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

• “MediaStorm broke new ground in digital publishing on Tuesday,” writes Jonathan D. Woods for Time‘s Lightbox, “with the launch of a pay-per-story video player, one of the industry’s most exciting attempts to capitalize on the strength of multimedia productions.” The company’s founder Brian Storm explains the decision to start charging viewers $1.99 for their latest premium multimedia content.  Maggie Steber, whose piece “Rite of Passage,” is one of the first offered under this arrangement, responds to early critics of the new publishing model.
• Kathy Ryan, for The New York Times‘ 6th Floor blog, covers the Alex Webb interview with Geoff Dyer at last weekend’s Look3 Festival, offers some choice quotes and a selection of images that appeared in the photographer’s retrospective monograph The Suffering of Light (Aperture 2011). PhotoShelter Blog offers a more extensive “Look3 Festival Round-Up,” in journal format with images of some of the exhibition spaces.
• Joerg Colberg publishes a piece on Conscientious called “Photography After Photography (A Provocation)” which addresses the question, “Now that we’ve done all that stuff that you can see in history-of-photography books, now that we’ve become obsessed with re-creating that past over and over again – how can we turn around, to look at and move into the future?” It garnered a bit of attention and a response from Fototazo titled “What Is Progress in Photography Today?“
• PetaPixel posts this video of a talk that Lytro founder Ren Ng gave at TEDxSanJoseCA last month on the future of photography, exploring how his company’s revolutionary camera which allows users to “shoot now, focus later,” will change the art form.  They also shared a nice info-graphic this week, “A Shapshot of the Photography Industry” which illustrates just how rapidly technology has revolutionized the field. In 2000, 99% of photography was analog. Today, that number is more like 1%.
• LIFE publishes “Father’s Day Special: Life with Famous Dads,” featuring a slideshow of images from their archive, NYTimes’ LENS Blog takes a look at work by Zun Lee, “Exploring African American Fatherhood,” and NPR’s The Picture Show profiles the highly compelling photographs by Timothy Archibald–”Frustrated By Autism, A Father Turns To Photos“–which explore not his son’s diagnosis, but their ensuing relationship.

Recently profiled by Time‘s LightBox and New Yorker‘s PhotoBooth, Rebecca Norris Webb’s My Dakota, on view at the Dahl Arts Center in South Dakota (through October 13, 2012), is an intensely personal engagement with the landscape, a photographic response to the sudden, unexpected death of her brother. Following the family tragedy, the photographer’s “explorations shifted from the geography of the West to the interior landscape of grief,” writes Suzanne Shaheen.

For the duration of the exhibition, Webb will be opening up and soliciting photographic responses to her own inward-looking work from an online photography community through the Our Dakota open flickr group.  Group members will be offered three response assignments over the course of the next few months, created by Webb and her husband and creative partner, Magnum Photojournalist Alex Webb. The first assignment, which explores the notion of loss and landscape is now live. The following two will be posted on July 1, and September 1.

A selection of photographs from the Flickr group curated by the Webbs and their assistant, photographer Trent Davis Bailey, will be shown at the South Dakota Festival of Books in Sioux Falls and at the Dahl Arts Center before the Webbs’ joint slide talk on Friday, October 5, 2012.

In addition to being a photographer, Rebecca Norris Webb is also a poet and educator. She and her husband have been conducting popular photography workshops for some time now, including one at held at Aperture Gallery in late March of this year, which sold out. The two are offering another weekend workshop called “Find Your Vision” in October immediately following the joint slide talk, which is still open for registration.

Select images from My Dakota are also being exhibited at the group show Weather (through August 17, 2012) at Ricco Maresca Gallery in New York.

Read interviews with Rebecca Norris Webb and Alex Webb from Visura Magazine, The Tripod Blog and The Telegraph.

View Alex Webb’s installation shots of Rebecca’s exhibition in South Dakota on their blog.

My Dakota
Exhibition on view:
June 1 – October 13, 2012

“Find Your Vision” Public Slide Talk With Alex and Rebecca Norris Webb
Friday, October 5, 2012 at 7:00-9:00 pm
FREE

Dahl Arts Center
713 7th Street
Rapid City, SD
(605) 394-4101

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

• “Imagine a place where a thousand of your best photo friends and heroes have taken over an artsy southern town,” says Andrew Owen, managing director of this weekend’s Look3 Festival in Charlottesville, VA, “and over three days you take in a dozen gallery exhibits, eat at outdoor cafes between talks by legendary photographers, see new work from photographers working all over the world, and return home exhausted and inspired.” That’s where we’ll be for the next few days, in part presenting a special exhibition, the Aperture at Sixty Library, which will showcase highlights from Aperture’s many years of publishing. La Lettre de La Photographie profiles exhibitions at the festival by Hank Willis Thomas, Alex Webb, Bruce Gilden, Stanley Greene, and many more. NYTimes‘ LENS blog takes a closer look at Thomas’ work, LA Times‘ Framework interviews Mitch Dobrowner, whose work is also featured at Look3, and Time‘s LightBox speaks with guest curators Vincent Musi and David Griffin.
• More in festival coverage, Flak Photo offers four free days of live streaming lectures and panel discussions from the Flash Forward Festival, emerging photographers from Canada, the US and the UK, in Boston, MA at Fairmont Battery Wharf, June 7 – 10, 2012, presented in part by the Magenta Foundation. Download the festival catalogue here, and check out the full calendar of events.
• Meanwhile in Europe, PhotoEspana has gotten underway. Of particular interest: Image Anxiety, curated by Chinese independent curator Huang Du, and of course, the annual Photobooks of the Year exhibition. In other international festival and fair news, the word is out that Paris Photo will launch a Los Angeles edition in April, 2013 at the Paramount Studios, as reported by the LA Times and the British Journal of Photography.
• NPR’s Claire O’Neill heads on a trip to the New York Times’ “Lively Morgue,” their basement newspaper archive which contains five-to-six million photographic prints and contact sheets, overseen by Jeff Roth, mined and disseminated on the Times’ brilliant Tumblr site by photo editor Darcy Eveleigh and others.
• “Sometimes it takes me two hours to get down a street, because there are so many things to photograph and people to meet,” writes Magnum photographer Jacob Aue Sobol in his latest entry from Beijing for Leica Camera Blog’s fascinating Arrivals and Departures series, unfolding live. Follow Sobol’s journey along the Trans Siberian Railway, “from the Russian forests to the Mongolian desert and finally through the mountains to Beijing,” shooting black-and-white every step–quite literally–along the way with the Leica’s new digital monochrome-only camera. Episode five, offers up a stunning gallery of images–dynamic, saturated street photos that remind us of work by Eikoh Hosoe from Barakei.

• Another historical archive of photographs has emerged in New York at the New York Public Library. A “visual encyclopedia” of 41,000 prints by Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and others have recently been found, many digitized and now made available to the public on a special NYPL site. Originally compiled and organized  in the 30s and 40s by Roy Stryker, founder of the Farm Securities Administration’s photography project, many of the prints were in a public lending library until the 50s. ”Incredibly,” writes James Estrin for NY Times’ LENS blog, “anyone with a library card could check out an original print of a Dorothea Lange image and put it on their wall for a while. It’s easy to imagine that some were never returned.”
• Find images of the once-in-a-lifetime Venus in Transit event which happens every 105 years or so, from LA Times‘ Framework, Boston‘s Big Picture, WSJ‘s Photo Journal, Conscientious, and The Atlantic‘s In Focus. Marvin Heiferman, author of the new book Photography Changes Everything (Aperture 2012), shared this great link on his twitter feed, “a history of photographers who’ve already tracked the Transit of Venus.”

According to Time Magazine’s LightBox, “The very day after the 2011 LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph ended, this year’s guest curators—National Geographic photographer Vincent Musi and Washington Post visuals editor David Griffin—started to put together the slate of artists who will appear [for the 2012 iteration.]” This weekend, the visions of Musi and Griffin come to fruition as Charlottesville, Virginia plays host to LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph 2012.

LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph returns June 7 through 9. Pinned as a “celebration of photography, created by photographers, for those who share a passion for the still image,” LOOK3 is sponsored by BD, National Geographic magazine, and Canon USA, and hosted this year along Charlottesville, VA’s Downtown Mall. The Festival features exhibits and on-stage appearances of three “INsight” photographers, as well as exhibitions, outdoor projections, workshops and interviews over three days and nights.

INsight artists Alex Webb, Donna Ferrato, and Stanley Greene will be featured in 2012, three artists who have met the standards of having produced a significant body of work, and who are understood to possess the capacity to inspire others in the field. The weekend’s masters talks will be given by Ernesto Bazan, Hank Willis Thomas, Lynsey Addario, Bruce Gilden, Robin Schwartz and Camille Seaman, as well as Aperture Foundation’s Executive Director Chris Boot, whose more than 25 years in photography has yielded countless books commissioned, edited or published since 1984.

Aperture will be further present, assembling a special exhibition, Aperture at Sixty Library, which will showcase highlights from Aperture’s many years of publishing—first through the eponymous magazine then, starting in the 1960s, through books—that will reflect on one of the most comprehensive and influential libraries in the history of photography.

LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph
June 7 through 9, 2012
Downtown mall and other venues
Charlottesville, Virginia

Chris Boot MASTERS TALK
June 8, 2012, 11am
The Paramount Theater

Aperture at Sixty Library
June 7 through 17, 2012
200 Water St

———

›› La Lettre de La Photographie profiles exhibitions at the festival by Hank Willis Thomas, Alex Webb, Bruce Gilden, Stanley Greene, and many more. NYTimes‘ LENS blog takes a closer look at Thomas’ work, LA Times‘ Framework interviews Mitch Dobrowner, whose work is also featured at Look3, and Time‘s LightBox speaks with guest curators Vincent Musi and David Griffin.

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

• The New Yorker‘s Photobooth, APhotoEditor and many others track Magnum’s latest expedition, “House of Photos,” an archival collaboration by photographers Martin Parr, Alex Webb, Larry Towell, Bruce Gilden, Jim Goldberg, Alec Soth and five others, similar to their recent “Postcards From America” series.  Eleven Magnum photographers have been exploring Rochester, NY, the birthplace of Kodak on the eve of the company’s demise, each in their own particular style, posting regular updates to Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook. Find more background on the project in a Q&A with Martin Parr.
• Photo District News reminds us all about worldwide Pinhole Photography Day, which falls on this Sunday, April 29, 2012, and shares a selection of seven pinhole camera-made images, encouraging readers to submit their own. Grab an empty oatmeal can and learn how to make your own pinhole camera from Kodak.
• This week, PhotoShelter Blog compiles a list of “The 40+ Items Every Photography Assistant Needs Now,” including some not so obvious ones like Tums, a blow drier, and Tylenol. The article is just one small part of their new 44-page downloadable Photo Assistant’s Handbook which covers among other things, “12 Problems that Photo Assistants are Expected to Solve.”
• The Washington Post‘s Paul Farhi investigates the sudden disappearance of Vogue’s highly controversial profile of Syria’s first lady from the Conde Naste publication’s website; a profile accompanied by images shot by war photographer James Nachtwey.
• On Tuesday, the NYC Department of Records announced the official debut of a public online archive containing an astounding 870,000 photographs of New York City. Unfortunately, “due to overwhelming demand,” and server maintenance, we didn’t get to see the images just yet, but Associated Press did. The Atlantic‘s Alan Taylor did too, and culled through the archive posting 53 of their favorites. While they work out the kinks in their system, you can still check out the work of Eugene de Salignac in New York Rises (2007), a copublication with the Municipal Archives (now part of the Department of Records). This book offers a peek into one small part of the City’s amazing archive — a selection of images de Salignac shot while working for NYC’s Department of Bridges/Plant and Structures from 1906 – 1934.
• Time‘s LightBox announce the 2012 Overseas Press Club Award winners André Liohn, David Guttenfelder, and Pete Muller with a slideshow of 50 images, and a profile for each. They also post an exclusive on the Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Awards winner, Carleton Watkins: The Complete Mammoth Photographs by Weston Naef and Christine Hult-Lewis, from Getty Publications.
• Fototazo opens up an extensive two-day conversation on “The Increasing Consideration of Documentary Photography and Photojournalism as Fine Art Photography.” An image from Richard Mosse’s Infra was among the many used to illustrate.  The monograph (Aperture 2011/12) was also included in The New York Times‘ round-up of “Vivid Guides to Unfamiliar Landscapes” and was nominated by Rob Hornstra as one of the best books of this past year at the International Photobook Festival.

April 26 through June 17, the Fondazione Forma per la Fotografia hosts two compelling exhibitions: The Suffering of Light, Photographs by Alex Webb, as well as Magnum Contact Sheets.
___

Alex Webb’s latest monograph The Suffering of Light, published by Aperture in spring of 2011, is a retrospective of his 30-year “photographic dialogue with the streets.” This Spring’s exhibition of his body of work at Fondazione Forma per la Fotografia in Milan brings together this same thirty years of photography and journalism, further celebrating Webb’s use of dense, vivid colors to tell stories about places and situations in some of the most unusual corners of the world.

The self-termed “street photographer” describes the practice of assembling three decades of his works in color as an exercise in exploring “the dominant obsession of [his] photographic life… a particular way of seeing in color.” A trip to Haiti in 1975 incited change in his way of seeing, since driving the photographer toward localities where “light and color are essential to understanding and describing the territory.” Color emerged as a language closer to his own sensibilities, since becoming an essential choice in his visual storytelling.

“Three years after my first trip to Haiti, I realized there was another emotional note that had to be reckoned with: the intense, vibrant color of these worlds. Searing light and intense color seemed somehow embedded in the cultures that I had begun working in, so utterly different from the gray-brown reticence of my New England background. Since then, I have worked predominantly in color.” – Alex Webb

Curated by Alessandra Mauro, The Suffering of Light: Photographs by Alex Webb is on view April 26 through June 17 at Fondazione Forma per la Fotografia in Milan, accompanied by a weekend workshop on May 5th and 6th, entitled “Milan: Finding Your Vision.”

___

In simultaneity, Fondazione Forma per la Fotografia will host Magnum Contact Sheets, an exhibition that presents forty of the most important, and most valuable, contact sheets by great artists of Magnum Photos, alongside their respective final images. The selected contact sheets, shown with notes by the artists themselves, construct a revealing narrative, retracing the artist’s creative process of shooting and choosing. In a The Telegraph UK review of the 2011 publication, it is noted that Henri Cartier-Bresson, cooperative founder of Magnum, speaks of the contact sheet as “a little like a psychoanalyst’s casebook.” Also on the subject of the contact sheet as an intimate document of the artist, Belgian photographer Martine Franck, Cartier-Bresson’s widow, confesses:

“I feel that by allowing myself to be violated [sic], and by publishing that which is most intimate, I am taking the very real risk of breaking the spell, of destroying a certain mystery.”

At a time when digital photography has dramatically changed the way photographers work, the exhibition recalls an entirely different way of approaching photography; contact sheets allowed photographers to look back through the lens of time across visual memories of an event, a time, and a particular state of being.

The Suffering of the Light: Photographs by Alex Webb and
Magnum Contact Sheets
April 26 through June 17

Milan: Finding Your Vision
A Weekend Workshop with Alex and Rebecca Norris Webb
Friday, May 4th, 6:30PM
Saturday, May 5th and Sunday, May 6th, 10AM – 6PM

Fondazione Forma per la Fotografia
Milan, Italy

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

• Time magazine’s Lightbox features Manish Swarup’s photograph of a Tibetan exile self-immolating during a demonstration in New Delhi in their Pictures of the Week, reminding of Malcolm Brown’s iconic image of a Buddhist monk who set himself aflame in protest in 1963, and the photojournalistic ethical issues that go with it.
• Conscientious explores the challenges of still portraiture and points to a new study published by the British Psychology Society which finds that “the same people are rated as more attractive in videos than in static images taken from those videos.”
• NPR’s The Picture Show features “A Lifetime of Photos in a Little Email Retrospective,” images by “somewhat hermetic” Dennis Darling who relishes “staying under most radar” and rarely publishes or exhibits his work for other than those on his small email chain.
• The New Yorker‘s Photobooth commemorates Edward Steichen’s would-be 130th birthday with a slideshow of the seminal photographer’s images published in their magazine across the years.  Several limited edition prints from his early work are available at Aperture.
• “Taking a photograph is a response… it’s a pre-rational response, it’s an intuitive emotional response, it’s spontaneous, it’s immediate,” says Alex Webb of The Suffering of Light in Part 4 of 6 of the Q&A  session with Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb by David Chickey of Radius Books at The National Museum Of Singapore on March 9, 2012, now all posted on Invisible Photographer Asia.
• APhotoEditor suggests, “Perhaps Most Photographers Don’t Understand the Value of Usage,” posting a reader-submitted story in which an “ex-student lied about having [her] permission and gave the image to the college, which then used the image on a billboard advertisement that wraps around a 20 story building on a very busy road in the city.” How was this resolved and did she get paid?
• Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier Bresson, Robert Frank, Stephen Shore, Nan Goldin, William Eggleston, Alec Soth, Diane Arbus are all photographers you should… IGNORE? That’s according to Bryan Formhals’ brash OpEd piece on LPV Magazine “10 Oeuvres Aspiring Photographers Should Ignore.”  Wired and the Click got a kick out of the post, which was inspired by “The 10 Most Harmful Novels for Aspiring Writers.” We think self-willed ignorance is more harmful than knowing one’s precedents and counter with this oldie but goodie: those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

To call the AIPAD Photography Show just another art fair would be a tremendous understatement. The annual photography exhibition, now in its thirty-second year, is famously regarded as one of the most important international photography events occurring today. Fittingly so – this year’s event draws seventy-five of the world’s leading fine art photography galleries, presenting a wide range of museum-quality work, including contemporary, modern, and 19th-century photographs, as well as photo-based art, video, and new media.

Join Aperture at the Stephen Daiter Gallery booth, #107, at the AIPAD Photography Show for two very special book signings. On Friday, March 30, John Gossage will be signing copies of his classic monograph, The Pond, reissued by Aperture in 2010, and on March 31, Alex Webb will be signing copies of his books, including his latest, The Suffering of Light (Aperture, 2011).

Beyond Aperture’s happenings at the Stephen Daiter Gallery booth, the show boasts a ticketed Opening Night Gala benefiting inMotion (tickets will be available at the door), and a strong schedule of panel events, featuring conversations with internationally recognized Dutch artist Rineke Dijkstra—in advance of her June 2012 Guggenheim Museum retrospective—as well as a panel titled “How to Collect Photographs: What Collectors Need to Know Now,” moderated by Steven Kasher of Steven Kasher Gallery.

AIPAD Photography Show
Park Avenue Armory
New York, New York

Show Hours and Admission

Thursday, March 29 from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Friday, March 30 from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Saturday, March 31 from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Sunday, April 1 from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Show tickets are available for purchase at the Park Avenue Armory during Show hours.

AIPAD Opening Night Gala
Park Avenue Armory
New York, New York

Wednesday, March 28 from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m.

Tickets will be available for purchase at the Gala.
You may purchase tickets at the Park Avenue Armory by credit card or cash only.

“Sisyphus with Leica,” Alex Webb termed himself in three words for a Q&A with the UK Telegraph last year. The renowned Magnum photographer known for his evocative color street photos—work that he’s repeatedly called 99%, “if not more, about failure,”—will be at Aperture on Friday signing books and presenting a co-lecture with his wife and creative partner, Rebbecca Norris Webb, or “maker of books,” as she described herself for that same Q&A. The free event will take place on the first night of their SOLD OUT weekend photography workshop.

His latest monograph The Suffering of Light, published by Aperture in spring of 2011, is a retrospective of his 30-year “photographic dialogue with the streets,” he tells the Times.  Making the book, he realized, “could be a way to explore the dominant obsession of my photographic life,” he writes, “a particular way of seeing in color… inexplicable, intuitive.”  This obsession, along with his acute sense for the rhythm of the streets has manifested itself through a tremendous body of work.

Webb recalls being originally inspired to engage with the life in public spaces as a teenager seeing for the first time the Chicago series by Ray Metzker titled “My Camera and I in the Loop” in an issue of Aperture magazine–something he paid homage to in color late last year. As he matured, however, he increasingly became drawn to places that have more evident “sociopolitical tensions,” borders and boundaries of societies, and began wandering extensively through the streets of Haiti, Mexico, Istanbul and the like. Still, he wouldn’t approach these places as a “traditional photojournalist.” Instead, his ramblings have resulted in a stunning blend of art photography and documentation.

“I’m looking for photos that have a greater level of ambiguity,” he tells the Times. “It’s more a matter of questioning or enigma than we usually associate with photojournalism, whatever that is. I’m looking for photos that ask questions. I’m not sure I’m able to provide an answer, but you ask a lot of good questions.”

Lately, he’s expressed interest in returning to the United States to photograph and produce a body of work that’s closer to home. “Though it is at this point very much in a state of infancy,” he told Leica Camera blog, he and his wife “are exploring the notion of creating another joint project.”

Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb Artist Talk and Book Signing
Friday, March 23, 2012 at 7:00 PM

Aperture Gallery & Bookstore
547 West 27th Street, 4th Floor
New York, New York
(212) 505-5555

Aperture is now offering another chance to join  Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb in a weekend photography workshop at Aperture.

Do you know where you’re going next with your photography –– or where it’s taking you?  This intensive weekend workshop will help photographers begin to understand their own distinct way of seeing the world.  It will also help photographers figure out their next step photographically  –– from deepening their own unique vision to the process of discovering and making a long-term project that they’re passionate about, as well as the process of how long-term projects evolve into books and exhibitions. A workshop for serious amateurs and professionals alike, it will taught by Alex and Rebecca, a creative team who often edit projects and books together –– including their joint book and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, exhibition, Violet Isle: A Duet of Photographs from Cuba, Alex’s recent Aperture book, The Suffering of Light, and Rebecca’s upcoming third book, My Dakota.

Included in the workshop will be an editing exercise as well as an optional photography assignment and long-term project review.  For more information –– including workshop fees, how to enroll, daily schedule –– please email Anne Lewis alewis@aperture.org.

WORKSHOP SCHEDULE: Friday evening, March 23, 2012, thru Sunday afternoon, March 25, 2012

Friday, March 23, 2012: 7:00-8:30pm: Alex and Rebecca Slide talk and Q&A

Saturday and Sunday, March 24 & 25, 2012: 10-6:00 pm

Price: $500/ $450 for photography students and Aperture Patrons

Aperture Gallery and Bookstore
547 W. 27th Street, 4th Floor
New York, NY
(212) 505-5555

MORE ABOUT THE WORKSHOP: (more…)