Tough news coming out of France this week: Sipa Press, the country’s leading photo agency, has filed for bankruptcy protection. Michel Puech of the Le Journal de la Photographie reports that the filing came on November 22nd, and can lead to two possible outcomes: reorganization or liquidation.
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Corbis, one of the largest photo agencies in the world, has agreed to acquire Demotix, a crowd-sourced citizen journalism photo agency that was founded in 2008. Corbis had already picked up a piece of the young agency through an investment last year, but now it has decided to purchase the whole company outright. The acquisition price was not disclosed.
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The 2012 election season is now over, and photojournalists who have been scrambling for many months on the campaign trail can now take a breather and reflect on their experiences. Reuters sent us the video above in which Reuters White House photographer Jason Reed offers a short 2-minute-long behind-the-scenes look at what it was like to photograph Barack Obama as he hustled around the nation, “from riding in motorcades through the streets of Manhattan to flying in Air Force One.”
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Here’s a powerful video shared by The Economist a couple of years ago that features acclaimed British photojournalist Don McCullin talking about his 50 years of photographing war, atrocities, and human suffering. (Warning: it contains disturbing images.)
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Yesterday we shared a piece by photographer Kenneth Jarecke on why Instagram isn’t fit for photojournalism. Now, from the other side of the aisle, Jeff Bercovici of Forbes writes that Time had great success after hiring five Instagrammers to document Hurricane Sandy:
The resulting collection on Lightbox, Time’s photography blog, was “one of the most popular galleries we’ve ever done,” says [Time DP Kira] Pollack, and it was responsible for 13% of all the site’s traffic during a week when Time.com had its fourth-biggest day ever. Time’s Instagram account attracted 12,000 new followers during a 48-hour period.
One of Benjamin Lowy’s photos even ended up getting selected for the cover, although it’s one of three covers Time is running this week [...] While the level of resolution isn’t perhaps what might be achieved with a camera, says Pollack, “It reproduced beautifully. There’s almost a painterly quality to it.”
Pollack tells FolioMag that the decision to use Instagram was based on distribution speed rather than aesthetics.
Why Time Magazine Used Instagram To Cover Hurricane Sandy [Forbes]
P.S. It seems that by “Instagram photo”, Forbes and Time are referring to the fact that they were shared through, not captured with, Instagram.
Photojournalist Kenneth Jarecke wrote up a thought-provoking piece yesterday titled, “Instagram, the Devil, and You.” He offers his thoughts on the question, “Will ‘Instagram photojournalism’ stand the test of time?”:
As for you Instagramers, twenty years from now you’ll be sorry. You’ll be more sorry than I am when I look back on a picture I made twenty years ago with a 20mm lens when I should have used a 28mm. Years from now, you’ll awake in the middle of the night and suddenly realize putting a fake border on a picture makes the whole picture fake. You’ll understand that the technical choices you made destroyed the longterm credibility of both you and your images.
Instead of having a body of work to look back on, you’ll have a sad little collection of noisy digital files that were disposable when you made them, instantly forgotten by your followers (after they gave you a thumbs up), and now totally worthless. You’ll wish you’d have made those images on a Pentax K1000 and Tri-X (at the very least or most depending on your age and perspective), but the times you failed to record properly will be long gone. But don’t listen to me, listen to all your Insta-friends. They love you.
Instagram, the Devil, and You [Mostly True via The Click]
Image credit: Part of an art project involving tiny pics of my art — using #instagram as one part of the medium. by kimboburly
Here’s an interesting video in which renowned photojournalist Steve McCurry shares some thoughts on documentary portraiture. Titled Close Up: Photographers at Work, the video takes us behind-the-scenes with McCurry as he shoots some candid portraits on the street and then reviews some of his most prized shots captured over the course of his career. (There’s a brief glimpse of the original film slides of his iconic Afghan Girl photo.)
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Want to enjoy some of the world’s latest and greatest news photographs on your iPad? Reuters has a new app designed just for you. Called The Wider Image, it’s a photo experience that’s designed to bring beautiful photojournalism to life in your hands.
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The National Press Photographers Association announced this week that it will be joining a major lawsuit filed against NYC and the NYPD for civil rights violations during the Occupy Wall Street protests.
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The New York Times has a fascinating interview with Li Zhensheng, a photojournalist who worked at a local newspaper in China during the Cultural Revolution. In addition to the “positive” propaganda photos he shot for his paper, he also captured “negative” photos that he kept hidden until decades later.
Most events I went to there were positive pictures and negative pictures. Some slogans were actually not all that positive but as long the crowd’s mouths were open and fists pumping air — that looks positive in the photographs. And I’d leave some film for “negative,” “useless” pictures. We were given film each month according to a ratio: for every picture published, we earned eight frames. I would process all my own film. And I did all my own enlargements.
[...] I knew I had lots of “negative” frames, so I would quickly dry them and clip them off, to not let other people see them. The only fear I had was the others would complain that I was wasting public resources, shooting pictures that the newspaper couldn’t use — and I would leave the positive ones hanging to dry.
I would put the “negative” negatives into brown envelopes in a secret compartment in my desk. In the spring of 1968, I sensed that I would be [searched] soon, I took batches of the negatives home every day after work. I sawed a hole in the parquet floor at home under desk and hid them there.
Li says he spent a week sawing the hole in his floorboards slowly, bit by bit, while his wife kept watch at their window. His secret photo collection is now one of the best records we have of what actually occurred in China decades ago.
