This is How a Camera Adds 10 Pounds via Petapixel
It’s commonly said that a camera adds 10 pounds, making you look heavier than you actually are.
Striking example of how lenses and focal length affect what we see. Notice how head and nose change shape.
Lev Manovich: photos, bio, complete CV.
Lev Manovich – Instagram and Contemporary Image
Instagram and Contemporary Image (2016) is a free new downloadable book by Lev Manovich.
The book methods combine traditional qualitative approaches of humanities and computational analysis of 16 millions of Instagram photos in 17 global cities carried out in Manovich’s lab (softwarestudies.com) since 2012.
The book chapters arebeing released online under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Creative Commons license. The chapters are posted online as they are completed. (Three chapters have already been published, and two more will be added during summer 2016.)
W.A.G.E. HAS BEEN FORMED BECAUSE WE, AS VISUAL + PERFORMANCE ARTISTS AND INDEPENDENT CURATORS, PROVIDE A WORK FORCE.
W.A.G.E. RECOGNIZES THE ORGANIZED IRRESPONSIBILITY OF THE ART MARKET AND ITS SUPPORTING INSTITUTIONS, AND DEMANDS AN END OF THE REFUSAL TO PAY FEES FOR THE WORK WE’RE ASKED TO PROVIDE: PREPARATION, INSTALLATION, PRESENTATION, CONSULTATION, EXHIBITION AND REPRODUCTION.
W.A.G.E. REFUTES THE POSITIONING OF THE ARTIST AS A SPECULATOR AND CALLS FOR THE REMUNERATION OF CULTURAL VALUE IN CAPITAL VALUE.
W.A.G.E. BELIEVES THAT THE PROMISE OF EXPOSURE IS A LIABILITY IN A SYSTEM THAT DENIES THE VALUE OF OUR LABOR.
AS AN UNPAID LABOR FORCE WITHIN A ROBUST ART MARKET FROM WHICH OTHERS PROFIT GREATLY, W.A.G.E. RECOGNIZES AN INHERENT EXPLOITATION AND DEMANDS COMPENSATION.
W.A.G.E. CALLS FOR AN ADDRESS OF THE ECONOMIC INEQUALITIES THAT ARE PREVALENT, AND PROACTIVELY PREVENTING THE ART WORKER’S ABILITY TO SURVIVE WITHIN THE GREATER ECONOMY.
W.A.G.E. ADVOCATES FOR DEVELOPING AN ENVIRONMENT OF MUTUAL RESPECT BETWEEN ARTIST AND INSTITUTION.
W.A.G.E. DEMANDS PAYMENT FOR MAKING THE WORLD MORE INTERESTING.
Founded in 2008, Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.) is a New York-based activist organization focused on regulating the payment of artist fees by nonprofit art institutions and establishing a sustainable labor relation between artists and the institutions that contract their labor.
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.
It’s that time of the semester to work on artist statements.
An artist statement is a general introduction of your work as an artist. It is the what, how, and why of your work, from your own perspective.
Some Resources:
Welcome the Internet Archive to The Commons from the Flickr Blog.
Over the past couple of weeks, The Internet Archive has already been uploading content behind the scenes, and today we are very excited to officially launch them into The Commons.
The Internet Archive is best known for its historical library of the web, preserving more than 400 billion web pages dating back to 1996. Yet, its 19 petabytes include more than 600 million pages of digitized texts dating back more than 500 years. What would it look like if those 600 million pages could be “read” completely differently? What if every illustration, drawing, chart, map, or photograph became an entry point, allowing one to navigate the world’s books not as paragraphs of text, but as a visual tapestry of our lives? How would we learn and explore knowledge differently? Those were the questions that launched a project to catalog the imagery of half a millennium of books. [read more]
Hyperallergic blog has a great story about this as well.
The Best of Photojournalism – September 2014 -TIME LightBox
TIME Lightbox has amassed an interesting selection of recent photographs and fantastic group of recent articles looking at recent events in Ferguson, MO, Iraq, and Gaza, as well as the Ebola outbreak and more – LINK
Came across this and too good a list not to post. More life life lessons than making one a better person.
50 Essays to Make You a Better Person via Flavorwire.
Michael Schmidt
On May 24, 3 days after he received the Prix Pictet, Michael Shmdit died.. The award this year focused on consumption. [see NY TIMES article]. The Prix Pichetet site has a great post about him. A quote:
Michael Schmidt once called himself a ‘blind alley’ photographer, “… that means that I stroll straight into a cul-de-sac and can’t find a way out. Then I come to terms with this as a sort of condition and at some point later on, I’m back on the outside again. (…) That is to say, failure or making mistakes is an integral part of my way of working.”
MICHAEL SCHMIDT | AMERICAN SUBURB X. has several of his series posted. [bookmark American Suburb blog – excellent resource.]
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.
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]
