Robert Frank’s Unsentimental Journey -> Vanity Fair →

America felt good about itself in the 1950s. It had won the war. It was rich, and the magazines and television programs were promoting the American Way of Life. Patriotism, optimism, and scrubbed suburban living were the rule of the day. Myth was important then. And along comes Robert Frank, the hairy homunculus, the European Jew with his 35-mm. Leica, taking snaps of old angry white men, young angry black men, severe disapproving southern ladies, Indians in saloons, he/shes in New York alleyways, alienation on the assembly line, segregation south of the Mason-Dixon line, bitterness, dissipation, discontent.

The Julie Project -> Darcy Padilla →

“For the last 18 years I have photographed Julie Baird’s
complex story of multiple homes, AIDS, drug abuse,
abusive relationships, poverty, births, deaths, loss
and reunion. Following Julie from the backstreets of
San Francisco to the backwoods of Alaska.”

The essential Rovogin: An in-depth conversation -> Buffalo Spree Magazine →

“My photographs are straightforward. I always asked permission before taking pictures. I wanted to get close and make the people be the most important thing in the frame. I never directed them or told them where to stand, how to hold their hands, or what to wear. The only thing I asked them was to look at the camera. I liked it when I saw their eyes and that’s when I knew I was ready to make their picture. Typically I would make 2 or 3 exposures. When you look at these pictures you know that I was not sneaking around trying to steal pictures of people.” (…)

(via photoreads)

Interview with Lucas Foglia -> Daniel Shea →

“In the current work, I am leaving room for more surprises. For instance, I went to an area south of Eden, Wyoming, where a rancher was herding his sheep across a wild landscape. The railroad company that owned the land nearby had recently sold the mineral rights to a company based in Houston for natural gas drilling and the land was about to be mined. When I arrived the rancher was counting his sheep. Thousands of sheep, one at a time. It was a long process and I felt stuck, but then I saw two of the sheep dogs away from their herd. The small dog really wanted to mate with the larger dog. He kept mounting her and she fought him off every time. The photograph that resulted from that experience is still about land use and sheep herding, but it is also about dogs fucking when they were supposed to be watching sheep. And I like that.” (…)

PHOTO TALKS: "PHIL UNDERDOWN" -> Urban Nautica →

“I often felt while photographing Grassland that this is what is left to us, as residents of the Northeast of the US––a managed landscape with little virgin wilderness. How do you explore what is so well known, so well mapped, measured and ordered? I think you explore what is close at hand and see what happens when you keep going back. The history of photography is full of grand vistas of mountains and plains. I tried to find these features on a smaller scale in the cracks and mounds of Grassland.” (…)

How Annie Got Shot -> FT Magazine →

“The Leibovitz story, however, is more than a tale of a photographer who got absorbed into the high-spending world of the people she portrays. It is a reflection of something unexpected – that, despite all her celebrity and talent, Leibovitz lacks earning power as an artist.” (…)

Chris McCaw on his Sunburn series -> PhotoEye Magazine →

“The simplicity of the ocean’s straight horizon paired with the burned path of the sun is one of my favorite areas to work with. It seems like it would get redundant quickly but when you look at each work, they are all very different. With this piece, I wanted to do an extended burn and break it up between 2 negatives. Playing with the abstraction of this simplified landscape, I purposefully placed just a taste of a cliff on the far right. This little bit of landscape information grounds the piece as a landscape, but looking over the rest of the image it can become complete abstraction.” (…)

Brian Ulrich by Lynn Saville -> BOMB Magazine →

“You go to these places, and they’re ugly, and they’re not spectacular. The hard part of this project is figuring out where to point the camera. How am I going to get people to think about this idea? I have to make an interesting photograph. I have to pull them into a narrative that has an aesthetic basis.” (…)

Eyes Wide Open: Interview with John Szarkowski -> Art in America →

“In a few cases photographers’ writings on their own work became highly influential. Among younger working photographers, Cartier-Bresson’s introductory essay in The Decisive Moment (1952) had constituted something close to an article of faith, until the authority of that text was undermined to some degree by Robert Frank’s Statement of 1958, which made it clear that working for magazines was not an option for photographers who had achieved adulthood. Edward Weston had stopped writing his Daybooks a generation earlier, but the first volume in book form was not published until 1961, and it became a very popular inspirational text, not only for its frequently penetrating thought on the art of photography, but for its suggestion that creative photography and sexual adventure were almost inevitable bedfellows.” (…)

Martin Parr on Brighton Photo Biennial -> British Journal of Photography →

“There is less socially engaged photography in the UK now: first, because of the difficulty in actually doing it; secondly because people don’t seem to want to engage. They like this idea of being an elitist artist, working in a studio, and not particularly connecting with the world. You know, for me the fundamental thing about photography – why I’m a photographer – is because I’m a nosey person. And when I go somewhere, I want to find out about it. And you do that by going there and talking to people.” (…)