Here is a Flickr set of 74 photos I took at the South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Texas, last week. From top: Morrissey, kd lang, Kris Kristofferson, Chhom Nimol of Dengue Fever and some indie music fans.

I posted the SXSW Interactive photo set earlier.

Technorati tags: music, SXSW Music, photos , SXSW 2006, SXSW

Just got back from The Recording Academy Honors 2006, the annual event of the San Francisco chapter of The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS), best known for producing the Grammy Awards. My first time at a NARAS event — several hundred people were dressed to impressed at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco for a fund-raiser and awards banquet.

Among the honorees: Green Day (with Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Pritchard and John Kiffmeyer), Dave Brubeck, George Duke and Tom Mazzolini, founder and organizer of the San Francisco Blues Festival for the past 34 years. Keb’ Mo’ played a song in tribute, and Taj Mahal introduced Mazzolini.

A fun night. Unfortunately, they didn’t allow cameras or camcorders to capture the speeches — including a heartfelt journey down memory lane by Brubeck, who had his start 60 years ago right across the street.

When citizen journalism is thusly shackled, the culture loses.

Because I took several photos of Amanda Congdon, host of the breakout Internet program “Rocketboom,” at SXSW this past week, I decided to put some earlier shots online, taken at the Symposium on Social Architecture at Harvard in November 2006. So, here’s a 24-photo set of Amanda.

Technorati tags: amanda, videoblogging, amanda congdon , rocketboom, SXSW, SXSW 2006, pretty, woman, girl

The Sunday New York Times recounts a recent significant legal ruling upholding the right to photograph people in public places: The Theater of the Street, the Subject of the Photograph.

This is an important article, with application to the grassroots media world, so I’ll quote from it at length. Excerpt:

In 1999 Philip-Lorca diCorcia set up his camera on a tripod in Times Square, attached strobe lights to scaffolding across the street and, in the time-honored tradition of street photography, took a random series of pictures of strangers passing under his lights. The project continued for two years, culminating in an exhibition of photographs called “Heads” at Pace/MacGill Gallery in Chelsea. …

When Erno Nussenzweig, an Orthodox Jew and retired diamond merchant from Union City, N.J., saw his picture last year in the exhibition catalog, he called his lawyer. And then he sued Mr. diCorcia and Pace for exhibiting and publishing the portrait without permission and profiting from it financially. The suit sought an injunction to halt sales and publication of the photograph, as well as $500,000 in compensatory damages and $1.5 million in punitive damages.

The suit was dismissed last month by a New York State Supreme Court judge who said that the photographer’s right to artistic expression trumped the subject’s privacy rights. But to many artists, the fact that the case went so far is significant.

The practice of street photography has a long tradition in the United States, with documentary and artistic strains, in big cities and small towns. Photographers usually must obtain permission to photograph on private property — including restaurants and hotel lobbies — but the freedom to photograph in public has long been taken for granted. And it has had a profound impact on the history of the medium. Without it, Lee Friedlander would not have roamed the streets of New York photographing strangers, and Walker Evans would never have produced his series of subway portraits in the 1940′s.

Remarkably, this was the first case to directly challenge that right. Had it succeeded, “Subway Passenger, New York City,” 1941, along with a vast number of other famous images taken on the sly, might no longer be able to be published or sold. …

(This image was taken by Walker Evans, who captured a series of pictures on the sly in the subway in the 1940s, “Subway Passenger, New York City.”)

Mr. diCorcia’s lawyer, Lawrence Barth, of Munger, Tolles & Olson in Los Angeles, focused on the context in which the photograph appeared. … Among others, he mentioned Alfred Eisenstaedt’s famous image of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square on V-J Day in 1945, when Allied forces announced the surrender of Japan.

Continue reading »

Just finished uploading my Flickr photo set of 81 images taken at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas, this past week. Above are Andrew Michael Baron of “Rocketboom,” Ian Clarke of Freenet, and Lacey Chavez of LaceyChavez.com.

I’ll post a separate photo set of the SXSW Music Festival tomorrow.

Technorati tags: sxsw 2006, technology, photography, SXSW

Author Bruce Sterling gave a keynote address at this week’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas. In this 25-minute video excerpt, which I filmed on Tuesday, he discusses "The State of the World," politics, Serbia, international affairs, deceit, living out of your laptop and much more. This is the first video footage I uploaded to NowPublic.

For the full 48-minute talk, here’s the SXSW podcast.

Technorati tags: BruceSterling,  videoblogging, video , journalism, SXSW, SXSW 2006