Things of interest

fotografi:

Erika Svensson

www.erikasvensson.com

Sounds like an interesting project!

“The Girl Project is a national collection of photographs taken by teenage girls. The photographs represent teenage girlhood and life as seen through the eyes of young women in America. The strongest images will be edited into a book and a traveling exhibition on female adolescence. E-mail us today and we will send you a disposable camera!

thegirlproject@gmail.com

Participation in The Girl Project is FREE. All we need from you is your time and creativity. Your photographs tell the story. Shoot what and who you want. Shoot close-up or from far away. Use the film to photograph 1 or 36 subjects. Take pictures of people, things or landscapes. Take self portraits. Use the camera to express your feelings and thoughts – happy, sad, angry or indifferent. Be thoughtful or careless, formal or informal, traditional or experimental, literal or symbolic. Photography is a visual way to communicate your ideas and opinions to the world.

While it is our hope to get as many photographs as possible, we regret that we will not be able to use all of them. Only the most unique and creative will be selected. Should one or more of your photographs be chosen for the book and/or gallery show, you will be notified. GOOD LUCK!”

Photo Courtesy of Marsha Amanova

Crying is a powerful act; taking a photograph of oneself crying and putting it on the Internet is another matter entirely. It is a very specific cultural phenomenon and is in many ways much like a performance. As such, the title of this project is borrowed from a piece of the same name made by the Dutch performance artist Bas Jan Ader in 1970. His piece consisted of a silent 16mm short black and white film of himself crying uncontrollably with no explanation. Regardless of the authenticity of his tears, his grief is overwhelmingly real. It is at once hard to watch, mesmerizing, and beautiful. 

“I’m Too Sad To Tell You (after Bas Jan Ader)” was originally conceived as a project to create an archive of self-portraits taken while crying. The images were to be displayed online on a website and then later made into a book. An open call was posted on the photo sharing community Flickr.com asking people to submit their crying self-portraits over the period of one month. 

The website went online containing over 100 self-portraits, a third of which were found on Flickr searching through “tags” people attached to their images. A majority of the people who independently submitted images had Flickr accounts as well. Thus, the project also deals with the phenomenon of Flickr and other similarly structured websites using photographs as a form of communication. The “I’m Too Sad” website then becomes an attempt to give the images back some of their integrity as images by placing them in a clean non-communication based gallery format.

The 50 States Project has brought together 50 photographers from across the USA.

Each photographer lives in one of the 50 States and during the year long project each photographer will represent the State where they live. Every two months each photographer will be sent an assignment by e-mail, they then have two months to produce one image in response. The images must represent both their style and the State in which they live.

The first assignment, (“People”), was sent on 2nd January 2009. The second, (“Habitat”), was sent on 1st March 2009. The remaining 4 assignments will be announced on 1st May, 1st July, 1st September and 1st November 2009 respectively.

By the end of the project there will be 300 images which hopefully represent the talent of the photographers involved and have something to say about the USA today.

[via photojojo]

A nice series of darkrooms in London by Richard Nicholson.

Extract from the project description: “This project, shot on 4”x5” film, documents London’s remaining professional darkrooms. It is based on my nostalgia for a dying craft (there are no young printers). It is in these rooms that printers have worked their magic, distilling the works of photographers such as David Bailey, Anton Corbijn and Nick Knight into a recognisable ‘look’.”

Great portraits by Chris Buck. Also check out these interesting interviews with him on aphotoeditor.com: [part1] [part2]. [via aphotoeditor]

The New York Times Magazine commissioned Nadav Kander to photograph “Obama’s People” [via aphotoeditor]

I went to see what’s up with Graig “Naughty James” Cowling’s 1095 Project and saw that the diary he has been using for posting his images has been developed to a open platform, looks interesting! The Big Cartel platform Graig uses for his webshop also looks promising, have to keep that in mind.