The World Photography Organization manages the Sony World Photography Awards, which offer parallel competitions for professional photographers and for amateurs.  Entry in competitions is free.  This year’s deadline for submission is January 4, 2010.  Information is available at the website, along with images of last year’s winners and amateur submissions.  The winners deserve our attention, but others do as well.  Images like this, for example:

Photograph of the department for newborn children, Pripyat’s hospital, Chernobyl alienation Zone, Ukraine, by Sergii Shchelkunov.

The website announces “Life on Earth through the eyes of its inhabitants,” but it may be both less and more than that.  The Week of Life documentary project invites anyone anywhere to take nine photographs a day for seven days and then post them at this web site.  Like this:

Photographs by Frederico Ciamei, designer, Italy for Week of Life, Monday, September 28, 2009.

London seems to be the place to be right now.  If you are especially adventurous you might be interested in Shoot Spitalfields Photography Treasure Hunt on October 11, 2009.  And for the rest there is Photomonth ‘09 running from October 1-through Novemebr 30th.

For more information on Photomonth ‘09 click here.

An exhibition by photographer Tim Davis opened yesterday at the Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, Fifth Avenue at 57th St., New York.

It’s titled The New Antiquity.

The exhibition runs through October 24th.  You also can see the set of slides at his website, here.

If you think Wikipedia is a good idea, you might also want to look at the Encyclopedia of Life.  This is an online collaborative project to document all living species.  If short on taxonomic skills, you might still be able to enjoy and perhaps contribute to the photo archive.  Here’s looking at you, kid.

Photograph of the eye of a European Green Toad, Bufo viridis, © Matt Reinbold via the Encyclopedia of Life media image page.

Morgan Hager has created a show called The People Project.

“There are a myriad of challenges facing the human race today. The People Project attempts to define the challenges facing humanity as a whole by examining the views of the individual. Through compelling images and the thought provoking words of his subjects, Morgan Hagar has begun an ambitious ongoing project in hopes of answering one question…  What is Humanity’s Greatest Challenge?”

This is an ongoing project still in its initial phase.  Hagar’s home page is here; his blog is here.

Feeling Photography
University of Toronto
October 16-17, 2009

“Feeling Photography” is an international, interdisciplinary conference that will bring together scholars working in a range of interpretive and theoretical approaches to interrogate the relationship between the affect, emotion, and/or feeling and the photograph. The conference will be held at the University of Toronto and is sponsored by the Centre for the Study of the United State and the Toronto Photography Seminar.

The conference features plenary addresses from the following scholars: Lisa Cartwright (UCSD); Ann Cvetkovich (UT Austin); David Eng (Penn); Marianne Hirsch (Columbia) and Leo Spitzer (Dartmouth); Christopher Pinney (University College, London); Shawn Michelle Smith (School of the Art Institute of Chicago); and Diana Taylor (NYU). We have assembled fifty-two papers from our fall CFP into sixteen panels featuring scholarly work from across the globe and the disciplines. Panel topics include Children and the Political Management of Affect; Feeling Together: Publics and Counterpublics; Emotional Geographies; Marketing Emotions: Loss, Fear and (Comic) Loathing; Racial Affects; Emotional States: Citizenship and Photography; Instrumental Images: Bodies, Cities and Empires, 1903-1918; Digital Affects; Public Intimacies; Touching Photo; Visual Witnessing: Photography and World War II; Feeling First: Documentary and Left Internationalism; Photography, Trauma, and the Ethics of Witnessing; Queer Affect(s); Affective Economies; Facial Tics – Faciality.

Early registration deadline for the conference is September 1st. To Register, and for further information, see www.torontophotoseminar.org.  Our email contact is Feeling Photo.

Conference organizers are Prof. Elspeth Brown, University of Toronto; Prof. Thy Phu, University of Western Ontario; and Prof. Matt Brower, University of Toronto with the assistance of David Sworn, graduate student in History at the University of Toronto and Nina Boric, Munk Centre. For the Toronto Photography Seminar, see www.torontophotoseminar.org; for the Centre for the Study of the United States at the University of Toronto, see http://www.utoronto.ca/csus/.

Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar, Sante Fe, NM, is pleased to announce “A Thousand Words: Masters of Photojournalism”, an exhibition of more than 60 great photographs from the field of photojournalism. The exhibition opens with a public reception on July 3 from 5 – 7 pm, and will continue through September 25.  Additional information is available here.

Photograph taken in Ann Arbor, Michigan in October 1950 by Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life.

Symposium: The Aesthetics of Catastrophe

Northwestern University
Friday, June 5, 2009
Annie May Swift Hall Auditorium

This symposium addresses questions of visual representation and public advocacy as they are evident in contemporary economic, environmental, and political disasters. Events such as floods, fires, terrorism, and genocide generate heightened media coverage, compelling images, and questions about the limits of photographic representation of events that involve massive disruption and loss. In the US, a series of disasters including 9/11, Katrina, and the economic crash have pushed photojournalists and media scholars alike to ask whether the available conventions for documentary witness need to be extended or reworked. This symposium provides images and arguments dedicated to provoking and guiding extended discussion of topics such as the violent image, visual fragmentation and political distribution, emergency status and citizenship, and the iconography of a “catastrophile” society.

Schedule:

9:00 – Coffee

9:30 – Ann Larabee, Michigan State University, “Brownfields, Ghostboxes, and Orange Xs: Reading Disaster and Catastrophe in the Urban Landscape”

10:45 – Robert Lyons, Photographer, “Intimate Enemy: Images and Voices of the Rwandan Genocide”

1:00 – David Campbell, Durham University, UK, “Constructed Visibility: Photographing the Catastrophe of Gaza”

2:15 – Aric Mayer, Photographer, “Representing the Unrepresentable: Disaster, Suffering, and Locating the Political in the Viewer-Image Exchange”

3:30 – Lane Relyea, Northwestern University, “From Spectacle to Database: On the Changed Status of Debris and Fragmented Subjectivity in Recent Art Culture”

4:45 – Reception

Free and open to the public. Organized by Robert Hariman. Sponsored by the Program in Rhetoric and Public Culture, the Center for Global Culture and Communication, the School of Communication, and the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, Northwestern University. For more information, please contact Patrick Wade at wpatrickwade@gmail.com.

Persuasion: Seminar on Rhetoric and Politics in Contemporary Discourse

A seminar organized by the Goldsmiths’ Centre for the Study of Global Media and Democracy and the Centre for the study of Culture and Politics, University of Swansea

May 5, 2009, 2-5 pm

Small Hall Theater, Richard Hoggart Building

Goldsmiths, University of London

Persuasion is one of the most fundamental of democratic political activities. But it is also one of the most ambiguous. Does democratic development and expansion require the slow substitution of persuasion or rational conviction or, on the contrary, the proliferation of opportunities for rhetorical contestation? Where is the line between persuasion and force? Are there standards of truth or consent that guarantee the democratic character of a persuasive activity? What forms of rhetoric distinguish a democratic polity from tyranny? What happens to political persuasion in an economy and culture dominated by commercial persuasion? How can we best understand and analyse the forms, modes and locations of contemporary political rhetoric as manifested in visual and media cultures?

This interdisciplinary seminar explores the modes of democratic persuasion, the methods for its explication and interpretation and the prospects for rhetoric both in the academy and in the contemporary multifaceted polis.

Speakers: Aleatta Norval (University of Essex), Michael Carrithers (Durham University), Rochana Bajpai (SOAS), Alan Finlayson (Swansea University),  James Martin (Goldsmiths).

The event is free and open to all, but please contact James Martin (j.martin@gold.ac.uk) if you’d like to attend.  Seminar to be followed by a wine reception in the SCR.