February 2012 Archives

The eyes of Chamonix


Mountain TV and Quechua interview three lovers of high-altitude images. Pascal Tournaire, René Robert and Monica Dalmasso, mountain photographers, talk about their extraordinary jobs — a mix of passion, precision and performance. (In French with English subtitles).

Montagne TV et Quechua sont partis à la rencontre de trois amoureux de l'image en altitude. Pascal Tournaire, René Robert et Monica Dalmasso, photographes de montagne, évoquent leur métier hors du commun, entre passion, performance et précision.

This photo essay, part of Leica Camera's collaboration with Magnum Photos, documents Alex Webb's exploration of Chicago and the Loop. Inspired in part by one of his early influences, Ray Metzker's "My Camera and I in the Loop," he explores the streets of the US's "Second City." Though unlike the street photographers of the so-called Chicago School (Callahan, Metzger, Sturr, Sterling), Alex Webb has chosen to photograph the city's multitudinous character in color. Having spent most of his 30 year long career shooting outside of the US, Alex Webb turns his lens to his home nation during this very important election year.

Read an interview with Alex Webb on the Leica Camera blog.

An narrative-rich photo exhibition at Noorderlicht Photogallery in The Netherlands explores what is behind the prison walls in the United States. The curators, Hester Keijser and Pete Brook, tell us:

The title of the show, Cruel and Unusual, refers to a long-established legal term that first appeared in the 1689 English Bill of Rights. Adopted in the late 18th century as part of the U.S. Constitution, the 8th Amendment declares: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” In 1958, the U.S. Supreme Court stated that understanding of "cruel and unusual punishments" should change over time, being those punishments which offend society's "evolving sense of decency." Each of the presented projects urges the viewer to ask the question: into what is our sense of decency evolving?

The caption to the photo (above) reads:

Stateville in a basement storage area. Electric chairs (no longer in use): one from the State, the other from Cook County. During an electrocution a prisoner’s hair would catch fire and sometimes their eyeballs would melt, so a helmet, on each chair, was placed onto their heads so that witnesses wouldn’t be subjected to such visual horror. © 1993 Lloyd Degrane.

See and read more in the article in Lens Culture. Caution: some images may be too disturbing for sensitive viewers.

Photographer Randy Halverson just won an award for this amazing video that he created without any digital gimmicks or special effects -- it's all natural, seen through his camera's lens. Bear McCreary, who wrote the musical score for Battlestar Galactica, liked Halverson's works so much that he created an original score for this video.

Here's what the photographer says about this piece:

What you see is real, but you can't see it this way with the naked eye. It is the result of 20-30 second exposures, edited together over many hours to produce the timelapse. This allows you to see the Milky Way, Aurora and other Phenonmena, in a way you wouldn't normally see them.

In the opening "Dakotalapse" title shot, you see bands of red and green moving across the sky. After asking several Astronomers, they are possible nonleticulent clouds, airglow or faint Aurora. I never got a definite answer to what it is. You can also see the red and green bands in other shots.

At :53 and 2:17 seconds into the video you see a Meteor with a Persistent Train. Which is ionizing gases, which lasted over a half hour in the cameras frame. Phil Plait wrote an article about the phenomena for Discover Magazine. There is a second Meteor with a much shorter persistent train at 2:51 in the video. This one wasn't backlit by the moon like the first, and moves out of the frame quickly. Watch for two Deer at 1:27.

Most of the video was shot near the White River in central South Dakota during September and October 2011, there are other shots from Arches National Park in Utah, and Canyon of the Ancients area of Colorado during June 2011. The Aurora were shot in central South Dakota in September 2011 and near Madison, Wisconsin on October 25, 2011.

Equipment Used: Dynamic Perception's Stage Zero Dolly, Canon 5D Mark II and Canon 60D cameras, with Canon 16-35 and Tokina 11-16 lenses. Shot in RAW format. Manual mode, Exposure was 30 seconds on most Milky Way shots, 15-30 seconds on Aurora. ISO 1600 - 6400 F2.8.

There is a 23 minute extended cut, available for digital download at dakotalapse.com for more info and digital download.

Watch in full-screen HD for maximum pleasure!

This World Press Photo of the Year shows a woman holding a wounded relative in her arms, inside a mosque used as a field hospital by demonstrators against the rule of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, during clashes in Sanaa, Yemen on 15 October 2011. The winning photographer, Samuel Aranda, was working in Yemen on assignment for The New York Times.

Koyo Kouoh, a member of the jury said this about the winning photo:

"It is a photo that speaks for the entire region. It stands for Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, for all that happened in the Arab Spring. But it shows a private, intimate side of what went on. And it shows the role that women played, not only as care-givers, but as active people in the movement."

Nina Berman, another member of the jury said:

"In the Western media, we seldom see veiled women in this way, at such an intimate moment. It is as if all of the events of the Arab Spring resulted in this single moment -- in moments like this."

You can see the other winning images, and read more about the winners and the competition in Lens Culture, including a high-resolution slideshow.

We love photobooks, and whenever we can, we browse and buy at our local bookshops. We also shop online for those titles that are hard to find. Now there is a simple way for you to help support Lens Culture while shopping for those hard-to-find photobooks.

If you shop on Amazon for photo books, camera equipment, gifts, or anything else at all, please consider using this link to Amazon. Lens Culture will earn a small commission on everything you purchase, and that will help us a lot.

You can find more than 100 photobook reviews on Lens Culture, and we've just created an easy way for you to browse and shop right here for a lot of the books we like. We'll be adding new reviews and new titles as often as we can. Cheers!

Now we see Ethiopia through Spanish eyes and the virtuoso large-format tilt-shift compositions of Juan Manuel Castro Prieto. On show currently at Galerie VU' in Paris, his photos are like metaphor-soaked visions from mysterious dreams. Almost surreal in their vividness of color, highly-selective focus, and unusually sharp details — his mural-size images seem immediately like long-forgotten memories with which one yearns to linger and to imagine the story of what happened just before and just after these moments were captured as memories on film.

He started in the 1970s as a self-taught enthusiast. Influenced by Gabriel Cualladó and Paco Gómez, whom he met at the Real Sociedad Fotográfica of Madrid, Castro Prieto makes a distinction between photography as a window onto reality, and photography as a mirror in which the author — with all his obsessions, memories and imagination fed by myths and literature — is reflected in what he portrays. Thus, for Castro Prieto, photography is a tool for connecting to the world, on his terms, and “an excuse for a philosophy of life” (interview with Alejandro Castellote, 2003).

In Ethiopia, on several extended visits between 2001 and 2006, he found "an ancestral memory of humanity" that "converses with the objects, signs and behaviors of the modern world."

Too wild and wonderful and creepy for words! "I FINK U FREEKY" by Die Antwoord.

Here's our own video interview with Roger about his photography: