What We're Reading: The Visual Power of AOC
Not since Barack Obama has the US seen as charismatic and visually savvy a political figure as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, notes the Columbia Journalism Review. After Time magazine recently assigned art and fashion photographer Collier Schorr to shoot portrait of her, Ocasio-Cortez made an incisive observation about media, photography, and the representation of people of color: “This is a small-big thing, but shout out to TIME and Collier Schorr for getting my skin tone right in this photo. It’s the little things that make a big difference.” Read the full Story >>
State of the Art: The Cameras That Shot This Year's World Press Photo Winners
The Spanish photography site Photolari has gathered metadata from the top photos in this year's World Press Photo competition. The results, notes PetaPixel, offers a glimpse at what gear the world’s top photojournalists are using at the moment. This year, 46.6 percent of the winning photos were shot with Canon cameras, compared to Nikon’s 36.8 percent. While Sony has made huge strides in the camera market over the past year — it became number-one in full-frame cameras in the US last year — only a single World Press Photo finalist was confirmed to have used a Sony camera (the a7R II). Read the full Story >>
In Focus: He Confronts His Family's Tragic Past in Colombia's War
As a photographer, Andrés Cardona had documented Colombia’s bloody history as a decades-old civil war inflicted on strangers. But among the murdered were members of his own family — including his great-grandfather, father, mother, uncle. Over the past three years, notes The New York Times, Cardona has confronted his family’s history, drawing upon portraits, family pictures and re-creations of murder scenes to bridge the past to the present with the hope of making sense of — and accepting — all that happened. Read the full Story >>
Legal Brief: U.S. Appeals Court Rejects Misguided "Fair Use" Ruling
In a new ruling meant to protect the incentive of professional photographers to create new work, a federal appeals court has rejected a controversial fair use ruling by a lower court, notes PDN. The earlier ruling, in the copyright infringement case of Brammer v. Violent Hues, held that an unauthorized use of a photograph qualified as fair use, even though it was a commercial use that did little to give any new meaning to the original photograph. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit emphatically reversed the lower court’s ruling. The National Press Photographers Association celebrates the decision. Read the full Story >>