Group items tagged

"Lessons from Perpignan: What We Learned at Video Camp For most of July we taught a videojournalism workshop in Perpignan, France, for eighteen American students. It was part of a study-abroad program co-sponsored by the Institute for Education in International Media (ieiMedia) and San Francisco State University. Here are a few tips we can pass along, based on common student errors and problems we encountered. "

"In Biafra in 1968, a generation of children was starving to death. This was a year after oil-rich Biafra had seceded from Nigeria, and, in return, Nigeria had attacked and laid siege to Biafra. Foreign correspondents in the blockaded enclave spotted the first signs of famine that spring, and by early summer there were reports that thousands of the youngest Biafrans were dying each day. Hardly anybody in the rest of the world paid attention until a reporter from the Sun, the London tabloid, visited Biafra with a photographer and encountered the wasting children: eerie, withered little wraiths. The paper ran the pictures alongside harrowing reportage for days on end. Soon, the story got picked up by newspapers all over the world. More photographers made their way to Biafra, and television crews, too. The civil war in Nigeria was the first African war to be televised. Suddenly, Biafra's hunger was one of the defining stories of the age-the graphic suffering of innocents made an inescapable appeal to conscience-and the humanitarian-aid business as we know it today came into being. "

One might say that Andreas Gursky learned photography three times. Born in 1955, he grew up in Düsseldorf, the only child of a successful commercial photographer, learning the tricks of that trade before he had finished high school. In the late 1970s, he spent two years in nearby Essen at the Folkwangschule (Folkwang School), which Otto Steinert had established as West Germany's leading training ground for professional photographers, especially photojournalists. At Essen, Gursky encountered photography's documentary tradition, a sophisticated art of unembellished observation, whose earnest outlook was remote from the artificial enticements of commercial work. Finally, in the early 1980s, he studied at the Staatliche Kunstakademie (State Art Academy) in Düsseldorf, which thanks to artists such as Joseph Beuys, Sigmar Polke, and Gerhard Richter had become the hotbed of Germany's vibrant postwar avant-garde. There Gursky learned the ropes of the art world and mastered the rigorous method of Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose photographs had achieved prominence within the Conceptual and Minimal art movements.

"Creating a Transmedia Symphony I re-read the article in Wired on transmedia today, and found it as good a read as the first time. Coming to the last paragraph I read Jeff Gomez's comment about transmedia and the birth of a new Mozart, "We are going to see visionaries who understand the value of each media platform as if it's a separate musical instrument, who'll create symphonic narratives which leverage each of these multimedia platforms in a way that will create something we haven't encountered yet." This rings true for me as an analogy of what many of us are trying to create. The question that popped up in my head was, however, "but hey, how do you create a "normal" symphony?". Lo and behold, a Google search later I found this wikihow on, yes, how to create a symphony. After reading it, the analogy rings truer still. So, to translate the creation of a "normal" symphony to the creation of a transmedia symphony, these would/could be the steps to take:"

For two hectic weeks between the US presidential election and the inauguration, one photographer was invited to make portraits of every member of Obama's new incoming administration. The result is a series of 52 unlikely semi-formal portraits that reveal a refreshingly diverse, young, energetic group of the people who will be key to helping forward Obama's agenda. This series of portraits originally appeared in The New York Times Magazine, in print and online. Now, for the first time anywhere, an exhibition of life-size prints of these images will go on display (not in America) but in Birmingham, UK. UK-based photographer Nadav Kander talks with Jim Casper of Lens Culture about how this daunting project came into being, and provides some very interesting personal observations about his brief encounters with the new power-brokers of America. See some of the images, and listen to the interview, here in Lens Culture.

THEORY: "Susan Sontag - On Photography" "Susan Sontag - On Photography" By: David L. Jacobs, Afterimage, Sunday, March 1 1998 The initial critical reception of Susan Sontag's On Photography (1977) is one of the most extraordinary events in the history of photography and cultural criticism. No other photography book, not even The Family of Man (1955), which sold four million copies before finally going out of print in 1978, received a wider range of press coverage than On Photography. The scores of reviews of Sontag's book extended not only across the spectrum of specialized photography and art magazines - that is, from Popular Photography to Artforum - but also across an expansive range of general-interest and intellectual periodicals from the Christian Science Monitor to the Village Voice, from Esquire to Encounter, and from the Saturday Review to the Antioch Review. What's more, On Photography won the National Book Critics' Circle Award for 1977 and was selected among the top 20 books of 1977 by the editors of the New York Times Book Review.