Refractions: A Conversation with Mark Peterson

 Via B & H Photo

Tuesday, Feb. 13, 2024 1:00pm - 2:00pm ET

On this episode of Refractions, Stephen Mallon is joined by photographer, Mark Peterson.

Refractions are live videocasts hosted by award-winning photographer and filmmaker Stephen Mallon. Conversations will be with a select group of guests discussing creativity, imagery, business, fine art, and light! Curators discuss working with new and established artists. Photographers talking about their careers. Festival directors sharing what challenges face them. Directors will talk about all aspects of filmmaking. Photo editors will discuss the changing world of editorial and what they need from today’s assignment shooters. The mostly one-on-one conversations will have a diverse group of image makers and the people that work with them.

Refractions: A Conversation with Mark Peterson from B&H Photo on Vimeo.

Mark Peterson

Mark Peterson is a photographer based in New York City. His work has been published in New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, Fortune Magazine, Time Magazine, Geo Magazine and other national and international publications. In 2018 he was awarded the W. Eugene Smith grant for his work on White Nationalism. He is the author of Acts Of Charity published by Powerhouse in 2004 and Political Theatre which was published by Steidl in the fall of 2016. In the Fall of 2023 Steidl will publish his new book The Fourth Wall. The National Gallery Of Art in Washington DC has collected one of his images from the January 6th insurrection. See his guest opinion essay in today's NY Times: 

At the Border, a Blending of Politics and Religion

Stephen Mallon

Stephen Mallon is a photographer and filmmaker who specializes in the industrial-scale creations of mankind at unusual moments of their life cycles. 

Mallon’s work blurs the line between documentary and fine art, revealing the industrial landscape to be unnatural, desolate and functional yet simultaneously also human, surprising and inspiring. It has been featured in publications and by broadcasters including Smithsonian Magazine, The New York Times, National Geographic, NBC, The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Mail, MSNBC, PBS, GQ, CBS, the London Times and Vanity Fair. Mallon has exhibited in cities including Miami, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, St. Louis and New York, as well as in England and Italy. 

Stephen’s project following the MTA’a artificial reef project where over 2000 subway cars were placed in the Atlantic was shown at The New York Transit Museum’s Grand Central Terminal Gallery. Over 60,000 people experienced the exhibition and was featured by Gothamist, Artnet, Yahoo, Fox News, and numerous other outlets. 

As David Schonauer wrote in Pro Photo Daily, “Mallon’s word harkens back to the heroic industrial landscapes of Margaret Bourke-White and Charles Sheeler, who glorified American steel and found art in its industrial muscle and smoke during the Great Depression.” He has also been compared to photographers including Edward Burtynsky, Thomas Struth and Chris Jordan. 

Mallon served as a board member of the New York chapter of the American Society of Media Photographers from 2002 until 2020 and served as president from 2006 to 2009. He is represented by Front Room Gallery in New York.

WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY: Empathy As A Perspective with Anne Wilkes Tucker

 

The Democratic Lens Scholar Lectures

Examining how images have shaped America’s collective memory and inspired individuals to participate in civic life.

Sunday, November 20

Livestream and La Fonda on the Plaza, Lumpkins Ballroom 100 E. San Francisco St. Santa Fe, NM 87501

Lectures are free and open to the public. Attend live online or in person at Santa Fe's La Fonda on the Plaza Hotel.

10-11 am | Photography & Restitution: The Civil Potential of the Image with Laura Wexler, Charles H. Farnam Professor of American Studies & Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, Yale University

11-12 pm | WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY: Empathy As A Perspective with Anne Wilkes Tucker, Curator Emerita, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

12-1 pm | What Can’t Be Unseen: Photography & Activism with Kymberly Pinder, Ph.D., Dean, Yale School of Art, Yale University

1-1:30 pm| Q&A with Moderator Will Wilson, Photographer & Program Head of Photography, Santa Fe Community College

Reserve here

Anne Wilkes Tucker is one of the four authors of War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and its Aftermath, a 612-page survey of images made of wars, from the Crimean War (1853-1856) through the Iraq War (2003-2011). The 2012 book was produced to document Tucker’s monumental exhibit of images of war at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Tucker will speak on War/Photography: Empathy as a Perspective as one of three scholars presenting at a Nov. 20 Review Santa Fe symposium called The Democratic Lens: Photography and Civic Engagement, sponsored by CENTER and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The symposium is free and can be attended online or in person.

Tucker will discuss how empathy plays a largely unexamined role in war, including for photographers who become involved with their subjects after photographing them. For example, one Los Angeles Times photographer took time off from his job to take a soldier he had photographed who was suffering from PTSD to a rehabilitation center and stayed with him for a month, Tucker says.

“I just want people to understand, when they get all ‘rah-rah’ about war, that the war doesn’t end for soldiers,” she says. “There is still a soldier a day in the U.S. who kills him- or herself.” 

Brink: David Butow in Conversation at Rochester Institute of Technology

David Butow:  January 6, 2021. Supporters of President Donald Trump retreat from tear gas during a battle with Law Enforcement officers on the west steps of the Capitol in Washington during the attack on the day of Joe Biden’s election certification by Congress

Via Rochester Institute of Technology City Art Space

This solo exhibition chronicles politics in the United States from the 2016 presidential election, four years of the Trump administration, the turmoil of 2020 and concludes with the insurrection and its aftermath at the U.S, Capitol in January 2021. Butow writes, "We lived through history minute by minute, so much so that the gravitas of what transpired is apparent only when one steps back and sees how the whole saga unfolded."

"As revisionists seek to trivialize or downplay these events, it's critical to maintain a record of just how close the presidency of Donald Trump brought U.S. democracy to the brink of disfunction.​" While some of the photographs were taken on assignment, or published right away in places like The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, TIME and Paris Match, Butow says, "I was most interested in making pictures that would be different from daily news coverage and that would be particularly compelling to viewers decades from now." - David Butow

Two different talks will take place during Butow's visit to RIT, both free and open to the public:

Charles Arnold Lecture Series Presents David Butow

Thursday, February 3, 6:00 PM | RIT Campus

Wegmans Theater @ MAGIC, RIT Campus, 300 Lomb Memorial Drive, Rochester, NY, 14623.

In person & Zoom/Webinar Option Click Here to Register (for webinar option)

Butow will share an overview of his long career in photojournalism. A facemask is required.

BRINK: David Butow in Conversation

Friday, February 4, 6:00 PM | Downtown Rochester

RIT City Art Space, 280 East Main Street, Downtown Rochester, NY, 14604

Free and open to the public | in-person only, facemasks required

RIT Photojournalism Assistant Professor Jenn Poggi, a former White House photo editor, will lead a conversation with David Butow about his latest project and book, BRINK. A facemask is required.

Butow is a freelance photojournalist whose projects and assignments have taken him to more than two dozen countries including Afghanistan, Burma, Iraq, Peru, Yemen and Zimbabwe. In 2017, as Donald Trump took office, Butow felt compelled to move from California to Washington, D.C., to document the events up close.

Butow's latest work, Brink, is a book of 104 photographs chronicling politics in the United States during the 2016 presidential election and the Trump administration, concluding with the January 2021 insurrection and its aftermath. Jenn Poggi, assistant professor in RIT's School of Photographic Arts and Sciences, served as an editor on the project.

An exhibition of the same name is also on view at RIT City Art Space from Feb. 4-20. A gallery conversation with Poggi and Butow is also scheduled for 6 p.m. Friday, Feb. 4, at City Art Space in downtown Rochester.

The events and exhibition are organized by Poggi and sponsored by RIT's School of Photographic Arts and Sciences.

Related exhibitions: David Butow: Brink

                                January 2021, One Year Later

To Do Saturday: Public Lecture: Photography from A to Z + Tea

 

 

"A" is for Atget, "B" is for Baltz and "C" is for come join Katherine Ware, our New Mexico Museum of Art curator of photography, for the official launch of FOCA + P (the Friends of Contemporary Art Plus Photography). Ware will take us on a journey through the museum's photography holdings and talk about collecting strategies, future exhibitions, and special projects. Come learn about photography and have a chance to join this exciting friends group.

2:00 to 4:00 p.m.
St. Francis Auditorium, inside the Museum of Art.

Free.
Light refreshments served.

image: Eugène Atget, Shop, avenue des Gobelins, 1925 (printed by Berenice Abbott c 1930). Collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art.

Photographer Craig Varjabedian discusses “Landscape Dreams” at 1:30 today at the Albuquerque Museum

 

This photo titled “Welcome to New Mexico” was made near Chama. (CRAIG VARDJABEDIAN FROM ‘LANDSCAPE DREAMS, A NEW MEXICO PORTRAIT’)

 

Review: Captivating panorama

Via The Albuquerque Journal

By David Steinberg / Journal Staff Writeron Sun, Dec 16, 2012

 Which one to choose for publication? A San Marcos cowboy holding a saddle with his canine friend Buddy next to him? A roadside descanso in Mora? Quaking aspen in Red River? Chile fields near Hatch?

I reviewed and re-reviewed the many wondrous black-and-white images of Santa Fe photographer Craig Varjabedian in his new book “Landscape Dreams” before deciding on the accompanying one you see.

I was taken by the tilt and the architecture of the “Welcome to New Mexico, Chama, New Mexico” sign. How 1950s New Mexico it was. I was also enraptured by the shimmering cool leaves, the curving vale, the stand of trees in the middle ground, the upward slope of the hill to the sky.

As the first full-page photograph in the book, it welcomes the reader to a journey – a journey into Varjabedian’s work – into a thoughtful essay on the Land of Enchantment, into an explanation of the photographer’s themes and artistic philosophy and into the how and why of his own coming to New Mexico.

I asked Varjabedian about the “Welcome to New Mexico” photograph.

“The sign is a kind of metaphor for New Mexico,” Varjabedian said. “As real and truthful as it looks, it is not really truthful. Ultimately what I am trying to say is that I’ve been calling this book my love letter to New Mexico. Whatever tools, tricks I can use as a photographer, I use. The sign was shot up. There were holes in it.”

The fact that the sign is a bit off-kilter, Varjabedian commented, says that there’s something “wonderfully different” about New Mexico.

He took the photograph in 2010. Since then, he said, the state Highway Department has replaced the sign with one that is more vertical.

“It’s a new sign and it doesn’t have the quality of its older relative,” he said.

Craig Varjabedian discusses “Landscape Dreams” at 1:30 today at the Albuquerque Museum, 2000 Mountain NW. In addition, Jeanetta Calhoun Mish and Jennifer Simpson read from essays in the book. Rebekkah Varjabedian, the photographer’s daughter, introduces her short film “Landscape Dreams.” UNM Press director John Byram talks about the press’ collaboration with Varjabedian and the importance of physical books.

To Varjabedian, the sign signifies something more.

“There’s something magical, enchanted and turned a little different about this place, which brings it its charm … and delights me to want to photograph it. I’m struck by those things that are turned a little bit differently, whether a sign or some historical fact,” he said.”

On the facing page of the “Welcome” sign is part of historian Hampton Sides’ foreword. In it, Sides touches on New Mexico’s road to statehood. The state “worked its way into the national consciousness,” he wrote, “and, as it nearly always does, won people over.” It was a reference to a welcoming act on Jan. 6, 1912 – membership into the Union as the 47th state.

Varjabedian’s public love letter was published in the same year as the New Mexico Centennial.

An exhibit of images from the book is up through Dec. 31 at William Talbot Fine Art, 129 W. San Francisco St., Santa Fe.

David Steinberg is the Journal’s Books editor and an Arts writer.

This is the cover of the book “Landscape Dreams: A New Mexico Portrait” (courtesy of unm press website)

AIPAD Photography Show Panel Discussions

Via AIPAD

AIPAD Panel Discussions
Saturday, March 31
SPONSORED BY RYERSON IMAGE CENTRE

Top curators, collectors, artists, critics, and gallerists will take part in AIPAD Panel Discussions during the run of The AIPAD Photography Show New York on Saturday, March 31. Please note the new location at Hunter College (one block from the Park Avenue Armory on the corner of East 68th Street and Lexington Avenue).

Tickets are $10 per person, per session, and will be available for purchase at the Park Avenue Armory during Show hours (Thursday through Saturday, as available). Tickets are limited and sold on a first-come, first-served basis. See detailed information below.

10 AM

A Conversation with Rineke Dijkstra Contemporary women photographers are being feted in a number of solo exhibitions at top museums across the country this year. This interview with the internationally recognized Dutch artist Rineke Dijkstra will offer a rare opportunity to hear about her inspirations and thoughts before her upcoming retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in June 2012. The interview will be conducted by Jennifer Blessing, curator of photography, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

12 PM

Curator’s Choice: Emerging Artists in PhotographyTwo major exhibitions in New York City during the run of The AIPAD Photography Show New York are of note—the Whitney Biennial 2012 at the Whitney Museum and Perspectives 2012 at the International Center for Photography. This panel will feature top curators discussing trends in photography and video. Panelists will include: Sarah Meister, curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Christopher Phillips, curator, International Center for Photography, New York; and Joshua Chuang, assistant curator, photography, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven.

2 PM

How to Collect Photographs: What Collectors Need to Know NowWhat important artists are being talked about right now? What do collectors need to know? What art fairs should be on your calendar? How has the photography market changed in recent years? Seasoned collectors will offer tips for both first-time and experienced buyers. Speakers will include: Kenneth Montague, director, Wedge Curatorial Projects, Toronto; and Joseph Baio, collector, New York. The moderator will be Steven Kasher, Steven Kasher Gallery, New York.

4 PM

A Celebration of Francesca WoodmanTo commemorate the traveling retrospective of Francesca Woodman (organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), experts will talk about the importance of this groundbreaking artist and her enduring legacy. Panelists will include: Julia Bryan-Wilson, associate professor, art history, University of California, Berkeley; Sloan Keck, designer, and friend of Francesca Woodman; and Elisabeth Subrin, artist and assistant professor, department of film and video, Temple University, Philadelphia.

6 PM

Italian Contemporary PhotographyDuring the run of The AIPAD Photography Show New York, an important exhibition will be on view at Hunter Art Gallery, New York. Peripheral Visions: Italian Photography, 1950s – Present will showcase the work of major Italian photographers who have explored unconventional images of Italy. The moderator will be Sandra Phillips, senior curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Speakers will include: Maria Antonella Pelizzari, exhibition curator and professor, history of photography, Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY; Yancey Richardson, Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York; Julie Saul, Julie Saul Gallery; and Olivo Barbieri, artist.

Ticket InformationTickets are $10 per person, per session, and will be available for purchase at the Park Avenue Armory (643 Park Avenue at East 67th Street) during Show hours (Thursday, March 29 through Saturday, March 31, as available). Tickets are limited and sold on a first-come, first-served basis.

Tickets will not be sold on-site at Hunter College. We encourage you to purchase tickets at the Park Avenue Armory before Saturday, March 31.

Panel Discussions Location

This year, due to the high level of interest, AIPAD Panel Discussions will be held in the Hunter West Building at Hunter College. The entrance to the Hunter West Building is located on the corner of East 68th Street and Lexington Avenue, just one block from the Park Avenue Armory. Enter through the West Lobby and proceed to the sixth floor, room HW 615. Photo ID may be required.

The 6 train stops directly under Hunter College at the 68th Street station. There is an entrance to the Hunter West Building in the subway station. Turn right upon exiting the turnstile and the entrance will be directly in front of you.

For detailed directions, visit the Hunter College website. For more information about The AIPAD Photography Show New York or the AIPAD Panel Discussions, call +1.202.367.1158 or email info@aipad.com.

Visit Monroe Gallery of Photography during the exhibition at Booth #419,