©Larissa Sansour

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.

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.

© Pieter Hugo, from Permanent Error

The Photographers’ Gallery in London has announced the four artists shortlisted for the 2012 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. The prize of £30,000 (about $47,000 US) is awarded to a living artist who has made a significant contribution to photography in Europe between October 1, 2010 and September 30, 2011.

Rinko Kawauchi of Japan is nominated for the French edition of her book Illuminance, which was published earlier this year in Germany by Kehrer Verlag (the book originated and was published in the US by Aperture, and Éditions Xavier Barral published the French edition).  For more on the book, see “In a Moment,” PDN March.

South Africa-based photographer Pieter Hugo is nominated for his book Permanent Error, portraits of men and boys working in a dump  for toxic electronic waste in Ghana. (See our story on the project, “Digital Divide,” PDN, May.) The book was published by Prestel.

British-born artist John Stezaker, who makes photographic collages, was nominated for his 40-year retrospective, exhibited this year at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

American Christopher Williams is nominated for a show of his work at the Budweis in the Czech Republic. Williams, “as much conceptual artist as photographer,” according to Photographers Gallery, has been creating images of cameras, vehicles and other technical devices for 40 years.

The jurors for this year’s Deutsche Börse Photography Prize are François Hébel, Director, Les Rencontres d’Arles; photographer Martin Parr; Beatrix Ruf, Director/Curator, Kunsthalle Zürich and Anne-Marie Beckmann, Curator, Art Collection Deutsche Börse, Germany. Brett Rogers, Director of The Photographers’ Gallery, is the non-voting Chair.

The winner will be announced in April 2012. Previous winners of the prize have included Jim Goldberg, Juergen Teller, Rineke Dijkstra, Robert Adams and Andreas Gursky.

Related stories:
Notable Photo Books 2011, Part 2

Jim Goldberg Wins $50,000 Deutsche Borse Photography Prize

A print auction held at the annual PDN PhotoPlus Expo Bash on October 28 raised more than $8,000 for the Red Cross’s relief efforts in Japan, PDN PhotoPlus Expo has announced.

Harry Benson, Douglas Kirkland, Susan Meiselas, John Isaac and Art Streiber were among the 50 photographers who donated prints for the benefit silent auction.

Unique Photo, Fuji Film and Modernage sponsored the event, held at Highline Stages in New York City, which featured live music by Tyburn Saints and was attended by more than 1,200 people.

“It was important for us as an organization, and an industry, to organize an event that would give us an opportunity to participate in the worldwide efforts to help the victims in Japan,” Jeff McQuilkin, Group Show Director for The Nielsen Company, said. “Obviously, the photographic industry has strong ties to Japan and its culture and was deeply affected by the disaster. The fundraising event was one way we could show our support.”

“It was amazing how the industry came together to support this event,” added Lauren Wendle, Vice President, Nielsen Photo Group. “Everyone had a great time but never seemed to lose sight of fundraising aspect of the event. The print auction was very active and we want to extend our warmest thanks to the photographers who donated prints, and our guests who bid and bought them.”

© Andreas Gursky/courtesy Christie's

A print of Andreas Gursky’s “Rhein II” sold for $4.33 million last week, making it the most expensive photo ever sold at auction. This might be considered good news for the fine-art photography market, but most of the press about the sale has ranged from puzzlement to downright mockery.

Some of the criticism is of the predictable, my-4-year-old-could-do-that type of scoffing, but some seems to be genuinely wrestling with just how stark and plain this digitally retouched image looks, at least online. We can’t remember anyone writing this way about Gursky’s previous record setter, the diptych “99 Cent Store,” or about the Cindy Sherman self portrait that is now the second most expensive photo ever sold.

Here are some sample comments about Gursky’s “Rhein II”:

“It’s nice. Is it $4.33 million nice? We don’t get art sometimes. Okay, all the time.”
–Dan Amira, New York magazine

“…While it is hard to argue that he [Gursky] has achieved his aim – it is even harder to see why someone would pay a substantial sum of money to own the piece.
But the digitally altered – and some might say visually uninteresting – ‘Rhine II’ has become the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction.”
–Charles Walford, The Daily Mail

“It’s not worth a penny over $4.2 million if you ask me, but at least one collector disagrees.”
–Amy Rolph, Seattle Post Intelligencer

“This mediocre pic is the most expensive photo in the world, worth $4.3 million dollars. Behold!  It’s some…grass…and we’re pretty sure that’s a– lake?  Right?  Maybe?”
-Jo Pincushion on ESPN1420.com (a sports radio station’s Web site. Zheesh, everyone’s a critic.)

One dissenting voice is that of Florence Walters. Writing in the Telegraph, she says,  “This image is a vibrant, beautiful and memorable – I should say unforgettable – contemporary twist on Germany’s famed genre and favorite theme: the romantic landscape, and man’s relationship with nature.” She also notes, “For all its apparent simplicity, the photograph is a statement of dedication to its craft.”

For those who would like to judge for themselves, other prints from the same edition are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, Munich’s Pinakothek der Modern, and the Glenstone Collection in Potomac, Maryland.

Related Story:

Andreas Gursky’s $4.3 Million Print Sets New Record

© Mark Cohen

As manufacturing has disappeared from many American cities, old factories that once held heavy machinery have attracted artists and galleries, and many former sites of industry now host fledgling arts communities. In the former steel town of Bethlehem, PA, the non-profit group ArtsQuest has been celebrating the city’s art scene through its annual InVision Photo Festival. Attendees at this year’s festival, taking place November 3 through 6, will be greeted by large-scale photos by fine-art photographer Mark Cohen, author of Grim Street and an InVision Artist in Residence. Cohen’s images will be displayed outdoors at the festival headquarters and other festival venues.

The festival includes talks by Sam Abell, the National Geographic photographer, Theo Anderson, Frank Smith and David Rehrig, among others. Judy Linn will be speaking and signing copies of her book Patti Smith 1969.

On Saturday photographer Michael Soluri, known for his multi-year documentation of the NASA space shuttle, will be making a special presentation in conjunction with (how’s this for smart programming?) a microbrew tasting.

There will also be portfolio reviews and workshops. The festival kicks off November 3 with a SlideLuck Show. A calendar of events, a guide to all the exhibitions taking place throughout the Lehigh Valley, and ticket information can be found at www.artsquest.org/invision/

The 2011 Critical Mass Top 50 were announced last night by Photolucida, the organization that runs the competition. Each year hundreds of photographers submit their work for judging to a panel of 200 photo industry professionals. (51 photographers are included in this year’s Top 50 due to a tie in voting.)

Photographers in the Top 50 are eligible for several prizes, including a book award that supports one photographer’s book publication; a solo show at Blue Sky gallery in Portland, Oregon; or one of five scholarships for international photographers.

Images by the Critical Mass Top 50 photographers will also be included in a traveling exhibition that will tour the West Coast in Spring 2012. Starting in February 2012 the exhibition will be at Photo Center NW in Seattle, then in April at Newspace Center for Photography in Portland, and concluding in May at RayKo Photo Center in San Francisco.

Check out the work of the 2011 Critical Mass Top 50 here.

Read a list of this year’s jurors here. (PDN creative director Darren Ching, PDN senior editor Conor Risch and Jill Waterman, editor of PDNEdu were among this year’s jurors.)

Aiming to shed some light on how photography mavens find innovative work, W.M. Hunt moderated the seminar Your Picture is Fabulous: The Tastemakers and Why We Look at What We Do during the 2011 PhotoPlus Expo. The panel featured a gallery owner (Yossi Milo of Yossi Milo Gallery), a magazine photo editor (Caroline Wolff of W) and an agency director (Kelly Penford of Jed Root)—in other words, a wide array of influential people every photographer dreams of impressing.

Though it’s not easy to articulate what makes a photograph cutting-edge, Hunt, a photo collector and former gallery director, noted that he needed to be excited by the work and told the story of traveling to Paris to see photojournalist Luc Delahaye’s Taliban Soldier, a large-scale image of a Taliban fighter lying dead in the dirt. Though Vanity Fair and The New Yorker both passed on the photo (American Photo ended up publishing it) when he returned to the U.S., Hunt was able to sell the image to a collector for $15,000—using just the color Xerox of the print—proving he had indeed discovered something new. Milo seconded Hunt’s sentiments, saying he wants to be blown away by a work and cited the example of Kohei Yoshiyuki’s series “The Park,” which not only excited him, but also had an amazing concept he was intrigued by.

Yet Hunt readily admitted that it’s hard to be fresh and pressed the panelists to find out what is trending now. In a word: technology. Milo said he’s been looking to younger photographers and is currently captivated by innovations in the picture-making process. An example is Matthew Brandt’s series “Lakes and Reservoirs,” in which he develops the photographs using water from the lake or reservoir featured in the photo. Wolff explained that she recently commissioned on online video from Santiago & Mauricio in which still images contained moving droplets of water, while Penford added that digital is the only acceptable method for his clients, who expect to see instantaneous results.

So how do you get your work in front of a tastemaker? Wolff said she reads a variety of magazines and newspapers, and used the examples of a few up-and-coming photographers she’s either commissioned or is keeping tabs on: She discovered Santiago & Mauricio through their submission in W’s Fashion on Film series; Chadwick Tyler was featured on the cover of Grey magazine; and Elle Muliarchyk’s “Dressing Room” series was published in The New York Times Magazine.

Penford said he looks at everything and anything, but emphasized the power of photo blogs. His agency currently represents Scott Schuman whose blog The Sartorialist receives millions of visitors each month, the popularity of which lead to new assignments, and recently signed Bill Gentle largely due to the photos on his blog Backyard Bill. Milo said he also reads a lot, both print and online, as well as travels and goes to shows. However, he tends to track photographers and follow them for a couple years to see how their style evolves before contacting them.

The moral of the seminar? Though there’s no way to guarantee your work will be deemed worthwhile by influential people in the industry, one thing that’s for sure is that it has to be out there in order to get noticed in the first place. Start a blog, enter a contest, send an introductory e-mail—do whatever you can to get your photographs seen by the right people.

During a seminar titled “The New World of Online Magazines and Curator Web Sites” this afternoon at PDN PhotoPlus Expo, photographer Sophia Wallace posed a question to photographers who’ve been hesitant to harness the full power of the internet for fear that their work might be stolen: Should you be more afraid of image theft, or of working in obscurity?

This rather direct question, which had resonated with Wallace after she heard it at another talk recently, gets to the heart of the decision that photographers must make in today’s market. You can embrace online publishing on blogs, online magazines, Tumblr pages and the myriad other platforms on which people are looking at imagery these days, or you can keep your work to yourself.

Suffice it to say that nobody in the audience was interested in the latter option. But in case they were, Wallace and fellow photographer Manjari Sharma shared stories about their own experiences that made a strong case for diving headlong into promoting one’s work online.

By getting their work featured by online platforms, such as those run by moderator Stella Kramer (StellaZine) and panelists Julie Grahame (aCurator) and Michael Itkoff (Daylight), each of the photographers had built momentum for bodies of work that eventually led to concrete achievements like exhibitions, advertising commissions and essential project funding.

After having her work circulate one image at a time across various online publications (and in a couple of print magazines), Wallace received what she termed “the email she’d been waiting for.” It was from a curator asking if she would show her work in a three-person show at Colgate University’s Clifford Gallery with photographers Catherine Opie and Jo Ann Santangelo. During her presentation Wallace also showed how, through Google analytics, she could track who was looking at her site and where they came from. It was amazing, she said, to realize that people all over the world were looking at her photographs.

Sharma showed two projects that she’d promoted online. A series of portraits of people taken in the shower in her Brooklyn apartment was discovered by art directors at the ad agency JWT in Delhi, which lead to a commission to replicate that work for ads for a German maker of shower heads that was expanding their business in India. Sharma’s photographs appeared on billboards in 23 cities, she said.

After she created a well-produced Kickstarter video to raise funds for her project Darshan, several photo blogs and other online publications wrote about the work. She ended up raising $26,000 of funding over the course of three months.

Each of the panelists encouraged the audience members to build networks online through Facebook and Twitter, and to help promote other photographers whose work they appreciate. Wallace made the point that opportunities for group exhibitions often come from other artists, and introductions to clients often come from fellow photographers.

Kramer also made another useful point for photographers who might still be hesitant to publish their work online: “The more you are associated with your work, the harder it is to steal it,” she said.

US-based private equity firm The Blackstone Group has reached an agreement to buy 44 percent of Leica Camera AG in a deal to be completed by the end of the year, Blackstone and ACM Projektentwicklung GmbH, Leica’s parent company, announced today.

Blackrock investment funds will acquire the stake through a holding company, the announcement said.

In a statement, Dr. Andreas Kaufmann, the chairman of Leica’s supervisory board, called Blackstone “an experienced and internationally established strategic partner.” The deal, which is likely to be completed by the end of the year pending approval from government regulators, will help fund Leica’s “growth plans into new markets such as Asia, South America and the Middle East,” he added. Leica is coming off a 2010/2011 fiscal year when they turned record profits, the company reports.

Axel Herberg, Blackstone senior managing director, also emphasized a focus on emerging markets in his statement. “We are very excited about supporting Leica to secure long-term commercial relationships, specifically in emerging markets, and help strengthen the company¹s operational and retailing capabilities globally,” he said.