The Archive
Andrea Mongia
What Learned This Week: '80s Opulence Is Trending. So Is Aura Photography.
If you liked the Reagan era, you'll love 2019. This week we spotlighted Shutterstock's newly released 2019 Creative Trends report, which the stock giant compiles by studying gazillions of search terms to see what marketers and consumers are interested in. And, as we noted, the company found that the year ahead will look a lot like the 1980s, with a twist. Shutterstock sees the return of zine culture -- but the "raw, homemade aesthetic" will get a digital update. There will also be a return to '80s opulence. "Forget good taste, this is about good times," notes the report. You know what else is in? Aura photography.
Spotlight: Windows Into Mexico's Most Urgent Problems
A man who loves his admittedly dirty job. A city coming together after a natural disaster. A teacher struggling to shape the morals of the next generation. These are the subjects of a slate of short documentaries recently featured at The New York Times, which notes that the films, by some of Mexico's outstanding filmmakers, "offer windows into Mexico's most urgent problems and also introduce the people committed to solving them." Through these remarkable films, notes The Times, "we hope to challenge our audience to consider the country in new ways, guided by the artists who call it home."
Studio Visit: Riccardo Vecchio
Several years ago, Riccardo Vecchio, whose studio practice combines multiple disciplines, from illustration and painting to sculpture and photography, began a series of paintings on location in the mountains near his family home east of Milan. A selection of these works were first shown at the Institute of Fine Arts in 2016. Photos above and below: courtesy Riccardo Vecchio Studio The sites Riccardo visited were along the Alpine ridges that separate Italy from the former Austro-Hungarian...
Spotlight: Gabriel Figueroa and the Knotty the Aesthetics of the Female Body
Gabriel Figueroa's series "Nodum" is a study in landscapes. The project matches the landscapes of the female body with the desert landscape of Cuatro Cienegas in the State of Coahuila northen Mexico - one of the few places in the world, Figueroa notes, to have gypsum dunes, warm pools in the middle of the desert and a marble quarry. The work was also inspired and influenced by pre-Raphaelite paintings and the Japanese art of rope binding called shibari. "However, as in all creative processes, this project followed its own evolutionary path," says the photographer. The series was named a winner of the Latin American Fotografia 7 competition.
American Photography Open 2018: Meet the Winner, Zay Yar Lin
Meet the winner of the American Photography Open 2018 contest: Zay Yar Lin of Sanchaung township, Yangon, Myanmar. Zay Yar's winning image was "Mending Fishing Nets," a beautifully composed photograph shot in a fishing village in Xiapu County, Fujian Province, China. "I was shocked," said Zay Yar when he was told he had won the first-ever American Photography Open competition - a contest open to any photographer at any level using any type of gear.
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.