Archive for the 'dialogue' Category

BURN is buzzing…..in New York…..now….

wherever i went at the recent New York Photo Festival in the last couple of days, BURN was the talk of the town…now yes of course it would SEEM like that to ME…..but, even factoring out the dah pride thing, BURN was buzzing…..

however, forget that….the important thing right now for all of us is the response you have given us starting within seconds of us putting up the donation button…..as many of you know i was reluctant to put up a donate button…..hard for me to ask…but the response has been humbling to say the least….YOU have saved BURN…well, you have saved BURN for another month or so…but, that might be just about right….we are making the big push for responsible sponsorship, setting up a gallery for your work, continuing as per normal my personal mentoring for some of you, and continuing to put out an online magazine (annual print)where we can share our opinions on a wide variety of styles …. where the integrity  and morality of the work is just as important as the aesthetic……

i want us to be on the high ground…as sponsors now view us, each person here is personally responsible for our move into a whole new world of publishing….what you now write is read by many in our craft and in our art…your words are now more than ever IMPORTANT….as you hold me to my responsibilities, i will hold you to yours…..

think before you write and write exactly as you think…

as we move closer to Look3 and the announcement of our  EPF grant recipient, our discovery/promotion  of the new talent imperative here on BURN will clearly be manifested….you may or may not agree  with the finalists and the final jury choice, but i do not want anyone to doubt the integrity of the selection….Anton and i together went through all 1,200 entries…i made the selection of the ten finalists within the context of serious second opinion from Anton….so we alone are responsible for the ten finalists soon to be presented on BURN starting  probably on Tuesday….a prestigious eclectic jury of peers will make the final choice for the 2009 recipient….neither Anton nor i will have a vote towards the grant recipient….there will be other, soon to be announced,  support for the remaining finalists as well…

our potential sponsors will notice our traffic and the loyalty of our audience….mostly they will notice our audience produced content with the emphasis on authorship……they will definitely notice your volunteered financial support for BURN….i thank you for all three from the bottom of my heart….

part of my plan is  to put some respected legends in our craft on commissions specifically for BURN…i want to do the same for some of you……not just the EPF finalists, but for the most talented  of you here on BURN….for example,   one legend producing original photography for BURN and three emerging photographers on an equal commissions doing original work as well….i can put this together with guaranteed photographer’s publishing rights, better than editorial day rates,  and artistic control by the authors….how could i represent anything less??? we are going to rock with this one….

i will count on you to help keep BURN all  it can be, and i will do all i can to help you to be all that you are….

…..david alan harvey

three days ago i moved most of my belongings out of “the Kibbutz’, my New York home for the last four years….certainly one of THE buildings in NYC among the photography crowd and a few other crowds as well….more than a few iconic photographers live there , along with some internationally known artists of all types..jazz musicians, sculptors, painters, the like…the Kibbutz is an ugly building…..but it has high ceilings and lots of light and a rooftop to die for…nobody doesn’t like the view from my rooftop…the East River takes a hard left northern turn going up right at the point where the Kibbutz sits near the Williamsburg Bridge…so this small piece of geography is a unique  vantage point in New York where you can look all the way down to Wall Street and all the way up to Harlem…yup, the whole island up and down, all in one glance…

the view from my loft is a view that normally only millionaires have in New York…yet i pay little, for the Kibbutz is an unimproved artists loft… there are many writers here on BURN who well know that i live a spartan existence…it is too late in my professional life now for me to make “big money”…for whatever reasons (divorce did not help), i have done everything in my power to avoid ever having too much cash…yet, i have never been out of work…but, i have consistently rejected some commercial work in favor of “doing my own thing”…and, i have not regretted this lifetime decision for one second….i would rather have the pictures than the money…as simple as that…time spent in producing books does not reap financial rewards, nor does all of the personal shooting i do…whatever magazine assignments i have done (40 stories for Natgeo alone), and even the best ad jobs, have all pretty much been tailored in the long run to whatever personal project i was doing at the time…simply put, i worked for the magazines, the magazines worked for me…

well, you may be asking, if this Kibbutz is so damn cool and you love it, why in hell would you move out??? answer: as many of you know, i found an old historic beach cottage down on the Carolina shore that is just, well, just just ME…i had sold my small apartment in Washington which i had owned for 20 yrs….sold it before the financial crises and bought the little beach cottage after the crises…so i was lucky, not smart…so now i own, by luck, my dream house…with the smells and feel of where i grew up and started making my first photographs…the sea, the sea, and the sea…so so sustaining for me my whole life… this house will always need repair….and the old kitchen will probably stay the old kitchen…but the fireplace draws well in winter and the wrap around porch lets you sit outside anytime, and away from wind, because there is always a leeward side…most importantly, this house is very near my two sons, a fathers dream… it fronts a 40,000 acre state park…nobody can ever build in front of me or in back of me…water to left, water to the right, dunes straight ahead…nobody can see me standing on my front porch, even though a tourist area is not far away in reality..yup, t-shirt shops etc are somewhere out there over the dune line…but, never mind, i am in my own little world…as usual…

creating “my own world”  has been my lifelong pursuit…as a kid i played in the dunes not far from here and made prints in my humble darkroom and dreamed of using my camera as a tool for exploration and expression…i refused to let anything interfere with that original dream…it was too powerful a dream to deny….

so, here i am right back where i started…with the same damn dream…it will not go away even if i wanted it to…so yes yes a lot of hard work blah blah blah, but i sure feel just plain old lucky…so lucky that i feel compelled to share with others what i think are the ways to get lucky….to make photography a life, not just a means of technical recording…hence BURN….as i sit in my mostly broken down beach cottage right now, it totally amazes me that i am right this second communicating with so many of you…you are “out there” somewhere just over the dune line…you are not just in my imagination, you are very real…

communicating online was never a dream per se..how could it have been??…that just happened…and after all it is just a part of what i do anyway…BURN is some kind of reflection of my personal life, so it is actually a personal project of sorts, only with your work instead of mine, but it is somehow my work too…so, we are in this together…BURN is just simply what goes on in my loft at the Kibbutz all the time…official workshops yes, but general hang spot for photographers more often than not…as i said, one of THE photo spots in New York…many of you have experienced this first hand at various photo projections and events …and more than a few of you have even slept on my floor (ode to Koudelka)…

ok, back to the point…all my stuff is now out of the Kibbutz…i simply cannot afford to stay there any longer because my primary expense is now the beach house (by the way, the beach place will soon become a place for you to visit…a bit of a trip, but worth it…and i plan to have some limited photo events here as well). anyway, i have just enough money to keep the Kibbutz loft through May…it now sits largely empty…and as i was pulling away from the Kibbutz three days ago, i thought “damn i just cannot let this place go…it is just too too perfect for a NYC space…”

so, the van was packed and it just hit me just as Mike and Tony Skater and i turned on to the highway….my thoughts raced to the obvious…so obvious…..

i thought: why not turn the Kibbutz loft into a BURN gallery for the photographers here??…sell your prints from selected work….

figure out some fair percentage for both of us (galleries usually have a 50/50 split) so that when Tom Hyde sells his tumbleweed photograph for $1000. he keeps half, and BURN keeps half (or whatever we work out)…to pay for the gallery, the office, and Anton, therefore financing BURN and YOU with an infrastructure we already have in place…sell your self published books too…BURN would not be an agency, but BURN could be your agent…there is a difference…and nobody has anything to lose that i can imagine…IF you sell a print, you help yourself, you help Burn…maybe help me to finance shooting some more families for my long term Off  For a Family Drive…i mean, i wanna play too!!

i am soon to be looking for major subsidies for BURN…not advertising…i am talking major support to be able to finance photographers work…the EPF is only the beginning…taking large amounts of funding with minimal strings attached is of course the goal…impossible?? not really…we do it at Magnum with some regularity…

as of last week , i have been charged with helping to develop an online “channel system” for Magnum…Magnet….BURN will become a Magnum channel via Magnet…other Magnum photographers may or may not have their own channel…Magnet can develop its own funding as a larger “brand” and/or BURN can secure its own funding or both… or, perhaps we become a “column” or “channel” on other major sites as well…we are in uncharted waters…this will keep us viable here and help to keep you growing and producing out there just over the dune line…

i will be announcing soonest the new Advisory Board for BURN…an “A” listing of folks respected in our business and who will draw sponsorship and/or donations….i will be announcing soonest the entire list of staff from our audience here…up until last week, i had Anton Kusters and yours truly doing everything…Bob Black has volunteered, at my request, to be Editor at Large (seeking new talent, writing special essays, and well, just being Bob Black)…Kerry Payne has worked hours and hours on a viable business plan (she does that professionally), and Chris Bradley, Creative Director at Ogilvy & Mather has volunteered his services outside of his agency, to study the whole “branding” bit…i am talking with several others of you who have expressed interest in helping us with BURN…you know who you are…

all of this sounds a bit daunting, but all of this will allow us to do exactly what we are doing only about 10 times better…right now we are “one dimensional”…i can see much more “depth” with each photographer whose work is presented on BURN….

i will not go into details of what we will do now, but believe me the possibilities are revolutionary…let’s face it, it is time for a revolution…throughout history whenever there has been confusion and floundering (which certainly describes our business/craft now) is exactly when something comes along and changes the “face” of everything…

the large publishing companies, with debilitating overheads, cannot move with stealth in this new economic environment…they have now to fire half their staffs…they have big buildings with big monthly expenses…at BURN we have my humble loft ….and we are in close touch with all of the same photographers that many magazines and agencies now cannot afford to hire…and they have to “over please” their readers so that they can attract a circulation which attracts advertising revenue….hmmmmm.…we could build,  at a fraction of the cost, a better mousetrap…we have low overhead and a circulation that produces itself…

the audience is the action…

to point,  we have YOU….the new breed…the new generation…the next bunch to rip it up…and WE are already gathered…we are not making stuff up here, i am telling you all of this already exists….hmmmmm, so put two and two together…timing, timing, and timing…and Chris Bradley’s concept of “co-opetition” is so true in the online community…we are not competing in the old fashioned sense of it….we will not take one dollar away from the established media companies…..we actually will help them…they will help us…funding is going to be shared by many….we just have to be in the game…

these are ideas anyone can have….so, why would it work for us??  because we already have totally in place a whole combination of things that nobody else has…but even if it does not work, what the hell?? nothing lost at all…forget one possible fear right off…my close attachment to all of you is germane to this whole issue….i ain’t going anywhere…and you know damn well i cannot get rich, because it would blow my whole image…survival sounds attractive however…

ok, well sorry, this was a way too long winded comment…but,i am in full thinking mode, so forgive please…and besides, the whole point of this is that i need your thoughts…but just on the ONE ISSUE, the gallery issue, for the moment…a BURN based gallery to sell your prints (curated shows…say, monthly events to do so)…i can hang 30-40 prints at a time…we can have print storage shelves etc etc…you provide the print or work out a deal with Mike to print for you (Mike has very long list of known photographers for whom he has been their primary gallery printer before he came to work with me)…

as with everything with BURN , we are a community with arbiter…just as in the submissions here for publication on BURN, the EPF (recipient to be announced at Look3) , etc etc. not everyone can participate in everything, but everyone sure as hell has a chance…do exemplary work , and you are “on it”…

again, just one more way to turn our online experience into a reality…

your thoughts???

finally….springtime…i do not know about you, but for me spring just does not come quite quick enough….spring brings hope and promise and well, just warmer weather is just fine with me….and spring is just the time to clean house….throw out all the junk one accumulates over the winter…both physical and psychological ….time for us to begin anew….this spring brings challenges for all of us….with the lovely green of spring , this year brings us to face a world where we might all just have to do with less….

wherever i go now photographers are flat out scared…fearful of the future….businesses are closing down everywhere…magazine circulations have dropped leaving little money for assignments, galleries are not selling as before,  advertising agencies no longer have big budgets for photography, and newspapers are cutting their photo staffs drastically, if not going out of business entirely….i do not know one single professional photographer who is not affected by our global financial crises….

at the very same time i see amazing work being done…one way or another, the best will thrive in the long run….photographers and agencies who can move with stealth will move forward…those with too much overhead will have to do serious “spring cleaning” in order to survive….this is our new reality…

as i start now to look through the 1,029 entries that came in for the Emerging Photographer Fund grant, i am so so impressed with the  high standard of work being done by so many….a truly staggering tour de force of worthy work was submitted to me here on BURN…..to choose only one seems right off the top  somehow unfair, since i would so love to help so many more…..i am not the chooser, and i am pleased to not be the chooser of the recipient for this grant because i would be very hard pressed to make a decision among so many worthy photographers…i will do all i can to at least give those who do not receive this funding at least as much opportunity as i can give them with some solid exposure here on our forum in the coming months…

do i see a solid future for these emerging photographers as we go through these difficult times?? of course i do…hard times befall almost every generation…and harder times than these to be sure….now is just the time to share…band together…for mutual benefit and creative growth….and we must all throw away what we do not need which is historically what led the citizens of Valencia, Spain (above) to create the spring Fallas…

so many photographers and so few resources to finance them as professionals will lead many to search for other sources of income….however, the true visionaries will do just fine….and it has always been so…..

how do you see it??  bad times, or just time to clean house???

The deadline for the Emerging Photographer Fund grant is officially moved to April 1, 2009….

This is a two week extension from the original March 15 deadline date….

The Emerging Photographer Fund is a $10,000 grant to be awarded to a photographer to continue  a personal body of work….

Initiated by BURN , the EPF operates under the non-profit status of the Magnum Cultural Foundation .

Details for applying for  this grant can be viewed in the upper right hand corner of BURN….

Finalists will be announced on or before  May 1, 2009. The recipient of this grant will be announced on or before  June 1, 2009..

PLEASE  do not send private e-mails regarding this grant nor ask procedural questions on your entry submitted through Photoshelter. The high volume of entries makes it impossible for me to answer.

If you follow the very simple guidelines for entry,  your work  will be received and viewed and considered carefully.

You may ask any last minute questions of me right HERE in the comments box….

-david alan harvey

i read carefully all of your comments on our last two essayists, Michael Christopher Brown and James Chance….both received almost unanimous “thumbs up” votes from the readers here on the essays presented…both are working in the documentary style of “bearing witness”, and yet this seems to be a good time to point out how quite different are these two fine photographers….

first i would suggest that Mike created his own narrative out of simply his own desire to make an essay out of Sakhalin…there was no inherent or obvious “story” to be told….there was no editorial reason for an editor to jump up and say “yes, let’s do a story on Sakhalin”…it would not be number one on the IMPORTANT  list…but alas, the essay succeeds quite simply because Mike decided to do it…period….Mike made it important…..and he used his approach and his visual authorship to create a mood and a  “style” and  because of the power of the “vision” itself , a story has been told…

this is quite different from James, who had  a “built in subject” in editor’s parlance…..tell an editor that you have found a place where people live in a cemetery and eyebrows automatically raise….the subject is obvious…James just might pique your curiosity about the Manila cemetery even before you have seen picture number one….we are shocked automatically  because of the subject matter…period…the “story” is not created by James’ vision , but by the nature of the topic at hand….this is not to say that James was not “seeing”, but i think you can see the wide difference from an editor’s point of view…..

James photographed something that was THERE….Mike photographed something that was in his HEAD…i could easily imagine so many different approaches to the cemetery that would work, because no matter what there are people living in tombs…interesting by nature….i could also easily imagine many a photographer going to cold stoic  Sakhalin and coming back with absolutely nothing….in other words, it really takes a photographer with a point of view and a real “look” to pull of a Sakhalin style essay…and it takes a good journalist to create the multi-media piece James gave us…both totally valid..

James used pictures to TELL a story…..Mike used photographs to MAKE the story….

when editors at magazines choose one photographer over another for an assignment, these are things they think about…who is going to do THIS story best?  some stories are suited for one photographer, while others would be best done by someone else…in “movie speak” this is called “casting” and this  is not much different in photoland…matching photographer to subject and the expectations of results is what “assigning” is all about….if you were an editor, would you send James to Sakhalin and Mike to the cemetery?  do you think both would do great essays in both places?  hmmmm, something to ponder for sure….they of course would both be “good” if they traded places, but a magazine editor might think long and hard about this one…

now these are subjects that i have discussed at great length with both men…i have had the opportunity to sit down in person with James Chance on several occasions to edit cemetery , so he knows what i think….the same for Mike Brown…we edited Sakhalin at my apartment just before i published….both men studied photography at almost the same time from the same university and with the same teachers….Ohio University has over the years been a leader in producing talent for newspapers and magazines…and is probably the largest rival school for the famed University of Missouri….both schools go competitevly neck and neck with a long list of very successful graduates ….i have no doubt that both James and Mike will be two photographers on the “A” list for top editors to choose, despite their differences……who gets chosen for what will be interesting to see…

so i have a question for all of you, albeit oversimplified for the purpose of discussion…..

do you see yourself as a photographer who needs a strong clear subject in front of you in order to work,  or do you prefer to “invent” the concept in your head and carve interesting photographs out of “nothing” ???

VISIONS FOR 2009

Just as we cross the seemingly imaginary time line into 2009, the world appears to be in turmoil. We are all wishing each other Happy New Year while  more and more attacks are levied into Palestine, the world financial crisis gets worse by the minute, and our most immediate world of print publishing is in a virtual  state of panic. Most of us are now facing  the biting jaws of winter and spring flowers seem far far away.

Well, we are not in control of any of the above.  We must just do what we can do with our talents and make the most immediate space around us a better place. Since photography is what I seem to do best, and since my role as a photographer has extended into the photographic lives of others as a mentor, I will just do what little  I can here on BURN to push all of you to use your eyes, hearts, and intellect in the most constructive ways. Either as documentary photographers or conceptual artists or whatever category of photography you may identify. Labels tend to be just that…labels.  I do want BURN to have the windows wide open for whatever leading edge photography and writing may come our way.

Many of you may know that BURN is a spinoff of my two year old blog “Road Trips”. This blog/forum was almost  exclusively intended as an online workshop or mentoring program for those who logged on. The essays I have published here so far are indeed works in progress from “Road Trips”  or from my students from the four or five workshops I do every year. My primary goal as a mentor is to lead photographers towards their own books. To become authors. To celebrate the vision of a photographer unfettered by preconceived notions of commercial publishing. Commercial publishing has certainly been the lifeblood for my livelihood and education , yet it has always been the struggle between personal vision and editorial  “needs” that have forced me to light a candle for independence, without biting the very hand that has quite literally fed me.  This is a delicate balance for me and I am sure for most of you.

One of my goals here on BURN is to finance some of you so that this can be a source of income and a room where you can grow. In a downsliding economy , this may be difficult for me. OR the timing is just right.  As advertisers flee the traditional print media, they are looking for content on the web.  While their budgets are down, we here on BURN would only need a very small piece of the old pie to rock n’ roll right off the proverbial charts.  Why not have sponsors directly finance a photographer for a specific body of work??  The idea is not to  give funding to BURN, but to give  in the form of stipends or grants funds  directly to the photographer.

This may prove to be a silly dream. This may be a new wave to ride.

To kick things off, and to prove to you and to  potential sponsors that I am serious, I now announce on this New Years Day  the Emerging Photographer Fund grant for 2009.

A $10,000 grant will be given in a few weeks to one of you.
Any  photographer anywhere in the world is eligible.

Generous private donors, who have believed in me and my mentoring programs have provided this funding for you, the readers/photographers  of BURN.  They are able to donate tax exempt funds into the Magnum Cultural Foundation, a non-profit wing of Magnum Inc.  Inside this umbrella of the MCF, I created in 2008 the Emerging Photographer Fund and was able to give a $5,000 grant last year to Sean Gallagher for his continued work on the desertification of China. I am still holding funds for additional stipends.

I will not be on the jury. I will choose the jury from the best talents I can find.  One of the jury will be from Magnum, but I want to cast a wide net. For example, James Nachtwey from VII will be one of the jury. This will be a five person jury representing the magazine world, the art gallery world and the book publishing world. Details for entering , jury selection , and deadlines for entry  will be posted under “Emerging Photographer Fund” in the column immediately to the upper right.

Some of you know that in the last two years I have developed strong online friends based on “Road Trips”. I mentored several books with these friends. Turned online friends into “persona a persona” relationships and have in general tried to take online into “the real world”. While the early essays on BURN do represent the relationships built from “Road Trips”, the door is wide open to anyone reading now or to anyone in the future who so desires to submit work here or become part of my editing/mentoring world.  Like any magazine editor, I will have some photographers I know and develop and collaborate with and yet keep my eyes  open for new talent at all times and from any direction.

Simultaneous with this New Year’s story , I present now (below) the work of Patricia Lay -Dorsey. She is one of my online prodigies.  We have met in person during the year, but most of our collaboration has been online…Patricia is not a professional photographer. Patricia has had multiple sclerosis for 20 years and before she discovered photography she was obsessed with being a painter. Patricia does not aspire to become a magazine photojournalist, yet she is every bit as brave as iconic war photographer  James Nachtwey. He would be the first to say so.

Patricia is a free spirit in the best sense.  We have wrangled, scrambled and collaborated in the most amazing ways. Please appreciate Patricia, and then let Patricia appreciate you in the future.

Please stay tuned…..2009 could turn out just fine after all….

Cheers, David

the man is a teddy bear….a family man…he would much rather talk about his teenage daughter Nina and French wife Sophie than about photography…honesty is his best policy…. you never never have to worry about what he “really thinks”…i live in Brooklyn…..but, Bruce Gilden is Brooklyn….

many think Bruce “attacks”…i do not know this for sure, but i am imagining Bruce has had a least one of his subjects “attack back”…but, Bruce and i are as much on the “same page” as anyone i know in Magnum …we surely have opposite personalities and ways of working, yet we have exactly the same “code” for life regarding fairness, transparency, and family….

Bruce is now working on a project on foreclosures in the U.S….a hardball look at one of the primary reasons for the financial collapse in America and the folks who “lost it all”…

his new Magnum in Motion digs in deep and gives us a vision of a side of this country that most ignore…

when Bruce went to Florida for the opening series on foreclosures, he showed us a certain kind of sympathy that i just do not recall in his previous work…

my first impression of Bruce came with his book on “Coney Island”…then “Haiti”, then “Go”….i thought Bruce harsh , but irresistibly fascinating…and funny…i can never take my eyes off of Bruce’s pictures even though i might feel a bit guilty for “intruding”, even as the viewer….if Bruce appears somewhat cynical with his work , when you know him personally , he is more “realist” than cynic….there is a difference…..the man’s work reveals a part of his personality, but not all…there is a straight up kindness in Bruce Gilden..and nobody but nobody has a better sense of humor…

please keep your eye out for Bruce’s continued work with foreclosures….anybody can smell a book in the making…

i am only hoping that i do not become one of his subjects…..