• APhotoEditor and Conscientious Extended do round-ups of the many arguments and comments ignited by an NPR intern’s blog post about never paying for music and David Lowery‘s response to the post, looping in MediaStorm’s recent pay-per-story model announcement and its reception to explore what these kinds of attitudes could mean for the creative fields in general.
• The highly anticipated, so-called “Google Glasses” were demoed at the I/O conference this week, PetaPixel reports. These camera-equiped goggles, which are set to ship sometime next year, could one day allow point-of-view shooting and instant sharing online. The relatively discreet $1500 device has the potential to bring about the most radical change to street photography since the development of the 35mm film camera.
• Magnum photographer David Alan Harvey blogs about packing up and heading off to Les Rencontres d’Arles, ”arguably one of the most important international photography assemblages,” where he’ll be doing free portfolio reviews along with the rest of the staff of Burn Magazine. Additionally at Arles, sixty exhibitions by photographers including Sam Falls, Regine Petersen, and Jonathan Torgovnik, author of the monograph Intended Consequences, are on view through September 23.
• Boston‘s The Big Picture shares photos from LGBT pride events taken around the world, some of which were met with violence and intimidation. The New Yorker‘s Photobooth shares a selection of black-and-white images from the 70s and 80s, “Forty-Three Years After Stonewall,” when a riot at a popular Manhattan gay bar in response to a routine police raid ignited the LGBT rights movement.
• Feature Shoot shares a terrific hour-long streaming documentary on Magnum Photo founder Henri Cartier-Bresson, “Just Plain Love,” which features backstories from many famous photographs, directed by Raphaël O’Byrne in 2001.
• Photoshop, the Game, otherwise known as LevelUp for Photoshop, which offers the opportunity for users of the software to improve their skills, learn new features, and win prizes, is free online until July 15, 2012, reports John Nack. Maybe by then, you too can be as good as Kelli Connell, whose exhibition Double Life is on view through this Saturday, June 30.

These two women seen above floating in a pool–this never actually happened. Kelli Connell, whose work as Leo Costello claims, “falls within a tradition of Surrealist photography… [giving] form to the multifaceted, dynamic unconscious,” digitally manipulates her images to combine multiple exposures. She uses what is commonly thought of as an objective tool to create what she has instead termed “constructed realities.”

Her series Double Life (on view at Photo-eye Gallery through June 30, 2012) in which she employs this technique, “documents” the evolving relationship between two women (one model). In addition to exploring the visual rhetoric of digital imagery, the work is an investigation of and a kind of metaphor for the fluidity and instability of identity, sexuality, and gender roles.

“By digitally creating a photograph that is a composite of multiple negatives of the same model in one setting,” Connell writes in an artist’s statement, “the self is exposed as not a solidified being in reality, but as a representation of social and interior investigations that happen within the mind.”

This solo exhibition has previously been on view at Yossi Milo Gallery in 2007, and Catherine Edelman Gallery in 2011. That same year, Decode Books also published the Double Life monograph, which is reviewed here by Time Out Chicago and was featured as one of American Photo magazine’s Books of the Year.

A limited-edition print from that series, Floating, 2005, is available for purchase from Aperture. The image also appears in Connell’s volume of the sold out tripartite series MP3: Midwest Photographers Publication Project (Aperture 2006).

Additionally,  Connell’s work has appeared in Photo Art: Photography in the 21st Century (Aperture 2008) and The New York Times Magazine Photographs (Aperture 2011).

Prior to the show, check out a transcribed conversation between Connell and American portrait photographer Dawoud Bey on the subject of Double Life at Flak Photo.

Kelli Connell: Double Life
Exhibition on view:
June 1 – June 30, 2012

photo-eye Gallery
376 Garcia Street
Santa Fe, New Mexico
(800) 227-6941