Moving to Syracuse in the Fall

My wife, Deborah Pang Davis, has accepted a tenure-track faculty position with Syracuse University's Newhouse School of Public Communications, teaching a range of design classes beginning in January.

So we'll be moving east in the fall, sadly leaving Portland but excitedly greeting life in Syracuse.

Deb is going to be a great teacher and Syracuse is without question one of the top schools in the country, especially when it comes to breaking new media ground.

I'll continue to work with photographers as I have been, not skipping a beat. And with any luck I'll get involved in some things at the school. Being close to New York, the city, and D.C. will be nice, too.

I'm eager to reconnect with long time friends Bruce Strong, Tom Kennedy and Ken Harper and to get to know the rest of the faculty and other aspects of life in Syracuse.

Another new adventure.

And we won't be giving up on Portland, our favorite city in America. We're definitely coming back for visits. 

Such a busy month

Matt Eich was among photographers chosen for PDN's juried Curator selections. Matt projects is about Baptist Town, a neighborhood in Mississippi.What a busy month. I can’t believe it’s been nearly 30 days since I last wrote here.

In that time, I’ve helped several photographers prepare entries for a variety of juried competitions and workshops, including Communication Arts, PDN Photo Annual and PDN’s The Curator selections.

Several people succeeded in making it to through the selection process. Toni Greaves and Matt Eich were most successful, in making the cut for Communication Arts and PDN. So did Lisa Wiltse, Andrew Spear and Bryan Thomas with whom I worked during the last few months.

Also congratulations to Benjamin Rusnak for being among the 10 finalists for Burn’s emerging photographer award. Ben and I worked together on a submission and on a book of his work 23 degrees north of the equator.

The list continues with the work of Naples, Florida based photographer Greg Kahn, which was a Pulitzer finalist this year. We worked together more than once last year to edit his body of work about foreclosures in Florida. We're now working on his current project.

I’ve also worked with a range of photographers on developing portfolios and projects. Among them is Minneapolis based photographer Cori Chandler Pepelnjak. We edited a broad range of Cori’s work into cohesive presentations for her site and a print portfolio. She’s extremely talented so it was a real treat to work with her. The edits aren't live yet but stay tuned.

Tuscon based photographer Chris Hinkle contacted me to help put together a new portfolio for him. That too was a treat. Chris presents a combination of portraiture, photography about the cycling world and personal projects that is compelling.

And Moscow based photographer Diana Markosian now has an up to date portfolio representing her work in Russia. Diana has a fresh eye that sees the extraordinary in the ordinary. She connects with her subjects as if they were lifelong friends. It helps that she speaks Russian.

Roanoke, Virginia based photographer Jared Soares is headed to Review Santa Fe so I helped him put together a tight selection of images from his project about hip hop in Roanoke, Virginia.

... just to name a few of the things I’ve been up to. More news soon.

Update on Tuesday, June 7, 2011 at 4:51PM by Mike Davis

You can download the current issue of f8 magazine by following the link - click on the image above.And I forgot to mention that I started to write a column for f8 Magazine. I answer questions submitted by photographers. Miguel Moya is the editor and creator of f8, in Spain.

Fly, drive, walk, bike, take a bus or a train but by all means, get to Look3

Virginia Quarterly Review used most of its spring issue to show the work of photographers that Look Between gathered together last summer. Next month's gathering returns to the giant roster of photographers for Look3.There are many reasons to go to Look3 June 9-11 in Charlottesville, Virginia. It's the preeminent gathering in the U.S. for photographers who make pictures that tell stories and whose images are equally at home on gallery walls as they are on the pages of the world's best publications.

The reason to go is similar to why a bee visits a field of flowers. A lot of bees come to check out the flowers, which creates a big buzz and in turn spreads the buzz far afield long after leaving said field. Huh?

In other words, there are few other settings that present the opportunity to see so much good work and see and hear and meet so many photographers, editors, publishers, gallery owners, curators ... much of the gamut of the photography world.

And its kind of nice to see what those folks look like, in person.

Other reasons it worth going to Look3? Do you need others?

I love photographers

Today was exceptional.

Thank you, today.

Why?

I talked to an amazing range of people who are photographers. One is just a few years out of school and is learning the ropes. Another just took a buyout from a lengthy newspaper career and moved to Portland for the lifestyle and is ramping up a freelance business.

And then I went to spend a grueling hour on a stationery bike at one of Portland’s most notable cycling venues - Upper Echelon Fitness - and Daniel Sharp was there making pictures. He’s a talented photographer who makes enigmatic pictures of cycling and clothing and all manner of subjects. What stays the same is his seeing.

Then were several emails and other contacts with photographers.

Each of these people is dramatically different one to the next and each makes pictures as they do. And that is the spleandor.

When does a photograph become dishonest?

The answer to the question, when does a photograph become dishonest, seems obvious. Unless it’s not. And that’s the tricky part.

Several people have mentioned this lately so I thought I’d start down a path on the subject here. Honesty in photography is an issue that has been around for decades and will never go away but it’s only an issue in the purist of journalistic environments. Which makes sense, I guess.

It’s easy to look back in horror or disapproval at the fact that Matthew Brady moved bodies and rifles to make better compositions or that W. Eugene Smith added elements to a photo of Albert Schweitzer and changed the dynamic range of photos in the darkroom in ways that wouldn’t be permitted in World Press Photo’s competition today.

Applying today’s standards to images of the past is a mistake, in the same way that anthropologists fail when assessing one society using the standards and mores of another society.

The first step down this path is trying to agree about what is honest, or even if that can be the goal. Honesty, accuracy, truthfulness and other terms are sides of a dice that we roll every time we approach a subject. What might be honest to one person won’t be to another.

This shows up in a lot of ways. The most clear I’ve been around was while working in a Republican White House, where the notion of truth meant something specific. Perspectives on world events were nearly opposite of those formed in most newsrooms, at least those I’ve worked in.  The administration generally perceived The New York Times’ coverage as wrong and generally thought The Washington Times’ coverage was right and preferred Fox News over CNN and MSNBC. That throws out the notion that news is objective and shows that truth is not a universally definable measure. It’s easier to know whether something lies than it is to know whether it portrays a truth - in part because there are almost always many types and degrees of truth - though even lies have many facets. WMD.

Is it possible to set standards that everyone agrees to, that would make it clear whether a given practice is honest, truthful, accurate? Probably not. And even it were possible, knowing whether a given photograph meets the standard is hard to detect.

It’s easy to write rules: The photographer may not alter the image in any way by moving, replacing, slicing or dicing parts of an image. The photographer may not apply borders, may not adjust toning in a way that changes the scene from it’s original representation. May not this, may not that ...

It’s not so easy to gauge whether those rules have been followed. Anyone can alter elements in a photo in a way that can’t easily be detected. So you can get away with altering images – moving a Pepsi can or pyramids or missile launches or soldiers. No wait, people didn’t get away with those. Speaking of pyramids, did you know the Geographic altered at least three cover images. More water was added to a cover photo of a man wading through Indian flooding, more hat was added to an eastern European military officer’s hat. But those were more than a couple decades ago.

Rules are clearly nothing more than a guideline, a way to reject an image if it’s determined to break the specific aspects of the rules, the interpretation of which varies widely. Rules generally only work in a contest environment. Even contests vary widely in their wording of do’s and don’ts.

The publishing realm is even more divergent in interpretting what is acceptable. Do you suppose Weekly World News and People Magazine have the same rules about altering images? 

Dartmouth’s research in detecting altered images could help in a contest environment or if a publishing environment applied the filter. Otherwise, we’re left not knowing for sure whether a given image was altered.

That leaves the notion of accurately representing a scene, not altering the tones or color range or shadow density or highlights beyond a certain point. Variables such as type of camera, lens and film/digital and black and white or color alone produce wildly variable representations of the same scene. And there are more variations of these being used now than ever. Add the differences in how humans perceive color and light and how capable different photographers are in perceiving and representing scenes and there’s little doubt that accuracy is a gooey notion.

This is all a bit like people saying they can’t define pornography but they know it when they see it. We can’t make a ruler by which we can measure honesty. The best we can hope for is that photographers set out with good intentions, that the people in charge of setting standards are wise and well informed and that the public understands the nuances of all of this. All of these conditions are likely to happen soon after we learn how to make wine from water.

So here we are, stuck in the continual vortex of agreeing to disagree about what is and is not acceptable.

In answer to the opening question, photographs are not dishonest, people who intentionally misrepresent situations to compensate for their own shortcomings are dishonest.