United Photo Industries, a Brooklyn-based collective dedicated to exhibiting and promoting photography, has announced their first major event, which will take place at a river-front park in Brooklyn, New York, this summer from June 22-July 1.
Dubbed “Photoville,” the event at Brooklyn Bridge Park, will feature 35 concurrent exhibitions of photography from all over the world. Each exhibition will be housed in shipping containers, forming a “village” of photography exhibitions, which will be free and open to the public.
As part of the Photoville programming, PDN has joined with United Photo Industries and Brooklyn Bridge Park to produce an outdoor photo exhibition called “The Fence,” which will adorn Brooklyn Bridge Park for two months this summer.
To create the installation, more than 300 images will be printed on photographic mesh, forming a 1,000-foot fence. The images exhibited on “The Fence” will be selected from contest entries by a jury of photography curators and editors. For more information on how to enter, visit The Fence contest site here.
In addition to the exhibitions, Photoville will also feature outdoor projections, panel discussions and lectures, workshops, a food and beer garden, tents with photo gear vendors, and even a dog run.
For more information about the inaugural Photoville event visit photovillenyc.org.
Photographer Jim Lo Scalzo’s funny/sad video “America’s Dead Sea” won third place in the World Press Photo Multimedia contest, announced this morning. Lo Scalzo manages to find a fresh perspective on the much photographed Salton Sea in the southern California desert. Intercutting his still photos and video footage with archival promotional films, Lo Scalzo’s three-and-a-half minute video traces the area’s decline from a major tourist attraction to a lifeless toxic dump, contaminated by salinity and farm chemical runoff. The video is touching, and there’s ukelele music on the soundtrack.
You can see “America’s Dead Sea” and Lo Scalzo’s other videos on Vimeo.
Charles Dharapak of the Associated Press has been named Photographer of the Year in the still photography division of the 2012 “Eyes of History” contest, the White House News Photographers Association (WHNPA) has announced. Andrew Harnik of the Washington Times won the Political Photo of the Year award.
In the new media division of the competition, John Poole of NPR won first place in the Best Use of Photography & Audio (with narration). David Gilky of NPR won Best Use of Photography &Audio (natural sound). Whitney Shefte of The Washington Post won first and second place in the Best of Multimedia (in depth) category, while Jim Lo Scalzo of EPA won first place in the Best Multimedia Package (simple) category.
Judges for the still photo competition were Ohio University professor Marcy Nighswander and photographers Bob Pearson and Ed Kashi. A full list of still photography winners will be posted here on the WHNPA site.
Judges for the new media competition were photographers Liz O. Baylen, Will Yurman, and Zach Wise. The full list of new media winners will be posted here on the WHNPA site.
The White House News Photographers Association sponsors The Eyes of History contest. This year’s winners will be honored at the annual “Eyes of History” Gala on May 5, 2012, in Washington, DC.
Tomas van Houtryve, whose “Behind the Curtains” photo essay has won this year’s World Understanding Award at POYi, completed the eight-year project with the help of money he raised through the crowd-funding site Emphas.is. We don’t know if this is the first crowd-funded project to win a major award, but we’re pretty sure it won’t be the last, given the scarcity of support for documentary photography at magazines, and the growing popularity of crowd-funding to underwrite long-term photography projects.
Van Houtryve is currently using Emphas.is again in hopes of raising enough money to turn his recent work on North Korea into a book and exhibition.
When we asked him why he turned to crowd-funding for “Behind the Curtains,” he explained that he began “Behind the Curtains” in 2004, covering Nepal’s Maoist revolution. “It was certainly a challenge to keep the project going at full force when the 2008 U.S. economic crisis hit, followed by the global media and advertising crisis in the following years,” he says. In 2010, he won POYi Photographer of the Year – Freelance award. Still, he says, “I had to keep looking for new revenue streams, switching from mainly magazines to grants and eventually to crowd-funding.
“It started to feel pretty acrobatic to have to constantly think about shifting and reinventing business models while keeping my focus on the project.”
In March 2011, he began looking for funding on his own site and on Emphas.is. “My proposal was to finish my 21st century communism project by taking a final trip to Laos.
The Magnum Foundation has announced the 2012 class of Emergency Fund grantees. The Emergency Fund supports photographers who are working on long-term documentary projects that address “critical global issues that have not received the attention they deserve, or budding crises that are still over the horizon,” according to the EF Web site.
The Magnum Foundation, established by the cooperative photo agency to promote and finance independent documentary photography, began its Emergency Fund grants in 2010. Past grantees include Jonas Bendiksen, Tomas van Houtryve, Emily Schiffer, Larry Towell, Bruce Gilden and Krisanne Johnson.
Grantee candidates are nominated by an international committee and evaluated by a selection committee. This year the Emergency Fund received 93 nominations, and 76 photographers from 28 countries submitted proposals.
The Magnum Foundation also announced the its 2012 scholarships for the NYU/MF Photography and Human Rights program, a 5-week summer intensive at New York University that teaches photographers skills for creating documentary projects on human rights. This year’s scholarships went to: Poulomi Basu of India; Arthur Bondar, of Ukraine, Liu Jie of China; and Pooyan Tabatabaei of Iran.
The need to tell stories
Social injustice is not new to our planet. As life-threatening diseases take hold of global populations, their burden weighs most heavily on the shoulders of developing and emerging nations. When organizations of all types collaborate together they have the power to make a difference where it’s needed – and they often do. But the first step is raising awareness of the issues; without awareness there can be no advocacy, and advocacy is a direct path to action.
Why photography?
More often than not we at BD choose to tell these stories through photography. We know that the power of the medium cannot be overstated: a photograph has the ability to convey emotion, mood, narrative, ideas and messages. We know that you know this, too.
So who is BD, anyway?
Often described as a “humanitarian healthcare company”, BD makes fundamental medical technology focused on improving drug delivery, diagnosing infectious diseases, and advancing research and production of new drugs. The breadth of our capabilities gives us the privilege to help combat many of the world’s most pressing diseases. Our company’s purpose is Helping all people live healthy lives, and with our partner organizations, we are able to serve mankind in both the most industrialized and the most impoverished places on earth.
This video by NPR was honored in the video category of the 2011 PDN Photo Annual. NPR Music’s Project Song challenges musicians to write and record a song in
just two days, then records the results. David Gilkey, John Poole, Bob Boilen and Neil Tevault produced the video.
Moby and collaborator Kelli Scarr finished writing their song so quickly, they wound up recording three different versions of “Gone to Sleep.”
The 2012 PDN Photo Annual is now accepting entries in 12 categories, including video, web sites, photo books, advertising, photojournalism and more. To learn about prizes, the panel of judges, rules, deadlines (avoid the late fee and enter soon!) or to upload your entries, visit www.pdnphotoannual.com.
The Musée de l’Elysée abruptly cancelled the 2011 Lacoste Elysée Prize for photography, protesting the decision by prize sponsor Lacoste to exclude one of the finalists. Lacoste, meanwhile, has announced that is “has decided to cancel once and for all its participation in this event and its support for the Elysée Prize.”
Lacoste reportedly objected for political reasons to a project by finalist Larissa Sansour called “Nation Estate,” which was inspired by the recent Palestinian bid for nationhood at the United Nations. Lacoste said in a statement today that Sansour’s work did not fit the contest theme, and denies it excluded her for political reasons.
Click here to read the full story.
A close-up photograph of a dragonfly weathering a rain storm in Indonesia’s Riau Islands earned photographer Shikhei Goh the $10,000 grand prize in the 2011 National Geographic Photography Contest.
In a statement, National Geographic magazine photographer Tim Laman, who was one of three judges for the competition, celebrated the photograph’s “beautiful light, rare action in a close-up image, as well as its technical perfection.” Goh’s photograph also won first prize in the “Nature” category.
A photograph by Izabelle Nordfjell of a Sami reindeer hunter preparing to take a shot while his son covers his ears won first prize in the “People” category, while George Tapan’s image of
a rainbow stretching out over the ocean off of the Philippines’ Onuk Island received first prize in the “Places” category.
These photographs were selected from more than 20,000 images submitted by professional and amateur photographers from more than 130 countries.
Galleries of the winning images and honorable mentions are online here.
The other judges were National Geographic magazine photographers Amy Toensing, and Peter Essick.
Over on PDNOnline we’ve gathered together the biggest photography news stories of 2011, a year marked infringements on the rights of photographers, by sticky legal cases whose results will be felt long into the future, and by tragedy. The 15 stories we highlighted were the most-read news articles and blog posts on PDNOnline and PDN Pulse this year.
Which of these stories do you think was the most important news story of the year? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.
