For the month of January, we registered over 245,000 unique visits to our site, and the AVERAGE visitor to Lens Culture stayed longer than 11 minutes!

In addition to our archives of 6 years of photography articles, portfolios, critical essays and book reviews, it looks like people are really enjoying our ever-expanding audio-video interview section where you can hear (and see) photographer's talking about their own work.

When you have some spare time, dig in to our archives and you are sure to find at least a few interesting and inspiring discoveries from the wide world of contemporary photography.

We're busy preparing our next new issue, which will include discoveries from the Anthropographia Awards for Human Rights Photography and Multimedia (I was honored to be on the jury this year), as well as work from photographers around the world who have submitted their work directly to Lens Culture for our review. And in the next two months, I will be reviewing portfolios in person in Budapest, San Francisco, and Houston FotoFest -- so it looks like we'll have lots of new material to present soon!

Cheers.

During the filming of our interview with Roger Ballen, for the third installment in our new video series, Lens Culture Conversations with Photographers, I asked him how important photobooks were to him. That part of the conversation didn't make it to our final cut of the tightly-edited interview, but I thought his comments might offer another welcome point of view in the discussion about the future of photobooks being hosted by our friends at LiveBooks.com. So, here's a short clip of what Roger Ballen has to say about photobooks. Enjoy!

Portfolio reviews give aspiring and established photographers the perfect opportunity to get feedback and advice on their work from the right people – plus, these events are a wonderful way to make contacts and meet like-minded photography professionals.

Our friends at PhotoAlliance in San Francisco hold a portfolio review once a year. Their event brings together top photography editors, publishers, curators, gallerists, and educators representing small, mid-sized, and major venues from around the U.S., to meet with engaged photographers, review their portfolios and encourage their careers and exchange opportunities.

The Our World event is pre-juried, with a limit of 50 participants, and is set to take place the weekend of March 12-14, 2010. Last date for applications is February 10, 2010. For more details, check out www.photoalliance.org/ourworld.pdf.

Highly recommended.

In a great, new 10-minute video, photographer Roger Ballen talks about psychology, metaphor, controversy and art in photography. He also traces his background, the evolution of his work, and more. The interview was recorded in January 2010 at the Kamel Mennour gallery in Paris, where an exhibition of Ballen's latest work, Boarding House, just opened.


This is the third installment in our new video series, Lens Culture: Conversations with Photographers. We've also recorded video interviews with Klavdij Sluban and Simon Roberts.

We're eager to get your feedback about this video series. Please add your comments here to our blog, and offer suggestions for other photographers who should be included in the series. Thanks!

We're delighted to announce an all-new issue of Lens Culture with great contemporary photography from around the globe.

Discover new photography from China, Australia, Cuba, India, the US, Canada, England, South Korea, and Brazil. This volume also includes new photobook reviews, a great video interview with UK photographer Simon Roberts, and more. So, settle in with a cup of good coffee, put your feet up, and enjoy!

Las Vegas Birthday Slideshow from Little Brown Mushroom on Vimeo.

Happy birthday Alec! Love this slide show and your storytelling.

UPDATE: a generous donor has claimed this prize already — Thank you! But I do believe there are a couple sets of signed books and prints still available for sale at Simon Roberts' website.

British photographer Simon Roberts has generously offered a gift to the very next financial supporter of Lens Culture who contributes $250 or more. It's a signed copy of his excellent book, Motherland, along with a signed, limited edition print from that series made in Russia in 2005. The print is 11" x 14", number 44 of 50, signed verso. This is a £175 value, and about to be sold out completely.

You can contribute by paying for a one-time voluntary subscription to Lens Culture via Google Checkout. All proceeds go toward the production costs and educational programs of Lens Culture.

One of many happy moments in 2009 for photography lovers was the launch of a new blog, Little Brown Mushroom, that includes essays, videos and photographs from Alec Soth and some of his collaborators. It's always a joy to get Alec's intelligent, heartfelt take on photography and new ways to use it and disseminate it. In a recent post, he interviews Monica Haller about the book she just published called Riley's Story, which includes photos and text from a guy who served as a nurse in Abu Ghraib prison and took lots of digital pictures while he was there.

Here is the cover, and below is the informal video interview made by Alec.

From the Library: Riley and His Story from Little Brown Mushroom on Vimeo.

The book looks great, and important, and especially timely. You can download a generous PDF excerpt (114 pages!) here, which apparently covers about 1/4 of the whole book. You can get more info about the book here.

About five or six years ago, the guys behind the Hamburger Eyes photo happenings in San Francisco (Dave and Ray, and the photographers around them) really opened my eyes to a photo-based lifestyle that was (and still is) so alive and real and super-attractive in an honest, often not so glamorous way. Fueled by passion, and a desire to have fun and document real life, they publish great raw photography in their almost wordless magazine, and they make it affordable. They throw wild kick-ass parties with photography literally covering nearly every inch of wall space. Every person in the crowds at their parties could be living, walking, talking and dancing photographs themselves. This short video just came to my attention and took me on a happy time trip back to the buzzy excitement they created. If you like your photography rough and funky, tough and goofy and honest, check it out.

Hamburger Eyes from Nick Fogarty on Vimeo.

For the second installment of Lens Culture's new video interview series, "Conversations with Photographers", I spoke at length with British photographer Simon Roberts about his work, and in particular about his two remarkable photobooks, Motherland and We English. You can view the tightly-edited interview here.

As always, however, there were bits of articulate insight from that interview that didn't make it into the final cut for one reason or another. So, with absolutely no color correction or smooth transitions or titles or credits, we've decided to share these short "bonus" clips where Simon Roberts talks about why he deliberately made the shift from shooting primarily for magazines to authoring his own photobooks. We thought this might be another welcome point of view in the discussion about photobooks being hosted by our friends at LiveBooks.com.