Abe’s Penny’s August 2012 edition features images from Jen Davis, whose decade spanning “Self Portraits” series was featured in reGeneration 2: Tomorrow’s Photographers Today, the second book in the esteemed series shining a spotlight on the next generation’s rising stars.

›› Shop Jen Davis’s limited-edition print Untitled No. 32, from the “Self Portraits” series
›› Buy reGeneration 2: Tomorrow’s Photographers Today

While working on a series of cloud photographs in 1925, Alfred Stieglitz coined the title ”Equivalents” for his work, with the idea that the photographs could correspond to both the reality in front of the camera’s lens and the internal being of whoever was looking at them. Photographs could be representational and abstract, so even a photograph of a mundane subject could provoke a strong emotional response.

W. M. Hunt, the juror of the 17th Annual Photo Competition at Photo Center NW, chose this idea as the open theme for this year’s contest. So, the winning images are eclectic, but all meet Hunt’s criterion for what makes great photographs: their ability “to evoke a sensation that resonates through my being,” regardless of subject matter or technical process. See if the work resonates through your being too at Photo Center NW’s Seattle gallery, or check them out online. And for more of Hunt’s curatorial vision, check out The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the Unconscious, 35% off as part of Aperture’s summer sale, which ends this Friday, August 10.

Aperture Anthology In-A-Bag

The bluelines for our upcoming Aperture Magazine
 Anthology: The Minor White Years, 1952–1976 have just been delivered to editorial, expertly packaged and fully portable!

This long-awaited volume—published on the occasion of Aperture Magazine’s sixtieth anniversary—will provide a selection of the best critical writing from the first twenty-five years of the magazine—the period spanning the tenure of cofounder and editor Minor White.

The texts and visuals in this anthology were selected by Peter C. Bunnell, White’s protégé and an early member of the Aperture staff, who went on to become a major force in photography as an influential writer, curator, and professor. Several documents from Aperture’s founders and individual articles are reproduced in facsimile, and the book is enlivened by other distinctive elements, including a portfolio of each cover, and a selection of epigrams and editorials that appeared at the front of each issue. An extensive index of every contributor to the first twenty-five years of the magazine makes this an indispensible resource. Stay tuned for its Fall 2012 release…

This summer, the world descends on London for the Olympic Games.  A photo project commissioned by the Photographer’s Gallery, however, shows us that the world is already there.  “The World in London” is a collection of 204 portraits of 204 Londoners, each of whom hail from one of the 204 countries competing in this year’s Games. Since each portrait was carried out by a different photographer, the style of the work is as diverse as its subjects: formal studio portraits, Skype screengrabs, and casual snapshots, by established artists and emerging talents, all make their way into the collection.  The resulting work is a portrait of both human and artistic diversity, showcasing one of the world’s most international cities through the lenses of some of its most creative photographers.  See photographs by Martin Parr, Stephen Shore, Rinko Kawauchi, Penelope Umbrico and 200 others at The World in London.

›› Throw out your SLR? App-maker Hipstamatic announced its plans to launch the Hipstamatic Foundation for Photojournalism to educate and support ”the next generation of photographic storytellers using smartphones with Hipstamatic.” Photojournalist Brad Mangin posted “How I Made Instagram Images That Were Good Enough for Sports Illustrated,” an essay about how he got a portfolio of iPhone Instagrams published, and how you can too. Traditional photojournalists everywhere are groaning, but check out Benjamin Lowy’s blog featuring his reports from Libya via Instagram (supported in part by a Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund grant) and judge for yourself.

›› The Associated Press has announced that it will be using robotic cameras (in addition to its team of photographers) to photograph the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. These cameras, which have been mounted on ceilings and the bottom of pools, will provide an otherwise impossible perspective on the games. On the heels of the highly controversial Olympics Portraits that made the rounds on the web earlier this month, LightBox tells the story of The Best Magazine Assignment Ever, photographer’s Neil Leifer’s 1984 “Olympic Odyssey Around the World” during which he traveled to 13 different countries to create a collection of images that would appear in TIME’s preview of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.

›› The New York Times Lens Blog published a collection of color slides taken by groundbreaking American photographer, musician, writer and film director Gordon Parks in 1956, images from his “Segregation Series” that had been thought lost until they were found at the bottom of a box this spring. The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture opened Gordon Parks: 100 Moments, a retrospective focusing on the photographer’s work in Harlem and Washington D.C. in the 1940s. The International Center of Photography opened an exhibition of Parks’ photographs in May, and they’ll be on view until January 2013. Parks, who died in 2006, would have been 100 this year.

›› What does the future hold for photography publishing? The British Journal of Photography reported on the growing body of work being printed on newsprint, profiling publications by Jason Larkin, Guy Martin, Alec Soth, and Rob Hornstra, who are enthusiastic about the medium’s affordability and impermanence. Joerg Colberg discussed how serious photography might best use the internet as a means of dissemination.

›› The Guardian’s Geoff Dyer profiles StreetViewer photographer Michael Wolf, as well as Doug Rickard whose forthcoming monograph A New American Picture sparked lively debate on our Facebook page last week, some condemning his practice as lazy appropriation, and others praising its conceptual ingenuity. In discussing Rickard, Dyer links “this new way of working” to the candid photography traditions of Paul Strand, Robert Frank, and Walker Evans: “The shifting spirit of Robert Frank seems also to be lurking, as if the Google vehicle were an updated incarnation of the car in which he made his famous mid-50s road trip to produce his photographic series, The Americans.” In other virtual reality news, StreetView now includes images from the Antarctic huts of explorers Shackleton and Scott, providing yet more digital space for such artists to explore.

Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation have joined forces to launch two new photobook awards in 2012, celebrating the book’s contribution to the evolving narrative of photography. Entries will be accepted from July 15 through September 10, 2012. A pre-selected shortlist of thirty titles will be profiled in The PhotoBook Review; exhibited at Paris Photo at the Grand Palais and at Aperture Gallery in New York; and tour to other venues, to be determined. Winners will be revealed on November 14, 2012, Paris Photo opening day.

FEATURING TWO PRIZE CATEGORIES

First PhotoBook
A $10,000 prize will be awarded to the photographer/artist whose first photobook is deemed by an independent jury to be best of the year.

PhotoBook of the Year
PhotoBook of the Year will be awarded to the photographer/artist, and publisher responsible, whose book is deemed by an independent jury to be the best of the year.

THE JURY

The awards will be judged in two stages. An initial jury will meet in New York to select the shortlisted entries in both categories. Jurors will include Phillip Block, Julien Frydman, Chris Boot, Lesley A. Martin, and James Wellford. The final winners will be decided by a separate jury that will meet in Paris before Paris Photo begins, including Els Barents, Roxana Marcoci, Edward Robinson, and Thomas Seelig.

ENTER HERE

Over the course of photographing for what would become his 2010 monograph Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes, Trevor Paglen spent years tracking the orbit of American military spacecraft and documenting their ghostly trails across the night sky. The resulting images (which also appeared in Aperture # 191) were as much about photography itself—exploring the power and the limits of photographic knowledge—as they were meditations on the relationship between humankind and the infinite. In a fascinating evolution of this work, Paglen is now behind The Last Pictures, a project that will attach a record of human photographic images onto a satellite that will be sent into orbit in September 2012. Paglen spent five years interviewing scientists, artists, anthropologists, and philosophers to decide what images should compose this photo-historical record, and then worked with materials scientists at MIT to inscribe the 100 images he chose onto an “ultra-archival” silicon disc (not unlike the Pioneer Plaques and the Voyager Golden Record) that will be attached to EchoStar XVI. This satellite will function as a regular television satellite for the next fifteen years before powering down, entering a “graveyard orbit,” and remaining for billions of years as a photographic relic of modern human civilization for future civilizations and lifeforms to discover. And perhaps it will even show up in one of Paglen’s future photographs.

Here on earth in the year 2012, you can catch Paglen’s lecture tour (beginning September in New York) featuring philosophers and scientists discussing the project. Later this year, Creative Time will publish a book of the images, accompanied by short texts by those who contributed to the project. For more on Paglen and his work, visit his website.

Aperture aggregates the best posts from this past week in the photography blogosphere.

›› Vice‘s Motherboard blog released the never-before-told story of the first photograph ever uploaded to the World Wide Web, which celebrates its 20th anniversary next Wednesday.  The image, which has been referred to as “a Photoshop disaster,” has been met with equal parts adoration and horror since its release. The story also appeared on Gallerist NY and ABC News’ Tech This Out, which digs a bit deeper into the naïve roots of the image.

›› PIX, a proposed “photography lifestyle magazine for women,” has drawn commentary from photo editors Stella Kramer and Jasmine DeFoore and Jezebel blogger Katie J.M. Baker for its fluffy content—stories like “Smudge-proof makeup tips for long days behind the camera”—directed towards young female photographers.

›› Two years ago, Scott Blake, the digital artist behind the “Chuck Close Filter” website, was confronted by Close himself for what the painter believed to be unfair use of his copyrighted artwork. Blake recently recounted his dormant dispute with Close in an online essay, raising questions about when art is derivative, when it is plagiaristic, and if it’s possible for it to ever be entirely original. Wired reported, bloggers weighed in.

›› Les Rencontres d’Arles was in full swing last week. As The Guardian reported, Christian Patterson’s Redheaded Peckerwood took home the festival’s author book award, the second year in a row that a Mack-published photobook has won the award—Taryn Simon’s A Living Man Declared Dead…was the 2011 winner. Jonathan Torgovnik won the €25,000 Discovery prize for Intended Consequences, and The Latin American Photobook was awarded the festival’s historical book prize. Additionally, Magnum celebrated its 65th anniversary at the festival, announced nominees Zoe Strauss, Jerome Sessini and Bieke Depoorter, and considered what the future holds for the organization.

›› Yoda reviewed photobooks a couple of weeks ago on Blake Andrews’ blog. We can’t believe we missed it. Work by Vivian Maier, Duane Michals, Rinko Kawauchi, Alec Soth and John Gossage, and The PhotoBook Review were amongst the titles critiqued by the Jedi Master. On the Gossage/Soth collaboration The Auckland Project: “Tack this poster to their dorm room I’m guessing few collectors shall. In protective cover will it remain. Hmm. Yeesss.”

›› The Rolling Stones celebrate their 50th anniversary this week and Magnum has reached into the archives, posting on their Facebook page a vintage Guy Le Querrec image of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards at a show in 1967. Over at The New Yorker, Photo Booth has launched an 11-image slideshow of photos from the band’s early years, including a birds-eye shot of fans mobbing the band’s vehicle after a press conference at the Hilton, NYC in 1965.

›› More in anniversary news…In celebration of  the 50th anniversary of Andy Warhol’s first solo exhibition, at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, The Metropolitan Museum of Art is planning Regarding Warhol: Fifty Artists, Fifty Years, which opens in September and will also feature works by photographers Cindy Sherman and Robert Mapplethorpe. Over at NokiaConnects Joel Willians recounts the 5 Strangest Habits of Andy Warhol, asking the age-old question, “Eccentricity and genius go hand in hand, right?”

Dave Anderson has photographed in tough places—a surviving Ku Klux Klan bastion in Texas, New Orlean’s post-Katrina Ninth Ward—but his photographs are rarely gritty. His Aperture monograph One Block, which documents the rebuilding efforts of one block of Ninth Ward residents, focuses less on the neighborhood’s despair and more on its hopes for renewal. Anderson knew that to photograph amidst such hardship he would have to tread lightly: “I was super-cognizant of ‘photographers fatigue’–people were sick of photographers showing up night and day and making grand promises,” he mentioned in a Color magazine profile. That Anderson spent time living and forming relationships with the residents he photographed is evident in the work—the subjects appear at ease, comfortable sharing their struggle to rebuild with Anderson and his lens.

Anderson produces videos as well as photographs—he is the man behind Oxford American’s SoLost web series, a video exploration of “the side roads, backrooms, cellars and psyche of the modern South,” which so far features 29 four-to-seven minute mini-documentaries on subjects ranging from a couple constructing a medieval castle in Arkansas, to Alabama menswear designer Billy Reid, to photographer William Eggleston. SoLost is a one-man operation, which accounts for the easy rapport between Anderson’s camera and his subjects, and why these videos feel like privileged glimpses into the richness and diversity of life in the American South.

Anderson will give a lecture about his image-making projects at The Center for Photography at Woodstock, this Friday, July 13 at 8pm. If you’re in the area, it will be worth checking out.

›› Watch a video of Anderson speaking about One Block with Aperture, and head to the Aperture store if you’re interested in purchasing a copy.

The Latin American Photobook, edited by Horacio Fernández and published by Aperture, has been awarded the historical book award at the Rencontres d’Arles photography festival. The volume, a blend of bibliography, facsimile, and encyclopedia, offers a critical study of the most important photography books to come out of Latin America, from the 1920s to today. Along with Aperture’s The Dutch Photobook: A Thematic Selection from 1945 Onwards and Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and ’70s, The Latin American Photobook is part of a growing body of scholarship on the photobook and its place in photographic history.

Jonathan Torgovnik won the Rencontres d’Arles Discovery prize for Intended Consequences—his portraits of women and their children who were born of rape in the Rwandan genocide—which was published by Aperture in 2009. Watch an excerpt of a panel discussion with Torgovnik, and read an interview with the photographer on FLYP. Intended Consequences and limited-edition prints of Torgovnik’s work are available for up to 35% off as part of Aperture’s summer sale, until midnight EST, August 10, 2012.

Check out The Guardian for more coverage of the Rencontres d’Arles festival prizes.