Nina Berman

Nina Berman will be visiting Greensboro for student workshops and a public lecture. If you are in the NC area, the lecture is on March 18th @ 6PM in the Weatherspoon Art Museum.

Mark Steinmetz

I have always been a fan of Mark Steinmetz. Nice article here: The gray lays on top of everything like a heavy blanket. It is almost as if the suffocating gray inhabits the people and has slowly spilled out to seep into everything on the outside... covering every lie, every truth, every object and every thing... every hope, every dream. Or is it the other way around? Is it that the gray that blankets everything on the outside seeping into them? The gray that blankets the woods, that shadows the sky, that crawls over the open areas... is it them into it or it into them? http://www.americansuburbx.com/2009/02/mark-steinmetz-grey-that-blankets.html

Hillbilly Heroin, Honey: Hannah Modigh

wow, i am on the fence here...here is a bit about the work, please check out her website and comment:

This project is not without its flaws. Modigh has stated that this idea came from an interest in photographing poor white people, but in a press release Modigh (or her gallery) made the poor choice of referring to her subjects as "white trash." While this cannot fairly be construed as an insult, it does point to a misunderstanding of this American pejorative if not also her subjects place in American culture. The title Hillbilly Heroin, Honey, a reference to Oxycodone, is another peculiar aspect. http://www.hannahmodigh.se/

Sorority Skin Tones by Travis Shaffer

“Sorority Skin Tones: a PANTONE color guide” is the first of a series of handmade, screen-printed  books made using PANTONE brand house paints, and physically replicates the Pantone Matching System Color Guides. “Sorority Skin Tones” contains the nearest PANTONE equivalent to the 20 most prominent skin tones in american sororities by analyzing the facebook pages of the ten largest american sororities.

Never Enough Brassai

By Brassai, Excerpts from Brassai: Letters to My Parents, 1978

I was delighted to notice in the letters that from the start I saw photography as a way to uncover and record the world that surrounded me, the city in which I lived, as comprehensively as possible. There were a good number of critics, by the way, who reinforced me in my belief and my expectations about photography. http://www.americansuburbx.com/2011/02/brassai-letters-to-my-parents-1978.html

William Gedney's Journal Entry

Review of Beyond Caring by Paul Graham via Conscientious

At the time of this writing, the official unemployment rate in the US is 9%. This number excludes a large variety of people, incl., for example, those who gave up looking for work or those who’d prefer a full-time job over a part-time one. It’s a bit harder to come by the actual unemployment rate, in part because it depends on how you define it. If we take the US government’s U-6 rate, we get 16%. Very much related to this, the number of photographers, graphic designers and writers I have talked to recently who told me about severe problems getting jobs is mind-blowing. I am not active in the field of commercial or editorial photography, but from what I hear there is some severe howling and gnashing of the teeth going on. So even though it might just be a coincidence, it still seems entirely appropriate that Paul Graham’s Beyond Caring was just re-published by Errata Editions. (more)

Some days I just miss Helen Levitt

For those who have never seen her short films, from 1948 here is In the Street :

Roger Eberhard's "Wilted Country"

Swiss born Roger Eberhard first came to our attention when he released his debut published work, So Long, Cockaigne in 2008, which portrayed destitute farmers in Russia's vicious winter.

Eberhard has taken his search for desolation a step further and trekked across the USA, scouring cities from Reno, Nevada, all the way through to Nebraska and the picturesque North Dakota. When we first came across Eberhard's new work Wilted Country it looked more like a dusty memoir from a forgotten age.

Format: The International Photography Festival

Wow, somewhat overwhelming, but lots of great photography, this year's theme was street photography:

FORMAT was established in 2004, by Louise Clements and Mike Brown, and is now one of the UK's leading non-profit international contemporary festivals of photography and related media. The biennale programme celebrates the wealth of contemporary practice in international photography. FORMAT is the place to see an incredible range of new work alongside some of the best-known practitioners in the world. FORMAT is focused on developing opportunities for audiences to see, debate, develop and engage in the best of what photography is and can be. The festival is a unique opportunity to see and engage in contemporary photography and to hear what is happening 'right here, right now'.