| « Previous | Home | Next » | Storytelling, on photography being easy and difficult, My Best Shot, Stephen Mayes, Jean François Leroy, mapping media coverage... 09:03 |
 Matthew Howse had no intentions of telling a story that night, but his friends talked him into it. He did well for a first-timer. He told a story about the greatest basketball game in Newfoundland and why his father, who carried that game, had trouble sitting down for three days after his high school team’s historic win. As I am preparing some grant/award/just-give-me-some-damn-money applications for a project I am very keen on, I have been paying more attention than usual to various things related to photography - well... to proposal writing really, but there were some interesting gems that came up anyway: Paul Graham has a short but sweet piece on why is photography so easy and so difficult at the same time. It’s so easy it's ridiculous. It’s so easy that I can’t even begin – I just don’t know where to start. After all, it’s just looking at things. We all do that. It’s simply a way of recording what you see – point the camera at it, and press a button. How hard is that? [...] It’s so difficult because it’s everywhere, every place, all the time, even right now... Drift your consciousness up and out of this text and see: it's right there, across the room - there... and there. Then it’s gone. You didn’t photograph it, because you didn’t think it was worth it. And now it’s too late... The Guardian’s Art and Design section (imagine that - Art and Design section in a daily newspaper) has a feature called My Best Shot that is worth checking out. The following two texts go hand in hand. Stephen Mayes, World Press Photo Secretary, gave a keynote address earlier this year that caused quite a bit of trouble in the photojournalism community, which is fine as far as it goes so kudos to him. Every year, the jury is astonished by the repetition of subjects and the lack of variety in the coverage. From the infinity of human experience the list of subjects covered by the entrants would fill a single page, and... could be reduced even to three lines:- The disposed and the powerless Jean-François Leroy, the founder of Visa pour l’Image, unleashed his wrath on photo agencies and buyers: Many agencies now have flat-rate schemes offering attractive prospects for magazines and newspapers run by people whose only goal is profit... By offering these subscription schemes, they are digging this profesion’s tomb... This year, I can count less than a dozen photographers who have gone on a magazine assignment to do a real news report, allowing the photographer to make a living from his work and pay his bills at the end of the month. L’Observatoire des Média has a perfect visual demonstration of what Leroy and Mayes are talking about. Croatian word of the day: kratkovidnost shortsightedness [kra tko vid nost]
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Posted by Bojan Archived under: St. John's, On media... |
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