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By Wired, on January 13th, 2011%
 > Soraya Darabi, Foodspotting . > View all “Solitude vivifies; isolation kills.” —Abbé Joseph Roux, 19th-century priest and poet. On paper, it sounds like one of the worst ideas for a photo project: Portraits of bloggers? At their computers? But Gabriela Herman ’s photos of exactly that are surprisingly thoughtful, deep and compelling. They bring out the hidden drama in an extremely passive-looking activity. Herman’s Bloggers sheds light –- usually the glow of the laptop screen -– to the previously invisible rise of dormitory pundits. She shows us not only the physical spaces where blogging takes place and the people behind the blogs, but also the human connections made over those apartment wi-fi connections. “I wanted to bring their intimate worlds to the outside public,” says Herman. “Ultimately though, Bloggers is more about rethinking the way we experience the world, looking at how we live and spend our time.” Ancient lore tells us of a time when blogs were the exclusive playground of nerds who hand-coded every page themselves in pure HTML. Now everyone from Fortune 500 companies to cats with cheezburgers have adopted blogs to shape the world with their commentary. WordPress alone has more than 25 million accounts. Wired’s 2002 declaration of the blog’s arrival now seems foolishly self-evident. The blog’s big bang has led many to question whether communicating with a larger audience from a secluded room is more or less social than speaking with a vastly smaller network of people face-to-face. For her part, Herman disputes that technology has an isolating effect. “I believe bloggers are connecting us, bringing us closer,” she says, “allowing for an interactive platform, a two-way dialogue that allows for both online and offline relationships to form.” For her, Herman says, blogs are a “comfort” and her “go-to source for information.” Appropriately, Herman’s method for finding her subjects mimics the subject she’s documenting. Following each shoot, Herman asked the sitter to recommend someone on his or her blog roll as her next subject. The series of portraits began to mirror the tentative web links between the subjects and their online activity. “In the beginning I ended up with a lot of photography bloggers, because those were the ones I knew and had access to,” says Herman. “Then through referrals I ended up meeting a lot of media bloggers.” With thoughts leaning toward a future show, Herman is now reaching out to higher-profile bloggers and is focusing on individuals who make a living through blogging. All photos: Gabriela Herman . . . → Read More: Voyeuristic Blogger Portraits Put Faces to URLs
By Wired, on January 12th, 2011%
 > [This article is the second in a two-part series. Read Part 1: Relics Reborn — Ribbon Microphones Rally for Vintage-Audio Geeks .] As studio-quality home-recording equipment has become cheaper over the years, a good microphone — a key component of a bedroom setup — has remained prohibitively expensive for many amateurs. Ribbon mics are widely considered among the best microphones, but they can easily cost thousands of dollars. See Also: Ribbon Microphones Rally for Vintage-Audio Geeks Birth of the Microphone: How Sound Became Signal So it was no small boon when, over the last decade, a crop of cheap, Chinese-made ribbon mics appeared on the U.S. market. Suddenly the landscape for music engineers on a budget was more inviting. And while the quality of these microphones is predictably questionable, a handful of tinkerers have found that small modifications to these imports can exponentially improve their quality, thus shrinking the price tag for a comparable mic by a factor of 10. Though multiple Chinese companies sell ribbon mics under different brand names (most commonly Apex, MXL or Nady), many American customers suspect that most, if not all, of the Chinese mics are made in the same factory. Michael Joly, who upgrades Apex mics commercially, believes that portions of the Chinese imports are clones of the American-made AEA R84, which retails for $1,000. In most industries, the kind of direct copying perpetrated by Chinese manufacturers would trigger a lawsuit, but the original patents for ribbon mics have long since expired, and the technology hasn’t changed radically since the old days. As a result, the basic design of ribbon mics, from the guts of the ribbon assembly to the glossy chrome of the exterior, is something akin to collective property. Present-day builders can emulate the tried-and-true mics of the past, often copying a single element, such as the body of the mic or the layout of the ribbon. Even AEA, one of the most respected companies in the business, makes replicas of classic and copyright-free RCA ribbon microphones. What distinguishes top-quality mics from the mass-produced Chinese copies is craftsmanship — and a fixed address. As studio owner John Vanderslice points out, if something goes wrong with one of his American-made mics, he can pick up the phone and talk to the person who made it. Murky origins aside, some audio enthusiasts were surprised by the quality of Chinese-made mics, which offered respectable sound for around $100, a relatively low price. Top photo: College student and musician Jeffrey James used a piece of bathroom handrail for the chassis of a ribbon mic. James used plans from Rick Wilkinson, profiled later in this article. Bottom photo: The completed mic. Photos by Katherine Anderson. > View all . . . → Read More: Ribbon Microphones: Audio Icon You Can Build in Your Garage
By Wired, on January 11th, 2011%
 > As part of our special feature on ribbon mics this week, we’re taking a trip through the microphone’s early days — from invention to old-school broadcasting. Enjoy these historic photos of a time when recorded and amplified audio were a novelty, rather than a necessity of everyday life. Above: Carbon-Button Microphone This drumlike device is a carbon-button microphone, patented by Emile Berliner in 1877. It was one of the first ever created and by far the most usable. Berliner is credited with inventing the carbon-button microphone in 1876. Though there were other microphone technologies in existence, Berliner’s design was more robust than the rest (including a liquid-based mic invented by Alexander Graham Bell). Bell himself was so impressed with the carbon-button that he bought the rights from Berliner for $50,000 (1.1 million dollars in today’s money), so he could use it in his telephone prototypes. Berliner called his microphone a “loose-contact transmitter” because it was composed of two electrical contacts separated by a thin layer of carbon. The “loose” contact was attached to a diaphragm that vibrated when struck by a sound wave. The other was connected to the output. Unfortunately for Berliner, his patent didn’t survive a legal challenge, which resulted in an 1892 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that gave the credit to Thomas Edison. In fact, neither Berliner nor Edison could rightfully claim full credit for the carbon-button mic. The idea for it had been around for years before they began their experiments, though it had never been perfected. > View all . . . → Read More: Birth of the Microphone: How Sound Became Signal
By Wired, on January 10th, 2011%
 Inspired and perplexed by our image-saturated culture, French artist Leo Caillard has cast the Louvre as a larger than life playlist of masterpieces. In Caillard’s digitally rendered images, paintings display navigation elements from iTunes, iOS and Mac OS X. Museum goers flip through famous works like they would the albums of their music collection. Is it bad that we wish the Louvre really worked like this? “We see thousands of different pictures every day in news, art, fashion, internet ads, Facebook,” says Caillard. “Everything is together without any organization. People start to lose the ability to reflect on what they are looking at.” Caillard arrived at the UI concept after visiting Paris’ famous museums. He saw visitors looking at masterpieces for five seconds at a time, the same way they look at pictures on a mobile phone, and then move on to the next painting. An Apple product user himself, Caillard adopted the “highly recognizable” interface for the series titled Art Games . “I imagined people playing with art around them, like they would do playing with pictures on their iPhone/iPad,” says Caillard. Caillard is not against tech and its tools. Indeed, computers and software are what allow him to render his . . . → Read More: Artist Maps Apple’s UI Onto the Louvre’s Masterpieces
By Wired, on December 15th, 2010%
> About 40,000 young Swazi girls take part each year in the Umhlanga Dance, a rite of passage into womanhood. The polygamous King Mswati III, who already has 13 wives, may choose one of the 40,000 virgins as a new wife. Photo: Krisanne Johnson, from the series I Love You Real Fast . > View all The Magnum Foundation has launched a new initiative called the Emergency Fund to offer support for photographers working on thoughtful, long-form stories around the world. This new resource is a bright spot on a bleak horizon, as traditional media financing for documentary projects dries up. While the fund is not able to pick up the entire tab for a story, it promises to get fledgling projects off the ground. “We’re not giving out cushy grants that people can live on,” says Susan Meiselas, Magnum photographer and president of the Magnum Foundation, “We’re giving a boost that can get an important project started.” Each year, photography professionals will nominate 100 of their colleagues to submit proposals to the fund. An independent editorial board will then select between 10 and 20 projects to support, based on the importance of the issues the photographers propose to address. Completed projects will be distributed widely through traditional and new media, in collaboration with nonprofits or NGOs, and on the Emergency Fund website. Photographers retain the copyright to their work. An early success story for the fund is Krisanne Johnson’s I Love You Real Fast . The project documents the shortened life cycles of girls with AIDS in Swaziland. With the fund’s help it raised well over its original $7,500 goal on Kickstarter, an Emergency Fund partner. Other funding partners that are helping to keep deeper photo projects off the endangered species list include Open Society and Atlantic Philanthropies. Meiselas also hopes the fund will combat the potential conflict of interest of documentary photographers relying on NGOs and other organizations for financing. Aid groups can often influence a photographer’s project, intentionally or not, because they hold the purse strings. “We’re in a strange time,” she says. “With the traditional media not supporting new production, there’s a gap. Some advocacy groups now give assignments directly, but that raises all sorts of complicated [journalistic] issues. We’re trying to find a way to stay balanced in this chaotic environment.” Three years in the developing, the Emergency Fund project extends the philosophy and quality of Magnum Photos –- the oldest photo collective in the United States, beyond the work of its elite membership. The Magnum Foundation is a nonprofit with its own finances and board, operating independently of Magnum Photos. “We’re a charity, and we support the public interest,” says Meiselas. “The Magnum legacy is about supporting important work with an open heart, and passing down generations of experience.” Above are nine photos from some of the younger, less-well-known photographers supported by the Emergency Fund. View the new Emergency Fund Website . Follow the Emergency Fund on Twitter at @EmergencyFund . Connect with the Emergency Fund on Facebook . You can support the Magnum Foundation at www.magnumfoundation.org . . . . → Read More: New Magnum Fund Pays Out for Deep Photo Stories
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