Author Archive for emily

From Lauren Indvik at Mashable Tech…

More than a quarter of photos and videos shot by individuals in the U.S. are now being captured by smartphones, according to an online survey of 3,300 Internet users ages 13 and up. Sales data suggest smartphones are replacing consumers’ need for low-end point-and-shoot cameras and camcorders.

The percentage of photos taken with a smartphone went from 17% to 27%, a 44% increase from the year previous, according to a survey conducted by NPD Group. Meanwhile, sales of point-and-shoot cameras dropped 17% in volume and 18% in revenue in the first 11 months of 2011. Individual sales of pocket camcorders dropped 13%, with a 10% decrease in revenue.

Higher-end items performed better: Sales of cameras with detachable lenses (average price: $863) increased by 12%, and sales of point-and-shoot cameras with optical zooms of 10x or greater (average price: $247) grew by 16%. More…

From MITnews…

MIT researchers have created a new imaging system that can acquire visual data at a rate of one trillion exposures per second. That’s fast enough to produce a slow-motion video of a burst of light traveling the length of a one-liter bottle, bouncing off the cap and reflecting back to the bottle’s bottom.

Media Lab postdoc Andreas Velten, one of the system’s developers, calls it the “ultimate” in slow motion: “There’s nothing in the universe that looks fast to this camera,” he says. More…

From Bruce Davidson at The New York Review of Books Blog…

In the spring of 1980, I began to photograph the New York subway system. Before beginning this project, I was devoting most of my time to commissioned assignments and to writing and producing a feature film based on Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novel, Enemies, A Love Story. When the final option expired on the film, I felt the need to return to my still photography—to my roots.

I began to photograph the traffic islands that line Broadway. These oases of grass, trees, and earth surrounded by heavy city traffic have always interested me. I found myself photographing the lonely widows, vagrant winos, and solemn old men who line the benches on these concrete islands of Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

I traveled to other parts of the city, from Coney Island to the Bronx Zoo. I revisited the Lower East Side cafeteria where I’d photographed several years before. The cafeteria was a haven for the elderly Jewish people surviving the decaying nearby neighborhoods. I photographed the people I had known there, survivors from the war and the death camps who had clung together after the Holocaust to re-root themselves in this strange land. More…

From Terry Castle at The Paris Review…

I’ve been collecting anonymous photographs for more than two decades now and probably own a thousand or so, in all kind of formats. Nineteenth-century tintypes and cyanotypes, cabinet cards and cartes de visite, turn-of-the-century RPPCs (Real Photo Postcards), disaster pix, police mugshots and Bertillon cards, photo-booth strips, deaccessioned newspaper photos (especially ones with white crop marks), old prom photos, not to mention a recently acquired batch of ratty, Nan Goldin–style, 1970s Polaroids. Should I be in rehab? Lately I’ve managed to put a small part of my collection into serious, made-for-collectors-type albums—the organic kind, that is, with acid-free archival sleeves and glassine pockets. You can get them in the kale and beets section at Whole Foods. But most of my pictures, alas, remain scattered about, secreted away in boxes and drawers and plastic bags, stuck into books, or else just hiding out somewhere in my house. Where, I’m not sure: domestic life becomes ever more Grey Gardens–like. No more vintage photo shows, says spouse Blakey—nor will I be going anywhere near the eBay log-in page—until I unearth all the mute, two-dimensional Missing Persons already lurking somewhere in the downstairs closet.

As addictions go, collecting old photos of obscure provenance may be harmless enough. Indeed, the habit might seem easy to peg as one of the fast-expanding subdivisions of the Great American Nostalgia Industry—along with scrapbooking, rubber-stamping, collecting Pez dispensers or Barbies still mint in their boxes. Now that digital photography has made just about every older image-making process obsolete, even the prints and Polaroids of only ten or twenty years ago have begun to look quaint and vestigial. Collecting them is like dragging out one’s old Joy Division albums. More…

A book review, by Errol Morris, from the Los Angeles Times…

In the brutally hot summer of 1936, Arthur Rothstein, a young photographer working for a branch of the Farm Security Administration, made a series of images that soon took on a bizarre life of their own.

They were photos of a sun-bleached cow skull resting in a bone-dry corner of South Dakota, one of several drought-decimated states during the Dust Bowl era. The wider reality they alluded to, of a natural catastrophe wreaking havoc on America’s farmers and tearing at the nation’s social fabric, was undeniably, frighteningly real.

But within days of their publication in newspapers across the country, the photos’ “authenticity” was being mocked and challenged by skeptics who claimed that Rothstein had repeatedly posed the skull, like a stage prop, possibly to drum up support for Franklin Roosevelt’s big government spending programs. More…