Friday, July 10, 2009
NEWARK URBAN PLANNER MAPS MORTGAGE CRISIS
City of Newark waterfront urban planner and artist Damon Rich developed a visual playground for adults, called the Red Lines at the Queens Museum of Art. Calling it an experience of the United States mortgage crisis, Rich mapped neighborhoods in dire circumstances using the 1964 World's Fair Panorama of the City of New York.
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE PULLS PHOTOGRAPHIC ESSAY
Edward Martins, a Portuguese photographer living in London has had his photo essay about the U.S. mortgage and real estate bubble removed from The New York Times online slide show due to digital cloning and manipulation in photographs that were promoted as manipulation-free. A blogger initially noticed that three of Martin's photos were indeed digitally enhanced and manipulated in Adobe Photoshop. Photo District News an industry tabloid paper picked up on the story.
Although the manipulations might appear as a minor indiscretion, when understanding the nature of cloning, unfortunately for the New York Times' special presentation of an historical event in this country, an artist making aesthetic corrections to enhance journalistic photographs poses a major breach of ethics. It's bad enough when ordinary readers often don't recognize a construction for what it is, especially when dealing with issues like women's representation and body image, where a great deal of human flaws are removed or repaired. That's advertising. But Martin was commissioned to take photographs that were meant to serve as a historical document of our economic times. Good thing someone was paying attention and deconstructing the images.
See the manipulated photos.
Read Simon Owen's interview with the blogger who exposed the manipulations.
Although the manipulations might appear as a minor indiscretion, when understanding the nature of cloning, unfortunately for the New York Times' special presentation of an historical event in this country, an artist making aesthetic corrections to enhance journalistic photographs poses a major breach of ethics. It's bad enough when ordinary readers often don't recognize a construction for what it is, especially when dealing with issues like women's representation and body image, where a great deal of human flaws are removed or repaired. That's advertising. But Martin was commissioned to take photographs that were meant to serve as a historical document of our economic times. Good thing someone was paying attention and deconstructing the images.
See the manipulated photos.
Read Simon Owen's interview with the blogger who exposed the manipulations.
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
Inside Out: Voices from New Jersey State Prison
A powerful collection of poems, stories, memoirs and commentaries by 43 inmates who took part in a creative writing workshop. Compiled and edited by Kal Wagenheim, who directed the workshop, similar to one he directed for college students at Columbia University in New York City.
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