State of the Art

And the Overseas Press Club Awards Go To….

Last night at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Manhattan, the Overseas Press Club handed out its awards for journalism from abroad. The OPC awards include four very coveted photojournalism prizes. (For a list of all the winners, go here.)  Photographers from Getty Images won three of them, leading the ceremony’s host, Ann Curry of NBC News, to comment that she saw “a pattern” at work.
     The Robert Capa Gold Medal Award (for reporting that requires exceptional courage and enterprise) went to John Moore of Getty Images for his images of the assassination of former Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Accepting the award, Moore told the black-tie audience that he’d been adopted as a child, then went on discuss the role that luck, or perhaps fate, plays in photojournalism and in life. He recalled that on the day of the assassination “something” told him to move away from Bhutto’s car. He avoided being killed himself and was able to photography the chaos that followed.
     Paula Bronstein of Getty Images won the John Faber Award (for photographic reporting in newspapers or wire services) for her coverage of the Bhutto attack. The judges said her images “document human vulnerability in a world shattered by the now familiar deadly destruction of suicide bombing.” Bronstein is a well-traveled photojournalist who has often found herself in dangerous situations.
     Getty photographer Brent Stirton won the Feature Photography Award for his pictures of gorillas that had been slaughtered in the Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The images, which appeared in Newsweek magazine, are absolute showstoppers (see above) and have been winning awards in a variety of photo competitions. Stirton was named as one of American Photo’s “Heroes of Photography” in 2007 for his coverage of environmental issues in Africa. (He is also the photographer asked by Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt to make the official photographs of their baby Shiloh in 2006.)
      The non-Getty winner of the evening was Cedric Gerbehaye of Agence Vu in France. He won the Olivier Rebbot Award (for photographic reporting in magazines or books) for images made in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where millions have died as a result of civil unrest. (See below.) Gerbehaye is a Belgian photographer who traveled to the DRC with the Doctors Without Borders organization.—David Schonauer

Opinions Fly About Julianne Moore Photos

The May edition of Paris Vogue features some very, very interesting images of actress Julianne Moore, shot by Mario Testino. Oh, the fashion blogs have been buzzing with opinions. Some people loved it. Others...more on that later.
    Moore has graced the covers of dozens of magazines--there is something about her alabaster skin, red hair, and ability to freeze a glacial expression that photographers and editors love. Her cool elevates what would be a fashion picture into something kinda artistic. (Helmut Newton could do it with just about any woman, but he really could do it with Sigourney Weaver.)
    Some bloggers really resented the crotch-on-the-cover thing. Lewd? With Moore's presence, I think the crotch was unnecessary. The inside shot of her in a sheer top is neither lewd nor unnecessary--it's brilliant.
    Several of the blogs I read seemed most upset with the fact that Moore is posing for shots like this at age 47. That's ridiculous. Sexy is sexy, and sometimes 47 is sexiest. 
    The important thing here is to note that this is Paris Vogue, and it fits perfectly into the culture and tradition of that magazine. Your opinion?
    Age aside, Moore looks a lot better than Gwyneth Paltrow on the cover of the May American Vogue. She's been Photoshopped into something unrecognizable.--David Schonauer
   

"I'm not a screamer"

Some news stories beg a photograph for verification. Such is the case with the alligator that strolled into Sandra Frosti's kitchen in Oldsmar, Florida. Fortunately someone had the presence of mind to snap several pictures of it before it was removed (our favorite shot is at left).

"I was in my bedroom and I heard a noise. And I walked in and he was in the kitchen," Frosti told ABC News. "How about that? But I'm not a screamer, so I just went 'Oh my God' and I ran to the telephone."

After reading this, what I'd really like to see is a picture of the unflappable, 69-year-old Frosti. But all Google Image searches of her name lead back to photos of the interloping gator. However, Frosti's voice has been immortalized in a clip of her 911 call about the gator's intrusion that has become a big internet hit.

During the call, the dispatcher asks Frosti if the animal might be an iguana. “Oh-no, no, no, no, no,” Frosti answered matter-of-factly. "It's huge." And the photos bear her out.

But on a much sadder note in the Animals Gone Wild department, the grizzly bear that appeared in the Will Ferrell film "Semi-Pro" reportedly lashed out and killed one of his trainers yesterday. Of course, this story also begs a photo — one of the bear's publicity stills is at right. — Jack Crager

Where to Go and What to See

If you haven't picked up on this before, I'm a photojournalism girl at heart, so I'm happy to see there are several shows this week that have a distinctly documentary bent while preserving the beauty and grace of what we call "fine-art photography" (although the distinction between the two is getting blurrier every day).

Shifting Landscapes at the powerHouse Arena in Brooklyn looks at changes humans have wrought on our environment through images by Edward Burtynsky, Olaf Otto Becker, David Maisel, and Simon Norfolk. It also includes work from Christopher LaMarca, whose individual Forest Defenders show opens contiguously today.

I wasn't familiar with Stella Johnson's work before, but I'm glad to have been introduced to it through her show on Saturday at the Hallmark Museum of Contemporary Photography in Turner Fall, Massachusetts. She spent her Fulbright year photographing women in rural Mexican communities, and her new book, Al Sol, demonstrates the best of her dense, poetic black-and-whites from there as well as Nicaragua and Cameroon.

Finally, it's a bit of a hike (to Amsterdam actually), but I highly recommend a show with Lana Slezic and Robert Knoth at the LUX Photo Gallery on Thursday. If you can't make the trip (and most of us can't), it will be worth your while to get familiar with these two artists through the internet at least. Slezic's book Forsaken was on American Photo's top ten list last year, and her new series of portraits made with an old field camera of unveiled Afghanistan women is mesmerizing (see above). Robert Knoth has systematically documented the effects of long-term nuclear testing on parts of the former USSR, and his portraits especially are haunting without being voyeuristic.

~Miki Johnson

(Photo: © Lana Slezic)

Follow the link below for details on these and many more photo events around the world.

The Photo Book As Art and Insulation

Here’s some good news for people who love photo books—and all books for that matter.
    If you are one of those people, you may sometimes feel guilty about trees being cut down for paper. But the editor’s of the Bookseller magazine in the UK now assure all of us that books are environmentally good. Their thinking is that books lining the walls of homes actually provide a type of insultation, reducing energy usage for heating.
     The science behind the claim—spelled out in an article in the Telegraph newspaper—isn’t really spelled out, as far as I can tell. But it’s an intriguing idea, and very welcome, I can tell you. I’m tired of carrying around a paper-lover’s guilt. I believe in photo books as collections of history, as art objects in their own right. My office (above), which contains stacks and mountains of photo books, lined against walls and piled high on tables, must be the most energy efficient office in New York.
      I know I'm not alone in this. A couple of weeks  ago I was interview photographer/book packager Rick Smolan, who confessed that a lot of his friends try to make him feelbad about making books. (Rick is one of the people behind the popular "Day in the Life of..." series, so he's go a lot of trees to answer for.) But, as he told me, there is nothing like books in terms of reproducing images with great power and authority. The Telegraph article says that a survey of people in the UK found that many more would rather have a home library than a home theater system. I wonder if the same would be true in the U.S. Let's start our own informal pole: What would you rather have, a home photo library or a home theater?
—David Schonauer

Tintype Buckaroos

Having grown up in the Texas Panhandle with a healthy dose of cowboy artifacts and imagery all around, I'm always tickled when I come across said folklore here in New York City. So I was pleased as a pig in mud to see the arts-section feature story called "You Bet Your Tintype, Buckaroo" in yesterday's New York Times.

The subject is the photography of National Geographic veteran Robb Kendrick — a native of tiny Hereford, Texas (home to world-class stinky feed lots, and sports rival to my nearby hometown of Canyon) — who often shoots modern cowboy life using the outdated but aesthetically apt medium of the tintype.

"The latest result of Mr. Kendrick’s twin obsessions — with tintypes and the bow-legged anachronisms who continue to make their living on horseback — is Still: Cowboys at the Start of the Twenty-First Century, a new collection of 148 tintype portraits published by the University of Texas Press," writes Randy Kennedy in the Times.

The story's online slide show includes evocative portraits such as those of Raithe and Merline Rupe (above left) and Kendrick himself at work (right). The project is a fascinating rediscovery of rural North America, historic photo techniques, and enduring relics. Happy trails to viewers. — Jack Crager