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.
TED Demands CC License from Photographers, Fails to Provide Credit
Cross-posted from PetaPixel. [By Jaron Schenider]
“TED — which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design — hosts speaking engagements that are distributed online for free under the slogan “ideas worth spreading.” According to photographer Paul Clarke, the organization forces photographers to list any photos of a TED event as creative commons, but fails to abide by those rules.”
“‘I believe that TED and any of its ‘TED Parties’ is obligated to abide by Creative Commons licensing to provide attribution,’Mickey Osterreicher, General Counsel for the National Press Photographer’s Association (NPAA) tells PetaPixel in reference to TED’s contract. ‘The question, as I see it, is that the terms of this ‘release’ do not specify which CC license is applicable.’
That said, Osterreicher does point out that all six Creative Commons licenses require attribution.
Each becomes increasingly more restrictive, but all retain the minimum attribution requirement,’ he says.”
Model Confronts Photographer Who Told Her Not to Eat to Lose Weight
Cross-posted from PetaPixel. [By Michael Zhang]
“A model has gone viral on the Internet after sharing a secretly recorded video in which she confronts a photographer during a photo shoot. She’s accusing the photographer of telling her to not eat until the next photo shoot in order to lose weight.”
“In just a few days since being published, the model’s video has already racked up over 17.5 million views, 4.5 million likes, and 44,000 comments.
In other comments posted to the video, the model shares that her clients were happy with her size and the ones paying for her work — it was just the hired photographer who offended her with his comments prior to the start of the shoot.“
Gillian Laub Explores Her Family’s Political Dramas
Cross-posted from The New Yorker Photo Booth. [By Naomi Fry]
“The photographer, who has documented conflicts around the world, describes her new collection as “the most exposing thing” she has ever done.”
“In the course of her two-decade career, Laub has become best known for work whose framework is political: she has documented subjects living in areas affected by conflict, photographing, as part of one extended project, Jews and Arabs in Israel and Palestine, and, as part of another, Black and white inhabitants of a largely segregated community in Georgia. (This series, ‘Southern Rites,’ also led to a documentary of the same name, which Laub directed for HBO.) Meanwhile, her own family—a wealthy and close-knit Jewish-American clan living in the New York suburbs—might seem, by comparison, an oasis of relative calm. And yet family is the bedrock from which we emerge and to which we belong, but from which we can’t help but attempt to detach ourselves. ‘Some people tell me that this is such a departure from the rest of my work, but I don’t think it’s a departure at all,’ Laub told me. ‘Photographing my family is a way for me to navigate my identity. These are people, my people, who I have felt very much a part of, but also outside of, and I have been navigating that line since the moment I picked up the camera.’ In her practice, she had always attempted to portray her subjects with empathy while retaining a measure of appraising distance from them; the challenges of maintaining this doubleness, she realized, were heightened when it came to making pictures of her own relatives.”
What Gilles Peress Saw on 9/11
Cross-posted from The New Yorker Photo Booth. [By Margaret Talbot]
“The Magnum photographer looks back on capturing an ‘inconceivable event.’”
“The photographer Gilles Peress, who has chronicled war and its aftershocks all over the world, was at home in Brooklyn on the morning of September 11, 2001, when he got a call from his studio manager, telling him to turn on the TV: a plane had just hit one of the World Trade Center towers. ‘I looked at it, and it was evident that it was not only a major incident but that it was not an accident; it was an attack,’ Peress recalled. He had a contract with The New Yorker, and the magazine’s editor, David Remnick, phoned as Peress was getting ready to head toward the site. ‘I drove to the Brooklyn Bridge—there was no way to get across by car. I parked the car and walked across against the traffic of people fleeing lower Manhattan. I got to the other side as the second plane was hitting the second tower, and I continued toward the scene. A cop tried to stop me. He said, ‘You’re crazy, you’re going to die,’ and I said, ‘O.K.,’ and I bypassed him. I arrived as the second tower was falling. There were very few people there.’ The only people he recalled seeing at first ‘were a group of about six firemen, who were trying to do the impossible.’”
Matt Black’s American Geography: A Tale of Two Countries
Cross-posted from Magnum. [By Pauline Vermare]
“What does it mean for a photographer to dedicate their work to something they believe in passionately and wholeheartedly?
Matt Black’s work has focused on themes of geography, inequality, and the environment in the United States. In this essay, Magnum’s former Cultural Director Pauline Vermare analyses the social and political motivations of Black’s work, situating it in the context of 20th century photography that actively fought for justice.”
“Black’s photographs are a direct response to this escalating greed. California’s farm fields became the first and central subject of his work in the late 1980s – the Central Valley in particular, which remains one of the poorest regions of the country, despite the fact that over half of all U.S. produce is grown there. His work stems from the struggle of the American and migrant workers – including the many Mexican and Filipino men and women who, led by César Chávez, Larry Itliong, and Dolores Huerta, conducted the California Grape Strike of the 1960s and created the United Farm Workers Union (UFW). In 1988, as Chávez was fasting to protest unhealthy working conditions for grape workers, Matt Black, who had just turned 18, went unassigned to photograph Chávez as he was putting an end to his fast. There, he met Magnum photographer Paul Fusco, who had been closely following the grape strikes and the UFW from their onset. For Black, this encounter was pivotal. He and Fusco shared the same social awareness and the same humble and empathetic relationship to the people they photographed, as well as a desire to act upon America’s social tragedies.”
Judith Joy Ross’s Timeless and Empathic Portraits
Cross-posted from Aperture. [By Rebecca Bengal]
“Ross has been called one of the greatest portrait photographers in the history of the medium. As a long-overdue retrospective opens in Europe, a new generation will witness her radical belief in the individual.”
“In the early 1980s, when photographers could simply show up in person on an appointed day at MoMA and drop off their portfolios for review, Ross was called in to speak with John Szarkowski, the photography department’s director, who, looking at her first major series, Eurana Park (1982), asked if she knew the pictures of the German photographer August Sander. Ross lied and said she didn’t. “I was like Judas denying Christ,” she says. ‘I didn’t want him to think I was cheating.’ Szarkowski, who bought two of the pictures, offered reassurance: ‘“It’s okay, Judith. It’s called tradition to be influenced by another’s work.’ She had, in fact, studied Sander’s pictures closely—how he photographed straightforwardly, centering the person in the frame. Sander’s monumental series Menschen des 20 Jahrhunderts (People of the 20th Century), begun in the 1920s and proceeding for decades, identified and grouped subjects by occupation and social class. Ross isn’t nearly as taxonomic; she is guided by a rapt, intense, wholehearted belief in the individual. (Ross disputes that Sander categorized people.) Her idiosyncratic printing practice—contact prints on printing-out-paper that are then toned with gold— enhances the fundamental uniqueness of the individuals she encounters.’“No two prints by Judith are the same,’ says Joshua Chuang, who is curating Ross’s retrospective and editing the accompanying catalogue. ‘Her way of experiencing humanity is through photography.’”
AB+DM
Cross-posted from Communications Arts. [By Dzana Tsomondo]
“Photographers are often seen as singular artists whose individual sensibilities make, or break, an image. Perhaps that is why photography duos are so rare, which is part of what is so intriguing about the partnership of Ahmad Barber and Donté Maurice. Known professionally as AB+DM, the inimitable Atlanta duo have moved from relative obscurity to hot commodity in record time, with their striking imagery showing up everywhere from Town & Country to Essence to Marie Claire to XXL.”
How a Surprise Discovery of Photographs From the 1960s Meets the Moment
Cross-posted from The New York Times. [By Pierre-Antoine Louis]
“Not long after his mother passed away in 2018, a massive relic from Jeffrey Henson Scales’ childhood was unexpectedly found in his family’s home. His stepfather and older brother were preparing the house for an eventual sale when they came across a trove of 40 rolls of film.
‘We think these are probably yours,’ they told Mr. Scales, a photographer and a photo editor at The New York Times.
Included in the rolls were photographs that Mr. Scales had taken when he was a teenager — images that captured major cultural, political and social moments of the 1960s. There were pictures of student protests in Berkeley, Calif., photos of Jimi Hendrix, Sly and the Family Stone at the famous Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, and about 15 rolls of the Black Panther Party.”
“Now, they are part of an exhibition that opens Sept. 16 at the Claire Oliver Gallery in Harlem. The exhibition, “In a Time of Panthers: The Lost Negatives,” showcases a series of photographs captured by the young Mr. Scales when he was immersed in the Black Panther movement in Northern California. The images capture the movement — and its lasting reverberations and impact on today’s Black Lives Matter movement — and also mark a pivotal time in Mr. Scales’s life, when he realized his own power as an artist and young activist.”
Made in the UK: Photographer Janette Beckman
Cross-posted from Please Kill Me. [By Amy Haben]
“After documenting the punk and post-punk scenes in the UK, Janette Beckman moved to New York in time to shoot the burgeoning rap and hip hop scenes, as well as gang life in East L.A. Amy Haben caught up with Janette Beckman for a conversation about working with the likes of Joe Strummer, breaking barriers as a woman in the industry, and her iconic photos of the stylish youth of decades past”
“Working at Melody Maker from 1977-1982, it was male dominated rock n’ roll office, they didn’t really understand my ‘artsy’ sensibility; in retrospect, I think I had to deal with a certain amount of misogyny. Things that would now be called out were just accepted as a part of the business. All I wanted to do was photograph the bands and the scene so I ignored all the bullshit. When I came to NYC in 1983, I started working for the upstart hip hop labels and Paper magazine. Being a British woman was actually an asset. People did not travel so much in those days and they didn’t know what to make of me. Going to the Bronx to photograph rap artists, they were intrigued by my accent and wanted to know why I was there. It started conversations which led to trust and collaborations.
I started working for the magazines like Glamour and Nickelodeon, the photo editors were all female, they liked working with me. We were all about getting great portraits with no stress, collaborating to make it happen. I started shooting celebrity politicians, sports stars, writers, and actors.”
The Nights When New York Felt Alive Again
Cross-posted from The New York Times. [Text by Julia Carmel; Production, Photos, Video, and Reporting by multiple people.]
“There was a glorious yet fleeting moment this summer, between waves, when the Covid case count was at its lowest since the beginning of the pandemic. Before the Delta variant began heightening anxieties and led to increased calls for a return to wearing masks, the city felt, shockingly, almost normal.
At no time was that more evident than the hours between sunset and sunrise, when New York’s streets became electric. We headed back to our regular haunts, and at bustling Pride celebrations we rediscovered the kind of liberation that comes from losing track of your limbs in a crowd.”
“Over eight weeks between May and July, The New York Times sent 40 photographers and nine reporters to all five boroughs to document performances, house parties, bars, dance floors and all the chaos that makes New York come alive in the dark. The portfolio captures the collective risk that many New Yorkers took to revel in the city’s deeply missed party scene. Now, as cases spike once more, the moment looks a little like a reckless tragedy averted, but these euphoric weeks were a release from the heaviness of the year — a hint at what we will hope will be waiting for us on the other side.”
The Silent Clapping of Their Hands
Cross-posted from lensculture. [Photographs by Davide Bertuccio
Interview by Cat Lachoswkyj]
“Befriending a colorful circus master just before the pandemic, photographer Davide Bertuccio captured a life full of color and resilience, charting the growth of a new friendship despite these trying times.”
“In his series The Silent Clapping of Their Hands, Bertuccio introduces us to Claudio Madia, a sixty-year-old former television presenter living inside a colorful house of theatrical rooms in Milan. Before the pandemic hit, Madia was organizing circus shows and living an equally prismatic life. But during the lockdowns, he isolated inside his autobiographical Circincà—his “circus at home”—where Bertuccio explains “he was left without an audience, except for those he had drawn himself on his walls”.
Exploring Madia’s story of resilience, Cat Lachowskyj speaks with Davide Bertuccio for LensCulture about how he met his quirky friend, and how his new, intimate project brought him out of his creative comfort zone.”