considering pictures | sean justice > open journal

The photograph is dead; long live photography. Sorry for the melodrama. I like to exaggerate, but this isn't an exaggeration: there's a lot of worry and chatter these days about what's happening to our sacred domain. In fact, the anxiety is so thick you can shoot it at 1/15th of a second and still catch it clearly. Last week, the New York Times spelled it like this: For Photographers, the Image of a Shrinking Path . ( Karen d'Silva , an industry guru, wrote in an email: "It's crazy how many people sent me this article. Very telling.") Blogs everywhere record the hubbub, including this post by Shannon Fagan for Ellen Boughn a few weeks ago, a post that generated more than a hundred frantic replies. And on the APA listserve conversation yesterday, a fellow member asked us if anyone, anywhere, had any good news to report. I could go on and on in this vein (just one more: at the SPE national convention last month, an industry executive told a ...

NYSAT this morning: Voice for the future of our city. Before: After: Before: After: Before: Before: After: After each whitewashing we posted a notice of our intent: From the Metropolitan Landscape Control Committee: The MLCC has recently become aware of the fact that NPA City Outdoor is operating over 500 illegal street level billboards in NYC, as well as many illegal wildposting locations. Despite private contracts, and other previous arrangements made between NPA City Outdoor and building owners, the above-mentioned advertising locations have been found to be illegal due to lack of permitting and failure to adhere to New York City zoning regulations. Under the Department of Buildings sign code § 26-256 these advertisements are subject to civil penalties and violations of up to $15,000. The Municipal Landscape Control Committee has organized the whitewashing of all NPA City Outdoor street level advertising locations until further structural removal can be implemented. The continued po...

Photographs © NYSAT-Municipal Landscape Control Committee Pictures are part of our modern landscape, and help create it, too. New York City tourists know they're here because their experience matches their image of it — an image formed often and substantially by pictures. Paraphrasing Sontag: our streets are thickened by billboards, animated signs, and advertisements adhered to every surface, an irresistible mental pollution to which we are addicted, and we crowd along the avenues in an image-addled stupor, feeling that our citizenship is more stable than it is. So...wow, that feels kind of negative. But as you've heard me say in class, the best way to recognize their influence on us is to imagine a day without them, entirely off the grid, no pictures of any kind. I know this strikes a nerve somehow because I see you smile as I say it. My friend Jordan knows the power of pictures, especially the advertising pictures that assault us on the sidewalk. His epic struggle against the...

If you're interested in the world behind commercial and editorial photography, A Photo Editor should be on your regular roll. Rob Haggert is the former Director of Photography of Men's Journal and Outside Magazine and he draws from a deep well of experience with the process and practice of commercial-editorial photography. His recent post about the portraits made by Nadev Kander of the Obama team that were published in the New York Times Magazine is an example of his perceptive and expansive insights. Plus, his posts generate a ton of conversation about the process of photography (browse the comments section of the Kander post to get the flavor of how other working photographers are reacting). This is great for all of us. Too often, especially recently, the whole process of creating the picture that is subsequently used (or abused) by various media and/or political interests -- that whole process is invisible, presumed to be somehow natural or automatic, and the intentions...

i wonder if a picture can describe experience? i want to believe in connection, in conversation. in this ad the decision was made to not retouch the "arab" girl, her skin. can you feel it? perhaps i'm particularly sensitive to the texture of skin, the touch of it. i teach retouching. i'm a photographer. i have bad skin. but why and how was this ad released like this? is it a mistake? is it a comment? is it a ploy, a meta-ploy, to get us talking about the ad itself (see the tag line). i work in advertising and i collect photos about photos and photos about ads, but this seems simultaneously too subtle and too crass. our white american girl with perfect skin is at high school, wondering about her doppelganger with bad skin cloistered behind curtained windows on the other side of the world. is this our new story? our new social network? can the bones of this new experience really be wrapped in the old skin of snap decisions about surface beauty and the dee...