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In case you have not explored Pedro Mayer’s Zone Zero – I’ll highlight some examples of the galleries:
Apart from the wide range of images , the galleries themselves are beautifully put together.
05 Wednesday Sep 2012
Posted Black and White, Photography
inTags
In case you have not explored Pedro Mayer’s Zone Zero – I’ll highlight some examples of the galleries:
Apart from the wide range of images , the galleries themselves are beautifully put together.
02 Wednesday Jun 2010
Posted Black and White, commercial, Photography
inTags
Zone Zero is a great web site for photographers (both those working in analogue and digital formats). Pedro Meyer leads the show with his questioning , accurate and provocative editorials:
For example: Why World Press Photo is wrong!
World Press Photo has just disqualified Stepan Rudik from receiving the 3erd. prize story award in Sports Features.
Their argument goes that “after careful consultation with the jury, [it has] determined that it was necessary to disqualify Stepan Rudik, due to violation of the rules of the WPP contest”. The photographer had removed a foot of one of it’s subjects from a photo.
The photographer has explained that his motives behind the manipulation. “The Photograph submitted to the contest is a crop, and the retouched detail is the foot of a man which appears on the original photograph, but who is not a subject of the image submitted to the contest. There is no significant alteration nor has there been the removal of important information.”
We fully support Stepan Rudik, and consider that the stance by World Press Photo, is yet one more instance of a jury not understanding the meaning of photography.
Let me reiterate for all those who have not given this subject too much thought. Photography by it’s very nature is manipulation. Look at the contradictions, of this jury. That someone submits a crop of an image, seems to be quite acceptable. To remove a foot that is not part of the story, is worthy of being burned in a pire of ignominy. “How dare the photographer, have removed a foot”, while cropping a picture was not an issue.
Apparently we still have a long way ahead of us, in teaching all these juries and organizations around press photography, that their moralistic stance, is tantamount to the Spanish inquisition, searching for sins that did not exist.
Check out the galleries section:
For example Shahidul Alam
Or the Portfolios section:
For example Jose Goncalves
And what about the magazine section, full of information about the whole world of photography, plus links to new sites such as Black Snapper
and magazine articles e.g. from Nick Bilton:
Former Book Designer Says Good Riddance to Print
A recent blog post by Craig Mod, a self-titled computer programmer, book designer and book publisher, offers a thoughtful and distinctive perspective on the move of books from paper to interactive devices like Apple’s iPad.
Mr. Mod summarizes his argument in the subtitle of his post: “Print is dying. Digital is surging. Everyone is confused. Good riddance.”
Mr. Mod divides content broadly into two categories: content where the form is important, such as poetry or text with graphics, and content where form is divorced from layout, which he says applies to most novels and non-fiction.
This kind of thinking makes a key point: instead of arguing about pixels versus paper, as many book lovers tend to do, it is more useful to focus on whether the technology is a good match for the content.
Under Mr. Mod’s analysis, the common paperback and many other physical books are disposable. He writes,“Once we dump this weight, we can prune our increasingly obsolete network of distribution. As physicality disappears, so, too, does the need to fly dead trees around the world.”
As someone who long reaped a paycheck from the sale of books, Mr. Mod isn’t looking at the transition with any form of glee. Instead, he argues that it doesn’t really matter which vessel we choose to read on, since the content will always be king. He writes, “For too long, the act of printing something in and of itself has been placed on too high a pedestal. The true value of an object lies in what it says, not its mere existence.”
When I’ve written in the past about the changing landscape of the print world, I usually get a raft of angry comments stating that print will never go away or that books will have to be pried away from a reader’s cold dead hands.
In anticipation of such commentary, Mr. Mod’s argument is highly respectful of people’s love of the physicality of holding and touching a book. In comparison, sitting upright at a computer screen does not offer this “maternal embrace.” Yet devices like Amazon.com’s Kindle and Apple’s iPhone and iPad are getting closer to that intimate experience.
Mr. Mod also discusses the need to push the boundaries of how we interact with content on these devices. Apples’s iBookstore, for example, takes the book metaphors too literally in a digital setting and doesn’t innovate enough given the tools at hand. “The metaphor of flipping pages already feels boring and forced on the iPhone. I suspect it will feel even more so on the iPad. The flow of content no longer has to be chunked into ‘page’ sized bites.”
For hundreds of years, we’ve been consuming information on static pages, and for the most part, this content has been presented with a beginning, middle and end. Nonlinear, digital platforms will prompt a new range of thinking about stories and how to tell them.
There’s plenty more on Zone Zero...certainly worth watching.
08 Monday Jun 2009
Posted Photography
inTags
analog photography, black and white, digital photography, documentary, Latin America, Mexico, Pedro Meyer, world photography
“Truths and Fictions” – Another Theory of Relativity – Zone Zero and Pedro Meyer.
ZoneZero © is a great find if you have not discovered it. Its founder, Pedro Meyer, a Mexican photographer ‘of great stature’ in terms of quality of his images and ethics in the industry, has been working on the transition between analog and digital photography.
As stated on the web site :-
ZoneZero © is dedicated to photography. Its name intends to be a metaphor for the journey from analog to digital image making. One of the references comes from “The Zone System” a fine example of the analog heritage in photography made so famous by Ansel Adams. From the analog dark room we are now moving to the digital one; where everything analog is transformed into digits represented through the infinite combinations of either zeros or ones.
Take a joyous run through the galleries , portfolios and profound editorial comments and you will discover, firstly the relationships between Latin America and the rest of the world and secondly the relationship between photography and expressions of truth and fiction represented through many eyes.
Some examples:
From the ‘Galleries‘ section: Helen Zout -Argentina
A boy infected with AIDS plays at his house. The boy was born by a prostitute who gave him up for adoption. Another woman legally adopted him knowing that he carried the virus.
Children – bearers of AIDS
Life for children with AIDS is very complex, they have an uncertain future, and a very complex present. Sometimes the children are cared for by their parents, but it is more common for the relatives or grandparents of the AIDS infected children to provide the care, because most often, the AIDS infected parents are sick and in no condition to care for them, or they are dead.
There are many cases in which these children are neglected and abondoned, or where a judge decides to leave them in the public hospitals.
In most cases, after the commotion surrounding the initial illness is over, the resiliency, tenacity and courage exhibited by the children, their parents and family and the hospital staff is amazing.
The future for the children who carry the AIDS virus is always uncertain, because, were a cure to be discovered their lives would be radically altered .
Love is a fundamental contributing factor to the health of the people infected with AIDS. And, while the love and attention won’t cure them, it is does prolong their life expectancy.
In most of my pictures I do not show the patients faces because I want to preserve their identities from a society that stigmatizes and condemns those who bear the AIDS virus. That is why I decided to use masks, or other objects, to obscure the identity of the subjects in my photographs.
Helen Zout
An example from ‘Portfolios’ : Camilo Andrés Matiz Zamorano – Chile
This small collection of urban snapshots depicts individuals of all ages that share the overwhelming sentiment of briefness that submerges them in the painful fleeting and relentless postmodernity.
Camilo Andrés Matiz Zamorano
In the magazine section there are articles and reviews of exhibitions , books etc
“Looking at Pictures in East and West”
por Hans Durrer (Switzerland)
“There is no reason to assume that a Thai, when looking at a photograph of the Eiffel Tower, should see a different Eiffel Tower than, say, a Swiss does. What Thai eyes and Swiss eyes register is the same, how they interpret it might however be another story.
Our interpretations of pictures depend not least on our cultural upbringing. The famous picture of the lonely man facing the tanks on Tiananmen Square in 1989, for instance, has been read, by the Western media, as a symbol of exceptional bravery in the face of a massive threat, whereas the official Chinese reading saw it as an expression of extraordinary restraint by the tank commander.”
“TrueGrain is a pro-grade tool for accurately recapturing the aesthetics of black and white film with digital photography.
With TrueGrain, you can:
-Accurately recapture the aesthetics of particular film stocks—including “lost” films—while retaining an all-digital workflow.
-Creatively employ credible film aesthetics.
-Add high resolution film grain information to digital images to elegantly minimize the pixilation effects of upsampling.
-Match digital imagery to existing film images for restoration and compositing purposes.“
Browsing through the archives of zone zero you will not only discover a wider world of images that you do not often see but you are left with much to think about as the issues that are raised through the images cover the whole breadth of humanity.