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From The British Journal of Photography website:
American photographer Robert Adams has won this year's prestigious Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography

Adams wins approximately £40,000 for his work spanning more than four decades. 'Adams is one of the most important and influential photographers of the last 40 years,' says the Foundation. 'During that time he has worked almost exclusively in the American West, and, as photography has altered and fragmented, he has refined and reaffirmed its inherent language, adapting the legacies of nineteenth century and modernist photography to his own very singular purpose.

'Precise and undramatic, Adams' accumulative vision of the West now stands as a formidable document, reflecting broader, global concerns about the environment, while consistently recognising signs of human aspiration and elements of hope across a particular changing landscape.'

His prize, along with a gold medal, will be presented at a ceremony at the Hasselblad Centre in Gothenburg in November, where an exhibition of his life's work will go on show.

Posted by at 6:07 AM | Permalink

From the Fox News Website:

NEW YORK — A very early photograph of New York City in the 1840s has sold for $62,500.

The photo depicting Manhattan's Upper West Side as open countryside was sold Monday at Sotheby's auction house.

The photo is a daguerreotype, an early form of photography that was used mainly for portraits. It is believed to date from 1848 and shows a white house with shutters, a grassy hillside and a horse-drawn carriage.

Sotheby's said the photo was recently discovered in New England. Neither the buyer nor the seller was identified.

The auction house estimated the pre-sale value of the daguerrotype at $50,000 to $70,000.

Posted by at 6:25 AM | Permalink

August 31, 1913 - March 29, 2009

Helen Levitt, US photography legend has died.

From the British Journal of Photography website:
Levitt was considered one of the world's greatest street photographers, and the last living link with America's golden age of photography in the 1930s. Throughout her life, she worked in the streets of New York taking pictures of everyday things such as her most famous image, which depicts three children preparing to go trick-or-treating on Halloween in 1939.

Born in 1913 in New York City, Levitt left school to work for a commercial photographer and, by 1938, had started her seminal book, In the Street: chalk drawings and messages, New York City 1938-1948.

Levitt met Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1935 and even followed him when he photographed on the Brooklyn waterfront. She studied with Walker Evans, and in 1943, had Edward Steichen curate her first solo show at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1959 and 1960, she received two Guggenheim Foundation grants to take colour photographs in New York.

Levitt published her first major book, A Way of Seeing, in 1965, but in other respects photobooks were a later development for her. In the Street wasn't published until 1987, and her magnum opus, Crosstown, didn't hit the shelves until 2001. Slide Show, the Colour Photographs of Helen Levitt, which collected together her little-known colour work, was published in 2005.

Last year, Brooklyn-based Powerhouse Books published her last monograph, which saw Levitt handpick her eclectic mix of iconic and previously unpublished images, making this book her 'greatest hits' collection of personal bests.

Levitt died in her sleep in New York on Sunday.

Visit powerhousebooks.com for more details on her last monograph.

Posted by at 6:21 AM | Permalink