On the Web: June 2007 Archives

At Photobooth.net, you can find a photo booth near you. I've used the one at George Eastman House. A comprehensive photo booth resource, you can also find a list of artist who use photo booth photography in their work and even arrange to rent one. No walk-ups, please!

As part of the Magnum 60th Anniversary, WNYC's The Leonard Lopate Show interviewed Jonas Bendikson, Alec Soth and Mark Lubell (Magnum's director). Includes an interesting explanation of how the Magnum membership process works. In the recent portfolio review session, they culled down 250 submissions from each of the four Magnum offices down to 4-8 photographers being reviewed by all the members to become a Nominee. Last year there were no Nominees selected. Nominees have two years to create a new body of work for review before moving up to be an Associate Member. Associates then have two years to create another new body of work to be submitted for Full Membership. Full Members are members for life.

Listen in the embedded player above or on the WNYC site.

It's reputed that the Yale School of Art represents the top of the photography education programs in this country if you are interested in entering the Art World and being successful as a manufacturer of fine art photography. I don't know if this is empirically true as I have yet to investigate the density of Yale MFA degrees in current and recent photography shows in town, but something in my gut says this reputation is outsized in comparison with the evidence. In any case, it may be educational to watch the career trajectories of the current crop of graduates, whose work is (mostly) on display on the Yale Gallery wiki. I say "mostly" because, since it is a wiki, any member of the Yale community can log in and edit the gallery pages and,as a result, approximately a third of the 90 images are now broken and unviewable. No attribution is given to the individual images, so it's not too useful for sussing out the new generation of photography all-stars, but it is instructive to me that my own struggle with proper exposure of the sky in landscape work is probably misplaced effort.

The marketing blog "murketing" has posted an interesting interview with Jen Bekman about her new 20X200 project. It elborates on many of the thoughts I've had about this initiative, including the potential ghetto-ization of the participating artists. As a business person (wow, that sounds weird), I'm also interested about the underlying economics of art as a product. Bekman picks up on this as well:

I want to create an opportunity that’s not instead of the traditional gallery environment, but in addition to it. I want more artists to make their living making art and I want the people who want to buy art, but feel that it’s too rarefied for them, to actually buy it. It’s absurd to me that there are so many of both of those types of people and yet they’re not connected with any sort of efficiency. I want to sell more art and I want more people to buy it.

The project is slated to launch July 27th.

The weekend Times' Travel section is dedicated to photography and has several great articles pertaining to travel photography and photo-oriented travel. Of particular interest was the article about "photo safaris" that combine sightseeing with photography workshops.

One of the online features is a catalog of 2007 photo shows across Europe and the US. After finding the link on Personism, I read through the piece and was flattered (shocked!) to find Gallery Hopper listed at the bottom of the page as one of three online resources for photo information.

Part 1 of an exploration of "the deadpan style", contrasting the work or Stephen Shore and Andreas Gursky. Uses a slide-show essay format, which I don't find completely satisfying and seems to be only used to drive additional ad impressions. Slate does the same thing.

Office Parks by Mark Luthringer

From Mark Luthringer's artist statement:

The typological form achieves an uncanny synergy and resonance with this subject matter because it mimics the mental images I suspect many of us form as a way of ordering the chaos of abundance that surrounds us. We can’t help but form in our heads lists, groups and categories based on product, brand, price point, style, market segment, country of origin, etc.

To see one of these turned into a group of images lined up together can be unnerving, though. In print, they confront us in a way never possible when they're just in our heads. We are presented with order, and while it is often an absurd, seemingly pointless order, it is one that we recognize immediately.

(via Core77)