April 8 - April 22, 2022
A look at some of the best photography stories of the week along with photography opportunities, and more.
THE WEEKLY ROUNDUP
Great Photography Stories
Kenneth Dickerman Reviews Tony Chirino’s new photo book ‘The Precipice’ for the Washington Post
The photos in Chirino’s book were made in operating rooms and morgues over the course of his career as a biomedical photographer. Read the full review and check out some of the incredible photos from the book here:
“It’s not that the photos are gory. They aren’t. But their heaviness makes the book a challenge to the reader. Fundamentally, it asks questions about the nature of life and death. As Chirinos said to me, “The truth is that living is both a luxury and a dilemma.”
The Guardian features Robbie Lawrence’s Northern Diary
Robbie Lawrence is a photographer whose body of work Northern Diary have an intensity of mood that stays in my mind long after I stop looking at the pictures. Click here to see the Guardian feature.
“Northern Diary brings together a selection of work that Robbie Lawrence has produced over the past seven years, many of which have never been seen before in a gallery setting. Subjects include landscapes, portraits and still lifes made across Scotland’s cities, rural locations and coastal towns. Northern Diary opens at Stills in Edinburgh on 1 April”
Portraits from a Chicago bar in the early 1970s
Loved this Blind Magazine feature on John Banasiak’s portraits and photos in a Chicago bar - images made from his perch as the bartender.
“Long before John Banasiak became a professor of photography at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion (where he’s taught for 42 years), he was a factory worker, a night watchman, and a bartender at George Brown’s Bar, a working-class drinking hole in one of Chicago’s Polish/ Ukrainian neighborhoods. It was there, in 1971, when Banasiak was just 21, that he made a series of tender, elemental pictures that capture a proud, hard-working community.”
VIDEO OF THE WEEK
Check out this great 1994 BBC documentary on Cindy Sherman
“New York based artist, Cindy Sherman, is famous for her photographs of women in which she is not only the photographer, but also the subject. She has contributed her own footage to the programme by recording her studio and herself at work with her Hi-8 video camera. It reveals a range of unexpected sources from visceral horror to medical catalogues and exploitation movies, and explores her real interests and enthusiasms.”
It’s an age-restricted video, so you have to watch it on YouTube directly.
EQUITY AND ETHICS IN PHOTOGRAPHY
The Daily Tar Heel, student newspaper of the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill covers a controversy in their midst when photographer Cornell Watson’s work about the school was censored.
The Daily Tar Heel’s reporter Jade Neptune does a deep dive into what happened when an exhibition of photographer Cornell Watson's work, created as part of his artist residency, was canceled.
“In June, Watson was offered an artist residency at the Stone Center to create a body of work that captured spaces of memory for Black history.
Then, after six months of creating the photo story that would later be named “Tarred Healing,” a reflection of Black history through places, people and systems in Chapel Hill, the photos were pulled from display at the Stone Center in their solo exhibition set to open Feb. 22. This followed the images being featured in The Washington Post.”
OPPORTUNITIES / CALLS FOR ENTRY
NYC Photo Community Newsletter
Just published a new photo book or zine? Putting on a photo talk? Maybe an exhibition opening? Let us know. We'd love to share your good news or help publicize your photo talk or event. We also want to feature your work. Follow @nycphotocommunity and tag your photos #nycphotocommunity to be considered. If you've enjoyed what you read, please spread the word by sharing this subscription link. Thanks!
Photo at top of Weekly Roundup: Bit Coin ATM, NYC © James Prochnik
March 25 - April 8, 2022
A look at some of the best photography stories of the week along with photography opportunities, and more.
THE WEEKLY ROUNDUP
Great Photography Stories
Stephen Shore excerpts his new book in The Paris Review
I enjoyed reading and seeing some of Stephen Shore’s influences and inspirations in this Paris Review excerpt from his upcoming memoir published by MACK, Modern Instances: The Craft of Photography:
“One of the threads running through the history of the medium is the redefinition of meaningful content. Photographers find meaning in something where it hadn’t been recognized before, and then, over time, that content itself becomes a convention. And when it becomes a convention, it lacks the immediacy of the original picture. “Immediacy” means without mediation. Without the mediation of visual conventions. In time the original content becomes a cliché. And the cutting edge of immediacy finds new territory to function as an objective correlative.”
The Guardian highlights some of the work of this year’s Deutsch Börse photography prize nominees
Photographers Anastasia Samoylova, Deana Lawson, Jo Ractliffe, and Gilles Peress were all shortlisted for the big photo prize this year. See some of their photos here, and read more about their photo projects, and the shortlist exhibition currently on view in London at The Photographer’s Gallery here.
“From flood warnings to the Troubles, these images from the four award nominees document the intimate alternatives to preconceived histories”
RIP to Stephen Wilhite, Creator of the GIF file format
While GIFs can be overused, this file format whose primary use these days is to send a quick emotional response over social media have probably brought more moments of quick happiness and good cheer than to more people than most inventions coming out of the tech world. If only Wilhite accepted that people were going to use a hard ‘G’ when they pronounced it! The Verge has a good obit on this influential programmer.
“While there have been long-standing debates about the correct pronunciation of the image format, Wilhite was very clear on how he intended for it to be said. In 2013, he told The New York Times, “The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations. They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story.”
VIDEO OF THE WEEK
Not that I think I’m ever all that great about noticing details in scenes I photograph, but this short video, one of the winners of the 2021 ‘Best Optical Illusions’ of 2021, shows me, in humiliating detail, how much I can easily miss. I do think optical illusions are a valuable adjacent field of study or interest to photographers - a reminder that much of what we see, or think we see, with our own two eyes is constructed after the fact.
EQUITY AND ETHICS IN PHOTOGRAPHY
Aperture Magazine presented a lot of excellent online programming to accompany their last issue, Latinx.
If you wanted to see some of these talks, but missed the opportunity when they were live, Aperture has now added this programing to their YouTube playlist. Check out great conversations from the links (🔗) below:
“Recently added Aperture Conversations:
Celebrating Thalía Gochez and Las Fotos Project 🔗
The Narrative Arc of Latinx Photography 🔗
Sasha Phyars-Burgess, Sonel Breslav, and Anika Sabin in Conversation 🔗
Genesis Báez, Joiri Minaya, and Steven Molina Contreras in Conversation 🔗
Inside the “Latinx” issue with Pilar Tompkins Rivas and Elizabeth Ferrer 🔗
On Community: Thelma Golden, Dr. Kenneth Montague, Jamel Shabazz, and Xaviera Simmons 🔗
On Power: Mark Sealy, Vanley Burke, Dr. Kenneth Montague, and Richard Mark Rawlins in Conversation 🔗
On Identity: Liz Ikiriko in Conversation with June Clark, Dr. Kenneth Montague, and Bidemi Oloyede 🔗”
OPPORTUNITIES / CALLS FOR ENTRY
NYC Photo Community Newsletter
Just published a new photo book or zine? Putting on a photo talk? Maybe an exhibition opening? Let us know. We'd love to share your good news or help publicize your photo talk or event. We also want to feature your work. Follow @nycphotocommunity and tag your photos #nycphotocommunity to be considered. If you've enjoyed what you read, please spread the word by sharing this subscription link. Thanks!
Photo at top of Weekly Roundup: On The Beach, Coney Island © James Prochnik
March 18 - March 25, 2022
A look at some of the best photography stories of the week along with photography opportunities, and more.
THE WEEKLY ROUNDUP
Great Photography Stories
Proof: On Screen: A Conversation With Matthew Kamholtz
Enjoyed reading friend of NYC Photo Community Reuben Radding’s conversation with Matthew Kamholtz on Lenscratch about Kamholtz’s new photobook ON SCREEN which consists of photographs of television and computer screens during the Summer and Fall of 2020 as Black Lives Matter protests streamed across screens all across the world:
“‘RR’: Were you just shooting the video streams in real time as they unfolded, or were you experimenting with freezing video to find images? Did you go back over things you’d possibly missed as the video played?
MK: When I first started doing it I was shooting TV news right as it happened. Then I realized that there was all this stuff on YouTube. Thousands and thousands of videos that people would post and I could play those on my computer. Sometimes I would play them and shoot directly off the computer. Sometimes I would attach the computer to the TV and watch the video on the TV because the TV is actually lower resolution than the computer screen, so I could see all the little pixels and stuff. And then somewhere along the line, probably about halfway through making the work, I realized that I could stop the video and frame it and take multiple pictures of the scene.”
Blind Magazine and the mystery of Rian Dundon’s lost photo book Changsha
By now we’re familiar with the story of an archive of astonishing photos by an unknown or lesser-known photographer being rediscovered ala Vivian Maier. But this was a new one for me - a photo book published in 2012 with a print run of 1000 that, due to the publisher going out of business, got largely lost for ten years (a few copies had made it out into the world). The books have now been found, and Blind Magazine has the full story here. The photos are excellent.
“Changsha was a sprawling metropolis of concrete and neon laced with an energy that made me dizzy. Here were six million people in a city literally built on top of its own ashes and I loved it. I did my best to absorb everything, every bit of local language or news or culinary offering. And I photographed, always photographed.”
How Designers Think About Photobooks
I’ve been thinking a lot about photobooks recently and so I appreciated this recent Aperture feature on Alex Lin/Studio Lin discussing some of the decisions and thought processes he engages with translating a photographer’s vision into a book.
“We were after a design that felt timeless, so you wouldn’t necessarily know when the book came out. Typography is often the element that dates a book, so we intentionally left that off the cover. Instead, we silkscreened a primary character from the book in fluorescent red for the cover. The exact color came from a parking sign in Manhattan that I walked by every day; it felt like the perfect supercharged red.”
The most recent episode of Sasha Wolf’s ‘PhotoWork’ photography podcast is with MACK Book Designer, Morgan Crowcroft-Brown, and that’s definitely worth a listen as well.
VIDEO OF THE WEEK
“How do you tell the story of absence? How do you visualize the space occupied by longing? These were the challenges in creating Sheila & Joe, a film about two people separated by incarceration who met, fell in love and committed their lives to one another through letters.”
The ICP is holding a special screening of the short film “Sheila & Joe,” Sunday March 20 at 3pm followed by a conversation with the filmmakers, director Julie Winokur and cinematographer Ed Kashi, and the subjects of the film, Sheila Rule and Joe Robinson. For more information or to attend the screening: [click here]
EQUITY AND ETHICS IN PHOTOGRAPHY
The Photo Ethics Centre is asking photographers and photo organizations to publish a statement of ethics.
A lot of ethical conversations in photography are reactive - some ethical transgression or possible ethical transgression has occurred and people react to what happened. A lot of ethical lapses, generally, could be avoided if one was to think about various scenarios in advance and consider the principles one might use to guide one’s ethical decision-making. This pledge, and the examples it has already set, are a good framework for thinking about ethics in your practice.
“What is a Statement of Ethics?
A Statement of Ethics is a declaration of your ethical principles and a description of how you enact those principles in your photography practice. The purpose is to explore what ethics means in your practice for yourself, and then to share your commitment to ethics with others.”
OPPORTUNITIES / CALLS FOR ENTRY
Grant Opportunity- Creatives Rebuild New York
This new philanthropic program sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation sounds fantastic - Together they’re dedicating 125 million dollars to New York State-based artists and arts organizations. 300 artists will be awarded grants of $65,000/year + benefits to focus on their practice. 2700 artists will be awarded $1,000.00/month for 18 months. And community-based arts organizations will receive grants of $25,000 - $100,000.00 a year to support their collaborations with artists. You can apply now, and applications are due March 25.
More information / Submit Work: [here]
NYC Photo Community Newsletter
Just published a new photo book or zine? Putting on a photo talk? Maybe an exhibition opening? Let us know. We'd love to share your good news or help publicize your photo talk or event. We also want to feature your work. Follow @nycphotocommunity and tag your photos #nycphotocommunity to be considered. If you've enjoyed what you read, please spread the word by sharing this subscription link. Thanks!
Photo at top of Weekly Roundup: Taxi and Muscle Car, Chinatown © James Prochnik
March 11 - March 18, 2022
A look at some of the best photography stories of the week along with photography opportunities, and more.
THE WEEKLY ROUNDUP
Great Photography Stories
No sound but the wind.
Loved this Guardian preview of Vanessa Winship’s new photo book, Snow, which explores winter landscapes in rural Ohio and is accompanied by a fictional narrative by writer Jem Poster:
“As I drive out of town the wind is rising, whipping the powdery snow from the roadside shrubs and sending it whirling across the blacktop. I know what I’m looking for but I see the sign a moment too late. The surface is treacherous. I let the car slow to walking pace before I brake.”
Peta Pixel remembers the time Robert Frank got arrested and put in jail during his photo road trip that became The Americans.
Have you ever been arrested or treated with suspicion because of your camera? I was questioned pretty thoroughly a couple of years ago when I got caught in a rainstorm while out photographing in a suburban neighborhood. Frank’s mistake was being a foreigner with a lot of cameras in small-town Arkansas. Peta Pixel tells the story here.
“They said, ‘We got to arrest you,’ and I said, ‘What for?’ and they said, ‘Never mind,’ and kept me in jail for almost three days. I didn’t know anybody; they could have killed me.”
High Five!
Fun Input Magazine story on the origins of the ‘High Five’ photographs that illustrate Wikipedia’s ‘high five’ article:
“One reason I love the Wikipedia article for “high five” is that it’s one of those entries about an utterly basic aspect of everyday life that reads like it was written by a group of aliens observing human beings”
VIDEO OF THE WEEK
Enjoyed Tim Davis’s Aperture Conversation around his latest photo book, I’m Looking Through You.
EQUITY AND ETHICS IN PHOTOGRAPHY
The Washington Post looks at how newspapers decide how to publish wartime images of violence.
From almost the moment photography was invented people have struggled with the ethical implication and issues that arise when cameras capture images of violence and its consequences. This Washington Post article looks at how these issues are playing out in the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. (Warning: a graphic image accompanies the article)
“The image was so exceptionally graphic that the conversation was elevated to a high level [among editors] fairly quickly,” said Meaghan Looram, the newspaper’s director of photography. “But the sentiment was universal. This was a photograph that the world needed to see to understand what is happening on the ground in Ukraine.”
OPPORTUNITIES / CALLS FOR ENTRY
Grant Opportunity- Creatives Rebuild New York
This new philanthropic program sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation sounds fantastic - Together they’re dedicating 125 million dollars to New York State-based artists and arts organizations. 300 artists will be awarded grants of $65,000/year + benefits to focus on their practice. 2700 artists will be awarded $1,000.00/month for 18 months. And community-based arts organizations will receive grants of $25,000 - $100,000.00 a year to support their collaborations with artists. You can apply now, and applications are due March 25.
More information / Submit Work: [here]
Palm Prize Submissions Open
“Palm Photo Prize is open to photographers working in all disciplines and styles. Submit your work for a chance to be shortlisted and featured in the exhibition at 10 14 Gallery
Submissions open 15 February – 15 March 2022 | FREE to submit.
Due to high levels of submissions, entrants are limited to two images per person, any submissions over this amount cannot be considered. There are no themes and strong stand-alone images are encouraged.”
More information / Submit Work: [here]
NYC Photo Community Newsletter
Just published a new photo book or zine? Putting on a photo talk? Maybe an exhibition opening? Let us know. We'd love to share your good news or help publicize your photo talk or event. We also want to feature your work. Follow @nycphotocommunity and tag your photos #nycphotocommunity to be considered. If you've enjoyed what you read, please spread the word by sharing this subscription link. Thanks!
Photo at top of Weekly Roundup: Willy, Coney Island © James Prochnik
March 04 - March 11, 2022
A look at some of the best photography stories of the week along with a great video about photography, photography opportunities, and more.
THE WEEKLY ROUNDUP
Great Photography Stories
Blind Magazine looks at new Roy DeCarava exhibition at David Zwirner in London.
My motto is that if one is given a chance to spend some time with Roy DeCarava photographs, spend that time! This Blind Magazine article reviews Roy DeCarava: Selected Works at David Zwirner in London through the end of the year and includes a generous sampling of photographs to enjoy from the exhibition.
“I made a choice not to get caught in the meanness; I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in the possibilities,” DeCarava said. “It doesn’t have to be pretty to be true, but if it’s true it’s beautiful.”
The New Yorker contrasts images from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine made by photojournalists with images and videos made by Ukrainian people caught in war but still posting to social media.
The New Yorker magazine has an article called ‘Watching The World’s “First TikTok War” which explores the strange incongruities and images emerging from social media during the current conflict in Ukraine.
“Large numbers of Ukrainian civilians are taking up arms to defend their country against Vladimir Putin’s reckless imperialism; they’re also deploying their mobile cameras to document the invasion in granular detail. The war has become content, flowing across every platform at once.”
As photos and videos purporting to be from Ukraine pour across our feed how do we know what’s real?
Lewis Bush, writing in The Art Newspaper offers seven ways we can spot fake imagery from Ukraine:
“‘There’s a tendency to more readily believe low-quality material. In fact poor-quality content makes it harder to judge what you’re looking at.’”
VIDEO OF THE WEEK
T. Hopper, who has a commercial YouTube channel that looks at many sides of photography explores the photography of Patti Smith and the lessons we might learn from her thoughts and work in this short video essay.
EQUITY AND ETHICS IN PHOTOGRAPHY
Jörg Colberg reflects on what photographers take from humanity versus what they give back.
Jörg Colberg, whose magazine Conscientious Photography often explores ethical issues in photography, reflects on some of the issues raised by photographer Robert Bergman’s book, A Certain Kind of Rapture, which largely consists of close portraits of people on the margins of society or otherwise living a hard life.
“At the same time, every photographer can — and I would argue: should — ask themselves that question before going out into the world to take pictures. You go out to take your pictures — what exactly do you give back?”
OPPORTUNITIES / CALLS FOR ENTRY
Grant Opportunity- Creatives Rebuild New York
This new philanthropic program sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation sounds fantastic - Together they’re dedicating 125 million dollars to New York State-based artists and arts organizations. 300 artists will be awarded grants of $65,000/year + benefits to focus on their practice. 2700 artists will be awarded $1,000.00/month for 18 months. And community-based arts organizations will receive grants of $25,000 - $100,000.00 a year to support their collaborations with artists. You can apply now, and applications are due March 25.
More information / Submit Work: [here]
Palm Prize Submissions Open
“Palm Photo Prize is open to photographers working in all disciplines and styles. Submit your work for a chance to be shortlisted and featured in the exhibition at 10 14 Gallery
Submissions open 15 February – 15 March 2022 | FREE to submit.
Due to high levels of submissions, entrants are limited to two images per person, any submissions over this amount cannot be considered. There are no themes and strong stand-alone images are encouraged.”
More information / Submit Work: [here]
NYC Photo Community Newsletter
Just published a new photo book or zine? Putting on a photo talk? Maybe an exhibition opening? Let us know. We'd love to share your good news or help publicize your photo talk or event. We also want to feature your work. Follow @nycphotocommunity and tag your photos #nycphotocommunity to be considered. If you've enjoyed what you read, please spread the word by sharing this subscription link. Thanks!
Photo at top of Weekly Roundup: Spread Love, Brooklyn © James Prochnik
February 25 - March 04, 2022
A look at some of the best photography stories of the week along with a great video about photography.
THE WEEKLY ROUNDUP
Great Photography Stories
The Washington Post features Stella Kalinina’s photographs and reflections on her ancestral home in Izium, Ukraine.
As we process the news about Russia’s attack on Ukraine, I found this photo essay to be a moving and worthwhile look at one corner of this Texas-size country.
“The Ukraine I keep in my heart is much different from the strife and worry we see on the news. Where They Wait for Me, my decade-long photography project, is a meditation on memory, family and my ancestral home in Izium, Ukraine, a small town in eastern Ukraine about an hour’s drive from Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv.”
The Paris Review talks to Alec Soth about his new book 'A Pound Of Pictures' and the accompanying exhibition at Sean Kelly Gallery in New York (closing this Saturday 2/26).
The urge to hold onto ephemeral moments, to preserve a changing world as we once saw it, and the physical presence of the photograph are explored in this conversation with Alec Soth:
“The way I learned to think of the medium of photography was that the whole point of taking a picture was to preserve a moment. So, throwing away a negative? I can’t conceive of it. Even damaged negatives, ones with giant light leaks, I don’t throw away.”
My Modern Met has a feature on Mitch Dobrowner’s extraordinary black and white images of tornados.
With tornado season fast approaching in the midwest, it’s a good time to look at the incredible images that Mitch Dobrowner makes of these destructive, yet sublimely beautiful weather phenomena:
“‘It's such a surreal sight,’ he admits. ‘Their stature and prominence always overwhelm and amaze me. Each one is so different and individual. The biggest challenge is to stay focused, to remain calm and ‘see' as a photographer.’”
VIDEO OF THE WEEK
Do you appreciate all the great work that Black Women Photographers does to help connect black woman photographers with jobs and opportunities in the photo industry? This video by B&H is a great introduction to the founder of the organization, Polly Irungu, a creative dynamo and excellent photographer in her own right.
EQUITY AND ETHICS IN PHOTOGRAPHY
ARTnews looks at a tweet about a planned NFT drop by the Associated Press that went very badly
However you feel about NFTs (and I’ll be having more to say in the coming weeks) this ARTnews report about the NFT drop gone wrong points towards at least some ways in which the new tech is stumbling into old money-driven ethical pitfalls.
“Plans for the sale went viral, with many bashing the news agency for profiting from human misery. AP’s tweet was up for four hours before it was deleted. The sale of the NFT has also been halted.”
PetaPixel has more info on the story here.
OPPORTUNITIES / CALLS FOR ENTRY
Grant Opportunity- Creatives Rebuild New York
This new philanthropic program sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation sounds fantastic - Together they’re dedicating 125 million dollars to New York State-based artists and arts organizations. 300 artists will be awarded grants of $65,000/year + benefits to focus on their practice. 2700 artists will be awarded $1,000.00/month for 18 months. And community-based arts organizations will receive grants of $25,000 - $100,000.00 a year to support their collaborations with artists. You can apply now, and applications are due March 25.
More information / Submit Work: [here]
Palm Prize Submissions Open
“Palm Photo Prize is open to photographers working in all disciplines and styles. Submit your work for a chance to be shortlisted and featured in the exhibition at 10 14 Gallery
Submissions open 15 February – 15 March 2022 | FREE to submit.
Due to high levels of submissions, entrants are limited to two images per person, any submissions over this amount cannot be considered. There are no themes and strong stand-alone images are encouraged.”
More information / Submit Work: [here]
NYC Photo Community Newsletter
Just published a new photo book or zine? Putting on a photo talk? Maybe an exhibition opening? Let us know. We'd love to share your good news or help publicize your photo talk or event. We also want to feature your work. Follow @nycphotocommunity and tag your photos #nycphotocommunity to be considered. If you've enjoyed what you read, please spread the word by sharing this subscription link. Thanks!
Photo at top of Weekly Roundup: Untitled © James Prochnik