Holiday shopping idea

Speaking of collect.give, the holidays are coming up and some prints of my image "Hammock" (below) are still available via the site, you can see my page here.

collect.give: new book, new website--check them out

For Immediate Release   The charity-based online photography gallery  collect.give announces the release of a book celebrating  the project's first 50 photographers - all of whom have  pledged to donate 100% of their print proceeds to charities they've selected. Since 2009, collect.give  has raised over $28,000 for a wide variety of charitable  organizations, by selling affordable, limited edition photographs.         Description  128 pages, softcover, perfect bound, printed by MagCloud.  ________________________________________________________________________________________ Design By    Heidi Romano Photographs By  Jane Fulton Alt, Malu Alvarez, Jonathan Blaustein, Mark Brautigam, Jesse Burke,  Barbara Ciurej & Lindsay Lochman, Katrina d'Autremont, Amy Eckert, Matt Eich,  Jon Feinstein, Sarina Finkelstein, Elizabeth Fleming, Max. S. Gerber, Meggan Gould,  Andrew Hetherington, Geoffrey Hiller, Peter Hoffman, Jon Horvath, Ben Huff, Dave  Jordano, Stella Kalaw, Melissa Kaseman, Liz Kuball, Shane Lavalette, David Leventi,  John Loomis, S. Billie Mandle, Kerry Mansfield, Mark Menjivar, Kevin J. Miyazaki,  Annie Marie Musselman, Colleen Plumb, Susana Raab, Shawn Records, Ellen  Rennard, Dalton Rooney, Jonathan Saunders, Manjari Sharma, Daniel Shea, Kelly  Shimoda, Emily Shur, Allison V. Smith, Aline Smithson, Brea Souders, Sarah Sudhoff,  Jake Stangel, Lacey Terrell, Sonja Thomsen, Susan Worsham and David Wright. Essays By Crista Dix, Darius Himes, Lisa Hostetler, Rachel Hulin, Miki Johnson, Larissa Leclair, Wally Mason, George Slade, Amy Stein and Alison Zavos.  _________________________________________________________________________     To Benefit  The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA). In keeping with the collect.give mission to donate 100% of proceeds to charity, all profits from this book will be donated to the RSPCA, a charity chosen by the designer Heidi Romano. Price $22.00  To Preview or Purchase    http://www.magcloud.com/browse/issue/290686  __________________________________________________________________________ Contact For more information, visit www.collectdotgive.org or send an email to Kevin J. Miyazaki. Thank You  collect.give wishes to thank Heidi Romano of threestones and publisher MagCloud for their generous in-kind donations related to the book project.

Critical Mass doppelgängers

Technology can be a hoot sometimes. James was on the couch with his iPad and I was here at our desk computer and for a good half hour we were both looking at the Critical Mass top 50 web page at the same time, keeping up a running dialog while we checked out the winners. We were having a lovely time going back and forth telling each other to "check out so-and-so" or "so-and-so's work bores me" or "so-and-so's is hilarious (in a good way)" when we soon we realized that there were quite a few instances where one artist's work uncannily resembled another person's. For example:

 Lucia Ganieva

vs.

Mark Lyon

I wonder whether it would feel weird to see images that were so similar to my own in such close proximity. Moving on, here we have:

Jane Fulton Alt

vs. 

Youngsuk Suh

In reading the statements that correspond to the matching series I'm reminded of how subjective the act of interpreting one's work is. Let us move on to developing trays vs. viewfinders:

John Cyr

vs.

Meggan Gould

Or Russia vs. the Ukraine, just add or subtract snow:

Evgenia Arbugaeva

vs.

Misha Friedman

All of this perhaps points to a potential issue with the CM means of judging: because the winners are based on a blind mathematical system of voting there's a large possibility that there could be a lack of variety, as seen above (and in other work on the list which I'm not showing here). I'm not sure if this repetitiveness has always been in evidence--maybe I've just never scrutinized the winners this closely in the past. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to knock Critical Mass, it's a great opportunity for photographers and Photolucida is an amazing organization. But it's an interesting conundrum--jury by a group of 200 can lead in the end to a sort of non-curated whole that gets, well, a little monotonous when all is said and done.

iPL at the Corcoran

My book is now part of an exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery which opened today, announcement below. See the full list of books and artists here. Many thanks to the curators for selecting my publication--you can buy your very own copy for only $12 by going to here.