Is it news anymore when print publications fold? Recently we learned that two very different magazines, each with its own place in photography's recent history, are leaving the scene -- or at least the ink-on-paper scene. Legacy photography magazine Shutterbug announced that it is dropping its print edition after 45 years of publishing and will focus on its website. Meanwhile, Interview magazine, founded by … Read the full Story >>
Chinese artist Ren Hang is the recipient of the 2016 Outset/Unseen Exhibition Fund from the Unseen Photo Fair in Amsterdam. The award presents the Beijing-based photographer with the opportunity to have a solo exhibition at Amsterdam’s Foam Photography Museum in 2017. “Deliberately provocative, Ren Hang’s images challenge conventional codes of morality in a still highly conservative society,” notes the British Journal of Photography. See Vice for an interview with the artist. See AnOther for highlights from the Unseen festival. Read the full Story >>
Making an impact on the web is director Samual Abrahams’s Offline Dating, an entertaining short that sends a nice guy out into the streets and parks of the real world to find a date the old-fashioned way—face to face. The piece feels like the kind of well-edited video sketch that David Letterman mastered, but it goes deeper to make a point about the way modern romance is conducted. Abrahams got the idea for it when his newly single friend Tom Greaves was about to download a dating app: “We started talking about the difference between the us we present online and the us that exists in real life" Abrahams tells Mashable.” See another interview at Short of the Week. Read the full Story >>
Details continue to emerge about the sale of Getty Images to the private equity firm Carlyle Group for $3.3 billion. As the British Journal of Photography notes, the deal will see Carlyle acquire a controlling stake in Getty Images, while co-founder and chairman Mark Getty and the Getty family "will roll substantially all of their ownership interests into the transaction." In an interview with BJP, Getty CEO Jonathan Klein says the “enormous scale” of the Carlyle Group will help the agency expand internationally. He also states that the company will maintain its support of photojournalism initiatives, including Reportage by Getty and grant programs. As for Getty contributors: “Nothing will change for them,” says Klein. Read the full Story >>
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 >>
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 >>
“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 >>
“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 >>
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 >>
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 >>
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 >>
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 >>
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 >>
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 >>
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 >>
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 >>
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 >>
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 >>
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 >>
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 >>
