Mark Tucker is one of the most consistently inspiring photographers working today. His work spans from commercial and advertising to travel and documentary - all in beautiful black and white.

His personal projects are great and have a very southern sense of humor.

some beautiful images from antarctica

there was a nice portrait project called freedom row in the NYTimes sunday magazine this week. the premise behind the portraits is that after serving hard time for someone else's crime, these recently exonerated men revisit the past.
in april 2003, an exhibition of taryn simon's work will be on display at p.s. 1 contemporary art center, an affiliate of the museum of modern art.
[thanks to logan wallace for pointing us at it!!]

here's a chance to add some new names to your photo repertoire:
incredibly straight forward, gimmick free, and very real is how i would describe the portraits of john johnston. he's got a very clean, refreshing way of seeing and an eye for quirky deatils. johnston's personal project involves some spliced negatives, and a lot of tape. it's a little darker, a little more experimental, a little more about the culmination of several artistic influences.
michael grecco has photographed everyone from professional athletes to CEOs to movie stars to street performers. the one thing all his pictures have in common is that his ability to get to the essence of that person's soul is captured beautifully every time.
what amazes me most about chris buck's site is that you get to read the stories behind the photographs. so not only do you get to see that this guy is a bad ass with a camera, but you also get to read about his quirkiness, spontanaeity, and care-free attitude, then see how that translates into a photograph. you also learn that he has this innate ability to get people to do things that most would never even have the nerve to ask them to do.
mark my words, the up-and-coming young norwegian photojournalist jonas bendiksen is going to explode onto the international agency scene and find his name being spoken of with reverence by the photogods someday.
and then there's darin mickey. his photos are proof of what the spawn looks like when you cross an abercrombie and fitch catalog with a doubletake magazaine.

Just what the hell is going on over at National Geographic?! After 12 months or so of magazines that only occasionally inspired I saw this being advertised on TV last night and nearly spit my beer all over the floor.

With several lack luster "special editions" hitting the shelves recently will National Geographic now stop at nothing to make a buck?

in an act of both boredom and pleasure, i'm going through the random assortment of photo-related bookmarks i've collected, and clearing house for your viewing pleasure:
i can just picture it... a couple of friends sitting around having a late-night brainstorming session over onion rings and milkshakes at a greasy spoon, going, hey let's start a website with some great big long name like interviewswithandorarticlesonphotographersandotherimagemakers.com. and they then have photographers and other imagemakers interview people and write articles on the conversations . and they did. the resulting site can be shortened to photographerinterviews.com for those who, like me, stopped remembering big long strings of things in the 4th grade. it's a fun handful of interviews between a photographer and his/her photographee.
associated press reporters, writers and photographers will be taking their bylines off stories this week to support their union's call for fair health care coverage.
so i stumbled across a website called haikoo! which playing off of the yahoo! search engine sets itself apart by being a directory powered by poetry. you can search using keywords found in web-inspired haikus. so naturally, the geek in me did a search for "photo" which led me to "a collection of canadian photography presented as a boxed series of postcards available to the general public... presenting the best work of both emerging and established image makers" via this fun haiku: the women will speak / through the light in photographs / without any words.
and two nice photo essays up at time magazine: the face of aids in asia, by john stanmeyer and inside the bubble -- a look at the world that surrounds the president, by christopher morris. both of vii
colombian marxist rebels kindap 2 u.s. journalists
and last but not least, turning your shack into a live-in, life-sized pinhole camera which involved lots of tape and yielded some pretty rad images and huge kudos for experimentation.

"Good photographers sometimes take bad pictures and occasional photographers sometimes take great pictures. The Everyman contest offers a forum for both of these categories."

Do you think it's true that everyone takes great photos, even if by accident?

"EVERY photographer is a photographer of transition. The shutter blinks, confines history to a moment or a mood, but elsewhere, life moves on. The image left behind is part of a world that is already receding.
Bruce Davidson has been taking pictures for more than 50 of his 69 years. Throughout his career, he has been a particular poet of transition, his lens drawn to places and moments on the verge of historical eclipse."
[NYTimes login: aphotoaday / password: aphotoaday]

Story-telling through the much abused and underrated form of the music video. The beauty lies in that each "scene" can be frozen to create a perfect still yet the lyrics and the images are amazing. Whether you like the music (Cash covering a NIN song) or not, the power of the medium cannot be denied.

Edward Keating leaves the NYTimes over staged news photo allegation. "The Times and Mr. Keating have reached a mutually satisfactory agreement regarding his employment, and as a result, he no longer works here," says Times spokesperson Catherine Mathis.

right on... you just fold and use these origami pinhole cameras.
" The modern camera is a wonderful thing, but it's nice to remember how simple the mechanism can be. You can strip away the technology until there is little left but the abstraction on which the machine is based. A simple manipulation of space, a few materials, and a couple of hand tools and the magic (physics) is at your fingertips without sophisticated engineering.
To simplify these cameras as much as possible I made them out of the 11x14 inch photo-paper itself. There is no film in the camera because the camera is the film. Like a salad bowl made of lettuce leaf, and consumed with the meal, the camera doesn't exist after its utility is fulfilled. There is no machine. It is more of an arrangement than a thing. "

it's that time of year again. contests, contests, contests...
POY entries must be in missouri by january 14.
World Press entries must be in the netherlands by january 16.
and the deadline for BOP is february 14.

happy new year to all.
didn't see enough good photos in 2002?
here are some of the best of the bunch:
the new york times has a few of their favorites chronologically [user name: aphotoaday / password: aphotoaday]. and time magazine recently posted the year in pictures divided by categories like, people, spirit, nature and conflict.
both are worth drooling over.