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.

• 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.

• 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.

• The New York Times covers Mary Ellen Mark’s series Prom, first featured in Aperture issue 187, now a monograph by Getty Publications, and shares a trailer from Martin Bell’s accompanying documentary. The Sunday Review publishes an essay by Mark, “Prom Night,” and posts a slideshow of images from the series. LensBlog follows up with a Q&A with the photographer on shooting with one of five existing, finicky, but rewarding 20×24 Polaroid Land Cameras for this series and her earlier monograph Twins (Aperture 2005).
• In their weekly Modern Art Notes Podcast, ArtInfo‘s Tyler Green talks to Mitch Epstein, who he calls “one of America’s most prominent and most honored photographers,” about shifting focus from American Power to trees in New York City, now on view at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. in Chelsea. Epstein will be in conversation with Sondra Gilman and Celso Gonzalez-Falla of the Shared Vision collection at Aperture on Wednesday, April 11, 2012.
• “Is your phone’s camera the only camera you need?” asks the Wall Street Journal, profiling new apps and accessories that make that possible. They also share cell phone snapshots by professional photojournalists, and invite readers to do the same.
• “In an environment where seconds count, there are glorious triumphs and heartbreaking defeats,” writes Michael M. Grynbaum for LensBlog on staff photographer Richard Perry‘s hectic images from the New York City subway. Can’t help but think back to Bruce Davidson’s series from the 1980s and resulting monograph Subway (Aperture 2011), save for the striking dissimilarities between now vastly different transit systems.
• Simon Bray shares a few key points on Phototuts+ on “Why Returning To A Photographic Location Is Such A Good Idea,” whether it’s months, weeks, days, or hours apart. It’s something Richard Misrach did when he began a three year project photographing the same scene from his from porch at all hours of the day for the monograph Golden Gate, which is soon to be released by Aperture as a stunning 16×20″ oversized edition.
• Fototazo interviews Luca Desienna, Chief Editor of Gomma Magazine, on the occasion of the announcement of the eight winners of the call for entries for their exciting new publication of black and white photography MONO, Volume 1 (November 2012). Lightbox at Time shares a slideshow of images by the winners and explains briefly what entailed Gomma’s “search for the best  new black-and-white photographers.”
• The National Press Photographers Association launched a new blog, Ethics Matters, opening up the often circular discussion on how much image manipulation is too much, focusing specifically on new HDR technology which allows cameras to combine multiple frames into a single image, often for a more saturated color effect. This, as Aperture is in the process of acquiring a HDR camera for our own digital media reporting purposes. Stay tuned!