We all helped to speed the demise of professional photographers

We all helped to speed the demise of professional photographers, by Andrew Brown, at the Guardian Weekly

A picture-sharing site like Flickr contains the work of tens of thousands of talented amateurs, all of them capable of producing one or two photographs a year that could be published anywhere. If only 1% of the pictures on Flickr are publishable, that would mean 1.5m usable pictures uploaded there every year. Most of the drudgery of identifying good, relevant pictures is also done here - by the photographers themselves, who tag them, and by the other users, who notice them and have their interest recorded by the software.

Sad news from JPG magazine

From Derek Powazek’s blog:

Unfortunately, issue 10 will be the last one that Heather and I will have a hand in. We are no longer working for JPG Magazine or 8020 Publishing.

[this is bad] [this might be offensive]

internet pornography statistics… revealed.

Sound from the 29th of April conference

Here’s the sound from the April 29th conference, featuring, in alphabetical order:

Luc Debraine, Journalist, Le Temps, Geneva

William Ewing, Director, Musée de l’Elysée

André Gunthert, Maître de conférence EHESS and editor in chief of Etudes photographiques, Paris

Jonathan Lipkin, Professor of Digital Media, Ramapo College, New Jersey, U.S.A

Martin Parr, Photographer, Great Britain

Fred Ritchin, Professor, NYU, U.S.A

Radu Stern, Head of Educational Programs, Musée de l’Elysée

The speakers spoke in the language they felt the most comfortable in, so Luc Debraine and André Gunthert speak French.

Pictures from the show

(image courtesy Andre Gunthert)

Andre Gunthert, a french art historian, director of the French scholarly publication “Etudes Photographiques” who was part of the advisory team for the show and part of the panel / roundtable on April 29th has posted a Flickr set of pictures from the show.

The Machine is Us/ing Us

Noah Kalina. Everyday. For sale.

Noah Kalina is selling prints from his ‘everyday’ project.

A conversation with Fred Ritchin

Fred Ritchin, whose resume includes being a photo editor at the New York Times, co-autoring Salgado’s Uncertain Grace and authoring In Our Own Image - the coming revolution in photography, a book about the challenges of digital photography which was in print for 15 years, as director of PixelPress, a groundbreaking essay on Bosnia with Gilles Peress, and who is currently teaching at NYU gave a talk about digital photography and his upcoming projects.

The first few seconds are clipped, and we’ll put a video sometime next week as Fred was showing pictures.

In the meantime, you can listen to it here.

N.B : Pour les francophones, la discussion est traduite.

A discussion with Martin Parr

Martin Parr, author of, among others, “Boring Postcards” and “Bliss : Postcards of Couples and Families” explains in his conference how your family photography is form of propaganda, his opinion on technique, what his new agenda is, the demise of Corbis and Getty at the hands of Flickr and what the best new business model for successful photography is. And how dreadful, cliche’ed and boring a lot of amateur photography is.

you can download it here.

A Danish cellphone scandal

Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet and UK paper Metro are reporting on a new cellphone scandal out of Denmark.

According to the newspapers, a group of high school students has used cellphones to film an annual strip tease competition held in front of, and judged by, teachers. The circulation of the footage has created an outcry from school authorities.

The video was posted to Youtube, taken down, and has been made available in its original form on infamous swedish bittorent tracker The Pirate Bay.