Dumb and Dumbo: A Brief Review of the New York Photo Festival

You think the New York Photo Festival in Dumbo was bad last year: Be reassured, it was even worse this year. Last year was the premier for the festival, so we could understand that it was somewhat disorganized. But there can't be an excuse for the  amateurism and incompetence on display this year. On the opening night,last Wednesday, four exhibitions were closed, and one had still the prints on the floor. Most offensive were the portfolio reviews: If you were a starving artist or student, you had to pay $500 to have your portfolio looked at—far too much in the current economy. In France we describe this kind of proposal by saying, Do not shoot on the ambulance. The organizers may well be unable to find any wounded suckers next year.--Jean Jacques Naudet  

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

America's Next Top Photographer?

Supermodel-turned-actress Paulina Porizkova is tonight’s judge on the CW network's ever-hot reality show, America’s Next Top Model. But I’ll be catching tonight's episode for its talent, not its beauty: The featured fashion photographer is up-and-coming Sarah McColgan of New York City.

If you haven’t yet heard of Sarah, it's just a matter of time before you will. She’s going places. And I’ve known for years that she's got the ambition and talent it takes. (That's Sarah below, in one of her own photographs.)

Campaign Visuals In the Age of Facebook

Stephen Ferry is a freelance documentary photographer based in New York City and Bogotá, Colombia. Ferry's work has received numerous prizes and honors, including two World Press photo awards. In more than 20 years of international travel, Ferry has concentrated on long-term reportage on issues of historic change and human rights. His 1999 book, I Am Rich Potosí: The Mountain that Eats Men (Monacelli Press), documented the lives of silver miners in Potosí, Bolivia, over an eight-year period. Since 2000, Ferry has focused his work on Colombia, carrying out assignments for GEO, National Geographic, Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, and The New York Times. He is currently based in Bogotá and is dedicated to long-term coverage of Colombia's civil war. In this Q&A with guest columnist Michael Shaw, he discuss his image (shown here) taken January 7 at a campaign stop in Rochester, New Hampshire.

Michael Shaw: Given the range of campaign images I've been looking at lately, this one you made the other weekend, just before the New Hampshire primary, is substantially different. This has a completely different kind of energy.

Stephen Ferry: It seems a little funny talking about my own work this way, but of all the photos I shot in New Hampshire, I think this one speaks to something new and essential going on. Although Obama was the subject, it says less about him than about this social moment in time. Specifically, it seems to me there's a "Facebook zeitgeist" in this campaign.

MS: What do you mean?

SF: First of all, it's about equalizing. Notice how his smile and her smile are lit by the same kind of light. Both are subject to the same cameras that are in everybody's hands nowadays. That, to me, speaks to the Facebook experience. Once they are posted there, all photographs are equal on Facebook. The only way they differ in importance has to do with how many people connect to them.

What Lars Tunbjörk's Cross-cultural Office Images Can Tell Us About the Way We Work

Guest column by Michael Shaw

Ever wonder why an American office worker might prefer to sit under his desk, while his Japanese counterpart would do anything to not have to leave his chair? Lars Tunbjörk's "Office" series, an artful photographic documentary of corporate offices in Japan, North America, and Sweden, seems to hold some clues.

With their static subject matter and lackluster color palette, it has been too easy for these images to be pigeonholed as studies of boredom and banality. But given the chance to spend time with them during a recent visit to Cohen Amador Gallery in New York, I’ve come to see these photos as much more than half-whimsical indictments of lifeless automatons trapped in drab cubicles and off-the-rack suits.

On closer inspection, in fact, they provide fleeting insight into the ways disparate cultures relate to restrictive spaces.

 

Do the portraits from HBO's "Alive Day" documentary compel us to see veterans more clearly, or just to watch HBO?

 Guest Column By Michael Shaw, Ph.D.                                                                   

Given advances in medical technology and the tactical nature of the ongoing conflict in Iraq, American combat troops are now surviving injuries that would once have been fatal -- and attracting the attention of visual documentarians as a result.

Making portraits of the wounded, however, is a delicate matter. Damage is as much, or more, psychic as physical. Innumerable variables are in play regarding dignity, memory, and the reconstruction of post-combat identity. And then there are still other factors in front of those, including the context and purpose of the images themselves.

Over the past year, I have been aware of and spent time studying two sets of portraits of injured American Iraq war vets: Nina Berman's award-winning series Purple Heart: Back From Iraq and a newspaper photo feature titled Wounds of War by South Florida Sun-Sentinel photographer, Anastasia Walsh Infanzon. Because photographer Lori Grinker includes a few injured veterans in her distinguished series, AfterWar, I have been looking at relevant examples there also. (Full disclosure: Nina Berman contributes to my BAGnewsNotes blog.)

© Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

Then, two weeks ago, I received an email announcing a new documentary series from HBO titled "Alive Day Memories: Home From Iraq." The program, which consists of individual interviews conducted by actor James Gandolfini with ten injured Iraq war veterans, premiered Sept. 9. According to the press release, "the documentary about wounded soldiers surveys the physical and emotional cost of war through memories of their 'alive day,' the day they narrowly escaped death in Iraq." Billed as "a multiplatform event," the project also features portraits of the veterans by the well-known photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders.

Together these wounded veteran series constitute an important new sub-genre of war photography that seems to have sprung from three converging factors: 1) the continued escalation in Iraq, 2) recent leaps in medical technology, including fascination with cyborg-like associations, and 3) the fact that there were previously few, if any, photographic studies dedicated exclusively to portraits of wounded American war veterans.

Last Week in Blog History

As posts piled up last week, I thought it might be a good idea to give you the highlights in case you missed anything. It would especially be a shame to miss our most recent guest blog with photographer/blogger Martin Fuchs about American Photo's "Heroes" issue, and our complete coverage of last week's New York photo auctions. Links on second page.

~Miki Johnson

April Guest Blog: Martin Fuchs

Since interning in New York at Magnum Photos a couple years ago, Martin Fuchs has returned home to Vienna, Austria, where he is now shooting for international magazine, newspapers, and commercial clients, and working as an editor and producer for Magnum Photos New York. But what impressed me--why I asked him to look over our May/June Heroes of Photography issue and give us his thoughts--was his insightful blog, Journal of a Photographer, where this story will be cross-posted. As he points out below, defining a heroic photographer is hard to do...and capturing that heroism in a few magazine pages is no easy task either.
~Miki Johnson

A Heroic Photographer Should Be:
a) invisible
b) well-balanced
c) committed
d) what do you mean "heroic"?

American Photo's new issue highlights 10 Heroes of Photography who "inspire us with their commitment and courage" as the American Photo staff writes. But not one of those photographers actually wants to be called a hero, because they don’t see themselves as heroes. Personally I am very much with Joseph Rodriguez who, according to Fred Ritchin, the director of PixelPress, insists that the people he photographs are the true heroes. How true. As I always say: “What could possibly be more interesting than real life?” Sure, there are people I consider heroes, in photography and outside of it, but that’s more about their feeling, dedication, talent, and calling than about a heroic idea of a single person.

I really like the idea of the invisible photographer (as Ambassador Richard Holbrooke describes photographer Brent Stirton). I like the idea of the photographer as somebody documenting and recording history, showing what’s going on by getting close and by blending into the environment without intruding and disturbing. Witnessing is the key. And I imagine that witnessing is not always an easy task. Those photographs that tell us about life and not about the photographer that took them are the true masterpieces of photojournalism and documentary photography.

This brings up an oft-asked question: Is it possible to photograph something without affecting the scene, without shaping what happens in front of the lens by the sheer presence of a photographer? I don’t have an answer to this question, and honestly I don’t think there is a valid answer to it. But if it is possible, I think it can only be achieved by a photographer with commitment, passion, respect, and love.

February Guest Blog: Chase Jarvis

To kick off our new guest blog, we've asked Seattle-based commercial photographer Chase Jarvis to look through the March/April issue of American Photo and expound on anything that struck his fancy. Here's what he came up with, cross posted on his own blog. We're excited to be adding voices like Chase's to State of the Art, but we want to hear yours too. Leave your thoughts in the comments below.
~Miki Johnson

The Dichotomy of the
Photographic Portrait:
Portrait Not as View of the Soul,
But as Personal Advertising?

If the eyes are windows to the soul, and if in advance of a portrait sitting you’ve basically had the windows washed and lined up all the furniture inside and put on your favorite clothes for an open house, are the photos that result from that sitting any less “real” than a haphazard photojournalistic snapshot someone grabs of a subject at 10PM on a Tuesday night? Are the results from one portrait style more authentic or merit-worthy than another?  I recently wrestled with these questions when I got my hands on an advance copy of the March/April 2007 American Photo “Portrait Issue.”  Editor, David Schonauer’s piece got my mind really moving--it’s definitely worth a read.

 

I’ve long had huge respect for great portraits and pure portrait photographers.  Shooting great portraits can be intense--wonderfully exploratory sometimes, but almost always intense. Especially if you set out (as many photographers claim) to capture an image that authentically and reasonably addresses the sitter, and the photographer’s vision of that sitter. 

 

In reading comments from numerous uber-talented colleagues featured in Schonauer’s piece, like Leibovitz, Watson, Rolston and others, one thing that was inferred by many, but not directly addressed to my satisfaction by any, was the idea NOT of portrait as hollowed ground or sacred view into the soul of the sitter (there was some of that), but rather that nearly all portraits--from your high school yearbook shot, to family shots by Yen Lui, from glamour shots by Deb, to Oprah Winfrey shot by Leibovitz--they’re all fundamentally ‘portrait as PR or personal advertising.’