Good Reputation Sleeping

Pistols at Dawn

Dueling web video projects from two of the old/new media powerhouses, The Washington Post and The New York Times. Both attempt to take a fresh approach to what we call 'journalism'. Both succeed in different ways.

First, earlier in the week, was 'onBeing' from the Post. Clean, simple and personal. Short stories of Washingtonians by Washingtonians courtesy great video interviews by Jenn Crandall and great interface design by Rob Curley and crew. It has proven to be one of the most successful pieces ever posted on washingtonpost.com.

The Sunday New York Times Magazine online features director Jake Paltrow's commissioned piece, 'The First Ones', interviewing some of Hollywood's finest. The format is again, very simple - one question, "what was the first film that made an impression on you?" The answers are short and sweet and artfully filmed (almost painfully so), and it works. The interface is nice also, allowing you to watch the whole thing or pick where to enter.

These two projects are not quite YouTube, but are also a nice step away from the TV-derivative stuff we are used to seeing from MSM. Hopefully we will see more like this; video journalism that starts to feel like the web is truly its home.

Why Print Still Matters

Why Print Still Matters
Originally uploaded by Burnt Pixel.

As our society, thanks to the dominance of TV and the increasing ubiquity of the Web, becomes more visual, how we present information is more and more important.

While TV has gone for the shotgun; information dancing through every corner of the screen, and the web is still trying translate the 3-D world into HTML, print has centuries of practice and refinement under its belt.

The result, on the best of days, is presentation that both stops you in your tracks and helps you move through words and pictures in a way that both informs and entertains.

Jill

Babeth’s Feast - New York Times.

The French fashion editor Elisabeth Djian, who goes by the more wholesome-sounding Babeth, can often be found sitting, arms crossed, in the front row. She has the intimidating look of a French madam, heightened by stiletto booties, a wink of a black bra and a laugh as free as salt. There’s a knowing quality about her without an eagerness to reveal herself. I once asked Djian what her life was like in the 1980’s when, as the fashion director of the influential little magazine Jill, she captured, and created, the ultrafeminine look of that era. Her answer sailed as cleanly as an arrow over my bow. “Lovers,” she said." - Cathy Horyn, NYT

Anyone who has been to my house or gone with me on vacation knows that magazines are a MAJOR part of my life. Its no accident that my two most favorite jobs were as a photographer for the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine in the late '80's and as Photography Editor of The Washington Post Magazine from 1999 till 2005.

Growing up on Long Island, magazines were my escape; my dad brought home a bunch, including several photography mags, and National Geographic was always around. When I decided to make the switch from law to photography, magazines and photo books paved the way.

Jill was one of those magazines that helped me make sense of what it was to be a photographer. It presented challenging fashion and portrait images in a tactile format; you could get personal with this mag, it was never stuffy or elitist. You felt like you held art in your hands, and for a very reasonable import price of $4.95, you did.

New York Times Fashion

My favorite issue of the mag!
This one is better than several of the most recent.
More later....

Weekend Guilty Pleasure - Salsa Fresca!

Actress Eva Mendes does fashion with photographer Peggy Sirota in "T".

Beauty, By Any Other Name

The New York Times > Style > Slide Show > The Originals.

"In her hometown, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Liya Kebede was the tall, skinny girl. But today the rest of the world views her quite differently. Ever since Tom Ford hand-picked her to strut the runway for Gucci in 2000, she has had great success, culminating in a contract that has made her Este Lauder's first spokeswoman of color. "I hope that it inspires others to embrace the beauty in all people," she says. Kebede moonlights as a World Health Organization Goodwill Ambassador for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health - and as a mother of two." - Photograph by Robert Maxwell

Spool up the FTL Drive!

Ron Moore's Deep Space Journey

"The interior of the Battlestar Galactica is a warren of shadowy, angular hallways and spare functional chambers split over two sound stages situated on the semi-industrial fringe of Vancouver, British Columbia. The Galactica is a spaceship, but it does not feel particularly space-age. The communication panels on the walls were scavenged from a Canadian destroyer; the desk lamps are from Ikea. If you have seen ''Battlestar Galactica,'' which began its second season on the Sci Fi Channel on Friday, you will know that this Galactica only vaguely resembles the ship that previously bore that name, when ''Battlestar Galactica'' first flew on prime time in 1978, square in the shadow of ''Star Wars.'' And it certainly does not resemble the Enterprise, the ''Star Trek'' vehicle that has defined the visual and thematic vocabulary of television science fiction for four decades. On the Galactica, there is no captain's chair; there are no windows full of stars. The command center is busy and dark, protected deep within the ship the way it would be on an actual military vessel. As the actors move from room to room, hand-held cameras swoop behind them, closing in on them claustrophobically. The characters do not travel heroically from planet to planet, solving the problems of aliens. There are, in fact, no aliens at all.

To be fair, though, there are androids. As in the original show, the humans of the Galactica and its fleet are relentlessly pursued by evil robots called Cylons. But in the current version, conceived by Ronald D. Moore and David Eick, most of the evil Cylons look like people and have found God. Ruthlessly principled and deeply religious, the Cylons have been compared by fans and critics both to Al Qaeda and to the evangelical right. And the humans they are relentlessly pursuing are fallible and complex. Their shirts are not clingy or color-coded; the men of space wear neckties. They are led by Edward James Olmos as the Galactica's commander and Mary McDonnell as the president of the humans, and their stories revolve as much around the tensions within -- between the military and civil leadership of the fleet -- as they do around the Cylon threat. As Eick described the show to me last month with evident, subversive pleasure, ''The bad guys are all beautiful and believe in God, and the good guys all [expletive] each other over.'' Moore, who is also the show's head writer, put it more simply: ''They are us.'' - John Hodgman

White Boy!

The New York Times Magazine > Beck at a Certain Age.

"As a teenager, Beck Hansen would board the bus in a Latin neighborhood just south of downtown Los Angeles, where he lived with his mother and brother. He was a pale, blond, slightly built kid, with narrow shoulders and no hips. Mostly, he was ignored, but occasionally, someone on the street would shout, ''Guero!'' (''White boy!''). In his late teens, he grew his hair long. ''Sometimes they would whistle at me,'' he recalls. ''They would think I was a girl.''

The bus was coming from the South Central ghetto, heading north toward Hollywood. By the end of the ride, it would be filled with people from disparate worlds, side by side, on their way to school or work. When Beck, who is 34, talks about it now, instead of a city bus it might be his own eclectic music he is describing: an assortment of wildly incongruous cultures, jostling and colliding, intent on getting somewhere." - Arthur Lubow

Fashion Photography from "T"

T: Style Magazine.

Photographs by Raymond Meier, Paolo Roversi, and Nobuyoshi Araki.

Over The Top!

The Masters

The New York Times: Camera Men.

"All three lives -- Cartier-Bresson's, Newton's, Avedon's -- followed unexpected trajectories, with significant detours, geographic and otherwise. Cartier-Bresson, after reinventing himself several times over, stopped taking pictures altogether in 1974 and devoted the remainder of his years to drawing, like a monk giving himself over to meditation. Newton, who changed his name once and his continent of residence several times, appeared to be a semifictional character, his flesh-and-blood existence indistinguishable from the ironies of his pictures. Avedon trafficked in confection and then in the absence of confection, the two apparently opposing halves finally resolving to make him the greatest portraitist of his time. In combination, the three demonstrated that the camera is less an extension of the eye than of the subconscious mind, with all of its riches and all of its snares. They showed that photographic truth is never literal, is often tangled up with artifice and always speaks to the emotions before addressing the intellect." - Luc Sante