Blog About Photography

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.