A friend sent me this interview with James M. Tabor author of Blind Descent (amazon here
To the Ukrainians who actually blew the doors off the world depth record, the American team was in a race by themselves, in the wrong place.
Still the book is a good read, buy it
-Stephen Alvarez
Sewanee, TN
Joel Sartore has a new book. Rare: Portraits of America's Endangered Species
Once overhunted, these magnificent national treasures are now carefully monitored to prevent their total annihilation. Captive breeding and migration training have saved the whooping crane, but power lines along migration routes, an industrial shipping canal in their wintering marsh, and reduced genetic diversity still trouble the species.
The story behind the photo:
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An advance copy of James Tabor's new book Blind Descent arrived in the mail yesterday. It chronicles 2 great achievements of exploration the exploration of the Cheve cave system in Mexico and the 2+ kilometer deep Krubera cave in Abkhazia.
Tabor explains the exploration by looking at the two men who pioneered the work. Bill Stone (above) and Alexander Klimchouk couldn't be any more different and as the book explains, their expeditions were polar opposites. Stone's were fraught with personal infighting, death and intrigue. Klimchouck's hummed along like a machine.
Black Passport
Stanley Greene and Teun van der Heijden
Aperture 2010
Let me say two things right of the bat.
1, I’m no war photographer. I’ve worked in war zones and I’m
no stranger to the thrill of photographing something that might well kill you. But as for shooting war for war? It is not my particular
drug. It is, however, Stanley Greene’s drug of choice. He returns to it over
and over, making his pictures but loosing a part of himself each time.
A Quick Note about The Americans and Robert Frank from Pradip Malde, Professor of Fine Arts at Sewanee, to compliment the 10 Photo Books of 2009 List. Be sure and check out Pradip’s evocative Haiti Portfolio. Pradip leads a documentary photography class there most summers. From Pradip:
Robert Frank's 'The Americans' has become one of several
commentaries on American culture and politics that is insightful, cautionary,
and almost prescient. Others that come to mind in this cluster are Alexis de
Tocquevile's 'Democracy in America' (1835 and 1840) and Jack Kerouac's 'On the
Road' (1951). Frank travelled across the USA for some two years during the mid-1950s,
generating almost 30,000 exposures. The resulting edit of 83 photographs was
published in the USA by Delpire Press in 1959. Fifty years on, Senior Curator
of Photographs at the National Gallery of Art, Sarah Greenough, presents us
with an incredible reconsideration of Frank's work. 'Looking In: Robert Frank's
The Americans - expanded edition' maps out the relationships between the
creative processes of an artist and the culture of a nation, the tensions
between expression and commodity, and the rigors of doing documentary work. All
of this with essays and, most important, hundreds of richly reproduced archive
images, work prints and contact sheets. This book, the expanded edition, should
be issued with every new American passport.
- Pradip Malde
[Note that 'Looking In' is also available in a more condensed version and is substantially different from the expanded edition.]
So many choices
this year – so here’s the random 10. Frank, Eggleston, and Anderson were
clearly trending among the picturati. (Thanks to all of you who graciously
weighed in.) And yes Chris, Stephen still owes you a print…
The new National Geographic Image Collection book is featured on NYT LensBlog (here). It opens with one of my photos from Oman. I'm humbled to be included in this book with some of my heros and mentors. It is a great book, $31 from Amazon (order here
-Stephen Alvarez
Photo Book from National Geographic Focal
Point Press ($30 order it here
A Quick Look by April Alvarez
When she first started making the case for stepping up the conservation of the photography and art collection at National Geographic, you would have thought Director Maura Mulvihill was asking to house her personal shoe collection. No one with their fingers on the purse strings was interested in spending the money. Cardboard boxes full of glass plates languished. Black and white prints were in giant file cabinets in the warehouse. But she persisted, until today when a state of the art preservation system holds one of the most extensive, and still, astonishing collections of images in the world.
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