David Schonauer
Vimeo Monday October 31, 2016
Shant Hamassian’s short film Night of the Slasher is a smorgasbord of arch comedy and fright that will leave you sated on Halloween night. The 11-minute
film, a huge hit at festivals, is a “shot-in-one-take” tale about a teenage girl who lures a masked killer by committing every horror-film sin in the book, including dancing in front of a
mirror in her underpants. In an interview at Vimeo’s blog, Hamassian explains that he
began the project after becoming disillusioned with the movie industry. “I was traumatized from a horrible experience when a project I was working on went south," he says. "So, I stopped making
movies and watched all of the Friday the 13th movies on Netflix.” Read the full Story >>
The Huffington Post Friday January 2, 2015
Yes, technically it’s now 2015, but since it’s also a Friday, we’re going to close out the week with a final look back at 2014, starting with the best magazine covers of the year, as
selected by the Huffington Post. Making the list: Entertainment Weekly’s dual covers featuring Veep’s Julia Louis Dreyfus as House of Cards’s Kevin Spacey, and vice
versa. Photographer Robert Trachtenberg shot both images. Also spotlighted: photographer Steven Klein’s smokey Interview magazine cover photo of Kanye West, and a Time mag cover shot of the
violent protests in Ferguson, MO, shot by Scott Olson of Getty Images. Read the full Story >>
BLOUIN ARTINFO Friday March 8, 2013
“Artists Used To Live Here.” The filmmaker Su Friedrich spray-painted that slogan on a construction wall across the street from her former loft in the Williamsburg neighborhood of
Brooklyn, where she had lived since 1989. Friedrich started to notice drastic changes happening around her after the 2005 rezoning laws implemented by Mayor Michael Bloomberg. She took her camera, and
her sharp commentary, to the streets, documenting the high-rise luxury apartments, fashion-conscious new residents, and the construction workers making a constant racket. “Gut Renovation,”
Friedrich’s resultant film, is now playing at New York’s Film Forum. Artinfo has an interview with
Friedrich. Read the full Story >>
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Monday February 9, 2015
“I have to be honest—I don’t know what I do. I learn more about what I do from other people asking me questions or commenting. It’s nothing I think about; I just do it.”
So says legendary fashion photographer Steven Meisel in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. The occasion for the engaging Q&A with Style.com’s Tim Blanks is the selling exhibition “Role Play,” which debuted in Paris and is now on view at the Phillips auction house in New York City. Meisel talks about working
with supermodels and a repertoire company of stylists and set designers. When Blanks likens his role to that of a movie director like Orson Welles, Meisel says simply, “Maybe you’ve been
at the bar too long. But I’ll take it.” Read the full Story >>
Vimeo Wednesday April 15, 2015
Created as a special episode at Adult Swim’s 4 a.m. cult hit Off the Air, the music video for Baltimore composer/musician Dan Deacon’s song “When I Was Done Dying” is
a compendium of animation styles. That’s because it was created by a dream team of nine animators enlisted by Off the Air creator Dave Hughes, who calls the video “a beautiful and
seamless journey through the afterlife.” In an interview at Stash, Hughes says he intended to create transitions between the
video’s different segments in After Effects, but found that the animators had already talked with each other and created their own transitions. Go here for more from Hughes and the artists involved in the project. Read the full Story >>
STASH Tuesday December 8, 2015
New York director Kris Mercado brought together dot matrix printers, cel animation, found footage, live action and stop motion to conjure a low-fi chaos he calls “retro funk weirdness” in
the spectacular music video for “The Green Ray,” from rap legend Kool Keith and hip-hop producer L’Orange. “The idea was what if MTV’s Liquid Television was still around,
and we created a film that felt like channel surfing in some sci-fi 1950’s McCarthy-era nuclear world in space,” Mercado tells Stash in an interview. Read the full Story >>
Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery Wednesday June 26, 2013
The artists JR and José Parlá have brought their astounding “The Wrinkles of Havana” project to New York City this summer, and if you haven’t had a chance to see it,
there is still time: The exhibition, which consists of twelve large portraits along with a site-specific installation, is on view through July 12 at the Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery in Manhattan. The
project began in 2012, when JR, the French artist noted for creating and displaying monumental photographs of people around the world, began collaborating Parlá, who is of Cuban descent,
to photograph and interview senior citizens in Havana who lived through the Cuban revolution. Parlá interlaces the images with palimpsestic, calligraphic writings and color. There is also a
book. Read the full Story >>
PetaPixel Tuesday August 13, 2019
These days, financial reports
and interviews from camera companies frequently read like death omens and dire warnings, but Nikon CEO Toshikazu Umatate seems to be taking a more sanguine view, notes PetaPixel. In a recent interview
with Japanese publication Nikkei, Umatate admitted that imaging profits have fallen to one-sixth of their peak in 2012 — to just 12 billion yen ($113.2 million) for this past fiscal year.
“The expansion of mirrorless products increases costs in advance,” he said. “However, we hope the profit will increase to 20 billion yen [$188.7 million] three years later.”
See also: Nikon
Rumors. Read the full Story >>
feature shoot Tuesday June 10, 2014
While they grew up on opposite sides of the world, Australian photojournalist Ashley Gilbertson and American photojournalist Peter van Agtmael found themselves trudging through the same Iraqi soil in
the mid-2000s. This spring, both are bringing out books about the experience of war and its rippling repercussions. Gilbertson’s astonishingly intimate Bedrooms of the Fallen takes viewers into the homes of families across the US, Canada, and Europe, where the memories of lost loved ones are
preserved in hushed spaces. Van Agtmael’s Disco Night Sept 11 looks at war
from the perspective of soldier, civilian, mother and father, and the battered and broken, notes Feature Shoot. The New York Times has an interview with Van Agtmael. Read the full Story >>
By
Peggy Roalf Friday June 24, 2011
Since making her photographic debut in 2001 with the simultaneous publication of three books in Japan, Rinko Kawauchi has continued to inspire fascination for her portrayal of the
endless cycle of nature. Photographing minute details from everyday moments that might otherwise pass unnoticed, Kawauchi has shaped a new narrative for photobooks. Images that might seem not
so interesting at first glance become an … Read the full Story >>
FILMMAKER Tuesday November 20, 2012
It’s not easy keeping up with someone like James Balog, a veteran adventure photographer who has spent the past half dozen years or so trekking to frozen landscapes to create time-lapse
videos showing the shockingly rapid melting of glaciers due to climate change. To create the new film Chasing Ice, which chronicles Balog’s endeavor, director Jeff Orlowski shot from
dog sleds and inside ice crevasses, working in extreme weather with delicate equipment. “We didn’t want this…to be a heavy ‘science’ or ‘talking head’
film,” he tells Filmmaker. Read the full Story >>
Paris Photo Friday November 10, 2017
French-Venezuelan photographer
Mathieu Asselin’s Monsanto: A Photographic Investigation (Verlag Kettler) is the winner of this years Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation First Book Award. The book investigates the
underreported long-term risks of products from Agent Orange to PCB coolants and GMO crops. The British Journal of Photography has an interview with Asselin. Photographer Dayanita Singh’s Museum Bhavan (Steidl), a multivolume boxed set blending book and exhibition, is the winner of the
PhotoBook of the Year award. Go here for BJP's report on all the
winners. Read the full Story >>
By
Peggy Roalf Thursday December 12, 2024
Skarstedt Paris presents Andy Warhol: Who is Who?, an exhibition that delves into the myriad influences art history had on Warhol’s work. The show, which closes on December 21st, traces his art historical appropriations throughout the 1970s and 1980s, featuring seminal examples of works from series such as Heads (After Picasso), The Last Supper, Mona Lisa, After de Chirico, and The Scream … Read the full Story >>
COLOSSAL Wednesday August 6, 2014
The Internet is erupting with praise for Marilyn Myller, a stop-motion animated short from director Mikey Please that explores the metaphysics of artistic creation with what PetaPixel describes as “intricate styrafoam models and long-exposure light trickery.” After picking up accolades on the festival circuit, the film is available
online now, along with a BTS video showing how Please and Dan Ojari of Parabella Animation Studio spent a year crafting the models
and photographing them, notes Colossal. “What begins as cosmological tale of artistic power slowly morphs into a darkly humorous take on the demands of a creative life,” declares Motionographer, which has an interview with Please. Read the full Story >>
By
Peggy Roalf Friday August 15, 2008
A cool breeze from the north, in the form of Tony Cederteg, has brought in a group show featuring 18 photographers he invited to create work that expresses pure emotion. The Stockholm publisher,
curator, and tv fashion show host, known here mainly for his zines, asked each of the artists to photograph someone or something that's very dear to them. The exhibition of portraits … Read the full Story >>
VICE Wednesday December 3, 2014
The innovative new photo exhibition “Conflict, Time and Photography,” on view
at London’s Tate Modern through March 26, 2015, looks at war through the scrim of memory. Rather than being organized around the individual conflicts, the exhibition is orientated around time
and how soon after the conflict the photo was taken, be it seconds after or 99 years after, notes the Guardian. Featuring the work Don McCullen, Simon Norfolk, Susan Meiselas, Sophie
Ristelhueber, Luc Delahaye, and others, the show probes the notion of reflection and our relationship with the war-torn past. “We wanted to think about the mechanics of memory: How do we
remember?” says the Tate’s photo curator Simon Baker in an interview at Vice. Go here for an AV look at the show. Read the full Story >>
The Atlantic Monday October 5, 2015
“There's a long history in this country of dealing with problems in the African American community through the criminal justice system," says the Atlantic’s national correspondent
Ta-Nehisi Coates in an animated interview accompanying a recent
story. Coates, a recent recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, adds that the enduring view of African Americans in this country is "as a race of people who are prone to criminality."
The animation, from designer-director Jackie Lay, brings statistics to life as Coates explains the implications of the numbers. In fact, he notes, the criminal justice system is working just as
intended — that intention being to jail massive numbers of people. Read the full Story >>
TIME LightBox Monday June 2, 2014
The homeless are part of the visual landscape of New York City, and yet in a real sense they are overlooked by the city’s residents. But as Time LightBox notes, photographer Andres Serrano has
recently put the homeless squarely in the public’s eye with a series of moving portraits that have taken over spaces typically occupied by outdoor advertising in New York’s West Village
neighborhood. A native New Yorker and longtime artistic provocateur, Serrano launched the work last winter, when temperatures plunged; supported by public art organization More Art, he took to the streets with a 4×5 camera and began shooting. The work will be on view through June 15. Artinfo has
an interview with the artist. Read the full Story >>
The Pulitzer Prizes Tuesday April 17, 2018
Last August, photojournalist
Ryan Kelly was covering the “Unite the Right” rally in
Charlottesville, Virginia, when he captured the exact moment a car driven by a man later identified as a white supremacist crashed into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing a 32-year-old woman.
Yesterday, Kelly’s photo, made for The Daily Progress of Charlottesville, was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography. (See this interview with Kelly at the Columbia Journalism Review.) The Pulitzer Prize for
Feature Photography goes to the staff of Reuters for coverage of the violence Rohingya refugees faced in fleeing Myanmar. The New York Times has more. Read the full Story >>
The New York Times Thursday March 8, 2012
Because a frightening solar storm may disrupt all human communication today, we are forced to report that, according to RadarOnline.com, Lindsay Lohan “recently enjoyed a steamy night of
passion with controversial fashion photographer Terry Richardson.” She wants a relationship, but Richardson, 46, is "just not interested." BTW, Richardson has been all over the news this week.
On Monday, the Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy blog tsk-tsked his big “Terrywood” exhibition at L.A.’s Ohwow Gallery. More enlightening was the rare interview
Richardson gave to the New York Times on Sunday, which gave a glimpse into his creative process. Solar storm, Lindsay Lohan, and Terry Richardson—coincidence? Read the full Story >>
