I get my share of junk email and so was glad the filters I have set up hadn't squashed Tina Dehal‘s recent note.

Short and sweet introductions are so hard to pass up. Here is what she said: “I am a photographer based in bombay, India……i just happen to come across your site and was very impressed with the amount of information you had on it…”

I suggest you check out her web site. I was very impressed with the way she approaches fashion – it's vastly different from what I have seen coming out of India and what makes it special may just be the way she chooses to light her subjects.

Via John Laxmi

One of my favorite documentary photographers – Eugene Richards – has an exhibit now through May 8 at the Leica Gallery in New York City. Read Vicki Goldberg's article in today's New York Times.

April 18, 2004
Photojournalism Without Apologies
By VICKI GOLDBERG
‘Fat Baby and Other Tales'

Leica Gallery, 670 Broadway at Bond Street. Through May 8.

WHILE photography blossoms and spreads unchecked in the art galleries, photojournalism and documentary photography generally shiver in a winter of discontent. Outlets for photojournalism, in decline in this country since the demise of the weeklies Life and Look in the early 70's, continue to shrink in favor of celebrity portraiture. War and its surrogates are the only other expanding areas for photojournalists. Documentary photographs are accused of lying and documentary photographers of exploitation, condescension, pandering and related unsavory activities. Yet they continue to try to report the world as it is or as they see it, some hoping to change it, some struggling with doubts they harbored long before the critics arrived.

Eugene Richards, 59, one of the most respected American photojournalists, has photographed a couple of circles of Dante's hell and come back to tell the tale. In spite of all his experience, he says that, in fact, he never trusted photography. You won't catch him saying the medium is truth, or that it's nuanced, or gives people room to change dramatically or, in the end, that it's enough. Photography can let the ideas loose and start the discussion, but he doesn't believe you can change anything, though you do the best you can. In a recent interview he remarked that the crack addicts in “Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue,” his 1994 show and book, “did what they were going to do all along — they died.”

That this is the view of a man at the top of his profession gives an idea of the difficulties photographers can face when confronting situations in need of repair. Still, he has never stopped. Evidence of his perseverance can be seen at the Leica Gallery on lower Broadway in “Eugene Richards: Fat Baby and Other Tales,” which presents 52 black-and-white images from three of his books.

There are glimpses here of mental and physical illness, teenage gangs and drug busts, as well as of marriage, birth, gay love and old age — a gamut from bleak to dire, with a few detours into tenderness and joy. “The Fat Baby,” a new book from Phaidon, includes some unpublished photo essays and has a number of less taut and clamorous images — a few that merely mark time, a few that strain for effect. (The book's title comes from the chapter about famine in Niger.)

Mr. Richards's camera cuts a rude fragment from a scene, finding a jagged piece that concentrates its emotional force. He has honed a style that mirrors — with disjunctions, displacements, extreme croppings, surprises and surprising angles, and sometimes an almost unbearable in-your-face closeness — the shattered or merely alienated lives he often observes.

For instance: in the center of the floor of a Mexican mental institution a long puddle of urine advances toward us; there are legs and silhouettes beside it and the reflection of a man in its middle. In a picture from Boston in 1975, the lower half of a boy leaping across a gap on his bike hangs down from the top edge of the frame just above a scribbled sign that says “Kill Niggers.” In Africa, an ancient woman, seen from waist to shoulder in profile, has the wrinkled skin of an elephant and a pendulous breast. She is carrying her grandson on foot for miles to save his life.

Mr. Richards can also adroitly register the evanescent signs of happiness, sorrow and exhaustion: the moment when a pregnant woman's eyes grow wide as she listens to her baby's heartbeat through a stethoscope; the shell-shocked eyes of a nurse in an emergency room; his first wife in the hospital, laughing despite the black scar from surgery for breast cancer, which would ultimately kill her.

If such disturbing images, as highly personal and as jarring as they are, have a vaguely familiar look, that is partly because, from the early 1970's on, Mr. Richards made the style so powerfully expressive that scores of young photojournalists followed him. His work can strike sparks; in 1994 “Cocaine True” practically lit a fire. A black media watchdog group accused Mr. Richards of being bigoted. He had few defenders; he recalls that it was “a kind of lonely year.” He finally met with the group's representatives and convinced them that when he was photographing a subject like crack he just didn't notice anyone's color.

Two of the addicts later got clean and invited him to their wedding; similarly, an elderly doctor he photographed has become a kind of surrogate father. Sometimes the photographs are aggressively intimate, as in the view of one eye, the nose and mouth of a crack addict who is missing a number of teeth and holds a needle between those she still has, or the close-up of a man leaning atop his new baby to kiss his wife, still evidently shocked by the birth experience.

Mr. Richards says he can get so close because people can tell he's not judgmental. And, he says, “my biggest problem is I'm so uninteresting that all these people forget I'm around.” While he was photographing a 17-year-old pregnant woman and her boyfriend, they would quarrel and throw rocks at each other and even start to make love — at which point he would get out, certain her father would murder him if he caught him there.

He does tend to fade into the woodwork: slight, nearly bald, with a shaved monk's tonsure and a thin beard and mustache, glasses, a voice so quiet it is barely audible at times, and an unassuming, receptive manner. This is not the expected kit bag of someone who has found his way into a crack den, the home of a child abuser and the operating room in a remote Serbian hospital. But he started down this path as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War, studying with the master photographer Minor White while waiting to be carted off to prison. Unexpectedly, he was offered the option of volunteering for Vista, a social service organization, in Arkansas, where civil rights were words you didn't bother saying out loud.

He photographed, wrote for a small newspaper and ran a day-care program. Vista sent two black women — he's white — to help him at the center. He wrote to say they couldn't do that; they said that was a racist remark. Eventually he was beaten so badly he suffered massive seizures and lost “an entire archive” of his memory, which he says he has replaced with stories, because everyone needs memories. For a while he was addicted to phenobarbital to prevent the seizures, giving him some sense of the power of drugs.

Photographing the down side is a hard way to make a living and has steadily become harder. Photo essays, Mr. Richards's métier, have nearly vanished as publications demand a grand-slam picture to do it all at one blow. Sixteen years ago, when he was already happily remarried and his son was newly born, his year's income was $8,000. “When you're a creative person,” he says, “you don't notice how little you're making.” Most years he makes from $20,000 to $50,000 after expenses. Advertising work and occasional grants free him to photograph as he wants. Many documentary photographers do commercial work or teach to supplement their incomes.

His own parents struggled financially and quarreled constantly, mostly about money. As a boy in Dorchester, Mass., he would try to break the television set so that they would be mad at him rather than at each other. “You can grow up angry,” he says, “and you have to find some way to express it.” He thinks about this. “Being a social critic is a way of getting all the anger out.” When he's working, he says, everything's alive, all his feelings are alive, he gets upset but keeps going; he does his job. Any real distress hits him later.

He speculates that his early awareness of struggle is one part of what drives him to make his kind of pictures, though no one can quite pin down what makes a photographer seek out nursing homes and blind men and babies dying of AIDS to make them somehow beautiful, somehow comprehensible, somehow visible to those who were not there and would not, perhaps even could not, look if Gene Richards did not show the way.  

Via John Laxmi

Late as this post may be, it's an exhibit not to be missed (click on the link below for the NYT article). The NYTimes review mostly pans the Magnum (a premier photo agency) photo exhibit but it is nonetheless an important collection to peruse should you find yourself in NYC.

Since the exhibit runs through September 6, perhaps we could arrange a trip during the SAJA Convention. Registration for the convention is now open. Discounted (Early Bird) registration is from April 15 to May 7. Advanced registration is from May 8 to June 11. While on-site registrations may be possible, save the disappointment and register early because the SAJA convention almost always sells out!

THE NEW YORK TIMES
April 2, 2004, Friday

PHOTOGRAPHY REVIEW; Pictures of the Picturesque, Not Necessarily of the Truth

By KEN JOHNSON

Before television, Pop Art, Deconstructionist theory and the digital revolution, it was possible to believe unreservedly in photojournalism. It was back then, in 1947, that the renowned photojournalists' cooperative Magnum Photos was founded by the photographers Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and David Seymour.

Magnum's mission was to liberate its members from the formulaic requirements of mainstream magazines and newspapers, to enable them to bear witness more directly and truthfully to the tumultuous unfolding of 20th-century history.

Times have changed, however, and today hardly anyone takes for granted the transparent veracity of journalistic or any other kind of photography. Even Magnum's Web site acknowledges, ”In today's ‘information age,' if the reader can be enjoined to enter the quest for meaning, then one has succeeded.” Which brings us to ”Magnum's New Yorkers,” an exhibition of pictures by Magnum photographers at the Museum of the City of New York.

Culled from the Magnum archives by the museum's curator of photography, Bob Shamis, the show's 130 pictures by 35 photographers are meant to add up to a portrait of New York. Dating from the late 1940's to 2002, the pictures show people from many walks of life in all kinds of situations: celebrities and crack addicts, politicians and strippers, Wall Street businessmen and East Village bohemians, political protesters and fashion models and so on.

While perusing this occasionally diverting but ultimately enervating display, you may wonder if this photographic panorama truly represents New York and its huge and hugely diversified population. Of course it doesn't, and probably no selection of 130 photographs could. There's just too much to cover, especially if you stretch it out over 50 years. But the show — in which, by the way, there are no photographs involving technical deceptions, digital or otherwise — also affirms deeper doubts about photojournalism itself and its ability to tell us the truth about our world.

What photojournalism mostly trafficks in — or, at least, the photojournalism in this exhibition — is not the truth but the picturesque. Photojournalists don't bring us the news: they give us professionally processed images and stories — polished, plausible fictions — that we effortlessly understand because they are so much like stories and images we've seen before.

This explains the many photographs of famous people in ”Magnum's New Yorkers”: James Dean walking through a wintry Times Square with his overcoat collar turned up and a cigarette dangling from his lips; a luminous close-up of the young Marilyn Monroe; Grace Kelly emerging like a goddess between two men watching her from the foreground; Miles Davis coolly blowing his horn in a smoky jazz club. At their best such images become icons permanently installed in our culture's fantasy life.

Beyond images of the glamorous, rich, powerful and famous, pictorial clichés run in every direction: boys jumping into the East River; a sprawling inner-city family picnicking in Central Park; children playing in the spray from a fire hydrant; the sleeping man's bald head down on a cafeteria table; Fulton Fish Market workers romantically silhouetted against the early morning sun; a woman and her child visiting a man at the Tombs; a young man throwing himself into the mosh pit at a punk rock concert; a recently arrived Chinese immigrant breakfasting in his briefs on a fire escape above the Bowery; women examining handbags piled on a street vendor's display table.

There are, as well, the expected sorts of quirky and incongruous pictures: the long neck and little head of a llama sticking out of a car window; the short, stout, conservatively dressed white man standing next to the tall, slender, black dude in a plaid suit; the masked man in a maid's outfit in the parlor of a private club for sadomasochists.

All these and many others have human interest and sometimes genuine entertainment value, and they are all made with impeccable professionalism.

Yet there is not one that looks different from thousands of similar photographs that we have seen before in magazines and newspapers. The deadening familiarity extends even to the kinds of gritty investigative work that the most adventurous photojournalists pursue. See, for example, the portrait of a hollow-eyed young woman hungrily watching a glass pipe pass from hand to hand in a squalid crack den, from a series on addiction by Eugene Richards.

All the photographs mentioned above were made, of course, by particular photographers: the show includes pictures by the four Magnum founders as well as notables like Cornell Capa, Bruce Davidson, Elliott Erwitt, Inge Morath, Susan Meiselas and many others whose names you may know. (Magnum now has 62 active members.) Yet a curious sense of anonymity prevails throughout the show. It's as if a single collective mind, the generic mind of photojournalism, were being channeled by different people with only superficially varying inflections.

To put all this into perspective it may help to think of two photographers who are not in this show but who made some of the most compelling New York photographs ever: Diane Arbus and Gary Winogrand. Both pursued particular kinds of subject matter, Arbus seeking out socially marginal people and Winogrand compulsively stalking beautiful women on the street. But what distinguishes the work of each is not what they were looking at but how the formal qualities of their pictures reflected their deeply idiosyncratic ways of experiencing the world.

It's been said before, but it's worth repeating: what changes your world is not seeing different things but seeing things differently.

”Magnum's New Yorkers” is at the Museum of the City of New York, 1220 Fifth Avenue, near 103rd Street, (212) 534-1672, through Sept. 6.

Via Melissa Lyttle

For the last three years there has been a split between the National Press Photographer's Association and the University of Missouri's Pictures of the Year. The purpose of this letter is to begin a dialogue with the hope of bringing the two groups together and offering a united community to photographers who enter these contests.

There is such a fine tradition behind the original contest as it was affiliated with the NPPA. Members looked forward to this one contest as a way to measure their work amongst their peers. We believe that having two similar contests based in America dilutes the honors and ultimately does not serve the profession. Resources are limited, and duplicating the effort amounts to wasted time and money on all sides.

The original mission of the unified POYi competition was simply to recognize good work and to elevate the craft of visual storytelling. It is in this spirit that we implore the leaders of POYi and NPPA to out their egos aside and begin discussions to come together to forge a new relationship. This new beginning is something photojournalism will benefit from.

In order to do this, please take a moment and go to this link:

http://www.aphotoaday.org/petition.html

Add your name to a petition to show your support for this movement among photographers both in and out of the NPPA membership.

I sincerely thank you for taking time to address this issue. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions please email them to petition@aphotoaday.org and we will try to address them.

We are stronger together than we are apart.

Thank You,

Melissa Lyttle

David Pogue's article in today's New York Times promises to make it easy for us to share our images with our friends and family and even have them printed at a photo store of our choice.

Please let me know of your experiences, if any of you actually use the two services mentioned; OurPictures.com and ShareALot.com. From David's article I understand that OurPictures.com is a Window-only based program. ShareALot.com appears to be open to Windows and Macintosh platforms. It's not rocket science to figure out which one I'll be using.

Twenty years ago Weston Naef, the curator of the J. Paul Getty Museum‘s photo collection in Los Angeles, established a permanent home for some very important photographs. Today, not only does he overlook the work of social documentary photographers Lewis Hine and Dorothea Lange, he is also responsible for the abstract imagery that made avant-garde photographer Maholy-Nagy famous.

Now through July 25, these images and more can be seen in a show called Photographs of Genius At the Getty.

“Presenting the work of innovative photographers who profoundly influenced their contemporaries and succeeding generations of artists, this exhibition celebrates the 20th anniversary of the Museum's department of photographs. It includes selected prints by 38 major photographers whose work is held in depth by the Getty, including Julia Margaret Cameron, Carleton Watkins, Eugène Atget, Alfred Stieglitz, Walker Evans, and Diane Arbus. “

If you are in LA, check it out!

The New York Times reports that Vishakha N. Desai will take over as President of The Asia Society, “the first woman and the first Asian-American to head the organization.”

Ms. Desai's appointment continues this organization's evolution from an elite club of Foreign Service hands — devotees of Asian culture, most of them white and male — to a center with a broad cultural and educational purpose covering more than 30 countries, with offices in Washington, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Hong Kong, Manila, Shanghai and Melbourne, Australia.

May we expect to see more art exhibits from South Asia?

The National Press Photographers Association has announced the winners of this year's Best of Photojournalism competition.

Much of what separates MSNBC.com from the online pack is its innovative and aggressive use of graphics – or “art” in the news-business parlance.

The article by Jon Friedman of CBS MarketWatch.com fails to mention Brian Storm (now a vice president at Corbis Images), a key player who made it possible for MSNBC.com to achieve such high standards in the use of images and graphics. Indeed for years, it was Storm's bold initiatives that garnered the website a steady stream of well-earned awards.

I get asked where one could learn photography. There is a long list of colleges and institutes. But none of them will be as much fun as Julia Dean's workshops. They are out of this world. Trust me. I have watched her teach. I spent some time as an intern with Julia Dean several years ago. She is a fabulous teacher and photojournalist. You will be inspired by her energy and enthusiasm for all things photographic.

Check out the line up of people for April and May. While she may not be teaching all of these courses, there is something for everyone; from beginner to advanced photographer. Julia's contact information is listed below should you need to get more information. And, yes, while Julia offers workshops in a great many places around the world, you have to be in LA for all these workshops. If you do sign up with her, tell her I sent you!

April 2004

Portfolio Review:
How to Create a Winning Portfolio with Debra Weiss
April 3 (a one-day workshop), Saturday, 9 am – 5 pm
This is a wonderful opportunity to have a former professional photo agent give you advice about your portfolio, how to put it together and how to improve it. Debra — now a creative consultant — was an agent for some of the top names in the business.
Workshop Fee: $250

Lighting and Dramatic Portrait on the Venice Boardwalk
with Michael Grecco
April 12 – 16 (a one-week class), Monday – Friday, 9 am – 5 pm
Michael Grecco, one of today's premier portrait photographers, will guide you on a photo journey along the Venice Beach Boardwalk. Michael has taught here before, but only for one day. This time, he'll be teaching a week-long workshop, so take advantage of this great opportunity. Michael will show you many different lighting techniques, as well as how to work with the people you are photographing to make them more at ease.
Workshop Fee: $825 (fee includes all equipment rental)
http://www.michaelgrecco.com

The Black & White Course II with Julia Dean
April 12 – June 21 (a six-week class over 12-week time period), Monday evenings, 7-10 pm
This course is all about seeing in Black & White, developing a personal vision and style, and creating a body of cohesive work. We discuss all the genres of photography such as landscape, nudes, portraits, still life's, documentary. Each week, you then pick a genre, and will photograph under a specific lighting situation such as contrasty light, low light, inclement weather, to get a good grasp of how to expose in all kinds of lighting situations.
Workshop Fee: $415

Basic Photography with Julia Dean
April 13 – May 18 (a six-week class), Tuesday evenings, 7-10 pm
(This class is full.)
Workshop Fee: $415

Alternative Photography:
Pinhole Cameras, Plastic Cameras, Polaroid Transfers
with Aline Smithson and Julia Dean
April 21 – May 12 (a four-week class), Wednesday afternoons, 12-4 pm
This class is as much fun as a grade-school art class! People who take this class are either (1) novices who don't know anything about photography or (2) more advanced photographers who want to add some creative approaches to their work. If you want to know more about all of these “alternative techniques,” we will be having an exhibit opening on April 16th of “alternative” work. (Invitation to come next week!)
Workshop Fee: $395
Lab Fee: $75 (covers all supplies and equipment for each process, including a plastic camera that participants will keep
http://www.alinesmithson.com

Intermediate Photography with Robert Rosenheck
April 22 – May 27 (a six-week class), Thursday evenings, 7-10 pm
This class is for those who have had a Basic Photography class and are ready for the next step. Robert will not only be reviewing topics such as exposure and composition, but he'll be adding additional information such as “night shooting,” and much more!
Workshop Fee: $415
http://robertrosenheck.com

Infrared Made Simple with Stephen Schafer
April 24 & 25 (a two-day workshop), Saturday and Sunday, 1-5 pm
This is a beautiful technique, but rather difficult to figure out on your own. Avoid years of frustration with Stephen's simple formulas. Check out Steve's work to for beautiful examples of what you can do with infrared film.
$250
http://www.schafphoto.com

The Photojournalistic Approach with Daniel Milnor
April 28 – July 7 (six-week class over 12-week time period), Wednesday evenings, 7-10 pm
Not only is Dan a fabulous documentary photographer, but he's a natural born teacher as well. For those of you who know me, this was a hard class for me to give up, since it's one of my very favorites. THAT should tell you how much I think of Dan's teaching.
Workshop Fee: $415
http://milnorpictures.com

May 2004

Introduction to Color Photography with Robert Rosenheck
May 1 – 22 (a four-week class), Saturday mornings, 9 am – 12 pm
This goal of this class is to obtain a working understanding of how film reacts to light and records color. You will learn how to “see” color and how to develop a personal color sense. The class covers types of film, such as negative versus transparency, and tungsten versus daylight. You'll learn about cross processing and various other creative techniques too.
Workshop Fee: $350
http://robertrosenheck.com

View Camera Workshop: Portraits and Landscapes
with Norma C. Smith
May 1 – 22 (a four-week class), Saturday afternoons, 1-4 pm
This hands-on class will give you a chance to learn and practice skills using large format cameras. The class will cover all aspects of view camera use, such as movements, exposure, equipment choice, lens choice, film handling, and filters. There is nothing more beautiful than a BIG negative. And Norma is a great teacher!
Workshop Fee: $395 (Fee includes view camera rentals and Polaroid backs)

Studio Portrait and Location Lighting
For the Working and Aspiring Photographer with Harold Sweet
Manager of the Rental Department at Samy's Camera
May 25 – June 29, (a six-week class), 7-10 pm
(This popular class is full.)
Workshop Fee: $600 (Fee includes all rental eqiupment)

Julia Dean & Associates
The Julia Dean Photo Workshops
3111 Ocean Front Walk, Suite 102
Marina del Rey, CA 90292
310-821-0909 phone
310-821-0809 fax
email: julia@juliadean.com
workshops: http://www.juliadean.com
child labor project: http://www.childlaborphotoproject.org