Group items tagged

THEORY - "The Indecisive Moment: Frank, Klein, and 'Stream-Of-Consciousness' Photography" THE INDECISIVE MOMENT: FRANK, KLEIN, AND 'STREAM-OF-CONSIOUSNESS' PHOTOGRAPHY By Gerry Badger "Frank … and Klein brought to the decade a feeling for its woes which, in retrospect, synthesizes it for us. There hovers in their work an oppressive sense of the odds against which people struggled, the dismal mood and chance of defeat that lowered the emotional horizon. This was all the more striking because of the general affluence of the period, underway shortly before the start of Frank's and Klein's major effort, in the great boom of 1955. These transplanted photographers found live and visual metaphors for the bleakness of this Cold War moment, and the deadness of the things in it. For those who remember the era, these photographic evocations of it have the keenest resonance; for those who came later, The Americans and New York offer a wondrous guide."

Overview The Exhibitions Program at the Center for Documentary Studies presents images, documents, sound, and written experiences in four galleries, bringing to light telling details and resonant moments in everyday life that might otherwise go unnoticed. CDS exhibitions connect people to those moments, and to a larger story. Serving as a community forum for documentary work, the galleries make the documentary arts accessible to a general audience and present experiences that inform, heighten our historical and cultural awareness, create discourse, foster understanding, and confront traditional views of "others."

10x10™ ('ten by ten') is an interactive exploration of the words and pictures that define the time. The result is an often moving, sometimes shocking, occasionally frivolous, but always fitting snapshot of our world. Every hour, 10x10 collects the 100 words and pictures that matter most on a global scale, and presents them as a single image, taken to encapsulate that moment in time. Over the course of days, months, and years, 10x10 leaves a trail of these hourly statements which, stitched together side by side, form a continuous patchwork tapestry of human life. 10x10 is ever-changing, ever-growing, quietly observing the ways in which we live. It records our wars and crises, our triumphs and tragedies, our mistakes and milestones. When we make history, or at least the headlines, 10x10 takes note and remembers. Each hour is presented as a picture postcard window, composed of 100 different frames, each of which holds the image of a single moment in time. Clicking on a single frame allows us to peer a bit deeper into the story that lies behind the image. In this way, we can dart in and out of the news, understanding both the individual stories and the ways in which they relate to each other. 10x10 runs with no human intervention, autonomously observing what a handful of leading international news sources are saying and showing. 10x10 makes no comment on news media bias, or lack thereof. It has no politics, nor any secret agenda; it simply shows what it finds. With no human editors and no regulation, 10x10 is open and free, raw and fresh, and consequently a unique way of following world events. In 10x10, we respond instinctively to patterns in the grid, visual indicators of relevance. When we see a frequently repeated image, we know it's important. When we see a picture of a movie star next to a picture of dead bodies, we understand the extremes that exist in our world. Scanning a grid of pictures can be more intuitive than reading headlines, for it lets the new

Landmark moments in citizen journalism Monday, March 30, 2009 Depending on whom you ask, citizen journalism is either pushing journalism forward or is unaccountable vigilantism. Either way, it is shaping the way we consume our news. Surely ordinary citizens were documenting and discussing news events before the advent of the internet but what separates citizen journalism from pure observation is the use of the net as an avenue to either aid or circumvent traditional media outlets and spread the news independently. Average Joes can take their own photos, record their own video and recount a story through blogs or other social media, often more quickly than a media organization can begin to report and in a more organic way than is usually presented by mainstream media. The following is a timeline of events in which ordinary citizens shaped the news, followed by an analog description of each landmark moment.

Soren Gordhamer writes and consults on ways we can more creatively and effectively use the technologies of our age, including social media. He is the author of "Wisdom 2.0″ (HarperOne, 2009). You can follow him on Twitter at @SorenG. It is hard to know sometimes how our life has changed until we stop for a moment and look at how different it is from ten or even five years ago. In recent years social media, likely more than anything else, has significantly impacted most of our daily lives. Envisioning the global conversation that has developed over the past few years because of tools like Facebook (Facebook) and Twitter (Twitter) might have been unimaginable for most people at the beginning of this decade. But social media communication tools have profoundly changed our lives and how we interact with one another and the world around us. Here are the top areas that social media has affected in our daily lives.

Soren Gordhamer writes and consults on ways we can more creatively and effectively use the technologies of our age, including social media. He is the author of "Wisdom 2.0″ (HarperOne, 2009). You can follow him on Twitter at @SorenG. It is hard to know sometimes how our life has changed until we stop for a moment and look at how different it is from ten or even five years ago. In recent years social media, likely more than anything else, has significantly impacted most of our daily lives. Envisioning the global conversation that has developed over the past few years because of tools like Facebook (Facebook) and Twitter (Twitter) might have been unimaginable for most people at the beginning of this decade. But social media communication tools have profoundly changed our lives and how we interact with one another and the world around us. Here are the top areas that social media has affected in our daily lives.

Twitter Literacy (I refuse to make up a Twittery name for it) Post-Oprah and apres-Ashton, Twittermania is definitely sliding down the backlash slope of the hype cycle. It's not just the predictable wave of naysaying after the predictable waves of sliced-breadism and bandwagon-chasing. We're beginning to see some data. Nielsen, the same people who do TV ratings, recently noted that more than 60% of new Twitter users fail to return the following month. To me, this represents a perfect example of a media literacy issue: Twitter is one of a growing breed of part-technological, part-social communication media that require some skills to use productively. Sure, Twitter is banal and trivial, full of self-promotion and outright spam. So is the Internet. The difference between seeing Twitter as a waste of time or as a powerful new community amplifier depends entirely on how you look at it - on knowing how to look at it. When I started requiring digital journalism students to learn how to use Twitter, I didn't have the list of journalistic uses for Twitter that I have compiled by now. So I logged onto the service and broadcast a request. "I have a classroom full of graduate students in journalism who don't know who to follow. Does anybody have a suggestion?" Within ten minutes, we had a list of journalists to follow, including one who was boarding Air Force One at that moment, joining the White House press corps accompanying the President to Africa.

Twitter Literacy (I refuse to make up a Twittery name for it) Post-Oprah and apres-Ashton, Twittermania is definitely sliding down the backlash slope of the hype cycle. It's not just the predictable wave of naysaying after the predictable waves of sliced-breadism and bandwagon-chasing. We're beginning to see some data. Nielsen, the same people who do TV ratings, recently noted that more than 60% of new Twitter users fail to return the following month. To me, this represents a perfect example of a media literacy issue: Twitter is one of a growing breed of part-technological, part-social communication media that require some skills to use productively. Sure, Twitter is banal and trivial, full of self-promotion and outright spam. So is the Internet. The difference between seeing Twitter as a waste of time or as a powerful new community amplifier depends entirely on how you look at it - on knowing how to look at it. When I started requiring digital journalism students to learn how to use Twitter, I didn't have the list of journalistic uses for Twitter that I have compiled by now. So I logged onto the service and broadcast a request. "I have a classroom full of graduate students in journalism who don't know who to follow. Does anybody have a suggestion?" Within ten minutes, we had a list of journalists to follow, including one who was boarding Air Force One at that moment, joining the White House press corps accompanying the President to Africa.

The photographer Simon Norfolk finds moments of beauty and wonder in the world's most forlorn landscapes. From Afghanistan to Auschwitz, Norfolk documents the imprints of war-sometimes physical, sometimes physic-on its surroundings. His book Bosnia: Bleed is an impressionistic testimony to the mass slaughter that accompanied the war in the former Yugoslavia. In particular, he focuses on the sites of "secondary mass graves," where the perpetrators tried to hide the evidence of their crimes. He writes, "They thought that, by intimidation and subterfuge, their dirty secrets could be preserved, held, trapped. Frozen."

In the vanguard of the Marines, the press corps had already stormed Somailia. Now we will see more of the famailiar pictures of grotesque human degradation, with foreign angels of mercy ministering to starving children, juxtaposed with images of trigger-happy teen-age looters. Such pictures prompted President Bush's military adventure-now they will justify it. The camera can't lie, we are told. But anyone who has watched a Western film crew in an African famine will know just how much effort it takes to compose the "right" image. Photogenic starving children are hard to find, even in Somalia. Somali doctors and nurses have expressed shock at the conduct of film crews in hospitals. They rush through crowded corridors, leaping over stretchers, dashing to film the agony before it passes. They hold bedside vigils to record the moment of death. When the Italian actress Sophia Loren visited Somalia, the paparazzi trampled on children as they scrambled to film her feeding a little girl-three times. This is disaster pornography.

"There is an unmistakable seriousness as well as a handsome hospitality in the range of method and morality, topic and topography on show." Times Higher Education Supplement The past two decades have witnessed an explosion of interest, research and writing on visual culture within the humanities and social sciences. journal of visual culture is an international, refereed journal which is a site for astute, informative and dynamic thought on the visual. The journal publishes work from a range of methodological positions, on various historical moments and across diverse geographical locations. It promotes research, scholarship and critical engagement with visual cultures.

E xpatriate Englishman Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904), a brilliant and eccentric photographer, gained worldwide fame photographing animal and human movement imperceptible to the human eye. Hired by railroad baron Leland Stanford in 1872, Muybridge used photography to prove that there was a moment in a horse's gallop when all four hooves were off the ground at once. He spent much of his later career at the University of Pennsylvania, producing thousands of images that capture progressive movements within fractions of a second.

Defending the Barricade On Feb. 1, 2006, Associated Press photographer Oded Balilty was in the West Bank settlement of Amona when a violent confrontation broke out between Jewish settlers and Israeli security forces. The troops were attempting to enforce a government order to tear down nine houses built on private Palestinian land after Israel's Supreme Court rejected a final appeal by the settlers. Balilty, camera ready, stood about 3 meters from the end of the barricade. Crowds lined up on a wall overlooking the holed-up settlers, while Israeli troops in riot gear advanced. "Nili, a young settler ... was standing 15 meters away, biting her fingernails, when she saw them coming and ran toward the barricade," Balilty said. Said Nili: "I felt a stranger pushing me to defend the barricade. It was God who gave me the courage." Moments after Balilty took the photograph that won him the Pulitzer Prize, Nili was beaten by club-wielding police.

On the eve of the election, a number of Magnum photographers have been venturing into American to capture what they can of this historic moment in time. The project is called InSight America. But rather than publish this work as a book a year after the fact, Magnum is posting the work online and on the fly. I caught up with Alex Webb after his recent journey to Ohio:

Wars have a way of reducing themselves to moments, single memories, tiny episodes. Here, pictures have a thousand-to-one advantage over words. The 10-year Vietnam War was summed up in four photographs: Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams captured the instant in 1968 when South Vietnamese Brig. Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan executed a Viet Cong prisoner on a Saigon street. Nick Ut snapped a picture of Kim Phuc, a Vietnamese girl, fleeing naked down a highway in Vietnam after a napalm attack in 1972. Ron Haeberle took a picture of the limp bodies of the My Lai massacre victims after they were shot in 1968. John Filo caught Mary Ann Vecchio screaming over the body of a fellow student slain by National Guardsmen during a war protest at Kent State University in Ohio in 1970. These photographs, it could be argued, tilted the whole balance of public opinion against the war. What occurred on the battlefield was rendered largely irrelevant by what occurred when certain photons massed themselves into images and rushed into the retinas and minds of the American public.

The Beauty of the Slideshow - Now Available to Everyone By Stanley LearystanleylearycloseAuthor: Stanley Leary See Author's Posts (38) Recent Posts * Still Images Plus Audio Can Be More Effective Than Online Video * Teaching Is a Great Way to Learn * Telling Stories with a Telephoto Lens * If Your Pictures Aren't Good Enough, You're Not Close Enough * What Kind of Photographer Are You? Stanley Leary is a Black Star photographer who has been telling stories for more than 20 years as a photojournalist. His work has appeared in Newsweek, Business Week, Sports Illustrated, Wired, Chicago Tribune, NY Times, World Book Encyclopedia, Information Week, Popular Mechanics, Technology Review, Atlanta Journal and Constitution, and many other publications. in Video and Multimedia on January 20th, 2008 Even before the Internet, I appreciated the slideshow. I created presentations with multiple projectors and audio, and I was always impressed with what the combined media could communicate. Even compared to video - where you move right through a moment so quickly you can miss the subtlety of it - the slideshow has its unique charms. The problem, in the old days, was that you had to have the audience present to deliver the program; it was a lot of work for a small number of people. The printed page reached a much larger audience. Today, with the Web becoming the leader in delivering the news, we are no longer limited to printed words and still images on the page. Rather than publishing a quote, we can deliver audio of the interviews and the experience, giving a story authenticity in a way that we couldn't achieve before. We can create slideshows for everyone - to watch whenever they choose.

NEW YORK-The panoramic photograph of a bootless soldier, sprawled almost gracefully in death in Afghanistan, might have made readers pause for a moment if it had appeared in a newspaper or magazine. But when "Taliban Soldier" filled a New York City gallery wall-blown up to near life size-it made the art world take note. Taken with a large-format camera, the monumental 4- by 8-foot print was presented for $15,000 four years ago at the Ricco Maresca Gallery, a Chelsea stop usually favored by folk and fine art collectors. It catapulted the Paris-based photographer Luc Delahaye, who shot the image on assignment for Newsweek, into international prominence. And it signaled a turning point for a small club of international war and "conflict" photojournalists, who now see their images appearing regularly in gallery and museum shows. Suddenly, the reality of war, famine, poverty and pain has turned into fine art. "Great collectors are always looking to be delighted by something that they don't know about, and this excites some of them," says Bill Hunt, the former Ricco Maresca co-director of photography who introduced Delahaye to gallery crowds.

The venerable profession of journalism finds itself at a rare moment in history when, for the first time, its hegemony as gatekeeper of the news is threatened by not just new technology and competitors but by the audience it serves. Citizens everywhere are getting together via the Internet in unprecedented ways to set the agenda for news, to inform each other about hyper-local and global issues, and to create new services in a connected, always-on society. The audience is now an active, important participant in the creation and dissemination of news and information, with or without the help of mainstream news media.

By A. D. Coleman The "New Documents" exhibition opened at New York's Museum of Modern Art on February 28, 1967, almost exactly a third of a century ago. Organized by John Szarkowski for the museum's Department of Photography, this show featured almost 100 prints by three relatively unrecognized younger photographers from the east coast of the U.S. - Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand - and came as a watershed moment in the evolution of contemporary photography. What exactly did this exhibition signify?

"Recently, the "citizen photo agency" Demotix has had reason to celebrate. The site gained fame by selling front-page photos to the New York Times taken by Iranians who captured shots of protests after the disputed presidential election in Iran. Then came another seminal moment when the site got the only shot of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. in handcuffs when he was arrested. That photo was featured on CNN, CBS and NBC and in the Washington Post, Boston Globe and other papers, bringing in more than $4,000 for Demotix and the photographer, William B. Carter."

"This past weekend, the horrific image of a young woman dying on camera in the midst of a protest in Iran turned into a rallying cry for many of those participating/following the events in Iran. In 40 seconds of grainy footage (shot on what appears to be the mobile phone of a passerby), we first see the wounded woman - now identified as Neda - as she falls to the floor into a pool of blood. Two men come to her aid and try to stem the bleeding from her chest. The person filming moves in closer and Neda turns towards the camera, seeming to fix her gaze on the lens pointed at her. A few seconds pass, the bleeding becomes more profuse, and Neda falls unconscious, passing away within moments. "