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Jake Naughton came to photography as a disillusioned art student. Jesuit high school had instilled in him a passion for social justice that he wasn’t sure how to reconcile with the insularity of the art world. “I liked to travel, I cared about the world and I was interested in esthetics,” he says. A college friend suggested Naughton try photojournalism. He pursued a journalism degree and became the photo editor at the student newspaper. Naughton then moved to Washington, D.C., to intern at the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting; he was soon hired as the multimedia projects coordinator. He learned how to produce and fund photography projects, and how to collaborate with editors at major publications. After three years at the Pulitzer Center, Naughton wanted to produce his own work. “I decided the fastest way to build up my chops would be to go to graduate school.” At the City University of New York, Naughton found a mentor in James Estrin, co-editor of The New York Times Lens blog. Through Estrin he landed an internship at Lens, as well daily assignments for the paper. “Jake does not settle for easy images, no matter how visually arresting they may be,” Estrin says. “He makes great images, but what sets him apart is the depth of his critical thinking and his ability to communicate his ideas and observations in nuanced ways.” Naughton says he’s strategic about his business, only pursuing stories that he knows he will be able to sell. He’s funded personal projects through grants, and his collaborations with writers have helped him sell stories to major media. He also cofounded the cooperative Black Box with Chris Gregory, Natalie Keyssar and Alejandro Torres Viera. “We are all exploring how esthetic a news photograph can be, and pushing against what a publication can offer.”

#W12 #Jake Naughton

“Even if my assignment is one portrait, I’ll go above and beyond and try to put together a story,” says Justin Kaneps. His work ethic and his ability to combine portraits with storytelling have caught the eye of photo editors. “His pictures are suffused with natural light and rich colors and textures that give them a vivid, dreamy quality,” says Bloomberg Businessweek’s Clinton Cargill, who assigned Kaneps to shoot a cover story on Levi’s. “They also fit clearly in the tradition of the early color photographers…. It gives his pictures a sense of nostalgia that worked perfectly to portray an iconic American brand like Levi’s.” Kaneps breaks down his approach to photography like this: minimal gear, respect for subjects, let the work speak for itself. He balances the meticulously placed and the arbitrarily happened-upon, the thoughtful and the spontaneous. At art school, he was heavily influenced by the New Topographics photographers, but when he started making portraits in 2011, he looked to the work of Walker Evans and Lewis Hine. Moving forward, he hopes eventually to dig into long-term storytelling projects in places as far flung as Alaska, Guatemala, Latvia or Sweden. Kaneps credits human connection and communication with both peers and editors for the advancement of his career thus far. “I wear my heart on my sleeve, but it’s helped me forge deep connections to my peers, mentors and subjects,” reveals Kaneps. Meeting individually with editors in their offices has been more helpful for earning assignments than attending portfolio reviews or festivals. Speaking about marketing his work, he says there’s a lesson he’s learned: “Keep a fire in your heart and if you really want it you’ll get there with a fine balance of patience and persistence.”

#W12 #Justin Kaneps

Dazed and Confused (1993) - Official Trailer - Matthew McConaughey Movie HD Subscribe to CLASSIC TRAILERS: http://bit.ly/1u43jDe Subscribe to TRAILERS: http:...

he adventures of high school and junior high students on the last day of school in May 1976. Featuring an excellent ensemble cast, a precise feel for the 1970s, and a killer soundtrack, Dazed and Confused is a funny, affectionate, and clear-eyed look at high school life.

#W10 #Dazed and Confused

SUBSCRIBE: http://bit.ly/A24subscribe Winner of 3 Academy Awards® including Best Picture, from director Barry Jenkins and starring Naomie Harris, André Holla...

A chronicle of the childhood, adolescence and burgeoning adulthood of a young, African-American, gay man growing up in a rough neighborhood of Miami. Moonlight uses one man's story to offer a remarkable and brilliantly crafted look at lives too rarely seen in cinema.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/24/moonlight-undoes-our-expectations

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/feb/19/moonlight-review-five-star

#W12 #Moonlight

Dina Litovsky’s work examines social performances and group interactions in both public and private spaces. Dina was born in Ukraine and moved to New York in 1991. After receiving her bachelor degree in Psychology from NYU, Dina turned to photography and earned her MFA graduate degree in Photography from the School of Visual Arts, NY in 2010.

#W12 #Dina Litovsky

As an undergrad, Adam Birkan studied photojournalism at Ohio University’s School of Visual Communication, a program designed to train “staff newspaper photographers,” says Birkan. For fun, he and his friends would watch documentaries about photographers. One, about William Eggleston, was a revelation to Birkan. “After four years of hardcore photojournalism, watching William Eggleston just blew my mind,” he says. “The next day I was taking pictures of cracks in the street.” While his studies had focused on telling stories, Eggleston was appealing in that “he doesn’t have grand ideas,” says Birkan. His interest shifted from photojournalism to photography as art, and after he graduated, Birkan moved to Bangkok in search of an interesting place to make pictures. With teaching English as a fall-back plan, he began working on a personal project that eventually became “All That Glitters,” a mix of street life and architecture that comments on economic disparity. Once he had a set of images he liked, he began submitting them to “blogs that are good at getting your name out there into the wild.” His work received some press and awards, and editorial assignments began trickling in from photo editors who had come across his work. (He also emailed dozens of editors directly but says, “I never ever got a single assignment that way.”) Most of his bigger assignments have come in the past two years, he says. The low cost of living in Thailand allows Birkan to choose assignments that offer the most creative freedom, and to continue his explorations of places that spark his interest, from studies of life on a Thai island during the off-season to a look at the piecemeal modernization of the capital of Vietnam. He’s planning a trip to Israel to look for traces of recent and ancient history in the landscape. Rather than plan an itinerary or shot list for the trip, “I like to think I’ll find interesting things,” he says. “But that’s what Eggleston taught me—everything is interesting.”

#W11 #Adam Birkan

This week in class we discussed the idea of time in a photograph and what that means. Ultimately time is either involved:

Technically: as a constraint or tool

Conceptually: as subject matter

I couldn't help but think of Henri Cartier-Bresson during this discussion. He is known for photographing in the decisive moment which focuses on the importance of time in an image. He explains the connection of time and photography best himself by saying:

“Photography is not like painting. There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera.

That is the moment the photographer is creative. Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.”

#W10 #Reading Response

In class this week we discussed the concept of reproduction of imagery and the new meaning it can take on because of it. I found this concept to be very interesting and thought back to Andy Warhol’s famous work of Marilyn Monroe in “Marilyn Diptych”. Marilyn Monroe died in August 1962, having overdosed on barbiturates. In the following four months, Warhol made more than twenty silkscreen paintings of her, all based on the same publicity photograph from the 1953 film Niagara. The film is about two couples who are visiting Niagara Falls as tensions between one wife and her husband reach the level of murder. Warhol took a image and gave it completely new meaning through his reproduction. The Marilyn Diptych centred on the themes of death and the cult of celebrity. By repeating the image, he evokes her ubiquitous presence in the media. The contrast of vivid colour with black and white, and the effect of fading in the right panel are suggestive of the star’s mortality.

#W9 #Reading Response

After working for several years as a wedding photographer, Tasneem Alsultan received her first call about an assignment in 2015. A National Geographic editor wanted Alsultan to cover Saudi Arabia’s first elections in which women would be allowed to vote and run for local office. “I’m not interested,” Alsultan replied. “This is how the Western audience wants to portray Saudi women as being liberated and it’s a lie,” she recalls saying before hanging up. The editor called back to get Alsultan’s perspective. Alsultan said women were still struggling to win control of their own lives. She agreed to take the story, however, and show the restrictions placed on female candidates. “No gathering between the women and their voters was allowed to be photographed and published anywhere,” she explains. She contacted candidates in several cities “until I had the few that allowed me to photograph them in different environments that would represent their districts.” Alsultan says making the leap from wedding photography to documentary photography wasn’t difficult: “I learned how to tell a full narrative through weddings and work well under stress and pressure.” Alsultan’s best-known body of work, “Saudi Tales of Love” shows the lives of happily married, divorced and widowed women in a country where divorce is still stigmatized. Alsultan says the series found its footing after photographer Tanya Habjouqa, whom she met at Magnum Foundation’s Arab Documentary Photography Program, encouraged her to collaborate with her subjects. Alsultan began asking them how they would like to be portrayed in a story about love. “I felt like I was peeling off layers of these humans that I wouldn’t have reached with documentary photography alone,” says Alsultan. Habjouqa also urged her to choose less pretty, more emotional photos. “Coming from a wedding background, I wanted everything to look perfect—no lines crossing the head, well lit, everyone smiling.” “She is trying to use her work to change the way people see Saudis and Arab women, and Arabs in general,” says photographer Maggie Steber, who mentored Alsultan. Steber says Alsultan goes beyond “the obvious and goes right for the heart and the intellectual thinking.” Alsultan is working on a project about the LGBTQ community in Kuwait. “It’s the only country in the Gulf region that is very out,” she says. “Westerners wouldn’t know this, but we know this.”

#W9 #Tasneem Alsultan

Andy J. Scott says working as a videographer and editor for six years, first in Atlanta and then in Los Angeles, helped train his eye for framing, color and composition. But after shooting photography “as a creative outlet,” he decided to quit his day job and seek jobs in the photography world. That’s when he discovered how much he needed to learn. He contacted Nicholas Maggio, a photographer he admired, about an assisting gig. As Maggio’s career in commercial photography took off, Scott assisted him on larger and larger shoots, gaining knowledge of techniques and production. In his spare time, Scott shot portraits and images for young musicians he liked. “It was using photography as a way to connect with people I might not otherwise connect with,” he says. “That’s remained the thing I love the most about photography.” Very early in his career, he mailed some images to dream clients like Rolling Stone. He realizes now he was “embarrassingly shooting for the stars,” he says. “I think I wasn’t quite ready to put myself out there.” Since then, he’s gotten most of his jobs either through word of mouth or by “having a clean, updated website with good SEO,” he says. “I have gotten a lot of overseas work because [clients] are Googling ‘LA photographers.’” A personal project on the artists and musicians of LA’s Fairfax district led directly to his biggest break to date: Pivot TV network hired him to shoot promos for the reality show “Welcome to Fairfax.” Says Scott, “People always say, ‘Shoot what you want to shoot.’ This just worked out perfectly.” Assignments for Nike and BMW followed. Scott strives to make “timeless” photos, and avoids “trendy techniques,” he says. An assignment to shoot MADE Fashion Week, which highlights young, independent fashion designers, forced him to apply his thoughtful style while shooting amidst a scrum of runway photographers. He had to “tune all that out and look for the moments no one else was getting,” he says. Scott is exploring making music videos while continuing to refine his photographic style. “Knowing what subjects you want to shoot and how you want to portray them will keep you on a path, and honing your style will bring clients who want your unique voice.”

#W9 #Andy J. Scott

During the lecture this week, a particular slide stood out to me:

I immediately drew the connection to the Kardashian family and their self entitled reality show “Keeping up with the Kardashians” which is probably one of the most famous reality television shows on the market today. The show follows the Fourth Stage Simulation as explained above. Through the Kardashian family’s deception through their “real life” portrayed on the show, they have built an empire through their following which has now spread across multiple platforms including Snapchat, Instagram etc. Even though it is obvious of the faults in their so called honest life on the show, we as a society still watch and attempt to inmate and emulate what it would be like to live their life.

#W7 #Reading Response

Walker Evans, (born November 3, 1903, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.—died April 10, 1975, New Haven, Connecticut), American photographer whose influence on the evolution of ambitious photography during the second half of the 20th century was perhaps greater than that of any other figure. He rejected the prevailing highly aestheticized view of artistic photography, of which Alfred Stieglitz was the most visible proponent, and constructed instead an artistic strategy based on the poetic resonance of common but exemplary facts, clearly described. His most characteristic pictures show quotidian American life during the second quarter of the century, especially through the description of its vernacular architecture, its outdoor advertising, the beginnings of its automobile culture, and its domestic interiors.

#W7 #Walker Evans

Jerome Delay is AP’s chief photographer for Africa, based in Johannesburg.

After working as an AP stringer in Denver, Colorado and as a staff photographer for Agence France-Presse (AFP) in Washington, DC, Delay has been on staff with the AP in a variety of roles: chief photographer in Jerusalem, staff photographer and international photo editor in Paris and international photographer based in London and in Paris. He has covered the White House, the Calgary Winter Olympics and World Cup soccer, as well as conflicts all over the world: the Middle East (Israel, Palestine, South Lebanon, Iraq), Africa (Somalia, Ethiopia, Rwanda, the Congo), the Balkans (Bosnia, Kosovo, Albania, Macedonia, Serbia), Northern Ireland, Haiti, Kashmir and Afghanistan.

#W7 #Jerome Delay

“I love film, psychology and literature. My images almost always have a sense of narrative. I like to tell a story. I love to explore the darkness of the human psyche and the fragility of human emotions and reflect these through fashion. I like to capture the issues that most people don’t like to confront or deal with such as domestic violence, child abuse, sexual fetishes, etc. My work usually always has a sense of contradiction, sometimes it is beautiful, sometimes it is disturbing, and sometimes it is both. And I like that. I love to explore new things, new imagery and new symbolism. I definitely don’t want to get stuck with one look or one kind of lighting and as a result, get too comfortable with myself.”

An Le is based in New York city.

Publications: Vogue Latin America, Vogue Portugal, Vogue Ukraine, Vogue.it, Vogue Spain, W magazine, Vogue Hombre, Vogue Taiwan, Numero Russia, i-D magazine, Nylon, Flaunt, Tush, The Sunday Times magazine and more.

Commercial clients: Balmain Hair Couture, Bottega Veneta, Ben Sherman, Bruno Magli, Judith Leiber, etc.; and celebrities such as Sarah Jessica Parker, Naomi Campbell, Grimes, Brooke Candy, Olivia Palermo, John Legend, Rebecca Hall and more.

New York - Los Angeles

#W7 #An Le

Nearly 60 million people are currently displaced from their homes by war and persecution. Half are children. This virtual reality film tells the stories of three of them.

This video investigates what childhood looks like for the over 30 million child refugees who have been displaced worldwide from their homes. In the video, we follow the lives of 11 year-old Oleg from the Ukraine, 9 year-old Chuol of South Sudan and 12 year-old Hannah from Syria and discover the daily challenges young refugees face – along with the optimism that carries them through.

#W10 #Ben C. Solomon #Imraan Ismail

Rebecca Norris Webb (born 1956) is an American photographer. Originally a poet, her books often combine text and images. She has collaborated with her husband and creative partner, the photographer Alex Webb.

#W10 #Rebecca Norris Webb

Rebecca Norris Webb (born 1956) is an American photographer.[1] Originally a poet, her books often combine text and images. She has collaborated with her husband and creative partner, the photographer Alex Webb.

#W10 #Rebecca Noris Webb

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