DMJM Design

Los Angeles will soon be getting a new photography museum, courtesy of the Annenberg Foundation (legacy of the early media mogul Walter Annenberg, who began as the founder of Seventeen Magazine).  Although the J. Paul Getty Museum has one of the most renowned photography collections in the world, as far as I know this will be the only museum in Los Angeles dedicated solely to photography.  That is, unless you count Riverside as being part of L.A., which I guess you could if you’re the sort of local who thinks “L.A.” is any place you don’t have to board an airplane to get to.

And improve your French ! France, land of better wine in the world, beautiful women, Tour de France, bling-bling president, Art of living. France which as a country can give birth to the better or worse.
Let’s talk about the better today, let’s open the JAK LAB #3 . Every quarter JAKLAB magazine offers a 360° vision about a theme or an aspirationnal trend. JAKLAB invites contributors and gives them room and time to explore and talk. Strategic planners, researchers, writers, artists, photographers, architects are creating an effervescent on line webzine. Monitored friendly by Just A Kiss  founders, a design, creative and strategic agency in Paris, JAKLAB is an open publication and platform.
After Desirable Sunstainability, Absolute Necessity , give a breath to your eyes and brain and involve your senses in Urbanity. If you want to contribute to the next issue, please feel free to “superpoke” this unique quartet on their Facebook group.  http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=11026998211 !  Have fun !  Brigitte Mantel .

sb10062686e-001 Dougal Waters/Getty Images

It’s predicted that in three years we will be watching so much TV and videos on the internet that bandwidth will run out. Most of the networks have their shows on their websites for viewing and now there are new sites like Hulu that have plenty of diverse TV shows and movies. You can also get shows on pay-per-view sites like iTunes and Amazon.

What amazes me is that with the popularity of large HD flat screen TVs, why are we spending so much time on the internet watching videos in such low quality? I’ve decided that it’s because our attention span is so short we need a constant supply of entertainment on our TVs, our computers and our iPhones. Why do I believe this? Because of my case study below…

200018793-001 John Giustina/Getty Images

Case study - Dramatic Prairie Dog

One year ago a clip from a Japanese TV show with a segment about prairie dogs as pets showed up on YouTube. Someone took ten seconds of a close-up of the prairie dog and matched it up with dramatic music. Then it became a YouTube sensation. There were over 2,000 spin-offs and mash-ups of the dramatic prairie dog.

South Park summed it up best in their Canada on Strike episode when they thought the best way to raise money for Canada was to become a YouTube phenomenon. When they became a hit, they earned 10 million theorical dollars on YouTube. They went to the Department of Internet money to get paid. While waiting to get paid, they met up with all of the YouTube favorites, including the prairie dog waiting to cash in…

Tony Linck / Getty Images

Polaroid appears to be the next brand of film to go extinct, the company having just announced plans to completely shut down all of its film-making facilities. It seems they are hoping another company will license the technology to continue producing the film for the devoted (hint hint Lomography).

Kodak was the last big name extinction, an event that British artist Tacita Dean captured on, well, film, documenting the final runs of celluloid at the factory, for which she won the prestigious Hugo Boss art award in 2006.

Update:  Turns out there’s a whole site/movement dedicated to saving Polaroid

Daniel Day/Getty Images

“Hansel…he’s hot.”

So says Will Ferrell as Mogatoo in Zoolander, one of my favorite movies of all time. I bring it up, a) because it makes me laugh and b)because most industries from fashion, technology, fine art and food to name a few, are all trying to discover what’s hot, who’s in, who’s out and what’s next. It’s no different at Getty Images.

I head up this great team of people called Creative Research. Our job is to figure out “what’s hot” for pictures. We do this by studying how consumer trends and behavior affect the imagery our art directors, photo editors and photographers create.

In the past months I’ve spent a lot of time with the gang in sales and a lot of time with our customers. I wanted to find out the truth. Are we are bringing the right pictures to our customers?

So, we just completed this enormous study, we looked at over 2,000 print and TV campaigns from the US, Japan, England, France, Brazil, China, Australia and Germany. We looked at photo requests from our customers, we talked to customers, we looked at consumer behavior in each of these studies. Here’s an excerpt that you can now see for yourself.

What do you think? Talk to me people.

Pangea Day is a global event on May 10, 2008, conceived by documentary filmmaker Jehane Nouhaim (”Control Room”), that aims to tap “the power of film to strengthen tolerance and compassion while uniting millions of people”. Various cities around the world will be “videoconferenced live to produce a 4-hour program of powerful films, visionary speakers, and uplifting music”. Not exactly clear what’s gonna happen, but here’s the trailer, all the footage in which is courtesy Getty Images:

Interesting discussion yesterday on KQED San Francisco’s Forum with Michael Krasny on “Photography and Its Future”.

Photo: FPG via Getty Images

In a nutshell: white monitor space uses more energy than black monitor space, so blackle.com steps in to green the aesthetically spartan but energy-extravagant Google behemoth. A totally brilliant bit of internet MacGyvering that, if not a runaway success, will certainly go miles in raising awareness about what’s possible.

There’s no real reason it shouldn’t be a runaway success of wide and rapid adoption, but then again, there’s no real reason that people who buy an SUV should have a huge tax windfall instead of paying a tax directly (if not exponentially!) proportional to the weight of their vehicle - thankfully a loophole that appears to be on the wane.

Speaking of the Webbys, I’ll be damned if this doesn’t get nominated and hopefully win next year.

The latest TED talk release includes an understated but amazing demo by Blaise Aguera y Arcas of some new technologies that are sure to have an impact on the way we use and view digital images, photo-sharing, and the web in general.  It’s only 7 minutes and you should definitely see it.

Photojournalist James Nachtwey won one of the 3 TED prizes this year.  The winners get $100K to continue their work and also get to make a wish, that the  influential TED community is then tasked to help bring to fruition.  Watch his acceptance speech here.  The other 2 winners were Bill Clinton and E.O. Wilson.