Conscientious

I saw a new body of work by some photographer today (no, I'm not going to say who it is), and I thought "Wait a minute, this looks exactly like the older work." By "looks exactly like the older work" I don't mean the photographer's style, but the general subject matter (imagine someone shot water towers, and then the "new" series is water towers). I immediately felt guilty about the thought, because I try not to treat art like a commodity - where the "new" always has to be different from what is "old" ("This brand-new camera now has 14 Megapixels instead of 13").

Continue reading "Consuming versus Experiencing Art" »

Roger Ballen at Lens Culture, Lydia Panas at The Girl Project, and Richard Renaldi at Too Much Chocolate.

One of my pet peeves is people not bothering to worry too much about how to spell my first name, and I've always wondered how people can possibly manage to turn "Joerg" (which, btw, is the no-umlaut version of Jörg) into "Jorge". Can letters in words simply be shuffled around? Is thta mcomon praticce anwherey? In any case, maybe those people sending email to "Jorge Colberg" really mean the actual Jorge Colberg, who even has his own theme tune! I can't compete with that (neither can the actual Jim Colberg).

"A series of majestic emerald arcs light up one of Britain's most iconic landmarks in this stunning photograph taken with one of the longest-ever exposures." (story) Those interested in this kind of work might want to check out Michael Wesely's work, for example, his two-year exposures of Berlin's Potzdamer Platz.

Just like any other aspect of our modern Western lives, health care has been turned into an industrialized business, with all its advantages and disadvantages (for a particularly noxious example, read this article). Their associations with illness and death aside, there is a reason why most people are very hesitant to go to a hospital (unless they have to): Hospitals are extremely unpleasant places. Thus most people probably prefer not to look too closely at the actual environment inside a hospital while being there. Enters Clinic. Clinic "explores the aesthetic of the medical world through contemporary photography" through the eyes of eleven photographers (Olivier Amsellem, Constant Anée, Eric Baudelaire, Geoffroy de Boismenu [who shot this reviewer's favourite section of the book], Christophe Bourguedieu, Jacqueline Hassink, Albrecht Kunkel, Ville Lenkkeri, Matthew Monteith, Mario Palmieri, and Stefan Ruiz), with artistic director Rémi Faucheux.

Continue reading "Review: Clinic" »

If you want reviews of photography shows you typically have to look into your print media. I suppose the absence of such reviews in the world of blogs is based on the same reasons as the paucity of critical discussions of photography. A noteworthy exception is the blog dlk collection, which, however, seems to focus mostly on larger shows. Another very noteworthy exception is this review on the German blog Fotofeinkost. Unfortunately - you probably already guessed it! - it's only in German. Shame, it would (and should) serve as a fine example of a really good review of a photography show.

Via David Bram's blog comes the news that JPG Magazine is closing shop. When I first saw the magazine I wondered how a magazine that basically was Flickr in magazine form could survive - and we now know it can't. Of course, you could argue that photography in print always looks much better than online, so then doesn't this all say/mean something? A tempting question, but I think on needs to be careful with what conclusions to draw. I think what this all means is that for JPG Magazine's target audience the added value of seeing photos printed on paper that they can easily see online does did not translate into sustainability of the magazine. This conclusion cannot necessarily be applied as a whole to other photography magazines, though - Rob might disagree (he does know these things better than I do after all), but I think the demise of JPG Magazine clearly shows that for a photography magazine to be able to survive it needs to offer something that you can't easily find online.

Continue reading "JPG Magazine RIP" »

Nothing says "Happy New Year" as much as the 2009 calendar images of a German portable-toilet company. No, I'm not making this up. Not safe for work, but you really shouldn't be working today anyway. Here in Western Massachusetts, it's only thirteen and a half hours into 2009, and there already is a strong contender for the most revolting photograph to come out of this year. Btw, if you can't understand German, don't worry, the captions (explanations! of some of the bits in the photographs) make things only even more tasteless than they already are.

At least half of our modern world's politics deals with propaganda or, as the players would probably prefer to call it, "messaging". It's not what you really do, it's what you make it look like. Paul Krugman offers a compelling and simple discussion of how staging an image twice didn't play out the same way for George W. Bush.