Our AP 2-D Design Studio Student of the year is Michelle Henneberry!
Our Photography Student of the year: Kendall Wallin!
Thanks to all who attended, enjoyed, and generously participated.
A Sampler of the 2012 Portfolios
Sixteen solid portfolios flew out the door and up into cyberspace yesterday at the huge school. These images were included.
A picture apiece by Zach Rowe, Victoria Taylor, Rachel Parker, Michelle Henneberry, Melissa B. Jones, Matt Wloch, Margaret Rajic, Kendall Wallin, Justine Kaszynski, Joyce Gaffney, Jesse Filian, Jamie Gray, Emma Haney, Corey Nguyen, Chanelle Biangardi, and Caroline Horswill. Here they are, finishing the paperwork:
See also:
https://photodevoto.wordpress.com/2011/09/29/one-of-those-magical-days/
https://photodevoto.wordpress.com/2011/09/25/late-summer-work/
https://photodevoto.wordpress.com/2011/05/03/catalog-preview/
https://photodevoto.wordpress.com/2010/04/24/pieces-for-the-ap-senior-catalogue/
https://photodevoto.wordpress.com/2010/04/09/recent-ph-d-documentation/
https://photodevoto.wordpress.com/2009/09/26/how-they-look-online/
Your N. T. A. W. Is Now
From an op-ed piece by Charles M. Blow:
“As Albert Einstein once said: ‘Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school'” and “She showed me what a great teacher looked like: proud, exhausted, underpaid and overjoyed.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/05/opinion/blow-teaching-me-about-teaching.html?hp
You Were Expecting, Maybe, Usher Fellig?
It’s about time you checked in. You should probably subscribe right now to this here blawwg (I think it’s done on the other page), so that you can know when posts appear about photography, BHS, the “AP Photo” class, jazz, le cinema, modnot, darkroom 411/info/secrets, bon mots au les auteurs, one’s rostromedial prefrontal cortex, the lives of the saints, and maybe baseball. And related duties.
(Some things bear repeating: do not acquire this camera.)
P.S. This is Usher, aka Arthur Fellig, aka Weegee:
Where Would We Be?
…without Bert Weeden? You’ve probably never heard of him, but read on: we owe him.
The Law (well… some laws, somewhere)
This is not event-specific or timely or a reaction to anything, simply something of which to be aware.
http://thestreetphotographymanifesto.com/2011/12/08/street-photography-and-the-law/
Color Reversal Transparencies (aka “slides”)
Kodak has announced: “Due to a steady decrease in sales and customer usage, combined with highly complex product formulation and manufacturing processes, Kodak is discontinuing three Ektachrome (color reversal) films.” This means that, after 77 years, the Great Yellow Father is no longer in the business of making slides. ‘Tis a pity: slides can’t be beat for color saturation and sharpness. Fortunately, we still have excellent Fuji films with those qualities.
Me, I’m drownin’ in slides. Carousels, boxes, plastic sheets, even food storage bagsful. Kodachrome, Ektachrome, Agfachrome, and Fujichrome, pretty much all 35mm. I also curate (i.e. have) my grandfather’s Anscochrome, some of my in-laws’ stuff, a batch depicting office culture at United Air Lines’s EXO, work shot from printed sources for delectation in class, and endless dupes of a generation’s worth of AP work. Slides are part of the reason the missus insists that if I go first she’ll have the basement bulldozed, rather than make sense of its contents.
Richard Benson wrote: “The huge amateur market that consumed 35mm slides has always been a mystery to me. Why did all those people make all those pictures? The impulse must be connected to an effort to retain memories of times gone by. It is somewhat tragic, because as we use technological devices to aid our memories we inevitably reduce our capacity to remember. We see this demonstrated in the mnemonic wonders of oral traditions, which always suffer as writing is introduced to cultures. Color slides are even more mysterious because they are almost never looked at. At least with an album of prints we can take the book off the shelf, easily leaf through it a bit, and then put it away again. The slide requires a projector, a dark room, and almost invariably other people, who have been gathered together to participate in the viewing of someone else’s visual history. For me there is no more excruciating event than looking at the family slides.”
I have only respect for Mr. Benson, so I will gently address some of these points. It’s safe to assume that marketing is what fueled the 35mm transparency (and its business in projectors) popularity, yes? Oral traditions are no parallel to easily leafing, are they? If technological devices reduce one’s capacity to remember, it’s for some sort of trade-off, n’est-pas? Peut-etre the tragedie is on a nostalgic level, within a generation or so (I recall gnashing over the proliferation of soft-cover books). Oral traditions necessitate a gathering, a ritual; hello? And they need not be family slides. (Okay, there was that one time when Jack Niemet showed us hundreds of slides of composers’ birthplaces, pianos, deathbeds, and headstones, and I went to bed while he went to the loo, but hey, the exception proves the rule.) The sharpness in transparencies can’t be beat, and lord knows there are ways to convert the images to other, um, mediums.
The ACLU Says
Simply to remind ourselves from time to time (like, say, before a field trip):
Police officers may not generally confiscate or demand to view your photographs or video without a warrant.
Much more at http://www.aphotoeditor.com/2012/02/13/aclu-says-know-your-rights-photographers/ including, for instance:
If you are arrested, the contents of your phone may be scrutinized by the police, although their constitutional power to do so remains unsettled. In addition, it is possible that courts may approve the seizure of a camera in some circumstances if police have a reasonable, good-faith belief that it contains evidence of a crime by someone other than the police themselves (it is unsettled whether they still need a warrant to view them).
An end-of-the-year Top 15 (+21) List (as well as 20 or so “MIA”)
Surf this; find something that you can use: http://lpvmagazine.com/2011/12/top-photography-websites-of-2011/
…and surf these for what remains: http://blakeandrews.blogspot.com/2011/12/in-memoriam-photoblogs-2011_26.html
Creative Camerawork 