The 2008 Prix Pictet Award in Photography is a major new global prize in photography that "focuses on perhaps the greatest single issue of the twenty-first century: sustainability." The theme for 2008 is water. The award is sponsored by Pictet & Cie, in association with the Financial Times.

From a field of over 200 nominated photographers from 43 countries, the judges have shortlisted 18 photographers "who have produced works that are of outstanding artistic merit and communicate messages of urgent global significance."

Each of the shortlisted photographers will exhibit their work in Paris, at the Palais de Tokyo, at the end of October. The winner of the first Prix Pictet will be announced on October 30th, and will receive CHF100,000 (approximately $100,000 USD).

I am delighted to learn that 3 of the finalists are photographers whose work has already been shown in Lens Culture. Each of the 3 has also contributed in-depth audio interviews:

David Maisel, and here too.

Edward Burtynsky

Jules Spinatsch


The other shortlisted artists are:


Benoit Aquin
Jesus Abad Colorado
Thomas Joshua Cooper
Sebastian Copeland
Christian Cravo
Lynn Davis
Reza Deghati
Susan Derges
Malcolm Hutcheson
Chris Jordan
Carl De Keyzer
Mary Mattingly
Robert Polidori
Roman Signer
Munem Wasif


Here are two images by Benoit Aquin that were chosen to be finalists:

See seven photo diptychs of waves made by Japanese buddhist monk Syoin Kajii, and read a short, insightful interview with the photographer.

Geometric Informatics scanning systems produce structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne Lidar system that uses multiple lasers is used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In this video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes.

"House of Cards" by Radiohead
Directed by James Frost
From the album IN RAINBOWS

More info here, along with this cool "Making of the House of Cards" video:

When I first saw Denis Darzacq's photos of people floating in urban spaces, or falling from buildings (just about to hit the pavement), I was unnerved. They looked too real, I thought, but they couldn't be real, they must be the result of digital manipulation, putting two photos together as one...

But then, I saw a short documentary video which offered a behind-the-scenes view of how Darzacq captures his magic moments, working with talented young dancers in the streets of suburbs surrounding Paris. It's a little like a magician revealing how he performs a trick. But it's better than that, because we realize that the "trick" requires creative genius and choreography to pull it off successfully.

To my delight, Denis Darzacq and Agence VU' in Paris, have given me a copy of the short 7-minute documentary film to share with the readers of Lens Culture.

Regarding the project shown in this video, Virginie Chardin writes:

"In 2006, Denis Darzacq asked dancers and athletes to perform jumps against backgrounds that he had found and prepared. Wearing ordinary clothes chosen in agreement with the photographer, the performers executed their leaps in these precisely defined settings.

"Everything had been prepared in advance. Everything was ready. The models launched themselves into space. There is nothing false in these scenes . These moments really occurred. There is no fiction, no retouching or special effects. Photographed in the courtyards of buildings or in streets in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, in Nanterre and in Biarritz, these young people were just being themselves, simply performing jumps in a modern urban setting. And the photographer shot the images, intervening only to give a few guidelines as to their movements. However, at the moment of the leap, chance and gravity also intervened."

Take the time to discover more of The Fall (and lots of other cool work) at the Agence VU' website. You can see Darzacq's photographs from a more recent project — Hyper — right here in Lens Culture, and even more at Denis Darzacq's personal site.

The latest issue of Foam magazine, the international photography magazine based in Amsterdam, features a 16-page portfolio of photographs by Myoung Ho Lee, whose work first appeared in Lens Culture in July 2007.

Myoung Ho Lee is a student, lecturer and photographer based in Seoul, Korea. He attracted international acclaim when his series “Tree” was first published online by Lens Culture (www.lensculture.com) in July 2007. Within days, more than 200 other websites and blogs had reproduced his images and pointed to the original article and images in Lens Culture. The “buzz” continues today, with reproductions of his photographs gracing the covers and inner pages of many high-profile national and international print magazines (of all genres, including art, ecology, entertainment, home decorating, news, and men’s fashion), and more than 500 websites referring to his work. His photographs are in the collections of institutions and individual collectors in Europe, Asia, Australia and North America.

Myoung’s “Tree” series has drawn references to diverse traditions in the history of photography, including landscape photography, anthropological field studies, studio portraiture, fashion, staged photography, cinematic projections, surrealism, and billboard advertising.

These timeless portraits were all made in 2007 by the British photographer Vanessa Winship while she travelled and photographed in Turkey. They will be featured as one of the highlights this year at the Rencontres festival in Arles, France. A book of photographs by Vanessa Winship will be released in conjunction with the exhibition.

Winship writes:

One enduring image that had always struck me wherever I travelled was the schoolgirls in their little blue dresses, the same in every town, city or village.

These dresses with their lace collars and sweet messages embroidered on the bodices, were the symbol of the Turkish state, but the girls who wore them were simply little girls.

In the borderlands of Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Armenia the dresses were still the same...

See more of this remarkable series here in Lens Culture, accompanied with text by the photographer.

This is the photo book that redefined what a photo book could be — personal, poetic, real. Now celebrating its 50th anniversary, Robert Frank’s masterpiece still holds up — the selection of photos, and their sequence and pacing is fresh, rich, generous, and stunning.

Read our whole review here, and view a high-resolution slide show of several stellar examples from the 80-plus photos in the book.

Like a modern-day Weegee, Harri Palviranta cruises the night streets of Finland, armed with his Hasselblad camera and a big flash, looking for a fight to photograph, or the bloodied face of a drunken party-goer, or the scene of a recent brawl. See his series, Battered, in Lens Culture.

Every day, people from all over the world contribute their photos of Buddha to Lens Culture's Buddha Project. The collection now numbers over 400 Buddha pictures, with a goal of 1,000 photos or more. It's amazing to see the range of Buddha images that crop up in diverse cultures around the globe. Here are just three from the latest batch posted online.

I was happy to discover that there will be plenty of photography that is "off-topic" as well. Here are just three from the vast, eclectic mix. Check the Lens Culture feature for the whole preview and a high-rez slideshow.

Settle in with a good cup of coffee and enjoy important new photography from: Israel, France, Germany, Argentina, USA, Britain, and beyond. We also feature extensive previews from Photo Espana in Madrid, and the Look 3 Festival of the Photograph in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Topics include 18-year-old girls in the military, urban and suburban sprawl, the illusions of levitation, psychic readings by cell phone camera, urban tree portraits, shuttered businesses, digital photograms, and more.

So, something for everyone, we hope. Please check out the latest issue of Lens Culture online now — free!

French photographer Denis Darzacq is an acclaimed photojournalist (he won a World Press Photo award last year) who likes to work on artistic projects, as well.

In his latest series, Hyper, people seem to hover and glide, weightless, through surreal shopping scenes. The colors and poses are delightfully cartoon-like, yet they become all the more fascinating when you realize that there are no hidden wires or pulleys, nor any digital manipulation to the photographs. These are honest, undoctored photographs — albeit taken with high-speed film at a fraction of a fraction of a second. They depict real people, at real moments in real space.

Darzacq says:

For many years now, I have questioned the place of the individual in our societies in my photographic work. This is achieved through the use of artistic but also purely documentary photography.

In Hyper, this questioning is structured around a formal opposition: between the body and its surroundings, or between being and having.

All my photographs are the fruit of shared real-life experience. There is no digital manipulation. I asked young dancers and athletes to jump around, encouraged by the violence of their surroundings – hypermarkets – and movements inspired by mannerist painting: unreal, overacted and pointless.

I see these as movements of resistance to a consumerist world invading our lives more and more. But they are also simply an artistic proposition free of any social or political interpretation.

American photographer Andrew Phelps has created a minor masterpiece of a photobook that documents in an artful way, the end of the town of Higley, Arizona, as it is swallowed up and completely transformed into just another sprawling generic suburban development in the desert lands to the east of Phoenix.

The story, which took three years to photograph, is particularly interesting since all four of Phelps' grandparents lived in the sleepy outlying town of Higley while Phelps was growing up in Phoenix. So, we can watch in an intimate way as the funky little town gets bulldozed to make way for instant suburbia, American style.

Check out our book review and a dozen photos from Higley, here in Lens Culture.

The 11th annual Photo Espana festival in Madrid will host 69 exhibitions: 32 at the Official Section and 37 at the Off Festival, with works by 230 artists from different disciplines and 35 different countries.

There are also lots of events, workshops, conferences (Joan Fontcuberta is heading up a multi-day symposium about "The Future of Photography"), a photo book fair, portfolio reviews, and more.

Lens Culture is delighted to be an active part of this year's festival. Editor Jim Casper will be reviewing the portfolios of 70 finalists from over 900 applications. We plan to feature the work of several of these great, emerging artists in upcoming issues of Lens Culture.

And of course, we will try to present some of the best picks from the great exhibitions, as well.

In the meantime, here is a random sampling of some of the work that can be seen in the exhibits.

Eyemazing, a great, oversized print magazine from Amsterdam, features the work of Lens Culture Editions Artist lauren e. simonutti is the latest issue. You can see more of simonutti's work here in Lens Culture. And you can buy signed, numbered, hand-printed, hand-toned silver gelatin prints made by simonutti online through Lens Culture Editions.

Congratulations to lauren — her feature is in good company: right before an interview with Joel-Peter Witkin (an appropriate pairing), and along with work by other favorites like Alec Soth. Be sure to check out the issue of Eyemazing at your local arts magazine shop.