Chicago 2009

Late for class

The Postmodern Condition

Congratulations to this year's winners of the Grand Prix Paris Match du Photoreportage, Guillaume Chauvin and Rémi Hubert!
Their winning entry, which exposes the harsh conditions that their fellow students at Strasbourg University face, is tough and uncompromising, the kind of reportage that signifies at once a photography concerned with suffering while also revealing the photographers' deep-seated humanist values. Take a look at their incredibly well-done photo-essay here, and then continue reading below...
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From the British Journal of Photography:

Every year, Paris Match, which remains one of the last weekly magazine to give predominant space to photography, organises its ‘Grand Prix Paris Match du Photoreportage.’ This year, the prize, which comes with €5000 and ten pages in Paris Match, was awarded to two students attending Strasbourg’s university.

Guillaume Chauvin and Rémi Hubert won for a reportage chronicling the harsh difficulties some poor students encounter while studying at the Strasbourg university. Their images showed students living in basements or offering sex to pay their rents. Another image portrayed a young man falling asleep in a bus as he embarked on a two-hour commute to his university. The reportage can be seen on Paris Match's website here.

The trick? All of the images had been faked, the two winners announced as they received the coveted prize on 24 June. ‘We though it was a bit caricatural,’ says one of the students to Le Monde newspaper. ‘We thought it would never win.’

However, terms and conditions don’t forbid faked reportages – a situation that is likely to change next year. Already, Paris Match has withdrawn its cash prize, offering it, instead, to the two student’s university of decorative arts in Strasbourg. The weekly magazine, which is now warning readers that the images have been faked, has also announced that next year’s cash prize will be increased to €10,000 as a result of this year’s ‘fraud’.
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Regardless of whether you feel vindicated or outraged after seeing their photo-essay, it definitely leaves an impression--and in my opinion, it's an important commentary, not only on the photojournalism profession but also (and, it seems to me, predominantly) on viewer expectations about what photojournalism is or should be.

Pride, prejudice, zombies

OK, this has nothing to do with photography, but I wanted to mention it anyway...a really cool book, and a brilliant concept. All the emphasis on well-bred country gentlemen and ladies that you've come to expect from Jane Austen with all the brain-eating gore that you've come to expect from zombies. Plus there's some sweet ninja action thrown in too.

New work

I've been keeping busy shooting a lot of black-and-white film over the past couple of months (3 different projects and a workshop with Mary Ellen Mark) and I'm just now sorting through it all. The backlog is steadily growing...

Maybe I should look into how other photographers edit their work, but I have a feeling there's just no way to speed up the process.

Recorded music, for a change

From the WFMU Record Fair a few years back. Going through some old photos...

Another concert, another concert photo

I took this picture last Friday in a small all-ages club located in the middle of a strip mall in suburban Virginia. I went with a music photographer friend to hear a handful of bands play short back-to-back sets of screamo music--a new experience for me. Screamo is basically hardcore emo music, sung in the preferred vocal style of Nordic death metal bands. The screamo scene originated in San Diego but has amassed quite a large following on the East Coast, where most of the bands' influences were/are based. Even though the bands have only self-released their CDs or put them out on very small labels, the high school girls standing in front of me were gushing over the guys in the bands like they were the Jonas Brothers, and they knew all the words to the songs by heart. Anyway, I'm pretty sure that the name of this band is This Time Never, which, incidentally, is a pretty cool name for a band.

Earth Day on the Mall 2009

The Flaming Lips headlined the Earth Day festival on the National Mall this past weekend, so I packed up the camera bag and off I went. I'd wanted to see them perform live for ages, and they did not disappoint, to say the least. The Capitol Building in the background provided a nice surreal touch to what's in all likelihood the most postmodern rock concert experience available. Wayne Coyne, merry prankster extraordinaire, came out onstage with the giant hands on, surfed the crowd in a plastic bubble, and at some point, he was playing a crazy looking double-guitar, where the bottom guitar was some sort of modified "Guitar Hero" device. I have no idea how he played it--or even if he really was, for that matter. (Judge for yourself in the 3rd picture...) Highlights included an intense, gong-banging cover of Madonna's "Borderline" and the encore (and new official state rock song of Oklahoma) "Do You Realize?"

Other bands on the bill included Los Lobos (who encored with their incredible rendition of the Grateful Dead song "Bertha") and moe. The mall was packed, and of course there were plenty of college girls in hippie skirts with hula hoops. Because what would a neo-hippie gathering be without college girls and hula hoops? Or the secretary of labor, for that matter? It was like a mini-Coachella, with a lot more policy wonks and a lot less music, the kind of festival where every speaker loudly proclaimed "I am a member of the Green Generation!" despite actually being members of different generations, and the rare event where people could wander in and out of the Smithsonian in between acts.

Indelible

Wow--I can't believe I neglected to mention this, but one of my pictures from the 2008 election was featured in "A Campaign for the Ages," a Web-exclusive slideshow on VanityFair.com. Many thanks to the amazing photo editors at Vanity Fair for including my picture in the slideshow. Hmm...my ego is actually getting a little bit bigger each time I look at it...not sure if that's a good thing, but anyway...

Click here to see the entire slideshow.

Summer and Anya, January 2009

Blitzen Trapper

Live at the Black Cat in Washington, D.C.

Upcoming exhibit at Rayko Photo

One of my photos is headed out west for an all-expense-paid six-week trip to San Francisco....I'm envious. Anyway. Just a quick reminder that RayKo's 2nd Annual International Juried Plastic Camera Show opens this Thursday, February 26th. The opening reception is from 6-8pm so if you're in the area, swing by and check it out.

Top photo: Christophe Dillinger
Bottom photo: Aline Smithson

Jokerman

Over the past couple of weeks, I've become overexcited, obsessive, single-minded and highly research-oriented...something that always seems to happen when I start a new project. This time around, I'll be collaborating with Ellen Blaschke, a good friend and an amazing photographer.

"Adults with Autism" on Time.com

I've been meaning to post this link for a while, but things got kinda busy...
You can see the picture (and read the article) here.

Giving Bush the boot

Outside the White House on Bush's final day in office...

Scenes from the National Mall - 2009 Inauguration

Frenetic

Yet another panorama

I'm still hard at work editing this series. Expect more soon...

Pictures without people in them, for a change

My Life as a Stuffed Deer Head

President Obama

Happy Rocktoberfest!

Fleet Foxes

live at the Black Cat in Washington, D.C.

James Nachtwey on documentary photography

The video of Nachtwey's speech upon receiving the TED prize is well worth watching. Nachtwey discusses the reasons why he (along with so many documentary photographers) chose this crazy profession to begin with, and narrates a slideshow of images spanning his entire career and all four corners of the globe.

Resolution by Erin Lambert

My first book cover! If you only buy one chapbook of poems this year, this is the one!

Pre-order your copy here.

Silver Jews

live at the Black Cat in Washington, D.C.

Yet another panorama

Magnetoencephalography

For the full report, and more photos: click here.

NYC cabdrivers probably hate me

Living out my T.J. Hooker fantasies...

That was then, this is now

Watching Hillary Clinton speak at the Democratic National Convention on C-Span a couple of nights ago, I found myself flashing back to earlier in the year, when I covered her Super Tuesday celebration in NYC. It was fascinating to observe her campaign, then in full "regroup" mode and gearing up for the difficult months ahead...and it's interesting to look at the pictures now in retrospect, knowing how everything ultimately panned out. The one below it is of an Obama volunteer speaking to a small but enthusiastic crowd at a local campaign event at a downtown bar a few weeks prior to Super Tuesday.

Two and a half months to go...

Tikvah in her room

Party at the Pink Boa

The World Future 2008 Conference

Sad As New York City

Shoes and Tattoos

Oryx and Topi - Oregon, 2007

NYC panoramas, continued...

Tapes n' Tapes live at the 930 Club

One more from the archives

For those of you who remember my earlier post about this project, here's the before-and-after of another forgotten picture. Making Buckminster Fuller proud, circa 1968.

One of the Chosen People

Some good news! Three of the photos that I submitted to American Photography 24 were chosen to appear on the AI-AP web gallery disTRIBUTE this year. The photos are from the feature for German Geo that was published this past October ("Utopia im Wald"). Needless to say, I'm really excited about that (I'm in a state of disbelief, actually), and I'm also looking forward to the annual AI-AP Pub Party this November. It's supposed to be an incredible party, and it will be a great excuse to visit friends in NYC. It's been a big transition leaving NYC and moving to DC this past month, but I'm getting settled in, starting work on a couple of new projects (and of course continuing the older long-term projects), making the rounds, and generally getting my act together. Expect more new pictures soon...

Heavy Metal Drummer

Here's a picture from a recent death metal show at the Corpse Fortress, a group house in Silver Springs, MD that hosts metal and punk shows. A total of four bands performed in the basement that night.

99 Cents Only!

The best use of an Andreas Gursky photo ever?

From the 99 Cent Stores' website: "Renowned photographer Andreas Gursky describes his famous '99 Cent' photo as aisles of brightly packaged merchandise fused into a perfectly ordered whole. This 11 by 7 foot photo has been displayed in the New York Museum of Modern Art, as well as museums in Paris, London, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. It was taken in 1999 at the 99¢ Only Stores located on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, California. This photograph recently sold for over $1,999,999!"

Personally, I really love the fact that Gursky let them use the photo. That's quite a way to give back.

Sean's zombie

My good friend Sean Samoheyl had his work included in the WPA art auction in DC last week. I had the opportunity to crash the party and hang out with him and another Virginia artist and all-around good guy Warren Craghead. It was great seeing Sean's monster dolls on display in a museum setting -- his art's getting a lot of exposure these days, and he's currently planning to take his phenomenally amazing one-man puppet shows on tour this summer (he'll be opening for Kimya Dawson, of Juno fame). Sean gave me a hand-carved wooden Leica M6 a couple of years back, and it's one of my most prized possessions. Check out his website, and if you get a chance, go see him perform live--you will not be disappointed.

Fire + Hula Hoop = Fun

Salsa dancing

Walk for Obama NYC

Gearing up for an exciting election year...

Berlin Alexanderplatz at PS-1

Fassbinder's controversial and bizarre epic "Berlin Alexanderplatz" is on exhibit at PS-1, both as a "multichannel video installation" (is what I believe they call it) and as a series of film stills--the room filled with film stills is what really caught my attention. Viewed as single images, the cinematography (by Xaver Schwarzenberger) becomes even more captivating and lyrical.

Harlem

Blind Light

Anthony Gormley's installation "Blind Light", at the Sean Kelly Gallery in Chelsea.