Every year the MacArthur Fellowship announces the winners of its $625,000 grant and among the 24 they have chosen for this year is a photographer by the name of LaToya Ruby Frazier. LaToya has been documenting her small hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania for the past 12 years and it has resulted in some very large accolades.
The images from the September 11th tragedy are no doubt stuck in all of our minds. For most of us, the phrase "9/11" instantly reminds us of a plane hitting the World Trade Center, smoke billowing out of the two buildings, or the heroic images of rescue workers attempting to save lives after the buildings had collapsed. Among the 1000's of images taken on that day, Richard Drew's "The Falling Man" has been both the most controversial as well as the most forgotten. This powerful documentary explorers the stigma surrounding one of the most censored images in US history.
Since the advent of photography, the craft has completely changed the world — from its profound effects on communication and documentation in practical applications, to being a powerful form of personal expression and a visual art. Now, photography is being used to look into the past and discover significant historical information thought to be lost forever.
It takes a lot to motivate me to reach out to a photographer for permission to feature their work but a lot is exactly what Brisbane-based photographer and digital artist Jane Long provides with her latest series, "Dancing with Costică”. Colorizing, compositing and creating content for images she sources from the Costica Ascinte Archive, Jane is able to deliver beautiful, imaginative and surreal narratives to each of her final images.
Three years ago, Photographer Christian Carollo came upon his grandfather's travel photography from across the United States. The initial spark for the "Past and Present" Project started with a particular image of the small coastal town of Winchester Bay, Oregon. Christian wondered if he could replicate the image and he succeeded. This was the start of an epic and awe-inspiring project now known as the Past and Present Project. Christian has traveled all over the United States, continuing to replicate his grandfather's images. The results are breathtaking and have re-inspired in me the true emotional potential a single image can have.
Seeker Stories defines itself as taking a deep look at some of the world’s most unique individuals, places, and cultures. With weekly short documentaries set out to expand our perspective and transform our understanding of the world. Having watched their latest documentary about the role photographers play during wartime, I have to say, they've achieved what they set out to do. I've often thought about being a wartime photographer and this video has rekindled that desire.
What once was old and lost can be found new again, can’t it? That’s what photography is all about, after all. Sealing something in time. A visual tomb, preserved without the breeze of the next day to blow it along, but never suffocating. Alive. It's funny that this is how I felt when I stumbled across photographs from The National Gallery of Australia’s "Colour My World" exhibit.
In 2015, I can transmit photos to my wire service from the field using my phone, seconds after the images were shot. Back in the 80s however, it took a case of equipment weighing upwards of 80 pounds to get that job done. As the poet wrote: times they are a-changing.
A set of over 300 never-before-released photos taken on September 11, 2001 has just been posted on the U.S. National Archives' Flickr page. These images take us right into the middle of meetings between President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and more. They offer us a powerful look at the reactions of our nation's leaders as they are faced with the largest terrorist attack ever on U.S. soil.
First Lady Michelle Obama just announced via her Instagram that the longstanding ban on cameras and photos during public tours in the White House has been lifted.
There has been a lot of fan fare about the recent legislation that allows nationwide marriage for gay couples in the USA but not everyone is happy or excited. One photography business has been the target of this intolerance when their support of gay marriage resulted in a cancellation request from a wedding client. The response they provided was perfect.
Electrophotography is a medium that was never intended to be used for photography. Electrophotography, later changed to xerography, was originally intended for use as a photocopier. This video follows Tom Carpenter as he uses the electrophotography method to create a portrait. The results certainly won't be putting Canon out of business, but they are interesting from a creative and experimental photography standpoint.
Italian photographer Filippo Blengini embarked on a mission to take a panoramic photograph of Mount Blanc, Earth's 11th tallest mountain. After 70,000 individual photographs, 46 terabytes consumed, and 2 months of editing and processing later, the photo taken by Blengini and his team of five is currently the largest photograph in the world. Check out this video for a brief overview of how they did it.
Documentary photographers, fashion photographers, businessmen, housewives, househusbands, you, the world – everyone should know the name and works of Sebastião Salgado. His work has moved millions of social workers, doctors, politicians, economists, and photographers alike. His work moves humans because it is human. This might mark the second or third film review on Fstoppers, but it’s rare and extremely fortunate that we should have the ability to engulf the pleasures of what can easily be called the most soul-entrancing art documentary in the world that is “Salt of the Earth.”
Last month, internet pioneer and Google Vice President Vint Cerf warned the world on BBC about the impermanence of our data in a digital form due to the fact that the technology that can read it today will become obsolete. He argued that in a few hundred years, we may not be able to read any of the images or videos created today for the same reason we can't read a floppy disk: because technology will have moved on without us, and without that information. But is he right?
Today marks a special day for the beloved Adobe Photoshop, as today is it's 25th birthday. Even at only 25 years old, Photoshop has had a number of facelifts. From it's initial release, Photoshop was revolutionary in it's tools, and still remains to be the best tool for photographers today. So lets take a look at all the changes this iconic software has seen over these last twenty five years.
The world's eyes have been on climbing lately. With the recent incredible 19 day climb of the Dawn Wall in Yosemite Valley and now this, the Red Bull sponsored venture of scaling the frozen heights of Niagara Falls, climbing is producing some increasingly spectacular imagery. Canadian climber William Gadd became the first to ascend these icy walls - a dangerous stunt leaving us with incredible video and photos!
Seventy years ago, on January 27, Russian soldiers arrived to liberate less than 8,000 prisoners still remaining at Nazi-Germany's deadliest concentration camp, Auschwitz-Berkinau. During the camp's operation, Auschwitz' officers were responsible for an estimated 1.1 million deaths. To mark the historic liberation of the camp, BBC treated its audience to a unique view that embodies the eerie and gruesome history of the vast camp.
San Francisco, a city of picture-postcard beauty wasn’t always as pretty as it is today. Semi-industrial ‘wastelands’, like the South of Market (SoMA) neighborhood, have been transformed into expensive, hip hoods, filled with tech firms and wealthy tech workers living in luxury condos. Let’s cast our mind back to a time not long ago, a time before the internet and the associated tech money that has changed the city so dramatically, and remember what San Francisco used to look like.
A group of filmmakers from Edmonton, Alberta have been working on a three-part science and nature documentary called The Great Human Odyssey. I recently spoke with some of the crew to learn more about how a production team approaches a project that involves planning and shooting in some of the most remote environments in the world. Check out their behind the scenes video, but read on for more videos and insight into their process.
In late 2014 at an auction in Ohio, Levi Bettweiser of the Rescued Film Project, stumbled upon one of his greatest finds. Up for bid were 31 rolls of 70 year old undeveloped film from World War 2 shot by an unknown soldier and photographer. The Rescued Film Project is an effort to find and salvage undeveloped film from as early as the 1930's. They strive to recover even those films which are damaged by age or the elements, as in the case of this large find of film from WW2.
Early last year, the Smithsonian announced that they would be opening up their digital collection for the world to see. The first phase constitutes over 40,000 pieces of art, including over 400 photographs, from the Freer and Sackler Galleries and the Freer Study Collection, all of which focus on the museum’s Asian gallery collections. The collections are available for anyone to download and use for free for non-commercial use under a program they call Open F|S.
“Through Darkness to Light” fully immerses its audience in the awe-inspiring history of the Underground Railroad through a series of breathtaking images. The series chronicles the perilous journey of those who sought freedom from slavery.
From 1920-1956, Ernst Leitz II was the head of Leica Camera, but perhaps his most impressive achievement took place from 1933-1939 when Leitz and his family rescued hundreds of Jews by smuggling them out of Nazi Germany. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Leitz, concerned for the safety of many of his Jewish employees, transferred them (along with retailers, family members and friends of family members) out of the country to sales offices in France, Britain, Hong Kong and the United States.
Before the invention of photography, historical events were depicted in elaborate paintings. Then in the early 19th century, photography came along. But it wasn’t until the 1930s when color photography was used. It’s amazing how good colorization work on a historical image can change your view of certain events. Before I saw the images coming out of Dynamichrome — a company that colorizes historical black and white photography — I did not feel the same connection. With the addition of color, the subjects in the images come to life.
Have you ever wondered what fashion trends will be in style, let’s say 20 years from now? Well some say the best way to predict the future is to look at the past, and this video does exactly that. "100 Years of Beauty in 1 Minute" illustrates hair and makeup styles from each decade, starting at 1910 straight through to 2010.
Capturing the launch of a space shuttle is undoubtedly a tremendous task to take on. Add to that the pressure of capturing the last space shuttle launch and you may have one of the most immense photographic endeavours of your career. In a very passionate and insightful video talk, Dan Winters takes us through the process of accomplishing said task. From his emotional relationship with capturing launches, to diagrams of his camera setups, Winters not only shows us how he captured his incredible photos, but conveys what doing so meant to him as a photographer as well as a human being.
You never know what’s going to happen in New York. Last week, photographic gold was struck in Times Square in the deep cavernous archives inside the Conde Nast building. Two thousand prints shot by Edward Steichen, one of 20th Century’s most influential photographers, were found after lying hidden for over eighty years. The story behind them, and of Steichen’s rise to photographic fame and acclaim, are almost too unbelievable to be true.
I spend a lot of time shooting or walking on the streets of New York. You see every type of camera imaginable here, from the latest and greatest DSLRs to old Rollei’s and film cameras. If you hang around B&H long enough, you’ll probably see Louis Mendes with his old Speed Graphic. But I have never, ever seen anyone shooting with what Justin Borucki is using. This guy might have the most unique camera setup in New York.
In the 1980s, Doug Menuez was given unprecedented access to photograph Steve Jobs after his ousting at Apple while he started NeXT. The project eventually expanded as Menuez photographed countless, top, tech-sector executives including John Warnock at Adobe, John Sculley at Apple, Bill Gates at Microsoft, John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins, Marc Andreessen at Netscape over the course of 15 years. These images and the stories behind them are now published in "Fearless Genius."
Whether it's capturing a close encounter with a great white, documenting an Eiger ascent or riding the dash of an F-16 the GoPro has been used for some pretty amazing things. Here is one recording I don't see any of us re-creating anytime soon though.
Sure it's easy to put off watching a video that isn't under five minutes long. Sometimes you just have to make an exception, and the weekend is the perfect time to do it. In this video, David Brommer talks about not only the rules of composition, but the theory behind the rules we all know and how they relate to our way of seeing. He takes us through the history of painting (which is the best possible thing to study for composition) and how it relates to every single image we take.
Photographer Lisa Bettany, creator of the Camera+ and MagiCam iPhone apps, put together a fascinating and thorough comparison of images coming from every generation of the iPhone ever created. With insight into low-light performance, macro capabilities, overall sharpness, and how Apple's own image processing algorithms seem to have changed over the course of time, the results are certainly interesting.
Last year, Fstoppers interviewed photographer, and possibly one of the nicest people on the planet, Coty Tarr. Last week, Coty got not only his first cover ever, but THE cover for anyone that photographs anything remotely athletic - Sports Illustrated. What makes this story so great isn't just that it's the cover of SI, it's that Coty grew up just south of Pittsburgh. He's a diehard Pittsburgh sports fan. It wasn't just a cover for him... it was home.
Christiaan Welzel and his wife Kseniya have trekked across the world adventuring for the majority of the last eight years. They decided to start exploring places that were extremely hard to get to like Antarctica or various ghost towns, but they finally decided on traveling to Ukraine where Kseniya is from. It was in April of last year, days before the 27th anniversary of the nuclear disaster, when months of preparations finally came to fruition and they headed off to Chernobyl.
