Announcing Our YouTube Channel

We are pleased to announce our YouTube Channel. Watch for new videos in the coming days and weeks.

As a very small measure, we hope viewing our videos brings you enjoyment during this difficult time. You may also view our exhibits, current and past, on our website.

STANDING ROCK SIOUX TRIBE PREVAILS AS FEDERAL JUDGE STRIKES DOWN DAPL PERMITS

Ryan Vizzions: Protesters face off with police and the National Guard on February 1, 2017, 

near Cannon Ball, North Dakota.

Via Earth Justice

MARCH 25, 2020

Washington, D.C. — A federal court today granted a request by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe to strike down federal permits for the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline.

The Court found the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers violated the National Environmental Policy Act when it affirmed federal permits for the pipeline originally issued in 2016. Specifically, the Court found significant unresolved concerns about the potential impacts of oil spills and the likelihood that one could take place.

For example, the Court criticized the Corps for failing to address the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s expert criticism of its analysis, citing issues like potential worst case discharge, the difficulty of detecting slow leaks, and responding to spills in winter. Similarly, the Court observed that DAPL’s parent company’s abysmal safety record “does not inspire confidence,” finding that it should have been considered more closely.

The Court ordered the Corps to prepare a full environmental impact statement on the pipeline, something that the Tribe has sought from the beginning of this controversy. The Court asked the parties to submit additional briefing on the question of whether to shut down the pipeline in the interim.

“After years of commitment to defending our water and earth, we welcome this news of a significant legal win,” said Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Chairman Mike Faith. “It’s humbling to see how actions we took four years ago to defend our ancestral homeland continue to inspire national conversations about how our choices ultimately affect this planet. Perhaps in the wake of this court ruling the federal government will begin to catch on, too, starting by actually listening to us when we voice our concerns.”

“This validates everything the Tribe has been saying all along about the risk of oil spills to the people of Standing Rock,” said Earthjustice attorney Jan Hasselman. “The Obama administration had it right when it moved to deny the permits in 2016, and this is the second time the Court has ruled that the government ran afoul of environmental laws when it permitted this pipeline. We will continue to see this through until DAPL has finally been shut down.”

BACKGROUND
In December of 2016, the Obama administration denied permits for DAPL to cross the Missouri River, and ordered a full environmental impact statement to analyze alternative pipeline routes and impacts on the Tribe’s treaty rights. Yet on his second day in office, Trump reversed that order, directing that permits be issued. Pipeline construction was completed by June of 2017.

The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe challenged the permits in court and won. The Court ruled then that the environmental analysis had been insufficient because it failed to account for consequences facing the Tribe, and ordered the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to redo it. However, the judge declined to shut down the pipeline in the interim.

The Army Corps then redid its environmental analysis, but essentially shut the Tribe out of the review process, and concluded that its previous analysis had been sufficient and that nothing needed to change. In response, Earthjustice and the Tribe went back to court. In a motion for summary judgment filed last August, the Tribe asked the Court to shut down the pipeline and order the Corps to conduct a full environmental analysis.

The massive 2016 gathering of Tribes and allies defending Standing Rock Sioux territory from DAPL captured the world’s attention and attracted international media coverage. It helped give rise to a global movement of indigenous resistance to fossil-fuel infrastructure projects.

UPDATED : Monroe Gallery Temporarily Closed

March 18, 2020

The health and safety of our community, patrons, and colleagues is of the utmost importance to us and in light of the New Mexico state government’s public health guidance, and to be responsible to our community by preventing unnecessary spread of Covid-19, the Gallery is currently closed. We are working remotely and are available by email and appointment.

Thank you for your understanding and support in these difficult times.

Updated information will be posted here and on our social media feeds.

Thank you.

Sid and Michelle Monroe

info@monroegallery.com

www.monroegallery.com

Monroe Gallery on Paris Photo New York Fair Postponement and COVID-19

March 11,2020


Today Paris Photo New York released the following statement concerning the scheduled first edition of the fair April 1-5, 2020:

"Paris, 10 March 2020 – After careful consideration and comprehensive discussions with galleries and partners, the inaugural edition of Paris Photo New York, organized by Reed Expositions France, will be postponed to a later date due to the growing concerns over public health and safety and the developing COVID-19 situation. A new date will be announced as soon as possible.  

Reed Expositions France, the Show Management of Paris Photo New York, together with AIPAD, Show Committee members, and the Selection Committee made the difficult decision in consultation with all stakeholders and in alignment with the advice from the US public health authorities regarding travel to and from impacted countries.  The Show Management takes the concerns of its exhibitors and supporters seriously and is convinced that the postponement is in the best interest of galleries, collectors and art enthusiasts alike.

Michel Filzi, President of Reed Expositions France, said: “With 178 exhibitors confirmed, this first edition has had an overwhelming welcome from the photo art galleries and editors. We were all very excited to launch this first edition of Paris Photo New York in March, and to build another bridge in the art scene between our two continents. However, the health and well-being of exhibitors, visitors, sponsors, media representatives, cultural institutions and our employees from around the globe is and will always be our first priority. We have therefore made the decision to postpone the Paris Photo New York event to a later date.”

“We fully understand and appreciate the level of planning that is required to participate in an event like ours.  Reed Expositions France will therefore be doing our utmost to help all our customers and their partners to prepare for the upcoming edition. On behalf of all of the Reed Exhibition teams, we truly thank all those involved for their trust, their hard work to date as well as their continued encouragement and support during this challenging time,” said Michel Filzi."

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The health and safety of our community, patrons, and colleagues is of the utmost importance to us. Amid growing travel concerns surrounding COVID-19, we want to assure you we are taking preventive measures to keep our gallery safe and maintain a healthy environment. We are currently attempting to maintain normal business hours but recommend calling for the latest information. 

We are continuously making decisions on how the latest health mandates impact our daily operations. For the most up-to-date information on our exhibits and events, visit our website www.monroegallery.com

International Acclaim For the Exhibition "Ida Wyman: Life with a camera"

Ida Wyman: Man looking in wastebasket, Coney Island, New York, 1945

Today, March 7, would have been Ida Wyman's 94th birthday. The daughter of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Ida Wyman was born March 7, 1926 in Malden, Massachusetts. The family soon moved to New York, where her parents ran a small grocery store in the Bronx. Her parents bought her a box camera when she was 14, and she joined the camera club at Walton High School, honing her skills at taking and printing pictures. By the time Wyman was 16, she know that she wanted to work as a photographer.

Opportunities then were few for women photographers, but in 1943 Wyman joined Acme Newspictures as a mail room ‘boy’; pulling prints and captioning them for clients.

When the war ended, Acme's only female printer was fired so a man could have her job. Wyman set out on her own to begin free-lance work for magazines, and her first photo story was published in LOOK magazine the same year. By 1948 she was in Los Angeles, working on assignments for LIFE magazine. She would eventually cover over 100 assignments for LIFE.

For the next several years, Wyman covered assignments for LIFE, Fortune, Saturday Evening Post, Parade, and many other leading publications of the time. Ida Wyman passed away in July, 2019. Although not as famous as some of her contemporaries, Ida was one of the defining artists of early street photography that helped shape how we look at our world.

HUCK Magazine

The unsung photographer of the 20th century: Celebrating Ida Wyman

The Daily Mail

The best photographer you never heard of: Ida Wyman captured 1950s American street life, Hollywood glamour and the euphoria of the Allied victory over Japan - now it's all rolled into one glorious exhibition

Ida Wyman: Life with a camera continues through April 19, and selection from the exhibit will be on view in our booth #A1 during Paris Photo New York Presented by AIPAD at Pier 94 in New York, April 2-5.

Exhibition examines Life Magazine's innovative role in shaping 20th-century photography

Via ArtDaily

Robert Capa, Hungarian, 1913–1954, Normandy Invasion on D-Day, Soldier Advancing through Surf,  1944. Gelatin silver print. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Howard Greenberg Collection—Museum purchase with funds donated by the Phillip Leonian and Edith Rosenbaum Leonian Charitable Trust. Robert Capa © International Center of Photography. Photograph Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

PRINCETON, NJ.- From its groundbreaking launch issue in 1936 through the conclusion of its weekly run in 1972, Life magazine profoundly shaped how its readers viewed themselves – and the world. Life also had a transformative impact on the development of modern photography and on the artists and photojournalists who have employed the medium to tell their (and our) stories ever since. Drawing on unprecedented access to Life magazine’s picture and paper archives, Life Magazine and the Power of Photography features more than 150 objects, including an array of archival materials such as caption files, contact sheets and shooting scripts to provide new insights on the collaborative processes behind the magazine’s now-iconic images and photo essays. Unlike previous projects that have celebrated Life’s imagery and photographers, this exhibition and its extensive publication attempts something entirely different: an exploration of how Life’s contributors and staff championed and influenced photography through sophisticated visual storytelling.

Life Magazine and the Power of Photography is co-curated by Katherine A. Bussard, Peter C. Bunnell curator of photography at the Princeton University Art Museum; Kristen Gresh, Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh senior curator of photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Alissa Schapiro, Ph.D. candidate in art history at Northwestern University. It premiered in Princeton Feb. 22-June 21, 2020, before traveling to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Aug. 19-Dec. 13, 2020.

The organizers are the first museums to be granted complete access to the Life Picture Collection and among the first to delve deeply into the newly available Time Inc. Records Archive at the New-York Historical Society.

“The global reach, connective storytelling and visionary photo-essays of Life magazine substantially reshaped how Americans understood the role of photography in the 20th century,” notes James Steward, Nancy A. Nasher–David J. Haemisegger, Class of 1976, director, “and we are delighted to bring this to life through this exhibition.”

From the period of the Great Depression to the Vietnam War, the vast majority of the photographs printed and viewed in the United States appeared on the pages of illustrated magazines, including the photography showcased in Life magazine. During its 36-year run as a weekly (1936-72), Life became one of the most widely read and influential magazines of all time. At the height of its circulation, the magazine boasted 8.5 million weekly subscribers, and consistently reached approximately 25 percent of Americans. In the words of Life’s founder, Henry R. Luce, Life proposed “to scour the world for the best pictures of every kind; to edit them with a feeling for visual form, for history and for drama; and to publish them on fine paper, every week, for a dime.”

The work of photographers such as Margaret Bourke-White, Larry Burrows, Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Charles Moore, Gordon Parks and W. Eugene Smith will be explored in the exhibition in the context of the magazine’s complex and highly collaborative creative and editorial processes. In addition, the exhibition explores the ways in which Life promoted a predominately white, middle-class perspective on politics and culture that reinforced the geopolitical prominence of the United States.

The accompanying 336-page catalogue, published by the Princeton University Art Museum and distributed by Yale University Press, examines Life’s groundbreaking role in mid-20th-century American culture and the history of photography by considering the complexity of the magazine’s image-making and publishing enterprise. The book includes essays and contributions by the curators and 22 additional scholars of art history, American studies, history and communication studies. 

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Monroe Gallery was pleased to contribute several prints to the exhibitions, and will feature its own exhibition of LIFE magazine photographers April 24 - June 21, 2020

Ida Wyman at Monroe Gallery of Photography

The Santa Fe New Mexican
Friday, February 14, 2020

       Ida Wyman, Boy with Inner Tube, Santa Monica, California (1949), gelatin silver print



Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar Ave., 505-992-0800, monroegallery.com


Although her evocative images of everyday life have graced the pages of magazines such as Life, Business Week, Parade, and Fortune, Ida Wyman never achieved the fame afforded to her contemporaries. Now recognized for the quality of her street art, Wyman, who died in July, gets the recognition she deserves with her first posthumous retrospective at Monroe. The daughter of Jewish immigrants, she grew up in Massachusetts and New York and, at 16, was determined to become a photographer. At a time when there were few opportunities for female photographers in the United States, Wyman worked as a freelancer, garnering hundreds of assignments. Her work is known for its humanism and slice-of-life depictions of America at mid-century. The show, Ida Wyman: Life with a Camera, opens with a 5 p.m. reception on Friday, Feb. 14 (through April 12).

Monroe Gallery at the 2020 Photo LA Fair

We are pleased to again be exhibiting at the longest-running international photography fair on the West Coast, the Photo LA Fair. This year the fair takes place January 30 – February 2, at The Barker Hangar, 3021 Airport Ave, Santa Monica. Monroe Gallery will be located in booth #A02, just to the right of the main fair entrance.

The gallery will be exhibiting a selection from the just-concluded acclaimed exhibit “La Dolce Vita” that celebrated Tony Vaccaro’s 97th birthday alongside photographs by Ida Wyman (1926–2019), whose work for Life, Look, and other magazines went unrecognized for decades. A special exhibit will showcase work of the new wave of fearless frontline photojournalists that are covering 21st-century events.

The fair will feature photography from more than 60 local and international galleries and dealers, but will also welcome collectives, leading not-for-profits, art schools, and global booksellers. Moreover, the fair will present renowned lectures, panel discussions, special installations, and docent tours.

The Private Vernissage will take place on Thursday, January 30th, from 4 to 6 p.m, while the Opening Night Preview will be held from 6 to 9 p.m. The doors of the fair will be open to the public from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Friday and Saturday and from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Sunday.

Tickets and more information can be found here.

Bill Ray shot some of the most iconic celebrity images of the 20th Century

It is with great sadness that we announce the death of famed LIFE magazine photographer Bill Ray.

Via the NY Post
By Isabel Vincent

January 18, 2020

Marilyn Monroe singing "Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy at 

Madison Square Garden in May 1962

When Private Elvis Presley shipped out of the Brooklyn Navy Yard on his way to his military tour of duty in West Germany in September 1958, the US Army’s brass band played “Hound Dog” to honor the King of Rock and Roll.

“And the captains and the majors helped him with his bags!” said Bill Ray, the former LIFE Magazine photographer who captured the moment.

Ray, who died earlier this month at his home on the Upper West Side, shot some of the most iconic celebrity images of the 20th century.

There is his photograph of a sultry Marilyn Monroe in a shimmering, nude-colored dress, its plunging bare back accentuating her curves as she sang a breathy rendition of “Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy at Madison Square Garden in May 1962. Three months after Ray shot the picture on stage from behind the movie star, the troubled sex symbol would be dead of an overdose. Kennedy was assassinated a year after that, and the famous dress, designed by Hollywood costume designer Jean Louis, sold at auction a few years ago for nearly $5 million.

Ray, who worked for LIFE in Los Angeles, Paris and Beverly Hills, shot The Beatles when they first arrived in Los Angeles in 1964, partied with Roman Polanski and his wife Sharon Tate a year before the pregnant actress was brutally murdered by Charles Manson in 1969. He was a regular presence on hundreds of Hollywood movie sets, photographing Elizabeth Taylor, Brigitte Bardot and Natalie Wood, among others.

“Steve McQueen once told me that he had to have sex five times a day,” said Ray about the “Bullitt” star at a 2009 presentation of his greatest work at the Coffee House Club in midtown, where he had been a member for more than 50 years. “I was too stunned to ask Steve what happens if you don’t.”

William Ray was born in Shelby, Nebraska, a windswept village of 626 about two hours west of Omaha. Ray was the youngest of four children of a prosperous lumber merchant and his artist wife. He developed such a passion for photography that by the time he was 11, he was already a member of the Omaha Camera Club and had his own professional darkroom at home. He got his first staff job as a 17-year-old at the Lincoln Star Journal newspaper.

“The city editor had a smoke and hired me on the spot,” he said.

After a photographic workshop in Hannibal, Missouri, where he impressed the faculty with a series of photographs about the local barbershop, Ray was hired by LIFE magazine and sent to New York in 1957.

“I wanted to live in New York City since I saw Fred [Astaire] dance with Ginger [Rogers] in Central Park,” he said.

For years, Ray and Marlys Ray, his wife of nearly 62 years, lived in a sprawling apartment across from Central Park where he was a regular on the tennis courts and an avid bird watcher. On January 8, the couple took a long walk in the park, feeding a few cardinals along the way, “and, best of all, saw the rising nearly full moon with a kiss (one of our silly rituals),” said Marlys Ray, a partner in her husband’s photo business.

“It was his best day in a long time.”

Ray died hours later of a heart attack. He was 83.

2020