Photographer Art Shay at Monroe Gallery

Art Shay: Muhammad's Grandchild With Black Muslim Sisters, 1969

Via The Santa Fe New Mexican
Pasatiempo

 Friday, November 25, 2016           

 Paul Weideman The Santa Fe New Mexican

The veteran photographer and writer Art Shay cites Honoré Daumier as a longtime inspiration for his focus on civil rights, social justice, and crime. The 19th-century caricaturist “taught me to aim my predatory camera at the contumely, at snobbery, pretensions, cruelty, and the machinery of petty power,” Shay writes in his 2000 book Album for an Age: Unconventional Words and Pictures from the Twentieth Century. “Daumier was the only master I really recognized,” Shay told Pasatiempo in mid-November, “because I figured out that what he had done and the time he had done it, like the mid-1850s with a sketchpad, was an extraordinary achievement. I feel that some of my pictures capture some of what he was trying to capture.”
A retrospective of Shay’s images as a street photographer and from assignments with Life, Sports Illustrated, and other magazines, is now on exhibit at Monroe Gallery of Photography, and Shay plans to be there for the opening on Friday, Nov. 25. The last time he was in New Mexico, he was an air cadet — it was World War II, and he would soon be serving as a navigator in a Consolidated B-24 Liberator bomber on more than 50 missions.

                    

Shay was born in 1922 and grew up in the Bronx. In a 2013 piece about his years at Life, he writes that his father, Herman Shay, was once friends with Leon Trotsky in Russia but “had a falling out with him. He came to America and ended up in the family trade, a semi-employed tailor during the Depression who taught me chess and gave me a lifetime reverence for Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Hemingway. He taught me to be a mensch and how to forgive. And as a bar mitzvah present in 1935, he gave me his folding Kodak.”

Shay sometimes had occasion to use a camera in the war years. “As a matter of fact, I began my real photo career at an air base,” he said. “After landing from a mission, I heard this great noise in the sky, and I looked up, and there were 200 planes gathering around a buncher beacon, which is a radio signal; they were all going out on another mission, and two of the Liberators suddenly hit, and 20 kids were killed. I had seven pictures of them coming down from impact to the ball of fire on the ground.”

After the war, Shay was employed for two years as a staff writer at Life magazine. He wrote about those times in a 2011 story in the Chicagoist. “The best show,” he wrote, “was the great Life photographers and contributing geniuses like Ansel Adams who desultorily milled around on the 31st floor where most of the magazine happened. The day I met Adams, a big, balding outdoorsy man, he was flummoxed by the very first electronic flash, sent by Heiland, a Milwaukee strobe firm. ‘Imagine — not having to use flashbulbs!’ Adams exclaimed to Margaret Bourke White.” She then told the story of the time during the war that a flashbulb accidentally exploded as she was posing Joseph Stalin; afterward, the Soviet leader demanded she give him the film she had exposed as he hid behind a sofa.

Art Shay: "be Kind Now", c1950

In 1949, Shay began working on a freelance basis for Life, Time, Sports Illustrated, and other magazines. A small sample of his deep portfolio boasts pictures of Marcel Marceau, the Supremes, Vince Lombardi, Jimmy Hoffa, Johnny Cash, Nikita Khrushchev, nine U.S. presidents, Cassius Clay, Judy Garland, and Timothy Leary. There are also hundreds (or thousands) of images of non-celebrities, the results of his candid work as a street photographer, which included a series of explorations of Chicago with writer Nelson Algren during the 1950s. Shay also worked with photographer Francis Reeves Miller on about 40 stories. According to the Chicagoist piece, Miller was the one who taught him “the art of hiding cameras in shoe shine boxes, briefcases, cigarette lighters, in elaborate bow ties, in holes in jackets my wife would come to hate. He taught me the art of the stakeout, especially of Mafia types.”

More than 70 books bear Shay’s authorship. “There were a lot of kids’ books,” he said by way of explanation. “I raised five kids, and I did things to answer their questions: ‘What happens when you mail a letter, daddy?’ ‘What happens when you put money in the bank?’ ” So his resumé includes What It’s Like to Be a Nurse and What Happens in a Car Factory, as well as 40 Common Errors in Golf and Winning Racquetball; in 2012, this veritable Renaissance man was inducted into the National Racquetball Hall of Fame.

Among the images in a 2002 book titled Animals are Kentucky Derby thoroughbreds and monkeys in little racing cars. “As a Life reporter,” he writes in those pages, “I named the first pair of octopuses that mated in captivity.” His 2003 book Couples has some splendid photographs of couples — and of a couple of pigs, a couple of men outside Ed’s Tap & Restaurant, a couple of nuns, and a couple of clowns. He also wrote several plays. His most recent book is My Florence, a photo-essay on his beloved wife, who died in 2012. “She was a famous rare-book dealer and the friend of a lot of writing types and acting types,” he said. “We just sent an invitation to one of them, David Mamet.”

Another book is now in the works at University of Chicago Press. Its subject will be the same as was featured in last year’s Shay exhibition at the Gage Gallery in Chicago. Called Troublemakers, the show focused on “the chaos Chicagoans experienced in their fight for civil rights from 1948 to 1970,” according to a gallery description. “One of the images is of black people with a sign that says, ‘If you believe in human rights, Mr. Mayor, how come there are no blacks in your neighborhood?’ It’s about the ironies of social change,” Shay said. “There are pictures of kids demonstrating, a lot of police brutality, the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and also a lot of good kid pictures and some others about a human-rights battle in my own community, Deerfield, Illinois, in the early 1950s. There’s lots of action and lots of violence. I’ve always been the go-to photographer in Chicago for this kind of picture, as well as for intellectual sports pictures like the guy in the vines.”

It was less than two weeks after the Chicago Cubs had stunned the sports world by winning the World Series, and we had already discussed Shay’s great 1961 photo of an outfielder trying to catch a fly ball while almost totally submerged in the famous ivy at the back of Wrigley Field. The image shows a line of fans leaning out of the stands reacting to the baseball about to enter the gloved hand sticking out of the tangle of vines.

Asked about favorite cameras over the years, Shay said, “I was mostly a Leica user, an experimenter, and I’d adapt to all kinds of activities. My background was as a reporter and then a bureau chief at Life magazine; I was the youngest bureau chief. When I was twenty-six or twenty-seven, I was head of the San Francisco bureau. I still have a bunch of cameras and camera parts that I gaze at fondly every now and then. And I would design trick cameras for certain uses. I did about 80 Mafia stories — with a hidden camera, usually. My wife was my assistant, and she had a favorite purse camera, with which she nailed the head of the Cleveland Mafia, a guy named Moe Dalitz, who was two tables away.”

The Monroe Gallery show features 50 photographs, a pithy sampling from a very long career. “I’ve had something like 1,200 magazine covers,” Shay said. “That’s a lot of comings and goings and packings and unpackings.”

History Seer: Art Shay’s America

Marlon Brando and family dog, Libertyville, Illinois, 1950

Art Shay

Via The Santa Fe Reporter

November 23, 2016

By Maria Egolf-Romero

Lifelong photojournalist Art Shay says that his favorite photo shoot was with the legendary Marlon Brando. He tells SFR—during a phone interview from his home in Chicago—that the superstar asked Shay for lady tips. “We were both the same age, about 27. He said, ‘Well, you’ve been around Life magazine a long time. Can you tell me how you know if a young woman is coming after you—is she really hot for you, or is she trying to advance her career?’”

Shay says he answered with age-old, sage advice: “I advanced the same argument that had been historically advanced, which is, ‘You have to figure some things out for yourself.’”

Now 94, Shay helped cultivate the iconography of American history throughout his 70-year career working for publications such as Life and Time magazines. He’s captured nine presidents and countless celebrities, and his work is in the permanent collections of major institutions like the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago and the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Muddy Waters and his wife, Geneva, 1950

Art Shay

Shay’s portfolio has, in fact, shaped the public experience of modern history. Viewers can see a representative sampling at an upcoming exhibit of his photography opening Friday at Monroe Gallery of Photography. “As you really study his work, it’s almost like the work of multiple different photographers,” says Sid Monroe, who co-owns and curates the gallery with Michelle Monroe. “There is an element of street photography, there is photojournalism and documentary photography, there are some elements that are autobiographical. He photographed his wife over the entire course of his marriage and made really beautiful photographs—if the viewer didn’t know it was his wife, it wouldn’t matter.”

Shay’s photographs may feature many different subjects, but each portrays a mood and a story. “I think there are a couple of components to that,” Monroe continues. “The first criteria for a photographer is that a single image conveys a story, captures the time and the emotion; the second part is less under the control of the photographer, and that is the window of history, being present in a moment. And I think what Art did was recognize that he was in the presence of history.”

The exhibit features about 50 of Shay’s photographs, representing multiple periods throughout his career. “What we found so astounding was the enormous range of his work. We tried to present and illustrate that and, at the same time, show off what we feel is a really unique approach to how he made photographs,” Monroe tells SFR.

Shay’s approach, eye and technique produced everyday images just as striking as his portraits of American elites. “There is something so uniquely American about his experience and his perspective and it translates into his images,” says Monroe. “You have these wonderful pictures of children playing in essentially the ghetto of Chicago, and they are just as iconic as pictures of President Kennedy.”

Shay is a bit of a comedian, too. “There’s a place for humor and most photographers don’t handle it too well, [but] I’d like to think that a lot of my pictures are funny,” he says, referring to a particularly humorous photo he snapped as he witnessed three delivery trucks marooned in snow drifts on an empty street in the Bronx, each emblazoned with the words “co-op.” As the drivers assisted each other in escaping their snowy tombs, Shay’s shutter opened and closed. “So I have one picture in which I show the street trucks cooperating and getting each other out of the snow. I thought that was pretty funny,” he says. “I was only 17. I still think it’s funny.”

Many of the events Shay photographed—especially on magazine assignments—were captured in the presence of a slew of other photographers, yet it is his work that stands out among the crowd and that we still see today. These assignments didn’t always include glamorous celebrities. “What makes one photographer’s image stand that test of time?” Monroe posits. “Again, it’s that ability to really capture it,” he says.

And yet, Shay isn’t quite the famed artist he probably should be. Considering he has photographed everyone from Liz Taylor to Mohammad Ali and many of our nation’s most important protest movements, he’s supremely humble. “Art has been a very gentle soul,” Monroe says of the photographer. “He has worked hard and had great success—he hasn’t promoted himself, he hasn’t really reached for recognition. We feel so fortunate because we feel like we’re almost bringing an undiscovered genius to light. We want to be on the rooftops and say, ‘Hey, everybody look at this guy!”

Art Shay: Storyteller Opening reception
5-7 pm Friday Nov. 25. Free.
Monroe Gallery of Photography,
112 Don Gaspar Ave.,
505-992-0800

Tuesday To-Do in NYC: Underfire: The Untold Story of Pfc. Tony Vaccaro Discussion at ICP

Via ICP

World War II, Tony Vaccaro played two risky roles, serving as a combat infantryman on the front lines, as well as a photographer who shot nearly 8,000 photographs. Though he began as a young GI eager to record the war, he vowed never to take another war photo on the day the conflict ended, horrified by what he had seen.

Underfire: The Untold Story of Pfc. Tony Vaccaro chronicles the life and vision of this remarkable man, exploring how photography defines the way the public perceives armed conflict, and revealing the sheer difficulty of survival while taking photos in a war zone.

Clips from the film will be shown, followed by a panel discussion. (The entire film will not be shown.)

Panelists

• Tony Vaccaro
• Max Lewkowicz
• James Estrin

Bios

With a $47 camera and developing the negatives in his helmet at night, World War II infantryman Tony Vaccaro took nearly 8,000 photographs on the frontline, creating one of the most comprehensive, haunting, and intimate photographic records of combat of all time. In the decades that followed the war, Tony would go on to become a renowned commercial photographer for magazines such as Look, Life, and Flair, capturing everyone from Marilyn Monroe and Sophia Loren to Pablo Picasso and John F. Kennedy. Tony's work is currently on display at a retrospective in Caen, France and housed in a permanent museum in his honor in Bonefro, Italy. His work is represented by Tony Vaccaro Studio in New York and he is the subject of HBO Documentary Underfire: The Untold story of Pfc. Tony Vaccaro, premiering November 14, 2016.

Max Lewkowicz, founder and owner of Dog Green Productions and director of Underfire: The Untold Story of Pfc. Tony Vaccaro, has written, directed, and produced feature films and hundreds of productions for network and public television, museums, and multinational organizations. He is the recipient of a New York Emmy for his feature film Morganthau, as well as the Silver Screen Award at the U.S. International Film and Video Festival, the grand prize of The Chicago International Film Festival, and the 2003 Award of Excellence from the National Association of Museum Exhibitions.

James Estrin is a Senior Staff Photographer for the New York Times. He is also a founder of Lens, the Times's photography blog, and co-edits it with David Gonzalez. Mr. Estrin has worked for the Times since 1987 and was part of a Pulitzer Prize winning team in 2001. He is a co-executive producer of the movie Underfire: The Untold Story of Pfc. Tony Vaccaro, which will appear on HBO in November 2016. He teaches at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism and the School of Visual Arts Digital Photography Program as well as at Anderson Ranch in Aspen, Colorado. Mr. Estrin attended the Advanced Studies Program at the International Center of Photography from 1979 to 1980.

Event Hashtags

#ICPtalks
#ICPMuseum
#ICPalumni

Full details here.


View Tony Vaccaro's photographs at Monroe Gallery of Photography

Join Us Friday, November 25 to Welcome Art Shay

Art Shay: Chili Con Carne, Chicago, 1949

A major exhibition of photographs from one of America’s most accomplished photographers, Art Shay, November 25 through January 22, 2017. Opening reception with Art Shay Friday, November 25, 5-7 PM.

For over 70 years, Art Shay has documented life, combining his gifts of storytelling, humor and empathy. Born in 1922, he grew up in the Bronx and then served as a navigator in the U.S. Army Air Forces in World War II, during which he flew 52 bomber missions and a series of pictures he took of a collision between two B-24s above his air base in East Anglia was published in Look magazine. Shay joined the staff of Life magazine as a writer, and quickly became a Chicago-based freelance photographer for Life, Time, Sports Illustrated and other national publications. He has photographed nine US Presidents and many major figures of the 20th century. Shay also wrote weekly columns for various newspapers, several plays, children's books, sports instruction books, many photo essay books and authored several pays. Shay's photography is in the permanent collections of major museums including the National Portrait Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, and The Art Institute of Chicago. Although his last formal assignment was in 1988, when he shot the night the lights went on at Wrigley Field for Time Magazine, Shay has continued actively photographing in his later years.

View the exhibition on-line here.

Also on exhibit: Tony Vaccaro: War, Peace, Beauty

Tony Vaccaro: War, Peace, Beauty - A Pop Up Retrospective

© Tony Vaccaro: The Violinist, Venice, Italy, 1947

TONY VACCARO: WAR PEACE BEAUTY
A pop-up photographic exhibit, in association with the Monroe Gallery of Photography
November 11 – 21, 2016
10:00 am to 6:00 pm, Mondays through Saturdays; 12 - 6 on Sundays
508 W 26th Street, Loft 5G, New York, NY 10001
Also on view at Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar, Santa Fe, NM

www.monroegallery.com

Essay by Peter Frank from the Catalog TONY VACCARO: WAR, PEACE, BEAUTY

When our lives and our communications were based on a simpler equation than they are now – when there were no social media posts suspended in a zone of truthiness and selfies took a week to come back from the camera store – our relation to the big news and big names of the day was a distant one. Pictures from wars were ominous and dramatic; pictures of celebrities were glamorous and iconic; fashion shots were staged in places we never knew could exist. These people and places and events impacted our lives indirectly – closely enough to get us to vote and go to the movies, but at enough of a remove as to float somewhere between the real and the imagined, the now, the soon, and the later. Time elapsed between the taking and the delivering of the photograph, which gave the photographer just enough room to make a good picture out of a good image – and a good story out of that. This is an entirely different approach to reportorial photography than we’re used to these days; it allowed photographs of urgency and beauty to be artful as well as truthful. Major periodicals were built on this approach, and for decades brought both the world and the brilliance of the people who photographed it to a huge and hungry audience.

Tony Vaccaro is one of these brilliant photographers, one of the last. He may have lived long enough to see his values all but swallowed up by the vacuity of today’s globalized and instantaneous sociobabble; but Vaccaro has also lived long enough to see his own work, along with his peers’ from the golden age of photojournalism, enshrined as examples of the-news-as-art. Vaccaro was adept at conveying what a portrait subject meant to her or his civilization with the same immediacy invested in what a tank rolling through a town meant. Both images had a monumental right-thereness, the moment at once fleeting and eternal. And such images retain that vitality and profundity to this day.

Vaccaro’s early life was spent between the United States, where he was born in Pennsylvania in 1922, and Italy, where his parents’ families resided. In 1939, with the formation of the Axis, Tony and his sisters reclaimed their American passports and returned Stateside. Encouraged by a high school art teacher in suburban New York, Vaccaro discovered himself as a photographer at age 20 – just in time to enter the army and be sent over to England with the 83rd Infantry Division. The “Thunderbolt Division” landed on Omaha Beach two weeks after D-Day and fought its way into Germany, participating in the Battle of the Bulge. As a frontline scout, Vaccaro had both time and inclination to compile photographic documentation of combat, army life, and the newly liberated Europeans he encountered. Discharged from the army in September 1945, Vaccaro stayed in Germany until 1949, working as a photographer for (among other news services) Weekend, the Sunday supplement of Army newspaper Stars and Stripes. His documentation of postwar life throughout Europe was as reverberant as his combat-zone work had been, and – recording as it does both momentous political occasions and everyday life in a continent reduced to rubble – as much of a contribution to history.

Returning to the United States, Vaccaro embarked upon a career as a feature and fashion photographer. This was at a time when glossy weekly publications, with their emphasis on the visual, comprised a form of communication distinct from, complementary to, and every bit as  successful as daily newspapers. Vaccaro spent more than two decades contributing to such magazines as Life, Look, Town and Country, Harper’s Bazaar, Newsweek, Venture, Quick, and Flair, working out of Rome as well as New York and proving equally adept at portraiture, fashion, and action photography. Indeed, many of his published photographs in various genres have proven signal images of the postwar era, etched into the public’s memory as deeply as those of Arnold Newman, Margaret Bourke-White, or Vaccaro’s friend W. Eugene Smith. People know Gwen Verdon, Sophia Loren, Anna Magnani, and Ali MacGraw through his lens as much as they do through the lens of filmmakers; his photo series on Georgia O’Keeffe culminated in an unforgettable picture of the painter holding an abstract painting before the landscape that inspired it. Vaccaro’s vast inventory includes many more such photographs, published and unpublished. In his day he was one of the more sensitive photographers of artists, whether capturing a pensive Jackson Pollock in his studio, a stolid Giorgio de Chirico in raking light, or Frank Lloyd Wright gesturing like a conductor while lecturing at Taliesin. Vaccaro’s postwar portrayals of Europeans, especially Italians, capture in still photography the gritty but poignant neo-realist spirit of filmmakers like Vittorio de Sica and Luchino Visconti. His often experimental fashion shoots play on the animated patterns and extravagant contours coming out of European fashion houses in the 1950s and ‘60s. No matter who they are, Vaccaro seems to empathize with the thoughts and spirits of his subjects, endowing his pictures with a doubled allure for the viewer: you wish you’d been there even as you feel you somehow had been. This allure is only heightened by Vaccaro’s exquisite compositional sense, a formal elegance that calls attention to the subject rather than to itself even as it pervades everything. As Vaccaro has said, “I was born with this idea in my head that every photograph has an order. I have always believed in this. Without geometry, I don’t do photography. Each photograph must be in the geometry.”

As the glossy weeklies (the fashion magazines excepted) waned in prominence in the 1970s, Vaccaro worked less and less with them until officially retiring in 1982. Of course, he has not put his camera down for an instant since, adding steadily to an oeuvre that now numbers some half-a-million pictures. About to celebrate his 94th birthday, Vaccaro is still very much among us. Despite many honors in Europe and America, however, despite numerous exhibitions and upwards of a dozen publications, Vaccaro’s remains a name just beyond the public tongue. We know so many of his images, we respond so readily to his intimate connection with his subjects and his innate ability to compose a picture, but we can’t quite place the signature. The experts know him, historians cite him, his peers laud him as their equal, and those who would keep such inventive photojournalism alive in our Instagram culture turn to him for inspiration. But only now, with a new television documentary and new exhibitions and publications, are the rest of us coming to recognize Tony Vaccaro, not just as one of many cameras in the crowd but as an artist, artisan, reporter and story-teller with his own style and spirit – and, again, author of some of the quintessential images of the postwar era.

— Peter Frank

For further information please contact Monroe Gallery of Photography.

Review Santa Fe Photo Festival November 2 - 6

Via Center

Review Santa Fe Photo Festival, NOVEMBER 2-6, 2016, is the premier juried portfolio review event in the world. The Festival offers photographers, reviewers and photo enthusiasts a week of photographic programming and events. Review Santa Fe Photo Festival 2016 features a number of ways to connect including: two professional development workshops (career reviews & preparing for reviews), exhibitions, artist talks, portfolio viewing, two receptions, a dinner honoring Susan Meiselas and more. You can view the full event schedule here.

There are lots of ways to get involved in Review Santa Fe Photo Festival. CENTER Award & Grant winners will be offering a number of free and open to the public artist talks Friday, November 4 & Saturday, November 5. The Review Santa Fe 100 photographers will be showcasing their work at Portfolio Viewing the evening of Friday, November 4. In addition to free public programming, Review Santa Fe Photo Festival is offering a festival pass which offers entry into two private receptions with artists and reviewers and VIP hour at Portfolio Viewing. The pass offers a great way to stay plugged in to the CENTER network, and connect with artists and reviewers.

UNDERFIRE: THE UNTOLD STORY OF PFC. TONY VACCARO, RECOUNTING THE LIFE OF A WWII COMBAT INFANTRYMAN AND WAR PHOTOGRAPHER, DEBUTS NOV. 14 ON HBO

Via HBO PR


"In World War II, Tony Vaccaro played two risky roles, serving as a combat infantryman on the front lines, as well as a photographer who shot 8,000 photographs. Though he began as a young GI eager to record the war, he vowed never to take another war photo on the day the conflict ended, horrified by what he had seen." (click for full press announcement)

The poignant documentary debuts Monday, Nov. 14 (8:00–9:15 p.m. ET/PT), exclusively on HBO.


TONY VACCARO : WAR, PEACE, BEAUTY
A pop-up photographic retrospective exhibit, in association with The Monroe Gallery of Photography.
November 11 - 21, 2016
508 W 26th St Loft 5G, New York, NY 10001
505.992.0800/ info@monroegallery.com for information
Also on view at Monroe Gallery of Photography, Santa Fe, NM.

Related: Monroe Gallery of Photography is honored to represent Tony Vaccaro

Monroe Gallery Announces Three Exhibitions For November

Monroe Gallery of Photography announces three timely exhibits for November, two of which coincide with major film releases.

Beginning November 1, LIFE magazine photographer Grey Villet's intimate images of Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple who married and then spent the next nine years fighting for the right to live as a family in their hometown, will be on exhibit.

Their civil rights case, Loving v. Virginia, went all the way to the Supreme Court, which in 1967 reaffirmed the very foundation of the right to marry. On November 4, the feature film “Loving” opens, from acclaimed writer/director Jeff Nichols and starring Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga in the roles of Richard and Mildred Loving. Grey Villet’s photographs are on exhibit November 1 – December 31, 2016, and will then be exhibited at Photo LA, January 12 – 17, 2017.

Monroe Gallery of Photography will present a pop-up gallery exhibition in collaboration with veteran curator and art critic Peter Frank: “Tony Vaccaro: War, Peace, Beauty”, November 11 to 21, 2016, at 508 West 26th Street, 5th floor, in the West Chelsea Arts Building in New York City. The exhibit opens with a reception for Tony Vaccaro, Friday, November 11, 6 – 8 pm. Sidney and Michelle Monroe will be in attendance. Tony Vaccaro’s photographs will be on exhibit concurrently at Monroe Gallery in Santa Fe, NM, through December 31, 2016.

The Vaccaro exhibits coincide with the HBO premiere on Monday, November 14, of the documentary film “Under Fire: The Untold Story of Private First Class Tony Vaccaro”. The film tells the story of how Tony survived the war, fighting the enemy while also documenting his experience at great risk, developing his photos in combat helmets at night and hanging the negatives from tree branches. The film also encompasses a wide range of contemporary issues regarding combat photography such as the ethical challenges of witnessing and recording conflict, the ways in which combat photography helps to define how wars are perceived by the public, and the sheer difficulty of staying alive while taking photos in a war zone.

Finally, on November 25 Monroe Gallery presents a major exhibition of photographs from one of America’s most accomplished photographers, Art Shay. The exhibit of 50 photographs opens Friday, November 25 with a reception for the 94-year old photographer from 5 – 7 PM, and continues through January 22, 2017.

Gallery hours are 10 to 5 Daily, admission is free. For further information, please contact the Gallery.

Hikaru “Carl” Iwasaki, famed Japanese-American photographer, dies at 93 in Denver

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

Via The Denver Post


Hikaru “Carl” Iwasaki, an American of Japanese heritage who was relocated to a World War II internment camp as a teen and went on to become a renowned photojournalist, died last week in his Denver home. He was 93.

As a contributor to Time, Life and Sports Illustrated magazines, among other publications, Iwasaki photographed several presidents and multiple sport stars. His work also included many everyday Japanese-Americans settling throughout the country in the aftermath of World War II internment as well as documenting the civil rights movement, including Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kan., in the 1950s.

“He was a real old-timer, well-known in this community among other (photographers) and journalists,” said Dick Woodbury, a colleague and long-time friend.

Woodbury, who met Iwasaki at an Air Force Academy home football game in 1962, described his friend as “a kind, gracious, unassuming person, a very hard worker.”

Born Oct. 18, 1923, in San Jose, Calif., Iwasaki became interested in photography through his high school yearbook and newspaper. At age 19, Iwasaki and his family were sent to an internment camp in Heart Mountain, Wyo.

Iwasaki’s photo skills led him to a position with the War Relocation Authority photo unit in Denver, where he worked in a darkroom. He soon became a WRA photographer, documenting Japanese-Americans released from camps as they resettled throughout the country.

Over the course of his journalism career, Iwasaki photographed Presidents Ford, Nixon, Truman and Eisenhower.

Eisenhower’s connections to Denver — he recovered from a heart attack here — helped Iwasaki form a special bond with Ike.

“Not many people know about this, but (Eisenhower) loved to paint,” Iwasaki told the Monroe Gallery of Photography in 2010. “I photographed him painting, and he autographed it for me. … I got to know him very well.”

Monroe featured Iwasaki’s work in a Santa Fe gallery.

“Everyone recognizes his work as a photographer,” said Dean Iwasaki, his son. “It was real art. He had an eye for that.”

Iwasaki had been a member of the Denver Press Club since the 1950s.

He was preceded in death by his wife, Beatrice, in 2005. He is survived by two sons, Dean, of Denver, and John, of Connecticut; a daughter, Janice, of California; two stepsons, Tom and Ed; and numerous grandchildren.

Private family services are pending.

Carl Iwasaki's photograph of the Brown Sisters in featured in the current exhibition "History in a Moment" through November 20, 2016.

The Story of Richard and Mildred Loving

Photograph by Grey Villet

Richard and Mildred Loving laughing and watching television

in their living room, King and Queen County, Virginia, 1965

Exhibit of Photographs Coincides with Feature Film “Loving” Premiere

Santa Fe--Monroe Gallery of  Photography, 112 Don Gaspar, is pleased to exhibit  LIFE magazine photographer Grey Villet's intimate images of an interracial couple, Richardand Mildred Loving, who married and then spent the next nine years fighting for the right to live as a family in their hometown. Their civil rights case, Loving v. Virginia, went all the way to the Supreme Court, which in 1967 reaffirmed the very foundation of the right to marry. Grey Villet’s photographs are on exhibit November 1 – December 21, 2016.

On November 4, the feature film “Loving” opens, from acclaimed writer/director Jeff Nichols and starring Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga in the roles of Richard and Mildred Loving.

The families of Richard Perry Loving and Mildred Delores Jeter had lived in Caroline County, Virginia for generations. Richard first met Mildred while listening to her brothers play music at the Jeters’ home. They dated for a few years before deciding to marry. Interracial marriage was illegal in Virginia and in twenty-five other states. For this reason, on June 2, 1958, Richard brought to his bride-to-be to Washington, D.C., where there were no racial bans on marriage.

Based on an anonymous tip that the Lovings were illegally living as a married, sheriff Garnett Brooks and two deputies burst into the Lovings’ bedroom on July 11, 1958 at 2 a.m. When Richard explained that the woman in bed with him was his wife, Brooks replied, “Not here she’s not.” They were arrested for unlawful cohabitation and both pled not guilty. Richard only spent one night in jail while Mildred had to spend four; Richard was told that he would be put back in jail if he tried to bail out his wife.

In October 1958, the grand jury of the Circuit Court of Caroline County charged the Lovings with violating two sections of Virginia’s 1924 Racial Integrity Act. Because Richard was white and Mildred was African American and Native American, their marriage was illegal and a felony offence in Virginia.

On January 6, 1959, the Lovings pleaded guilty to the felony charge of miscegenation and Judge Leon M. Bazile sentenced them to one year in prison. The sentence was suspended if the Lovings agreed to be banished from Virginia for twenty-five years. On appeal, Bazile refused to set aside his original verdict, thereby propelling the Lovings’ case toward the U.S. Supreme Court, stating, “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay, and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”

Banished from Virginia, the Lovings’ moved to Washington, D.C. In June 1963, Mildred wrote to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, asking if the new Civil Rights legislation would help her family return to Virginia. Kennedy responded that Mildred contact the American Civil Liberties Union, who had been actively pursuing anti-miscegenation test cases since the late 1950s. ACLU attorneys Bernard S. Cohen and Philip J. Hirschkop took the Lovings’ case, filing a brief in November 1964. The Loving v. Virginia decision delivered on June 12, 1967, found all miscegenation laws unconstitutional.

From Chief Justice Earl Warren’s 1967 unanimous opinion:
"Marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man," fundamental to our very existence and survival. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the State."

In an era before any digital tinkering with results was possible, Grey Villet’s technique was one that required intense concentration, patience and understanding of his subjects joined with a technical mastery that allowed rapid use of differing cameras and lenses to capture and compose the "right stuff" on film as it happened. “RIGHTS, RACE & REVOLUTIONS:A Portrait of LIFE in 1960s America by Grey Villet” was exhibited at the Museum at Bethel Woods April 2 – December 31, 2016. Grey Villet died in 2000.

Gallery hours are 10 to 5 Daily, admission is free. Visit www.monroegallery.com for more information.