©Stephen Collector
ASMP NewsFeed. Keeping You in the Know.
With all that is happening in the world around us, we know that you don’t always have extra hours in your day to catch up on the latest news from the myriad of information sources available today. Curated by former ASMP National Board Member and Contributing Editor Barry Schwartz, the ASMP NewsFeed brings you current articles related to the business and art of photography published in diverse arenas in one single post, so you can peruse and read about a topic that might be of personal or professional interest to you.
The Daily Edit – Artist Management Association
VIDEO: Where We Are Now – Episode 15 – Introducing the Artist Management Association
Cross-posted from aPhotoEditor and Workbook.
“The elephant in the room is the tsunami of imagery available and its consumption rate. This creates an erosion of value.
While there is a plethora of imagery available, from influencers to iphone photos, there is still a need for that subset of professional photographers that can make truly iconic imagery. Valuing their talent and the work (and crews) involved in that process is our focus.
For many years the internet and social media was considered a bit of a throw away, but now paid digital campaigns are the main form of advertising and amazing imagery is needed to break through this clutter. Additionally, Social media can often become the new catalog of retail sales, with click to buy offers embedded in the posts. Through education we are trying to change the mindset of “it’s just digital” and also awareness that you can’t just repost an image – that can equate to the illegal use of imagery.”
Video Introduction: “This week we have assembled the founding members of the Artist Management Association, a collective of companies who serve Photographers, Directors, Creative Directors, Stylists and other creative talent who work in the commercial and fine art industry. Seven top agency owners will explain what the association is, its goals and priorities and why this is good for our industry.”
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Ruth Orkin : Stolen Moments
Cross-posted from Blind. [By Miss Rosen]
“A new exhibition and book celebrate the extraordinary legacy of American photographer Ruth Orkin, one of the most influential women photographers of the twentieth century.”
“‘Ruth had a big personality. She was very charismatic,’ says her daughter Mary Engel, Director of the Ruth Orkin Photo Archive, who is honoring the centennial of her mother’s birth with the new book Ruth Orkin: A Photo Spirit and exhibition “Ruth Orkin: Expressions of Life”. Working across genres, Orkin created a singular archive of mid-twentieth century life, capturing a feeling of optimism that defined the modern. Orkin’s empathic eye found its home whether photographing celebrities or strangers she encountered on the street.”
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The Thomas Walther Collection: The Advent of Photographic Modernity
Cross-posted from Blind. [By Marie D’harcourt]
“What is striking about this exhibition is, first of all, the abundance of images. The diversity of this collection reflects not only the number of artists, but also of the genres and approaches represented: architecture, portraits, nudes, reportages, photomontages… These photographs bear witness to the spirit of freedom and the exuberance that characterized artistic circles during the interwar period. Photographers at the time, whether in Europe or the United States, were constantly experimenting, forging an avant-garde photographic grammar.”
“Artists of audacity and mobility, these avant-garde photographers abandoned art photography and launched themselves into photojournalism. They were interested in speed and movement captured by the snapshot. The weightless bodies of the swimmers leaping from the diving board into the void take our breath away. In John Gutmann’s photo, Olympic high diving champion Marjorie Gestring appears to float in the sky, her body almost perfectly parallel to the diving board. These shots of athletic feats are again an opportunity to experiment with framing, where the main subject is positioned off center. Take, for instance, this image of a diver developing his, which is only a round shape at the top right of the frame, to leave 3/4 of the photo to the sky and clouds.”
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Carrie Mae Weems’s Visual Response to Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come”
Cross-posted from Hyperallergic. [By Carrie Mae Weems]
“The below photo essay, a visual response to Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” is excerpted from Ways of Hearing: Reflections on Music in 26 Pieces, edited by Scott Burnham, Marna Seltzer, and Dorothea von Moltke, and published by Princeton University Press. The editors write in the introduction that Weems’s essay “exhorts us to ‘hear’ in her images the lament that is also both a promise and a plea contained in the soul lyric by Sam Cooke: ‘It’s been so long, it’s been so long, a little too long / A change has gotta come.’’”
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David Hockney: ‘Abstraction in Art Has Run Its Course’
Cross-posted from The Art Newspaper. [By David Hockney]
While Hockney is generally known as one of the best and most innovative painters of this century and the last one, he is also a scholar of visual art, a practitioner of photography and cinema, and a historian.
“Cameras were being made by the 17th century, but the invention of photography is not the invention of the camera. Even Susan Sontag in her book Regarding the Pain of Others writes: “When the camera was invented in 1839…”. She got away with this. Why didn’t an editor ask her who invented it? She couldn’t have named the inventor—who can? Nobody. Because the camera is a natural phenomenon; a small pinhole in a room will project the outside image onto its opposite wall. All cameras today make perspective pictures, because they are all seen from a mathematical point at the centre of a lens.”
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The Beginning of Photography: The Drama of 1839
Cross-posted from DPReview. [By Roger Cicala]
“While Talbot was vigorously defending his English patents, another Englishman, Frederick Scott Archer, developed a new technique in 1848. The collodion (or wet plate) process, used glass coated with a gelatin to hold the silver chemicals. Archer did not patent, publishing his technique so that others could use it freely. The collodion (or wet plate) technique was relatively inexpensive, exposed quickly, and the glass plate negative was easier to print from.
Talbot, being Talbot, sued wet-plate photographers on the grounds that this technique was just like his own. British photographers rallied to the case and brought reams of evidence that Talbot was not the true inventor (much of the evidence was later found to be false and fabricated). The jury found that Talbot’s patents were valid, but only for his exact process. Anyone who varied from his published methods even slightly was not guilty of patent violation, and by that time all photography varied from Talbott’s original methods.”
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VIDEO: Freelance Contracts: a Public-interest Roundtable
Cross-posted from FIRE.
Photographers, like the reporters focused on in this video, are subject to all the same kinds of pressures regarding editorial (and commercial) contracts. This video talks about various kinds of clauses, particularly indemnification and Errors & Omissions, which may sound intimidating, but can be easily understood.
“Discussion Sept. 28, 2021, hosted by FIRE (Freelance Investigative Reporters & Editors) and featuring Mother Jones CEO Monika Bauerlein, former Bloomberg News Global Media Counsel Charles Glasser, investigative reporter Alexandria Bordas, and FIRE Executive Director Laird Townsend. A lively roundtable discussion with moderated Q&A on how to solve the problem of legal liability that’s leaving too many public interest investigations unreported. See firenewsroom.org for more information.”
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Latter-Day Paradises in the Cherokee National Forest
Cross-posted from Southern Cultures. [Photography by John Lusk Hathaway, text by Mark Long]
“Geographer Dennis Cosgrove has written that American landscapes may best be apprehended from the air. So vast are US landscapes and, likewise, our interventions to rework them, that a vantage point at that level of remove is necessary to appreciate the scale of physical and human geographies here. Nowhere, perhaps, is that perspective more apposite to grasp the enormity of planned American landscapes than for the series of behemoth, high-modern, dirigiste projects undertaken by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), whose territory, spanning seven states, is half the size of California.1
Close to a century after its creation, in the fading years of the last generation to marvel at the miracle of instantaneous light and energy, the magnitude of those engineering projects is as taken for granted as the electricity that is one of the TVA’S lasting legacies for millions across the South. Yet, for all that the exercise of colossal governmental power and the monumental transformations that result are often overlooked today, their impact on the ground is plain to see in John Lusk Hathaway’s photography project One Foot in Eden.2”
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Expert Advice: Twitter for Photographers
Cross-posted from Wonderful Machine. [By Shannon Stewart]
“Social media is a vital part of a how a business promotes itself, and having a wide variety of social media tools at your disposal is important. While you can link all your social media accounts together to create one post appearing on all of them, this strategy ignores unique opportunities each platform offers to its audience.
For example, Twitter might be perceived as just a witty space to carefully craft a succinct 280 characters. But it has features that distinguish it from other platforms to help you build your brand and implement your business strategies.
For photographers, the short and sweet style of Twitter can help you easily advertise your photos and your distinct style.”
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Where Intimacy Meets Tactility: Artists and Publishers on the Nature of the Photobook
Cross-posted from Lit Hub via Develop newsletter. [Interview by W. Scott Olsen]
“W. Scott Olsen Speaks to Tomasz Trzebiatowski, Joel Meyerowitz, Elysa Voshell, Olga Karlovac, and Phil Penman”
“Tomasz Trzebiatowski: What catches my eye, what holds my breath, what makes me forget everything else, is the photograph itself. And it usually does not matter what size it is or what paper it is printed on. The most wonderful, highest quality paper will not help if the image itself does not speak to me. But on the opposite side of this spectrum, something else is definitely happening: a good photograph gains even more impact if reproduced on high quality paper and placed in a book of a thoughtful and elegant design.”
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What We’re Reading: State Copyright Plunder is Bad and Getting Worse
Cross-posted from ProPhotoDaily. [By David Schonauer]
“There’s a copyright heist going on.
The culprit: state governments that, writes Kevin Madigan at Real Clear Policy, ‘have run roughshod over copyright protections to simply take these items. And they’re getting away with state-sponsored larceny, abetted by an obscure legal doctrine called sovereign immunity.’”
“Meanwhile, The Art Newspaper reports an update in the case of the North Carolina filmmaker, Rick Allen. Backstory: In the 1990s, Allen filmed the salvaging operation of an 18th century pirate ship that had run aground at Beaufort, North Carolina in 1718. “Almost 20 years later, the State of North Carolina took one of Allen’s still images and videos and posted them on its tourism website and social media pages. The state justified its actions by claiming Allen’s photographs, video recordings and other documentary materials were ‘public record,’ notes TAN. North Carolina also claimed Sovereign Immunity protection.”
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Drawing With Light
Cross-posted from The Bitter Southerner. [Photos by Margo Newmark Rosenbaum]
“Margo Newmark Rosenbaum earned her BFA in Painting at the San Francisco Art Institute, and her MA in Painting at the University of Iowa. Her photography centering on Georgia traditions was widely seen in Folk Visions and Voices, a touring exhibition that was shown in many Southern museums and at the Razor Gallery in New York. Her photographs on musical and other subjects have been widely exhibited and published in The New York Times, Newsweek, and The Old-Time Herald.
‘I really like to think of using the camera as drawing with light, as I would charcoal on paper,’ she writes in her book, Drawing With Light: Photographs by Margo Newmark Rosenbaum. ‘I try to express something important with every image. There are so many problems; we need to remind ourselves that life has many positive moments, and I often try to reveal those in my work. On the other hand, I often detect a moodiness in my work, something below the surface of what is being looked at.’”
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Lisette Model: A Photography Lesson
Cross-posted from Blind. [By Sophie Bernard]
“While Lisette Model was fascinated with the general feel of the city and the anonymity of the crowd, she never lost sight of individuals. “Pedestrians” delivers clandestine portraits of passersby, while another series focuses on bars and nightclubs in two popular neighborhoods, the Lower East Side and the Bowery. Lisette Model’s great merit was to be interested in all social classes. She was able to find the extraordinary and a grain of timeless truth in the banality of the everyday, as evidenced by her views of Coney Island (1939–1941).
Throughout her career, Lisette Model made a living from press assignments, especially for Harper’s Bazaar. From the 1940s, her work was exhibited at the MoMA in New York and at the Arts Institute of Chicago. She also left her mark as a teacher, with Diane Arbus being her most famous student. The advice she gave her students was, ‘Photograph with your guts!’”
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The Book of Veles: How Jonas Bendiksen Hoodwinked the Photography Industry
Cross-posted from Magnum. [By Jonas Bendiksen]
“The photographer explains the many layers of intrigue that went into the creation of his book about misinformation in the contemporary media landscape”
“I started to ask myself the question – how long will it take before we start seeing “documentary photojournalism” that has no other basis in reality than the photographer’s fantasy and a powerful computer graphics card? Will we be able to tell the difference? How hard is it to do? How skilled will our own community of photographers and editors be in sniffing out what are deep fakes and what is real?
I was so frightened by what the answers would be that I decided to try to do this myself.”