This is beautiful:

The above video is early test footage of Kodachrome color movie film from 1922. Kodak’s blog has more info about the film. It predates the first color feature film by 13 years.

In other Kodachrome news, you probably have already heard about how Steve McCurry was given the last produced roll of Kodachrome and shot it for National Geographic, and that the last place to process Kodachrome will cease processing the film in December 2010.

In other test footage news, here’s some early improvisational camera test footage of Kermit the Frog and Fozzy Bear.

Corentin Fohlen has been awarded the City of Perpignan Young Reporter’s Award – 2010 for Visa Pour L’image this year. Fohlen’s work is definitely worth a look: beautiful colors and interesting stories.

“Five years feels like a long time, and many buildings have been rebuilt and a lot people have returned to the Gulf Coast devastated by Katrina. But many have not come home, and they may never. Some neighborhoods have never looked better; other areas are returning to nature. There, the vegetation grew wild and high after the ruins were bulldozed away.” -Alan Chin, Katrina: the Fifth Anniversary

Alan Chin has a wonderful piece revisiting Hurricane Katrina up at Newsweek just now. The presentation pairs images from the immediate aftermath of the hurricane with a look at how the life has moved on for the city and its people. Definitely worth a look.

TIME Announces New Version Of Magazine Aimed At Adults

Devastating satire.

The Online Photographer and Peter Turnley published this week a two-part story on the life and career of master printer to the stars Voja Mitrovic. A Yugoslav immigrant to France, Mitrovic began working at the famous Picto lab in Paris and became essentially the personal printer to such greats as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Josef Koudelka. The piece in part one and part two provides a terrific backstory to Mitrovic’s own life and his role in printing some of the most famous photographs of the last century.

He indicated to me that the three most important things involved in being a great printer are patience, developing a good dialogue and communication with the photographer he is printing for, and knowing how to read a negative. It is most important to know the photographer, to know what he or she wants, and to be able to read the image—like photographers, some people see things, and others don’t! Great printing involves knowing how to choose the right paper, having technical skills, and a strong artistic and aesthetic sense. He feels that it has helped him very much to have been himself a photographer, in order to understand the goal of a photograph.

One of the world’s oldest cities, Kashgar serves as both the spiritual and political capital of traditional Uighur culture.  Since 1949, the modern People’s Republic of China has exerted strong control over the region, and Kashgar has been particularly hard hit.  Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, a province covering 1/6th of China’s territory holds a majority of the country’s oil and gas reserves.  Long at odds with the Uighurs’ sometimes bloody quest for independence, the Chinese government has insituted a program of subsidized migration and settlement in the area by Han majority Chinese.  In so doing, the government hopes to develop a stable and robust economy whose purpose is the exploitation of the region’s natural resources and to overwhelm the local ethnicities.  Whereas the Uighur population of Kashgar was previously as high as 90%, government settlement efforts have changed the city’s demographics to less than 70% Uighur, and the percentage is still dropping.

At the heart of Kashgar is the so-called Old City.  Of tremendous historical value, the twisting alleyways and haphazardly built houses clump together and spring out of the city’s terrain in an organic and natural way.  After sporadic uprisings and fighting between Uighurs and Hans, the Beijing-controlled municipal government has unveiled plans to completely renovate the Old City. Uighur families who’ve lived in the same location for, in some cases, hundreds of years will be uprooted and resettled in cookie cutter apartment blocks built according to contemporary Chinese building standards.  Notwithstanding the individual upheaval of this process, the redevelopment of central Kashgar will radically transform the nature of daily life in the Uighur community.  The alleyways of the Old City create a naturally closed and safe neighborhood structure in which children can play and neighbors interact without fear of outsiders or traffic.  These alleyways also lead to central streets, arteries for the community on which Uighur-owned businesses thrive.  All of this will change as the government imposes redevelopment on the Old City, though not everyone is convinced the change will be bad.

In his home not far from the Grand Bazaar, 60-year-old Mohmat* cries as he describes his life.  Hans moving into the area have taken his job and his house is soon to be demolished.  Unable to afford medicine, he smokes marijuana to relieve the pain in his liver and legs.  Pages of the Koran hang on the walls of his bedroom.  At once blaming China’s central government for his problems, he also sees some sense in the policies.  His house has no plumbing and little electricity.  With the new apartment buildings, his family would enjoy a marked improvement in their quality of life.  Still, without a more systemic overhaul of city and state policies, and clear protection for Uighur employment and religion, he sees the development of the Old City as a small step toward much needed reform in Kashgar.

Others are more optimistic.  On a bus from Kashgar to Hotan, a man named Askar* approaches me.  A Uighur living in Urumqi, the provincial capital, his english is great and he’s eager to talk.  ”I am hopeful,” he says of the future of Xinjiang.  He worries about the transformation of Kashgar, but sees it as a necessary step in the progress of the region.  His own life has changed dramatically, too.  His first career was working as a newspaper journalist, but it felt to him like a deadend job.  He spent hours upon hours teaching himself english in libraries and has been an Amway representative for the past year or two.  Amway, of course, being the multi-level marketing scheme made popular in the US in the 1970s.  ”I will be the president [of Amway] in 7 years,” he exclaims hopefully.  His trip to Kashgar and Hotan, in fact, was to set up more Amway franchises.  The business, he tells me, is an exciting opportunity, a way to live the American dream in a place that couldn’t be more different from the suburbs where Amway was made popular.  The promise of a better of life offered by the company, and which is never achieved by the overwhelming majority of Amway representatives, provides Askar with a goal far removed from the problems facing Kashgar and the Uighurs.

More photos from this story are available for license at M. Scott Brauer’s archive.

*only first name given over concern for safety

A complicated mix of politics, media and the freedom of both are colliding again in Venezuela after a national court ruled that “for the next four weeks, no newspaper, magazine or weekly of the country can publish images that are violent, bloody, grotesque, whether about crime or not”. This comes as national legislative elections are to be held in the next month and from reaction to the country’s largest newspaper El Nacional publishing an image of an over-filled morgue on its front page last week. After the ruling on Tuesday the paper published blank images with the word “censored” across their front page in protest.

The Guardian reports that “crime regularly tops Venezuelans’ list of concerns. In the absence of complete official figures, which are no longer published, watchdog groups estimate 16,000 people are murdered every year.” Today’s El Nacional led with the question “do you feel that the national feeling of insecurity is to be mostly blamed on the information transmitted by the media?” and they reported that 88% said “no”, their rebuke to the Government’s assertion that “media opponents were using gutter press tactics to sensationalise crime, sell newspapers and damage the country’s socialist revolution”.

I’m sure this all needs to be considered in the complications of local politics, but it is interesting to me that there is a newspaper publishing such shocking images (in whatever context, especially considering the image seems to have been taken last December) and is taking a bold response to censorship. It also amazes me that the censorship could be so ham-fisted, with claims to protect the “psychic and moral integrity of children and adolescents” yet only be in temporary effect until the elections. We’ll see what comes.

Update (8/20): CNN is reporting “Venezuelan judge says newspapers can print violent pictures”: “A judge has lifted an order banning Venezuelan media from printing violent photographs, an official said on state-owned VTV.” Seems like international pressure from press advocates contributed. (via @foodforyoureyes)

Facing Water Crisis – Rio Favelas from Balazs Gardi on Vimeo.

Facing Water Crisis is Balazs Gardi’s latest project. The project incorporates stills, video, and a comprehensive website, and addresses the coming global water crisis. The work, as we can expect from Gardi, is beautiful and poignant. The project, moreso, serves as an example of what the future of visual journalism might look like, produced and published by the photographer through the website.

Love the music in the above video, by the way. Reminiscent of Lynch, perhaps. In the credits, come to find out, the music was made by fellow photographer Tivadar Domaniczky.

Friend of dvafoto Andrew Spear directed my attention to the work of Daniel Shea last month, specifically his project Removing Mountains.

Coal, the number one energy-based resource domestically, is often extracted through a process of mountaintop removal mining. Through this process, mountains are literally blown apart to efficiently access coal seams. The physical overburden is pushed into the valleys and streams below, leveling a once dynamic landscape. Through this violent process, coal is eventually extracted, processed, shipped, burned and then distributed through electric grids to much of the United States. Simply turning on the lights suggests a complex matrix of ecological, industrial, and human implications. (link)

Shea is also funding the travel for a related (and also terrific) project called “Plume” entirely though a print sale on his blog, and still has some prints available at great prices to help fund the exhibition of the work later this year in Kentucky.

But don’t stop with just having a look at this project; Shea has a number of other impressive works on his website. And see Pete Brook’s post and interview about Shea’s Baltimore Project over on Prison Photography. Also cool: Shea did a terrific interview with Alec Soth for Too Much Chocolate last year.

Theatre of War from Richard Mosse on Vimeo.

We’ve posted a few times about Richard Mosse’s work, most recently about his Pink Soldiers and earlier about a related project to this video, “Breach”. It is great to see how is vision and passion for “classical history paintings” translates into a solemn and measured video piece.

Found via A Photo Student’s tremendous post full of wonderful photographer-related videos. It’ll take me to get through all of that good stuff, and I’ll probably be finding other gems to post here too. (just check out the Winogrand interview!)