photo-eye Magazine Blogs - Bob

Subhankar Banerjee Photo in New York Review of Books

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:18:00 -0400

Image Copyright: Subhankar Banerjee. Subhankar Banerjee's photograph, Caribou migration, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, 2002, was used to illustrate Tim Flannery's article in the New York Review of Books.

It is often argued that cap and trade legislation requires too many compromises with--and give-aways to--polluting corporations to pass the House and Senate, and that consequently it is ineffective at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. While environmentalists are failing to support cap and trade, those opposing action on climate change are fiercely attacking it. Yet such a system is essential when it comes to getting global action on climate change--not least at the increasingly imperilled climate summit in Copenhagen in December--for it delivers a transparent benchmark by which nations can judge each other's commitment. Read more of Tim Flannery's Review here.

Clothes as Camera

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 10:33:00 -0400

Using technology recently developed for electronic textiles, researchers at MIT have developed a fabric camera made from polymer fibers. The potential applications are difficult to predict -- the advance of these type of high-tech fiber technologies will radically transform the integration of new technologies into our everyday lives, making processes like monitoring vital signs, air quality and even collecting visual information an invisible function of the clothes we wear.

integrate eight semiconducting light sensors into a polymer cylinder with a diameter of 25 millimeters. controlling the sensor's spacing and angle within the fiber. Once the sensors, made of a type of semiconducting glass, were in position, the polymer cylinder was heated and then stretched so that the diameter shrank the diameter of hundreds of micrometers--a process that is identical to the way in which commercial fiber is made for telecommunication applications--retaining the orientation of the sensors.

Read more on Technology Review, published by MIT.

PDN Pulse: Review Santa Fe Recap & Interview with Jason Florio

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 11:50:00 -0400

Former Santa Fe resident and PDN Photo Editor Amber Terranova gives her wrap up of Review Santa Fe and and interview with one of Center's 100 Jason Florio.

I've just returned from sunny Santa Fe after an exciting weekend of reviewing portfolios and meeting with photographers from all over the world.Photo-Eye kicked off the event on Thursday night by setting up a delicious New Mexican buffet dinner for all of the photographers, reviewers and people in the Santa Fe community. The outdoor area was packed with photographers and reviewers mingling, while others perused the bookstore and Debbie Fleming Caffery's striking new exhibition(that opened the same night in the gallery). While in the bookstore I asked some folks to share with us their favorite book of the moment. Here's what some said: Norman Mauskopf ? Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard. Norman says he likes it so much because, "Evans has a big postcard collection and so do I." Maarten Schilt ? Looking at the US. 1957 ? 1986 by Wendy Watriss and Frederick C. Baldwin Ferit Kuyas ? Brian Finke's Flight Attendants Darren Ching ? James and the Other Apes by James Mollison with text by Jane Goodall Debra Klomp Ching ? Steve Pyke's: Post Partum and Post Mortem from the Nazraeli's picture books series Carlan Tapp ? Robert Frank's, The Americans Laura Wzorek Pressley - Pitch Blackness by Hank Willis Thomas

Read the full article including the interview with photographer Jason Florio.

Never-Before-Published Photos From Memphis, April 4, 1968

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 16:46:00 -0400

On April 4, 1968, LIFE photographer Henry Groskinsky and writer Mike Silva, on assignment in Alabama, learned that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had been shot at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. They raced to the scene and there, incredibly, had unfettered access to the hotel grounds, Dr. King's room, and the surrounding area. For reasons that have been lost in the intervening years, the photographs taken that night and the next day were never published. Until now.

View the photos on LIFE.com.

from LIFE.com

Army Medical Archive on Flickr

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 16:53:00 -0400

An Army archivist is undertaking a massive project to digitize and make public a unique collection of rare and sometimes startling military medical images, from the Civil War to Vietnam. This previously unreported archive at the Army-run National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C., contains 500,000 scans of unique images so far, with another 225,000 set to be digitized this year. Mike Rhode, the museum's head archivist, is working to make tens of thousands of those images, which have been buried in the museum's archive, available on Flickr. Working after hours, his team has posted a curated selection of almost 800 photos on the service already.

A Conversation with Steve Pyke and Joerg Colberg

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 13:57:00 -0400

Since Joerg Colberg is very much the lover of photographs of the human figure, the conversation between him and photographer Steve Pyke primarily focuses on his Pyke's portraits.

The human face signals our emotions, suggests our cultural background. It is the naked part, that we present to the world; our faces speak realms about our identity. Our faces anchor us to our histories, our stories and the stories of our ancestors. Our faces change with time, our faces absorb the passage of time. We tell our stories through our faces: how we present ourselves, how we use this personal canvas to convey not only our emotions, but also histories and identities.-- Steve Pyke

Pyke goes on to discuss photographing the homeless in the 1980s in Britian, French philosopher Helen Cixous and General Pinochet. Read the entire conversation at Conscientious.

What Stanford Wanted to Know and the Museums Don't Get

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 11:06:00 -0400

Eadweard Muybridge, Dread the Dog

cigarettesandpurity.com linked last week to an article about the how experts-- for example, museum prepators and taxidermists-- often mess up quadrupedal gait:

They [a team of biological physicists] randomly gathered a representative sampling of 307 depictions of quadrupeds walking in museum exhibits, taxidermy catalogues, animal-anatomy books and toys. The result? Museums screwed things up a stunning 41% of the time. Taxidermy catalogues got it wrong 43% of the time, toys 50% of the time, and animal-anatomy catalogues were the worst, with 63.6% errors.

The article sites how the Eadweard Muybridge studies and the simple observation of your neighborhood mongrel can help prevent these professionals from making such a mistake. Read more at Collision Detection.

U.S. Lifts Ban on Coffin Photographs

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 15:57:00 -0400

Earlier this week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates removed the ban on pictures of coffins of returning war dead. The article at CNN.com includes video of the announcement to the press and the video of the news conference where President George H.W. Bush is simultaneously broadcast with an inset footage of the first casualties being brought home from Panama. Unbeknownst to the first President Bush at that time, his light attitude while these images were displayed side by side was not taken well. This broadcast is thought to have lead to the government ban two years later in 1991 on photographs during the first Gulf War. Now the ban has been lifted provided the living family gives consent. Glenn Ruga, founder of SocialDocumentary.net, commented on the lifting:

The ban amounted to government censorship of the media and denial of vital public information to the American public. It is the public's right and responsibility to see these images and learn about the consequences of military actions. These images, if done respectfully, only add to documenting the honor of the soldiers and their ultimate sacrifice. The photographs also ensure that there is transparency in government and visual information available on casualties from war to inform future generations.

Read more on the lifting of the ban and some of the controversy surrounding the decision at SocialDocumentary.net, CNN.com, and NYtimes.com.

Sugimoto Graces Another Album Cover

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 15:04:00 -0400

U2's new album, No Line on the Horizon will be released in the US tomorrow. For the cover of this new release, they've elected to use a minimal design over Hiroshi Sugimoto's photograph Boden Sea. Ryan Dombal at pitchforkmedia.com points out that they are not the first band to release an album using this particular Sugimoto photograph.

In 2006, the sound artists Richard Chartier and Taylor Deupree were invited by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden to musically reinterpret the works in Sugimoto's Seascapes series. The result of their efforts premiered on March 30, 2006 in front of the curved panoramic window of the Museum's Lerner Room as the sun set across the city's skyline. The live recording was subsequently released as the album Specifications.Fifteen with Boden Sea. Odd that the very same image, out of the many Sugimoto has in the series, was selected again. Find more at Pitchfork Media, including a link to Taylor Dupree's blog which has gotten a slew of comments from some rather avid U2 devotees.

Joel Meyerowitz Interview

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 10:15:00 -0400

Colin Pantall's Blog linked to an interview between Too Much Chocolate member John Saponara and Joel Meyerowitz.

JS: How do you think the process differs today from when you were establishing yourself in the 60's and 70's?
JM: Back in my day it was like laying bricks. Slow and steady and labor intensive. Probably today it's similar for those who believe in themselves and the medium, in that it always takes a deep personal commitment to the mystery and craft of this special system we love. But what is different today is the means at your disposal for transmitting the work that you do. In my time it was a one-on-one means of showing/sharing work and it had to be done in person so the person you showed it to could clearly see that you were a young, wet behind the ears, photographer. Now you can shoot a "slide" show to people across the globe and they don't know who you are and only have the work to deal with. But that's really a plus for all of you.

Read more of the interview at Too Much Chocolate.

Interview with Mikhael Subotzky

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 09:35:00 -0400

This week on his blog Conscientious, Jörg Colberg posted an interview with magnum Photographer Mikhael Subotzky.

Jörg Colberg: A lot of your work so far has dealt with crime and punishment. You portrayed the conditions of prisons in South Africa, and your first book Beaufort West opens with an aerial shot of the little town, in whose very center there is a prison. How did you get interested in this subject matter?

Mikhael Subotzky: In 2004 we had our third democratic election in South Africa, and there was a prominent Constitutional Court case going on which was to decide whether prisoners could or couldn't vote. This question interested me in relationship to our history of disenfranchisement, but also in relation to the experience of living in South Africa at a time when crime levels were supposedly peaking.

Photography, Torture and the Memory

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 14:13:00 -0400

There is much discussion about the connection between photography and memory, and many photographers cite explorations of this relationship as the basis for their work. A new series of studies presented in an article on Wired Science Blog show how the mind can be made to create false memories, in this case specifically related to interrogation, even when confronted with a visual record of a photograph. "Using data from soldiers in a mock prisoner-of-war exercise within the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape programs of the U.S. military, new research shows that 85 percent of soldiers chose the man in the photograph - who was not involved in any way - instead of the man who had actually subjected them to what the military calls a "very stressful interrogation" that could have included a variety of physically demanding tasks and some violence." Read more on Wired Magazine Blog.

World Press Photo 2009 Announced

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 14:11:00 -0400

World Press Photo of the Year 2008: Anthony Suau, USA, for Time

"US photographer Anthony Suau has won Photo of the Year at the 52nd World Press Photo contest. Suau's winning photograph shows an armed officer of the Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Department moving through a home in Cleveland, Ohio, following an eviction as a result of mortgage foreclosure. As jury chair MaryAnne Golon points out, the image is 'a double entendre. It looks like a classic conflict photograph, but it is simply the eviction of people from a house. Now war in its classic sense is coming into people's houses because they can't pay their mortgages.'" Other winners were Brenda Ann Kenneally, Callie Shell, Tomasz Wiech, Carlos Cazalis, Chiba Yasuyoshi, Steve Winter, Chen Qinggang, Olivier Laban Mattei, Zhao Qing, Mashid Mohadjerin, Luiz Vasconcelo, and Wojciech Grzedzinski. Read more about the projects and the winners at World Press Photo or Creative Review Blog.

Large-Scale Kenyan Women Project by JR

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 13:16:00 -0400

Social photographer and installation artist JR and his team have previously worked in Brazil, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Sudan. Like his previous projects, this new piece is designed to draw attention to the plight of women in impoverished areas, and specifically in this region of Kenya. JR has a history of installing photographs on the sides of buildings, walls, and even abandoned trailer trucks; however, this project takes the idea of public installation one step further, residing on the tops of structures: often the homes of their subject, and even an active train. The exhibition is on such as scale that it is "designed to be visible from Google Earth satellites as well as the elevated train tracks that pass by the village twice a day." Lens Culture Blog and JR's website 28millimetres has more information about this, previous and future installations.

The Election & Photography

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 20:34:00 -0400

'Kenyans celebrated Senator Barack Obama's election victory at his family homestead near Kisumu, in western Kenya' photo: Evelyn Hockstein for The New York Times, from "The World Reacts"

Only a handful of times in our lives can we say, with certainty, that history is being profoundly shaped before our watching eyes. The election of Barack Obama as the next president of the United States is undoubtedly one of these moments. The world has watched the election and its results with rapt attention, not least of all the international community that adds the prefix "photo" to everything it touches. As such, here are some interesting takes, celebrations and comments from around the photo-blogosphere: Rob Haggard (A Photo Editor) points out some great examples of the effective use of photography throughout the campaign. PDN lists five photos that clinched the election for Barack (and point out that it's a good day for print) while Boston.com posts 35 of the best images from the campaign trail. David Levi Strauss deconstructs Obama's groud-breaking 30 minute ad on the Exposures blog at Aperture, while Magnum posts photographs by several of their members, taken on election night. And of course, there are the gleeful and whimsical celebratory posts. Additionally, The New York Times has a host of slideshows with some brilliant photographs in them, particularly "The World Reacts".