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.