A quick and torrential rain just fell through my office window drenching the curtains. In a second floor apartment, one doesn’t worry too much about flash floods. Terrible flooding in Manila after tropical storm Ketsana raged for nine hours. Areas under 20 feet of water. Storm namers need to retire the letter ‘K’ for a [...]

Today’s photo stars are regulars on lecture circuits, at workshops, seminars, in blogs. I don’t know Eugene Richards personally but I’ve been one of a billion in a lecture hall listing to him speak. David Burnett, Annie Leibovitz, Gary Knight, James Natchtwey, Mary Ellen Mark. All familiar voices. Enter Weegee. I am a life long [...]

Leopold Godowsky, Jr. and Leopold Mannes, two musicians, invented Kodachrome in the early thirties. God and Man. Eastman Kodak is stopping film production after 75 years. The news might be sad, but the media is having great fun with headlines thanks in large part to Paul Simon. He should get royalties for such liberal lyric [...]

At some point, the historical negative from a box scenario will slide away into digital obscurity. And I am not entirely convinced a ‘found’ file from some forgotten external drive will carry the same intrigue and significance. To me, that would just seem like sloppy digital asset management. Today marks the twentieth anniversary of Tiananmen [...]

CNN has an interesting story of Katherine McIntosh, one of the young girls in Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother” image taken in 1936. McIntosh is on the left, next to her mother Florence Owens Thompson. -Damon Keisow

My mood is 777 points lower this morning. Derivatives, sub-prime loans, securities, bonds. How do you photograph a crisis still playing out on a balance sheet? Traders with heads in hands, foreclosure signs, politicians at lecterns. What I’m not seeing is any evidence of the human condition on Main Street in national media coverage. ——————- [...]