THOMAS STRUTH - VIRTUAL EXHIBITION TOUR. Annie Leibovitz. Diane Arbus. Nan Goldin. Memory of a Memory | Home | Duane Michals. Lillian Bassman. American photography legend Lillian Bassman, who at 93 says she uses "the same techniques in Photoshop as I did in the darkroom," neatly dismisses both romantic notions of film's purity and digital fantasies of spectacularly-manipulated images.
Describing her modern approach, the former Harper's Bazaar art director explains the shift in her career as a simple tool upgrade, "the palette has changed, the end result is the same. " While her stunning black-and-white photos poetically depict the fine art of fashion, her unwavering reverence for couture doesn't extend to the fashion industry as a whole. "I don't look at fashion photography much and never really have," Bassman says.
Instead the pioneering photographer turned to textile studies in high school, eventually picking up a camera during her time at Bazaar (where she was also known for promoting the careers of legends like Richard Avedon and Louis Faurer). Lillian Bassman - Photographer. Photographs that changed photography. Photography. Dossier Journal » In Conversation with Michael David Murphy. “This is a picture I did not take of the most optimistic homeless man in America, spare changing at the Fox News-sponsored ‘Tea Party’ in Atlanta on April 15, rattling his empty cup as hundreds passed-by and grimaced at the sight of him approaching, trying to avoid meeting his smiling face, clenching their car keys and homemade signs about Taxes, about how the government is taking too much of their money, while a man stands in front of them with an empty cup and full smile, saying ‘there’s no good crowd or bad crowd — we’re all one, baby’ while they hustle past as fast as they can, to catch a glimpse of their hero Sean Hannity, to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with hands over their hearts while singing God Bless America.” – Michael David Murphy Since 2004, writer and photographer Michael David Murphy has recorded non-fictional descriptions of everyday life as part of his online side-project, Unphotographable.
I spoke to Murphy recently about his word and camera-based photography. 500 Photographers. Anthony luke's not-just-another-photoblog Blog. 100 Ideas That Changed Photography. By Maria Popova From the camera obscura to the iPhone, or why photography is an art of continuous reinvention. Earlier this year, British publisher Laurence King brought us 100 Ideas That Changed Graphic Design, 100 Ideas That Changed Film, and 100 Ideas That Changed Architecture. Now comes 100 Ideas That Changed Photography (public library) — an equally concise and intelligent chronicle of the most seminal developments in the history of today’s most prevalent visual art.
From technical innovations like the cyanotype (#12), the advent of color (#23), the Polaroid (#84), and moving pictures (#20) to paradigms like photojournalism (#66) and fabrication (#93) to new ways of looking at the world like aerial photography (#54), micro/macro (#55), and stopping time (#49), each of the ideas is accompanied by a short essay contextualizing its history and significance. Syracuse University fine art professor Mary Warner Marien writes in the introduction: Images and captions courtesy of Laurence King. Images Found. Self-portraits of photographers | The green box. Photographs Not Taken: A Collection of Photographers' Essays. Vivian Maier.