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After the Kodak Century (1)

In September 2013, just months before I wrote this, Kodak emerged from bankruptcy, much diminished as a consequence of having sold off most of its patents, downsized and reconfigured now as a new-tech company concentrating on developing commercial and consumer digital printers and inks for the publishing, packaging, and advertising sectors. An enterprise that for almost a hundred years ruled as the undisputed alpha dog of its industry has fallen abruptly back into the pack. […]

What Happened in Vegas (2)

What is striking about current work is its diversity of style and mood, its attention to the sensuous and tactile, and its insistence on encompassing not only a wide range of sexual behaviors but also a full spectrum of sexual moods. This collective accomplishment unquestionably denotes a raising of the bar for what David Steinberg calls “sexual photography” — an embrace of the true complexity of sex at the present-day intersection of sex and photography. […]

What Happened in Vegas (1)

People here in the United States pursue in growing numbers what I call the photo-erotic, by which I mean the specific act of putting erotic behaviors on the visual record, playing them out in front of a lensed instrument loaded with light-sensitive materials or digital sensors, registering on film or in pixels our erotic inclinations — not just for our private delectation but also for wide distribution. […]

Bad Day in Vevey (3)

On a purely practical, bottom-line level, this gang of five — Michel Berney, director of the CEPV; Christian Rossier (on the technical faculty of the CEPV)Pierre Keller of ECAL; local entrepreneur Vincent Juillerat; and Anne-Catherine Lyon, director of the cantonal department of education — took a post-secondary photography program that operated in the black and turned it into a losing proposition, with no clientele, in the space of about 18 months. How very Swiss of them. […]

Bad Day in Vevey (2)

Apparently you intend to “professionalize the work of the CEPV students and to improve their relationship to the field” by removing them in their culminating third year from the guidance of an unprecedented group of established high-profile professional names in those various territories of photography — famous and influential senior figures whose connection to these students can benefit them in many ways — and instead placing those students under the strict supervision of a cluster of Swiss nonentities. The pedagogical rationale for this escapes me. […]