The Archive
Aaron Fernandez
Bleacher Report
What We Learned This Week: Why Everything Is Illuminated These Days
When is a salad like a CEO? When they're being photographed these days. "Pick up a magazine or fall down Instagram's rabbit hole and you're likely to come across at least one photograph lit up by an unnaturally bright flash -- a flash that floods the space, evenly illuminating every detail in vivid color," noted the Racked website recently. The same lighting is used to capture Waffle House sandwiches to young Fortnite players, as well as those salads and CEOs. "That pop of flash helps to elevate what would normally be a fairly banal situation," explained Jody Quon, photography director of New York magazine.
Spotlight: In the Front Line to Save the World's Oldest Biome
The Cerrado covers 25 percent of Brazil's land mass. The savannah is the world's oldest biome, or community of plants and animals, notes Fabio Erdos, a Brazilian documentary filmmaker and photographer whose work focuses mostly on non-profit and foundation projects. In collaboration with the Brazilian chapter of the non-profit ActionAid International, Erdos, a PPD reader, shot a series of three short films for a campaign to protect the Cerrado. The films show a little of the daily life (and struggles) of three traditional communities from the region. We feature them today.
The Sketchbooks of Tom Cocotos
As Summer maintained its grip on Our Fair City weatherwise, Instagram offered a peek into Tom Cocotos’s sketchbooks. Here, for the very last installment of Pimp Your Sketchbook, is what I discovered last week. Sitting on a crowded A train, a woman boards, weary, arms full of packages. The cool of winter has her in a heavy brown overcoat, hat slightly cocked, scarf pulled loose, bags resting at her feet—a face full of character, and certain sketchbook potential. ...
Spotlight: Annick Donkers Photographs the Spirit Animal Healers of Costa Chica
Annick Donkers first went to Mexico's Guerrero state in 2016. "To celebrate the New Year, a friend and I went to the beach in Marquelia, which is part of the coastal region known as the Costa Chica," says the Mexico City-based documentary photographer. "For me it was special that this region was home to Afro Mexicans -- Mexicans descended from African slaves. Outside this region, they are little-known." Donkers learned of the area's traditional healers, called curanderos del tono, or spirit animal healers, and determined to photograph them. Her work was later named a winner of the Latin American Fotografia 6 competition.
Profile: Hope Wurmfeld's Memory of Rome, 1964
Hope Wurmfeld's love of Rome began 53 years ago. That's also when she discovered her love of photography. As she came to discover, the two passions -- Rome and photography -- are abidingly linked. In 1964, Wurmfeld moved to Rome after marrying her college boyfriend, who was there for year on a Fulbright scholarship. In the city's black market she bought two Leica cameras, several lenses, and a light meter, and then photographed everything she saw. Wurmfeld went on to become a noted fine-art photographer, but recently went through her archive and rediscovered her old images of Rome -- a Rome that is no more. Now they are collected in a new book.
The SONY a9: What the Pros Have to Say
"Eventually you knew it had to happen. Sooner or later cameras would get so good at what they did that basically your job as a photographer would be to look for interesting things to shoot and then try not to get in the camera's way as it did it's thing capturing them. I mean, imagine if a camera had pretty much flawless exposure capability, flawless focusing and could fire and focus so fast it never missed a frame?" So writes Jeff Wignall in todays Street Test of the Sony a9 full-frame mirrorless camera. Sony Artisans of Imagery Katrin Eisman, Andy Katz, and Pat Murphy-Racey join in with their takes on the 24.2-megapixel camera that has caused an uproar in the photo industry.