Instant Dreams

Premiering at the IDFA . Will be looking for distribution on this one! Directed by Willem Baptist: https://www.willembaptist.nl


The photos that killed a friendship

By Tom Sheeter Harry Houdini left us on October 31, 1926. Or perhaps his spirit lingers on, as his former friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle believed. Even more unlikely than the mutual admiration shared by the showman and the scribe was a source of its undoing: disputed photographs and a mocking selfie. The two celebs …


See What Developed – Elsa Dorfman’s Photography

We love Errol Morris and Polaroids. Just had to have Michael Masterson review this super new doc. Treat yourself! By Michael Masterson When I was a teenager I wanted a Polaroid SX-70 camera so badly I could taste it. When my parents finally caved in and gave me one for Christmas, I was entranced with …


70 years of Magnum through the Female Lens

“Glass ceilings.” “Level playing fields.” And similar terms, that we’ve all heard many times before, when it comes to describing the push for women to be able to compete, professionally. One might think that Magnum – with its commitment to journalistic truths, its inherent desire to expose the true nature of the world; via more …


Homer Sykes – British Customs and US Street Photography

by Julian Jackson Homer Sykes started as a photographer by grabbing his father’s camera and shooting in the backstreets of Nice in France, where they were holidaying in the 1960s. Streetlife and cultures of the UK have remained a major feature of his work. He is almost an anthropologist who instead of studying distant cultures, …


Gado Images – Both Preserving History and Monetizing It

Guest post by Michael Masterson Thomas Smith is Co-founder and CEO of Gado Images, a San Francisco-based company that works with archives worldwide to help them digitize and monetize their visual history. Gado’s partner collections include Johns Hopkins University, the Afro American Newspapers, Silicon Valley Historical Association, Stuart Lutz Historic Documents, and many more. Since …


Memory Lane with Vintage Stock Photos

In its section “Street Scenes”, stock photo agency Vintage Stock Photos features an intriguing image of titled “Native American Group on Float”; and it’s a classic representation of old-town Americana; with what appears to be a group of “Native American Indians” on a carnival float, complete with the legend “Heap Big Medicine Man.” Whether the …


Breaking News

We are all familiar with Marshall McLuhan’s observation that “The medium is the message”; and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center offers the chance for us to reassess this, with a curated show of museum artworks dating back to the early days of when we began to notice the media “strings showing” for the first …


Decolonizing Photography History

Cultural protests at a lack of cultural representation in the pop mainstream might be more visible and glamorous at #oscarssowhite, but that only comes around once a year. For a sustained and more cogent (and far more diverse) portrait of current representation (and omission) in the photographic medium, the blog Dodge and Burn is a …


A Map to Photographic Process

When first scrolling Graphic Atlas’s list of pre-photographic, photomechanical, photographic and digital lists of photographic processes, even the lay photographer might think that they have stumbled upon an exotic and previously unseen science-fiction world out of “Star Wars.” However, “Dye Imbibition,” “Bromoil Transfer” or “Wet Plate Collodion” are not science-fiction characters; they are a wholly …