Photographs

Recently I've found myself wondering where the work of the photojournalists in Afghanistan has been. Surely I'm just not looking in the right places. Well Time magazine is one place I should have been looking. Photo essays here, here, and here. There's an article on the subject of operations in the region as this week's cover story as well.

My only complaint is that we are still in a transitional period where not everyone is utilizing Flash gallery presentation to optimize slideshows for the web. There is no good reason why I cannot click a button to cause these photographs to fill my screen. Let me show you what I mean.

The New York Times magazine did a mostly candid celebrity portraiture series shot by Magnum's Paolo Pellegrin. The results are, frankly, rather stunning. The accompanying audio commentary is also quite nice, and has given me a lot to think about in terms of how web presentation is blurring the lines between still photography and cinematic methods of display and pace of viewing (in this case in the viewer's control). The issue had full articles discussing each performer as well that I'm still working through.

And saving the best for last. I haven't really linked to anything on Burn before. Burn is another Magnum related project; a website curated by David Alan Harvey as a showcase for emerging photographers. Like Foam magazine I observe the work there and am rather awed. I have a long way to go. They post single images, and photo essays. There's almost nothing on the site that couldn't be effusively recommended, but Michael Christopher Brown's Sakhalin, a series of pictures from the Russian island of the essay's title is one of my personal favorites. Really staggeringly great work, as is almost routine on the site as a whole. Check it out.