Hello, roosters! If Avedon's your man, then this fine Monday morning The New Yorker has a treat for you:

"This week's issue features a portfolio of entertainers from 'Richard Avedon Performance,' a new collection of rarely seen work by Richard Avedon due out in October. Avedon had an enduring relationship with performers: he was portrayed by one--Fred Astaire--in the 1957 movie 'Funny Face,' and throughout his career they remained among his favorite subjects."

charming:

I heard today from the very cool Lou Mora about a new kind of photo agency that seems almost like a collective. I'm psyched about the name-- Wonderful Machine (!), and I'm psyched about the very simple interface. Photo Editors- you know when you need a photographer in Missoula on one day's notice?

Problem solved: just call Heath or Anne.

Aspen, Cleveland, and Tampa are also covered. Not to mention Edmonton.




We got some insider info on how the agency hopes to position itself:

"Ultimately, we intend to be a full-service, global photo agency with a web site that will be a primary destination for art buyers seeking high quality commercial and editorial photographers. We expect to max out at 50 cities in North America by the end of the year, then expand to other major markets around the world. We will have a select number of photographers in each location and no two alike. Though we will be as exclusive as possible with the photographers we choose, we will not require that our photographers work with us exclusively. Striking the right balance - in quality, quantity, specialty, and geography - will make us a logical first stop for clients.

We've created a business model that is unique in the industry, and it's one that we think will provide our photographers with the best possible bang for their marketing buck. It's a hybrid, combining elements of a web portal with those of full-service artist representation. What makes us different from other portals, is:

•  We have a limited number of photographers in each city/specialty, so your name will always stand out.

• We maintain a high standard of talent, so your photography will only be associated with other good work.

• Your photography will be actively promoted to a wide range of qualified prospects.
  

• We can assist you with estimating, production, and other consulting services."
  

I was thinking about LA yesterday after that job announcement, and came across some of Alan Greth's images in the collection. SO LA, SO '80s, SO crazy. I'd love to give a novelist (or an alien from another planet) these three images and see what they come up with.

A little about Mr. Greth:

Alan Greth has been a working photojournalist since 1986 when he started his first staff photographer job at the Whittier Daily News in the Los Angeles area. Greth Worked for the Associated Press as a Staff Photographer and a stringer. He has been Director of Photography at the Oakland Tribune and and most recently Executive Photo Editor at the Contra Costa Times in California for the past eight years.



Former U.S. President Ronald Reagan reaches into hit coat pocket as he walks out of a Sees Candy store in Century City, Calif December 8, 1989. Reagan was Christmas Shopping.

All I can say is whoa. I mean wow.

There's an almost embarrassingly rich field of photographers in Beijing; I wrote about Vincent Laforet's blog last week, and found two more incredible Olympic repositories today, from Contact Press Images photographers Kenneth Jarecke and David Burnett.

These two have drastically different styles and are both incredible shooters. I think I just lost my afternoon.

In any case, I chose two images from each to show you-- one gymnastics, one field hockey (a personal fave). So go for the gold and check these blogs out.


Kenneth Jarecke's Mostly True






David Burnett's We're Just Sayin

I visited David Black's site last night and was greeted with a truly spectacular sight: Daft Punk. In helmets and leather.



With smoke....



of many colors.



Turns out the shoot was for this:




And, of course, there's an anecdote. And it's funny.

From our photographer:

"I used color smoke bombs and made the mistake of leaving them in my carry-on bag when catching a flight at LAX. I ended up getting arrested and the bomb squad came to the airport. No joke, it was one of the scariest experiences of my life.

Best!

David"


Yowser! Stop Smiling, indeed. I hope that was on the way back from the shoot.

kaboom.

I don't know about you, but I don't handle change well. So when I went to PDNOnline this morning, I was a little taken aback. It's all different! It's grayer! There's a community section!

I calmed down a little when I got playing with the new "Compass" feature, which has a rad map situation that zooms in and out on other members' locations. I do like a map.

Anyhoo, Haggart's talking about it, and it seems like the future. I nailed down my buddy Daryl Lang, News Editor and all-things-awesome over at PDN, to tell us what's what.



This is Daryl Lang. Photo by Danny Tsui.

Hey Daryl! What made PDNOnline decide to change its look?

It was time. Web sites have changed a lot since PDNOnline's last redesign. To take one thing, people have gradually migrated to higher-resolution computer screens and faster Internet connections, so we have more freedom to play with wider layouts and bigger photos. Also, our readers have become much more comfortable with nontraditional formats like blogs, forum posts and videos. The new site is better organized to wrangle all this extra information. There are also a lot of technical improvements that might not be obvious. For example, we have a new search engine that's much better. This is a good place to mention that the new site was a team effort involving many people from PDN and Nielsen Business Media's digital media group.

What new features has the site added?

This site brings together a couple of PDN sites that were previously isolated from one another. It's easier for readers to find information from the PDN Gear Guide site, our PhotoServe directory, our Photo Source guides and our PDNedu publication for students and educators. We have a slick new events calendar that's going to be jammed full of exhibitions, contests and photo shows. Our forums are a lot better. And we have just launched PDN Compass, which is a community site for photo professionals.



What purpose is the community section intended to serve? Is it sort of like Facebook meets a photo forum? Is it aimed primarily photographers, or industry professionals, and will it be able to connect the two?

We looked around and saw a couple of excellent social networking sites for photographers who specialize in one thing or another. And we saw lots of photographers active on LinkedIn and Facebook, which are much more generalized. What was missing was a community site for everybody who works in photography-- photographers, editors, creative directors, assistants, techs, retouchers, curators, educators, you name it. We decided to build one and connect it to our forum, which has gotten increasingly lively in the last few months. Communities like this are only as good as their members, so it was important that we make it welcoming and easy to join. It's free, of course. You don't have to subscribe to our magazine. As it grows, our tech team plans to build on more features. To start, the killer ap is the map.

I'm psyched about the map function, Daryl! Tell me about that!

We hope it works as a simple, visual way to bring photo professionals together. You can search the map by location and specialty. So if an editor wants to find, for example, a photojournalist in Florida, they can locate everyone who meets that description, check out their Web sites, and get in touch. Or if you're planning a trip and want to talk to somebody who's familiar with where you're going, you can find that person and ask for advice. The more people who join, the more useful the map becomes. Did I mention it's free?

In what other ways is PDN planning to take over the world?

I'm thinking reality television. America's Next Top Photo Editor?

__

You heard it here first, Bravo TV.

Check out the new site here, and click on community to add your profile to the mix.

digital file from original nitrate neg


I feel compelled to post some versions of Dorothea Lange's famous "Migrant Mother" image. This was one of the pictures that resonated with me during my very first photo class at RISD a gazillion years ago; I chose Lange to profile in my requisite slide presentation, and have been fascinated by the FSA photographers ever since.

A few folks have alerted me to the PBS film on this topic that's airing tonight, and the related article in the Times: "Documenting the Face of America: Roy Stryker and the F.S.A./O.W.I. Photographers" shows how the small Farm Security Administration's New Deal project to document poverty turned into a visual anthology of thousands of images of American life in the 1930s and early '40s."

Sounds unmissable.

One of the thing I like so much about the FSA works is that they're public domain; they show an incredible cross-section of America, and they belong to all Americans. It seems downright patriotic to me.

Something I've been meaning to do forever is to order a "Migrant Mother" print. It's amazing how easy and inexpensive this is to do. I also went searching in the Library of Congress' online vaults, and I found out some interesting things about the print. They provide three versions (you can also download very high-res files and print them yourself). The version up above is  the original nitrate negative for "Migrant Mother". It was retouched in the 1930s to erase the thumb holding a tent pole in lower right hand corner. The file print made before the thumb was retouched can be seen in copy negative (second image below).

There's also some more information about the people in the image:

"Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California" 



digital file from print


digital file from b&w film copy neg. of unretouched fileprint showing thumb in right corner


It's pretty unbelievable how easy it is to order a print-- printed by a real person no less-- from the Prints and Photographs Online Catalog.

Here's the pricing structure. Looks like I'll be getting an 11"x14" fiber print (since it's from a nitrate neg) for $78.00. Pretty good deal, I'd say.







Check out more available imagery-- you'll be owning a piece of (beautiful) history for nearly nothing.

A double-dose of Juergen today: first a profile and discussion of his W Magazine fashion shoot in New York Magazine, and second, the pictures and parse in W itself.

It's a bit confusing, I admit. We'll do it by numbers:

1. New York Magazine piece (accompanied by the cutest JT picture I've seen yet)



"Juergen Teller, the photographer, has spent much of this summer Tuesday editing a shoot commissioned by W Magazine about the art world in New York. The star of the shoot is the 47-year-old actress Tilda Swinton, who has been dressed up as everyone from an artist to a gallerist to an insecure collector mid-Botox procedure. She's accompanied by artists like Rachel Feinstein and collectors like Renée Rockefeller. The whole thing looks fairly dark; the lighting is not gentle or flattering, and if any of the subjects has a pore, or a sagging breast, well, there it is.

'Most fashion photography is done by gay people finding women sexy,' Teller says, 'which is sort of not sexy at all, at least to a heterosexual man. She's so retouched, so airbrushed, without any human response at all, and, well, you don't really want to fuck a doll.' "


2. The W fashion piece; Tilda Swinton, Rachel Feinstein, Heather Mnuchin, Renee Rockefeller, Yvonne Force Villareal and more of W's favorite fashion icons slip into fall's best looks.



"Looking one moment like a Park Avenue matron and the next like a punked-out artist, Tilda Swinton is doing what she commonly does when she alights in a city from her home in the Scottish Highlands: gallery hopping.

But on this particular weekend in New York's Chelsea, she is portraying an assortment of über New York women for photographer Juergen Teller. Inside Barbara Gladstone's gallery, wearing seven-inch stilettos and a silk miniskirt, she gets down on the floor and raises herself into a shoulder stand, jackknifing her legs so that they dangle precipitously. At Andrea Rosen, her 5-foot-11-inch frame skyrocketing another 10 inches atop platform wedges, she pokes her head between the hairy legs of one of David Altmejd's colossal sculptures of giants."

__

OK, UM... hmmm. You know, I just don't see these pictures and think "oooh, let me pick up Fendi's 24k gold-infused mink jacket (in the picture on the left) or ooh, I must have Ralph Lauren Black Label's lambskin pants" (in the picture on the right).





I mostly just think: "good god, these are some ugly and unfortunate images. What a waste of a good Tilda."

I think Juergen may have finally gone too far. Am I wrong?

I hate to be repetitive and reference The Times twice in a row, but the Women's Fall Fashion 2008 Style Magazine was out this weekend, and I learned some things:

• Penny loafers are back. It's best to actually put pennies in them.

(This fine loafer is by Cole Haan)

• Penny-colored hair is in. My guess is that Joan from Mad Men had a hand in this.

Weatherproof Garments on left, Catherine Maladrino on right

• Rachel McAdams is better off in 2008 than 1988, with all due respect to Raymond Meier. Et voilà:

• And most importantly, Coppi Barbieri can shoot a beautiful eye. I would point out that even beauty shoots are now referencing animals, but I think we've been through that. In any case, these are beautiful beautiful. They lose a little at 522 pixels, but you get the point. My favorite's the goldfish-- it matches our penny theme.

Hed: Dreamstates
Dek: Where the Eye Collides with the Natural Order

I've been amazed at some of the work I've seen coming out of Georgia and Tbilisi in the past week. Much of it has been in The New York Times, and much of it has been from Reuters. Many of these images feel quite raw and unfiltered.

There was an incredible slide show yesterday in The Times.

You can see slide shows on Reuters' site too; take a look.

Here are two that are seared into my brain.

This is not Toronto-based photographer Finn O' Hara. This is an Underwater Hockey player. Wait-- you think Underwater Hockey doesn't exist?! Let's ask Finn about it:

Finn! tell me about this Underwater Hockey project! How'd it come about? Are you showing it anywhere? How do they hold their breath so long?

It kinda started with a conversation with friends about high school, and the strange games that they made us play in gym class. I recalled playing Underwater Hockey, where we spent more time humiliating and punching one another underwater than trying to play the game. My friends didn't believe me, and claimed that there is no such thing as Underwater Hockey. I set off to prove them wrong, and googled "Underwater Hockey" to find some proof of its existence.

Much to my surprise, it's a huge international game, played in over 20 countries, and very organized. I had just started research into shooting a series on strange games, so I thought this would be a perfect subject to cover. It even turned out that there were several clubs nearby, so I called them up to see if I could photograph their games and tournaments, and they readily agreed.

I'm not showing it anywhere at the moment, but I would like to find a gallery or publisher that would be interested in exhibiting or publishing the strange games series. As for holding their breath, they're extremely talented swimmers, and with the use of a snorkel and fins, they can really cover a lot of pool. It's a tough sport too, hence the armored glove, head protection, and mouth guards. I've seen a few nasty cuts and heated arguments while shooting.










Finn! Tell me about the Mountain Dew assignment-- what was the concept for the shoot? Did you find it personally fulfilling-- did it mirror your own work in any way? What was the final response?

The Mountain Dew work is portraits of the characters from a commercial film shoot I worked on in the Spring. The Director of the shoot is a friend, Chris Hutsul, and they needed stills that were to be used in collaboration with the video.

The characters were formed around a campaign that never actually launched, unfortunately (I added the retro Mountain Dew logo to identify the work on my site). It was a total drag that the campaign got canned. As you can see, the wardrobes were hysterical, and the casting was done mostly through craigslist, which added a huge layer of authenticity. And yes, it was fulfilling, for sure. It fit in with some of the creatives that I'm working on now. Stay tuned!

From Black and White Cat:

"This was one of a set of pictures Xinhua sent out on the wire late on Friday night. An hour and a half later, Xinhua sent it again, this time with a notice to all clients: 'This photograph has been withdrawn. Please do not use.' "

I was strangely saddened by the news of Playgirl's print passing last week; I somehow have nostalgia about this magazine, although I'm not sure why. I thought we might take a trip down cover memory lane together, and explore the magazine's trajectory. They started off in 1974 with Burt, which is an auspicious a start as any, I imagine.

Along the way they had some truly classy folks posing for us-- Meryl and Chevy, oh my! And don't forget to notice those A-list photographers; Brigitte Lacombe and even Annie Leibovitz got in on this action.

But by the '90s they were on to celebrity stock, and in the '00s-- well, you'll see.

Playgirl December 1974

Coverguy
Burt Reynolds photographed by David Meyer

Features
Is Howard Hughes Dead And buried Off An Island In Greece?
Photographing Pain And Pleasure
The Presidency: Overnight From Party Hack To Divine Absolution
Exciting Centerfold - Sexy Apres Ski - Nude Hotdogging

Playgirl November 1979

Coverguy
Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep photographed by Brigitte Lacombe

Features
Dustin Hoffman: Why Hollywood May Force Him To Give Up Acting
Tricks To Make You A Better Bedmate
Lusty Latin Lovers: Red-Hot And Handsome
Meryl Streep: The Freshest Face In Hollywood

Playgirl August 1980

Coverguy
Chevy Chase and Jane Seymour photographed by Norman Seeff

Features
Shirley MacLaine: Why It Takes More Than One Lover To Satisfy Warren Beaty's Big Sis
What Every Woman Must Know About The Presidential Candidates Before It's Too Late
When Your Relationship Is Falling Apart - How To Mend It
Special Nude Pictorial: The Rich, Sexy & Powerful Men Of Wall Street

Playgirl October 1984

Coverguy
Matt Dillon photographed by Annie Leibovitz

Features
Superhunk Matt Dillon: The James Dean Of The Eighties
Special Nude Spread: Bachelors Of Beverly Hills
Men's Sexual Secrets: What He Never Tells You
Go-Go's Backstage With Rock's Top girl Group

Playgirl August 1998

Coverguy
Matt Damon photographed by Globe

Features
The Sizzling Men of South Florida
Hollywood's Hot Young HeartThrobs: Top 10 New Leading Men Matt Damon Leonardo DiCaprio Will Smith
Faking It: Super Curves Without The Knife
Summer Lovin': 20 Ways To Seduce A Sexy Sun God

Playgirl March 2008

Coverguy
Alex Hawn (nude inside) photographed by Eric Schwabel

Features
Mission: Irresistible
Doggy Style: The Controversial Bounty Hunter Speaks!
Celebrity Sex Scenes!
Centerfold Anton: Wondrous Woodsman

This morning's turning up a little low-brow here on the blog. I can't control it, the blogosphere chooses its own rhythm. I figure you won't mind, since yesterday was all nuclear cakes and atomic curatorial talent.

What's got my photo goat today? The US Weekly gallery: Can You Believe They Dated?

Um, no. NO I CAN'T.