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"This exciting global initiative will give children and teenagers a platform to show how they see the natural world, and the chance to discover some of the challenges currently facing our planet." -Children's Eyes on Earth

It is amazing when you see a child, at such a young age, take a camera, make a photograph, and say with the utmost pride, 'I made a picture'. Whether they are taking it seriously or just playing around, they take a personal interest into seeing through the viewfinder, pressing a button, and looking at their results on a small LCD screen. Children are the future of our planets health and photography is a great way to get young people invested in what they see in front of them: our planet.

The theme for this years competition is 'I Love Nature, I Fear Pollution' and anyone ages 17 and under can submit their images. The deadline is September 5th 2012 and the images will be judged by an international panel, alongside one winner who will be chosen by you the viewers. Prizes include laptops, SLR cameras, iPads and more.

This project is supported by National Geographic and World Photo Organization.

Information and Submissions:

http://childrenseyesonearth.org/contest/

Image by REZA, National Geographic Photographer and organizer for Children's Eyes on Earth.

"The sweeping gestures of photography have thrived on extremes. Great things, epic moments, the wretched, the vile, the dispossessed, the celebrated and the trodden, have all found themselves facing the lens. Photography has exalted suffering, celebrated the vain. Quiet moments, reflective spirits, the hesitant step, the furtive glance have rarely made headlines. Perceived as being unworthy of the shutter." -Chobi Mela Website

Launched in 2000, Chobi Mela has been and still is a great platform for artists in Bangladesh as well as artists from around the world, to concetrate and explore topics on general yet profound world issues. This years theme for the 2012 Chobi Mela VII International Photography Festival will be 'Fragility'. Submit your projects by July 31st and for more information, check out their website.

Information and Submissions:

http://www.chobimela.org/

Image by Karen Knorr, previous Chobi Mela participant

Photograph by Germán Herrera

Language

“I have started believing that the value of art is the feeling it produces in us, artists, when it is ushered to existence, inspired... and, hopefully, the feeling someone living it and connecting with it, may experience; the transmission. But for that, you have to be able to recognize what is inspired and what is created, by a mind, a cartesian Newtonian mind asserting its separation from that to which we all belong (and perpetuating the dream we have been thought to believe as reality),” my friend Germán Herrera says, as we discuss art’s relevance and reflexive place. 

Relevance, and even reality, are dictated by the emotional investment we attach to a person or object. What happens when the tangibles documented by the image--the action or specificity--are gone? My computer hard drive recently decided to stop working, one random morning. The very first hit of panic was not for the potential work lost or even various creative projects, those could be pieced back together; but it was for the snapshots, the everyday photos of the past few weeks that hadn’t necessarily been backed up. The photo harbors what now is only memory, and memory is an unstable rumpled fabric map of reality. 

My reaction to the computer crash cued me as to how fierce I’ve become about documenting what I believe in the moment to be the reality of experience, or evidence of my family’s language. And there’s a reason for this. A year ago my kids’ dad unexpectedly and suddenly passed away. The archive of a life rests in photographs now. Their visual connection to a person, to this part of their history, are cued now from rectangle pieces of paper. And how the content of how those images is interpreted has become a language all its own, ever-shifting, as nuances of daily life stack to interfere with clarity on whatever that ‘reality’ was in the first place. My kids look at photographs of their dad, goofy ones dressed up at Halloween, more serious ones of him holding them in the hospital the day they were born. It is how my son and daughter are brave.

“To build a personal imprint through creativity you have to go beyond your zone of comfort, stick it out, create your own language,” Germán continues. And I would add, on some fundamental level, at least in my family, this individual vernacular becomes essential to survival, collapses time, takes us back to the moment held in the frame, and directs a spray of light to those corners in ourselves that darken from time to time. 

My son says, “What?” a lot. Born with significant hearing loss, he’s world is quieter than that of a lot of us. Tinnitus provides varying frequencies of buzzing and pitched hums that thread across, between, through ordinary conversations about what to have for dinner, homework, the “I love yous” scattered throughout the day. I often wonder about tones and timbre and gain variances affecting his interpretation, in ways creating a new language, one of a different interpretation than mine. I hear, “Mama, let’s walk the dog,” as unencumbered words, straight, stark; for my son this simple sentence is a library of sounds, the wrong parts muffled, the annoying parts accentuated. 

Whether visual or verbal, the creative impulse to improvise and riff off ourselves, work with the circumstances given, is basic human nature. I see it with how my son compensates for the losses in his life. I see it when I find an artist who invests vulnerably and openly in seeing. 

Paul Strand famously said,“Thoreau said years ago, ‘You can’t say more than you see.’ No matter what lens you use, no matter what the speed of the film is, no matter how you develop it, no matter how you print it, you cannot say more than you see. That’s what that means, and that’s the truth.” (Aperture vol. 19 no. 1, 1974). 

You can’t say what you can’t hear or hold, either. But one can remember. One can stay committed to trying. Even if at times it means squinting, or saying, “What?”

I’ve been attached to Germán’s images for a long time. They make me feel. They are intuitive, emotive. One hangs right by my front door ushering in or out the day, light, the people I care about. He says, “The images are correspondences,” and now more than at any other time, I believe that to be true--of Germán’s photographs, of all the imagery I’m drawn to by famous or unknown photographers, of my own family snapshots. 

Germán tells me, “There is the inherent nature of photography being a medium that uses the reality "out there" as its reason to exist, to record such reality....the minds out there trap our attention by the way they see, there are not many of those, and then, I may add, the hearts are even more difficult to find, artists with the honesty and capability of reporting on their own journeys, or who make imagery about ‘what is.’” 

What is, is what we have, remembered or otherwise. 

To view more of Germán’s images, go to http://www.germanherrera.com/

Miyuki Kanei, 2011, Jérémie Nassif

One of the best things about the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, located in the Marais district of Paris and recognized as one of Europe’s premier photography galleries, is its consistently open-minded approach to the medium. Jérémie Nassif’s gem of a solo show, ‘Envols’, accompanying the publication of his latest book of the same name, embodies this perfectly. Nassif combines the photograph with classic drawing materials – charcoal, pencil, etc. – to capture the performances of several dancers the artist followed and worked with for several years.

The end product is a remarkable rendering of the action and fluidity of dance. Framed within a pure white background, Nassif’s performers seem to split apart in front of our eyes as they move, the result of long exposures and some inventive use of shading on the artist’s part. As François-Marie Banier states in his introduction to the exhibition, Nassif displays a ‘consummate mastery of line’ – though his images capture the flowing movement of his subjects particularly well, they never seem messy or crowded.

The actress Charlotte Rampling’s ‘Secret Albums’ is similarly noteworthy, though its premise may appear self-indulgent if misunderstood. The exhibition is made up of three parts – photographs of Rampling taken by various well-known photographers, photographs taken by Rampling documenting her own life, and a selection of self-portraits of various photography greats selected by Rampling from the Maison Européenne de la Photographie’s own collection.

Charlotte Rampling, Sans titre, 1979, Charlotte Rampling

It would be easy to dismiss the show as egotistical self-exploration on the part of Rampling – however to do so would be to completely miss the point. The portraits of Rampling are less about their subject than the artists who took them (Juergen Teller, Helmut Newton, Peter Lindbergh, among others), as well as the various photographic fashions of the last 50 years. Even Rampling’s own photographs aren’t really about her – though of course amateur in many ways, they do have a documentary value, particularly the images taken by Rampling of her travels in East Asia.

The most interesting aspect of the exhibition, however, is the series of self-portraits of noted photographers. Subjects range from Duane Michals and Larry Clark to Nan Goldin and WeeGee. Like Rampling’s own portraits, this series acts as a kind of miniature ‘history’ of modern photography in its own right. The fact that this section of the show is its standout feature suggests even a basic knowledge of Rampling’s life isn’t necessary to understand it – in the end the actress takes a backseat to an interesting exploration of mid-to-late 20^thcentury photography.

Là-bas (‘Over There’) is a collection of video installations by nine Israeli artists that explore complex personal, political and often controversial issues. To quote the exhibition’s introduction, the concept of Là–bas is to address the ‘Otherness’ with which Israel is often associated by the rest of the world. The result is a fascinating exploration of life within a politically and socially diverse nation from the point of view of those who experience it from day to day.

Entering the exhibition, we are presented with Nina Pereg’s ’67 Bows’. Here, Pereg has recorded the reactions of sixty-seven flamingoes in a glass cage to the sound of a gun being cocked and fired. We watch as the flamingoes become so accustomed to bracing at the sound that eventually the gun does not need to be fired at all – the sound of it being cocked is enough to force a reaction from the birds. Pereg’s explains this installation as a statement addressing the absurdity of the use of weapons as a consequence of fear.

Yael Bartana’s ‘Trembling Time’ similarly deals with issues of weapons and warfare – her installation records the annual two-minute silence observed by Israelis in remembrance of soldiers killed in fighting, here carried out by motorists on a freeway. As the motorists leave their vehicles to observe the silence, Bartana manipulates light, sound and speed to great effect – the result is both dramatic and emotionally moving. Sigalit Landau’s ‘Azkelon’ directly addresses the Arab-Israeli conflict and reveals the artist’s deep personal desire for a dialogue to develop between the two peoples, while Tom Pnini’s ‘Volcano Demo’ – a recording of a paper mâché volcano built by the artist on his own roof being set alight – explores what Pnini sees as both the conscious and unconscious anxiety regarding the past, present and future felt in Israel at all times.

Together these installations culminate in an original, honest and completely three-dimensional look at Israeli society. Full list of artists featured: Nira Pereg, Sigalit Landau, Nir Evron, Rona Yefman, Yael Bartana, Talya Keinan, Tom Pnini, Daniel Landau, Tamir Zadok

http://www.mep-fr.org/us/

Jérémie Nassif, ‘Envols’: 27 June – 26 August 2012

Charlotte Rampling, ‘Secret Albums’: 27 June – 26 August 2012

Là-bas (‘Over There’), Videos by nine Israeli artists: 6 June – 15 July 2012

We all use hard drives and they serve a pretty straight forward service. Being in the digital age, most of what we do these days require memory, and hard drives give us a compact data-based form of storage. However for the people who need more information from their hard drives are now in luck with the UltraDock v5. The UltraDock v5 lets you access, set up, diagnose, and repair a drive giving you far more information and control over your drive.

Check out the UltraDock v5 by CRU-DataPort:

http://www.wiebetech.com/products/UltraDock_v5.php