Wordle is poetry design meets thrift store shopping. Take a bundle of words, a quote, a shopping list, a love letter gone awry, and ingest the sentences into wordle. Your words are regurgitated as a well designed and seemingly organized thought cloud. Wordle randomly mixes and matches font, layout, color, language, and your input, into a gallery piece or a printable design.
I started creating one a day, documenting my daily food intake. That guilty bag of blue M&M's suddenly became sandwiched between coffee and asparagus and perpendicular to turkey instead of hanging over my head.
The first MediaStorm workshop projects launched recently, featuring a fine cast of photographers including Lucy Nicholson of Reuters and Carolyn Cole of the Los Angeles Times. The workshops took place the first week in May, giving photographers a canvas to define a New Yorkcentric story with audio, video, stills, and production.
I recently took a look at Reuters photographer Lucy Nicholson's piece and was impressed with the combination of media Lucy utilized. She told the story of the famous New York Naked Cowboy from an intimate perspective, incorporating a narrative from his girlfriend as well as the Cowboy's described auto-biography. The quality of the editing and production work was class.
The workshop, if interested in attending, is not for amateurs. The admitted photographers in this first round are at the top of the photojournalism field. It's compelling that MediaStorm is single-handedly helping talented photographers compose multifaceted narratives.
Moo.com- An ingenious printing press allowing users to create paint-swatch-esque "moo cards". The cards come in a petite box and can be used as a mini collection of images or as satisfying business cards.
Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years- MOMA's illustrious flash experience devoted to the sculptor. Full screen images of work with a nice splitting zygote menu for effect.
Checkland Kindleysides- The most soothing promotional design site EVER. Imagine: a paper tree blows leisurely in the wind while you look at hard-hitting design work for some of the largest corporations in the world. The navigation is as fluid as the calming background music.
PostSecret- A cheap and easy (yet so gratifying) blog. Concepting off of I can Has Cheezburger, this blog takes random doodlings, drawings, photos and offers them vulnerable narratives.
Blurb- Make your own book. Blurb allows users to download software and put together a collection of images/words for a very captivating price. It seems to offer more options than iphoto and has a FANTASTIC URL.
This past weekend was hectic for the New York art scene. The grand Armory Show came to Chelsea along with a slew of other less exalted fairs. The crowning event for me was the cultish photo event, the Slideluck Potshow, at the Chelsea Art Museum.
Slideluck originally began as a social gathering in an apartment and quickly burgeoned into a massive party. The main concept of Slideluck is based around the dual interaction of a potluck and a slide-show. An attendee must bring food/beverage to participate in the slide-show watching, which begins post desultory shop-talk and a grub session of mostly chocolaty deserts. The participating photographers range from celebrated professional to emerging amateur, but the images are always of the highest caliber. The participating audience is a mixed bag, but all are welcome to attend.
The most recent Slideluck was the first true combination of still photography and multimedia. The past attempts to include audio beyond music didn't succeed due to the overly-chatty atmosphere of the events. The recent combination of fewer freebie- hunters (the event is now paid-membership based), the leveled architecture of the Chelsea Art Museum, and the sophisticated content of the multimedia, fostered an attentive crowd. Or perhaps we now just expect more than images...
The once wee face of Slide-luck is converting into a diversified project-- both in location and work presented. It's worth the membership.
To commemorate the five year anniversary of the war in Iraq, Reuters joined with MediaStorm to create a multimedia project portraying the agency's coverage and bureau. The presentation 'Bearing Witness' is both succinct and substantial, extracting stories and images epitomizing the futility of this war and iconography representing the agency's ubiquity.
I am consistently impressed with MediaStorm productions, and this is no exception. The chronology of the war was beautifully interlaced with the chronology of coverage, of personalized accounts from within the bureau representative of the greater conflict. The most harrowing account came from Samia Nakhoul, the Gulf Bureau Chief who had been covering Iraq since 1991. She explains the destitution of watching a country destroyed, her own body mauled, and the weight of Post-Trauma after seeing children killed. She cannot cover war any longer.
A despondent thread ran through all of the interviews. Most mentioned that this was like any other war. Civilians are always effected in wartime, but the account painted was one of complete inseparability from all involvement; of complete defenselessness within Iraq. There was no insinuation of positivity, just a tributary nod to all involved and a sad remembrance of the lost. There is a huge amount of heroism in war coverage, but the price is an irreversible reverence for lost relationships, and lost pieces of ones self.
One of the most respected photographers in the industry recently passed. Philip Jones Griffiths (1936-2008) shot images for 60 years, working with the esteemed Magnum Photos agency. His epic images of post-war Vietnam published in the collection 'Viet Nam at Peace' are respected as touching articles of a country dealing with the emotional wreckage of conflict. Magnum Photos put together a touching tribute on both their blog and main website.
According to a recent Stanford News Service report, Standford researchers are developing a camera exceeding our two dimensional standards.
Professor Abbas El Gamal and a team of students are embarking on research to develop a three-dimensional camera containing 12,616 lenses as opposed to the single lens in two-dimensional SLRs. Stanford News Service reports, "they've shrunk the pixels on the sensor to .7 microns, several times smaller than the pixels in standard digital cameras." These pixels are further grouped into arrays of 256 with a lens topping each array.
The coolest thing about this proposed invention is its depth perception and quality. Imagine having the ability to upload images and instead of viewing and editing a flat surface, different planes of the image are navigable and alterable. Direct your 'crop' tool to take you five feet into the frame instead of 20 pixels from the top and side. The quality of the imagery would lead you into gigapixel territory, eliminating the antiquated 'megapixel' devices.
Cost and size? Cheaper than your current point and shoot, and smaller than your cell phone. Now if that isn't photo-progress, I'm not really sure what is.
The Times created a multimedia piece featuring the images and voice of Moore. The shift in images represents the trajectory of events; the rally begins saturated and framed, and quickly explodes into vibrant smears of oranges and blacks, then to a hurried and bloody aftermath. Photographers who are lucky/unfortunate enough to witness momentous events in history have a nanosecond to make a mortal decision. John stayed, documented, motor-drived during the blast, and solemnly reflected on the tragedy .
He states, "I stayed clear of the area where they were doing the body searches... that's where I thought a bomber might set off the charge...they knew their target, they wanted to get her, and they did."
Check out John's work and the rest of the winners of the POYi prize.
There has been a series of award announcements within photography recently, most notably the PDN 30 award and the ICP infinity award. I attended a charming (and surprisingly informative) lecture with three of the PDN's winners at Parson's School of Design, which influenced me to follow up by checking out the portfolios of the 27 others.
Most of the portfolios were commercial/portrait based portfolios with a sprinkling of photojournalism. I noticed the crops instantly- square- reinforcing the concept that these images were shot using medium format cameras, and most likely with film. There is a classic reverence for the use of film; and this idealism was expressed in the winners panel. There is a connotation of professional dexterity, skill (sports withstanding) if shooting preference for portraiture/art is analog instead of digital. There is a purity attached.
But the digital/analog debate has become contextual -- if a magazine demands a tight deadline, blessed film becomes an impossibility. This makes me question, were deadlines not tight 10 years ago? Is film only reserved for the upper echelon photogs who actually DON'T have tight deadlines? Would any 'true professional' photographer admit that they prefer digital over film?
Regardless, there were some standout selections from the winners-- Christina Paige's eerie street shots, Mike McGregor's elegant portraits, Mikhael Subotzky's diverse documentaries ( He also won the Young Photographers Award from the ICP). I recommend perusing the winners portfolios at PhotoSource.
I've been fortunate enough to participate in the brilliant taste tests that AOL Food has started to hold on a regular basis. Thus far I have shot peanut butter spoon-fulls, Valentines Chocolate, candy bar cross-sections, and most recently 52 frozen pizzas.
While most of these classy cuisines have been presented in a Consumer Reports format, the candy bar cross-sections are available in quiz form. You think you know what the innards of a Snickers Bar look like? From my perspective, a spelunkers dream. And if you want to see more disorienting cross sections of not so delectable gastronomic inventions, check out the Cross-Sectioning site.
