Does Photo Reouching Ruin Lives?

The website of the New York Times has a video opinion piece concerning the effects that retouched photographs have on women's body image that is worth taking a look at. There are some interesting interviews with digital retouchers, who seem to agree that the work they do promotes false ideas about physical perfect. It's probably not news to the readers of a photography blog that essentially every image in every fashion or celebrity magazine is retouched. Should there be a law against such practices? (The video piece begins by noting that in France such laws have been considered.) Should magazines have to tell readers which images have been retouched? One solution mentioned in the piece is that magazines should include the names of retouchers in its photo credits. I know plenty of retouchers who would love to get credit alongside the photographers who take the pictures--and plenty of photographers who would hate that. But maybe that is the solution. Thoughts? --David Schonauer

Disfarmer's Life as Theater...Puppet Theater

There have been some good movies about photographers, but to my knowledge there has never been a theater production about the life of a famous photographer. Until now.
     A  new production, called "Disfarmer," has opened at St. Anne's Warehouse in Brooklyn. As you might expect from the title, the drama is about Mike Disfarmer, the eccentric small-town photographer who during the Great Depression captured the residents of Heber Springs, Arkansas in his store-front studio. Disfarmer's work was discovered by East Coast art critics and curators in the 1970 and today is being championed collector Michael Mattis and gallerist Steven Kasher. Aside from that, there isn't much about Disfarmer's life that would lend itself to the dramatic demands of theater. Especially puppet theater.
    Yes, the production, by Dan Hurlin and based on a script by Sally Oswald, is done with puppets. Here you see the star Disfarmer puppet.
     Based on the review by Christopher Isherwood that appeared in today's New York Times, the play is...well, lacking in drama. Nonetheless, it's worth taking note of. Read the review here, and watch a video of a portion of the production.--David Schonauer

Six Zombie Technologies: Dead, but Among Us

Speaking of technology, this little item happily lists six technologies that are already dead but don't know it. They're like zombies--unliving but still walking around among us. Some of the selections (such as the phone) had us nodding in total agreement . Others (such as Mp3 players, the iPod included) had us reconsidering future purchases. And then there were a couple (alas, newspapers and magazines) that reduced us to abject depression. Is the guy right or wrong?  Go ahead, we can take the truth.--David Schonauer

LaChapelle Disturbing New Rhianna Video

Photographer and director David LaChappelle's latest music video is for Rhianna's single "Disturbia." It's a visual kick--if you consider a dark journey through insanity a kick.--David Schonauer

Because They're Cute, That's Why

Sometimes you see a picture, and you can't say that it's a great picture, but you know you like it. I like this one, because how often do you see a pack of baby white lions? These cubs were born in a wildlife park in Germany. Two different white lion females gave birth on the same day, which is what I call a good day. According to  National Geographic, about 30 white lions live in captivity worldwide. Photo by Alex Grimm/Reuters.--David Schonauer

Three Glimpses of Photography's Future

By now I'm guessing that most people who read blogs (or email) have read Vincent Laforet's insightful, tough-love opus at Sports Shooter about the state of photography today (and tomorrow), The Cloud is Falling. It's a long piece, so there's a chance you might not have gotten to this late paragraph:

I'll leave you with this. If I were 22-years old right out of college looking for a job or a career path, I wouldn't be focusing on working on x newspaper to get to y newspaper and then eventually z magazine with my 20 image portfolio that contains 2 spot news photos, 4 sports pix, 4 feature photos, and a 10 picture story. That model is dead - to put it bluntly. I'd be thinking big - realizing that I have a chance to be a pioneer in this new world of opportunity. Trying to think up of the next big thing.

Woohoo Vincent. You tell 'em. I've been saying this for years, especially because many of the photographers I'm frequently in contact with are, to varying degrees, just out of college, and I know they have the talent to get this revolution off on the right foot. Anyway, it's nice to have that idea reiterated by one of today's biggest photojournalists, especially when he supports it with so much first-hand evidence.

This whole thing has gotten me thinking about what this "new world" might look like, and I've found a couple of promising things (see below). To my mind, the faster we recognize and assimilate the good ideas, the faster we can move on to the even better ones.

That Special Web Kind of Serendipity

As I was perusing my RSS feeds today I saw that APAD had mentioned that the new Soul of Athens project was live. If you're not familiar with it, Soul of Athens was started last year as an online location for multimedia photojournalism pieces about Athens County by local Ohio University students. And as you probably didn't know, I grew up in Athens...so I was glad to check it out. The first story I clicked on (in a format where I could only see words) was titled Love, Loss and Land. As the farmer with a familiar drawl started reading a poem for his dead wife I thought, wait, is that Dave? Sure enough, the story is about Dave Bircher, who happens to be a close family friend. He lives down the (gravel) road from my parents. My dad used to play penny-ante poker with him and the other local farmers. I was at the funeral where Dave read that poem about his wife Connie.

It's a strange sensation to see someone you know translated into black-and-white images and audio voice over. I imagine Dave feels the same way, as does anyone who has every been the subject of any kind of journalism. But overall the piece didn't make me uncomfortable. (If that sounds like an backhanded compliment, it's not.) It didn't unfairly idealize or doom the farming life. It didn't sensationalize the pain Dave felt when Connie died or the happiness we're happy he found with his second wife, Nancy. And when I could manage to step far enough away from the images to see them somewhat objectively, I could tell they were simply beautiful. And then I noticed who had made them. Aha, no wonder. Matt Eich and I got to know each other last year when I was organizing American Photo's Emerging Talent issue, in which he was featured. Being from Athens, I had to meet this kid studying there who was blowing everyone away with his talent when he was only 21. We had some drinks when I went home for the holidays and he came to see me last time he was in New York. It's a small, small world sometimes -- and it's nice to be reminded that photographs can make it even smaller.

~Miki Johnson

(Photo: © Matt Eich)

Artist Robert Rauschenberg Dies at 82

The great American artist Robert Rauschenberg died yesterday at 82. You can read the New York Times obit here. As critic Michael Kimmelman puts it, Rauschenberg obscured and blurred the boundaries between almost every artistic medium: "Building on the legacies of Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell, and others, he thereby helped to obscure the lines between painting and sculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking, sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture and technology, technology and performance art — not to mention between art and life."--David Schonauer

This Day In Photographyy, 1937: The Hindenburg

On May 6, 1937, the German zeppelin Hindenberg exploded while attempting to moor in Lakehurst, New Jersey, killing 36 people. The disaster resulted in the death of the commercial trans-Atlantic zeppelin service and the rise of the mass news media. On this date, still photographers, filmmakers, and radio broadcasters put together a perfect storm of coverage that set the stage for the future of communications.
     At least it seems that way to me, but I’m no historian. Yet I can’t think of any event before the Hindenburg explosion that equaled it’s multi-media coverage.
     There are a couple of angles here that are interesting for photographers today.
     (And lots of interesting trivia: According to this article, the Hindenburg was to have been filled with non-flammable helium; however, the United States owned all the world’s helium and had placed an embargo against selling it to Nazi Germany. The Graf Zeppelin Company, which built the Hindenburg, turned to hydrogen as an lifting agent. Kapow!)

Iconic Decline

Photo © Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times

As an amateur guitarist and rock-and-roll fan, James Blake Miller may well marvel that he's made "the cover of the Rolling Stone." But he's probably not thrilled about the context.

Miller's picture is not on this week's RS cover — that honor goes to Chris Rock — but Miller is the subject of one of the main feature stories: "Home From War: Tragedy of the Marlboro Marine." The story recounts the sad journey that Miller's life has taken since his face became famous in an iconic photograph (above) — a shot of Miller in Falluja, Iraq, made in 2004 by imbedded photographer Luis Sinco for the Los Angeles Times.

The picture — which seemed to capture at once the steely resolve, grimy entanglement, and weary disillusionment of U.S. soldiers in Iraq — became widely known and emblematic of the war. "To my surprise, the image became iconic, capturing a sense of the front line in a young Marine's face," Sinco wrote later in the L.A. Times.

But after his return home, Miller's life began to unravel, and he became a different kind of symbol: a medically discharged former vet who suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, wartime flashbacks, and social isolation. Sinco continued to follow Miller's story and created a moving multimedia piece called "The Marlboro Marine" on the photojournalism website mediastorm.org (as we recounted in American Photo's March/April story on "The Photographer as Director").