First Tears Over Another Man, 2002
© Elinor Carucci

Women in Photography has just launched with their first online exhibition of photographs by women photographers: photographs by Elinor Carucci from her projects Crisis and Pain. Every other Tuesday of the month, WIP will present a new photographer, co-curated by my lovely friends Amy Elkins and Cara Phillips.

Visit the site to see more from Carucci. If you’re a woman photographer, you can also find the submission guidelines there.

Popularity: 35% [?]

Thanks to Leslie, I’ve been entertaining myself for the last fifteen minutes with this great little Java applet that can turn any website into a graph.

For a simple example, see my portfolio (shanelavalette.com):

Here’s an explanation of how it works from Sala, the creator:

Everyday, we look at dozens of websites. The structure of these websites is defined in HTML, the lingua franca for publishing information on the web. Your browser’s job is to render the HTML according to the specs (most of the time, at least). You can look at the code behind any website by selecting the “View source” tab somewhere in your browser’s menu.

HTML consists of so-called tags, like the A tag for links, IMG tag for images and so on. Since tags are nested in other tags, they are arranged in a hierarchical manner, and that hierarchy can be represented as a graph.

Sala has written an applet that visualizes such a graph. As you might expect, the visualization get more interesting when there are more tags. Here’s what this blog looks like (shanelavalette.com/journal):

Curious what the colors mean?

blue: links (the A tag)
red: tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: the DIV tag
violet: images (the IMG tag)
yellow: forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

Here’s Google (google.com):

Looking at the graphs themselves is interesting – in fact, there’s a Flickr group dedicated solely to these sorts of images – but the applet also animates the graphs, allowing you to watch them grow from the HTML tag, the root node. Pretty neat.

Head to the site and try it for yourself!

Popularity: 36% [?]

Charles Leadbeater, a researcher at the London think tank Demos, is raising a lot of interesting questions about sharing ideas and the role of the internet. (Along with the above video, also see his TED talk on collaborative innovation and the “rise of the amateur professional” and, if you have the time, read the first three chapters of his book, We Think.)

Lately I’ve been considering how this all affects photographers and bloggers and would love to host some conversation on the topic here.

Share your thoughts (because you can?)!

Popularity: 27% [?]

I got an e-mail the other day from Eric Marth. At the end of his e-mail, Eric casually mentioned his “blog,” which he simply calls Pictures. “It’s updated as I find images,” he writes. “On occasion there’s the delightful accident like the pairing of Maude Schuyler Clay’s photo of Eggleston and one of Walker Evans’s images from Cuba, currently on the second page.”

I absolutely love it.

Popularity: 25% [?]

badges made by Liz Kuball

Cara Phillips made great post on her blog a few days ago titled “What’s a Lady to Do?” where she considers the challenges of being female in the photo world. The post seems to have sparked a call for action to create more support, discussion, and opportunities for women. Cara wrote me, excited to report that there is a new blog started by Amy Elkins called Women in Photography which will focus on addressing these topics through the showcasing of work.

Women In Photography contains a simple concept:

To showcase work, news and ideas from women in the contemporary photo world.
To create a collection of strong work by women actively creating work.
To reach new audiences collectively.

The blog is now accepting submissions by practicing women photographers for a “group show” to kick things off. Those of you interested in submitting should send 5 images from a cohesive project or a work in progress (saved as “myname_title.jpg”, 5×7 @ 150 dpi) and a short statement/bio to womeninphotography [at] gmail.com.

Visit the blog for more information and to follow the posts.

Popularity: 15% [?]

envelope and contents, including Drawing #81, Binoculars, 2008
from Jason Polan (The Drawing Project)

Jason Polan has been posting daily drawings on his blog, The Drawing Project, since the end of November and making them available to the first reader to e-mail him with their name and address.

Just the other day I received Drawing #81 in the mail, a lovely little (3.625” x 3.25” in.) pen and ink rendering of a pair of binoculars. I suggest subscribing to his RSS feed if you want to grab one of these.

Thanks, Jason!

Popularity: 30% [?]

Dad, Hampton Ponds III, 2002
© Mitch Epstein

Miguel Garcia-Guzman of Exposure Compensation and Joerg Colberg of Conscientious ask, “what makes a great portrait?”

They received responses from Timothy Briner, Thomas Broening, Chris Buck, David Burnett, Doug Dubois, Joakim Eskildsen, Rob Haggart, Bruce Haley, Bill Hunt, Kalpesh Lathigra, Jason Lazarus, Colin Pantall, Amy Stein, Bill Sullivan, Tribble & Mancenido, Brian Ulrich, Peter van Agtmael and Dylan Vitone.

I took a little too long thinking about how to properly respond to such a question and, as a result, I sent my answer to Joerg and Miguel late in the game. I felt it was hard to get into detail without getting into a lot of detail and spent the last few nights writing long-winded explanations that would just leave me having to write more to explain myself. In the end, my final response was this, which really puts how I feel about a large and captivating subject into very few words: “A successful portrait elicits feeling in an honest account of a person [or place].”

Furthermore, I would add, a great portrait will often make viewer forget that the photography is present.

Mitch Epstein’s portrait of his father will never fail to move me.

Read all of the responses here.

I encourage readers to offer their thoughts on this thread.

Popularity: 52% [?]

Laurel Ptak wrote to inform me of a call for entries for her latest I Heart Photograph curated exhibition, “Is it possible to make a photograph of New Jersey regardless of where you are in the world?” The deadline for submissions is February 22. The selected work will be on view at Pierro Gallery in New Jersey from April 6 – May 25, 2008.

More info here. Love the website.

Popularity: 16% [?]

Nine Polaroids, Champlain Valley Fair, Essex, VT, 2007
© Shane Lavalette

Last Spring I received a wonderful gift from Norman Beierle and Hester Keijser (also known as Mrs. Deane). The gift was a beautiful leporello from their private collection that included “12 different fifo quality photos” of Bad Homburg, a well known spa on the Taunus in Germany. See a few of those images here.

Along with the leporello, they also sent me a pack of Polaroid Polapan 100 Type 664 film. Brilliant! It was a while before I used it, but one day in August I took out the ol’ Hasselblad and shot the film at the fair that happens every summer in my home town in Vermont.

It was such a great feeling to make images that are one of a kind, to see them appear before my eyes and somehow very soothing to look at things in black and white. Shooting the Polaroids inspired me to also use some black and white film at the fair. Those images will be up on my website as a new series very soon.

To show my gratitude to Norman and Hester, I thought I’d share the Polaroids here. If you’re counting, you’ll notice there should be one more frame in the pack. I took the first shot of my little cousin standing in the morning sunlight on the front lawn of my mother’s house.

If you’d like, you can view the ones above a little bit larger.

Popularity: 18% [?]

Daily mail on the desk where it all took place
© Rob Haggart

Rob Haggart, the now exposed photography director behind A Photo Editor, made a great post today about promo cards. Also see the Flickr set.

Popularity: 21% [?]