10 posts tagged “photography”
An update to the story I published on Saturday: Derek Powazek has written about what happened at JPG Magazine, from his perspective, and how he and Heather are no longer involved.
In one evening, Paul removed issues 1-6 from the JPG website, removed Heather from the About page, and deleted the "Letter from the Editors" that had lived on the site since day one. Paul informed me that we were inventing a new story about how JPG came to be that was all about 8020. He told me not to speak of that walk in Buena Vista, my wife, or anything that came before 8020.
Here's where the whole "not lying" thing comes in. I just could not agree to this new story.
Powazek is restrained in his writing on this issue and doesn't badmouth anyone. As an outside observer though it appears that Powazek made the mistake of trusting friends when it came to business. Again, this is just my take on it as an outside observer but it seems like Powazek trusted that he and his friend, now JPG editor and publisher, Paul Cloutier would always be able to agree on the really important issues pertaining to both JPG and their publishing company, 8020, so it wasn't any big deal that Cloutier was technically CEO. That trust was the downfall because when the CEO and the venture capitalist funding 8020 decided to rewrite JPG's history (and seriously what is that about? There are lots of us who've been around since the beginning.*) Powazek was unfortunately, from a business perspective, in a position with absolutely no power to veto their decision.
Powazek lists some lessons he's learned from this experience and for anyone in business, particularly entrepreneurs, they are lessons that need to be chiseled into your brain. They include
Make no assumptions when it comes to roles and responsibilities. Like my dad says: "Someone's gotta call quittin' time."
When someone says one thing, but acts in a contradictory way, you have a choice between believing their words or believing their deeds. Believe their deeds.
Never let anyone tell you what you want. When someone says, "You don't want that," what they really mean is, "I don't want you to have that."
That ends the Derek part of this entry.
*At first this rewriting of JPG Magazine's history made absolutely no sense to me. I mean there were so many of us that submitted to the first few issues, ordered the issues from Lulu, participated in the Flickr group, and watched Derek and Heather's baby grow into an amazing magazine that everyone could subscribe to and everyone could participate in to some degree or another. Why would the money people and the new CEO want to get away from that history? It's a freaking great history to have.
A bit more thought about it and I can only come to one conclusion. I could be totally wrong about the theory I'm about to lay out and it's just that, a theory, but it's the only thing that makes sense to me. Those thousands and thousands of us who are really passionate about photography and were really passionate about JPG Magazine from the very beginning are small potatoes compared to the new audience and new participants 8020 and its venture capitalist are looking to as participants in the new JPG. The percentage of the population interested in seeing interesting toy camera images alongside glossy, pretty images and gritty street photography images is probably small compared to the percentage of the population of passionate new shooters with brand new DSLR cameras who want to see the kind of images they are creating in print. We are small in number and influence compared to the new crop of photography hobbyists who can afford great new DSLR cameras and really want to see their images in print more than they care about retaining rights, getting paid, etc. We are small and the audience of subscribers they want is large. More subscribers, more advertisers, more advertising money. To get those many more subscribers JPG is going to have to become more accessible to the general public audience (think more flower/kids/pet images, less esoteric fine art photography, less not-beautiful photography, less abstract work and definitely less nudity/sensual/body images). Rewriting the history is a first step toward that.
A few speculations on future developments at JPG Magazine that may be very, very wrong but wouldn't surprise me if they are right in part or as a whole.
- A large camera company will sponsor a contest for the best flower/kids/pet/something pleasing to a mass audience. The winning photo will be on the cover of JPG Magazine, the winning photographer will be paid $100 and the camera company will own the rights to all submitted photos to use in advertising at their will.
- Photographers who submit to JPG will have the option of their photographs being sold in a microstock capacity. This option will be turned on by default. Users will have to actively opt out if they don't want to sell their work for pennies.
- Photography submitted to JPG will be used in other magazines published by 8020. Pay for these images will be better than microstock wages but still far less than standard magazine photography rates. 8020 magazines will not have staff photographers or use freelance photographers on anything resembling a regular basis. They won't have to.
Update: Ongoing conversations about this topic:
Later, JPG. in the The Unofficial JPG Magazine Group at Flickr
Heather and Derek are suddenly out of JPG Magazine at Metafilter
*Disclaimer: I love JPG Magazine. I'm a subscriber and I had a photograph published in JPG a few issues ago. I bought the very first issue of JPG when it was an on-demand publishing venture through LuLu so, from a distance I watched it grow up and evolve into what it is now.
What in the world is up with JPG Magazine that makes it possible that any mention of JPG founders Heather Champ and Derek Powazek seem to have been deleted from both the current incarnation of the magazine and the history of it?
8020 has decided to rewrite the history of how JPG came into being, removing the original six issues from the site, and any mention of Derek and I. - Heather Powazek Champ
If I'm not mistaken 8020 was founded by Powazek and a partner and JPG Magazine's evolution from a quarterly, print on-demand work to a traditional subscription based one was their first project.
In the web 2.0 era where radical transparency is touted it seems awfully bizarre that this shakeup has thus far been terribly quiet. As a subscriber and someone with obviously deep interests in photography I'm concerned about the future of the magazine because it was Derek and Heather's baby and I wonder how it will progress without their vision. Truthfully though I kind of hope they start a new publication because clearly their vision of a photography magazine is a successful one and I think there is more than enough space and room in the market for another Chowazek publication
Update: From Derek Powazek's member profile on the JPG Magazine site
Update 2: Paul Cloutier is listed as JPG Magazine's publisher on the about page and in a thread in The Unofficial JPG Magazine Flickr Group Cloutier says
There is no doubt that everyone was operating under a state of hyper alertness and suspicion on the Virginia Tech campus on Monday after the tragic events there. Given those events and the environment it's perhaps understandable that police arrested and held Shaozhuo Cui, photo editor for the Virginia Tech student newspaper, on the grounds that as a young man of Asian descent he was a "suspect matching the profile" of the shooter that had been described to police. Even Cui finds it understandable
"I can't blame authorities for any of their actions, and I certainly understand that they need to do what they feel is best in a dangerous situation."
What isn't understandable though is why the police, even after they cleared and released Cui, are still holding on to his equipment. His camera, camera bag, media cards and the images they contain and even his IDs are still being held, as of Tuesday April 17, by the police.
"But as a student journalist, I don't feel it's appropriate that authorities continue to hold my camera and my work without any further explanation."
Obviously deepest thoughts and sympathies go out to the entire Virginia Tech community. That being said this is a story worth following and paying attention to. The student photojournalist did nothing wrong and he deserves access to his equipment and his images. Even in the darkest times we can't ignore cases of journalists being silenced either through force, or in this case by keeping images away from the photographer who captured them.
via PhotoAttorney
Original Story: Student photographer detained during Virginia Tech crisis, equipment confiscated
Last week I wrote about the former Toledo Blade photographer who got caught digitally altering a photograph submitted for publication. Today Rob Galbraith brings the news that this was not a one time incident. The paper's investigation found dozens of seriously altered photos that were submitted by the photographer, many of which ended up in the paper or on the paper's website.
National Press Photographers Association says
Even though photojournalists being caught altering photos is becoming more and more common the magnitude of this story is shocking.
The Blade offers a comparison PDF of some of the altered photos and their unaltered originals.
Mr. Detrich, as reported last week, has decided to leave photojournalism. He has also decided to disable comments on his blog.
A photographer for the Toledo Blade, Allan Detrich, digitally altered an image to remove a pair of legs from the frame of his shot of the Bluffton University baseball team. When the doctored photo was brought to the paper's editors a correction and apology was run in the paper, and the photogarpher's work went under serious review. Now the photographer has quit the paper and has in fact left photojournalism entirely.
The photojournalist in hot water for digitally altering a photo that makes it to publication has become, sadly, a relatively common story over the past couple years so I didn't comment on it when it first broke. However the photographer's decision to quit the Toledo Blade made me think about it a bit more and two aspects in particular. First why he'd alter a news photograph in such a manner. After first denying that he'd altered the photo he then said he'd done so because he wanted to make a print of the image for himself so we can assume that he considered the image considerably improved without the stray legs in the frame. I've looked at the images in question at length and I have to disagree with any assertion that the altered version is far superior than the original. So my question remains: why do such a major alteration?
Second, there have been several commenters on Mr. Detrich's blog who not only accept his apology over the incident but they support him emphatically and feel that the whole situation is overblown, and that any serious criticism of Detrich's altering the image is misplaced.
This morning Jason Kottke talked about the very famous Migrant Mother photograph that Dorthea Lange took in 1936. Kottke's piece is about how the woman in the photograph was very unhappy with the impact the photo had or didn't have on her life. Namely, since Lange included no contact information for the woman in her notes the woman never received any payment, compensation or even a print and since Lange didn't get any details about the woman's life or her story the impression created by the image and the title, Migrant Mother, was misleading at best and inaccurate at worst. Kottke concludes "Like all photographs, Migrant Mother is neither truth nor fiction but somewhere in-between."
So now I'm thinking about the two aspects of this incident that interest me in the context of Kottke's conclusion. If you allow that photographs live somewhere between truth and fiction then can editing out a pair of legs be much worse than composing a shot where the legs are left out? Or cropping the image down so that the part of the frame where the extra legs were is missing? What's the difference between those 3? Intent, technical skill, access to Photoshop? Different in camera framing, digital altering, and cropping would have all had the same effect on this image. They would have all managed to leave out part of the story. The part left out is that beside a group of reflective, mourning ballplayers you have a set of legs that belong to a partially obscured photographer who is almost on top of the ballplayers. All the published shots of this scene that I've seen were taken from a respectful distance, away from the ballplayers but the photographer who was caught in Detrich's image is very, very close to the players.
When I first saw the photos, read all the stories, etc I didn't give much thought to who the legs belonged to. I assumed they were a parent, a team manager, or someone affiliated with the team and honestly couldn't imagine why the photographer would edit them out. Now that I know they belonged to a photographer who was, in my opinion, uncomfortably close to a very private, personal moment for the surviving teammates, I can now think of at least one reason to edit those legs out: taking out an interloper after the fact. Was this Detrich's motivation? I don't think so but it's possible and one more angle to the story. That brings me back to Kottke's thoughts on photographs being between truth and fiction. Like the edited picture Kottke's statement is at least partially true but it also doesn't tell the whole story. Photographs tell a story and many small steps along the process determine what story a particular photograph tells. Compose one way and the shot tells one story, compose another and the story is completely different. Post process the image one way and the story is very accurate and true to life, post process another way and everything, save the bare facts of the image, is changed.
Photojournalist, perhaps more than any other photographers, are telling stories with their images. Anyone who admires, studies, practices or even thinks about photography knows that there is no way a single photograph can capture every detail of a scene or an event. There is no way that a single photograph can tell the entire story. But since we know we're only going to get part of the story in any given news image we want that image and the story it is telling to be as accurate and as truthful as it can be. So while I understand the people who support Detrich and think the situation got blown out of proportion I have to disagree. By altering this news image he broke the fundamental unwritten contract between photojournalists and viewers, which is that he give us the most accurate, truthful story he can in his images while we will trust him and the story he is telling and we'll let it touch us and impact our lives. Digital tools make breaking this contract a lot easier and a lot easier to get away with but that doesn't make it right.
Is there a way to get Vox to not hate the JPG Photo Box?
I had a photo shoot yesterday that was pretty uncomfortable for me. It was uncomfortable because I was on the wrong end of the camera, that is to say I was having my picture taken, but also because the photographer and I did not click at all. I was being photographed for a story one of the local weekly papers (INtake which is owned by the Indianapolis Star) is running on local blogs and bloggers. I'm featured because of Consuming Indy. The photographer I was supposed to be working with got hurt earlier in the week so she couldn't make it and instead a freelance photographer was sent. I confess that I have a real issue with people who are late. I think it says you don't respect the other person's time nearly as much as your own. So naturally I was not amused as I sat waiting in a restaurant for 25 minutes until the freelance guy showed up. I had decided to give him 5 more minutes when he showed up. So he shows up, doesn't even comment on the fact he's 25 minutes late, much less apologize and moves on to sort of scooping the place out for where to shoot. Neither he nor the reporter had bothered to call the restaurant though so they weren't sure why this guy was setting up and they weren't amused that no one had asked first. Eventually the restaurant was like fine whatever but we had to wait for the prop food to cook. Had they known we were coming they would have had the prop food ready but no, instead we got to wait for it. The actual shooting took less than 10 minutes and made me feel, just....horrible about myself. He didn't say anything directly but I got the distinct impression the guy really didn't want to be there and really didn't want to be shooting me. He gave very little direction and what direction he did give came across as "jesus I don't have much to work with here do I?" I was looking forward to the photo shoot and the story in the paper but really it just ruined my day.
Maybe I read too much in to things, maybe I didn't but either way it was extremely educational to me as a photographer. It was a real lesson in how not to behave when you're shooting someone.
It's the time of year to make the photographers and photography lovers in your world very happy by gifting material goods their way. Or it's the time of year to reward yourself for being very, very good. Either way enjoy Exposure's Holiday Gift Guide and spread the photography love.
Note that the gift guide is presented as an Amazon.com store. Any sales through the guide will support Exposure with a tiny percentage of the sale.
JPG Magazine Issue 7 (http://jpgmag.com/) will be available mid-November and guess who is going to have a photograph in it? That's right me. I can't tell you how excited I am. JPG 7 is the first issue that's going to be available in bookstores. So please request it from your local book store or get yourself a JPG subscription.
This is my first paid publication as a photographer and I'm just giddy with joy about it. It feels like a step. You know?
So there's this "dynamic travel guide" called Schmap that some people find helpful. I had never heard of it until they asked to use one of my photographs in their latest guide for New Orleans. It's curious that they'd want one of my photographs since I've never been to New Orleans but whatever. Apparently a semi-nice photograph of Marti Gras beads is New Orelans-y enough. Of course I got paid 0 dollars and 0 cents but it technically counts as my first published photo credit so I looked at it as an opportunity and jumped on it. So now I get to say I'm a published photographer and not be lying. That's pretty cool. Step one on the list of goals toward world domination as a photographer.
