All Things Art & Photography
In the vast Kalahari Dillon Marsh found some epic bird nests in a series he calls: Assimilation
In the vast barren landscapes of the southern Kalahari, Sociable Weaver Birds assume ownership of the telephone poles that cut across their habitat.Their burgeoning nests are at once inertly statuesque and teeming with life. The twigs and grass collected to build these nests combine to give strangely recognizable personalities to the otherwise inanimate poles.
via the web site
While many images are (for me) a little too detached and scientifically cool, Marten Lange’s series on the natural world titled Another Language is really wonderful and a great example of how to pace your images in a series and especially how the series becomes more important than each individual image. A great book to look at if you are thinking about how photographs work together and more importantly how they function as a language.
via the artist’s web site
SHIMPEI TAKEDA’s series Trace documents radiation in the soils via sites he picked in Japan. He rigged up a unique method to expose photographic paper to the soils radiation content. Like some sort of shaman/scientist he makes the invisible visible and records all his methods in this haunting project of Japan’s contamination and loss.
“Hardly anyone outside of Japan had heard the name “Fukushima” until last year, now it’s known around the world disgracefully. The nuclear fallout covered precious land where ancestors passed away. As the reading on the radiation meter climbed uncomfortably, it was such an odd and terrifying experience to collect soil samples as I felt like gathering somebody’s ashes.”
A national wrap up of all the attempts at squashing the press lately..
It is an artist’s prerogative as to whether or not they will allow photography of their performances. A photo ban is one thing but it appears that Beyoncé wishes to have her cake and eat it too. She still wants photographic coverage but only wants to release images of her own choosing. The NPPA believes that this is improper and we have said so in our letter to her publicist.
We also believe that once it becomes apparent that news organizations are willing to accept this type of policy and use handout photos it will only encourage others to follow suit. The danger in this type of “infotainment” is that the public will be denied the information and images that come from independent news gathering and the media will be relegated to being nothing more than aggregators of sanitized material provided by public relations firms and press secretaries. This point is best illustrated in a joint protest by the NPPA and the White House News Photographers (WHNPA) Association regarding the photo manipulation of an official photograph made available for distribution by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s office.
via Photography & the Law – Beyonce’ and Beyond: A Roundup of Recent Legal Issues – JPG News.
A very interesting article about how current technology will eliminate the working methods of the individual pro photographer and change the game again. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer thinks we don’t need pro photographers anymore but she missed the point. It’s not that there are so many humans with camera’s – it’s the ability to place cameras everywhere we need, to get every viewpoint recorded, that now changes the game in a big way. Clayton Cubitt has decided we can forget about the Decisive Moment because we now live in the Constant Moment.
With the iPhone 5 camera module currently estimated to cost about $10/unit, and dropping like a rock with the inexorability of Moore’s Law, we can see how even an individual photographer might deploy hundreds of these micro-networked cameras for less than it costs to buy one current professional DSLR.
What might a photographer do with a grid of networked cameras like this, with their phone as the “viewfinder?” A street photographer could deploy them all over a neighborhood of interest, catching weeks worth of decisive moments to choose from at leisure.
A photojournalist could embed them all across a war zone, on both sides of the battle, to achieve a level of reality and objectivity never seen before. A sports photographer could blanket the stadium and capture every angle, for the entire game, even from each player’s perspective.
Clayton Cubitt via The Decisive Moment is Dead. Long Live the Constant Moment.