Sunday, December 20, 2009
Last Minute Photography Internship Opportunity
National Geographic Traveler Magazine Internship
Job Description: Visit www.nationalgeographic.com/jobs and click on job ID 3985.
Salary: unpaid
Type of Job: Internship
Job Location: District of Columbia
Company Name NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY
Entry Level evening photography studio assistant in NYC
bryangardnerphotography@gmail.com
Submit your work to Flak Photo
Flak Photo is a daily photography website that celebrates the art & culture of photography online. Produced by Andy Adams, the site highlights new series work, book projects and gallery exhibitions from an international community of contributors.
SUBMISSIONS
An online gallery and social media magazine, Flak Photo provides unique opportunities for artists and photography organizations to share their work with a community of photographers, galleries, publishers, curators and editors. To submit your work for consideration, email your photograph (sRGB JPG format, minimum 1000px wide) with title and caption details to photo@flakmag.com. Please include the following information with your submission:
- Title
- Place of capture, including city, state / province and country (if applicable)
- Year
- Is the image part of a series that's available online? What's the URL?
- Your website URL
Naturally, photographers retain all copyright on submitted materials. Contributors are formally credited and Flak Photo's style is to link the credit to a contributor's website.
The Future of Photo Books
Interested in what photo books will look like in 2019?
Miki Johnson over at RESOLVE, the liveBooks blog, and Andy Adams of Flak Photo have started an online resource that contains all the various discussions about the future of the photo book going on right now in the online photo community. The post is unique in that it is a collaboration of several different blogs to contribute on the same topic - photobooks.
Illumination
The juried exhibition “Illumination” is open to national and international artists of all levels. Entries to this call should either be constructed using light or explore light as subject matter. To be considered, an entry form, entry fee, artist statement and digital images of the artwork should be submitted to Desotorow Gallery by 5pm, Jan. 8. A $15 submission fee allows for the submission of up to 3 pieces of work. Artists will receive notification of the list of selected pieces through email on Jan. 11.
Further information about submitting work for the exhibition “Illumination,” including a complete list of dates, submission guidelines and forms, can be found at http://www.desotorow.org/exhibits/call.html.
Any questions about Desotorow Gallery and this exhibition can be addressed by calling 912.355.8204 or emailing info@desotorow.org.
Monday, December 14, 2009
Larry Sultan, California Photographer, Dies at 63
Larry Sultan, a highly influential California photographer whose 1977 collaboration, “Evidence” — a book made up solely of pictures culled from vast industrial and government archives — became a watershed in the history of art photography, died on Sunday at his home in Greenbrae, Calif. He was 63.
The cause was cancer, said his wife, Katherine, who is known as Kelly.
In the mid 1970s using a grant and a letter of introduction from the National Endowment for the Arts, Mr. Sultan and Mike Mandel, who had met as students at the San Francisco Art Institute, somehow managed to persuade several large companies, agencies and research institutions like the Bechtel Corporation, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the San Jose Police Department and the United States Department of the Interior to let them rummage through their documentary photo files.
Highly influenced by the West Coast brand of Conceptualism then percolating out of places like the California Institute of the Arts, both men were interested, as Mr. Mandel later said, in exploring photography as “more than just the modernist practice of fine-tuning your style and way of seeing.” The pictures they chose from the archives, out of the hundreds of thousands they examined, were a strange, stark, sometimes disturbing vision of a late-industrial world: a space-suited figure sprawled face down on a carpeted floor; a car consumed in flames; a man holding up a tangle of weeds like a trophy; a shaved monkey being held down by a gloved hand.
Some of the images seemed to have been picked for their uncanny resemblance to installation art being made at the time. But the 59 photos published, with no captions to explain what they showed or where they came from, pursued a much broader, Duchampian agenda of harnessing found photographs for the purposes of art while using them as a way to examine the society that produced them. The critic Kenneth Baker of The San Francisco Chronicle wrote that the project demonstrated brilliantly the degree to which “we have no calculus to unravel relations between what a picture shows and what it explains.”
Along with other artwork using vernacular photographs, like that of Michael Lesy in his book “Wisconsin Death Trip” and of Richard Prince, the project, first shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, opened broad new avenues for photography that have since been explored by major museums and by artists like Christian Boltanski and Carrie Mae Weems.
Born in Brooklyn, Mr. Sultan was raised mostly in Los Angeles, where his family moved when he was an infant and where his father worked as a traveling salesman and later as a vice president for the Schick Safety Razor Company.
Not initially interested in photography, Mr. Sultan studied political science at the University of California at Santa Barbara and later earned a master’s degree in fine arts from the San Francisco Art Institute. Before he and Mr. Mandel began working on “Evidence,” they collaborated on another project in which they bought space on billboards around Los Angeles and posted traffic-slowing Dada-esque messages. One bore the announcement “Oranges on Fire,” and showed two cartoonish arms holding a bunch of flaming oranges.
For more than a decade beginning in the early 1980s, Mr. Sultan, who became a professor at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, worked on a project about his mother and his father, who had been forced into early retirement. Using stills from home movies along with lush, colored-saturated pictures he took of his parents, the resulting book, “Pictures From Home,” was a deeply personal document but one that continued Mr. Sultan’s lifelong mission of exploring photography’s fictions.
Mr. Sultan’s father, Irving, speaking of a picture of himself in a suit sitting on the edge of a bed with a vacant stare on his face, related how his son had instructed him not to smile and had created a portrait that the elder Mr. Sultan felt was much more about the photographer than the photographed.
“ ‘Any time you show that picture,’ ” Mr. Sultan said his father told him, “‘you tell people that that’s not me sitting on the bed looking all dressed up and nowhere to go, depressed. That’s you sitting on the bed, and I am happy to help you with the project, but let’s get things straight here.’ ” His parents died not long after the work was completed.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Sultan is survived by two sons, Max and Will, both of Greenbrae; and two brothers, Michael, of Pacific Palisades, Calif., and Kenneth, of Santa Barbara.
In the 1990s, Mr. Sultan began to photograph in the San Fernando Valley, near when he went to high school, shooting suburban homes that were being rented as sets for pornographic movies. Sandra S. Phillips, the photography curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, said that while the work, called “The Valley,” was “nominally about the industry of adult sexual fantasy, the true subject of Sultan’s pictures is how photography is used in the construction of that fantasy.”
Writing in LA Weekly about the work in 2004, Mr. Sultan observed of one particular set: “The furnishings and objects in the house, which have been carefully arranged, become estranged from their intended function. The roll of paper towels on the coffee table, the bed linens in a pile by the door, the shoes under the bed are transformed into props or the residue of unseen but very imaginable actions. Even the piece of half-eaten pie on the kitchen counter arouses suspicion.”
Source | New York Times
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Friday, December 4, 2009
The Importance of Branding
This is a good article, written by an art buyer, with some good advice on branding and identity as a creative professional: Ask an Art Buyer: The Importance of Branding and Other Things
A couple of things stick out to me. First, while branding is important, don't put effort into your brand at the expense of your work:
"I don’t mind if photographers want to bling out their promos for extra attention as long as the quality of the work goes along with it. What I don’t dig, is photographers spending what looks like a ton of money on business cards, expensive promos or portfolios meanwhile they really need to spend more time crafting their work."
And second, in the example used in the article, the photographer hired a designer to craft his identity and put together his marketing materials:
"I decided to hire a designer to create my look on market. As a photographer who appreciates good design, I saw the benefit in hiring a professional to help establish something memorable and edgy to represent my style."
As photographers we bring value to our clients through our experience and expertise in our medium. Unless you're also a graphic designer, why wouldn't you want to hire a professional to bring that value to your identity? The investment is absolutely worth it, and it doesn't have to be a big cash outlay. Make contact with students in the graphic design program and trade work with them - designers frequently need good photography for their projects and many will be more than happy to work on an identity design for you in exchange.
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Pictory
Nice looking startup online photo magazine, with open call for submission:
Pictory
Welcome to Pictory!
I love photography. Few things make me happier than a beautiful image—online or in print. That said, I’ve become a little complacent about some photos. The Internet is brimming with eye candy, but the vast majority of these images have lost their original context. Photo credits are rare and captions usually garbled, so I find myself often wondering: Who made this? What does it mean? The forces of the Internet can sometimes turn good work into confusing shrapnel.
I hope to do the opposite with Pictory. I want to collect images and stories directly from their sources: the people who create them. And then I want to make the best work that much better by editing, proofing, and compiling submissions into glossy online showcases. Big images. Careful details. Practical design. Credit and context.
Maybe it’s a new model for online magazines. Or, maybe it’s just the best I can do from my living room.
In any case, it’s a humble start, and it needs you. Enjoy the features, share Pictory with your friends, submit to the themes, and don’t be afraid to tell me what you think the site needs.
—Laura Brunow Miner, Editor/Designer/Founder
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
In Progress
The juried exhibition “In Progress” is open to national and international artists of all levels. To be considered, an entry form, entry fee, artist statement and digital images of the artwork should be submitted to Desotorow Gallery by 5pm, Dec. 11. A $15 submission fee allows for the submission of up to 3 pieces of work. Artists will receive notification of the list of selected pieces through email on Dec. 14.
Further information about submitting work for the exhibition “In Progress,” including a complete list of dates, submission guidelines and forms, can be found at http://desotorow.org/opportunities/inprogress.html.
Any questions about Desotorow Gallery and this exhibition can be addressed by calling 912.355.8204 or emailing info@desotorow.org.
Camera Club of New York 2010 Darkroom Residency
CCNY invites emerging photographers who are not enrolled in college or graduate photo programs to apply for a three-month darkroom residency at its facility at 336 West 37th Street, New York City.
A jury will select four residents for the 2010 year. Residents will receive cash stipends and will have access to CCNY's darkrooms (both color and B&W) and shooting studio, with up to three printing/shooting sessions per week during a three-month term. (Please note that living accommodations are not provided.)
Please mail a CD with 10 images (jpg files only, at 72dpi, approx. 1024 x 768 pixels, no more than 1 MB total each image) with CV and separate image description list (provide: title, date, medium, dimension for each image) and any other support materials to:
Camera Club of New York (CCNY)
Attn: Residency Program
336 West 37th St, Suite 206
New York, NY 10018-4212.
Postmark deadline is December 5, 2009. Please be sure to name and label your CD and include SASE for return of materials.
Decisions will be announced by December 20, 2009. The first residency begins Jan 4, 2010.
This program is supported by the New York State Council for the Arts. For questions, email
CCNY at info@cameraclubny.org
Website: http://www.cameraclubny.org