April 8, 2008 by pmelcher.

I was fortunate enough to have met both Pierre and Alexandra Boulat. I have been even more fortunate to have seen their images. In their memory and to continue the great photographic work of this amazing family, I am proud to  announce the creation of : The Pierre and Alexandra Boulat Association and Grant and the Pierre and Alexandra Boulat Association.
Formed in the memory of Pierre and Alexandra Boulat by friends and family after the death of Alexandra Boulat in 2007, the Association seeks to keep the spirit of father and daughter alive through making their work available to the public and creating an annual grant for a photographer and sponsoring the education of young photographers.

Membership of the Association and Donations:

To become a member of the Association:

> For individual subscribers: 50 €
> For a company or an organization: 100 €

Additional donations are welcome:

In Europe:

Pierre & Alexandra Boulat Foundation
HSBC UBP – Paris Madeleine, France.
RIB: 30938 00080 00800019113 05
IBAN: 3093 8000 8000 8000 1911 305
code BIC LUBPFRPP
The Pierre and Alexandra Boulat Grant:
We will award a Grant to a photographer to produce a story that must be told but that the photographer cannot find support for from within the Media.
The first Grant will be awarded at Visa pour L’Image in Perpignan 2008, as it was an event very close to the hearts of Alexandra and Pierre Boulat.

The photographer should submit, no later than July 1st each calendar year, a one page proposal with a portfolio of 20 pictures to prove competency. A first committee will make a pre-selection in Paris and the final decision will be made in Perpignan with a jury of 7 or 9 people chosen among the most important photo editors at Visa pour L’image.

Submissions to:

The Alexandra and Pierre Boulat Association Grant
Cosmos
56, Bld Latour Maubourg,
Paris, 75007
France.
Exhibition projects:
-Vannes Festival in April in France is devoted to Alexandra. They will show her video MODEST.
-New York Photo Festival will show MODEST by Alexandra in the new VII gallery in Brooklyn in May
-FotoGrafia International Festival, Rome. Through the Looking Glass, an homage to Alexandra curated by Francesco Zizola and Deanna Richardson. May 8th to June 5th
-Bruxelles: Bruno Stevens who is organizing a major exhibition on War-Photojournalism will show one of Alexandra’s images with her comment.
-Visa pour l’Image, Perpignan September 2008 will show a major retrospective exhibition of Alexandra’s work. It will be in the present Pierre Boulat space.
-To be confirmed: Jean-Louis Atlan Space Ground 00 In Washington will show an exhibition by Alexandra for the first edition of Photo Week D.C. November 2008

Prints:
Alexandra’s prints are available through Bill Hunt Gallery in New York and through the Alexandra and Pierre Boulat Association in Paris.
Pierre’s Prints are available through the Alexandra and Pierre Boulat Association, Paris.
Press: Pierre Boulat is represented by the Cosmos Photo Agency in Paris.
Alexandra Boulat is represented by the VII Photo Agency in Paris and New York

The Board
Annie Boulat – Présidente
Gary Knight – Vice Président
Antoinette Boulat – Secrétaire
Jean-François Leroy – Trésorier

Honorary and consultant members :
Issa Frei, Maryanne Golon, WW Hunt, Olivier Kaeppelin, Antonin Kratochvil, Patrice Lamotte, Caroline Mangez, Alison Morley, Chris Morris, Ariane Quentier, Robert Stevens, Sylvie Grumbach, Patrice Massoteau, Nicolas Saada, Jean-François Gallois, Jean-François Camp, Mete Zihnioglu,Goksin Sipahioglu,Kent Kobersteen.

For further information please contact Annie Boulat: annie(at)cosmosphoto.com

Posted in magazine, Cosmos, newspaper, photojournalism, france, editorial, news | Print | No Comments »

April 7, 2008 by pmelcher.

I will never understand the publishers stubbornness in designing magazine online. They literally replicate their print edition. Not just the content, but the layout. You have a cover/front page. You have sections, you have pages and along all that, a lot and lot of text .

Scrolling, for example, is much easier online. No need to change pages when all you have to do is scroll down. Why fix a limit on how far down you can scroll, when the majority of us have a wheel and can read down for ever?

One reason is that making you change page forces the page to reload, thus displaying new ads. Good for the publisher, not for the reader.

And what is it with this obscene amount of text? Since the launch of Netscape, back in the early 90’s, the web can easily display images, yet all publication use much more text than visuals. Yet the cost is practically the same.

One would have thought that, by now, all the news could have been delivered in a multimedia format. Instead of the linear print magazine format, the web offers video, sound, graphics and of course, photography, to give the readers a more three diminutional vision of a story.

Yet few, if none, use this ability. Its like driving a ferrari at 20 MPH all the time.

Magazine publishers, as we all know, are extremely resistant to change. If anything, they will do more of the same and copy their competition before they will innovate. They mostly believe that their content is so special, it cannot be brought down by the packaging.  They should think again.

With the coming of age of the internet generation, those who grew up in the 90’s and are about to hit college, this will change fast. Right now they are busy absorbing. Absorbing Youtube, Facebook, EW online, myspace. They currently take what is being offered to them. As somewhat passive consumers. But when they hit the work force and take charge, they will certainly create a new medium and certainly affect it deeply.

Online magazine will be more web friendly, mixing text, video, voice over, photography to deliver the story. Navigation will no longer be up and down, left to right.

Interfaces will more like the one use by Brightqube who sadly currently only uses it for delivering  RF images. You will be able to slide your way through a publication that will all reside on one page. Companies like MediaStorm will be able to produce more interactive multimedia, where one would be more involved in its unfolding instead of being a passive listener.  For example, on a report on the Iraq war, one could decide between the short or long version, the unrated or family friendly version, wether to read or listen. And much, much  more.

Magazine sites currently look like scanned magazines. TV sites, look like small tv sets. News site, depending on who produced it, look like their parent. Obviously they want to maintain their brand, and they will. But like microstock to the commercial stock world, they are leaving the door wide open for someone else to steal their readership.

And they will.

Posted in magazine, mediastorm, focus, technology, Piclens, multimedia, Search, msnbc.com, editorial, photojournalism, web 2.0, newspaper, news | Print | No Comments »

April 3, 2008 by pmelcher.

You would think that you could immediately say which news photographer won 11 prizes this year. You would probably think..”mmm, someone from VII or Getty, no ?”.

You could say that but you would be wrong.

This year alone, he won:

3  National Geographic prizes.

4 White House News Photographers associations prizes

Grand prize PDN & National Geographic Traveler

2 Honorable Mentions PX3 Prix de la photographie de Paris

First Place portrait Best Of Photojournalism NPPA

Yet his images have never been shown at Visa Pour l’image, ICP and other venerable photo institution. You will not see his images at the first NY photo festival. Probably because he does not shoot wars, does not have any images of dead people and does not carry a HOLGA. However you have seen his images in Newsweek, TIME, Stern, Paris Match. And you will see more, trust me. You even have seen him published here.

Yes, it’s Olivier Douliery, from Abaca Press . Extremely talented news photographer from Washington DC who does magic with an extremely  difficult subject : US politics. A great example of what photojournalism can do when it does not desperately try to be art, but a communication language. Olivier does not capture faces and places, he gets their soul. From a defeated Mike Tyson before his final match, to a playful Dalai Lama, from a Bill Clinton looking through the shoes of his candidate wife, to a George Bush laughing like a little kid at his inauguration as if he just pulled a nasty trick at another kid in the schoolyard, Olivier photograph with a smart sense of humor that makes you smile and reflect at the same time. There is no politicians in Olivier’s image, but rather players on an empty stage that have their moments of sadness, doubt, happiness, exhaustion, triumph. People with emotions, like you and me. Olivier captures the emotions of the so called powerful. The whole gamut. And makes them human again, with an incredible respect for his subject. A little bit as he was photographing  his cousins at summer family gathering.

There is a sense of time in all of his images, of  immediacy. It would be almost impossible to take any of his image and put them out of context. They would look odd and wrong. That is why he is a great photojournalist. Because he no only captures the person, but also everything that is going in at that time, in that persons life.

And finally, Olivier is great human being. Nice, polite, helpful, he is respected and adored by his peers. I am privileged to know him. He as a great career ahead of him.

More of his images here

Posted in TIME, newspaper, magazine, Newsweek, photojournalism, slideshow, news, france, editorial, getty | Print | No Comments »

April 2, 2008 by pmelcher.

A new company emerged from unknown depth a few days ago, proposing free “automated” tagging, or keywording. Named Tagcow, the company does not explain how the tagging is done.

Curious, I decided to give it a spin with a couple of images including this image:

After two days, the image was finally tagged with two words: “Pool” , “Man”. I guess that is what you get for free. Furthermore, when I downloaded the image, I could not find the keywords anymore…There is nothing automated about this service. It is currently impossible for a computer to recognize  the content of an image. The most advanced systems I have seen have a 10% success rate, and then again with very contrasted and simple pictures. Tagcow uses a little known service offered by Amazon call the Mechanical Turk. With this service, anyone can put a long, painful task and offer to pay for human beings to fulfill them

“Complete simple tasks that people do better than computers. And, get paid for it”. At 0.01 cent a picture, one can get images keyworded for cheap. However, the quality is not guaranteed.

Thus it is the power of the masses used here, making more obvious why they picked a cow for their name. Not the brightest animal in the land

Posted in No sense, Search, copyright, IPTC, keyword, flickr, prosumer, web 2.0, filter | Print | 2 Comments »

April 1, 2008 by pmelcher.

A little fun exercise for the week. Taco Bell in association with Sports Illustrated have launched this interesting website :

- You pick a location

- you pick some action

You start shooting.

No, you cannot  license them .

All the fun of being a top swimsuit photographer for Sports Illustrated with none of the hassles.

try it here :  http://www.directdaniella.com/

Posted in magazine, focus, technology, lens, celebrity, license, prosumer, web 2.0, multimedia, editorial | Print | No Comments »

April 1, 2008 by pmelcher.

How many times will  members of this industry get together and talk about IPTC, keywording and other metadata. How many meetings, conferences, synopsis, “get togethers”, panels, parties, does it take ? Both the ASPP conference in Arizona and CEPIC in Malta have scheduled hours long conferences on this subject. Again. The one in CEPIC is 8 hours long !!!

It used to be that the IPTC was a small geeky association of nerds looking into how to standardize metadata in images. It has now become the most sought-after organization. More than the dying PLUS coalition.

The amusing part is that none of the attendants are keywording their own images. They have staff people to do that. Furthermore, none of the companies that offer this service are on the panels( JaincoTech, Keedup, OnAsia Digital, Etc) They would know better, wouldn’t they?  Instead, you have marketing managers or agencies owners sitting in stuffy rooms, vaguely writing notes while waiting for the suffering to end until they can finally get a free drink at the evening’s cocktail party.

At a time when the temple of controlled vocabulary  ( the Library of Congress) has decided to pull out from its antiquated method of keywording by putting 4,000 of its images into Flickr and ask for crowdsourcing wisdom, the photo agency world is wasting time and money into desperately trying to impose a standardized form of controlled vocabulary. Some probably spend more time and money on attending these panels than they do in a whole year of marketing.

The aim, apparently, is to define a series of code words that could be transported from one databank to another and yield the same results. Thousands of them. Same keywords. Wether they are related to the real world is irrelevant as the priority is to standardize and eventually give photo buyers a book on which word to use and how. And then what, have university offer a degree in photo researching, transforming photo buyers into bonified librarians? It is bad enough that some “photo editors” have no visual experience, it gives me the shivers to think what would become if this would happen.

There are few misconceptions here :

Language, unless dead, evolves all the time. Even dictionary publishers worldwide know  as they add and delete words every year.  Who uses “walkman” anymore ?

Keywording is not a marketing tool:  A bad or irrelevant  image well keyworded is still a bad image. It will not sell.

Controlled Vocabulary does not include local cultures. If it does, than it cannot be controlled anymore. It is arrogant, pedant and quite simply foolish to even believe that one controlled vocabulary can and will apply to the whole world.

A word is not a definition. It is only a description. It takes many words to skim the surface of what an image is. Thus keywording should be an accessory to search, not its main engine.

In the long term, keywording will die. Already, there are other emerging ways to search for images : visual, color, face recognition, similar, pattern recognition. In the text world, there is even semantic search, which allows you to search by meaning instead of exact match.

Google images, which everyone sees as the ultimate “find me tool” does not even index IPTC.

They say insanity is repeating the same thing over and over hoping for a different result. Seems to be that the photo industry is banging over and over on the same door and it will just not open.

The solutions ? Exactly what the user generated content agencies are doing. Let the keywords be offered by the source . They shoot, they keyword. And they keyword well because they are using an everyday vocabulary that the buyers are also using. A vocabulary that changes and evolves all the time. A vocabulary that is not “controlled”. Organized chaos.

Or follow the giants. Getty, which you never see at these repeated panels, as well as AP, Reuters, Corbis and others, have hired outside companies to do their keywords. Because it is not their chore business and do not feel it necessary to have a full time dedicated team of librarians. They seem to prefer selling images rather than cataloguing them.

It would be an interesting exercise to calculate how much time was wasted in “perfectly” keywording images that never sold in some of the medium or smaller agencies that seem to be obsessive about doing in house keywording .

Would it be more interesting for these congress, meetings, conference to have a panel about how to make great pictures that sale ?

Worst that could happen would be a few hours looking at great image.

Posted in keyword, Search, Plus, Zymmetrical, google, flickr, corbis, PACA, CEPIC, getty | Print | No Comments »