STEVE SCHAPIRO: Once Upon A Time In America

Steve Schapiro: Entering Montgomery, Selma March, 1965

One of the most respected American documentary photographers, Steve Schapiro has photographed American history, and the fractured fabric of contemporary American life, over the last five decades. The list of people Steve Schapiro has photographed during his career reads like a Who's Who of the most influential politicians, celebrities and newsmakers in contemporary American history.


Join us Saturday, July 5, from 5 - 7 PM for a public reception with Steve Schapiro for the opening of the new exhibition "Once Upon A Time in America".


Steve Schapiro discovered photography at age of nine at a summer camp. Excited by the camera's potential, he would spend the next decades prowling the streets of his native New York trying to emulate the work of the great French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. Schapiro was a disciple of the great photographer W. Eugene Smith, and shared Smith's passion for black and white documentary work. From the beginning of Schapiro's career, he had already set a mission for himself: to chronicle the "American Life". His career in photography began in 1960 with personal documentary projects on "Arkansas Migrant Workers" and "Narcotics Addiction in East Harlem". Schapiro became involved in many civil rights stories including the Selma March and covering Martin Luther King; he traveled with Bobby Kennedy on his Senate campaign and Presidential campaign; and did photo essays on Haight Ashbury, the Pine Ridge Sioux Indian Reservation, and Protest in America. He photographed Andy Warhol and the New York art scene, John and Jacqueline Kennedy, poodles, beauty parlors, and performances at the famous Apollo Theater in New York. He also collaborated on projects for record covers and related art. As picture magazines declined in the 1970's and 80's he continued documentary work but also produced advertising material, publicity stills and posters for films, including, The Godfather, Rambo, The Way We Were, Risky Business, Taxi Driver, and Midnight Cowboy.

Related: The Santa Fe Reporter  Once Upon a Time… Veteran photog Steve Schapiro serves up poignant history

REVIEW SANTA FE JUNE 26 - 29

"Review Santa Fe is the premier juried portfolio review event in the world. Considered one of the most important events for photographers who seek career advancement, Review Santa Fe is designed to facilitate relationships between photographers and leading industry professionals looking for new work.

Nestled in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountain, up to 100 photographers meet with up to 45 of today’s most relevant and esteemed reviewers comprised of curators, editors, publishers, gallerists and others who can offer professional development advice and opportunities."

See the Review Santa Fe 100

CENTER is expanding the long-standing conference Review Santa Fe, to include more exhibitions, ongoing artist’s presentations, a night of Portfolio Viewing and a Party in Black & White. Please join us in celebrating our favorite medium with many public programs before and throughout the weekend.

PHOTO EXHIBITION

May 30 – August 1, Alumni exhibit at the Marion Center

PHOTO EXHIBITION

June 14 – August 10, The Curve exhibition at the CCA

WORKSHOP

June 25-26, Preparing for Portfolio Reviews

PORTFOLIO VIEWING

June 27, Review Santa Fe 100 at the Farmer’s Market Pavilion

ARTIST’S PRESENTATIONS

June 27-28, hear from the artists at Zane Bennett Contemporary Art

PARTY IN BLACK & WHITE

June 28, Print auction and more at the CCA

Click to learn more about the full schedule of events.

HAPPY SUMMER

John Dominis: Going Fishing, Texas, 1953

©Time Inc.

Happy first day of summer!

June 21, 1964: The Murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner

Bill Eppridge: Mrs. Chaney and young Ben, James Chaney funeral, Meridian, Mississippi, 1964

June 21, 1964: The Murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner

Steve Schapiro: John Lewis, Clarksdale, Mississippi, 1965

Rep. John Lewis 50th Anniversary of Mississippi Freedom Summer and the Lives of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner

The 50th Anniversary of Mississippi Freedom Summer

Jeff Widener, the photographer behind Tiananmen 'tank man' image

June 5, 1989, Tiananmen Square: A day after the military opened fire on protestors, photographer Jeff Widener was setting up the shot for the now iconic "tank man" image: "I was leaning over the balcony aiming at this row of tanks, and the guy walks out with this shopping bag and I was thinking 'the guy is going to ruin my composition.'" The final photo won the Scoop Award in France, the Chia Sardina Award in Italy, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize

The Charlie Rose Show:  Charlie Rose has a conversation with award-winning photojournalist Jeff Widener who took one of the most famous photographs of the 20th century

Time LightBox: Tank Man at 25: Behind the Iconic Tiananmen Square Photo


Bloomberg TV: `Tank Man’ Photographer Remembers Tiananmen Square


Voice of America: Q&A with Jeff Widener: 'Tank Man' Photographer



Jeff Widener is the photographer who took the famous ‘Tank Man’ photograph near Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on June 5, 1989, during a crackdown on pro-democracy students that stunned the world. On the eve of the 25^th anniversary of the photograph, interviews with Weidner are featured in many news outlets, a few are linked below.


CNN: Jeff Widener, the photographer behind Tiananmen 'tank man' image


Widener: 'Tank Man photo changed my life'


The New York Times: 25 Years Later, Details Emerge of Army’s Chaos Before Tiananmen Square


Wall Street Journal: Forgotten Negatives From the ‘Tank Man’ Photographer


South China Daily Post: 'Many have forgotten the brief moment China was free', says Tiananmen 'tank man' photographer


Daily Mail: Tiananmen Square 'Tank Man' photographer shares forgotten negatives from bloody government crackdown on 25th anniversary



"Each year in the run-up to the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square killings, China tries to intimidate journalists into silence. The 25th anniversary seems to have prompted an even broader crackdown," said CPJ Deputy Director Robert Mahoney from New York.

Bedrooms of the Fallen: Honoring the Casualties of War

BEDROOMS OF THE FALLEN

Over 5,000 men and women have died serving the United States in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. This is a project about who they were - sons, daughters, sisters, brothers - and the bedrooms which they once called their own.

About This Project

These bedrooms once belonged to men and women who died fighting in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. These fallen men and women were blown up by IEDs, RPGs, hand grenades and suicide bombers. They were shot down in ambushes and by snipers. They died in helicopters, in humvees, and in tanks. It all took place thousands of miles away from home, and the country they fought to defend.

The purpose of this project is to honor these fallen – not simply as soldiers, marines, airmen and seamen, but as sons, daughters, sisters and brothers – and to remind us that before they fought, they lived, and they slept, just like us, at home.

Bedrooms of the Fallen was conceived in 2007 as a way to memorialize soldiers and marines who died in Iraq. It was expanded to include casualties from Afghanistan in 2009. Order the book here.



Related: Time LightBox
Bedrooms of the Fallen: Honoring the Casualties of War

Look back: 60 years since Brown v. Board of Education

Brown Sisters Walk to School, Topeka, Kansas, 1953. Photograph by Carl Iwasaki

Via MSNBC

It has been 60 years since the landmark Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education outlawed school segregation in America. The decision shook the country to its core, defying the fundamentals of the country’s most ardent and longstanding manifestations of racism – the legal, physical separation of the races.

 

Portrait of African American students for whom the Board of Education case was brought (Left to right)- Vicki Henderson, Donald Henderson, Linda Brown, James Emanuel, Lucinda Todd and Lena Carper. Topeka, Kansas, 1953. Photo by Carl Iwasaki/Time & Life/Getty   Click for slide show

The 1954 decision ruling that racial segregation in public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment (guaranteeing equal protection), as well as the Fifth Amendment (guaranteeing due process), forced the country – and the court, for that matter – to reckon with the unfulfilled Constitutional rights of countless African Americans who’d for generations been denied the most basic rights.

But many cities and school districts fought compliance of the law. And a year later, in 1955, the Supreme Court ordered that districts desegregate with “all deliberate speed.” While some schools integrated with varying degrees of success, the decision sparked a mass exodus of white students from desegregated public schools.

“If we can organize the Southern States for massive resistance to this order I think that, in time, the rest of the country will realize that racial integration is not going to be accepted in the South,” former Sen. Harry Flood Byrd of Virginia, said in 1954. He called the decision “the most serious blow that has yet been struck against the rights of the states in a matter vitally affecting their authority and welfare.”

In many cases, rather than integrate, state school officials simply shutdown public schools. In one case, in 1959, officials in Prince Edward County Virginia closed the school system, which remained closed for the next five years.

In another act of resistance, white parents began removing their children from the public school system all together. Because Brown v. Board only applied to public schools, white parents across the country began to form what came to be known as “Segregation Academies,” all-white private schools that skirted the Supreme Court’s mandates. The so-called “Seg Academies” flourished throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. And even into the late 1970s and 1980s, when districts began bussing programs to diversify stubbornly segregated public schools, many whites erected barricades, hurled insults and in some cases resorted to petty violence.

Book of the photographs of Guy Gillette captures decades of ranch life in small-town East Texas

Via Cowboys and Indians magazine

Guy Gillette

A new book of the photographs of Guy Gillette captures decades of ranch life in small-town East Texas.

by Dana Joseph

Photos from A Family of the Land: The Texas Photography of Guy Gillette, University of Oklahoma Press.

Guy Gillette liked to tell a good story, whether it was on stage in his younger days as an actor or behind the camera during his long career as a famed photojournalist. By the time Gillette died last August at age 90, his images had appeared in high-profile magazines, books, and exhibitions. He had covered the Korean War, the civil rights movement, and Vietnam War protests. And he had photographed countless celebrities, including Elvis Presley, Audrey Hepburn, Queen Elizabeth II, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

But it was in ordinary country living in rural Houston County, Texas, that Gillette found some of the best stories through his viewfinder. Decades of photographs he took there dating from the 1940s are the subject of the new book A Family of the Land: The Texas Photography of Guy Gillette.

Arnolds, Cafe, Lovelady, Texas, 1956



Click here for slide show.

Gillette came to know the Piney Woods of Southeast Texas by way of New York. Born in Minneapolis, he initially wanted to become an actor and moved to New York to pursue the stage. While a student at the Michael Chekhov Acting Studio, he got work as a busboy at a vegetarian diner, where he met Doris Porter, an aspiring fashion designer from Texas supporting herself waiting tables. The two fell in love, married, and soon began a long series of summer trips from their home in New York to Doris’ family ranch in Houston County.

Gillette had taken up photography as a hobby, and he found the Porter Place — the ranch Doris’ father, Hoyt Porter, had assembled as a young man — and the neighboring small towns of Crockett and Lovelady great ground for practicing the kind of unassuming picture-taking that would become the hallmark of his work. Seeing those early images, a friend in New York encouraged Gillette to follow photography.
    
“In a good photograph, something happens,” Gillette once said, and in Houston County, there was always something happening to train his lens on. On Saturdays, folks turned out to walk around town. There were domino games at the garage. Church homecomings and Bible school. Boot shining and porch conversations. Potlucks and hymn sings. And there was all that went with ranch work and the schooling of Gillette’s two young sons — Guy Porter and Pipp (they would grow up to make award-winning cowboy music as the Gillette Brothers) — in working cattle and riding horses. There were quiet times of cooking breakfast on the range and of cooling off at the water hole. And every now and then there was an emergency, like a tense trip to the vet when a favorite cow dog got its leg broken.
Edward Steichen, who was reportedly moved to tears by an image of a young Guy Jr. looking into the eyes of his injured dog on the vet’s table, chose two of Gillette’s images for the famous Family of Man exhibition. But if some saw art in his photographs, Gillette saw simple, true stories. “Though photography is often called art,” he said, “I have wanted to be artless: to be a documentarian, not an artist.”

Asked to describe what photography meant to him, Gillette struggled for a pithy explanation. If he had a philosophy, he held with the French photographer Brassaï: “I do not look for exceptional subjects. I avoid them,” Gillette said. “I think it is daily life that is the great event, the true reality.”
Telling the simple truth of those stories occupied Gillette his entire life. “It is why I have enjoyed watching the people of Houston County, seeing them through a camera’s viewfinder.”

A Family of the Land: The Texas Photography of Guy Gillette (University of Oklahoma Press, 2013) by Andy Wilkinson is available at www.oupress.com.

http://www.cowboysindians.com/Cowboys-Indians/April-2014/Guy-Gillette/

Finding Vivian Maier screening at Cinematheque in Santa Fe

Finding Vivian Maier

“Compelling … haunting … captivating.”–Variety

John Maloof discovered the work of an amazing photographer—a nanny whom, over the course of 40 years, took more than 100,000 photographs. As Vivian Maier’s work is discovered, in storage lockers and thrift stores, she is being recognized as one of the 20th century’s most prolific and gifted street photographers. Using her unseen photographs and 8mm films, and interviews with dozens who thought they knew her, Maloof tells the story of an unsung master of 20th century expression. (U.S., 2013, 83m, DCP, IFC Films)

Synopsis: Who is Vivian Maier? Now considered one of the 20th century's greatest street photographers, Vivian Maier was a mysterious nanny who secretly took over 100,000 photographs that went unseen during her lifetime. Since buying her work by chance at auction, amateur historian John Maloof has crusaded to put this prolific photographer in the history books. Maier's strange and riveting life and art are revealed through never-before-seen photographs, films, and interviews with dozens who thought they knew her.

Starts April 25 at CCA
Showtimes:Fri-Thurs April 25-May 1: 2:15p, 5:15p*


*After the 5:15pm show on Sunday, April 27 there will be a skype Q&A with co-director, Charlie Siskel, moderated by Michelle Monroe of Monroe Gallery of Photography.

"a celebration of the LIFE magazine photographer who famously shadowed an unknown act in the US on February 1964, The Beatles"



 Screaming Girls, JFK Airport, NY, Febraury 7, 1964.

Copyright Bill Eppridge

“Ladies and Gentlemen The Beatles!”

The Santa Fe Reporter

April 22, 2014

By Enrique Limón

 

Hot off the heels of When Cool Was King, Monroe Gallery of Photography unveils their latest, Bill Eppridge: 1964, a celebration of the LIFE magazine photographer who famously shadowed an unknown act in the US on February 1964, The Beatles.

 

Eppridge was at John F Kennedy airport on assignment for the mag. After consulting with John Lennon, Ringo Starr gave the OK to Eppridge to shadow the group for the next few days and exposed American masses to the British sensation.

 

“Bill never set pictures up; he liked to find pictures and make pictures that way,” Eppridge’s widow Adrienne Aurichio tells SFR.

 

Eppridge’s assignment was just to capture the Fab Four’s arrival. “But nobody expected what happened out there,” she says of the group of rabid fans, some 3,000 strong. 

 

“Bill was somebody who actually did a lot of photo essays,” Aurichio continues. “He liked to do stories in-depth, which is why he stayed with The Beatles for six days.” 

 

The photographer’s gumption paid off and resulted in iconic shots like the group hanging out inside their room at the Plaza Hotel, practicing for their career-making debut on The Ed Sullivan Show and later performing at Carnegie Hall.

 

Those shots are now immortalized in the book The Beatles: Six Days that Changed the World, which Aurichio edited before her husband’s untimely death in October of last year.

 

Aurichio presents and signs the book at the art opening this Friday.

 

“When he saw things happening, he would just follow the story,” she says of her late husband’s approach. “He would try and tell the story as if he were describing it to you and you as a writer would write it. He wanted to show you the story in his pictures, so he would methodically go about it.”

 

Bill Eppridge: 1964

5-7 pm Friday, April 25

Monroe Gallery of Photography

112 Don Gaspar Ave.,

992-08