Ted Kawalerski’s unique photographs will be exhibited at Calumet Photographic in New York City from 21 October through 31 December. Experiencing life from the inside of his car, house, studio, airplanes, and client board rooms, Kawalerski has created a body of work that reminds us of how often we become isolated from the world around us. From Shanghai to SoHo and Miami to Milan, Kawalerski uses colour, motion, and an intuitive look at everyday life from a spectator’s perspective to create a body of work that takes the mundane and transforms it to magnificent. See for yourself at Calumet Photographic, 22 West 22nd Street in New York City.

Kris Dickson has been awarded the title of UK Master Photographer of the Year 2009. The announcement was made at the Master Photography Awards in Newcastle last night. In addition to the main prize of the evening, Dickson was awarded firsts in the following categories: UK Fashion and Beauty, the Mario Acerboni Northern Ireland Award and the overall Mario Acerboni Award. He was also crowned UK Fashion & Press Photographer of the Year. Jingna Zhang, from Singapore, was named Overseas Master Photographer of the Year 2009. Click through / read on for the full list of award-winning photographers.

The Royal Photographic Society Annual Awards ceremony, which recognises those who have made outstanding contributions to the art of science and photography, will take place on 19 November. Annie Leibovitz will be presented with the Centenary Medal and Honorary Fellowship of the RPS, while the society’s Terence Donovan Award goes to Mark Edwards. Bryce E Bayer, best known for the Bayer colour filter array used in digital cameras, will be awarded this year’s Progress Medal with Honorary Fellowship. Honorary Fellowship recipients include Scottish born photojournalist Harry Benson CBE, who has photographed 11 American presidents, including Bill Clinton (see accompanying photo). Click through / read on for the full list of RPS award winners.

Fashion and portrait photographer Irving Penn died yesterday at the age of 92. Originally schooled in drawing and painting, he became famous for post World War II glamour photography and portraiture. One of his most famous shots is a tightly-cropped portrait of Pablo Picasso but, as The New York Times notes, “his subjects were usually shown whole, apparently enjoying a splendid isolation from the real world”. Superior compositional skills, a penchant for clarity and creative use of light were the cornerstones of his style. In 1950, he married one of his models, Lisa Fonssagrives, and the two remained faithful to each other until Lisa’s death in 1992.

Website: Obituary in The New York Times

To celebrate his 10th anniversary as a professional photographer, Andy Rouse will give an inspirational talk in Wadhurst, East Sussex on the evening of Saturday December 5th 2009. Proceeds from the event will benefit the Aspira Fund, set up between Andy and Páramo to provide funds for conservation and research projects. The Wadhurst event is one of a series of 10th anniversary talks around the country when Andy will look back over the last decade of his action career as a wildlife photographer with a display of photos, video shots and accompanying music – sharing tales of drunken gorillas, playful penguins and sitting in the path of bull elephants to achieve that perfect shot. Doors open at 6pm for a 7pm start. Tickets are on sale from Páramo for £12 in advance (£15 on the door), or £10 each for groups of 10 or more.

This Autumn, a series of state of the art exhibitions will take place around Europe to showcase stunning images taken by Daniel Beltrá, the winner of this year’s Prince’s Rainforests Project Award at the Sony World Photography Awards. The exhibitions entitled, ‘Focus on the Rainforests’, will take place in London (Kew Gardens), Paris (Hotel de Ville) and Berlin (Alexa Centre). Opening in October, these interactive photographic experiences form the closing chapter of Daniel’s trip. The London exhibition will take place from 3 October through 6 December.

Apple will be hosting a webinar, complete with an interactive Q & A section, delivered by sports and fashion photographer Mark Newton. The webinar takes place between 7 and 8pm on 24 September 2009, at the Apple Store UK website. Mark will talk live about how Apple Aperture has extended his creativity and about the tools he uses to create great images on location, plus you get to see a video showing him at work, and finally, you can also chat wit him in an interactive question-and-answer session. The webinar is free to attend, but advance registration is required. You can register at the website below.

Website: Meet the Expert: Mark Newton, Photographer

The New York Underwater Photographic Society will be hosting “20,000 Bytes Under The Sea”, a special presentation by legendary National Geographic photographer and IMAX filmmaker, Emory Kristof. Kristof, whose innovative photography uncovers the heretofore-unexplored worlds of deep-sea animals, will recount the challenges and solutions encountered in bringing back striking images from miles down in the world’s oceans. The presentation will take place on 30 October 200, in New York’s Bleecker Street Theatre. Admission is complimentary, and since seating is limited, advance registration is mandatory to get on the guest list. Send an RSVP to [email protected], with the words “RSVP Special Event” in the subject line. In the body of the email, include your full name and your city and state of residence.

Famous French photographer Willy Ronis, a contemporary of Robert Doisneau and Henri Cartier-Bresson, died at the age of 99. Ronis, who originally aspired to be a composer, first got into photography when his father fell ill and he had to take over the family photo studio. After his father’s death, however, he gave up studio photography and became a photojournalist. He worked for a number of prestigious publications including Regards, Plaisir de France and Life. His work, along with that of Doisneau, Cartier-Bresson, Izis and Brassaï, was showcased at the Museum of Modern Art in New Yor City in 1953, as part of an exhibition entitled, somewhat misleadingly, “Five French Photographers” (neither Izis nor Brassaï was in fact French, though both worked in France at the time). Ronis rceived a number of awards, including the Gold Medal of the Venice Biennale (1957) and the Grand Prix des Arts et Lettres (1979). While predominantly a photojournalist and a master of street photography, Willy Ronis was also noted for his nudes and fashion shots. Upon hearing from his death, the office of France’s President Nicolas Sárközy issued a communiqué saying, “Willy Ronis has immortalised for us and future generations a popular and poetic France”.

Website: Obituary in The New York Times

Stephen Shakeshaft: Liverpool People at the National Conservation Centre 18 September 2009 – 24 January 2010 features about 70 photographs including unpublished gems alongside award-winning images amassed since the 1960s over decades of great social change.In this new exhibition, Stephen also reveals some of the secrets of his personal archive, displaying his talent for immortalising ordinary fleeting moments and reflecting the personalities of his subjects. Stephen says: “Much of my work involved sport and news stories but there were often quieter periods when I might see an everyday scene making a great picture. The passing years have added to the atmosphere of these images.” The exhibition is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day, and admission is free.

Myrna Kresh, a well-known photography insider and agent, has developed a new agency and business platform for outstanding talent. Catering to knowledgeable creatives under the moniker of Myrna K Represents, her agency has formed alliances with strategic partners to raise the level of production and visual capabilities to where it must be in today’s marketplace. In s nutshell, Myrna K Represents is a dynamic photographers’ agency that melds the talents of professionals from multiple disciplines to support the company’s master photographers in developing outstanding visual art projects for its clients.

Website: Myrna K. Represents

The Nature Conservancy has just launched a new audio slideshow, in which the Nature Conservancy’s Director of Photography, Mark Godfrey, interviews Chris Helzer, master photographer of the American prairie. You can listen to the interview while watching Chris’ beautiful photographs. Besides being a photographer, Chris Helzer is also an Eastern Nebraska programme director for the Nature Conservancy, and he is a grassland ecologist. In the interview, he talks about how and when to take compelling macro photographs of insects and wildflowers, and highlights the challenges facing someone trying to capture the beauty of a flat landscape. Oh and did you know prairie fires were so important to grassland ecology that experts are now doing “prescribed burning” of prairies to keep them diverse? Chris’ photographs capture this too.

Website: Prairie Close-Ups on Mark Godfrey Selects

The final lecture in the PhotoVoice Lecture Series will be delivered by photojournalist Tom Stoddart. During a long and varied career he has witnessed such international events as the war in Lebanon, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the election of President Nelson Mandela, the bloody siege of Sarajevo and the wars against Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Stoddart is represented by, and works closely with Getty Images, to produce powerful photo-essays on the serious world issues of our time. His lecture will be held at 7.30pm on Tuesday, 6 October 2009, in Conway Hall, South Place Ethical Society, 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL. Tickets are available for £10 in advance or £12 on the door.

The Portraits of Love Project is a volunteer effort aimed at sending 10,000 free family portraits to soldiers around the globe this holiday season. The project is utilizing the talents of over 275 volunteer photographers across the USA who are opening their studios this September, to offer free family portraits to military family members who have a soldier deployed overseas. The goal of the project is to send 10,000 free family portraits during the month of September. Those photographers interested in volunteering their time can sign up online at www.pmdaportraitsoflove.com .

The School of Visual Arts (SVA) has announced a lecture series entitled “Art in the First Person”, and the first event in the series, a conversation with photographer Hellen van Meene, will take place on 14 September. Dutch photographer Hellen van Meene has exhibited her work in New York City, London, Holland and Germany. Her photographs have been collected in several books, including the recently published Hellen van Meene: New Photographs (Schirmer/Mosel, 2009). The conversation about her work, which is free and open to the public, will be held in the SVA Theatre, 333 West 23 Street, New York.

Verve Gallery of Photography has announced Reverie & Rhapsody, an exhibition exploring “dreams, memory and time, and the rhythm of contemplation and mystery that is held within all three”. The three-person exhibition includes Verve gallery artists Susan Burnstine, Susan kae Grant and Beth Moon. The Opening Reception is held on Friday, August 28, 2009 from 5-7pm. There will be a Gallery Talk with Photographers Beth Moon and Susan Burnstine on Friday, August 28 from 3-5pm, and with Photographer Susan kae Grant and Composer Sarah Alexander on Saturday, August 29 from 2-4pm. The exhibition is on view through Saturday, November 7, 2009.

Home Is Where You Make It, a Walker Arts Center residency project by artists Lauri Lyons and Tish Jones is raising public awareness about the homeless youth population in the Twin Cities. The interactive installations provide an opportunity for homeless youth to develop and display their artwork to a broad audience, and are paired with a three-week long series of artist led workshops where homeless youth will write personal narratives and shoot black and white portraits. The portraits will then be digitally enlarged and mounted onto cardboard and assembled by the teens into 5’ x 7’ ‘houses’ on the street. The resulting structures will challenge common perceptions of the homeless population and literally bring a face to the issues they encounter daily. Home Is Where You Make It runs until 21 August 2009.

A Spanish newspaper claims that Robert Capa’s iconic photograph, known by the titles “Falling Soldier”, “Death of a Loyalist Soldier” and “Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death”, may have been staged. Questioning the authenticity of the photograph is nothing new - the fact that the split-second shot is almost perfectly composed, with only a bit of the rifle and the tips of the soldier’s feet being cut off, has raised suspicion many times since its first publication in Life magazine over seventy years ago. However, the skeptical voices were silenced when the soldier was identified as Federico Borrell García, a militiaman who was indeed killed in the battle fought near Cerro Muriano on 5 September 1936, and again when Richard Whelan pointed out that the curled fingers of the soldier’s left hand “clearly indicate… that he is already dead.” Despite this, the Spanish newspaper El Periódico now asserts the photo was “fabricated”, claiming that the “real location” was near the town of Espejo rather than Cerro Muriano, where “there was no fighting”. The timing of the article coincides with a major Robert Capa exhibition, currently on show in the Palace of Arts in Budapest.

Via The Independent

World famous architectural photographer Julius Shulman passed away on Wednesday. He is noted for documenting the works of leading Modernist architects throughout most of the 20th century and his mission of building the reputation of these architects through his excellently composed photographs. His career as an architectural photographer started at the age of 26, when he met architect Richard Neutra, and he continued taking assignments into his 90s until his declining health prevented him from carrying on.

Website: Obituary in The Los Angeles Times

Ben Roberts, the latest winner of The British Journal of Photography’s Project Assistance Awards, run in partnership with Nikon, is the latest photographer to be featured at Nova Gallery. Ben’s photo, ‘Glen Feshie, 6:30am’, will be available from the 14th July 2009 as a limited edition print in three sizes. The smallest size is priced at £19. The photo is from his series, ‘Higher Lands’, a project about youth culture and growing up in the unique environment of the Highlands of Scotland. Nova Gallery was launched last month, with the aim of I) helping up-and-coming photographers gain some exposure and sell prints, II) making contemporary photography more accessible and collectable and III) utilising the power of photography as a catalyst for positive social change.

Website: Nova Gallery