Photography Collection

By John Koblin
This past winter, Paul Tough, a story editor at The New York Times Magazine, brought Emily Gould, a recently retired editor of Gawker.com, to the sixth floor of the paper’s skyscraper on Eighth Avenue. Sometimes, writers meet with the magazine’s editor in chief, Gerry Marzorati, and this was one of those times. Mr. Marzorati had never before heard of Ms. Gould, he told Off the Record. They talked for around an hour about her “wanting to write some memoirish piece about having lived a fair amount of her life on the Internet in her first years in New York; I was interested.” The assignment was made. The piece arrived in Mr. Marzorati’s in-box around six weeks ago. “It was a lot better written and more ‘thinky’ than I could have imagined,” he said. “I think she’s really a good writer, it turns out.” The task of illustrating fell to Elinor Carucci, a freelance photographer who said she does mostly fine arts work and spent several hours over two days in a one-on-one photo shoot at Ms. Gould’s apartment in Brooklyn. “I got some direction: ‘We want it to be personal,’” Ms. Carucci said. “‘What’s her day like? Does she type on the bed? At the desk?’ They wanted her clothes, or maybe something that will be more intimate.” Mr. Marzorati said his instructions were “to try to convey this sort of intimacy and dreaminess and sort of intimate detachment—if that’s a meaningful oxymoron—that is in the piece. They worked that out together.” And this is how an image of Ms. Gould, poured upside-down onto a rumpled bed wearing a camisole, no bra and a come-hither look, landed on New Yorkers’ laptops and brunch tables over Memorial Day weekend. The writer was involved in winnowing the photos to a dozen, Ms. Carucci said. Still, “when I saw the cover, I was shocked,” Ms. Gould said on the phone from Bryant Park on May 27. Did she feel a tad exploited? Ms. Gould paused. “Yeah, I really don’t want to talk about it.” She referred Off the Record to an online Q&A she gave for the Times Web site, in which she describes the photos as “vaguely cheesecakey.” “I am starting to wish the Magazine had chosen to illustrate the piece some other way, though,” she wrote. “I don’t think it was terribly complicated,” Mr. Marzorati said of his cover calculus. “You’re always trying to entice people with a cover, whether it’s a story like this or it’s a story about Afghanistan. I mean, this just happened to be an intimate story written by a young person who happened to be attractive.” “The photos speak for themselves,” said Kathy Ryan, the magazine’s photo editor, before ending a conversation with Off the Record. Sex sells, of course—but this was not Maxim. And women writers in Manhattan could be forgiven for a slightly sickly feeling as they regarded the images. This again?

Photographing the young, attractive female writer of first-person narratives has become something of a tradition in New York media. There was Katie Roiphe writing about her divorce in New York magazine a few years ago, posing in a tight trench coat, with her baby and her designer purse hanging off each arm (there were no such images for Philip Weiss’ discussion of adultery on May 26). Ms. Roiphe’s visage also graced her Times Magazine cover story about date rape back in 1993. Then there was the one-two punch of Lucinda Rosenfeld and Nell Freudenberger, young fiction writers discovered by The New Yorker (Ms. Freudenberger was then fiction editor Bill Buford’s assistant), and photographed, both in -- wouldn’t ya know it?-- camisoles. Ms. Freudenberger has published a book of short stories and a novel, and married an architect in 2006, according to The Times’s Styles section. Her agent, Amanda Urban, said she recently had a baby and was unable to comment. Ms. Rosenfeld also recently had a baby, her second, and is married to New Yorker writer John Cassidy. “I remember some creepy guy at Connecticut Muffin in Park Slope asking me if I was the ‘girl on the stoop,’” she e-mailed, when asked about the photo shoot. She added that long term, she didn’t think it had affected her career one way or another. “Magazines come and go—every seven days. In the end, it’s the quality of the book that counts.” She said she’d had no time to read Ms. Gould’s cover story. Joyce Maynard, who appeared on the cover of The New York Times Magazine back in 1972, at age 18, wearing dungarees and a crew neck sweater, was more voluble. “I felt a motherly concern for that young woman, who is clearly a talented writer who now can’t quietly develop and will not have the opportunity to develop,” she told Off the Record by phone from California. “I would say now there are many better and few worse ways to launch one’s career and to develop as a writer than to plunge onto the cover of The New York Times Magazine. “She’s the age of one of my sons,” she continued, considering Ms. Gould. “And I think a young artist is going to make all sorts of embarrassing mistakes. It’s best to make them a little less publicly.” Did she think the younger woman was exploited? “Twenty-six is a little old to be exploited,” Ms. Maynard clucked. “I think she may have exploited herself. “A serious writer should take her growth and development seriously,” she said. “Wait, that’s a bad sentence. A serious writer should put in the time to locate her own voice before she goes singing to the balcony. And that’s all very good advice given to me by J. D. Salinger in 1972 in somewhat different language in how I stated it, but that was pretty much the gist of the letter he sent to me.” (Mr. Salinger famously wrote to Ms. Maynard after seeing her story, and they had a relationship that she wrote about in a 1998 memoir, At Home in the World. In 1999, she auctioned off his letters for $156,000 at Sotheby’s.) Ms. Maynard recalled that she got the story in the magazine after writing a letter to the paper’s Sunday editor, Max Frankel. (Mr. Frankel, now retired, said he hadn’t read the Gould piece. When asked about the cover, he said, “I’ll never judge a story by its cover!”) A few years later, Ms. Maynard got a reporting job at The Times. “That was the beginning of my serious development as a writer, to begin to look outside myself and look at the world,” said Ms. Maynard. “So I got a job, and that’s a very good thing to do.”

According to the Artprice Global Index of Photography the prices of sales in auction houses have risen especially from 2002. The french limited company Artprice has developed indices for the world of art based on sales by auction houses for different genres and periods of art. So collectors of photographs can compare the development of prices with the situation on the art market for e.g. paintings or drawings. The index shows the changes of prices on a basis of quarters.

You can download the Artprice Global Index here, it's an Excel sheet, so you need to have a version of Microsoft Office or Microsoft Excel installed on your computer. This is the download link: Artprice_Global_Indices.xls

The market for 19th century photography rallies on each new sale of a private collection offering the opportunity to bid for major negatives which have been carefully preserved for the past 100 or 150 years. Other than how well these delicate prints have been preserved, the wide range in prices depends on the subject’s interest and the beauty of the negative. Daguerreotypes, negatives in all genres and old prints tell us as much about the 19th century as they do about the history of the photographic medium.
19th century photography first came to the fore in 1999 when Sotheby's achieved unexpectedly strong results at its sale of the André Jammes collection. Galvanised by this new market in which prices were soaring, buyers bid up over a two-year period, driving a significant increase in price levels (+191% between January 1999 and January 2001). Prices had risen too rapidly, however, and gave up their gains in 2001. A pioneer of photography such as Gustave Le Gray(1820-1884) has yet to recover the record prices set at that time. In 1999, a collector paid close to EUR 720,000 for his Grande vague, Sète (GBP 460,000), beating the pre-sale estimate by a factor of ten! Since then, the best price level achieved for a print of this same Grande Vague has been GBP 85,000, some EUR 600,000 short of the 1999 record. Another record sale, another collection… this time belonging to the artist since it was the Joseph Philibert GIRAULT DE PRANGEY archives which were to record the most impressive result of the past five years: GBP 500,000 for an 1842 daguerreotype, 113. Athènes, T(emple) de J(upiter) Olympien pris de l'Est (20 May 2003, Christie's London). The work united all the qualities required to set a record: historic interest (taken only three years after the official birth of the daguerreotype), provenance (the artist's archives) and rarity value (we only know of two daguerreotypes of this temple in the archives). Such price peaks remain exceptional, however, since the trend is now for modern and contemporary photographs. The 19th century pioneers do not reach the heights of the current stars of the art: let’s not forget that the some USD 3 million achieved for the Richard Prince Cowboy image at Sotheby’s NY in November 2007 is far from the price levels seen by a Le Gray or a Prangey.
2008 is confirming this trend. On 7 April, the Sotheby’s New York auction of the Quillian collection recorded five and six-figure results for Édouard Denis Baldus, Charles Lewis Dodgson and Eugène Atget. Baldus achieved USD 49,000 (EUR 31,000) for a view of the west portal of Amiens Cathedral (1855). He had not done better since the Jammes sale in 1999 when his Rochers en Auvergne tripled the pre-sale estimate, the hammer coming down at USD 68,000. Some other noteworthy results from the 7 April sale: USD 105,000 (EUR 66,700) for the albumen print, Alexandra Kitchin, by Lewis Carroll (1832-1898). The artist had not exceeded the symbolic USD 100,000 mark for 7 years! These results, while creditable, are shy of those recorded on the same day for the modern prints from the Quillian collection. Unlike 19th century negatives, those of the 20th century set new records, notably for Edward Weston (Nude, 1,285 million de dollars), Paul Strand (Rebecca, 515 000 dollars), August Sander (Werkstudenten, 395 000 dollars), Richard Avedon (Marilyn Monroe, New York City, 365 000 dollars)and Hans Bellmer (La Poupée, 260 000 dollars).

There have only been published very few photos of Spencer Tunick's nude shot in Vienna's Ernst Happel Stadium. Welt Online the website of the german news paper "Die Welt" presents a picture gallery and a short article about the art project in the english news section.

By Michelle Cazzulino And Neil Keene
Oscar-winning actress Cate Blanchett yesterday mounted an impassioned defence of australian photographer Bill Henson, urging Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and NSW Premier Morris Iemma to reconsider their comments on the controversial artist's work. The mother-of-three was among more than 40 signatories, including writer Peter Goldsworthy and economist Saul Eslake, to an open letter by the Creative Australia 2020 Summit representatives. The missive was released just hours after a third NSW gallery removed a number of Henson's works from display.
Police last week raided the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Paddington, closing down an exhibition of the artist's works just before it was due to open. On Friday, officers seized 20 of Henson's images, some featuring a naked girl, said to be aged just 13. The artworks were criticised by a number of politicians, with Mr Rudd describing them as "revolting". But the letter signed by Blanchett said the Prime Minister, along with Mr Iemma, should "rethink their public comments". It also warned that pursuing criminal charges against Henson could harm the children depicted in the seized images. "The potential prosecution of one of our most respected artists . . . does untold damage to our culture reputation," the letter said. "We suggest that the. . . criminalisation of laying charges against Mr Henson, his gallery and the parents of the young people depicted in his work would be far more traumatic for the young people concerned than anything Mr Henson has done."
A spokesman for Mr Rudd last night said the Prime Minister did not resile from his remarks. "He was asked to express a personal opinion and he did that," the spokesman said. Mr Iemma was also unrepentant: "My opinion is clear - these photographs crossed the line and they were inappropriate. I'm all for free speech but never at the expense of a child's safety and innocence."
NSW Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione yesterday told The Daily Telegraph the force's legal division was still considering whether criminal charges should be laid against Henson or the owners of the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery. He said he found the images objectionable. "I've got my own personal view and it's one that's not inconsistent with those police who have been out and taken those pictures into their possession," he said. " . . . I support the police in what they've done." In Victoria, Adrian Maiolla, the acting president of the Life Models Society, said he, too, had found Henson's images distasteful. His organisation did not allow models aged under 18 to become members and would not supply them to artists, he added. At the Newcastle Regional Art Gallery, staff yesterday removed a giant print by Henson, featuring a naked and seemingly unconscious female being carried by two other naked subjects. Detective Chief Inspector Peter Fox, from Newcastle police, said the images were regarded as suspicious.

Swann Galleries’ May auction of Photographic Literature & Photographs opened with a selection of photo books, including Surrealist works. Among them was the auction’s top-selling lot, a numbered and signed copy of Hans Bellmer’s Les Jeux de la Poupée, one of 142, Paris, 1949, which brought $96,000*. Other Surrealist books were Claude Cahun’s Aveux non Avenus, one of 500 numbered copies, Paris, 1930, $11,400; and Georges Hugnet’s La Septième Face du Dé, Poèmes-Découpages, inscribed twice by Hugnet, and accompanied by two prospectuses announcing the sale of the book, Paris, 1936, $16,800.
Among a select assortment of titles by Robert Frank were the first French edition of the Les Américains, 1958, signed and inscribed, with an original photo, and the first American edition of the book, New York, 1959, $15,600 each. Sought-after copies of the legendary journal Camera Work, published by Alfred Stieglitz, were Number 48, with Modernist plates by Paul Strand, New York, 1960, which sold for a record $24,000, and Number 49/50, the final issue, with 11 photogravures by Strand, in a box that was marked with Strand’s and Stieglitz’s handwritten notations, New York, 1917, $14,400. Other photo lit highlights included Richard Prince’s Fish Story, first edition, 1976, signed and inscribed, $13,200; Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places, deluxe edition, one of 100 signed and numbered copies issued with a photograph, New York, 1982, $10,200; and several Japanese books, such as Shinzo Fukuhara’s Beautiful West Lake, first edition, one of 500 numbered copies, Tokyo, 1931, $2,880; Koishi Kiyoshi’s New Techniques for Shooting and Producing Photographs, signed first edition, Tokyo, 1936, $2,880; Nobuyoshi Araki’s Young Ladies in Bathing Suits, first edition, Tokyo, 1971, $3,360; and Eikoh Hosoe’s Ordeal by Roses Re-edited, revised edition, Tokyo, 1971, $3,840.

Cornell Capa, photographer, editor, and Founding Director of the International Center of Photography (ICP) died in New York on Friday, May 23, 2008. "The world has lost a great photographer and a great humanitarian; the world of photography has lost its greatest friend and champion," said Willis E. Hartshorn, ICP Ehrenkranz Director.
Cornell Capa coined the term "concerned photographer." His own photographs throughout his lifetime remained true to that mission. His respect for humanity and his desire to help better the world through photography was reflected in his images. He photographed missionaries and poverty in Latin America, and covered politics throughout the United States, including his classic studies of Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy. The lyricism of the Bolshoi Ballet, and the quirkiness of American and British life found their way to Capa’s camera; and his documentation of old age in America showed us that photographic images have the power to change the way we look at the world. "Cornell believed that photographs could lead us to action," said Mr. Hartshorn.
One of the passions of Cornell Capa’s life was a dedication to the example set by his brother, famed war photographer Robert Capa. Cornell Capa’s photographs and those of other photographers he championed, often reveal the richness of an ordinary person’s relationship with the world, encompassing everything from cataclysmic events to the subtle epiphanies of daily life. "It took me some time to realize that the camera is a mere tool, capable of many uses," Capa wrote in 1963, "and at last I understood that, for me, its role, its power, and its duty are to comment, describe, provoke discussion, awaken conscience, evoke sympathy,
spotlight human misery and joy which otherwise would pass unseen, un-understood and unnoticed. I have been interested in photographing the everyday life of my fellow humans and the commonplace spectacle of the world around me, and in trying to distill out of these their beauty and whatever is of permanent interest."

From Europe to the U.S.
Capa was born Kornel Friedmann on April 10, 1918 in Budapest, Hungary. Graduating from the Imre Madach Gymnasium in Budapest in 1936, he intended to study medicine, and joined his brother André (Robert Capa) in Paris. Shortly thereafter, he began printing his brother’s photographs, as well as those by Chim (David Seymour), and Henri Cartier-Bresson. After moving to New York City in 1937, he got a job in the darkroom of the Pix photo agency, which represented Robert Capa, and the following year he began working in Life magazine’s darkroom, where he met many leading photojournalists and was inspired by their work. In 1939 he published his first photo-story on the New York World’s Fair, in the British magazine Picture Post. It was at this time that he also made his well-known stop-action flash photos of lindy hoppers in Harlem.
In 1944 he became an American citizen and officially changed his name to Cornell Capa, in the course of a stint in the U.S. Air Force Photo-Intelligence Unit and USAF public relations division (1941-46). After becoming a Life staff photographer in 1946, he worked first on assignments throughout the United States, and subsequently in England—the latter of which Capa thought of as one of the most wonderful periods of his life, as it allowed him the opportunity to begin working consistently on serious and satisfying photo-essays.
Work abroad
In 1953 Capa made his first trip to Latin America, where he would spend much time—and do some of his most important work—over the course of the next twenty years. 1954 saw him working back in the U.S., on a story for Life about the education of developmentally disabled children and young adults. This feature was a breakthrough, for until then the subject had been regarded by most American magazines as taboo. Published in two parts, the story drew such a favorable response from the public that Capa, with writer Maya Pines, expanded it into a book entitled Retarded Children Can Be Helped.
After Robert Capa was killed in Indochina on May 25, 1954, Cornell Capa resigned from the Life staff and joined the elite Magnum Photo Agency, the cooperative of which his brother was a founder, helping to manage it as its President. While there, his work ranged from continuing documentation of politics in South America and in the United States, to a six-week period in the Soviet Union where he photographed stories on Russian Orthodoxy, Boris Pasternak, and the Bolshoi Ballet School. While Capa has called his stay in the Soviet Union the most miserable time in his life because of his constant frustration in dealing with the official bureaucracy and church functionaries, it was nevertheless during this trip that he shot some of his greatest and most memorable photographs.

Fascination with American politics
In 1952, he proceeded to cover Adlai Stevenson’s presidential campaign. He admired Stevenson greatly and supported his cause enthusiastically: the photographer and the politician became friends, and Capa would ultimately cover Stevenson’s subsequent bids for the presidency in 1956 and 1960. However, during the 1960 Wisconsin primary, while working on a story for Life on the nature of American politics (which remained one of his foremost preoccupations through the late 1960s), Capa first encountered John F. Kennedy. Witnessing firsthand the extraordinary response that the candidate elicited from crowds, Capa gradually came to see that Kennedy was able to generate an excitement—especially among young people—that was rare among Stevenson’s audiences. When Kennedy won the Democratic nomination, Life asked him to cover the campaign.
Attending Kennedy’s January 1961 inauguration ceremony, Capa was struck by the new president’s speech; the inspirational tone and adventurous spirit reminded him of the beginning of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt presidency, when FDR confronted daunting challenges and accomplished great things during his first hundred days. Capa decided to assemble a book on the first hundred days of the Kennedy presidency, enlisting eight fellow Magnum photographers and seven writers and historians in his effort. That book, Let Us Begin: The First 100 Days of the Kennedy Administration, often cited as the first topical photojournalistic book, came out on day 110, and Time magazine called it "instant history."

Daile Kaplan, Swann Galleries Vice President and Director of Photographs, states that there is a growing demand for "quality pictures in the mid market" after sale 2146 on May 15 of photographic literature and photographs. "The media tends to focus its coverage on the exclusivity and performance of high-end artworks." She is absolutely right. So these are the top lots:

Details
Dates: Thursday, 13 November– Sunday, 16 November, 2008
Opening by invitation only: Wednesday, 12 November, 7:00 pm – 10:00 pm
Venue: Carrousel du Louvre, 99 rue de Rivoli, 75001 Paris, France
Opening hours: Thursday, 13 November from 11:00 am to 8:00 pm, Friday, 14November from
11:00 am to 9:00 pm, Saturday, 15 November from 11:00 am to 8:00 pm, Sunday, 16 November from 11:00 am to 7:00 pm
General admission: 15 €, 7.50 € for students and groups
Catalogue: 20 €
Information: www.parisphoto.fr

The New York Photo Festival is attracting photographers and art buyers this weekend in the Dumbo quarter. A place were curators, art maniacs and a lot of journalists wil meet. Don't fear to miss something if you canot afford to be there. Photo District News provides video coverage of the festival and some articles about what's going on in Dumbo.

There is an auction of 16 nude photographs by Florence Henri, a french photographer and painter at Million & Associés, Paris, at 2 p.m. today. Florence Henri was born in New York. After she has studied music in Paris and Berlin she switched to photography and her teacher was László Moholy-Nagy. After living in Germany she moved to Paris and became part of the art scene in the french metropolis. At 2.30 p.m. there will be contemporary photographs of artists like Nan Goldin, Peter Lindbergh and David Lachapelle be auctioneered at Million & Associés.

Helmut Newton Foundation presents “Pigozzi and the Paparazzi” with Salomon, Weegee, Galella, Angeli, Secchiaroli, Quinn and Newton, on view June 20th through November 16th, 2008. With the current exhibition the “bad boys” of photography are the subject of an extensive show for the first time in Germany. Paparazzi photography is an aggressive form of photojournalism, particularly today when the famous names in show business are hunted down and pushed into dangerous situations for the sake of getting the most interesting picture possible.
In the 1960’s and 1970’s, the “classic“ era of the paparazzi, the combination of voyeurism and exhibitionism, whereby photographers lie in wait for the stars to make their public appearance, was less strident and loud. Inventiveness, speed and persistence, along with a touch of cheekiness—put to use at the Cannes Film Festival, or on the Via Veneto in Rome—was usually enough to guarantee good results. The current exhibition concentrates on snapshots and portraits of famous people from this era and offers us a glimpse of how the mythic aura of the stars was dismantled by showing them going about their daily lives. We encounter Alain Delon and Prince Charles, Mick Jagger and Woody Allen, Sophia Loren and Grace Kelly, Brigitte Bardot and Gina Lollobrigida at parties, on the street, at the beach and so on. Most of these pictures were taken “from a safe distance” with the photographer going unnoticed. Nevertheless, once in a while a fight would break out between the hunter and the hunted when a photographer got too close or was discovered in his hiding-place. The paparazzi were legendary, and today they are feared. In a way this all began in the 1930’s with Erich Salomon. A lawyer by training and a self-taught photographer, he gained access to major political events and was the first to secretly take photographs in a courtroom—something that was, and still is, forbidden. No one before him had dared risk doing this. Salomon used a camera with a very light-sensitive lens, which he usually hid in his briefcase or coat. Thus armed, he would find his way in to forbidden places, for example, the salons where high-ranking politicians of the era between the two World Wars pondered the new order of Europe.
Based in the USA, Arthur Fellig was an Austro-Hungarian photographer, who went by the name of “Weegee” and had a similarly unconventional style. He, however, focused on other subjects. By listening in on police radio Weegee would get a head start on police units and was often able to reach a scene early enough to photograph people who had suffered accidents, violence and other catastrophes. He was also drawn to those who did not get much from “the land of opportunity”; the homeless, the prostitutes and the drunks in the Bowery, and chronicled their lives with his camera.
In his autobiography Helmut Newton wrote that after he saw Federico Fellini’s film La Dolce Vita starring Anita Ekberg, he became interested in the phenomenon of the paparazzi. In 1970 he traveled to Rome to work with “real” paparazzi. As part of a commission for the fashion magazine Linea Italiana, Newton hired a few of them to pose with his models. In Newton’s unconventional approach the photographers were asked to treat the model as if she were a famous person. An interesting aspect of Newton’s work is the combination of multiple real elements, such as the model, the fashion and the paparazzi, on the one hand, with the staging of the photograph on the other. In the 1980’s and 1990's he aimed his camera at the paparazzi again—and they too aimed theirs at him—whilst he worked with his models on the Croisette, at the Cannes Film Festival. The name of Fellini’s character Paparazzo from the film La Dolce Vita has since been adopted as the standard term for these kinds of photographers. The character was modeled after a real person: Tazio Secchiaroli, who later rose to become Fellini’s set photographer. In the late 1950’s and early 1960’s Secchiaroli and his colleagues waited nightly, with camera and flash in hand, for prominent victims on Rome’s Via Veneto. About the same time, Edward Quinn and Daniel Angeli were very active in the South of France, mainly on the Cote d’Azur, and often worked with very long lenses. The interactions between the photographers and their usually unwilling models is particularly exciting, especially when stars like Greta Garbo, or Marlene Dietrich, did their best to hide their faces. Working mostly in New York and Los Angeles, Ron Galella has long been a cult figure in the USA, and was both an influence upon and a mentor to many younger photographers.
Presenting approximately 350 B/W and colour prints by Salomon, Weegee, Galella, Quinn, Angeli, Secchiaroli, Pigozzi and Newton, the exhibition displays the forerunners and central figures of the “classic” period of Paparrazi Photography—and provides a visual commentary about the evolution of this phenomenon. The exhibition offers an overview and critical look at the history of a photographic genre dedicated to fame and sensationalism. A genre that continues to feed the Yellow Press with exclusive reports on the comings and goings of the jet set in order to push the sales of their publications ever higher. There will always be paparazzi photographs that cross over into celebrity and portrait photography. Jean Pigozzi, the photographer included in the exhibition title, has been able to cultivate the kind of intensive and intimate relationship with the rich and the famous that is so desperately sought after by the paparazzi at large. He too penetrates into their private sphere, yet the stars generally acquiesce to the photographic unmasking with a smile. Being befriended with many famous people in the international social and cultural scene, he has been making candid portraits of prominent individuals at private locations since the 1970’s. An unusual aspect of his work is his double portrait series Pigozzi & Co.

Pigozzi and the Paparazzi
Helmut Newton Foundation
Jebensstrasse 2
Berlin, Germany

About 1,800 people stripped naked on Sunday for U.S. photographer Spencer Tunick at the stadium that will host the Euro 2008 soccer final. Tunick, who regularly stages such mass nude events, arranged his subjects in the colored seats of the venue, having been told by organizers the grass was too precious. "It will be fun. Austria is very conservative. This might bring more openness," said Michael, a 20-year-old Austrian who drove for two hours to take part. Others came from Germany and elsewhere. Tunick spoke to his models over the public address system, telling the men and women to spread out in sections of the stands and strike different poses. He told them not to smile or laugh and to remove sunglasses.
The stadium stages seven matches of the Euro 2008 soccer championship, being jointly hosted by Switzerland and Austria next month, including the final on June 29. "This very special ephemeral installation that we are inviting you to be part of is devised to capture and combine the spirit of sports, the grand sweeping waves of stadium architecture and the abstract relation of the human form to modern structures," Tunick said on his website. One of Tunick's latest stunts was on a Swiss glacier, where 600 people stripped off in temperatures of about 10 Celsius (50 F) last August. His biggest was last year in Mexico City with 18,000 people. The next after Vienna are planned for Cork, Ireland, on June 17 and Dublin on June 21. Sponsors of Tunick's latest event included a body promoting the soccer festival and Austrian railways, which gave participants free tickets. Those taking part were volunteers who were offered a limited edition copy of the photo. Tunick told a news conference in Vienna last week that rules in the United States made it hard to organize his photo shoots there. "My work is a little edgy. It is tough for me to get permission to do things in the U.S.," he said. (Reuters)

According to research by an American scholar, Larry Schaaf, a 200-year-old image of a leaf may be the world's oldest photograph. The image laid for years in an album, and was believed to have been dated 1839. However, Schaaf, believes it may have been made more than 30 years earlier by Thomas Wedgewood. The photogenic drawing, which is a negative obtained by laying the leaf on light-sensitive paper and exposing it to the sun, was attributed to Henry Fox Talbot, one of the pioneers of early photography. Schaaf, an expert on Fox Talbot, says that a "W" on the image may refer to Thomas Wedgewood, who was a member of the Wedgewood china family. 200-year-old image of a leaf, which lay for years in an album, may be the world's oldest photograph, according to research by a scholar.
The photogenic drawing, a negative obtained by laying the leaf on light-sensitive paper and exposing it to the sun, has been attributed to Henry Fox Talbot, one of the pioneers of photography. Wedgewood began experimenting with making solar pictures during the 1790's, in the exact same way that Fox Talbot did in the 1830's. Both used paper made light sensitive by a treatment with silver nitrate. Wedgewood conducted his photography experiments while living in Bristol, UK, but it was thought that none of his work had survived. Currently, the oldest permanent photography is an image by Joseph Niepce of France, which was created on chemically treated pewter in 1826. But if Schaaf is correct, the leaf image may date from the final years of the 18th century, and in turn would be the world's oldest photography. The leaf image was purchased in London in 1984 by a New York dealer for about $12,000. Today it would be worth anywhere between $100,000 and $140,000. However, if it can be confirmed that it is the world's oldest photograph, "the sky could be the limit" said Sotheby's photography expert, Denise Bethel.
The leaf image had been offered for sale last month at a Sotheby's auction in New York, but has since been withdrawn pending further investigation. The image had been in an album belonging to Henry Bright (1784-1869), a Bristol MP and member of a very prominent family interested in the arts and science. Five other photogenic drawings from the album were also sold in 1984, of which four also have a "W" on them. One is in the J Paul Getty Museum, one is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and two are privately owned. Both of the museums are now conducting their own private tests of the images. Schaaf indicated that the leaf did not fit into Fox Talbot's known body of work, but mentioned that the Bright and Wedgewood families shared mutual scientific friends.

For the second consecutive year, LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph will convene for a 3-day program of exhibitions, outdoor projections, workshops, interviews with world-famous photographers and special events that will transform downtown Charlottesville, Virginia into a "living image." This year’s festival will take place June 12-14, 2008. LOOK3 2008 will feature three legendary photographers: Mary Ellen Mark, Joel-Peter Witkin and James Nachtwey.
Mary Ellen Mark’s images of our world's diverse cultures are landmarks in the field of documentary photography, exhibited worldwide and published in over 16 books. "I think each photographer has a point of view and a way of looking at the world... that has to do with your subject matter and how you choose to present it. What's interesting is letting people tell you about themselves in the picture" explains Mark. Mary Ellen’s numerous awards include the ICP Cornell Capa Award, three NEA grants, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Joel-Peter Witkin began making photographs at the age of sixteen. While pursuing graduate work at the University of New Mexico he refined his work in relationship to the history of painting and sculpture. Witkin stages visceral, timeless compositions that "confront our sense of normalcy and decency, while constantly examining the teachings handed down through Christianity." Among his awards are two Ford Foundation and four N.E.A grants, the ICP Award for Visual Arts and the Commander de L’Order des Artes et des Lettres.
James Nachtwey has been a contract photographer with Time Magazine since 1984, and is one of the founding members of the photo agency, "VII". Nachtwey’s work, especially wartime photography, has been exhibited internationally, and his numerous honors include the Robert Capa Gold Medal (five times), the World Press Photo Award (twice), and Magazine Photographer of the Year (seven times). Nachtwey says of his photography: "I am a witness and I want my testimony to be honest and uncensored."
On each evening of the Festival, National Public Radio’s Alex Chadwick will host in-depth conversations and big screen projections with the three featured photographers in the historic Paramount Theater.
The LOOK3 Festival is an outgrowth of the "Hotshots" shows that National Geographic Photographer Michael "Nick" Nichols hosted in his backyard for the last twenty years. The intimate, informal spirit of those gatherings continues. LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph’s name signifies "3 days of peace, love, and photography" featuring 3 renowned photographers. Jeff James, Manager of Photography at Rosetta Stone describes his experience at last year’s festival, "…I feel lucky and proud to be a photographer after witnessing the brilliant presentations from my heroes as well as the rising stars in our profession… This is the "Sundance" of photography."
Nichols is Co-Executive director of the LOOK3 Festival, along with Jessica Nagle of Charlottesville. The project’s Board of Advisors includes: Melissa Harris, Editor-in-Chief of Aperture Magazine; Kathy Ryan, Photo Editor of The New York Times Magazine; and David Griffin, Director of Photography at National Geographic Magazine.

How to administrate a photography collection? There are three softwares for collectors to do it: GallerySystems is one of them and a very renowned product, because the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY, is working with it, the Museum of Modern Art and the Albertina in Vienna, Austria. There are two versions: The Museum System to manage a collection through ten integrated record types or modules and TMS light for small to medium size institution and private collectors with three record types.

Museografic is much less expensive than GallerySystems and offers a search engine for the art works, an export function (Excel, txt) and you can personalize the screens with your logo, url and email address... Interested collectors can download a full working test version.

As long as you manage not more than 5000 records there is a free software: Adlib Museum Lite. It is available in different languages. You can choose between English, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Greek and Arabic and the following type of data can be stored: identification, creation and dating, physical description, techniques and materials, condition, documentation, location, insurance and acquisition.

It sounds like a highbrow fairy tale: an unsuccessful artist turned cable TV host snags an interview with one of the world's most reclusive and glamorous art stars, Cindy Sherman -- and the two fall in love. This is what actually happened to Paul Hasegawa-Overacker, aka Paul H-O, who uses it as the premise for the documentary he co-directed, "Guest of Cindy Sherman." But to cling too tightly to that romantic story line is to seriously misrepresent this movie, which is screening this week at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York and is slated to run eventually on the Sundance Channel.
In fact, "Guest of Cindy Sherman" feels more like three or four docs fused into one entertaining (and sometimes squirm-inducing) concoction. We get a sidelong view of the art world and its symbiotic relationship with commerce and celebrity, as well as an exploration of the awkward life of a famous person's "plus one." (H-O's own complaints are bulked up by an amusing interview with Elton John's companion, David Furnish.) At the center of it all is Sherman, in a fragmented portrait of a woman H-O calls "the most famous mystery girl of art," a photographer who has used her own image as the basis for a hugely influential body of work.
All this is strung together with H-O's confessional voice-overs, which present him as a goofy dude who has stumbled into the force field of a radiant, powerful woman and found himself devastated by his own lack of stature and lost sense of self. "I'd sort of been swallowed up," he complains. For five years he tags along as Sherman attends galas, hobnobs with celebs and collectors and jet-sets around the globe, spending his days as "the person hardly anyone wants to talk to." The final blow, at least as he presents it, may just be when H-O brings Sherman to see his therapist in an attempt to save their five-year relationship, and the therapist chooses to take her on as a client, jettisoning him. "Even my shrink would rather be with Cindy!" They eventually break up, though he carefully avoids showing any of the actual drama on-screen.
"Guest of Cindy Sherman" arrived at Tribeca wreathed in controversy: Sherman has officially disassociated herself from the doc, even going so far as to apologize to friends who are interviewed in the film for involving them. However, Sherman herself comes off surprisingly well -- whether working in her studio (where we watch her experiment with an endless permutation of outfits and makeup until she finds the perfect amalgam) or chatting with her sister. H-O says that Sherman got something close to final cut (at least as far as her own appearances are concerned). But for an artist whose work revolves around manipulating her own image, and yet who has very deliberately shielded herself from the publicity machine, it must feel like very unwelcome exposure -- by an ex-boyfriend, no less.

From 9th May the first extensive retrospective of the Russian photographer Jewgeni Chaldej is presented in the Martin's Gropius Bau, Berlin. Jewgeni Chaldej has reported as a photographer extensively about the second world war, the war between Germany and the Soviet Union. Some of these images are world-famous and have become icons of the history of photography. Jewgeni Chaldej got famous not only by his spectacular documentary photographs of the second world war or by the staged image of soviet soldiers fixing a flag at the destroyed roof of the German Reichstag (above), but also by those photographs he took during the Potsdam conference and at the Nuremberg trial. The retrospective presents beside pictures that have never been published as well as early works from the 30s and the late work of the 80s.

Born in 1917 in the Donezk area in Ukraine, Jewgeni Chaldej received his first camera at the age of 13. In 1936 he became a photo reporter at the Soviet news agency TASS. He accompanied the Second World War with the camera since the 22nd June, 1941, the day of the raid of the German army on the Soviet Union. He became the witness of many battles, from the north with Murmansk to the Black Sea. Jewgeni Chaldej experienced as a soldier and photographer the retreat of the German troops and documented the advance of the Russian soldiers on Belgrade, Budapest, Vienna and, in the end, Berlin. With interruptions he worked till the seventies years of the "Prawda". He died on the 6th October, 1997. Jewgeni Chaldej travelled as a photo reporter of TASS across the whole Soviet Union. He took photos of the construction of dams in Siberia, the oil fields of Baku and the wheat harvest in the Ukraine, as well as the political rulers of that time. All photos of Jewgeni Chaldej come from the collection Ernst Volland and Heinz Krimmer as well as from the photo agency Soyuz, Moscow.