Last night was ICP’s 24th Annual Infinity Awards, a wonderful event and the major fundraiser for ICP each year; visit the link to view the list of this years honorees, among them my mentor from my graduate studies Bill Jay was among those honored for their contributions to our field. Darius Himes, another of Bill’s students was also present to celebrate with him. Read the event entry on the blog PDNPULSE.com

Tonight was the launch of the PDN Annual, another wonderful evening filled with innovative photography, inspiring discussions and great company. Read about it on www.pdnpulse.com

Tomorrow is the launch of the first-ever New York Photo Festival, taking place in Brooklyn from the 14-18th. Have a good look at the event website for maps of the curated exhibition pavilions, lists of event lectures, panels and films.

BOOK SOUP: Thursday night

Book Soup
A Photography Panel Discussion and Book Signing Event

Thursday, May 15, 2008
Panel Discussion: 8–9pm
St Ann’s Warehouse
38 Water Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201

Book Signing: 9–10pm
The powerHouse Arena
37 Main Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201

To kick off the evening programming for the New York Photo Festival, co-founder Daniel Power, CEO of powerHouse Books, will lead a panel discussion with five of powerHouse Books’ most acclaimed authors to discussing the future of photography book publishing. Featured authors joining Power for the 8pm conversation at St. Ann’s Warehouse include:

Harry Benson, author of R.F.K.: A Photographer’s Journal, discussing the future of photography and classic canons.
Leora Kahn, author of the Lucie Award-winning collection Darfur: Twenty Years of War and Genocide in Sudan and the forthcoming fall 2008 release Child Soldiers, discussing the power of photojournalism to affect sentiment; Joseph Rodriguez, author of East Side Stories: Gang Life in East L.A., Juvenile, Flesh Life: Sex in Mexico, and the upcoming fall 2008 release Still Here: Stories After Katrina, speaking on the power of documentary photography to change attitudes; Slava Mogutin, author of Lost Boys and NYC Go-Go, revealing how improvised situations can document an imaginary reality; Brian Finke, author of Flight Attendants, discussing how improvised situations can document a reality; Jamel Shabazz, author of Back in the Days, Seconds of My Life, A Time Before Crack, and The Last Sunday in June, speaking on how street photography can document a time and place.

Following the panel discussion, there will be a book signing extravaganza at The powerHouse Arena at 9pm with authors including:

Lili Almog, Roger Ballen, Juliana Beasley, Harry Benson, Kevin Bubriski, Julia Calfee, Vivian Cherry, Livia Corona, Valdir Cruz, Lalla Essaydi, Larry Fink, Brian Finke, Ron Galella, Stephen Gill, Arlene Gottfried, Christopher Griffith, John Gruen, Alice Harris, David Alan Harvey, Henry Horenstein, Ellen Jong, Leora Kahn, Seth Kushner & Anthony LaSala, Christopher LaMarca, WassinkLundgren, Jeff Mermelstein, Slava Mogutin, Rachel Papo, Martin Parr, Nigel Parry, Mark Peterson, Thomas Roma, Steve Schapiro, Joachim Schmid, Jamel Shabazz, The Snorri Bros., Michael Spano, Peter Sutherland, Linda Troeller, Victor Vazquez, Veronique Vial, Nathaniel Welch, and David Yellen.

Thursday night in NYC there are gallery openings all over town, many in Chelsea.

Friday through Sunday, May 16/17/18, the

NYPF AWARDS: The 2008 Nominees for the New York Photo Awards are posted online and will be announced on Friday night, the Awards event will be held on Friday the 16th.

Tickets are still available for all NYPF programming; see the website for details; remember that programming is held from May 14-18.

AGENCY VII SEMINAR:

VII Seminar will be held in Brooklyn as well, not far from the NYPF activities. Daily portfolio reviews, and book signings are offered as well. Not to be missed; as of this morning there were still seats available.

It is a week of learning, to say the least. See you in Brooklyn this week!

“From the Aperture website:

A Couple of Ways of Doing Something
Photographs by Chuck Close
Poems by Bob Holman
Talk and Book Signing

Sunday, May 11, 2008
2:00 p.m.

Tacoma Pantages Theater
901 Broadway, #700
Tacoma, Washington
(253) 591-5890

Coinciding with the exhibition on view at the Tacoma Art Museum, Chuck Close will discuss the work from A Couple of Ways of Doing Something, featuring daguerreotype portraits of many artist-friends who have been the subjects of Chuck Close’s paintings over the years, including Cindy Sherman, Philip Glass, and Andre Serrano. Lyrical praise poems by New York School poet Bob Holman accompany each photograph. For the exhibit, which is accompanied by the Aperture book of the same title, Close uses each daguerreotype as a base from which to create other works, including tapestries and photogravures.”

Young Americans: Photographs by Sheila Pree Bright
May 3 – August 10, 2008

The High Museum, Atlanta
Lower Level, Wieland Pavilion

Young Americans is a portraiture project exploring the attitudes and opinions of young Americans (18–25 years old) toward their nation and their identity as Americans. Individual relationships to the nation as a whole are of increasing relevance as political engagement comes to the foreground in the 2008 election year. The themes explored in Young Americans also echo those of  the Civil Rights Era, as examined  in  Road to Freedom: 1956–1968 and After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy, on view simultaneously beginning June 7.

Exhibition Details

Young Americans consists of 28 large-format chromogenic prints, several accompanied by statements from the subjects revealing their opinions and attitudes about American culture and society. Sheila Pree Bright began working on the series in the fall of 2006, and her swift development of the project led to her selection as the inaugural recipient of an artist-in-residency at the Amistad Center for Art and Culture. Her subjects are photographed with the American flag in poses reflecting elements of their identities and feelings about their country. Pree Bright collaborates with her subjects by inviting them to choose their own clothing, poses, and interactions with the flag. She has said of the work, “Young people born between 1982 and 2000 constitute the largest generation since the baby boomers, but they are often portrayed negatively in our society. I wanted to give them a platform to speak for themselves—to show and describe how they feel about this country. I also wanted to include young people from diverse backgrounds and socio-economic groups.”

Sheila Pree Bright

A 2002 National Graduate Seminar Fellow at the Photography Institute at Columbia University, N.Y., Pree Bright earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in photography from Georgia State University in 2003. Her photographs are included in public and private collections across the United States. In 2006 she was awarded the prestigious Santa Fe Prize. Presented annually by the Santa Fe Center for Photography, this prize recognizes young artists working in photography who show special promise. Currently a studio artist at The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, she was awarded the En Foco New Works Photography Award (1999) and the National Bronica Award (2001). Pree Bright’s work prior to Young Americans highlights issues related to ethnic identity and gender and includes the series Suburbia, which focuses on home environments of African Americans residing in the suburbs.

Exhibition Organization and Support

The production costs for the Young Americans project and exhibition have been generously underwritten by the AETNA Foundation. The exhibition is organized by Julian Cox, Curator of Photography at the High Museum of Art, in partnership with the Amistad Center for Art & Culture at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut. The exhibition will travel to The Amistad Center for Art and Culture, an affiliate institution housed within the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Conn, this fall and will travel to additional venues to be announced.

EMINENT DOMAIN: CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY and the CITY will be on view in the main floor exhibition space at the Humanities and Social Sciences Library (branch of the New York Public Libraries), 5th Avenue at 42nd Street in Manhattan, through the summer.

From the website:

“The exhibition Eminent Domain: Contemporary Photography and the City features the work of five contemporary New York–based photographers drawn primarily from new acquisitions in the Photography Collection. Thomas Holton’s The Lams of Ludlow Street is an empathetic account of one family’s daily life in Chinatown and a photographer’s personal quest to better understand his own heritage. Bettina Johae’s borough edges,nyc is a digital project exploring the edges of the city’s five boroughs, which the photographer physically traversed as a way of “remapping” the supposedly well-known city. In Window, Reiner Leist used a 19th-century camera to photograph the view from his 26th-floor apartment on Eighth Avenue overlooking downtown Manhattan. At different times on almost every day during the past decade, Leist captured a slice of Manhattan that includes One Penn Plaza, Madison Square Garden, and, until September 11, 2001, the World Trade Center towers. Over the same period of time, Zoe Leonard tracked changes and disappearances occurring on the Lower East Side as a result of the city’s economic transformation; her Analogue also serves as both elegy and homage to a long-standing tradition of documentary photography. In his series Untitled/This is just to say, Ethan Levitas photographs individual train cars and their passengers along the elevated lines of the New York City subway, capturing unexpected moments of connection and contradiction in the most obvious and overlooked of public spaces. Levitas’s project, like all of the works in Eminent Domain, deals with the life of the city in terms of passage (of seasons and time, people and place) and exchange (between individual and collective, interior and exterior). Turning on the nature of photography itself (which always complicates the relationship between private and public property), the works in the exhibition intersect and resonate with current concerns about the reorganization of urban space, and its public use, in New York City.

A publication accompanying the exhibition will include written meditations on these themes by the Bronx-born artist Glenn Ligon, who is known for his multi-media explorations of critical issues in contemporary culture. “

From the e-blast:

Hotbed: Video Cultivation beside the Getty Gardens

Dates: Friday, May 9, and Saturday, May 10, 2008
Time: 7:00–9:00 p.m. on Friday, 7:00–10:00 p.m. on Saturday
Location: Getty Center
Admission: Free; no reservations required.
Projected onto the exterior walls of the Getty Center, 18 artists’ videos from 1984 to 2007 explore the theme of the body as nature or culture. This free, special two-evening installation complements the exhibition California Video and is curated by Anne Bray, Director of Freewaves, a Los Angeles-based arts organization connecting new media from around the world. The videos are arranged thematically and play in a loop starting and ending at the tram arrival plaza, with a fulcrum at the Museum Courtyard..

Click here for information about all of the videos that will be projected and to download a map of the screening locations. http://www.getty.edu/visit/events/hotbed_video.html

Admission is FREE and no reservations are required.
Beer and wine available.

This event complement’s the Getty’s current exhibition, California Video, which features more than 50-single channel videos and 15 installations by 58 artists including Eleanor Antin, John Baldassari, Brian Bress, Nancy Buchanan, Chris Burden, Jim Campbell, Meg Cranston, Harry Dodge & Stanya Kahn, Allan Kaprow, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Bruce Nauman, Tony Oursler, Martha Rosler, Jennifer Steinkamp, T.R. Uthco and Ant Farm, Diana Thater, Bill Viola and William Wegman. Co-organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Getty Research Institute, approximately half of the works in the exhibition are drawn from the GRI’s extraordinary collection of video art, which, since its acquisition of the Long Beach Museum of Art Video Archive in 2006, has become one of the largest institutional collections in the world. California Video is curated by Glenn Phillips, senior pojects specialist and consulting curator, Department of Contemporary Programs and Research at the GRI.

California Video runs through June 8, 2008. Click here for more information and to watch excerpts from some of the videos: http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/california_video/index.html

JoAnn Verberg will be speaking at the San Francisco Art Institute this Friday evening, sponsored by PhotoAlliance.

About JoAnn Verburg:
JoAnn Verburg received a BA in sociology from Ohio Wesleyan University and an MFA in Photography from the
Rochester Institute of Technology.

From 1977 to 1979, Verburg served as project manager for the Rephotographic Survey Project, traveling throughout the American West to replicate the same wilderness views made by 19th-century frontier photographers William Henry Jackson and Timothy O’Sullivan. While heading Polaroid’s
Visiting Artist Program in the early 1980s—a program she created—Verburg promoted technical innovation in the field by inviting such artists as Chuck Close, Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, Michael Bishop and Linda Connor to experiment with new 20 x 24 and 40 x 80 cameras.

Distinguished by its extraordinary sensitivity to the energy and sensuality of the natural world, Verburg’s work combines soft lighting, varied focus, and thoughtful composition to convey the beauty of its subject and setting. Often exhibited as large-format diptychs and triptychs, her evocative images of olive groves near her home in Spoleto, Italy, envelop the viewer in a serene and dreamlike atmosphere. For over 20 years Verburg has returned to the area with her husband, poet Jim Moore, capturing the fields and trees of the Italian countryside.

Her photographs of Moore relaxing in this idyllic environment have been compared to Alfred Stieglitz’s
portraits of Georgia O’Keefe and Harry Callahan’s pictures of his wife Eleanor. In addition to landscape, still
life, and portrait photography, Verburg has also worked on various installations and public art projects in
Minneapolis and St. Paul.

Verburg has exhibited her work extensively. The solo show “Present on the Road to Bazzano” was held at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in 2001. She is currently the subject of a mid-career exhibition and catalog, “Present Tense: Photographs by JoAnn Verburg” organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2007 which traveled to The Walker Art Center in 2008. (NOTE: you can hear an audio tour of the exhibition at that link as well.) Her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York; G. Gibson Gallery, Seattle; the International Center of Photography, New York; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the George Eastman House, Rochester, N.Y; Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Teharan, Iran; and other museums and galleries.

Click here to listen to an interview JoAnn, MoMA Curator Susan Kismaric and photographer William Allard produced by Minnesota Public Radio.

From the mailer:

IMAGE 08

“Open to Professional, serious amateur and student photographers residing within the United States. Submit one or more of your favorite images created on or after January 1st, 2007.”

Judges - a very interesting group of professionals; I encourage you to consider introducing your work to these talented individuals:
Michael Foley, Foley Gallery, NYC

Michael Ash, Photo Director and Artists Representative, Radical Media

Rockwell Harwood, Creative Director, Details Magazine

Katie Dunn, Photo Editor, Travel and Leisure Magazine

Sean Mosher-Smith, Echo Deighnlab

Helaina Buzzeo, Former Senior Art Buyer, McCann WorldGroup

Entry deadline extended to May 15th, 2008

INFO AT: www.asmp.org/image08

This coming Tuesday evening I will be presenting a public lecture in New Orleans entitled “Finding Your Audience” which is sponsored by New Orleans Photo Alliance and the ASMP Gulf Coast Chapter and will be hosted by the Contemporary Arts Center, 900 Camp Street in New Orleans. If you have attended a lecture of mine in the past you will know that I am constantly updating my presentations to bring current and relevant information to artists. I look forward to meeting many of you there!

About New Orleans Photo Alliance:

“The mission of the New Orleans Photo Alliance is to encourage the understanding and appreciation of photography through exhibitions, opportunities and educational programs. The Alliance strives to be a cultural stimulus, which fosters economic and artistic growth while preserving the rich and diverse photographic culture of New Orleans and the southern region.

The New Orleans Photo Alliance is a diverse group of photographers who joined forces in 2006 to create unity and opportunity for photographers in the Gulf South. We are a volunteer based, artists run nonprofit. Our mission is to encourage the understanding and appreciation of photography through exhibitions, opportunities and educational programs. We strive to be a cultural stimulus which fosters economic and artistic growth while preserving the rich and diverse photographic culture of our region.”

I encourage you to join and support this vital young organization, and watch for their PHOTONOLA 3 a month of photography events including Portfolio Reviews coming in December. Click here for a listing of the PhotoNola 2 events.

Theme: BETWEEN MEMORY & HISTORY

From the event website, www.contactphoto.com:

“CONTACT 2008 examines how photography shapes our understanding of the world around us and the enduring role it plays in the preservation of individual and collective memories. A wide range of images from the epic to the everyday look beyond the headlines to explore private and social histories.”

Program offerings include exhibitions, films on photography and a workshop with the Magnum photographers. For a complete calendar of events, click here.

From the exhibitions section:

“Throughout the years, CONTACT has questioned photography’s ability to represent the truth, explored rapidly increasing global interconnections and celebrated constructed imagery within a photographic culture. Despite its ever evolving conditions, a fundamental characteristic of the medium & its ability to preserve our individual memories and collective histories, at least for the moment, remains unchanged.

Photography has been associated with memory since its invention and memory has long been described as a continuous exchange of images. As we experience the global shift from film to digital technology, will photographic images merely become memories made easy�? As the increasing participation in CONTACT demonstrates, photography is prevalent throughout our lives, now more then ever before, and wields a complex relationship to human experience.

Our primary exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA), Between Memory and History: From the Epic to the Everyday, probes relationships that exist between the intimate and the public, between moments of personal significance to events of global resonance that affect each one of us. Ten artists from nine countries exhibit a wide range of images � from the epic to the everyday � and look beyond the headlines to explore private and social histories.

Raymonde April (Canada) Robert Burley (Canada) Luc Delahaye (France) Nan Goldin (USA) Adi Nes (Israel) Martin Parr (UK) Chi Peng (China) Thomas Ruff (Germany) Alessandra Sanguinetti (Argentina/USA) Bert Teunissen (The Netherlands)

For details on this exhibition at MOCCA Click Here

Further extending our theme into the city�s fabric, CONTACT transforms urban spaces with photography. Eight site-specific installations throughout the city invite reflections upon the evolving nature of our environments and the continuum that exists between image, personal memory and collective history. Feature exhibition venues become places marked by the past - from public chronicles of iconic events to personal recollections - with 29 exhibitions that explore the extent to which photographic images inform memory and influence understandings of history. Visit the Public Installations and Feature Exhibitions section of the website for more details.”

NEW portfolio review event - register soon if interested - will sell out!

From the NW Summer Portfolio reviews event website:

Given the great response & feedback from Photolucida’s bi-annual spring Portfolio Reviews, we’ve decided to offer a more intimate summer version, with half the number of photographers, reviewers, and days. We’ve also decided to have more of a regional focus, inviting reviewers primarily from the Northwest (as well as a large handful of our tried-and-true reviewers from outside this region).

But of course photographers from anywhere and everywhere are encouraged to participate!

The Reviews

Photolucida’s in-person Portfolio Reviews give photographers a chance to show their work to gallery owners, curators, editors, collectors and publishers from all over the US, but this time with a particular emphasis on professionals from the country’s Northwest region. The list is still growing, but check out the great reviewers that have confirmed so far. Photographers register for one-on-one meetings with the reviewers of their choice and receive 4 or 5 20-minute reviews per day. It’s a great opportunity to put your work in front of people who love photography and make decisions. Numerous photographers have walked away with opportunities to exhibit, publish and sell their work after attending the Portfolio Reviews. Past attendees from our spring Reviews have included Donald Weber, Doug Dubois, Elaine Ling, Todd Deutsch, Dona Schwartz, Rachael Dunville, and John Chervinsky.

Registration fee for two days of Reviews is $475.

Photographer’s Master Index & The Portfolio Walk

Just as we do at our spring Reviews, each photographer’s contact information and a thumbnail image will be printed in a Photographer’s Master Index, a reference tool to be distributed to all of the reviewers to keep among their treasures. All registered photographers are also invited to participate in the Photolucida Portfolio Walk, an off-site casual exhibition of their work. It gives the photographers, the reviewers, and the general community a chance to see all the great work that has come together for the weekend. In previous years this has been a very successful event, drawing in large numbers of viewers from the area.

Accomodations

Our summer Reviews are taking place at Blue Sky Gallery’s gorgeous new space along the Park Blocks in downtown Portland. Reviewers will be staying at the Ace Hotel. While participants are welcome to stay wherever they choose, The Ace Hotel, the Mark Spencer, and the Benson, are all within a ten-minute walk from the gallery. The Benson and Mark Spencer have offered discounted rates for a limited number of our participants, and the Ace’s rates (while not offering a discount) are comparable. To book your rooms, contact the hotel directly and be sure to tell them you’re with Photolucida. For complete downtown hotel information, contact POVA.

Registration

Please note: Photolucida’s Reviews are not juried, but we ask photographers to understand that their work needs to be at a certain professional level— attending an event such as this is an investment on your part and the caliber of your work should reflect this. Registration for our spring Reviews fills up incredibly fast. This being half the size, it’ll probably do the same. Don’t wait to secure your spot!

To register, CLICK HERE.