State of the Art

Friday Photos in the News

Flooding the Grand Canyon:
In an effort to mimic the natural floods that once gushed through the Grand Canyon, water was unleashed from Glen Canyon Dam this week. This attempt at rejuvenating the ecosystem of the Grand Canyon at the very least provided a wonderful photo op. Are you picking up on any symbolism in the Associated Press picture here? Or did I simply have too much coffee after lunch?

Obama, On the Record—and How!
The day after Hillary Clinton defeated Barack Obama in the Ohio and Texas primaries, the New York Times ran this image, by Win McNamee for Getty Images, showing Obama talking to reporters on his campaign plane. The Times unfortunately cropped out the best part, which is the reporter at right holding a bunch of cell phones or tape recorders or something. Gawker happily showed the entire image. What in the world is she doing?

Rare Helen Keller Photo Found
This week the New England Historic Genealogy Society released this photographic of an eight-year-old Helen Keller with her teacher, Anne Sullivan. The rare image also shows Keller holding a doll. The word “doll” was the first that Keller ever spoke. The image, made 120 years ago at Cape Cod, was found in a photo album by Thaxter Spencer, 87, whose mother was a close friend of Keller.  Go here for more of the story.

The English Earthquake
How do you depict the violence of an earthquake in a still photo? David Moir of Reuters shot scientists with the British Geological Survey scanning a seismograph readout of the U.K.’s strongest earthquake in more the 20 years. The quake registered a 5.3 on the Richter scale.--David Schonauer

Leering at Athletes is an Old Game

If you aren’t scanning the web all day like me, you may not know that Allison Stokke is an Internet sensation. The talented young pole-vaulter recently set a women’s indoor pole vault record at the University of California, Berkeley with a mark of 3.99 meters. Her Internet fame is due not to her vaulting abilities, however. Rather it’s due largely to a single photo, made before she was even in college. (Just Google her name; you’ll find the shot.) Yeah, the whole thing is a little creepy. The girl was in high school when she became just another bit of cultural buzz. If you want, you can even download screen savers of her.
       But it’s not like we haven’t leered at athletes before. Some pictures of that type have of course even become iconic. The standard will always be the shot of Swedish high jumper Gunhild Larking, taken by Life magazine photographer George Silk during the 1956 Olympic games in Melbourne, Australia. Silk had been covering the games with a wide-angle camera but wasn’t producing anything noteworthy. Then he saw Larking, and followed her as she waited to compete in a heat. She didn’t win any medals, but Life’s editors noted that she did win many hearts.--David Schonauer

The Wonderful Theo Westenberger

Photographer Theo Westenberger  died last Thursday, February 28, and the news has been slowly filtering through the a photo community that mourns her loss. She passed away at her home in New York after a four-year battle with lung cancer. She was 57. According to Photo District News, she worked up until about  four months ago, when she shot her last story for Architectural Digest. Westenberger's website, which is still up, notes that over her career she shot three presidents and actors like Clint Eastwood, Meryl Streep, and Jennifer Aniston. Photo editor Laurie Kratochvil, who worked with Westenberger on several jobs at Rolling Stone, recalls Westenberger as one of photography's sunniest figures: "She always brought laughter, fun, and  energy into every place she ever worked. Her laugh made you laugh. Her work had a positive, uplifting quality to it, and people had a good time on her shoots."--David Schonauer

Film, Stills, and Albert Maysles

As Dave Schonauer writes in his recent blog, Nubar Alexanian has photographed on the sets of many of Errol Morris's documentaries, work collected in a new book called Nonfiction. If you've never seen Morris's 1980 Gates of Heaven, do: I remember it as a brilliant series of talking still photographs. Another great documentary filmmaker, Albert Maysles, actually took his own pictures as he created such classics as Gimme Shelter and Grey Gardens. (Those earlier films were produced with Albert's brother and sound man David, who died in 1987.) Albert was in fact a photographer first, and you can catch his vintage black-and-white prints from the 1950s and 1960s, color stills from the filming of Grey Gardens, and his recent "cinemagraphs" at New York City's Steven Kasher Gallery, where they're on display through March 15. The cinemagraphs (below) are printed directly from frames of actual Maysles films.

Annals of Advertising: More Butts and Art

The cement behinds in the new Gucci print campaign were obviously put there with some intent. But I prefer the subtle, rubberized treatment in this image from the new Tommy Hilfiger campaign (above). The tire protruding from the model’s backside—what do you think, are we seeing an art directing mistake, or is it there on purpose? Maybe the photographer, Dewey Nicks, was looking for a nice way to add shape to his size-zero model. The campaign was shot at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah.
     Meanwhile, the confluence of fashion and art continues, most directly in the spring-summer print campaign for Bottega Veneta, which was shot by British fine-art photographer Sam Taylor-Wood (below). The company lauds Taylor-Wood’s “sense of composition…use of lighting, and the psychological depth that she brings to pictures.” And you thought it was about the clothes.—David Schonauer

The High Cost of Printing: A Liquid Comparison

Everyone complains about the cost of inkjet printer ink, but have you ever sat down and figured out what you’re really paying? How does ink, as a commodity, compare to other valuable liquids? If I asked you how much you pay for a gallon of gas, I bet you’d know. Can you guess what a gallon of inkjet ink costs?
     My coworker Russell Hart and I sat down with our pencils to do the math. Now, this was a pathetic sight, because Russell and I are decent writers and editors, and Russell is also a very good photographer, but at math we are, um, rusty. We worked hard at it, though, and we were only dealing in rough approximations anyway, but feel free to check our findings.
     Russell checked the price of a 13ml cartridge of color ink for a Canon Pixma printer, which was about $15. That means a full liter would be about $1,170, which means a gallon of the stuff would cost roughly $4,000. 
    “Yikes,” is what I said when we figured that out. When you pay that much for ink, it gives you a whole new perspective on things—like crude oil.

Science As Art: The Earth, From Mars

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is a gifted photographer. Below, see a photograph made on February 19, showing at least four avalanches (or debris falls) at the Martian North Pole.  The camera aboard the orbiting satellite is called the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiement—otherwise cutely known as HiRISE. (Scientist/Artists back here on Earth add colors to the images to make them more media friendly.) While the avalanche images are amazing, more breathtaking in my opinion is the shot that the HiRISE camera made of Earth and the Moon last October 3 (above). I don’t think I’ve ever seen our planet in this perspective. I want a big print!—David Schonauer

Photographer Finds Grownup Nirvana Baby

Sometimes it takes just one shot to put a photographer’s name all over the web. Jason Lazarus, a photographic artist and teacher from Chicago, is getting all sorts of attention just now for a portrait he made earlier this year of a young man in Los Angeles. The guy in the portrait is Spencer Elden, and he’s in his last year of high school. Back in the day he was the baby on the cover of Nirvana’s “Nevermind” album. I love the way still images let us see how time flies. The original image has to be in my top-three album cover list. It still amazes me they left the penis in. According to the Wikipedia entry about the album, they almost didn’t.

According to Cobain, he conceived the idea while watching a television program on water births with Grohl. Cobain mentioned it to Geffen’s art director Robert Fisher. Fisher found some stock footage of underwater births but they were too graphic for the record company…. Instead, Fisher sent a photographer to a pool for babies to take pictures. Five shots were yielded and the band settled on the image of a three-month-old infant named Spenser Elden, the son of the photographer’s friend Rick Elden. However, there was some concern because Elden’s penis was visible in the image. Geffen prepared an alternate cover without the penis…but relented when Cobain made it clear that the only compromise he would accept was a sticker covering the penis that would say “If you’re offended by this, you must be a closet pedophile.”

The new image by Lazarus is very sweet. I love the way still images let us see how time flies.—David Schonauer

Annals of Advertising: Gucci’s Bottom Line

You can always count on Gucci for print campaigns that get noticed. This fashion line will do what it takes, even if it means carving a “G” into a model’s pubic hair. Compared to that, the spring/summer print campaign is subtle, if by subtle you mean posing a model under a big horse’s butt. Indeed, there are statuesque bottoms all over the new campaign, which was shot by Ines van Lamsweerde and Vinoohd Matadin. The girl in the images is model Natasha Poly, who seems to be having fun. (That alone sets the campaign apart from most others, in which the models usually look hungry and unhappy.) Is there symbolism at work in these images? Perhaps the message is about how the vitality of fashion props up the edifice of high culture. I give the campaign a B+. —David Schonauer

The Soul of the Photo Collector

I hope everyone saw this article about photography when it appeared last week, but you might have missed it since it was  in the House & Home section of the New York Times. I was happy that American Photo got a mention in the lead—and happier to read the full profile of Jen Bekman, whose Manhattan gallery and online marketing savvy made her one of our Innovators of the Year in 2006. Nominally, the Times story is about living with art. In reality, it’s a fascinating journey into the soul of a collector.The photo of Bekman is by Gabriele Stabile. —David Schonauer

Must See TV: Photography on Sundance Channel

A quick programming reminder, for all photography enthusiasts who also happen to get the Sundance Channel on their cable packages: This week you can view a series of intriguing documentaries about photographers and photography. The series includes films about Tina  Barney; Henri Cartier-Bresson); Peter Beard; William Eggelston, Helmut Newton, and Tina Modotti. The series will also include an airing of James Crump’s great documentary on photo collector Sam Wagstaff. Go here to read about the series in the New York Times. And here for a great overview of all the documentaries to be presented, along with the times they will air. --David Schonauer