June 2011 Archives

One of our personal favorites, British photographer Vanessa Winship, has won the prestigious Henri Cartier-Bresson Award. The HCB Award is a remarkable prize of 30,000 euros "to stimulate a photographer’s creativity by offering the opportunity to carry out a project that would otherwise be difficult to achieve." This is the first time in the history of the Award that a female photographer has won.

Lens Culture featured her series Sweet Nothings in 2008.

Winship’s work has focused on individuals and history. She began with a classic journalistic approach in her early work in the Balkans and around the Black Sea. Then, she entered into a more frontal style with large-format portraits: Sweet Nothings, and Georgia. For her new project Out there: an American Odyssey, she wants to tell the stories of anonymous individuals deluded by the American dream. She believes that people are often more honest, direct, and revealing when confronted by a stranger.

The Award was created in 1988 by Robert Delpire, and it was relaunched in 2003 with the opening of Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris. Previous recipients of the Award are: Chris Killip (1989), Josef Koudelka (1991), Larry Towell (2003), Fazal Sheikh (2005), Jim Goldberg (2007) and David Goldblatt (2009). The prize is awarded every two years.

When we wrote to congratulate her, she responded, "I'm a little overwhelmed and speechless. This is huge, and they are blood big shoes to fill!"

The jury underlined the humanist tradition of Vanessa Winship's work, "making photographs that can be seen as classical documentary but that have a sensitivity and complexity that is thoroughly contemporary."

An exhibition of her finished project is scheduled to be shown at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Spring 2013.

On June 11th the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo displayed Mitsubishi Electric’s “Geo-Cosmos”, the world’s first large-scale spherical OLED. It was breathtaking, the video above is proof.

The gigantic globe features 10,362 OLED panels which cover an aluminum sphere hanging 18 meters from the floor. The 6 meter orb is an upgrade to a previous model which featured regular LED panels. This spanking new OLED version features a resolution about 10 times greater than LED, more than 10 million pixels!

The globe was installed to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the museum, as a result of Executive Director Mamoru Mohri “wanting to share with people the sight of our beautiful Earth as seen from space.” The display features satellite images of the earth updated daily. There are also interactive “Geo-Scope” touch-screen panels which allow visitors to browse images and data collected from all over the world. Something particularly interesting was a simulation showing the point of origin and eventual dispersion of the March 11 tsunami following the great earthquake.

Video and text via tokyotek.com

Photographer Ashley Gilbertson narrates this audio slideshow, presenting photo comparisons of the pre-packaged contents of Meals Ready to Eat (MREs) from 15 nations, as officially distributed to their soldiers fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Some general observations: Food for warriors often includes nostalgic tastes from home. One French packaged meal can be traded for five American packaged meals. However, many other cultures crave the American packages, because they contain "fun food" -- hamburgers, natchos, Skittles candy, peanut butter and pound cake. Australian MREs include vegemite. Italians get three disposable tooth brushes in their daily packages. British soldiers have about 40 menus to choose from, but the most popular is lamb curry, including a small bottle of Tabasco sauce, and tea, of course. German soldiers sometimes get a Bosnian-Serbian ground beef meal and Austrian bread with a shelf-life of many years. Polish soldiers eat goulash. The potato servings in Canadian meals sizzle like gunpowder and firecrackers when thrown into a fire.

Gilbertson says this:

In combat, eating is often the only good thing about a day. When a soldier or marine sits down to warm up his M.R.E., he’s not being shot at, he’s not losing friends. It’s almost a ritual, and the very act of opening one of these packages suggests safety, however brief it may be.

To a lot of the troops from many nations that I've met, mealtimes are the only thing to look forward to – other, perhaps, than going home.

The slideshow includes photo comparisons of meals for soldiers from the following countries: United States, Canada, Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Lithuania, Ukraine, South Korea, and Australia.

The latest issue of Lens Culture, the 30th edition of our online magazine about contemporary photography, is filled with a wonderful selection of diverse approaches to photography — plus essays, book reviews, and festival previews. Dive in to discover lots of delightful, provocative, challenging, and inspiring views from around the world.

www.lensculture.com

PLUS — We've been busy, our small hardworking team!

We're preparing for our upcoming exhibition of 31 contemporary photographers (winners from Lens Culture International Exposure Awards 2010) at VII Photo Gallery in DUMBO, New York. (Opening July 14, 2011).

And gearing up for launch of this year's expanded global competition (including a new multimedia category). Details coming soon!

And getting ready to open registration next week for Lens Culture FotoFest Paris 2011 (November 7-8-9).

And reviewing applications from photographers who want to participate in our 5-day Workshop with Jeff Cowen in Berlin (August 6-10, 2011). It's not too late for YOU to apply. Limited to 5 photographers.

So, hope you enjoy the new issue. And come join us at any or all of these upcoming events!

As America celebrates Flag Day, we're also saluting old dogs in America.

Check out this series of great portraits of Senior Dogs Across America by photographer Nancy LeVine.

Cheers!

All photos © Jeff Cowen, jeffcowen.eu
Video produced by Rémy Badan, pixiesfilms.com

Photographer Jeff Cowen will be conducting a masterclass in black-and-white analog photography at his studio and custom large-format darkroom in Berlin, August 6-10, 2011. I will be participating, as well, leading discussions on editing, marketing, and strategies for career-oriented photographers.

It's going to be great.

Limited enrollment: 5 photographers. Check out the details and sign up today!

Mrs. Milner, from the series Beauty and Wisdom, © Robbie Kaye

Beauty and Wisdom documents a fast disappearing aspect of American culture (Americana) as well as a diminishing population of women who are part of a generation that is often overlooked. More important than their weekly ritual of going to the 'beauty parlor' is the fact that these women are extremely vibrant, wise and humorous…and committed to maintaining their life-long ritual for rejuvenation and connection.

As baby boomers age, the rituals of their mothers and grandmothers will fade and become obsolete. Beauty and Wisdom documents a generation of women, aged 70 and over, who have been going regularly to the beauty parlor once a week not as a luxury, but as a necessity, for most of their adult years. This project explores the grace and courage in which these women age in a society so heavily focused on the beauty of youth. Ironically, these are the women who opened doors for future generations of women to walk through, yet they are now part of an invisible generation.

See and read more in Lens Culture.

Photojournalism was yet-again re-defined earlier this year when Michael Wolf was awarded an honorable mention in the World Press Photo competition for photographs he took of his computer screen.

Wolf spent literally hundreds of hours at his computer, trolling virtually around the world, looking for anything weird or bizarre that had been captured by the ravenous cameras mounted on the top of Google’s special GPS-coordinated Street View camera vans.

When he found an image that fit his project, Wolf mounted his own camera in front of his computer screen, cropped the part of the Google image that he wanted, and made his own picture of that picture. ...

Read more, see more, and watch a video interview with the photographer in
Lens Culture.

For 25 years, Elisabeth Sunday has found her muse in Africa: a place of origins, devastating beauty, great troubles and unyielding expressions of life. A few years ago, Elisabeth traveled to the West African country of Ghana to scout out a new location. There, she met a group of Akan fishermen living along the beach who were willing to be photographed over a period of time. The fish, sometimes cradled in the arms of the powerful fishermen, are an ancient symbol of higher awareness and provide a proof of their continuous link to nature. Elisabeth simply asked the men to express their love for the sea through the fish they capture. The resulting portfolio of the Akan is an intimate look at their bond with the sea and the natural world and the respect they have for both.

For another project, Elisabeth traveled to the country of Ethiopia in East Africa and photographed the painted tribes of the Omo Valley in the southwest. Elisabeth photographed the painted Koro men, (who only parted with their weapons for the sake of the shoot), for the Animus series exploring the shadow side of masculine identity.

When asked about her technique of creating these long, curvy stretched images, she explains how that came about:

My work was inspired by a series of vivid and transformative dreams of elongated and undulating imagery influenced by a painting my grandfather had made of Mangbetu Women in the Congo in 1931.

Not long after the dreams occurred, I searched for ways to elongate my images, as I had seen them, and began photographing with the mirror in 1983. I continue to use the mirror as a visual interpreter for the invisible forces that bind the forms of life together; each one connected through a pulsing, writhing sea of forms and shapes, from the great to the small, the complex to the simple.

The mirror is a creative tool, like a paintbrush or pencil that allows me to draw a doorway to another world and travel inward into a place of spirit, strength and beauty; a dwelling place common to the human soul.

The prints have no digital special effects or computer modifications of any kind. All are shot on negative film. The smaller prints, 30 x 40 inches and under, are printed on gelatin silver photographic paper and are handmade by me. Each is gold toned using a combination of processes I worked out 20 years ago. The gold toning casts a silvery blue in the highlights and warm brown in the shadow area of the print giving the print a slight split toned effect.

Elisabeth Sunday will give an artist talk at Gallery 291 in San Francisco, Thursday evening, June 9, 6 to 8 p.m.

You can see more of her work, here, in Lens Culture.

On June 6, 1968, in the midst of his campaign to be president of the United States, Robert F. Kennedy died from an assassin's bullet. Two days later, after a funeral mass in New York City, his casket was placed on a special train bound for Arlington National Cemetery. A journey that should have taken hours took all day, as thousands of Americans lined the 225 miles of track in a spontaneous outpouring of grief. Paul Fusco was the only journalist on the train, and he ended up taking more than a thousand pictures from his window. These images can be seen in the Aperture publication Paul Fusco: RFK.

Now on the 43rd anniversary of the event, documentary filmmaker Jennifer Stoddart brings Fusco's images to life. Personal stories are told by Fusco, and RFK's then-press secretary, as well as by the people who appeared in Fusco's images, recalling the emotional impact of Kennedy's assassination on the country. The film also includes video and audio clips of Bobby Kennedy speaking so eloquently and passionately about his hopes and dreams for the country.

Watching the documentary was a moving experience for an American like me, who lived through those sad and rocky moments in America's history. And once again, I am reminded of the power of photography to capture a mood and feeling, and how a multimedia presentation like this documentary can serve to intensify the meaning of almost each and every image.

The documentary film, ONE THOUSAND PICTURES: RFK’S LAST JOURNEY, airs on Wednesday, June 8 at 8 p.m. ET. And tonight, Monday, June 6 at 6:30, Paul Fusco and filmmaker Jennifer Stoddart will host an artist's talk and book signing at the Aperture Gallery and Bookstore in Chelsea. 547 West 27th Street, 4th Floor.

The trailer for this film can also be viewed at HBO.

Storytelling through a combination of still photographic images, video, audio and graphics, is becoming the new high-standard for photojournalists, documentary photographers, filmmakers, and artists who use photography, video and sound. The in-depth nature of the communication is engaging on many levels, and it feels very intimate, as if the photographer/author is sharing the experience directly with you.

Here is a recent example that really benefits from the wonders of multimedia presentation:

Flying in a motorized paraglider over one of the most diverse continents in the world, George Steinmetz captures the beauty of Africa's landscapes and people. His pictures show not only the patterns of the land, but also the potential and hope that the continent encompasses.

A self-taught photographer, Steinmetz has traveled through more than 30 countries in Africa photographing its diverse wildlife, landscape and culture. For the past decade much of his work has involved flying a ultralight aircraft to photograph remote landscapes. His foot-launched aircraft consists of a backpack motor and paraglider-style wing. It is the world's lightest and slowest motorized aircraft and allows a unique and more intimate style of aerial photography.

His photographs have appeared numerous times in National Geographic magazine and in the German edition of GEO. Video courtesy of MediaStorm.

Last week, 35 international photography experts and 100 serious photographers from 15 countries gathered at the Swedish Museum of Photography (Fotografiska) in Stockholm for a series of one-on-one meetings, lectures, exhibitions, workshops and more.

Our first annual international portfolio review event in Sweden offered tremendous opportunities for every participant to meet, network, make friends, and talk about important issues touching on the business of photography, art, photojournalism, book publishing, magazines, marketing, the impact of the internet on the world of photography, and more.

Roundtable discussions covered topics about art galleries, photo festivals, collectors, and innovative new ways for photographers to pursue their passions with creativity and savvy business sense.

Fotografiska is a beautiful, comfortable, inviting setting. Each day's events were planned and organized to make the most of this remarkable gathering of passionate people. So, it was intense, exhilarating, fun, inspiring, and even a bit exhausting. But everyone left filled with ideas, and lots of connections with colleagues and new friends from around the world.

Here is a slideshow of 101 snapshots from our time together.

Thanks to the photographers and expert reviewers who participated, and to the volunteers and hardworking staffs of Fotografiska and Lens Culture who made it happen. Cheers!

Now, we're gearing up for our next international portfolio review in Paris this November 7-8-9, 2011. Sign up for our mailing list for the latest information!