Photography Reading Shortlist – 08.22.12
Screenshot from Interactive 360 Panorama from the Curiosity Rover
›› Contending with the barrage of Olympics sports photographs were a number of “everyday” London photo collections, on Lightbox, the Lens, and at the Tate Modern, which opened “Another London,” featuring classic photos of London by legendary photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson (who would have turned 100 today), Robert Frank, Bruce Davidson, and Irving Penn. We’re curious to see how London looks through Jason Fulford’s idiosyncratic lens; he was there covering the Olympics for Harper’s.
›› The mars rover Curiosity touched down after an eight month flight, joining the Opportunity, which has already been on Mars since 2004, in its photo documentation of the Martian landscape, equipped this time with a more advanced camera. This camera recently transmitted images, which have since been stitched into a 360º panorama, 154 million miles through space. American Photo offered some historical perspective. The vast, empty reality of the Red Planet might not quite live up to our fantasies, which were recently expressed in a NASA-commissioned digital image series, Mars: Adrift on the Hourglass Sea, which actually bore some resemblance to real images of Mars researchers in the Utah desert.
›› Following the arrest of a New York Times photojournalist who was photographing the NYPD’s response to a street fight in the Bronx, the Lens blog published a Q+A with National Press Photographer’s Association lawyer Mickey Osterreicher about the legal rights of photographers. Osterreicher recently published a legal guide for photographers covering the upcoming Republican and Democratic National Conventions, in an effort to preëmpt the kind of police-media confrontations that occurred earlier this year and during the 2008 conventions.
›› A major retrospective (featuring over 300 prints and dozens of monographs) of Robert Adam’s work opened at the Yale University Art Gallery, after travelling to galleries across North America. Adams was interviewed in a Modern Arts Notes podcast, and ASX posted an excerpt from an older Adams interview.
›› Esteemed photographer Martine Franck, a 32 year member of Magnum Photos who photographed extensively in Asia and on her home turf in France, died of cancer. She was 74. The Guardian, Lightbox, the New York Times, and Magnum paid tribute with obituaries and slideshows of her work. Kate Phillips of Slate commented on the in memoriam writing, which has often focused more on Franck’s marriage to Henri Cartier-Bresson than her own artistic work.
›› “It is a straightforward book that stirs complex emotions” – Walker Evans’ American Photographs was published seventy-five years ago, and was just reissued by the Museum of Modern Art. Ben Cosgrove at Lightbox considered why the book still feels so vital today. To see how the work was originally presented, check out a collection of installation views from Evan’s 1938 MOMA show.
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