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.