Monday, October 8, 2012
NY Photography Auctions: Results
Via La Journal de la Photographie
Christie’s sales of Photographs and Richard Avedon on 4-5 October achieved a combined total of $7,793,000/ £4,831,660/ €6,000,610, selling 73% by lot and 80% by value.
Sotheby’s October 3rd Photographs auction in New York featured a range of material from the 19th to 21st centuries.
Phillips de Pury & Company’s Photographs auction totaled $4,704,450, selling 81% by value and 76% by lot
Swann sold a complete set of Edward S. Curtis's The North American Indian for $1,440,000--the highest priced item ever sold at New York's premiere auction house for works on paper.
Saturday, October 6, 2012
Its a great weekend of photography in Washington, DC and Santa Fe, NM!
The DC Fine Art Photography Fair continues today, 12 - 7, and Sunday, 12 - 5.
Bob Gomel will be in the gallery in Santa Fe following last night's gala opening reception for
the exhibit "Bob Gomel: Life in the 1960s"
Winds have cancelled today's festivities at the Albuquerque Balloon Festival, so its a great day to come meet this legendary Life magazine photographer.
Friday, October 5, 2012
The DC Fine Art Photography Fair: "I want to encourage people to educate their eyes”
Via The Washington Post
Photography fair offers opportunity for collectors
By Michael O’Sullivan
Friday, October 5, 2012
With the (e)merge art fair’s exclusive focus on up-and-coming artists, the organizer of another art fair hopes there’s room in the spotlight this weekend for more established names.
On Saturday and Sunday, Washington photography dealer Kathleen Ewing will unveil the inaugural DC Fine Art Photography Fair, featuring 15 booths by photography dealers she invited from across the country, each of whom specializes in more traditional imagery than one can expect to see at (e)merge.
Ewing will offer a wide range of prints, including a $12,000 photograph by the great Edward Weston (1886-1958) and a $450 image by MacDuff Everton, a contemporary photographer based in California. Washington’s Hemphill Fine Arts also will showcase a diverse mix of artists, including Colby Caldwell, William Christenberry, Don Donaghy, Godfrey Frankel, Max Hirshfeld, Franz Jantzen, Tanya Marcuse, Kendall Messick, Anne Rowland, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Julie Wolfe.
Dealers include the far-flung and the homegrown. San Francisco’s Scott Nichols Gallery, which is known for handling work by Ansel Adams and other members of the famous Group f/64, will participate, along with Multiple Exposures, a contemporary cooperative gallery based at Alexandria’s Torpedo Factory Art Center.
Ewing says visitors to the fair should expect something completely different than the edgy (e)merge and FotoWeek DC, a photography festival -- returning next month for its fifth year -- that’s known more as a broad celebration of all things photographic than as a breeding ground for collectors. Ewing says she thinks that with Washington’s educated, culturally connected and visually sophisticated population -- not to mention its booming economy -- the time is ripe for a commercial fair offering a range of price points for both the aspiring and the established collector.
“I want to encourage people to educate their eyes,” says Ewing, who hopes her fair will introduce the “passion of possessing beautiful works of art” to a new generation. To that end, the fair will feature a free panel discussion on collecting Saturday at 11 a.m.
Event Information
Information:
202-986-0105
» Web site
Price:
Free
2801 16th St. NW
Washington, DC
Washington, DC
Thursday, October 4, 2012
Washington, DC - Santa Fe, NM
Photo by Bob Gomel
Visit Monroe Gallery of Photography this Columbus Day weekend at the inaugural DC Fine Art Photography Fair - or meet renowned LIFE magazine photographer Bob Gomel at the opening reception for his exhibition "Bob Gomel: Life in the 1960s"
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
Acclaimed LIFE photographer Bob Gomel looks back
One of his fabled JFK shots. - Courtesy Bob Gomel
October 3, 2012
Acclaimed photographer Bob Gomel looks back
Asked what it was like to be a photojournalist for LIFE magazine during its 1960s heyday, Bob Gomel does not hesitate to answer. “It was the mecca,” he says with a combination of excitement and nostalgia.
“In my wildest dreams, I thought about things like that, and it never really occurred to me that I would ever become part of that wonderful, elitist group of photographers,” the renowned photog tells SFR. “There was no place higher that you could aspire to.”
Gomel’s iconic images have stood both the tests of time and digital media: a meta Malcolm X photographing then Cassius Clay inside a Miami diner; JFK examining the first space capsule; candid shots of the Beatles relaxing the day prior to their career-defining Ed Sullivan Show appearance.
“It’s a trip down memory lane,” he says of the images he selected for LIFE in the 1960s, his forthcoming exhibit at Monroe Gallery. “Everybody realizes now, retrospectively, that the people that we photographed all became iconic, [but] we had no idea of their value historically when we were doing it.”
“It’s amazing to me how 50-years-ago images can be still relevant today,” Gomel, who describes his current schedule as still “busy as can be,” continues.
Not bad for a kid from the Bronx who was first captivated by photography at age 10, after admiring a picture his science teacher had shot and hung inside the classroom
.
“[It] was a beautiful sepia-toned print of a cobblestone street with a manhole cover in the middle, and a pigeon on it,” he recalls. “I looked at that thing and thought, ‘My God, that’s just beautiful,’ and I was mesmerized.”
Curious, he joined the “little photo club” at his public school, and his lifetime affair with still images began.
“I got hooked!” he says.
The one thing missing in the equation was convincing his parents to fork over the then-whopping $83.75 to purchase his dream instrument, a Ciro-flex camera.
“It was the first post-World War II camera made in America,” he points out.
His parents didn’t budge, so the young Gomel started a bike route delivering groceries to earn the dough.
“I remember once, in the middle of the winter, driving up the snowy hills with that bike, the front wheel basket loaded, and I slipped and fell over,” Gomel reminisces. “A dozen eggs cracked and so, not knowing what to do, I went home and replaced the broken eggs with ones from my mother’s refrigerator and continued to deliver that order,” he laughs. “It’s really what sticks in your mind [after] all these many years.”
He took over a closet in his family home and turned it into a makeshift darkroom.
“It was a cheap imitation of the German Rolleiflex, but I cut my teeth on that Ciro-flex,” he says of his first camera, adding that because there was no real formal training available, he mastered his craft based on “trial and error.”
Focused, he would later land his dream job at LIFE, where he became a trailblazer implementing now-standard maneuvers like double exposure and camera rigging—like when he took a groundbreaking aerial shot of the casket containing the body of President Dwight D Eisenhower in the US Capitol’s rotunda from 280 feet above ground.
“If you can envision a picture and you haven’t got any immediate idea of how to do it, you seek out ways,” he explains.
His visit to Santa Fe, it turns out, will be something of a class reunion, as both former LIFE managing editor Dick Stolley and former reporter Hal Wingo—the twosome that would later found People magazine—live in town.
“I don’t get a chance to see many of my colleagues because the TIME-LIFE alumni association basically orients interests and activities around New York City—luncheons and what have you,” Gomel, who is now Houston-based, says. “It’s not practical for me to be able to join them on those occasions.”
With one foot in the retirement door and the other still active in sporadic travel photography, Gomel says, he often gets the itch to immerse himself in photojournalism once more. One event that cemented this, he says, was a trip to New York in 2001. After several delays, he flew back home the evening of Sept. 10.
“I was sound asleep the following morning when my friend called me something around 7:30 am and said, ‘Turn on your television set,’” he says. “When I saw what was going on, I realized I was right there a few hours before, and God—it was killing me not to have been able to be a part of that event and that I had just missed it. So the answer to your question, do I miss it? You bet.”
Opening reception with Bob Gomel
Friday, October 5 5 - 7 PM
Exhibition continues through November 8, 2012
“In my wildest dreams, I thought about things like that, and it never really occurred to me that I would ever become part of that wonderful, elitist group of photographers,” the renowned photog tells SFR. “There was no place higher that you could aspire to.”
Gomel’s iconic images have stood both the tests of time and digital media: a meta Malcolm X photographing then Cassius Clay inside a Miami diner; JFK examining the first space capsule; candid shots of the Beatles relaxing the day prior to their career-defining Ed Sullivan Show appearance.
“It’s a trip down memory lane,” he says of the images he selected for LIFE in the 1960s, his forthcoming exhibit at Monroe Gallery. “Everybody realizes now, retrospectively, that the people that we photographed all became iconic, [but] we had no idea of their value historically when we were doing it.”
“It’s amazing to me how 50-years-ago images can be still relevant today,” Gomel, who describes his current schedule as still “busy as can be,” continues.
Not bad for a kid from the Bronx who was first captivated by photography at age 10, after admiring a picture his science teacher had shot and hung inside the classroom
.
“[It] was a beautiful sepia-toned print of a cobblestone street with a manhole cover in the middle, and a pigeon on it,” he recalls. “I looked at that thing and thought, ‘My God, that’s just beautiful,’ and I was mesmerized.”
Curious, he joined the “little photo club” at his public school, and his lifetime affair with still images began.
“I got hooked!” he says.
The one thing missing in the equation was convincing his parents to fork over the then-whopping $83.75 to purchase his dream instrument, a Ciro-flex camera.
“It was the first post-World War II camera made in America,” he points out.
His parents didn’t budge, so the young Gomel started a bike route delivering groceries to earn the dough.
He took over a closet in his family home and turned it into a makeshift darkroom.
“It was a cheap imitation of the German Rolleiflex, but I cut my teeth on that Ciro-flex,” he says of his first camera, adding that because there was no real formal training available, he mastered his craft based on “trial and error.”
Focused, he would later land his dream job at LIFE, where he became a trailblazer implementing now-standard maneuvers like double exposure and camera rigging—like when he took a groundbreaking aerial shot of the casket containing the body of President Dwight D Eisenhower in the US Capitol’s rotunda from 280 feet above ground.
“If you can envision a picture and you haven’t got any immediate idea of how to do it, you seek out ways,” he explains.
His visit to Santa Fe, it turns out, will be something of a class reunion, as both former LIFE managing editor Dick Stolley and former reporter Hal Wingo—the twosome that would later found People magazine—live in town.
“I don’t get a chance to see many of my colleagues because the TIME-LIFE alumni association basically orients interests and activities around New York City—luncheons and what have you,” Gomel, who is now Houston-based, says. “It’s not practical for me to be able to join them on those occasions.”
With one foot in the retirement door and the other still active in sporadic travel photography, Gomel says, he often gets the itch to immerse himself in photojournalism once more. One event that cemented this, he says, was a trip to New York in 2001. After several delays, he flew back home the evening of Sept. 10.
“I was sound asleep the following morning when my friend called me something around 7:30 am and said, ‘Turn on your television set,’” he says. “When I saw what was going on, I realized I was right there a few hours before, and God—it was killing me not to have been able to be a part of that event and that I had just missed it. So the answer to your question, do I miss it? You bet.”
Opening reception with Bob Gomel
Friday, October 5 5 - 7 PM
Exhibition continues through November 8, 2012
Listen to Art Beat radio interview: Life Magazine and photographer Bob Gomel
Monday, October 1, 2012
Worcester Art Museum exhibition features some of the most powerful and provocative American photographs of the 1960s.
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.”
Saturday, September 29, 2012
New Mexico History Museum Exhibit Presents Photographer's Images of Shrines
‘Altared Spaces’
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.”
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.”
Friday, September 28, 2012
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.
Thursday, September 27, 2012
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.)
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.”
Wednesday, September 26, 2012
LIFE Photographer Bill Eppridge: Presidents, Politicians, and Transitions: Photographing Political Campaigns - Then & Now
Via B&H Photo
Speakers: Bill Eppridge
Skill Level: Intermediate
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.
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
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