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

• “It is almost impossible for me to shoot a photo where someone is NOT taking a picture or posing for one,” writes Martin Parr on his blog in a post titled, “Too Much Photography.” Prime examples of this can be found in his series Tourism Inc. which is being published by Reporters Without Borders for the 20th anniversary of their “100 Photos for Press Freedom” collection, accompanied by an exhibition at Galerie Photo Fnac Forum des Halles in Paris, La Lettre de la Photographie reports. His photographs of Atlanta for the High Museum’s “Picturing the South” series are also featured in the upcoming summer issue of Aperture 207.
• In further commentary on CNN’s controversial edit of Stacy Kranitz’ series on Appalachia, Joerg Colberg writes, “If we wanted to know what a place looked like we would need an infinity of photographs, taken from all possible angles excluding nothing, seeing everything at the same time,” a notion he thinks antithetical to the practice of photography, but increasingly possible, not only as Parr points out through the proliferations of cameras, but with the help of the Google Street View car, profiled by the Times here. Check out art made with photos pulled from the Street View service by Aaron Hobson, Jon Rafman, and Michael Wolf of the monograph Transparent City (Aperture 2008). And stay tuned for the upcoming re-issue and expanded edition of A New American Picture by Doug Rickard coming from Aperture in fall 2012.
• Perpetual shooting brings us to the post on APhotoEditor asking, “Is It Time To Eliminate Stills From Your Shoot?” due to the ease and success with which quality still images may be pulled from video footage as a result of the recent proliferation of HDSLR cameras on the market. Now with no need to pick the decisive moment, soon no need to pick where to focus, who’ll need photographers? Have a look through SFMOMA’s page “Is Photography Over?” and read about the dialectical relationship of aesthetics and distribution/media on Fotomuseum Winterthur’s blog Still Searching.
• On a different note, watch this great video from Feature Shoot, “Inside the World’s Only Tintype Photography Studio,” a photo gallery and walk-in commercial tintype portrait studio. Owner/photographer Michael Shindler says, ”I think what people seem to be looking for now is a kind of photography where the process itself is going to impart its own flavor to the finished image, a little bit of uncertainty.”
• American Suburb X  shares Kelly Dennis’ 2005 essay, “Landscape and the West – Irony and Critique in New Topographic Photography,” which explores the work of Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Art Sinsabaugh and more. After reading, check out new-New Topographic photography in Camps & Cabins at G. Gibson Gallery in Seattle, the third solo show by Eirik Johnson, author of the monograph Sawdust Mountain (Aperture 2009), on view through May 26, 2012.
• LENS blog profiles the opening of “Gordon Parks: 100 Years” at the International Center of Photography, celebrating the centennial of the legendary photographer’s birth with an exhibition of his work presented not inside the center, but in their windows, on view to the street. Parks was featured in an essay by David Campany on “Precedented Photography” in Aperture issue 206. His writing also appears in the requisite volume, Photography Speaks: 150 Photographers on Their Art.
• Fototazo posts Part II of their three-part interview with Oregon-based photographer Blake Andrews of the popular blog B. During this exchange, they invite him to create a competition for photographers to rank and sequence famous photographs, and predict the most popular sequence. The results of the contest will be published on Fototazo and Andrews’ blog. Part III of the interview will be published on Fototazo May 24, 2012.

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

• Find May Day photos from around the world at Boston’s The Big Picture Show, New York Times‘ LensBlog, and LA Times‘ Framework. Time‘s LightBox also offers “Resources for Photographers Covering Protests,” a bit of a distillation of what the ACLU has up on their website. In addition this week, the National Press Photographers Association and other press groups “call on Justice Department to protect right to record,” pointing out that more than 70 people have been arrested documenting Occupy protests since last September.
• The New Yorker‘s PhotoBooth shares brilliant photos from the eight night performance run of electronic music and Krautrock pioneers Kraftwerk at MoMA last week– those shows that sold out in a blink of an eye, crashing ticket servers. The featured photos were taken not by concert photographers, but audience members with their cell phones who shared on Instagram, Facebook and Flickr, including one by their pop music critic Sasha Frere-Jones, who wrote for the magazine this week on the band’s legacy.
• Daidō Moriyama, who is interviewed by Ivan Vartanian in Aperture issue 203, was awarded the Lifetime Achievement award during ICP’s Infinity Award 2012 ceremony this past Wednesday, La Lettre De La Photographie reports, posting a gallery of his images. Be sure to check out the Daidō Moriyama pop-up library, on display at the ICP Library until May 23, 2012, and watch videos from Moriyama’s 2011 PRINTING SHOW–TKY at Aperture, a recreation of his 1974 ad hoc photobook-making performance of the same title. Moriyama also has his first solo museum exhibition, Fracture: Daido Moriyama, on view at LACMA through July 31, 2012, LA Times‘ Framework reports.
• Ben Lowy, the “Hipstamatic Journalist,” an ardent defender of cell phone photography according to a New York Times profile and Q&A on LensBlog, also won an Infinity Award this week for his work in photojournalism. Soon, the Times reports, Hipstamatic will release a Ben Lowy Lens filter. This week, software developer jag.gr also released the 645 Pro camera app for the iPhone, Rob Galbraith reports, which appeals to advanced photographers and can capture TIFF images, features real-time shutter speed and aperture readouts, a live histogram, a choice of spot or multi-zone metering, as well as focus, exposure, and white balance lock. PhotoShelter Blog shares a lengthy post on “Why Instagram is Terrible for Photographers, and Why You Should Use It,” while APhotoEditor explores some of the many licensing issues with the social media sites through which these images are shared.
• Read about the long strange saga of student photojournalist Andy Duann’s ‘bear falling out of a tree‘ photo which was went viral last week according to Poytner, eventually being picked up by the Associated Press (we first noticed it on WSJ‘s Photo Journal).  Duann had been considering legal action against his school, the University of Colorado, for distributing the photo without compensating him, until they acknowledged that he retained the copyright and announced they would no longer demand copyright from their students in the future.
• MediaStorm share two videos this week that live up to their column titled, “Worth Watching.” First, watch Ian Ruhter’s SILVER & LIGHT clip about his–literally–truck-sized traveling camera. Then watch Jeff Harris’ sometimes-heart-wrenching video on his project collecting 4,748 daily self-portraits–and counting. MediaStorm also draws our attention to Aday, “a unique photographic event,” scheduled for May 15, 2012, in which countless people from all different backgrounds use any camera they can get access to and submit photos to create a massive historical document–”A Day in the World,” which will be published as a book in October 2012. Sign up today.
• Andy Adam’s Flak Photo is teaming up with Tom Griggs’ fototazo next week to host an online community conversation focused on essays from Gerry Badger’s recently published The Pleasures of Good Photographs (Aperture 2010). We’re looking forward to Monday, May 7, 2012, which is when the discussion kicks off with the essay, “Literate, Authoritative, Transcendent: Walker Evans’s American Photographs.”

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.

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

• LightBox presents an essay written by Tim Hetherington, who was featured in Aperture issue 204, from the new book Photographs Not Taken, one year after the photographer’s death in Libya. The collection, compiled by Will Steacy (one of Aperture’s Green Cart Commissioned photographers), also features essays by Roger Ballen, Ed Kashi, Mary Ellen Mark, Alec Soth, Peter van Agtmael and more. Additionally, PDN features an 8 image retrospective by Hetherington, whose work is now on view at Yossi Milo Gallery in New York (through May 12, 2012).
• This week in commentary: LPV Magazine  digests Instagram articles by Om Malik, the New Yorker’s Ian Crouch and New York Magazine’s Paul Ford, finds out, “Facebook Buys Instagram, Some Photographers Sad.” APhotoEditor reads Paul Melcher‘s poignant article on La Lettre de La Photographie alongside Marc Andreessen‘s WSJ piece “Software Will Eat The World,” and explores “how a company with 13 employees and no profits [Instagram] can replace a now bankrupt company [Kodak] that once employed over 120,000 people with annual sales of $10 billion as the ‘manufacturer’ of a device to bring photography to the masses.” In related news, NPPA opens a mobile phone photo contest, calling for entries through Sunday, April 22, 2012, while Magnum Photos has deployed another team to Rochester to document the once-vibrant home of Kodak as part of their Postcards From America series.
• Poynter investigates the controversy over the Pentagon delaying the LA Times from publishing photographs of US soldiers posing with the body parts of Afghan corpses, a story which has since elicited over 2000 comments on the Times’ website.
• Sophie Calle, featured in Aperture issues 191 and 142, talks to the Guardian about her best shot from the series Voir La Mer, in which she “took 15 people of all ages, from kids to one man in his 80s, to see [the sea] for the first time.” She photographed them from behind so as to not obstruct their initial encounter, and she captured the entire process, including their reactions, on video. Her current exhibition, Historias de Pared (at Museo de Arte Moderno Medellín through June 3, 2012) is reviewed on Fototazo.
• In honor of Albert Hoffman’s infamous Bicycle Day (April 19), LIFE Magazine shares a number of never-before-published dream-like photographs that were to accompany an original 1966 article titled, “New Experience That Bombards the Senses: LSD Art.”
• American Suburb X shares journal entries from William Gedney on “Kentucky, Sex and Diane Arbus,” alongside scans of the archival material culled from the Duke University Rare Books and Manuscript Library.  Speaking of rare books, ICP Library profiles some of the innovative and experimental photobooks they found and photographed at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair last week.
• Time Magazine releases their annual list of “The 100 Most Influential People in the World,” alongside a portrait gallery of 24 of the honorees.  Included this year is artist Christian Marclay, of the monumental video installation recently purchased by MoMA, The Clock, and the 2007 Aperture monograph Shuffle, which takes the form of a deck of cards. The Clock will be shown for free this summer from the middle of July to mid-August at Lincoln Center’s David Rubenstein Atrium. Stake out your places now!

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.

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

• Art Nouveau magazine interviews artist Hank Willis Thomas, of the monograph Pitch Blackness (Aperture 2008) whose transmedia installation Question Bridge: Black Males is still on view at three different locations around the country, on his latest body of work Strange Fruit which makes ”vivid comparisons of black perception between the pre-slavery era and post-Civil Rights Movement.”
• Joerg Colberg posts on Conscientious Extended about “How To Make a Photobook,” though he admits early on, “My headline is slightly disingenuous: There actually is no simple recipe for photobook making.”
• New York Times‘ Lens blog does a Q&A with Mexico City-based photographer Dominic Bracco II about one of his images “showing death with humanity and dignity,” as well as the Eugene Richards’ photograph from the series “Below the Line: Living Poor in America,” which inspired him.
• Jess Dudley, Wonderful Machine Producer, posts a very informative piece on APhotoEditor, “Pricing and Negotiating – Non-Fiction Book Cover,” in an attempt to elucidate the often murky realm of reproduction rights through a real-life annecdote.
• New Yorker‘s Photobooth profiles “Lost & Found: Salvaging Snapshots in Japan,” with a slideshow of the recovered family photographs from the Japanese town of Yamamoto devastated by the tsunami one year ago, featured in Aperture issue 206, and on view at Aperture Gallery April 2, 2012 – April 27, 2012.
• Time’s Lightbox profiles the independent photo project on Afghanistan (Danger and Aftermath, on view at Museum London in Southwestern Ontario through April 1, 2012),  by Magnum photographer Larry Towell, who’s work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine Photographs (Aperture 2011) and Access to Life (Aperture/Magnum Photos/The Global Fund 2009).
• NPR’s The Picture Show takes “A Peak Inside the Copy Cat Building: Where Baltimore Artists Work – And Live.” Alex Wein and Rob Brulinski’s photographs portray the living spaces of over 100 eclectic new tenants of a building which once housed Copy Cat printing, and was the birthplace of the Crown Cork bottle cap, “a worldwide standard for the beer and soda industries.”