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 ...

Yesterday at ICP Bradly Treadaway and I talked about how we could improve our teaching. One of the topics we touched on was the idea of substance, specifically technology training, and we asked ourselves what should be included in our curriculum, and what might be unnecessarily clouding the issues. This morning I answered emails from more students wondering about classes for next term - what they should take in order to keep advancing towards becoming a photographer - and caught up on some photo blogs. One thread in particular, from APL , has caught my attention lately: it started when Haggart posted an email he'd received from a photo-school graduate who was having difficulty "making it" in the photo world. Nearly 200 replies later (I added my own thoughts today, in fact), the conversation is going strong. It's totally engaging, if you're interested in the business of photography and the education of photographers, and has touched on many of the concerns I hea...

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...