Sept 23 - Oct 7, 2022
INTERESTING PHOTO NEWS & GREAT PHOTO LINKS
Great Photography Stories
Do CAPTCHA Photos get you down?
I enjoyed this essay by Clive Thompson on why CAPTCHA photos are so unbearably depressing:
“CAPTCHA images are never joyful vistas of human activity, full of Whitmanesque vigor. No, they’re blurry, anonymous landscapes that possess a positively Soviet anomie.”
Angella d'Avignon looks deeply at ‘free dirt’ photos
There is a lot we can learn from almost any kind of photograph. Angella d'Avignon proves the point in this wonderful essay for The Paris Review.
“Depending on the angle and composition of the images, “free dirt” posts on Craigslist can look like unintentional landscape vistas. Some shots feature calloused hands covered in tawny fill dirt, vignetted by palm trees and paved driveways in postwar cul-de-sacs. There are endless frames of earth spilling onto asphalt, flattened mounds of rich brown soil indented with tire tracks, craggy piles of dirt gathered evenly along the perimeters of blue tarp in driveways. Where I’m from, in Southern California, free dirt is abundant.”
The stories behind Marion Ettlinger’s author photographs
Have you ever been asked to make an author photograph? If so, you might enjoy this New Yorker profile of Marion Ettlinger as much as I did:
“Once the hard and lonely work of book-writing was done and the publishing machine’s publicity gears were whirring, authors hoped to get “Ettlingered.” The coinage, which for decades was common parlance in the literary world, referred to having your picture taken by Marion Ettlinger, a master of the authorial portrait.”
VIDEO OF THE WEEK
Wonderful profile of artist and photographer Margriet Smulders who makes extraordinary photographic compostions by collaging and rephotographing flowers, glass, mirrors, and fabrics. Really beautiful work.
EQUITY AND ETHICS IN PHOTOGRAPHY
Is there a ‘right way’ for photographers to document low-income communities if they are not part of those communities?
It’s Nice That recently ran an interesting essay by Liz Gorny asking the question, should only working-class photographers take pictures of working-class places?
“But, when a community does not have access to a photographer in their midst, does it not deserve representation? How, then, can a visitor do this ethically? What harm can a photograph pose to a community? This leads to another, perhaps more urgent consideration: if a territory has only ever been shot to its detriment by predominantly wealthy outsiders, should visitors continue to photograph there at all?”
OPPORTUNITIES / CALLS FOR ENTRY
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Photo at the top of The Roundup: © James Prochnik