Group items tagged

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.

Is The Amateur Really A Threat to the Pro? Consider the photographer who has an unlimited amount of time to accomplish an image. Or, the student, who has a week or two to complete an assignment on, say, lighting a bowl of fruit. Or, the hobbyist photographer, who stumbles upon a great image. Are these photographers a threat to the photographer who works on assignment?

Episode III - Enjoy Poverty is the second in a series of three films by Martens that raise issues regarding contemporary image production. For Episode III Martens travelled for two years with his video camera in the Democratic Republic of Congo, an area marked by humanitarian disaster, questioning why the Western 'poverty' industry are benefactors rather than the people in the images. Working with Congolese photographers, he attempts to guide them in earning a living from poverty photography - a project doomed to failure. Episode III was screened at London's Wilkinson gallery for several weeks this winter, and during that time Martens spent an evening discussing his work with ArtReview's J.J. Charlesworth. This is Part I of that discussion.

Ryan Sholin on the future of newspapers, online news and journalism education. How I share: A tour of my personal linking behavior May 12, 2009 Things you may have noticed about me in recent days, weeks, months, or years: 1. I don't write blog posts as often as I used to. 2. I share links all over the place, and I have for a long time now. 3. I have a new job that involves a lot of thinking about best practices for journalists who link to content they don't produce themselves. With those three things as givens, what follows is an exploration of how I share links. If I ramble off on some tangent, feel free to jump in and stop me. [Sidenote: You can't jump in. Is there a WordPress plugin for paragraph-by-paragraph commenting yet?] Let's start with a list of links to all the places I share lists of links, and a brief explanation of what sort of links I share there:

2005 and 2006 saw the popular recognition and commercial embrace of a phenomenon which is set to deeply affect the intellectual life of developed and developing nations for years to come. Yahoo! bought Flickr. Google acquired YouTube. Rupert Murdoch purchased MySpace, and declared the future of his NewsCorp empire to lie in the user-led content creation spaces of such social software Websites more than in its many newspapers, broadcast channels, and other media interests (Murdoch, 2005). Finally, TIME broke with its long-standing tradition of nominating one outstanding public figure as 'person of the year', and instead selected 'you': all of us who are active in collaborative online spaces (Grossman, 2006).

The image was grainy, low quality and shot by a 17-year-old, most likely on a mobile phone. And, according to the London Times, it earned the photographer

Center for Citizen Media Rotating Header Image The Decline (and Maybe Demise) of the Professional Photojournalist Dec 4th, 2006 by Dan Gillmor. The rise of the citizen journalist is not a new phenomenon. People have been witnessing and taking pictures of notable events for a long, long time. And they've been selling them to traditional news organizations just as long.

Study from 2007 on 'hyperlocal journalism' - more from the perspective of web-editor, but with some useful information. "The rule in hyperlocal citizen journalism is that no one size or shape fits all. This study, funded by the Ford Foundation, sought to take a snapshot in time of a robust phenomenon - specifically, the development of hyperlocal community news sites - that is changing and growing week by week."

"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."

"Social Media: Don't Be Left Behind Departments, Electronic Market, Fall 2009 - By Richard on October 23, 2009 at 11:19 am Social networking websites are the talk of the town, but how can they help your business? By Rosh Sillars Supporters exalt it as the great advance in communication. Detractors consider it a waste of time. Like it or not, the phenomenon of social media empowers the public at large to capture and disseminate information immediately. But how do all these technological advances affect the photographer? Is the growth of social media killing our business? How do these changes affect the amateur? Are there ways for photographers to use these new tools for their benefit?"

"ast week, one of my media course (ed PD) classmates talked about the ongoing struggle to help students make sense of the flood of information online. She cited a negative experience with wikipedia, which resulted in an energetic exchange about the merits (and challenges) with open online content. It's not about "authority" nor should it be As a long time defender of the open web and open content, I wanted to point out that the educational bias towards "authoritative" or "received" sources, though relevant, is also highly political/ideological - especially in relation to emergent sources of knowledge (i.e., Open Content). Ideological in the contexts of: 1) who has access or control of the means of knowledge power and production 2) who endorses or authorizes those voices and 3) "what" forms are accepted as "valid"."

"Defining journalism now During my 11 years as a copy editor, I spent a lot of time with my nose in a dictionary. I doubt that I ever looked up the words journalism or journalist. Today, prompted by a question on Twitter, I did."

"There are times when technological change catches up with an idea. Now is such a moment, as social media transform how people receive and share news and information. Just a few years back the notion of journalism being a conversation, not a lecture, wasn't embraced widely in an industry content to transmit what reporters learned to audiences expected to consume it. Comfort with that notion grew as online comments and live chats assumed a role that Letters to the Editor once held on their own, albeit with greater anonymity and often less civility. Then, from the "audience" spilled forth blogs and photos, videos and tweets. Soon, the words "citizen" and "journalist" were joined in a marriage brokered by technology and nurtured by convenience as news organizations shed staff yet still needed to produce "content.""

interesting piece on how social networks helped build an audience for multimedia "It used to be so simple: Whether I needed to make my way through a police roadblock or explain to curious neighbors why I was taking pictures on their block, barking just two words usually did the trick: "Daily News!" In one breath, the transaction was complete. I had told them something about the authority behind my presence, and at the same time let them know exactly where they'd find my photos-in the next day's paper. I spent the better part of 17 years with the Philadelphia Daily News as a staff photographer and, eventually, the newsroom's first video journalist. Then, 10 months after taking a buyout, I found myself unable to respond to a local deli clerk's simple question: "What do you do for a living?""

"The past decade has seen dramatic changes in the information and communication environment. Parameters as to who has access to information gathering and dissemination have altered rapidly and irreversibly. Civil society actors such as NGOs and advocacy networks are becoming increasingly significant players as the traditional news media model is threatened by shrinking audiences, the availability of free content online, and the declining fortunes of mainstream media. To what extent do NGOs take on functions as information intermediaries, working in cooperation with, or even in the stead of, traditional news organizations? Are we witnessing a general trend, or do NGOs fulfill specific purposes in times of crisis or critical events that focus attention on a specific (international) topic? And what are the consequences of this for the fields of advocacy and journalism? This essay series, organized by the Center for Global Communication Studies (CGCS) at the Annenberg School, University of Pennsylvania, in cooperation with the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, seeks to examine these critical questions from a variety of perspectives, and encourage discussion and deliberation on what these changes mean for NGOs, traditional media outlets, news consumers, and society as a whole."

Part 1/6 - "From Refugee Photographer to War Photographer." Ashley Gilbertson photographs the war in Iraq for the New York Times. He talks about the invasion of Iraq, the battle for Falluja, the Marines he worked with, post-traumatic stress disorder, Iraqi civilians, and the future of photojournalism. His work is available in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War published by the University of Chicago Press. part 1 of 6

PhotoPlus Event: Elliott Erwitt and Alec Soth\n\nElliott Erwitt and Alec Soth, two great photographers widely separated by their vision, style, and generations--but sharing a sense of irony, self-effacing wit, and a photo agency (Magnum)-took the stage at New York's Javits Center last night to talk to a packed audience about their work and careers.\n\nPrompted by the moderator Harald Johnson and a projection of some of his most iconic images, Erwitt spoke first, offering a brief, matter-of-fact accounting of his career and work, which he peppered with one-liners.\n\nErwitt is a keen observer of people and dogs, and the absurd things they do. He also has a sharp comic sense of visual timing and juxtaposition. All of that was on display in his slideshow. Describing one image of a dog in jumping straight upwards, Erwitt said, "People ask, Why is he jumping?' It's because I barked. I bark at dogs, they jump."

Joe McNally is an internationally acclaimed American photographer and long-time photojournalist. McNally is known worldwide for his ability to produce technically and logistically complex assignments with expert use of color and light.