David Schonauer
FILMMAKER Thursday October 18, 2012
The world didn’t know it, but it needed another cinematic version of Wuthering Heights. Filmmaker calls director Andrea Arnold’s new movie a “shatteringly potent
adaptation of Emily Bronte’s too-often-filmed 19th century English lit classic” that “renders the perhaps unconsummated love at its center as unsentimentally as possible.”
Unlike most other film versions, Arnold’s focuses almost solely on the first half of the book—a decision, the director notes in a revealing interview, that was purely
“instinctive.” Read the full Story >>
FILMMAKER Wednesday April 17, 2013
Filmmaker Brandon Cronenberg is the son of David Cronenberg, genre cinema’s great auteur of psychodrama and body horror, and, notes Filmmaker, he shares with his father a strong interest in
the inextricable brain-body link. His feature debut as a writer and director, Antiviral, is a case in point: The sci-fi satire is the story of a facility that perpetuates the ultimate form of
star worship, infecting fans of celebrities with diseases harvested from the cells of their idols. “Celebrities are not real, they’re group hallucinations,” says Cronenberg in a
smart interview. Read the full Story >>
LACMA Tuesday August 30, 2016
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has launched a new video interview series called “Artists On Art,” featuring contemporary artists discussing works from the museum’s permanent
collection. Among those interviewed are several photographers, including Catherine Opie (talking about Thomas
Eakins’s 1899 painting “Wrestlers”; James Welling on László Moholy-Nagy; Judy Fiskin on Lee Friedlander; and John
Baldessari on René Magritte. Read the full Story >>
VULTURE Wednesday December 24, 2014
If you’re thinking of going to a movie on Christmas and really want to see The Interview, you’re in luck: After initially deciding to cancel the release of the film because of
possible terrorism threats, North Korea-hacked studio Sony Pictures is giving independent theater chains the go-ahead to premiere the film on Christmas Day. Vulture tells you where to see it.
Meanwhile, in the wake of the decision to pull the movie, the Huffington Post looks back at America’s long history of film censorship. And while
Paramount has pulled the 2004 cult-comedy Team America: World Police from theaters because of its possible offensiveness to North Korea, you can see it, too. HuffPo tells you where. Read the full Story >>
FILMMAKER Monday April 22, 2013
Last week HBO premiered journalist and filmmaker Sebastian Junger’s deeply moving documentary about photographer Tim Hetherington, who was killed while covering the Libyan uprising in 2011.
Junger and Hetherington were longtime colleagues—they made the Oscar-nominated film Restrepo, about U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan—and close friends. In an interview with Filmmaker,
Junger notes that making Which Way to the Front? The Life and Times of Tim Hetherington did not assuage his sense of loss. “In fact,” he says, “it made the emotional
experience worse.” Read the full Story >>
The Los Angeles Times Thursday July 5, 2012
Photographer Richard Koci Hernandez is a two-time Pulitzer Prize nominee, but today he is best known for the evocative street photography he makes with an iPhone and shares on Instagram. Hernandez
teaches new-media courses at U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and presented a mobile photography master class at the TED2012 conference. “The art of the hunt and the final
capture is what matters,” says Hernandez in a revealing interview with the Los Angeles Times’s Framework photo blog. “I’m open to using all the tools available to me
as a photographer. Right now my tool of choice is the iPhone.” Read the full Story >>
By
Peggy Roalf Thursday September 25, 2014
Amid the excitement of opening the exhibition of Sebastião Salgado’s Genesis and the accompanying series of panel discussions and talks regarding
the issue of climate change, the International Center of Photography is currently negotiating the purchase of a new exhibition space in
downtown Manhattan. According to the announcement from the Communications Department yesterday, ICP has also finalized an agreement for a storage space to house the … Read the full Story >>
YouTube Friday May 29, 2015
Legendary photography Mary Ellen Mark, who died on May 25 at age 75, was
known for her humanistic documentary work and portrait photography, but she also shot many indelible images on film sets. The Criterion Collection has a video interview with Mark, who talks in detail
about what she was looking for when photographing filmmakers, including Federico Fellini: “What appealed to me about working on film sets is that I could approach it as a documentary
photographer,” she says in the interview. “I was documenting somebody else’s work in the style they worked.” Fellini, she noted, didn’t mind being photographed. “In
fact,” Mark says, “I think he rather enjoyed it.” Read the full Story >>
FILMMAKER Monday July 15, 2013
Few films have arrived with the impact of Fruitvale Station, writer-director Ryan Coogler’s breakthrough tale of a notorious incident in 2009 when police shot a black man in the back
on a subway platform in Oakland, CA. The film won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and has opened to critical acclaim. NoFilmSchool
features a
video interview with Coogler, who began the project after participating in the Sundance Screenwriting Lab and shot the micro-budget feature in 20 days. Filmmaker has an interview with Coogler by
fellow filmmaker Ava DuVernay, herself the winner of the Sundance Best Director Award. Read the full Story >>
FILMMAKER Tuesday October 16, 2012
Harris Savides’s visual recipe for reality was simple, noted Interview mag in an article about the
cinematographer: “Don’t overdo it.” Savides, who died last week, was certainly recognized by his peers as a master. Filmmaker spotlights a message-board thread on Cinematographer.com
featuring “remembrances of Savides’s gargantuan talent.” Writer Zachary Wigon asserts that Savide’s greatest film work was on the 2004 film Birth: “The
creaminess of the film, of the texture, which persists despite a definite grain, is a great counterintuitive feat of cinematography,” he notes. Meanwhile, the AV Club website has a must-see “attempted interview” video short with Savides. Read the full Story >>
The New York Times Tuesday June 4, 2013
In the aftermath of the death of three noted storm chasers, killed by violent storms in the Oklahoma City area last week, the New York Times asks whether the quest for ever more dramatic stills and
video footage of tornadoes is putting image makers in unacceptable peril. Tim Samaras, considered a leader in tornado research and data collection, died along with his 24-year-old son, Paul Samaras,
and partner, Carl Young, while tracking an EF-3 tornado Friday evening. (Go here for a last haunting interview with
Samaras.) PetaPixel quotes Weather Channel meteorologist Mike
Bettes, who says he has seen a trend among storm chasers to get closer and closer to deadly weather. Go here for a past PPD interview with severe weather photographer Jim
Reed. Read the full Story >>
Thursday January 23, 2014
“I’ve been asking him to let me do an interview for years, and he finally said yes,” says curator, blogger, and educator Elizabeth Avedon, speaking about her recent interview with
international man of mystery Jean-Jacques Naudet, editor in chief of the highly informative Paris-based newsletter L’Oeil de la
Photography. Avedon, who writes occasionally for L’Oeil, talks with Naudet about his career, from his days editing French Photo and American Photo magazines to his current work and the new
technologies that have fundamentally changed photography. The highlight is Naudet’s view of photographers of the past—for instance Chris Von Wangenheim, Bill King, and Mike
Reinhardt—now too often overlooked. Read the full Story >>
The New York Times Monday January 7, 2013
A recently discovered transcript of an interview with legendary photojournalist W. Eugene Smith is creating a stir, not just because it exists, but because of what Smith says in it about staging
photographs, a practice that, as the New York Times’s Lens blog notes, is now taboo in documentary and journalistic photography. The interview, done sometime in the mid-1950s, was conducted by
another photography legend, portraitist Philippe Halsmann, who was at the time the first president of the American Society of Media Photographers. The organization only recently discovered the
transcript. At one point, Smith tells Halsmann that a photographer should have “some reason or purpose” to risk his or her life. He also says he “wouldn’t hesitate” to
stage a picture “if I feel that it is an intensification of something that is absolutely authentic to the place,” adding, “I didn’t write the rules—why should I follow
them?” What do you think? Read the full Story >>
By
David Schonauer Monday September 9, 2019
Being a photographer isn't always amazing. Sometimes, notes photographer Joe McNally in a recent video interview with Advancing Your Photography's Marc Silber, "despondency creeps in." Photography,
says McNally, can be hard, even overwhelming. "One thing I find is handy is to be comfortable with uncertainty," he adds. In the interview, which we feature today, McNally offers insights on
creativity by reflecting on his own … Read the full Story >>
By
David Schonauer Thursday January 14, 2021
"Kennedi Carter is only 21 and she's already made history." So noted Interview magazine recently, after Carter photographed Beyonce for British Vogue (becoming the youngest person to ever photograph
the cover), Erykah Badu and Summer Walker for Rolling Stone, and Dan Levy for Bustle. Currently, Carter is a student at North Carolina A&T. Her latest project looks at Black cowboys in the south.
"I've … Read the full Story >>
By
David Schonauer Tuesday May 12, 2020
We're living through an extraordinary time. And we're living through it with the help of extraordinary people. Now The Photo Closer "Projections" series is putting together a project focusing on
those people by asking photographers to interview (safely, via Zoom or Facetime) a person in their personal world who's helping us through the Covid-19 pandemic -- healthcare workers, police and
firefighters, postal workers, bakers, … Read the full Story >>
By
Peggy Roalf Friday January 29, 2016
Shooting with a large format camera, in black and white, on weekends off from jobs assisting
advertising photographers in London, Chris Killip documented the British working class of the Northeast. With In Flagrante, whose images he made between 1973 and
1985, Killip bridged a period in which the foundations of England's empire-building industries were undermined, then shattered, by new economic policies that came to be personified … Read the full Story >>
By
Peggy Roalf Friday September 27, 2013
Per-Anders Pettersson went to South Africa in 1994 to cover the first democratic elections after the fall of apartheid. He says, “Nelson Mandela became the first black
president of South Africa. He had been free for four years and had toured the world like a rock star. The election was one of the most significant events in recent history; from the
ashes of a repressive, segregated and racist state … Read the full Story >>
UnBeige Thursday July 31, 2014
Indefatigable photographer Bill Cunningham has been looking for stylish types on the streets of New York City for decades, but while he is often seen (riding his bike), he is seldom heard. That
changes on September 3, when the 85-year-old legend peddles uptown to the 92nd Street Y, where he will join fashion insider Fern Mallis on stage in a rare interview, notes UnBeige. Grab your tickets now. Read the full Story >>
PHOTOSHELTER Wednesday May 17, 2017
“A large part of [my
work] means tapping into a diversity of voices to tell our stories visually, voices that have been historically underrepresented in journalism, and frankly, continue to be today,” says Bloomberg
Digital Features Photo Editor Eugene Reznik in interview with PhotoShelter. His biggest challenge? To “cultivate new audiences beyond our historic base of traders, investors.” Read the full Story >>
