From Richard Ross's "Juvenile Injustice" photo essay in the October 2011 issue of Harper's Magazine. © Richard Ross

Vogue won the prize for best overall use of photography at the 2012 National Magazine Awards, held in New York City last night. Given out by the American Society of Magazine Editors, the awards honor excellence in magazine editorial. Vogue beat out four other finalists in the category of Photography: GQ, Interview, National Geographic and Virginia Quarterly Review. The fashion title’s photography department is lead by photography director Ivan Shaw.

In the News and Documentary Photography category, Harper’s Magazine won for “Juvenile Injustice,” a photo essay on juvenile detainees by photographer Richard Ross. He worked with art director Stacey D. Clarkson and assistant art director Sam Finn Cate-Gumpert on the assignment. In the same category, Harper’s Magazine was also nominated for “Uncertain Exodus,” photographed by Ed Ou. The other finalists were National Geographic for “Too Young to Wed,” photographed by Stephanie Sinclair; The New York Times Magazine for “From Zero to 104,” photographed by Damon Winter; and Time for “Birds of Hope,” photographed by James Nachtwey.

The New York Times Magazine won the Feature Photography award for “Vamps, Crooks & Killers.” Alex Prager shot actors dressed as iconic villains for the photo essay and accompanying video. She worked with director of photography Kathy Ryan, deputy photo editor Joanna Milter, design director Arem Duplessis and editor Hugo Lindgren on the assignment. The other nominees in the category were National Geographic for “Taming the Wild,” photographed by Vincent J. Musi; Time for “Portraits of Resilience,” photographed by Marco Grob; Vogue for “Lady Be Good,” photographed by Steven Klein; and W for “Planet Tilda,” photographed by Tim Walker.

For a complete list of winners, visit magazine.org.

Related Article:

ESPN, W, New York Times Magazine Win 2011 National Magazine Awards for Photography

You don’t have to be caught up in the NCAA college basketball championship to appreciate David Leventi’s images of basketball arenas. Leventi, a Brooklyn-based photographer, was assigned to shoot some of the country’s oldest college basketball courts last fall for ESPN the Magazine. His images, all shot in available light using a 4×5 camera, capture the architectural grandeur of basketball courts built before 1940, including those at Butler, Fordham, University of Pennsylvania and Yale.

Top: Butler's basketball arena. Above: University of Pennsylvania. All photos © David Leventi

“The idea was to show them as cathedrals of basketball,” he explains. He had two to three hours in each of the spaces to wait until the light was just right, and also to figure out the best place to position his camera in order to get a dramatic photo. “The challenge is finding the one emblematic shot that says it all compositionally as well as on an emotional level.”

Leventi has recently been getting assignments from The New York Times Magazine, Esquire and other clients to shoot grand interiors, including the refurbished TWA terminal in New York’s JFK airport, thanks to his series of images of great opera houses in Europe, which he exhibited last year in Toronto.

Leventi, who also shoots landscapes and less splendid interiors, says his very personal project on opera houses was inspired as much by his grandfather, Anton Gutman, as by his interest in architecture.  Gutman’s singing career was thwarted, Leventi explains. “He was a cantor who was interned in a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp from 1942-1948. The Danish operatic tenor Helge Rosvaenge, also a prisoner, heard my grandfather sing an aria from Tosca and gave him lessons. I grew up listening to him sing in our living room,” says Leventi, who ended up photographing the great stages on which his grandfather never got to sing.

More of Leventi’s architectural work can be found on his blog, davidleventi.wordpress.com.

The late photographer and filmmaker Tim Hetherington created one of his first major projects by embedding in 2003 with a Liberian rebel group attempting to overthrow then-president Charles Taylor. Hetherington’s Liberia work was collected in his 2009 book Long Story Bit By Bit: Libera Retold.

In a new paperback book, Photographs Not Taken (Daylight, $14.95), edited by photographer Will Steacy, Hetherington is among 70 photographers who described photographs they were unable or unwilling to take.

Hetherington wrote about living with “a rag-tag army of heavily armed young men” as they fought their way into the capital, Monrovia. In his story, which is excerpted today on the Web site of Obit magazine, Hetherington describes advancing with the rebels into the city, only to retreat exhausted and outgunned during a counter-attack.

The experience of being under fire and out of control sapped Hetherington of his ability to photograph a horrific auto accident he witnessed just as he and the rebels he was with escaped danger. “My brain was like a plate of scrambled eggs,” he recalled.

Read Hetherington’s full story at Obit magazine.

For more about Photographs Not Taken visit Daylight’s Web site.

Two months after she settled a copyright suit brought by photographer David LaChapelle, pop singer Rihanna once again has the blogosphere in an uproar. Recently, a LiveJournal blog posted screenshots from her new video, “You Da One,” alongside images by photographer Sølve Sundsbø. The scenes from the video show Rihanna in a bowl-cut wig wearing what appears to be a nude bodysuit with the shadows of various shapes projected on to her body. The shots are remarkably similar to editorial work Sundsbø has done, which Fashionista reported appeared in a 2008 issue of Numero magazine. Neither Rihanna nor Sundsbø, who is represented by Art+Commerce, have released statements regarding these latest accusations.

Earlier this year, Rihanna was sued by LaChapelle for copyright infringement, who claimed scenes from her video “S&M” borrowed heavily from various sadomasochistic images he’s made. The two reached an out-of-court settlement agreement, the terms of which were not disclosed.

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David LaChapelle Sues Rihanna for Infringement

© Shikhei Goh

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.

Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter has named Judith Puckett-Rinella as Photography Director of the magazine, effective January 3, publisher Conde Nast announced this morning. Puckett-Rinella replaces Susan White, who left the magazine several months ago to become executive director of licensing for Trunk Archive.

Carter praised Puckett-Rinella in a statement issued by Conde Nast for for having “the right combination of experience in photojournalism and classic portraiture” and he added, “besides that,  she’s just a fabulous human being.”

Puckett-Rinella joins Vanity Fair from the The New York Times Style Magazine, where she has been a senior photography editor since 2005. Last spring, she told PDN in an interview how she sources photography. For more information, see People on the Move.

Related story: Client Q&A: T Magazine‘s Judith Puckett-Rinella

The Photographer’s Advisory Board for National Geographic magazine has launched a new Web site to showcase the work of National Geographic photographers. Membership in the group, dubbed “The Photo Society,” is limited to photographers who’ve published at least one feature story in the magazine.

The purpose of the group and their Web site is to promote the work of the photographers, and to inform the public about their work. It also appears the site is meant to help would-be (or wannabe) National Geographic photographers understand what it takes to work for the magazine.

“Explaining the diversity and composition of this group is the easiest way to answer the question, ‘How do I become a National Geographic photographer?’” writes photographer Randy Olson on the site. “‘It is not easy or glamorous,” he explains, “And this is not where you begin your career. You are competing with world-class documentary photographers and within that genre there are men and women who are the absolute best at their specialty.’”

Check out The Photo Society site here: http://thephotosociety.org/

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), a non-governmental group that deals with “complaints about advertising” in the U.K., banned a Miu Miu fashion ad shot by Bruce Weber because they found it to be “irresponsible and in breach of the Code in showing a child in a hazardous or dangerous situation.” The child in question is 14-year-old American actress Hailee Steinfeld, the breakout star of last year’s True Grit.

The ad shows Steinfeld donning 1940s-inspired Miu Miu clothing while sitting on abandoned railroad tracks. The ASA accepted parent company Prada’s explanation that the setting was meant to depict an actress on a movie set, relaxing between takes and rubbing her eye nonchalantly, rather than to suggest the young girl is upset and contemplating suicide. The ASA also acknowledged that the ad was geared toward a mature audience since it was published in Tatler magazine, whose readership is for the most part adult. However, the ASA still found the ad to be troublesome since Steinfeld is shown in a “potentially hazardous situation” and noted the “ad must not appear again in its current form.”

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There’s no better argument for eschewing a buyout or work-for-hire contract, than Michael Grecco’s real-world example of how he earned more than $140,000 in licensing fees over an eight-year period from one advertising client. Because the contract had a set licensing period, every time the client wanted to use the images after the license expired, Grecco had to be paid again. John Harrington, Grecco’s partner for the 2011 PhotoPlus Expo seminar Licensing: Putting Money Back in Your Pocket, presented a similar case study to demonstrate how he earned $940 from an editorial client who wanted to use additional takes from a cover shoot for two sister publications not included in the license.

Of course, none of these fees would have been possible if their licensing agreements, which should always include the terms of usage (length of time, type of medium, region, etc) and exclusivity, were not clearly defined. Harrington is a big proponent of PLUS (Picture Licensing Universal System), a non-profit organization with the goal “to simplify and facilitate the communication and management of image rights.” On its site, UsePLUS.com, there is a License Generator tool that allows users to create a license based on the criteria entered. The trade organization American Photographic Artists also has licensing information on its site, APANational.com, or you can work with an intellectual property attorney who specializes in artists’ rights. Grecco also mentioned the importance of obtaining model releases and keeping them on file, especially if you plan on selling images commercially.

An important component of licensing is copyright protection, which Grecco and Harrington also discussed. Though as the photographer you technically own the copyright of an image at the click of the camera’s shutter (unless you’re doing work-for-hire or you’ve ceded the rights of the image), actually registering the photo at the U.S. Copyright Office will make prosecuting an infringement case much easier—a lesson Grecco learned the hard way when his photos were infringed: once when a derivative work was created and another time when a work was reprinted, both without his permission.

Grecco briefly touched on his system for registering his images with the Copyright Office, which he does en masse while the photos are still unpublished (once they’ve been published they must be registered individually): He fills out the necessary forms at Copyright.gov; creates CDs or DVDs with the files, organizing them using Print Window for Mac software; and sends the discs via a shipper that provides proof of receipt, such as FedEx or UPS. This last part is particularly important since the copyright goes into effect on the date it’s submitted, which means the date it’s received by the U.S. Copyright Office.

Though the licensing process seems onerous, it’s worth the extra work; both Grecco and Harrington use their knowledge of copyright and licensing to negotiate better fees from clients. And making extra money on photographs you’ve already taken, that’s just a smarter way to do business.