What would happen if you take pictures of people walking in the street, exhibit the prints at a gallery and then sell them for prices ranging $20-30K each? Do the people portrayed have any rights to claim for financial compensation? Do they have the legal rights to preclude of exhibiting and selling the prints at a fine art gallery? The answer is no, they can't ask for financial compensation nor stop you from selling the prints -at least in the U.S.A.- as long as they are sold for editorial use (including fine art prints) and with no commercial purpose (e.g. advertising).

This was the famous case of Philip-Lorca diCorcia, in a dispute involving one of his photographs that was taken as part of a series of portraits of pedestrians where the photographer had set up strobes on a New York City street corner and had photographed people as they walk by, without the subjects being aware that they were photographed. Emo Nussenzweig, an Orthodox Jew (picture on the left) who objected on religious grounds to deCorcia's exhibitit at a gallery of a photograph taken of him without his permission sued the photographer. Later the judge dismissed the lawsuit, finding that the photograph taken of Nussenzweig on a street is art and it is protected by the First Amendment, that protects pictures taken without commercial purpose. The photographer had the right to sell and profit from the prints and the subject had no rights to claim invasion or financial compensation. See Nussenzweig v. DiCorcia for more information on this case.

Probably many of you already know this case, as it was publicized broadly in the media, given the high profile of the photographer and the implications for the photographic community. I wanted to use it as an example to raise awareness of the implications of the law in our photographic work.

Where can we find information about law affecting photography explained in a way that is easy to read and understand? Thankfully we have Carolyne Wright, a professional photographer and lawyer that is specialized in the legal aspects of photography. Carolyne is an strong advocate of the photographer's rights and very involved in educating the photographic community.

She runs a very popular blog, PhotoAttorney, about law and photography, a site that I very much recommend given the amount of useful information she shares. She also has written a fantastic book with a collection of topics that cover most of the legal aspects of photography (mostly U.S.A. law). You can purchase a printed book or even download an eBook for a very reasonable price.

Recently Carolyne Wright was interviewed at the Digital Photography Show. You can skip the first part of the podcast if you like to go straight to the interview with Carolyne where she discusses ten questions as examples of misconceptions on photography and law. It is a very interesting interview and I am certain you will guess wrong many of the questions that are discussed as examples -I was wrong in many-. Law is not that intuitive but we need to be aware of it.

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New York City to Ease Permit Rules for Capturing City’s Image

How timely. I just posted about the importance of being aware of the law affecting our freedom and rights to take photographs when I read [via Conscientious] the New York Times article about the revision of regulations that will allow amateur photographers and film makers to take pictures in public spaces in New York without having to get insurance or permits. So, now you can go and take pictures in Times Square without being challenged by security officials or needing to get insurance if it happened that you decided to wait - e.g. for the right light - in a location for more than 30 min. Before the revision, more than 30 min in the same spot would have required a permit and insurance for more than 1 million USA dollars. These things puzzle me [article]. Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting (MOFTB) press release.

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© Hiroshi Watanabe

Sometimes you find photographers who's work takes your breath away. Hiroshi Watanabe is one of these artists.

His black and white and color images are exquisite in tonality, composition and depth of field but more important they have density of emotions, they captivate. Working with a medium format camera and doing his own printing in the traditional dark room he produces images and prints that have strong aesthetics, sensuality and are emotionally involving. It is wonderful that there are several websites that exhibit his work, including his own website, the master of fine art site, and photo eye.

© Hiroshi Watanabe

There are different sources to purchase prints in case you are interested. All his images are printed by the artist using gelatin-silver materials. You can purchase prints at different galleries and also directly from photo-eye.

© Hiroshi Watanabe

Born in Japan in 1951, his initiation in photography emerged as a way to scape from the rigors of academic school. After hard and disciplined study in school, Hiroshi Watanabe decided to major in photography ands enjoy an easier life in college. He earned a bachelors of Arts degree in photography in 1975 at Nihon University College or Art. By chance, a new job brought him to Los Angeles to work with a Japanese TV commercial production company where he worked for 5 years to then start and run his own production company for 20 years. Since 2000 he has focused entirely in his photographic work.

He has published several books. The most recent one, to be published in October, is from the body of work that was honored by the Photolucida Critical Mass Award in 2006, a beautiful book entitled "Findings". Three different volumes of his portrait work have been published in several volumes named "Faces" and his most recent portraiture work, "Kabuki Portraits" was the subject of Lenswork Magazine #70 (just to see these superb images is worthwhile to purchase this issue in case you are not subscribed).

© Hiroshi Watanabe

My photographs reflect both genuine interest in my subject as well as a respect for the element of serendipity. I strive for both calculation and discovery in my work, studying my subjects in preparation, while at the same keeping my mind open for the surprises. The pure enjoyment of this process drives and inspires me. Mostly, I seek to capture people, traditions, and locales that first and foremost are of personal interest, while other times I seek pure beauty. I wish for my images to distill scenes ranging from the ephemeral to the eternal, from the esoteric to the symbolic. A current that underlies my work is the concept of preservation. I make every effort to be a faithful visual recorder of the world around me, a world in flux that, at very least in my mind, deserves preservation, and that I constantly seek to expand. - Hiroshi Watanabe

I particularly love his recent work in a psychiatric hospital in Quito, Peru, "I See Angels Everyday", an incredible collection of images just published in an exquisite book.

One summer day of July 2001, I walked into the building of San Lázaro Psychiatric Hospital. This colonial building was made in 1751 as a house for poor, homeless, sick, mental illness, leprosy patients, and abandoned children. I was told its name, San Lázaro, came from Lázaro, who was a leprosy helper in the Bible. After changes of many years, it is now a three-story massive building standing on a steep hillside of the old colonial section of Quito, Ecuador. I heard about this hospital while I was working on another project in Ecuador, and since then something had been urging me to photograph there. I finally asked Trinidad, my good friend in Ecuador, to take me to the hospital.

With its aged high white walls, I somehow imagined inside to be a bit of chaos, like the last scene of the movie “Amadeus”. But when I went inside, the first thing I saw was a courtyard, simple and peaceful with a fountain in the middle, and there were several people standing quietly. I wondered if they were patients. Mostly, I was surprised at the calmness.

We went upstairs to the women’s section and entered a large room with evenly spaced beds lined up on both sides, and there were many patients. Some are walking around, and some are sitting on beds, while others are sleeping. As we walked by, a woman started to walk side by side with us. I see her eyes full of excitement and curiosity. She follows us around to the outside of the room and started to talk. She kept talking without stop and complained about her toothache every 5 minutes. When we were finally about to leave her, she said, “Do you see the angels? Have you seen the angels?” and she declared, “I see angels every day.”

The hospital has a large church inside, occupying almost one fifth of the complex. Besides doctors and nurses, there are nuns who seem to play important rolls of the hospital activities and caring of the patients. I was reminded by a doctor that medical science started as a part of religious endeavors, and the churches were big part of saving the souls of sick people. Only recently, science became the dominant part, and religious aspect became smaller in general. I was intrigued by the way science and religion co-existed in this hospital doing their parts in effort to help those who were struck by the most intrinsically human illnesses.

There are many stories to tell. These pictures were taken inside of the hospital and in the adjacent colonial section of Quito. They are all visual reminder of the stories I heard. - Hiroshi Watanabe

© Hiroshi Watanabe (from "I See Angels Everyday")

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“Goals provide the energy source that powers our lives. One of the best ways we can get the most from the energy we have is to focus it. That is what goals can do for us; concentrate our energy. The reason most people never reach their goals is that they don't define them, learn about them, or even seriously consider them as believable or achievable. Winners can tell you where they are going, what they plan to do along the way, and who will”- Denis Waitley

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“I am always doing things I can't do, that's how I get to do them. Action is the foundational key to all success.”- Pablo Picasso

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We all know from our professional careers that without specific goals and proper planing it is difficult to achieve effective progress. If you are a professional photographer it seems obvious that you need to have well defined goals and milestones to guide your business. But for the majority of photographers, the craft is a hobby, and so it is very uncommon to find a photographer that can describe his/her near term goals less their objectives as a photographer.

No matter who you are as a photographer it is certain that defining - and achieving- specific goals will lead to better work, more fulfillment, and higher motivation to create new work. There is something energizing when you accomplish specific and tangible goals and see your photography evolve.

After reading a nice essay on this topic by Thom Hogan, a Nikon guru and photographer, I took the time to clarify my artistic goals for the near future. I went from having undefined wishes to write down the goals I like to achieve in the next 12 months. I hope this will help focus my energy to drive my work to the next level.

What are your photography goals? Why do you photograph? What is the intent of your photography? What are your artistic strengths and weaknesses? What motivates your creativity? Which field of photography you like more to explore? Do you aspire to become a professional photographer?

Answers to these questions will help to set a list of priorities and goals to guide your progression as photographer.

I will write in a future post about some examples of goals that can facilitate our progression in photography.

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by George Kavanagh

George Kavanagh is a British commercial photographer that mixes his work with fine art photography. I have browsed through his portfolios and found some interesting images like the examples in this post. In particular I like quite a bit some images in his "New Work" gallery (like the examples on the top of this post) as well as some images in the "Location" galleries (like the examples below).

by George Kavanagh.

by George Kavanagh

Something I noticed reviewing George Kavanagh's website is that there are too many images in the portfolios, and more important, some really excellent images are mixed with other pictures that don't match that well in quality or context. This situation reminds me about an important topic: portfolio editing.

The more I am exposed to see portfolios of photographers the more sensitive I am to the editing that has been done to select the images in the portfolio. Editing means making sure that the portfolio is cohesive (style, topic etc), well selected to target a defined audience, and limited only to show the best material. There are many reasons to make a portfolio, so one could apply different rules for each purpose, but if the intent is to convey an style or to share a fine art project there are some rules I learned from others that I find reasonable.

(i) Start defining a purpose and the audience for the portfolio. It is important to be aware that the portfolio intends to send a message to a defined audience. In the web most times the audience will be broad, but perhaps it is just for a subset of the fine art community.  Deciding on the contents of your portfolio will be much easier if you define the intent and know who your audience are. This knowledge will be helpful to make choicdes regarding the images that should be included, the style etc.

(ii) I find that a portfolio benefits largely by the presence of an artist statement that explains the intent of the portfolio. Sometimes this is not necessary, and a general artist statement may be sufficient rather than defining an artist statement for each portfolio.

(iii) Avoid using more than 15-20 images in a portfolio to express an style of work for a given topic (e.g. portraits, landscape). This limit is also important when showing the work to gallery owners or editors for a portfolio review, but it is also very important in the web. If you don't have 20 excellent images, that's fine, fewer will be OK in most cases. I believe that 8-10 images are sufficient to express an style. If you have the need to show more work than 20 images of a selected topic, perhaps it is better to create additional portfolios and distribute the images in the most cohesive way within these different portfolios. Again, avoid putting more than 20 images per portfolio. Of course, this rule may not apply in cases when the portfolio intends to communicate a story. Even then, the patience of the viewer rarely will goes beyond 15-20 images unless it is combined with audio or other multimedia.

(iv) Make sure that the images are cohesive in photographic style and topic. No mixing landscape with life style, no B&W mixed with color. A cohesive portfolio of pictures will - preferably - include pictures taken with the same film type or post-processed following similar digital methods (color, tonality, contrast, dynamic range, borders, etc).

(v) Presentation is key. In the web, make sure the images are presented in a navigation friendly format that (a) have proper image size -about 750 pixels is good; (b) the color space is complaint with the web (sRGB); (c) the portfolio has a list of thumbnails that rapidly gives a sense of the images in the set; (d) the images should load fast in a clean page - neutral colors like black, white of gray are preferred. The patience of the viewer is usually not that great, and most people don't look to more than 10-15 images, and even less if navigation is difficult.

(vi) If possible, don't do the editing and selection of images for the portfolios yourself alone. Share the work with other colleagues, ideally photographers that know about the audience you target, and learn from others which are the images that have the highest aesthetic impact.

(vii) Even if it is difficult, try to eliminate the "less than excellent" images that are not on a par with the best ones, even if you love them. A portfolio with 8 excellent images will have higher quality and impact than the same portfolio mixed with 4 additional average images. This is one of the reasons why it is useful to do the editing after receiving feedback from other photographers, editors or artists; it is difficult to be objective with your own images. The best way to learn about portfolio editing is to received feedback from the experts and colleagues. There are several avenues for the fine art photographer to get expert feedback and in the future I will refer to some of the options in a new post.

Like always, comments are open for your ideas, agreement or disagreements on this topic.

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© Subhankar Banerjee

Indian photographer Subhankar Banerjee uses photography to communicate about issues that harm our planet. Five years ago, Banerjee spent two years in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, photographing this remote region in northeastern Alaska in all four seasons (see images here). His work there coincided with the intent of oil companies and the current U.S. administration to open up the oil and gas reserves on the coastal plain to drill for oil. During his work he stayed in interior and coastal villages with both Gwich’in Athabascan and Inupiat communities, learning about their intimate relationships to the northern environment and the birds and animals that live there. You can read an interview with Subhankar Banerjee here.

My arctic study started with a documentary impulse. The Arctic Refuge had not been visually documented in a comprehensive manner, so I decided to study and document the cycle of seasons of this land and its inhabitants, much the same way as Henry David Thoreau studied the cycle of seasons at Walden Pond with total immersion and contemplation. At the end of my first year in the
arctic I felt I had documented most of the important ecological things. In the second year my approach changed to where I was in no rush to photograph anything in particular. Instead, I immersed myself in the land and wanted to portray the soul of this place. In essence, my arctic study is both documentary, because it documents the important ecological and cultural aspects of the refuge, and at the same time it is art, because it is a meditative study of the fragility and vulnerability of a remote and harsh landscape.

In late 2000, when I first started to plan my journey to the Arctic, I used to think of the land as untouched by man, a so-called Last Frontier. After six years of intense engagement with the land, its peoples, and its issues, I see the Arctic not as a Last Frontier but as the most connected land on the planet. This connection is both celebratory—millions of birds from every land on the planet migrate to the Arctic each year for nesting and rearing their young, a planetary celebration of epic scale—and tragic, as resource wars (oil, coal, mineral), global warming, and toxic migrations have in turn connected the Arctic to the lives of people in faraway lands in a rather tragic manner too. - Subhankar Banerjee

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I just arrived back home from a trip and my next post is to recommend you a book I purchased few weeks ago and I find fascinating. The book is "Image makers, Image Takers".

The book, published in 2007, is a collection of interviews with leading photographers, curators and editors -with 218 images inserted to exemplify the work of the artists. The photographers are categorized based on the type of photography including current leaders in documentary, fashion and advertising, portraiture and art and a chapter with four photographers that exemplify the next generation of artists. This follows with interviews to curators, gallery owners - the people that often times are key to launch the career of new artists- agency directors, editors and publishers. If you are interested in knowing how the artists started their careers, what drives their inspiration, how editors and curators select images and what these experts think in general about the field you will find the book as fascinating as I did.

From the publisher:

Image Makers, Image Takers is the first book to examine systematically what inspires today’s photographers and what it is that makes them succeed. It reveals how some of the world’s most established photographers, from art, documentary, fashion, advertising and portraiture, actually work, and explores what it is that picture editors, curators, gallerists, agency directors and art book publishers are looking for when choosing an image.

Anne-Celine Jaeger delves into the working practice of famous photographers, unveiling the mysterious process of artistic creation involved in making and taking a photograph.

Whether it is basic questions of what to look for in an image, views on cropping or the use of colour over black-and-white, the shapers and makers of taste provide a unique and indispensable account of their working methods.

The book first focuses on photographers’ working practices, from how Mario Sorrenti got the inspiration to photograph a naked Kate Moss draped over a couch for the iconic Calvin Klein campaign to how the Dutch portrait photographer Rineke Dijkstra gets the best out of her subjects. What made the photographer start taking pictures? How did he or she develop a signature style? What is the process involved in going from concept to shoot? How important is postproduction?

Then the book turns to selection. How does the picture editor of the New York Times Magazine decide which photographer to commission for the next fashion spread? What kind of photograph, according to the Senior Curator of London’s Photographers Gallery, is worthy of being hung in a gallery? What advice would art book publisher Gerhard Steidl give a budding photographer? Whether it is the question of what to look for in an image, views on cropping, or the pros and cons of color versus black and white, the shapers of taste give acute and useful accounts of their methods.

Anne-Celine Jaeger is a journalist and critic who has written for many publications, including Wallpaper*, the London Times and the Guardian, as well as the Süddeutsche Zeitung and Art Investor magazine in Germany. She first became fascinated by photography at the age of six – she later graduated from the University of Oxford and then City University, London.

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I am travelling now and have no time and access to the web is difficult so no updates until early next week when get I get back home. Meanwhile, I may suggest you take some time to read older posts here or to visit the blogs listed in the blogroll ... if they are not part of your usual reading list already.

Have a great week.

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from the "Rear Window" series by Ori Gersht

Ori Gersht is a photographer and film maker that was born in Tel Aviv, Israel in 1967, and now lives and works in London. He has an extensive and quite diverse series of beautiful projects going from panoramic images of European football stadiums, images of buildings scared by the war in Sarajevo to pure abstractions like the series "Rear Window" where he captures the beautiful light at twilight in London as seen from a single window in his apartment.

The dramatic skies in London create the illusion of abstract paints with an inticrate blend of color and light in the polluted atmosphere of London. All the images were taken through the same window at different times of the year and at different times of day. It is quite amazing how the same place, the same view with different light, can produce such distinct images like they were taken in different locations (see two more examples below). The images were shot with no filters and the saturated colors are a results of cloud formations and light accumulation.

'The series calls into question our familiarity with our own natural habitat, pointing out the gulf between the sky that we believe we know, and that of the photographs: a gap between the mechanical, attentive and unassumptive vision of the camera, and the presumptive and subjective vision of the human eye." Ori Gersht

from the "Rear Window" series by Ori Gersht

from the "Rear Window" series by Ori Gersht

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by Ken Gehle

I quite like the work of Ken Gehle, and my favorite is the series Gas Stations that you can find in the link to his projects at his website.

This is a personal project that has sort of become a collection hobby for me. Although in the beginning I only shot in Georgia, I am now making trips to places like Alabama, Tennessee and Florida to search for this fading icon of America's motoring history. When time allows in my travels I skip the interstate to wonder the old road in hopes of finding one more for my collection. I have since published an small book of some of my favorites which can be obtained by giving me a call.- Ken Gehle

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by Jesse Marlow

Reading the interesting blog 5b4 I discovered the work of Australian photographer Jesse Marlow.

“Street photography is my main passion. The solitary experience of walking the streets seeking out ‘that’ moment – a rare emotion, a chance sight. And yet, it is often the most everyday things that I keep coming back to, such as people meeting on a summer’s day; a kiss; journeys made on the train.”- Jesse Marlow

by Jesse Marlow

Jessy Marlow just published an interesting book "Wounded" about people who recover from severe wounds as they go along their daily routine in the street. You can see the images here.

"Having my arm in a sling for a short period of time some years ago opened my eyes to others around me in similar situations. It was then I began to consider the possibility of producing a series of photographs of people on the street in similar situations. Being wounded is an unfortunate experience most of us have to deal with at some point during our lifetime. Every time I turned a corner for the next few years, it seemed like all I saw was a broken arm or leg and crutches. Photographically it became a challenge to turn interesting looking injuries into interesting photographs. These are not photographs you can set out to take. Sitting outside a hospital would be cheating" - Jesse Marlow

by Jesse Marlow

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