In the book store this morning I spent a great deal of time looking at The Here and Now: The Photography of Sam Jones. Jones is a very well known photographer who is most famous for his celebrity and advertising (which often features celebrities) work. The book is an impressive collection of celebrity portraits. I didn't buy a copy but only because Borders has it for $40 in the store and I can order it from Amazon for $26. I'm going to buy it and I very much recommend that anyone interested in portrait photography buys it as well. Some of the images are eleborate set pieces including costumes, props and staged locations while others are direct, intimate headshots. All are very interesting and give the portrait photographer lots to examine and think about.

So while all the images in the book are good and interesting and while I encourage you to buy the book that's not what this post is about. This post is about one image in the book, a shot of Tom Cruise that was used for a Time Magazine cover story. The cover story is from 2002, well before any of Cruise's couch jumping or his railing against anti-depression medications. In other words, the image was taken well before any of us started thinking Tom Cruise is crazy. I imagine that when the magazine came out the image was perceived as one of a handsome, charismatic movie star. He looks pretty and has a satisfied grin in the image, like he's got the world on a string as the expression goes. The unfocused colors in the background call to mind stage lights as if to remind us that "this is a movie star" while the deep, deep stare would seem to indicate that viewers can and should trust this man.

Looking at the image this morning in the book store my immediate thought was "wow, he looks like a crazy, charismatic cult leader. He's very frightening." Obviously I'm looking at this image with the Cruise Scientology video still very fresh in my mind. The unfocused lights in the background make me think today of all the science fiction stuff the religion purportedly believes. That satisfied grin? It makes him appear to me like a smug manipulator. Like he knows exactly what to say and how to behave in any situation to get what he wants and that he finds himself quite superior to most everyone else.

All this is to note how much context, current events and individualism very much influence how an image is perceived. As a photographer you cannot always decide when or how your images are displayed but when you can control those things it's wise to put a great deal of time and thought into the details that will influence how your images are received. This includes putting them in context when appropriate, including text descriptions, making sure prints are appropriate sizes, etc.

If you haven't been following the Lane Hartwell situation Derek Powazek has a really good wrap up of events up to this point.

Lane has just released her statement about the situation and it has caused me to reaffirm my complete support of her and her actions. Many people have said they're happy when others steal their works because it means the work is good enough to steal or they're happy when people steal their works and then create new works because hey new stuff is cool. That's great for those people. I encourage those people to release all of their works under the appropriate Creative Commons license and be happy and merry and bright with all the sharing and the stealing. I don't mean that sarcastically. If you don't mind your work being taken and re-used that's great but here's my issue: the creator, gets to choose if people can take and re-use his work. If someone posts his work on the internet and explicitly says that all rights are reserved then all rights are reserved by that artist. End of story. If the artist releases his work under a creative commons license that allows use or perhaps the artist even just says, basically, sometimes people steal my work but cool sometimes cool stuff comes out of that theft so I'm just going to say "ok take my stuff" that's fine, but each and every person creating original work, in my opinion, gets to make that decision.

And I think that saying "people on the internet are going to steal so suck it up" is bullshit. That's kind of like saying "people in the real world are going to commit armed robbery so suck it up." Yeah, some people on the internet steal stuff just like some people in the physical world steal stuff. That doesn't make it right in either instance.

I've been trying to think of a way to describe photographer Zoe Strauss and her work. I've been failing but it turns out that's ok because a recent article in Heeb magazine did it for me.

“They just aren’t pretty,” my grandmother declared after walking in and quickly out of Zoe Strauss’ solo exhibition at Silverstein Photography this past summer. I was startled. I had spent the last month visiting the people and landscapes in this captivating exhibition, staring at candid portraits and hoping to learn more of their stories. But for all my fascination with Strauss’ subjects, my grandmother was correct—her photographs are not pretty. Rough, raw and often bleak, they expose forgotten and overlooked neighborhoods and residents, giving us a window into hidden worlds. They can often be disturbing or downright brutal, but it is each image’s honesty and quiet beauty that make Strauss’ work so poignant.

I said recently that right now I'm very interested in photography that is glossy and pretty and can take me out of the real world a little bit. The one exception to this is Zoe Strauss. I can't explain what it is about her work that appeals to me so much but it does. Check out Strauss's blog for updates on her work, shows and her recently being awarded a United States Artists Fellowship.

Lexington Herald-Leader photographer Mark Cornelison has a nice little video up about shooting athletes. In it he talks a little about his setup and his style for making athletes look cool. The video is made even cooler because it features the quarterbacks for Kentucky's two major university football teams, including my beloved Louisville Cardinals.

via Strobist

I saw the link to The Explorers by Jennifer Zwick in my friend Kevin's delicious feed and I'm so glad that I did. It's an interesting short series with an even more interesting behind the scenes blog from when the series was created.

National Press Photographers Association has a nice feature about student photojournalist Andrew Worrall, the 19 year old freshman to be at the University of Missouri at Columbia's media convergence program, who shot some very compelling images of the Minneapolis bridge collapse yesterday. He was on his way to a Minnesota twins game when he heard about the collapse on the radio. He had some gear and his high school press pass with him and got into the thick of things.

A full day after the bridge first fell, Worrall was asked what he thinks about Wednesday's experience in retrospect. "It really pushes my ethics; it's definitely hard to shoot people suffering and tragedy in general. But I'm happy if I can make the world a better place by sharing my vision through my lens."

National Press Photographers Association has an interesting article about Alan Kim, the photographer for The Roanoke Times whose photographs from Virginia Tech have become, I think, the most used and seen photographs from Monday's events.

via Rob Galbraith

This isn't a book about guns. It's a book about people. - Kyle Cassidy

Photographer Kyle Cassidy's upcoming book Armed America: Portraits of Gun Owners in their Homes looks absolutely incredible. The book won't be out until August 2007 but there is a generous selection of photographs and text from the book available online.

via kottke

Tags: photography, Armed America, Kyle Cassidy

PopPhoto.com has two new features on portrait photography that are very interesting reads and have extremely interesting accompanying photographs.

First up is The New Portrait: A Study in Three Parts.

Here we look at work by ten contemporary photographers who approach the subject of the human form in vastly different ways.

Next is Portraiture: A Master Class.

The technique and the philosophy that underpins the work of our featured photographers.

Um spoiler alert for an already aired episode of CSI.

Thanks to CBS on demand (and the insane amount of money I pay each month for digital cable) I watched Thursday night's episode of CSI this morning. The episode is called "Happenstance" but since it's already aired I'd like to rename it "The Photographer Did it!" As an episode of CSI it had had the requisite twists and turns but the main point is a photojournalist murder his editor to keep her from spilling the beans that his Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of American soldiers in Iraq was actually a composite. He'd taken a bunch of boring, mundane stuff and pasted it together to create one dynamic shot.

It made for a good storyline on CSI but this is actually a very serious topic that working photographers and anyone buying photography has to deal with. Earlier this year Reuters fired a freelance photographer in Lebanon for significantly digitally altering his photographs that many felt changed the context and meaning of the events in the photos. The Charlotte Observer fired a photographer over the summer for altering the colors of a sunset in one of his photos. The photographer said he made the edits to make the colors in the photograph more true to how they actually were. In other words he was trying to improve upon the limitations of photography not change the meaning of the photo or deceive anyone.

In some of my portrait work I've done some serious photo editing to soften backgrounds, increase shadows, etc and the photographs have benefited from it and my clients were very happy. I don't discuss what levels of photo editing have taken place with the client not because I want to deceive or trick them, they simply aren't interested. They want to see the end product not all the steps and processes that lead up to it and they want that end product to make them (or their child) look interesting and beautiful. Photojournalism is a whole different ball of wax. Lots of magazines and newspapers have written guidelines and rules on what is considered acceptable photo editing but as technology improves it's going to be harder and harder to figure out what is Photoshopped, what is real and what the difference truly is.