Cover Image: Uluru Rock, Australia, by Art Wolfe

As the new year approaches here it goes an idea for you all ... take a picture of your land/home/city at day break of the New Years day, January 1st, 2007. This idea came to me when I recalled a beautiful book published to celebrate the begging of the 21st century: Daybreak 2000. Why not doing this every year at New Years Day? It could be a nice personal project, a nice memory of our life.

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by Ellen Kooi

Ellen Kooi is a Dutch photographer with a beautiful and unique instinct to visualize and blend people with the landscape. Her work at first sight may look like common, everyday situations but some images are quite surreal scenes of people interacting with the landscape. In all, she manages to preserve a piece of surprise and spontaneity in her images. Most of her work are panoramas that are carefully staged. After visualizing and getting inspired from the location, Ellen will carefully place the subjects and design elaborated lighting to get the final image.

You can see her pictures here, here, and at her website. Ellen Kooi is represented by Foto-Formation (you will find more of her pictures there) and prints of her work can be purchased from two galleries/dealers, PPOW (NY, USA) and Torch Gallery (Amsterdam, NL).

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by Ruth Orkin

One of the most beautiful and well known street photographs, American Girl in Italy by Ruth Orkin, was partially staged.

On August 22, 1951, on the Piazza della Repubblica in Florence, Ruth Orkin snapped this image a photograph that made her career. At the time Orkin was a 29 year-old aspiring photojournalist traveling alone in Italy. The main subject, the girl walking in the street while not less than 15 men look at her, was an American art student that Ruth Orkin met at her hotel in Florence. Jinx Allen, the art student who became her model for a photo essay based on their joint experience as women traveling alone in Europe. By chance that day the two walked through the now famous gauntlet of gawking men. Orking turned and photographed Allen behind her. Orkin asked Allen to walk through again, and with that she captured the legendary image. It took only two exposures.

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by Chuck Close

Chuck Close, painter, printmaker, and photographer has published stunning daguerreotypes in a beautiful book: A Couple of Ways of Doing Something.

A Couple of Ways of Doing Something replicates a deluxe limited-edition portfolio whose initial run was only 75 copies. This cloth-bound edition preserves the luxurious sensibility of the original with 22 extraordinary oversized daguerreotypes printed in rich tritone. Working with daguerreotype master Jerry Spagnoli to conquer the complexities of this venerable process, which yields images of astonishing detail and gravity, Chuck Close photographed many of the same artist-friends who have made regular appearances in his paintings over the years: Laurie Anderson, Lyle Ashton Harris, Cecily Brown, Gregory Crewdson, Carroll Dunham, Ellen Gallagher, Philip Glass, Bob Holman, Elizabeth Murray, Elizabeth Peyton, Andres Serrano, Cindy Sherman, James Siena, Lorna Simpson, Kiki Smith, James Turrell, Robert Wilson, Terry Winters, Lisa Yuskavage and himself. Each image is complemented by a poem on its subject by Bob Holman, the celebrated and widely published New York School poet who originated and hosted the famous Poetry Slams at the Nuyorican Poets Café and now runs the Bowery Poetry Club. With the counterpoint of Holman’s engaging poetry, the collected work becomes a transfixing group portrait of Close’s influential and highly creative circle of friends and colleagues, as well as an exploration of a challenging photographic medium. A Couple of Ways of Doing Something was originally published, in 2004, as a limited-edition portfolio (75 copies, plus artist’s and other proofs; $15,000). The new Aperture edition makes this unique collab­orative project available to a wider audience while preserving the luxurious sensibility of the limited edition. Each image is gor­geously reproduced in rich tritone; each poem is reproduced from press proofs of the letterpress originals, composed by renowned typographer Ruth Lingen.

An exhibition of the daguerreotypes, poems, and representative works by each artist-subject are currently shown at Aperture Gallery between November 9, 2006 and January 4, 2007.

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"Almost giving happens when good thought and intentions don’t turn into actions"

A poweful message, a beautiful campaign, don't almost give.

The Generous Nation campaign PSAs demonstrate what happens when people almost give, with the hope to inspire more giving. The Generous Nation campaign is designed to inspire Americans to translate their everyday compassion and good intentions into action by giving more often.

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Ken Meeks, AIDS patient, three days before dying.- Alon Reininger (Contact Press)

I did not want to do just a story about Ken Meeks. Ken was a character in a bigger story. He knew that I was taking his picture in a broader context. It just happened that I took a picture of him in one particular situation that struck a raw nerve with a lot of people.- Alon Reninger

The work of Alon Reininger had a significant impact humanizing AIDS with the fist images published of American patients in Life magazine in 1986. You can see here several videos with an interview of Alon Reininger describing the documentation of people suffering AIDS. This image (winner of the Word Press Photo award in 1986) was selected by Photo District News magazine as one of the most important images of photojournalism in the period 1980-2000. American Photo magazine selected Alon Reininger as one of the underrated masters of photography. Today, 20 years after this image was published the AIDS pandemic remains one of the most important humanitarian catastrophes of our times (more on this in other posts in this blog and elsewhere).

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by Jack Bridges

For two years photographer Jack Bridges spent his time getting to know the people and the problems in the Robert Taylor Chicago Homes. This resulted in a collection of beautiful images that you can see at Jack Bidges's site.

This is a photograph of a young man pointing his 22 rifle directly at the lens. This picture has a deep meaning to me because this guy was killed, was shot, in the streets of Chicago and now I am very close to his family. And I have photographed the funeral and I have been taking pictures of his family for over three years. So, it is a sad story.

I like people to take away a very strong sense of place. I like people to put themselves at Robert Taylor homes and think how their own life would be if they have grown there. I like people to see the humanity in the images, see the people, and maybe go out of their way and spend more time in a city and get to know people who are different than you.-Jack Bridges

You can listen to a radio interview of Jack Bridges describing this project here.

Robert Taylor Homes is a housing project in the Bronzeville neighborhood of the South Side of Chicago, alongside the Dan Ryan Expressway on State Street between 39th and 54th streets. It was completed in 1962 and named for Robert Rochon Taylor, the son of the first African-American architect accredited in the United States. At one time, this was the largest housing project in the world. It was composed of 28 high-rise buildings of 16 stories, mostly arranged in U-shaped clusters of three, stretching for two miles. As of April 2006, 27 of the buildings were demolished and only one remains standing. The Chicago Housing Authority plans to move out all residents by the end of 2006.

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by Jill Greenberg

Jill Greenberg, one of the most success commercial photographers at the moment, conceived the idea of photographing children crying back in 2004. She related the emotional impact to the despair of seeing G.W. Bush become reelected in 2004 and called it End Times.

I saw this little girl who'd come to a party with her mom, and she was beautiful, so I thought it might be interesting to photograph her. When they came to my studio, the mother brought along her toddler son, and I decided to shoot him too. We took off his shirt because it was dirty. He started crying on his own, and I shot that, and when I got the contact sheets back I thought, this could go with a caption, 'Four More Years,'" like he was appalled at George Bush's reelection. The images have a real power—they immediately get under your skin. The emotion you see is just so compelling, yet they're beautiful at the same time. That was one of the things that interested me about the project—the strength and beauty of the images as images. I also thought they made a kind of political statement about the current state of anxiety a lot of people are in about the future of the country. Sometimes I just feel like crying about the way things are going.- Jill Greenberg

She probably didn't anticipate the attention the project would raise. Certainly it is out of question that the idea is very original and the execution remarkable. She is building a unique style in fine art portrait photography with very original portraits of monkeys and apes, which in turn led to her work with children. I will comment on her work with portraits of monkeys in a future post in this blog. A unique component in her style is the digital post production of the images, with her signature look for skin tonality, highlights and skin reflections. Despite being manipulated, her images don't loose the photographic impact and feel. Nowadays, the commercial landscape is tending very much in to digitally manipulated images, and so artists like Jill Greenberg who combine outstanding lighting and photographic skills with digital mastery are leading the field. Very properly, her website is named "The manipulator".

You can listen to Jill Greenberg speak about this project and her work at the following podcast from American Photo. For a gallery of images go here.

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by Michael Thompson

Fashion-celebrity photographer Michael Thompson, who began his career assisting the legendary Irvin penn, shot the beautiful and original images for the campaign "I Am African", in partnership with Conde Nast. See the images here. Possibly you have seen the images in magazines few months ago, but I wanted to link to this work because I find the campaign and images very powerful and captivating.

Interestingly, I found a charity site that is auctioning limited edition prints online here.

The campaign was launched few months ago to raise awareness and funds to combat Aids in Africa. It features a number of celebrities like Mischa Barton, Richard Gere, Lucy Liu, Gwyneth Paltrow, Sarah Jessica Parker, David Bowie, Alicia Keys and Lenny Kravitz etc. The combination of black and white images, with splashes of color for the make up "depict a moving picture of modern day African identity". The campaign is used by the non-profit organization Keep a Child Alive to raise awareness of our common roots to Africa (genetically all of us are linked to original ancestors that lived in Africa) and the need to support the fight against the AIDS pandemic.

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by Kristen Ashburn

The power of inspiration and purpose ... Bloodine by Kristen Ashburn.

I began this project to give a voice to the people behind the statistcs- Kristen Ashburn

The AIDS pandemic continues to devastate sub-Saharan Africa. Two million people died from the disease in 2005 alone. Twelve million children have lost at least one parent. The statistics are staggering.

Kristen Ashburn's BLOODLINE: AIDS and Family is the story of these men, women and their children. Ashburn’s photographs are heartbreaking (see more here and here). But they also tell us of something more. They remind us of how tenuous our connection is to each other. In doing so, they show that what matters most is the care we give to those in need. (from MediaStorm).

Miguel Garcia-Guzman

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