SIMPLE ADVICE: TELL THE TRUTH

When asked about advice for photographers starting out today, Bill Eppridge emphasizes telling the truth. "I believe our world is at a time right now in which it should be documented completely." He says we should all be protectors of our environment and heritage. "If we can influence people with photographs, maybe we'll be able to maintain our planet."

Bill Eppridge is the 2011 Lucie Award Honoree for Achivement in Photojournalism. The Lucie Awards gala ceremony honoring the greatest achievements in photography takes place Monday, October 24 at Lincoln Center in New York.

Vivian Maier, Invisible Woman

Vivian Maier: Street Photographer, edited by John Maloof and published by PowerHouse Books. $40     


Via American Photo

Rescued in a fluke from the dustbin of history, an unknown street photographer makes a remarkable posthumous journey from obscurity to acclaim.

"Howard Greenberg, a top photography dealer who also handles prints by Cartier-Bresson and Stieglitz, confesses, “My fascination with her story has only grown, as has my involvement with her photographs. It is such an unusual story with no resolution. At first her images are extremely well seen, quality photographs of life on the street, in New York City and Chicago. But as one looks at the body of work, she reveals her deeper interests. Then one tries to imagine who she was, what motivated her, her personality. It’s not every day that one becomes so involved and even obsessed with thinking about a particular photographer. It’s completely infectious.”

Full article here.

Exhibit in Santa Fe: February 3 - April 22, 2012

All Access: The Rock 'n' Roll Photography of Ken Regan

 

 Ken Regan/Camera 5: The Rolling Stones, September, 1977

Rolling Stone Magazine has an article about the new book: All Access: The Rock 'n' Roll Photography of Ken Regan.

"This is the book that closes the book. The best book of rock photography....ever."

GQ interviews the veteran photojournalist, who talked about getting close to Bob Dylan, hanging with Mick Jagger, and his revealing new book.

Mr. Media: Audio interview with Ken Regan

"Happy Birthday" Performances to US Presidents: Then, and Now

©Bill Ray: Marilyn Monroe Singing "Happy Birthday" to President John F. Kennedy, Madison Square Garden, NY, 1962

Another performance, another headline: Lady Gaga stole the show at former Bill Clinton's 65^th birthday as she took the guise of Marilyn Monroe, sang an unplugged version of " Born this Way" and made a pass at the former President and his wife.

" Bill, I'm having my first Marilyn moment. I always wanted to have one, and I was hoping that it didn't involve pills and a strand of pearls," she joked.

Via Technorati

" I just love you and your hot wife," she said emerging from a white tree on the stage of the Hollywood Bowl. With her long blond hair complemented with a beauty spot on her cheek, Gaga performed under the persona of Monroe, wearing a flesh colored cape, top and leggings with a large mesh hat.

Photographer captures life's curiosities

Via  The Wisconsin State Journal

Ida Wyman was sitting at her kitchen table in Fitchburg the other day, explaining why she hadn't taken more photos of a future U.S. president when she had the chance.
"I was there to cover Bonzo," Wyman said.

In November 1950, Life magazine sent Wyman to the set of "Bedtime for Bonzo," a film with a chimpanzee in the title role, supported by an actor named Ronald Reagan.

"He supposedly understood 500 commands," Wyman said of Bonzo. "He was short, like a little kid, but his grip was something else. He'd chatter at me, and I'd chatter back. He was very friendly."
She paused. "Reagan was friendly, too."

Wyman was holding a photo she took that day of Reagan holding Bonzo. "Who knew he was going to be president?"

Ida Wyman: Ronald Reagan with "Bonzo", California, 1950

Ida Wyman, 85, is a great American photographer who five years ago moved to the Madison area without a lot of fanfare. She has a granddaughter who lives here. And while Wyman has had a couple of exhibits of her work locally since then, she remains pretty much under the radar.

That may change when "Ida Wyman: Portraits of America," debuts Oct. 28 at the Paoli House Gallery. The exhibit runs through Nov. 20, and there will be an artist's reception from 5 to 9 p.m. Nov. 11. The Reagan-Bonzo photograph is included in the exhibit of some 30 images.

In addition, Wyman will be heading to New York City for the opening celebration early next month of "The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League, 1936-1951," at the Jewish Museum.

Wyman was a member of the Photo League — which encouraged photographs of the gritty realities of ordinary New Yorkers — and her work will be part of the exhibit, which runs Nov. 4 through March 25.

"My style and outlook were compatible with the league," she said. "I was already shooting in a documentary style, not posed."

She got her start in the high school camera club, growing up in the Bronx borough of New York City, where her parents were grocers.

"Usually cash poor," Wyman said. "It took a lot of coaxing to get my father to give me $5 for my first camera."

It was a modified box camera, and Wyman toted it around the city, capturing people and scenes, driven by a curiosity that has not diminished, even all these years later.

"If I'm standing on line," she said — New Yorkers don't stand "in line," they stand "on line" — "I will get the story of the people in front of me."

The camera club taught her to develop film, and over time she learned about lighting, movement, shutter speed — the tools of her craft. Still, out of high school — she graduated early, at 16 —Wyman wanted to be a nurse, not a photographer. It turned out nursing students had to be 18.

She contacted New York newspapers and news services looking for work as a photographer, instead landing a job as a printer for Acme Newspictures.

When that ended in 1945 — the men returned from the war — Wyman began pitching photo story ideas to magazines like Look and Life. She made inroads with some editors and began hanging out at the Photo League. In 1948, she took a cross-country trip, taking photographs all the way, winding up in Los Angeles, where she spent several years.

The "Bonzo" assignment came then, as did another from Life that required Wyman to travel to northern California with Richard Nixon, who was running for the U.S. Senate in 1950 against Helen Gahagan Douglas.

Nixon spoke to miners at a gold mine — "his wife gave me a gold nugget," Wyman recalled — though the photo of Nixon in the Paoli exhibit will be one Wyman snapped in a northern California deli.

"He was genuinely friendly, one on one," she said of Nixon. "On stage, you never saw it."

What got her temporarily out of photography was raising her children. That was back in New York, and it was there, no longer married, that Wyman in 1969 went to work as chief photographer with the Department of Pathology at Columbia University.

In 1983, after a cancer scare, Wyman resolved to return to her true love, magazine photography. "People said I was crazy," she said, but she revived her career.

She came to Madison in 2006, and likes it here, though she wishes the buses came by her neighborhood more often. Afternoons, when the light in her condo falls just right, she gets inspired. She's working on a memoir. Beyond that, Ida Wyman will go where her curiosity takes her.

Contact Doug Moe at 608-252-6446 or dmoe@madison.com. His column appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday.

Copyright 2011 madison.com. All rights reserved.

A Woman Of Photos And Firsts, Ruth Gruber At 100

Via NPR

At the age of 100, Ruth Gruber is responsible for a lot of firsts. When she was just 20, she became the youngest Ph.D. ever at the University of Cologne in Germany. She was the first photojournalist, much less female journalist, to travel to and cover both the Soviet Arctic and Siberian gulag. She documented Holocaust survivors and the plight of the ship, the Exodus 1947.

Photographer unknown/Courtesy of International Center of Photography

Ruth Gruber, Alaska, 1941-43

 

 

Born in Brooklyn in 1911 to Jewish immigrants, Gruber has been the subject of a documentary film; of a made-for-TV movie; a musical; and, earlier this summer, she received a Cornell Capa Award and exhibition at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in Manhattan.

It was as a correspondent in the Soviet Arctic in the mid-1930s that Gruber first started taking photographs — focusing on frontier life and the role of women. No one taught her, just as no one taught her to write. She had an ear and an eye.

Slideshow: Ruth Gruber/Courtesy of International Center of Photography

"She was just a badass — no other way describe it," says Maya Benton, curator of the ICP exhibition. Gruber was already an established author and reporter when U.S. Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes appointed her Field Representative to the Alaska Territory in 1941, where she made some of the earliest color images of the region.

It was in Alaska that she learned what she called to "live inside of time." In her New York City apartment she tells the story of once sending a cable to Anchorage, in need of a flight to Barrow:

"So I got a cable back from this company that had bush pilots: 'See you Tuesday, weather permitting.' Tuesday came, no pilot. Another Tuesday came, no pilot. I'd send another cable. No pilot. In New York, if the train was late, I was raring to go. What was the use getting upset in Alaska? So I decided I would just live inside of it like a golden bubble."

Andy Kropa/Getty Images

Ruth Gruber attends a tribute organized in her honor, in New York City in February, 2011.

It's a quality that Gruber claims is responsible for her ability to be patient — to see things that she might otherwise have missed in her urge to tell a story. That, and being a woman gave her an advantage in getting sources to reveal themselves.

In 1944, she spent two weeks on the Henry Gibbins, a ship of 1,000 Jewish refugees, many of them clad in striped concentration camp uniforms, on a voyage from Italy to America.

She recalls: "Some of the men said, 'We can't tell you what we went through, it's too obscene. You're a young woman!' I said, 'Forget I'm a woman, you are the first witnesses coming to America.' So they talked. Nobody refused to talk."

As she recounts in her memoir, she told the men and women that through them, America would "learn the truth of Hitler's crimes." But it was on another ship, three years later, that Gruber did some of her best-known work. The Tribune assigned Gruber to accompany the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine.

In Haifa, she saw the nearly-destroyed ship, Exodus 1947, and its 4,500 Holocaust survivors, who were forced to board three ships waiting to take them back to Germany. It was on the Runnymede Park that she took what is her most famous photograph: A Union Jack superimposed with a Swastika — and beneath it in the high contrast of a burning sun, hundreds of people squashed together. The image became Life magazine's photo of the week.

Ruth Gruber/International Center of Photography

1,500 Jewish refugees, having been forced off Exodus 1947 in Haifa, Palestine, wait aboard the British prison ship Runnymede Park. In protest, the prisoners painted a swastika on top of the Union Jack. August 22, 1947

In her doctoral dissertation on Virginia Woolf, the 20-year-old Gruber wrote that her subject "is determined to write as a woman. Through the eyes of her sex, she seeks to penetrate life and describe it." The same could be said of the woman who wrote that: 100-year-old Ruth Gruber.

PROTEST SIGNS

Steve Schapiro: Supermarket Protest, New Jersey, 1963

The current Occupy Wall Street protest has inspired solidarity events springing up across the country.

Decisive Moments: Eddie Adams Workshop XXIV

 

Photo Courtesy of the Eddie Adams Workshop

Must read on Getty Images Blog: A first-time visitor to the Eddie Adams Workshop shares his experience - encouraging, honoring photojournalists.


"For me, it all clicked while listening to renowned photojournalist Bill Eppridge give a presentation about “decisive moments.”

Sitting at the back of an old barn with a few hundred people — seasoned photojournalists, editors, staff and students – I realized that the second I stepped out of my car and into the warm sunlight of rural Jeffersonville, NY earlier that day, I had walked into one.

Now in its 24^th year, the Eddie Adams Workshop is an intense four-day, tuition-free gathering of top photography professionals, along with 100 carefully selected students from all over the globe, chosen based on the merit of their portfolios. It’s the brainchild of Adams himself, the Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist who covered 13 wars and some of the most celebrated people in the world, but wanted his legacy to be greater than the work he created from behind the lens."

Full article here.

Related: Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar, is honored to welcome Bill Eppridge, recipient of the 2011 Lucie Award for Achievement in Photojournalism, to Santa Fe for a gallery discussion of his work. The discussion takes place on Friday, November 4, from 5 to 7 PM.

More information here.

Snapshot of a Vibrant Market

Pierre Dubreuil's The First Round, ca. 1932, sold for $314,500 at Sotheby's

COURTESY OF SOTHEBY'S



Via ARTnews

NEW YORK—Fall photography sales fell roughly in line with totals seen last year as collectors continue to emphasize top-quality works by blue chip artists from across the spectrum of 19th to 20th century, vintage works to modern and contemporary prints. The total at Phillips de Pury & Company, Sotheby’s and Christie’s sales from Oct. 4-6 was $17.5 million, compared with $17.4 million realized last year.

Phillips accounted for $6.9 million of that total, an improvement on last year’s total of just under $4 million, while Sotheby’s realized $4.7 million, as compared with $4.97 million last year. Christie’s total was $5.8 million, compared with $8.5 million achieved last year. In addition to its various owner sale on Oct. 6, Christie’s held a separate single-owner auction, titled “The American Landscape,” featuring black and white photographs from the collection of Bruce and Nancy Berman on Oct. 7. The sale realized $1 million, compared with an estimate of $900,000/1.3 million.

Phillips opened the series on Oct. 4, with a regular various-owner sale as well as a special offering of works from an unidentified private collection, titled “The Arc of Photography,” that collectively took in $6.9 million compared with an estimate of $4.5 million/6.5 million.

Both sales were heavy with established names such as Richard Avedon, Man Ray, Irving Penn, Alfred Stieglitz and Robert Mapplethorpe. Of 272 lots on offer, 224 lots, or 82 percent, were sold. By value, the sale realized 91 percent.

The top lot was Avedon’s portfolio of The Beatles, 1967, which sold for $722,500 compared with an estimate of $350,000/450,000.The second-highest price was paid for a work from the private collection by Nadar (Gaspard-Félix) and Adrien Tournachon, Pierrot with Fruit, 1854-55. It brought a record $542,500 compared with an estimate of $150,000/200,000.

Man Ray’s Untitled (Self-portrait of Man Ray), 1933, sold for $398,500 compared with an estimate of $80,000/120,000 while Penn’s Black and White Vogue Cover (Jean Patchett), New York, 1950, sold for $374,500.

Stieglitz’s portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe, 1935, also featured in the top prices, selling for $146,500, and falling within the $120,000/180,000 estimate. Among more contemporary works, Candida Höfer’s Handelingenkamer Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal Den Haag III, 2004, sold for $104,500 compared with an estimate of $50,000/70,000, while Mapplethorpe’s Calla Lily, 1987, sold for $86,500, clearing the $50,000/70,000 estimate.

Vanessa Kramer, worldwide director of photographs at Phillips, said the results “mirror the strength of the photographs market across the spectrum as well as the increase in demand for the highest caliber of works,” adding that the sales “speak of the steadfast growth of the field.”

Sotheby’s sale on Oct. 5 saw solid results with the house posting a total of $4.7 million, falling within the $3.6 million/5.5 million estimate. Of 193 lots offered, 138 (or 72 percent) were sold.
The top lot was a complete set of Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly, a journal that was published by Stieglitz from 1903-17. Estimated at $200,000/250,000, the set sold for $398,500 to Christian Keesee, according to Christie’s.

The sale posted two artist records: for Pierre Dubreuil, when his oil print, The First Round, ca. 1932, sold for $314,500 compared with an estimate of $150,000/250,000; and for Alexander Gardner et alii when the sketchbook, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War, sold for $158,500 on an estimate of $70,000/100,000. In the top lots, Gardner’s Portrait of Abraham Lincoln, 1863, sold for $98,500 on an estimate of $30,000/50,000.

Christopher Mahoney, senior vice president of Sotheby’s photographs department said that the wide range of material in the top lots “demonstrates the richness and depth of the market.”
Chelsea dealer Bruce Silverstein was listed as the buyer of Alvin Langdon Coburn’s gum-platinum print, The Cloud, 1906, which was estimated at $20,000/30,000 but sold for three times that, at $92,500.

At Christie’s sale on Oct. 6, 294 lots were offered and 214, or 73 percent, were sold. By value, the auction realized 83 percent.

Deborah Bell, Christie’s specialist head of the photo department, said the sale “offered a wide range of photographs that stimulated active bidding across all categories. The top-two prices achieved for works by Ansel Adams and Vik Muniz demonstrate the strength and sweeping diversity of the market for photographs.”

The top price was $242,500 for a group of works by Adams titled Clearing Storm, Sonoma County Hills, 1951, made up of five gelatin silver print enlargements, flush-mounted on plywood. It was estimated at $200,000/300,000.

It was followed by Muniz’s The Best of Life, 1989-1995, ten gelatin silver prints of iconic historical images from Life magazine, which sold for $170,500 clearing the $80,000/120,000 estimate.
Two other lots by Adams figured in the top ten, with both selling to U.S. dealers. These included: Surf Sequence, A-E, 1940, five gelatin silver prints printed in the 1960s, that sold for $170,500 against an estimate of $100,000/150,000; and Aspens, Northern New Mexico, 1958, a gelatin silver mural print, printed in 1965-1968.

A mixed-media gelatin print by Peter Beard, Bull Eland Passing Elephants Digging Water, near Kathamula Tsavo, North, for The End of the Game, February 1965, sold for $158,500 (estimate: $80,000/120,000).

Work by Robert Frank also figured prominently in the auction’s top lots. The highest of these was London, 1951, a gelatin silver print, printed late 1970s, which sold for $116,500 on an estimate of $90,000/120,000. Two other works by Frank took $98,500 each, against estimates of $100,000/150,000, including Charleston, S.C., 1956, a gelatin silver print, printed ca. 1970, and Fourth of July-Jay, New York, 1956, a gelatin silver print also printed ca. 1970.

William Eggleston’s Sumner, Mississippi, ca. 1970, a dye-transfer print, printed 2001, sold for $104,500 on an estimate of $30,000/50,000, and Frantisek Drtikol’s Svítání, 1928-1929, a flush-mounted pigment print, also sold for $104,500 on an estimate of $40,000/60,000.

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Hondros, Hetherington Prizes Awarded at Eddie Adams Workshop

 

Via PDN


Among the awards given out at the 24th annual Eddie Adams Workshop, held October 7 through 10 in Jeffersonville, New York, were two prizes created in memory of photographers Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros, who were killed in Misrata, Libya on April 20, 2011.

The Chris Hondros Fund, created after his death to support young photojournalists, gave a $2500 prize and a print to Workshop attendee Enrico Fabian.  The Tim Hetherington Memorial Award, a $2,000 prize, was given to Dominic Braccome. The prize was funded by a collection taken at a gathering of Hetherington’s friends and colleagues held at New York’s Bubble Lounge days after his death.

Each year, the intensive, four-day Workshop ends with a memorial to photojournalist Eddie Adams, the Workshop’s founder, and six of his Vietnam-era colleagues who were killed covering war. This year, the memorial was made more poignant with the addition of tributes to Hondros and Hetherington.

Hondros, a 1993 Workshop alumnus, was remembered with a screening of short interview excerpts from the 2007 documentary In Service: Pittsburgh to Iraq. In one segment, Hondros, who had covered the Iraq war for Getty Images, spoke about the gap between American and Iraqi culture, saying, “Our government is infatuated with Iraq but our people are not.”

Jamie Wellford, international photo editor at Newsweek, told the audience that Hetherington had been looking forward to attending this year’s Workshop. On the day he died, Hetherington had emailed Wellford, but he didn’t receive it until after Hetherington’s death, because it  “spent a week in digital purgatory.” Wellford introduced a screening of Hetherington’s 19-minute film Diary. Made in 2010, it is a kaleidoscopic, deeply personal compilation of footage showing Hetherington’s view of his life as a war photographer.

Among the other prizes given out during the Workshop to Barnstorm participants:

The Colton Family Award, for the student who best embodies the spirit of the workshop, a $1000 Award and a spot on the Black team at next year’s Workshop:

Scott Mcintyre
$1000 Cash Awards From National Geographic (two):

Kiana Hayeri And Arthur Bondar
$500 Awards From LIFE Magazine (Two):

Gregory Gieske, David Maurice Smith
Assignments from Newsweek, People, Sports Illustrated, Esquire Digital, AARP and AARP Bulletin, AP, Getty Images, The Los Angeles, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other newspapers and publications were also given out. Additional awards of services or gift certificates were offered by Altpick, B& H Photo, Mac Group and PDN.

A full list of 2011 participants is available on  http://www.eddieadamsworkshop.com/.

–with reporting by Jill Waterman