The 28th annual CONTACT Photography Festival is underway with dozens of exhibits running citywide for the month of May. 

The festival aims to make the art of photography more accessible to the public and has supported more than 7,500 artists over the last 27 years in developing professional exhibitions, projects and practices.

According to the festival, one of its primary objectives is to address the needs of artists, with the aim of providing a well-rounded and inclusive creative experience for the city and the GTA.

“The Festival presents lens-based and mixed-media works by over 250 artists and photographers exploring topics including anti-colonial practices, community-building, Afro-futurism, crip liberation, ceremony and revolution, and personal and collective memory, addressing violent gaps in historical archives,” according to CONTACT’s website.

CONTACT says it presents works by acclaimed and emerging artists, documentary photographers and photojournalists from Canada and around the world.

Exhibitions can be found across the city, from outdoor installations to museums and galleries.

Artists say festivals help with exposure, accessibility 

 Arielle Bobb-Willis’ exhibition ‘Furiously Happy’ will take over Davisville Station. The artist is known for her colourful, unconventional images that focus on the human figure.

“My purpose is to fall in love with as much as I can and photography is a tool that helps me remember all the things I love,” she said, adding she hopes her images bring out different responses from attendees.

“Whatever the feeling is, I just hope people feel something from it,” she said.

Toronto-based artist June Clark has work at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery.

“The photographs are from the 70s and 80s when I first arrived in Canada,” she explained.

“I arrived in 1968 and found myself walking around Toronto looking for the familiar, after having been basically wrenched from the community I lived in with my husband at the time in New York. I was trying to discover community.”

Clark says for artists, festivals like CONTACT are a powerful way to reach more people in the community and help make art more accessible to everyone.

“There aren’t that many commercial galleries to accommodate the amount of high calibre artists we have in Toronto,” she said.

All of the exhibitions at CONTACT are free and open to the public. The festival runs until May 31, though some exhibition dates extend beyond the end of the month.

Vivo is all set to release the X100 Ultra and X100s smartphones this month. Vivo has been teasing the impressive camera capabilities of these phones. Now that we are near to the launch, we have more news regarding the upcoming devices. Vivo has now officially revealed the camera samples of Vivo X100 Ultra and X100s models.

Jia Jingdong, the Vice President of Vivo Brand revealed new information regarding the device on Weibo. The new teasers show the Vivo X100 Ultra with a Natural Titanium-inspired color, while the X100s model flaunts a green hue. The phone takes the DNA from the original X100 series. Hence the models come with a similar circular camera module design. However, the difference is that this time the company will offer a flat display for the X100s model.

Along with the teaser, Jia Jingdong also revealed the camera capabilities and other details. Let’s take a brief look at them below.

Vivo X100 Ultra Camera

The X100 Ultra is dubbed “Image Thanos”, inspired by Marvel’s character Thanos. Furthermore, the company has created six telephoto capabilities inspired by the six “Infinity Stones.” The infinity stones of Vivo X100 Ultra are High-speed sports, low-light portraits, polar starry sky, extreme macro, telephoto sun, and telephoto stage.

The Vivo X100 Ultra features a 200-megapixel Zeiss APO super telephoto with an HP9 sensor. The phone also features a 50-megapixel LYT-900 main camera with CIPA 4.5-level gimbal stabilization. Vivo also partnered with Zeiss and top suppliers for the camera enhancements. Moreover, the company also uses its own Blueprint Imaging Technology and V3+ imaging chip.

Vivo X100s

Vivo X100s will be a polished version of the classic X100 smartphone. The major change is that it will offer a flat display. For comparison, the original X100 models used curved displays. Moreover, the smartphone will also bring the Dimensity 9300+, an overclocked version of the original Dimensity 9300. Earlier, we covered the AnTuTu and Geekbench scores of the Dimensity 9300+, and it was impressive.

Apart from that, the X100s seem to bring new software enhancements rather than hardware to the camera department. The Vivo official reveals that the phone will have a new humanistic street photography mode for SLR-like control. Moreover, it will also offer the latest “Four Seasons Portrait” mode.

That said, the Vivo X100 Ultra and Vivo 100s models will be launched sometime this month. We hope to see a launch date announcement from the company soon.

Few novelists ever inhabited their vocation with more conviction than Paul Auster, who died last week of lung cancer at the age of 77. This picture, taken in 1993 by Arnold Newman, captured the writer in his element and among the objects that defined him.

The author of The New York Trilogy is pictured in his basement study in the Brooklyn brownstone house that he shared with his wife, novelist Siri Hustvedt (she wrote in a room in the attic). The white walls and bare lightbulbs cast the 19th-century workspace in 20th-century light; you are reminded that his contemporary and friend Don DeLillo had, the previous year, described Auster’s fictional method as “building a traditional storytelling architecture with sharply modern interiors”. There is the ever-present authorial cigarette – Auster’s 1995 film Smoke was set in a Brooklyn tobacconist (he belatedly switched to a vape in 2018) – and, centre stage, the Olympia manual typewriter on which he produced every word of his novels and which was itself the subject of a short 2002 book.

That latter stunt was typical of the author. His gift was to bring the riddling metafictions of the European novel to the noirish streets of his home city. “I’m not just interested in the results of writing, but in the process, the act of putting words on a page,” he said in the Paris Review. “As a young person, I would always ask myself, where are the words coming from?”

The immediate answer to that question was that they were emerging from the battered keys and ribbon of the trusty machine on his desk. “Like it or not,” he wrote in The Story of My Typewriter, “I realised we [Auster and his Olympia] had the same past. And as time went on,” he suggested, “I came to understand we also had the same future.”

A federal judge in Seattle has declined to grant summary judgment to either party in a copyright infringement case involving a photograph of the late Reggae and Dancehall singer Lincoln “Sugar” Minott. 

The case will now proceed to trial.

The lawsuit was initiated by British photographer Adrian Boot against Rhapsody International Inc., the company that operates the Napster music streaming service. Boot’s photograph of Minott was taken in 1979 and later used as cover art for the 2005 album Sugar Minott At Studio One.  The original photo itself (not the album cover) was subsequently used on Napster’s streaming service, allegedly without Boot’s consent.

In her 12-page order handed down on Friday (May 4), obtained by DancehallMag, U.S. District Judge Kymberly K. Evanson said a clear-cut decision was not possible because there were issues of material fact that must be resolved by a jury.  

This includes, among other things, whether Rhapsody had an implied or express license to display Boot’s original photograph of Minott on its Napster website.

Boot had initially licensed the photograph to Soul Jazz Records for £552.25. According to the photographer, his agreement with Soul Jazz Records permitted the photograph’s use solely on the cover of Minott’s album. He claimed that Napster’s digital use on their website would have required a separate license fee of £2,147.56 through his company Urbanimage.

Rhapsody countered, suggesting the photograph’s use was legally permissible under licenses passed through several entities, from Soul Jazz Records, the initial licensee, to music distributor Play It Again Sam (PIAS), and finally to Rhapsody/Napster.

Addressing Rhapsody’s argument that Boot granted an implied license to Soul Jazz Records to distribute the photograph with the album, Judge Evanson wrote, “Rhapsody has not explained why the Court should conclude, as a matter of law, that Boot intended to grant an implied license to Soul Jazz Records that would permit it to distribute the photograph in its original form, rather than the photograph as part of the Sugar Minott at Studio One album cover.”

The judge noted the “scant evidence” presented on the issue: “Because the question of fact as to whether Rhapsody’s use was within the scope of an implied license granted to Soul Jazz Records cannot be answered on the record before the Court, this issue must be presented to the jury.”

Regarding Rhapsody’s claim of an express license through its contract with content aggregator Play It Again Sam (PIAS), Judge Evanson said, “Because the Court finds that on this record, there are questions of fact as to whether Rhapsody’s use was licensed either expressly or impliedly, and that issue is dispositive to both cross-motions for summary judgment, both motions must be denied and this case must proceed to trial.”

Additionally, the judge denied both parties’ requests for attorney’s fees and set new deadlines leading up to a trial date scheduled for June 10, 2024.

Boot, a former teacher who once taught Physics in Jamaica, has photographed several other famous musicians, including Bob Marley.

The Sugar Minott At Studio One album is a collection of the Jamaican singer’s work at the legendary Studio One during the 1970s.  It included songs such as Hang On Natty, Vanity, Jah Jah Children, and Love Gonna Pack Up.

Miniott passed away in July 2010 at age 54.