Cherylynn Tsushima

life:

“By some special graciousness of fate I am deposited — as all good photographers like to be — in the right place at the right time. Go into it [photography] as young as possible. Bring all the asset you have and play to win.”

— Margaret Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself

Truth.

(via timelightbox)

life:

What makes color photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson so rare?

There’s a reason, it turns out, why coming across his color photos can be so jarring; not only did Cartier-Bresson infrequently shoot in color, but he destroyed virtually all of his color negatives, leaving an almost exclusively black-and-white legacy to future generations. Finding out that Cartier-Bresson shot professionally in color — and sometimes worked on major assignments in color — is a bit like reading Just Kids and learning that Patti Smith is not only a poet, but a thrilling, moving, utterly masterful writer of prose. One has a sense of happy surprise and, somehow, of enlargement.

One of Cartier-Bresson’s most significant color projects was a 1958 assignment for LIFE: a four-month, 7,000 mile tour through communist China during that country’s convulsive “great leap forward,” when the huge, ancient nation was being alternately pushed and pulled, dragged and harried by its leaders to leave its past behind and to embrace industrialization, collectivism and the precepts of Chairman Mao.

See the layouts from this photo essay here.

(via nprradiopictures)

theniftyfifties:

Fashion photography by Richard Avedon, 1957.

Avedon’s exhibit at the MFA Boston was fantastic. 

As a side note, a friend told me she was at a gallery opening and Robert Frank and Elliott Erwitt were there. WHAT?!?!? Oh, just two of the greatest photographers alive and two of my favorite Magnum photographers. Not. Real. Life.

futurejournalismproject:

Photojournalism v. Instagram, The Battle Continues?

A few weeks ago, photographer Nick Stern expressed his grievances against Instagram, chiding its inauthenticity for eroding the value of professional photojournalism:

Every time a news organization uses a Hipstamatic or Instagram-style picture in a news report, they are cheating us all. It’s not the photographer who has communicated the emotion into the images. It’s not the pain, the suffering or the horror that is showing through. It’s the work of an app designer in Palo Alto who decided that a nice shallow focus and dark faded border would bring out the best in the image.

Yesterday, Heather Murphy, Slate’s Photo Editor, produced a rebuttal in which she pointed out the journalistic value app-driven photography actually creates:

Instagram is not a threat to photojournalism. The real threat is that photojournalism professionals are refusing to engage with the platform. If they spent a bit more time with it, they’d see that Instagram is about much more than these faux-vintage-filters. It’s a community of millions of photo addicts, eager to embrace their work, journalistic standards and all. 

The FJP: The app-photography v. photojournalism debate is not a new one and you can get the full breadth of Stern and Murphy’s arguments at the links above. At minimum, Murphy agrees with Stern that Instagram should not be a substitute for more formal outlets of presenting photographs. We agree too. Well, Michael did, back in October:

The results produce very interesting documentation but I don’t think you can call it photojournalism. There’s just too much fabrication going on.

But perhaps the debate sheds light on a more interesting trend. In that same post, Michael wrote of the iphone-as-camera as a tool. Nothing less, nothing more. And in the future-of-journalism light, tools are often fascinating means of creating new communication cultures. Murphy addresses this well. Not only does Instagram “help novice photographers get their feet wet,” but it creates an environment to aid transparency for journalism at large, much in the way that other social media outlets (like Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook) do for news outlets, individual journalists, and writers. Murphy writes,

Reporters like Parker are learning about photography while sharing behind-the-scenes tidbits. Campaigns, we all know by now, are big charades; little deconstructed moments like the directional tape on the floor help make them more interesting, accessible, and real.

I can experience photos from photojournalists I admire (the handful who are on the platform), just a few seconds after they took them. I can leave them a question in the comments—and they might answer. They might even like my photos back.

So, if we stray a bit from the need to defend the integrity of photojournalism, we can re-locate the debate hashed by Stern and Murphy in a larger conversation on the tools that allow journalism, particularly the process of journalism, to become more transparent, interesting, and accessible to its audience.  -Jihii

(photo via Slate)

Read it all.

(Source: futurejournalismproject)

timelightbox:

Congratulations are in order for Justin Maxon — he was recently awarded the 2012 Alexia Foundation professional grant. The $15,000 grant will go toward the completion of his project which aims “to shed light on the frightening reality of how many murders go unsolved every year in America.”

See his work on LightBox here.

I feel strongly that many photographers today, myself included, have not fully utilized the work we are making to benefit those we document. Work often just ends up on a personal website or at best, published in a magazine or newspaper, where the photographer has no control over the dialog or who their images reach. We throw our work out into the abyss of imagery, idealist in our hope that something will happen from it. Most often nothing comes to pass; people turn the page and move on.

Read more: http://lightbox.time.com/2011/06/10/justin-maxon-when-the-spirit-moves/#ixzz1oAqsya4F

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Wow.

YES.

(via pictureyourselves)