Esko Männikkö - Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2008

Esko Männikkö is a fininsh photographer who won the important Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2008. The finalists of this prize were exhibited at the c/o galerie in Berlin this summer, and I liked the way Mr. Männikkö presented his work very much (see some snapshots of the exhibition below). He uses different kinds of wooden frames, different sizes, older ones and newer ones… It’s really inspiring to see photographs presented in such an unconventional way, not alu-dibond or diasec / plexi how you see it all the time these days (not that I don’t like these materials, but sometimes they just don’t fit!).

Esko Männikkö has also published some really beautiful books, available e.g. @ www.schaden.com

See more at his gallery’s website Nordenhake .

More examples of his framing here .

Joakim Eskildsen - The Roma Journeys

For all of you who haven’t heard of this book before, I would like to recommend “The Roma Journeys” by Joakime Eskildsen. The book is a comprehensive collection of photographs that show Roma people all over the world, from Finland to India. There is lots of great portraits in the book, and Eskildsen truely has a great sense for composition and colours. To me, this book is one of the best and most appealing books of the last year, it’s  a great plaisure to read and watch it…I’ve spend hours doing that…

http://www.joakimeskildsen.com/

1979- 1997: Polaroid project by James Livingston

I found an interesting article on guardian.co.uk - read it here.  It’s about a young american film student named James Livingston who in 1979 started to take a polaroid each day. What makes this project so intense is the fact that James Livingston continued to do this until 1997, the year when he died because of cancer. I think the collection of polaroids is an incredible diary - allthough it’s only 1 image per day it says so much about James Livingston’s life, his friends, his environment. I found it very moving and inspiring, but it also was thought-provoking and made me kind of sad. So, whatever comes, we have to enjoy every day - it could always be the last…

http://photooftheday.hughcrawford.com/

Synchronised diving: Sascha Klein wins olympic silver medal

During the last months I worked on a sports portfolio that shows some of the best german athletes who start in Peking at the 2008 olympiad right now.

End of June, I photographed divers in Aachen (from left to right: Sascha Klein, Norman Becker and Pavlo “Pawel” Rozenberg). 2 days ago, Sascha Klein won in Peking the silver medal in the men’s 10 m synchronized final with his partner from Berlin, Patrick Hausding - congratulations!!

And there are some more competitions coming up next week where Sascha Klein will start again, also together with Pawel Rozenberg. Good luck guys!!!

Furthermore, I photographed Helena Fromm (Taek-won-do), Rustam Rahimov (Boxing) and Oksana Chusovitina (gymnastics).  I’ll try to put more photos online by the end of the months, but first I will leave for the alps now for a couple days…

Platon talks about the Putin shoot

Now New York based photographer Platon won the 2008 World Press Award, category best Portrait. He and all the other winners talk about their projects and photos, you can see all interviews here .

I especially love what Platon tells us about the shoot with Russian president Vladimir Putin - just crazy.

Here another interview:

And last but not least some more videos from his own website here .

http://www.platonphoto.com/

My Magazines

I found a great website thats hosts hundreds of scanned articles & magazines, unfortunately only US and Canadien publications. I hope that this site will keep growing, because it’s really a perfect resource for photography and editorial design.

http://www.mygazines.com

Braschler + Fischer / Portraits of China

Swiss photographers Matthia Braschler & Monika Fischer produced an extensive portrait portfolio about people from China. The series was recently published in german STERN magazine as well as in the UK-Guardian.

Not only the quantity of this body of work is really impressive, but also the quality they produced travelling through China for 6 months, driving 20.000 miles. I don’t like all of the shots, sometimes the lighting to me seems to artificial, sometimes you just the the “surface” of the people but the portrait itself doesn’t have enough “depth”, isn’t strong enough to be a great shot. But who can produce dozens of great shots in a row?

And i’m pretty sure that these photographs will be a very important piece of documentary photography in 20,30 or 50 years.

More here or here (Guerdian)

Or here (Stern)

http://braschlerfischer.com/

Here a documentary in german, english version can be found on the Guerdian Site..

Greg Miller

I found some inspiring portraits of Brooklyn based photographer Greg Miller. He works with a large format camera and with very narrow depth of field. Allthough I do not always like the effect of that I think that his photographs tell us something about the people,  the places,  the ambiance. They remind me also of paintings. Would love to see the printed versions…

http://www.gregmiller.com

Michal Chelbin “strangely familiar: …”

Dear readers, greets from Berlin! With my friend Christian I saw the Wolfgang Tillmans (if you are in Berlin, you must see it) show at the wonderful Hamburger Bahnhof here in Berlin. Afterwards, we stopped by at the museums book shop and we found this truly wonderful book of israeli photographer Michael Chelbin: ”Strangely Familiar: Acrobats, Athletes and Other Traveling Troupes” (Aperture). I guess I haven’t seen such a great book for a long time, and I found these pictures absolutely moving and beautiful. Tough, I was slightly disappointed of the printing of the book, the paper felt somewhat glossy and “plastic-stlye”-cheap. I hope this work will be shown in Germany soon… Unfortunately, I couldn’t fnd very many of her photos online, but check her website here.

Tokyo Olympiad Film by Kon Ichikawa

Last semester I took a photography course that was about sports, olympia, body culture etc. , and I had to give a presentation on the olympic films. As you might know, each olympiad has one official film, though the most famous ones are those of Leni Riefenstahl 1936 and Kon Ichikawa 1964.

Kon Ichikawa’s “Tokyo Olympiad” shows the 1964 olympic games in a sometimes very poetic way, with some really beautiful camera. Someone put the whole film on youtube (divided into 20 parts or so, see it here), and for those of you who are interested in movies it’s worth watching them.

Here are 2 examples, but check out the other ones too, there are sooo many good scenes.