On Exhibit: Grey Villet's Photographs of The Lovings

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 Grey Villet

 Mildred and Richard Loving, King and Queen County, Virginia in April 1965

Concurrent with the opening of Vivian Maier: Discovered, we are pleased to exhibit selected photographs Grey Villet shot of the Richard and Mildred Loving for Life magazine in 1965. "Grey Villet: The Lovings" will continue through March 18, 2012.

Grey Villet took over 2,400 frames of the Lovings for Life in 1965 but the magazine did not run the story until March 18, 1966, when the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals upheld the lower court ruling and the Lovings’ case headed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The tone of the piece, as well as the selected images, was cool and neutral; the three published images that include both Mildred and Richard are extremely chaste and do not capture the emotional bond between them as so many of Villet’s other images do. Life, like many other media outlets, did not want to address the topic of interracial sex directly for fear of offending popular opinion.

The Loving Story, a documentary film, tells the story of Richard and Mildred Loving to examine the drama, the history, and the current state of interracial marriage and tolerance in the United States. It's World Premiere was at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in April 2011, and the On-air premiere of The Loving Story will be on HBO, February 14, Valentine’s Day, 2012.

A selection of Grey Villet's photographs, including several of The Lovings, will also be on exhibit during the AIPAD Photography Show in New York March 28 - April 1, at Monroe Gallery Booth #419.

Related:

NPR: The Loving War: How Black History Is Both Black And White

Richmond Times Dispatch: HBO documentary examines Lovings' struggle

Life of Marital Bliss (Segregation Laws Aside)

Grey Villet: The Lovings

"I always think that if I had had any money and any decent equipment, I would never have taken that picture"

Neil Leifer:  Alan Ameche TouchdownN.Y. Giants vs. Baltimore Colts, NFL Championship Game
Yankee Stadium, Bronx, N.Y., December 28, 1958

"There is a picture of Alan Ameche scoring the winning touchdown in what has been referred to as "the greatest game ever played". It was the famous sudden death between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants, which coincidentally took place on my 16th birthday, December 28th 1958. When Alan Ameche scored the winning touchdown there were so many Colt’s fans, (mainly drunken Colt’s fans) on the field that the security had their hands full just making sure that they could keep those people off the field. They weren’t worried about someone like me that they had seen every week. So I ended up exactly ten yards in front of Ameche as he scored the winning touchdown. He came right at me and I got that picture, which today, is certainly one of my best-known pictures. I always think that if I had had any money and any decent equipment, I would never have taken that picture because, if I would have had a long lens, a 135mm or a 180mm, I would have tried to fill the frame with Ameche going in for the winning touchdown. Instead I got the wide shot that takes in the whole ambiance of Yankee Stadium that afternoon which is so much better than any picture I would have taken years later when I was an established pro." -- Neil Leifer

Bonus: Live Blog of Today's Super Bowl Commercials

VIVIAN MAIER: DISCOVERED

Pasatiempo, Friday, February 3, 2011

Pasatiempo is the in-print, nationally-acclaimed, arts and culture magazine published by The New Mexican. "Vivian Maier Discovered" is the feature article in today's edition, click to enlarge:.

© 2012 The New Mexican

Santa Fe woke up to a surprise snowfall this morning, and for a while travel was difficult. But, the sun is out and all roads are clear now. Please join us tonight from 5 - 7 as we celebrate the opening of the exhibition "Vivian Maier: Discovered". (And enjoy the skiing later!)

EYE ON THE STREET

Photographer Vivian Maier, showing at Monroe Gallery, was almost never discovered

By Kate McGraw

The Albuquerque Journal North

February 3, 2012

For the Journal

     An international sensation is coming to Santa Fe.

In the past couple of years, the world of photography has been shaken by the discovery of a cache of negatives and undeveloped film rolls shot by a woman named Vivian Maier. The discoverer, a photographer and collector named John Maloof who lives in Chicago, found the trove in a couple of trunks he bought at a 2008 public auction of items from a storage unit.

Curious, he began printing the negatives and realized that they were what is called “street photography;” that is, pictures taken on the Chicago streets in the 1950s and ’60s. But these weren’t just good photographs, Maloof decided, they were great.

Finding her name on a photo-lab envelope, Maloof Googled Vivian Maier and discovered that she was ill. By the time he made up his mind to try to reach her in 2009, she had died at age 83.

He began working with curators and photographic experts, all of whom were as excited by his find as he was. In the past 18 months, Maloof has spread the word about this extraordinary photographer. Her photographs have been shown in the United States and Europe, and published in a book about her and her work, “Vivian Maier: Street Photography” (PowerHouse Books, 2011). An exhibit of 35 photos of her photos opens today at Monroe Gallery of Photography on Don Gaspar Avenue.

The story has spread and been told in The New York Times, National Public Radio, La Republica, TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Independent, the Guardian, Vanity Fair, CBS News, Smithsonian magazine and elsewhere. “Maier is posthumously being recognized as one of the greatest American street photographers of the 20th
 century,” gallery owner Sidney Monroe said in a written release about the show.

“The story is really fascinating,” Monroe said in a separate interview. “Little is known about her. She was born in New York in 1926 and she worked as a nanny in Chicago all her adult life. When at the end of her life she was very poor, some of the children she’d taken care of banded together and took care of her. She never talked to anybody about her photography and never showed it to anyone.

“John Maloof has spent four years with some of the best photography curators doing research and cataloguing her work, to preserve her legacy. It’s become his full-time avocation. Her work is not only good but shockingly good,” Monroe said. The 35 prints being shown in Santa Fe are a selection by Maloof and Monroe, some of them also seen in the book. Copies of the book will be available at the gallery.

Reportedly, Maier was a quiet, almost aloof person who often was seen on the streets of Chicago with a Rolleiflex camera around her neck. People posed for her willingly, apparently never asking themselves what she was doing with the pictures. She managed to amass more than 2,000 rolls of film, 3,000 prints and 100,000 negatives that she shared with virtually no one during her lifetime.

Her black and white photographs form indelible images of the architecture and mid-century street life of Chicago. She rarely took more than one frame of an image and seemed to concentrate on children, women, the elderly and the indigent.

There are also a series of striking self-portraits and a series of prints from her many travels to Egypt, Bangkok, Italy and the American Southwest.

“Maier’s subject,” Monroe said in his description of her work, “is the interaction of the individual and the city in the 1950s through 1970s. She scouts out solitaries of all ages and frames them in poignant juxtapositions. Her pictures have the tug of effecting urgency.”

Monroe obviously is as infatuated with Maier’s story and work as Maloof and the other curators. “It is hard enough to find this quality and quantity of fresh and moving images in a trained photographer who has benefited from schooling and a community of fellow artists,” the veteran photography enthusiast wrote. “It is astounding to find it in someone with no formal training and no network of peers.

“Yet Vivian Maier is all of these things,” he added. “The photographs are amazing, both for the breadth of the work and for the high quality of the humorous, moving, beautiful and raw images of all facets of city life in America’s post-war golden age.”

John Maloof

Maloof is almost as interesting as the woman whose legacy he has been fighting to rescue. A native Chicagoan, he is a collector and writer who has become a street photographer himself in response to working with Maier’s photographs.

“I guess you can call me a street photographer. I always have my camera with me to document interesting moments or stories I come across in my life. I’m not a commercial photographer and not interested in becoming one. Photography is a personal obsession of mine,” he wrote in a blog on his own website.
 

Maloof also created vivianmaier. com, where he has written about his work on her behalf, always calling her by her first name. After so much work reviving her imagery, it appears, he seems to feel a kinship.

“I acquired Vivian’s negatives while at a furniture and antique auction while researching a history book I was co-authoring on Chicago’s Northwest Side. From what I know, the auction house acquired her belongings from her storage locker that was sold off due to delinquent payments. I didn’t know what ‘street photography’ was when I purchased them,” he blogged.

“It took me days to look through all of her work. It inspired me to pick up photography myself. Little by little, as I progressed as a photographer, I would revisit Vivian’s negatives and I would ‘see’ more in her work,” he wrote. “I bought her same camera and took to the same streets, [only] to realize how difficult it was to make images of her caliber. I discovered the eye she had for photography through my own practice. Needless to say, I am attached to her work.

“After some researching, I have only little information about Vivian. Central Camera (a 110-year-old camera shop in Chicago) encountered Vivian from time to time when she would purchase film while out on the Chicago streets. From what they knew of her, they say she was a very ‘keep your distance from me’ type of person but was also outspoken. She loved foreign films and didn’t care much for American films.

“Some of her photos have pictures of children and oftentimes it was near a beach. I later found out she was a nanny for a family on the North Side whose children these most likely were. One of her obituaries states that she lived in Oak Park, a close Chicago suburb, but I later found that she lived in the Rogers Park neighborhood.

“Out of the more than 100,000 negatives I have in the collection, about 20,000-30,000 negatives were still in rolls, undeveloped from the 1960s-1970s. I have been successfully developing these rolls. I must say, it’s very exciting for me. Most of her negatives that were developed in sleeves have the date and location penciled in French (she had poor penmanship),” he added.

“I found her name written with pencil on a photo-lab envelope. I decided to Google her about a year after I purchased these only to find her obituary placed the day before my search. She passed only a couple of days before that inquiry on her. I wanted to meet her in person long before I found her obituary but the auction house had stated she was ill, so I didn’t want to bother her. So many questions would have been answered if I had,” he wrote sadly.

“Over the course of scanning her work I’ve discovered that Vivian traveled the world in 1959. She visited and photographed places like Egypt, Bangkok, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam, France, Italy, Indonesia ... the list goes on. Something also notable is that she traveled alone.”
 

Maloof added that he wanted to thank everyone for their support and encouraging emails.

“There’s a lot of weight on my shoulders and I hope I’m doing the right thing for Vivian’s legacy,” he said.

    If you go

WHAT: “Vivian Maier: Discovered,” posthumous exhibit of street photography
WHEN: Today through April 22; reception 5 to 7 p.m. today
WHERE: Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar
CONTACT: (505) 992-0800; monroegallery.com  

 

COURTESY OF MONROE GALLERY OF PHOTOGRAPHY

This September 1956 photograph shows a woman standing next to a bus. Titled “Sept., 1956, New York, N.Y.,” it was taken by street photographer Vivian Maier.

COURTESY OF MONROE GALLERY OF PHOTOGRAPHY

This untitled photograph of a man carrying a newspaper was taken by Vivian Maier in Chicago.

“New York, Undated” is a gelatin silver print from a photograph by Vivian Maier.

“June 7, 1956, Chicago” is a gelatin silver print from a photograph by Vivian Maier.

This Aug. 11, 1954, photograph of a boy and a horse was taken by Vivian Maier in New York City.

The gallery is open daily 10 to 5.


Related:

EYE ON THE STREET: Photographer Vivian Maier, showing at Monroe Gallery, was almost never discovered

Everyday People:  Vivian Maier was essentially unknown throughout her lifetime

Save The Date: AIPAD Photography Show Opening Night March 28

The Association of International Photography Art Dealers

invites you to preview The AIPAD Photography Show New York at the

AIPAD Opening Night Gala
to benefit inMotion

Wednesday, March 28, 2012
from 5 to 9 in the evening

The AIPAD Photography Show New York
Park Avenue Armory • Park Avenue at 67th Street

5 to 9 p.m. • 250 USD
Includes entry for one person, one four-day Show pass, and one copy of the AIPAD catalogue

7 to 9 p.m. • 100 USD
Includes entry for one person and one, one-day Show pass

To purchase tickets online, please visit gala.aipad.com

Since 1993, inMotion has confronted the challenging needs of families in crisis by providing free legal services to low-income, underserved, abused women and their children. InMotion has helped thousands of women in New York City free themselves from abusive relationships, stay in their homes and win the financial support to which they—and their children—are legally entitled. Learn more at:

inmotiononline.org

 

FREEDOM OF THE PRESS?

Police during the Occupy Wall Street 'Day of Action.'

Adrian Kinloch

Via CapitalNew York

By Joe Pompeo

12:23 pm Feb. 1, 2012

The New York Times fired off another letter to the Police Department today on behalf of 13 New York-based news organizations about police treatment of the press over the last several months.

The first letter, sent back in November during the height of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, resulted in a meeting with NYPD brass and "stepped up" efforts on the part of the department's public information office to train officers in working with the media.

But in today's letter, a copy of which was obtained by Capital, the news organizations, which also include the New York Post, Daily News, Associated Press, Reuters, Dow Jones, Bloomberg News, the National Press Photographers Association, several local TV affiliates and others, say problems have persisted.

"There have been other reports of police officers using a variety of tactics ranging from inappropriate orders directed at some joumalists to physical interference with others, who were covering newsworthy sites and events," the letter reads. "Indeed, as recently as this Monday it was reported ... that at another OWS demonstration, police 'officers blocked the lens of a newspaper photographer attempting to document the arrests.'"

Read the full post HERE.

Related:

Report: American Press Freedom Declines Due to Occupy Arrests

"You got that credential you’re wearing from us, and we can take it away from you.”

WHAT TO READ ABOUT PHOTOGRAPHY

Conscientious is a consistently great blog about photography. This new post is not to be missed:

"But when you see the photograph first - as I did - and then the title, it’s still a shock. Or maybe more accurately an aftershock. You see the photograph, and you think you know what’s going on, or maybe you wonder what’s going on, you wonder whether this could possibly… and then there’s the title. It’s almost as if someone knew what we would be asking and decided, “I am going to tell all these people exactly what they want to know.”

Full post here.


About:

Conscientious is a website dedicated to contemporary fine-art photography. It offers daily profiles of photographers, in-depth interviews, exhibition and book reviews, and general articles about photography and related issues. More detailed contents – such as the interviews and longer articles, including contributions by guest writers – can be found in the "Extended" section.

Everyday People: Vivian Maier

Vivian Maier: September 28, 1959, East 108th St.,
 New York

©Maloof Collection

The Albuquerque Journal

By Adrian Gomez / Asst. Arts Editor, Reel NM
on Sun, Jan 29, 2012

Vivian Maier was essentially unknown throughout her lifetime. But that’s changing very quickly.

Maier, who worked as a nanny in Chicago, is setting the photography and art world on fire with her work in street photography that spanned more than 40 years. But she’ll never see it – which is the way she wanted it – because she died in 2009 at age 83.

“I never imagined that I would find a gem like Vivian,” says John Maloof, of the Maloof Collection based out of Chicago. “I saw her work and immediately worked on making sure she was in the right place in the history books.”

Exhibitions of Maier’s work have been held in New York, Chicago, England, Germany, Denmark and Norway. And it’s coming to Santa Fe.

The exhibit “Vivian Maier: Discovered” will run at Monroe Gallery of Photography in Santa Fe beginning Friday, Feb. 3.

Gallery owner Sidney S. Monroe says the exhibit will have approximately 35 prints, the majority of which have never been seen.

“Vivian’s story is fascinating and it keeps getting better,” he says.

Monroe says the gallery has been working to bring the show to the City Different since September and was thrilled to be one of the first venues to host the exhibition in the United States.

“This is such a huge international story, and it speaks to Vivian’s significance in the art world now,” he says. “Our goal from day one was to bring in top-flight exhibitions. It speaks to Santa Fe and it being a world-class destination for art and photography.”

In 2007, Maloof, a real estate agent and historian, purchased 30,000 negatives on a hunch from an auction house in Chicago. Buried deep in that purchase were the virtuosic street photographs taken by a reclusive nanny in Chicago.

Maloof says he bought the 30,000 prints and negatives from an auction house that had acquired the photographs from a storage locker that had been sold off when Maier was no longer able to pay her fees.

He says after buying the collection in 2007, he acquired more from another buyer at the same auction. He now owns 100,000 to 150,000 negatives, more than 3,000 vintage prints, hundreds of rolls of film, home movies, audio tape interviews, original cameras of Maier’s, documents and other items, representing roughly 90 percent of Maier’s work.

“She has become a fascinating person to me, and I wouldn’t be promoting her work if I didn’t think it was amazing,” he says.

Maloof says he had no idea of his find until he started perusing the negatives.

“I was captivated by what I saw,” he explains. “It’s really a great body of work and no one had seen it. Of course, not all the photos were great, but the ones that are stood out immediately.”

Maloof was credited with the find, and Maier’s profile as a street photographer was born and soon went viral.

“She lived her life in a private way,” he says. “I think that’s what makes it interesting. She was a normal, working-class woman who loved photography. It really could be any one of us.”

Maloof says at 25 Maier moved from France to New York, where she worked in a sweatshop. She later made her way to Chicago in 1956, where she became a nanny.

“Most of the families said Vivian was very private and spent her days off walking and shooting pictures,” he says. “I can just imagine her walking around town with a Rolleiflex around her neck, snapping pictures.”

Maier’s photographs gain interest because of the subjects. She had an eye for fashion as well as capturing the daily lives of people.

“You can see how Vivian lived through the photographs,” Maloof says. “She captured everything that seemed interesting to her.”

Maloof says three years after Maier’s death, he’s surprised at how much interest she has gotten in the past year.

“My initial goal was to get her noticed and for her to take her place in the art world,” he explains. “I know she was a private person, but I believe her photos are a gift to the world that needed to be shared.”

If you go

WHAT: “Vivian Maier: Discovered”
WHEN: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Daily;  opening reception will be held from 5-7 p.m. Friday, Feb. 3. Continues through April 22
WHERE: Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar in Santa Fe
HOW MUCH: Free

Life of Marital Bliss (Segregation Laws Aside)

Grey Villet: Mildred and Richard Loving, King and Queen County,

Virginia in April 1965

We have been covering the forthcoming documentary film about Mildren and Richard Loving, an inter-racial couple who made civil-rights history. "The Loving Story" film will premiere on HBO on Valentine's day, February 14. An exhibition of Grey Villet's vintage photographs is currently on exhibition at the International Center of Photography.

Today's New York Times has a review of the exhibit:

"Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple from Virginia whose marriage prompted a benchmark 1967 Supreme Court ruling overturning state miscegenation laws, are portrayed in “The Loving Story: Photographs by Grey Villet” as heroes who fell into history by accident.

 Grey Villet,  a South African photographer who worked for Life magazine, entered the story in 1965 when he traveled to Virginia to photograph the family, by then living together under an unofficial amnesty with their three children. Mr. Villet shot 73 rolls of film, but Life published only 9 images. The photographer then sent 70 prints to the Lovings. The vintage prints in this show are from that collection, as well as from Mr. Villet’s estate.

The images represent the heyday of social documentary, but also the photo-essay format established by magazines like Life and Look. There is the whiff of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and other 1930s documentarians, but also of W. Eugene Smith, a revered midcentury photo essayist, and David Goldblatt, a South African chronicler of apartheid"  Full post and photographs here.

Concurrently, Monroe Gallery of Photography is opening the exhibition "Grey Villet: The Lovings" on February 3, concurrent with the exhibition "Vivian Maier: Discovered". The exhibition continues through March 18, and Grey Villet's photographs of the Lovings will be on exhibit during the AIPAD Photography Show March 29 - April 1 at Monroe Gallery, Booth #419. Monroe Gallery of Photography is honored to represent the Estate of Grey Villet.

Related: Director's Interview: The Loving Story

"LIFE Photographers: What They Saw": masterpieces of the magazine's photographers

La Lettre de la Photographie:

"John Loengard was born in New York City in 1934. He began working as a professional photographer for Life magazine while still a senior at Harvard University. He spent much of his career photographing for Life in its various incarnations, also acting as picture editor of the monthly Life magazine relaunch from 1978-1987. He is the author of eight books on photography including Celebrating The Negative ( Arcade Publishing, 1994), and As I See It ( Vendome Press, 2005 ).

In 1998, John published a book called: "LIFE Photographers: What They Saw" on some of the masterpieces of the magazine's photographers with their commentaries. 
Each week, we are going to share with you the pictures that John talks about. Today we start with two of them."

Life: Loomis Dean
The Andrea Doria

S.S. United States sailing in New York harbor © Andreas Feininger / Time Life

Life: Andreas Feininger
SS United States

Director's Interview: The Loving Story

Grey Villet: Mildred and Richard Loving,

King and Queen County, Virginia in April 1965

This is a compelling, riveting, promotional clip from the HBO documentary "The Loving Story":

Via HBO:  "The Loving Story", Director Nancy Buirski interview

"Almighty God created the races....The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mate"