Worcester Art Museum exhibition features some of the most powerful and provocative American photographs of the 1960s.

 Joseph Louw, South African, about 1945-2004, The Death of Martin Luther King, Jr., Lorraine Hotel, Memphis, April 4, 1968, Gelatin silver print, gift of David Davis, 2011.148

 Iconic news photographs of 1960s on view in exhibition at Worcester Art Museum

Via artdaily.org


WORCESTER, MASS.- Worcester Art Museum announces its major fall exhibition, Kennedy to Kent State: Images of a Generation, opened September 29 and on view through February 3, 2013. The exhibition features some of the most powerful and provocative American photographs of the 1960s.

The photographs chronicle world events during the turbulent decade of the 1960s. From disturbing assassinations, the Vietnam War, antiwar protests, the thrill of space exploration, and the lightheartedness of pop culture, this exhibition represents a range of human emotion. The photographs are from the museum’s permanent collection. The photographs were originally collected by David Davis, as a way to recall and reflect his memories of the era.

The photographs also reveal the activities of news gathering and publishing in the 1960s. Many are vintage wirephotos or file photographs from newspaper and magazine archives. These were used in editing, layout, and as camera art for the creation of printing plates. In the 1990s, when news outlets transformed their imaging libraries to digital formats, these objects were discarded or released onto the market. Many of the prints were stamped or inscribed on the back with a record of each use, and in this way they reveal their own history, and carry powerful qualities as artifacts.

“The Worcester Art Museum was among the very first American museums to exhibit photographs as works of fine art,” said Matthias Waschek, director. “In 1961, coincidentally the time that the Kennedy to Kent State era began, we established a curatorial department of photography and began building a permanent collection. These holdings now represent a survey of the history of photography in the United States in its fascinating variety. To the post-Baby Boomer generations, this exhibition has the power to awaken them to the correlation between their present lives and the not-so-distant past.”

Kennedy to Kent State: Images of a Generation was organized by David Acton, curator of prints, drawings, and photographs at the Worcester Art Museum. He has organized nearly 100 exhibitions at the museum, and published extensively on Old Master, American prints and drawings, and the history of photography. Notable among his exhibition catalogues are A Spectrum of Innovation: Color in American Printmaking 1890-1960, The Stamp of Impulse: Abstract Expressionist Prints, and Photography at the Worcester Art Museum: Keeping Shadows.

“Then, as now, pictures were the medium by which most people experienced the wider world,” said Acton. “Photographs created a common experience, plotting a historical arc of embracing familiarity. Kennedy to Kent State presents a selection of these pictures, providing a glimpse of that turbulent time. Many of the images transcend reportage. In their momentary imagery, refined compositions, and humanity, they attain the stature of true works of art.”

In 2000, David Davis founded the Schoolhouse Center for Art and Design, home to the Driskel Gallery of Photography, and the Silas Kenyon Gallery of Regional Art in Provincetown, Massachusetts. When Davis acquired the famous Vietnam photographs by Nick Ut and Eddie Adams, he began his 12-year project to collect a survey of the iconic images by which Americans experienced a transformative period of their history.

“I wished to do something that I have not seen before,” said Davis, “to present a kind of storyboard of the 1960s. From the time I entered my teen years until that of my college graduation, there were assassinations, an unpopular war, a trip to the moon and the rise of the protest movement and counterculture. It was a confusing, unsettling, exciting, and ‘far out’ time to grow up.”

New Mexico History Museum Exhibit Presents Photographer's Images of Shrines

‘Altared Spaces’

Via The Albuquerque Journal North

By Kathaleen Roberts / Journal Staff Writer
on Fri, Sep 28, 2012

Shrines have dotted New Mexico since pueblo members first stacked rocks to create sacred mountaintop boundaries.

Havens of spirit and space, they can be carefully grouped devotions to the saints or a “ghost bike” arranged in the memory of a fallen cyclist. People have always found ways to invest places in prayers and devotions, be it through an assemblage of Teddy bears or the Virgin of Guadalupe. It’s a universal need for a private place of veneration and contemplation, be it religious or secular.

From the tragedy of Sept. 11 to the death of Princess Diana, people have erected shrines to mark their sense of loss and need for solace. People still deck Billy the Kid’s grave with flowers and plastic angels in an homage to the American West.

Taos Pueblo residents have made spiritual pilgrimages to their sacred Blue Lake for thousands of years. In the mid-’50s, they fought the U.S. government for title to its 48,000-acre watershed, which was finally granted in 1970.

Since 1814, when Don Bernardo Abeyta built the Catholic shrine of El Santuario de Chimayó, pilgrims have flocked to its doors seeking healing and hope. Today family members erect roadside descansos in memory of lost loved ones. Be they a group of polished beach rocks or a backyard Buddha, personal shrines meld seamlessly into their surroundings, each as singular as its devotee, whether secular or sacred.

“Altared Spaces: The Shrines of New Mexico” opens at the New Mexico History Museum Sunday, revealing three New Mexico photographers’ interpretations of these secular sanctuaries. Featuring the work of Siegfried Halus, Jack Parsons and Donald Woodman, the exhibit is located in the museum’s second floor gathering space, just outside the “Contemplative Landscapes” and “Illuminating the Word: The Saint John’s Bible” exhibitions. The photographers will kick off the exhibit at 2 p.m. Sunday with a discussion of their work in the auditorium.

“They’re havens of spirit and space,” said author Carmella Padilla, who penned the show’s text. “It’s like a designated spot. It could be religious but it doesn’t have to be.”

“It’s about anything that’s meant to stop and mark that moment of grace,” New Mexico History Museum Director Fran Levine added.

Siegfried Halus lived in Austria until he was 8. Devotees posted images of Jesus, the Virgin Mary and other saints on crossroads and roadsides. Halus was raised Catholic, the son of a liturgical sculptor who moved the family to Philadelphia in the 1950s. When Halus moved to Santa Fe in 1989, he felt at home amongst New Mexico’s traditions of santos and shrines. He collaborated with author and santera Marie Romero Cash on the photography book “Living Shrines: Home Altars in New Mexico.”

Halus’ photographs honor those spaces, with their environmental settings “enshrining their shrines” to express reverence.

A photograph taken near Galisteo — improbably around midnight –– shows a grotto dedicated to the Virgin Mary overlooking the Galisteo Basin. The shrine glows with incandescent candlelight thanks to a long exposure and abundant moonlight. A gnarled piñon hovers behind it; a pot of lilies sits to the side.

“Even though it was a full moon, I made a number of exposures because I was working with available light,” Halus said.

Those exposures lasted from one to one-and-half minutes. Art turns darkness into light.
Another Halus image shows a Santa Fe woodworker’s bulto propped on an ancient icebox beneath Our Lady of Guadalupe. The shrine’s placement reveals its creator’s occupation as the saints share the space with poles and a horse harness, expressing both their familiarity and importance to daily life. The woodworker made the cabinet that crowns the refrigerator and filled it with carvings of saints.

“My father carved throughout Europe and the U.S.,” Halus said. “It was a tradition I was intimately engaged in. When I came to New Mexico (in 1964) and saw this, I was overwhelmed.”
Shrines have been central to Jack Parsons’ photographic journey through New Mexico for more than 35 years. The photographer has captured areas of abandonment, be they an old pink schoolhouse in Tres Piedras or a stone grotto, linking objects to acts of devotion.

He acknowledges the slight invasion of privacy inherent in his work, but celebrates the aesthetic value.

A weatherbeaten Española back yard boasts a figure of Christ framed by an old TV. A stone shrine hugs it, brimming with objects of religious devotion. Rusted lawn chairs await visitors.
Parsons found the sanctuary off a dirt road.

“It seemed to be an amazing devotional piece that was done by somebody without any money, but was so dedicated to their religion that they put this together with whatever they had,” he said. “It is almost naive art.”

“Look at the rock work,” Parsons continued. “It shows an enormous amount of work; it took a lot of time. It’s a pure expression of religious devotion.”

The heart and spirit invested in these altars places them beyond the critic’s judgmental eye.
Levine has spotted rock shrines flecked with dried flowers and feathers marking hiking trails in the Sangre de Cristos.

“It says, ‘Stop here. This is where I got peace’,” she said. “This is meaningful to people who don’t normally express themselves verbally.”

For some, shrines represent the spiritual. For others, they’re merely a marker or a practical message.
Belen’s Donald Woodman has photographed more secular spaces, such as Socorro’s Very Large Array and the Lightning Field land art installation.

The Array “is an astronomical observatory, but it’s also aesthetically appealing,” Padilla said. “The Lightning Field is a shrine in (artist Walter de Maria’s) mind. He says the landscape is a shrine unto itself.”

While traveling in Europe for a Holocaust project, Woodman visited concentration camps, memorials and other markers of human devastation in remembrance of those who endured the horror.
Woodman’s “God Is Just a Prayer Away” captures a Chimayó roadside grouping of a white cross, flowers, angels and a miniature wooden house with pictures along an endless landscape beneath wispy tendrils of clouds.

The composition grew out of the photographer’s disappointment after visiting the Santuario de Chimayó. Photography is now forbidden in the chapel.

“And it’s all cleaned up,” Woodman said. “People used to come up and leave things and it was wonderful –– things were all helter-skelter –– so I was disappointed.”

While he was driving home, he stumbled across what he calls a photographer’s gift.

“It was the perfect New Mexico day with the perfect New Mexico clouds,” he said. A diagonal wooden board hanging precariously from the fence read “God Is Just a Prayer Away.”

“I have a funny attitude,” Woodman continued. “Everybody photographs shrines in New Mexico. I don’t like to tread in areas other people have trod. (But) that sort of caught my attention on the winding road going out of Chimayó.”

Woodman’s panoramic photograph of pilgrims climbing Tomé Hill at Easter showcases both the devout and the indifferent.

“We climbed up to the top of the hill,” he said. “There were these ultra-religious people climbing up on their knees and kids on their cell phones texting. It was the whole spectrum.”

---

THE DC FINE ART PHOTOGRAPHY FAIR OCT 5 - 7

 

 

Monroe Gallery of Photography is pleased to join fifteen established fine art photography galleries from across the United States for the inaugural DC Fine Art Photography Fair October 5 - 7, 2012. An extraordinary range of photographic images—from 19th-Century Images to cutting-edge contemporary visions—will be on display and available for purchase. Full details here.



Please click below for you personal invitation to the Preview Reception Friday evening from 6:30 to 8:30 PM.

BOB GOMEL: LIFE IN THE 1960'S

Black Muslim leader Malcolm X photographing Cassius Clay after he defeated Sonny Liston for the Heavy Weight Championship, Miami, February, 1964

Santa Fe--Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar, is pleased to announce an extensive exhibition of photographs from the 1960's by LIFE magazine photographer Bob Gomel. The exhibition opens with a reception for the photographer on Friday, October 5, from 5 to 7 PM. The exhibition will continue through November 18. (Listen here to Art Beat, radio interview about Monroe Gallery and Bob Gomel.)

 

The triumphs and tragedies of the 1960s provided photographer Bob Gomel and his LIFE magazine colleagues extraordinary opportunities to advance American photojournalism. "LIFE was the world's best forum for photojournalists. We were encouraged to push creative and technical boundaries. There was no better place to work in that extraordinary decade." The exhibition includes images of presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon, the 1963 Freedom March in Washington, The Beatles, Marilyn Monroe and other entertainers; Malcolm X, and sports figures such as boxer Muhammad Ali, baseball legend Nolan Ryan, and golfer Arnold Palmer. Several unpublished images - including one of 90 heads of state gathered around the catafalque at the Kennedy funeral and another of John F. Kennedyemerging from America's first space capsule at the Johnson Space Center in Houston - are in the exhibition. (September 12, 2012 marked the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy's "We choose to go to the moon ..." speech at Rice University, which Bob Gomel photographed for LIFE magazine.)

 Also featured is Gomel's perhaps most known photograph: of then 8 - year old John F. Kennedy Jr. standing solemnly at the funeral of hisuncle, Robert Kennedy, in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. This photograph appeared in a two-page spread in the June 1968 “Special Kennedy Issue” of LIFE magazine.

Bob Gomel was born (1933) and raised in New York City. After serving four years in the U.S. Navy, he was promptly offered a job at the Associated Press. But by then, he had changed his mind about what he wanted to do. “I just felt one picture wasn’t sufficient to

tell a story,” he explains. “I was interested in exploring something in depth. And, of course, the mecca was Life magazine.”He turned down the offer from AP, and began working for LIFE in 1959, producing many memorable images. When LIFE ceased being a weekly in the early 1970s, he began making photographs for other major magazines. Also in the 1970s, he branched out into advertising photography. Among other accounts, he helped introduce Merrill Lynch’s Bullish on America campaign.

Bob says, “Each time I raised a camera to my eye I wondered how to make a viewer say, “wow.” What followed were the use of double exposures to tell a more complete story; placing remote cameras where no human being could be; adapting equipment to reveal what could not ordinarily be captured on film. My goal with people was to penetrate the veneer, to reveal the true personality or character. The ideal was sometimes mitigated by circumstances, a lack of time or access. But more often than not what the mind conceived could be translated into successful photographic images. Life Magazine in the 60s sold 8,000,000 copies a week. It was a great honor to be a part of that information highway.”

 

 

LIFE Photographer Bill Eppridge: Presidents, Politicians, and Transitions: Photographing Political Campaigns - Then & Now

Via B&H Photo

Speakers: Bill Eppridge

Event Type: Photography

Skill Level: Intermediate

Register here

 Sunday, October 14, 2012 | 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM

 

Join legendary Life magazine photojournalist Bill Eppridge as he takes a look back at the politicians and campaigns he photographed in the nineteen sixties and seventies, and talks about how the issues that were happening then are still prevalent in this country today. He will also talk about advances in the camera equipment he uses, and how he transitioned from film to digital cameras beginning in 2001. This is a unique opportunity to learn about history and political coverage from someone who experienced it with insider access.

Many people are familiar with Eppridge’s historic coverage of Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign, and his two books on Kennedy. Less well known and rarely seen are his photographs of President Lyndon Johnson during a campaign trip on Air Force One, and assignments covering the fear mongers of the early sixties - Governor George Wallace of Alabama during the Wisconsin presidential primary, and Robert Shelton, the grand wizard of the United Klans of America among other controversial figures of that time. He also covered both the Republican and the Democratic conventions in 1972, the year in which the Vietnam War was dividing the country and Richard Nixon was re-elected.

Eppridge believes that politics is more important than the average person realizes, and that politics shape our daily lives, from health care to farming. He will also discuss the difference in access to candidates then as opposed to now. He went to a rally for then candidate Obama in 2008 to see this himself, and will share tips for covering local political campaigns, something that almost anyone can do nowadays.

Eppridge continues to work as a photographer today and will discuss how the technological changes of the past decades have made it easier for both professionals and amateurs.

Photograph by Bill Eppridge / LIFE / © Time Inc.

Bill Eppridge

 

Bill Eppridge is based in Connecticut where he continues to work on personal projects. He is producing books and exhibits of his recent photographs as well as work from his vast archive. He has been a working photographer for more than fifty years and has covered a wide array of subjects as diverse as the Beatles arrival in America; the Woodstock festival; heroin addicts in Needle Park; the Presidential campaign of Senator Robert F. Kennedy; the Vietnam War; Olympics; The America’s Cup; Elephant soccer in Thailand, and much more. He was a staff photographer for the original weekly Life magazine until publication ceased in 1972. He later worked for as a photographer for Sports Illustrated for nearly 30 years.

He has been awarded some of photography’s highest honors including the National Headliners Award; NPPA’s Joseph A. Sprague award; The Missouri Journalism School Honor Medal, and was the 2011 Lucie Foundation Honoree for Photojournalism.

Photograph by Adrienne Aurichio

Never-before-seen Kennedy family photos released

Via  CBS Morning News

• comments
Click to Play CBS News Video

(CBS News) A collection of new photographs has been released nearly 50 years after the death of President Kennedy. The photos -- released in a new book, "The Kennedys: Photographs by Mark Shaw -- show JFK with his wife Jackie and their two children during intimate family moments
The late "Life" magazine photographer, Mark Shaw, and his wife, 81-year-old Pat Suzuki, grew to become close friends of the Kennedy family. The friendship allowed Shaw unprecedented access to the first family during the so-called era of Camelot.

In 1959, he was assigned to shoot a "Life" cover story on Jackie Kennedy, when her husband, then a Massachusetts senator, was making his presidential run.

Shaw captured the couple at home, on the campaign trail and at the office. The pictures were an immediate sensation and depicted the Kennedy family with an air of glamour that is atypical in the political realm. Shaw -- and his camera -- soon joined the family at the Inaugural gala, at the White House and on vacation in Hyannis Port, Mass. and Italy.

Kennedy biographer Mark Dallek says the photos added a previously unseen intrigue to political life.
"There's a sort of Hollywood quality to it, a sense that these are celebrities," Dallek told CBS News' Bill Plante. "These are people who are famous, and they enjoy their fame, and they enjoyed their notoriety and the public responds to it."

Dallek also claims the photos shaped the way JFK was perceived for decades to come.
"It was not just that he was handsome, but there was a kind of aura, a kind of charisma to the man that allowed him to capture the public imagination."

Though perhaps less comfortable in front of the camera, Jackie Kennedy nevertheless quickly became one of the world's most famous women, revered for her style and elegance.

Pat Suzuki remembers her camera-shy friend, "When she was under pressure and she had the paparazzi moving in on her, it made her...not so much self-conscious but it assaulted her sense of propriety," Suzuki told Plante. "It was hard on her in the beginning and then she learned to handle it," she added.

For a glimpse of Shaw's historic photos, watch the video above.

© 2012 CBS Interactive Inc.. All Rights Reserved.

Mark Shaw: The Kennedys book now available through Monroe Gallery of Photography
Mark Shaw: The Kennedys Exhibit at Monroe Gallery November 23 - January 27, 2013

NY Public Library Series: Visually Speaking: Contemporary Photojournalism in America

 

Monday, October 1, 2012, 6:30 - 8 p.m.

Program Locations:

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Langston Hughes Auditorium (Map and directions)

Partially accessible to wheelchairs

 

Free

Register
How to register: Online - Registration required: www.schomburgcenter.eventbrite.com or call (212) 491-2040

 

Visually Speaking is a photographic panel series that examines the current state of photojournalism through the lens of photographers and image makers of the African Diaspora. Join panelist, Marilyn Nance, James McGrawth, Ozier Muhammad, Terrence Jennings, Michelle Agins and moderator, Grace Aneiza Ali for the launch of this series

The Gallery will be closed Friday - Sunday, September 21 - 23, for the Memorial of Barbara Ann Sayre Monroe.

Steve Schapiro: Then and Now

 

Freedom Bus, Summer of 1964 © Steve Schapiro

Via La Journal de la Photographie (with slide show)

Robert Kennedy was the most imposing politician he ever met. And Johnny Depp is incredibly photogenic. Steve Schapiro (1934 in Brooklyn) ought to know, because he has actually photographed them all: his expressive portraits of Martin Luther King, Jr., Muhammad Ali, Barbara Streisand, Marlon Brando, David Bowie, Jodie Foster, and Robert de Niro are part of our collective visual memory. Besides his work with the stars, Schapiro and his camera accompanied the greatest political and social upheavals of the sixties and seventies. These photographs have also achieved iconic status.

This volume includes a selection of photos taken over a period of more than fifty. In the accompanying essays, Schapiro explains how they were created, describing his experiences in a lively, humorous way. Along with previously unpublished photographs, the book also features new works by the timeless master.

Steve Schapiro, 
Then and Now

Texts by Steve Schapiro, interview with the artist by Matthias Harder, graphic design by Julia Günther, Steve Schapiro
Editor : Hatje Cantz
272 pages, 25 x 31 cm
60 €

Links

http://www.hatjecantz.de/controller.php?cmd=detail&titzif=00003426&lang=en

Monroe Gallery at the Inaugural DC Fine Art Photography Fair

 

Monroe Gallery of Photography is pleased to join fifteen established fine art photography galleries from across the United States for the inaugural DC Fine Art Photography Fair.  An extraordinary range of photographic images—from 19th-Century Images to cutting-edge contemporary visions—will be on display and available for purchase. Monroe Gallery will feature selected highlights from the gallery's renowned collection of 20th and 21st Century Photojournalism, as well as Stephen Wilke's acclaimed Day To Night series.

LOCATION
2801 Sixteenth Street, NW (former residence of the Ambassador of Spain) Columbia Heights neighborhood, accessible by Metro and major bus routes

HOURS
Friday, October 5: Opening Night Preview (by invitation only)
Saturday, October 6: Noon to 7pm
Sunday, October 7: 11am to 5pm

Exhibitors

Addison/ Ripley Fine Art, Washington, DC
Catherine Couturier Gallery, Houston, TX
Gary Edwards Gallery, Washington, DC
Kathleen Ewing Gallery, Washington, DC
Gallery 339, Philadelphia, PA
Halsted Gallery, Franklin, MI
HEMPHILL, Washington, DC
Rebekah Jacob Gallery, Charleston, SC
Alan Klotz Gallery, New York, NY
Monroe Gallery of Photography, Santa Fe, NM
Multiple Exposures Gallery, Alexandria, VA
National Geographic Image Collection, Washington, DC
Scott Nichols Gallery, San Francisco, CA
21st Editions, South Dennis, MA
Rick Wester Fine Art, New York, NY