A picture of a woman

I don't normally write about fashion photography on this blog, or go out of my way to see fashion images. E doesn't really buy magazines so it's not lying about the house either. But like any other person living in a big city, fashion photography is absolutely everywhere, something that we practically breathe in every time we step outside. In the case of major women's magazines, I find the images that they publish to be almost invisible given how repetitive they are.

The unhealthy fetishisation of thinness in fashion and women's magazines is not exactly breaking news. Angry opposing voices have been heard for some time on the issue, but little has changed except that we are probably likely to see more ultra-thin model flesh than before. When I came across this image (not flipping through Glamour magazine unfortunately, but on the Guardian website), it stopped me in my tracks. For a split-second I wondered whether this little belly had been photo-shopped onto this woman's body? That first reaction quickly turned into amazement. Amazement that I couldn't remember having seen another image like this, that this image of a woman whose body is just slightly closer to some form of reality could possibly be this unusual, that people are actually having a debate about whether this woman is fat, that I could have had such a ridiculous sub-conscious reaction. As the author of the article suggested this image being published definitely shouldn't be newsworthy, but unfortunately it is.

As an aside I find it highly amusing that an article written to highlight the ridiculous body image standards of women's magazines should have the following url: www.../lizzie-miller-model-fat

Miao Jiaxin

Miao Jiaxin is from Shanghai but is currently living in the United States, completing an MFA at the Art Institute of Chicago. There is a great mix of work on his site, with some radically different approaches. The above image is taken from the 2006 series Times Square, "a juxtaposition of Shanghai and NYC created in film using only traditional exposure methods." I also suggest taking a look at Good Night New York; proof that this is a man who is willing to suffer for his art. Some of this work is for sale with a French online gallery, Wanted Paris, at very reasonable prices.

The mus-mus @Paris project

The mysterious mus-mus collective have just launched their @Paris project online. The project was based on the idea of finding out how photographers today see Paris and think about the Paris they see." There are some big names in here (Stephen Shore, Alec Soth) but also a lot of discoveries. I did find a lot of interesting material (Céline Clanet's image above is a favourite), but overall I felt slightly frustrated. Paris has become a difficult city to photograph because of its past, but for me, as a group, these photographs did not sufficiently get under the skin of the city. The website also includes texts by Darius Himes and Ulrich Baer, which are worth a read.

On lists

I have recently come across a couple of 'best ever', 'must-have', 'unmissable' lists that have given me food for thought... quickly resulting in indigestion. The first of these is a list of the top 10 photo-journalists of all time and the second, a list of the 26 (nice random number) books every photographer should own.

This kind of thing is definitely not confined to the world of photography, as anyone who has spent an evening watching TV in the UK will know. I don't particularly like these top-10-50-100s, but I generally still succumb to the urge to see who comes out on top, even if only to then dismiss the thing completely. And so I did go through the top-10 photojournalists of all time and shortly afterwards went to find out what the 26 holy grails of books relating to photogaphy might be. And despite being promised some sort of photographic enlightenment, the experience just left me feeling depressed.

I don't really want to argue the merits of calling Robert Frank a photo-journalist or ranking Zoriah Miller above Don McCullin and Eugene Smith. And I certainly am not running to my nearest photo-book store to grab the last remaining copy of Galen Rowell: A Retrospective. In fact I would like Lindsay Adler to consider what planet photography would be like  if every photographer owned those 26 books that she picked out.

Instead I want to make a plea to any photo-bloggers or journos out there who are wondering what to write about next. If you have a big stack of books at home that you recently arranged into order of preference, or simply have absolutely no inspiration whatsoever, just put down that keyboard. Instead why not go out and discover one photo-book or one photographer that will blow your mind and look at their photographs for hours on end before writing the greatest eulogy ever, or think about what the hell this thing called photography is all about now that newspapers and magazines are dying and digital is replacing everything else and everyone has tiny little cameras that they use to photograph everything all the time, or even go outside into the world and take a photograph, just the one.

With most of the posts that I publish, I'm never sure whether they are adding anything except another voice to the cacophonous mix. But I am sure of this: we do not need another list.

Source features eyecurious

Last week I got an email from the good people at Source magazine, telling me that they wanted to feature eyecurious on a list of 10 photo-blogs you should read. To my knowledge this is the first one of these that eyecurious has been featured on so thanks to Source for reading and for appreciating. There is a short profile of me on their site, which, if you're already a reader of eyecurious, you probably don't need to know about, but I highly recommend that you check out their other picks because the five that are there so far are all absolutely essential photography reading.