Good Reputation Sleeping

My Camera Bag, 2006

Pugwash Bag
Originally uploaded by Burnt Pixel.

I wish you could see my old bag from 1987; maybe I'll re-create it. Back then I had a Nikon FM, FE and a 'professional' F3 (I liked to travel light). I was working for The Boston Globe and covered the Red Sox, chased fires, followed politicians and, in between, hung out at the donut shop with the Boston P.D.
Photographic life was good.

Today's professional photographer is between a rock and a hard place. The business is changing.

More and more we are told about the need to do video; just a couple of years after we gave up film. Today, if W. Eugene Smith were still turning out essays, he would have to add nat sound. Cartier-Bresson would possibly be vlogging. Brassai definitely would be.

Photography has always been tied to technology. Knowledge of chemistry and physics was necessary if you wanted to come back with photographs from a glass plate expedition; available light photos with an Ermanox required more than just pushing the button. Today's professional, like those of the past, must look to the world of the amateur for the cutting edge; their tools will be our tools.

A look at this camera bag is a look into how we will be practicing the profession of photography in the very near future.

Weekend Guilty Pleasure - Stereophonic

A wonderfully eclectic photoblog I have been looking at for more than a year.
A photographer with an eye for composition who always gives me something to think about.
When you get to the site, click on the photo and enjoy.

Gordon Parks, At Rest

'Life' Photographer And 'Shaft' Director Broke Color Barriers.

Gordon Parks, a photographer, filmmaker and poet whose pioneering chronicles of the black experience in America made him a revered elder and a cultural icon, died yesterday at his home in New York. He was 93.

His nephew, Charles Parks of Lawrence, Kan., said Parks had cancer and had been in failing health since 1993.

Parks, the son of a dirt farmer, rose from meager beginnings and above recurrent discrimination to walk through doors previously closed to African Americans. He was the first black person to work at Life magazine and Vogue, and the first to write, direct and score a Hollywood film, "The Learning Tree" (1969), which was based on a 1963 novel he wrote about his life as a farm boy in Kansas. He also was the director of the 1971 hit movie "Shaft," which opened the way for a host of other black-oriented films.

Elegant and aristocratic with a trademark mustache, his work traversed a vast landscape from poverty and crime to luxury and high fashion. He was a high school dropout turned award-winning photographer who traveled the world, using his camera with deftness and defiance.

"I didn't set out to do all that I did," Parks told an interviewer. "I think there was always fear -- fear of not being educated. All the things I did were done because of the fear of failure." - Yvonne Shinhoster Lamb, TWP; Photograph by Suzanne Plunkett, A.P.

Weekend Guilty Pleasure - Salsa Fresca!

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

A Room With A View

A MOST EXCELLENT news photo by Stephen Crowley of The New York Times. Its tough to make a new picture in a room that has been photographed a thousand times, but he did.

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

flickr SUSPENDS charliebrown8989

flickr SYSPENDS charliebrown8989
Originally uploaded by Natchaliti.

Is this the end of Flickr as "the next big thing"?

Questioning someone's account because they have too many contacts?

I thought that was the whole point, you know, interaction with your fellow flickr-ites!

What's the real deal here?

William Eggleston in the Real World

As for the Photographer, He Had No Comment - Terrence Rafferty, NYT

"IN the scene that is in some peculiar way the climax of Michael Almereyda's fascinating new documentary, "William Eggleston in the Real World," Mr. Eggleston, a bespectacled, bemused-looking 60-ish man, says to Mr. Almereyda: "Whatever it is about pictures, photographs, it's just about impossible to follow up with words. They don't have anything to do with each other."

He is, in the gentlest possible manner, trying to deflect the filmmaker's persistent attempts to draw from him more telling reflections on photography, the elusive art of which he is, as it happens, one of the world's greatest living practitioners. (His 1976 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art was a landmark: the museum's first one-man show of color photography.) Confronted with theory, metaphor - any kind of verbal formulation of his artistic activity - Mr. Eggleston politely but firmly digs in his heels: "Art, or what we call that," he continues, "you can love it and appreciate it, but you can't really talk about it. Doesn't make any sense."

My First Paper

It has been pretty quiet here lately.

I have been transitioning between my old job, as photo editor for The Washington Post Magazine and my new job, as Picture Editor for The Washington Post newspaper. My staff has exploded from 1 to over 40 (including 5 Pulitzer prize winners) and my mandate includes trying to stop the slide of readers away from newspapers by re-introducing them to consistently great daily photography.

Yesterday was my first full day in the new gig; it was a slow day, thankfully, but I know that won't last. I am looking forward to the challenge - and after helping the news move to the web (as Photography Director of washingtonpost.com and AOL back in the mid-ninties), I get to return the favor and help keep the news interesting and relevant in print.

Robert McNeill, At Rest.

Robert McNeill Dies at Age 87; D.C. Photographer of Black Life.

"Robert H. McNeill, 87, whose photographs of African American life in Washington and Virginia during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s pushed viewers to focus on the ordinary and extraordinary lives of black Americans, died May 27 at Georgetown University Hospital of complications from diabetes.

A native Washingtonian, Mr. McNeill took up the camera as a student at Dunbar Senior High School and over the years turned his lens on the rich life around him, from portraits of hogshead barrel makers in rural Virginia to families at the National Zoo on Easter weekend to the world-famous entertainers and sports figures who swept through the District's U Street venues and Griffith Stadium.

His work, in rich blacks, whites and shades of gray, artfully explored the segregation and racism that were part of life for African Americans in the mid-Atlantic region in mid-century. Late in life, his prints grew famous and were included in numerous national exhibitions, traveling shows and books. His work also is found on many historical markers along U Street." - Patricia Sullivan, The Washington Post