Results tagged “photographer”

This short video of James Gandolfini menacing a Guest of a Guest photographer who was videotaping him in the West Village is funny, but also kind of sad, for a couple reasons. First, Gandolfini's worked hard to find roles that take his career past the Tony Soprano archetype, and now here he is acting just like Tony about to thrash the Bada Bing bartender for not being sufficiently anxious about Al Qaeda.

     

If you've ever seen Warhol's Factory, it was likely in part through the lens of Nat Finkelstein, who documented much of that era and the characters who created it. The photographer died of pneumonia and emphysema on October 2nd at the age of 76, while at his home in Shandaken, New York. The NY Times notes that he was the house photographer at the Factory from 1964 to 1967, and "created spontaneous portraits not only of Factory regulars like Sedgwick and Gerard Malanga but also of the artists and celebrities who drifted in and out of the Warhol orbit."

Celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz, who had been facing a lawsuit because she failed to pay back a $24 million loan, worked out a deal with her creditor, which will allow her to buy back control of her photographs and pay back the money under new terms. Originally, Leibovitz had signed over the rights to all her photographs (past and future), as well as her three West Village townhomes and Rhinebeck estate, as collateral for the loan, which was supposed to have been paid back on Tuesday. It's unclear when the loan will be repaid at this time, but Art Capital is now letting "Ms. Leibovitz...retain control of those assets within the context of the loan agreement which shall prevail until satisfied." In a statement, the photographer said, “In these challenging times I am appreciative to Art Capital for all they have done to resolve this matter and for their cooperation and continued support. I also want to thank my family, friends, and colleagues for being there for me and look forward to concentrating on my work"—and maybe selling off some of that real estate.

Just when it looked like The Man was standing up for photographer's rights, or at least understanding the law, things have gone sour again. Carlos Miller reports that 43-year-old professional photographer Randall Thomas "was jailed for six hours—and had his camera and memory card confiscated by a judge—after filming an FBI building from across the street in New York City Monday."

The State Senate has agreed to settle a lawsuit brought by their former official photographer, who says Governor Paterson fired him because of his race, back when Paterson was Senate Minority Leader in 2003. In his civil rights lawsuit, Joseph Maioriello of Schenectady said John McPadden, then Paterson's chief of staff, explained he was being fired because some senators wanted to replace him with "a minority photographer, a black photographer." Maioriello, who had been a Senate employee for 26 years before he was fired, said McPadden also told him, "You got to remember who Sen. Paterson is. Sen. Paterson is black." In a sworn deposition, Paterson denied the allegations, claiming he didn't see well enough to have fired Maioriello because of his race. Paterson would have been required to testify had the case finally gone to trial, and one source "close to the lawsuit" tells the Post that the size of the settlement—$300,000—suggests "that the state wouldn't have made out very well if it had gone to trial. If nothing wrong happened, why is the state paying out this kind of money?" Shhh... It's late Friday afternoon—by Monday it'll be like this never happened.

       

Last night at her home in Manhattan, the Brooklyn-born and celebrated NYC street photographer Helen Levitt died at the age of 95. The NY Times remembers Levitt, saying she "captured instances of a cinematic and delightfully guileless form of street choreography that held at its heart, as William Butler Yeats put it, 'the ceremony of innocence'.” In the 1930s and 40s, the photographer focused on "the city’s poorer neighborhoods, like Spanish Harlem and the Lower East Side, where people treated their streets as their living rooms and where she showed an unerring instinct for a street drama’s perfect pitch." By 1943 she had her first solo show at MoMA, and starting in 1949 (for a period lasting around ten years) Levitt was a full-time film editor and director. She went back to still photography, this time in color, in 1959 upon receiving two Guggenheim Foundation grants.

                     

Photographer Bruce Barone has a treasure trove of old photographs he snapped in the late 1970s and early 1980s, while working at Hearst Magazines. He tells us he is now self-publishing a book featuring some hand-selected images, which should be ready by the end of February. For now, here's a look back through his lens at an older New York.

Dith Pran, the New York Times photographer whose survival of Cambodia's "killing fields" was turned into a movie, died at age 65 in NJ. Dith had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in recent years.