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Contemporary Art Photographers Mess With the Medium

By Martha Schwendener @ The Village Voice

The question of why certain practices thrive at particular moments feels like the art world equivalent of asking why honeybee populations have collapsed in the last decades or mussels have started growing in the Hudson. Why, for instance, are contemporary photographers—or, if you like, artists working with photography—obsessed with abstraction, materiality, and process?

First, the evidence. A good place to start is "Processed: Considering Recent Photographic Practices" at Hunter College (East 68th Street and Lexington, through December 12). The show includes artists like Marco Breuer, whose spectral abstractions, made by scratching and scuffing chromogenic paper, are hung across from Josh Brand's photograms that look like muted Josef Albers paintings.

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The Restless Medium

By Jed Perl @ The New Republic

Michael Fried,who shot to intellectual stardom in 1967 with an essay in Artforum called "Art and Objecthood," is an intimidating writer. He looks very closely. He has passionate feelings about what he sees. And he shapes his impressions into a theory that fits snugly with all the other theories he has ever had. Whatever his chosen subject--Diderot, Courbet, Manet, Kenneth Noland--he comes up with an interpretation that is as smoothly and tightly constructed as a stainless-steel box. His writing amounts to a set of matching stainless-steel boxes. He puts potential critics on notice that the best they can hope to do is leave a few fingerprints or scratches on these perfectly polished surfaces. And so many people back away. Fried wants us to feel that we could as easily demolish the Great Pyramid of Giza with a pick-axe as successfully question his interpretations of his chosen themes--which now include the art of the camera, in his new book, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before.

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Roy DeCarava, Pioneering Photographer, Dies at 89

By Randy Kennedy @ NYTimes

Roy DeCarava, the child of a single mother in Harlem who turned that neighborhood into his canvas and became one of the most important photographers of his generation by chronicling its people and its jazz giants, has died. He was 89.

His death was announced by Sherry Turner DeCarava, his wife and an art historian who wrote frequently about his work.

Mr. DeCarava trained to be a painter, but while using a camera to gather images for his printmaking work, he began to gravitate toward photography, in part because of its immediacy but also because of the limitations he saw all around him for a black artist in a segregated nation. “A black painter, to be an artist,” he once said, “had to join the white world or not function — had to accept the values of white culture.”

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Atlanta 9/09

Lumière Brothers - The Serpentine Dance (c.1899)

America, Captured in a Flash

By HOLLAND COTTER @ NY Times

Like probably a zillion other school kids, “My country tears of thee” was the way I understood the first line of “America.” Maybe that’s the way the Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank heard it too when he came to the United States from Europe in 1947, at 22, with English his second, third or fourth language.

Sadness seems to trickle through the 83 photographs in his classic 1959 book, “The Americans,” his disturbed and mournful song-of-the-road portrait of a new homeland and the subject of a 50th-anniversary exhibition now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.


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DCC Digital Classic Camera 5.0

The Minox re-invented!

"The new digital Classic Camera from MINOX comes in a really stylish format! On the outside it features a miniaturized shell, designed in great detail, and inside it is packed with innovative technology in the form of a powerful digital camera. A unique harmony of classic design and state-of-the-art features. This new edition of the wee camera is a logical and up to date further development of the previous DCC model, and features a color monitor and a memory card slot, making the miniature camera geared to continue a success story."


Minox

The Digital Print

"This invaluable resource demystifies the complex, rapidly changing, and sometimes confusing world of digital print technologies. It describes the major digital printing processes used by photographers and artists over the past forty years, explaining and illustrating materials and their deterioration, methods of identification, and options for acquiring and preserving digital prints. A removable poster provides a ready reference for identifying specific processes and materials."

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