Joachimesque or Joachim Robert, depending from where you look.
Tokyo has an incredible structure to support photographers who are passionate about their work, but not yet professionals—in short, someone like Emi. Totem Pole is run by a group of members who all pitch in to pay the rent, and make decisions together about the gallery.
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The Future of Photography Is Alive and Well in Tokyo | American Photo
Very interesting article.
when the web started, i used to get really grumpy with people because they put my poems up. they put my stories up. they put my stuff up on the web. i had this belief, which was completely erroneous, that if people put your stuff up on the web and you didn’t tell them to take it down, you would lose your copyright, which actually, is simply not true. and i also got very grumpy because i felt like they were pirating my stuff, that it was bad. and then i started to notice that two things seemed much more significant. one of which was… places where i was being pirated, particularly russia where people were translating my stuff into russian and spreading around into the world, i was selling more and more books. people were discovering me through being pirated. then they were going out and buying the real books, and when a new book would come out in russia, it would sell more and more copies. i thought this was fascinating, and i tried a few experiments. some of them are quite hard, you know, persuading my publisher for example to take one of my books and put it out for free. we took “american gods,” a book that was still selling and selling very well, and for a month they put it up completely free on their website. you could read it and you could download it. what happened was sales of my books, through independent bookstores, because that’s all we were measuring it through, went up the following month three hundred percent i started to realize that actually, you’re not losing books. you’re not losing sales by having stuff out there. when i give a big talk now on these kinds of subjects and people say, “well, what about the sales that i’m losing through having stuff copied, through having stuff floating out there?” i started asking audiences to just raise their hands for one question. which is, i’d say, “okay, do you have a favorite author?” they’d say, “yes.” and i’d say, “good. what i want is for everybody who discovered their favorite author by being lent a book, put up your hands.” and then, “anybody who discovered your favorite author by walking into a bookstore and buying a book raise your hands.” and it’s probably about five, ten percent of the people who actually discovered an author who’s their favorite author, who is the person who they buy everything of. they buy the hardbacks and they treasure the fact that they got this author. very few of them bought the book. they were lent it. they were given it. they did not pay for it, and that’s how they found their favorite author. and i thought, “you know, that’s really all this is. it’s people lending books. and you can’t look on that as a loss of sale. it’s not a lost sale, nobody who would have bought your book is not buying it because they can find it for free.” what you’re actually doing is advertising. you’re reaching more people, you’re raising awareness. understanding that gave me a whole new idea of the shape of copyright and of what the web was doing. because the biggest thing the web is doing is allowing people to hear things. allowing people to read things. allowing people to see things that they would never have otherwise seen. and i think, basically, that’s an incredibly good thing.”
- neil gaiman on copyright, piracy, and the commercial value of the web
via garychou: roominthecastle
Wisdom. No wonder he’s one of my favourite writers.
If you happen to be in Cologne today, you should drop by at the 2. Kölner Blattsalon in Ehrenfeld to take a look at the new issue of ehrenfelder, romka and other great publications.
(via She Blogged By Night: Warning: Words Approaching)
Anna May Wong, signed to Franz Lederer, circa 1927
These sentiments are common, but I’ve never seen them stated with so much bite and humour.
“As the mass money dries up, there is a trend to aspire to be closer to the Versailles salon of the Sun King. From riding on the back of a Pentagon war machine subsidy, picking up…
Do you work on a series of pictures about a particular subject until you exhaust it, or do you simply photograph and allow each body of work to emerge?
I just work and I throw the pictures in a box that says “X” or whatever, and eventually if the box gets full it merits looking at. I often work on two or three or four of those things at once. People tell me that they all look like they’ve been well thought out, and that’s because I’ve worked on them for so long.
Why do you work that way?
In a way it gets rid of infatuation- because I don’t think of it as anything except that I’m doing this little bit all the time. And I don’t even know what it’s going to be like until several years later, when I start to look at them. The nudes, for instance, took twelve years or so, and I didn’t really look at them closely during that time. They just went into boxes.
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Interview excerpt with Lee Friedlander
from Maria, an edition from the Smithsonian Series Photographers at Work
dvdp:
The Milky Way and Storms over Africa
view from ISS, 2011-12-29 (over central Africa to Madagascar)
(Source: eol.jsc.nasa.gov)
Gizmodo: Perfectly Colored Famous Photos Are So Much More Powerful Than The BW Originals
what do you think?
what’s “more powerful” is that we re-discover these iconic photos. We know them so well in black and white, that they don’t carry their meaning anymore. In colour, well, it’s a different perspective. Now, take an iconic color picture from the last ten years, for example that one :
and watch it now in Black and White. Doesn’t it “seem” more powerful now?
I think it’s just a question of point of view and re-discovery of a well known photo.
The stero-typical poor …………(insert nationality here) person staring blankly at the camera and then converted using the ‘Poverty’ filter in photoshop that we see more often than a hipstamatic print.
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Poverty’s not so black and white? | we produce beautifully crafted multimedia
Another eye-opening article from Duckrabbit.
Sécurité ou lapins, il faut choisir
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L’Union (à cause de lerigolisse)
LAPINS !
(Source: ajustetitre)
found photo of those found ginkgo leaves between pages of this found book from an used book store, 01/08/2010. woo, feels like such a long time ago.
(via mari kojima: founds)
