The Archive
Maëlle Doliveux
Dog Days Edition, Part 1: The Best Dog Photos of 2018
Welcome to our annual Dogs Days edition of PPD. As we've noted previous, the dog days of August are so called not because dogs prefer to pant through a siesta during hot humid days, but because ancient Greeks and Romans associated the period with the appearance of the dog star, Sirius, in the in the constellation Canis Major. At any rate, today we present a selection of winning work from the 2018 Dog Photographer of the Year contest. Sponsored by the U.K.'s Kennel Club, the contest brought in nearly 10,000 entries from over 70 different countries around the world, including China, Israel, Russia, Argentina and South Africa. More dogs, and some cats, are coming next week.
Spotlight: Focusing On the Moments that Make High-Rise Buildings Rise
A high-rise building on the rise can appear as a farrago of enterprise and motion. "The massive scale of these projects makes them seem remote, inhuman, forbidding, but then when you look closely, you see they're all built by teams of individual people," says San Francisco-based commercial and editorial photographer Ian Tuttle, who has occasionally found himself on assignment at high-rise construction sites. "With the human eye, the world looks very remote from 22 or 30 floors up, but with a telephoto lens suddenly it's brought back to the human scale," he says. His new motion project "Laundry Road" focuses on the people and that moments that make a high rise happen.
Paul Hoppe's 2018 Travel Sketchbook
The 2018 DART Summer Invitational, Pimp Your Sketchbook, in which artists open a window onto their creative processes—and their summer travel experience—begins with Paul Hoppe, who spent July in Europe. This summer I was able to do a month-long trip to Europe, to visit family and friends, and also to have time for further exploring. During this time I kept a simple sketchbook diary and set the goal of doing at least one drawing in every city I visited. Taking photos is nice, but ...
Spotlight: Portrait of the Escaramuza Cowgirl
Eight years ago, Dane Strom moved to Mexico. He'd quit his job as an editor with the Denver Post and headed south with a guitar, settling in a town in the subtropical mountains of Jalisco state, on the north shore of the country's largest lake, Lake Chapala. "All of my photography is now dedicated to Mexico, and the majority of it to this one town -- its culture, traditions, and annual fiestas," says Strom. Among the events he photographs is the charreria, the Mexican competitive sport of horsemanship, including women's escaramuza competition. His portrait of an escaramuza rider was named a winner of Latin American Fotografia 6.
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.