Visions and Images

Frederick Sommer

Visions and Images was part of a series on the arts done in the late 1970's and 80's. Interviewies include: Garry Winogrand, Elliot Erwitt, Frederick Sommer, Harry Callahan, Joel Meyerowitz, Arnold Newman, Duane Michals, and Cornell Capa + Burk Uzzle.

"The Diamonstein-Spielvogel Video Archive features interviews Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel conducted with prominent artists, musicians, architects, designers, photographers, directors, actors, writers, and art collectors, documenting the arts world during the nineteen seventies and the nineteen eighties. This collection includes interviews from several programs: American Architecture Now, About the Arts, Barbaralee Diamonstein and, Handmade in America, Inside Fashion, Inside New York's Art World, Interior Design: The New Freedom, and Visions and Images."

Duke University Digital Archives

Visions and Images on YouTube

Rodchenko & Popova: Defining Constructivism

by Rachel Campbell-Johnston @ The Times Online

It's a good thing that that wobbly bridge got fixed because you can almost feel the stamp of the military boots as Rodchenko and Popova march into Tate Modern. Here is the art of the Russian Revolution: clear, strong, insistent and iconoclastic. As you walk through this show, it takes over your imagination - a bit like Bolshevik troops once took over Red Square.

Are you going to fall into rank? At first it feels pretty hard not to. Rodchenko & Popova: Defining Constructivism is a big, powerful exhibition with the pull of an unstoppable force. Although prevailingly intellectual, it has a hard, bold, determined aesthetic that works a bit like a blow from a rifle butt. It smacks itself down direct on the retina.

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Suzanne Mooney

On another note there was an interesting little blurb about Suzanne Mooney's new work at SEESAW Magazine. "I photograph the diagram itself. The work denies the erotic charge that the photographic images may have, and becomes a humorous but disturbing comment on glamour photography."


Interesting work.
"The camera simultaneously offers us access to the view whilst denying us the full appreciation of the scenery."

I like the way she thinks....

Suzanne's website

"Park Life" - An Interview with Tod Papageorge

by Aaron Schuman @ SEESAW Magazine

AS: Aaron Schuman
TP: Tod Papageorge

AS: You’ve often said that you were originally inspired to pursue photography because of Henri Cartier-Bresson. Where did you find his work in the first place?

TP: It was totally by accident. I was taking an introductory photography class at university, and I guess I was curious enough to go to the library and look at some bound periodicals. And there was this photograph by this man I’d never heard of; it was totally shocking to me. It provoked me to literally do everything I could in that library to find any other pictures by him. I think I found one more. But those two pictures inspired me to become a photographer.

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Photography and the eyes of the beholder

by Liz Jobey @ The Guardian

For anybody interested in the changing nature of photography over the last 30 years, Michael Fried's Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before is an important book. The reputation of its author – one of the leading art historians and critics of the past half-century – is guaranteed to capture the attention of photographers and artists alike. Its size and thoroughness, over 400 well-illustrated pages in a large art-book format, distinguish it from the many volumes of critical theory that contemporary photography has spawned in recent years. And the title unambiguously states that photography matters as art, which settles one long-debated question at a stroke.

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Twilight of the color photo

As printed snapshots vanish, we're losing more than shoe boxes full of mementos

By Dushko Petrovich @ Boston Globe

ONE HUNDRED YEARS ago, one of Paris's richest men had a quixotic dream. Returning from a personal trip to China and Japan, the banker Albert Kahn decided to build a huge visual archive of the planet. Kahn believed that mutual misunderstanding was the source of world conflict, so in 1909, he began funding scores of photographers as they set out across five continents. By the time the Great Depression finally bankrupted him 22 years later, Kahn's intrepid op??rateurs had managed to document almost 50 countries, returning to France with 120 hours of film footage and 4,000 black-and-white pictures. This alone would have been a remarkable legacy, but the real jewels of the collection were printed on glass, in a full spectrum the world had never seen. The recently invented technique of the autochrome - which made portable color photography possible - meant that Kahn's emissaries could also amass a staggering total of 72,000 color plates.

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A haunting memorial in 'Library of Dust'

Photographer David Maisel became fascinated by canisters of cremated remains at the Oregon State Hospital. They spoke to him of secrets, transformation and loss.

By Leah Ollman @ LA Times

The first photograph in David Maisel's new book presents a view into a storeroom that clearly doesn't get a lot of foot traffic. An old wooden desk with no chair is parked in the corner. Bits of debris have gathered on the stained linoleum floor. The walls are what give this room, and Maisel's book, its name: "Library of Dust."

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In Photography, What Puzzles the Eye May Please the Mind

By KEN JOHNSON @ New York Times

NEW HAVEN — Photographs are shameless. They’ll do anything to get your attention. They’ll show you celebrities in and out of their clothes, exotic creatures and objects, places and events that you would never otherwise see.

Another, paradoxical strategy for captivating viewers is to show them something they can’t immediately understand. Whether because of its visual complexity, its oblique perspective, its lighting, its degree of abstraction or the unfamiliarity of its subject, it’s the kind of photograph that makes you stop and think, “What the heck is that?” And it keeps you looking until you’ve figured out what it is you’re looking at.

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'Why am I making this picture?'

by Liz Jobey @ The Guardian UK

Ever since 1971, when she was a student at Harvard and decided to take portraits of the people who shared her boarding house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the American photographer Susan Meiselas has questioned the motivation behind her pictures and their relevance to the wider world. She has been a member of the international co-operative Magnum Photos since 1976, but her work has developed far beyond the role of a photojournalist. She spent the end of the 1970s and most of the 1980s in Central and South America on the front line of the people's revolution in Nicaragua and the civil war in El Salvador, documenting the "dirty war" in Argentina, human rights abuses in Columbia and the end of the Pinochet regime in Chile. During that time, and since, working with her own photographs and with other people's, she has expanded her role to that of curator, film-maker, teacher, historian and archivist.

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Double Exposure: William Eggleston and Enrique Metinides

Buckle up for some curious photo road trips

By Leslie Camhi @ The Village Voice

'Life is in color, but black-and-white is more realistic," director Samuel Fuller once said. Two exhibitions—a retrospective devoted to the sumptuously hued visions of a decadent Southern gentleman, and a show of vintage black-and-white prints, south-of-the border tabloid fodder by a man of the people—suggest he was only partially right.

Both artists were given Brownie cameras as 10-year-old boys. But William Eggleston deferred picture-taking until after he'd left the family plantation, when in college and later, as a restless young man-about-Memphis in the 1960s, he began honing a color aesthetic that was part Cartier-Bresson, part visitor from another planet.

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Photograph of Jesus

301 Inkjet tips wins award

As a contributor I am happy to announce that 301 Inkjet Tips and Techniques: An Essential Printing Resource for Photographers by Andrew Darlow was chosen as the winner in the "Photography: Instructional/How-To" category of The National Best Books 2008 Awards, sponsored by USA Book News.

Press Release

Photo Ops: Josef Koudelka Revisits Prague 1968

By Megan Buskey @ The Nation

One afternoon in early September, the Czech photographer Josef Koudelka was administering a bottle of cognac to a group of well-wishers at the Pace/MacGill Gallery, two placid, spacious rooms on the ninth floor of an office building on Fifty-seventh Street in Manhattan. The occasion was the opening of an anniversary exhibition of photographs Koudelka had taken forty years earlier, during the invasion of Prague by Warsaw Pact forces tasked with extinguishing the Czech spirit of political reform. At the time, Koudelka was 30 and a relative newcomer to his art. He had never taken photographs for the purpose of reportage (his portfolio at the time mostly featured pictures of Gypsies and the theater), but he turned out to have a natural gift for documentary photography.

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Interview with Henry Wilhelm

Michael Reichmann interviewed Henry a month or so ago and has put the interview up on the Luminous Landscape site.

Click here to view

Random Image

Aardenburg Imaging & Archives

I must applaud Mark on the development of his site! It has come a long way and continues to develop nicely. There is a load of information on the permmenance of digital printing.

"Aardenburg Imaging & Archives was founded in 2007 by Mark McCormick-Goodhart. It is located in the historic Hyde House in Lee, Massachusetts. AaI&A collaborates with serious amateur and professional print makers, photographers, and artists who work with digital printing processes. We are carefully building an archive of digitally mastered photographs and fine art prints. Our goal is rigorously to document the late 20th and early 21st Century digital printing technologies used to make photographs and fine art prints. Aardenburg's collecting policy emphasizes the materials and processes rather than any specific genre of artists or subject matter. "

Aardenburg Imaging & Archives

The Expansive Lens

Peter Campus, Douglas Gordon and David A Ross in conversation @ TATE Etc.

Peter Campus was one of the first artists to explore the formal possibilities of film and video technology. Douglas Gordon, who admires Campus's work, is best known for his iconic video installation 24 Hour Psycho. The two artists talk to curator David A Ross.

DAVID A ROSS : Both of you have worked in the medium of video, but starting in different decades and different cultural environments. For example, Peter, when you showed your video installations at the Bykert Gallery in 1975 there wasn’t much cable television. However, what you have in common is a deep and serious engagement with cinema. I know you are both fans of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, a film that underscores the idea of looking, the psychological complexity of being looked at, the gaze of the camera, but also the obsession of recording and filming – all aspects that relate to both your bodies of work.

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Adobe CS4

Adobe's SVP of the Creative Business Unit - Johnny L and Photoshop Product Manager John Nack show off some upcoming CS4 technologies as well as technology Adobe is working on beyond CS4.

Podcast

Indecisive moments

Australian and Japanese artists explore the ambiguity of time, memory and reality

By ASHLEY RAWLINGS
Special to The Japan Times

Henri Cartier-Bresson's legacy of the "decisive moment" had a profound impact on photography. As a cofounder of the photographic cooperative Magnum Photos in 1947, his philosophy influenced a whole generation of photojournalists, and, for decades, Magnum photographers were instrumental in constructing the popular impression of reality. They crafted a collective memory of history as a set of succinct narratives told through images captured in the briefest of instants.

echnology and developments in "photomedia" since the '80s, contemporary artists have rethought the role of time in photography. With this in mind, the curators of "Trace Elements: Spirit and Memory in Japanese and Australian Photomedia" have brought together 10 artists from Australia and Japan for a heady exhibition that is meant to address the notion of photomedia as a "memory- creation device."

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Layers to Comment on Layers of Imagery

By KAREN ROSENBERG @ New York Times

As it sifts through the riches of the extraordinary Gilman Collection of photographs, acquired three years ago, the Met is slowly bringing its holdings of contemporary photography up to speed. In the fall the museum dedicated a new gallery, the Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall, to the exhibition of post-1960 photography.

“Photography on Photography: Reflections on the Medium Since 1960” is the second installation in this space. It is better than the first, largely because of its variety of works (by artists male and female, young and old, American and European, famous and fledgling). Thomas Ruff and Hiroshi Sugimoto are here, but so are Janice Guy, an artist turned dealer who is benefiting from a sudden interest in her early self-portraits, and Mark Wyse, a young photographer who is also active as a curator. The 21-artist mix isn’t perfect, but the curator, Doug Eklund, deserves credit for taking a few risks.

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