The old city is graceful and quietly beautiful. Her modesty is mirrored in her citizenry. Sensing her essence, one discovers a serene conversation merging with presence. It is friendship and family that help us manage the loneliness that we face and happiness is the consequence of the way in which we live our lives. ‘White City,’ Rajasthan ©Brian Vikander
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.
Distanced
Cross-posted from STAT. [By Bethany Mollenkof]
“Photographer Bethany Mollenkof spent six months documenting the impact of Covid-19 on residents of rural Black communities in the South. While the pandemic has exacerbated existing medical and financial inequities in these remote corners of the region, it has also highlighted communities’ strength in the face of unprecedented challenges.”
Midwestern Exposure
Cross-posted from Lapham’s Quarterly. [By Kim Beil]
“How do you study the Library of Congress’ collection of nearly sixteen million photographs when the objects themselves are out of reach? It’s an esoteric riddle, perhaps, but one that Adrienne Lundgren, a conservator of photographs at the library, was forced to solve when lockdowns began in 2020. She decided that using data science to understand the early history of photography and the context of her institution’s collection might prove interesting, and she was right.
As Lundgren digitized records of the country’s first photographers, an unexpected pattern emerged. During the medium’s first two decades in the United States, the largest concentration of women photographers wasn’t in the Northeast, the country’s most populous region. Women photographers were most active in the Midwest. Between 1840 and 1860 more than half the country’s women photographers were working in just nine states: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Lundgren didn’t identify any new photographers in her research; she just looked at the existing records in a new way. ‘The data was all there,’ she told me. ‘The geographic trends just couldn’t be seen in the original analog format.’”
How to Make Your Job Search Suck a Little Less
Cross-posted from Vox. [By Rani Molla dn Emily Stewart]
“There are plenty of jobs listings lately — but have you actually tried applying? Despite a record number of open jobs in the United States, many people looking for work are having a hard time getting it.”
“But even when you do find that job you want, it might seem like your application is getting lost in the ether. The problem is a combination of hiring software that needlessly excludes completely hirable people and a corporate hiring process that, for a variety of reasons, isn’t always good at bringing in the right people for an interview.
While you can’t always outsmart an algorithm or a bloated corporate hiring system, there are some ways to give yourself an edge. We spoke with a number of job experts about how to navigate our current system in order to make your job search a little less awful…”
Diana Blok: The Beautiful Imperfect
Cross-posted from Talking Pictures. [By Alasdair Foster]
“I first became aware of your work through the series ‘Blood Ties and Other Bonds’. How did that series begin?
I had been experimenting with staged self-portraiture for several years, searching for an alternative aesthetics of the nude while exploring my own sexual identity. By the mid-Eighties, I was looking for a change, other realms to explore… and then I experienced a moment of revelation…It was during a photo session with a couple. I had been loading the camera with my back to them. As I turned around I saw them standing naked, vulnerable and beautiful, with expressions of natural love and care as if the barrier of the camera had fallen away. I was fascinated by the intimacy of this portrait, and ‘Blood Ties’ evolved from there.”
Featured Promo – David Strongman
Cross-posted from aPhotoEditor. [By rhaggart]
“We ended up printing a few thousand 4×6 prints for the initial edit covering the main floor of my house, and we began laying out the shots according to whatever arcane and esoteric principles we could BS each other with. It’s amazing what you see when your floor is completely covered in photographs. Colours, shapes, themes, stories, light. The limitations of a computer monitor were quickly realized when we made visual / narrative connections with a room full of photographs that never would have been made on a tiny screen. This is really where the magic happened. When we had our final edit we realized that we were sitting on over 450 images. I stubbornly said let’s print them all. He agreed because again … he was family and couldn’t say no.
After the wide edit we then started the layout for two separate books. One focused on Editorial images – people and places. And the other on Interior images – something looser than pure architecture. I kept the two separate because it’s pretty rare that the interiors guys are also people shooters. One job is total silence, the other requires people skills. And people hiring for one often don’t consider you for the other. It made sense to kept the two brands separated.”
AP Sponsors Print Sale to Raise Money for Afghan Women Journalists
Cross-posted from PetaPixel. [By Anete Lusina]
“The Network of Women in Media, India (NWMI) has launched a print sale initiative together with the Associated Press (AP) to raise funds for women journalists affected by the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan.”
“The goal is to raise funds to help Afghanistan’s women journalists “tell their stories amidst all odds.” The raised money will be directed towards finding safe houses, evacuations, rebuilding small media start-ups, settling in new countries, or finding ways to allow these professionals to continue telling their stories.
The collection of photographs in the print sale features work by AP’s “bravest and most talented visual journalists” and showcases moments captured from the daily life of Afghanistan for more than two decades. Each print costs $100, excluding shipping, and is printed on 10-inch by 15-inch Hahnemuhle Photo Rag 308GSM Matt Fine Art paper.”
The Photographs That Women Took
Cross-posted from The New Yorker: The Art World. [By Peter Schjeldahl]
““The New Woman Behind the Camera,” at the Met, is dizzying in its scope, acting as an index of female photographers between the nineteen-twenties and the fifties.”
“But here I am singling out classics from a show that, nonjudgmental to a willing fault, blurs discriminations of fame and even of originality. The array, installed by the Met’s Mia Fineman, tantalizes to the point of possibly maddening some viewers, with perhaps one or very few prints by photographers who rouse in us a yen to see more of them. In truth, that’s a payoff for Nelson, who imposes no unifying aesthetic beyond a general concordance with modernism. She advances just one, foggy thematic idea: “the New Woman,” a phrase, or slogan, that was coined by two European writers in the late nineteenth century for rebels against Victorian conformity. I think most of us associate it with bobbed-haired partyers in the twenties and the wisecracking heroines of Hollywood comedies in the thirties. Its vagueness serves Nelson’s intent of equalizing all types of photography, without observing a distinction between art and commerce. She and five essayists in the show’s catalogue are at pains to avoid essentializing femininity.”
Brassaï, the Outsider Who Photographed Paris after Dark
Cross-posted from Artsy. [By Alina Cohen]
“While Brassaï (1899–1984) was a veritable polymath—he wrote novels, sculpted, and painted throughout his career—his pictures of Paris at night remain his career-defining masterworks. Before World War II struck the city, he captured foggy avenues with bare trees, the gate to the Luxembourg Gardens, bridges, and street façades. He snapped pictures of the meat porters and kissing couples of the streets, and the giddy inhabitants of restaurants and lounges. Lights from cars, windows, hotel signs, snowy grounds, and watery reflections enhance the sense of drama in his dreamy nocturnal shots. In a 1968 catalogue for a Brassaï exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, novelist Lawrence Durrell wrote: ‘He is very much a child of Paris, and in some ways the city’s most faithful biographer.’”
Uprooted: Life After the Mines
Cross-posted from The Groundtruth Project. [Text and Photography by Brittany Geeson]
“Many miners have worked in the industry long enough to know when their employer is in desperate trouble. The warning signs have become prevalent. For example, a company will cease repairs on mining equipment — even though doing so puts miners in danger and curtails productivity. Both Blackjewel and Cambrian limited repairs and ceased ordering additional supplies just weeks before their bankruptcies, according to their former employees. In the past, amid bankruptcies, coal companies have often restructured or sold off assets while attempting to keep employees on payroll.”
Stunning Photos of the Coldest City on Earth
Photos From the Coldest City on Earth
Cross-posted from Smithsonian Magazine and My Modern Met. [ByNatasha Gelling and Alice Yoo]
“What does it look like in the coldest city in the world? Thanks to one New Zealand photographer named Amos Chapple, we won’t just have to wonder. Oymyakon, Russia is the coldest place on earth where humans actually live. The small, rural town has brutal winters where temperatures can dip to minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit. The area is six time zones away from Moscow. You wouldn’t guess it but neighboring Yakutsk is an economically vibrant place, mostly due to the abundance of natural resources around it, like diamonds, oil and gas. That makes it an expensive place to live in and visit.
When Chapple arrived in Oymyakon, he was struck by the emptiness of the place. The population stands at about 500 permanent residents. As he told Smithsonian, ‘The streets were just empty. I had expected that they would be accustomed to the cold and there would be everyday life happening in the streets, but instead people were very wary of the cold. It felt extremely desolate. It wasn’t, but everything was happening indoors, and I wasn’t welcome indoors.’”
Internal Facebook Research Shows Instagram is Toxic for Teen Girls
What Facebook Knows
Cross-posted from The New York Times and PetaPixel. [By Andrew Ross Sorkin, Jason Karaian, Sarah Kessler, Stephen Gandel, Lauren Hirsch, Ephrat Livni and Anna Schaverien; and by Jaron Schneider]
“This week, The Wall Street Journal published a bombshell investigation about how Facebook responds to the flaws in its platform. The four-part report, which is largely based on internal documents, suggests that the company often plays down what it knows about these problems. According to The Journal, at least some of the documents have been turned over to the S.E.C. and Congress by a whistle-blower.”
“The main issue with toxicity is linked to social pressure and bullying that young girls feel from using the social network, issues that are intrinsically tied to the popularity contest that is Instagram. Fixing the problems exacerbated by Instagram while also keeping it engaging seem to be goals that are at odds, and are perhaps unreconcilable.
The full report reads like a damning conclusion that has been theorized by outside groups but given more credence since now it is coming from inside the company.“
“Instagram’s own research shows risks to teenagers’ mental health. The service, which is owned by Facebook, has been studying its effect on young users for three years. ‘We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,’ read one slide in an internal presentation, according to The Journal.”
Inside Claudia Schiffer’s New Exhibition of 90s Fashion Photography
Cross-posted from AnOther. [By Sabrina Cooper]
“The supermodel turns curator for Captivate!, a new exhibition examining the decade that changed fashion forever”
“‘Since the beginning of my career, I have collected fashion images and worked and learned from true masters – Helmut Newton, Richard Avedon, and Peter Lindbergh – and my personal collection forms the basis of the exhibition,’ Claudia Schiffer tells AnOther. ‘There were literally thousands of images to choose from. I [also] wanted to show the numerous formats of fashion photography in the pre-digital age – from fine art prints to Polaroids, contact sheets, fashion magazines, to campaigns and model cards.’”
A Simple Directive Sparked a Storied Career: ‘Now, Take the Picture.’
Cross-posted from the The New York Times. [By Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff]
“A new retrospective honors Michelle V. Agins, a Pulitzer-winning New York Times photographer who captures stories that would otherwise go untold.”
“Ms. Agins, 68, is now one of the longest serving staff photographers at The New York Times, having started in 1989. Her body of work is set to be honored this fall at the Photoville Festival in New York. The retrospective, created in partnership with Ms. Agins’s colleagues at The Times, will reflect on an immense body of work — and acknowledge the fact that, as one of the first Black photographers at The Times, she served as an emissary for the paper in a way that few Black journalists of previous generations had the opportunity to do. Much like pioneers such as Don Hogan Charles, the first Black photographer hired by The Times, Ms. Agins has spent much of her career documenting Black stories and offering readers a glimpse into Black American life in a way they had never been granted before.
‘I like historic storytelling, because our history sometimes disappears,’ she said. ‘We forget about people unless they’re getting shot down or hurt. I want to bring people into the forefront before any of that stuff happens.’”
Martin Parr Times Fifteen
Cross-posted from Blind. [By Sabyl Ghoussoub]
“The English photographer Martin Parr has his first retrospective in Belgium: Parrathon looks back at a forty-year-long career through fifteen photography series.”
“The photographer’s first retrospective in Belgium covers the three floors of the Brussels photography center, Le Hangar. It focuses on fifteen emblematic series by one of the most recognizable representatives of contemporary documentary photography. A modern-day satirist, Parr has always looked at the world around him, and the West in particular, with an offbeat, ironic gaze.”
Fresh: Elizabeth Wirija
Cross-posted from Communications Arts.
“This New York-based photographer uses surrealism to break societal boundaries in their work.”
“Artistic influences: Growing up in Jakarta, Indonesia, my childhood was incredibly inspiring to me. I watched a lot of TV, read manga and watched anime, so I tend to be influenced by artists in a wide variety of media like animation, filmmaking, illustration and painting. Only looking at photography and photography alone makes this boy dull.”
“Favorite projects: The Future of Beauty story I photographed for Vogue. It features futuristic, unconventional beauty looks ideated by the fascinating makeup artist Raisa Flowers. I just felt like everyone on the team was aligned creatively and we made magic together. I like the idea that our perception of beauty in the future can morph into a realm where nothing is nonlinear or one-dimensional.”