Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

Interestingly enough, the single image of mine in over 20,000 on Flickr that remains censored by Flickr is an image of a woman by artist Mel Ramos (seen here and that I blogged yesterday). The image is from a painting that hangs in the Oakland Museum of California as part of their permanent collection. There is also another Mel Ramos painting in the de Young (the Superman image — I thought the two images above went together well) but that’s certainly less controversial than a female nude.

Mel Ramos has been one of my favorite artists for a while. A lot of people consider him a Pop artist in the style of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, etc. But I’ve always thought of him first and foremost as a representative of the photo realism school of painting. However you think of and classify Ramos though, his art is interesting, provocative, contemporary and certainly controversial.

Last week, the New York Times (thanks to the Oakland Museum of California for the heads up) published an article entitled, “The Image Is Erotic. But Is It Art? ” where they took a look at Ramos and his body of work (literally and figuratively speaking). If you are interested in Ramos or his work, I’d recommend the article.

Mel Ramos is represented by the Louis K. Meisel (who invented the term photorealism) Gallery.

U.S. New York Representative Pete King (Republican, Long Island) introduced a new bill in Congress this month H.R.414: “To require mobile phones containing digital cameras to make a sound when a photograph is taken. ” The short title of the bill is simply, “Camera Phone Predator Alert Act.”

From the bill:

” (a) Requirement- Beginning 1 year after the date of enactment of this Act, any mobile phone containing a digital camera that is manufactured for sale in the United States shall sound a tone or other sound audible within a reasonable radius of the phone whenever a photograph is taken with the camera in such phone. A mobile phone manufactured after such date shall not be equipped with a means of disabling or silencing such tone or sound.

(b) Enforcement by Consumer Product Safety Commission- The requirement in subsection (a) shall be treated as a consumer product safety standard promulgated by the Consumer Product Safety Commission under section 7 of the Consumer Product Safety Act (15 U.S.C. 2056). A violation of subsection (a) shall be enforced by the Commission under section 19 of such Act (15 U.S.C. 2068).”

Now I’m a father of four young children, and nobody wants to protect their children from predators more than I do, but this is just plain stupid.

First off there are many times that you don’t want your camera to make audible noises. Let’s say your shooting your own kid in the school play. Having a bunch of disruptive beeps going off every time someone takes a photo is annoying. There are many times when you want to shoot something being less disruptive not being more disruptive. There are certainly plenty of times and places where it is perfectly appropriate to try and be as quiet as you can while shooting.

Secondly, this bill only applies to cell phones. So if some predator wants to try to sneak photos of kids in the locker room all they would have to do is use a regular old point and shoot camera which this bill doesn’t apply to. In fact, spy type cameras have been around for years and if someone really wants to try to take stealthy photos, they certainly can without the need to use their cell phone camera. The law also does nothing to address video.

Then of course there is the part of the bill that this would only apply to new phones. So let’s see, a predator then could, theoretically, still use any old cell phone that they want to take silent phones while millions of law abiding users have to put up with noisy beeps going off whenever they shoot.

I have no idea what the cost of implementing this technology would be, but I’m sure AT&T would figure out some way to make the “enhancement” a reoccurable fee every month on your cell phone bill.

It seems to me like this bill is yet another example of really bad ideas coming from government. It would seem that this is not the first boneheaded idea that Rep. King has come up with by the way. Another of his winner ideas was responsible for funneling $3 million in taxpayer money to a campaign donor for custom manhole covers that Con Ed said could be dangerous in — order to fight those pesky terrorists. At least that’s the way the Daily News reported it. I thought Republicans were supposed to be for less government not for more.

ArsTechnica has more on this new bill here. Thanks, Geoff!

Museum of Neon Art (MONA)
136 W. 4th Street
Los Angeles, CA
213-489-9918

Last month while I was down in Los Angeles I had an opportunity to stop by the Museum of Neon Art, or the MONA as those familiar with the museum call it. Those of you who follow my photography know that my Neon Days and Neon Nights set is one of my most worked on collection of images. I’ve got almost 2,000 photographs of neon in my collection so far and so I was very excited to be able to visit this interesting museum devoted to neon signs in Los Angeles.

The MONA is easy to miss. It’s on 4th Street in Downtown L.A in a fairly nondescript space with three big letters in it’s storefront window, A-R-T. But if like me you admire neon, you will definitely want to stop by and check it out.

The museum was founded in 1991 and the space it’s in now is its temporary space from what I understand. I don’t think that a permanent space has been identified for the museum but I think that they are working on finding one. The current space that houses the MONA is a little on the small side for a museum, but they make up for their smaller size by having some of the most amazing vintage neon signs I’ve ever seen. Included in their collection are a giant Jantzen neon diver, a great vintage Pep Boys sign, a Van de Kamp’s bakery sign, a Fun Land side with moving neon, and lots of other great vintage signs.

In addition to the museum’s vintage neon signs, most of which were restored and in perfect working order, there were a number of other interesting group exhibits by contemporary artists focusing on neon. In the lobby of the museum they also had several fantastic neon photographs by photographer Rob Carter. They also had some great historical neon photographs, including a photograph of the first neon sign in the United States, a Packard sign that people used to drive from miles around to come see and visit.

I spent a half an hour or so talking to the guy who was working the door at the museum and he gave me a lot of great background on the museum. Apparently, in addition to the museum itself they also have a giant warehouse with even more signs downtown somewhere that is not open to the public. Apparently the warehouse doesn’t have electricity so you have to visit it with flashlights. Hopefully someday I’ll be able to check out that place as well.

My favorite thing about the museum? It was such a relaxing place to take photographs of their signs. It’s refreshing to me that the museum is so open with it’s photo policy and had no problem with me spending a few hours shooting their collection. I pretty much had the entire place to myself and had all the room I needed to work and photograph the amazing collection. I was able to get down on the floor to shoot and really had the run of the place. My only warning from the guy working there was to watch out for the suitcase that moves around on the floor, it’s an exhibit and sometimes people forget that it’s there.

In addition to the neon museum itself, the MONA also runs a number of different double decker bus neon tours. I didn’t get a chance to go on any of those but I’ve heard from other people who have that they are great.

It seems like every other day another neon sign is coming down. I worry that, especially with the bad economy, more and more places are going to go out of business and that we are likely to lose more and more historic signs going forward. Having a museum devoted to salvaging these signs and restoring them is a great thing. Hats off to the people behind this museum for doing the important work that they do.

Admission to the MONA is $7. There is metered street parking, but bring lots of coins because the parking meters downtown are pretty expensive (fortunately I found a broken meter when I visited). The museum is open Thursday-Saturday noon-7PM; Sunday noon-5PM.

I put together a set of about 15 images from the museum that you can view here. I’ve got lots more images of the museum that I still need to upload that I’ll be adding in the days ahead.

Update: Interestingly enough there is an article today over at the Environmental Capital blog at the Wall Street Journal that talks about the recent decision by ConnocoPhillips to try and save some of the Union 76 service station balls that have been coming down. It looks like the MONA has in fact recieved on of these iconic balls from ConnocoPhillips. Thanks, Russell!

Recently when my Flickr photostream hit 20,000 images I blogged a post about my 20,000th image on Flickr. I got a number of messages though from people telling me that I’d done my math wrong, that I hadn’t actually hit my 20,000th image. I was surprised by these notes and so I logged out of Flickr myself and sure enough, when not logged in, my Flickrstream showed five less images than I saw when I was logged in.

So earlier today I posted in the Flickr Help Forum about this to see if someone from Flickr Staff could explain why my stream showed five less images than it should. It turns out the answer to this was easier than I thought and that I could use the Flickr Organizer to see if any of my photos had been marked as “Restricted” images by Flickr.

It turns out that five of my images on Flickr were actually marked “Restricted,” the five images that you see above.

The first of the images of mine censored by Flickr is of a sculpture that sits in the middle of Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. It’s public art approved by the City of Beverly Hills and seen by thousands of children every year. Unfortunately Flickr deems the image too risque for the public view and has instead chosen to censor it.

The second image of mine censored is of a painting by artist Mel Ramos that hangs in the Oakland Museum of California. Again, a public museum visited by children every single week of the year.

The third image of mine censored by Flickr is of a screenshot of the Flickr Blog announcing the Yahoo acquisition of Flickr from back in 2004 stating, “…but we’re going to stay true to our vision and to the people who made us what we are — that’s you, the Flickr pioneers…” The post was critical of Flickr who many feel have not stayed “true” to their original vision.

The fourth image of mine censored is a screenshot of an interview that I did with the website Black Star Rising.

The fifth image of mine censored is a screenshot I took of a Flickr Help Forum post when Flickr reversed their decision to cap the number of contacts you were allowed to have at Flickr at 5,000.

What bothers me as much as the censorship at Flickr is the fact that when you are censored at Flickr there is really no way to know. When you are censored at Flickr it is done by some nameless faceless Yahoo staffer. You are not notified that you were censored. You are not given a chance to object to the censorship. You are just quietly censored and they hope you won’t notice.

As much as I love Flickr and enjoy using the service I’ve long been critical of the rampant censorship that continues to take place on the site and object to the images in my photostream being marked “Restricted” by Flickr staff. Certainly there may be some things that Flickr should mark as restricted — pornography, hate images, etc, but restricting public fine art paintings and sculpture or screenshot posts that are critical of Flickr should not be how they use their censorship tool. And even when they feel that stuff should be censored, I think that Flickr owes the community at least some sort of notification that their images are and have been censored and why, with an opportunity to appeal or object.

If you’d like to see if Flickr is censoring any of your images as well, go to the Flickr Organizer and click on “more options” under the search function and then tell the organizer to show you only “Restricted” content. You might just be surprised that Flickr has censored some of your images as well.

Update: Flickr has uncensored 4 of my 5 images that they were censoring now. I’m working on trying to get the remaining image uncensored as well. I’m also hoping that Flickr will agree to notify people in the future if they censor their work. I think that’s only fair. The Flickr Help Forum thread above is a long one and worth reading if this is an area that interests you. One of the things debated in the thread is the question as to why it is ok on Flickr to publish photographs of male nude sculpture (like Michelangelo’s David) which clearly show male genitalia, but it is not ok to publish photos of female sculpture that show genitalia. Personally I don’t think any photographs of sculpture on Flickr should be censored, but they have not agreed to that point yet.

Yesterday Adobe released the latest version of Lightroom, Lightroom 2.3, as well as Camera Raw 5.3.

From Adobe:

“The ‘release candidate’ label indicates that this update is well tested but would benefit from additional community testing before it is distributed automatically to all customers. The Lightroom and Camera Raw teams would like the community to help verify the quality of this update through normal usage as this will ensure that the application is tested on a wide variety of hardware and software configurations not available internally at Adobe.

Adobe is also pleased to announce the availability of Lightroom in eight new languages, including Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Korean, Chinese (simplified) and Chinese (traditional). The Lightroom 2.3 Release Candidate available on Adobe Labs includes these additional languages, and Adobe greatly appreciates any feedback the community can provide the Lightroom team.”

You can download both Lightroom 2.3 and Camera Raw 5.3 from Adobe Labs here.

You can submit feedback on the new version of Lightroom here.

Aaron Brazell is the WordPress king as far as I’m concerned.

After three years of thinking about moving from the Blogger Platform to WordPress I finally took the plunge last week. I’d always wanted to make the switch but it just seemed too technically difficult for me to do myself. I’d heard about a bug that wouldn’t allow blogs with lots of comments (I had over 20,000) to transfer all of the comments over from Blogger to WordPress.

It turns out that there was in fact a 5,000 comment limit, but a huge thanks to Rick Klau, the Blogger Product Manager, who worked with us to change that (not just for me, but for everyone going forward) so that I could move my blog over to WordPress. Usually helping a customer move to a competitor is not high on anyone’s development list, but I’m really pleased that Blogger helped us with this and I think it goes a long way to show a very positive front from Google with regards to data portability.

Aaron has a more detailed post out today about how he moved my blog from Blogger to WordPress here including more of the technical details involved.

What I will say is that I was *tremendously* pleased with the job that Aaron did in the migration of my blog. He is an amazing professional and made the entire transfer seamless and easy for me. And I’d really encourage anyone who is thinking about doing any work with the WordPress platform to consider hiring him to do the work for you. In hindsight, moving the blog over is something that I never could have done on my own. I would have spent many hours on the project and been extremely frustrated. If you are on another blogging platform and are thinking of making a change or need any sort of WordPress work done, Aaron is definitely the guy to do it.

Since I transferred my blog to WordPress last week it has lit a fire under me with a greater desire than ever to blog. I think I’ve blogged more posts in the past week than any week since I’ve been blogging. I can’t say enough good things about the WordPress platform. I love the way my new layout looks and feels and I feel like I have so much better control over my blog now and so many great tools from the WordPress Community to use. I only wish that I’d moved my blog over years ago instead of waiting as long as I did.

Aaron has a consulting page up on his own site here. He actually really needs consulting work right now and things are getting sort of dire for him in this bad economy. If you or your company are considering any WordPress work it would be fantastic if you could take a look at his services. Consider this a ringing endorsement from a very satisfied customer. Oh, how did I find Aaron by the way? On FriendFeed, where else He’s on FriendFeed here.

I shot the above photo of the HOPE posters back when Shepherd Fairey had a show in town late last year and plastered San Francisco with various images of his.

Tom Gralish over at the Philadelphia Inquirer has a blog post out today where he claims that the iconic and famous Obama HOPE Image, which now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery and is credited as being created by artist Shepherd Fairey, may have actually been taken directly from a photograph taken by Freelance Photographer Mannie Garcia. Although I’m not aware of Garcia ever being attributed as the source of this image, Gralish did a great bit of his own detective work to come up with this conclusion. I have not seen any comments anywhere yet from Garcia on the image which will likely go down as one of the greatest and historical works of art of the past century.

Interestingly enough, it also appears that the original photo was not taken at some philosophical moment where Obama was contemplating the future of our great nation or delivering some great speech, but rather when he was probably listening to either Republican Senator Sam Brownback or possibly actor George Clooney.

From Gralish:

“The photo was made by freelance photographer Mannie Garcia who was on assignment for the AP in April of 2006, where a National Press Club news advisory alerted the media that, Academy Award Winner George Clooney will address National Press Club on hisrecent visit to war-torn Darfur and will release video footage from his trip to Sudan. Clooney will be joined by U.S. Senators Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), co-sponsors of S. 1462, The Darfur Peace and Accountability Act, and co-sponsors of amendments to increase funding
 for peacekeeping operations in Sudan.”

So, it looks like the image that poster artist Shepard Fairey said looked presidential, telling the Washington Post: “He is gazing off into the future, saying, ‘I can guide you,’ ” actually showed our new president listening to George Clooney. Or, probably more likely, fellow Senator Brownback.”

Richard Prince would be proud.

In related news today, it was also uncovered that the famous “Joebama” poster, created by artist Joe Reifer, interestingly enough, also was lifted from a photograph of Reifer taken by yours truly in 2007 at the Lucky JuJu Pinball Gallery. (If you’d like to create your own Obama Hopeish poster from your own image you can do that here).

Update: It seems, from Garcia’s website, that representatives of Fairey’s yesterday confirmed that the original image did in fact come from one of Garcia’s photographs:

The Danziger Gallery which represents the artistic works of Mr. Fairey contacted me on the 21st of January 2009 to inform me that my photograph was in fact the basis for the artwork that has become better know now as the “HOPE” and “PROGRESS” posters., thanks Claytonia!

Update 2: NPR has a podcast audio interview with Fairey where he discusses this image from yesterday here. Thanks, David!

The video above is a sneak preview clip of a new photography video series being produced by Zoom In Online. Zoom In Online is an excellent photography news and resource site and I’m excited to learn today about the new video series that they will be launching.

For their first video episode, Zoom In Online interviews photojournalist Keith Bedford. Bedford covered the Obama campaign from its beginning all the way through to election night as a professional photojournalist. Some of the images of the campaign in the sneak preview video above are fantastic, really strong reportage.

The new show officially premieres on February 1st. Congrats Sophia on the new series!

I love seeing more professionally created photography video series showing up online. My Pal Marc Silbur also recently just launched his new video series Photoshow as well. I blogged about that a few weeks ago. I did an interview with Marc while shooting the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco that you will be able to see there in the near future.