April 2009 Archives

I was delighted to have the opportunity to make a presentation last week in Portland, showing the work of 8 photo-based artists who I especially admire.

Many people in the audience at this great Photolucida event told me they would like to learn more about each of these artists. So, here are links to portfolios and essays here in Lens Culture. From each portfolio, you can also find links to take you to websites that feature more work and information about each of the artists:

JR
Yuki Onodera
Denis Darzacq
Elaine Duigenan
Ludmila Steckelberg
Odette England
Alexei Vassiliev
Myoung Ho Lee

Special thanks to Laura Moya and the whole Photolucida team for hosting such a great 4-day event. I was able to formally meet and review the work of 48 talented photographers. Plus I met many other photographers, informally, and got many chances to catch up with colleagues from the international photography community. Non-stop and exhilarating!

You will be able to discover the work of several of these emerging artists here in Lens Culture in the near future. Cheers!

I'm happy to announce that edition #20 of Lens Culture is online now and filled with lots of really great photography and interviews and photobook reviews. Be sure to check it out, and enjoy!

This photoessay is an intimate view into the lives of people who live in old prefab apartment blocks in suburban Slovakia. It appears in a book titled "East" which is the first of two volumes celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Anzenberger Agency. See the full story here in Lens Culture.

For two hectic weeks between the US presidential election and the inauguration, one photographer was invited to make portraits of every member of Obama's new incoming administration. The result is a series of 52 unlikely semi-formal portraits that reveal a refreshingly diverse, young, energetic group of people who will be key to helping forward Obama's agenda.

This series of portraits originally appeared in The New York Times Magazine, in print and online. Now, for the first time anywhere, an exhibition of life-size prints of these images will go on display (not in America) but in Birmingham, UK.

UK-based photographer Nadav Kander talks with Jim Casper of Lens Culture about how this daunting project came into being, and provides some very interesting personal observations about his brief encounters with the new power-brokers of America. See some of the images, and listen to the interview, here in Lens Culture.

The proliferation of online photography and geo-tagging allows researchers to visualize and define a "geography of buzz". A new study of time-stamped, geo-tagged photos uploaded to the internet equates quantities and clusters of images as photographic tokens of cultural value. How will urban developers and event marketers tap into these power centers highlighted by stock photo agencies and citizen photographers uploading images to Flickr and Twitter? Very interesting reading in the New York Times, and the original research paper.

"Nagano (b. 1925) is one of Japan's most prolific documentary photographers. Since the end of World War II he has photographed all across Japan, and the streets of Tokyo, his adopted home, have been his greatest muse. This book reveals a lesser-known series that he took on his first overseas trip to Hong Kong in 1958. This is the first time that a book of these 'classic' black-and-white street photographs has been published, fifty years after they were taken..."

Read the full book review by Marc Feustel.

The annual photography festival in Lodz Poland takes place this year from May 7 - 31. Lens Culture will be there for the opening events, to see the exhibitions, to review photographer's portfolios, and to present the work of five of our favorite photographers. There is still time for serious photographers to sign up to participate in the portfolio reviews. Check all the details at the festival website: fotofestwal.com.

Oy! We just upgraded our slide show software, and only after it was loaded on our server, did we learn that we also have to "re-generate" files for all previously existing slide shows. We're talking about over 4,000 images. So, our lovely high-resolution slide show feature may be down for a day or so. All regular pages are working fine, but the slideshows look blank for the moment. Fresh coffee anyone?