In an attempt to balance copyright restrictions and ever-present camera phones, some museums are loosening their ‘no photography’ policies

On Facebook photographer Harry Watts announced that he is having a sale on his three self-published books. His book Studio is one of my favorites. This picture is taken from the Studio series by Harry Watts.

GREAT NEWS! I am have a sale on my three self-published books. STUDIO is only £5 (+P&P) http://tinyurl.com/d6nge8f and FINDS 1 http://tinyurl.com/ce24p8u & 2 http://tinyurl.com/cl5ewcv are just £1 (+P&P)

In this post the critic Jörg M Colberg asks “whether re-issues or second editions should be changed/modified or not”. He does not have an answer, but I think it is also not a question.

Revised editions are as old as the history of the printed book. It is up to the creator how he or she wants to express the ideas and he or she can take advantage of every opportunity to alter the expression and the manifestation of a work like for example the revisions made in the second and third editions of Redheaded Peckerwood.

The audience has to live with this, but it might help them to focus a bit more on the intellectual content rather than the physical object.

Last week I paid a visit to &Foam and there I bought a copy of Car Crash Studies by the Danish photographer Nicolai Howalt.

Interesting enough a couple of years ago Swiss photographer Raffael Waldner published a similar book wih the same title Car Crash Studies: 2001-2010. Howalt made his series in 2009.

Where Howalt focuses on details like scratched paintwork, blown airbags and interiors, Waldner provides a more exhausting documentation of crashed cars. He also included shots of frontal and rear impacts and engines. Most of his subjects are fast and expensive cars from brands like Ferrari, Aston Martin, Porsche Lamborghini and Maserati. In Switzerland these kind of cars are not uncommon.

The pictures of car interiors in Howalts’ book are truly haunting and clearly show what impact a car crash can have. 

Both books are highly recommended. The Howalt book will be a bit more difficult to get as it is limited to 300 copies, but there are still copies available here and there. And if you dive into the subject do not forget to take it to a different level with Crash by J.G. Ballard or the adaptation of the novel by David Cronenberg.

Friday May 17th Foam organizes an Artist Talk with photographer Stephen Gill.

The exhibition Best Before End focusing on the Hackney related work by Stephen Gill is on show in Foam in Amsterdam from 17 May to 14 July 2013.

Studio Pile (2012) by Sara Cwynar

I like this work by Sara Cwynar. It is part of the exhibition Everything In the Studio (Destroyed) at Foam in Amsterdam. This work is somewhat different compared to the other work on display in that the other works contain mostly still lives of three dimensional objects like fruit and all sorts of household goods and other stuff.

Always a surprise what these kids collect in their pockets. Composition inspired by Herman de Vries.

A couple of pictures of the exhibition Tí by Koos Breukel & Roy Villevoye at Foam Amsterdam. Highly recommended. Breukel and Villevoy created portraits of all the inhabitans of Tí, a small village is situated on the upper reaches of the Unir river in the northeastern part of the Asmat in in the Indonesian part of New Guinea.

His Majesty the King Willem-Alexander and Her Majesty the Queen Máxima, April 2013, © RVD, photo by Koos Breukel

After the gossip about Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, it is time for some royalty news on On Almost Every Topic. Photographer Koos Breukel created two official portraits of the new King and Queen of The Netherlands. You are allowed to download the high resolution photo’s for private and educational use.

I’d say download your copy, print and frame it with a nice gold frame and you have a real Koos Breukel and even better a picture of the Dutch King and Queen on the wall. There are also a couple of good portraits of Máxima by Erwin Olaff on the site of the Royal House, but at the time she was just a princess.