Monday, June 29, 2009

North Korea Photo Essay

As long as North Korea is such a hot topic these days, here's a pretty nice photo-essay on the country from the May/June 2009 issue of Foreign Policy magazine.







Thursday, June 25, 2009

Bill Owens


5.5 x 7 inches, heavy card stock


The following three items were advertising events associated with the same show. The first is the show announcement, the second is for a book signing and the third a poetry reading.

Front


Open, back is blank

9 x 12 inches, card stock, folded once to make a 9 x 6 inch card




7 x 5 inches, card stock




7 x 5 inches, card stock

Saturday, June 20, 2009

Photographers Have to Make a Living Too, Part 3

Hawking cameras...


Arnold Newman for Canon
News Photographer
October, 1999



Elliott Erwitt for Minolta
Photographic

November, 1999



Sally Mann for Toyo view and Mamiya medium format cameras
(I'm afraid I don't know where this is from but it appeared in 1991.
It's big too: 11 x 16 inches.)





Now, what's curious about these two ads is that they appeared in the May, 2004, issue of Shutterbug. Mary Ellen Mark is endorsing competing brands of cameras, in the same issue of a magazine. Admittedly, they're as separated as you can get in a magazine: the Mamiya ad is on page 5, right before the contents page and the Hasselblad ad is on the back cover.

It's the magazine's responsibility to let the advertisers know of this conflict. So I suppose the thinking, on the magazines part, is that "oh, by the time the reader gets to the end of the mag, they'll have forgotten that the same photographer already endorsed a different camera." Unless one camera company owns the other, I don't see how you get away with that.

Anyone know anything about this? Does one of those companies own the other? I would think that when you're hired to endorse a product you sign a contract. And it would seem that one of the provisions would almost certainly be: you can't endorse a competitor of ours while under contract to us.

Just for the record, I'm not criticizing anyone for making money off of promoting a tool that they've probably used for years anyway and do in fact believe to be superior to the other tools out there. I'm just curious about these ads by MEMark in the same issue.

Sunday, June 14, 2009

Larry Fink in BusinessWeek

Larry Fink, shooting day traders on Wall Street, you'd think that was a match made in heaven. Not as compelling as one would hope. The June 10, 1991, issue of BusinessWeek with the results of the shoot.







Edward Burtynsky

10 x 4 inches, card stock, blank back



Front


Open


Back

20.5 x 4 inches, card stock,
folded once to produce a 10.25 x 4 inch card that opens horizontally




Front


One panel opened


Fully opened


Back

27.75 x 7 inches, card stock,
folded twice to produce a 9.25 x 7 inch card that opens horizontally




Front


Back

6.5 x 5 inches, card stock



Front


Open


Back

7 x 11 inches, card stock,
folded once to produce a 7 x 5.5 inch card that opens vertically




Front


Back

7 x 6 inches, card stock



Front


Back

7 x 5.5 inches, card stock



Burtynsky By Jim Panou, 2009

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Odds and Ends, Poster Invites

The theme in this post is exhibition announcements that fold out into posters. The Newton is a bit of a stretch, but it looks like a poster.


17.5 x 11.5 inches, folded twice



22 x 17 inches, folded three times


Front


Open


Back

16 x 10 inches, card stock, folded once



22 x 17 inches, folded three times

Sunday, June 7, 2009

Stephen Shore & Katy Grannan

The June/July, 2009, issue of Details contains a couple of interesting photographs. Stephen Shore shot a fashion spread and Katy Grannan produced the creepiest portrait I've seen in a long time. The mag also runs a Martin Parr photo about a half-page but I'm not reproducing it here. Shore and Grannan got their mug shot on the Contributors page.



The Shore piece is 8 pages, which actually feels short. Not that it's great shoot--it's good--but it feels like it's only getting started when you're on to the next article. (The shortness of the piece is probably a result of the mag overall being so thin.) It does have one of his Uncommon Places-type tabletop-after-dinner shots. Truth is, he shoots fashion fairly often for Elle and W these days. You can see some more of his commercial work here on the photo-rep Bill Charles' website. And while you're there, check out who else Charles represents. It's quite a long list of respected "art" photogs.



I've tried to run this Katy Grannan portrait as large as possible but you should really go to the magazine itself to see the image. It is chilling. Now, true, the guy is an assassin who has killed numerous people on behalf of Mexican drug lords but it verges on grotesque. (Grannan was one of the Another Girl, Another Planet artists and the photographer as author of Dream America and Model American.) (If you can't figure out what makes this so odd and you can't find an issue of Details, let me know and I'll spell it out.)


Everyone seems to be shooting commercial work these days. I suppose art doesn't pay nearly what one might think, given it's cache in our culture, and given that same cache, the fashion magazines have been drawing as many "art" photogs into the fold as possible. Besides, I'll bet it's fun to shoot fashion. Shore in fact, even shoots weddings. Academia must not pay very well either.