Blog About Photography

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Sunset Park, 2005 by Debora Mittelstaedt

The photographers to be included in Remain in Light, the Photography Journal spearheaded by my pal Shane Lavalette and Karly Wildenhaus, have just been announced and a good looking site launched for the project.

The list is:

Andreas Weinand
Anne Lass
Coley Brown
Debora Mittelstaedt
Ed Panar
Estelle Hanania
Gustav Almestål
Hiroyo Kaneko
Kamden Vencill
Mark McKnight
Michel Campeau
Nicolai Howalt & Trine Søndergaard
Nicola Kast
Nicholas Haggard
Shawn Records
Raimond Wouda
Richard Barnes
Thobias Fäldt
Whitney Hubbs
Yann Orhan

It’s also going to include an essay by Tim Davis. That’s pretty sweet.

The New Yorker came on Tuesday, and the first thing I opened to was this elaborate Mastercard ad, which I have since taken the time to remove, scan and post here. The first page reads “ARE YOU SEARCHING FOR THE PRICELESS THINGS IN LIFE?” and something to effect of “maybe it’s on the next page.” It then opens to a spread of this Julian Schnabel painting (self portrait?). The back of that has an envelope pasted to it, which is a chance to win a commissioned Schnabel painting of youself, which opens to reveal that, alas, you did not win but should check out the Mastercard website.

Schabel, I think, is the kind of postmodern painter who started painting in order to make millions of dollars anyway, so why the fuck this ridiculous credit card ad and promotion? Good for him. I can’t imagine how many other magazines they could possibly run this thing in that would reach people that would actually give a shit about it though. Artforum aaand that’s pretty much it.

Also, when I first wrote this post before the whole thing got lost when my browser crashed, I said some kind of insightful stuff about the art market, but now I’m just going to say that that it’s a good thing Schnabel’s tightened up his game since ‘96 when he made Basquiat because that movie totally fucking sucked.

Cookie at Vittorio’s casket NYC, September 16, 1989, Nan Goldin

I was a train from Penn Station to New Brunswick, NJ a couple months back, and the woman sitting across the aisle from us got a phone call that brought word of a friends death. She was instantly overcome with grief. My instinct was to take a picture. I got out my camera, but Britt, my red-headed compatriot, was totally mortified. She asked me what I was doing with enough indignation in her voice for me to know that it wasn’t a question. I know it’s exploitive. And I obviously felt huge amounts of sadness for this person. But if Britt hadn’t been there, there’s a pretty good chance I would have taken it. Is that fucked up? 

Turquoise Marilyn, Andy Warhol, 1962

No, seriously. And it’s classified by the FBI. And it’s not an actual tape, obviously:

An illicit copy of the steamy, still-FBI-classified reel - 15 minutes of 16mm film footage in which the original blond bombshell performs oral sex on an unidentified man - was just sold to a New York businessman for $1.5 million, said Keya Morgan, the well-known memorabilia collector who discovered the film and brokered its purchase.

The footage appears to have been shot in the 1950s. When it came to light in the mid-’60s, then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had his agents spend two weeks futilely trying to prove that Monroe’s sex partner was either John F. Kennedy or Robert F. Kennedy, according to declassified agency documents and interviews, Morgan said.

The silent black-and-white flick shows Monroe on her knees in front of a man whose face is just out of the shot.

As long as there have sex there have sex tapes, I suppose, though it doesn’t sound like this one came about through Paris Hilton-esque circumstances. The FBI informant who ended up with this thing on the 50’s was a mobster, and it was made before Marilyn was famous. So that sounds like it really fucking sucked, and is  a paradigm far older than the celebrity sex tape.

I’ve taken a lot of pictures of Will over the four years we’ve been friends. If you’ve ever taken a look through the pictures on my site, you’ll have seen him many, many times. Even more on Flickr. He’s not a person, he’s the protagonist of a novel. I’m going to write about him sometime so you’ll know what I mean. And he makes for good picture-taking. I really should make a zine.

UPDATE: Fixed the link. Sorry for being an idiot.

This is a story from the New York Times today that’s worth taking a look at. It’s written by an Iraqi sculptor and, not surprisingly, provides a new view of how terrifyingly dark and impossibly fucked up it is there.

So every time I pick up my pen and try to sketch, I find myself drawing scenes of death, and when I try to think of it as a way to let off steam a little, I start to feel pity for the person who is going to see it.

See?

The wonderful Liz Kuball interviewed me and you can read it if you want to know what I think about things.

My good friend Ben over at Planet of the Books just sent me a heads up about the interview he just posted with photographer Brian Finke. I first saw Finke’s work on the Goings on About Town section of the New Yorker, a page near the front that features one of the magazine’s only photographs every week. It was a picture of a couple of acrobats stretching and I was so capitvated by it that I emailed Brian to say hey. Hey never wrote me back, but I’m sure that was just some kinda oversight or he hadn’t heard of me yet or something, you know? Anyway, dude recently showed his Flight Attendants at ClampArt and PowerHouse Books just put out a monograph of the work.

BEN: The first question that will no doubt come to everyone’s mind as they look through this beautiful book, Flight Attendants, is “How is this possible?” Gaining access is always a challenge for documentary photographers, how did you gain access here? Was your previous work and reputation an aid or do you believe you could have gained access without that history?

BF: Flight Attendants is a personal project I started in 2004. I began proposing airline related story ideas to magazines. I worked with them to help gain access and get my first introductions to airlines. For the proposals I had to come up with an editorial perspective. An early proposal was to photograph airlines that had hired high end designers to design their uniforms. I photographed a portfolio about Flight Attendant fashion for City Magazine and another portfolio the following year for their travel issue. I also did stories for the New York Times Magazine, Fortune, Newsweek and Cathay Pacific’s in-flight magazine photographing flight attendants working during flights, at home and at training schools.

The magazines and I contacted airlines public relations departments. The airline would either want nothing to do with the stories or would totally be into the press. Once the airlines were on board I would have amazing access, running around airports with my assistant, during flights and out on tarmacs. And flying all around the world.

Read the rest of the interview at Planet of the Books

Adobe launched Photoshop Express not too long ago. It’s a web-based app that offers online photo editing plus a little bit of flickr-esque community. You upload images, edit them in this online version of photoshop, and then you can save them for others to view at your “personal sharing address”. The whole thing’s kind of whatever, and I wouldn’t even mention it if not for one thing. This is from the terms of use:

you grant Adobe a worldwide (because the internet is global), royalty-free (meaning we do not owe you any money), nonexclusive (meaning you are free to license Your Content to others) fully sublicensable (so that we can permit our affiliates, subcontractors and agents to deliver the Service on our behalf) license to use, reproduce and modify Your Content solely for the purposes of operating the Service and enabling your use of the Service. With respect to Your Shared Content, you additionally grant Adobe the rights to distribute, publicly perform and publicly display Your Shared Content (in whole or in part) for the sole purposes of operating the Service and enabling your use of the Service and to sublicense Your Shared Content to Other Users subject to the limitations of Section 7 below.

For those of you who don’t want to bother reading or deciphering that, it means that when you upload something to Adobe Express, you retain ownership of your image but automatically give Adobe the right to do anything they want with it pretty much without paying you any money. Right?

They should probably rethink this. I don’t know who’s going to be cool with that idea. Or maybe it’s just a way of restoring balance to the universe given that we rampantly steal their software. But I stopped uploading my pictures to Facebook a few months back for the same reason.