Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Stillings' Bridge Project Garners Multiple Awards

Jamey Stillings' Hoover Dam Bypass Project images were recognized by several significant award shows this week, and the project continues to gain momentum and exposure among the fine art blogosphere. Two images were chosen for the American Photography 26 annual and tbe project won First Prize in the 2010 Editor's Choice Award from Center, out of 2,596 submissions. To quote from the jurors statement, "We gave the top prize to Jamey Stillings for his work on the Colorado River Bridge. These pictures are epic and poetic at the same time. Stillings recognized what a great visual story the building of this bridge could be and then committed to it, making lots of good photographic decisions along the way. These awe-inspiring images deliver the thing photography does best – a documentation of a moment in time that won’t be repeated." The series also received an Honorable Mention in Center's 2010 Curator's Choice Award and made it into the upcoming PDN Photo Annual. It will also appear as part of a special slide show presentation at The Annenburg Space for Photography in LA, April 22, in conjunction with the Annenburg's current exhibit, Water, Our Thirsty World. It's been quite a week already and it's only Wednesday!!

Saturday, March 13, 2010

Ad Rags Becoming a Joke?

I feel sorry for the publishers, editors, art directors, writers and the rest of the people still trying to make AdWeek and BrandWeek look like legitimate trade publications. They've got so little "meat" on (in) them these days, they are more like newsletters with advertising. And Advertising Age isn't much better - especially if you take out the "Advertising Special Section" that's normally included. Our subscription to Adweek somehow lapsed (could have been that I got in the habit of ignoring the repeated mailings they sent trying to give us deals on renewing our subscription WAY before it was close to ending... I HATE that!), which we noticed after missing a few months' worth of paper. Decided to re-up and for some reason, added BrandWeek as well. BrandWeek arrived first and after getting the second copy containing only about 8 pages of editorial content, I canceled my subscription. Then AdWeek started arriving. The God-awful redesign was the first thing I noticed. And it's fashion model thinness. Apparently, they've also succumbed to the less is more trend afflicting almost every pub these days regarding the depth of editorial features, and are now serving up info in smaller bites that are more easily digested by us busy, distracted readers. If I see one more "By the Numbers" spread, I'm gonna, I'm gonna..... They even devote a page in the pub to printing comments from their blogs. If I wanted to read what people were saying online, I'd go THERE! Since the BrandWeeks have continued to roll in despite my canceling the subscription, I continue to spend the 5 minutes it takes to look at them, and am amazed how much content is the SAME in both pubs! I swear, sometimes it feels like they've just put a different (but similarly ugly) cover on the same damn magazine.
On the bright side, my subscription does provide access to the email news updates and AdWeek.com, which has been more useful. I wonder how long they will continue the charade of producing the printed version.

We've Got MOTION!

It's been a long time coming but we've finally arrived. Attentive visitors to our site in the last month or so may have noticed a change to our landing page: the addition of an entire new section called MOTION. It's actually a separate site we developed and incorporated within the existing site's navigation as the most cost effective approach to handling the change. Hopefully, it feels fairly seamless. Evolving in this direction was inevitable, as the markets for still and moving imagery are quickly merging. We've started with content from three of our artists, Steven Lippman, Anthony Redpath and Bryan Christie, and while we don't yet have a deep body of work to show, we will be adding more shortly. All three have productions they are working or that are coming up, and we hope opportunities arise soon for rest of our roster. The site was designed by Daniel Stromberg of The Creative Common Good, and developed by Thom Meredith and Michael Madgett