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.