Today marks the start of the new exhibit "Ed Kashi: Abandoned Moments", now on view through April 24. Please join us live in the Gallery or on-line via Zoom for a special discussion with Ed Kashi on April 1 at 5:30 (MDST).
WIDEWALLS
Monroe Gallery of Photography Announced Exclusive Representation of Ed Kashi
ART DAILY
Monroe Gallery of Photography announces representation of photojournalist Ed Kashi
In January, we were honored to host photojournalist David Butow for an exhibition and discussion about his new book "Brink".
He is now covering the massive humanitarian crisis inside Ukraine and along its borders. POLITICO recently featured his photographs in the essay "On the ground in Ukraine, in photos: Millions flee their homes amid intensifying Russian attacks." Click to view.
Santa Fe, NM -- Monroe Gallery of Photography is honored to announce exclusive representation of Ed Kashi, a renowned photojournalist, filmmaker, speaker, and educator dedicated to documenting the social and political issues that define our times.
A new exhibit celebrates “Abandoned Moments: A Love Letter to Photography” (Kehrer Verlag, March 2022) his newest book; featuring photographs made over a 40-year period that reveal imprecise glimpses of transitory events filled with frenetic energy – the chaos of everyday life.
On April 1, Ed Kashi will be in discussion in the Gallery and streaming on-line via Zoom. Event starts promptly at 5:30 pm (MT), RSVP and Zoom registration at 505.992.0800, www.monroegallery.com, or info@monroegallery.com
Kashi’s sensitive eye and an intimate and compassionate relationship to his subjects are signatures of his intense and unsparing work. As a member of VII Photo Agency, Kashi has been recognized for his complex imagery and its compelling rendering of the human condition. Kashi continues to create compelling imagery and engage with the world in new ways.
“I take on issues that stir my passions about the state of humanity and our world, and I deeply believe in the power of still images to change people’s minds. I’m driven by this fact; that the work of photojournalists and documentary photographers can have a positive impact on the world. The access people give to their lives is precious as well as imperative for this important work to get done. Their openness brings with it a tremendous sense of responsibility to tell the truth but to also honor their stories.”
– Ed Kashi
Abandoned Moments Book Trailer from Ed Kashi on Vimeo.
Via MIT Knight Science Journalism
Journalist Nina Berman has been reporting on the hostile sonic environment that U.S. military training is creating in some civilian communities.
Via Berkeley School of Journalism
CANCELLED
Photographs by David Butow
on view in the Reva & David Logan Gallery for Documentary Photography
UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, North Gate Hall
A live conversation with photographer David Butow and Berkeley Journalism Prof. Ken Light, followed by Q&A with Berkeley Journalism students Kathryn Styer MartÃnez ('23) and Mathew Miranda ('22)
Live stream:
https://youtu.be/7uUVql_0Kmo
Friday, March 11, 2022 | 5:00-6:00 PM (PT)
Statement from David Butow:
A few weeks before the 2016 presidential election, I traveled to the swing states of the upper Midwest to try to get a sense of what was driving support for Donald Trump. I fully expected Hillary Clinton to win but Trump had tapped into something I didn't understand, and I was surprised that this self-centered, unscrupulous businessman who seemed to have no interest in government, was the Republican nominee.
His stunning victory, and the sense that the country would go through a very strange period, compelled me to move from California to Washington, D.C. I'd spent decades as a photojournalist covering, in part, the results of public policy, but I'd never worked inside the halls of power in the nation's capital. This seemed like a good time to do it, and while I expected the incompetence, I underestimated the treachery.
The first three years were an endless stream of scandals, highly-charged congressional hearings on Capitol Hill and declassé press events at the White House. I was curious what happened outside of the frame of television cameras and tried to make photographs that were different from typical pictures designed for the daily news cycle and quick hits on the web.
In 2020, everything changed. The drama and tension was acute, and visceral. Americans were dying of COVID-19 by the thousands, the administration was slow to respond and protests of the murder of George Floyd pressed up to the very gates of the White House. Late in the year, after Joe Biden's victory, the president and his hard-core supporters laid the groundwork for challenging the election.
On the afternoon of January 6, 2021 I was standing on the west steps of the Capitol watching something so surreal, dramatic and terrible, for a few seconds, or maybe it was minutes, I lowered my camera and just tried to process what I was seeing through the foggy view of my gas mask. The next few weeks at the Capitol were unrecognizable, as young National Guard troops carrying loaded machine guns stood on patrol behind miles of razor wire, protecting U.S. democracy from its own citizens.
It was then that I knew I must organize the work I'd begun four years earlier into a narrative that would at least illuminate the arc of events that had brought the country to this point. We lived through history minute by minute, so much so that the gravitas of what transpired is apparent only when you step back and see how the whole saga unfolded. As revisionists seek to trivialize or downplay the events of 2016-21, it's critical to maintain a record of just how close the presidency of Donald Trump brought U.S. democracy to the brink of collapse.
Four years ago, I thought this period would be an aberration. Regrettably, I no longer hold that view.
This past weekend, Bob Gomel returned to the site of where some of his most historic and iconic images were made 58 years ago.
In February of 1964, Muhammad Ali, then as Cassius Clay, was training for his Heavyweight Championship fight in Miami with Sonny Liston, Bob Gomel was assigned by Life magazine to cover the matchup. Clay was an 8–1 underdog, but Gomel was assigned to take photographs of him in advance of the fight that could be used on the cover of the next weekly Life issue in case Clay upset Sonny Liston.
History was made on Tuesday night, February 25, 1964 as Clay defeated Lison in a 7-round TKO. Bob Gomel was ringside photographing the fight, and instinctively followed the triumphant Clay back into his dressing rom. From there, he accompanied the crowd to the Hampton House Motel for a celebration with ice cream along with Malcolm X and an entourage. The story was later shared on the big screen in the movie "One Night In Miami".
Shortly thereafter, bolstered by his mentor Malcolm X, Clay stepped in front of a room of journalists to declare his conversion to the Nation of Islam. After fielding hostile questions, he voiced the words that would become his lifelong anthem and would forever change the world of sports: “I don’t have to be what you want me to be.”
Via the Daily Hampshire Gazette
It’s arguably one of the most iconic album covers of all time, certainly in the folk and pop world: a young Bob Dylan, on the cusp of stardom, walks down a slushy street in Greenwich Village in New York City, hands in his pockets and shoulders hunched against the cold, as his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, clings to his left arm.
That image, from the 1963 disc “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” came out of a session that Don Hunstein, a longtime director of photography for Columbia Records, had staged with Dylan in the singer’s nearby apartment, capturing the rising folk star as he played his acoustic guitar, sprawled in a beat-up armchair, and tried at one point to smoke and sing at the same time — another memorable shot
Those are just two of hundreds of impressive images that are now preserved on a website dedicated to Hunstein’s work, a site put together by Hunstein’s daughter, Tina Cornell, who lives in Florence with her family, and cdeVision, a Holyoke web studio specializing in advertising, website design and more.
Along with taking many shots of Dylan in his early career, Hunstein, who died in 2017, photographed a huge array of stars on Columbia’s roster from the late 1950s into the 1980s: Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, Barbara Streisand, Simon and Garfunkel, Johnny Cash, Janis Joplin, Billy Joel.
The photographer also shot hundreds of album covers, including Loretta Lynn’s memorable “Coal Miner’s Daughter” from 1970, as well as the records of classical musicians including pianist Glenn Gould.
Hunstein, born in 1928 in Missouri, grew up in St. Louis but settled in New York in the 1950s. He made his mark as a documentary photographer — his adopted home was a favorite subject — whose unobtrusive style, Cornell says, helped put his subjects at ease.
As one of his obituaries noted, “Don had the ability to listen with his camera. Instinctively he under stood that to capture artists at their best moments, patience, trust and humility were needed.”
Now Cornell and her mother, DeeAnne Hunstein, who also helped develop the website, are hoping to bring some more attention to Hunstein’s work, in turn highlighting an era when photography became an important tool for documenting the cultural history of music.
“My dad was humble to a fault, just very self-effacing,” Cornell said during a recent phone call. “He didn’t act like a fan [of musicians] or put himself out there like he was some kind of big shot … He saw this as a job, and he always said he was lucky to be at the right place at the right time.
“And yet he created all these great images,” she noted. “People liked him — they felt comfortable around him, he was good at making a joke, and that’s why he was able to do what he did.”
Case in point: Cornell says Johnny Cash could sometimes be testy with reporters and photographers, but her father and the gritty country singer hit it off, with Cash inviting Hunstein to visit him on his Texas ranch in the late 1950s.
Though Hunstein mostly took black and white photos, his website offers a couple especially atmospheric images of Cash in color. In one, wearing a checked shirt and a straw hat, he leans on a worn wooden fence rail and looks off moodily into the distance. In another, the singer, this time decked out in dark suit and white shirt, sits with his guitar on a huge woodpile, his nearby open guitar case revealing a bright purple interior.
“I love that mix of colors!” Cornell said.
hen there’s the near-silhouette of jazz great Thelonious Monk, hunched over a piano, a cigarette dangling from his mouth (there was a lot of smoking in Columbia’s studios in those days). And Cornell says one of her father’s favorite photos was an image he took of Duke Ellington, his “all-time hero,” as she puts it.
“My dad used to say he was really lucky to have this job, because he was such a huge music fan himself,” she said.
‘Don Hunstein did all this?!’
Bill Alatalo, a co-partner of cdeVision with Antonio Costa, says the company actually first designed a website for Hunstein’s work perhaps a dozen years ago after Cornell first approached them. It was a simpler affair, with far fewer images, Alatalo notes, in part because Cornell and her mother were busy at the time trying to help Hunstein, who struggled with Alzheimer’s disease for about a decade before his death.
Then Cornell got back in touch about a year ago, Alatalo said, and asked if cdeVision could develop a new site. “The old one kind of got lost in the shuffle, and at this point Tina had a lot more photos for us to work with,” he said. “Antonio and I were amazed — we were like, ‘Don Hunstein did all this?!’ ”
As a music lover and record collector himself, Alatalo says the Hunstein website “has just been a cool project to work on, to really give it some play and give people a better sense of what he did.” The website also dovetails with other music-related work cdeVision has done in recent years, Alatalo said, such as designing a new site for Hawks & Reed Performing Arts Center in Greenfield.
For Cornell, who was born in 1968, her father’s website is a deeply personal project. She was inspired by his work as she got older, she says, and studied photography herself as well as drawing and painting. She came to the Valley about 20 years ago with a former partner, and the couple had plans then to create a pottery studio. Today she works as a jeweler and goldsmith and also is involved with a local chapter of an environmental group, Mothers Out Front.
She can remember going as a kid to her father’s studio at Columbia Records, then located in a building on 52th Street near 5th Avenue in Manhattan, and “playing with the props” while her dad was arranging shots of various artists.
“It wasn’t until I was older that I really developed an awareness of the full scope of his work,” she said.
Cornell and her mother have also established the new website as a means of protecting the provenance of Hunstein’s work. Some of his photos now crop up online, such as on people’s Instagram sites, and go uncredited, she noted, and she’s had to ask people to remove the pictures.
In addition, the Sony Corp. bought Columbia Records (and Columbia Pictures) in the late 1980s, acquiring all of Hunstein’s work for the record label, and Cornell and her mother have since worked with Sony to gain access to many of those images.
Ultimately, Cornell says, the website is designed to reacquaint people with her father’s work and his era as a photographer. He never took to computers or digital photography, she notes, instead working with contact sheets in his darkroom, giving his photos a distinctive style and pedigree that she believes is worth commemorating.
More are added to the website regularly, she says, and the site also has many images her father took of Puerto Rican communities in New York City in the early 1960s, part of a book project for an English publisher.
“My dad was just a huge part of my life,” she said. “This is my way of honoring that.”
Ansel Adams is one of the first names that springs to mind when people think about photography. This exhibition of sixteen prints from the museum’s collection, augmented with two promised gifts, concentrates on the photographs that Adams made around 1932, before he became a household name.
In the late 1920s, Adams shifted away from the soft-edged style of pictorialism, prominent in the early twentieth century, toward hard-edged modernism. In 1932, he and several of his San Francisco Bay Area compatriots formed Group f/64 and issued a manifesto declaring their dedication to “pure photography.” For Adams, that meant a commitment to the precision of the camera; use of glossy, high-contrast photo paper; and visualization of the final image before releasing the shutter.
Ansel Adams: Pure Photography includes close-up nature studies, portraits, and views of architecture Adams made during this formative time. A small selection of later photographs, including two of his most iconic prints, Aspens, New Mexico and Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico. The artist’s hard work and ambition come to fruition in these later images, illustrating how his work of the 1930s developed into the mature style for which he is internationally celebrated.
Related: A look at the early, intimate works of photographer Ansel Adams
Via The Historic Hampton House
The event commemorates the legacy of Cassius Clay's (Muhammad Ali's) momentous victory against Sonny Liston on February 25, 1964.
About this event
The Greatest Weekend is a three-day inaugural festival taking place at the Historic Hampton House Museum & Cultural Center in Brownsville, Miami, Florida, on February 25-27, 2022.
The event commemorates the legacy of Muhammad Ali’s momentous victory against Sonny Liston on February 25, 1964, in Miami Beach, which earned him boxing's World Heavyweight Championship title.
The Line-Up
Join us for discussions Ringside, Music in the Courtyard, Food Court with food trucks and vendors at the Villagers Welcome Plaza (West entry) with friends of The Historic Hampton House.
*Schedule is subject to change*
Friday, February 25th - Welcome to The Greatest Weekend-6:00 to 11:00 PM
6:00 PM Opening Reception - Kick-off the evening with lite bites and drinks. 6:30 PM Welcome and Evening Festivities! 7:00 PM-The Weigh-In-Sonny Liston and Cassius Clay Discussion lead by Boxing Historian Ramiro Otero 8:00 PM-Round One: Clay in Allapattah-The story of Cassius Clay living in Miami through the eyes of neighbors, moderated by Calvin Hughes 9:00 PM - The Concert - Carla Cooke (daughter of Sam Cooke) graces The Hampton House Stage.
Saturday, February 26th - The Boxing Match Continues! Round for Round-10:00 AM to 6:00 PM
10:00 AM-Round Two: Fifth Street Gym-Training Cassius Clay, a discussion narrative of his training. 11:15 AM-12:15 PM-Round Three: Third Man in the Ring-Whom did you come to see? The referee is the main attraction, decisions, and calls during the fight. 12:30-1:45 pm-Have a seat in Your Corner: LUNCH IN THE FOOD COURT - Enjoy the fare from local food trucks and shop with vendors in the courtyard at the Historic Hampton House. 2:00-3:15 PM-Round Four: Women Around The Ring-Calling to Remembrance, the life of Cassius Clay, boxing through the eyes of love and friendship moderated by Tameka Hobbs. 3:30-5:00 PM-Round Five: The Knockout-Knockout Shots! A conversation with photojournalist Bob Gomel, returning to The Historic Hampton House after 58 years.
MUSIC, FOOD FESTIVITIES CONTINUE IN THE COURTYARD AND FOOOOOOD COURT!
Sunday, February 27th - The Historic Hampton House Tours at 11:00 AM, 1:00 PM, and 4:00 PM
The event is FREE but must have tickets to enter the museum. Get tickets here.
Food Court does not require tix but admission will be limited. It’s gonna be a real KNOCKOUT! Come be a part of the Inaugural event of Great Conversation, Music, Dance, Food, and Fun!!
You can help the Historic Hampton House raise funds to acquire Bob Gome's prints to stay at the Historic Hampton House for permanent display here.
