Exhibitions: The Girls, Guns, and Birds of James Bond
His name was Bond, James Bond, and he wrote the definitive taxonomy Birds of the West Indies. Later, author Ian Fleming borrowed the ornithologist’s name when he created the world's most famous spy. Now photographer Taryn Simon has complied an intriguing catalog of the real and the unreal by conflating the two Bonds: Her new exhibition “Birds of the West Indies,” up through April 12 at the Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles, is divided into two parts, one in which Simon indexes the women and weaponry of the Bond films. For the second, she cast herself as the bird-watching Bond, carefully analyzing every scene in the Bond movies to identify the 340 birds that appear in them, mostly by accident. Nowness has a portfolio. Read the full Story >>
In Focus: Canadian Freelance Photog Killed in Syria
Ali Mustafa, a Toronto-based freelance photographer and activist whose work has appeared in The Guardian, The Times and Radio Free Europe, was killed in Aleppo on Sunday while covering the civil war in Syria, reports Time. Mustafa and seven others were killed after Syrian military aircraft dropped barrel bombs on the opposition-held Hadariyeh area of Aleppo, reports AP. Less than two weeks ago, Mustafa had filed photographs of the aftermath of a barrel bomb attack in Aleppo to the European Pressphoto Agency. Read the full Story >>
PPD Spotlight: Jason Lindsey in a Montana Paradise
“I grew up in a small farm town as a child of factory workers surrounded by ‘salt-of-the-earth’ people, and I am still grounded in that upbringing,” notes Chicago-based photographer (and PPD reader) Jason Lindsey. His background is apparent in a new personal project focusing on the families of Paradise Valley in southwestern Montana, and their relationship to the Big Sky landscape all around them. “It’s been getting an amazing amount of interest from creative directors,” says Lindsey. Read the full Story >>
Art News, 1: Win $10,000 to Build an Audience for Your Work
The art world is facing a crisis, notes Jennifer Schwartz of Crusade for Art, a mentoring organization for artists: While schools and other programs are turning out more and more fine-art photographers, not enough effort has gone into systematically cultivating demand for art. That’s why Schwartz has launched the Crusade Engagement Grant, which offers $10,000 to a photographer or group of photogs with the most innovative plan for increasing their audience and collector base. Go here to view the grant guidelines and to apply. Read the full Story >>
Art News, 2: Photography At the Whitney Biennial
This year’s Whitney Biennial spans three floors of the museum, and there is a good deal of photography hidden in plain sight, notes ArtNews, which spotlights seven artists whose work in the show points to where photography is headed. They include Dawoud Bey, whose portraits of people in Birmingham, Alabama, might be the most straightforward in the Biennial, and Sarah Charlesworth, whose inverted and reversed diptych of a view camera takes photography itself as a subject. Read the full Story >>
Art News, 3: The Ultra Rich Want Art!
As commodities go, art provides the worst financial return, notes CNBC. But that’s just the kind of bad news the world’s ultra rich don’t even care about! Because according to a new report from Knight Frank and WealthInsight, the super rich still want to buy art: The survey showed that art is "growing in popularity" among 44 percent of people worth $30 million—making it the most popular class of collectibles. And over a 10-year period, art is still a good investment, according to the report, with a return of 193 percent. Read the full Story >>
Exhibition: Susan Silas's "Sex Over 50" at STUDIO10 in Brooklyn
Running through April 6 at Studio10 in Brooklyn, photographer Susan Silas’s series "Love in the ruins: Sex over 50" is in fact not only about sex, but also the subtle changes of age and approaching mortality. Silas herself describes the work as "a personal diary of sex and sensuality; about the resilience and the decay of the aging body." Begun in 2003, the project, she notes, is ongoing, and images will be added to it over time. Previously, Silas has focused her camera on the processes of decay and transformation in a project photographing found birds. For the new work, she turns the camera on the self, peering closely at the idea of intimacy, notes ArtDaily. Read the full Story >>
Glittering Prizes: W. Eugene Smith Grant Now Accepting 2014 Submissions
The W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund is now accepting submissions for its 2014 W. Eugene Smith Grant In Humanistic Photography. The $30,000 grant is awarded to a photographer whose past work and project proposal follows in the tradition of W. Eugene Smith’s concerned photography. Past recipients include Robin Hammond, for a project about the treatment of the mentally ill in a number of African countries, and Peter van Agtmael, who documented the consequences of American wars. Read the full Story >>
See It Now: The Smithsonian Looks at "American Cool
Walt Whitman had it. So did Bogie and Bacall. Hendrix electrified it. Deborah Harry gave it a heart of glass. And Kurt Cobain suffered for it. As the Smithsonian museum notes in the intro to its exhibition “American Cool,” each generation seems to get the icons of cool that it deserves. The show (up through September 7) traces cool back to its roots, defining its aura of the new and unattainable through portraiture by the likes of Philippe Halsman, William Claxton, and Mark Seliger. Read the full Story >>
Tech News: The Sony A7's Light Leak ... And How to Fix It
Sony’s A7 and A7R, released last year, made news by packing a full-frame sensor into a compact mirrorless body. But, notes übergizmo, users began complaining of light leaks around the lens mount area of the cameras. Fstoppers features a simple fix for the problem, courtesy of photographer Ferrell McCollough, who discovered that the light leak could be stifled by putting an elastic hair band over the area where the lens mounts. Read the full Story >>
PPD Spotlight: Portraits Raise Awareness of South Sudan Violence
Photographer and PPD reader Mike Millea’s portrait project “Our Side of the Story: South Sudan” may be aesthetically pleasing, but it’s purpose is to reveal something ugly. Millea worked with supermodel Nykhor Paul to create the photographs of celebrities, models, and musicians who managed to escape violence in South Sudan. The images are accompanied by their stories about displacement and the love ones they left behind. The work will be exhibited at Tapir Editions Gallery in NYC on April 10. Read the full Story >>
Follow-Up: More On Getty's Embed Tool , Which Has Been Hacked
The big story last week about Getty’s new embed tool, which will give bloggers and others access to the agency’s stock images for free, raised so may questions that PDN Pulse went to Craig Peters, Getty’s senior vice president of business development and marketing, to find out what the agency hopes to gain from this extraordinary decision. “What we’re trying to do is broaden the industry. You have to find business models that address the needs of the individuals that you’re trying to get to use your content,” says Peters. Meanwhile, PetaPixel reported that the embed tool has been hacked so that credit lines can be removed from the free images. Read the full Story >>
Trending: Getty's Free Embed Tool Upends Photo Biz
A stunned photo community is reacting negatively to the recent news of Getty Images’ new embed tool, which will allow non-commercial bloggers and social-media users access to 35 million of the agency’s stock images … free of charge. “Getty Images has single-handedly redefined the entire photography market,” notes the British Journal of Photography. “It’s hard to overstate the importance of a move like this,” declares PetaPixel. Getty’s announcement "lit up the Twittersphere,” writes PDN Pulse, adding that the tool will make it easier for Getty to track non-commercial uses of its images. Bottom line: The new strategy is a tacit admission by Getty that it cannot successfully fight widespread image piracy. All the agency wants is proper credit on its pics. Read the full Story >>
Tech News: Dispatches from WPPI, From Panasonic to Animoto
The annual WPPI wedding and portrait photography show in Las Vegas ended yesterday, and Fstoppers rounds up the big new products that were on display and announced there. Included are video creation website Animoto, Nikon’s new D4s flagshop DSLR, and Panasonic’s new Lumix GH4—which at under $2K may bring 4K videography to the masses. Read the full Story >>
Exhibitions: Matthew Pillsbury Comes Out, Via Long Exposures
In 2004, Matthew Pillsbury met Nathan Noland, fell in love, came out as a gay man, and subsequently left his wife. It was a liberating and anguishing time for the then-30-year-old photographer, during which he worked on a series of long-exposure photographs of people watching television programs. Eleven of those black-and-white images are part of a show, called “Nate and Me,” at the Sasha Wolf Gallery in New York. Pillsbury notes that the exhibition is his first to be “so openly auto-biographical,” notes Slate. Read the full Story >>
Insight: Should Photographers Accept Bitcoin As Payment?
Enthusiasts of bitcoin, the electronic currency, have more ways than ever to spend their digital cash. But should professional photographers try to take advantage of the growing popularity of bitcoin by accepting it as payment for their work? Considering the recent news surrounding the currency, you might want to learn as much as you can about bitcoin before getting paid in it, notes PetaPixel, which offers a thorough backgrounder. Bottom line: As the NY Times's Joe Nocera points out, Bitcoin isn’t backed by any government. But at least we now know the identity of the man who invented the cryptocurrency. Read the full Story >>
Trending: Picturing the Legacy of Prison Time
Prisons and prison time are the focus of two intriguing photo projects spotlighted recently on the Internet. LA-based photographer Alyse Emdur's series “Prison Landscapes,” for instance, pairs portraits of inmates in front of prisoner-painted backdrops—photos that have been sent to her through years of correspondence with inmates—with images she took of these backdrops within various US prisons. Together, notes the Huffington Post, the pictures illuminate the tension between captivity and the desire for freedom. Meanwhile, Massachusetts-based photographer Stephen Tourlentes‘s series Of Length and Measures captures U.S. prisons glowing ominously at night. Read the full Story >>
Industry News: Trunk Archive Acquires Licensing Rights for Magnum Photos
Image licensing company Trunk Archive announced today that it has acquired North American licensing rights to the image library of Magnum Photos, reports PDN Pulse. Statements from both Magnum and Trunk focused on the possibilities for Trunk to do a better job generating revenue from the archive than Magnum has. The news comes just a few days after Trunk announced its acquisition of rep firm Bernstein & Andriulli and its sister company, Gallery Stock. Read the full Story >>
Books: Photographing the Oldest Living Things on Earth
All that lives must die—but some organisms get more time than others. For nearly a decade, notes Time, photographer Rachel Sussman has been capturing images of the planet’s oldest continuously living things, in an effort to “step outside our quotidian experience of time and start to consider a deeper timescale,” as she put it in a TED talk in 2010. The result is a book, The Oldest Living Things in the World, featuring her images of the 100,000-year-old Posidonia sea grass meadow, and more. Read the full Story >>
Insight: Susan Meiselas on Embracing An Uncertain Future
Noted photojournalist Susan Meiselas has been thinking a lot about the torrent of pictures on social media and the Internet—images, notes the New York Times, documenting both the mundane and the momentous. As a guest editor of the new issue of Aperture magazine, Meiselas chose to highlight how photographers can embrace their role in an image-saturated world and use new tools to start new conversations. “Photography’s exploding in so many different dimensions,” she tells the Times in an interview. Read the full Story >>