APAD

Reality TV

Austin-based photographer Blake Gordon wants people to turn off their televisions and get outside. He transports us to natural landscapes throughout the American West, with an old school television.

A graduate student of Design at the University of Texas at Austin, he is represented by Aurora Select.

Camille Seaman

Award-winning photographer Peter Turnley talks to CNN’s Jim Clancy about his experience in Haiti and challenges ahead.

Christian Bobst

Nicola Lo Calzo (via Verve Photo)

It began with a bottle of whiskey, a fence and a borrowed folding screen. I arrived in Norfolk, Va. last September to find that the house I rented shared a backyard with Matt and Melissa Eich, recent transplants from Ohio. A shared fence has meant a lot of late night porch-sitting, emergency editing, cooking and, when the tide is high on my side, a relatively safe place to park my car.

Matt and I arrived in Norfolk recent graduates of two different photojournalism programs, Ohio University and the University of Missouri, but we both felt the same nostalgia for the community of photographers we had gone to school with. The wide world outside of school is exciting and daunting; without a peer group to reinforce your work and spur your progress, you can feel unmoored. We are right to feel this way; entering this job market, we navigate an uncertain landscape, propelled by little more than an irresistible commitment to photojournalism. Matt is a freelancer and founding member of LUCEO, which is a robust collective of talented emerging photographers, and I am at my first newspaper staff job at The Virginian-Pilot after internships at The Herald in Jasper, Ind. and The Dallas Morning News. Though our career paths are different, we share a dedication to the communities we photograph and try to become better photographers and better storytellers, everyday. We learn to be better from the people around us, our peers and our subjects, not by sitting at our computers considering our own work (though, to be fair, I think we all do plenty of that.)

By some accident of geography and timing, Norfolk and the surrounding area is populated with some remarkable photographers. Sick of looking at one another’s work all the time, Matt and I wanted to invite them all over and see what they were working on. I had an empty garage and access to a projector. Matt and Melissa had a living room and dining room and, of course, that wide and welcoming porch. Looking to recreate some of that community we missed, we decided to open our doors and invite all the photographers in the Tidewater area to come over for some beer and some photos, asking them to hop the fence after the show for a party at Matt and Melissa’s house. We called it Hop The Fence Photo Night.

I swept the garage, I set up an ancient projector screen from a forgotten storage closet at the Pilot, and lit a fire in the backyard. That first night, Tim Gruber and Jenn Ackerman came up from their retreat on the Outer Banks to talk about their transition from school to freelancing, Ross Taylor, a new staff photographer at the Pilot, showed work from a recent trip to Bangledesh, local photographer Jesse Hutcheson showed work, and two students from ODU, Shane and Caroline, shared photos. We drank, we sat around the fire, we looked at pictures and listened. On subsequent nights we’ve seen work from Nicole Fruge, Maisie Crow, Ryan Henriksen, Brendan Hoffman, Pilot former editor Norm Shafer and the always surprising high-school photographer Richard Perkins, among others. We’ve had hot chocolate in the winter and lemonade in the spring, and this upcoming Hop The Fence Photo Night with be our biggest, as it falls on Matt’s birthday. If you’re in Norfolk, Va. on July the 11th, feel free to drop by and bring work to share.

We see work from students just beginning their forays into photography to accomplished photojournalists, and the discussion, though sometimes long, is always fruitful. As we all know through following APAD, there are communities all over the country, waiting to be coalesced, and there is a relaxed camaraderie to seeing pictures in a garage in your own neighborhood. All it took was a projector, some beer and an email list. So far, it’s been a great year.

1000 copies, his first book in 10 years. Not sure what to expect, all I know is that I’m definitely curious to pay the $18 to find out. It looks to be b/w … which, I thought he was done with after the birth of his child, as stated in his “Minutes to Midnight” Magnum piece, but I’m betting it’s still pretty interesting anyways.

The book is sold through Soth’s publishing arm Little Brown Mushroom. They are certainly doing some interesting things up there in Minnesota.

California is a Place is a multimedia project loaded with potential—at once edgy, fun, experimental, funny and deadly serious—while seemingly constant in it’s own universal type of flux.

The website is a series of ongoing vignettes produced, directed & captured by Filmmaker Drea Cooper & Photographer Zackary Canepari.

Being a photographer means tough decisions: do I purchase food, film or a new photo book this week?

oneyearofbooks gives you inspiration for the latter. Don’t blame me or Laurence Vecten when it comes to paying rent next month. And if you are responsible, perhaps you can connect with Laurence and see about trading books.

Photographer Tim Hussin is taking some time with his brother Noah to travel throughout the country and tell stories about people in everyday communities that are making a difference.

With Noah’s background as a 2008 Fullbright Scholar, and Tim’s experience interning at both National Geographic and MediaStorm.org after being named the 2009 College Phtotographer of the Year, this brotherly duo is out to shake things up a bit.

Instead of relying solely on the decisions of editors and publishers to tell the stories they discover while cycling across the country, they are seeking funding from the general public.

And if you donate to their publicly-funded cause, you will receive a gift ranging from a postcard to a huge poster-sized print as a special thanks.

America reCycled

Photographer Teru Kuwayama of Lightstalkers and a Knight Fellow at Stanford University just won a $202,000 grant to support his project proposal summarized here:

“Broadening the perspectives that surround U.S . military operations in Afghanistan, this project will chronicle a battalion by combining reporting from embedded journalists with user-generated content from the Marines themselves . The troops and their families will be key audiences for the online journal steering, challenging and augmenting the coverage with their feedback . The approach will directly serve the stakeholders and inform the wider public by bringing in on-the-ground views on military issues and the execution of U .S . foreign policy. The troops were recently authorized to use social media while deployed, and this project will also study the impact of that decision on the military.”

Congrats to Teru and all of the winners for their great ideas. It’s exciting to see good journalistic and reporting ideas get some real money behind them. More details on the winners here. http://www.newschallenge.org/knc-2010-winners

The winning portfolio for EPF’s 2010 Grant Recipient Davide Monteleone is now up on Burn. Davide will receive a $15,000 grant from Burn Magazine & the Magnum Cultural Foundation to continue working in the Northern Caucasus of the former Soviet Union.

The 13 EPF Finalists Preview has also been published with complete essays to be released on Burn in the coming weeks.

Burn Emerging Photographer Grant 2010 Finalists
Congratulations to all EPF finalists! Below are links to their individual websites for reference:

• Matteo Bastianelli
• Michael Christopher Brown
• Victor Cobo
• James Dodd
• Matt Eich
• Dima Gavrysh
• Jiwon Kim
• Justin Maxon
• Alexander Mendelevich
• Davide Monteleone
• Jukka Onnela
• Emily Schiffer
• Kate Stone

Burn Emerging Photographer Grant 2010 Jury

• Alessandra Sanguinetti
• Michael “Nick” Nichols
• Bruce Gilden

Sarah Elliott

Highlights from NPR’s On The Media radio broadcast this week include:

• A discussion of photographers facing continued access denial while attempting to cover the Deep Water Horizon oil spill in the Gulf
• How Charles Bowden’s latest journalism-skirting fusion of reportage, poetry, police transcripts & illustrations may allude to the collapse of Mexico’s government in his work Dreamland: The Way out of Juarez
• Why video of the Israeli Blockade Crisis is just making a confusing situation all the more obfuscated

UNC Professor Chad Stevens and his team are in the latter stages of a long term documentary film that focuses on mountain removal mining and its effects on a community. The project, Stevens says, is nearing a resolution and he and his team are seeking the funding to finish this up. His proposal, as well as a trailer (which in and of itself is a compelling piece of documentary filmmaking) for the film are up on the unique fundraising site Kickstarter. Please take a look here.

Ohio University’s School of Visual Communication just launched it’s fourth iteration of their now annual Soul of Athens multimedia storytelling website. Each year the presentation changes and we get a chance to see a lot of good projects in various forms from lots of the overworked, sleepless designers, photographers, writers, coders, producers and more who put this together. This year’s version has a bit of a stripped down aesthetic and utilizes social media in new and exciting ways to include the community whose stories they are telling, including a time-based release for much of the content, with the entire content rolling out over the course of a matter of weeks so that viewers can come back repeatedly and see something fresh throughout the month of June.  Besides some interesting stories, a cool little unexpected piece is Phil Walter’s and Andy Eggert’s short film of ink falling.

Disclaimer – I’m an alum of the school.

The folks over at iN-Public have just recently put out a street photography compilation of 200 images by their photographers over the past 1o years. Appropriately and simply titled 10 I’d imagine this might be an interesting resource for finding some work beyond the household street photographer names, and to maybe see some new locations too. Check it out here. The price is about what you’d expect for a boutique hardcover….actually maybe a bit less.

Photographer Aaron Huey gives a moving presentation on the state and his documentation of the Lakotah tribe of the Black Hills. It is a tragic and striking reminder of our history as a nation and a revealing look at the current state of life and struggle within the reservation. Altogether Huey’s photographs are beautiful and inspiring.

Bas Uterwijk

Molly Landreth