Remember when you were young and you'd stare off into the distance, hoping against hope for a future of excellent stock photography?




Me too.

Well, your dreams have been answered, thanks to Shoot! The Day's amazing winners. Our July event was a great success, and now you can relax and just concentrate on being the best ballerina (or drunken swimmer) that you can be.

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*If you live in another city, do not despair. Find your nearest photobooth here.

Look folks-- it moves!



From Design42day:

"Celebrating its 75th anniversary, american men's magazine Esquire comes with a very special cover. A limited number of copies (100,000 of the total 720,000 print run) will feature an experimental cover that was built using electronic ink. The price, although undisclosed, is prohibitive, and Ford has been brought in as a 'sponsor': A moving car ad appears on the inside cover. Esquire even had to design a battery (a 'six-figure investment') that was small enough to fit into a magazine and keep things running until the mags are sold. The batteries will last for 90 days."

I hate to hate in the face of jaw-dropping technology, but I wish they'd chosen a more interesting graphic. Something with a pretty lady, maybe.

Like you know, Blade Runner:



Oh Los Angeles, 2019. I can hardly wait for you.

Good thing you shall actually be a reality.

Eric A. Hegg

A bit more gold, and then we'll move on. These images are from the amazing archive of Eric Hegg photographs at the University of Washington which  document the Klondike and Alaska gold rushes from 1897 - 1901. Images include depictions of frontier life in Dawson City, the Yukon Territory, and Skagway and Nome, Alaska.

Some more info...

In the fall of 1897, after hearing of the gold strikes in the Yukon Territories, Hegg joined the thousands of gold seekers heading north. Accompanied by a group of men from Bellingham Bay , he traveled by steamboat up the Inside Passage through British Columbia to his destination in Alaska. Finding his passage further north closed due to the freezeup on the Yukon River, he settled temporarily in Dyea, Alaska which was the jumping off point for the Chilkoot Trail to Dawson. Here he opened a small photography studio. Later, during the winter of 1897-1898, he established a second, more substantial, studio in Skagway.

The photographer Per Edward (Ed) Larss who had arrived in Skagway in March of 1898, was employed by Hegg to assist in documenting the huge migration to the Yukon known as "the Stampede". For a short time, he and Larss made frequent trips to the Chilkoot Pass following the footsteps of the thousands of Klondikers who wound their way up the Dyea River to the Golden Staircase and over over into British Columbia. They also documented scenes along the White Pass Trail. Along the trails they recorded the sail driven sleds, temporary tent towns, piles of snow covered food caches and the many hardships endured by the Klondikers as they neared their goal.

Ooh, I'm panning for gold all over the place today, and I figured I'd try my own backyard. Here are some golden moments from the PSC.

1. Low Brow: Money Celebrities!





Also, Stirton shot some amazing imagery in the Congo for Newsweek, but you know, this is about Brad.

Eric Etheridge's Breach of Peace post got a lot of deserving praise last week, and I received many related emails. One was from Mark Tucker, who told me about an assignment he was given for Newsweek ten years ago, to mark the 30th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination.

Tucker worked with picture editor Debbie Edelstein at the magazine, and traveled around the country to photograph the men who had been closest with King at the time of his death. He was given tremendous freedom in how to create the images:

"Debbie was the ultimate picture editor for this project -- she just said, 'Go do what you do'. Who could not love that? We traveled across the country, finding these men in their current occupations, and I think we shot the whole project on 665 Polaroid, and cleared the negatives at night in the hotel room. Looking back now, it seems pretty crazy to have done the whole project on 665 neg, but it felt right at the time. I can't remember now whether David Halberstam's book, The Children, had come out yet when we did this assignment, but it gives further intimate details about the climate of that period."

Ooh, an eventful trip to Ads of the World this morning; looks like Lexus picked up on a little photographic trend, and Microlamp found a Creature in the Abyss. Not to be smug, guys, but we found these first: 1. wee planets; 2: into the deep.

I AM glad that advertising is using interesting imagery. Gone are the days of apoplectic dudes holding up oak board signage on car lots, promising re-financing beyond your wildest dreams.

right?

joel barhamand

This weekend, I would like to lie down in a bed of flowers. 

Hey Guys-- heading to the beach for one last sand castle before this summer gig is up? Maybe you need some advice about how to frame that charming sea shanty! We'll be running a travel article over on School of Stock next week, but I got such great information from Endless Vacation Magazine's Moya McAllister when interviewing her for said article, that I thought I'd share some with ya now. There she is, above.

Moya currently produces and directs photography for many of Story Worldwide's publications, especially travel magazine Endless Vacation for RCI and also clients such as UPS, Bank of America, ILORI, Unilever and others. She is involved in concepting shoots, hiring photographers and stylists, casting models and directing shoots on-location.

Moya is going to parse two layout in the magazine for us-- she'll tell us why she chooses which images, how they're made, and essentially let us into her head.

Thanks, Moya! All the following words are Ms. McAllister's.

___

Endless Vacation Magazine's motto is Play - Eat - Shop - Relax - Explore.  Each feature story we publish, whether it's themed a "Relax" story or an "Eat" story, will incorporate the motto throughout, especially visually. For an 8 page feature - each of these photographers probably shot 10-16 hours a day for 4-5 days. They probably captured over 2500 images on the shoot, and turned over about 500 images for my edit. We publish somewhere between 15-25 images per feature story.



For the Core Banks story (from Endless Vacation's third issue - July/August 2007)-- I hired experienced travel photographer, Rob Howard, to shoot this lesser-known area, the Core Banks of North Carolina's coast.

A.

Corsica, France
Ed Alcock for the New York Times

B.

Eric Etheridge recently sent over a copy of his book Breach of Peace, and it has literally taken my breath away. An exhaustive photographic and archival survey of the lives of the Mississippi Freedom Riders through their original mug shots, it seems an incredibly important and poignant reminder of what can be achieved by ordinary people.

Here's a description and synopsis from the very helpful Breach of Peace blog:

Breach of Peace is a book about the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders, a photo-history told in images old and new. The book features new portraits of 80 Riders and the mug shots of all 328 Riders arrested in Jackson that year, along with excerpts of interviews with the featured Riders.

In the spring and summer of 1961, several hundred Americans -- blacks and whites, men and women -- entered Southern bus and train stations to challenge the segregated waiting rooms, lunch counters and bathrooms. The Supreme Court had ruled that such segregation was illegal, and the Riders were trying to force the federal government to enforce that decision.

Though there were Freedom Rides across the South, Jackson soon became the campaign's primary focus. More than 300 Riders were arrested there and quickly convicted of breach of peace--a law many Southern states and cities had put on the books for just such an occasion. The Riders then compounded their protest by refusing bail. "Flll the jails!" was their cry, and they soon did. Mississippi responded by transferring them to Parchman, the state's infamous Delta prison farm, for the remainder of their time behind bars, usually about six weeks.

A few days after the last group of Riders were arrested in Jackson, on September 13, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued new regulations, mandating an end to segregation in all bus and train stations.


Here's more info on the project.

Below are tidbits I've cobbled together from conversations with Eric, research on the blog, and text from the book.


How do these records exist?!



Eric Etheridge:

In 1956, Mississippi established the State Sovereignty Commission and empowered it "to do and perform any and all acts and things deemed necessary and proper to protect the sovereignty of the State of Mississippi, and her sister states, from the encroachment thereon by the Federal Government."

As it turned out, "any and all things" included hiring a former FBI agent who had once worked for J. Edgar Hoover and establishing a network of informants throughout the state to report on on the doings of anyone who showed the slightest inclination to thing or act differently on matters of race.

The commission's investigators kept close track of the Riders as they came to Jackson, gathering their names, addresses, birth dates and mug shots from the police and filing that information away. They thus preserved not only the mug shots but the name of every Freedom Rider and other information that would prove very useful in finding them some forty years later. In my research I found no evidence that the commission ever used this this information again, even though several of the Riders continued working for the movement in the state. Perhaps the investigators were were just fulfilling a bureaucratic imperative. For whatever reason, the investigators proved also to be excellent, if inadvertent, archivists.

I started contacting Riders and making portraits in 2005. I usually met them in their homes. Our sessions lasted on average three hours, the first of which was spent conducting an interview. Then we made a picture.

Though it was defunct by 1973, the commission was not finally abolished until 1977. At that point, the Mississippi ACLU and other plaintiffs sued the state to force it to open the agency's files. Twenty-one years and much legal wrangling later, they won, and the files were turned over to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History and opened to the pubic. Four years later, in 2002, MDAH archivists published every page of the files online, which is where I came across them, two years later.

Our intrepid reporter Jennifer Hsu, who is at the RNC for the The Takeaway
(a co-production of WNYC Radio and Public Radio International in collaboration with the New York Times, BBC World Service, and WGBH Radio Boston), sent us some pictures of the speaking floor that you'll rarely see on television. Jen writes: "have you noticed the big images they display behind the Republican speakers? Something you probably can't really notice on TV: they display these odd photos during the speeches. Sarah Palin might be making a grand declaration about U.S. foreign policy and suddenly, there's Old Faithful spouting."

You can't make something this good up, folks.





From downtown Wasilla, itself.

Random, but awesome. I love a masterly smoke image. This one is brought to us by German photographer Maximilian Pablo Jänicke.

I just discovered The Panopticist, and I must say: Color me amused. This Palincrastinator just lost another hour.

Zoom!

photo by Julia Baum

And he shall loveth all things photography.

Seriously, folks. This week we're starting off the gallery season with a bang. Shows are listed many places, but no one does it more cohesively than Peggy Roalf in the DART newsletter. Here's what she tells us about Thursday (and beyond):

"This month offers the best in contemporary photography, showcasing themes that continue to ripple to the top of a very full glass. Here are 100 or so shows in the not to be missed category, covering themes of identity, race, class, the consequences of war, environmental concerns, and new approaches to setup photography, to name just a few."

To receive this newsletter, fill out the information requested here on AI-AP's website.

Here are some of the picks. And make sure to click on the jump on the bottom-- this thing spans states and countries, so it's a loooong list.


NEW YORK: CHELSEA and DOWNTOWN

Michel Szulc-Krzyzanowski: The Early Sequences: 1977-1982
Robert Mann Gallery
September 4 - October 18, 2008
Opening Reception: September 4, 6 - 8 pm

Alexandra Sanguinetti: The Life that Came
Yossi Milo Gallery
September 4 - October 18, 2008
Opening reception: September 12, 6 - 8 pm

Julia Baum: A Rare Breed -- Portraits of Redheads
NY Studio Gallery
September 4 - 27, 2008
Opening reception: September 12, 7 - 9 pm

Jonathan Calm: New Video and Photography
Caren Golden Fine Art
September 4 - October 11, 2008
Opening reception: September 4, 6 - 8 pm

Polixeni Papapetrou: Games of Consequence
Foley Gallery
September 4 - October 11, 2008
Opening reception: September 4, 6 - 8 pm

Paul Fusco: RFK Funeral Train Rediscovered
Danziger Projects
September 4 - October 4, 2008
Opening reception and book signing: September 4, 6 - 8 pm

Meredyth Sparks: We Were Strangers For Too Long
Elizabeth Dee Gallery
September 4 - October 11, 2008

Jane Hammond: Photographs
Galerie Lelong
September 4 - October 11, 2008
Opening reception: September 4, 6 - 8 pm

Michael Thompson
Hasted Hunt Gallery
September 4 - October 25, 2008
Opening Reception: September 11, 6 - 8 pm

Amada Means: Glass + Light
Ricco Maresca
September 4 - 27, 2008
Opening reception: September 4, 6 - 8 pm

Michal Chelbin: Strangely Familiar
Andrea Meislin Gallery
September 4 - October 18, 2008
Opening Reception and Book Signing: September 4, 6 - 8 pm

Josef Koudelka: Invasion 68 Prague
Aperture Gallery
September 5 - October 30, 2008
Opening reception: September 4, 6 - 8 pm

Shimon Attie: Racing Clocks Run Slow
Ka Hassan: Recent photographs
Jack Shainman Gallery
September 4 - October 20, 2008

The Figure Today featuring multimedia work by Julia Fullerton-Batten, Lynn Goldsmith, Saul Leiter, Chris Raecker, and Jeong Mee Yoon, among others
Jenkins Johnson Gallery
September 4 - September 27, 2008
Opening reception: September 4, 6 - 8 pm

Kevin Cooley: At Light's Edge
Massimo Audiello Gallery
September 4 - October 11, 2008
Opening reception: September 4, 6 8 pm

Joel Sternfeld: Oxbow Archive
Luhring Augustine
September 6 - October 4, 2008
Opening reception: September 5, 6 - 8 pm

Guido Castagnoli: Provincial Japan
Sasha Wolf Gallery
September 11 - November 1, 2008
Opening reception: September 11, 6 - 8 pm

Jeff Whetstone: Post-Pleistocene
Julie Saul Gallery
September 12 - October 25, 2008
Opening reception: September 12, 6 - 8 pm

How I Spent My Summer Vacation, featuring work by Rachael Dunville, Sebastian Lemm, Christopher Rauschenberg, Roger Eberhard, Josh Quigley, Caleb Charland among others
Michael Mazzeo Gallery
September 12 - October 11, 2008
Opening reception: September 12, 6 - 8 pm

Vivan Sundaram: Trash
SEPIA International | The Alkazi Collection
September 17 - November 1, 2008
Opening reception: September 17, 6 - 8 pm

Joshua Lutz: Meadowlands
Dave Anderson: Roadside Ghosts (Project Room)
ClampArt
September 18 - October 18, 2008
Opening reception: September 18, 6 - 8 pm

Doug Aitken
303 Gallery
September 20 - November 1, 2008

Parsons MFA Photography Thesis Exhibition
Sheila C. Johnson Design Center | Parsons the New School for Design
Through September 12, 2008


click on the link below to see MANY MORE!

This list is &%$@# priceless. Add your own gripe, it's a community just for whiners. Brilliant.

Highlights:

7. The world is global now. Please fix your pricing. Thank you.

10. Make my 2009 Photoshop faster than Photoshop 3.5

28. Your installer is the worst piece of software on the planet... well, actually, your updater is worse. For the love of all things good, fix it.

34. Let me keep my browser open while you update your programs. Or eat hair. The choice is yours.


As, always, thank you JC.

I've always loved Lauren Lancaster's 2005 project about stock brokers, in which she followed a group of hard-working, hard-partying fellows in Manhattan's financial district for three months. She followed them to work, to bars, on the subways, and into the office.

A laborious project, about laborers.

Very labor day-appropriate (or the day after, but who's counting). Anyway, enjoy.

And welcome back to work.

A man modeled a Burberry umbrella in Vogue that costs about $200. Some 456 million Indians live on less than $1.25 a day.

From The Times:

"Vogue India's August issue presented a 16-page vision of supple handbags, bejeweled clutches and status-symbol umbrellas, modeled not by runway stars or the wealthiest fraction of Indian society who can actually afford these accessories, but by average Indian people.

Vogue India editor Priya Tanna's message to critics of the August shoot: 'Lighten up,' she said in a telephone interview. Vogue is about realizing the 'power of fashion' she said, and the shoot was saying that "fashion is no longer a rich man's privilege. Anyone can carry it off and make it look beautiful," she said.

'You have to remember with fashion, you can't take it that seriously,' Ms. Tanna said. "We weren't trying to make a political statement or save the world," she said."

In Vogue India magazine, a child from a poor family modeled a Fendi bib, which costs about $100.

"The editorial spread was 'not just tacky but downright distasteful' said Kanika Gahlaut, a columnist for the daily newspaper Mail Today that is based here, who denounced it as an 'example of vulgarity.' "

Read the whole article here.


What say you, reader?