02/26/11 Recent [Tragic, Joyful, Useful, Bizarre] Photography News . . .

Talented Reuters photog (and friend) Molly Riley  is now President of WPOW – Women Photojournalists of Washington! Check out this really cool Back To The Future project by photographer Irna Werning.  Here’s an interesting  video on the craft of photo editing.  Abe is back in town! The group trying to resurrect Polaroid film call themselves “The Impossible Project.” FotoDC is having a Cherry Blossom Photo Contest. Best Of: protest photos from Cairo.  Anti-Mubarak protesters in front of the White House.  See the last roll of Kodachrome frame by frame here [ I like #17 best but think McCurry ran out of creative steam by the time he rolled into Parsons – exhibit A being his “feet on bed watching TV” photo.]  The photographs of  Eugène Atget and his vision of 19th century Paris set records at auction. Do it yourself iPhone cover with pix from Photo Booth.  Headline: Flickr Accidentally Deletes a Users 3,400 Photos And Can’t Get Them Back – but they eventually did.  Year of the Rabbit festivities.  Odd fetish – a photo blog collection of all the best bookshelf photos in the world called Bookshelf Porn. Paris underground.  Headline: British Photo Judge Investigated for Giving Prize to His Baby Mama. Is there room in the NYC party circuit for 4 more photographers who are not Patrick McMullan? Probably.  This was WSJ’s most popular Photo Journal posting of 2010. The Nets released a team photo taken in Moscow which was doctored in the old Soviet fashion – meaning unpersons were deleted and people who were not there were added. Photo enlargers as dinosaurs: “There were 204 photo printing labs in and around London in 2006, printing images from film stock to paper. By 2009, only six remained.”  French photographer Lucas Mebrouk Dolega died 01/17/11 while covering the protests in Tunisia “he was hit, in the face, by a tear gas canister fired by a police officer. According to reports, Dolega was hit at point-blank range, suffering head trauma.” Detroit In Ruins: the photographs of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre. No Pants Metro Ride ’11. In the spirit of the popular satirical website Stuff White People Like comes the new Sh*t Photojournalists Like which includes entries like cargo pants, making fun of reporters and “horribly tragic events.” Richard Avedon’s photos of “The Kennedys 50 Years Ago” are on exhibit at the National Museum of American History.  PBS Newshour story on photographer Alec Soth.  The ultimate “photobomb” missed being on Time’s  “Most Surprising Photos of 2010” by one day.  Sad and remarkable: thousands of images by a woman named Vivian Maier – an amazing street photographer from Chicago who worked as a nanny – are discovered only after she takes ill and the contents of her storage locker are sold at auction. When the buyer of her work tracks her down a year later, he discovers she has died just a few days earlier. Covering Marines at War, Through Facebook.  The Top 15 Photography Websites of 2010. Veteran Getty photographer (and friend) Win McNamee was seriously injured when ice the size of bowling balls fell on him from the roof of Cowboys Stadium as he was making photographs days before the Super Bowl.  The court appointed administrator of the now defunct Corbis Sygma photo agency declared that he is about to destroy perhaps 12 million of Sygma’s photographs since he could not find a buyer at auction. Tips on Building A Better Online Portfolio from Pulitzer Prize winning photo editor (and friend) Stella Kramer.  And finally – a Photo Box of Mystery.

[Image from Crystal Couture fashion show 02/04/11]