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Frontline Club: Irme Schaber talks about Gerda Taro At last week's Photography event at the Frontline Club, Irme Schaber talked about the life and work of Gerda Taro. If you missed the event, here is your chance to watch the entire debate. Schaber is a writer and lecturer on the history of exile photography, photojournalism and print-media. She is also Taro's biographer and curator of the current exhibition at the Barbican. Next week, she will present and talk about a wide selection of Taro's work. Taro worked alongside Robert Capa, who was her photographic as well as romantic partner and the two collaborated closely. Her photographs were widely reproduced in the French press and incorporated the dynamic camera angles of New Vision photography as well as a physical and emotional closeness to her subject. While covering the crucial battle of Brunete in July 1937, Taro was struck by a tank and killed.

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.