“There is no more meaningful honor than one given by one’s peers,” said photographer David Goldblatt as he accepted the Cornell Capa Lifetime Achievement award last night. Goldblatt’s was the last of the awards given at the 29th Annual International Center of Photography Infinity Awards, an event honoring achievements in photography. The awards presentation, held at Pier Sixty in New York City, is the primary fundraising event for the International Center of Photography (ICP), including its museum, photo school,  educational programs, student scholarships and community outreach.

In his acceptance speech, Goldblatt apologized for voicing a note of criticism about his award: Its name. “Lifetime Achievement,” he said, implies “one has reached the end of the road,” suggesting the winner wouldn’t be coming back to accept another award in “15 or 20 years.” Goldblatt, who was born in 1930, said that if it were renamed the “Work in Progress Award,” the recipient might be encouraged to work harder, albeit “in a state of geriatric dissolution.” Mark Robbins, the executive director of ICP and the master of ceremonies for the evening, then told Goldblatt, “We look forward to much, much more.”

“Work in Progress” also describes recent images by the Young Photographer Award winner, Kitra Cahana, who has begun to follow “a new trajectory in my photography,” she said. A photojournalist who has shot for National Geographic and The New York Times, she has over the past year taken intimate and quiet photos of her father in his hospital bed. As a result of a stroke, he is paralyzed from the eyes down. Cahana explained in the video that preceded her speech that her father, a rabbi, now dictates his sermons “letter by letter, blink by blink.”

Actor Jeff Bridges, winner of a Special Achievement Award, praised Cahane’s work in his acceptance speech. Bridges, who shoots film on a Widelux camera to photograph on movie sets, offered a toast to film as well as to the moments photography captures.

David Guttenfelder, the Associated Press photographer who has photographed widely in North Korea for the past year and a half, won the Photojournalism award. Other award winners view photojournalism with skepticism. Cristina de Middel won the Publication prize for her book The Afronauts, which envisions Zambia’s aborted attempt to create a space program in 1964. She said she had worked as a photojournalist until she became frustrated with the media. “Two years ago, I started messing with fact and fiction,” and decided to try “telling stories in a new way.” The video interview that preceded her speech showed archival news photos of the space program, as well as real documents she incorporated into the book.  (Like all the videos shown last night, it was created for the event by MediaStorm. A longer form of each video can be viewed on the MediaStorm website.)

Mishka Henner, winner of the Art prize, has doctored iconic images by Robert Frank (a past Cornell Capa Award winner) by removing significant sections. He has also explored oil fields by collecting satellite images and gathered images from Google Street View for a study of sites where sex workers have been solicited. “It’s funny. Do photographers own what they photograph?” Henner asks in his video interview. “It’s raw material for me, just as Frank’s woman in an elevator was raw material to him.”

The award for Applied/Fashion/Advertising was given to Erik Madigan Heck, whose clients include Neiman Marcus, Eres, Vanity Fair and W. “I create an image purely to create a beautiful image. Sometimes I don’t show the product,” he said in his interview.

The ICP Trustees Award was given to Pat Schoenfeld, who was hired by ICP founder Cornell Capa in 1974, shortly after he opened the museum. Schoenfeld launched the museum book store, and over the years worked on membership, publications, publicity and other programs before she left ICP to launch the ARTS cable service. She has served on ICP’s board since 1987. She told the audience that she thinks of herself as “the grandmother of ICP,” having seen it through its childhood under founder Cornell Capa, and its adolescence under the direction of Willis Hartshorn, who stepped down last year. She said, “I look forward to the coming years with our new director, Mark Robbins.”

This year’s Infinity Award winners were selected by Susan Bright, writer and curator; Douglas Nickel, professor at Brown University; and Ramon Revert, editor in chief and creative director, Editorial RM. They made selections from nominations submitted by a nine-person committee that included Isolde Brielmaier, curator at Savannah Collect of Art and Design Museum of Art; Frank Kalero, publisher of OjodePez and director of GetxoPhoto; Michele McNally, assistant managing editor for photography, The New York Times; Marleos Krijnen of FOAM in Amsterdam; photographer Facundode Zuviria; Carol Squiers, ICP curator, and others.

Related Articles
A Tribute to David Goldblatt, ICP’s 2013 Lifetime Achievement Honoree

ICP Infinity Awards to Honor Goldblatt, Henner, de Middel

AP’s David Guttenfelder Inside North Korea

Moriyama, Ai Weiwei to Be Honored at ICP Infinity Awards

Daniel Martinez Bazaldua, a photographer with the newspaper Vanguardia, was found dead yesterday in the northern Mexico City of Saltillo, the Associated Press reports. He had been missing since Tuesday, when he left the Vanguardia office in the afternoon.

The bodies of Martinez Bazaldua, age 22, and another man identified as Julian Zamora, 23, were found dismembered on a street. According to state prosecutors, the body parts were dumped along with a  hand-written message saying that the Zetas drug cartel was responsible for the killings. Saltillo is located in northern Coahuila, a state where Zetas is known to operate.

Coahuila state Attorney General Homero Ramos told reporters that investigators had indications both men “were participating in illegal activities.” Vanguardia, which hired Martinez a month ago to shoot for its society pages, rejected the attorney general’s claim, which was made before any criminal investigation into the murders.

In a statement issued yesterday, Carlos Lauría of Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said, “It is irresponsible for authorities to reach conclusions before conducting a full investigation.” CPJ called on Mexican authorities “to fully investigate this crime, examine all possible motives, and bring those responsible to justice.”

CPJ reports that according to a Vanguardia editor who asked to remain anonymous, “Photographers covering the society section in Mexico have been targeted by organized crime groups in the past for inadvertently capturing images of cartel members, according to CPJ research.”

In May, three news photographers who covered organized crime and drug violence in Veracruz were found dead and dismembered.
CPJ reports that more than 50 journalists have been killed or disappeared in the last six years

Related Article
Three News Photographers Murdered in Veracruz, Mexico

Since the 1990s, Magnum photographer Thomas Dworzak has explored the volatile republics of the Northern Caucasus. It’s a region that’s now in the news because alleged Boston bombing suspects Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had ties there, but  Chechnya, Dagestan, Georgia and other republics of the Caucasus have long been a source of curiosity and geopolitical ambitions, especially in Russia.

In his 2010 book, Kavkas, Dworzak, who is now based in Georgia, wrote: “Having discovered the importance of the ‘Caucasus Experience’ in 19th century romantic Russian literature, I finally put together a book with all the images from my years spent in the Caucasus.” Kavkas includes images Dworzak took while covering the conflicts in Chechnya and Abkhazia and their aftermath, as well as scenes from Dagestan, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Ossetia.

In the book’s introduction, Dworzak called Kavkas “a toast to the Caucasus.” Magnum in Motion made a multimedia slide show of some of the images from the book. They appear on screen as in the book, interspersed with text from writers including Tolstoy, Lermontov and Pushkin.

While many of Dworzak’s images are poetic and allusive, and compliment the writers’ rhapsodic prose, at other times they make a sharp contrast, showing the violence and hardship the region has seen in recent years.

Related article:
Boston Bombings Focus Attention on Caucasus, And Photo Projects on the Region

Notable Photo Books 2010 (review of Kavkas, published by Schilt)
(For PDN subscribers only.)

© Davide Monteleone/VII. From Red Thistle (published by Dewi Lewis)

As investigations into the alleged Boston Marathon bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev focus on their connection to Chechnya and to the region of Dagestan, where Tamerlan spent time in January 2012, we’re once again looking at photographic studies of the North Caucusus. This volatile and troubled region may be little known to many Americans, but it’s been the subject of in-depth examination by photographers including Stanley Greene, Thomas Dworzak and Davide Monteleone. They have explored not only the violence in the region, but its culture, rituals and legacy of ethnic and political tensions.

Talking about his 2012 book Red Thistle, which explores life in the Northern Caucusus, David Monteleone told PDN in  2012 that he wanted to learn more about the people in the region than he could learn from media reports about terrorist attacks and human rights abuses. The book is a collection of images he took over several years in the republics around Chechnya, including Dagestan, Abkhazia (the Georgian Republic), Ingushetia, Karachay–Cherkessia, Kabardino-Balkaria, North Ossetia and the disputed territory of South Ossetia.

“For every work that I do, I want to show the daily life of people,” Monteleone told PDN. “Then of course I try to get a little bit deeper and try to find my own vision, but it’s my curiosity first of all.”

People he met in the region who were hospitable and welcoming, he says, but “the authorities were not.” Many of his images were shot indoors, conveying the constraints he experienced. “You have this wild, big [landscape], and at the same time the people are sort of afraid of moving, they cannot reach some places. A lot of areas are closed because of antiterrorist operations, you cannot go to the mountains because it’s forbidden because of military operations … [The people] are restricted in a way, in the mind and physically.”

You can read Monteleone’s full interview in “Disputed Territories: Exploring Life in the Northern Caucuses” on PDNOnline.

* Photo, above: A woman in the Dagestan village of Gimri during the sacrifice of a bull. © Davide Monteleone/VII
Related articles
Disputed Territories: Exploring Life in the Northern Caucusus
Photo Gallery: More Images from Red Thistle

© Thomas Hirschhorn. Courtesy Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, and Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York.

A.K. Burns, Lucas Foglia, Jim Goldberg, Mishka Henner, Thomas Hirschorn, Andrea Longacre-White, Gideon Mendel, Trevor Paglen, Michael Schmelling, Mikhail Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse are among the 28 artists selected for the 2013 Triennial at the International Center of Photography (ICP). This survey of contemporary photography and video from around the world opens May 17.

The theme for this year’s Triennial–the fourth in the museum’s history– is “A Different Kind of Order,” and according to a statement from ICP executive director Mark Robbins, it will look at works “shaped by social, political and technological changes.” Given that social, political and technological change characterizes life everywhere these days, the theme sounds like a catch-all. But the show will also look at a different order of image making, showcasing works that explore digital image making, video, painting, sculpture, collage, and installation art as well as photographic print making and the role of the photographer as curator. The exhibition will include an installation of approximately 100 photo books as a testament to the explosion of interest in artist’s books and self-publishing in the past few years.

The Triennial is curated by Kristen Lubben, Christopher Phillips, Carol Squiers and Joanna Lehan.

Some artists’ talks and events will be held in conjunction with the Triennial. On the night of the May 17 opening, for example, Nica Ross, one of the artists in the Triennial, will stage a video performance inside the glass-box pavilion of the ICP School, across the street from the Museum. If you’re coming by taxi, expect some rubber-necking delays on 6th Avenue.

Here’s the complete list of selected artists:
Roy Arden b. 1957, Vancouver; lives and works in Vancouver.
Huma Bhabha b. 1962, Karachi, Pakistan; lives and works in Poughkeepsie, New York.
Nayland Blake b. 1960, New York City; lives and works in New York City.
A.K. Burns b. 1975, Capitola, California; lives and works in New York City
Aleksandra Domanovic b. 1981, Novi Sad, former Yugoslavia; lives and works in Berlin.
Nir Evron b. 1974, Herzliya, Israel; lives and works in Tel Aviv.
Sam Falls b. 1984, San Diego; lives and works in Los Angeles.
Lucas Foglia b. 1983, New York City; lives and works in San Francisco.
Jim Goldberg b. 1953, New Haven; lives and works in San Francisco.
Mishka Henner b. 1976, Brussels; lives and works in Manchester, England.
Thomas Hirschhorn b. 1957, Bern, Switzerland; lives and works in Paris
Elliott Hundley b. 1975, Greensboro, North Carolina; lives and works in Los Angeles.
Oliver Laric b. 1981, Munich; lives and works in Berlin.
Andrea Longacre-White b. 1980, Radnor, Pennsylvania; lives and works in Los Angeles.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer b. 1967, Mexico City; lives and works in Montreal.
Gideon Mendel b. 1959, Johannesburg; lives and works in London.
Luis Molina-Pantin b. 1969, Geneva, Switzerland; lives and works in Caracas, Venezuela.
Rabih Mroué b. 1967, Beirut, Lebanon; lives and works in Beirut.
Wangechi Mutu b. 1972, Nairobi, Kenya; lives and works in New York City.
Sohei Nishino b. 1982, Hyogo, Japan; lives and works in Tokyo.
Lisa Oppenheim b. 1975, New York City; lives and works in New York City and Berlin.
Trevor Paglen b. 1974, Camp Springs, Maryland; lives and works in New York City.
Walid Raad b. 1967, Beirut, Lebanon; lives and works in New York City.
Nica Ross b. 1979, Tempe, Arizona; lives and works in New York City.
Michael Schmelling b. 1973, Atlanta, Georgia; lives and works in New York City.
Hito Steyerl b. 1966, Munich; lives and works in Berlin.
Mikhael Subotzky / Patrick Waterhouse b. 1981, Cape Town, South Africa; lives and works in Johannesburg / b. 1981 Bath, England; lives and works in Italy, England, and South Africa.
Shimpei Takeda b. 1982, Sukagawa City, Fukushima Prefecture, Japan; lives and works in New York City.

* Photo, above: “Film still, Touching Reality, 2012.” © Thomas Hirschhorn. Courtesy Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, and Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York.

Related Article

ICP Infinity Awards to Honor Goldblatt, Henner, de Middel

A suspect has been charged with murder in the killing of a freelance photographer who was shot April 6 while driving home in Oakland, California, the Oakland Tribune reports. Lionel Fluker, a former contributor to the Oakland Tribune, was killed by a stray bullet fired in a fist fight that escalated into a gun fight, according to the Alamada Country District Attorney’s office. The suspect, who was arraigned April 9, was also charged with possession of a gun by a felon, carrying a concealed weapon and carrying a loaded firearm.

A memorial service for Fluker will be held on April 13, the NPPA reports. (Details on location is available on the NPPA site.)

As PDN Pulse recently noted, several photographers and TV reporters have been robbed at gunpoint in Oakland this year.

Related article
Photojournalists Stripped of Gear at Gunpoint in Oakland

The team of Benjamin Drummond and Sara Joy Steele have long been using multimedia and video to get beyond statistics and portray the stories of individuals around the world whose lives are affected by climate change. The four new films in their Facing Climate Change are about people in the Pacific Northwest adapting to rising sea levels and atmospheric change. The films premiered this year at the Wild & Scenic Film Festival and are currently being shown around the country on a nationwide tour.

Their film “Oyster Farmers, Facing Climate Change” uses dramatic underwater footage, documentary photography and video, music and interviews to tell the story of Kathleen Nisbet and her father, Dave, who have for years farmed oysters in Washington’s Willapa Bay. Recently, however, oyster larvae and young oysters have been dying at an alarming rate because of the acidity of local waters, caused by the absorption of carbon dioxide. The problem is particularly acute off the Northwest coast. The Nisbets’ solution:  moving some of their business to Hawaii, where there is less ocean upswell, and thus the acidity in the water is increasing less rapidly.

Drummond and Steele had many partners in the making of the new films, including the Climate Impacts Group at the University of Washington and Washington State Department of Ecology, and they received major funding from Nau’s Grant for Change and several other funders. You can read about the making of the film on Drummond and Steele’s blog, bdsjs.com/blog. You can view all the videos at bdsjs.com/facing-climate-change/ and on Vimeo.

Shortly after we published our Lighting issue, in which we featured Cade Martin’s use of HMI lights to shoot the Starbuck’s Tazo tea campaign, photographer Rodney Smith cried foul. He sent us an e-mail saying that many people had contacted him to say they thought Martin’s work, including the image we ran on our cover, copied Smith’s work.

Smith directed us to a post on his blog in which he had written, “What I’m really not sure about, is why someone would applaud or even hire a vision that is by it’s [sic] very nature ‘second-rate.’” Smith didn’t name Martin or PDN specifically, but his blog post went on to say: “I realize that there is always much in life to imitate and the urge to do so is enormous, yet I also realize that to be original one has to look deep within themselves and find what no one else can copy, a very private voice.” The post appears with an image by Smith of a woman sitting in a fancy house in streams of sunlight, surrounded by teacups.

Smith also told PDN that Starbucks had contacted him about shooting for the campaign, though he couldn’t remember when.

The question Smith seems to be posing on his blog is: How could PDN have featured work that shares similar propping and subject matter as an image created previously? The answer is: We hadn’t seen Smith’s image. We know a lot of Smith’s black-and-white work, but hadn’t seen—or at least didn’t remember—the work that Martin’s resembles.  So, if we had see Smith’s images first, would we have asked Martin to explain the lighting techniques he used to create another model-with-teacups image?  Probably not.

In the plethora of images that surround us daily, we are constantly seeing projects, photo stories and campaigns that resemble works we’ve seen before. Comparison is inevitable, and we tend to privilege whichever example we saw first, and ignore the one we saw later. And at a time when ad agencies and clients are cautious of greenlighting any idea that isn’t tried and tested, photographers who manage to squeeze something fresh and inventive to their depiction of familiar themes and visual symbols are more likely to grab our attention.

We’re frequently sent pairs (or trios) of similar-looking photo projects by outraged readers who think they’re clear-cut examples of copyright infringement. But these similarities rarely rise to the legal definition of infringement, because the subject of a photograph isn’t protected by copyright law.  Recently an appeals court judged who ruled against a photographer in an infringement case expressed sympathy with “the frustration of photographers …whose works are afforded a limited copyright because they are comprised substantially of unprotected content.” As the Supreme Court has stated, “copyright assures authors the right to their original expression, but encourages others to build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work.”  Inventing new photographic material whole cloth, without reference or regard to the models of the past – from Rembrandt to the latest photography show – is nearly impossible in photography, and it would produce aridly self-referential work. The creativity of photographers who “build freely” on models from the past helps their work stand out, and push the medium forward.

Martin wouldn’t respond to our request for comment, beyond saying that he’s proud of his contribution to the campaign and the accolades it’s received. We appreciate that he gave so much time to sharing techniques and lighting advice, both with to and with our readers.

* Photos, above: © PDN/photo by Cade Martin (left); © Rodney Smith (right).

Related Article:

Lighting Recipe: Cade Martin’s Whimsical Advertising Work

It’s officially spring. Deadlines for some big grants are approaching.

Inge Morath Award
Administered by the Magnum Foundation, the Inge Morath Award of $5,000 is given annually to a female photojournalist under the age of 30. The Award supports the completion of a long-term documentary project, and is juried by Magnum photographers and the director of the Inge Morath Foundation.
Deadline: April 30.
www.ingemorath.org/index.php/2013/01/the-inge-morath-award-2013-guidelines/

Getty Grants for Editorial Photography
Starting April 1, Getty will be accepting applications for its 2013 Grants for Editorial Photography. Five grants of $10,000 each will be awarded to photojournalists “pursuing projects of personal and journalistic significance.” Deadline: May 1.
imagery.gettyimages.com/getty_images_grants/overview.aspx

The Aaron Siskind Foundation
The Aaron Siskind Foundation offers grants of up to $10,000 each to individual photographers, selected by a panel of judges. The entry fee is $10.  Applications are open to US citizens and legal permanent residents 21 years of age and older, and there is no requirement regarding subject matter, genre or process, except that the work must involve photography (no video).  Deadline: May 24.
aaronsiskind.org/grant.html

W. Eugene Smith Grant for Humanistic Photography
Each year the W. Eugene Smith Fund awards a grant (in 2012, the award was $30,000) to a photographer whose past work and proposed project follow the tradition of W. Eugene Smith’s concerned photography and dedicated compassion. The board of trustees of the W. Eugene Smith Fund appoints a three-member jury to evaluate written proposals and photos. There is a $50 application fee. Deadine: End of May.
smithfund.org/eugene-smith-grant

The winners of the PDN Edu Student Photo Contest   were announced last week. Alexander Kreher, of Virginia Commonwealth University, won the multimedia/video category
with an 18-minute short film, “Street Dreams,” about the young woman who became the first female to run alone and unsupported across the United States. She made the 2,867 mile-run to raise $17,000 for the Boys and Girls Clubs of America.

In his other video submission, a piece called “All Those Wonderful Things,” Kreher uses a mix of stills, video and a compelling audio interview to tell the story of one woman’s struggles with hoarding, the financial problems it creates, and the disappointment she feels about her life. Kreher made that four-and-a-half minute piece while studying at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland, Maine.

“All Those Wonderful Things” can be found on Vimeo.