livebooks blog

As I mentioned in my post yesterday, it was great to hear and see so many young photographers at LOOK3 who are taking ownership over the incredible change happening in the industry today. But, in the end, we were all there to scope out some great photography. Here are 10 awesome things from LOOK3 that I might otherwise have missed (they’re in no particular order, so I’m not even numbering them).

• Shaw Rocco’s Cellular Obscura, a series of images taken with this generation’s Kodak Brownie i.e. a cell phone. Don’t miss the end of the slideshow – it’s very worth it. Also, bonus points for a great version of one of my favorite songs.

• Jason Eskenazi’s Wonderland, the result of more than 10 years (and several prestigious grants) documenting post-Soviet Russia. Several people mentioned this to me as the standout of all the festival slideshows.

• Carl Bower’s Chica Barbie about the beauty pageants of Colombia. I feel incredibly ambivalent about these images, which in my mind is a marker of great art. This was one of several great projections brought in by Slideluck Potshow…a natural addition to a festival that started as a projection in Nick Nichols’ backyard.

• Martin Parr’s Playas book. Watch the preview on Magnum in Motion, but keep in mind that the book is so much trashier (in the best way) in person. Parr found the worst designer, cheapest paper, and least-talented printer possible to produce this little conversation piece…which claims “$7.99!” on the cover but really sells for $40.

• Kelly Shimoda’s I Guess You Don’t Want to Talk to Me Anymore. Ok so I technically knew about his one before, and in fact I think my cell phone is probably in this project somewhere, which comprises photos of cell phones displaying text messages. But until I saw this at Slideluck, I didn’t realize how many images were available on Kelly’s blog and website.

• Michael Wolf’s Transparent City. Considering that the Museum of Contemporary Photography has already picked up on these, I’m probably behind the times. The best part about seeing these as a slideshow was the mix between the distance and detail shots of people photographed in the windows of huge office buildings.

• Blood Trail, a documentary following conflict photographer Robert King through 15 years in the field. Sadly, I didn’t make it to this film, but I heard so many great things about it that I am making it a point to hunt down a copy asap.

• Jessica Dimmock’s Papparazzi! Jessica made a name early for herself with her Ninth Floor work about a community of addicts living in a posh New York apartment building. Of course I was intrigued to learn she had moved on to photograph the least respected and possibly best paid editorial photographers in the business.

• Tim Hetherington’s Sleeping Soldiers, which most people saw at the New York Photo Festival, where it was praised as the highlight of the program. I’d watched the video online, but it’s always better live on a huge screen.

• Yolanda Cuomo and Kristi Norgaard, who designed all the visuals for the festival, explaining the fascinating process they go through to design photo books for legends including Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus, and Sylvia Plachy.

A lone farmer rides his tractor through a small rural village. ©Sean Gallagher. Courtesy Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting

During my 1-year paid internship at Magnum Photos London in 2004-5, the then deputy director Hamish Crooks gave me and fellow interns some simple yet important advice on how to find newsworthy stories. “Pick up a newspaper and read.”

Hamish encouraged us to devour headlines to understand why people care enough about an issue to report on it. He also advised us to find topics we were passionate about on a personal level, rather than simply covering issues we were “expected” to cover. From that point on, I started to read news in a different way — always assessing its visual potential and gauging my own interest in the subject matter.

In the summer of 2007 I came across the subject of desertification in a news article. Images of villages and towns being swallowed by slowly moving sand dunes filled my mind. I imagined cracked earth in drought-stricken regions and intense sandstorms blocking out the sun. When you first consider covering an issue, it is inevitable that you conjure images that represent your preconceptions about it. Some turn out to be true, others don’t. One of the challenges of reporting on a subject is to confront your preconceptions and free yourself from them.

I began my work on desertification in western China by taking two weeks to gauge the potential for this story. At the beginning of 2008 I received the first David Alan Harvey Fund for Emerging Photographers, which helped me continue this work and also look at other environmental issues in Asia. As I continued the desertification story, I started to look for other sources of funding to help me continue the work and enable me to push even deeper into the subject matter. This is when I discovered the work of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and their travel grants to cover under-reported issues, which I felt desertification definitely was.

Application for the Pulitzer Center grant involved writing a detailed project proposal and outlining logistical and financial planning for the entirety of the proposed project. My project also had to fall in line with the Pulitzer Center’s focus on, “enterprising reporting projects throughout the world with an emphasis on issues that are under-reported, mis-reported, or not reported on at all.” Even though I had first read desertification in an international publication, and had seen work on the same subject by other photographers, I still believed it was a vastly under-reported issue and deserved more attention.

In February of 2009 I received an email from Nathlaie Applewhite, the Associate Director of the Pulitzer Center, informing me that my application for the grant had been successful. At that point I began my preparations and logistical planning for 6-weeks on the road. Needless to say, there was a lot to do!

• This week marks the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Protests. The iconic image of the “Tank Man” is splattered all over the internet, except on the Great-Fire-Wall-bound Chinese internet. The New York Times photo blog, Lens, has a great interview with photographers explaining how their version of the Tank Man came about. Most interesting of all, though, is a follow-up post yesterday showing a never before published photo of the Tank Man getting ready for the confrontation.

• Have you seen The Vendor Client Relationship video yet? If not, you might be the last one. Go check it out now and we won’t tell anyone ;-) It’s a hilarious take on the real world situation for those who work in the photography and advertising business.

• A Photo Editor pointed us to another noteworthy new online video — Michael Almereyda’s documentary about photography icon William Eggleston on Snag Film, William Eggleston in the Real World. The fillmmaker followed Eggleston on various trips around the country, capturing his complex personality and how it affects his work.

• The winning images of the PDN Photography Annual 2009 are now available on its website. We want to give a big shout out to our friends and contributors Alan Chin and Ed Kashi, who won the Photojournalism/Sports/Documentary and Corporate Design/Photo Products categories respectively.

• 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.