Group items tagged

Tim Heatherington photojournalist

No Caption Needed is a book and a blog, each dedicated to discussion of the role that photojournalism and other visual practices play in a vital democratic society. No caption needed, but many are provided. . . .

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.

A little while ago, I received an email that told me about a project photojournalist James Nachtwey had been working on, which was going to get unveiled at a later date. The email contained the request to write a post that included some piece of code, which would automatically reveal the new project on the day in question. Since I prefer to have full editorial control over this blog, I decided not to post about it. But I was also uncomfortable with how this then secret project - something supposedly very important and completely underreported - was being handled. I thought that generating a lot of suspense could easily be somewhat damaging to whatever it was Nachtwey wanted to talk about: What if on the day in question people would think "Well, this is it?"

Photographic truth and Photoshop April 17th, 2009 Photography's anxiety about truth, manipulation and reality has been on show recently. In different ways and from different contexts, people have been asking: "how much Photoshop is too much"? From the realm of fashion, French Elle is being celebrated for running a cover story in which the models photographs have not been 'Photoshopped' (thereby confirming, as I've noted previously, that digital manipulation is the norm in this visual domain). From the world of photojournalism, blogs like 1854, PDNPulse and the Online Photographer (with a follow-up here) have been buzzing with the story of the Danish photographer Klavs Bo Christensen who was excluded from that country's Picture of the Year competition for excessive colour manipulation of his Haiti story. Along with two others, Christensen was asked to submit his RAW files to the competition judges who felt that the colour in his photographs had been excessively saturated (their debate can be heard here), and removed his images from the competition as a result. Christensen was subsequently happy to have his files put on the web for comparison and discussion, thereby performing an important service to the photographic community.

Movie World Photo Press Award Winner 2008 05/06/2009 Filmed only a week before leaving for Amsterdam to receive the 2008 World Photo Press Award, Leica joined photojournalist Anthony Suau as he used his camera on assignment in Spanish Harlem to document the Feed the Children Drive in his ongoing coverage and interest of the economic crisis. As he traveled to Wall Street to discuss this major achievement in photojournalism, Leica had the opportunity to hear about his recent travels, how he captured the award winning photo and the other images in the series on the economic and foreclosure crisis in the U.S.