Why should student artists get special tutorials in “the business of being an artist” when no one seems to think that student anthropologists need special instruction in the business of being an anthropologist? Do we assume that young artists, as distinct from young physicists or historians or literary scholars, are special-needs cases meriting the pre-professional equivalent of training bras to ready them for the elementary truth that once they leave school they’ll have to earn a living somehow? […]
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Michael Rosen first published his book Vanilla Sex: Explicit Fine Art Photographs as a free PDF download. Rosen invited me to write the introduction to this project. My essay turned into a meditation not only on his work but on the state of sexually explicit photography in our culture — a subject to which I’ve turned my attention frequently over the decades. That PDF recently passed its 10,000-download mark, which strikes me as remarkable success for a self-published project on such a controversial subject. Now Rosen has published a printed version of the book, via Blurb.com. . . . […] We lost Bill Jay this spring. He died peacefully in his sleep on Sunday, May 10, 2009 in Samara, Costa Rica, where he’d set up residence. He was born in London in 1940. I got to know Bill after he left England (where he’d served as the first director of the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London and also worked under the late Colin Osman as the first editor of the germinal UK magazine Creative Camera. In 1970 he founded the short-lived but extremely influential UK magazine Album. […] In early 2007 one of my local institutions, the Staten Island Museum, commissioned me to respond in writing to a set of 49 photographs drawn from its extensive collection. The group consists of Island scenes depicted in lantern slides, commercially produced postcards, amateur photographs, professionally made group portraits, film stills, and assorted other forms. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |
BigYellowDaddy Takes Our Kodachrome Away
I try my best to keep up with whatever news affects me as a member of our lens culture, I attend some of the trade expos, I talk with and listen closely to photographers, I observe at first hand what goes on in photo-education programs around the world, and I make a point of reading the handwriting on the walls. So, when Eastman Kodak announced on June 22 that it had ceased production of Kodachrome film after 74 years, I didn’t consider that at all surprising. Indeed, I found myself in the odd position of thinking “I told you so.” […]