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Playing "god" in a digital age: The thin line between art and the subjectivity of photojournalism Jarle recently commented on the post "Crazy light", in which I wrote: "We are constantly challenged to make scenes that are less than interesting, more interesting." The question that this raises, however, is when and how are the conventions of honest visual reportage bent for the sake of making images more compelling? Jarle continues: Correct. We all strive to make our photos more interesting. But, ethically and philosophically speaking, isn't this in direct conflict with the "our pictures must always tell the truth" mantra? There's often a thin line between photojournalism, "art" and subjective, commentary photography. And, playing the devil's advocate, what's the difference between adding motion blur in Photoshop and using a slow shutter speed? I'll start out by agreeing with much what Jarle has said here. From a purist perspective, "Straight" photography should be a style of photography that records what the eye witnesses without elaboration or embellishment. For the most part, this form of photography, what is photojournalism today, has remained pretty much true to form. At the same time, it is possible to find quite a few examples of photojournalism from the 1980s to the present day, that deviate from the normal conventions.

"Donovan Wylie became the youngest ever full member of Magnum Photos in 1997, when he was just 26. Born in Belfast in 1971, he has explored the architecture of conflict in Northern Ireland and, more recently, in Iraq, where he hopes to return later this year. One of his images is going on show in the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester from 25 September - 23 January, in a group exhibition called The Land Between Us: place, power and dislocation. BJP took the opportunity to catch up with him."

Lens Culture is an online magazine celebrating international contemporary photography, art, media, and world cultures. Discover photography from all continents and various points of view: documentary, fine art, photojournalism, poetic, personal, abstract, human, and street photography. Read essays, analysis and criticism about photography and culture. Listen to audio interviews with photographers. Enjoy reviews of exhibitions and photo books. Buy very cool 21st century photography at our new online store. Lens Culture attracts visitors from more than 100 countries every day.

Lens Culture is an online magazine celebrating international contemporary photography, art, media, and world cultures. Discover photography from all continents and various points of view: documentary, fine art, photojournalism, poetic, personal, abstract, human, and street photography. Read essays, analysis and criticism about photography and culture. Listen to audio interviews with photographers. Enjoy reviews of exhibitions and photo books. Buy very cool 21st century photography at our new online store. Lens Culture attracts visitors from more than 100 countries every day.

Founded in 2003, Daylight Magazine is the biannual printed publication of Daylight Community Arts Foundation (DCAF), a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the use of photography as a tool for effecting social change. By reimagining the documentary mode through collaboration with established and emerging artists, scholars and journalists, Daylight Magazine has become one of the premier showcases for contemporary photography. Recently DCAF launched Fundacion Imaginer (www.fundacionimaginer.org) based in Panama City, Panama which is dedicated to promoting contemporary art and photography from Latin America.

Over the past 20 years, photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank has been something of a recluse, a sort of art-world J.D. Salinger, avoiding the public and generally declining requests for interviews. Dividing his time between his old loft on Bleecker Street in Manhattan and a former fisherman's shack on the coast of Nova Scotia, Frank has deliberately eschewed the trappings of celebrity in recent years despite growing acclaim for his work as a photographer--or perhaps because of it. In 1989 he became so fed up with the commercialization of the photography market that he nailed a stack of his rare vintage photographs to a board, tied it up with baling wire, and called that his art work. Such acts of defiance have only added to the legend of Frank's irascibility and desire to be left alone.

Digital Images and Fair Use Web Sites Maryly Snow Librarian Architecture Slide Library University of California, Berkeley I'm going to discuss digital images on the World Wide Web using three fair use web sites as examples: SPIRO, the visual public access catalog of the Architecture Slide Library at the University of California, Berkeley; the Vincent Van Gogh Information Gallery; and the Art Imagebase from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. This presentation is structured into three segments: introduction to the notion of fair use web sites; presentation of the three fair use web sites; problems and idealized solutions for the use of digital images in fair use web sites.

Through the Lens of Time: Images of African Americans from the Cook Collection is a digital collection of over 250 images of African Americans dating from the nineteenth and early twentieth century, selected from the George and Huestis Cook Photograph Collection at the Valentine Richmond History Center. The digitally scanned images on this site are of prints from glass plate negatives or film negatives taken by George S. Cook (1819-1902) and Huestes P. Cook (1868-1951), primarily in the Richmond and Central Virginia area. The Cook Collection consists of over 10,000 negatives taken from the 1860s to the 1930s in Virginia and the Carolinas. The lens of a camera can both reflect and refract reality, and it is important to understand that a photograph, like any work of art, can tell us as much about the photographer as the photographed. These photographs of African Americans provide an interesting combination of examples of African American life and the white photographers' perceptions of that life, often at least tinged by stereotypes. While some photographs more obviously represent one or the other, it is an interesting exercise to attempt to determine which photographs were taken in a completely spontaneous manner and which ones were posed or staged by the Cooks. These photographs of African American life in turn-of-the-century Central Virginia are valuable both as conveyers of unique historical information and as examples of the nascent art of photography. Their preservation by the Valentine Richmond History Center and their digitization by VCU allows everyone from historical researchers to school children to access and learn from this fine and rare resource.

Ffotogallery is the national development agency for photography in Wales and the premier arts organisation dedicated to the promotion and presentation of photographic art in the country. The gallery looks at photographic practice in the broadest sense, and initiates exhibitions that focus on documentary as well as more expansive uses of photography that may involve the use of projection, digital and other lens-based forms. Through its exhibition & publishing programme and educational outreach work, Ffotogallery consciously attempts to respond to issues that are pertinent to the culture of Wales. In parallel with this, Ffotogallery endeavours to bring photographic work to Wales that is at the forefront of contemporary critical debate, from Britain and around the world.

History of Photography is an international quarterly devoted to the history, practice and theory of photography. It intends to address all aspects of the medium, treating the processes, circulation, functions, and reception of photography in all its aspects, including documentary, popular and polemical work as well as fine art photography. The goal of the journal is to be inclusive and interdisciplinary in nature, welcoming all scholarly approaches, whether archival, historical, art historical, anthropological, sociological or theoretical. It is intended also to embrace world photography, ranging from Europe and the Americas to the Far East. The journal aims to provide a significant resource to diverse communities, including, but not limited to, academics, curators, independent scholars, undergraduate and postgraduate students - indeed, anyone with a serious interest in the history and practice of the medium. The journal encourages submissions from young scholars, while also seeking to publish work by established authorities in the discipline. Over the past three decades History of Photography has become an indispensable source of documentary texts, new and original scholarly articles, novel interpretations, and original thinking in this field. History of Photography is a peer reviewed journal overseen by the Editor and supported by a board of scholars of international standing.

The Research Center Collections are central to the VSW mission to support the "creation, presentation, collection, preservation and education" of media based arts. VSW's focus on the aesthetics, cultural history of media, and social use of images has developed a collections policy which includes both creative work and vernacular images, as well as items that represent the history of media use. The Independent Press Archive has 5000 artist's books -- the largest collection of artists' books in upstate New York. This Archive is complemented by the Illustrated Book Collection, which contains illustrated books published from 1694 to the present day that display all aspects of engraving and photo-engraving practices and all forms of imaging technologies from wood engraving to xerography. These collections are supported by a Research Library of 20,000 books concentrating on the areas of photography, filmmaking, video, bookmaking, media studies, and the cultural practices of image making. The Photograph Collections contain 27,000 original photographic or photo-mechanical prints made by 2,200 known photographers and more than 600,000 examples of vernacular or anonymous images in the form of lantern slides, stereo cards, snapshots, postcards and news agency photographs. These collections hold examples of every type of photographic practice from the family snapshot to the fine art print and include work of every era from the daguerreotypes of the 1840s to digital prints from the present day.

In 1994 The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired the personal archive of the American photographer Walker Evans (1903-1975). The Walker Evans Archive contains the artist's life's work-forty thousand negatives and transparencies dating from the late 1920s to the early 1970s-as well as Evans's personal and professional correspondence, papers, diaries, family photo albums, and his collection of books, picture postcards, clippings, roadside signs, and works by other artists.

There are few single works of art that have changed the direction of their medium. In 1959, one book dramatically altered how photographers looked through their viewfinders and the way Americans saw themselves. The Americans was the work of Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank, and the National Gallery of Art is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the book's American debut with an exhibition. Curator Sarah Greenough says The Americans was actually reviled when it was first published in the United States. "Popular Photography asked a number of writers to critique the book and almost all of them were very negative," Greenough says. "It was described as a sad poem by a very sick person."

For a second answer to the question of how photographers will market their work over the next five to ten years we turned to leading UK-based landscape, documentary and fine art photographer Simon Norfolk. Said Simon: "In the few weeks between being asked to write this piece and me actually sitting down to do it, the international financial system has dissolved and the key banks nationalized. All the money I had squirreled away to pay my future taxes and something for Mr and Mrs Norfolk's old age has disappeared in a bizarre Icelandic banking collapse. So my prognosis about the economy over the next 5-10 years is not very optimistic, I'm afraid. I gave up trying to make a living from editorial a few years ago, instead selling my work as limited edition fine art prints through galleries in London, New York and Los Angeles. I still work for magazines - most of what goes on the gallery wall starts out as a magazine commission - but I see magazine fees as start-up capital.

British photographer Martin Parr, whose work straddles documentary and fine art photography, argues that photojournalism "has to get modern" to regain the attention and support of mainstream magazines. In this month's "State of the Art Report: Photojournalism Survival" (PDN August), Parr asserts, "You have to disguise things as entertainment, but still leave a message and some poignancy." In a recent interview, we asked him to elaborate on his theory.

Edward Hopper interview, 1959 June 17, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Interview with Edward Hopper Conducted by John Morse June 17, 1959 The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Edward Hopper on June 17, 1959. The interview was conducted by John Morse for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Your Camera Is an Agent for Change By Qiana MestrichqianamestrichcloseAuthor: Qiana Mestrich See Author's Posts (6) Recent Posts * Braving the Sight Unseen: Interview with Blind Photographer Timothy O'Brien * Photographers on Twitter, Part 2: My Favorite Tweets * Photographers on Twitter: How They Use It * Photography Empathy: How You Feel Is What You Get * Your Camera Is an Agent for Change Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, of Panamanian and Croatian heritage, Qiana Mestrich has studied photography and its history for more than 15 years. Trained as a fine art photographer, Qiana's personal work ranges from portraiture to still life and landscapes. As a world citizen, she's also documented her travels to countries like Panama, Cuba, Trinidad & Tobago, the U.K. and more to come. View Qiana Mestrich's fine art photography on her Web site or read her blog, Dodge & Burn: Diversity in Photography. in Photojournalism on September 16th, 2008 As photographers, we often use our cameras to make money - shooting weddings, editorial, advertising, stock photography, etc. Yet the camera can do more than help us earn an income. As Dorothea Lange put it, this powerful tool can teach people "how to see without a camera."

link to film siege of Sarajevo is here https://vimeo.com/128590723 link to PG marking criteria is here http://www.arts.ac.uk/media/arts/study-at-ual/academic-regulations/PG-Marking-Criteria-Matrix-with-Letter-Grades.pdf

HackelBury exhibits fine 20th and 21st century photography - a carefully selected stable of artists, founded on the shared expertise, passion, & experience of Sascha Hackel & Marcus Bury, dealers & curators of fine art photography since 1990.

THEORY - "Andreas Gursky and The Contemporary Sublime" Andreas Gursky and The Contemporary Sublime Art Journal, Winter, 2002 by Alix Ohlin The German photographer Andreas Gursky takes pictures of enormous spaces--stock exchanges, skyscrapers, mountain peaks--in which crowds of people look tiny and relentless, making their presence felt in the world, like a minute, leisurely colony of ants. Also like ants, these people appear to spend little time examining their own encroachment--architectural, technological, and personal--on the natural world. In their determined, oblivious way, the people in his photographs make clear that there is no longer any nature uncharted by man. In place of nature we find the invasive landmarks of a global economy Taken as a whole, Gursky's work constitutes a map of the postmodern civilized world.