The ability to capture the essence of humanity in a single frame is what draws many to street photography. However, the genre often finds itself trapped in repetitive patterns and clichés, hindering photographers from expressing their unique perspectives. 

Coming to you from Justin Mott, this passionate video candidly discusses the current state of street photography and challenges viewers to break free from the mold. Mott, a seasoned photojournalist, expresses his concern over the lack of genuine emotion and storytelling in many contemporary street photographs. He critiques the overreliance on predictable formulas, such as high-contrast black and white images with isolated subjects, often shot through puddles or reflections for added effect. While acknowledging the mastery of legendary photographers who employed similar techniques, Mott emphasizes the importance of infusing images with soul and character, something he finds lacking in many modern interpretations.

Mott argues that blindly following these established formulas, without understanding the underlying emotions and stories they conveyed, leads to a generation of “soulless photographers” producing derivative work. He encourages viewers to move beyond mere technical proficiency and explore themes that hold personal significance. Instead of replicating the styles of others, Mott urges photographers to discover their own voices and express their unique perspectives through their work. He advocates for experimentation with different approaches, whether it be shooting in color, utilizing wide angle lenses, or incorporating a series of images with a clear purpose and narrative.

The core of Mott’s message is a call to action for street photographers to break free from the constraints of clichés and infuse their work with authenticity and meaning. He challenges viewers to dig deeper, explore their own motivations, and find their own visual language to tell compelling stories through their photographs. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Mott.
 

Call it beginner’s luck.

On a trip to the Oregon coast in late April, amateur photographer Michael Sanchez took his new camera out to Hug Point State Park to snap pictures of waterfalls.

Sanchez, a 41-year-old middle-school band director from Vancouver, Wash., recently picked up photography and, by his account, is by no means a bird-watcher. But his trip turned into an impromptu photo shoot that made him the envy of birders.

“I got all the shots that I needed and when I was finishing up, I looked behind me and, still before the sun’s fully up, I see this little bird with black feathers. I said, ‘Oh, well, what a cute little bird, why don’t I practice shooting that bird?” Sanchez, 41, told NPR on Thursday. “When I got home, I started to process the pictures from my trip and I saw that it wasn’t a little black bird — it was actually a beautifully colored blue and a chestnut bird.”

It wasn’t until he posted his pictures to Facebook that he learned his bird sighting was extremely rare: a blue rock-thrush, far from its native breeding habitat in parts of Europe, Africa and Asia.

His April 21 sighting is the first time the bird has been seen in the U.S, bird experts said. It’s also the first blue rock-thrush sighting in North America since 1997, according to the American Birding Association, when the species was spotted in British Columbia. The prior sighting had been rejected by the ABA over debate about how the bird had arrived in the area; however, the Oregon sighting may prompt the association to reevaluate its 1997 record.

Brodie Cass Talbott, an educator with the Bird Alliance of Oregon, was stunned by the finding after his team verified the sighting. He said the male bird is the Southeast Asian philippensis subspecies — the only one of five with a reddish-brown belly.

“It was just a real shock,” he said. “This is potentially the rarest bird that’s ever been seen in Oregon.”

Oregon isn’t usually a stopping ground for vagrants, a term for birds that travel well beyond their normal breeding or wintering locations, he said — especially those traveling from Asia like this one.

Alaska likely would’ve been the quickest destination for this particular bird, which his team believes migrated from just north of Japan.

“They’re usually going to come across the Bering Sea, from Russia to Alaska and then make their way south,” he said. “So, that’s a really, really broad ocean that this bird would need to cross.”

Among birders and ornithologists, the unusual sighting has invited theories about this bird’s origins.

Talbott doubted that the bird made it all the way across the Pacific Ocean on its own two wings.

“What seems more likely is — especially since it is in the heart of migration season for this species in Asia — that this bird may have gotten blown off course during migration,” he said.

A storm could have whisked the bird toward the ocean, or it could have hopped a ride on a cargo ship, or maybe a combination of the two, he conjectured.

Just a few days later, another blue rock-thrush sighting occurred further down the Pacific coast, deepening the intrigue. About 500 miles away from the Oregon site, the same subspecies was photographed by researchers on Southeast Farallon Island off the coast of San Francisco.

It’s unclear whether this is the same bird or a second bird, the ABA said, adding that “both scenarios seem about equally likely.”

“Both possibilities are so rare that it’s really hard to know,” Talbott said.

He speculated that it was the same bird, blown south by a recent wind recorded in the region, while trying to get back home.

As for hobbyist photographer Sanchez, the buzz around his early work has inspired him to expand his focus.

“I have more of an interest in photographing birds now,” he said. “I don’t imagine I’ll ever get something like that again. But, you know, it does help me to notice birds a little bit more.”

Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

In 1970, aged 35, Jack Lueders-Booth left a well-paid management job at an insurance company in his native Boston, Massachusetts, to pursue his interest in photography. “Until then, I was a serious hobbyist,” he tells me over the phone from the city where he still lives, “but my interest had deepened to the point where it was more and more difficult to do my day job. I needed something more stimulating. Photography was my real vocation.”

Soon afterwards he landed a job as an administrator for the fledgling photography department at Harvard University, where later he also enrolled as a student. For his master’s thesis, he submitted a proposal that would alter the course of his life. “I told them I wanted to teach photography in places of confinement such as prisons and mental hospitals,” he elaborates, “I thought it would be beneficial for the inmates in all sorts of ways, not least because they could share their experience with their families through the images they made.”

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In 1977, he began teaching photography in Massachusetts Correctional Institution Framingham, a women’s prison that had been founded in 1872 to house those convicted of the crime of “begetting” – giving birth out of wedlock. Over the ensuing decades, under various liberal governors, MCI Framingham became known for its progressive initiatives: allowing prisoners to wear their own clothes, employing female guards and, for a short period from the mid-1970s, allowing a small intake of male prisoners who mixed freely with the female inmates.

Over the seven years that he taught photography there, Lueders-Booth transformed an unoccupied wing of the prison, building dark rooms in unused 19th-century cells and installing sinks and enlargers. There, he taught his eager charges how to make photograms (camera-less images), construct cardboard pinhole cameras and make formally accomplished portraits of their fellow prisoners. His reputation as a gifted and trusted teacher was such that he was allowed to roam freely with his 35mm Leica, taking “tens of thousands” of black-and-white photographs of the inmates. “In all sorts of ways, it was a different, more liberal time,” he says wistfully.

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The 32 images that comprise his new photo-book, Women Prisoner Polaroids, have been culled from about 200 colour portraits he also made there in 1980, when he became the recipient of the first of two generous Polaroid fellowships that included a donation of 12 state-of-the-art 4×5-inch view cameras and an unlimited supply of Polacolour film.

The results are striking in their relaxed intimacy and ordinary domesticity. As Lueders-Booth points out, the cells often “look more like college dorms or apartments”. Barred windows have been artfully concealed by curtains or decorative blinds, steel doors covered by wood-veneer panelling and the interiors often feature bookshelves, armchairs and chests of drawers topped with family snapshots, ornaments and even hi-fi record decks and speakers. Only the drab, peeling painted brickwork of the corridors and communal rooms fracture the illusion of home.

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Over the years he worked there, Lueders-Booth came to know and respect the incarcerated women, many of whom, he says, brought “an incredible openness and curiosity” to the portrait sessions. “A successful portrait is an exchange of trust that requires both parties to be totally present and engaged,” he says. “When I came to choose the images for the book, it was not just about how formally good they were, but that they somehow told a story about the person and the place.” His role, he says, “was to be a truthful witness” and, as such, he often detected “a sadness that many of the women carried, even though they would bring a brave face to the camera”.

The book also includes a short selection of anonymous oral testimonies Lueders-Booth tape-recorded during his time at Framingham. One expectant mother explains how her baby will be taken into foster care soon after she gives birth: “I cannot see myself, after five days, giving my new baby up to anyone. They’ve got their nerve. But I’m not supposed to have any feelings about this.” Another inmate speaks frankly and without remorse about the moment when she fatally stabbed an abusive man with a pocketknife. “I told the judge, ‘If I have to do it again, I’ll do it again…’ I know I’m in jail, but, no sir, no sir. I do not feel sorry for defending my body ’cause I’m a woman and I have had it. I have had it.”

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These visceral and defiant first-hand accounts evince an anger that is in stark contrast to the stillness and calm of the portraits, I suggest. “Yes,” he says. “But what you have to understand is that, for many of the women, this may have been the first and only time they have had a chance to express their anger at the injustice of their lives.”

The book concludes with a long freeform poem written by an inmate, Tina Williams, in 1980, when she had served nine years in Framingham for “turning tricks.” Titled I Love My Sisters, Sisters Love Thy Selves, it articulates a hard-earned wisdom that, ironically, was only achieved through a time of deep reflection in the relatively calm confines of Framingham prison. There, she and women like her were free from brutally controlling male partners or parasitic pimps, and what she memorably calls “the knife of life’s coldness”.

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Williams was one of a few women with whom Lueders-Booth formed a lasting friendship. “She died just a few weeks ago,” he says quietly, before describing her poem as “a cautionary tale that speaks of the damaged lives that many of these women had”. In his time there, he encountered several prisoners who, having served their time and been released, would end up back inside a few months later. “They came back looking battered and drained,” he says. “I realised that, for them, prison was a better life. A place where there were no pimps, no coercion, no violence.”

These humble Polaroid portraits speak of another America that seems impossibly distant, while the anonymous faces that stare back at us across the decades seem both present in the moment and out of reach. “A photograph is made in one-twetenty-fifth of a second,” says Lueders-Booth. “It cannot come close to representing the totality of a life, but, through a kind of rapt attentiveness, it can reflect a moment very deeply. Maybe that is enough.”

A Russian soldier raises a Soviet flag over Berlin’s Reichstag in Yevgeny Khaldei’s well-known 1945 photograph of wartime triumph.

But in the original image, the officer standing below can clearly be seen wearing a watch on both wrists. Khaldei’s shot, first printed in a Moscow magazine, was quickly withdrawn and the extra watch, which might actually have been a military compass, was removed for safety’s sake. Looting was not a good look and was punishable by death.

This little-known work of deliberate visual distortion is shown in a new exhibition, The Camera Never Lies, which opens later this month and tackles the public’s dwindling faith in photographs. Tristan Lund, who co-curated the new show, said: “It’s rare to see both the ‘before’ and ‘after’ prints together. The Khaldei photograph that went out later had one watch scratched out because the editors knew this tiny detail might have incriminated not just the officer but the whole Soviet army.

“In the second image, the sky is much darker and dramatic as well. It has been massively manipulated for effect.”

The exhibition, which features more than 100 images from world-renowned photographers including Don McCullin, Stuart Franklin, Robert Capa and Dorothea Lange, will demonstrate that a picture, however well intended, can never be the whole story. Although few images on display involve deliberate distortions, the interpretations of several have spawned controversies and rival accounts.

The show, at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich, features shots of the assassination of President Kennedy, the Chinese “tank man” protester in Tiananmen Square, and the chilling image of a figure jumping from New York’s burning World Trade Center in 2001. Running from 18 May until 20 October as part of the six-month series What is Truth?, it looks at how altered context, sometimes coupled with technical manipulation, has defined events in modern history.

The role of photographs as a reliable, trustworthy source is increasingly under threat, with editing technology now readily and cheaply available. In March, family shots put out by the Princess of Wales were found to have been edited, and the Observer revealed that other candid royal photos had been quietly altered before.

Lund said that he and his collaborator, Harriet Logan, still value the “inherent truth” of the work they display, although he believes it poses a key question for our age: “The exhibition asks what truths we can really expect to extract from a photograph. Is the succinct and objective sharing of facts the thing we remember most from a single image, or is it the emotion triggered by the composition and creativity of the photographer that tells a thousand words?”

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Visitors will be able to compare three of the four images of Tiananmen Square that went into news archives. Franklin’s 1989 shot “The Tank Man” depicts a moment when the Chinese government cracked down on a lengthy Beijing democracy demonstration, killing hundreds on 4 June. The unknown protester who stood in front of a line of tanks was photographed from different angles by cameras inside the same building, documenting a scene that has been heavily censored in China but in the west has become an emblem of oppression.

“Younger people may not know where the picture came from and, if they do recognise it, they will probably have a composite of all the photographs in their mind,” said Lund. “One image zooms in on the protester while another is a little further out and includes the distraction of a street lamp. Franklin’s has more of the street and the tanks.

“We wanted to remove each from its news context to slow down the way people could look at them. We are displaying it with the Kate Adie BBC report from Tiananmen and with a work we’ve commissioned from a contemporary Chinese artist whose father was in the square. Some of his friends didn’t survive. She does not want her name known because she wants to continue to visit her family in China.”

“Beijing continues to deny that it happened,” added Logan, a former news photographer. “But for the public the image is often a proof, a kind of verbatim truth, that allows us to relax about what we are being told about uncomfortable events. Many of the images in the exhibition, like the one known as “Napalm Girl”, from Vietnam, have become part of history.”

This upsetting image of Phan Thi Kim Phuc, who was photographed as a young naked girl fleeing a napalm attack, now visually represents a 20-year war, Lund said. The same has happened with Capa’s 1936 photograph “The Falling Soldier” from the Spanish civil war. The story behind this shot is disputed, due to the lack of background detail given by Capa at the time and the loss of the negatives. Some suggest it was staged. Research later established the location and revealed that on that day the frontline was some distance away.

“Capa was only 21 when he took the [shot] and he will have sent back an unprocessed roll of film which may not have been correctly captioned. That happened,” said Logan. “I worked back in the analogue days, and picture editors cropped photographs later and made decisions that defined an image. So when Capa got home he will have been confronted with a whole lot of truths attributed to his image.”

Seventy-nine years later, another Magnum photographer, Max Pinckers, stood on the same hill with a colleague and made the artwork Controversy, now also in the show. Using a high-resolution camera they recorded the landscape, now empty except for olive trees.

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.

Nature photographer Tim Johnson will be leading program participants through the basics of photographing wildlife and landscapes, according to a release.