David Schonauer
British Journal of Photography Friday April 27, 2012
Mitch Dobrowner’s images of storms in America’s “Tornado Alley” have earned him the Sony World Photography L’Iris d’Or award worth $25,000. The
competition’s winners were announced yesterday in London. Praising Dobrowner’s work, judge William H. Hunt said, “These pictures are fantastic. They are violent and well done. They
feel like they are these large-format pictures [by] somebody that tied himself to the mast of a ship.” The British Journal of Photography has an interview with Dobrowner and a list of all the
Sony winners. Read the full Story >>
FILMMAKER Monday April 15, 2013
Speaking of documentaries: Director Graham Meriwether’s recently released film American Meat is, says Brandon Harris at Filmmaker, “a valuable primer on the ways in which
industrial food production is both essential (we couldn’t feed a population growing as fast as ours without it) and in dire need of change.” It follows films like Morgan Spurlock’s
Super Size Me and Robert Kenner’s Food Inc. in the emerging “food crisis” genre, notes Harris, who talks with Meriwether about his movie and how America can build a
sustainable food industry. Read the full Story >>
Station Independent Projects Friday October 7, 2016
Opening tonight and running through Oct. 30 at Station Independent Projects in New York is the exhibition “Supermodels at the End of Time,” which combines
photographer Miles Ladin’s study of “the hollow glamour found during our most recent fin de siècle” — aka the ’90s — with text from author Brett Easton
Eillis’s 1998 novel Glamorama. Ladin shot the photos at A-list events while on assignment for Women's Wear Daily and W Magazine. See an interview with the photographer at Art Jobs. Read the full Story >>
The Huffington Post Friday April 11, 2014
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 >>
BLOUIN ARTINFO Thursday February 14, 2013
Winner of the 2011 TED Prize, the charismatic French artist JR has spent the past two years working on his “Inside Out” global art project, an offshoot of earlier guerilla work in which
he photographed the inhabitants of slums in Brazil and Kenya and then pasted massive versions of the images on the facades of buildings. He recently talked with Artinfo about bringing his show
“Could Art Change the World?” to Japan’s Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, after traveling through the country’s earthquake-and tsunami-stricken Tohoku region. Read the full Story >>
DAZED Tuesday January 13, 2015
“In 1985, I began a photo series of street prostitutes in Los Angeles,” says photographer Scot Sothern in an interview at Dazed. Twenty years later, his black-and-white portraits remain a
brutal and honest celebration of gritty everyday life at the edge of fading Sunset Strip dreams, says the website. The images are on view at Daniel Cooney Fine Art in New York City through Feb. 28. “I made photographs in crappy motel rooms…and empty lots and alleys in Skid Row. It
began as a bit of a lark and became an integral part of my life,” Sothern says. Read the full Story >>
Vimeo Tuesday April 9, 2013
Filmmakers and photographers—and photographers who are transitioning to filmmaking—will want to watch the inspirational video from Eli Sinkus about his love for photography. Sinkus, a
former freelance photographer and video journalist who now works with the video studio 522 Productions, created a 2:19 black-and-white tale
about a boy discovering the world through photography. Sinkus wanted to convey his fascination with photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson’s famous concept of the Decisive Moment, in particular, and
in his research came across an interview HCB gave in 1973. In a masterful piece of editing, he used the audio as a backdrop for his story. Brilliant Read the full Story >>
New York Thursday February 27, 2014
In the wake of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death from a heroin overdose, photographer Graham MacIndoe’s images documenting his own addiction to the drug come with added resonance.
Writer Susan Stellin, who dated MacIndoe and broke up with him, only to reunite with him after he got clean in 2010, unearthed the 342 self-portraits, which present an intimate glimpse of what she
calls the “solitary existence, the monotonous repetition of an addict’s daily life.” MacIndoe, who spent five months at Rikers Island because of his heroin use, tells Stellin in an
interview, “I went down the addiction path and had to see it to its end.” Must read. Read the full Story >>
Le Journal de la Photographie Tuesday September 25, 2012
Recently, Le Journal de la Photographie broke the news that Vera Michalski, owner of France’s Libella publishing group, had acquired Delpire Editions, the publisher of iconic photo books like
Robert Frank’s Les Américains. Now Michalski, who is the sister of Arles photo festival patron Maja Hoffmann, talks to Le Journal’s Christian Caujolle about why she stepped
in to save the struggling photo publisher. Make no mistake, she says: Legendary editor Robert Delpire, now in
his 80s, will remain the head of publishing. Read the full Story >>
News Shooter Monday April 21, 2014
Once again, US newspapers and other online publications are in the midst of a wave of investment in video. Now a new report from the TOW
Center for Digital Journalism at the Columbia Journalism School looks closely at this trend to explore the opportunities and challenges facing newspapers, digital-first organizations, and long-form
video producers as they compete for online traffic. Conclusion: While video is an important editorial tool, there is no consensus on how to best produce it or profit from it, notes News Shooter, which
also features an interview with TOW
Center professor Duy Linh Tu. For more on the future of video journalism, watch this News Shooter panel discussion from the recent NAB Show. Read the full Story >>
The New York Times Tuesday January 14, 2025
Oliviero Toscani, the Italian photographer and art director who masterminded memorable ad campaigns for the Benetton fashion line that used images of an AIDS patient and death row inmates, died on Monday, reports The New York Times. He was 82. His shock-and-awe campaigns in the 1980s and ’90s helped turn Benetton from a small Italian brand into a global fashion powerhouse. His career at Benetton came to an end in 2020 not because of his boundary-breaking ads, but because of an offhand comment he made in a radio interview about a bridge collapse in Italy in which more than 40 people died.
Read the full Story >>
PDN Wednesday November 30, 2016
William Christenberry, who
depicted rural Alabama through photographs, paintings and sculpture, died on Monday in Washington, D.C., at age 80, reports PDN. He had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2011.
Christenberry was one of the pioneers of color fine-art photography in the 1970s, working first with a Kodak Brownie camera and, later, 8×10 and 35mm cameras. He produced his work largely
through annual trips to Hale County, Alabama, which he thought of as home. “I don’t want my work thought about in terms of nostalgia,” Christenberry said in an interview in 2005.
“It is about place and sense of place. Read the full Story >>
Vimeo Friday November 4, 2016
Donald Trump made building a wall along the US border with Mexico one of his bedrock campaign promises. If he ever builds it, it will be a long wall: The border between
the two countries is 1,954 miles long. You can see every mile in an arch and enlightening video made by Josh Begley, a Brooklyn-based data artist and web developer. His six-minute film
Best of Luck With the Wall is a wild ride along the entire length of the border constructed from 200,000 stitched-together satellite images. The project, he says in an interview, is about “the pure desire to understand the visual landscape that we are talking about when we are
talking about the southern border of the United States.” Read the full Story >>
Vimeo Monday December 7, 2015
After debuting at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival, The Shaman, a 17-minute short, went on to win awards left and right on the festival circuit. And now you can watch it online.
What’s interesting about this big-budget sci-fi project — it was shot in Austria and Iceland by a team of international artists and boasts outstanding production values — is how it
embraces the short-film genre. “It was clear for me that this must not be a mere proof-of-concept, but a stand-alone narrative piece that can entertain and inspire its audience,” says
director Marco Kalantari at Short of the Week. Go here for an in-depth interview with
Kalantari. Read the full Story >>
Slate Monday March 16, 2015
Netflix’s political blockbuster House of Cards feature state-of-the-art technology and beautiful cinematography—every shot,
notes Slate, is composed with precision and austere elegance, all emphasizing the cold, calculating world of Kevin Spacey’s President Frank Underwood. In a 2014 podcast interview, the series’ cinematographer, Igor Martinovik, reveals how the camera never pans and tilts at the same
time, helping create a sense of stillness. Now Slate notes how every frame is composed with a blue/black object in the foreground and a pale yellow/grenn light behind. Watch for yourself. Read the full Story >>
The Huffington Post Thursday July 31, 2014
Huffington Post editor James Nichols calls filmmaker Tim Marshall’s documentary-style series Torso “an
international film experiment exploring the world behind the online community.” The short videos, shot in Sydney, Australia, Reykjavik, Iceland, and most recently in Los Angeles, feature
interviews with gay men who reveal, through their words and Marshall's imagery, the insecurities they feel about their bodies. “I wanted to explore this new world of gay dating and sex
culture,” says Nichols in an interview. Read the full Story >>
FILMMAKER Monday December 2, 2013
Director Michael Gondry structured his new documentary Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? around a seemingly simple film, notes NonFics: In essense, it consists of Gondry sitting down to talk with the noted linguist Noam Chomsky about language, perception, and
the workings of the human mind. But Gondry’s film is elevated by its use of hand-drawn animation. In an interview with Filmmaker, Gondry talks about using primitive tools like a lightbox and a
Bolex camera to craft a film that’s unlike any other this year. Meanwhile, the New York Times features Gondry analyzing an early sequence in the film, in which
Chomsky talks about his earliest memories. Read the full Story >>
theguardian Monday July 29, 2013
In 2001, Sally Mann was described by Time as “America’s best photographer,” but in a revealing interview she tells British newspaper the Guardian that she is exasperated for being
known best for her images of naked children. Mann talks about her early days of snapping grip-and-grin pictures—“The manager of Pizza Hut shaking hands with a prize college athlete: I did
that sort of thing for 10 years”—and about why her images push people’s buttons. Her first a solo exhibition in Britain takes place in August at London’s Photographer’s
Gallery. Read the full Story >>
Fandor Friday February 10, 2017
Indiewire calls the documentary I Am Not Your Negro the most important Oscar nominee of the year. The film, from director Raoul Peck, uses the words of James Baldwin
— most memorably from his book-length essay on American cinema, The Devil Finds Work, as well as an unfinished manuscript on the deaths of Medgar Evars, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King
— to support a montage of images of Baldwin, past and present America, and racist scenes from Hollywood films, notes Fandor. “There cannot be a dream if it is based on a
lie,” Peck says in an interview. Read the full Story >>
WIRED Friday October 12, 2012
Director Rian Johnson hopes to get repeat customers for Looper … by offering a downloadable audio commentary for fans to listen to while watching his sci-fi film in theaters a
second time. The commentary supplies insights into the filmmaking and writing process. “It is totally different from the commentary track that will be on the Blu-ray/DVD, a bit more technical
and detailed,” says Johnson. If the time-travel plot of the film still has you confused, you can use Wired’s Looper timeline to help
figure it all out (but beware of spoilers). If you want to read more from Johnson about the making of the movie, IGC MAGAZINE has a behind-the-scenes interview. Read the full Story >>
