The End of Kodachrome

Steve Hebert for The New York Times

Read the full story in The New York Times.

Hide/Seek Exhibition Walk Through Video

Here is a great examples of how not to see an exhibition. Nonetheless, it does give a good sense of how the show is laid out. Have a look, and pause here and there.

Bill Armstrong and Linda Connor at SEMP in Daytona

Both exhibitions close on February 6, 2011
The Southeast Museum of Photography

ODYSSEY
The Photographs of Linda Connor

Linda Connor, Muhammad Ali Mosque, Cairo, Egypt, 1989

Odyssey: The Photographs of Linda Connor reflects an artist’s pursuit of diverse and compelling subjects from around the world. Although she frequently focuses on devotional sites and monuments, Connor is also drawn to revealing the spirit embedded in everyday life. She is fascinated with photography’s relationship to time: her pictures present a compelling combination of timelessness and a palpable sense of the passage of time. Another core element in her work concerns the dynamic relationship between the natural world and the sacred; its sites, iconography, and philosophy. Odyssey includes some of Connor’s best-known images from the...MORE

SPIRIT
From the Infinity Series
Bill Armstrong

Bill Armstrong, Figure 02, 1999

Bill Armstrong’s Infinity series transforms re-photographed and appropriated images to create ephemeral, abstracted and de-materialized color fields and strongly evocative iconic figures. Working with source material as diverse as African masks, Roman busts, statuary and other representations, Armstrong’s finished figurative andportrait images are powerfully evocative of an unseen presence. Spirit presents selections from five of the series that make up Bill Armstrong’s Infinity project. Working with his unique process of re-photographing...MORE

Please note: Bill Armstrong will also have work in the exhibition, The Edge of Vision: Abstraction in Contemporary Photography which will be on view in the Cornell Fine Arts Museum all semester.

Disneyland Dreamer

Robbins Barstow, Home-Movie Maven, Dies at 91

Robbins Barstow, a Connecticut man who, movie camera whirring, documented every aspect of his family’s life for decades, yielding a vast body of work that formed the cornerstone of the recent home-movie revival and has lately garnered a huge following online, died on Nov. 7 at his home in Hartford. He was 91 and previously lived in Wethersfield, Conn.

Mr. Barstow made more than a hundred films in the course of eight decades. In 2008, his best-known, “Disneyland Dream” (1956), a 30-minute account of a family vacation, was named to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.

Read the entire story from The New York Times HERE.

You can find Disneyland Dream and an AMAZING mass of other films at archive.org

New Issue of Ahorn

© Claudine Doury, Famille de Silkhon, Kiziljar, KZ, 2003

And man, oh man, is it GREAT!
Click HERE to see it.

Six Reflections on the Photography of Robert Frank

“I have a lot in back of me – of what has happened in my life – and that’s a tremendous pull backward. And in front of me I love the sea.” - Robert Frank

Robert Frank
Sick of Goodby's, Mabou 1978
© Foto museum Winterthur/National Gallery. Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York
Gelatin silver print
48.3x33cm

Click HERE to read some wonderful comments on Frank's photographs (such as my favorite, above) by Ed Ruscha, Lou Reed, Mary Ellen Mark and others.

Ed Templeton - The Second Pass

The Second Pass, by Ed Templeton. Published by Seems Books, 2010.

Here is a GREAT example of how an artist has combined photographic images together in a meaningful and intentional manner in the form of an artist's book. This should help those of your in Memory and The Photograph.

To read more about the book, click HERE

Erasure Project by Ben Alper

Untitled, from the series Erasure by Ben Alper

An interesting take on the family photo album.

Alper writes of his project:

Among the many transformations that have taken place at the hand of the digital revolution is the relatively sudden disappearance of the traditional family photo album. More and more often these days, photographic images are stored and organized on personal computers. This shift away from tactility toward a more ephemeral experience of the photograph marks a pronounced negation of tradition and signals the loss of both cultural and familial memory. This trend has only been further exacerbated by our access to, and consumption of, a nearly infinite flow of cultural imagery. With these ideas in mind, Erasure examines the physical impressions and deterioration left behind by photographs that have been removed from family albums.

Read more about this work in a review from Hey Hot Shot here.

Curtis Mann to Lecture @ UCF on Friday, October 15th

GREAT opportunity, students! Click on the poster below to view the image in larger size:

Recently Opened: MOMA - New Photography 2010

Above Image: Amanda Ross-Ho, Irreconcilable Indifferences. 2010

Just can't get away from reclaimed photographs this year - here, there, everywhere!
Click HERE to view more images from the show.

Info on the exhibition from the MOMA website is below:

New Photography 2010 presents four artists— Roe Ethridge, Elad Lassry, Alex Prager, and Amanda Ross-Ho—whose photographs mine the inexhaustible reservoir of images found in print media and cinema. Ethridge takes his pictures in “editorial mode,” directly borrowing from commercial images already in circulation, including outtakes from his own illustrational magazine work. Lassry defines his practice as one consumed with pictures, meaning with generic images lifted from consumer society, such as Hollywood publicity stills and design illustrations. Ross-Ho’s hand-drilled sheetrock panels lined up with found pictures and mural-scale images of studio residues renegotiate the various stages of the creative process. Prager takes her cues from pulp fiction and the fashion images of Guy Bourdin to construct filmic narratives starring women disguised under synthetic wigs, dramatic makeup, and retro polyester attire. Infusing the seductive language of film and advertising with a touch of sly conceptualism, the artists included in New Photography 2010 explore the relationship between straight and constructed photograph, image and picture.

The exhibition is organized by Roxana Marcoci, Curator, Department of Photography.The exhibition is made possible by the Carl Jacobs Foundation.

2010 MacArthur Fellows!

See the links below to watch short videos on the work of the two visual artist selected this year.
Always a very exciting time! Genius Awards, whoo-hoo!!

Jorge Pardo - MacArthur Foundation

Jorge Pardo - MacArthur Foundation

Elizabeth Turk - MacArthur Foundation

Elizabeth Turk - MacArthur Foundation

Two Photographers - Two Families

Top Image: Chris Verene, My Cousin Steve With His Daughter, His Wife Had Just Left Them, 1992
Bottom Image: Tina Barney, Marina's Room, 1987

Seeing the announcement for Chris Verene's new book Family (available from TwinPalms Press), made me think back to some of Tina Barney's earlier work - this thought occurred to me not only because of the inherent similarity and overwhelming discrepancy in terms of subject matter, but also because of conversations that have been taking place in the Memory & The Photograph seminar. I think it might be useful for students to have a look at these two very different photographic representations of family, especially as they relate to our discussions of autobiographical memory and identity formation.

Here is an excerpt from the press release from Verene's recent exhibition at Postmasters in New York:

CHRIS VERENE
"FAMILY"

Chris Verene's first show at Postmasters will present over forty photographs made during the past twenty-six years. This landmark exhibition of documentary storytelling chronicles a group of closely-knit characters from the photographer's family and their rural Illinois community. The photographer is also one of the characters-- his blood bonds and bonds of friendship within the small town are carefully spelled out in simple handwritten captions atop the colorful pictures. Verene's new book, "Family," published this summer, contains many of the images on view - it opens with his cousin Candi's divorce. Candi was made famous when her wedding picture appeared on the cover of Verene's first book ten years ago. Both husband and wife were fired in the Maytag factory closing described in President Obama's first address to the United States in 2004 and in the 2010 State of the Union. Theirs is not the only family torn apart by the economic struggles of the country, as Verene documents other similar stories. The exhibition will also bring to light recent developments in the artist's intimate life, as his young child, Nico, Brooklyn-born and half-Puerto Rican, appears throughout the latest photographs, playing with his cousins and newfound friends in Galesburg. This show will offer an extraordinary, inspiring, hopeful, and sometimes sorrow-filled view into the true personal stories and private lives of the artist's immediate and extended family in their small community as photographed throughout a lifetime in economically depressed Galesburg, Illinois. Museums currently showing Verene's work include The Tate Modern, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and The New Orleans Museum of Art.

Above content from Postmasters Gallery

And here is an excerpt from the overview of "So The Story Goes" - an exhibition that included Barney's work at The Art Institute of Chicago:

Tina Barney has said, “I began photographing what I knew.” For much of the 1980s and 1990s, this meant taking pictures of her friends and family as they went about their daily lives in affluent areas of Long Island, New York City, and New England. Employing a large-format, 8-by-10-view camera enabled her to create highly detailed images that retain their focus and richness even when made into four-by-five-foot prints. Barney was thus one of the first photographers to present color work on a grand scale that rivaled most twentieth-century paintings. This scale also inspired a deliberate construction of the picture, at times requiring supplementary lighting and the direction of the sitters.

Barney’s photographs expose the emotional and psychological currents that course just beneath the surfaces of perfect trappings and banal gestures. In Jill and Polly in the Bathroom, such tension is evident in Jill’s strained expression, Polly’s turn away from Jill, and the distance between them that persists even in the cramped quarters of such a small room. Barney notes, “When people say that there is a distance, a stiffness in my photographs, that the people look like they do not connect, my answer is, that this is the best we can do. This inability to show physical affection is in our heritage.” While the myth that material comfort ensures personal contentment is an alluring one, Barney’s photographs undermine such illusions, even in later images in which the focus has shifted away from context to the personality and face of the sitter. In these more recent photographs of family and friends—many of which eliminate her directorial approach and allow for more self-presentation to the camera—Barney continues to make photographs distinct from family snapshots or formal group portraits in their refusal to serve as predictable commemorations of happy times, important gatherings, and ritualized affection.

Above content from The Art Institute of Chicago

You can see more of Verene's work HERE, or at his website, www.chrisverene.com
You can see more of Barney's work HERE and HERE

In Defence of Stealing Photographs

Above image from iheartphotograph

...thought the gang from Memory and the Photograph would like to read this lovely little essay.

Click HERE to access the post from iheartphotograph

Bastienne Schmidt at Southeast Museum of Photography

This exhibition is right here in our backyard - or sideyard, I suppose. The Southeast Museum of Photography in Daytona is a venue we are fortunate to have so close by. I highly encourage all of you to make the drive over to see the exhibitions that make up their fall season (click HERE for more info).

I think the Bastienne Schmidt exhibition will be of particular interest to many of you currently enrolled in Rollins art/photography courses. There will be an artist's talk and book signing by the artist on October 30th from 5 to 7:30 p.m. Highly, highly recommended.

Below is an excerpt from the Southeast Museum of Photography website:

September 4 - November 7, 2010

HOME STILLS
Bastienne Schmidt

The Red Dress, Sagaponack, 2009

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

This exhibition and book project uses photographs, large scale mixed-media pieces and film still images to explore female gender identity as it is refracted through popular culture. Schmidt challenges our visions of a domestic utopia with “tableaux” photographs of herself in the role of a “housewife” that re-stage many disconcertingly familiar scenarios and circumstances. Working strictly in her own home environment of suburban Long Island, Schmidt takes on the social context of a world of suburban fragmentation and loneliness with the presentation of the housewife character as a wandering, rootless protagonist.

Putting Memories to New Use - Sara VanderBeek at the Whitney

Sara VanDerBeek; Metro Pictures, New York and Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco

Read the New York Times review HERE.

Outpost: Harvey Benge – Against Forgetting

Above image from Harvey Bange - Photography/Art/Ideas
See below for a review of Harvey Benge's new artist's book from Outpost.

Outpost: Harvey Benge – Against Forgetting: "I was trying to recall the last occasion when an Auckland photographer looked closely at one of this region’s suburbs. I think that it was ..."

Captured: America in Color from 1939-1943

Above Image: Chopping cotton on rented land near White Plains. White Plains, Greene County, Georgia, June 1941. Reproduction from color slide. Photo by Jack Delano. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

I first saw these photographs earlier this summer - this image gallery has been making the rounds. It is WELL worth a look.

(Click link below to view more images)
Captured: America in Color from 1939-1943 – Plog Photo Blog

Selective Memory - Dance/Video/Performance

“Selective Memory,” with Madeline Best, at the Chocolate Factory.

Came across a review for this work today - sounds INCREDIBLY intriguing. Certainly relevant to those of us reading about memory and the photograph in the honors seminar, and also of interest to students in ART130, and of course related to much that we are/will be discussing in ART300. Good stuff.

Information on the piece from The Chocolate Factory website reads,

"Selective Memory is a real time video performance about nostalgia for relationships that never took place, events which never happened; a film which was never made, but which everyone remembers; exploiting the misappropriation of "real" sounds and images to confound, distort, remake and ultimately erase the truth."

Read the rest of the description HERE.
And read a New York Times review HERE.

Indianapolis Museum of Art to Represent U.S. at 2011 Venice Biennale

From the IMA website:

The Big News
The IMA has been selected to represent the United States at the 2011 La Biennale di Venezia (Venice Biennale) and present the work of Puerto Rico-based artist collaborative Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla. Often described as the Olympic games of the contemporary art world, more the 70 nations present the newest and best works from their respective countries every other year at the Venice Biennale. This year marks the 54th International Art Exhibition.

That's big news, alright.To read more, view the IMA website, or read the article posted today on the blog, Eyeteeth.

Landmark, Vieques, Puerto Rico, 2003 (above image from Eyeteeth)

Seeing and Time: Video Art as Experience

Sharon Lockhart, Podwórka, 2009.
Installation at Gladstone Gallery, New York, courtesy the gallery.

Below is a great review of a recent show at Toronto's Power Plant, which I was fortunate enough to see in person. And yes, it did take some time to take it all in and truly consider the work. For my students who are perplexed with what to do when presented with time-based works, please have a read!

Seeing and Time: Video Art as Experience

Richard Misrach - Destroy This Memory

Destroy This Memory.
Photographs by Richard Misrach.
Aperture, 2010. 140 pp., 70 color illustrations, 15x11½"

I've known about this book for a few months, but was reminded of it today when I came across a brief review on American Suburb X. It's particularly apt for those enrolled in Memory and the Photograph, but a relevant book for any and all interested in photography and current events. (All artist royalties donated to the Make it Right Foundation to help rebuild the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans.)

A link to the book is below:

Aperture Foundation | Destroy This Memory - Default Store View

Welcome Back Everyone - Here is a New Photo Submission Opportunity for You All!

http://www.tate.org.uk/youngtate/exposedcompetition/how.htm

The contest is based around the themes in the exhibition listed above. I was fortunate to see this exhibition at the Tate Modern while in London a few weeks back. They've published an accompanying catalog as well. A worthwhile look indeed.

More information on the exhibition is here.

Photo Submission Opportunity for Students!!

I encourage you all to apply!

RSVP: CLASS PICTURES, now open for submissions

Artists are currently invited to submit work for consideration in Class Pictures, an RSVP online exhibition of exceptional work by currently enrolled students of undergraduate photography programs. Students may submit up to five images from a single project.

RSVP is a Michael Mazzeo Gallery program of curated online exhibitions. By way of call and response initiated on the gallery blog, artists are asked to submit images to be considered for inclusion in specific, themed shows. RSVP exhibitions are handled in the same professional and enthusiastic manner as the gallery’s on-site exhibitions, with advertising and sales efforts, on-demand printed catalogs and gallery support.

It is important to note that this is not a pay-to-play program and the exhibitions are not 'competitions'.
There is no charge for entries.
There is no charge for inclusion in exhibitions.
There is no charge for inclusion in exhibition catalogs.

To submit images, follow the instructions on the Online Submissions page.

Above content from Michael Mazeo Gallery

Cartier-Bresson @ MOMA

Above Image Credit:
Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos, Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson

A Photographer Whose Beat Was the World

Read a review of the exhibition HERE.

Yale University Acquires Photographer Lee Friedlander's Archive and Master Prints

Yale University Acquires Photographer Lee Friedlander's Archive and Master Prints

Photo Submission Opportunity for Students!!

Lark Photography will award $1,000.00 to one photography student that submits the winning self-portrait.

Send your photo to selfportraitcontest@larkbooks.com and you could win the grand prize.

2nd and 3rd place finishers each win all four books in the Digital Masters series.

Read the official rules before entering. Your photo must be received by April 30, 2010.

Lark Books

Zoe Strauss, I-95 Project, Final Show of 10 Year Project, Final Edit - Awesome.

Is Photography Over?

SFMOMA posed this question to a group of well known critics, curators, theorists and artists who will convene later this month at the museum. You can read their brief initial responses by clicking the links below...

(Below content from SFMOMA)

Overview

Unknown Untitled [Man reflected in mirrors], n.d.; photograph; gelatin silver print; Collection SFMOMA, Gift of Gordon L. Bennett;

SFMOMA has been collecting and exhibiting photographs since the museum's founding in 1935 and is dedicated to the examination of the medium in all its forms. This major symposium on the current state of the field is the first in a series of public programs on photography. The texts below reflect the initial responses of 13 invited participants to the symposium's central question: Is photography over? The discussion begun here will continue on April 22 and 23, when the participants will convene at SFMOMA for a series of public and private conversations on the current state of the medium.

Participants

Vince Aletti George Baker Walead Beshty Jennifer Blessing Charlotte Cotton Philip-Lorca diCorcia Geoff Dyer

Peter Galassi Corey Keller Douglas Nickel Trevor Paglen Blake Stimson Joel Snyder

Borrowed from Sarah Stonefoot's Beloit College Blog...

Elliott Erwitt by Alec Soth

...because it is SO perfect!
It's even more perfect if you're familiar with the work of both Soth and Erwitt - if you're not, have a look HERE and HERE...

Sarah's blog is HERE if you're interested.

PHOTOESPAÑA - Interview with Jem Southam

"Looking at the world with a camera is hugely rewarding."
- Jem Southam

Follow the link below to read the interview....

PHOTOESPAÑA

Levitating Man/Photographic Illusion = AWESOME!

Came across this today during my morning Google Reader routine on John Foster's Accidental Mysteries Blog. Foster himself found it on a blog by Richard Wiseman (a psychologist and magician!) - I just love the blog-go-round!

At any rate, the image is a wonderful example of truth and illusion in photography!

Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance

Opens Friday at The Guggenheim in NYC - can't wait to see this show in May!

March 26–September 6, 2010

Much of contemporary photography and video seems haunted by the past, by ghostly apparitions that are reanimated in reproductive media, as well as in live performance and the virtual world. By using dated, passé, or quasi-extinct stylistic devices, subject matter, and technologies, this art embodies a melancholic longing for an otherwise irrecuperable past. Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance examines myriad ways photographic imagery is incorporated into recent practice and in the process underscores the unique power of reproductive media while documenting a widespread contemporary obsession, both collective and individual, with accessing the past. The works included in the exhibition range from individual photographs and photographic series, to sculptures and paintings that incorporate photographic elements, and to videos, both on monitors and projected, as well as film, performance, and site-specific installations. Drawn primarily from the Guggenheim Museum collection, Haunted will feature recent acquisitions, many of which will be exhibited by the museum for the first time. Included in the show will be work by such artists as Marina Abramović, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Sophie Calle, Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Roni Horn, Zoe Leonard, Robert Rauschenberg, Cindy Sherman, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Jeff Wall, and Andy Warhol. A significant part of the exhibition will be dedicated to work created since 2001 by younger artists. This exhibition is curated by Jennifer Blessing, Curator of Photography, and Nat Trotman, Associate Curator.

This exhibition is made possible by the International Director’s Council of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Additional support is provided by grants from The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation and the William Talbott Hillman Foundation. The Leadership Committee for Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance is gratefully acknowledged.

Douglas Gordon, Bootleg (Empire), 1998. Video installation, dimensions variable. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift of the artist, 2004.99

Above content from The Guggenheim-New York

Twitter with The Whitney?

Sure! Why not?

Have you ever wanted to ask a Biennial curator why they chose a certain work, or what it's like to try to capture what's going on in American art today? On March 23 you'll have a chance. Join 2010 co-curator Gary Carrion-Murayari and WNYC art critic Carolina Miranda for an online Twitter Tour of the Biennial. As Dave Itzkoff of The New York Times says, "For some of us, it may be the first time we visit the Whitney in our pajamas." Submit questions via Twitter using the hash tags #whitneybiennial or #whibi before or during the tour, which begins at 2:30 pm.

Above content from The Whitney Museum of American Art

Chrystel Lebas at Witzenhausen in Chelsea

I was so disheartened to get this announcement from Chrystel last week, as her show in New York will close before I have a chance to get up there. BUT....if any of you will be in the area between now and March 27, please go have a look.

I was fortunate to meet Chrystel while at a conference last year in the U.K., and she is a remarkable artist dealing with time, space and memory through the medium of both photography and video in a very subtle yet captivating manner. I recently purchased her book Time in Space for the Olin Library as well - go and have a look!

Information on her exhibition in New York is below:

Witzenhausen Gallery New York is proud to present work by French artist Chrystel Lebas. The exhibition is on show from February 25th till March 27th at the Witzenhausen Gallery in New York.

Chrystel Lebas’s work is drawn from her interest in looking at how landscapes contain psychological significance in relation to historical events, legends, Fairy Tales and our childhood memories and how to communicate these within an image.

She employs photography and the moving image, often pushing the apparatuses to their limits of their functionality to produce images. The works are mainly produced during the twilight hours, or as in the French expression, “Entre chien et loup”, translated in English as “Between Dog and Wolf”: the moment when twilight embodies the transition from dog to wolf, when it is nearly impossible to tell the difference between the howling sound coming from the two animals.

Above content from Witzenhausen Gallery

For more information on the work of Chrystel Lebas, visit her website: http://www.chrystellebas.com

New Yorker Critic Peter Schjeldahl's Whitney Biennial Review

...in audio slideshow format - a nice summation. He seems to find the show rather dull, but nice. He thinks we'll be glad, though, if we go!

Click HERE for the audio slideshow

Whitney Biennial Reviews Begin

Click the link below to read what The New York Times has to say. Not a bad review, really - I'm looking forward to going up to see the show in May. Have a glance at the slideshow within the Times article to see a few representative images as well.

I've also included a link to another Times review of the Brucennial 2010 exhibition in Soho - a sort of Whitney Biennial counter show of sorts, put together by the five-person art collective known as the Bruce High Quality Foundation. Interestingly and/or appropriately, this collective also has work in the Whitney.

Click HERE for the New York Times Whitney Biennial Review
Click HERE for the New York Times Brucennial 2010 Review

Above image:
Bruce High Quality Foundation's "We Like America and America Likes Us" and Lorraine O'Grady prints on the wall.
Photo: Chad Batka for The New York Times

Danny Lyon - The Bikeriders @ Southeast Museum of Photography in Daytona

The exhibition opens this Saturday, February 27th. The museum will hold a reception from 5:00 to 7:30 p.m. It's just a quick drive to Daytona - about 40 minutes, and well worth it. The book that accompanies this series of photographs had a huge influence on my own development as an artist and photographer. It's really wonderful work, and I highly recommend heading over to the museum to view these prints in person.

"The use of the camera has always been for me a tool of investigation, a reason to travel, to not mind my own business, and often to get into trouble. The real question faced by a photographer or journalist today is not, of course, the type of film that is inside their camera; although that matters. The real question is what's inside their head. That has always been the question and will always be the question. [The Bikeriders] is a personal record, dealing mostly with bikeriders whom I know and care for. If anything has guided this work beyond the facts of the worlds presented it is what I have come to believe is the spirit of the bikeriders: the spirit of the hand that twists open the throttle on the crackling engines of big bikes and rides them on racetracks or through traffic or, on occasion, into oblivion." - Danny Lyon

About the exhibition:

In 1968, just before Easy Rider roared its way into American consciousness, Danny Lyon finished The Bikeriders. After four years with the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Gang, he had created one of the defining photography projects of the 1960s: The Bikeriders, and pioneered the style that has come to be known as the “New Journalism.” With its mix of grit, realism and romanticism, and its ground-breaking use of the bikers own stories and accounts, The Bikeriders was a landmark collection that documented the abandon and risk of motorcycle gangs, and powerfully propelled motorcycle counterculture into the mainstream American consciousness. The images and interviews in The Bikeriders are as raw, alive, and dramatic today as they were nearly four decades ago.

Above content from The Southeast Museum of Photography
More information on the exhibition can be found on the SEMP website - HERE.

Photographer Zoe Strauss - 10 Year I-95 Project

Every May for the past 9 years, Zoe Strauss has mounted a public art exhibition under the ramp of I-95 in her hometown of Philadelphia. Each year, she has edited down from hundreds (if not more likely, thousands) of images to a final selection of 231 photographs. The exhibition this May will conclude her 10 year project. I highly recommend signing up to follow her blog to watch the editing process unfold. Strauss posts both new and old images and comments on those that she thinks (at the moment) are in, out, or maybe - and why.

Click HERE to access her blog, and watch the video below for more information on the project.
Click twice on the video to access the full screen version on YouTube.

Harry Ransom Lecture: Sarah Greenough

Harry Ransom Lecture: Sarah Greenough

Click the link above to find out more about this upcoming lecture that will apparently be made available via live webcast, beginning at approximately 7 p.m. on Thursday, February 25th.

More information on the lecture is below (below content from Marketing Photos with Mary Virginia Swanson)

Greenough presents the lecture “Transforming Destiny into Awareness: Robert Frank’s The Americans, 1959.”

Sarah Greenough was also the founding curator of the National Gallery of Art’s department of photographs in 1990. Since that time she has organized numerous exhibitions at the National Gallery that have traveled to museums around the world, including Paul Strand: An American Vision (1990), Walker Evans: Subway and Streets (1991), Harry Callahan (1996), Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries (2001), Roger Fenton (2004), and Irving Penn: Platinum Prints (2005). She has written several award-winning publications, including Alfred Stieglitz: Photographs and Writings (1983), On the Art of Fixing a Shadow: 150 Years of the Art of Photography (1989), Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set (2002), André Kertész(2005), and The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888–1978 (2007). She most recently organized Looking In: Robert Frank’s “The Americans.”

Exhibition Opportunity for Undergraduates @ Manifest in Cincinnati

For those of you who graduated last year or plan to graduate this year or next (class of 2009, 2010, 2011), this is a great opportunity for you all...
6th Annual

RITES OF PASSAGE

JUNIORS, SENIORS, and
GRADUATES ONE-YEAR OUT

$300 BEST OF SHOW AWARD

Postmark Deadline for Entry: March 5, 2010

Click HERE for specifics

Prisencolinensinainciusol

Wow. This is pretty much the best thing EVER. Diego Pinedo, a student in The Photograph as Language course, posted this on his class blog. We're working with a population with the acquired language disorder, aphasia - which led Diego to think about what English sounds like to those who don't speak the language. The lyrics of this song are apparently pure gibberish. The song's artist states that "the song is about "incommunicability" because in modern times people are not able to communicate to each other anymore. He added the only word we need is prisencolinensinainciusol, which is supposed to stand for "universal love."

AWESOME!!

(Click on the video to access the full-screen version on YouTube)

RFK Funeral Train Rediscovered @ Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach

I highly, highly recommend visiting this exhibition if you are in Palm Beach between now and May 2nd - in fact, if you're not, take a trip down. I plan to! I ordered this book for the Olin Library last year, so you can preview the work beforehand if you like.

More information on the exhibition is below.

Above Image: Copyright Fusco/Magnum Photos

Paul Fusco: RFK Funeral Train Rediscovered
Organized by the Norton Museum of Art
February 13 - May 2, 2010

On June 5th, 1968, Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles as he campaigned for the presidential nomination. Kennedy's body was flown to New York City for a memorial service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and then carried by train from New York to Washington D.C. for burial at Arlington National Cemetery. Hundreds of thousands of mourners lined the railway tracks to pay their final respects to Kennedy. On board the train was Magnum photographer Paul Fusco, on assignment for LOOK Magazine. From inside the train, Fusco took some 2000 pictures of the mourners—black, white, rich, poor, in large groups and on their own. The resulting images are one of the most powerful and affecting series of photographs ever taken. This commemorative edition of 20 images was printed in 2008 on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination.

Click HERE to access the museum website.

Borderland Youth Documentary Project

Thought some of you in The Photograph as Language class (and others, of course) might be interested in having a look at some of the work my friend and colleague Jason Reed is doing down in Texas. Below is a video interview where Jason talks about the work. You can find out more about the program by signing up to follow the Borderland Youth Blog as well.

(Click directly on the video to access the full-screen version on YouTube)

Life After Stroke Awards

This information comes from Anna's blog, Through the Looking Glass - thanks, Anna! Follow the links below to watch videos from recent winners in the Art category. You'll note that the severity and types of aphasia are quite distinct from one another, the articles provide information and insight into each award winner's particular circumstances and afflictions. It's too bad these award are only available for residents of the U.K. - maybe we can find a similar program in the states?

2009 Winner, George Glaves Video
2008 Winner, Peter Bull

Magnum Archive Moves to Texas

Funny to think of all those amazing photographs heading down the highway in a big ole truck (with GPS, of course)...

Read the story in The New York Times HERE

Above Image: Larry Towell/Magnum Photos

A 1993 image of an Arab child and an Israeli soldier after a protest in East Jerusalem is part of Magnum's archives in Austin.

Criterion Collection Releases New Chantal Akerman Set

I'm certainly going to buy this for the Art Department, but I'll bet it's available on Netflix as well. The story from The New York Times is below....


CHANTAL AKERMAN IN THE SEVENTIES

A new entry in the Criterion Collection’s no-frills Eclipse series, “Chantal Akerman in the Seventies” offers five films by this Belgian director best known for her 1975 “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles,” a seminal work of women’s cinema that combined gender politics with an innovative style using long takes to underline the passing of time.

The set includes Ms. Akerman’s first feature-length film, the 1975 “Je Tu Il Elle,” in which she plays an alienated young woman on a road trip punctuated by two erotic encounters; and “Les Rendez-Vous d’Anna,” a more mainstream feature from 1978, centered on a film director (Aurore Clément) and her glancing contacts with humanity during a promotional tour of European cities.

Both are challenging and often beautiful works, but the highlight of the set may be the disc called “The New York Films.” It unites two of the short, experimental works that Ms. Akerman made in Manhattan during a 1971-73 residency, and the 86-minute “News From Home” (1976), a return to New York filmed after “Jeanne Dielman.”

All three were made in collaboration with the cinematographer Babette Mangolte. And all three reflect Ms. Akerman’s fascination with the avant-garde work — by filmmakers like Marcel Hanoun, Yvonne Rainer and Michael Snow — that she discovered at Anthology Film Archives during her New York stay. Taken together they allow us to see a young artist absorbing her influences and confidently moving into territory of her own.

The 11-minute single-shot film “La Chambre” borrows a formal device from Michael Snow’s “Région Central” (1971), in which a coldly precise camera movement is used to survey a space, here a cramped one-room apartment. As the camera pans in a full circle (three rotations from right to left, then suddenly from left to right), it passes Ms. Akerman lying in bed in poses that variously suggest sloth, sensuality and paralysis. A geographical gesture in Mr. Snow’s work here becomes something domestic and dramatic, allowing us to infer a story from these few glimpses of a woman confined in her personal space, as “Jeanne Dielman” would do more extensively and expressively.

In “Hotel Monterey” (1972) Ms. Akerman expands her vision to include an entire building. A residential hotel on the Upper West Side is covered from bottom (the lobby and lounge area) to top (the camera strains to peer out windows on the upper stories, trying to catch a glimpse of the Hudson). Filmed over the course of a single night, the movie proceeds from dark elevators and dimly lit corridors to expansiveness and sunshine, while the human presence gradually drains away. These images have a lyrical loneliness that critics have compared to the works of Edward Hopper, but there is something more spectral here too, a haunting emptiness that looks forward to similarly filmed hallways in Stanley Kubrick’s “Shining” (1980).

The spatial configuration of hallways returns on a grander scale in “News From Home” as eerily unpopulated New York streets. This time there are no domestic interiors, but only public places: an East Village corner covered by a slow pan, a view from the side window of a car driving up a far West Side avenue, extended shots of subway interiors (in which some passengers can be seen defiantly returning the camera’s gaze).

The two previous films were silent, but “News From Home” has a crowded soundtrack consisting of city sounds blended with Ms. Akerman’s own voice, reading increasingly imploring letters from her mother back home in Belgium. As in “Jeanne Dielman” we gradually become able to infer a story — this time, of a young woman’s growing autonomy and escape from the past.

Like William Friedkin’s “French Connection,” “News From Home” has, with time, become a documentary on New York in the 1970s. Lingering shots of pre-gentrified downtown neighborhoods, graffiti-slathered subway cars and the little village of shops and stands that once filled the Times Square station now carry a sense of impermanence and inaccessibility, of a world receding into the past, just as notions of “home” have receded for the unseen protagonist.

The final image — a 10-minute take from the deck of the Staten Island ferry, looking back on a lower Manhattan fading into fog and mist — now carries an extra charge. Defining the left border of the frame is the World Trade Center. (Criterion Collection/Eclipse, $44.95, not rated)

Above content from The New York Times

Human Rights Activisit and Photojournalist Paula Allen to Speak @ UCF Next Week

For more information, visit www.ucfglobalperspectives.org

Being In The World @ CIFO in Miami

Highly recommended, if you can make your way down to Miami.

Being in the World: Selections from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection

Curated by Berta Sichel for cifo
December 2, 2009 - March 7, 2010

The Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO) is proud to present Being in the World: Selections from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection, an exhibition curated by Berta Sichel on view from December 2, 2009 to March 07, 2010, coinciding with Art Basel Miami Beach (Dec. 2-6 2009).

Being in the World: Selections from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection is freely framed by the idea of situation as it was developed by French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre's situation, or being in the world, includes an individual's place-or current circumstance-and that person's memory, which is a closed circuit providing a background view. The way an individual understands his/her position in the world is a product of past and present circumstances, which include people, close friends and acquaintances as well as strangers who pass unnoticed.

The exhibition proposes this as a useful model for understanding recent artworks which struggle with the individual in a changing world. Being in the World includes 7 artists whose works were selected from the 63 media-based works in the collection. It features works by leading artists Chantal Akerman, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Muntean/Rosenblum, Robin Rhode, Shirin Neshat, Bill Viola, and Francesca Woodman.

The works in Being in the World: Selection from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection, might also be closest to Sartre's notion of the difference between life and art, since for Sartre art only belongs to us if it restores ambiguity and sometimes a brutal freshness to actual events. In one way or another, the works selected all tell stories, and for Sartre to tell a story when we don't know the outcome creates illusion. Some of these stories are close to reality, others drawn from imagination, but all have uncertain outcomes. All describe situations, ways of being in world. Together they transmit the freedom of art, the freedom of choice-the only freedom Sartre recognized. That is their intrinsic value.

Featuring work by: Chantal Akerman, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Muntean/Rosenblum, Shirin Neshat, Robin Rhode, Bill Viola and Francesca Woodman

Image:
Muntean / Rosenblum
Disco, 2005
HD DVD, 1 sequence: 5: 5; looped
Courtesy the artist

Above content from Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation

Photography RULES!

I had to borrow this link from my colleague Peter Happel-Christian as I found it so wonderfully hilarious. And, as Peter suggests in his post on his Creative and Social Blog at St.Cloud State University in Minnesota, sometimes the images in the "wrong" column are much, much more interesting than those in the "right" column. Have a look - it's a good time, I swear (just click on the link below)...

78 Photography Rules for Complete Idiots

Photo-Eye Best Books of 2009

(Click on the image to access the link to Photo-Eye)

The list is HERE! As suggested by others who are passing the list around, do make sure you have some time on your hands as you go through this, as you are likely to be prompted to do lots of looking and wandering around via various links and searches that you find yourself undertaking. Fun, fun, fun!!

Art Palm Beach Opens Tonight

Head on down, gang - only about 2 1/2 hours south of us. Aperture will have a presence, it'll be a hoot! (Click on the logo to access more information)

Omer Fast @ The Whitney

Omer Fast: Nostalgia
Through February 14, 2010

Omer Fast: Nostalgia is a new three-part film and video installation that continues Fast's fascination with exploring configurations of fact and fiction through narrative and filmic constructions, intertwining modes of documentary and dramatization. The exhibition is presented as part of the 2008 Bucksbaum Award, conferred on Fast for his significant contributions to the visual arts in the United States. Fast's work has previously been seen at the Whitney in the 2002 and 2008 Biennials.

Read reviews of the work in Art in America and The New York Times.

Get ready, everyone!!!

For over 30 years, photo-eye has published our annual selections for Best Books of the year. Last year we started what we hope will be a long tradition of inviting photographers, writers, curators, publishers, and other photo professionals to select their 10 top books of the past year. Among the list are a few of the wonderful guest contributors from last year and some new additions.

2009 Best Books Guest Contributors:

Ron Jude & Danielle Mericle
Marco Delogu
Antone Dolezal
Tricia Gabriel
John Gossage
Todd Hido
Anne Kelly
Jeff Ladd
Lesley Martin
Melanie McWhorter
Jeff Mermelstein
Eric Miles
Laura Moya
Martin Parr
Andrew Phelps
Markus Schaden
Paul Schiek
George Slade
Alec Soth
Ed Templeton
Sara Terry
Jennifer Thompson
Erik van der Weijde
Michael Wolf

Above content from Photo-Eye Newsletter

Chuck Samuels at Daziboa in Montreal

Since 1980, Chuck Samuels has been using the history of photography and cinema to explore philosophical questions concerning memory and the construction of the self in a body of work shaded with irony. His work, which has been seen widely in Canada and abroad, can be found in collections such as that of the Maison européenne de la photographie in Paris, the Musée de la Photographie de Charleroi.

With Before Photography, Dazibao’s series of events and exhibitions based on the recovery and appropriation of images comes to a close. Chuck Samuels, in a vast deconstruction and re-organisation project, explores his personal history by means of a powerful critical and aesthetic strategy: fiction.

This task, which is much more than a stylistic exercise, derives from Samuels’ enquiry into the nature of the bond that tied him to his father. In Chuck Goes to the Movies, 108 photographs form the basis of an exuberant analysis of photographic representation in popular cinema and television from their early days until 1967, the year Samuels was introduced to photography by his father. Here Samuels, a kind of Zelig of the camera lens, offers up a delirious repertoire of possibilities, hypotheses and characters. Chuck’s Home Movies takes a similar tack, creating free associations between clips from a number of films with iconic depictions of photographers.

In the other two sections of the exhibition, Last Words on Photography and Chuck’s Family Photos, Samuels speaks directly of his memories of his father to paint an emblematic, perhaps even mythical, portrait of the “man with a camera”, thereby highlighting and interrogating an entire field of recent cultural history which has suddenly become accessible and even popular, one marked by the desire of individuals to see themselves depicted in it.

Above content from Daziboa Centre de Photographies Actuelles

in Belgium and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, as well as in numerous private collections. He lives in Montreal.