seeing & being seen

Faked photographs are, of course, old news. Yawn, etc. However, a pleasant new spin thereupon: Two Students Con Paris Match’s Photojournalism Prize. Or, in French via Le Figaro here.

Guillaume Chauvin and Rémi Hubert won for a reportage chronicling the harsh difficulties some poor students encounter while studying at the Strasbourg university. Their images showed students living in basements or offering sex to pay their rents. Another image portrayed a young man falling asleep in a bus as he embarked on a two-hour commute to his university. The reportage can be seen on Paris Match’s website here.

The trick? All of the images had been faked, the two winners announced as they received the coveted prize on 24 June. ‘We though it was a bit caricatural,’ says one of the students to Le Monde newspaper. ‘We thought it would never win.’

A photograph for you of the coming week… which looks disconcertingly like the last two:

Another ones bites the dust…. This time we bid farewell to Kodachrome, as announced today by Kodak.

For those of you with freezers full of it yet to process, or yet to shoot… Dwayne’s Photo in Kansas, the last lab to commercially process the stuff in the world, will continue to do so until 2010.

*almost all of the news headlines are irritatingly referencing Paul Simon; I felt obliged to follow suit.

Heard this story of contemporary photo appropriation/diffusion on the radio: Family Surprised at Ending Up in Czech Ad.

Back from Santa Fe - a whirlwind weekend of meeting lots of fine-art-photo-geeks and seeing mountains of work. I will post more about some of the specifics of people I met… because, you see, I have turned over this new leaf.

Indeed. Mea culpa to my one diligent reader still out there, who has appropriately chastised me. So many links I fully intend to post, so many open tabs here in my browser full of the best of intentions. Upon return from Santa Fe next week, I will be reformed.

Hiroshi Sugimoto Boden Sea at Uttwill  2993

Photographer Sugimoto strikes a Stone Age deal with U2

Bono confessed that he loved Sugimoto’s seascape photographs and began quizzing the artist about the work.

“He started taking notes as I talked,” Sugimoto recalled. Those notes became the foundation for the new album’s title track. Last year, during a visit to Dublin, Sugimoto heard the first demo tape, and a few months later was told by Bono that U2 wanted to use the Boden Sea image on the album jacket.

“I said, ‘Are you sure? If you use it you won’t be able to put anything on top of it, not even the U2 name,” the artist remembered.

He was surprised when Bono strongly agreed. Rolling Stone is now calling the text-free jacket “an early front runner for album cover of the year.” (The cover also features an equal sign, but it is attached to the plastic wrapper, so it disappears once opened it.) Then came talk of money.

“I gave myself just a second to think about it,” Sugimoto recalled, “and I said ‘How about a Stone Age deal — no cash?’ “

Bono agreed on an “artist-to-artist” barter whereby Sugimoto could use the “No Line on the Horizon” song in any project he wanted in the future. Sugimoto says he still hasn’t made up his mind about how to use the song — which he says he likes, but liked even better in its “more hard rock” demo stage.

Errol Morris is at it again, via his NYTimes blog. At stake this time is the image below and its histories. Fascinating stuff.

No name — but a soldier brave, he fell.
We shall find her, without a name;
This picture, sometime, will tell whence he came.

— Emily Latimer, “The Unknown”

Helen Levitt, Who Captured New York Street Life on Film, is Dead at 95

Helen Levitt. New York, circa 1940.

Form is henceforth divorced from matter. In fact, matter as a visible object is of no great use any longer, except as the mould on which form is shaped. Give us a few negatives of a thing worth seeing, taken from different points of view, and that is all we want of it.

Oliver Wendell Holmes: The Stereoscope and the Stereograph (1859)