My new policy: Film the police anytime I see them interacting confrontationally with members of the public. I recommend you do the same. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. The price of freedom from a police state is constant surveillance by the citizenry of those who benefit most directly from the creation of a police state — the police. […]
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We’d know nothing of the truth about the death of Eric Garner if bystander Ramsey Orta hadn’t made and immediately posted a video. That video of the Staten Island police beatdown on Garner, and still images derived therefrom, plus other documentation by other concerned citizens, have gone globally viral. So this is about images. […] I don’t aspire to greatness as an artist, or even to consideration in that category. If I’ve exceeded your expectations of the rewards of engaging with criticism, I’d prefer to think that I’ve expanded your definition of what criticism can do, rather than that I’ve stepped into some parallel universe and switched roles. […] Unexpectedly, the dismantling of the myth of Robert Capa’s adventures on Omaha Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944, and the subsequent fate of his negatives became the year’s main project at this blog. I also took up the collapsing market value of post-secondary degrees in studio art and photography; the willful, mindless destruction of an excellent example of such a program in Vevey, Switzerland, which I witnessed firsthand; the photographic strategies and style(s) of Shelby Lee Adams vs. his claim to documentarian status; and the insidious agenda of the “internet everwhere” tendency. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |
What Makes One Photo Worth $2.9 Million? (2007)
[Checking the news this past December 12, I learned from Forbes that “On December 9 PRNewswire announced that Australian photographer Peter Lik sold a photograph entitled ‘Phantom’ for a record-setting $6.5 million. ‘Phantom,’ now the world’s most expensive photograph ever sold, was shot in a subterranean cavern in Arizona’s Antelope Canyon.” (See Rachel Hennessey’s report, […]