David Schonauer
Journalism Is Not a Crime Tuesday March 22, 2016
In Iran, Ahmad Jalali Farahani was a respected journalist and an award-winning documentary filmmaker. In Denmark, he is a refugee —or a “loser,” as he says in an interview with
Journalism Is Not A Crime. Farahani, a reformist journalist who worked for Iran state television and newspapers as well as making independent films, fell afoul of the government and ended up in Evin
Prison in Tehran. Following his release, he left the country. Now he struggles to gain back his identity. Read the full Story >>
VICE Monday March 21, 2016
Australian-based birth photographer and doula Angela Gallo is all too familiar with messages from social-media sites warning her to
remove her images. Gallo is one warning away from having her Facebook account shut down. She's already lost her Instagram account with more than 8,000 followers. “I understand that not everybody
wants to see boobs and vaginas on their timelines, but there are alternatives and there has to be a compromise,” she tells Vice in an interview. Your opinion? Read the full Story >>
BBC Tuesday August 14, 2018
Noted German filmmaker and
photographer Wim Wenders lashes out at smartphone photography in a recent interview with the BBC. Indeed, he declares photography to be “more dead than ever” because of smartphones. The
trouble with iPhone pictures is nobody sees them,” Wenders says. “Even the people who take them don’t look at them anymore, and they certainly don’t make
prints.” Read the full Story >>
filmschoolthroughcommentaries Monday August 5, 2013
Were you born to make films? If so, you’ll likely be inspired by the interview with self-taught director Richard Linklater (Bernie, A Scanner Darkly, Before Sunset) featured at
FilmSchoolThroughCommentaries. Linklater talks movingly about creativity and his obsession with filmmaking—a job, he says, that saved him by giving his life meaning. Success is all about
learning more every day: “The biggest misconception is people see someone’s first film and they think that’s what they did on their first day as a filmmaker,” he says. Read the full Story >>
theguardian Thursday April 26, 2012
Massoud Hossaini’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of a young Afghan girl screaming amid the chaos following a bloody bombing in Kabul has been rightly praised, but the photographer himself
wonders whether it will have any lasting effect. He worries that as America withdraws from his country the world will forget the problems and the hope of Afghanistan. “Afghanistan is not on some
other planet,” he says in nuanced, revealing interview. Can we look at pictures like Hossaini’s and then look away? Read the full Story >>
ARTnews Tuesday May 27, 2025
As we noted last week, photographer Isaac Wright, who goes by the name Drift and is known for scaling buildings and making images from vertiginous heights, was arrested by New York police at the recent opening of an exhibition of his work at the Robert Mann Gallery in Manhattan. Now Wright has opened up about the experience in an interview with Art News. “I have to be upfront and say that I’m tired of getting attention for the wrong reasons. If I was this prolific in any other field, like painting, sculpting, or any other type of photography, I would be so much more celebrated for my work,” Wright says.
Read the full Story >>
nofilmschool Wednesday December 16, 2015
When is a story better on paper, and when is it better on film? NoFilmSchool explores that question in an interview with journalist Laura Checkoway, who's written investigative features for Rolling
Stone and co-authored My Infamous Life: The Autobiography of Mobb Deep's Prodigy. After six years of work, Checkoway has just released her documentary film, Lucky, which focuses on a
tattoo-masked mother living on the streets of New York. Says the former writer, “When I first learned to edit in Final Cut, I realized that I was using the same storytelling skills.”
Read the full Story >>
The New York Times Monday March 3, 2014
Noted photojournalist Susan Meiselas has been thinking a lot about the torrent of pictures on social media and the Internet—images, notes the New York Times, documenting both the mundane and the
momentous. As a guest editor of the new issue of Aperture magazine, Meiselas chose to highlight how photographers can embrace their role
in an image-saturated world and use new tools to start new conversations. “Photography’s exploding in so many different dimensions,” she tells the Times in an interview. Read the full Story >>
Short of the Week Wednesday March 22, 2017
Do internet trolls believe the
inflammatory things they write? Are they just looking for a reaction? Norwegian photographer Kyrre Lien investigates online antagonists for a documentary called The Internet Warriors. Armed
with research conducted by the Pew Research Centre, Lien set on out a three-year journey around the globe to interview opinionated posters, including a Muslim hating English man with a Thai wife and a
Pennsylvanian preparing for civil was had Hillary Clinton won. Read the full Story >>
Fstoppers Wednesday June 26, 2013
Last week we mentioned the growing importance of photographic specialization. Today we feature work by UK photographer and filmmaker Martin
Wonnacott, who shoots liquids: If it comes in a bottle and pours, he photographs it … beautifully. (Find an interview with Wonnacott here.) You can also find a BTS video showing Wonnacott creating a new ad campaign for Jameson Irish
Whiskey at Fstoppers, which advices anyone attempting this type of work to keep your lighting simple and remember that ice is much easier to control when it’s fake. Read the full Story >>
chasejarvis Thursday December 6, 2012
Blogger Chase Jarvis features an interview with noted photography collector W.M. Hunt, which, aside from a number of entertaining insights, includes his list of the top ten ways for photographers
to get their work in front of curators, dealers, and collectors. Number 1: Be talented; Number 2: Be smart (and engaging); Number 3: Be focused (and ambitious). He also advises being articulate and
ready to act as your own primary dealer. And you’re going to have to be a merciless critic … about your own work. Must read. Read the full Story >>
The New York Times Monday April 16, 2018
Thirty-four years after his
death, Garry Winogrand’s photographs of America continue to charm, befuddle and amaze viewers, notes The New York Times, which spotlights a new book, The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand, exploring the work. The book takes
100 photos and pairs each with an essay by writer Geoff Dyer. “[W]ith Winogrand you keep thinking, ‘Why did he photograph that?’” says Dyer in an interview. Read the full Story >>
LensCulture Friday June 29, 2018
They were just girls when they
were taken by the militant Islamic group Boko Haram and trained to carry out suicide bombing missions. Instead, they resisted and escaped. “These young women still had the resilience, after all
this indoctrination, after losing their families, to make the decision not to commit a violent act,” says photographer Adam Ferguson in a LensCulture video interview. Ferguson was sent to
Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State in Nigeria, to shoot a powerful portrait series of the women. Read the full Story >>
Adorama Thursday March 15, 2012
You might think that photographer Michael Grecco’s advertising and editorial portrait work would be enough to keep him busy. He also lectures at photo events around the country and Tweets
like a madman. Now he’s coming out with an e-book called Lighting and the Dramatic Portrait: The Art of Celebrity and Editorial Photography. Along with technique tips, he tells the
story of his own career, which started in photojournalism. And it’s quite an interesting story. Read the full Story >>
Mashable Thursday May 2, 2013
The first successful Kickstarter campaign came from L.J. Ruell, of Long Island City, NY, who raised $20 in 2009 to make some drawings. “As more time passes, I increasingly think about that
project as a perfect microcosm of Kickstarter—here’s a simple idea, here's an invitation, let's work on this together,” Yancey Strickler, Kickstarter's co-founder, told CNN in an
interview in December. Now, notes Mashable, the most buzzed-about Kickstarter projects have a different equation for success: “Here's a celebrity. Here's an idea. Here's an invitation.
Fund.” Has Kickstarter lost its way? Read the full Story >>
FILMMAKER Wednesday January 9, 2013
Originally commissioned as a one-off, the landmark Up documentary series has been tracking the lives of 14 British citizens for some five decades, from childhood through middle age. Since
1964, director Michael Apted (who began as a researcher on the first Up film) has reconvened with the willing participants. He talks with Filmmaker about the series’ development, tone,
and treatment, while also shedding light on what he’s learned from the experience. “I see each film as a separate entity and not as a simple follow up,” Apted says. Must
read. Read the full Story >>
Vantage Wednesday August 31, 2016
“We are now seeing independent fields overlap. There have been developments not only in photography but in many other fields that has resulted in discussions as to where you could use the
strengths of photography for better storytelling.” So says World Press Photo Foundation Lars Boering in an interview with Blink writer Kyla Woods. Boering talks about about changes in the organization and offers insight for emerging and established visual storytellers. He also explains why
World Press Photo is and isn’t a photographic think tank. Read the full Story >>
Motionographer Friday March 17, 2017
The two-minute animated short
Dear Europe, a Vimeo Staff Pick, is a collaborative effort focusing on the upcoming European elections and how
lessons gleaned from the UK’s Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump in the U.S. might serve as cautionary tales. “I thought bringing together artists in the US and the UK would
naturally underscore our message,” says the piece’s director, Erica Gorochow, in an interview at Motionographer. She worked with 22 people across a number of time zones. Read the full Story >>
burn Thursday February 27, 2014
What does a National Geographic editor want to see in a photo? Get insight at Nat Geo photographer David Alan Harvey’s burn magazine, where editor Susan Welchman talks about what she is looking
for from the photographers she hires. In the short video interview—a preview of a longer one yet to be released—Welchman advises young photogs to simply be themselves. Find and
develop your particular vision and voice, because that's what editors will look to you for. Read the full Story >>
NONFICS Thursday August 7, 2014
And speaking of documentaries: NonFics asks whether it’s wrong or just weird when directors include interviews with themselves … in their own films. The technique is used in two recent
films—Mike Myers’s Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon and Ryan McGarry‘s Code Black. “Both are cases where the director is part of the story and therefore an
expert witness. So why not just offer a first-person point of view throughout the film?” asks editor Christopher Campbell. Read the full Story >>
