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 [...]
Box Props (from “Illuminations”) © Tim Davis Over on Words Without Pictures there’s an article by Jason Evans titled Online Photographic Thinking. This essay addresses the context of the web for photography. It’s a new frontier that, from the standpoint of an independent practitioner, doesn’t seem to have fulfilled its potential, given photography’s phenomenal recent [...]
Untitled, anonymous photograph from the 1950′s © Photographer Unknown / National Gallery of Art While Peter Plagens’ article Is Photography Dead? (written for the December 10th issue of Newsweek) draws a few interesting conclusions about the “digital revolution,” it generally seems to overlook fundamental ideas about art and photography which I thought were actually rather [...]
(photograph found on Flickr) © Grady O’Connor Sometime back in January, I wrote about Stephen Shore and linked to the audio interview where he was quoted as saying (note the bold portion): There has to be on the web a treasure trove of brilliant untutored pictures. I’d seen the photographs that were made at the [...]
North South East West (Sketch 6), 2006 © Hannah Guy Christian posted a great piece yesterday that discusses the present state and future of photographs by considering the history of photography as a tree: The seed as invention, the roots as early development, the trunk as a firm foundation, the branch as broad genre or [...]
Heidi Specker won me over shortly after an old roommate of mine introduced me to Im Garten, her lovely book published by Steidl. Though her exploration of man-made and natural forms at first felt a bit too lucid, the more time that I spent with the photographs, the more I understood her deeper interest in [...]
(from “Evidence”), 1977© Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel I’m not trying to beat a dead horse here, I promise. Though I presume that as long as there is a forum for discussion, this conversation will press on regardless of resolution (it was never “settled” thirty years ago — nor will it be on the blogosphere [...]
Untitled (Headlights), 2006 © Angela Strassheim Leave it to Mr. Colberg to break the discussion down for us. In light of the questions I hoped to ask about the value of staged photographs and photographs of real moments, Jörg responds, It seems to me that many questions about photography — like, for example, the one [...]
Untitled (Summer Rain), 2004 © Gregory Crewdson Alec has declared it Tod Papageorge week over on his blog. To keep faithful to his declaration he has been quite a blogging fiend, posting about Mr. Papageorge sometimes more than once a day. I must say, I’ve really enjoyed the posts and can agree with him that [...]
(from “Dalliendorf”) © Albrecht Tübke (from “Dalliendorf”) © Albrecht Tübke (from “Dalliendorf”) © Albrecht Tübke On the list of New Photographers 2006, besides William Lamson, Matthew Monteith, and Pieter Hugo, the full body portraits from Dalliendorf (a village in Germany with a population of 150) by German photographer Albrecht Tübke stood out. His subjects were [...]
