Isaiah (I Know No Other Word) // Collaborative Art and Healing

By Stephanie Gehring

Excerpt below; original post here.

Mathew Crawford, a fellow student of mine, asked me to collaborate with him on an art project. His three-year-old son Isaiah died of leukemia only a few years ago, and in one of the first conversations I had with Mat, he told me he was at Duke in order to figure out how it was possible that the experience of caring for his son during that last illness had been both the most horrific and the most beautiful experience of his life. Mat is a photographer, and he said he had a photograph of Isaiah that, he felt, captured some of the power of the experience for him. For the collaboration, he printed this photograph for me on watercolor paper, and asked me to begin with that background and interpret freely.

Keep reading...

What Does Mercy Look Like? // From NY Times' Lens Blog

Full article here // Excerpt below

By Niko Koppel

Mercy is commonly defined as compassion, forgiveness, kindness or an act of piety. But photographs of prisoners reaching through bars, a wrestler being contorted by masked men and an infant dressed for burial are among the many interpretations of the word in the book “The Mercy Project/Inochi,” created and curated by James Whitlow Delano.

Keep reading...

Photography and the Education of a Doctor // Learning from Patients

Full article here // Excerpt below

By Lucy Hood

A stethoscope, a blood pressure cuff and a few other tools are all pediatrician John Moses needs to obtain basic information about the health of his patients. But when he wants to go beyond the clinical setting and find out more about their health issues -- the whys and wherefores of teen pregnancy, for example - he puts the medical instruments down and picks up a camera.

Keep reading...

“Enhancing My Medical Education Through Photography," A Talk By Pediatrician/Photographer John Moses from Center for Documentary Studies on Vimeo.

Cairo Photographer Sees Hope in Turmoil // Scott Nelson Tells What It's Like

Full article here // Excerpt below

By The New York Times

Scott Nelson, 40, is a freelance photographer who works regularly for The New York Times. He’s from Denver but has been based in Cairo for a decade. For this post, he spoke with James Estrin late Saturday and followed that by elaborating on his experiences and expectations as a photojournalist and as a Cairo resident.

Keep reading...

Painting in Deadly Oil // From The NY Times' Lens Blog

Full article here // Excerpt below

Oil-soaked pelicans. Turtles caught midstroke in black ooze. Floating schools of dead fish. And then fishermen throwing out their catch.

In the visual coverage of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill last year, certain tableaus became pervasive. An image would move over the wires and photojournalists on the scene competed to match it. “Everyone was trying to make the same picture,” said Benjamin Lowy, “because it was very hard to articulate visually.” For one thing, he said, the spill was so vast.

Mr. Lowy, 31, a photographer with Reportage by Getty Images, found another way to capture the story. He focused on the oil itself as it collected on the water’s surface in phosphorescent, psychedelic swirls and paisleys, the result of different chemical mixtures, rates of oxidation and lighting angles.

Keep reading...

Documenting "Processions of the Cross" // Photographer Emil Gataullin in search of God

Full Article and Slideshow Here // Excerpt Below

by Teresa Tomassoni

For the last five years, he has traveled with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of Russians on pilgrimages to the country’s most sacred religious shrines. His series, “Greshnyi Cheloveche” (a sinning man or sinner), documents these “cross processions.”

Walking dozens of miles a day through scalding sun and heavy rain, sleeping on church floors by night amid wives praying for their alcoholic husbands, superstitious businessmen, sick children, repenting criminals and earnest monks, Mr. Gataullin has tried to understand why and how people seek God. He does so with his camera ready.

“It’s important to capture not just the religious side of the event, not the surface of what’s happening,” Mr. Gataullin said, “but to try to show the individual — his emotions, feelings, suffering, his inner state. And at the same time, to show the communication of human with a god.”

Keep Going...

Hands Through the Ages // Accompanied by Rilke's Poetry

Full Post Here // Excerpt Below

by Trent Gilliss

Immediately when I saw this photograph by Touhami Ennadre, this poignant moment in our interview with Joanna Macy came to mind:

“I’m looking at my hand right now as we talk. It’s got a lot of wrinkles because I’m 81 years old, but it’s linked to hands like this back through the ages. This hand is directly linked to hands that learned to reach and grasp and climb and push up on dry land and weave reeds into baskets, and it has a fantastic history. Every particle and every atom in this hand goes back to the beginning of space-time. We’re part of that story.”

Two Worlds // Torn Between the Artistic and Religious establishments

The hits keep coming from Transpositions, the blog of the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts at the University of St. Andrews. Their latest must-read arrives via Tanya Walker, a PhD student in Divinity at St. Andrews, on young Christian artists being torn between the aesthetic and religious establishments. An excellent piece. Enjoy! -- Leif

Full Essay Here // Excerpt Below

by Tanya Walker

I recently asked 24 young artists who were Christians to consider two questions:

What does your craft require of you?

What does the church require of your craft?

Their answers revealed the tensions they felt trying to “fit” into two worlds whose differing values seemed to pull them in opposite directions.

Keep Reading...

Taking a closer look at the origins of Photography

Full Article Here // Excerpt Below

By The LA Times

Historians seem to agree that the first photographic images were created around 1825 by Joseph Nicephore Niépce, a French scientist who experimented with various imagery techniques, including heliographs made on pewter plates. This week, the Getty Conservation Institute is presenting research that reveals new details about how Niépce created those first photographic likenesses.

Continue Reading

Duke Arts Festival Submission Deadline Extended to Oct. 15

The Duke Arts Festival has extended its submission deadline to October 15! This is a great opportunity for us to represent Duke Divinity School and our engagement with the arts to the broader Duke community. Click here to learn more and to see submission guidelines--visual art, photography, poetry, music, just about anything is fair game!

Duke Arts Festival 2010 // Call for Submissions

The Duke Arts Festival takes place Oct. 22 - Nov. 7. Student artists are invited to submit work in all media forms including, but not limited to, painting, photography, poetry, sculpture, mixed media, digital art, animation, film, video, music, dance and poetry. Submissions will be displayed in a public exhibit in the Bryan Center during the festival. A jury of students and arts department faculty will select visual art works for exhibition in the Bryan Center’s Louise Jones Brown Gallery — a gallery that traditionally exhibits the work of professional artists. Prizes will be awarded for works selected as Best of Show.

More info/submission guidelines

"Images from the Field" 2010 Field Ed Photo Exhibit // A Video

Here's a video that provides a glimpse into the 2010 "Images from the Field" photo exhibit, now on display in the Divinity School.

Seeing "New Beauty in the familiar, both near and far" // NASA unveils topographic photographs of the moon

Full Post Here // Excerpt Below

by Trent Gillis, senior editor of APM's Krista Tippett on Being

Wired Science has posted some incredible images from NASA of the first complete topographic map of the moon. These magical images also serve a practical function. They create a way of seeing and analyzing the formation and development of our solar system by way of its craters. Our planet has a shared history with the moon: “Among other things, the map confirms theories of an onslaught of massive asteroids around 3.9 billion years ago that likely evaporated any water present on Earth at the time.”

There’s a lesson here too. If we point our lens at something a bit nearer to us — whether it’s an interstellar object or the neighbor next door — we just may learn something about ourselves, and our future. Or at least we’ll see new beauty in the familiar, both near and far.

Keep Reading...

"The Happy Paradox of Meditation and Photography" // From SOF Observed

by Monica Biswas

Creating a photograph is like meditation, full of paradoxes that coexist happily. The perfect shot cannot be captured by chasing it into a corner, and yet you must have the persistent drive to do it.

Keep Reading...

Portraits of Survival in Pakistan // From The Virginia Quarterly Review & SOF Observed

Just up this morning over at the blog of Speaking of Faith (soon to be renamed Being by mid-September) is a link to a set of overwhelmingly powerful black/white portraits of steadfast survivors in Gaza which was recently published in The Virginia Quarterly Review. The photographs are taken by Asim Rafiqui, a rising star in photography who bases his work out of Stockholm, Sweden and who has focused his photography upon the people, landscape and stories of Pakistan and Afghanistan since 2003. Follow this link to The Virginia Quarterly to begin viewing the photos in the "Portraits of Survival" portfolio from Pakistan and to read Rafiqui's personal account of the back-story behind the images. -- Leif

Remembering Hurricane Katrina 5 Years Later

OK, I'm biased--part of this news piece was shot in my living room and features my parents and pictures taken by my sister. :) -- Sarah

__________

Submit Field Ed photos for the 2010 "Images from the Field" exhibit!

"Images from the Field" Field Ed Photo Exhibit

Have a favorite picture from your field ed experience this summer? Submit it to New Creation for inclusion in the 2010 "Images from the Field" Photo Exhibit! You don't have to be a professional photographer to send us an image! Please visit http://www.duke.edu/web/newcreation to download submission guidelines and forms, and send a completed form with each submission to newcreationartsgroup@gmail.com by Friday, September 10. New Creation leaders will print out photos and we'll have a hanging party the following Friday, to which everyone is invited. Can't wait to see your pictures! Feel free to email us at the above address if you have any questions.

Arnold Odermatt // Photographing the Calm After the Crash

Full article here // Excerpt below

By Jonathan Schultz

The shot, one of dozens on display at New York’s Leo Koenig Inc. Projekte gallery, was taken in 1972 by Arnold Odermatt, the official police photographer of Nidwalden, Switzerland. From 1948 until his 1990 retirement, Mr. Odermatt documented with a master lensman’s eye the aftermath of vehicular accidents within his canton — that is, his state within the federal state of Switzerland. His talent was later recognized by a Swiss curator, Harald Szeemann, who secured Mr. Odermatt’s oeuvre a showing at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001.

Keep reading...

Surreal Glories of a Salt Flat // From NYT's Green Blog

Full article here // Excerpt below

By John Collins Rudolf

Watch the full episode. See more POV.

For the past six years the Australian photographer Murray Fredericks has journeyed across the lake bed (it fills completely only about once every 100 years), camping alone on the salt flats for as much as five weeks at a time. He collected the photographs from these expeditions for display in “Salt,” a stunning 2006 gallery show in London, Sydney, Paris and Shanghai.

Keep reading...

Help Us Create a Picture Show About Celebration // GOOD Projects

Full article here // Excerpt below

Calling all photographers—amateur or professional.

There are a million reasons for celebration in our lives, and we often do so with parties, toasts, vacations, and everything in between. To catch those happy moments—big or little —in all their glory, we need you to send us a photo of a celebration in your life.

We'll select 10 to 20 of them to create a collaborative Picture Show, made by the GOOD community. Once the Picture Show is published, the GOOD community will be invited to choose their favorite images. The winning submission will be printed in our next issue, and the photographer will get a GOOD T-shirt and a free subscription (or gift subscription).

Keep reading...