Jack Lalanne

"If it tastes good, spit it out." From Jack Lalanne's guide to good eating.

My wife used to shout out his name when I took my top off. I never understood why. I do now. Yes, Jack Lalanne is real and he is dead. RIP Jack. Read his obituary here.

We are the youth

Until I started at Auburn, I went to a private, Evangelical Christian school in Memphis. I realized I was gay in probably the 7th grade. But if I had come out then, I would have been expelled. The general consensus at my school from Romans 1 was that it wasn’t a sin to be attracted to men, but that it was a sin to act on that attraction. And so I always said to myself I’m in the clear as long as I don’t do anything or tell anybody.



This is from We Are the Youth

We Are the Youth is a photographic journalism project chronicling the individual stories of LGBT youth in the United States.
This comes via La Pura Vida

Alixandra Fazzina

This is a lovely video on Alixandra Fazzina, shown working on a long term documentary project on displaced people in Pakistan.

See more of her work ( Million Shillings: Escape from Somalia) here.

Elisabeth Meyer

I love these pictures from Alaska, by Norwegian photographer Elisabeth Meyer. They can be found on the Preus Museum's Collection (which also has some other fantastic collections including Julia Cameron, Frank Sutcliffe and much much more). Thank you Mrs Deane for pointing me in this direction.

Also worth looking at are the Bolette Berg and Marie Hoeg pictures. Wonderful.

Copying pictures: Three Varieties

So here are two versions of  Mr Brainwash after Greg Friedmann's Run DMC portrait (read all the copyright implications of this here) , and here are 6 pictures by Michael Wolf with some Chinese copy artists. Finally a little bit of Kim Jong Phil.

Open-i and emphas.is: A new funding model?

It was fascinating to go on the Open-i webinar and hear the discussion of emphas.is and their crowdsourcing for photojournalism and documentary projects.

The most interesting question was asked by Paul Lowe who wondered if there wasn't another way to judge the success of photographs other than in pure numerical terms. It's lovely having lots of people see one's pictures in a newspaper or magazine, but given the almost inevitable nature of the owners of most magazines and their editorial stances, it's not so wonderful really is it. Does having a massive spread in Time or Newsweek or The Sunday Times really help anybody outside the photographic rhetoric of making a difference and bearing witness? I don't know if it does.

So what can we have for a new measure of success? This was the question posed by Paul Lowe. Another listener to the webinar asked if emphas.is would be funding local, community based projects or be more focussed on the kinds of expensive overseas projects that magazines might once have funded. In other words, would emphas.is be doing anything new rather than simply act as a replacement for crumbling old models. Would the funding be going on flights and transport, or would it be focus on more locally based photographers, with all the local involvement and knowledge that this might entail. And if it would fund those projects, wouldn't that make for a new measure of what success might be, something more akin to the outcomes that NGOs are involved with, something more tangible that the number crunching of how many people have seen the pictures or how many copies have been sold.

I'm not quite sure how you could measure the effectiveness of a project, but it sounds like a wonderful idea for finding a new model of how photography works, a model that could help build new involved audiences,  and so move photojournlism away from the preaching to the converted stance it so often takes at present.

I'm not sure if this is what the guys at emphas.is have in mind, but if it is, it would make the project a truly exciting, innovative and international platform for new work, one that would direct funds across a broad  spectrum and reach places that photography does not go to at present, providing knowledge, experience and insights into corners of the world in the most cost-effective way.

It would be a renewal in other words. And photography needs that.

And does anyone have an answer to that question - How can we judge the success of a photographic project.

Lauren Simonutti: If I do not have a photograph...I cannot be certain it happened

This is Lauren Simonutti's super-tactile handmade book for 2010, available from her blog, The Madness is the Method.


Simonutti's work is, in her own words:

"The misfirings of my beloved/despised mind that conspire to convince me to destroy all have rendered me housebound and led to a solitary life. I am a creature of past, proof, memory and imaginary friends."

"I have reached the point where if I do not have a photograph of something I cannot be certain it happened. So, locked inside the house with nothing else left, I shoot this"