© Jeff Rich. River Clean-up on the Swannanoa River, Asheville, North Carolina

Earlier this week Photolucida announced that Jeff Rich was selected as the 2010 Critical Mass Book Award winner for his survey of the French Broad River Basin watershed in North Carolina and Tennessee. Rich’s project includes landscapes, documentary images of cleanup workers and people using the French Broad for recreation, and portraits of people who live near the river.

“In the 1950s The French Broad River was one of the most polluted in the country,” Rich writes in his artist’s statement. But, he notes, the French Broad Watershed was cleaned up after the 1972 Clean Water Act was passed. However, “Due to weak enforcement of the Clean Water Act’s mandates and consistent non-point source pollution, the French Broad River is now becoming less healthy for the first time since the passage of the Clean Water Act, which threatens the reversal of such enormous progress.”

Rich’s work was recognized by a panel of 215 photography industry professionals. 549 photographers entered the Critical Mass competition this year.

Benjamin Lowy’s project on Iraq has won the fifth Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography.

Lowy will receive a grant of $3,000, the publication of his book, and inclusion of his images in an online exhibition.

The judge for this year’s CDS/Honickman First Book prize was photographer William Eggleston. Eggleston said of Lowy’s photos, which were shot through the windows of a Humvee and through soldiers’ night vision goggles, “Benjamin’s work is an opportunity to see as an American soldier sees when in Iraq–no one’s ever shown that, especially through night vision goggles.”

“Yeh, that was nice, wasn’t it?” Lowy said today, when contacted at home in New York by PDN. Lowy, who is represented by Reportage by Getty Images, had returned from Afghanistan just 3 days ago, when he learned that his images of the Gulf oil spill had won a first place in the World Press Photo competition.

Lowy first photographed Iraq through the protective glass an armored car in 2005, when he was moving around the country in a convoy of armored vehicles. “My only view of Iraq was through inches-thick bulletproof glass,” he wrote in his application to the prize.  He also made images through military-issue night vision goggles, which he attached to his camera “by means of duct tape, dental floss and, occasionally, chewing gum.”

The work has been exhibited at the Open Society Institute, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and elsewhere, but he had been unable to land a book deal, Lowy says. He hopes it can find an audience outside “art circles and anti-war circles,” Lowy says.

“It can appeal to people on the left and the right,” he says. “The work is esthetically different. That can overcome and bridge the public’s apathy. They see something different, and then they take a step closer. That’s a journalist’s challenge: trying to create a different way of showing something so people are interested.”

Photo © Benjamin Lowy/Reportage by Getty Images

A year ago, we asked PDN readers to nominate the 30 most influential photographers of the decade, and then stirred up a hornets’ nest when we posted the results: The voting put popular bloggers such as Becker and Jasmine Star well above photographic pioneers like Robert Frank and William Eggleston. Passions ran so high that we had to shut down reader comments after a few days.

So why would we want to stir things up again? Because Google Labs has posted an amazing and addictive tool–called “Books Ngram Viewer”– that allows you to search for phrases (and names of people!) published in millions of books over the last 500 years, and plot how often those phrases (or names) appear in books over time. (Keep reading to see the charts…) (more…)

Today publisher Little Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group, announced the release of an Ansel Adams iPad app that brings together images, video, audio commentary, personal letters and postcards, and other biographical information on the pioneering photographer for the media tablet audience.

The app, Ansel Adams for the iPad, is the latest collaboration between Little, Brown and The Ansel Adams Trust, a publishing relationship Adams himself established in 1976. Andrea G. Stillman, who formerly worked with Adams and who is an expert on his work, selected the 40 photographs featured in the app, which span the full range of his career.

In a statement about the release of the app, Little, Brown claims the iPad’s “extraordinary luminosity” gives readers “a feeling and impact very similar to that of seeing an original Adams print in a museum.” Adams is famous for his meticulous printmaking, and his printed photographs are highly sought-after by collectors.

The app in on-sale for $13.99 via Apple’s iTunes digital marketplace.

Update on “Ansel Adams Lost Negatives” Court Case

Adams and The Ansel Adams Trust have been in the news recently due to the claim by Rick Norsignian to have discovered 65 “lost” Adams negatives at a garage sale. The Trust disputes that the negatives were created by Adams and is suing Norsignian and his partners, who they say have illegally offered prints and posters using Adams’ name and likeness. A recent motion by Norsignian and the defense to either move the case to another court or have it thrown out completely was denied by a California judge.

Related: Ansel Adams Trust Sues to Stop the Sale of Garage Sale Images

Darius Himes, publisher of Radius Books, told the audience at the “Publishing Your Photobook” seminar at PhotoPlus Expo that having an honest assessment of the potential audience for your photo book “is almost as important as doing the work.” Knowing who would want to buy a book of your photos helps you determine whether to approach a large or small book publisher, what price you should put on the book, what its format and design should be, and how you can market it.

Himes presented the seminar along with fine art consultant Mary Virginia Swanson. They have co-authored Publish Your Photo Book, to be published this fall by Princeton Architectural Press.  Like their book, their PhotoPlus seminar covered the process of publishing a book from conception to sales, explained how to approach an acquisitions editor at a traditional publishing house, and covered some of the ways that photographers are using print-on-demand publishing and other self-publishing options either to deliver books to readers or to create book proposals.

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Nazraeli Press, the photo book publisher known for its beautifully printed photo books and “One Picture Book” series of limited edition books by contemporary photographers, has begun a new and even more expensive series of collectible editions.


This month Nazraeli has launched the first boxed set in its new “Six by Six” series. Each set contains six titles. Only 100 numbered copies of each over-sized book are being published, and each slipcased title comes with an exhibition-quality print by the photographer. The set sells for $4500 (that’s six books for $750 each), but prices may rise as the edition sells out.

Though the first Six by Six set released this month, Chris Pichler, publisher of Nazraeli, says that when word got out to collectors this summer, 70 of the 100 were pre-ordered almost immediately.

The first Six by Six set contains the following titles:

Anthony Hernandez: East Baltimore

Todd Hido: Motel Club

Raymond Meeks: Amwell

Martin Parr: Macchu Picchu

Toshio Shibata: Expressways 1986

Mark Steinmetz: Ancient Tigers of my Neighborhood

The next set is due out in Spring 2011, with more sets to follow every six months. Pichler says books by Emi Anrakuji, Michael Kenna, Tanya Marcuse, Daido Moriyama, and Alec Soth are planned.

The company is still publishing titles with larger print runs. “In addition to the ‘Six by Six’ series books, we are also publishing 16 regular edition books, and of course the One Picture Books (8 titles per year),” Pichler says.  The One Picture Book series, launched in 2000, has featured books by Stephen Shore, Todd Hido, Robert Heinecken and other photographers; they sell for $150.

Photo book publishers usually use limited editions and prints as a way to underwrite the high production costs of  books with larger print runs. The idea is to package the book as a collectible work of art well before it sells out and you have to go to E-Bay to find that highly praised photo book that slipped through your fingers a few years ago.

Are we in a Romantic revival?

In the Romantic era of the late 18th and early 19th century, ruins were in fashion. Aristocrats taking the Grand Tour of Europe sought out sites of classical ruins. Once they returned home, they commissioned landscape architects to create fake ruins overgrown with ivy. These “follies,” as they were called, were inspired by a fascination with the power of nature to reclaim the once impressive works of man.

In the 21st century,  we’re seeing a new fascination with ruins, this time expressed in photo essays on once impressive structures that have been abandoned or allowed to decay. The number of picturesque ruins showing up in photo projects may reflect our skepticism about the institutions we once trusted. (images after the jump)

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Life magazine may have folded for good three years ago, but its parent company, Time Inc., has continued to crank out photo books and themed issues using its photo archive as material. And now a Life publication is available to readers via the latest publishing technology: the iPad.

Life Wonders of the World is the digital version of the new photo book in the Life series. It includes over 100 photos, most of them scenics and landscapes. It sells for $5 on the Apple iTunes store (while the book costs $30 in bookstores).

A review posted of the iPad app, posted on iLounge, complains that the photos only appear in horizontal mode: Turning the iPad does not reorient the image. Instead a big black screen with the words, “Turn to Read Wonders of the World” appear.

That problem aside, Min, the trade magazine for publishing and PR, notes that “the sharp and luminous nature of the iPad display” makes it a natural fit for photo-heavy publications and “Life’s trove of images.”

Book publisher D.A.P. offers a behind-the-scenes look at the process of printing Lee Friedlander’s latest book, America By Car, through images taken by Director of Title Acquisitions Todd Bradway.

Bradway’s photos show the 50-foot long Heidelberg Speedmaster press at Meridian Printing in East Greenwich, Rhode Island, the prepped printing plates, buckets of metallic inks, and the foil stamp used on the jacket of the limited edition.

There are also a few shots of Friedlander himself documenting his involvement in the proofing process. Friedlander analyzed each completed print after it was inspected by Meridian Printing technicians.

The complete set of photos can be found here.

—Cameron Handley

VII and NOOR announced new additions to their memberships today.

New Jersey-based photojournalist Ed Kashi joins Marcus Bleasdale, the Estate of Alexandra Boulat, Ron Haviv, Gary Knight, Antonin Kratochvil, Joachim Ladefoged, Christopher Morris, James Nachtwey, Franco Pagetti, Stephanie Sinclair and John Stanmeyer as a co-owning  member of VII Photo Agency.

“Ed is not only an amazing photographer but also an original thinker with huge positive energy, which fits right into VII’s dynamic approach to expanding the relevance of photojournalism in the new millennium,” VII managing director Stephen Mayes said in a statement.

Alixandra Fazzina, a British photographer based in Pakistan, joins Nina Berman, Philip Blenkinsop, Pep Bonet, Jan Grarup, Stanley Greene, Yuri Kozyrev, Kadir van Louhizen, Jon Lowenstein and Francesco Zizola as a member of the NOOR foundation and photo agency.

Fazzina recently released a book, “A Million Shillings: Escape From Somalia” (Trolley, 2010), about Somalis fleeing their war-torn country along perilous smuggling routes.