12:37 am - 07/08/2012
Did Joe Klamar take crummy photos of Olympic athletes on purpose?
The images of U.S.A. Team London 2012 are so bad that it’s hard to imagine otherwise.
Portraits of the American Olympics team were released in May but only recently the Getty-commissioned images went viral, with their dim lighting, shoddy backdrops, and flat-out weird poses. The shots are poorly lit, poorly staged, and inexplicably strange. Slate went so far as to say that a shot of Michael Phelps made it look like he was “a volunteer heartthrob in an art school alien movie.”
The Getty photographer, Joe Klamar, isn’t an inexperienced—or bad—photographer either. He won Picture of the Year at the Czech Press Photo 2009 contest for a photo of Barack Obama taken during a visit to Prague.
Because Klamar has a pre-Olympics reputation as a great photographer, there’s some talk from our own design department that maybe he took the weak photographs on purpose, to protest the way the athletes and photographers were organized.
More pics and story at the source:
http://www2.macleans.ca/2012/07/05/d
Joe Klamar's Photos of US Olympians Receive More Criticism
Did Joe Klamar take crummy photos of Olympic athletes on purpose?
The images of U.S.A. Team London 2012 are so bad that it’s hard to imagine otherwise.
Portraits of the American Olympics team were released in May but only recently the Getty-commissioned images went viral, with their dim lighting, shoddy backdrops, and flat-out weird poses. The shots are poorly lit, poorly staged, and inexplicably strange. Slate went so far as to say that a shot of Michael Phelps made it look like he was “a volunteer heartthrob in an art school alien movie.”
The Getty photographer, Joe Klamar, isn’t an inexperienced—or bad—photographer either. He won Picture of the Year at the Czech Press Photo 2009 contest for a photo of Barack Obama taken during a visit to Prague.
Because Klamar has a pre-Olympics reputation as a great photographer, there’s some talk from our own design department that maybe he took the weak photographs on purpose, to protest the way the athletes and photographers were organized.
More pics and story at the source:
http://www2.macleans.ca/2012/07/05/d
His excuse is fishy to me. I know a lot of photographers who use the same amount of equipment he had to use and knock it out of the park. Not one of these 30 photos came out even good. It's pretty much knocking his ability to actually photograph a subject and not just a setting like he thought he was going to be doing.
That said, I still prefer these to the Vanity Fair shoot where the men were the Athletes and the women were the Accessories.