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

›› Vice‘s Motherboard blog released the never-before-told story of the first photograph ever uploaded to the World Wide Web, which celebrates its 20th anniversary next Wednesday.  The image, which has been referred to as “a Photoshop disaster,” has been met with equal parts adoration and horror since its release. The story also appeared on Gallerist NY and ABC News’ Tech This Out, which digs a bit deeper into the naïve roots of the image.

›› PIX, a proposed “photography lifestyle magazine for women,” has drawn commentary from photo editors Stella Kramer and Jasmine DeFoore and Jezebel blogger Katie J.M. Baker for its fluffy content—stories like “Smudge-proof makeup tips for long days behind the camera”—directed towards young female photographers.

›› Two years ago, Scott Blake, the digital artist behind the “Chuck Close Filter” website, was confronted by Close himself for what the painter believed to be unfair use of his copyrighted artwork. Blake recently recounted his dormant dispute with Close in an online essay, raising questions about when art is derivative, when it is plagiaristic, and if it’s possible for it to ever be entirely original. Wired reported, bloggers weighed in.

›› Les Rencontres d’Arles was in full swing last week. As The Guardian reported, Christian Patterson’s Redheaded Peckerwood took home the festival’s author book award, the second year in a row that a Mack-published photobook has won the award—Taryn Simon’s A Living Man Declared Dead…was the 2011 winner. Jonathan Torgovnik won the €25,000 Discovery prize for Intended Consequences, and The Latin American Photobook was awarded the festival’s historical book prize. Additionally, Magnum celebrated its 65th anniversary at the festival, announced nominees Zoe Strauss, Jerome Sessini and Bieke Depoorter, and considered what the future holds for the organization.

›› Yoda reviewed photobooks a couple of weeks ago on Blake Andrews’ blog. We can’t believe we missed it. Work by Vivian Maier, Duane Michals, Rinko Kawauchi, Alec Soth and John Gossage, and The PhotoBook Review were amongst the titles critiqued by the Jedi Master. On the Gossage/Soth collaboration The Auckland Project: “Tack this poster to their dorm room I’m guessing few collectors shall. In protective cover will it remain. Hmm. Yeesss.”

›› The Rolling Stones celebrate their 50th anniversary this week and Magnum has reached into the archives, posting on their Facebook page a vintage Guy Le Querrec image of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards at a show in 1967. Over at The New Yorker, Photo Booth has launched an 11-image slideshow of photos from the band’s early years, including a birds-eye shot of fans mobbing the band’s vehicle after a press conference at the Hilton, NYC in 1965.

›› More in anniversary news…In celebration of  the 50th anniversary of Andy Warhol’s first solo exhibition, at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, The Metropolitan Museum of Art is planning Regarding Warhol: Fifty Artists, Fifty Years, which opens in September and will also feature works by photographers Cindy Sherman and Robert Mapplethorpe. Over at NokiaConnects Joel Willians recounts the 5 Strangest Habits of Andy Warhol, asking the age-old question, “Eccentricity and genius go hand in hand, right?”

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.

• 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.

August 21, 1968. Hours after 30-year-old Josef Koudelka–then nascent career photographer–returned to Prague, having spent the past several years documenting the lives of Romanian gypsies, Soviet tanks suddenly cross the Czechoslovakian border. 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops and 2000 tanks head to Prague and occupy the capitol.

“Our city is experiencing perhaps the most trying moment in our recent history,” the Municipal Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist party of Prague announces. The country, then under the sphere of Soviet influence, had been occupied by foreign armies several times before, but never by troops from allied, supposedly friendly countries.

According to the a statement issued by TASS, the Soviet Press Agency earlier that day, the USSR made an appeal to Warsaw pact countries for immediate assistance, including armed forces, “to the fraternal Czechoslovak people.” They said the request was made “because of the emergent threat to the socialist system and statehood provided for by the constitution of Czechoslovakia.”

The “threat” comes as news to the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, which broadcasts a statement calling upon “all citizens of the republic to remain calm and not to put up a resistance to the advancing troops because defense of the frontiers is now impossible.”

As tensions mount, ‘Prague’, the Free Legal Radio Transmitter, surrounded by Soviet infantrymen broadcasts a reiteration: “Friends… any resistance to the superior force is utterly futile. This is not defeatism; our only chance is in our preventing bloodshed, because bloodshed makes no sense at all in the present circumstances. Please remain calm, as calm as possible.”

Despite a largely passive and civil resistance, 72 Czechs and Slovaks loose their lives, hundreds others are wounded.

Koudelka had never covered a news event at that point. He spent the first seven days of the invasion making a series of stunning, emotionally charged images in central Prague. The photographs he managed to have smuggled out of the country and a year later distributed anonymously by Magnum Photos. They earned him the Robert Capa Award, though he could not claim authorship until 16 years later when threats to his family had ceased.

Nearly 250 of these images were published, many for the first time, 40 years after the event in the monograph Invasion 68: Prague (Aperture 2008). Select photographs paired with related texts, including radio transcripts and eyewitness testimonies, are now part of a traveling exhibition opening in Porto Alegre, Brazil this Sunday, April 29, 2012 (at FestFotoFoA through May 27, 2012).

“The invasion of Czechoslovakia was meant ‘to restore order,’ to return a country that had broken off its chain to the position of an obedient vassal,” write Jiri Hoppe, Jiri Suk, and Jaroslav Cuhra in their introduction to the monograph. But, “urgent appeals were made to avoid violence,” and the tanks and assault rifles were “met by a wave of words and gestures.”

One mode of resistance was called the ‘anonymous town,’ in which “the names of streets, institutions, government offices and road signs were painted over with the aim of making it difficult or impossible for the soldiers to get their bearings in an unknown environment.” Substituted instead were wall scribblings with messages like, “Moscow – 1,800 km.”

Koudelka’s series, “is not a chronological record,” he writes, “although the historical sequence of events during the first week of the occupation is take into account. Rather, the intent is to evoke the atmosphere of those days.”

Exhibition on view:
Sunday, April 29, 2012–Sunday, May 27, 2012

FestFotoPoA
Rua Sete de Setembro, 1028
Porto Alegre, Brazil

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.
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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.”

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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

JAPAN. Tokyo. 1996. The new metro. © Gueorgui Pinkhassov / Magnum

Wednesday, December 7, 2011 at 7:00 pm

A conversation with Gueorgui Pinkhassov, Russia’s only Magnum photographer. He photographs color and light to translate his impressions of reality in a poetic way which creates for the viewer the experience of a daydream. At Aperture, he will discuss his inspirations, current projects and new ideas, and answer questions from the audience.

Born in Moscow, Pinkhassov studied cinematography and later worked as a set photographer at the Mosfilm Studio. His work was noticed by the prominent Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, who invited Pinkhassov to the set to make a reportage about his film Stalker.

Pinkhassov moved permanently to Paris in 1985 and joined Magnum Photos in 1988. He works regularly for the international press, particularly for Geo, Actuel, and the New York Times Magazine and has two books of his photographs published. His work is also included in the new book, The New York Times Magazine Photographs (Aperture, 2011), edited by Kathy Ryan, the award-winning photo editor of the magazine.

Presented by Snob Project at Aperture Foundation
547 West 27th Street, 4th floor
New York, New York

(212) 505-5555

FREE

Magnum photographer Jonas Bendiksen’s series The Places We Live, was recently featured on  The New York Times Lens blog in a piece titled: Must See: A New Kind of News. This project is highlighted as it has been presented as an interactive website based on his series, which was published by Aperture. The site provides a 360-degree view of the urban slums of Kenya, India, Venezuela, and Indonesia as well as interviews with the people who inhabit them. This interactive experience engages the viewer and opens eyes into the stories of those who live in the most unfortunate of conditions.

Check out www.theplaceswelive.com to experience these impoverished urban spaces for yourself.

Click here to purchase your copy of The Places We Live through Aperture.

An exhibition of this work is soon to be on view at The Building Museum, Washington D.C. this fall.

Coinciding with Aperture’s Spring 2009 title Access to Life copublished by Magnum Photos, The Stenersen Museum in Oslo presents an exhibition of works from eight Magnum photographers Jonas Bendiksen, Jim Goldberg, Alex Majoli, Steve McCurry, Paolo Pellegrin, Gilles Peress, Eli Reed, and Larry Towell. The work presents people in nine countries around the world before and four months after they began antiretroviral treatment for AIDS. The emotionally charged presentation of their faces, voices, and stories is illustrative of millions of people who would have died without access to free antiretroviral drugs.

Click here to view Access to Life via Magnum in Motion.

Click here to purchase your copy of Access to Life.

Access to Life
Saturday, June 20—Sunday, August 9, 2009
The Stenersen Museum
Munkedamsveien 15
N-0116 Oslo, Norway
+47 23 49 36 00

The cover of Bob Dylan’s latest album, “Together Through Life” features photographs from the legendary Bruce Davidson on the cover and Josef Koudelka on the back. Davidson’s work centers around a group of teenagers from Brooklyn called “The Jokers” whose antics he documented in summer of 1959. Magnum in Motion has created a video compilation of Davidson’s images to illustrate “Beyond Here Lies Nothin’”, click here to watch the full version via Amazon.

© Gilles Peress/Magnum Photos

For the past 25 years, the AIDS pandemic has inflicted excruciating pain upon humanity, having ravaged the lives of millions of people around the world. Over the past few years, however, a quiet global revolution has enabled millions infected by HIV to live healthy lives through the free antiretroviral treatment program initiated by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

In Access to Life, eight of the world’s leading photojournalists, all members of Magnum Photos, follow thirty individuals in nine countries before, and four months after, they began the antiretroviral treatment, documenting the transformative effect on their bodies, their lives, and the lives of their families. This dream team of photographers was assigned to the following countries: Jonas Bendiksen (Haiti), Jim Goldberg (India), Alex Majoli (Russia), Steve McCurry (Vietnam), Paolo Pellegrin (Mali), Gilles Peress (Rwanda), Eli Reed (Peru), and Larry Towell (South Africa and Swaziland). These powerful images reveal the patients’ complex struggle against the disease with great subtlety and hope.

Coinciding with the release of Access to Life (Aperture, Magnum Photos and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, April 2009), Aperture and The New School are pleased to present a compelling panel discussion with photojournalists Gilles Peress and Kristen Ashburn; Mark Lubell, the Bureau Chief for the Magnum Photos New York and former picture editor of Time magazine MaryAnne Golon; and moderator Fred Ritchin, Associate Chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and Director of PixelPress.

Following this panel discussion, Aperture will host a reception and book signing on Thursday, April 23 with Magnum photographers in attendance.

Access to Life: Photojournalism on AIDS
Panel Discussion
Wednesday, April 22, 7:00 pm

FREE

The New School
Tishman Auditorium
66 West 12th Street
New York, New York

Access to Life
Book Signing
Thursday, April 23, 7:00 pm

FREE

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