Oliver Weber wrote in to tell us about Michael Werner’s interesting interview project, Two-Way Lens. Weber wrote:

 

Two Way Lens is a project of interviews with international, contemporary photographers. Their answers to three simple questions about their career paths, presented in this project, should help, inspire and inform emerging photographers. The tips and advice provided will be of value to every young photographer. A new photographer/ interview is added to the project every month.

The interviews are short and sweet, but have some good information. Among those interviewed: Zoe Strauss, Richard Renaldi, Martin Parr, Lori Nix, Alec Soth, and Amy Stein.

My RSS reader has been full to the brim with photographer interviews of late.  Here’s a few worth checking out to fill a lazy Sunday afternoon:

• Dodge and Burn talks to World Press Photo spot news winner Walter Astrada about his career and goals.
• Foto8 talks to Andreas Gursky about, among other topics, the evolution of his work.
• Voices of San Diego talks to Matt Mallams about his plans for the summer and his style.
• The Fader talks to Andrea Diefenbach about her excellent work documenting AIDS in the Ukraine.
• The New York Photo Festival talks with Jacob Holdt about his process and thoughts about photography (scroll down a bit) (via 2point8)
• Camera Obscura talks with Mehrdad Naraghi about, among other things, how he publishes and shows his photos in Iran. (via Asian Photography Blog)
• Conscientious and Bomblog talk with Will Steacy about the process and intentions behind his recent project “Down These Mean Streets.” (second link via Rachel Hulin)
• +1 Magazine talks with Boogie (in a pdf; here’s Boogie’s site, too.).
• 100Eyes Magazine talks with Brenda Ann Kenneally about her own history and how her life has intertwined with her photographic subjects.

The British Photographic Council recently surveyed more than 1,000 photographers, press agencies, and picture libraries and found some disturbing trends. Editorial Photographers: United Kingdom and Ireland has the results. 93% of photographers have come under pressure to hand over greater rights to clients for no increase in the fee, with 76% saying that their income has fallen as a result.

Some more key points:

30% of photographers said they had encountered attempted rights grabs in the newspaper and magazine sectors

76% of photographers say their income has declined due to their resistance to pressure to hand over more rights for little or no more money, with 56% saying that their income had fallen “moderately” or “significantly” as a result.

74% of those photographers who were successful in chasing up infringements said that they did not consider the amount they received was fair compensation for the infringement, with 88% stating that the amount paid by the infringer would not serve as adequate deterrent to stop similar copyright breaches in the future.

99% of photographers said they were concerned by the infringements, only a quarter of those said that they tried to pursue every case, with 71% saying that this was due to the difficulty of raising a legal action.

These findings are only representative of the UK, but I imagine some similarities in the worldwide photo industry. More data in the full survey results PDF.

(via The Click)

I’m in Washington DC now hanging in the backroom of my friend Noah Devereaux’s apartment, where he is very generously letting me crash for the few days of this Obama Inauguration. While not on assignment per se I am working with Michael Shaw over at BagNewsNotes to provide some ‘exclusive’ images for his analysis and consumption, be sure to head over there to see what he is up to. As well, I’m feeding my European agents with the work and who knows, maybe a US publication or two will pick something up. Certainly, it is very nice just to be in DC for this event … this is definitely something we’ll all be recounting years from now.

On Saturday, 12 hours after getting into New York, I was in a two-car convoy of photographers heading south on the I95 through New Jersey chasing after the Obama “Freedom Train”.

We first caught him and Vice President-Elect Joe Biden giving a speech in Wilmington, Delaware. I was able to glimpse Obama from a distance (hooray) but the work was ‘on the fringes’ as Alan Chin would say and we all shot in the crowd. The first few images are from there. Then it was a mad rush back to the car and back on the road, trying to beat Obama to Edgewood, Maryland where he would make a ‘whistle-stop’ and roll through a small town’s Amtrak station to wave. Luckily we did make it to the city in time, about an hour south from Wilmington, and were able to shoot some nice scenes of a very diverse crowd waiting in the cold (maybe 15-20* F?) to see the new President roll in to town.

Then it was another rush to get to Baltimore, but here we lost the scent and were only able to photograph a gathering of people watching a Jumbotron of Obama’s speech on the Inner Harbor. After, a leisurely and exhausted drive into DC.

Sunday was the first official inaugural event, a giant star-laden concert at the Lincoln Memorial that had crowds stretched over a mile away past the Washington Monument and onto the national Mall. Lots of pictures here, interesting people crammed into an interesting space. Security prescence has been interesting … sometimes you see lots of police or troops, other times not at all.

More soon I hope .. will be heading out shortly to see what is happening in town on the Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday. The big stuff will be tomorrow though when Obama is sworn in at 11am. Still don’t have a real plan for how I’ll be covering that..

A. C. Thompson’s Nation article about racist vigilante killings during Hurricane Katrina has been on the edges of the news recently, but what I noticed when I first saw the article was the italic type at the top of the page.

A.C. Thompson’s reporting on New Orleans was directed and underwritten by the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute. ProPublica provided additional support, as did the Center for Investigative Reporting and New America Media.

We’ve written here before about the need for funding for in-depth and long-term journalism about what might be unpopular subjects as newspapers are drying up, and I think we’ll see a lot more of these sorts of underwriting disclosure statements. Maybe every article will soon start and end with “portions of this article have been funded by readers like you,” ala the American Public Broadcasting System’s “Viewers Like You”. (And here’s a short wikipedia history of “Viewers Like You”)

And while the portrait for the Nation article doesn’t make me swoon, I’m always curious when I see two names underneath a photo. Chandra McCormick and husband Keith Calhoun have been photographing New Orleans culture for 30 years (NYT slideshow, MSNBC article with video). They’re also fellows at the Open Society Institute (unfortunately, not too many photos there or elsewhere online, it seems). Their house was destroyed during the hurricane, and it was where they ran their photo studio. Much of their photo archive was damaged, but the water transformed the pictures into a visceral record of the damage caused by the storm and floods. This page at Architecture for Humanity suggests that the Calhoun Center for the Arts has been built, and it might be the new L9 Art Center which is mounting the Prospect.1 exhibition right now, featuring McCormick and Calhoun’s work alongside others’. Wish I could see it.

Matt sent me this video (and I saw it on Lens Culture, too). Not sure why he didn’t post it, but it’s worth sharing. The movie, William Eggleston: Photographer, by Reiner Holzemer is available on dvd.

I googled “Reiner Holzmer” and it turns out he wrote a post on the Magnum Blog a little more than a year ago. Additionally, Holzmer made a movie called “Magnum Photos: The Changing of a Myth” about the recent history of the agency. It sounds real interesting, but at $390 for the DVD, I’ll have to skip it for right now…

The Guardian’s been publishing the weekly “My Best Shot” series for a couple years now. It’s a great little column in which photographers (often well-known) share what they feel is their best shot, and why they think it’s their best. A lot of gems in the archive, though there are a few that leave me scratching my head. Here are a few: Bob Adelman, Elliot Erwitt, Lise Sarfati, Nadav Kander, Thomas Struth, Thomas Joshua Cooper (an innocuous landscape that likely would’ve landed him in jail), Edward Burtynsky, Joseph Szabo, Tod Papageorge, Tim Walker, Steve McCurry (not the first image that comes to mind…), and many more. Be sure to click on the pictures being talked about…some are cropped very awkwardly.

Don’t just look at the “My Best Shot” series, though, the Guardian’s whole photography section will keep you busy for a long while.

I’ve been adding a bit to the photo section in the sidebar to the right.  Looked through some of my old bookmarks and was reminded of the work of Jan Dago.  Solid, beautiful documentary work in the Danish style typified by the likes of Joachim Ladefoged (hoo boy, The Albanians is good) and Jan Grarup (personal site may be down, he’s also over at Noor).