July 15, 2008 by pmelcher.

Outside of the beaten path of wire services endlessly pouring at the same endless flow of images, there are islands of beauty. One of those, untouched by endless years of relentless competition, is photo agency Aurora. True to their initial vision, Aurora keeps on showing the world that true and great photojournalism can co-exist with a selfish capitalistic world. The images are beautiful, the topics not always made for easy viewing and the passion and dedication of the photographers almost medieval.

For those who were not at Look3 in Charlottesville last June 2008 as well as for anyone who believes and think that photojournalism is dead or dying, here is a little clip Aurora did on 9 of their photographers :

Posted in magazine, lens, Aurora, multimedia, photojournalism, slideshow, wire service, editorial | Print | No Comments »

May 15, 2008 by pmelcher.

Curators, not photographers, are the stars of the first New York Photo Festival. The poster says it all, four names, big black bold letters, it’s a curator festival, photographers only welcomed to drop by and admire. Situated all around the creators’ neighborhood (Brooklyn), Powerhouse and VII, the festival of “very important images” is a tribute to beautiful pictures on a wall. A kind of mix between fine art photography ( whatever that is ) and intellectually profound photojournalism. There is a lot of thought behind each image and sometimes you feel there is more thought than talent.

This type of photography, and the world around it, is in direct competition with painter or sculpture galleries that love to explain minimalism with grandiloquent words. It’s more about being seen than seeing. Sometimes I wonder what it has to do with photography besides the fact that it was taken with a camera. The motto here is, the more you wonder at what you are looking at, the more the picture is a success.

There is also a lot of ego in this festival. So much so, that one should bring a knife to cut through those excessive layers of self righteousness.  It is as if photography by itself is not enough and one needs to become something, someone in order to make the images more interesting.  Those poor images dangling on a wall seem lonely when no one is there to explain their “deep” significance. They are even lonelier after someone does. There is also a lot of vanity, this sort of social importance of who you know and who knows you  that fill these rooms. A sort of gentrification of  the photography world where you can feel pushed out if you are not in the know of who is hot and who is not.

Everyone and anyone wants to be included in everything while reserving the right to refuse any invitation. The group that becomes the most famously exclusive becomes the most popular. The NY Photo festival feels a bit like that. Even Darryl Lang has a hard time showing images on his daily video feeds. This festival is all about people who organized it, not really about photography.

If an image puzzles you as to why it was selected, don’t ask. You will be looked upon as a complete idiot and forever give up your chance of being part of those “in the know”. Sometimes you wonder if the photographers even know why they have been selected.

However, with all this said, it is a great idea to have launched this festival. Hopefully, it will mature to be wider instead of so eclectic. It will encompass other neighborhoods and different photography , and not try to transform photography into a religion with self-elected priests. It will maybe include more “reachable” images, so that those who are not in this business can enjoy it too. I do not know if it is an reverse effect of Flickr and other Photobucket that some seem to try to take photography out of the masses hands and create exclusive, by membership-only, temples. This festival sure feels this way to us, even if some amateur photography is being shown. It has this “us versus them” scent to it, as if to say : the crowd doesn’t decide, we decide.

There is much to see and probably more to hear and I do look forward to seeing more . To me, the more photography is celebrated, the better, even if I do not always agree with the way it is done. As a famous saying says, “taste and color are two things you should never argue about”. Kudos to the organizers.

Posted in lens, copyright, editorial | Print | No Comments »

April 26, 2008 by pmelcher.

What is revolting about this image ? what makes people so upset ? what about this one ?

Those the image above makes you feel like screaming foul ? Do you want to pick up your phone and tell the exhibitor to pull them down, immediately. I fear not. besides being not very good, these image seem totally harmless, don’t they ?

Well Parisians are upset, very upset. A little background info would be good here:  Theses images where taken in Paris, by a french photographer called Andre Zucca for a magazine called Signal. They are amongst some of the earliest color photographs ever taken and depict parisians going about their daily life under nazi occupation. The problem is that Signal was a nazi propaganda magazine and that Andre Zucca, a french collaborator more than happy to show that the parisians where a bunch of happy people during that time.

Not so,  said some french human rights organization and  individuals. Parisians were suffering and all doing “resistance”. However, when one visits this exhibit, it is clear that none of the images are staged. Perhaps posed, but certainly not stage. There is even photographs of the “Rue des rosiers”, in the heart of the Parisian jewish neighborhood where one can see a few people walking, albeit one man visibly wearing a yellow cross:

Parisians who lived during this period do not want to be showed as happy citizen during this period. French people, in general, would rather show them heroically fighting against the occupant. Thus after many protests, the exhibitors have agreed to add some more information to go along with the images to better explain the situation.

What is interesting here is how very banal images can trigger so much heated reaction. The images themselves, quite frankly, are boring snapshots.Yet, a lot of people are up in arms saying they are insulted by these images. I found it fascinating that images can become insulting not by what they depict but rather by what they do not show. Besides resistance, they do not show the terribly difficult situation such a big city had to face in order to find the most basic food during a time of war.It doesn’t show the constant humiliation to having to live under an enemy force and arbitrary sets of rules. It doesn’t show the frustration of witnessing such violent acts and not being able to do anything about it.

Let’s face it. Not every man or woman is a hero. Not everyone is ready to pick up a gun and fight against the most powerful army at the time. And these images show part of that. The reality was far more ambiguous than be a resistant or be a collaborator. The lines were not clearly defined and certainly not simple to cross. Sometimes, just getting decent food for your family, your kids, was all a days work and no other business could occupy your mind.

It is easy for us to judge, from the comfort of our home, on a time and place we have never been close to.

These images had never been published before. The German Nazi kept color photography for war images only. Furthermore, color photography was such a difficult process at the time, it could only be taken in bright sunny days. That adds  impression  that the occupation was just a long hot sunny day. Obviously people look worst under gray or rainy days.

Finally, the photographer, who was never persecuted for helping the nazis , was not allowed to shoot sensitive areas, mostly where the Nazi lived or assembled, for security reasons. Thus, there are multiple  invisible underlying censorships in these images: the photographers eyes, the technical requirement of the film and the Nazi censorship.

The mayor of Paris has ordered fuller captions and organized debates around this exhibit of more than a thousand images. Sensibilities have to be managed as well as the truth needs to be massaged by many words, spoken or written.

We say that an image is worth a thousand words. Well, it this case, an images needs a thousand more words.

Can we consider these images photojournalism ? After all, Andre Zucca was one of the most  important war correspondent before the war, working for celebrated publication France Soir. This is what he saw, with the tools he had, and an assignment he was given. Not so much different then if Time magazine* would send a photographer in Afghanistan to shoot the daily life and asking the reporter to show the bright side of Kabhul life.

This photo exhibit has more than the eye can see and brings our comprehension of photography a step further. How we see or perceive an event, how we can sometimes feel  frustrated by its short coming, how it fixes into time who we are, and how we behave.

More info and a little sideshow here

*Time magazine, of course, is not a propaganda magazine and the American army is not the Nazi, far from it.

Posted in lens, magazine, photojournalism, editorial, france | Print | 2 Comments »

April 10, 2008 by pmelcher.

When you grow up, like me, with a dad who is director of Magnum, these guys become family. Because that’s what magnum is. It’s not a co-op, a photo agency, a club, but rather, a big dysfunctional family of extremely talented men and women.

Burt Glinn was the crazy funny uncle. He had an exquisite sense of humor rapped around such a charming personality. He was also the only one of the magnum founding guard that made sure no one took themselves too seriously. He was not always succesful at it, but he didn’t mind. As much as his images were serious, as much as he could not resist making jokes or witty comments on the world around him. He crunched on life as he was talking, enjoying its apple fresh juicy taste. He was a man of many, many talents, with his most important being his love of life.

Last time I met Burt was at his apartment on the Upper West side, a few years back. He was showing me how he was scanning all his images with the help of a few student-Interns with the excitement of a kid about to lunch his first self made rocket-ship. Burt was passionate about technology and understand very early on that photography was going to be digital or nothing at all. And for a man of his generation, he knew a lot.

Burt is going to be missed a lot. Not just as a the great, immensly talented photographer that he was, but as the wonderful piece of humanity that he was : a perfect soul.

Should you do anything of importance today, spend a moment to look at some of his images on the magnum site. He would have liked that.

Posted in lens, Magnum, photojournalism, slideshow, editorial, news | Print | No 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 »

March 26, 2008 by pmelcher.

One reason Getty claimed revenues were not so strong was because according to them, a lot of the advertising dollars are going to purchase adwords at Google. Some companies pay upwards to $100,000 a month, if not more, to purchase the best location, based on your search terms.( I shouldn’t have to explain this).

Well, the future, at least for the photo stills department, is not looking brighter. For Getty or others. Google is already secretly beta testing Video-text ads. It will look like this:

Unobtrusive,  you will actually need to click to make the ad viewable. You can actually see a live demonstration if you do a search for “laptop” in google.com and look at the Intel entry on the right.( it doesn’t always appear. You might to do it a few times)

What does this mean for the photo industry ? Well for starters, commercial stock photographers not doing RF should really rethink their future, as well as RM only photo agencies, because between Video and RF, there will not be a lot of dollars left.

Commercial stock Photo agencies not doing video should also rethink their future.

Stock, in general, will begin to become obsolete in general, as the cost of producing a 30 second mini video will allow more and more companies to have customized work done in house .

Editorial photographers  should sit back and enjoy, because it will not affect them at all. Same for their photo agencies, if they are also only in their editorial field. However, they might want to look where the newspaper/magazine market is going if they want to survive. Hint: you need a computer to see it.

Finally, we will see ( although many exist already), a flurry of small video producing companies grow like mushrooms all over the world to respond to this new market. Some owned and operated by smart, flexible ex photographers, others by new players.

And then someday, someone will have the idea to consolidate them into one big company.

Posted in license, focus, technology, lens, multimedia, Search, web 2.0, google, newspaper, Royalty free | Print | 2 Comments »

March 17, 2008 by pmelcher.

It has been a while since I have wanted to write about a great plug in for Firefox hardly known in the photo industry. It has a lot of advantages and no defaults. For one, it is free, two, it can be installed on any image library, three, it is incredibly helpful. One can quickly and nicely browse through a lot of image, increase the interesting ones and download the best.

Zymmetrical.com is the first and only agency to currently test it live on its site and starting to get user feedback. You can see a screen shot here:

They have also added a link on their website where one can test it.

This a great example of a company leveraging technology for what it can bring to the user experience.

The Piclens plug in has been around for quite a while and works with Google Images, for example. It has gotten great reviews by everyone that has approached it. It is cross platform, easy and simple to install and to use. It is an incredibly useful tool for the image industry .

Posted in focus, technology, lens, Piclens, Zymmetrical, Midstock, web 2.0, Search, multimedia, slideshow | Print | No Comments »

March 7, 2008 by pmelcher.

Make a pinhole camera: Corbis, the company we love to pick on, has posted a really nice paper project for your week end. Called the ReadyCam, It is a set of instructions that let you build your own cool pinhole camera. Someone at Corbis marketing has brains. Try it here: ( click on any image)

Give yourself a face lift: Toronto ( again, the Canadians!!) based company ModiFace, Inc. just launched a website where you can make appropriate adjustments to see how you would look after plastic surgery on your face.

Founded in 2007 by University of Toronto professor Parham Aarabi, ModiFace Inc. utilizes advanced computer vision and image processing algorithms to visualize different facial operations including plastic surgery, facial aesthetic treatments and hairstyle changes. ModiFace’s patent-pending technologies empower consumers to redefine their images by automatically visualizing face enhancements, treatments and modifications.

You can redo you face, for free, here: liftmagic

Posted in technology, lens, Canada, multimedia, prosumer, corbis | Print | No Comments »

February 8, 2008 by pmelcher.

The World Press awards has revealed its winners for 2008. As expected, the picture of Britney Spears having her head shaved off won for the best image of Arts and entertainment. Or wait..it did not. Once again, The World Press has shown its complete disrespect for the world of news in favor of an overly intellectualized vision of the world. A bit as if the judges, once gathered in a room, behind closed doors, had said: “lets kill photojournalism a little bit more this year”

The photojournalism intelligentsia has voted. A closed group of overly self adoring and painfully egocentric intellectuals whose vision of a news photography is closer to the likes of ICP than the masses. They look for the creative touch, the Holga/lensbaby effect, the “je ne sais quoi” that makes a news photograph a work of art. They over think photography to an excess and seem to look for the Picasso rather than the human touch. They do not believe that an news image can be good, if doesn’t carry the touch of a creative artifact.

This years big winner is a blurry image of a tired soldier. Although not taken in a combat situation, and probably because of low light, it is slightly blurry. I don’t care for such poorly taken image. What is so wrong about reality that it has to be altered and given the highest prize in photojournalism ?

Sadly enough, we see the same intelligentsia controlling most of the major prizes worldwide and spitting out the same type of winners. These judges are all friends with each other and spend the rest of the year over analyzing images as if they where reading a Kafka novel. It has to be dark, blurry, slightly incomprehensible and borderline boring.

No wonder photojournalism is dying. Once again, the sports images of this year seem to be the real winners. Amazing images of incredible situation. The rest is dark, so dark. Not just dark subjects, but simply slightly underexposed or taken with low light. The less you see, the more you can imagine. The image is good for what is not there, so you can fill in the blanks yourself. Even the Nature category is full of blood and sadness because a happy image, according to these judges, cannot be a good image.

Lets no forget that politics, for example, has no place in the World Press. We marvel at the John F Kennedy images in the Oval office yet there is not one image of world leaders in action. Between the French election last year, the changing of guards in England and the US election, you cannot tell me there was no great images.

It is a little bit as if, outside of Africa ( Kenya, mostly), Afghanistan and Iraq, the rest of the world stood still. Or, maybe it was not favorable for a nice moody b&w panoramic Holga image. You can almost hear the judges discuss the lightness of being, quoting “The human condition”, while sipping their warm cappuccinos.” This image is so Nietzscheen, isn’t it?”

Certainly not a good year for the World Press. Even more, because, once again, they refused to acknowledge multimedia, one of the most powerful tool of today’s photojournalism. Or, in a socially driven internet, they do not have a people’s choice, where image consumers could vote.

No, they prefer to remain in photojournalism Medieval ages, taking comfort in congratulating themselves for picking the least interesting images possible as to prove there is more to photojournalism than the reporting of the news. If anything, this, and other awards of it kind, are killing photojournalism. They create the false impression that this is the standard to achieve.

If you have time to waste and have really nothing else to do, here are the winners :

World Press

PS: At least I was right about John Moore’s images who, by the way, truly deserved this prize.

Posted in mediastorm, multimedia, celebrity, magazine, lens, HOLGA, TIME, slideshow, editorial, lensbabies, photojournalism, web 2.0, news | Print | 1 Comment »

January 29, 2008 by pmelcher.

Photographers work hard. At least some do. John Harrington, for example, not only goes out and shoot the State of The Union address made by president Bush last night in Washington D.C., but he also stays after around to check on the work of other photographers. Not only he had to file his own images but he also took the time to create a great video report on how his colleagues work, what equipment they use, at what angle they prefer to shoot the event, and, most importantly, why ?

What a lot of people are not aware and that this video shows, is that pro photographers are not just snappers that are just offered a seat to shoot from and are satisfied with it. They think ahead of time of what image they want to catch, what would be the perfect photograph and why. They are much more than simple button pushers sitting on their butts shooting the president in a sequential harmony. As portrayed in the video, most couldn’t care less about Bush and his final speech. They were there for the Obama/Clinton/Kennedy shot as they preempted that it would be THE shot. The money shot.

It also shows how restrictive the work of a photojournalist has become. You are assigned a position and you can not move. For people trained to find the best perspective, whose talent partly reside in where they physically stand, it is an exercise in frustration. They are locked up and grouped together, almost forced to shoot the same thing.

Finally, it shows how big news organization, like the AP, Getty, Reuters can afford to have photographers in multiple locations, thus increasing the overhaul chance of getting the right image while the lonely independent guy has to battle to make the best of his position.

Here is John Harrington ’s video ( John also has a great blog that, although I do not always agree with, read every day):

I have also taken the liberty to show some of the results, which is, if it has any, the only weak point of the video :

The Washington Post here :

Posted in copyright, magazine, technology, lens, multimedia, newspaper, news, editorial, slideshow, photojournalism, getty | Print | No Comments »