livebooks blog

• Chase Jarvis is pretty much the ultimate iPhone advocate, updating his Twitter/FB feed with new iPhotos several times a day. No surprise, then, that he alerted us to the latest cover of the New Yorker: an iPhone “painting” by Portugal-born artist Jorge Colombo. Colombo used the Brushes iPhone application to create an impressionistic image of Times Square.

• Speaking of technology, the ASMP blog has a post on the five tech trends to watch, including multimedia, the mobile web, immersive websites, computer generated imaging, and augmented reality. If you don’t know what those are, time to get on the cutting edge.

• The New York Times reported that a group of scientists in Europe gathered in a small town in the Netherlands to try to reinvent Polaroid film, which stopped production last year. They took over an abandoned old Polaroid factory and are attempting to reinvent the chemicals needed for the instant film processing. According to the Times, Florian Kaps, the Austrian entrepreneur behind the project, hopes to start manufacturing and distributing the film worldwide later this year.

• Earlier this month, Stephen Mayes gave a key-note speech at a World Press Photo event in Amsterdam. Essentially, he criticized the lack of variety both in terms of subject matter and style of visual language in photojournalism. Whether you agree with Mayes’ argument or not, we think his speech is worth a look.

For a longer interview from Gray, check out this podcast from F-Stop Beyond.

Carmen Suen: You say that you are not a photographer, but an artist. What do you think is the difference?

Gray Scott: Obviously, photography is my medium now, but I didn’t start as a photographer. I actually started as a painter. My background is oil painting. I come from a very trained, technical background. Using the medium of photography has been really interesting for me because it’s faster. It’s immediate gratification.

I’m actually starting to realize now that the concepts that I have in my fine-arts series are very similar to if I were to go back to painting, or do both — that’s always a possibility, for me to do both, they would probably be very similar.

I’m interested in the human form. I’m interested in psychology, mythology, icons, symbology, and all of that. I guess for me, it’s just a difference in medium choice. I’m technically a photographer by trade, but in the scheme of things, the entirety of my work, I feel like I’m an artist.

You can see from my work that I’m not just taking pretty pictures. There is subtext to my pictures. And I’m hoping to push that further with a new series of fine-art photography that I’m working on. I’m hoping to push that to an even more aggressive place. Hopefully in six months to a year, I’ll be able to produce that.

An image in Gray's new series of work ©Gray Scott Studio

CS: Could you tell us about your fondness for contrasts?

GS: I like polarity. Hot and cold; good and bad. I like switching things around and pushing polarities around. I have a new piece in my latest promotion campaign that is a good example to explain that.

In the picture [above], the woman is the executioner. You seldom see women in that role. And when you look at the man in that picture, he’s naked and vulnerable. But she’s also exposing herself. To me, it seems that in our culture, for a woman to be that aggressive, she has to bare everything. She has to expose her entire self. Whereas men don’t have to do this. Men could just be aggressive without being exposed.

CS: When you want to refocus yourself, you’ve said you like to read art books. What kind?

GS: I read a variety of books, but I go to Caravaggio all the time. I think the reason I like Caravaggio so much is the drama in his paintings. The characters in his work are always in some sort of trouble. They’re either being executed or suffering. It’s not just a pretty picture. They’re actually going through some traumatic or beautiful experience.

Outside of art books, I read a lot of psychology. And I also like to read Aldous Huxley because he has such a dimension to his work. Some people would call him jaded, but I would say he is indifferent to people’s false morality, which I really enjoy. I think for any young photographers, their work is going to be stronger if they have some stories to tell.

• The New York Times launched its photography blog, Lens, this week. Not surprisingly, it aims to highlight the paper’s own top photography from the present, as well as its archive dating back to the early 20th century, but Lens also gives props to great photos from other newspapers, magazines, and agencies. With its beautiful full-screen interface and insider interviews with photo legends, like this with David Burnett about his images of Bob Marley, it’s no surprise the photo blogosphere is buzzing.

• Todd Walker of Gallery Hopper blog pointed us to a scanned copy of a NYPD internal memo which tells its officers that street photography is indeed legal. In the memo, it says, “photography and/or videotaping is rarely unlawful.” Given the recent outpouring of complaints regarding street photography, we’re glad the NYPD is taking steps to rectify the situation.

• American Photography 25 announced its winners earlier this week. A slideshow of the selected images is available online for a limited time. The 351 photographs selected from over 10,000 submissions will be included in a hardcover book to be released in November this year.

• American Apparel settled a year-long lawsuit with Woody Allen on Monday, agreeing to pay the director $5 million for using an image of him from Annie Hall, without his consent, for one of their billboards. Dov Charney, CEO of American Apparel, posted a thousand-word statement on the company blog in response to the settlement, explaining that it was the insurance company’s idea to make the settlement, not his.

• After a 4-month hiatus, the photo-sharing community magazine JPG is back in action. The last few months were a roller-coaster ride: since the announcement of its closure in January, there’s been news after news of possible buyouts, but nothing confirmed until late February. JPG sent out its official “back in business” announcement on Tuesday, May 12, to its community members. Expect the new JPG to hit news stands soon.

• We were glad to read that Iranian American photojournalist Roxana Saberi was finally released from the infamous Evin prison Sunday, after the court reduced her conviction from 8 years in prison to suspended sentence of two years as a result of a five-hour appeals hearing. Saberi was detained by the Iranian government in January and subsequently convicted of espionage charges. Her release comes at an opportune time — the film she co-scripted, “No One Knows About Persian Cats,” just premiered at the Cannes Film Festival yesterday.

• The much-anticipated Richard Avedon retrospective opens today the International Center of Photography in New York City. The exhibition includes images that the master fashion and portrait photographer created between 1944 to 2000. The New York Times has a great article and audio slideshow about Avedon and the exhibition.

• The latest NASA mission to fix the Hubble telescope has been all over the news this week. Last week NASA released some of the last pictures produced by the 16-year-old camera on Hubble — the new ones will take a little while to hit the internet. These ones are so breath-taking, we can’t imagine how stunning images from the new $126 million camera will be.