By NEAL RANTOUL I’m old. Believe me, I know it. I’ll be 70 in a few months. That fact may make it hard for you to take me seriously, but bear with me for just this post. With age comes wisdom, right? What I want to write here is that I think the field of […]
Filmmaker Errol Morris caused quite a stir. We photographers supposedly understand what we’re doing, yet there comes a guy like Morris telling us that, in the end, all photographs are posed. Doesn’t mean, he says, all photographs are manipulated. But they are neither true nor false. “False beliefs,” he says, “adhere to photographs like flies […]
By IHTISHAM KABIR When photography was invented in 1840, literature warmly greeted it. Why? I think the ability of photographs to precisely describe what is in front of the camera caught the imagination of writers who felt less threatened by photography than painters did. Authors as diverse as Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, John Ruskin […]
It’s a new industry in itself: the market for what’s not here yet. The camera industry in particular plays with the hopes, doubts and expectations of photographers. In part because ever new improvements, functions and promises make believe a photographer’s work improves proportionally to the money spent and technical improvements gained. Fact is, chances are […]
Photojournalism legend and Magnum photographer Thomas Höpker, 77, romances over the good old times when a magazine employed a dozen photographers and didn’t ask any questions about travel expenses. Photographers flew business class back then, enjoyed big paychecks and enough time to do a proper job — sometimes they even flew back on location for […]
By B. D. COLEN One of the few inviolate rules I force upon my documentary photo students is that they may not use Photoshop or other processing software to manipulate images beyond making the normal adjustments that would be made in a traditional darkroom — no adding anything to, or subtracting it from the image; […]
By HANK FAN Consider this list of the most famous photographers in history: Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Edward Steichen, Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, William Eggleston. I know I missed quite a few. Talent aside, do you know what they all had in common? They all came from wealthy families. This is a theme […]
