Fear, Fantasy, and Scholarship at the 2009 AIPAD Art Show

The annual AIPAD show at the New York Armory (March 26-29) got started yesterday with a press preview and gala opening party. I got to the preview but ducked out before the party. I think that was a good thing. Before the fun started, I was able to talk to lots of the gallery owners who were busy putting the final touches on their booths.
    Most said they there apprehensive—we don’t yet fully know what the effects of the economic crisis will have on the photo art market, after all.
     Oddly, I left feeling upbeat. Contemporary photography still seems heavily weighted to what American Photo editor at large Jean Jacques Naudet calls “plasticians”—the artists who use photographic processes and technology to create utterly fabricated imagery. Some of the work is beautiful and some is impressive if not expressive. There are some real surprises in this year’s show, which I’ll be revealing in the next day or two. The economy aside, the takeaway from the show would have to two brilliant new initiatives from the George Eastman House. Oh, I also learned that I need to make a correction to a previous post about the famous Shepard Fairey poster of Barack Obama.

Scholarships Available for LOOK3 Festival Workshops

The third annual LOOK3 Festival of the Photographs in Charlottesville, Virginia takes place on June 11 and 12, and we'll be telling you more about it in the coming weeks. (Go here from more information now.) Prior to this year's festival, from June 6-11, there will be a series of workshops available to undergraduate and graduate students at accredited two- or four-year photo programs. And thanks for backing from Canon USA and Leica Cameras, there are scholarships available. This is a great opportunity at a great American photo festival. Go here for more information on the workshops and how to apply.--David Schonauer

TMZ is to Journalism What...Hey, Maybe It Is Journalism!

I think the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley has done the right thing by inviting Harvey Levin to speak to students.
      Levin is the founder of TMZ, the online celebrity gossip site. (There is also a television show based on TMZ, which is owned by Warner Bros.) Levin spoke at the school yesterday, as part of an ongoing lecture series by media movers and shakers. He is essentially a gossip monger who isn't particularly interested in fine writing or the news standards traditionally taught at J-schools, so the announcement that he would be addressing students at a well-regarded J-school can be seen as shocking--or simply a sign of the times. And I for one welcome it. (By the way, many many many years ago I attended the J-school at Cal, so I'm speaking about my alma mater here.)
     Levin has been called the "king of the paparazzi,"  and I have long thought that the paparazzi should be given credit as journalists who record history of a particular kind. One of TMZ's biggest scoops recently occurred when it got hold of pictures of the bruised face of singer Rhianna after she'd been beaten by boyfriend Chris Brown. TMZ has also recently broken stories about a Chicago bank that used federal bailout money to host an extravagant golf outing in Los Angeles.
    According to the San Francisco Chronicle, one Cal student asked Levin if that meant TMZ would be covering "more serious stories."
    To his credit, Levin replied that he thought the Rhianna pictures were serious and important in there own right.--David Schonauer

Extreme Ice Survey News Update

I've been reporting on the Extreme Ice Survey for a couple of years now, and there's some nice new things to take note of right now. EIS is the brainchild of photographer James Balog, an old friend and intrepid artist and journalist. Back when climate change was something only Al Gore spoke about, Jim decided to take still cameras and place them in some of the globe's most remote and forbidding places to record the melting of glaciers over time. The results, which you can see here, have been spectacular and spectacularly scary.
    I just learned that Jim has received the Visual Arts & Design Award from the Aspen Environmental Forum. Congrats to him and the entire EIS crew.
   There is also a NOVA documentary about EIS scheduled to air on PBS stations in March.--David Schonauer

Eye Candy

In the category of Goofy But Fun Things to Do with Your Photos, we came across a site by M&M Candylab that lets you upload a picture of your favorite face and have it animated. In preparation for Halloween, you can direct your face to sing either Bow Wow Wow's "I Want Candy" or Thomas Dolby's "She Blinded Me with Science."

We chose the former tune for a picture of our six-year-old daughter, with mixed results. Be sure to choose a picture with a nice likeness that lends itself to being stretched in animation. For our first attempt we used an image that was a bit dark, and the animated result had our blond-blue-eyed girl looking shadowy and sinister — sort of like a scene from The Exorcist. Then we loaded a cheerier pumpkin shot (at right) and got a nicer result, though still a bit spooky (at top).

Naturally, the site includes options for sending your creation to a friend or posting it on Facebook. Oh, you can also put your pix on a personalized package of M&Ms for about $15 — at those prices, and in these times, maybe more apt for Christmas. — Jack Crager

Shorpy Trip

Came across a really cool website featuring photographs from the first half of the 20th Century, from journalistic slices of life to oddball visual novelties to wonderful period moments, such as the above shot, "Atlantic City Forever: 1912."

Called "Shorpy: The 100-Year-Old Photo Blog," the curious site is named after Shorpy Higgenbotham, a young Alabama coal minor who was immortalized in a series of 1910 photographs  by the legendary Lewis Wickes Hine. (Such an obvious name for a blog, after all.) The site's commercial functions include links to fine-art print sales and a print gallery, but it also makes for fascinating browsing, with seemingly endless pages of photos offering glimpses back in time. Though most images are early-century black-and-whites, a few Ektachrome and Polaroid color shots from the '50s and '60s appear.

Most of the jpegs are extracted from reference images from the Library of Congress archive, according to the site, which also has brief captions, amusing commentary threads, and a searchable database. It's a marvelous blend of musty old pictures and new technology. Worth a glance — or many.
— Jack Crager

Beam Me Up, Glennie

Photo © Andy Manis/The New York Times

I was pleased to see today's New York Times, in which one of my college acquaintances made the front page. But he's hidden in plain view. And levitating.

John Schwartz, a technology writer for the Times, was one of the other 56,000+ students at the University of Texas while I attended. A fellow staffer at the campus paper and magazine, Schwartz was one of those alums who went on to big things (others included TV talking head Paul Begala and political advisor Mark McKinnon). Now Schwartz has risen to greater heights — a couple of feet off the ground, in a jetpack.

"“There is nothing that even comes close to the dream that the jetpack allows you to achieve,” says Robert J. Thompson of Syracuse University in Schwartz's Times feature. "[It's] about the coolest desire left to mankind."

Schwartz got to sample a real-life jetpack, invented by Glenn Martin (at left in the above shot) at an air show in Wisconsin. "They held on to me at about two feet off the ground," Schwartz explained in a segement this morning on the NPR program The Takeaway (that annoyingly clever news show that runs in a slot where Morning Edition used to be). Schwartz added that it was a plum assignment. "Sometimes I really love my job," he said.

One of the amusing anecdotes in the Times story concerns the first guinea pig for Martin's new jetpack: The initial prototype called for a person weighing less than 130 pounds. "So [Martin] turned to his wife," Schwartz writes. "'Hey Venessa, what are you doing tonight?'"

Vanessa helped the project get off the ground. Martin plans to fly his invention to heights of up to hundreds of feet. "Mr. Martin said he had no idea how his invention might ultimately be used, but he is not a man of small hopes," Schwartz writes. "He repeated the story of Benjamin Franklin, on first seeing a hot-air balloon, being asked, 'What good is it?' He answered, 'What good is a newborn baby?' ” — Jack Crager

'Soldiers' On Tour

Photographs © Ellen Susan

Last summer, when we published a Web feature about Ellen Susan's remarkable series of U.S. Soldier Portraits using the collodion wet-plate process, the project had not yet been widely seen. But now it has — to use a show-biz term — Gone Nationwide.

Exhibitions of Susan's images are making the rounds in various venues around the country. In Portland, Oregon, Susan's work will be shown alongside a Robert Rauschenberg exhibition from July 2 through August 2 at the Blue Sky Gallery. In Savannah, Georgia, where the portraits were made, a show runs from tomorrow through July 8 at the Jepson Center at the Telfair Museum. In Boston, the work is at the Photographic Resource Center through July 1. In San Francisco, it's part of a group show of collodion work July 18 through August 28 at the Rayko Photo Center. Meanwhile, PDN has featured the work in its June issue, on newsstands now, and the Savannah-based The South Magazine published it in June/July.

"Many people realize that there's some connection with past forms of photography," Susan says of the public reaction to the project. "Lots of people bring up the visual connection to the past, particularly to the military past, and their point of view about that connection, and I like it when that happens."

Three Days in Charlottesville

In an ocean of bad news--picture editors being laid off, agency and magazines closures, recession--an island of hope, conviviality, and artistic recognition is thriving in Charlottesville, Virginia. The second-annual LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph, which ran last week from Thursday through Saturday, was a gathering of great talent and intelligent exhibitions, neither systematically desperate nor partisan.
    Created by photographer Michael K. “Nick” Nichols and sponsored by National Geographic magazine, Look3 is something entirely unique for the United States, which has never had a real photographic festival. Houston’s FotoFest is a provincial “salon,” and the New York Photo Festival, which debuted in Brooklyn last month, was an amateurish joke at best.
     As I see it, there are three reasons for the great success of the Charlottesville festival:

1. A Unity of Place
The festival’s activities, including exhibitions and presentations, are contained within an area that is easy to cover on foot—about a one-mile stretch through the charming city, featuring 20 galleries and exhibitions and three projection venues (the Pavilion, the Paramount Theater, and the IX Warehouse.)

2. A Unity of Time
The festival included presentations each day by a single master, allowing us all to view and assess the work of these people in great depth. Mary Ellen Mark showed a fantastic exhibition called “Proms.” Joel Peter Witkin, a real creator of phenomenal culture who hides behind a systematic provocation, conducted a three-house presentation of his work that, God knows, was nothing less that provocative. James Nachtwey was interviewed by MaryAnne Golon, herself recently departed from Time magazine, where she was director of photography. Nachtwey is astonishing--the Rudolph Valentino of photography. Women adore him. In his conclusion to his conference, while answering the question “is there still room for love in photography,” he said, “to be the witness of suffering is in a way a proof of love”. At that moment I’m sure the 500 women in the room had an orgasm. I have to admit, a hint of jealousy also crossed my mind.

3. A Unity of Content
There was importance placed on images published in magazines and a wonderful unity imposed to the projections: Each six minutes, one subject matter, by one photographer.
     Among the 60 projections there were three gems: “Brothers in Arms” by Brian Plonka, “Earthlings” by Richard Kalvar, and “Another Country” by Scott Strazzante.
     These three days of photography were neither pessimistic nor nostalgic. Rather, they showcased what is being done today and the approach of tomorrow: The use of video, the use of music, and the combination of different media.
     An added bonus: I discovered of one of the strongest picture of the Iraq war (above), taken by Barry Gutierrez of the Rocky Mountain News. Entitled “Leia’s Daddy,” it was part of an exhibition of winners of this year’s Pictures of the Year contest. Gutierrez photographed the body of Sgt. Ryan John Baum, killed in Iraq 11 days before the birth of his daughter, Leia. Sgt. Baum’s widow, Dana Baum, said that all her husband wanted was to come home and put his baby on his chest, so at his funeral a picture of the child was placed there instead. Heartbreaking, extraordinary.—Jean Jacques Naudet

Sign of Our Times

Those of us boomers who are wistfully pushing 50 (and those who've pushed past it) can at least feel cool that we're in hip company: The chicken-leg-in-a-circle Peace Sign turns 50 this year too. As part of the celebration, National Geographic has brought out a groovy little photo book called Peace: The Biography of a Symbol.

As noted in a Time magazine piece and other advance press, this book insightfully traces the origins of this humble logo design by British textile designer Gerald Holtom through its modern prevalence throughout the peace-loving world. Compiled by photographer-writer Ken Kolsbun and author Michael S. Sweeney, the book also does much more — it serves as a clear, fact-laden, mostly non-dogmatic history lesson on the entire Peace Movement.