first amendment Archives

Friday Links: September 26, 2014

September 26, 2014 By James Calder

Georgetown Waterfront (Blue) by His Noodly Appendage

The Exposed DC / InstantDC Fall Review, featuring winning images by 45 local photographers, opens next Friday, October 3. Will we see you there? Tune in next Tuesday when we’ll announce the prize winners!

The U.S. Forest Service says media needs photography permit in wilderness areas, almost certainly a constitutional violation.
VICE presents its first photo critique show featuring Bruce Gilden “telling up-and-coming photographers if their work is transcendent, total crap, or somewhere in-between”.
So wrong, and yet so good. Iconic photo portraits recreated with John Malkovich as the subject.
iluvsturgis by Lacey Criswell and Amanda Hankerson explores love and commitment at the notorious Sturgis Motorcycle Rally held annually in Sturgis, South Dakota.
A photographer uses all eight generations of iPhones to take the same picture and compare quality.
This street artist takes photos of people tearing down his art, turns them into posters and slaps them up in place of the art they took down.
Seen on friend-of-Exposed Andrew Wiseman’s blog New Columbia Heights: Whoa: Google Street View cameras go into Red Derby, Looking Glass, Red Rocks.
Toronto-based Meera Sethi’s multimedia art project showcases the often-overlooked “Aunty” couture.
Austrian photographer Reiner Riedler photographs famous film reels, exploring the relationship between the cinematic object and the cinematic experience in his series “The Unseen Seen.”
Dubai photographer Richard Allenby-Pratt captures the impact of development on the desert.
Take a good look at this rare Malayan tiger – it may be one of your last.

Friday Links

August 15, 2014 By James Calder

We hope you’ve been paying attention to the events in Ferguson, Missouri, after Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was shot and killed by police last Saturday. There are tons of photos on Twitter, including the police using tear gas on largely-peaceful protestors and an Al Jazeera tv crew (before taking down their equipment) on Wednesday. That same night, police closed a McDonald’s and ushered out all these “dangerous criminals” (they also arrested two reporters, including Wesley Lowery of the Washington Post). The New York Times put together the photos on all our minds, those from Ferguson in 2014 and the Civil Rights Movement half a century ago. Here at home, Howard University students posed for a powerful photo to protest Brown’s killing. Lastly, it’s always worth a reminder, because the authorities often forget: “Citizens have the right to take pictures of anything in plain view in a public space, including police officers and federal buildings.”
“It’s as though we’ve become unsure of our ability to feel, and need to outsource moments to a team, in the hope that collective approval will stand in for meaning.” A Boston Globe op-ed asks if we’re too busy sharing moments to truly experience them.
Photographer Christina De Middel takes spam email she’s received and creates beautifully composed, fictitious portraits of the imaginary senders.
David Waldorf works in both the commercial and fine art worlds, but his cinematic photographs of trailer park residents in Sonoma, California are striking and unsettling in their detail.
“If we’re big enough to fight a war, we should be big enough to look at it.” The fascinating story of The War Photo No One Would Publish.
A survey of photographers who’ve recently had photo books published, listing details of the deals they struck with their respective publishers.
First person account by fashion photographer Rachel Scroggins of a photo she made that ended up being broadly published with neither credit nor permission. Alternative description: Groundhog Day.
Guys on Instagram are now doing their own #MakeupTransformation photos, and it’s priceless.
Crazy images of waves caused by a tidal bore that have created a popular spectator sport in the Chinese city of Hangzhou. These photos make us want to bathe in some…different water, pronto.
The Capital Weather Gang blogged: “Is HDR photography enhancing or defiling how we see weather and nature?“
In 1974, Daniel Sorine photographed a couple of mimes performing in Central Park, only to discover 35 years later that he had captured a then little-known Robin Williams on film.
“The people Stanton photographs are reduced to whatever decontextualized sentence or three he chooses to use along with their photo.” A critique of the popular Humans of New York series.
Lida Moser passed away this week just before her 94th birthday. The highly acclaimed photographer lived in Rockville, Maryland and really hated being pigeonholed.
Two of the women in Garry Winogrand’s iconic 1964 photograph “World’s Fair, New York City” recollect that summer afternoon.
Think you’ve seen some cool cat photos on the interwebs? You ain’t seen nothing ’til you’ve seen Vincent J. Musi’s shots for National Geographic.

Know Your Rights as a Photographer

November 6, 2013 By Heather Goss

Last Saturday, Baltimore police arrested Noah Scialom, a contributing photographer to the Baltimore City Paper, while they were breaking up a Halloween party. Scialom, as he reports, had identified himself as press and began photographing the incident. He left the house with the other party goers until he reached the sidewalk, and continued to take pictures, when he was roughly taken to the ground and arrested.

It’s a familiar story to anyone who regularly uses a camera in public, and a source of constant tension between police and the press, between the needs of security and the Constitutional rights of citizens. The National Press Club held a discussion in October on the subject as part of their Free Speech Week, inviting photographers, lawyers, and even a representative from the D.C. Metro Police Department to share their thoughts.

So what rights do you have to record in public? While the answer seems straight-forward to most of us (if it’s in the public realm, we can record it), the courts are only just beginning to define the right through rulings. But this first step is great news for photographers. The nation’s founders probably didn’t predict the prevalence of smartphones in 2013, so having defined rules about how the First Amendment applies to modern-day recording devices benefits everybody. [Read more…]