seeing & being seen

doctored photos

meggan gould — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 12:24:41 +0000

French MPs want health warnings on airbrushed photographs: Airbrushed photographs could be given government health warnings in France to protect women from ‘false’ images of female beauty.

Despite the inherent sexism in above article title, this is interesting.

Flickr, As_One

Robert Frank, cont.

meggan gould — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 16:45:28 +0000

I love it when Anthony Lane writes about photography, as I have mentioned (possibly several times) before. This week’s New Yorker has a lovely piece: Road Show: The journey of Robert Frank’s “The Americans.”

Robert Frank. Parade, Hoboken, New Jersey 1955

Robert Frank’s elevator girl

meggan gould — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 16:48:44 +0000

That little ole lonely elevator girl looking up sighing in an elevator full of blurred demons, what’s her name & address?

- Jack Kerouac, from his introduction to Robert Frank’s The Americans

Robert Frank

Collins poses in a recreation of the photo, 50 years later. Ian Padgham/SFMOMA

Here is a lovely short piece on NPR about a woman who recognized herself in a Robert Frank photograph, decades later.

hiatus

meggan gould — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 15:12:49 +0000

So much for promises and good intentions. My June flurry of postings succumbed to months of house-hunting and the like. Impending semester will rectify this promptly. Interim-placation: a few shots from one visited house.

photojournalistic hoax

meggan gould — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 12:09:19 +0000

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 weather interlude

meggan gould — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 14:07:26 +0000

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

… gave us those nice bright colors*

meggan gould — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 19:53:46 +0000

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.

Stock family photography

meggan gould — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 23:00:43 +0000

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

Santa Fe

meggan gould — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 13:16:52 +0000

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.

DELINQUENT

meggan gould — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 12:32:10 +0000

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.