Ian Spalter has returned to New York-headquartered digital agency R/GA, this time as creative director in the mobile and emerging platforms group. He will work across accounts and lead projects focused on social media and digital product design to heighten brand experiences and create long-term value for consumers. Spalter was most recently VP of production management and user-experience design at Community Connect, a social-networking company that created ethnic community sites BlackPlanet.com, MiGente.com, and AsianAve.com. Prior to Community Connect, he was an associate creative director at R/GA….Olivier Gauriat has joined Madison Park Pictures, New York, as executive producer for commercials and new media content. He formerly headed production for Colgate Palmolive worldwide and earlier served as production head at Young & Rubicam, New York. Madison Park, which also has an office in L.A., is a commercial and feature film company founded by Stephen Ashkinos, Matthew Fiorello and Carsten Lorenz. Ashkinos is also the owner of New York-based Chemistry, an editorial house, and Pure, a visual effects company….Shane Diver, formerly of GSDM’s Idea City in Austin, has joined TM Advertising, Dallas, as creative director. He will handle the development of TM’s integrated interactive efforts while also working as co-creative director with Todd Connelly to help manage digital resources and projects.
Raoul Peck Resurrects A Once-Forgotten Anti-Apartheid Photographer In “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found”
When the photographer Ernest Cole died in 1990 at the age of 49 from pancreatic cancer at a Manhattan hospital, his death was little noted.
Cole, one of the most important chroniclers of apartheid-era South Africa, was by then mostly forgotten and penniless. Banned by his native country after the publication of his pioneering photography book "House of Bondage," Cole had emigrated in 1966 to the United States. But his life in exile gradually disintegrated into intermittent homelessness. A six-paragraph obituary in The New York Times ran alongside a list of death notices.
But Cole receives a vibrant and stirring resurrection in Raoul Peck's new film "Ernest Cole: Lost and Found," narrated in Cole's own words and voiced by LaKeith Stanfield. The film, which opens in theaters Friday, is laced throughout with Cole's photographs, many of them not before seen publicly.
As he did in his Oscar-nominated James Baldwin documentary "I Am Not Your Negro," the Haitian-born Peck shares screenwriting credit with his subject. "Ernest Cole: Lost and Found" is drawn from Cole's own writings. In words and images, Peck brings the tragic story of Cole to vivid life, reopening the lens through which Cole so perceptively saw injustice and humanity.
"Film is a political tool for me," Peck said in a recent interview over lunch in Manhattan. "My job is to go to the widest audience possible and try to give them something to help them understand where they are, what they are doing, what role they are playing. It's about my fight today. I don't care about the past."
"Ernest Cole: Lost and Found" is a movie layered with meaning that goes beyond Cole's work. It asks questions not just about the societies Cole documented but of how he was treated as an artist,... Read More