livebooks blog

Irving Penn, one of the masters of photography, died Wednesday, October 7, 2009, at the age of 92 at his home in Manhattan. Penn leaves behind him a wealth of iconic imagery, from portraits of cultural leaders to obsessively exact still lifes. Photography Now has a great selection of Penn’s work online and the Getty Center in Los Angeles is showing Penn’s exhibition “Small Trades” now until January 10, 2010.

Scientists Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith, inventors of CCD (charge-coupled device), will be sharing this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics with Charles K. Kao, the “Father of Fiber Optics.” Although the duo had moved onto other research projects, their discovery made digital imaging possible, from point-and-shoots to the Hubble Space Telescope.

Both Outside and Esquire launched a moving magazine cover this month, with the full videos available on their websites. Alexx Henry, the photographer behind the new Outside cover, made a name for himself doing a “Living Movie Poster” for the movie Mrs. Washington. It’s the second time Greg Williams has shot a moving cover for Esquire, after the first one featuring Transformer star Megan Fox.

Fashion label Ralph Lauren landed in hot water this week with a “poor imaging and retouching” job on one of their advertising images. After Boing Boing brought attention to a photograph of already thin Filippa Hamilton photoshopped to unltra skinny, Ralph Lauren’s legal department sent the blog a take down notice. Bad move. Now The Drudge Report, The Huffington Post, Yahoo!, Jezebel and ABC News have jumped on it. PDN has the details.

World Press Photo just launched an archive of 10,000+ photos by the 1,372 photographers from 79 nations who have been honored by the contest since its inception in 1955. Images are searchable by year, photographer, nationality, organization, category, or award.

Victoria Espinel, who President Obama appointed the the first U.S. intellectual property enforcement coordinator, is winning praise from several groups, including the Copyright Alliance, which includes a number of photographer organizations. PDN has more on the story.

The Guardian reports that Richard Prince’s Spiritual America exhibition, due to open yesterday at London’s Tate Modern, was withdrawn Wednesday after the organizer received a warning from Scotland Yard that a nude photograph of a 10-year-old Brooke Shields could violate obscenity laws. The work caused no major controversy when it was shown in 2007 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

The folks behind the DLK Collection blog informed us that Bono gave a big shout out to photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, whose photo was used as the cover art for U2’s latest album during a concert at Giants Stadium. “When was the last time the biggest rock star on the planet interrupted one of his signature songs in a stadium full of screaming people to give a shout out to a fine art photographer?”

Photographer Chase Jarvis, a long-time proponent of iPhone photography, this week announced the launch of his iPhone application, Best Camera. The simple, elegant photo editing app also allows you to share images to Facebook and Twitter, as well as TheBestCamera.com, the app’s new community photo sharing site. A master of cross promotion, Chase has also simultaneously released a new book of his iPhone photos, The Best Camera Is The One That’s With You.

In a bizarre twist on the celebrity-photographer love-hate paradigm, PDN reports that Agence France Presse staffer Yuri Cortez and freelancer Rolando Aviles are bringing a suite against Tom Brady and his supermodel wife Gisele Bundchen for an incident where their bodyguards demanded the photographers’ memory cards and then shot at them when they refused to comply and fled in their SUV.

We were excited to see the name of Istanbul-based photojournalist Lynsey Addario on the list of the 24 new MacArthur Fellows for 2009 announced this week. Each of recipient of the “genius award” will receive $500,000 in “no strings attached” support over the next five years.

Photographer and film director Richard Patterson released a new stop-motion music video for Iranian rock band Hypernova this week, which was created out of about 16,000 still photographs made with the Canon 1D Mark III and the new Profoto Pro-8 Air. Since releasing, along with a behind-the-scenes making-of video, it’s been viewed almost 40,000 times.

Kira Pollack, former deputy photo director at the New York Times Magazine, has been named the new director of photography for both the print and web versions of Time magazine, starting on October 5th. The New York Times Lens blog has an article highlighting Pollack’s career and a slide show showcasing some of her most memorable projects for the magazine.

Former Getty director of entertainment Frank Micelotta this week announced the launch PictureGroup, a new entertainment stock agency. The company has also created a strategic alliance with the Associated Press whereby they each will distribute content through the others platform.

Daryl Lang at PDNPulse raised a good point about the shifting style of news magazine photo editing in response to David Hume Kennerly’s reaction to his cropped photo of Dick Cheney in Newsweek magazine. There’s some good discussion on the PDN post as well.

Starting this week, iStockphoto will offer legal protection of up to $10,000 to any customers who buy images from the company. Customers looking for additional protection can purchase up to $250,000. Other stock companies, including Getty Images, who owns iStockphoto, offer similar protection, but it seems particularly pertinent in a space with less oversight and downloads by more media-law novices.