THE Magazine: "Eppridge's work was as epic at the times themselves"

THE Magazine
Santa Fe's Monthly Magazine of and for the Arts
August, 2010

BILL EPPRIDGE: AN AMERICAN TREASURE
Exhibition continues through September 26

Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar, Santa Fe, NM. 992-0800

More than 50 images in color and black and white by eminent photojournalist Bill Eppridge are guaranteed to awaken memories of the sixties: family members attending the funeral of a civil rights victim, the Beatles arriving stateside, marines in Vietnam. By far, however, Eppridge's name is associated with the picture of Bobbie Kennedy campaigning for the presidency. His photographs of RFK's life bleeding out while a busboy tries to comfort him in June, 1968. is. like so many images from the late sixties, sadly iconic. Eppridge's first professional assignment was a nine-month, worldwide shoot for National Geographic. That story ran thirty-two pages. The magazine wanted to put him on staff, but on advice from the soon-to-become Geographic editor, Eppridge went to New York City to renew some friendships he had made at LIFE. Eppridge's work in LIFE, beginning in 1962, was as epic at the times themselves.



Copyright THE Magazine

DOROTHEA LANGE'S GRANDAUGHTER TO GIVE PRESENTATION IN SANTA FE

Thursday, August 05, 2010


©The Albuquerque Journal
By Kathaleen Roberts
Journal Staff Writer

Dyanna Taylor grew up thinking all grandmothers took photographs.

But what pictures.

The Santa Fe filmmaker is the grandchild of Dorothea Lange, the great Depression-era photographer famous for her poignant and compelling images of migrant workers, sharecroppers and residents of Japanese internment camps. Taylor, now working on a documentary about her famous grandmother, will talk about Lange's work and her memories at 5 p.m. Friday at the National Park Service Building, 1100 Old Santa Fe Trail.

The fiercely independent Lange was born in Hoboken, N.J., her life forged by two traumatic events: the abandonment by her father when she was 12 years old, and her contraction of polio when she was 7, which left her with a limp.

Instead of moving into the teaching career her mother envisioned for her, she went to work for a famous portrait photographer in Manhattan named Arnold Genthe. She absorbed his artistry, the pain of her childhood feeding her sense of what suffering meant. When the U.S. government hired her to document the Depression, she produced masterworks such as the famous "Migrant Mother," shot in 1936, and now hanging in the Library of Congress collection.

"She was a challenge, and she was a charismatic woman," Taylor said. "She was quite brilliant."

Taylor's film is slated for the PBS "American Masters" series. She's still working on the documentary and hopes to see it air in 2012. It will include previously unseen footage of the photographer, as well as interviews with her still-living assistants. Lange died of esophageal cancer in 1965 at age 70.

"She was magical," Taylor said. "Everything about her was exotic. She dressed in an interesting and unique way. She wore capes; she wore berets, always heavy silver jewelry. This was not what people were wearing in the early '50s."

Lange lived in Taos for about a year with her first husband, the painter Maynard Dixon. Then a young mother, she spoke of watching the photographer Paul Strand drive by the small adobe house lent to her by Mabel Dodge Luhan. It was her second husband (Taylor's grandfather) Paul Taylor, a labor economist, who got her work documenting the Dust Bowl and Depression refugees.

Lange was the antithesis of the doting grandmother who was eager to praise the slightest accomplishment, Taylor said.

"You couldn't be a lightweight around her," she explained. "You really had to put your thinking cap on.

I learned from her as a photographer. She taught me to look twice at what was in front of me."

Taylor remembers proudly bringing Lange a handful of stones, anticipating praise. Instead of thanking her, Lange asked her if she really saw them.

"I was feeling slightly hurt and rejected," she said.

But the incident taught Taylor to look beyond the surface, a skill that fueled her own photographic career. The family often spent holidays, birthdays and weekends at Lange's cabin north of San Francisco.

"We would hike," Taylor said. "We'd spend time at the beach. We would look for stones. She would insist that we study geometry. She would tutor us in things that weren't necessarily taught in school. She was intimidating and charismatic, and you always wanted to be close to her, even though it was a little scary."

Toward the end of her life, Lange was working on a series about home, "the place where you live." She and her second husband, Paul Taylor, took two international trips, where she photographed Indonesia, Asia, Egypt and Iran. Taylor inherited her grandmother's cameras when she died.

She soon realized she preferred moving images to still photography.

"Also, it was easier than trying to replicate hers, which were so amazing," she added.

If she were alive today, Lange would be horrified by the current economic collapse and on the front lines documenting it, Taylor said.

"She and my grandfather would just be appalled," she continued. "My grandfather would be rolling over in his grave. He fought his whole career to keep the family farm alive. Dorothea would be right in there with everything happening during the recession — people losing their homes."

Taylor tried following in her grandmother's lens by filming newly homeless people camping beneath bridges and highway ramps near Sacramento last year.

"I went out there," she said. "It was difficult to film. People are angry. People trusted her. They don't trust people with cameras anymore."



Related: Monroe Gallery of Photography will present the comprehensive exhibition "Carl Mydans: The Early Years" October 1 - November 25. Mydans was a contemporary of Dorothea Lange and was also employed by the Farm Security Administration, prior to joining LIFE magazine in 1936.

STAY CONNECTED WITH MONROE GALLERY OF PHOTOGRAPHY

Margaret Bourke-White ©Time Inc.

Operators on the transoceanic switchboard at the Long Distance Building of the New York Telephone Company, New York, 1939

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SUMMER GALERY SCENE IN SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO

APhotoEditor

Summer Gallery Scene In Santa Fe, NM
©APhotoEditor


Correspondent Jonathan Blaustein is back with a report from the summer gallery shows in Santa Fe.

Since the last article I wrote for APE, I’ve spent the summer doing the usual things. Making new photographs for “The Value of a Dollar,” weeding in the yard, and running after my young son. Average summer duties. Beyond that, I released a limited edition print to benefit the UN World Food Programme through the collect.give, had the opportunity to hear public lectures by Jonathan Torgovnik, Mary Virginia Swanson, Christopher James, Cig Harvey through the Santa Fe Workshops.

But unlike New York, which quiets down in Summer, in Northern New Mexico it’s high Season. That means busloads of tourists. And tourists like art. So many of the big blockbuster photo exhibitions take place now, rather than in the Fall or Spring. The book designer and blogger Elizabeth Avedon did a blog post previewing the Santa Fe summer scene a couple of months ago, so I thought I’d go see what was on the wall, and report back to the APE audience.

I began my little adventure at photo-eye, which is undoubtedly the photography institution in Santa Fe. The owner, Rixon Reed and his crew recently celebrated their 30th Anniversary. They offer a lot to the community, including a great photo-book store, a sleek photo gallery, and a program of public events and artist salons. The current exhibit in the gallery is a three-person show featuring work by Edward Ranney, Mitch Dobrowner, and Chris McCaw. All three work in black and white, and have differing perspectives on the landscape.

Edward Ranney, a long time NM resident, just published a book with Lucy Lippard that investigates the nearby Galisteo Basin. It was home to pre- and post-Columbian Native American culture for centuries. Ranney’s stark photos are printed without heavy or dramatic contrast, and create the impression of timelessness. Some images depict remnants of earlier cultures, and some do not. Together, they give the impression that the land, with its volcanoes and rocky cliffs, works with a timeframe that mocks the ephemeral.


Mitch Dobrowner’s large-scale landscape prints, by comparison, are dramatic and literal. They’re very beautiful, to be sure, but lack imagination. One exception, a triptych of clouds moving across Shiprock, in the Navajo Nation, is tremendous. Particularly if one has traveled through the Four Corners, as the natural beauty juxtaposes against a hard-core culture of poverty and isolation.

Chris McCaw’s photographs have been exhibited widely of late in NYC, LA, and SF. His work is original and visually engaging, and was recently collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. McCaw uses a large format camera, and allows the sun to burn its way through photographic paper that takes the place of film, utilizing long exposures. So the paper will show the literal mark of the sun, which shares the rectangle with land & oceanscapes. The balance of creation and destruction is timely and visceral. Killer stuff.

Andrew Smith, at his eponymous gallery, has the other major old-school place in town. The gallery had an installation on the wall by William Christenberry that I was excited to see. There were 20 small prints, in frames, leaning against the wall in two horizontal rows, (one above the other,) sitting on a wooden rail. Like much of his work, the images were made of the same subject, re-photographed over time. In this case, it was an old sharecropper’s house in Alabama, shot between 1978 and 2005. In early images, an old blue car is parked in front of the house, and in some an African-American family is standing on the front porch. As the sequence resolves itself, the car and family disappear, and the house slowly degrades to ruin. It’s a powerful depiction of the cold efficiency of time, and a strong metaphor for the problems facing rural society in the United States.

Smith’s gallery also has a ridiculous display of historical work, hung salon-style, in several rooms on two floors. I’ve never been anywhere like it, outside of a major museum. Ansel Adams, Carleton Watkins, Muybridge, William Henry Jackson, Steichen, Friedlander, Eliot Erwitt, and many other legends of photography are well represented. It’s so full, in fact, that I spotted a vintage print by Walker Evans of the Alabama tenant farmer’s wife, the image that Sherri Levine appropriated years later. It was a foot and a half off the floor, down in a corner by a door-frame. That tells you a bit about how much of photography’s history is crammed into this space. Not to be missed.


Verve Gallery, on Marcy St, has a huge following in Santa Fe. I’ve seen several shows there, and they tend to have three person exhibitions, from what I can tell. The work leans towards photo-journalism and documentary photography, with some exceptions. They are currently showing two documentarians, Jeffrey Becom and Nevada Wier, alongside digital conjurer Maggie Taylor. The former offerings were not super-interesting to me, but Taylor’s work is fantastic, and worth a visit. She creates surreal images that layer taken and found photographs, arriving at an original vision with a unique color palette. Taylor has been working this way for a while, and ten years ago, before Photoshop’s ubiquity, there would have been a “how did she do that” quality that is no longer to be mined. But the photographs are compelling, creating a stream of characters out of a Greek Mythology, with rams heads and rhinos and fish men.

Monroe Gallery is another of Santa Fe’s photo spots that has a national reputation, as they show historical photojournalism from the early to mid-20th Century. It’s a different period and style than you see at Andrew Smith, but equally relevant to American photography lovers. This Summer, they’ve got an exhibition in the front room by Bill Eppridge. One wall focused on photos of Robert Kennedy during his campaign for the Democratic Nomination in 1968. Very Iconographic. One image showed Kennedy riding in an open convertible with NFL greats the “Fearsome Foursome.” It stopped me, due to the reference to his brother’s assassination, of course, but also because it seemed like such an anachronism. Can anyone imagine a scene like that transpiring in 2010?

The back room of the gallery had several walls of classic photographs of famous people, hung salon-style. It’s a strange, fascinating mash-up of Marilyn Monroe, Winston Churchill, JFK, MLK, Ganhdi, Jackson Pollock, Pablo Picasso, Stravinsky, Frank Sinatra, Albert Einstein and more, photographed by the likes of Robert Capa, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Margaret Bourke-White, and Arnold Newman. History; commodified.

Eight Modern is a relative newcomer, compared to the SF institutions mentioned above. It’s a contemporary art gallery in an old adobe building, just off of Canyon Road.

While they often show painting and sculpture in a beautiful setting, the June/July show was by the Chicago conceptual artist Jason Salavon. He uses the computer to make original work from historical masterpieces, and shows digital projections, video installation, abstract prints, and digital C-prints, which I’d classify as photographs.

The front room contained two pieces that were haunting, smart and original. Salavon created montages of portraits by Velasquez and van Dyck that show just the ghostly suggestion of classical portrait sitters to create a meta-portrait. The layers of brown and ochre, and the subtle look of under-painting, are rendered digital and morphed into hyper-real. The spot where the face resides is not recognizable, per se, but is lighter in color in just the way to suggest what it was. It was probably the best work I saw on my gallery crawl. (But that bespeaks my bias towards the contemporary and conceptual, obviously.)

Finally, I saw one show down I-25 in Albuquerque at the Richard Levy Gallery. I’m including it because why not, as Levy shows contemporary international work in a great downtown space. (And I happened to be in ABQ briefly one day.) His current exhibition is by Manjari Sharma, the Mumbai and New York based photographer whose “Shower Series” has gotten lots of exposure on the web. (Burn Magazine, Lensscratch, Fraction Magazine’s blog & more.) While I’ve seen the jpegs many times, it was good to experience the large prints on the wall. She’s photographed a mix of attractive, multi-racial people who agree to take a shower in her apartment. None of the photos depict the subjects looking at the camera. They’re caught in what appear to be private, contemplative moments. So while the work is visually engaging, I was interested in the way it called attention to the artificial nature and forced intimacy of photographer/sitter relationship.

Well, that was a lot of information, I know. If you’ve made it this far into the article, you’re obviously interested in photography, or Santa Fe, or both. That, or it’s quiet today and you have some time to kill. Regardless, I’d encourage a trip out to New Mexico if you’ve not been before. All the above galleries show high quality work on a regular basis, and you can add Site Santa Fe, the NM Museum of Art, James Kelly Contemporary, Zane Bennett Contemporary Art, and the NM History Museum to the list. And in case you were wondering, I’m not a covert member of the Chamber of Commerce. I assure you.

BLOOMBERG ART REVIEW:Paris Show Fetes Ronis With Photos of Rustic Nude, Workers

Provencal Nude" (Marie-Anne Ronis), by Willy Ronis. The photo is part of the show "Willy Ronis -- A Poetics of Engagement" which runs at La Monnaie de Paris through Aug. 22. Source: Monnaie de Paris via Bloomberg

By Jorg von Uthmann
Bloomberg News
July 28, 2010

All his life, Willy Ronis was overshadowed by his more famous contemporaries Robert Doisneau and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Only in 2005, at the ripe age of 95, could he relish an undisputed triumph: His solo show at City Hall in Paris drew more than 500,000 visitors.


The exhibition at the Monnaie de Paris was supposed to celebrate the photographer’s 100th birthday. He missed it by a few months: Ronis died on Sept. 11, 2009, at age 99.

Still, this is an attractive, though by no means definitive show. The French state, to which Ronis donated his archives more than 20 years ago, was slow to inventory the gift. The 150 images on display skim the surface of his work.


The subtitle “Poetics of Engagement” refers to two of Ronis’s favorite subjects: He never tired of exploring the charms of Paris, his birthplace, and he never hid his sympathies for the Communist cause.

Ronisen (his real name) was born into a Jewish family that had emigrated from Czarist Russia. He dreamed of becoming a pianist and composer before the economic crisis of the 1930s persuaded him to play it safe and work in his father’s photo shop.

It was a bread-and-butter job that “bored me stiff for four years,” as he confided to an interviewer shortly before his death (Le Monde, July 28, 2009), and he left it as soon as he could. After his father’s death in 1936, he became a freelance photographer.

Baguette Boy

Like Doisneau and Izis (Israelis Bidermanas), another immigrant from Eastern Europe, Ronis had an eye for the “little people” and their simple pleasures -- villagers playing the national game of “boules,” lovers kissing in a cafe or a beaming boy carrying a baguette bigger than himself.

 Le Petite Parisian, 1952

Quite a few of his pictures were shot in southern France where he survived during the Occupation and often returned after the war. One of his best-known photos shows Marie-Anne, his bare-bottomed wife, washing up in a stone-floored bathroom: You can almost smell the Provencal fragrances pouring in through the open window.

The 1930s were a period of sometimes violent tensions between the haves and have-nots in France. Ronis left no doubt on which side he stood.

He faithfully recorded the rallies of the Front Populaire, the alliance of Socialists and Communists; the strikes at Citroen and Renault, the car factories; and the social unrest in the mines of Saint-Etienne.

Communist Stance

At the height of the Cold War, he twice traveled to Communist East Germany, only to discover well-stacked libraries, assiduous students and happy children.

In New York, the center of the capitalist world, his preferred subjects were the homeless and run-down neighborhoods. When he felt that his pictures for Life and Time were used for propaganda purposes against the French workers’ movement, he broke off business contacts with U.S. magazines.

His political views didn’t prevent him from lovingly capturing the atmosphere in London pubs or the delicate contrasts between light and shade in Venice.


La Monnaie de Paris is at 11 Quai de Conti. The show runs through Aug. 22. Information: http://www.monnaiedeparis.fr/ or +33-1-4046-5666.

Copyright Bloomberg News  (Jorg von Uthmann is a critic for Muse, the arts and leisure section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.) To contact the writer on the story: Jorg von Uthmann in Paris at uthmann@wanadoo.fr.

Monroe Gallery currently has a selection of Willy Ronis' photographs available. Please contact the Gallery for further information.

Le Vigneron Giroudin, 1945

Rue Rambuteau (Les Marchandes de Frites), 1946

Quai Malaquais, 1953

Le Depart d’un Morutier, 1949

THE ALBUQUERQUE JOURNAL - Bill Eppridge: An American Treasure Review "An Eye On The Times"

Sunday, July 25, 2010


An Eye on the Times


©THE ALBUQUERQUE JOURNAL
By Dan Mayfield

Journal Staff Writer

From the civil rights movement, the murder of Robert F. Kennedy, wars in Vietnam, revolutions in South America and environmental disasters such as the wreck of the Exxon Valdez oil tanker, Bill Eppridge has seen it all.

His favorite work, he said, was following Robert F. Kennedy on the campaign trail. In this image, Bobby Kennedy campaigns in Indiana during May of 1968, with various aides and friends: former prizefighter Tony Zale and (right of Kennedy) N.F.L. stars Lamar Lundy, Rosey Grier, and Deacon Jones, members of the Los Angeles Rams' "Fearsome Foursome" 

Eppridge is a photographer who started his career with National Geographic, moved to become a staff photographer for Life magazine and later Sports Illustrated, where he was assigned to cover the most important events of the last half of the 20th century. For Life he covered the civil rights movement and was one of five photographers on hand when Robert F. Kennedy was shot. For Sports Illustrated, from 1974 until his retirement just three years ago, he covered outdoor events like sailing, hunting and the Olympics.

Eppridge has a new show of his photojournalism work from the last 50 years at the Monroe Gallery in Santa Fe through Sept. 26.

Eppridge, who grew up during World War II, said he was a fan of the great photojournalism work that appeared in Life and would wait by the kitchen table every Wednesday for the new issue of the magazine to appear in his hometown of Richmond, Va.

"I remember hanging out under our dining room table for the mail just to look at the pictures," he said. "When you grow up like that, it sticks with you."

When he went to high school, he said, his sister taught him to use a light meter so he could take pictures for the school paper. Later, in college at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, he said, he dived headfirst into the business, photographing revolutions in Hungary and Eastern Europe.

"Of course, when you start to do that, your grades slip," he said. But he moved on and when he graduated, was sent on a 27-city trip around the world for National Geographic.

"It's kind of an awesome first assignment," Eppridge said.

Though the company offered him a staff photographer job, he elected to instead take a staff job at Life, his childhood favorite.

At his show in Santa Fe, most of the images are from his Life days.

Bill Garrett, who later became National Geographic's editor, encouraged a young Eppridge to join Life.

"When he explained to me that if you haven't photographed a war, or been in that situation, you don't know what to do with your life," Eppridge said. "You have to know what that experience is and what happens when all hell breaks loose."

He was sent to Vietnam, Panama, Nicaragua and other hot spots throughout South America, and it prepared him for one of the seminal moments of his career. He was about 12 feet behind Robert F. Kennedy when he was shot in 1968 at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

"I know that I was 12 feet behind him when it happened," Eppridge said. "Had I been in the normal position where I should have been, I would have been back-walking 2 feet in front of him when Sirhan (Sirhan) had that damn gun.

"As soon as the gunfire started, I knew what it was. I knew where it came from. I was pretty close to the caliber in my mind. By the time it finished, I knew what had been used. It was things that I learned in wars and revolutions. I knew what incoming sounded like. That instinct, right there, all of those years of working, when it hits that fan ... it goes from your eye to your brain to your finger to hit that button."

His images of the moment, of a busboy holding RFK's hand, to his body lying on the floor, have become part of the American tapestry of images.

His images, too, of the civil rights struggle, such as the funeral of slain civil rights worker James Cheney, are in the show at the Monroe Gallery.

Photographer Bill Eppridge was assigned to cover many of the 1960's toughest issues, including the civil rights struggle. He photographed the funeral of James Cheney, a civil rights worker who was slain in 1964. Eppridge photographed Mrs. Cheney and her son, Ben, at the funeral.

When Life closed, Eppridge moved to Sports Illustrated, where he photographed "any sport without balls."

Casey Stengel, NY Mets Manager, New York, 1962

He spent time with hunters and sailors, and at the Olympics, he said. But he most enjoyed the magazine's rare pieces on the environment. He covered both the post-eruption destruction of Mount St. Helens and the Exxon Valdez oil spill for the magazine.

Once the magazine shifted focus to covering mainly the biggest sports and the biggest athletes, he said, it was time to go.

"The magazine changed, and I was not doing that," he said.

On one of his early assignments for LIFE. Eppridge photographed the Beatles on their 1964 American tour, including John Lennon relaxing on the train from New York to Washington, DC

If you go

WHAT: Photo exhibition by Bill Eppridge

WHEN: Through Sept. 26

WHERE: Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar, Santa Fe, 505-992-0800

HOW MUCH: Free



©The Albuquerque Journal

STEPHEN WILKES PHOTOGRAPHS FOR TIME MAGAZINE ON BOARD RELIEF WELL FOR DEEPWATER HORIZON

Photographer Stephen Wilkes gets on board the drilling rigs that will fix the Deepwater Horizon disaster once and for all. Published in TIME, July 22, 2010. (All photographs Stephen Wilkes for TIME.)

Rig Control Room


After the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig on April 20, BP began to drill two relief wells — parallel pathways to the oil reservoir beneath the floor of the Gulf of Mexico — that will eventually intersect with the original well. In this photo, workers in the control room on one of the platforms drive the rig as it works.

Ships of the Spill


The platform (right rear, with flame) is supported by numerous craft, including: the Discoverer Enterprise (center with the tall tower), which was the first ship to collect oil from a cap placed over the well; the Helix Producer (lower right with green helicopter landing pad), another containment ship that is on hold while the well remains capped; and a small flotilla of ships that operate the remote operated vehicles, the underwater robots that carry out procedures on the wellhead.

On Board the Rig


The drilling begins vertically, pushing down some 10,000 ft. below the surface of the Gulf. Then the drill's path has to curve into the original well.

High Rise


The task presents an extraordinaly challenge: The drill must strike a tiny target more than three miles beneath the surface of the ocean. As of July 20, the main relief well was less than 5 ft. from its goal. "We're absolutely perfectly positioned," said BP vice president Kent Wells, who is leading the effort.

Fireman


When the linkup is made, BP will be able to pour mud and then concrete into the original well, finally cutting off the flow of oil for good.

Protected


The rigs are located about 40 miles off the southeast Louisiana coast and a one-hour and 15-minute helicopter ride from Houma, La., where booms protect the marshland, above

Thick


Even after the spill is permanently stopped, a vast amount of cleanup work in the affected areas of the Gulf will remain.



For more than two decades Stephen Wilkes has been widely recognized for his fine art and commercial photography. With numerous awards and honors, as well as five major exhibitions in the last five years Wilkes has left an impression on the world of photography. Stephen Wilkes has completed several documentary projects, including China, Bethlehem Steel, and In Katrina's Wake.

Perhaps Wilkes’ most ambitious project was photographing the south side of Ellis Island (1998 – 2003). With his exclusive photographs and video work, Wilkes was able to help secure $6 million in funding to restore the south side of the island. Today all that remains of the past are Wilkes' haunting images. These photographs have appeared in The New York Times Magazine and have won numerous awards including American Photographer, The Art Directors Club, Applied Arts Magazine, Graphis and other industry awards. Wilkes continues to be involved with his passion for Ellis Island, working with the "Save Ellis Island" foundation and his work will be part of a permanent exhibition at Ellis Island. Wilkes received the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award for magazine photography, and in 2004 he received the Lucie Award for Fine Art Photographer Of The Year Award. His work is in the permanent collection of several important museum collections. Ellis Island: Ghosts of Freedom was published by W.W. Norton & Company in the fall of 2006, and was accompanied by a major exhibition at Monroe Gallery of Photography October 6 – January 7, 2007.

Robert Capa's Mexican Suitcase to reveal its secrets in New York exhibition

The International Center of Photography is getting ready for "a historical revelation", as it unveils plans to put on show the contents of the Mexican Suitcase - a newly-found collection of images by Robert Capa, David Seymour and Gerda Taro .

©British Journal of Photography
July 22, 2010
by Olivier Laurent

The 'Mexican Suitcase' - actually three cardboard boxes of negatives - was discovered in 1995 and released to the International Center of Photography in January 2008 after years of secret negotiations with the descendants of a Mexican general who found the work. (See the aticle and slide show here.)

The boxes contained more than 4500 negatives of images shot by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and Davic "Chim" Seymour. The images were long-feared to be lost after the negatives were left in Capa's studio in Paris when he fled France during the Second World War.

Last year, in an interview with BJP, Cynthia Young, an assistant curator at the ICP said that the suitcase contained "46 Chim rolls, 45 Capa rolls, 32 Taro rolls and three attributed to Capa and Taro, as well as two rolls by Fred Stein." The 4500 images were taken between May 1936 and March 1939, and most of them are from the Spanish Civil War, with the exception of two rolls from Capa's trip to Belgium in May 1939.

And, from September, after two years of scanning and cataloging, visitors will be able to get access to some of the most iconic images as the ICP opens its first Mexican Suitcase exhibition.

The exhibition opens on 24 September and will run for more than three months. "Capa, Chim, and Taro risked their lives to witness history in the making and showing it to the world, and the Mexican Suitcase contains some of their most important works," says the ICP. "The Mexican Suitcase marks a profound shift in the study of these three photographers. In the process of researching the negatives of both major events and mundane details of the war, the authorship of numerous images by Capa, Chim and Taro has been confirmed or reattributed.

"This material not only provides a uniquely rich and panoramic scope of the Spanish Civil War, a conflict that changed the course of European history, but it also demonstrates how the work of these legendary photographers laid the foundation for modern war photography."

The ICP adds: "Equally compelling are the stories of the photographers themselves as revealed through these images: the dashing Capa, the studious Chim, and the intrepid Taro, who died tragically in 1937, during the battle of Brunete."

The Mexican Suitcase exhibition will also include vintage 1930s newspapers and magazines - such as egards, Vu, Life, Schweizer Illustrierte Zeitung, Volks-Illustrierte - in which the images first appeared, providing "an enlightening historical context for the evolving coverage of the war and the growing reliance on the photo essay," says the Center.

To coincide with the exhibition, Steidl, in collaboration with the ICP, will release "a fully-illustrated two-volume catalogue," in which all the negatives in the suitcase will be thoroughly reproduced and accompanied by essays from twenty-one specialists in Spanish Civil War and 1930’s photography."

For more information, visit http://www.icp.org./

SPANISH MARKET: July 24 & 25, 2010

We'll take a brief break from photography to highlight one of Santa Fe's premiere summer events: The Annual Traditional Spanish Market, this year, it will be celebrating its 59th anniversary, Saturday and Sunday, July 24 & 25, 2010 on the Santa Fe Plaza. A popular event for residents and visitors alike, Spanish Market features handmade traditional arts by over 200 local Hispanic artists as well as continuous live music and dance, art demonstrations and regional foods. A separate youth exhibition area also features the work of some 100 emerging artists. The Market provides a unique opportunity for visitors to enjoy a taste of New Mexico’s vibrant Spanish culture, both past and present. Admission is free. More information is here.

Of course, you can take a break from the Market and pop into Monroe Gallery of Photography for a look at the current Bill Eppridge: An American Treasure exhibition, along with some of the best photography the 20th and 21st century have to offer.

ART SANTA FE UPDATE

The pace picks up this weekend at ART Santa Fe. The Fair is open Saturday and Sunday, 11 to 6.

For a glimpse of the fair, a brief video is currently on You Tube (here), and the Santa Fe Arts Twitter feed has several tweets about Santa Fe galleries showing at the fair.

Tonight, Roberta Smith, Senior Art Critic for the New York Times, delivers the keynote address for Art Santa Fe Presents. The Albuquerque Journal had this article in today's edition about the presentation.

We look forward to seeing you at the Fair and in our booth, # 25.

Stephen Wilkes: China

Eric Smith: The Ruins of Detroit

Monroe Gallery Booth #25