Anticyclic

Review time: Totally out of time I experienced a boom. Many new clients, good jobs, best year so far. Might have to do with the fact that I am still "emerging" (Are you still emerging in your sixth year? Guess so). Also, it proves to be a good thing not having witnessed the golden years of this business. You don't miss what you don't know.

Preview time: I will happily and instantaneously give up my anticyclical behavior once the global economy is on the rise again. I will stop leaning back and being easily content with the assignments that come in and instead try to give the whole enterprise more direction. Because leaning back is decadent, leads to more repetition than you want (and might not work forever). I will do more personal projects again (one starting this Saturday). I will blog more often (haha).

Happy new year to all of you!

Coming Up

No entries since July. Call me lazy, I deserve it. Well, actually not a case of all-out laziness. I've been working on a relaunch of my portfolio website for the past weeks. It will finally be up by tomorrow. And I am considering a twist for this blog. Might take some weeks though. Stay tuned, you handful of readers!

Intermediate Adopter

While the early adopters are chasing after the next big thing I set up a twitter account recently. Out of curiosity. Hope that won't mean even more silence round here. Twitter, and this is it, I will never join Facebook, I promise. For it is much more heroic (futile? preposterous? realistic?) to have one thousand followers than to have one thousand friends.

The Simple

Getty Images generated a new visual language that "connects with people’s concerns in the economic downturn". It is all about "The Simple" and since sharing is equally up-to-date as "The Simple" Getty lets us all know about it's analysis (read it here). There we learn that in order to stay in business you better desaturate your images, include some kids and some nature (mud and puddles qualify). And yes, there is a significantly growing demand for photos about knitting, baking and growing your own food. We also learn that Annie Leibovitz set the trend well before the collapse of Lehman Brothers. According to Getty her image of father and daughter Coppola for Louis Vuitton is about "wisdom, tradition and knowledge passed on from generation to generation". Wait a minute, that changes the angle of view on another of Leibovitz' images: wasn't that picture also about tradition and knowledge passed on from generation to generation?

The Privacy Paradox

Quote from Conscientious (for those 5 percent of the community who do not follow that blog anyway): "Here's something that I don't understand. Twenty five years ago, people would not have volunteered to enter a lot of their private information into an easily accessible public space, but you could have taken their photo without their permission without much of a problem. Today, it's the other way around: While people share more and more of their sometimes most private information with total strangers online, they'll get very angry if you take their photo without their permission." read more

Picturing the Crisis

"Where is the crisis?" Brian Ulrich asked a couple of days ago wondering why there is so little in-depth photographic reaction to the rapid transformation of the state of things. Just be patient! US photographers have never failed to come up with iconic images of major or minor turning points in American history. It might just take some time.

For momentary lack of iconic imagery of the current crisis (this year's WPP-winner does not fully qualify), everybody looks back at Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother", the dominant picture of the Great Depression. The 1936 portrait of Florence Owens Thompson and her children has near mythical status which is not impaired by the fact that it was (if only slightly) retouched and that Thompson many years later was quoted as saying: "I wish she (Lange) hadn't taken my picture. I can't get a penny out of it. She didn't ask my name. She said she wouldn't sell the pictures. She said she'd send me a copy. She never did." Obviously it is an essential ingredient of iconic images to be disputed. One of Thompson's grandsons seems to have come to terms with Lange's alleged transgression: he sells T-shirts with his grandmother's famous portrait on them.

So much for picturing the crisis over there. Over here however we don't have as much easiness and routine in producing iconic images. Moreover the surfaces have not yet changed as much as they have over there. Let's hope it stays that way (even if it makes documenting the crisis more challenging).

The Bright Side

Some new tearsheets from one of my fair weather jobs (click on image to see them all).

Start of Year Rant

I guess you readers from outside of Germany have never heard of a photo competition called "Rückblende". Roughly speaking this is the German version of "Picture of the Year". Kind of. This year's winning image can be seen here.
Nothing wrong with that image. It is just not what you would expect to be the best of the best in one year's photojournalistic output. Yet it is a good indicator of the mediocrity of press photography in Germany (same is true for Austria). I only have guesses as to where that mediocrity originates from, so could someone please offer some profound analysis?!