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.
Stepan Rudik
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
Shahidul Alam
Or the Portfolios section:
For example Jose Goncalves
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
c -blacksnapper
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.
Nick Bilton
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.