NY Photo Festival
The New York Photo Festival closed Sunday, surviving with little surprise and a few gems tucked away amongst quite a lot of work that I must say I just didn’t care that much for. It is only the second year of the festival and so it is not surprising that there were a few kinks to be worked out. Everyone, it seems, is talking about Tim Hetherington’s “sleeping soldiers” series and video project. Read about the buzz here and here. The images are politically powerful, however, it was the video installation that was ultimately more moving than the stills themselves.
Other standouts in my opinion were, without a doubt, the abstract color images of Enrst Haas, which reminded me of what I love about William Eggleston. Additionally, there was some beautiful if albeit less socially or politically relevant images by Rene and Radka – who prove once again that you can shoot fashion and still be recognized as artists. In the satellite show of the Tobacco warehouse I found some lovely images by Naho Kubota from her series Minimum Structure.
I’ve left out the images that go along with this post, after attending the panel on the relevance of blogging in the photographic community where the question was posed about the potential copyright issues associated with blogging about others’ work. The panel (consisting of: Jorg Colberg, Cara Philips, Laurel Ptak, Andrew Hetherington and Brain Ulrich) are all preeminent bloggers in the photographic community and promptly dismissed the issue when it was raised. However, I believe it is more complicated than they would admit on stage and am taking the time to think about it thoroughly before moving forward. More on this later…
I totally agree about the work that you liked best, I was also a fan of Kimolo Yoshida’s self portraits.
As for blogging about other’s work, I think it’s totally acceptable to portray others work as long as you are identifying it as there’s!