his clients, a stock-photo company, rejected his submissions because they didn’t meet the company’s minimum-resolution requirements. All photos had to be, for example, 10 megapixels or higher.
Tom knew that his five-megapixel photos (or whatever they were) would print perfectly well; he knew that the megapixel myth was at play. But he couldn’t convince the stock agency that its megapixel requirement was based on mythology.
So he took a photo file from a buddy who owned a fancy high-end Canon SLR, pasted in his low-res photo, and dragged it out bigger, so that it filled the full area of the higher-resolution photo. (Why did he start with his buddy’s file? So that the metadata—the invisible information about the photographic settings embedded in every digital photo—would indicate to the stock agency that the picture was taken with that high-end camera.)
Not only was the stock agency fooled, but to this day, many of its customers have used Tom’s phony high-megapixel photos in professional publications. They’ve all been delighted by the quality.
It would be interesting to find out how widespread this kind of fakery is in the photo industry.
If you’re subscribed to the New York Times, you might have noticed some unique-looking war photographs featured as the top story when opening up the paper yesterday. The four photographs were actually iPhone photos taken by NYT photographer Damon Winter in Afghanistan, and processed with the popular app Hipstamatic. Earlier this year AP photographer David Guttenfelder did the same thing in Afghanistan with an iPhone and a Polaroid filter app.
You can view a gallery of Winter’s Hipstamatic war photos over on the NYT Lens blog.
(via Gizmodo)
This audio slideshow interview by BagNewsSalon features New York Times contract photographer Michael Kamber, who discusses the issue of military censorship of photographs shot during the Iraq war and how his ability to document the war became more and more limited as time went on. An interesting point he makes is that uncensored photography should be allowed even if it can’t be published immediately, because it can provide posterity with an accurate view into the past.
Making pictures and getting them published have their own set of rules dictated by government, military, publishers and editors. The images made by the photojournalists who covered the war can reveal a gruesome reality beyond what the American media has shown us. “I think that we need to publish those photos for history even if we can’t get them in the newspaper today,” said Kamber.
A warning: the slideshow includes some pretty intense images of war.
(via A Photo Editor)
The New York Times recently issued an apology for staged photographs that appeared alongside an art review that ran at the end of September.
[The photographs] appeared to show museum visitors viewing the exhibit.
In fact, the people shown were museum staff members, who were asked by museum officials to be present in the galleries to provide scale and context for the photographs. The photographer acknowledged using the same procedure in other cases when an exhibition was not yet opened to the public.
Such staging of news pictures violates The Times’s standards and the photographs should not have been published. (While pictures may show previews or similar situations before an exhibition opens, readers should not be given a misleading impression about the circumstances.)
One of the photographs is shown above. Basically the photos showed museum staffers as visitors without indicating so in the captions. The comments over at PDNPulse are pretty interesting, with some commenters arguing that this isn’t such a big deal, while others claim that this undermines the credibility of photojournalism.
What are your thoughts on this story?
(via PDNPulse)
Image credit: Photograph by Fred R. Conrad for the New York Times
