The August 2012 cover of National Geographic. This issue was part of NG’s winning submission in the Photography category of the National Magazine Awards. It features an image from Aaron Huey’s series on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. © National Geographic/photo by Aaron Huey.

The American Society of Magazine Editors announced the winners of the 2013 National Magazine Awards last night in New York City. National Geographic won in four categories, including Photography and Multimedia. For the Photography category, National Geographic submitted three issues of the magazine, which included work by Aaron Huey, Andrew Parkinson, Carsten Peter,  Alex Webb and Michael Yamashita (August 2012); Robert Clark, Karla Gachet and Ivan Kashinsky, Rob Kendrick, Stephanie Sinclair and Brian Skerry (September 2012); and Robert Clark, Carolyn Drake, Tim Layman, Michael “Nick” Nichols, Paolo Pellegrin and Mark Thiessen (December 2012). National Geographic won the Multimedia category for “Cheetahs on the Edge,” which included still images by Frans Lanting.

In the Feature Photography category, W magazine took home the prize for “Good Kate, Bad Kate,” a fashion editorial shot by Steven Klein and featuring model Kate Moss. The work appeared in W’s March 2012 issue.

Other notable winners last night included New York, which took home two awards including top honors as the Magazine of the Year, and TIME, which won the Design category.

Since 1966 the trade organization, in association with the Columbia University School of Journalism, has been recognizing excellence in publishing. This year almost 260 publications entered work for consideration in the annual awards. The 330 judges included magazine editors, art directors, photo editors and journalism educators.

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

Related Articles:

Helping Communities Speak for Themselves: Aaron Huey’s Pine Ridge Community Storytelling Project
Photojournalist Aaron Huey sought a new way to tell the stories of the Oglala Lakota living on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, and found it with an online tool that enables the residents to create and share their personal histories. (For subscribers only.)

From Volcanoes to Glaciers, Carsten Peter on Shooting in Challenging Conditions
The National Geographic photographer talks about doing whatever it takes to get the shot, whether it’s from the crater of a volcano to the interior of a glacier. (For subscribers only.)

Anatomy of an iPad App: A Photo Archive That’s Also an App
Michael “Nick” Nichols grew weary of offering his wildlife photography for free online, so he relauched his Web site as a low-cost iPad application. (For subscribers only.)

W Magazine: Past, Present, Future
Stefano Tonchi on the importance of photographers to the magazine’s history, how the popularity of online video is influencing editors, and what he sees for the future of W and the magazine business. (For subscribers only.)

“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

Kodak’s transfer of its Personalized Imaging and Document Imaging businesses—including its photographic film division—to the UK Kodak Pension Plan (KPP) will not affect the production or distribution of photographic film, according to Audrey Jonckheer, Global Communications Director for Kodak’s Personalized Imaging business.

Jonckheer says the Personalized Imaging and Document Imaging businesses are gearing up for what they hope will be a smooth transition. “This whole plan was put together so there would not be any changes in product, services or delivery to our customer base…. All of the manufacturing sites will continue to operate as normal.”

On Monday Eastman Kodak Company announced that it would turn its Personalized Imaging and Document Imaging businesses over to KPP in order to settle $2.8 billion in claims KPP made against Kodak in bankruptcy proceedings. Kodak agreed to transfer the businesses to KPP for cash and non-cash consideration of $650 million. If the U.S. Bankruptcy Court and the UK Pensions Regulator approve the settlement, it will help pave the way for Kodak to emerge from Chapter 11.

The proposed deal has encouraged optimism, Jonckheer says. Today the KPP chairman, Steven Ross, was in Rochester, where Kodak is based, speaking with Kodak employees and local reporters. According to Jonckheer, “He exuded confidence in the growth prospects for the businesses,” and said that with the proper investment, which Kodak hasn’t been able to make due to their Chapter 11 status, the businesses could grow.

“That’s the part that’s exciting to us, because we are profitable,” Jonckheer says. “The future is looking bright.”

In the immediate aftermath of the announcement the majority of social media chatter was about the future of Kodak film, says Jonckheer. “From a social media perspective, from the immediate media coverage that we saw, it was primarily film. Film was in the headlines,” she told PDN. “No matter what this company does, the reaction is always, ‘How is this going to affect film?’”

“We have been asked that, and we have said what we’ve been saying all along, which is that the lifecycle of film depends on the demand for it, and as long as there is profitable demand there will be film.”

Related: Kodak Turns Over Film Division to Its UK Pension Plan

Iwan Baan‘s iconic aerial photograph of a blacked-out lower Manhattan in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Sandy helped New York magazine earn top honors in the American Society of Magazine Editors Cover of the Year contest for 2012. The New York cover also won in the News and Politics category.

A majority of the winning covers and finalists featured photographs or photo-based illustrations.

The finalists for Cover of the Year included Harper’s Bazaar‘s cover featuring a Terry Richardson photograph of Gwyneth Paltrow, and TIME‘s Martin Schoeller-photographed cover showing a woman breast-feeding a 3-year-old boy. The Harper’s Bazaar cover won in the Fashion and Beauty category.

The New York Times Magazine‘s Finlay MacKay-photographed cover featuring Jerry Seinfeld won in the Entertainment and Celebrity category.

The Times Magazine was also recognized in the Sport and Adventure category for its cover featuring Damon Winter‘s portrait of Venus and Serena Williams.

The cover of the New York magazine Sex Issue, which won in the Lifestyle category, featured a photograph by Tim Flach.

And a food photograph by Johnny Autry graced the Garden & Gun cover that won in the Most Delicious category.

Click here for a gallery of the winners.

Canon has released version 1.2.1 of the firmware for its 5D Mark III DSLR. This update brings two useful features to the popular camera, one benefiting still photographers and the other those who shoot video with the 5D.

Firmware 1.2.1 gives filmmakers the ability to capture uncompressed 8-bit 4:2:2 video. This uncompressed footage will be output through the camera’s HDMI connection at the same time it is recorded to the memory cards and displayed on the 5D’s LCD.

The new firmware also allows the center cross-type AF point to work with lenses that have a maximum aperture of f/8.

PDN’s  full story, including a link where you can download the free upload, is now on the Gear news page of PDNOnline.com.

Samsung today announced a new body in its NX mirrorless system, the NX 2000. With five bodies and 12 lenses, the Samsung NX has quietly become one of the larger mirrorless systems on the market today. The NX2000, like many cameras recently, adds  Wi-Fi and NFC (Near Field Communications) with the goal of making camera-smartphone connections a standard part of your photography workflow.  NFC allows users to connect the camera with another properly enabled device simply by touching them together. This means no more entering wifi details on a tiny screen or searching for bluetooth pairings.

Along with a 20MP APS-C sensor, the NX 2000 has a generously sized 3.7-inch 1152k-dot touchscreen LCD, 8fps continuous shooting and Full HD video recording. Continuing the industry-wide trend, the NX2000 will be available in pink and white along with the more traditional black. Perhaps of more interest to serious photographers is the fact that the NX2000 comes bundled with a copy of Adobe Lightroom 4. Not a crippled freebie as with the terrible “limited” Photoshop versions that came bundled with cameras in the past, this is a full version of Lightroom 4. In what some may see as a drawback, the NX2000 does use MicroSD memory rather than the more common SD cards.

Specifications can be found in Samsung’s NX2000 press release. Priced at $649 for a body and 20-50mm lens kit, the NX2000 will be available later this month from Samsung dealers and at http://www.samsung.com.

Priced around $649.99, the camera will be available as a kit with the 20-50mm lens and a copy of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom in white, black and pink. There is currently no information about its European price and availability.

The Transported of the KwaNdebele: Travellers from KwaNdebele buying weekly season tickets at the PUTCO bus depot in Marabastad, Pretoria, 1983. © David Goldbatt/The Goodman Gallery

Imagine photographs by Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson.  Wait a moment, then imagine some more by Diane Arbus and others by Sebastian Salgado.  Good.  Being the sort of person who reads this blog, you probably just conjured a dozen or more vividly remembered images in your mind’s eye.

Now imagine a photograph by David Goldblatt.  Thought so.  Unless you’re a fellow South African or one of his fans, you probably drew a blank.  He’s one of the world’s most honored living photographers, a man who is greatly respected and, yet, is little known.  It’s a paradox.

On Wednesday evening, when the International Center of Photography [ICP] confers on him its Cornell Capa Lifetime Achievement Award, Goldblatt will collect yet another prestigious award.  He’ll add this to his resume, right above the 2006 Hasselblad Award, 2009 Henri Cartier-Bresson Award, and the 2010 Lucie Award for Lifetime Achievement.

As prestigious as those honors surely are, they’re little more than the icing on a magnificent cake.  Over a 50-year career, Goldblatt has been the subject of exhibitions at major museums in Europe, Africa, and North America, including solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art, in 1998, and the Jewish Museum, in 2010.  In addition, leading publishers of photography have produced a dozen books devoted to his work.

It’s an impressive list of accomplishments by any measure.  So, why isn’t Goldblatt’s photography as well known as his name?  And what’s his photography all about anyway?  Read the rest of this entry »

© Paul Salveson, courtesy MACK / www.mackbooks.co.uk

American photographer Paul Salveson has won the 2013 First Book Award for his project “Between the Shell,” a series of color images made through creative observation and arrangement of objects close at hand. The award, announced last week, is co-administered by MACK books and Britain’s National Media Museum. They will publish Salveson’s book later this year.

The judges for the award were Michael Mack (MACK), Polly Fleury (Wilson Centre for Photography London), Liz Jobey (FT Weekend Magazine), Greg Hobson (National Media Museum) and photographer Clare Strand.

Salveson’s work was selected from more than 100 submissions.

The First Book Award, now in its second year, is open to photographers who have not previously released a book project with a publisher. However self-published and print-on-demand projects do not disqualify a photographer.

In order to be considered for the award, photographers must be nominated by one of an international group of nominators. The names of this year’s nominators were not released.

Today Eastman Kodak Company announced the transfer of its Personalized Imaging and Document Imaging businesses to the UK-based Kodak Pension Plan (KPP), its largest creditor. The deal includes Kodak’s Film Capture and Paper & Output Systems divisions, among others, and will see KPP take over responsibility for the operation of Kodak’s film business.

Kodak is giving the businesses over to KPP, the pension plan for its U.K. retirees, in order to settle $2.8 billion in claims KPP made against Kodak in bankruptcy proceedings. Kodak agreed to transfer the businesses to KPP for cash and non-cash consideration of $650 million. If the U.S. Bankruptcy Court and the UK Pensions Regulator approve the settlement, it will help pave the way for Kodak to emerge from Chapter 11. Kodak plans to focus on its Commercial Imaging business.

In a statement, Kodak Chairman and CEO Antonio M. Perez said the settlement helped Kodak clear “several key hurdles in our reorganization…. placing our Personalized Imaging and Document Imaging businesses with a new owner that recognizes their value and is focused on their growth and success, and providing the remaining liquidity we require to emerge from Chapter 11.”

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, KPP plans to hire new executives to run the Personalized Imaging and Document Imaging businesses so they can generate cash flow for the pension plan, rather than finding a buyer for the businesses.

“The businesses that we are acquiring will deliver long-term cash flows to support the plan’s obligations,” said KPP chairman Steven Ross in a statement. “The financial stability that KPP will provide for the Personalized Imaging and Document Imaging businesses will be beneficial to those businesses’ employees, customers and partners.”

Last month we wrote about some upcoming deadlines for major photography grants. Below are four photo contests that have deadlines fast approaching.

Newspace Center for Photography 2013 Juried Exhibition
The Newspace Center for Photography in Portland, Oregon, is hosting a contest in which the winners will be part of its 2013 Juried Exhibition. Additionally, one photographer will be selected from all of the entries for a solo exhibit at the Newspace in 2014. Deadline: April 30, 2013.
www.newspacephoto.org/gallery/call-for-entries

Image13
The American Society of Media Photographers’ New York chapter is one of the co-sponsors for the Image13 international photo contest. First, second and third place prizes will be awarded in two categories: Professional and Student. Prizes include inclusion in a New York City exhibition, a promotional e-mail sent to industry professionals and an ad in PDN announcing the names of winners. Only images created after January 1, 2012, will be eligible for the contest. Deadline: May 1, 2013.
www.asmp.org/image13/

Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize
The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University relaunched the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize this year, with updated guidelines that reflect the changing approaches to documentary projects. The new guidelines include accepting audio files or graphic novels in the written section of the submission; artists need to have already started the documentary project to be eligible; and photographers no longer need to work with a writer to qualify, as solo submissions are now accepted. According to the award’s online FAQ section, “All entries must have one thing in common: evidence that they were created with reliance on documentary methods—research and interviews—and immersive, long-term fieldwork.” The winner will receive $10,000 and an exhibition at the Center for Documentary Studies. Deadline: May 7, 2013.
www.documentarystudies.duke.edu/awards/dorothea-lange-paul-taylor-prize

Daylight Photo Awards
Non-profit book and magazine publisher Daylight is sponsoring the Daylight Photo Awards 2013. According to the contest’s guidelines, jurors are looking for analogue or digital images that “demonstrate the ability to build a strong series of images and a cohesive body of work.” Prizes include $1,000, an exhibition at the Daylight Project Space and a set of Daylight books. Deadline: May 15, 2013.
www.daylightphotoawards.com