Agenda: Deadlines for Latin American Fotografia and Ilustracion 3
Thinking of entering this year’s Latin American Fotografía competition? Now’s the time to act: The deadline for submissions in May 1. The contest is open to all Latin American photographers, creative professionals, publishers, agencies, representatives, students and art teachers living anywhere with work published anywhere for any purpose. Also eligible are those working or studying in Latin America with work created or published anywhere for any purpose. International photographers living anywhere who have Latin American representation or have been published or exhibited in Latin America are also eligible. Read the full Story >>
Call For Entries: The Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize
Now accepting entries, the $10,000 Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor documentary prize supports documentary artists working on projects that make use of the interplay of words and images. The award, organized by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, was first launched to encourage collaboration between photographers and writers in the tradition of Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor, who worked together on the seminal work American Exodus. Last year it was re-launched to allow solo photographers and artists to apply, notes the British Journal of Photography. Deadline: May 7. Read the full Story >>
Art News: Aaron Huey Says Money Not the Point of $10K Instagram Sale
Recently, photographer Daniel Arnold made news with an Instagram flash sale of prints that earned him more than $15,000, which he needed to pay rent. Last week, Nat Geo photog Aaron Huey had his own Instagram flash sale, which brought in $10,000. But Huey tells Forbes that the money wasn’t the point: He wanted to teach people reared in the digital world to buy physical art objects. While his sale is over, PetaPixel notes that Huey’s $100 prints are still available here. Read the full Story >>
Insight: How to Photograph Huge Groups of People
If you’ve ever photographed a group of 10 people, you know how hard it is to get a shot in which everyone looks good. But what if you were shooting a thousand people! That’s what Brooklyn-based Large Group Photographer Chaim Perl does for a living. Perl, who shoots groups of 200 to 2,000 people, is one of the only people in the world who specializes in this particular photographic niche, notes Fstoppers, which features a behind-the-scenes video showing how he creates his epic portraits. Read the full Story >>
Spotlight: Berkeley Student Finds Art, and a Story, in Plain Sight
The Albany Bulb, a former landfill situated on a peninsula that juts into the San Francisco Bay, is a haven for graffiti artists, sculptors, dog walkers, and several dozen homeless people, and it was there that UC Berkeley journalism student Mark Andrew Boyer met Bob Anderson, a homeless boxer who had built a makeshift mansion out of shipping pallets and other refuse. The astonishing three-story structure was the visual key to telling the story of Anderson’s wayward life and spirit of reinvention. Read the full Story >>
Addendum: Photo Directory Production Paradise Is Looking For US Agents
Online photography and motion art directory Production Paradise is expanding worldwide … and looking for agents who will represent the brand locally in the US. Created in 2002, the company has over 120,000 industry subscribers, more than 130,000 visitors per month, over 120,000 followers on various social media networks and an online archive containing over 100,000 images and 5,000 videos. If you would like to be a part of it, contact Catherine Delaloye at catherine@productionparadise.com. Read the full Story >>
Let's Continue the Conversation ...
Honors, 1: Photogs Tyler Hicks, Josh Haner Win Pulitzer Prizes
New York Times staff photographers have won both of the 2014 Pulitzer Prizes for photography, notes PDN Pulse. Times staff photographer Tyler Hicks won the Pulitzer for Breaking News Photography for his coverage of the terrorist attack on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya, last September. Josh Haner, also a Times staff photographer, won the Feature Photography prize for his photo essay last May about Boston Marathon bombing victim Jeff Bauman. Members of The Boston Globe staff, including photographers John Tlumacki and David L. Ryan, won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting for their coverage of the April 15, 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. The New York Times’s Len blog has more. Read the full Story >>
Honors, 2: Eleven Photographers Win 2014 Guggenheim Fellowships
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has announced the recipients of its 2014 fellowships, and, reports PDN Pulse, 11 photographers are among the 178 winners. They are: Robert
Dawson, LaToya Frazier, Jason Fulford, Phyllis Galembo, Gregory Halpern, Brenda Kenneally, Andrew Moore, Lori Nix, Matthew Pillsbury, Mark Ruwedel and Rachel Sussman. The Guggenheim Fellows receive a
grant to pursue a project; the foundation does not disclose the amount of money they receive. Read the full Story >>
Exhibitions: James Franco Channels Cindy Sherman at Pace
Cindy Sherman appropriated Hollywood tropes in her groundbreaking Untitled Film Stills; now, notes ArtDaily, movie star James Franco is returning the favor: Through May 3, the Pace Gallery in New York City is featuring “James Franco: New Film Stills,” a photo series recreating Sherman’s famed images. “Where Cindy used cinema as a starting place, I use art as a starting place,” notes Franco. “These photos allow me to take a step to the side, look back, and refashion the work I do in Hollywood.” Read the full Story >>
Industry News: Photo-Sharing Site Imgur Raises $40 Million
Photo-sharing site Imgur has so far flown under the radar, though, as the New York Times notes, it is popular: Each month, the site draws 130 million unique viewers who click on nearly five billion different images and pages. Each day, 1.5 million images are uploaded to the site, and 1.3 billion images are viewed. Now, however, the lean-and-mean operation has raised $40 million from venture-capital company Andreessen Horowitz to become a bigger player in the photo field. Read the full Story >>
Spotlight: Nicolas Bruno Turns Sleep Paralysis Into Art
Since he was 15, Nicolas Bruno, now studying photography at SUNY Purchase in New York, has suffered from sleep paralysis, a state in which he’s unable to move and is haunted by nightmarish visions. “I have experienced bone-chilling hallucinations and extreme terror during these dreams,” he tells Photography Blogger. Now Bruno has turned his visions of silhouetted and masked figures into a conceptual art project that is getting well earned attention. Go here for more on his work. Read the full Story >>
Passings: EPA Photojournalist Kerim Okten Killed in Motorcycle Accident
Acclaimed European Pressphoto Agency photojournalist Kerim Okten, 42, has died today after a motorcycle accident in Turkey, reports NPPA. According to reports, Okten was in a motorcycle crash that was caused by a lightning strike as he rode in the northwestern province of Canakkale. Okten, who was a juror in this year’s World Press Photo competition, had planned to fly to Germany on Saturday for the funeral of his dear friend, Associated Press photojournalist Anja Niedringhaus. Read the full Story >>
Special Report: What a Still Photographer Can Learn at the NAB Show
Why would a still photographer want to attend the National Association of Broadcasters Show, the big expo of video and motion gear? Because still photographers are no longer just photographers. "Many of us are working on independent projects, creating books, apps, multimedia content and videos, while bypassing traditional methods of distribution by going directly to the consumer," writes photographer and filmmaker Gail Mooney in ... Read the full Story >>
Tech News: Dropbox Upgrades Photo Storage with Suite of Apps
With tech giants like Google and Microsoft slashing the costs of cloud storage, Dropbox has decided to fight back: Last week the company unveiled a suite of new apps as part of a broader push to show it is about more than storing and file sharing, reports the Wall Street Journal. A new mobile app called Carousel will make it easier for users to scroll through photo galleries, putting Dropbox in closer competition with Facebook. Time has more. Read the full Story >>
Dept of Ideas: Peter Menzel Documents American Waste
Photographer Peter Menzel captured America’s attention with his last project, “What the World Eats,” and his book What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets, which, notes the Huffington Post, “powerfully portrayed differences in income, nutrition, and lifestyle.” His new series, “Waste in Focus,” shows what Americans across the country throw away and recycle. The work features eight American families surrounded by their weekly trash—images that underscore how much waste American households create. Read the full Story >>
Industry News: 85 Percent of Images on Web Are Stolen
Licensing and embedding tool IMGembed has a released a white paper that claims 85 percent of the images on the web are stolen. The paper says that marketplace confusion, copyright trolling, and the low risk of being caught are the main reasons for Internet picture plundering. As PetaPixel notes, with Getty Images and Flickr both releasing embeddable content, image theft is in fact going mainstream. Read the full Story >>
Art News: SF MOMA to Expand Photography Center
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, long renowned for its photography collection, will now have gallery space to match its ambitions, reports the NY Times: As part of an overall expansion project, the museum will create a center with more than 11,000 square feet devoted to photography exhibitions—the largest such space in the country. “What this is going to allow us to do is make shows from our permanent collection,” said Sandra S. Phillips, the museum’s senior photography curator. Read the full Story >>
Agenda: Get Ready to Shoot Tomorrow's Blood Moon Eclipse
Sky watchers and photographers are gearing up for tomorrow’s luridly named blood moon eclipse. Actually, it’s nothing more than a lunar eclipse—but it marks the beginning of four total lunar eclipses expected over the next two years. USA Today notes that some Christians link this series of so-called blood moons to a biblical prophecy of the End Times, so you might want to get it documented, in case. The eclipse will begin at 1:20 am on the EDT. Read the full Story >>
Art News: Why Lucas Samaras, Father of the Selfie, Hates Selfies
Lucas Samaras has been hailed as the master of self-depiction in post-war American art; indeed, as a painter, photographer and filmmaker, Samaras anticipated the modern era of the so-called selfie: Marla Prather, the curator of a major exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Lucas Samaras: Offerings from A Restless Soul,” says Samaras’s “devotion to his own image is an obsession born of profound narcissism, for which he makes no apology.” However, in an interview with the Huffington Posts, the reclusive Samaras talks not only about the power of self-representation in art, but also the superficiality of the selfie era and his objection to being associated with it. Read the full Story >>