Tag Archives: community projects

Fair Use & Image Integrity & Self-Defense

3 great online resources.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation: (EFF) Surveillance Self Defense Guide

The Integrity of the Image report from World Press Photo: Current practices and accepted standards internationally, when it comes to the manipulation of still images in photojournalism.

Storify piece by David Campbell on responses to the rejection of 20% of the entries  for World Press Photo Competition for the over manipulation of the image: What are World Press Photo’s rules and standards on manipulation?

College Art Association (CAA) has published Copyright, Permissions and Fair Use among Visual Artists and the Academic and Museum Visual Arts Communities: An Issues Report

Link to the sites for more information and FREE downloads. Thank you to all 3 organizations for this service to the field.

The Real Story About the Wrong Photos in #BringBackOurGirls

NY TIMES LENS BLOG, May 8, 2014
The Real Story About the Wrong Photos in #BringBackOurGirls.

A Twitter campaign using the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls has focused global attention on the plight of some 276 Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped by the Islamic militant group Boko Haram. Three photos of girls have been posted and reposted thousands of times, including by the BBC and by the singer Chris Brown (who himself has had issues with anger management and violence against women).

One problem: The photos are of girls from Guinea-Bissau, more than 1,000 miles from Nigeria, who have no relationship to the kidnappings.

The use of these pictures raises troubling questions of representation, and misrepresentation. Ami Vitale, the photographer who made the original images as part of a long-term project, spoke with James Estrin on Thursday. [read more]

Yes Lab: Operation Second Thanks

Our heroes at the Yes Lab strike again calling for renewable energy:

Yes Men at Dept of Homeland Security

To a dance-ready crowd of security and defense contractors at the Homeland Security Congress in Washington, one “Benedict Waterman”—a crazy-haired, bespectacled official supposedly from the U.S. Department of Energy—announces a revolutionary new energy plan to convert the U.S. power grid to entirely renewable sources by the year 2030, and give ownership of the new power-generation facilities to those on whose land they’re built—from Native American nations (thus serving as reparations for genocide) to anyone who puts a solar panel on his or her roof. (See full press release here.)

The plan, “Waterman” announces, will give us independence from the fossil fuel companies who are leading us to ruin, and will additionally create millions of jobs, eventually save half a trillion per year on health care costs, result in lower energy costs and greater price stability, and—bonus!—give our civilization a chance of surviving well into the future. (One such plan is described in some detail here.) [read more]

Link to interview on the Democracy Now site

PAD/D Archive of Political Art

 Highlights From the PAD/D Archive.

The PAD/D archive is comprised of over 2,700 items, split into two sections: Regular files made up of documents, flyers, photographs and slides, and large flat files for posters, prints, and stencils.

Highlights From the PAD/D Archive

Aside from material related directly to PAD/D, countless files are dedicated to socially conscious arts organizations active between 1979–1990. Alongside familiar names such as the Guerrilla Girls, Group Material, Gran Fury, and the Art Workers Coalition (AWC), one will discover a myriad of lesser known collectives such as Angry Arts and Carnival Knowledge. Were it not for the efforts of PAD/D, the histories of many of these groups would have gone undocumented. The archive was formally donated to MoMA in 1994 by PAD/D members Barbara Moore and Mimi Smith. The photographs below represent a tiny portion of the archive. [see photo essay on highlights from the collection]

Read the second article about PAD/D on Hyperallergic

NOOR’s Installation at the Zaatari Refugee Camp

NOOR’s Installation at the Zaatari Refugee Camp

Four photographers from the distinguished Amsterdam-based photojournalism collective NOOR spent New Years in the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan. Located 18 miles from the Syrian border, the camp opened with just 100 families in July 2012. It now hosts around 120,000 residents, making it the second-largest refugee camp in the world….

… These four photographers also documented daily lives in the camp. The resulting images and some from the photo booth have now been made into large outdoor prints that will be hung on the 330 yards of barbed-wire T-walls that surround the entrance to the camp. The aim is to provide refugees inside Zaatari with a way to reflect on their own situation, as well as draw attention to the Syrian refugee crisis. read more

Basetrack: Conversation with Teru Kuwayama

Basetrack: Conversation with Teru Kuwayama – Aperture Foundation NY

In 2010, after many years of covering the war in Afghanistan, freelance photojournalist Teru Kuwayama received an invitation to embed with the First Battalion of the Eighth Marine Regiment in Helmand Province. Although it was only the start of the counterinsurgency campaign, it was the tenth year of a long and costly war that carried on at a far remove of the daily lives of Americans in the United States. Along with four other photographers, Balazs Gardi, Tivadar Domaniczky, Omar Mullick, and Rita Leistner, Kuwayama decided to approach the embed differently, and started Basetrack, a social-media reporting project conceived to connect Marines and their families and to target the social network—friends, family, and online presence—surrounding the battalion. Most of the pictures were taken with mobile phones or inexpensive consumer-grade cameras and distributed through Basetrack’s WordPress website (being rebuilt), Flickr, and Facebook, the main Basetrack channel. [read conversation]

Basetrack vimeo channel

NY Times Lens Blog article on the project 

Another article at Graffiti of War 

>> And Teru Kuwayama is Facebook’s first Photo Community Liason.

Forest Houses Residents Consider the Gramsci Monument

Interesting Read from Hyperallergic


In Their Own Words: Forest Houses Residents Consider the Gramsci Monument.
With the help of local residents, Thomas Hirschhorn built a public artwork called the Gramsci Monument in the Forest Houses in the Bronx this past summer. From July 1 to September 15, the monument brought a theater, a radio station, lectures, art and computer rooms, and more to the public housing complex.

In Their Own Words: Forest Houses Residents Consider the Gramsci Monument

Some reviews on the project:

NY Times
Arts Journal
Black Box

Reblogging

In the last two days, I have had guest lectures by several of my fabulous former students.  Summaries below with links to the full posts on my other blogs.

Nicholas Calcott, P&I 2005 visited Multimedia and talked about how he uses the Internet to get his work out and meet other artists and writers. We looked and his blogs 12thpress.com and onshadow.com and his collective Le Garage. He also recommended many blogs. **link to full post**

Ifétayo Abdus-Salam, P&I 2006,  Katie Kline, P&I 2005, and  Alice Proujansky, P&I 2002 spoke to Community Collaborations about their work in K-12 education as teachers/facilitators/supervisors in community-based settings. It was very inspirational for me, an experienced teacher and my Community Collaborations students who have  been teaching for only one semester. See the complete blog post for information about their current work and links to many organizations that offer opportunities for future employment, internships, supervision, and innovative approaches to education and community-based art making.