›› 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.

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.

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

• The National Press Photographers Association announce “The Best of Photojournalism 2012,” this week. For aspiring hopefuls, the Photo Brigade posts “10 Tips for Photojournalism Students,” and Phototuts+ shares an article on “Building a Narrative Through Photojournalism.” The British Journal of Photography reports that the Carmignac Gestion Foundation is currently calling for entries for its annual Photojournalism Award, which comes with a €50,000 grant.
• New York Times‘ LENS blog profiles Binh Danh who works with a fascinating chemical-free alternative process known as chlorophyl printing–using sunlight to burn in monochrome images onto leaves, grass and other vegetation. His series “Immortality, The Remnants of the Vietnam and American War” features a decade of work printing images of “suffering civilians, soldiers on patrol and the dead,” in an attempt to recapture the experience of that war.
• A wide-ranging conversation about the ethics of conflict photography and how images are sold commercially has sprung up around the use of an image licensed to Lockheed Martin. Read Ron Haviv and VII responses to the initial criticism raised by Benjamin Chesterton of Duckrabbit, who takes issue with the use of a Haviv image commercially licensed by the arms manufacturer. Further commentary and assessment on the thorny issues of how to make, sell, and use — or not — images created during conflict are added by Michael Shaw, Colin Pantall, and Stella Kramer…
• Photo District News posts “Favorite Sources of New Photography” Part 1 and Part 2, a feature in which they ask photo editors from publications like The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, New York, Time, The New Yorker, and many more including our own publisher Lesley A. Martin, where they find inspiration for new work.
• What effect might increased scrutiny or transparency over digital image manipulation have on our visual culture? Poytner reports that a new software suite is in development by the former Adobe product manager for Photoshop that would detect the alteration of digital images. AdWeek explores what effect these attitudes might have on commercial photography in the wake of the pivotal ruling by the National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus that a certain fashion ad was not “truthful and accurate” and thus a “public health hazard.”
• More on Richard Misrach this week, whose monograph Golden Gate is soon to be reissued by Aperture on the occasion of the anniversary of the bridge, which turned 75 last Sunday. Time’s LightBox profiles “Revisiting the South: Richard Misrach’s Cancer Alley,” on view at the High Museum from June 2, 2012, as does CNN Photos with a slightly different slideshow edit. The series features images from his other upcoming collaborative photobook with Kate Off, Petrochemical America, profiled by the Huffington Post in “Beautiful Ambivalence: The World Through the Lens of Richard Misrach.”
• In exploring the future of photography, Hilde Van Gelder looks at its past in “What Has Photography Done?” on Fotomuseum Winterthur’s blog Still Searching. She outlines two dominant tracks–the “autonomous pictorial art,” that gets absorbed into the museum and the canon, and that which “comments on the social and economic reality in which we live and thus actively take[s] part in transformative social processes,”–and opens up a conversation on the public funding of institutions.

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.

• NPR’s The Picture Show publishes a five-part series called “The Visual South,” profiling five photographers from Oxford American magazine’s “100 Under 100” list of “the most talented and thrilling up-and-coming artists in the South.” Christopher Sims shoots Guantanamo Bay, Frank Hamrick shoots, develops, prints, and book-binds by hand, Tammy Mercure finds “wryly humorous scenes” in the Great Smokey Mountains, Brandon Thibodeaux wanders around documenting Mound Bayou. Stay tuned for the fifth.
• Time‘s LightBox sits down with Matthias Fiegl, “one of the original founders of the 20-year-old, pinhole- and fisheye-loving, Vienna-based company,” Lomography, to talk about their “prophecies of the analogue future,” countering much of the incessant Instagram talk over the last few weeks. In somewhat related news, Leica Camera announced the launch of the first-ever monochrome digital camera with a black-and-white sensor and no color filter. Hands-on previews from PDN and Digital Photography Review, commentary from The Online Photographer, The Travel Photographer, Steve Huff Photo, Luminous Landscape, and many more, probably.
• Photos from the 67th anniversary of Victory Day in Europe from Ukraine, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Belarus and more at Boston’s Big Picture, LA Times’ Framework, and WSJ’s Photo Journal. Jonathan Alpeyrie‘s exhibition World War II Veterans is currently on view at Anastasia Photo in New York (through May 31, 2012).
• LPV Magazine shares some thoughts on “Narrative and the Serialization of Photography Online,” on “plotting” your Tumblr, and what he thinks might have gone wrong with Magnum’s Postcards From America feed.
• In copyright news, David Hoffman writes extensively on the “unprecedented exploitation of photographs” in the digital age, David Walker explores the “Liability-Proof World of Pinterest” on PDN, and Tumblr lands a lawsuit from publisher Perfect 10 alleging infringement, according to Econsultancy.
• Major controversy this week over CNN’s edit of Stacy Kranitz series on Appalachia, “Regression to the Mean,” which was intended by the photographer to complicate and debunk common stereotypes of the region, Conscientious’ Joerg Colberg points out. Roger May, along with several hundred disgruntled commenters on the CNN page found that the edit–a set of 16 images which claimed to be the “everyday lives of people in Appalachia” and featured two of KKK-related content (culled from Kranitz series totaling 77 images, only 3 of which were KKK-related)–perpetuated and reinforced that visual myth. In response, photographer Kranitz is quoted as feeling shocked, ashamed, humiliated, stunned, and disgusted. Read about her thought on the matter in a interview conducted with The Revivalist.
• No reviews out just yet, but New Yorker’s PhotoBooth, Time’s LightBox, and La Lettre de la Photographie all profile Delpire & Co., a five-venue retrospective celebrating the career of visionary French publisher Robert Delpire all across New York, on view now at Aperture Gallery, The Gallery at Hermès/Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, Cultural Services of the French Embassy, La Maison Française of New York University, Howard Greenberg Gallery, and Pace/MacGill Gallery. Join the conversation on Instagram and Twitter with #Delpire.

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.”

Image by Daniel Gordon

Daniel Gordon Artist Talk at Aperture

Artist Daniel Gordon will discuss his large-scale color photographs and unique process at Aperture tomorrow as part of the Parsons Lecture series. Gordon’s work was most recently featured in MoMA/PS1′s Greater NY show. The artist’s collage imagery which has been described by Conscientious blog’s Joerg Colberg as falling in the “somewhat disturbing part of the spectrum,” has been exhibited internationally in museums and galleries.

Parsons Lecture Series: Daniel Gordon
6:30 PM, Tuesday, November 30th

Aperture Gallery and Bookstore
547 West 27th Street
New York, New York

Image by Hank Willis Thomas

A Conversation with Leslie Hewitt and Hank Willis Thomas

Tomorrow evening at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, artists Leslie Hewitt and Hank Willis Thomas will appear in conversation with Eva Respini, associate curator of MoMA’s photography department. This talk is the latest installment of the museum’s panel discussion series Conversations: Among Friends which brings artists, scholars and curators together in consideration of Art’s political and social contexts. Leslie Hewitt, was featured in Aperture published essay collection Words Without Pictures. Hank Willis Thomas’ monograph Pitch Blackness was released by Aperture in 2008.

Click here to buy tickets

A Conversation with Leslie Hewitt and Hank Willis Thomas
November 30, 6:45 pm doors,

The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street
New York, New York

Image by Richard Misrach

Richard Misrach at SF Camerawork

Richard Misrach’s book tour for recent release and critically acclaimed publication Destroy This Memory continues tomorrow night at SF Camerawork in San Francisco. Recently called a “Masterpiece” by writer Geoff Dyer in the Financial Times, Destroy This Memory presents an affecting reminder of the physical and psychological impact of Hurricane Katrina capturing the grafitti and messages scrawled by survivor’s on walls during the Hurricane’s tragic aftermath. The talk will be followed by a book signing and artist’s reception.

Lecture and Book Signing with Richard Misrach
November 30th, 7:00 pm

SF Camerawork
657 Mission Street 2nd Floor
San Francisco, CA