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.

Join Phaidon at VII Gallery on Thursday, May 3rd during the exhibition of Questions Without Answers to celebrate the launch of the long-awaited book of the same name, published in conjunction with the 10th Anniversary of the founding of VII agency.

This major work presents a remarkable sequence of photo-stories from pioneering photo agency VII, documenting world history as we have experienced it since the end of the Cold War. The 11 extraordinarily talented photographers who are part of this agency work at the cutting edge of digital photojournalism, committed to recording social and cultural change as it happens around the world. Each brings an individual vision to the agency – some choosing to tackle dramatic events head-on, others pursuing more idiosyncratic, personal projects – but all share a commitment to their individual subjects and to their belief that the act of communication provides hope even in the most extreme situations.

Questions Without Answers is an ambitious book featuring a strikingly broad selection of photo stories. Photos documenting Barack Obama giving a speech on Afghanistan to American troops sit alongside a collection of portraits featuring famous cultural figures such as David Bowie and Bernardo Bertolucci. We move from an exploration of the spread and impact of AIDS in Asia to dispatches from the current economic crisis and its effect on those working in finance. The crucial work done by VII in documenting conflict – environmental, social and political, both violent and non-violent – is also represented, including stories from the war in Iraq, the crisis in Darfur and the terrible events of 9/11.

With an introduction by the eminent David Friend, the former director of photography at Life magazine, this book is an important, moving and compelling record of the world we live in.

The book includes work by Stephanie Sinclair, and Lynsey Addario, both of whom have been featured in Aperture Magazine and The New York Times Magazine Photographs (Aperture 2011).

Questions Without Answers
Book Launch and Reception
Thursday, May 3, 2012, 7-9pm

VII Gallery
Brooklyn, New York

›› Buy The New York Times Magazine Photographs for 30% off.

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

• Time’s Lightbox profiles ‘Act’: Meditations on the Disabled Body by Denis Darzacq, a two-year project of photographing “people who have had trouble finding a place in society from the beginning of their lives,” he says. The Paris-based photographer known for his high-energy images and dynamic subjects will be giving an artist talk at Aperture this Monday, April 16, 2012 at 6:30 pm, FREE.
• Kathy Ryan, editor of The New York Times Magazine Photographs, shares the fascinating backstory of a photograph of Mohammad Ali with his future wife Lonnie that ran in the Sunday Magazine, taken at “the moment Cassius and I met,”  Lonnie wrote in an email to the photographer, Steve Schapiro.
• The New Yorker‘s photo department shares a collection of reader-submitted, “Hand-Picked Instagrams,” (as Wall Street Journal did last week, and more publications probably will in the future) alongside a thought-provoking essay by Ian Crouch, “Instagram’s Instant Nostalgia.” This, in the same week New York Times’ Bits Blog reports Facebook will buy Instagram for $1 billion.
• The British Journal of Photography reports on a controversial ad campaign for photographers’ rights launched by the French organization Union des Photographes Professionnels – Auteurs. In related news this week, the American Society of Media Photographers has filed a class action lawsuit against Google, PetaPixel reports, for “scanning, indexing, and storing copyright work without permission of the copyright holders” for their ambitions Google Books project.
• DIY gallerists take note: Phototuts+ shares “An Expert Guide to Matting and Framing a Photo,” which should be useful after you’ve watched their video lecture on Ansel Adams–delivered by Allan Ross who was Adams’ darkroom assistant for many years–and printed a bunch of restrained, expertly metered black-and-white landscape photographs of your own.
• American Suburb X shares a number of Nan Goldin readings this week, including an essay by Nan on actress and close friend Cookie Mueller who died of AIDS in 1989, as well as a fascinating in-depth paper by Mihaela Precup, “The Wound Which Speaks of Unremembered Time: Nan Goldin’s Cookie Portfolio and the Autobiographics of Mourning.” All great reads; our only quibble is: where did they come from? [UPDATE: ASX has appended the source of one of the pieces, created originally by Dirck Halstead at the once-pioneering web journal digitaljournalist.org]
• The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announce their 2012 Fellowships in photography, PDN Pulse reports. Ten photographers, including Doug Dubois of the monograph All the Days and Nights, and John Gossage, whose exhibition The Pond and a Little Romance opens today in Chicago, join the ranks of past recipients Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Robert Adams, Richard Mosse, Brian Ulrich, and Penelope Umbrico.

The ASME (American Society of Magazine Editors), earlier this week, announced the National Magazine Awards 2012 finalists, a list representing fifty-two national magazine titles nominated in twenty categories. Leading the pack in 2012 are New York and The New Yorker, both with six nominations overall, as well as the New York Times Magazine, with three nominations in the categories of news and documentary photography, feature photography, and feature writing.

Aperture is please to announce that our own Aperture magazine has again been nominated as an ASME finalist, in the General Excellence category of Though-Leader Magazines, honoring literary, scholarly and professional publications, as well as general interest magazines. View the full list of 2012 finalist and honorees here.

The 2012 National Magazine Awards will be presented on May 3rd, at the New York Marriott Marquis in New York City. The 2012 judges include 345 magazine editors, art directors and photography editors as well as journalism educators.

___

››The ASME and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism announced the winners of the 2012 National Magazine Awards for Digital Media on March 20, 2012. More than 300 editors, publishers and guests attended a lunch at the Grand Hyatt New York to honor the fifty-five finalists and eleven winners. View the winners’ gallery for the Digital Media honorees here.

››The latest issue of Aperture (#206) is now available.

››Buy The New York Times Magazine Photographs, edited by Kathy Ryan, award-winning editor of the New York Times Magazine, for 30% off, here.

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

• LensBlog explores why Rodrigo Abd‘s photograph of a young Syrian boy expressing grief over the death of his father landed on the front page of three of the most prominent national papers in the United States.

• Time magazine’s photo blog Lightbox celebrated it’s one year anniversary, revisiting their first post and the continuing saga of War is Personal by legendary photojournalist Eugene Richards, of the controversial 1994 Aperture monograph Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue.

• Conscientious, GalleristNY and LVP Magazine weigh in on Cindy Sherman’s retrospective at MOMA and on the “unanimity” among critics in New York reviewing it.

• One year after a devastating tsunami hit the coast of Japan on March 11, 2011, The New York Times does a “Side-by-Side look at Distruction and Renewal.” The Big Picture at Boston.com, Huffington Post, National Geographic, and The New Yorker ran similar posts, as did Time’s Lightbox, featuring a slideshow of photos by James Nachtwey, whose work is in The New York Times Magazine Photographs (Aperture 2011) edited by Kathy Ryan.

• NPR prompts the question: “You know Ansel, But Who is Robert Adams (And Why Should You Care)?” Bob Adams, of the recently reissued Aperture monographs The New West and Summer Nights, Walking, has a traveling retrospective The Place We Live now on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

• Sarah Palmer was just announced winner of the Aperture 2011 Portfolio Prize for her series As a Real House. Read her 2009 review of Eirik Johnson’s Sawdust Mountain, Robert Adam’s Summer Nights and Joel Meyerowitz’s Legacy, from when she was editor at Metropolis Magazine.

• Finally, Jonathan Blaustein‘s intensely personal column on APhotoEditor.com reviewing Donald Weber‘s beautifully put together photobook Interrogations is one of the best-written posts we’ve read all week. Interrogations will also be reviewed in the upcoming second issue of The Photobook Review.

Join us for a panel discussion with longtime photo editor Kathy Ryan. She will discuss her new book, The New York Times Magazine Photographs (Aperture, 2011) at Barnes and Noble, along with photographers Gregory Crewdson and Taryn Simon.

The book reflects upon and interrogates the nature of both photography and print magazines, at this pivotal moment in their history and evolution. It presents some of the finest commissioned photographs worldwide of various types, including reportage, portraiture, style, conceptual photography, and photo illustration. Also addressed are issues of documentary photography in relation to more conceptual photography; the efficacy of storytelling; and what makes an image evidentiary, objective, subjective, truthful, or a tool for advocacy; as well as discussion of whether these matters are currently moot, or more critical than ever. As such, The New York Times Magazine Photographs aims to serve as a springboard for a rigorous, necessary, and revitalized examination of photography as presented within a modern journalistic context.

Kathy Ryan (editor) is the award-winning photo editor of the New York Times Magazine. Ryan was recognized as Canon Picture Editor of the Year in 1997 at the Visa Pour l’Image festival in Perpignan, France, and in 2003 was named Picture Editor of the Year by the Lucie Awards.

Thursday, November 17, 2011
7:00 pm

FREE

Barnes & Noble Bookstore
150 East 86th Street
New York, New York
(212) 369-2180

Last week Aperture’s work scholars attended a private tour of Dutch Seen: New York Rediscovered with Sean Corcoran, Curator of Prints and Photographs at the Museum of the City of New York.  The exhibition, curated by Kathy Ryan, is in commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the Dutch arrival in Manhattan and features a collection of work from Dutch photographers including Helen van Meene, Rineke Dijkstra, Erwin Olaf, Hendrik Kerstens, and others, all aimed to create a ‘portrait of the city’. Alluding to Dutch traditions, each of the artists employs a unique approach to his or her interpretation of present day New York City.

Click below for more pictures from the tour.

The Dutch Seen: New York Rediscovered
Wednesday, June 10—Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Museum of the City of New York
1220 Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street, New York
(212) 534-1672

Click here for more information on Aperture’s Work Scholar Program.

(more…)

The Museum of the City of New York and Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam present Dutch Seen: New York Rediscovered. This exhibition is guest curated by Kathy Ryan, Photo Editor of The New York Times Magazine, and commemorates the 400th anniversary of the Dutch arrival in Manhattan. The show features works from contemporary Dutch photographers aimed at constructing a portrait of what New York City is today. The exhibition includes portraiture, landscapes, still lifes, conceptual photographs, and documentary photography in a display of modern work, firmly rooted within the Dutch tradition. Participating artists include: Morad Bouchakour, Misha de Ridder, Wijnanda Deroo, Rineke Dijkstra, Charlotte Dumas, Hendrik Kerstens, Arno Nollen, Erwin Olaf, Jaap Scheeren, Danielle van Ark, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, and Hellen van Meene.

Click here for information on tickets for the opening reception and symposium on Wednesday, June 10 at 5:00 pm.

The Dutch Seen: New York Rediscovered
Wednesday, June 10—Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Museum of the City of New York
1220 Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street, New York
(212) 534-1672