Wednesday, October 31, 2012


In lower Manhattan now at night, with no power, cell phone service, light is from police and ambulance lights, red, orange, blue, or from the little flashlights people carry while they’re walking their dogs, or from car lights, and just Tuesday night, buses.

The point of reference, like the North Star, is the Empire State Building, the line of demarcation. Everything North of the Building is normal, as though little happened. South of it is like another world, unreal, quiet, like a movie set.

© Nina Berman, 30 October 2012
 
 
 
 
The images and first-person descriptions from the East Coast are almost incomprehensible. For all of our family members, friends, clients, colleagues, and everyone affected, our thoughts and prayers are with you.
 
 
 

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Stephen Wilkes DAY TO NIGHT Photo Shoot Feature On CBS News Sunday Morning Show Nov 11







In his series, “Day to Night,” Stephen Wilkes photographs a scene “for a minimum of ten hours, from the same perspective, capturing a fluid visual narrative of day into night within a single frame.” CBS News Sunday Morning correspondent Martha Teichner joined Stephen Wilkes in a crane suspended over New York's Central Park during the recent creation of one of Wilkes "Day To Night" photographs. A special CBS Morning News segment, produced by Meggie Miao, was broadcast on November 11 - check local listings for time in your area.



"Day To Night", an exhibition of large-scale color photographs (up to 50 x 80 inches) was held at Monroe Gallery of Photography in Santa Fe April 27 through June 16, 2012, the first time the full collection was exhibited together. A selection of these photographs remains on view in the gallery.

 For more than two decades Stephen Wilkes has been widely recognized for his fine art, editorial, and commercial photography. With numerous awards and honors, as well as five major exhibitions in the last five years, Wilkes has made an impression on the world of photography. His most recent series features vibrant photographs of Times Square, Park Avenue, Coney Island, and Central Park, among other iconic New York locations, and capture, in a single frame, the transition from “Day to Night”. Using digital composites of images of the same site taken over a period of up to 15 hours, the photographs have a time-traveling quality, with the hustle and bustle in the afternoon sun giving way to the glow of city lights in darkening, cloud-streaked skies.


View the full "Day To Night collection here.  December 1, 2012 UPDATE: Contact the gallery for news about the newest international addition to the collection: Jerusalem, Day To Night.)


"Anything one can imagine one can create. Over the last several years, photographic technology has evolved to a point where anything is possible. I imagined changing time in a single photograph. I began to explore this fascination with time in a new series of photographs called: “Day to Night”. Photographing from one camera angle continuously for up to 15 hours, capturing the fleeting moments throughout the day and night. A select group of these images are then digitally blended into one photograph, capturing the changing of time within a single frame."

"Day to Night embodies a combination of my favorite things to photograph; documentary street photography melded with epic cityscapes. The work is a personal reflection of my deep love for New York. As this series has evolved, I discovered that the photographs began to highlight a form of emergent behavior within the daily life of the city. Studying the communication between pedestrians on sidewalks, cars and cabs on the street, these individual elements become a complex life form as they flow together to create the chaotic harmony that is Manhattan."

"Henri Cartier Bresson once said, “Photography is the recognition of a rhythm in the world of real things.” I am forever fascinated by the rhythm that is New York, the city’s relentless energy from “Day to Night”'.--Stephen Wilkes



Wilkes' photographs are in the permanent collection of The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; George Eastman House, Rochester, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Dow Jones & Company, New York City; The Jewish Museum, New York City; and in numerous important private collections throughout the world. His work has graced the covers of numerous international publications, including Sports Illustrated, Fortune, Vanity Fair, The New York Times Magazine, Life Magazine, and Time Magazine.

For further information, please contact the Gallery.

Related:

THE Magazine Review: Stephen Wilkes: Day to Night

 Opening Night: Stephen Wilkes "Day To Night"




Saturday, October 27, 2012

Bill Eppridge, noted photojournalist, will present keynote lecture on his experiences documenting the 1960s at Photo LA 2013






photo l.a. features new and established galleries from around the world that present classic, vintage and contemporary photography. Providing a visual discourse on photography's place in contemporary art, photo l.a. is an exciting forum for collectors and exhibitors.

Photography publications, and artist produced books, have become increasingly more important in the field of photography and contemporary art. We are delighted to announce photoBOOK LA as a new platform for boutique publishers and book artists. Since it's inception photo l.a. has contributed to the increased appreciation of photography and collecting in Los Angeles. We are certain that photoBOOK LA will be an excellent addition to this tradition.

With over 10,000 visitors photo l.a. is the best platform for meeting with collectors, curators and artists in Los Angeles. Our outstanding programming series continues to address the most current topics in the converging worlds of art and photography.


• Los Angeles County Museum of Art curator Britt Salvesen (Robert Mapplethorpe: XYZ) and Curator of Photographs at the Getty Research Institute, Francis Terpak (In Focus: Robert Mapplethorpe), will discuss the simultaneous exhibitions of the artist's work.



• Matthew Thompson, curator and author of The Anxiety of Photography, will lead a round table discussion with a mix of younger Los Angeles artists including Andrea Longacre-White, Anthony Pearson and David Benjamin Sherry, who hybridize photography with some other practice to explore its materiality.



• Point Of View: selections from Los Angeles collectors will be on view. A round table discussion some of the collectors will elaborate on their collecting motivations



Bill Eppridge, noted photojournalist, lectures on his experiences documenting the 1960s, specifically, Robert F. Kennedy's final campaign.



• Meg Partridge, Filmmaker, will speak about her father, Rondal Partridge, and his photographic work. The son of Imogen Cunningham, his mentors and colleagues included Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange and Edward Weston



• Artillery magazine hosts one of its infamous Face Off Debates.



• New Sales Platforms roundtable with Heritage Auctions, 1stdibs and artnet.



• Private docent tours of the fair with experts in the field of photography history, the market and museum exhibitions.



• Josephine Sacabo, will discuss her trajectory from a documentary street photographer to her current work using the etched photogravure as her exclusive form of print making.



• photoBOOK LA, a new platform for boutique publishers & book artists at photo l.a.



photo l.a., the 22nd Los Angeles International Photographic Art Exposition, takes place January 18 - 21, 2013 at the historic Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. Opening with a gala reception on Thursday, January 17, 2012. Please visit www.photola.com for fair and programming.

Visit Monroe Gallery of Photography during the fair at booth #M150.

Friday, October 26, 2012

Statue of Liberty Crown Reopens




For one of the best views of New York, you have to get inside a great lady’s head.

Via NBC News


Starting this weekend, it’s possible again as the Statue of Liberty crown reopens to the public on Sunday after a year of renovations. Visitors seeking magnificent vistas of the Big Apple and a glimpse of the famous monument’s inner workings are already snapping up tickets online.


“It’s an experience that stays with you for your entire lifetime,” said Chris Heywood, a spokesman for New York City’s official tourism agency NYC & Company, who still remembers making the climb as a child.


“The Statue of Liberty remains one of the city’s most iconic attractions and there certainly will be a pent up demand for visitors to want to go up and see the crown.”


The renovations promise better access and safer conditions. There are two new staircases, a new elevator inside the pedestal and a lift that will take visitors who are mobility impaired higher into the monument than ever before, said Mindi Rambo, a spokeswoman for the National Parks of New York Harbor.


“For the first time, people in wheelchairs will be able to go up to the top of the pedestal and actually see into the statue, whereas before, the highest level that they ever really got to was the museum level,” Rambo said.


“The lift is brand new, we’ve never had that before and we’re very excited about it.”


There is no elevator service from Lady Liberty’s feet to her head, so visitors must still go up a double spiral staircase to reach the crown. Official pamphlets warn it’s a strenuous journey, but Heywood recalled that it feels short “when you’re looking forward to a view that’s stunning.”


It takes adults up to 20 minutes to make the climb depending on whether they stop to examine the statue’s inner architecture and copper skin, Rambo said.


“You can see the folds of the robe, the interior of the statue, and many people find that fascinating. They stop to take photos and point things out to their kids like, ‘Oh, that looks like the back of her heel,’” Rambo said.


Once at the top, only 10 adults can fit inside the crown, a space that’s much smaller than people expect, Rambo added. Visitors often tell park rangers that they have come because they remember making the trip as a child and want their kids to have the same experience.
 
“I think part of that is just driven by the ability to say that they have made that climb and to look out into the harbor and, I suppose in a way, to look back in time to when people came on the big steam ships,” Rambo said.
 
The crown will be open each week from Thursday through Sunday. If you’d like to visit, you must make a reservation through Statue Cruises – the monument’s ferry transportation provider.

Tickets became available on October 1 and sales have been brisk: just a few dates in December remain available for 2012.

This is the second time in recent years that the National Park Service is reopening the statue’s crown. The attraction was closed after the 9/11 attacks for security reasons and then reopened on July 4, 2009.



National Park Service
Visitors to the crown of the Statue of Liberty get a great look at New York Harbor.
 
 
National Park Service         
National Park Service staff and the media greeted visitors when Lady Liberty's crown reopened on July 4, 2009, after being closed following the 9/11 attacks.

 
The chance to make the climb will give travelers just one more reason to visit New York, which is on track to set another record year for tourism, Heywood said.


Sunday’s crown reopening also coincides with the 126th anniversary of the statue’s dedication.


Margaret Bourke-White: Statue of Liberty

Monday, October 22, 2012

Photojournalists Stephanie Keith, Charles Meacham; the National Press Photographers Association Sue NYC for violated their First, Fourth, and Fourteen amendment rights during Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011



Via pdn

NYC Sued for Systematic Civil Rights Violations During Occupy Protests


Occupy Wall street protesters, New York City council members, and several journalists have filed suit against the City of New York, the Metropolitan Transit Authority, JP Morgan Chase and other defendants, alleging widespread civil rights violations during the Occupy Wall Street process in 2011. The lawsuit was filed today in Federal District Court in New York City.

The plaintiffs--including photojournalists Stephanie Keith, Charles Meacham, the National Press Photographers Association, several citizen journalists and five New York City council members--allege that the New York City Police Department .

"The City of New York in concert with various private and public entities have employed Officers of the New York City Police Department (NYPD) and others acting under color of state law, to intentionally and willfully subject Plaintiffs and the public to, among other things, violation of rights of free speech, assembly, freedom of the press, false arrest, excessive forces, false imprisonment, and malicious prosecution and, furthermore, purposefully obstructing plaintiffs carrying out their duties as elected officials and members of the press," the lawsuit asserts.

It goes on to say that police conduct was intended to obstruct, chill, deter and retaliate against the plaintiffs for engaging in "constitutionally protected activity." It accuses the NYPD of unreasonable search and seizure of the individual defendants (a Fourth Amendment violation) and deprivation of due process (a Fourteenth Amendment violation.)

The plaintiffs are seeking an unspecified amount of "compensatory and monetary damages," as well as injunctions to force the NYPD to allow citizens to protest peacefully in public spaces, and to prevent the police from barring the access of journalists to protests.

The suit includes allegations of specific acts of police misconduct against each individual defendant. More generally, it alleges that police prevented citizens from gathering lawfully and peacefully in public spaces; that police violated privacy by retaining photographs of protesters who were arrested then released without charges; that police detained people for extended periods without charges; that police charged the plaintiffs without probable cause, and for crimes not committed; that police used excessive force to discourage people from exercising free speech and other constitutional rights; and that police justified the use of excessive force under false pretenses.

It also alleges that police barred journalists from covering the eviction of protesters from Zuccotti Park on November 15, 2011. "The NYPD's use of force in general, and against journalists in particular is on-going and well-documented," the lawsuit alleges, with references to many reports about police conduct.

It also paints a picture of the NYPD as an unaccountable, insular organization that covers up the misconduct of individual police officers. "These practices, policies and customer engender perverse incentive for officers to commit acts of misconduct against civilians without consequences," the lawsuit alleged.

The lawsuit goes on to say, "by employing the NYPD in its present condition to police protests while failing to provide meaningful avenues of police accountability, the [City of New York] chills each plaintiff, and indeed each citizen, from engaging in Constitutionally protected speech by setting up the NYPD, in effect, as the arbiter of the content of speech in a democratic society."

Related:

Here we go again: Occupy Wal Street Arrests Photographers

 Suppressing Protest: Human Rights Violations in the U.S. Response to Occupy Wall Street
Report issued by The Global Justice Clinic (NYU School of Law) and the Walter Leitner International Human Rights Clinic at the  Leitner Center for International Law and Justice (Fordham)

STEVE SCHAPIRO: "“I don’t think I’ve yet taken my most important photograph"



 
Barbra Streisand, 1970. 'We shot this at her house in Malibu. She has extremely good taste and strong ideas about how pictures should be.'
Photo: Steve Schapiro

 Via The Telegraph


Steve Schapiro: access all areas


How did photographer Steve Schapiro go from documenting the lives of drug addicts and immigrants to spending months trailing Hollywood’s biggest stars? ‘I was quiet and polite,’ he tells Lucy Davies


Steve Schapiro learnt not to be intimidated by fame at an early age. As a teenager, long before he became a fixture of film sets and rock star mansions, Schapiro was determined to become “the world’s greatest novelist”. So he enrolled at Bard College in upstate New York, where he had tutorials with author Saul Bellow; they walked in the woods together, discussing Dostoevsky. But after a five-week sojourn in Paris and Spain working through the night on a novel, he realised there were “only four good pages in the whole thing. It was at that point I took up photography.”

Until then, it had been his hobby – something to do on holiday. He had a small, Bakelite camera called an Argoflex that he sometimes took outside on the streets near his home in the Bronx. “It seemed to me that the best thing you could do was work for Life magazine, so I began my own projects that were similar to the things they published – drug addicts in East Harlem, Haight Ashbury. I would keep going back to Life every few weeks to persuade them to hire me.”

In 1959, his story on migrant workers in Arkansas was picked up by a small magazine called Jubilee: “The New York Times saw it and asked if they could use one on their cover. It was really a terrific moment for someone just starting out.”

Life finally commissioned him – a portrait of Patrick Dennis, author of hit comic novel Auntie Mame. “I’d heard that Life photographers liked to photograph people in a bathtub – I don’t think it was necessarily true – but I brought along some bubble bath and persuaded him to do it. It ran full page.” The rest of the pack followed suit: Look, Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone.

“Even though I was in my twenties, I looked about 16, and I was quiet and polite. Everyone liked me. I travelled with Bobby Kennedy, I photographed the Selma March with Martin Luther King. I did Andy Warhol in The Factory and Muhammad Ali. I never knew where I would be in two days because I was always on the plane.”

Alongside the political stories he was making his name on the entertainment pages. His photograph of Dustin Hoffman for Look became the logo for Midnight Cowboy, then Otto Preminger hired him to take the onset photographs for The Cardinal, which was nominated for six Academy Awards.

While working on the lots he heard that Marlon Brando was going to be in Paramount’s forthcoming production of The Godfather. “At the time Brando was the top actor, so I went to Life and I got them to guarantee a cover, which they never do – they wouldn’t even do it for Frank Sinatra. I went back to Paramount and, of course, they agreed. I ended up working on the entire film.” Schapiro’s shots of Brando, Pacino et al are now classics of still photography. Everybody saw them, and everybody wanted Schapiro to photograph them. At the time it wasn’t unusual for him to spend four days, even six months, with a personality, one-to-one. “It often seemed we were the best of friends,” he says.

The only person he found difficult was Charles Bronson: “very brash”. Generally, though, his shoots were amiable collaborations. “For me there’s no difference between photographing a celebrity and a migrant worker. You’re always looking for a picture with emotion, design and information. I leave a lot of room for self-expression. I want my subjects to be themselves, and then I quietly pounce.”

Now 78, Schapiro lives in Chicago with his wife and youngest son. He continues to photograph and recently worked with his son on a photo story about the ageing hippie generation. “I don’t think I’ve yet taken my most important photograph,” he says. “I’m happy with many of the images. But I always look to the future.”

‘Steve Schapiro: Then and Now’ (Hatje Cantz, RRP £55) is available to order from Telegraph Books at £50 plus £1.35 p&p. Call 0844 871 1516 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk

This article also appeared in SEVEN magazine, free with the Sunday Telegraph. Follow us on Twitter @TelegraphSeven

Sunday, October 21, 2012

George McGovern, the Quiet Warrior: Photos By Bill Eppridge From His ’72 Campaign

 
 
 

Former U.S. Senator and 1972 presidential candidate George S. McGovern (b. 1922) has died after being admitted to a Sioux Falls hospice six days ago. He was 90 years old and had been in failing health “with a combination of medical conditions, due to age, that have worsened over recent months,” according to a statement from his family. From the mid-1960s through the early ’80s, he was one of the most prominent Democratic politicians in the United States — a proud liberal, decorated World War II veteran and tireless advocate for the poor and disenfranchised in America and around the world.

Here, LIFE.com remembers the native South Dakotan with a series of photos by LIFE’s Bill Eppridge, made on the campaign trail during the 1972 race for the presidency. Over the course of a few, heady months of that pivotal year, Americans were able to take the measure of the man to an extent that they never had before — and never would again. In November, he would lose to Richard Nixon in an historic landslide for the Republican incumbent; but during his time in the national spotlight, George McGovern articulated the progressive ideals he held dear as forcefully and as consistently as any candidate in the history of American presidential politics.

[Read Howard Chua-Eoan's McGovern obituary on TIME.com.]

Bill Eppridge recently told LIFE.com that, 40 years after that ’72 campaign, he recalled McGovern, the man, much more clearly than McGovern, the candidate. And he liked what he remembered.

“He was the sort of person,” Eppridge said, “that you’d want to have as a next-door neighbor. Friendly. Solid. He struck me as a genuine, down-to-earth person, and that’s not a quality you associate with many politicians. Not today, and not so much back then, either.”

Eppridge had documented Robert Kennedy’s 1968 campaign for the presidency and, famously, chronicled the violence-scarred final moments of RFK’s life as he lay dying in a bus boy’s arms on the floor of a Los Angeles hotel kitchen. Eppridge told LIFE.com that Bobby Kennedy’s death made it impossible for him to care, for years, about politics or politicians. He had grown into a Kennedy supporter and believer while covering the candidate in public and in private, and RFK’s murder in June 1968 left him bereft. He had to get away from the rough-and-tumble, and the unending stress, of high-stakes politics.

“But four years later,” he continues, “I was back covering a presidential race. McGovern’s campaign had a positive, unhurried feel to it. It ran smoothly, and McGovern himself was an easy guy to be around. The campaign had energy, of course, but it never felt frantic … or mean.”

[See more of Bill Eppridge's work at the Monroe Gallery of Photography.]

Below is an admittedly incomplete, at-a-glance biography of George McGovern — a man who led an exemplary American life, filled with accolades and victories as well as profound disappointments and searing personal loss. He will be missed.



George McGovern married his wife, Eleanor, in 1943, during the Second World War. They remained married for 64 years, until hear death in 2007. (She was also a native South Dakotan, and as a pilot during WWII McGovern named his B-24 bomber the “Dakota Queen” after her.)


Father of five children, including his late daughter, Teresa, who died in 1994 at the age of 45 after a long battle with alcoholism. McGovern later wrote a book, Terry: My Daughter’s Life-and-Death Struggle with Alcoholism, chronicling her struggle and the devastating effect her illness had on his family. In 2012, his son Steven died — after years of fighting alcoholism, as well.


Military Service: Pilot, B-24 Liberator, European Theater, WWII. Flew 35 missions, earned the Distinguished Flying Cross and three Air Medals


Ph.D., Northwestern University


Congressman (D-SD), 1958-1960; United States Senator, 1963 – 1981


Publicly opposed American involvement in Vietnam as early as 1963


Democratic candidate for president, 1972; lost to Richard Nixon in a landslide, winning only the state of Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. After the Watergate scandal destroyed Nixon’s presidency, cars were seen bearing bumper stickers that read, “Don’t blame me, I’m from Massachusetts.”


First-ever director of the United States’ Food for Peace program in 1961


Served as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture (1998–2001); named World Food Prize co‑laureate in 2008


Gandhi Peace Award Laureate (1991)


Presidential Medal of Freedom (2000)

For 180-years, people have been asking the question: is photography art?


Andreas Gursky's Rhein II fetched £2.7m last year, setting a record for any photograph sold at auction. Photograph: Andreas Gursky/AP Photo/Christie's
 
 
 
Photography: is it art?
 
From the earliest days of photography, practitioners took their inspiration from paintings. But as a new exhibition at London's National Gallery shows, the link went both ways
 
 
For 180-years, people have been asking the question: is photography art? At an early meeting of the Photographic Society of London, established in 1853, one of the members complained that the new technique was "too literal to compete with works of art" because it was unable to "elevate the imagination". This conception of photography as a mechanical recording medium never fully died away. Even by the 1960s and 70s, art photography – the idea that photographs could capture more than just surface appearances – was, in the words of the photographer Jeff Wall, a "photo ghetto" of niche galleries, aficionados and publications.

But over the past few decades the question has been heard with ever decreasing frequency. When Andreas Gursky's photograph of a grey river Rhine under an equally colourless sky sold for a world record price of £2.7 million last year, the debate was effectively over. As if to give its own patrician signal of approval, the National Gallery is now holding its first major exhibition of photography, Seduced by Art: Photography Past and Present.

The show is not a survey but rather examines how photography's earliest practitioners looked to paintings when they were first exploring their technology's potential, and how their modern descendants are looking both to those photographic old masters and in turn to the old master paintings.

What paintings offered was a catalogue of transferable subjects, from portraits to nudes, still lifes to landscapes, that photographers could mimic and adapt. Because of the lengthy exposures necessary for early cameras, moving subjects were impossible to capture. The earliest known photograph of a person was taken inadvertently by Louis Daguerre – with Henry Fox Talbot one of photography's two great pioneers – when he set up his camera high above the Boulevard de Temple in Paris in 1838. His 10-minute exposure time meant that passing traffic and pedestrians moved too fast to register on the plate, but a boulevardier stood still long enough for both him and the bootblack who buffed his shoes to be captured for ever.

When Daguerre turned his camera on people rather than places the results were revelatory. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was so struck by Daguerreotypes that she rhapsodised over "the very shadow of the person lying there fixed forever". The fidelity of features captured meant that she "would rather have such a memorial of one I dearly loved, than the noblest Artist's work ever produced" not "in respect (or disrespect) of Art, but for Love's sake". If, however, her photographer followed the advice of Eugène Disdéri, who wrote in 1863 that: "It is in the works of the great masters that we must study the simple, yet grand, method of composing a portrait," she could satisfy love with both physiognomy and art.




My Grandchild by Julia Margaret Cameron. Photograph: Hulton/Getty


What some pioneering photographers recognised straight away was that photographs, like paintings, are artificially constructed portrayals: they too had to be carefully composed, lit and produced. Julia Margaret Cameron made this explicit in her re-envisagings of renaissance pictures. Her Light and Love of 1865, for example, shows a woman in a Marian headcovering bending over her infant who is sleeping on a bed of straw. It is part of a line of nativity scenes that is as long as Christian art, and was hailed by one critic as the photographic equivalent of "the method of drawing employed by the great Italian masters". I Wait, 1872, shows a child with angel's wings resting its chin on folded arms and wearing the bored expression that brings to mind the underwhelmed cherubs in Raphael's Sistine Madonna. Such photographs were not direct quotations from paintings, but they raised in the viewer's mind a string of associations that gave photography a historical hinterland.

If Cameron and contemporaries such as Oscar Rejlander and Roger Fenton (who took numerous photographs of still-life compositions of fruit and flowers as well as his better known pictures of the Crimean war) were keen that their photographs should reflect their own knowledge of art, the links went both ways. In 1873, Leonida Caldesi published a book of her photographs of 320 paintings in the National Gallery, and her intended audience was not just the public but artists themselves, for whom the photographs were both more accurate and more affordable than engraved reproductions. By 1856, thanks to Fenton's photographs, artists could study classical statues in their own studios.





Richard Learoyd's Man with Octopus Tattoo II (2011) by Richard Learoyd. Photograph: Courtesy of McKee Gallery, New York


It was perhaps in depicting the nude Рsuch as Fenton's bestselling photograph of the discus thrower Discobolus Рthat photography could repay its debt to art. Hiring a life model was expensive, and engravings were a poor substitute. Delacroix was one artist who "experienced a feeling of revulsion, almost disgust, for their incorrectness, their mannerisms, and their lack of naturalness". He praised instead the painterly aid provided by acad̩mies (books of nude photographs) since they showed him reality: "these photographs of the nude men Рthis human body, this admirable poem, from which I am learning to read". He even helped the photographer Eug̬ne Durieu pose and light his models. And in 19th-century Britain and France, when pornography was illegal, photographs of the nude were in demand from customers who had no artistic interests.

When it came to landscape photography the new medium appeared just as the impressionists were beginning to work in the open air. Some commentators saw photography's real challenge to painting as lying in its ability to capture what the photographer and journalist William Stillman called in 1872 "the affidavits of nature to the facts on which art is based" – the random "natural combinations of scenery, exquisite gradation, and effects of sun and shade". Another practitioner, Lyndon Smith, went further, declaring landscape photography the answer to the "effete and exploded 'High Art', and 'Classic' systems of Sir Joshua Reynolds" and "the cold, heartless, infidel works of pagan Greece and Rome".

Being new was a laborious business, however. Eadweard Muybridge, the British-born photographer who first captured animals in motion and as a result ended the old painterly convention of showing horses running with all four legs off the ground, was primarily a landscape photographer. His pictures of the Yosemite wilderness, for example, involved carrying weighty cameras, boxes of glass negatives, as well as tents and chemicals for a makeshift darkroom, up mountains and through forests. Monet's painting expeditions by contrast required only paint and canvas.





Richard Billingham's Hedgerow (New Forest), 2003. Photograph: Courtesy of the Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London

If early photographers had no option but to negotiate their own engagement with painting their modern descendants can call on nearly two centuries of photographic history. It is a point the exhibition makes by combining old and new. So when a contemporary photographer such as Richard Billingham photographs an empty expanse of sea and sky in Rothko washes of slate blues and greys (Storm at Sea) he is referring to a heritage that encompasses both the monochrome tonality of Gustave Le Gray's atmospheric photographic seascapes of the 1850s and a painting such as Steamer on Lake Geneva, Evening Effect, 1863, by the Swiss artist François Bocion.





An image of a couple in their suburban home, from Martin Parr's album Signs of the Times, England, 1991 Photograph: Martin Parr/Magnum


The point is made across the different media. A brittle portrait of a suburban couple from Martin Parr's 1991 album Signs of the Times, for example, is contrasted with Gainsborough's Mr and Mrs Andrews of 1750. Both are images of possession and entitlement, the latter displaying landowners at ease amid their fields and woods, comfortable with both themselves and their station, the former a couple posing stiffly in their sitting room.




Ori Gersht's Blow-Up- Untitled 5, (2007) Photograph: Bigbang Ii/Courtesy of the Artist and Mummery + Schnelle, London



Meanwhile a 19th-century flower painting by Henri Fantin-Latour is the starting point for Ori Gersht's fragmented blooms, Blow Up. Gersht froze his flowers with liquid nitrogen before exploding them with a small charge and photographing the petals turned to flying shards. Among the nudes, Richard Learoyd's Man with Octopus Tattoo, 2011, is placed next to the gallery's 1819-39 painting of Angelica Saved by Ruggiero by that connoisseur of bodily curves, Ingres. The appeal of flesh and its sinuosity is timeless.

The curators of the National Gallery exhibition have avoided using many of contemporary photography's biggest names (there is no Andreas Gursky and no Cindy Sherman for example), and nor do they include photorealist painters such as Gerhard Richter or Andy Warhol. Their choices are largely less celebrated figures as if to show how deep is the seam of photographers still working with the long visual past. When in 1844-6 Fox Talbot published his thoughts about photography he gave the book (the first publication to contain photographic illustrations) the title The Pencil of Nature. This exhibition lays out what photography's founding father could never know: how the camera has also always been the pencil of art.


Seduced by Art: Photography Past and Present
National Gallery, London
WC2N 5DN
Starts 31 October 2012
Until 20 January 2013
Venue details

Saturday, October 20, 2012

"The Art of Collectiing Photography" Talk in Conneticut



Via Voices the Newspaper


WASHINGTON — Kathy McCarver Root will present The Art of Collecting Photography in a powerpoint presentation at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, October 25, in the Wykeham Room of the Gunn Memorial Library, 5 Wykeham Rd.

Ms. McCarver Root’s career as a photo editor and collector makes her uniquely suited in this particular field.

She says, “Photography is an extremely versatile medium and therefore can be woven into a variety of types of collections-paintings, drawings, ceramics, as well as a variety of décor styles — modern, traditional, urban and country.”

Ms. McCarver Root began her photography career upon moving to New York City, where she landed an internship with Esquire Magazine. An avid collector, she gained her experience throughout two decades while working as a photography editor.
She is now a photography dealer and consultant, working with individual and corporate clients to purchase and install fine art photography.

This program is free and open to the public. Registration is recommended.

Those seeking additional information or wishing to register may call 860-868-7586 or visit www.gunnlibrary.org
 
 
Related:  Photography dealer Kathy McCarver Root will open the latest show of fine art photography, Diane Arbus: Guggenheim Grants, 1963-1967, from Friday, October 26, through Saturday, December 29, at KMR Arts, 2 Titus Rd.

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

THE Magazine Review: Stephen Wilkes: Day to Night



Installation Photograph by Stephen Wilkes

The Magazine
Critcal Reflections
June, 2012

Iris McLister



Are you a city person? Do you like hailing a taxi or looking upward to see the tippy top of a skyscraper?


Maybe you’re more of a country mouse like me, and being among millions of people with places to go and people to see leaves you cold. My only, very brief, visit to New York City, several years ago, left my feathers substantially ruffled. The rush, the anonymity, the impossible task of trying to be nonchalant about riding the subway; the everywhere presence of interesting-looking people I’d never know or even meet.

No, not all of us are city people. Contemporary photographer Stephen Wilkes chose New York City as his subject for his series Day to Night, capturing moments of astonishing urban beauty in luscious, vivid color. His unique digitally manipulated, time-lapse photography allows the course of an entire day to be viewed in one image, thereby exposing the city’s constant energy while suggesting its ultimate stability.

We’ve all seen pictures of the Empire State Building or the Brooklyn Bridge at dusk; these aren’t those. The first thing you notice about the photos in Day to Night is the uncanny quality of light they capture; they look lit up from within. Wilkes has been a commercial photographer for many years, working for major publications like Sports Illustrated, Vanity Fair, The New York Times Magazine, and Time. As a fine-art photographer, his work reaches similarly wide audiences and often has political undertones. A series shot on Ellis Island depicts eerie scenes of dilapidated buildings and neglected grounds—it garnered so much attention that it helped prompt Congress to grant the area millions of preservation dollars and designate it as a “living ruin.” In a 2008 body of photographs taken in China, Wilkes conveyed in equal measure the sterile coldness of sprawling factories and the humanity of their workers.

For this more neutral, but visually dazzling, body of work, the artist began by choosing an iconic New York City location like Central Park or Washington Square. Perched fifty feet above ground level in a rented boom lift, the artist spent ten to fifteen hours taking hundreds of pictures of the same scene throughout the course of a day, painstakingly ensuring that every shot came from the same, fixed perspective.

Wilkes then blended together dozens or so carefully chosen shots with digital photo software to forge utterly seamless portrayals of a day’s shift into night. Painstakingly detailed and full of nuance, a single image can take months to create. Photographs take on time-travel qualities in their ability to relate distinct times of day in just one frame. In Gramercy Park, this city landmark becomes a dense forest, composed so that the vermillion shock of tall trees in the foreground gives way, somewhat ominously, to darkened evening skies. Apartment building windows are so warmly and clearly lit you can almost make out figures, and the bizarre lighting, which Wilkes sometimes manipulates into veritable fluorescence, suggests the contrivance of a movie set or a starkly illuminated dollhouse. In Park Avenue, rows of golden yellow cabs stream down traffic lanes in a scene of ecstatic motion. Thrillingly bright light beams downwards onto the avenue, and an inky-dark, cloudy sky makes a perplexing and delightful backdrop. This is a remarkably beautiful rendering of an urban scene—and it feels consummately new in its depiction. Coney Island is more literal in its representation of a day’s transition from morning to night; the evening portion on the left side of the picture gradually turns to brilliant daylight on the right. The neon blur of the Ferris wheel against the night sky gives way to the sunbathers and sailboats creating areas of startling, but somehow organic, contrast. Of these photographs, which Wilkes calls “quintessential city portraits,” the artist says: “You realize that the pedestrians are communicating, the cabs [are communicating], all these elements are coming together and creating a complex life form… that’s how the city works.”

In this eye-catching exhibition, Stephen Wilkes manages to inject scenes of urban New York with a dynamism that conjures universally relatable themes of renewal and change. This work encourages us to celebrate and share in the ineffably triumphant quality of New York City—and it’s got this country girl yearning for a visit to the Big Apple.

The exhibition has been extended through June 24, 2012.




AP’s Legendary Photographer’s Hong Kong Exhibition & London Memorial Oct. 18



Vietnam 1967 — AP photographer Horst Faas, with his
Leica cameras around his neck, accompanies U.S. troops in
War Zone C. (AP Photo)

Via Photo This & That

Earlier this year, May 10th, saw the sad passing of one of our time’s greatest photojournalists and picture editors; the legendary Horst Faas. Best known for his amazing images from Vietnam, Horst was a double Pulitzer Prize winner. As AP chief photographer for Southeast Asia and picture editor, he was also instrumental in getting Nick Ut’s powerful ‘Napalm Girl’ on the AP wire, along with another definitive image from that war, Eddie Adams’ Vietcong prisoner execution.


A boy carries a toy rifle as he walks with his mother past French
soldiers in battle gear at the Bastille Palace in Oran, Algeria,
May 4, 1962. Algeria’s eight-year battle for independence had
reached a tense cease-fire pending a July referendum.
 (AP Photo/Horst Faas)

The sun breaks through dense jungle foliage in early January 1965,
around the embattled town of Binh Gia, 64 km east of Saigon, as South
Vietnamese troops, joined by U.S. personnel, rest after a cold, damp
night of waiting in an ambush position for a Viet Cong attack that
didn’t come. One hour later, as the possibility of an overnight attack
faded, the troops moved out for another hot day hunting the elusive

communist guerrillas. (AP Photo/Horst Faas)

 

Exhibition

The Foreign Correspondent’s Club, Hong Kong will be have a reception and exhibition on Horst’s work on September 4th. For further details, visit the FCC website. The exhibition of images will remain on display for the foreseeable future.


Memorial

In London, on October 18th at 11.30am, we will be having a memorial service for Horst. The service will be at St Brides Church, Fleet Street.



South Vietnamese civilians, among the few survivors of two days of
heavy fighting, huddle together in the aftermath of an attack by
government troops to retake the post at Dong Xoai, June 1965.
Just a few of the several hundred civilians who sought refuge at the
post survived the two day barrage of mortars and bombardment.
After the government recaptured Dong Xoai, the bodies of 150
civilians and some 300 South Vietnamese soldiers were discovered.
(AP Photo/Horst Faas)


Monday, October 15, 2012

Save The Date: Paris Photo, November 15 - 18






 
PARIS PHOTO 2012
Dates: 15th -18th November 2012

Location:
Grand Palais
Avenue Winston Churchill
75008 Paris

Dates & times : Thursday 15 Nov. - Sunday 18 Nov. From noon till 8pm.
Opening: 14 Nov. 2012 (by invitation only)

Rates :
Full price : 28 € TTC
Reduced fare (student) : 14 € TTC
Catalog 2012 : 25€ TTC
"Mutations" Book : 25€ TTC
Package entry + catalogue : 45 € TTC

Free for kids under 12 years old and for Personal Care Attendant (upon presentation of proof).
 
lens culture has an an extensive (but by no means exhaustive) sneak peek preview of 276 photographic works of art that will be exhibited at the fair in 2012 - click here.

Thursday, October 11, 2012

Hank Walker: JFK and RFK, 1960

John and Robert Kennedy, Los Angeles by Hank Walker
© 1960 Time Inc



La Journal de la Photographie has been running a series of excerpts of interviews with several Great Life Photographers. This photograph is a particular favorite of ours.

"At the 1960 Democratic Convention, where everybody was shooting pictures like crazy, I was doing a story on Bobby Kennedy. The morning after Jack was nominated, we went up to his room. The brothers talked very quietly, and Jack told Bobby he wasn’t going to choose Walter Reuther for Vice President. I only made one picture in there, and then I waited outside for Bobby to come out. When he did, he was furious. We were walking back down the stairs, and Bobby was hitting his hand like this, saying “Shit, shit, shit.” You know, he really hated Johnson. "

(Interviewed September 29, 1994. Excerpted from: John Loengard, LIFE Photographers: What They Saw, Boston, A Bullfinch Press Book, 1998)

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Barbra Streisand Returns to Brooklyn

© Bill Eppridge: Barbara Streisand in her kitchen, Brooklyn, NY, 1964



Barbra Streisand is back. She opens her new Back to Brooklyn concert tour at the new Barclays Center arena on Thursday and Saturday, has a new album titled Release Me coming out Tuesday, will be back in movie theaters this fall with a film titled The Guilt Trip, and is the subject of a dishy new William J. Mann biography, Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand.

Bill Eppridge covered Barbra Streisand for a LIFE magazine cover story  as she was reaching international stardom in 1966. See it here.



Related: Remembering a Film About Brooklynites Who Were All About Streisand


©Bill Eppridge: Barbara Streisand with Paparazzi, Paris, 1966

Saturday, October 6, 2012

Its a great weekend of photography in Washington, DC and Santa Fe, NM!




The DC Fine Art Photography Fair continues today, 12 - 7, and Sunday, 12 - 5.

Bob Gomel will be in the gallery in Santa Fe following last night's gala opening reception for

Winds have cancelled today's festivities at the Albuquerque Balloon Festival, so its a great day to come meet this legendary Life magazine photographer.



Friday, October 5, 2012

The DC Fine Art Photography Fair: "I want to encourage people to educate their eyes”



Stephen Wilkes/Monroe Gallery


Via The Washington Post

Photography fair offers opportunity for collectors

By Michael O’Sullivan
Friday, October 5, 2012

With the (e)merge art fair’s exclusive focus on up-and-coming artists, the organizer of another art fair hopes there’s room in the spotlight this weekend for more established names.

On Saturday and Sunday, Washington photography dealer Kathleen Ewing will unveil the inaugural DC Fine Art Photography Fair, featuring 15 booths by photography dealers she invited from across the country, each of whom specializes in more traditional imagery than one can expect to see at (e)merge.

Ewing will offer a wide range of prints, including a $12,000 photograph by the great Edward Weston (1886-1958) and a $450 image by MacDuff Everton, a contemporary photographer based in California. Washington’s Hemphill Fine Arts also will showcase a diverse mix of artists, including Colby Caldwell, William Christenberry, Don Donaghy, Godfrey Frankel, Max Hirshfeld, Franz Jantzen, Tanya Marcuse, Kendall Messick, Anne Rowland, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Julie Wolfe.

Dealers include the far-flung and the homegrown. San Francisco’s Scott Nichols Gallery, which is known for handling work by Ansel Adams and other members of the famous Group f/64, will participate, along with Multiple Exposures, a contemporary cooperative gallery based at Alexandria’s Torpedo Factory Art Center.

Ewing says visitors to the fair should expect something completely different than the edgy (e)merge and FotoWeek DC, a photography festival -- returning next month for its fifth year -- that’s known more as a broad celebration of all things photographic than as a breeding ground for collectors. Ewing says she thinks that with Washington’s educated, culturally connected and visually sophisticated population -- not to mention its booming economy -- the time is ripe for a commercial fair offering a range of price points for both the aspiring and the established collector.

“I want to encourage people to educate their eyes,” says Ewing, who hopes her fair will introduce the “passion of possessing beautiful works of art” to a new generation. To that end, the fair will feature a free panel discussion on collecting Saturday at 11 a.m.

Event Information

Details:

Saturday-Sunday, Oct. 6-7

Information:

202-986-0105

Price:

Free
2801 16th St. NW
Washington, DC

Thursday, October 4, 2012

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Acclaimed LIFE photographer Bob Gomel looks back



p 25 VA Main
 

One of his fabled JFK shots. - Courtesy Bob Gomel
 
 

October 3, 2012



That's LIFE
Acclaimed photographer Bob Gomel looks back
 
Asked what it was like to be a photojournalist for LIFE magazine during its 1960s heyday, Bob Gomel does not hesitate to answer. “It was the mecca,” he says with a combination of excitement and nostalgia.


“In my wildest dreams, I thought about things like that, and it never really occurred to me that I would ever become part of that wonderful, elitist group of photographers,” the renowned photog tells SFR. “There was no place higher that you could aspire to.”


Gomel’s iconic images have stood both the tests of time and digital media: a meta Malcolm X photographing then Cassius Clay inside a Miami diner; JFK examining the first space capsule; candid shots of the Beatles relaxing the day prior to their career-defining Ed Sullivan Show appearance.


“It’s a trip down memory lane,” he says of the images he selected for LIFE in the 1960s, his forthcoming exhibit at Monroe Gallery. “Everybody realizes now, retrospectively, that the people that we photographed all became iconic, [but] we had no idea of their value historically when we were doing it.”


“It’s amazing to me how 50-years-ago images can be still relevant today,” Gomel, who describes his current schedule as still “busy as can be,” continues.


Not bad for a kid from the Bronx who was first captivated by photography at age 10, after admiring a picture his science teacher had shot and hung inside the classroom
.
“[It] was a beautiful sepia-toned print of a cobblestone street with a manhole cover in the middle, and a pigeon on it,” he recalls. “I looked at that thing and thought, ‘My God, that’s just beautiful,’ and I was mesmerized.”


Curious, he joined the “little photo club” at his public school, and his lifetime affair with still images began.


“I got hooked!” he says.


The one thing missing in the equation was convincing his parents to fork over the then-whopping $83.75 to purchase his dream instrument, a Ciro-flex camera.


“It was the first post-World War II camera made in America,” he points out.


His parents didn’t budge, so the young Gomel started a bike route delivering groceries to earn the dough.
“I remember once, in the middle of the winter, driving up the snowy hills with that bike, the front wheel basket loaded, and I slipped and fell over,” Gomel reminisces. “A dozen eggs cracked and so, not knowing what to do, I went home and replaced the broken eggs with ones from my mother’s refrigerator and continued to deliver that order,” he laughs. “It’s really what sticks in your mind [after] all these many years.”

He took over a closet in his family home and turned it into a makeshift darkroom.


“It was a cheap imitation of the German Rolleiflex, but I cut my teeth on that Ciro-flex,” he says of his first camera, adding that because there was no real formal training available, he mastered his craft based on “trial and error.”

Focused, he would later land his dream job at LIFE, where he became a trailblazer implementing now-standard maneuvers like double exposure and camera rigging—like when he took a groundbreaking aerial shot of the casket containing the body of President Dwight D Eisenhower in the US Capitol’s rotunda from 280 feet above ground.

“If you can envision a picture and you haven’t got any immediate idea of how to do it, you seek out ways,” he explains.

His visit to Santa Fe, it turns out, will be something of a class reunion, as both former LIFE managing editor Dick Stolley and former reporter Hal Wingo—the twosome that would later found People magazine—live in town.

“I don’t get a chance to see many of my colleagues because the TIME-LIFE alumni association basically orients interests and activities around New York City—luncheons and what have you,” Gomel, who is now Houston-based, says. “It’s not practical for me to be able to join them on those occasions.”

With one foot in the retirement door and the other still active in sporadic travel photography, Gomel says, he often gets the itch to immerse himself in photojournalism once more. One event that cemented this, he says, was a trip to New York in 2001. After several delays, he flew back home the evening of Sept. 10.

“I was sound asleep the following morning when my friend called me something around 7:30 am and said, ‘Turn on your television set,’” he says. “When I saw what was going on, I realized I was right there a few hours before, and God—it was killing me not to have been able to be a part of that event and that I had just missed it. So the answer to your question, do I miss it? You bet.”


Opening reception with Bob Gomel
Friday, October 5   5 - 7 PM
Exhibition continues through November 8, 2012

Listen to Art Beat radio interview: Life Magazine and photographer Bob Gomel

Monday, October 1, 2012

Worcester Art Museum exhibition features some of the most powerful and provocative American photographs of the 1960s.




 Joseph Louw, South African, about 1945-2004, The Death of Martin Luther King, Jr., Lorraine Hotel, Memphis, April 4, 1968, Gelatin silver print, gift of David Davis, 2011.148

 Iconic news photographs of 1960s on view in exhibition at Worcester Art Museum

Via artdaily.org


WORCESTER, MASS.- Worcester Art Museum announces its major fall exhibition, Kennedy to Kent State: Images of a Generation, opened September 29 and on view through February 3, 2013. The exhibition features some of the most powerful and provocative American photographs of the 1960s.

The photographs chronicle world events during the turbulent decade of the 1960s. From disturbing assassinations, the Vietnam War, antiwar protests, the thrill of space exploration, and the lightheartedness of pop culture, this exhibition represents a range of human emotion. The photographs are from the museum’s permanent collection. The photographs were originally collected by David Davis, as a way to recall and reflect his memories of the era.

The photographs also reveal the activities of news gathering and publishing in the 1960s. Many are vintage wirephotos or file photographs from newspaper and magazine archives. These were used in editing, layout, and as camera art for the creation of printing plates. In the 1990s, when news outlets transformed their imaging libraries to digital formats, these objects were discarded or released onto the market. Many of the prints were stamped or inscribed on the back with a record of each use, and in this way they reveal their own history, and carry powerful qualities as artifacts.

“The Worcester Art Museum was among the very first American museums to exhibit photographs as works of fine art,” said Matthias Waschek, director. “In 1961, coincidentally the time that the Kennedy to Kent State era began, we established a curatorial department of photography and began building a permanent collection. These holdings now represent a survey of the history of photography in the United States in its fascinating variety. To the post-Baby Boomer generations, this exhibition has the power to awaken them to the correlation between their present lives and the not-so-distant past.”

Kennedy to Kent State: Images of a Generation was organized by David Acton, curator of prints, drawings, and photographs at the Worcester Art Museum. He has organized nearly 100 exhibitions at the museum, and published extensively on Old Master, American prints and drawings, and the history of photography. Notable among his exhibition catalogues are A Spectrum of Innovation: Color in American Printmaking 1890-1960, The Stamp of Impulse: Abstract Expressionist Prints, and Photography at the Worcester Art Museum: Keeping Shadows.

“Then, as now, pictures were the medium by which most people experienced the wider world,” said Acton. “Photographs created a common experience, plotting a historical arc of embracing familiarity. Kennedy to Kent State presents a selection of these pictures, providing a glimpse of that turbulent time. Many of the images transcend reportage. In their momentary imagery, refined compositions, and humanity, they attain the stature of true works of art.”

In 2000, David Davis founded the Schoolhouse Center for Art and Design, home to the Driskel Gallery of Photography, and the Silas Kenyon Gallery of Regional Art in Provincetown, Massachusetts. When Davis acquired the famous Vietnam photographs by Nick Ut and Eddie Adams, he began his 12-year project to collect a survey of the iconic images by which Americans experienced a transformative period of their history.

“I wished to do something that I have not seen before,” said Davis, “to present a kind of storyboard of the 1960s. From the time I entered my teen years until that of my college graduation, there were assassinations, an unpopular war, a trip to the moon and the rise of the protest movement and counterculture. It was a confusing, unsettling, exciting, and ‘far out’ time to grow up.”