There's a wonderful article about Japanese photobook designer Kohei Sugiura over at the ICP Library blog, talking, amongst others, about my favourite photobook The Map (Chizu) by Kikuji Kawada (my vdeo presentation is here).

In an attempt to make the archives slightly more usable, I added a new category: Photobooks. So you can now easily access all the photobook related posts there.

New video photobook presentations (now only YouTube links): Notes from a Quiet Life by Robert Benjamin, In The Car With R by Rafal Milach (order here - you don't want to miss this one!), The Uncanny Familiar - Images of Terror by C|O Berlin, and Pau Wau Publications Vol. 1.

As far as I can tell Julia Hetta's photographs are all commissioned work. There are many gems here - make sure to look through the whole set!

If you participated in my reader survey (which is now closed) let me first thank you for taking the time! I'm incredibly happy so many people participated. For those who didn't have the time, the survey essentially was all about content. I started this website ten years ago, and I was curious about both what readers thought about existing content (specifically what they are interested in) and about possible future content (ditto). I've always believed that this website's focus should be on providing content. Content (as opposed to mere PR, say) is what I am personally interested in, and the results of the survey indicate that there is indeed a larger interest in that. A first, direct consequence of the survey has already made an appearance: My first meditation on a photograph is a result of large numbers of people noting that they would like to see articles like that. There will definitely be more of those types of articles. There will also be more interviews. (more)

Of course, you might wonder why I was asking these questions. Why not simply write what comes to my mind without wondering whether people are interested? The answer is simple: Right now, it's a question of time. With the exception of the guest contributions by Christopher Thomas, this website is a one-person operation, and producing content takes time. So knowing which type of content is of interest helps me produce content. I'm not going to write about things I'm not interested in. But when in doubt what to focus on knowing that something might be of less interest than something else helps.

I don't want to spend this anniversary year navel-gazing. There is a lot of talk about blogs ("are blogs dead?") or about photography criticism ("is photo criticism dead?") or about whether or not the internet is making us all stupid. These debates might or might not have merit. But instead of worrying about any of those questions I made the decision to ignore them, to simply produce content on photography.

After working on Conscientious for ten years, I now have a bit of a vested interest in it: I want to make sure the site is as good and as interesting as I can make it. The blog was started at a time when I had a lot of trouble finding information about photographers online. It was frustrating. So I decided to compile such information, in the hope that other people would find it useful. With time I then added other types of content that, I thought, were good to have. The reader survey has provided invaluable input in terms of where to go, what to do. Again: Thank you for your input!

PS: Many more people than expected left their contact information in the survey. I started looking at the responses, but I have not contacted anyone, yet.

Crowdfunding platform Emphas.is just added a book-publishing option. Here is an example.

I'll Die For You is a project by Laura El-Tantawy about the many thousands of Indian farmers who committed suicide over the past decade.

(The first in what probably is going to become a new feature.) If someone asked you what photography's big deal was, all you'd have to say is that it has something to do with "the gaze," and then show this photograph. Of course, photography is not just this image. There is a lot more - or, if you're a curmudgeon (there seem to be many these days) a lot less. But there is a lot to be said for talking about the most outstanding examples of any art form to get an idea of their power - instead of focusing on the detritus. Thus, when talking about photography we'd probably want to talk about photographs of the human form, and out of all those we might want to talk about this particular photograph. Its title is "A woman sits for a final photograph with her dying mother," and it was taken by Eduard Méhomé (the photograph can be found on page 41 of Life & Afterlife in Benin). Find the full article here.

A good eye for symmetry requires a good eye for asymmetry. Just the right amount of asymmetry, just the right amount of confusion will make any symmetric photography much better: It truly brings a photograph to life. Georg Aerni's Promising Bay is a perfect example.

In Sochi, every "self-respecting restaurant has a singer," The Sochi Project's Sochi Singers notes (I'll try to limit the use of the word "Sochi" in the following sentences, I promise; this and all following quotes are taken from their website). The city is a tourist resort ("The smell of sunscreen, sweat, alcohol and roasting meat pervades the air."), and of course restaurants have to be competitive. The level of cheerfulness that is - presumably - the intended result of the singing escapes me: "Chansons are Russian ballads, but the comparison with French chansons is only partial. The songs have their origins in the age-old Russian tradition of labour camps and prisons." And: "nowadays the term 'chanson' more often refers to the saccharine genre of Russian-language dance music. It is usually accompanied by a heavy disco beat and occasionally even a dash of techno." Labour camps to a disco beat: I don't want to know what that sounds like. (more)

What I truly enjoy seeing, however, is what this looks like: In a nutshell, it's a smallish stage with a table. On that table, there's a laptop computer plus a mixing board. Cables connect all the various devices, including the microphone(s) for the singer(s) and, inevitably, the loudspeakers. There might or might not be a cheesy backdrop. Everything looks a bit karaoke - except that here, there are no TV screen from which the lyrics are read.

Sochi Singers is a rather large book, but you need the size to be able to see what's actually going on. Everything that is relevant for the stage/singer is contained in the frames. You will find yourself studying the images, looking at all the various things on or next to the stage. The singers often look directly at the camera while doing their job - so there is that additional element of almost being there.

In the crudest sense of the word, the photographs of the singers (there are some photos of Sochi beaches in the book, too) are shot as a typology. But applying the idea of a typology really takes away from the fun that you'll have looking at this book (I bet you haven't seen the words "typology" and "fun" used all that much in the same sentence, have you?). Mind you, the book is not making fun of these singers. They are presented as what they are, and the text that comes along the photographs provides the necessary background.

With a focus on a very troubled region, The Sochi Project's attention to something that is very much part of that region, but that is not part of any sort of trouble (other than the audible kind), shows that hard-hitting documentary work can indeed be combined with something that is lighter fare. This doesn't mean that things always need to be light. But adding something like the cheesy singers in Sochi restaurants to the many other more troubling aspects of the region shows that what is happening there - and everywhere else - is multi-faceted: Our simplistic ideas of "this is good" and "this is bad" too often miss a more complex picture that, let's face it, we are very familiar with from our own lives.

Sochi Singers, photographs by Rob Hornstra, essay by Arnold van Bruggen, 80 pages, The Sochi Project, 2011