Duwei, drummer for the Nanjing-based punk band Overdose, rests in a park with friends before a gig at the small YuYinTang rock club in Shanghai, China.

I’m excited to announce that one of my prints, above, is on the block in Daniel Cooney’s iGavel Emerging Artists Auction. The reserve is US$200. The auction began Jan. 14, and will continue until Feb. 4.

The rest of the auction is worth a look, too. Among the photography, I particularly like the photos by Jody Ake, Ina Jang, Shane Lavalette, Wayne Lawrence, Nicole Lloyd, Michael Marcelle, Kelli Pennington, Irina Rozovksky, Jake Stangel, and Lyndsy Welgos. If you’ve got some spare wall space (and some cash burning a hole through your pocket), make a bid.

Tyler Hicks - A Scrapbook From the Tribal Areas - NYT At War Blog

The New York Times’ blogs keep getting better and better. Everyone knows Lens, but perhaps At War isn’t as well known. Formed out of the now defunct Baghdad Bureau blog, At War is “a reported blog from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and other areas of conflict in the post-9/11 era.” There’s always something interesting to read or see, from the above seized pictures from Pakistan’s restive Waziristan to Franco Pagetti’s grandmother’s gnocchi recipe as served to Ashley Gilbertson for a birthday to a translator’s perspective on speaking with a would-be suicide bomber to downtime on patrol with Afghan and American soldiers.

A number of photographers currently contribute or have contributed to the blog (that list isn’t up to date), and the archives are worth a look: Peter Van Agtmael, Tyler Hicks, Christoph Bangert, Michael Kamber, Johann Spanner, Ashley Gilbertson, and Joao Silva

There have been two prevailing attitudes toward the proposed conference/symposium dealing with issues of race and diversity in photography:

a) That it is absolutely necessary & b) It is a terrifying prospect.

The first point speaks for itself, and the second point becomes clear when one considers the kerfuffles, misunderstanding and (dare I say it) vitriol that has accompanied much online discussion.” -Prison Photography

Following up on earlier talk of a conference on race and photography, Pete Brook has spearheaded the effort to create an online symposium covering the subject, and the momentum is building. A great mix of potential contributors have already responded positively to the idea, and the work behind the scenes is moving quickly. Read about what we have up our sleeves over at Prison Photography. And get involved!

Pieter Hugo - Escort Kama. Enugu, Nigeria, 2008

Prison Photography’s started a great conversation on the possibility of holding a conference on the subject of race and photography. I think Pete may be on to something. We’ve had no shortage of discussion on the issue in the past, and it’s flaring up again as the conversation erupts around Pieter Hugo’s work. Prison Photography brings up a problem I have with this critical response to Hugo’s portrayals of Africans. I understand the concerns, made quite clear in Sebastien Boncy’s treatment of the pictures on Amy Stein’s blog. However, I am fanatically interested in these pictures. They have shown me something, an aspect of culture, that I didn’t know existed. So long as the photos are not completely contrived, and Nollywood and other works might be completely contrived, I have learned from these pictures.

Sebastien Boncy’s central concern with Hugo’s imagery is that its purpose is to allow white people to look at “weird, highly stylized, meticulously crafted images of crazy looking niggers doing crazy looking shit.” Toning down the accusation, he accuses Hugo of “othering” black Africans. That, I can see, and it isn’t a good thing. But I’m not convinced that the opposite is any better. Would Boncy have us look only at pictures of subjects with which we are familiar? Photography is at it’s best when it forces the viewer to confront and understand (or start to understand) the unfamiliar. Perhaps that’s where Hugo’s work is most deficient. The viewer confronts the strangeness, but has no invitation to understand those differences. The importance of diversity lays not solely in the concomitance of disparate cultures or ideas, but in what teases out from their mingling. But in their concurrence, differences must be preserved and celebrated, if cultural diversity is to provide any value. Only pointing a finger at those differences, as in Hugo’s work, does little to achieve that goal.

The discussion surrounding his work, though, is of real importance.

A conference might do well to provide structure and gravity to the debate. A conference on the subject may be ambitious at first, so perhaps the organizers of the New York Photo Festival or PhotoNola or the next Look, could integrate a panel discussion on the subject. Invite curators to create an exhibition addressing notions of race in contemporary and historic photography (both from the developed world looking to the developing world and from the developing world looking to the developed). Involve influential photographers, editors, and curators, from varying genres of photography; photojournalism has much to discuss, but so does commercial photography and fashion photography (especially after Vogue’s blackface…) and art photography.

Jörg Brüggemann / Same Same But Different

Within the last decade backpacking has literally become a global youth movement. Every year millions of young people from first world countries travel the planet taking with them nothing more then their backpacks. They are hoping to find freedom, cultural exchanges and a lot of fun. It has become a tourist industry on its own that has developed its very own touristic infrastructure. In some places like Ko Pha-Ngan in Thailand, Arambol in Goa or Vang Vieng in Laos individual or alternative travel is no longer existing. It has been transfered into a different kind of packaged tour.”

              -Jörg Brüggemann / Same Same But Different

Jörg Brüggemann’s “Same Same But Different” tackles a subject I’ve never seen photographed before. Sure, Martin Parr’s covered tourism and others have covered the effects of travel in local communities, but this treatment of backpacking and its many idiosyncrasies feels like new ground. The viewer is presented with a world not in its natural state, but instead created, produced, for consumption by wealthy, overwhelmingly white travelers looking to experience the third world or The Orient. Phrases such as “third world” and “The Orient” seem particularly apt, both because of the baggage they entail and the sense of separation they impart. Truly, the travelers in these pictures are entirely out of place, and yet they’re surrounded by all the comforts of home. The “foreign” has been rendered familiar. A guest house in India might as well be one in Thailand or Laos; the experience remains the same.

I won’t lie and say these pictures don’t hit close to home. As an American transplanted to China, the scenes in Brüggemann’s essay are all too familiar. I’d hesitate to condemn the travelers as much as The Spinning Head, or perhaps even Brüggemann, but I understand the queasiness. Travel by itself isn’t necessarily suspect. If it were, there’d be moral concerns with leaving our apartments or houses. Confronting the unfamiliar is a necessary and vital component of daily life, and travel is an extension of that. But, the complete destruction of communities and traditions in order to cater to such a widespread phenomenon of travel as backpacking is deserving of criticism and investigation (especially as most backpackers espouse some variant of a wish for spiritual discovery when traipsing around foreign climes).

A great story confronting difficult questions.

(via Asim Rafiqui)

(And my bet is that the title comes from a particularly common piece of so-called “Tinglish,” which I’ve heard, despite having never been to Thailand.)

100eyes: Breaking Ships Broken Men / Saiful Huq Omi

Andy Levin continues to one-up himself with each issue of 100eyes, which is now one of the leading publishers of photojournalism online. Take, for instance, the recent issue featuring exclusively Bangladeshi photographers. We all know Munem Wasif by now, but so many of the photographers presented here, with eye-opening documentary photography, need a wider audience. Remember all that hubbub a while back about cultural diversity in the photography industry? This is one of the answers.

From the introduction:

This issue of 100eyes shows a country as seen through the eyes of its own photographers. There is nothing remarkable about that, except in this case the country is one of the poorest nations in the world, known for being a subject for photojournalism rather than as a provider of photojournalists. Photographers flew into Bangadesh from New York, Paris, or London, that is, when they weren’t headed for nearby India. Photographers will still be flying to Bangladesh, including myself hopefully, but we won’t be alone.”

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.

Photoshelter and Look3 have just announced a call for entries for an online exhibition and projection at the upcoming Festival of the Photograph in Charlottesville. Looks like a great way to sneak your work into the festival if you missed the deadline for Slideluck Potshow or can’t make it to Charlottesville.

Brian Ulrich can’t believe he’s alive because he’s just been named a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow. Other photographers awarded the fellowship this year, most previously unknown to me: Thomas Joshua Cooper (examples), Osamu James Nakagawa, Suzanne Opton (you may have seen her Soldier Billboard Project), Anna Shteynshleyger, Cheryle St. Onge, and Byron Glen Wolfe (can’t find anything online for Wolfe… update: link found thanks to Tom in the comments).

Brian Ulrich has long been a favorite of mine. His work documenting retail stores, thrift stores, and store backrooms, explains the current American economy (starting about when George W. Bush told the American public that the most patriotic thing they could do after Sept. 11 was to go shopping) better than any photojournalism I’ve seen. Ulrich’s recent essay on closed stores in the suburbs for Time left me a little wanting (except for a picture or two), but the rest of his work is top notch, for sure.

Visura Magazine / Issue 2

Print media may be dying a slow death, but I’ve never known a time when magazines and newspapers ran huge edits of photography across multiple pages. Sure I’ve seen the odd spread or two, but those are outliers. My exposure to photography outside of the internet has generally been limited to edits of less than 5 images.

It’s hard to realize, but I think we’re in the middle of a golden age for visual culture. Never has more photography, of such high quality (and, of course, such low quality) been so readily available, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Newspapers and magazines are putting huge–often too huge–edits online, every photographer dead or alive has a portfolio website, blogs like this one or Conscientious or countless others sift through the cruft, and then there are the online magazines.

Visura Magazine, which I had not seen before, has just published their second issue. Where else will you see long pieces by Ed Kashi, Amy Stein, Shelby Lee Adams presented next to one another?

Visura does a lot right: pictures are big, but not too big; edits are long, but tight; diverse range of photographers and photography; great design (though flash and a page layout too wide for my screen are significant drawbacks). There seem to be a million of these online photography magazines popping up, and just as many have gone dormant over the past few years; hard to know which will survive, but it’s great to see a forest starting with so many saplings.

And speaking of the photographers above, be sure to check out “The True Meaning of Pictures: Shelby Lee Adams’ Appalachia”, a documentary exploring the controversy over the photographer’s pictures, Amy Stein’s fantastic series “Domesticated”, now a book, which in my mind is what the world looks like just before the birth of the world described in the Talking Heads’ “(Nothing but) Flowers” (lyrics):