The Archive
Marina Nazarova
Trending: When Is Artistic Alteration Image Theft?
Was it plagiarism or artistic license? South African photographer Graeme Williams says he was astonished when he walked into a Johannesburg art fair recently and saw a photo he'd taken in 1990 -- a shot of black schoolchildren taunting white policemen after the release of Nelson Mandela. The artwork, by the noted artist Hank Willis Thomas, was a slightly altered version of Williams's photo, and it was priced at $36,000. "I can see why he would be frustrated," Thomas said in response. "He said to me that he didn't feel like I had altered the image enough. The question of 'enough' is a critical question."
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 DART Board: 09.25.2018
Talks / Book Events / Open Studios / and Beyond Tuesday, September 25 REGISTER TO VOTE AT YOUR LOCAL LIBRARY. On September 25th, across all NYPL branches, you're invited to register to vote as part of the National Day of Voter Registration, and in collaboration with the New York City Campaign Finance Board. Info Claudia Rankine, Will Rawls and John Lucas | What Remains, performance, September 25-29 at Danspace is sold out, wait list for each night. Info Reimagining the Image | Mary...
Spotlight: Discovering Oaxaca, As a Mexican-American
Julie Cabral discovered Oaxaca, Mexico, in 2016. Cabral, a graduate of California Institute of the Arts who is based in Los Angeles, had been to been to Oaxaca many times, but it was only when she went to visit her grandparent there two years ago that she truly saw the place. "I'd never seen how beautiful and politically charged the landscape is," she says. "I came to realize how important it is to capture my culture without exoticizing it through an outsider gaze." The result is her multimedia series "How to Kill a Chicken," which earned her a spot among the winners 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.