My very unjerry enviroportrait of Mo at skate park

we have a logo!

Environmental Portraits

Enviro Portraits. Gotta admit that I wasn't too inspired this time around. But for what it's worth here they are...

Roger de Bookshop.

sexy GAV

Life Magazine

Life Magazine Photo Archive

Seen this?

Warwick JP Baker (a graduate of RMIT Photography) and TB Hemmingway created a book of photos and short stories called New & Used

I haven't read Hemmingway's stories but Baker's photographs were taken during a road trip in The States. Check out a selection of them here.

OCULI

OCULI: A group of doco photographers who formed an agency in Melbourne.... I know of a number of them from the age. One of them - Dean Sewell - just won the MORAN photo portrait prize - $80,000. Check their site out here: OCULI

Karsh

Hi all,

The website for KARSH.

Cheerio.

Cara Bowerman et al.

Hi people,

I'm really amped for this doco class. Let's sort out a time to meet each week once we're up and running. Perhaps our first meet could centre around enviro portraits, and take place sometime after this coming class. Perhaps we should aim for four portraits each. ???

I was impressed by Cara Bowerman's doco on CHEWTON that was shown in class. I tracked her down online and founds five/seven photos. I thought it interesting as it may have started in a similar fashion to what we've got going. I think they're all RMITers. Some better than others. Some decent stuff though.

Check it out:

http://www.fiveseven.com.au/home.htm

ALSO, big thanks to Kate for the ED KASHI link. I've been mesmerized by his stuff all night tonight. A real talent. Inspiring. And that's what this is all about.

Peace y'all,

Catcha Tuesday.

And a few more

Chris Rainier  and Ed Kashi are two of the photographers who feature in the National Geographic video about the Photo Camp in Uganda.

War Shooter

A few more PJ sites:

www.warshooter.com

www.americanphotojournalist.com/

http://digitaljournalist.org/

If we think any link is particularly useful, let's add it to the side bar of our blog.

S.

Interesting Blog

Dear all again,

Here's a blog relating to PJ. The blog itself seems somewhat bland, however it has many interesting links on the side bar. (WARNING: ALSO A LOT OF CRAP) Check it out: here.

More to come.

An interesting site...

Hi all,

Rich man George Soros has a foundation. The foundation has an arm that awards grants to documentary photographers. Some interesting things here.

Have a look around...

National Penny Farthing Championships

A few happy snaps from Evendale, Tasmania on 21st of February 2009:

Roger Ballen

Ballen is an American-born photographer who has lived in South Africa since the 70's. As well as having a degree in psychology, a masters in something else (I forget), and a PhD in mineral economics, he is an accomplished documentary-inspired photographic artist [my questionable title!].


While never having studied photography formally, his mother worked as a photographic assistant for Magnum for much of his adolescence and young adulthood.


His early work was more traditionally documentary based, developed during global travels. While living in in South Africa, however, his style evolved from observational and journalistic to interactive and artistic. His interest was with South Africa's poor white underclass - a group who was virtually unknown to the wider world.


With so much hatred and racial tension in South Africa at the time, Ballen has said that he wanted to neutralise the issues, to make photos that could be from anywhere and speak universally. He sees his work as both documentary and aesthetic in intention, and is drawn to subjects who are "archetypal".


In more recent years, Ballen has (by his own admission) taken his photography much more seriously. His work has become more abstracted and stylised, and focuses on documenting the 'human condition'. He states that subjects become actors, rather than people living in certain places, and has worked with the same people numerous times.

..."I'm really a perfectionist when it comes to formal aspects of images. On the other hand, the type of content I'm dealing with - the people, the places - are completely imperfect (in most people's definition)... [It balances] an inherent tension between the imperfect and the perfect." (Ballen in 'Self portrait : The work of Roger Ballen', a film by Saskia Vredeveld).

Check out his website here.

Closed

Following Sean's ideas this morning, I recalled a couple of projects that cover similar conceptual ground.

First up is Tacita Dean's Kodak (2006), a documentary video of the last days of a French Kodak film manufacturing plant. The full feature-length movie can be seen here, if you're interested. It's got a beautiful mix of these arcane, magical shots mixed with desolate & abandoned factory lines.









Secondly, a bunch of polaroids taken at the Enschede Polaroid factory in the Netherlands, just before it was closed, from Wallpaper.

World Press Photo 09

Check out the winners of the World Press Photo 2009 here.

Couple o' changes...

Hey kids - I invited you all as contributors so that we can post using our own Gmail accounts, which is basically why you'd use Blogger over the much prettier Wordpress.

Also changed the colours a little - hope that's cool - all the black was making me hallucinate.

Miranda Pregnant by Salt Lake

Mini Magnum Meeting - Saturday 28th of Feb

Saturday's meeting was a small one, with Kate, James and Sean showing up. Here's a copy of Sean's little spiel with relevant images:


Sean O’Carroll – Friday Night - 27/2/09

DISCUSSION STARTER

I’ve decided to embark on journey through some of the images that inspire me. To move past the “wow” and to try and encapsulate in words just how the image in question “works”.

Chechnya, 1996 - Ruins of central Grozny (Top Right).
By James Nachtwey.

I suspect that for some photographers, the world of photojournalism does not hold the same appeal as other areas of photography such as conceptual art photography, for the simple reason that unlike so much photography, the images born out of photojournalism are less “created”. Something has to happen in front of the camera, and this something is not controlled by the photographer. Compare this with the work of Jeff Wall or Gregory Crewdson. In their works, every detail in the image was born first in the mind of the photographer. Even the work of a landscape photographer like Ansel Adams seems somehow more “created” than that of photojournalists.

And yet history delivers to us a handful of names: Capa, Salgado, etc. The very existence of such a list implies that there is such a thing as photojournalistic talent. And this in turn suggests that there is indeed something of the photographer in each photojournalistic image. It seems that the successful photojournalistic image is a happy marriage between circumstance and art.

Let us consider Nachtwey’s image of the boy in Chechnya. It is my hypothesis that a great many of the conceptual themes that make photographic art “work” – i.e. succeed - are the same themes that make for powerful photojournalistic images.

Quite literally, the presence of the boy’s face puts ‘a human face’ on what might otherwise be an image of the destruction wrought by war.

Behind the boy we have a perfectly symmetrical streetscape that seems to continue on into the infinite past as though to say, “we have come so far, and this where we find ourselves.” This could be the boy’s journey, or the journey of the human race. One side of the street is light, warm perhaps. The other is dark and cold. A striking symbolism of the good and evil that the human condition asks us to choose between as we journey onward.

But the boy does not see what we see. And we cannot see what those dark pools of eyes see. The boy is looking away from the destruction of the past. To what? Perhaps the fact that we cannot see what the boy sees suggests that it is in fact up to us somewhat. What can we imagine for this boy? What do we want him to be seeing? To be moving towards? There is then, an imperative to this image.

The image is dominated by the boy’s large – almost exaggerated - cranium. To me this suggests “mind”. Firstly, the boy’s mind; a young mind, a growing mind, an impressionable mind. A mind that is still forming its “take” on the world. Secondly, I feel that this large cranium, squeezed into the foreground of the streetscape, alludes to the very concept of mind, and the relationship between reality and our experience of reality – a philosophical question as old as humanity itself. Is the mind bringing about the circumstances, or are the circumstances shaping the mind.


I would like to briefly show a shot of my own to make this discussion a little more personal. I refer to “Miranda pregnant by salt lake”. I am showing this piece because I feel that it taps some similar themes to those found in the Grozny shot. I feel that the notion of “the future” is heavily present in both images. I will not draw any further comparisons here but rather put the comparison up for discussion.


We could go on and on talking about Nachtwey’s image, for there is so much in it. But for now I simply want to acknowledge the genius of Nacthwey. We must marvel at what I earlier called the happy marriage of art and circumstance. We might ask, does a photojournalist such as Nachtwey find the symbolic scene and then wait for that extra element? In this case the boy? Or is it fully unplanned and simply testament to his “eye”? I do not accept the idea that luck plays much of a part in such work.

Perhaps we could say that when the great, time honoured themes of art - and here I refer to both its philosophical and aesthetic aspects – are captured in the midst of an “event”, the result is a powerful photojournalistic image.

Do photojournalists in the field need to be conscious of the symbolism around them, or can/do they simply operate on some kind of gut instinct? Can we, as aspiring photojournalists, “practice” our photojournalism with respect to being more consciously aware of these artistic themes as we cover an event?

Mini Magnum's blog is born!

Mini Magnum has a blog!

A place for us to discuss documentary photography, post images, interesting links, and anything else related to documentary photography.

At present Mini Magnum consists of Kate Golding, Pete Walker, Gavin Green, James McCulloch and Sean O'Carroll.