“My Faraway One: The Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz"

Credit: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Alfred Stieglitz attached this photograph to a letter for Georgia O'Keeffe, dated July 10, 1929. Below the photograph he wrote, "I have destroyed 300 prints to-day. And much more literature. I haven't the heart to destroy this..."


 Kathaleen Roberts / Journal Staff Writer
Wednesday, Aug 3, 2011

It was a relationship built on white-hot passion, nearly shattered on a fault line of freedom and creativity.

National Gallery of Art photography curator Sarah Greenough leafed through 25,000 pieces of paper exchanged by Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz to produce “My Faraway One: The Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Volume I, 1915-1933,” (Yale University Press, 2011) an 800-page tome as big as the Chicago phone book. Despite its girth, the book represents just one-tenth of their correspondence during this period.

Greenough will be at the New Mexico Museum of Art today to talk about the book.

When Stieglitz and O’Keeffe met in 1916, he was 52 and already considered the nucleus of the New York art world. She was an unknown 28-year-old Texas art teacher.
The book traces the pair’s correspondence –– hers in squiggles and curlicues, his in thick black lines –– across their relationship. Stieglitz became entranced by her work when introduced to it by O’Keeffe’s friend Anita Pollitzer. The couple frequently exchanged three to four letters a day. They were sealed, at O’Keeffe’s request, for 20 years after her death.
At first, O’Keeffe comes across as a smitten schoolgirl turned giddy by the attentions of a powerful man. Stieglitz, alternately charismatic, egotistical and narcissistic, yearned for a woman artist after spending years in a miserable first marriage.
“You can see them really starting to fall in love,” Greenough said.
Stieglitz, the man who had introduced Constantin Brancusi, Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso to the U.S., had long been searching for a great woman artist. He was convinced he had found one in O’Keeffe.
“In the early letters, you see him just getting to know her,” Greenough said. “I think he strongly wanted to encourage her art. Yet, eventually in the correspondence, his fascination with her as a woman artist gets transferred into his fascination of her as a woman.”
By 1916, Stieglitz was writing letters that were 20 to 30 pages long.
As O’Keeffe was about to return to Texas in 1917, he wrote to her: “How I wanted to photograph you –– the hands –– the mouth –– & eyes –– & the enveloped in black body –– the touch of white –– & the throat –– but I didn’t want to break into your time.”
Before O’Keeffe moved to New York in 1918, he wrote, “What do I want from you? –– Sometimes I feel I’m going stark mad –– That I ought to say.”
“They pretty much fell in love through their correspondence,” Greenough said.
Stieglitz found and cleaned a small studio for O’Keeffe. They began living together almost immediately and married in 1924.
By the mid-’20s, cracks start to snake through their bond. O’Keeffe desperately wanted a child; Stieglitz –– already the father of a daughter –– did not. She wanted to travel; he was a dedicated New Yorker. At first, the couple lived with Stieglitz’s brother and his wife. O’Keeffe later wrote that “living with the brother and the wife had all the emotional warmth of a cold, damp cellar.”
The family also intruded on her time to paint.
“And she wanted to live a more independent life than Stieglitz wanted her to,” Greenough said.
Thanks in no small part to Stieglitz’s promotion, O’Keeffe became a famous artist. Restless, she made the trip that would transform both their lives.
In 1929, O’Keeffe traveled to New Mexico to visit Mabel Dodge Luhan in Taos. She discovered a vast expanse of land and light that would flood her canvas. She was surrounded by a circle of artists and intellectuals, including Tony Lujan, D.H. Lawrence and Dorothy Brett.
“This really isn’t like anything you ever saw,” she wrote to Stieglitz from Taos in 1929. “Mabel’s place beats anything you can imagine about it –– it is simply astonishing.”
The letters offer glimpses of O’Keeffe’s take on her own paintings:
“I hate the back of my Ranchos church –– Tomorrow I must get out at it again –– It is heavy –– I want it to be light and lovely and singing.”
The cascading letters reveal the couple’s contrasting writing styles. Stieglitz’s is flowing and poetic, teeming with imagery. O’Keeffe paired phrases with squiggles and loops. “It’s almost as if she was … sketching out an idea.” Greenough said. “O’Keeffe is very lucid and very sharply rendered, like her paintings are distilled down to their essence.”
“Neither one of them cared about sending carefully crafted letters,” she added. “They’re very immediate and free-flowing.”
Greenough first met O’Keeffe through photographs –– the sparsely iconic black-and-white images by Stieglitz, the subject of the curator’s dissertation. Greenough organized one-man exhibitions of the acclaimed photographer at the National Gallery of Art. O’Keeffe asked Greenough to edit their correspondence. She annotated each letter with a “yes” or a “no” for publication.
“When I met her, it was an extremely different person than the one in the photographs,” Greenough said. “She had a very dry wit and a real twinkle in her eyes. She was definitely a strong-willed person.”
Greenough is at work on Volume II, which runs from 1934 to Stieglitz’s 1946 death.
“I think it probably won’t be nearly as long,” she said.

If you go WHAT: Sarah Greenough, author of “My Faraway One: The Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Volume I, 1915-1933″
WHEN: 6 p.m. today
WHERE: St. Francis Auditorium, New Mexico Museum of Art, 107 W. Palace Ave.
COST: Free
CONTACT: 476-5088

Via The Albuquerque Journal

Related: NPR - Stieglitz And O'Keeffe: Their Love And Life In Letters

Ken Regan Releases ALL ACCESS Photography Book



Monday, August 1, 2011
BWW News Desk


Ken Regan was there when the Beatles touched down on U.S. soil for the first time in 1964. He caught candid snapshots of their arrival at JFK International Airport in New York City, photographed their backstage downtime at the Ed Sullivan Show and spent a day clowning around with the Fab Four in Central Park.

This is what you call access-the type of proximity and intimacy with artists that have made Regan's images sought-after windows to the most historically significant moments in the last 40 years of rock and roll.

And with his exceptional new book, All Access: The Rock and Roll Photography of Ken Regan, Regan grants you, a little taste of that backstage wonderment.

He palled around with the Stones in 1975 in Montauk. He took Dylan's favorite picture of himself. He hit the gym with Madonna in 1985. He's ridden shotgun with Run DMC in Hollis, Queens.
"I was able to catch many legendary rock pioneers at ease," Regan writes. And as readers will note, it is Regan's "interest in doing more than just photo ops and concert shoots" that delivers some of the most remarkable cultural documents of the past half-century.

All Access is a collection of photographs, but more than that, it is a compilation of memories, stories from the front lines of several revolutions: the rock revolution; Pete Seeger's peace movement and Woodstock ("a photographer's paradise"); and the birth of hip hop.

"As a photojournalist, there were thousands of assignments that I covered over the last four decades," say Regan. "I am forever grateful."
But don't take Ken's word for it.

"You have to know the moment before it happens. To sense it, to feel it," Keith Richards writes in the book's preface. "Whatever this intuitive sense, is what my longtime friend has. Many times I've been onstage only to see Ken's beady left eye drilling through me with that wry grin under his camera and know he's got the shot he was after."

The Stones are generous in their praise of Regan. And Regan is generous with his experience. In the book, he gives readers never-before-heard insider accounts of dozens of events and over 40 artists, for example:

- Woodstock on stage and off
- When Bob Dylan met a young fan named Bruce Springsteen- On and off the road with The Rolling Stones throughout the 70's and the 80's
- Hanging out with his "Big Brother" Bill Graham, who introduced him to Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Stones and Bob Dylan
- The Concert for Bangladesh
- Roy Orbison and Johnny Cash in quiet moments at home with their families
- Backstage at Live Aid and Amnesty International

Regan gives the fly-on-the-wall account that only he can give: Just like his photographs, his writing is direct, honest and unclouded by obsequious fandom.

"When you look at the breadth of Ken's work, the first thought is, 'He could not have possibly shot all these'," James Taylor writes in the afterword. "Looking at Ken's remarkable catalog of images, I am reminded of a time when we did not know more about our favorite musicians than we wanted to know. Perhaps that's why we stuck with them  longer."

It certainly gives us reasons--hundreds of them, in both vivid color and intimate black-and-white--to stick with Ken Regan.

About the Author(s):
Ken Regan is an award-winning photographer whose work has appeared on more than 200 magazine covers, including Time, New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, People, Newsweek, Life, and Entertainment Weekly. He visually documented such extraordinary concerts as The Band's Last Waltz and George Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh. His previous photography book, Knockout: The Art of Boxing, earned an Independent Book Publishers Gold Medal Award. Regan lives in New York and Massachusetts.

Jim Jerome has coauthored a number of best-selling memoirs, collaborating with leading figures in popular music, film, television, cable news, and business. He has also profiled hundreds of rock, pop, country music, film, and television artists for People, Us, InStyle, and AARP magazines. He lives in New York.


Read more: http://books.broadwayworld.com/article/Ken-Regan-Releases-ALL-ACCESS-Photography-Book-20110801#ixzz1TtSLoSUc

Museum Admission: $$, Your Local Galleries: Free

Last week, the Museum of Modern Art announced that, " faced with what it calls “escalating costs in virtually all aspects of operating the museum,’’ it  is raising its admission price to $25 for adults from $20 effective September 1. This follows the same increase for the "suggested" admission price to the Metropolitan Museum of Art effective July 1.

The change has elicited some protest from observers who complain that the museum is too expensive already. But others acknowledge the difficult realities of museum financing.

All in all, remember that your local galleries offer free admission and similar opportunities to experience world-class art.

REVIEW: "ICONIC CONSCIOUSNESS"



Eric Smith: Funeral for Iraq War Soldier, Lake Orion, Michigan, 2006

By Maylin Wilson Powell
The Albuquerque Journal
July 29, 2011

In our current era of citizen journalism, when amateur submissions are used on Internet news sites, technology and media consolidation have rendered the work of professional photojournalists a much more contingent endeavor. There is, of course, great value in the kind of rousing images that were taken by young women with cellphones during the heat of Egypt’s uprising and transmitted instantaneously around the planet. But, what of the men and women who consistently invested in firsthand photographic reporting over a number of years? The number of photojournalism images published by news organizations has shrunk dramatically in the shift of emphasis to more entertainment and lifestyle coverage. Without courageous and seasoned photojournalists actually going and talking to and taking pictures of people during the eruptions of wars and revolutions, our understanding of the world becomes more and more distorted.

“History’s Big Picture” exhibition at the Monroe Gallery of Photography is a gripping selection of images that brings home the power of visual storytelling. Hung chronologically from the 1930s to the present, these 58 photo images by the masters of 20th and 21st century photojournalism are predominately sobering. The overall impression of history and the big picture presented here tells a collective story of “Woe is us.”

More than a third of the images are from what is known as the “Golden Age” of photojournalism, the 1930s to the 1950s, when magazines including LIFE, Look and Sports Illustrated (USA), Paris Match, and the Berliner Illustrierte Zetung along with newspapers The Daily Mirror (London) and The New York Daily News built huge reputations and circulations based on photography by such artists as Robert Capa, Alfred Eisenstaedt and Margaret Bourke-White. The show opens with the work of these three celebrity photojournalists, including Eisenstaedt’s image of the self-satisfied architects of fascism, “The First Meeting of Mussolini and Hitler, Venice, June 1934,” along with an especially chilling image of the vampirish “Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Geneva, September, 1933,” the Reich’s minister of propaganda, himself a failed journalist and writer who organized the 1938 Kristallnacht for burning books and synagogues.

Capa’s “D-Day, Normandy, Omaha Beach, 1944″ is actually a great watery blur of a soldier swimming toward such massive implements for killing as fortified tank turrets and hundreds of thousands of land mines. Bourke-White is represented by two images –– the first captures three raggedy children in front of a raggedy sign that announces “Entering New Deal, Montana, 1936,” which was a mini-boomtown that faded away in the 1940s after the completion of a federally financed dam. Her second image is a riveting, crowded composition of “Buchenwald Prisoners, 1945″ each of them staring directly at us and still pressing forward across more than half a century from behind a metal fence on the day of their liberation. Scanning their figures and faces, it brings into question what the concepts of liberation and survival could mean to every one of these individuals and their descendants.

On view are five iconic images that were seen on the front pages of newspapers around the world the day after they were shot on location. In the case of Joe Rosenthal’s “Marines Raise the Flag on Iwo Jima, February 23, 1945,” the U.S. government also printed 3.5 million posters for free distribution, and this image was certainly the template for Thomas E. Franklin’s raising of the flag by “Firefighters at Ground Zero, Sept 11, 2001.”

As the gallery notes, other justly famous images of the turbulent and troubled 1960s still “shake and disquiet us,” including Robert Jackson’s “Jack Ruby Shoots Lee Harvey Oswald, November 24, 1964,” Eddie Adams’ “Execution in Saigon, South Vietnam, February 1, 1968,” John Olson’s “U.S. Marines at battle of Hue, Vietnam, 1968,” and Bill Eppridge’s assassination of Bobby Kennedy in 1968.

Mixed in with these images that are part of the collective consciousness of baby boomers and assembled to celebrate the gallery’s 10th year in Santa Fe (after 14 years in Manhattan) are many images that are no less powerful but that have never before been exhibited on gallery walls. All of the conventions of fine art composition and framing are deployed by these masters in the heat of the “decisive moment.” Cameras are angled upward to frame such famous men as Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. as towering presences. Ground level shots with strong diagonals that signal things gone seriously awry including Eppridge’s splayed, spot-lit pieta of Bobby Kennedy attended by a waiter on bended knee, Loomis Dean’s tilting blasted “Mannequins after nuclear test at Yucca Flats, Nevada, May 1955,” and John Filo’s “May Vecchio grieving over slain student, Kent State, May 1970.” Unflinching, upright, straight-ahead perspective confers dignity and gives the viewer a place of privilege in such heart-wrenching situations as Ed Clark’s image of a tear-stained African American accordionist “Navy CPO Graham Jackson playing” a dirge for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s funeral cortege.

Sixties minimalism is used to great effect in Steve Schapiro’s austere and stripped-to-the-essential “White Women, Arkansas, 1961,” and in Eric Smith’s somber empty auditorium “Funeral for Iraqi War soldier, Lake Orion, Michigan, 2006.” Like Hiroshi Sugimoto’s late-1970s empty “Theatres” lit only by a streaming movie projector, Smith’s flag-draped, centrally illuminated casket with no one in attendance is an eerie metaphor, in this case, of offshore deaths that are intended to be kept out of sight and out of mind. In 2003, the Bush administration summarily banned all coverage of the bodies of U.S. troops returning from Iraq, a ban that was lifted in February 2009.

 Hadai Mizban: Iraq "War Games", Baghdad, Iraq, July 2, 2007 (c. AP)

That the gallery is almost always crowded with people talking about these images is due to a multitude of factors. The core reason is the consummate talent, quick response and fortitude of photojournalists working in often terrifying situations where their cameras make them prime targets. Are all those young viewers, who never had the opportunity to see them in print, a testimony to their thirst for truth, rather than entertainment? Certainly, it also has to do with the central location and welcoming open door of Monroe Gallery, a valuable addition to Santa Fe and a recognized international and persistent player in recovering and encouraging the best photojournalism.

In conjunction with this exhibition, the gallery is sponsoring an evening of conversation, next Friday, August 5, from 5 to 7 p.m., between two American photojournalists turned editors, Richard Stolley and Hal Wingo.

If you go WHAT: “History’s Big Picture”
WHERE: Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don GasparÂ
WHEN: Through Sept. 25.
HOURS: Monday through Saturday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Sunday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
CONTACT: 505.992-0800 or info@monroegallery.com

Carl Mydans:  Demonstrators in a Works Progress Administration (WPA) Strike, 1937 (c.Time Inc.)



Read more: ABQJournal Online » Photos Capture History http://www.abqjournal.com/main/2011/07/29/north/photos-capture-history.html#ixzz1TUabZmqX
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JEROME LIEBLING, 1924 - 2011: "My concern is with the very structure of the picture"

Via Star-Tribune


Former Minnesota photographer Jerome Liebling, 87, who profoundly influenced the state's professional photography community during two decades teaching at the University of Minnesota, died July 27 in Northhampton, Mass.

Liebling taught at the University of Minnesota from 1949 to 1969. After serving with the 82nd Airborne in Europe during World War II, he had studied design and photography at Brooklyn College and then film production at the New School for Social Research in New York City. He was hired by the U. of Mn. to teach photography at a time when colleges were expanding their art and theater departments in response to a flood of returning G.I.s.

His early black-and-white photos were shaped by his common touch and deeply humanistic instincts. Politicians were a favorite Minnesota subjects, especially DFLers for whom he was the unofficial documentarian. Two of his six books also pay tribute to his Minnesota years: "The Face of Minneapolis" (Dillon Press, 1966) and "Jerome Liebling: The Minnesota Photographs" (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1997).
“He always had a deep love for Minnesota, and a special interest in working folks,” said his daughter Tina Liebling, a lawyer and DFL state representative from Rochester.

Among Liebling’s favorite photos was one of then U.S. senator Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy, then a Minnesota DFL Representative in Congress, at a baseball game in 1958. A decade later in the midst of the Vietman War, Liebling had that photo printed up as a poster and, with Tina, sold it on the street outside the Chicago convention hall in which Humphrey was nominated as the Democratic candidate for president, and McCarthy — as the anti-war candidate — mounted a bitter challenge that split the Democratic party and led to the election of Republican Richard Nixon as president.

My father served in the military during World War II and had a profound dislike of anything militaristic," said his daughter, Tina. "I wouldn't say he was a total pacifist, but he certainly was against the Vietnam War."

Jerome Liebling at Minnesota Center for Photography, Star Tribune staff photo by Marlin Levison

Jerome Liebling at Minnesota Center for Photography in 2006. (Star Tribune photo by Marlin Levison)

The Brooklyn-born photographer had lived in Amherst, Mass. since 1969 when he moved there to start a film, photography and video program at fledgling Hampshire College. An alternative school that emphasizes independent projects and student initiative, Hampshire had not even opened when Liebling arrived to interview for the job.
Graced by a wide ranging intellect and infectious interest in student work, he became a popular figure at Hampshire where he is memorialized in the recently renovated Jerome Liebling Center for Film, Photography and Video. Filmmaker Ken Burns is the most famous of his many Hampshire students. He taught there for 21 years before retiring at age 67 in 1990.

"As an educator, Jerry influenced a whole generation of filmmakers, many of whom studied here at Hampshire," the college said in a statement announcing his death. "In addition to his artistry, the legacy he leaves us is that of a gifted teacher, beloved mentor, and dear friend and colleague."

He is survived by his second wife Rebecca Nordstrom, a dancer; five children from his first marriage, which ended in divorce; and five grandchildren. The children, all surnamed Liebling, are Madeline (Mark Liebow) of Shelburne Falls, Mass.; Tina (Mark Liebow) of Rochester, Mn.; Adam of Cambridge, Mass.; Daniella (James Lane) of Brooklyn, N.Y; Rachael Jane of Brooklyn.

The now-defunct Minnesota Center for Photography staged a quasi-retrospective, "Jerome Liebling: Selected Photographs" in 2006. It sampled more than five decades of his career in about 70 images, many of them presenting working-class subjects with sympathetic but unsentimental dignity.

"My concern is with the very structure of the picture," Liebling told the Star Tribune in 2006. "Everything has to count, but basically it's an effort to get close to the world and to reflect it. The better I do that, the more sympathy and humanity is present."

Reviews: "A great collector discerns quality before anyone else notices it"

Monroe, Brando Ooze Hollywood Glamour in London Exhibition: Martin Gayford

Via Bloomberg


A great collector discerns quality before anyone else notices it.


John Kobal (1940-1991) was in Los Angeles in the 1960s at a time when the Hollywood studios were clearing out their libraries of still photographs. Kobal often was invited to take his pick, according to his friend the critic John Russell Taylor. At other times, he was tipped off when the images were being dumped so he would follow and fill his car.

Some of those gleanings can be seen in “Glamour of the Gods: Photographs From the John Kobal Foundation” at the National Portrait Gallery (through Oct. 23) in London. Here are glittering divas and handsome movie heroes from Gloria Swanson to Marilyn Monroe. By Monroe’s era, Kobal’s enthusiasm was running out. He was a star-struck romantic, and in his view the “gods” and “titans” of Hollywood belonged to the ‘20s and the ‘30s.

 

 "Elizabeth Taylor" (1948) by Clarence Sinclair Bull. The photograph is on display in "Glamour of the Gods" at the National Portrait Gallery in London until Oct 24. Source: National Portrait Gallery via Bloomberg


Those publicity shots he rescued are partly performance art. Joan Crawford told Kobal, “I photographed better than I looked so it was easy for me… I let myself go before the camera.” The result, in an MGM still from 1933 by Clarence Sinclair Bull, was a blend of regal beauty and emotional intimacy.

Crawford and the others were doing what they did best, acting to camera. The studio photographers were deploying, often brilliantly, all the arts of traditional portraiture: lighting, composition, costume and flattery. The latter took the form of extensive retouching.

Worry Lines

There’s a telling comparison between shots of Crawford by George Hurrell in 1930, before and after this treatment. Au naturel, she has worry lines and freckles -- still beautiful, yet vulnerably human. No goddess. This brings out a truth: The histories of painting and photography have always been closely intertwined (all the more so today thanks to Photoshop). These photographs are altered by hand-painting; conversely, of course, painters often use photography as a tool.

 

Clark Gable and Joan Crawford "Dancing Lady" (1933) by George Hurrell. The photograph is on display in "Glamour of the Gods" at the National Portrait Gallery in London until Oct 24. Source: National Portrait Gallery via Bloomberg



“Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography in the 20th Century,” an outstanding exhibition at the Royal Academy (until Oct. 2), demonstrates the same point in a different way. Robert Capa, one of the major photographers included, once remarked, “It’s not enough to have talent, you also have to be Hungarian.” That was a backhanded way of emphasizing how many masters of the camera emerged from Hungary betweeen 1920 and 1940.

 

"Satiric Dancer" (1926) by Andre Kertesz. The photograph is on show in "Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography in the Twentieth Century" at the Royal Academy in London until Oct. 2. Source: Royal Academy via Bloomberg


Just why that Central European nation was so photographically fertile is hard to say. What the major figures -- Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Brassai, Martin Munkacsi and Andre Kertesz -- had in common was modernism. They use the same tight geometrical structure and pared-down forms as a painter such as Mondrian, whose studio apartment was the subject of a marvelous photograph by Kertesz.

Line and Energy

Moholy-Nagy actually was an abstract artist as well as a photographer. Munkacsi’s “Four Boys at Lake Tanganyika” (1930) has the fluent line and bounding energy of a Matisse, found in the real world and recorded in a split second (this image inspired Cartier-Bresson’s whole career). A few years later, Munkacsi went to the U.S. and began the modern tradition of fashion photography, an artificial art if ever there was one.

Four Boys at Lake Tanganyika" by Martin Munkacsi. The photograph is on show in "Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography in the Twentieth Century" at the Royal Academy in London until Oct. 2. Source: Royal Academy via Bloomberg


If the actual scene didn’t quite have the correct arrangement of lines and surfaces, these photographers might adjust it. Kertesz moved Mondrian’s vase to create the right curve, while Capa may have staged his celebrated and endlessly controversial “Death of a Loyalist Militiaman” (1936).

That possibility only bothers those who confuse photography and truth. Like the still of Crawford sans freckles, Capa’s image of a falling Spanish Republican isn’t raw reality. It’s art.

“Glamour of the Gods: Photographs From the John Kobal Foundation” is at the National Portrait Gallery, London, through Oct. 23. Information: http://www.npg.org.uk.

“Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography in the 20th Century” is at the Royal Academy until Oct. 2, see http://www.royalacademy.org.uk. For more on the foundation: http://www.johnkobal.org/.

(Martin Gayford is chief art critic for Muse, the arts and leisure section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer on the story: Martin Gayford in London at martin.gayford@googlemail.com or http://twitter.com/#!/martingayford.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Beech at mbeech@bloomberg.net.

PowerHouse Books Publishes Age of Silver by American Photographer John Loengard

NEW YORK, NY.- Age of Silver is iconic American photographer John Loengard's ode to the art form to which he dedicated his life. Loengard, a longtime staff photographer and editor for LIFE magazine and other publications, spent years documenting modern life for the benefit of the American public. Over the years he trained his camera on dignitaries, artists, athletes, intellectuals, blue and whitecollar workers, urban and natural landscapes, man-made objects, and people of all types engaged in the act of living.

In Age of Silver, Loengard has focused on of some of the most important photographers of the last half-century, including Annie Leibovitz, Ansel Adams, Man Ray, Richard Avedon, Sebastião Salgado, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Harry Benson, and many, many others. Loengard caught them at home and in the studio; posed portraits and candid shots of the artists at work and at rest. Age of Silver reveals expertly composed portraits and elegant photographs of the artist's favorite or most revered negatives. This extra dimension to the project offers an inside glimpse at the artistic process and is a stark reminder of the physicality of the photographic practice at a time before the current wave of digital dominance. There is no more honest or faithful reproduction of life existent in the world of image making than original, untouched silver negatives.

Far from an attempt to put forth a singular definition of modern photographic practice, this beautifully printed, duotone monograph instead presents evidence of the unique vision and extremely personal style of every artist pictured. Annie Leibovitz is quoted in her caption as once saying, "I am always perplexed when people say that a photograph has captured someone. A photograph is just a piece of them in a moment. It seems presumptuous to think you can get more than that." However, by including not just portraits of the artists, but also of their negatives Loengard aims to capture something more than just a piece of each of photography's greats with Age of Silver.

In celebration of the book's release, Monroe Gallery of Photography, Santa Fe, NM will feature a major exhibition of Loengard's photographs November 25 - January 29, 2012.

John Loengard: 1981, New York City: James Van Der Zee photographs Eubie Blake, in an art gallery on Madison Avenue.






JOE McNALLY: NEW YORK - SANTA FE

One of the most rewarding aspects of our role as gallerists is the time we spend with photographers learning about their careers and experiences. After completing a hectic week of instruction at the Santa Fe Workshops, last night Joe McNally joined us for dinner and conversation. Joe's impressive biography spans more than 30 years, from his early days as a stringer for the New York Daily News to cover stories for Life, TIME, Newsweek, Fortune, New York, Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, and Men's Journal; as well as being a contribution photographer to National Geographic for over 20 years.

Joe was one of the last staff photographer's at Life, and we share many fond (and humorous) memories of the giants that came before him such as Alfred Eisenstaedt, Carl Mydans, Ralph Morse, and many others.

As New Yorkers who experienced September 11, 2001, we have been passionate admirers of one of McNally's most notable large-scale projects, "Faces of Ground Zero". This collection has become known as one of the most significant artistic responses to the September 11, 2001, tragedy at New York's World Trade Center, and in 2003 we exhibited four of the Giant Polaroids in the exhibition "Icons" following a Six city tour.

The entire Faces of Ground Zero project consists of 150 photographs taken with a one-of-a-kind camera, a 12-foot by 12-foot high Polaroid which takes pictures 40 inches wide by 80 inches tall - larger than life-size. Joe has stayed in touch with many of his subjects over the last ten years, and has recently been photographing updated profiles.

 Joe shared with us an advance copy of the new book, LIFE One Nation: America Remembers September 11, 2001, 10 Years Later.

The book’s description says it all:

"This expanded edition includes a new foreword by Tom Brokaw, reflections on how the nation has changed in the decade since 9/11, updates on the people involved that day, and new and exclusive portraits by award-winning photographer Joe McNally, who made indelible pictures at Ground Zero in the immediate aftermath of the tragic event.

For decades, Americans have turned to LIFE to see, understand, and remember the most important events of history. In addition to a powerful array of photographs taken by many of the world's greatest photographers, ONE NATION includes original essays by some of our finest writers. Contributors include David McCullough, Maya Angelou, James Bradley, Melissa Fay Greene, Margaret Carlson, Bob Greene and many others. To re-read these pieces today is to revisit an astonishing moment. There is an immediacy and passion to the writing that speaks, just as the photographs do, to what 9/11 was-and meant to us all."

Joe has organized a very special exhibition of his original Face of Ground Zero Polaroids alongside some of his recent portraits. The exhibit will take place at the Time Inc building during the 10^th anniversary of 9/11, be certain to see it if you are in New York.

Thank you for a great evening, Joe.

A Man and His Camera: A Night with Bill Eppridge

 

 John Lennon on the train from New York to Washington for the Beatles' concert at Washington Coliseum, Feb. 11, 1964

Back by Popular Demand

 

A Man and His Camera: A Night with Bill Eppridge

Thursday, July 28 7-9:00pm
$8; Members and Students, $5
To register in advance, call 203-259-1598

or register online.

Bill Eppridge will return to share even more stories about his experiences as a Life magazine photographer and his illustrious career spanning more than five decades. Eppridge’s iconic images are a testament to the importance of photojournalism in documenting history and range from the Civil Rights movement to the powerful image of a dying Robert F. Kennedy cradled in the arms of a busboy.

On View Through August 28, 2011: IMAGES 2011

Bill Eppridge Retrospective

Fairfield Museum and History Center

Lecture: My Faraway One: The Letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz

New Mexico Museum of Art


WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 3
 1915 - 1933
6:00 pm

In her long-awaited book, My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Volume 1, 1915-1933 (Yale University Press, 2011), Sarah Greenough applies her formidable scholarship and insights to the engaging epistolary tale of one of the twentieth-century art world’s most famous couples. In more than 650 letters, selected and annotated by Greenough from thousands of pages, the two artists write candidly about topics including art, music, travels, friendships, and their powerful attraction to one another. This volume begins with the letters O’Keeffe and Stieglitz exchanged before they met, details through their passionate affair and marriage, and closes in the wee hours of New Year’s Day 1934, when Stieglitz was seventy years of age. In her lecture, Greenough will talk about tackling the voluminous correspondence of these two creative powerhouses and how their writings illuminate their works of art. Copies of the book are available for purchase in the museum shop. Sarah Greenough is the Senior Curator of Photographs at the National Gallery of Art. For a short biography about her career: http://www.nga.gov/press/bios/greenough.shtm For publishing information about the book: Yale Univeristy Press - http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300166309

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