• “Smudge-proof makeup tips for long days behind the camera”
• “Seasonal Flats: these flats will keep your feet covered, comfortable and cute while you’re on photo shoots”
• “Step-by-Step: create these beautiful lanterns for your studio”
• “Beauty Dish: New Jersey-based wedding photographer dishes about her camera-ready style”
• “Luminous Lenses: Shoot in style with these designer lens protection wraps”
• “Hanging Tough: These camera straps are stylish yet tough just like you”

-Headlines from PDN’s new women’s magazine, Pix

Photo District News have launched a new photography-focused digital magazine for women called Pix, a few screenshots from which are presented above. It’s a doozy. Jezebel is on the case: Finally, Lady Photojournalists Get Their Own Photo Ladymag Full of Lady Stereotypes. You can read through the whole first issue here, and the next issue will be available via iTunes in December 2012.

In more serious women-in-photography news, two women have been nominated to Magnum (Zoe Strauss and Bieke Depoorter, alongside Jerome Sessini), Isadora Kosofsky has won the 2012 Inge Morath Award, and as Matt wrote previously, the Alexia Foundation has started a $25,000 Women’s Initiative grant.

Kamerades is a new collective of photojournalists based in Belgrade who have come together to help develop independent photography in Serbia and to work on group projects documenting contemporary stories. They are currently working together to photograph the Serbian presidential and parliamentary elections, which will take place on Sunday May 6, 2012. These six photographers are contributing their own hard-edged and sardonic vision of the Serbian electoral process and how it reflects Serbian society. They call the project “Dirty Season”.

I think it is an important step for this group and Serbian photography in general to work on such collective projects, with financial support, and to have a community of like-minded photographers working together to get photographs published in their own voice. It is not easy, especially not here, but I admire their energy and efforts. With this in mind I had a few questions for the Kamerades crew about their formation and backgrounds. Given the timeliness of their new project with the elections this week, I chose not to show a portfolio of their work but this current electoral group project which I am so excited about. It is an incredible portrait of Serbia during this election cycle.

Kamerades is Saša Čolić, Nemanja Jovanović, Milovan Milenković, Nemanja Pančić, Marko Risović and Marko Rupena. As a group they regularly post to the Kamerades Blog including updates to the Election story, which they present without captions or credits.

So how did this group of photographers come together? Where did you meet?

Jovanovic: Marko Risovic, Milovan Milenkovic and I participated in a photography lecture supported by World Press Photo back in 2009. That was the first time that we showed some of our work to a group of people larger than three. I was swept by Marko [Risovic]’s Legionnaire story for example and one thing led to another. Milovan suggested that we meet and talk about doing “something” for Serbian photography, even if it means taking only baby steps. After two years of meeting in various pubs and places that would be too generous to call restaurants, speaking and inviting over 20 people to join us, this is what came out of it.

Pancic: Milovan Milenkovic and Nemanja Jovanovic initiated the idea that after our work when we have free time, we can meet at the pub and discuss our work. At first point it brought together a large number of photographers, but over the time there were six of us remained and those were the most persistent ones. During this period, which lasted some two years, we have become a collective. It’s started to affect in a positive way to all of us as photographers, but we also became close friends. In the end we decided to launch a website that allowed us to show our work to the public.

What backgrounds as photographers do you have? Freelance, agencies, newspapers?

Jovanovic: Probably every possible background you can think of! In Serbia, you don’t get a paycheck doing and specializing in only one kind of photography.

Risovic: All of the guys in Kamerades collective were working for Media outlets at some point. At the moment few of us are trying to freelance. In Serbia. Can you imagine?

Pancic: Some of us are working in the agencies, some try to be freelancers, and some in the press.

Was there a moment when this group came together and decided that it was time to work collectively? What was it? What gave you guys the idea to work together?

Jovanovic: Yes. The idea was not so clear in the beginning, but it was there all along. From start we were determined to “push each other forward” and to try to do what we like for no other reason. No money, no awards, fame or glory were important, only escaping our everyday routine which included participating in the inevitable decline of journalism, photojournalism and photography in Serbia. The collective came as a logical solution.

Risovic: Being colleagues, working next to each other for years, we were silent witnesses of degradation of photojournalism in Serbia. We realized that sitting and despairing doesn’t lead us anywhere. So, we decided to pursue some action, and besides hanging around, talking and drinking in the pubs, we tried to be constructive. As Nemanja said before, it was a process, but it was clear from the very beginning that we all have common goal.

How did the website come together? What are you hoping to accomplish with the website (that is, to sell work? to share pictures? promoting yourselves, promoting Serbia, just looking bad-ass, etc.)? Where did the design and logo come from?

Jovanovic: It took some time. We are not experienced in that kind of stuff, so we were learning the basics, step by step. We were lucky enough to be 6 people with completely different interests, knowledge, personalities, approach in photography, but we somehow clicked perfectly together, and it resulted in the fact everybody got their part of job. Mostly Sasha who whipped and pissed off rest of us (or, took the piss out of the rest of us), and Milovan who did logo and design details after approximately nine million e-mails and discussions about the same issue. Also, we had a lot of help from friends, like our colleague Darko Stanimirovic who did the website. A lot of people gave different advices, Matt Lutton among them [ed: happy to help guys!], Donald Weber from VII agency and our friends photographers, designers and editors from Serbia and abroad.

Selling our work is every photographer’s job of course, but with this portfolio we mostly seek attention and hope to sell something in the future, maybe to get some assignments that would suit our style/wishes. And looking cool is one of the goals, of course! We are pretty much terrible musicians and we couldn’t be rock stars, so we took cameras. Chicks love it!

Pancic: As I said before, the website has come as a result of our meetings during the past two years. One idea that keeps us together is that we want to show our work to world around us, we believe that as a collective we have a better chance to get more publicity and through joint actions provide us new projects. Logo design came from a smart push by Milovan Milenkovic, multitalented and good looking guy.

Risovic: Basic thing that bothered us from the beginning was the fact that when you simply google documentary photography and Serbia together, you don’t get any of the serious websites with representative work. There are great documentary photographers and photojournalists in Serbia. Believe us! We hope to change this with our website. And to look badass, it goes well with the fame.
Read on »

Magnum, who now distribute Tim Hetherington’s work (not without controversy), have just made available in their archive The Libya Negs: Tim Hetherington’s Last Images. Included in the selection is an image captioned “LIBYA. Misurata. April 20, 2011. Tim’s last photograph.” (screenshot above). Some of these photos were published by Newsweek earlier.

Hetherington was killed alongside Chris Hondros last April while working in Libya. Consider contributing to the Chris Hondros Fund or the organizations listed here.

Magnum Contact Sheets is a forthcoming October 2011 release by Thames & Hudson, the publisher responsible for a number of other classic Magnum books like Magnum Magnum and Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Man, The Image & The World (both of which are on my shelf). This book, four years in the making, features film contact sheets from Magnum photographers and “each photographer (or representative of an estate) has written a commentary on the assignment, how the photographs were taken, what happened at the time and what followed.”

Thames & Hudson have been running a feature on their blog called Life Cycle of a Book: Magnum Contact Sheets about the process of commissioning, editing, designing and publishing (more posts are promised) such a large important photography book. It offers a nice and detailed behind-the-scenes look into the huge process, time and number of steps required to put together such a juicy project. Design Director Johanna Neurath wrote about how the “dream project” came to be:

We all (the designers that is) got very excited when we saw the gorgeously graphic smudgey brightly coloured marks of the chinagraph pencils on the sheets. And the orderly little round stickers on some of the sheets, stuck just so, and those beautifully expressive felt-tip pen scribbles and stars and exclamation marks… All these things gave away clues to the personality of each photographer. We knew that somehow we wanted to make the most of this. (from the post Magnum Contact Sheets: Design #1)

I’m very excited to see the final book, though I am a bit wary of the marketing description on Thames & Hudson’s page for Magnum Contact Sheets: “Contact sheets tell the truth behind a photograph. They unveil its process, and provide its back story. Was it the outcome of what a photographer had in mind from the outset? Did it emerge from a diligently worked sequence, or was the right shot down to pure serendipity – a matter of being in the right place at the right time?”

Maybe not exactly true, but the sentiment it is pretty close to why most of us love looking at each others’ contact sheets. Who doesn’t want to see the roll (look above!) that produced Trent Parke’s cover photograph for his book Dream/Life?

For more behind-the-scenes bookmaking awesomeness check out our recent interview with Donald Weber about his new book Interrogations.

I love the emergence of photo books on the iPad. Perhaps what these apps do best is make difficult to find material (Capitolio, for instance, just officially sold out in North America, I learned on Facebook) easily available in an affordable way. Sure, it’s nothing like an actual book in one’s hands, but viewing photos on an iPad does wonders for photography that one might only ever see on a computer screen. These apps offer a hand-crafted and distraction-free way to view the work that a laptop screen just can’t match. Now, like Christopher Anderson’s Capitolio and World Press Photo’s 2011 photo annual before, two more Magnum photographers have released iPad collections of their work.

First is Carl De Keyzer‘s breathtaking Zona: Siberian Prison Camps (also available in print; and there’s a 77-image edit on De Keyzer’s website). I’ve long been a fan of the work, but have never gotten a chance to see the book in person.

And secondly, Elliott Erwitt has a retrospective collection of his work now available on the iPad. The book/app has 343 photos from his 60-year career and also features commentary from the man himself and some behind the scenes video.

By the way, if you click through our link to buy the apps, we get a (very) small cut of the sale. It’s a way for us to keep the lights on here at dvafoto. Thanks to those of you who have clicked through us in the past!

A new interview with Antoine D’Agata in Vice Magazine is making the rounds and rankling plenty of people: Fear, Desire, Drugs and Fucking: Photographer Antoine D’Agata lives a life less ordinary.
D’Agata’s work divides people more than almost any other photographer I know, and most people I hear from express some skepticism of his pictures.

I personally have always been fascinated with his work and appreciate that there is a photographer like him doing something in this particular vein of society. If this is the art/work he wants to make, that’s great. I don’t think it is a put-on, though I’m quite sure that there is and needs to be only one like him. He fulfills a corner of photography well and we probably don’t need to see students trying to imitate. Furthermore I think this interview in particular has a lot of insights to offer .. into D’Agata’s work and motivations but also the struggle of a photographer in general. Check it out, be offended a little, and be curious that there is this kind of work being made by such a character.

How would you describe your own work—as reportage, as art? Do you feel that photos can be an honest and effective way to convey a situation?

The only type of connection I have to the tradition of reportage is coming up with the most efficient ways to deny, denounce or destroy its prejudice. Beyond humanistic pretence, reportage always conveys twisted or insidious values. Its economic survival has always been dependent on logical means to perpetuate the efficiency and the profitability of a system controlled by the elite for their own benefit. And one has to remember that no photography can pretend to show the truth. A picture only shows a given situation under a very specific perspective, consciously or not, openly or not, relevantly or not. Photographers have to accept they can just convey fragments of illusory realities and relate their own intimate experience of the world. In this process of fictionalising an unreachable truth, it’s up to them to impose their doubts about any photographic truth, or accept being impotent pawns in the mediatic game.

Pete took it up via The Incoherent Light and La Pura Vida.

We wrote back in May about the new Magnum Foundation, the non-profit associated with Magnum Photos, and its interesting project: the Emergency Fund. This week the Fund unveiled a new website that includes information about the projects and photographers they are supporting.

The website is not quite finished or filled with work yet, but it is definitely worth keeping an eye on. Photographers include some of our friends and favorites Sohrab Hura, Larry Towell, Alex Majoli, Cedric Gerbehaye, amongst others. To stay in touch with the development of this website and the work being produced by the fund, you can follow them on twitter: @emergencyfund.

While you’re at it, check out Krisanne Johnson‘s terrific project “I Love You Real Fast”, a “four-year photography project documenting young women coming of age amidst the H.I.V/AIDS epidemic in Swaziland”. It is a Magnum Fund supported project and she is also looking for further support for the project through Kickstarter.

Along the lines of Ed Ou’s project we just posted about, photographer Chien Chi-Chang recently has published a Magnum in Motion presentation of his project “Escape from North Korea”, on assignment for National Geographic. He followed the paths and stories of men and women escaping from North Korea into China, Laos, Thailand and eventually South Korea. This is the project we’ve been waiting to see on this topic. You should have a look.

You should also visit Chang’s photos on the Magnum site if you haven’t seen his work before. He’s a special one, and he even came out of Seattle.

Magnum’s Georgian Spring is an incredibly interesting project, and possibly a turning point in photojournalism and agency work. This book, print, web and ‘multimedia’ project is a collaboration with the Georgian state itself, funded by the Ministry of Culture and arranged by photographer Thomas Dworzak with Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, and independently curated by publisher Chris Boot.
As Scott mentioned when this project first went live, 10 Magnum photographers are involved and are a very interesting cross section of what is being done in photojournalism today. Jörg Colberg, of Conscientious and photojournalism criticism fame, agrees in his review of the book. To quote him, “So there are ten photographic voices, all from the same photojournalistic agency – how could there be a crisis in photojournalism when there is such variety? Or asked in a different way: What kind of crisis?”

I see Georgian Spring as the latest in a series of interesting photographer and agency-driven productions where people are “doing it themselves” with alternative funding methods. I think of two other Magnum projects directly that I’ve always respected: Euro Visions, about the ten new EU states in 2004 in collaboration with Centre Pompidou and Magnum Off-Broadway (a project that deserves a post in itself, definitely coming soon).
Beyond being a necessary development to continue doing the work we’re out in the world to do, these agency and photographer-led projects almost invariably produce more interesting and personal work. (But maybe this is because I’m a photographer? Wonder if there is a breakdown between publication-designed and producer-designed projects with the public?).
There has been some hubbub around VII’s recent efforts (especially on the public relations front) to get ahead of new funding opportunities, such as working directly with NGOs and then maneuvering to have the work published. In an era where the number of assignments is shrinking and our archives are our pensions, finding any way to photograph important stories prior to selling them is intelligent. So likewise getting countries to pay for portrayals of themselves is an interesting idea that just brings this idea to a new level, and shows impressive lateral thinking. The multifaceted distribution is terrific too, from podcasts to an impressive book (so says Colberg, I haven’t seen it in person yet), to an exhibition and interactive website (with maps and breakdown by region in Georgia, which is nice to see). All around, from ideas to photographs to presentation, extremely well done and I think (at this early moment, juries will tell in time) a new landmark in photojournalism.

Thomas Dworzak has a long personal history of working in Georgia, having been (or continuing to be, as the website suggests) based in Tblisi. And maybe because of his close relationship with the country, and the president, his photographs in this project are the most contentious to me. Dworzak presents a love letter to Saakashvili, which is a curious choice given the mix of other work by his colleagues and the nature of the project itself. By all means I’ll defend his right to publish what he feels like but in such a project it is so strange to see this photo-profile of the president traveling the world, wooing its leaders and his domestic successes. The video presentation is especially strange, with lighthearted music, rapid pictures of the smiling president and running tourism-board commentary by Saakashvili himself. As PDN brought up in its piece Magnum on Georgia, For Georgia a “photojournalistic” project about a State funded by that State on the surface is begging for careful scrutiny of its objectivity. There seems to be ample distance between the creative and journalistic freedom of the photographers and their curator Chris Boot from the state itself, and many of the essays and their subject matter probably would not be picked up in tourist literature by Georgia.
Also enlivening from the PDN article is this quote:

According to Dworzak, the project set off some debate within Magnum. “It’s nothing extraordinary, Magnum has done it and other agencies have done it for many other countries, it’s just usually done in a very shitty way,” Dworzak says. That the Georgian government agreed to a completely hands-off approach “made it really easy to accept,” Dworzak relates.

On the other hand, I was blown away by many of the other projects. In some sense this was a narrow assignment, to bring photographers into one country and have them all cover it in their own way, perhaps putting photographers in positions they are not suited for in an obvious time crunch (the book was published roughly a year after the conflict with Russia). But just the opposite has happened, it opened each to do what they do best and it really compounds the impression of contemporary Georgia. As I said above, this project brings together ten unique voices and gives them freedom to search out their own stories and it is a treat to see it come together. I haven’t had a chance to watch through all ten ‘Magnum in Motion’ video presentations but two really have stuck with me, perhaps for obvious reasons.

Alex Majoli has long been an important photographer for me but his work in Georgia, both here and in the recent war, has taken my respect for him to a new level. Please have a look at his piece for this project on Magnum in Motion. From two stark black and white title cards that tie his personal experience (and relationship to music, which is dear to my heart) to his early photography and then straight to the emotions and people he was photographing in Georgia. The soundtrack, from Italian punk band CCCP, provides stark cohesion with the best of movie scores. The images are raw, beautiful and confounding.

Russian photographer Gueorgui Pinkhassov provides a similarly personal dispatch from Georgia, with terrific commentary (I believe his words, read by another person). Most of this piece is short video clips, fitting for a man who began his career as a cinematographer and working with Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. And they are ridiculously beautiful, absolutely in Pinkhassov’s ‘style’ but in motion. Indeed some of the videos are from scenes that became final photographs for his contribution to the book, such as the one posted alongside here. It is a moving and unique vision, and I can’t recommend strongly enough seeing his work on Magnum in Motion.

And have a look at the Jonas Bendiksen video, you just might spot him having a drink with the people at the party (in another short video clip, again used nicely). Glad to see the photographers getting involved personally!

Another question, which I admit not giving much thought to yet, is the new “Hollywood” film about the war tentatively titled “Georgia”. Wired’s terrific Danger Room blog riffs on an AP story in a post titled One Year Later, Hollywood Re-Fights Georgia-Russia War. What does this other project Georgia-supported project mean for this Magnum work? The film isn’t funded by Georgia it seems but it has gotten state support, and Wired is framing it as pro-Georgia. Does this paint the Magnum Georgia a different hue?

In the end, I think it is a wonderful thing to have such a portrait about a nation in an interesting point of its history, and I of course want to see more projects of this sort of subject matter as well as innovative funding strategies like this. But the final product of Georgian Spring does still leave me with some caution, particularly with Dworzak’s piece included. Maybe it is the newness of this idea, having the subject fund the project themselves, or having potential conflicts of interest so close to the surface (that’s a good thing, but still something new to deal with), but I’m a touch uneasy still. A bold approach, ingenious in many regards, and its bound to ruffle feathers, and I’m happy that it has affected me that way too. Can’t wait to see what is next, and I’m inspired to think about all of these issues anew.

The twenty finalists of the first Magnum Expression Award were just announced. This year’s theme was “Communities” and received submissions from over 170 countries and territories, and few of the finalists are ‘usual suspects’. There is a lot of interesting and fresh work in here by a lot of photographers I haven’t heard or seen work from before, which is always terrific. I think this is a great start for a very promising award. Tune in on October 23 when they announce the winner of the $10,000 grant and other prizes.

Though I like much of the work selected, I’m particularly enthralled with Andy Spyra’s work from Kashmir. I met Andy a couple of weeks ago as he traveled through Belgrade on assignment and he had interesting stories of how this work came together, his motivations and the process of making the story. The pictures will probably be divisive for many people, they’re full of motion and ambiguity, harsh shadows and exploited light, but they’re undeniably powerful.

Great to see a photographer taking huge chances and doing it his or her own way, something I’m really inspired by. These are risky photographs, an experimentation, and most work very well. Now to see how he can push it further, and where it’ll take his pictures and stories. Maybe soon we can get a little conversation up here with him.