The Brooklyn Museum At Night

I was perusing various art and photo twitters this morning (since PopPhoto.com just set up a twitter of its own, which you can view here), and I came across this great picture taken by Amy Dreher on the Brooklyn Museum twitter. The museum has several bronze Auguste Rodin statues in the front atrium, and at night they get covered in plastic. It almost looks intentional, as if the silhouetted figure under plastic was itself the work of art. I love this image though because it confirms my childhood belief that it would be very cool to wander around a museum at night.  —Lindsay Sakraida

Unseen Army Medical Photos On View at Flickr

Thanks to the after-hours work of a museum archivist, a trove of historical military medical photographs is now on view on Flickr. This is what the Internet was invented for.
     The previously secret archive at the National Museum of Health and medicine contains more than 700,000 images dating from the Civil War through the Vietnam War. Mke Rhode, the museum's head archivist, and a team of researchers worked after hours to scan some 500,000 of the images, many of which are now available for viewing here. Rhode did the work without the blessing of the military, according to this article.
     I've been looking at the images all morning, and they range from mundane views and soldiers undergoing recreational therapy to really interesting moments, such as the first aircraft accident investigation. --David Schonauer

Stewart Butterfield On How Flickr Came to Be

Seems like only yesterday that Flickr emerged on the tech/cultural radar. Now its time to look back in awe at how it came to be. Co-founder Stewart Butterfield tells the tale here.

Web Watch: What Happens to Your Online Photos When You Die?

Here's a good question I've never really thought much about: What happens to images you've posted on websites or social networking sites after you die? Will they live online forever? And if so, is that a kind of wonderful immortality, or is it creepy?
    This story on techradar.com has some info on the subject. If I read it correctly, your images on Facebook may stay around for a long time even if you go to that big darkroom in the sky. (Facebook accounts remain active unless you deactivate them, so theoretically your grandkids will be able to post images of themselves on your wall, even while you're in the grave.)
    According to the story, Flickr accounts are in theory supposed to die when you do. But in reality your account will remain on the web if there is occasion activity on it.--David Schonauer

Sign On, Meet Up, Shoot Away

Seattle-based photographer Chase Jarvis has long been a champion of amateur/emerging photographers, especially insofar as professionals are trying to shut them out of the industry because they feel threatened. The black box -- what Jarvis calls that core of insider knowledge pros can get overly protective of -- needs to have the top blown off, he says. Jarvis has been doing this on a personal level by posting detailed explanations on his blog of how he gets his shots, how he packs his bags, even every outtake photo from an entire shoot (the pros take crappy pictures too!). Now he's stepping it up to the next level by helping the Seattle amateur photo community, collected in a Flickr Meetup and Strobist group, to come together for big photo learning sessions. They just had their second shoot day, with 100 photographers and lots of models, lights, and, yes, professionals congregating in a HUGE studio space Jarvis helped procure. Check out the video here and the longer background description from the first shoot here. Although most communities will be hard-pressed to find a professional steward who "gets it" as quickly and completely as Jarvis, this is an idea and ideology that Jarvis (and I) hope to see proliferate around the country and globe.

~Miki Johnson

Flickr Superstar Profiled in Times Magazine

I’ve been keeping a secret for a while now, and it’s time I just let it out, so here goes: I totally don’t follow the whole Flickr thing. I check out images there from time to time, but I don’t know who the big stars and major personalities are. By now I should be an upstanding member of the Flickr community, since I write about photography, but instead I spend all my spare time working.
    So I was really interested in a piece in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine by Vigrinia Heffernan about Rebekka Guoleifsdottir, describes as “one of Flickr’s most popular photographers.
    The point of the story was that some savvy photographers have learned how to perfect a “Flickr style”—images that look good in thumbnail form, with fulsome digital manipulation—and how to work the social networking aspect of the site to make herself more popular.
     As the piece points out, Guoleifsdottir, who lives in Iceland, isn’t shy about posting images of herself (above, for example). She eventually became so popular on Flickr that she was hired to do a Toyota ad campaign.
      I’d be interested in hearing from Flickr members if they believe there is particular style of photography that defines a new aesthetic. Do film images really get shouted down because they seem out of focus? Is it wrong to game the Flickr system in order to become popular? (Analog artists have been doing that forever.)–David Schonauer

A Flickr of Leibovitz

Master photographer that she is, Annie Leibovitz is often stirring up the blogosphere ... as in the recent debate, both con and pro, over her new Vogue cover featuring an image of Gisele Bundchen and LeBron James (left).

But today, we're especially intrigued with this item about Lebovitz and Flickr. Hmmm. (Be sure to read the whole post and check out her Flickr page at the bottom.)

Campaign Visuals In the Age of Facebook

Stephen Ferry is a freelance documentary photographer based in New York City and Bogotá, Colombia. Ferry's work has received numerous prizes and honors, including two World Press photo awards. In more than 20 years of international travel, Ferry has concentrated on long-term reportage on issues of historic change and human rights. His 1999 book, I Am Rich Potosí: The Mountain that Eats Men (Monacelli Press), documented the lives of silver miners in Potosí, Bolivia, over an eight-year period. Since 2000, Ferry has focused his work on Colombia, carrying out assignments for GEO, National Geographic, Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, and The New York Times. He is currently based in Bogotá and is dedicated to long-term coverage of Colombia's civil war. In this Q&A with guest columnist Michael Shaw, he discuss his image (shown here) taken January 7 at a campaign stop in Rochester, New Hampshire.

Michael Shaw: Given the range of campaign images I've been looking at lately, this one you made the other weekend, just before the New Hampshire primary, is substantially different. This has a completely different kind of energy.

Stephen Ferry: It seems a little funny talking about my own work this way, but of all the photos I shot in New Hampshire, I think this one speaks to something new and essential going on. Although Obama was the subject, it says less about him than about this social moment in time. Specifically, it seems to me there's a "Facebook zeitgeist" in this campaign.

MS: What do you mean?

SF: First of all, it's about equalizing. Notice how his smile and her smile are lit by the same kind of light. Both are subject to the same cameras that are in everybody's hands nowadays. That, to me, speaks to the Facebook experience. Once they are posted there, all photographs are equal on Facebook. The only way they differ in importance has to do with how many people connect to them.

Media Watch: Tears for a Fallen Firefighter

Everyone tells me newspapers are going away, and I hope it isn’t true. As I posted yesterday, information has become a niche commodity, but newspapers still allow us to look outside our own interests to see things we didn’t know we were interested in. In that regard they differ from other media, such as magazines. (The axiom is that newspapers bring the world to you, while magazines bring your world to you. I suppose that means that personal media like Flickr allow you to bring yourself to the world.)
     I got to thinking about all this when I looked at the Metro section of the New York Times on my train ride into Manhattan this morning. I thought I would spend the trip reading about the results of the New Hampshire primary, but instead my attention went to Nicole Bengiveno’s photo of Jessica Martinson at the funeral of her husband, Lt. John Martinson of the FDNY, who was killed while fighting a blaze in Brooklyn last week. You can read the story here.
     Papers all over the country bring their readers this kind of local news every day. The pictures and the stories create something greater than the parts—newspaper don’t just provide information, they are something more visceral; they form the texture of our time. To look at today’s newspaper, or a newspaper from a particular day 50 years ago, is to know what that day felt like to people.
      I don’t get that feeling when I get news stories off the Internet, frankly. The texture of the news is torn up by that medium, which compels users to constantly choose what they want to see and read. I suppose it's old-fashioned to believe in the value  of confronting worlds that you don’t think you’re interested in.—David Schonauer

In the Future, Will Anyone See Your Photos?

This week we’ll all be eagerly reading reports about the important business the nation is conducting as Americans prepare to choose what kind of nation this will be in the future. No, I’m not talking about the presidential primary being held today in New Hampshire—I’m talking about the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Already we know that Blu-Ray has won the election over high-def DVD formats. Comcast is promising nearly unlimited choices of on-demand entertainment, which will come as a surprise to all those analysts who have been writing off the cable industry. Consumer electronics and photography have essentially become part of the same technological world, so we expect to hear some news about out special world coming out of CES as well.
     Now, however, let me come to the point of this meandering post: I have a gnawing suspicion that the wonderful technology that is offering us so many choices will in fact be the death of photography—or at least photography in one particular sense: That we make pictures so that other people can see what we have seen. It may be that in the future no one will really look at your pictures. You may be the only one who cares about what you have seen. And even you might not be that interested.