502. Josa Stephens | Estupefacto

  Date: Mon Jul 28, 2003 9:36:12 PM America/Mexico_City   ¡Hola que tal !   Soy Pepe Stephens, compositor de la ciudad de México. Siendo mi abuelo fotógrafo aficionado en los 30's y 40's, me despertó el ojo desde chico. Mi primer CD-ROM (recién salido) fué "fotografío para recordar" y, después de años de navegar, ahora me encuentro con zonezero. Pedro Meyer me devuelve la fé en la red. No solo la cantidad y calidad de su contenido son abrumadoras, además el diseño y funcionalidad son exquisitos hasta en los mínimos detalles. El site como obra de arte...   Más que felicidades, muchas gracias.  

Monday, 28 July 2003

504. Conferences Colloquium Zonezero 10 years

  The Centro Nacional de las Artes hosted several activities of the celebration of ZoneZero's 10th anniversary. Thursday, September 25th, 2003   FIRST SESSION So who won? Digital or Analog, during this last decade. * Rafael Goldchain -Canada * Francisco Mata -Mexico   SECOND SESSION So what changed in the architecture of photography? * Jonathan Green -USA   THIRD SESSION What happened with the curatorial experience during Internet times? * Rod Slemmons -USA   Go to site  

Wednesday, 09 July 2003

506. Revisiting Street Photography

    Four years ago, this very month, I wrote on the topic of "street photography". I was disheartened then with the problems related to making images on the street. Be those in conjunction with the security of the photographer or his equipment and the shear refusal of so many people to being photographed. Many of you wrote us sharing your views on this matter, some disagreed but most of you did find equally discomforting experiences.   We also received considerable comments on the lack of interest of Galleries and Publications for this genre of photography. It also seems that the number of you making pictures on the street has reduced in numbers judging by the Portfolios section in ZoneZero, in contrast to the high numbers of the long standing tradition of "street photography" done in the past.   Out of a total of 480 Portfolios, published in ZoneZero, only 49 have images one could consider as "street photography". We have therefore decided to do something about this, by creating in the Portfolios area, an entirely new section, dedicated solely to the genre of "street photography". Something which looking back, we should have done already four years ago.   I am glad to report, that all is not lost as some of us had felt. I have just been to Madrid, in Spain, and my experience of photographing on the street there, contradicts entirely what I had stated back in 1999, and what many of you had come to believe as well. Not only did I feel safe photographing on the streets there, obviously taking the needed precautions one would take in any major city in a contemporary world, but the people were inviting and totally at ease with the notion of having a camera pointed at them. Even photographing in the streets of Mexico City, has become somewhat safer. Technological developments since 1999, have also introduced some new variables that are quite interesting. For instance, the more recent digital cameras have the ability to expand their ASA rating to much higher ratings than before, providing us with a very good degree of low level light sensibility while at the same time having relatively little image noise. Then there are some new filters for noise reduction, also contributing mightily to making low level light photography a very reasonable option. So the quality of what the image can look like has been considerably expanded. The speed and reaction of digital cameras has been improved considerably, something that is quite essential to street photography. You can hardly capture the quintessential "decisive moment", stylistically so linked to street photography, if your camera is never there ready for you when you need it.   Well, today with higher sensibility, higher quality of image information, and greater handling speed, we are ready to see a significant growth in this sector of photography that has been largely abandoned. But the good news do not stop there. We have also found a plethora of potent new digital cameras which are very small and unobtrusive, while retaining some of the traits of larger cameras, making the possibility for making pictures on the street something less of a security issue as one can carry them in one's pocket and bring them out only when needed and under conditions that do not invite aggressions.   As to the publication of the images of street photography, some have complained there is no market for them. That Galleries are not interested in showing them. Well that is not entirely true. I have received numerous press releases telling us about shows that are related precisely to street photography. (the Paul Kopeikin Galley in Los Angeles, by shear chance, being the latest one www.paulkopeikingallery.com)   The possibility of printing these pictures to large formats, is something that also eluded most of us who had the traditional dark rooms in the past. Now with digital cameras, we can also go to larger format printing, which is something well appreciated in the Gallery circuits.   In addition to the possibility for making your work seen through the Gallery circuit, sites such as ZoneZero are bringing the work of street photographers, to audiences world wide, in numbers that would have been only dreamed off before. No traditional Gallery in the world has the possibility to offer the exposure to such work that it can garner through sites that are visited in large numbers over the internet.   We are at the threshold of new paradigm changes in photography, and as with everything else in the world, the term adaptation seems to be the driving force. Street photography has undergone a rather dark period for some years, and I believe that we are going to enter a new one with substantial changes in this direction.   However, there is one major issue that I still have pending, and that is the notion of the "decisive moment", the more I come up against it, the more convinced I am that we have to move on and understand that all the attributes that have been attached to the so called decisive moment are nothing but romantic notions pertaining more than anything to an era belonging to the birth of the 35 mm camera. The assumption that we can actually see all the elements within the frame of the so called "decisive moment" is just a whole lot of nonsense. It does not serve well to educate photographers under such fictitious aspirations.   The image I have shown here, although I am the author of it, would never lead me to suggest that I could have seen all the wonderful things to come together in this image at the moment of actually clicking the shutter. To take credit for this, would simply be wrong, there is no way I could have seen the simultaneous realities of all those visual planes operating in parallel. Of course, one can argue the very Zen idea of perception, that I did not have to see it all, in order to see it a ll. That I saw everything with my third eye. That I saw with my intuition, and so on. Well fine, let us suppose this all could be true, but then why does this not happen every time when I go out to photograph? after all, my intentions are no different from one day to the other. If I have developed the skills that served me so well on day A, why would they elude me on days B, C, D and so on?   I would say it has to do with luck, above all. So, yes you also have to have luck in finding and making good images. But how does one teach "luck" to students? You see what I mean? If artistic performance is to be measured largely by the contribution of luck, I think we are missing something very fundamental. The "decisive moment" is a very flawed concept of image production, that has done a lot of harm to a lot of photographers who have seen their efforts vanish into thin air, as they seldom were able to find the images that would stand up to such an unrealistic expectation, of being able to see all the parts of the image within a fraction of a second, in order to make them all fit and coincide marvelously at the time of triggering the shutter. It just does not happen that way.   This notion of the "decisive moment" has also been one of those burdens that street photography has had to endure, hopefully we will also make some inroads into reconsidering the possibilities that digital photography can offer us to create the images that might otherwise have eluded us. Some have described the process as a "magic" moment when all things come together without being seen. OK, I prefer a bit less magic, and a lot more reliance on my abilities to use the tools as I need them, rather as they see fit to work by themselves. Maybe the good thing is that today we have the options open for doing them both ways.   Pedro Meyer July 2003 Coyoacán, Mexico   Please share your comments on this issue with us in our forums.         http://zonezero.com/editorial/julio03/july.html      

Tuesday, 01 July 2003

508. José Hernández

  Date: Thu Jun 12, 2003 10:53:37 AM America/Mexico_City   dear zonezero,   i have been enjoying your web site for several months now and decided to register. i think you have an intelligent, provocative and visually interesting project.   thank you and best wishes,   José Hernández  

Thursday, 12 June 2003

510. How did you Learn Photography?

    We all have different stories of how we learned about photography. Many were dependent on where you lived and also what financial resources you could count on. I was living in Mexico City and there was no place you could learn formally about photography, fifty years ago.   That led me to subscribe to a correspondence course by the New York Institute of Photography, and therefore I taught myself. I still have those manuals, which when one looks back upon them today, they really are as poorly written and conceived as my recollection of how hard they were to follow at the time.   The entire process of photography was technically very complicated, the process of receiving by mail the courses was a lengthy one and by no means inexpensive. The acquisition of equipment was a nightmare in an era when the notions of world commerce had not yet taken on the fluidity of our contemporary world. Neither people or merchandise traveled as freely then as it does today. Think of a world of only propeller planes, radio, telegraph, and no Fedex.   I was a young kid who just wanted to see his photographic images not spend countless hours as a chemist, but that was not to be, I had to first spend days chasing chemicals all over town, going by bus to all the various places that sold them, coming home and then mixing them up properly to develop the film which had been hopefully exposed correctly, something not necessarily assured without the aid of a light meter, all of this in the hopes of finally being able to see a first stage of the image.   The world was not organized to make things simple. The courses took weeks to arrive between one and the next. My English was not too fluent so many things were, aside all the bad pedagogic notions of teaching in those manuals, a problem onto itself. Trying to find the correct translation to Spanish for some of the chemicals or the items described in the manuals was one of the things that befuddled me then. Today I look back upon all that, and I think it was an obstacle course in persistence more than anything to do with the art of photography.   Along rolls 2003 and we have the Internet, and people from all over the world have access today from anyplace they happen to live, to information one could only dream of fifty years ago. But this time and in this instance, the information is being brought to you from Mexico City. No longer are the traditional photographic power centers (New York-Paris-London) the only places from which the flow of information can emanate, it can come from anywhere.   As an interesting aside: if you place in your google.com search engine: "from analog to digital" you will have zonezero come up as number one, out of 1,990,000 searches; if you put "digital photography" it will come up as #10 out of 2,260,000 searches, even ahead of that great stalwart of photography: Kodak. So this tells you something of how the flow of information is changing in this era of the internet. Did I ever believe that we would have the potential to reach out to people all over the world, standing in that very same spot from where I was receiving those New York Institute of Photography correspondence courses fifty years earlier? of course not.   Enclosed find what we consider to be a quite impressive list of letters from literally across the planet, both from professors and students alike, making observations about their use of ZoneZero as a teaching tool.   Let me point out, two particular instances of our relationship with such aspects of education. One was the thesis by King Tong Ho, from New Zealand, who asked me to be one of his thesis examiners for his Master of Fine Arts degree at the Auckland University of Technology. We were so impressed with the quality of his work, that we in time turned his work into an exhibition here in ZoneZero, and the document into a PDF that can be downloaded, and it has become one of the most accessed documents.   http://zonezero.com/exposiciones/fotografos/king/index.html   A more recent surprise, along these same lines of a thesis, was by a young Chinese photographer Jia Xiao who sent us his work amidst the SARS epidemic in his city of Nanjing.     We enclose the full document he sent us, in a downloadable PDF document (588 Kb). Below is an excerpt, albeit not legible to us, because it is in Chinese characters, however, we still can appreciate the references made to ZoneZero in western characters, and therefore we extend him our appreciation.     In closing let us remind you that learning about photography has become easier, and photography itself has become a lot more fun than it used to be. The possibility to concentrate on image making (which will help us become great story tellers) seems to be more important than those other activities such as the chemistry, physics or optics, which granted a great deal of satisfaction to some people, and today have been supplanted by issues related to the computer.   Learning about photography has never been more exciting and more fun, and more accessible, with the technological changes upon us, we have become a generation were suddenly we have all become students again. Even those who are the professors, they are presumably learning as they go, only a few steps ahead of their students, not more. And they have to keep it up all the time, as there is no let up, gone are the days when you learned once and applied that know-how for the rest of your life.   Of course I am referring to technological matters, as issues related to culture, that will remain with us for the ages. The interesting thing of course is the new mixture of cultures and technology, as the world is offering a cultural diversity through the internet that is unheard of anytime before. These combinations have yet to find their way into mainstream photographic printed literature and curricula.   In this respect we are also contributing with some healthy questioning of the basic tenets of the photographic establishment and the values and merits of the dominant culture. Just by the fact that the center of gravity no longer emanates solely, from the traditional centers of the photographic establishments, I believe we can develop new ideas around the cultural directions for photography in an era of great transitions.     Pedro Meyer June, 2003 Coyoacan, Mexico   Please share your comments on this issue with us in our forums.         http://zonezero.com/editorial/junio03/june.html    

Sunday, 01 June 2003

512. Ronn Taylor

  Date: Sun May 25, 2003 5:50:50 PM America/Mexico_City   My name is ronn taylor and after an extended absence to your site, I've rediscovered ZoneZero. It is an inspirational site and much more than just photography. Please send the HTML version of your newsletter when possible. I hope to contribute both critically and artistically.   Regards, ronn  

Sunday, 25 May 2003

514. Valery Titievsky

  Date: Sun May 18, 2003 9:49:56 AM America/Mexico_City   My name is Valery Titievsky. I live in Russia, Siberia in Novosibirsk. I photograph life in the West Siberia and Russia for newspapers and magazines. I liked your Web page. Very beauty. "I want my news in html version".   Respectfully yours, Valery Titievsky  

Sunday, 18 May 2003

516. The Still Image in Real Time

    So my phone takes a picture, what changes does that forebode for photography you will ask. Well, look at it this way, over the past year (2003), the number of cameraphones sold world wide has been larger than the number of stand alone digital cameras, and no doubt the trend will continue into the future. By next year (2004) the number of camera-phones sold is expected to be greater than the number of digital and film cameras combined.   The amount of pictures that are being taken and sent to someone across the globe is growing exponentially and the images are being shared by someone, namely by you. That is what is happening, and this party has not even started.   I have always found the expression a "picture is worth a thousand words" to be rather inappropriate because we don't know whose picture and whose words we are comparing, but I must admit that in general terms, the amount of information that a picture conveys is pretty accurate in terms of the wealth of data. If you send just one picture over a phone, it would take you probably a thousand or more words to describe all that there is within that very same image. The possibility of sending this wealth of information at the click of a button, is what makes the experience of digital picture making so fulfilling, as well as efficient.   My friends Bob Goldstein and Alexis Gerard suggest that sales of camera-phones will approach 50 million units in 2003, while only 32 million stand alone digital cameras and 60 million film cameras will be sold worldwide. Are we on to something here? Could it be that the photographic community might be dismissing yet again another technology as "just a toy" as was the case with the first digital cameras?   There are already camera-phones that are starting to deliver 1 to 2 mexapixel images, that should tell you something about the level of resolution that some of these images are going to be arriving at, maybe during your next cell phone call or on your computer via the internet.   We should understand that with the camera-phones entire new photographic endeavors will emerge. We should not always judge the future by that which we already know, on the contrary, the exciting thing is to imagine what we do not yet know or even fully understand.   For instance, how will people use the camera-phone? Possibly to create their personal diaries in new ways that have not been done in the past, it's quite an intriguing proposition in spite of diaries not being something very new, in fact it is quite ancient. But what keeps it alive is that it is so human and so basic to our personal interactions. The potential to find new forms of delivery and construction (internet+ camera-phone images) is what offers such a great challenge to our imagination.   But what about someone who is out shopping and wants to confirm if the chair they are about to buy is the right design? Or if the pattern on the textile is the right one for their curtains? You can save yourself a lot of additional trips by just confirming via picture phone if what you need really is what you are being offered.   Then we have all those blind dates, they no longer need to be so blind! There can be a picture phone going on in either direction. We understand that escort services, also want for security reasons, to get a picture of their clients ahead of time, something that works to the benefit of both parties as security is sought by one side and "good looks" by the other, both seem to benefit from visual confirmation.   Photography has always been based among other ideas, on the notion of being a witness to an event. The desire to use the camera as a tool to mediate the world of the photographer in bringing the image to the viewer. However still photography was never delivered in real time, as could be the case with broadcast television. Now for the first time, the still image is in real time. The phone-camera, and the digital camera over the internet.   We are looking at something completely new, the delivery of the still image in real time. In the past, the time lag between taking a picture and showing it went from months, then to weeks, following that it went to days, and then to hours, and more recently to minutes, finally now we have for the first time all of this happening in real time.   The implications for all of photography are of course huge. When photography can be in real time, we will discover that we have to reconsider many of our traditional notions of what photography has stood for, and how it was delivered. Some new forms of delivery will emerge, others will tend to disappear, it is yet too early to tell, which ones. What is clear is that the world of photography is not going to remain the way it was only a decade ago.   Pedro Meyer April 23, 2003 Coyoacán, Mexico   Please share your comments on this issue with us in our forums.       http://zonezero.com/editorial/abril03/april.html      

Wednesday, 23 April 2003

518. The LA Times fires a photographer

We found that the photographer Brian Walski has been dismissed from the LA Times for no valid reason. It seems that the newspaper does not fully understand that the CONTENT of the image he sent in, was not altered in it's essence, even though he combined two consecutive images (images and the LA Times statement below).   The problem with this action by the LA Times news-organization, is that they use this sort of measure to cover up for what is in reality a much more profound issue, in particular in this war, and that has to do with the wholesale abdication of their responsibility in bringing to the public any news other than what the Pentagon or the White House wishes them to publish.   I did not see, for example, on the front page of the LA TIMES today, any of the images of the Iraqi children killed by US bombs plus the fact that the International Red Cross has denounced the war atrocities perpetrated by US bombs falling on a totally civilian population of farmers in the city of Hindiya. That in my book is the real omission of facts not what Brian Walski did.   Instead, they have fired someone for doing a professional job in trying to come up with a better picture, the same way that any of their journalists polish a text so that it reads better and is succinct. (why should a photographer be deprived of doing exactly the same that other professionals are doing on a daily basis as long as the information is not distorted?). The only explanation I can find, is that by accusing the photographer and attempting to portray themselves as publishing "unmanipulated" news, they are seeking to conceal the factual reality of their biased and one-sided presentation of the overall news. That seems to be the more important issue at hand.   Pedro Meyer   Editor's Note from The LA Times   On Monday, March 31, the Los Angeles Times published a front-page photograph that had been altered in violation of Times policy.   The primary subject of the photo was a British soldier directing Iraqi civilians to take cover from Iraqi fire on the outskirts of Basra. After publication, it was noticed that several civilians in the background appear twice. The photographer, Brian Walski, reached by telephone in southern Iraq, acknowledged that he had used his computer to combine elements of two photographs, taken moments apart, in order to improve the composition.   Times policy forbids altering the content of news photographs. Because of the violation, Walski, a Times photographer since 1998, has been dismissed from the staff. The altered photo, along with the two photos that were used to produce it, are below:       The Original Photo   The Altered photo Photographer Brian Walski used his computer to combine elements of the two photographs. The left side of the altered photo is taken from the top left photo, and the right side of the altered photo is from the top right one. Some residents on the left side of the blended photo are visible twice. The altered photo ran on the front page of the Los Angeles Times on monday, March 31, 2003.         http://www.zonezero.com/magazine/articles/altered/altered.html    

Wednesday, 02 April 2003

520. Maureen E. Mulvihill

  Date: Wed, 2 Apr 2003 22:31:21 -0500   Another good issue of ZZ, Pedro. Your variety & coverage are always first-class. My best to you & yours, MEM.   Maureen E. Mulvihill, PhD Fellow, Princeton Research Forum Princeton, New Jersey   "Relentless caper, for all those who step the legend of their youth into the noon." Hart Crane, Legend (White Buildings, 1926) Set by Mel Powell (Events, 1963).  

Wednesday, 02 April 2003

522. Sreekumar Viswanathan

  Date: Sun Mar 30, 2003 4:05:01 AM America/Mexico_City   My name is E.V.Sreekumar, Chief photographer of one of India's largest circulated daily in India -'malayala manorama'. I am 37 yers old and I have been in the institution for the past 13 years. I find the job very intersting as my daily schedule includes taking a cocktail of programmes like striking employees,relegious festivals, traditional dance forms,sports,monsoon,draughts etc etc. You can very well imagine the variety of assignments we are doing daily. This variety makes the job still interesting after 13 years. I prefer using 'Nikon' equipments and I presently use the nikond1h whichI find a very useful camera for newspaper photographers. I work in the souther state of the country called 'INDIA' called'Kerala'.   This state is the most beautiful state and tourists from all over the world come here to enjoy the scenic beauty . 'National Geographic' magazine finds kerala as the 'must see' 20 places in the world.  

Sunday, 30 March 2003

524. Renato Molina M.

  Date: Fri Mar 28, 2003 11:00:20 AM America/Mexico_City   HOLA!!!   Me enteré de su sitio en una revista de Mexicana de Aviación y me parece fantástico.   Tengo varios años de estar en "esta onda" de la fotografía digital, antes había estado solo en 35 mm.   Estoy asociado al Club Fotográfico de Guatemala donde participamos todos los meses en distintos concursos (los ultimos jueves de cada mes).   Agradeceré que me incluyan en la lista de personas para recibir información.   Resido en Guatemala pero viajo constantemente por cuestiones de trabajo. Me encanta la fotografía de arquitectura y gentes.   Cordiales saludos, Renato Molina M.  

Friday, 28 March 2003