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We have lots of party pictures from the PDN Photo Annual Party, held May 20 at the Tribeca Skyline Studios!

We have so many photos, in fact, that if you were among the winners, contest judges, sponsors and friends who attended the PDN Photo Annual party, be sure to check out our online galleries of party photos.  You’re likely to find a photo of yourself.

Richard Marot took some great photos at the Sony Studio. (Offer people a few props and the assistance of fashion stylist Ian Heath, and they can’t wait to strike a pose.)  Brendan Remler also photographed guests throughout the evening, both from the party floor and up on the deck of the Tribeca Rooftop, where guests enjoyed views of the Empire State Building, the Hudson River and the moon. And PDN thanks all the guests who served as paparazzi that night, taking photos with the dozens of Instax cameras that FujiFilm gave away.

You can also see Richard Marot’s time lapse video, hosted by Vimeo, showing the party space from set up through clean up.  Thanks for the memories!

(Photo © Richard Marot/Sony)

The winners of the third annual F Awards for Concerned Photography (promoted by Fabrica, Research Centre on Communication, Treviso, Italy, and Fondazione Forma per la Fotografia, Milan) are Jérôme Sessini of France for his photo essay "So Far From God, Too Close to America" (above) and Matt Eich of the U.S. for "Carry Me Ohio."

The jury, chaired by Peter Galassi, chief curator of the department of photography at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, unanimously agreed that Jérôme Sessini's ongoing exploration of drug-related violence in Mexico at the U.S. border is "remarkable for its sustained engagement with an increasingly alarming and dangerous reality, for its attention to concrete particulars, and for its ambition to convey the scope and complexity of the conflict." As the F award winner, Sessini will receive 20,000 Euros, the possibility of publishing a book and of having an exhibition of the work.

F25 winner (for photographers under 25) Matt Eich received recognition for his ongoing project focusing on the daily lives of the people residing in Southeastern Ohio who are coping with minimal opportunities, horrific housing conditions and sub-standard schools. Eich will receive a one-year scholarship in Fabrica’s photography department.

Getty Images, which has been licensing a selected collection of Flickr images since March 2009, has opened its licensing doors to the Flickr masses.

Flickr members can now "opt in" to a program that makes their images available for licensing through Getty. That doesn't mean Getty will promote the work of every Flickr member who opts in, though. Instead, the agency will simply handle the licensing transaction whenever an image user clicks on a "Request to License" link next to the images of a participating Flickr member.

"Customers have been coming to us asking about [Flickr] imagery that we would never invite into the collection. An example would be an image of an obscure travel location that isn't the most genius picture," says Erin Sullivan, Getty's director of content development. "And some Flickr members get tired of people asking to use their images for free, which happens quite a bit. So this program addresses both sides of that equation."

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Photographer and educator Joe Deal, who was instrumental in the development of the landmark exhibition "New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape" in 1975 and was the subject of several solo shows, died June 18 at a hospice in Providence, Rhode Island. The cause of death was cancer, according to his gallery, Robert Mann Gallery in New York.

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The Sotheby’s auction of more than 1000 photographs from the Polaroid Collection founded by Edwin H. Land in the 1950s will go ahead next week despite the controversy surrounding the sale.

Hundreds of artists, including Ansel Adams, William Wegman, Andy Warhol, Imogen Cunningham, Robert Frank, Helmut Newton, Luigi Ghirri, Chuck Close and Robert Mapplethorpe, donated Polaroid photos and other photographic prints to Land’s collection with the understanding, according to Close, that they were contributing to a collection that would be kept intact.

However PBE Corp., formerly Polaroid Corp., has been ordered by a Minnesota Bankruptcy Court judge to sell the collection to pay debts. PBE Corp. became a victim of a $3.7 billion Ponzi scheme by Minnesota businessman Tom Petters, whose Petters Group Worldwide bought it in 2005. Petters was convicted last year of fraud and money laundering, a sentence he is appealing while serving a 50-year prison term. After unsuccessful efforts to sell the collection to an institution, PBE Corp. decided to hold an auction to compensate creditors.

Some of the artists, most notably Chuck Close, under guidance from former magistrate judge Sam Joyner were reportedly contemplating legal action to block the sale from taking place, however no legal action has materialized.

Sotheby’s will auction only part of the collection—“the part of the collection that we felt had the most auction viability,” Sotheby’s photography expert Denise Bethel told reporters. The high estimate for the Sotheby’s auction is nearly $11 million.

Bankruptcy trustee John R. Stoebner will continue to seek buyer for the works that aren’t being offered for sale in the Sotheby’s auction, Bethel said.

Meanwhile, The Impossible Project, a Netherlands company that makes instant film for vintage Polaroid cameras offered an undisclosed sum for the 4,500 images from the Polaroid Collection that have been on loan at the Musée de l’Elysée in Switzerland since 1990. According to Dr. Florian Kaps, the company’s executive director, the offer has been accepted in principle but a contractual agreement is yet to be signed. Kaps says he hopes to complete the sale next week.

Adding to the controversy surrounding the sale and dispersal of the Polaroid Collection are questions about whether thousands of images may have been lost or stolen under PBE’s ownership. AD Coleman has pointed out on his blog Photocritic International that previous estimates placed the size of the collection at more than 24,000 pieces, while PBE Corp. stated in bankruptcy proceedings that the collection numbers just 16,000 pieces.

Stoebner did not respond to PDN’s request for an interview.

The Sotheby’s sales is scheduled for June 21–22. More information about the work included in the sale can be found here: http://www.sothebys.com/minisite/polaroid/index.html

Related: Auction Preview: Gems of the Polaroid Collection

—By Conor Risch and Eli Meixler

Tim Hetherington
and Sebastion Junger’s award-winning documentary film "Restrepo" is
set to open in theaters starting on June 25, 2010 in most major cities across
the U.S. The feature-length film won the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary films
at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, and was purchased by the National Geographic
Channel.

Restrepo takes its viewers inside Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley to a remote
U.S. Army outpost where 15 U.S soldiers are in combat. In 2007 Hetherington and
Junger were embedded with the 173rd Airborne Brigade and made a total of ten
trips to the Korengal while on assignment for Vanity Fair magazine and ABC
News. There was no running water, internet, or phone communication, and for a
while no electricity or heat, just sandbags and ammo. Hetherington
gathered 150 hours of footage showing an intimate view of the daily life at the
outpost and a harrowing depiction of war.  

For specific
screenings click here.

To View the
trailer for the film, click here.

- By Amber Terranova

VII Photo announced today that several photographers have joined the VII Network and VII Mentor Program.

Afghanistan-based photographer Andrea Bruce, who has worked extensively in Iraq as a staff and contract photographer for The Washington Post, and Paris-based photographer Tomas van Houtryve, who won 2010 Photographer of the Year from POYi, have joined the VII Network. Both are new to VII.

Adam Ferguson, Benedicte Kurzen and Maciek Nabrdalik, who were participating in the VII Mentor Program, are now members of the VII Network.

Tanyth Berkeley, Giovanni Cocco, Peter DiCampo, Ilana Panich-Linsman and Erin Trieb were invited to join the VII Mentor Program, the agency said in a statement.

Photographers and photo industry professionals who attended the LOOKbetween festival over the past weekend at Deep Rock Farm near Charlottesville, VA, participated in small, informal group discussions on Saturday morning that addressed three topics: The Business: From Individual to Agency; Storytelling Techniques: From Film to Video; and Publishing: From Book to iPad.

The shift to video being explored by many photographers was one of the major themes of a Storytelling Techniques discussion of which I was a part. And of course one of the primary questions about photographers creating video was, “Who is going to fund the work?”

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Davide Monteleone has won the $15,000 Emerging Photographer Grant from Burn Magazine and the non-profit Magnum Foundation for his work on the Northern Caucuses. Burn’s founder, photographer David Alan Harvey, announced Monteleone’s prize on Saturday June 12 at the LookBetween festival in Charlottesville, VA. 

The grant supports the continuation of a photographic project with either a journalistic purpose or purely personal and artistic intent. Monteleone has been documenting the Caucuses since 2008. 

Other prizes and honors were also announced at LookBetween. Masud Alam Liton, a photo student at the Pathshala South Asian Media Academy in Dhaka, Bangladesh, won the Student Project Award from the photo cooperative Luceo Images. Liton, who will receive $1,000 and a year’s mentorship with a photographer at Luceo, was chosen from applicants representing 43 schools on three continents, according to Luceo photographer Daryl Peveto announced.

 Though Bryan Anselm’s proposal for a project on the Srebrenica Genocide did not win the Luceo Student Project Award, his work was so highly regarded by the judges that one of them, Michael Wichita of AARP, offered Anselm an assignment.

Erik Danzer from Photocrati, a digital media company that provides online and blogging support for photographers, announced the winner of its $5,000 grant to an emerging photographer working on humanitarian or environmental projects. Seattle photographer Mark J. Davis won the Photocrati grant for his work on the effects of large-scale fishing on the livelihoods of individual fishermen in Chile.

Also at LookBetween, Ted Genoways, editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, a sponsor of the festival, announced that the magazine is devoting an issue to photography. Ten of the emerging photographers invited to the festival will be published in the special issue—and paid for their contributions. Genoways said he and Look3 founder Nick Nichols would be conferring about the selection of photographers—but during the Saturday night slideshow, Genoways was taking notes on his program.

For more on LookBetween, see Look Between Highlights Emerging Photographers' Multimedia.