Saturday, June 13, 2015

EDDIE ADAMS DAY 2015




             



via New Kensington Camera Club


Please join us to celebrate the life and times of one of America's greatest photographers, New Kensington's own PULITZER PRIZE WINNER,
EDDIE ADAMS.




- 1969 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Spot News Photography -



Show Opening Saturday, June 13th, 2015
10:00am at the Alle-Kiski Valley Heritage Museum in Tarentum, PA. The program will include a Marine Color Guard, special guests, a display of 21 large Eddie Adams prints from his Paris Exhibition, a display of photos by Barry Lavery, and the Inspired by Eddie Adams Show by members of the New Kensington Camera Club. Light refreshments will be provided for guests at the Museum.
 
A screening of the Eddie Adams documentary,
"An Unlikely Weapon" will take place at 1:00pm
 
A dinner at the Clarion Hotel in New Kensington will follow at 6:00pm with special guest speaker,  Justin Merriman of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. The photo exhibit will run throughout the month of June.
 
Proceeds from the show and dinner will be used toward the purchase of a Pennsylvania Historical Marker for Eddie Adams in his hometown of New Kensington, PA. Additional proceeds will be used toward the Eddie Adams, John Filo Scholarship fund and ƒ-Stop ALS/NKCC Cares.
Museum Admission is $5.00 (free to all paid members of NKCC  & Alle-Kiski Valley Historical Society)
Dinner Tickets are on sale for $25.00
Tickets for the EAD2015 Dinner may be purchased in advance from NKCC or  the Alle-Kiski Valley Heritage Museum. A limited number of tickets will be available at the door before the dinner.
 


Eddie Adams Day is an event held by the New Kensington Camera Club with the cooperation and sponsorship of the Alle-Kiski Valley Historical Society.
Visit nkcameraclub.org and akvhs.org for further information.




Special Guests
   
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review Photographer


Justin Merriman


Justin Merriman (b. September 28, 1977), an award-winning photojournalist with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, has spent more than a decade traveling the world to cover politics, wars, natural disasters and civil unrest. His work has appeared in leading national publications and he has received multiple top
journalism awards.

After covering the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks – including the crash of United Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania – Merriman committed to chronicling the U.S. military and its war on terror. He has followed this story across the United States and into the conflict zones of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He also has covered life in Fidel Castro’s Cuba in 2002, India’s efforts to
eradicate polio from its population, the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Pope Benedicts XVI’s visit to Cuba in 2012, the 2013 conclave and election of
Pope Francis in Rome, the second anniversary of Egypt’s revolution and subsequent unrest, Russia’s invasion of Crimea and the international political crisis that unfolded in Ukraine in 2014, and most recently, traveled the U.S. border with Mexico documenting issues on immigration.

Merriman has worked at the Tribune- Review since 1999, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, American Profile Magazine, Time, USA Today, MSNBC, Sports
Illustrated and publications across the globe. He has been recognized with numerous regional, national and international awards from organizations including: the Society of Professional Journalists, the National Press Photographers Association, the Society for News Design, the Atlanta Photojournalism Seminar, the Northern Short Course, the Southern Short Course, the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, the Military Reporters and Editors Association, and the Western Pennsylvania Press Club. He was awarded Photographer of the Year by the News Photographer Association of Greater Pittsburgh four times.

In 2014, Merriman received awards for his work in Egypt including the top award in the International Photo Story category in the Northern Short Course contest and an award of excellence in the Pictures of the Year International Competition for News Picture Story.

Born in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, Merriman graduated from the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg in 2000 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Writing. In 2009, the university awarded him its prestigious Alumnus of Distinction award.

Currently Merriman lives in Oakmont with his fiancé, Stephanie Strasburg, also a photojournalist with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

Justin is a Barnstorm XV alumnus and worked for the Valley News Dispatch.


    

  
Photographic work of Eddie Adams can be viewed at the Monroe Gallery of Photography.

For more information visit http://eddieadamsday.com/

Thursday, May 28, 2015

REVIEW: Margaret Bourke-White: Pioneering Photographer


Fort Peck Dam, Fort Peck, MT, 1936 (Cover for first issue of LIFE magazine)
Margaret Bourke-White, Fort Peck Dam, Fort Peck, MT, silver gelatin photograph, 14” x 11”, 1936
THE Magazine
June, 2015

IMAGINE, IF YOU CAN, A WORLD IN WHICH PHOTOGRAPHS WERE A RARE FORM

 of artistic documentation whose workings few understood. Imagine the United States in the first third of the twentieth century, with illiteracy and poverty key defining characteristics of the pitiable lives led by you and most everyone you knew. Images had nearly the power and drama, then, that they did during the Counter-Reformation in Europe, when the Catholic Church fought back against dull Protestantism with paintings as theatrical as opera sets, their shadowy depths filled with depictions of gruesome martyrdom—lit only at the moment of a would-be saint’s transmutation from agonizingly human into gloriously divine. Radiant sculptural forms of gold and silver reflected not merely the material wealth but the spiritual wealth of a religion that had dominated that part of the world for roughly a millennium. Bring yourself back now, from the seventeenth to the twentieth century and from Europe to the United States, populated by the shell-shocked heroes of the Great War dancing with pretty little flappers, their bobbed hairdos gleaming, and the gangsters, with their molls, who kept the country’s beak wet during Prohibition; imagine, finally, on a late fall day in 1929, stock-market millions vanishing within hours, heartlessly slamming shut the doors to the anything-goes twenties. (While you’re at it, imagine the unthinkable: Wall Street investors with such an overwhelming sense of responsibility that they jumped out of skyscrapers rather than face their own— and their clients’—financial ruin. Incomprehensible!) Meanwhile, the Great Depression loomed in the drought-stricken plains of America’s heartland. In the mind’s eye, these times could only have existed in grayed-out shades of black and white. Color, it seems, had been forgotten.
 
Unlike now, when anybody with a cell phone can, and unfortunately does, take pictures of everything from their breakfast to their genitalia—and makes them available to an unwitting public—only a very few of those initiated into the science of the lens and the alchemy of the darkroom were able to make photographs in the 1930s. Margaret Bourke-White was one of the few, and she led a charge of firsts: the first woman to photograph for LIFE magazine (for you post-Millennials, sort of the Internet of its time), the first accredited female war photographer (in World War II), and the first Western photographer allowed into the Soviet Union to record the proletariat’s triumph of mega-industry over the ease and comfort of privileged individuals.
 
In that heyday of pioneering photographers whom Bourke-White epitomized, black-and-white photography equaled photojournalism, which equaled truth with a capital T. This Truth was on a par with the same truth Americans revered in Norman Rockwell’s “real-life” scenes lifted straight out of a Mayberry without the laugh track, long before there was a Sheriff Taylor, Opie, Deputy Fife, or Aunt Bee. Or even television, for that matter. When images were few and far between, they had a credibility that is lost today in a thick overlay of irony and sheer disbelief. In the 1930s, if it appeared in LIFE magazine, or the Saturday Evening Post, or the newspaper, it was flat-out real.
Viewers lacked the objectivity to read meaning into a photograph as social commentary, for example, any more than the illiterate could read the black marks scratched into the white page.
The always-excellent Monroe Gallery presented their exhibition of silver gelatin photographs by Margaret Bourke-White as art, finding that, for her “as an artist,” photography served “as an instrument to examine social issues from a humanitarian perspective. She witnessed and documented some of the twentieth century’s most notable moments, including the liberation of German concentration camps by General Patton in 1945...” Bourke-White’s picture, “German civilians made to look at instruments of torture and execution at Buchenwald concentration camp, 1945,” is hardly an icon of objectivity. Nor should it be; some truths are beyond apprehension. Not to quibble with our dearly held ideals of photojournalism as an act of witnessing and documenting, but black-and-white imagery exists, among other reasons, when color cannot hold the entirety of its content. We demand this state of in-between-ness from art when what it depicts is too awful for mere reproduction.
While today you can find images of gore online anytime you choose to search for them, that they are not generally reproduced ad infinitum speaks to our understanding of the power of imagery. What Warhol repeated in a nightmarish grid (Jackie’s grief-stricken face on Air Force One en route from Dallas), and Picasso abstracted in his Guernica, Bourke-White reflected in the faces of her “German civilians” at Buchenwald.
Finally, when her country needed shoring up in 1936, during the height of the Depression, LIFE, a burgeoning publication that would become our society’s pocket mirror for at least a couple of decades, chose for its very first cover Bourke-White’s symbol of capitalism’s ultimate success. Her Fort Peck dam picture, all art-deco curves and fat-cat angles, describes more than the enormous potential for hydroelectric power: It is an image of America rediscovering her own righteous might, an America that, like the photographer “Maggie the Indestructible,” would liberate us from ourselves. There was the evidence, right in front of us in it-must­be-true black and white. —Kathryn M Davis
Margaret Bourke-White, Fort Peck Dam, Fort Peck, MT, silver gelatin photograph, 14” x 11”, 1936 ©Time Inc.
 
--The exhibition continues through June 28, 2015
 

 

Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Eddie Adams exhibition of photographs opens at the Dublin Arts Council

Street Execution of a Viet Cong Prisoner, Saigon, 1968


Eddie Adams' Pulitzer-prize winning shot of a man being executed on the streets of Saigon.


Via the Dublin Villager
By JENNIFER NOBLIT
Wednesday May 20, 2015


The exhibition of photographs set to open at the Dublin Arts Council Monday, May 25, is likely to bring conflicting emotions.


Eddie Adams: Vietnam is set to run through Sept. 11 at the Dublin Arts Council, 7125 Riverside Drive, and will show 50 photographs from Adams' time covering the Vietnam War, including his Pulitzer-prize winning shot of a man being executed on the streets of Saigon.


A group of veterans working with the Arts Council on the exhibition got a preview of some of the photos and it brought back memories for Vietnam veteran Jeff Noble.


"It was representative of my time," Noble said of the exhibition.


Noble spent one year in Vietnam as a pilot, supporting troops with firepower on a UH1C helicopter.


"Believe it or not there were some good times," he said.


Humor and camaraderie among troops number among the good times, as well as a job well done.


"There were times when we knew we had helped the troops on the ground and that was a good thing," he said.


Noble also saw some amazing things, including two soldiers walk away from a bad situation.


Noble was called into support troops under siege and after hitting the target twice he was told to cease fire because two U.S. soldiers were in the area.


"I couldn't believe after all this ordinance those guys were still alive," he said.
But Noble also remembered bad times, especially the third day after he arrived in Vietnam.


"We heard noise on the charlie pad from a team getting ready to go," he said.
The team was on the ground, waiting for a storm to pass, Noble said.
"Lightening hit the fox mike (of the helicopter) and sent electricity through the whole ship," he said.


The electricity launched rockets and one went into the lead helicopter, killing the pilot and injuring others.


"It was a rude awakening to life in the war zone," Noble said.


More bad news hit Noble within weeks of arriving in the war zone: "A good friend of mine from flight school went to a different unit and on his second mission in country, his helicopter was destroyed by enemy fire and he died."


Noble and fellow veteran Leroy Clendenen have provided the Arts Council with stories of their time in the Vietnam War for the exhibit and a booth will be set up to take other stories and recollections.


The public will also be invited to write letters to service members and veterans. Workshops on Tim O'Brien's book "The Things They Carried" are slated for August and will discuss the physical and emotional weight of war.


Counselors will also be available at peak times during the exhibit to offer guidance.
The photos could bring mixed reactions, and Noble offered advice for talking to Vietnam Veterans there: "Walk up and say 'Welcome home and thank you for your service.' "



Review Santa Fe Photo Festival


Via Center


Review Santa Fe Photo Festival
June 11-14, 2015

Review Santa Fe Photo Festival is celebrating its 15th anniversary and this professional development conference has expanded to include an exhibition and presentation series. The conference hosts 100 photographers from around the world showing their projects to leading professionals seeking out new talent. These top-notch reviewers including curators from The Library of Congress, J.Paul Getty Museum as well as editors from The New Yorker, TIME Magazine, MSNBC and 40 others.

An array of free and open to the public programs and exhibitions will be offered,
The Curve Exhibitions, CENTER Artist Talks, a night of the Review Santa Fe 100 Portfolio Viewing, a very special event honoring photographic luminary Anne Wilkes Tucker and more.
 
For more information visit: http://visitcenter.org/

Friday, May 22, 2015

Sonny Liston landed on canvas below Muhammad Ali’s feet on May 25, 1965, and Neil Leifer snapped a photo


Muhammad Ali Knocks Out Sonny Liston, Lewiston, Maine, May 25, 1965

Via Slate

The photo languished unlauded—before it was (much later) recognized as one of the greatest sports photos of all time; Ali became the most hated figure in American sports—before he was (much later) named “The Sportsman of the Century”; and Liston was subjected to intense scrutiny—before (not much later) he fizzled into a mostly forgotten footnote.

Like many sports fans, I’d glimpsed this picture for years—in random Ali articles, atop “best of” lists, even on T-shirts—but it wasn’t until doing my own research, excavating layers, that I discovered its most astounding attribute:
 
Everything you’d initially imagine about the image is wrong.
 
But first, just look at that photo! It instantly hits your eyes haloed in a corona of potency—structured so soundly as to seem staged, this forceful frieze of physical dominance. The Victor yells, the Loser displays himself vanquished, and the Watchers are all caught in that moment. The kinetic poetry of moving bodies, momentarily frozen, such is the stuff of the best sports photos—this has that.
There are also the incongruities! The Victor, appearing to proclaim dominance, is in fact pleading for the bested man to rise; and, for that matter, there is secretly a second bested rival below Ali; and though this looks like the moment after a vicious put-down punch, the photo was actually preceded by the puniest of blows, a “phantom punch,” as it would later be known—a wispy, theoretical mini-hook that none in attendance even observed. That Crowd so multitudinous that it stretches beyond the horizon line? They were actually the smallest assembled crowd in heavyweight championship history—there to witness a bumbling conclusion, filled with calls that the fix was in. This bout: still boxing’s biggest unsolved mystery. This image: still iconic, even (especially) with the controversy, for a sport as mythologized as it is crooked. Click for full article.

Thursday, May 14, 2015

Cassius Clay couldn’t sleep in Miami Beach after beating Sonny Liston there in the legendary 1964 bout

Black Muslim leader Malcolm X photographing Cassius Clay, Miami, 1964
Until recently, Bob Gomel remembered his photograph of Malcolm X and Cassius and Cassius  Clay as " It was February 26, 1964 in a Miami restaurant after Clay won the heavyweight championship from Sonny Liston. Howard Bingham, Ali's personal photographer is seen at the far right above Ali. Clay's brother Rahaman is seated to Cassius's left (only a fist is visible in the famous frame.) The name and exact location of the restaurant are paled into insignificance.” But now the location has been identified.



Via Miami Herald
May 8, 2015


When the rescue of Hampton House began six years ago, vagrants and drug addicts slept in the motel where Malcolm X once stayed. A tree grew out of the swimming pool where Martin Luther King Jr. swam. The walls were crumbling around the courtyard where Ebony magazine had photographed Muhammad Ali and his new wife and baby.

Amid the ruin, there was no hint of Hampton House’s heyday in the 1960s as the premier getaway for black Americans visiting segregated Miami, where beachfront icons like the Fontainebleau were off limits even to celebrities of color.

On Friday, the decay of Hampton House officially lifted as local leaders celebrated a $6 million rehab of the historic 1953 motel — a largely county-funded effort that’s been in the works for about 15 years.

“We got it done,” Miami-Dade Commissioner Audrey Edmonson told a crowd gathered for the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the motel at the corner of Northwest 27th Avenue and 42nd Street.
Facing demolition in 2000, the Hampton House is being relaunched as a community hub, with a museum, space for a restaurant and motel rooms being converted into office space for community groups, recording studios and rehearsal space for musicians.

Organizers hope to revive the Hampton House’s legacy of live entertainment, too. Its jazz club once drew evening crowds from throughout Miami, making Hampton a night-life hub for local African Americans. Traveling celebrities gave it star power.

Segregation meant Miami’s famous crop of luxury oceanfront hotels weren’t available for black people, so Cassius Clay couldn’t sleep in Miami Beach after beating Sonny Liston there in the legendary 1964 bout. The boxer went back to the Hampton House for a bowl of ice cream, and to celebrate with Malcolm X. A month later, Clay changed his name to Muhammad Ali.
“This was an oasis in a sea of racism,” Khalilah Camacho Ali said from the Hampton House’s new event space, an open-ceiling hall created out of the old jazz club and some motel rooms above.
On the wall hangs a photo of her leaning over Muhammad Ali as he cradles their infant daughter on a Hampton House pool chair. Ebony took the photo, and included it in a 1969 cover spread featuring the couple.

King stayed at the Hampton House often enough that one ground-floor room came to be known as his suite. A photographer snapped King in swim trunks from the pool. And he is said to have delivered an early version of his “I Have a Dream” speech during an event at Hampton House before it made history on the National Mall in 1963.

Historic Hampton House Motel reopens in Miami

The historic Hampton House Motel in Miami reopened Friday, May 8, 2015, with a ceremony to mark the occasion. The motel was frequented by black celebrities and civil rights activists such as Cassius Clay, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. in the middle part of the last century.

A white Jewish couple presided over the Hampton House’s golden years. Harry and Florence Markowitz owned land and apartment buildings in Miami’s Brownsville neighborhood, including what would later become the Hampton House location. In 1954, they leased the land to the Booker Terrace Motel and Apartments.
 
That venture floundered, and the Markowitzes decided to make it a more upscale destination and renamed it the Hampton House after a neigborhood naming contest. They brought in the jazz club to the 50-room motel, started a popular restaurant with late-night fare, and began pursuing black conventions and church groups to boost business. Baseball great Jackie Robinson used Hampton House for a golf tournament he held each year in the Miami area, and the two-story motel marketed itself as the “Social Center of the South.”

The motel closed in the 1970s, and the Markowitzes sold it before the building slipped into disrepair through the 1980s and ’90s. Sons Bob, 74, and Jerry, 66, attended Friday’s ceremony. Bob was asked how his parents would have reacted to seeing Hampton House restored. “I’m getting choked up to even say it,” he replied. “They would be overwhelmed.”

Integration is mostly blamed for the motel’s decline: With black residents and visitors able to frequent beach hotels, the Hampton House lost its edge.


Hampton House had thrived as a gathering spot for local African Americans in the 1960s. At the time, Overtown was fading as the heart of black Miami’s middle class, with more families moving into the new Liberty Square housing complex that sits about 35 blocks from Hampton House.


 
Edmonson, the county commissioner whose district includes the motel, recalls her mother and friends gathering at Hampton House for their regular tea parties. A young Edmonson was occasionally called on for the afternoon’s entertainment, and she was too nervous to look at anyone but her mother while reciting the poem Trees before the ladies decked out in white gloves.

“I remember the Hampton House,” Edmonson told Friday’s crowd assembled on folding chairs in the motel’s parking lot. “I am so proud to say I grew up in this community.”

The Hampton House’s neighborhood in Brownsville now includes some of the poorest stretches of Miami. Miami-Dade wants to raze and rebuild the Liberty Square complex in an effort to root out crime there and revitalize the neighborhood. Census figures from 2010 show Brownsville’s population growing for the first time in 40 years. About 15,000 people live there.

Hampton House organizers hope there will be enough interest in the area that they can generate revenue by renting out the old coffee shop as a restaurant. It’s been restored with a new version of the original mural from somewhere in the Caribbean, and yellow-vinyl stools along the lunch counter. It was the site of perhaps the most famous photo ever taken at Hampton House: Malcolm X, having gotten himself behind the counter, snapping his own photo of Clay after his victory against Liston.

For Enid Pinkney, founding president of the Historic Hampton House Community Trust and long-time champion of the restoration effort, the building’s return offers another chance to link prosperity with Hampton House.

“We’ll have a place in Miami,” she said in a trust video released last year, “where we can go and be proud of the effort that went into bringing that back as an economic engine in the community.”

This article was updated to correct the distance between the Liberty Square housing complex and Hampton House.
 

Thursday, May 7, 2015

Margaret Bourke-White: Pioneering Photojournalist



Via Photograph Magazine

Margaret Bourke-White: Pioneering Photojournalist

Monroe Gallery of Photography, Santa Fe


Margaret Bourke-White, Buchenwald Prisoners, 1945. Courtesy Monroe Gallery of Photography ©Time In.


Referring to the French Impressionist painter Claude Monet, fellow painter Paul Cézanne famously quipped to art dealer Ambroise Vollard: “Monet is only an eye, but my God what an eye!” The same could be said for American photographer Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971). Examining Bourke-White’s work, from the late 1920s through the 1950s, one quickly senses her complete command of the photographic tools at her disposal that resulted in compositions filled with formal elements of design that were part and parcel of narratives that documented times of significant events. Soaring heights of urban construction, extreme poverty in the South, and World War II are only a few of the historic moments captured in photographs by Bourke-White – many of which are iconic in American photography.

In 50 photographs on view at Monroe Gallery of Photography through June 28, Margaret Bourke-White: Pioneering Photojournalist gives a brief, yet fine overview of her prolific career.
 
Margaret Bourke-White, Fort Peck Dam, Fort Peck, MT, 1936. Courtesy Monroe Gallery of Photography  ©Time Inc

 
Included are instantly recognizable images such as At the Time of the Louisville Flood, Louisville, Kentucky, 1937, where people are queued in a bread line below a billboard exuding the good life, as well as Buchenwald Prisoners, Germany, 1945, in which prisoners confined behind barbed-wire await liberation -- the latter taken when Bourke-White was on assignment for Life Magazine traveling with Patton’s army. In one of her most artistic images, Patterns Made by Steel Liners for Diversion Tunnels, Fort Peck Dam, Montana, 1936, geometric patterns fill the frame composed of various machine-hewed disks with radiating spokes. Bourke-White, whose career was cut short by Parkinson’s disease in 1956, once said, “To understand another human being you must gain insight into the conditions which made him what he is.” She was tenacious in her pursuit of photographs that conveyed truths about the human condition, as well as the beauty in things produced by humankind. 
 
 

— By Douglas Fairfield  05/04/2015

Friday, May 1, 2015

World Press Freedom Day May 3





World Press Freedom Day is Sunday, May 3. Join us in remembering journalists who have died while bearing witness. Change your social profile picture to our black press ribbon and post your support using ‪#‎remembering‬ on May 3 between 6 and 9 p.m. (local time).

Learn more at rememberingfallenjournalists.com.

United Nations:  World Press Freedom Day 

UNESCO: World Press Freedom Day

Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Manifest Exhibit: Manifest Justice May 1 - 10

 
 
 
Join us for a large-scale pop-up art exhibition, cultural convening, and community organizing event. Together, we will lift our voices, assert our power and identify solutions to build healthy and safe communities worldwide.
 
 
(310) 779-6090
  
Monroe Gallery of Photography is honored to present a very special collection of Civil Rights photographs at the Manifest Justice exhibit in Los Angles May 1 - 10.
 
 

Thursday, April 23, 2015

Trailblazer: Monroe Gallery tips artistic hat to Margaret Bourke-White









Pick-MAIN
©Time Inc. Courtesy Monroe Gallery
Image result for santa fe reporter


Via The Santa Fe Reporter
April 22, 2015
As a symbol for globetrotting photojournalism, Margaret Bourke-White’s brand in the field is still felt today. Born on June 14, 1904, in New York City, she soon would become a beacon for editorial photography, focusing on subjects both live and inanimate, and securing the first cover image for LIFE magazine—an iconic study of the dams in the Columbia River basin.


“There is so much to talk about Margaret Bourke-White,” Monroe Gallery of Photography’s Michelle Monroe muses. “Her vision directed LIFE. It was her global look at why things mattered; why the Russian Revolution was going to affect ours; why man’s industry and this sort of race toward that conclusion mattered; why humans in India who were trying to gain independence from Britain mattered to America. It was a really sophisticated worldview for that time.”

Monroe continues, “America was largely illiterate in 1936, and this woman met [LIFE editor] Henry Luce and was the first person hired for his magazine, which is also extraordinary—because she’s a girl,” she says, with a playfully scandalized tone.
The Don Gaspar gallery showcases 54 of Bourke-White’s emblematic images, starting this Friday and going through June 28.

Before her death of Parkinson’s disease in 1971, Bourke-White managed to stamp her unique perspective on historic events like Gandhi’s release from prison in 1946, the ripple of the South African labor exploitation during the 1950s and the liberation of German concentration camps by General Patton.

The breadth of Bourke-White’s oeuvre as well as her approach, Monroe stresses, far surpasses whatever labels one might want to stick on her based on gender.

“I try not to talk about ‘female artists’ or ‘female gallerists’ because that puts us in a kind of margin,” Monroe says. “You have to think that in 1936, it was extraordinary that this woman was hired as the first journalist in what would become Henry Luce’s magnum opus.”




Margaret Bourke-White
5-7 pm Friday, April 24
Monroe Gallery of Photography
112 Don Gaspar Ave., 
505 992 0800

Tuesday, April 21, 2015

AIPAD Photography Show 2015 Recap





"Monroe Gallery of Photography (here): Classics of photojournalism often quickly jump into the realm of fine art, and this recent image by Whitney Curtis from the Ferguson protests is memorably symbolic. It’s a modern version of Goya, with the compositional opposition of the hands up and the over-the-top riot gear. Priced at $2500"


Via Collector Daily


Every Booth at the 2015 AIPAD Photography Show New York, Part 1 of 4


Every Booth at the 2015 AIPAD Photography Show New York, Part 2 of 4
Every Booth at the 2015 AIPAD Photography Show New York, Part 3 of 4
Every Booth at the 2015 AIPAD Photography Show New York, Part 4 of 4






Via BWGallerist


On Site: The Best of AIPAD 2015, Park Avenue Armory


Via L'Oeil de la Photographie


AIPAD 2015 : Monroe Gallery of Photography

Saturday, April 18, 2015

THAT'S ME IN THE PICTURE

That;s me: Ted Landsmark


That’s me in the picture: Ted Landsmark is assaulted in Boston, at an ‘anti-bussing’ protest, 5 April 1976 via The Guardian


View this photograph at the AIPAD Photography Show, Monroe gallery of Photography, Booth #119, April 15 - 19 2015







"38 years ago today I won my second Pulitzer. I recently found this clip (I have lots of clips but where they are nobody knows, including me). With the help of my friend Scott Ryder we copied a lot of stuff lately.

It was Marathon Day, April 18, 1977. The Marathon back then began at noon. I raced (by car) back to the finish line at the Prudential Building after covering the start in Hopkinton. The winners would start showing up around 2:10.

The Pulitzers were historically announced the first Monday in May so I had no clue why I was summoned back to the office immediately. It was a very exciting day."  --Stanley Forman

Thursday, April 16, 2015

The Eye of Photography: Monroe Gallery at AIPAD 2015





Logo
Via L'Oeil de la Photographie








AIPAD 2015 : Monroe Gallery of Photography




Rashaad Davis, 23, backs away as St. Louis County police officers approach him with guns drawn and eventually arrest him, Ferguson, Missouri, August 11, 2014


Rashaad Davis, 23, backs away as St. Louis County police officers approach him with guns drawn and eventually arrest him, Ferguson, Missouri, August 11, 2014 c Whitney Curtis


Monroe Gallery of Photography specializes in classic black-and-white photography with an emphasis on humanist and photojournalist imagery. The gallery features work by more than 75 renowned photographers and also represents a select group of contemporary photographers. The gallery (booth #119) is exhibiting a specially curated collection of civil rights photographs at the AIPAD Photography Show 2015. Featured will be a variety of images from the history of civil rights, with prints including the 1965 Selma March to the recent protests in Ferguson, Missouri.

Of particular note are two prints by Whitney Curtis, photographed during the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri. One print titled "Rashaad Davis, 23, backs away as St. Louis County police officers approach him with guns drawn and eventually arrest him, Ferguson, Missouri, August 11, 2014" was published extensively in national newspapers and just was awarded First Place in Domestic News by the National Press Photographer's Association in the Best Photojournalism of 2015 Awards. Monroe Gallery of Photography is proud to debut Curtis' photography at the AIPAD Photography Show

Monroe Gallery's booth is also exhibiting the environmental documentary photography of Stephen Wilkes, specifically images from Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy; and one from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Of particular note is a large format (50 x 66") color print of a television set washed up on the beach of Bay St. Louis, Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina that is visually arresting.

Monroe Gallery of Photography was founded by Sidney S. Monroe and Michelle A. Monroe. Building on more than four decades of collective experience, the gallery specializes in 20th and 21st Century Photojournalism.


1. Stephen Wilkes
Hurricane Katrina: TV in Sand, Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, June 12, 2006
Digital c-print, 50 x 66 inches, edition 2 of 8

2. Whitney Curtis
Rashaad Davis, 23, backs away as St. Louis County police officers approach him with guns drawn and eventually arrest him, Ferguson, Missouri, August 11, 2014

3. Whitney Curtis
A man raises his hands in front of a row of St. Louis County police armored personnel carriers, Ferguson, Missouri, Aug. 11, 2014
Archival pigment prints, 18 x 26 inches, edition 1/10

Sunday, April 5, 2015

April 5, 1976: "The Soiling of Old Glory"

The Soiling of Old Glory
Stanly Forman: The Soiling of Old Glory
April 5, 1976


Via Today in History


In 1976, during an outdoor demonstration against court-ordered school busing in Boston, a white teenager swung a pole holding an American flag at a black attorney  in a scene captured in a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph by Stanley Forman of the Boston Herald American.


Monroe Gallery of Photography will be exhibiting this photograph at the AIPAD Photography Show in New York April 16 - 19, 2015, in booth #119.



The photograph depicts a white teenager, Joseph Rakes, about to assault black lawyer and civil-rights activist Ted Landsmark with a flagpole bearing the American flag. It was taken in Boston on April 5, 1976, during a protest against court-ordered desegregation busing. It ran on the front page of the Herald American the next day, and also appeared in several newspapers across the country. It won the 1977 Pulitzer Prize for Spot Photography.




"Louis Masur has written an indispensable history about an
unforgettable image. With admirable empathy and grace,
he reveals why racial conflict in modern America is both so
compelling and so difficult to resolve."
        
















































Thursday, April 2, 2015

Photojournalist Whitney Curtis awarded First Place in 2014 Domestic News by NPPA



The National Press Photographers Association's Best Of Photojournalism 2015 awards were announced on Tuesday, March 31.


© Whitney Curtis
Rashaad Davis, 23, backs away slowly as St. Louis County police officers approach him with guns drawn and eventually arrest him on Monday, Aug. 11, 2014, at the corner of Canfield Drive and West Flroissant Avenue in Ferguson, Mo. Members of the community took to the streets to protest the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson.





In Domestic News,  first place was awarded to Whitney Curtis of The New York Times. Whitney Curtis is now represented by Monroe Gallery of Photography, and several of her momentous images from Ferguson, Missouri will be exhibited during the AIPAD Photography Show April 16 - 19 (Booth #119, Monroe Gallery of Photography). The Gallery will be exhibiting a specially curated collection of Civil Rights photographs from the 1965 Selma march to the present day.

Curtis' photographs will also be featured in the exhibition "Civil Rights from Sema to Ferguson" at Monroe Gallery of Photography July 3 - September 20, 2015.

About Whitney Curtis

Photos that raise awareness, reveal truth, and ask us to pause. Reflect. Photojournalism is how Whitney Curtis tells stories we might have never known otherwise.

As an editorial, corporate, and commercial photographer, Whitney’s goal is simple: show respect to the subject-matter by creating intimate, creative images that illustrate the story.

After graduating with a degree in photojournalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia, Whitney worked as a staff photojournalist at The Kansas City Star, northern Utah’s Standard-Examiner, and the Daily Herald in suburban Chicago. As an editorial photojournalist, Whitney’s work has been honored by The Associated Press, NPPA’s Best of Photojournalism, CPoY, and Women in Photojournalism.


Saturday, March 28, 2015

Exhibition of new photography acquisitions opens at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum





Alfred Stieglitz, the avant-garde photographer and gallerist who later became her husband, created a series of more than 300 photographs of O’Keeffe during the course of his life.



SANTA FE, NM.- “New Photography Acquisitions” opened at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum March 27, 2015. This exhibition presents a selection of the newest additions to the Museum’s photography collection, many of which have never been published or exhibited at the Museum.

“We are especially proud to offer the first look at these recent acquisitions, including photographs that span O’Keeffe’s life from New York to New Mexico,” says Robert A. Kret, director of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. ”New Photography Acquisitions" includes many rarely seen images of O’Keeffe, one of the most photographed women of the 20th century, by some of the most well-known photographers of her day.”

“It is wonderful to see these insightful images,” says Carolyn Kastner, curator of the exhibition, “which include beautiful gelatin silver prints from Alfred Stieglitz, Philippe Halsman, and Ansel Adams, whose mastery of their media is a great complement to O’Keeffe’s paintings.”

Alfred Stieglitz, the avant-garde photographer and gallerist who later became her husband, created a series of more than 300 photographs of O’Keeffe during the course of his life, beginning in 1917. Several images from 1918, are included in the exhibition. One is famous for picturing O’Keeffe in the act of painting (one of only two known to do so), while others, which have not previously been published, frame intimate moments at Lake George, where the couple spent the summer and fall at the Stieglitz family home.

After Stieglitz’s death and O’Keeffe’s move to the remote village of Abiquiu in New Mexico, the artist continued to be a subject of interest to important photographers of the day, who journeyed to New Mexico and captured the artist in her environment, at home and in the landscape. Important portrait photographers such as Philippe Halsman, Yousuf Karsh, John Loengard, Arnold Newman and Tony Vaccaro followed her west. O’Keeffe friends Ansel Adams and Todd Webb, famous for their landscape photography, composed portraits of the artist–working the stark New Mexico scenery into the frame. Later pictures by Doris Bry, George Daniell, and Arnold Newman portray O’Keeffe in her New Mexico homes and in the surrounding landscape.

The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s photographic archive numbers more than 2,000 images. It forms a valuable record of the many ways that O’Keeffe presented herself to the camera in formal portraits as well as in candid snapshots with friends and family. Since the Museum was founded in 1997, its collection of photographs has grown steadily, primarily through gifts. The largest gift of more than 1000 photographs was presented to the Museum in 2006 by the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation. That collection, assembled by the artist during her long life, became part of her estate after her death in 1986.

Similarly, the new acquisitions included in this exhibition, part of a collection purchased by the Museum in 2014, are unique because O’Keeffe selected the photographs for James Johnson Sweeney, the curator of her 1946 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. The acquisitions include a wide range of materials such as fine art prints, copy prints, negatives, contact sheets, and documentary photographs.

The Museum’s photographic archive also constitutes a collection of work by contemporaries of O’Keeffe who were recognized photographers in their own right as well as friends and visitors to New Mexico. The creative practice of O’Keeffe, her husband Alfred Stieglitz, and the photographers in the Museum’s collection span the 20th century and the rise of American Modernism. “New Photography Acquisitions” will be on view March 27 – September 26, 2015

RELATED: The Wall Street Journal: "Santa Fe is an unlikely center of photography"

Wednesday, March 11, 2015

"one of those giants, Art Shay, still walks among us"












 SPOTLIGHT "ART SHAY: HIS LIFE AND LOVE"

Via Crain's Chicago Business

The golden age of photojournalism may be long past, but the work of its giants—Walker Evans, Margaret Bourke-White, W. Eugene Smith, Henri Cartier-Bresson—continues to amaze and inspire. Many Chicagoans may not realize that one of those giants, Art Shay, still walks among us.

A new exhibit at the Art Center Highland Park, "Art Shay: His Life and Love," combines many of the greatest hits of his long career as a shooter for Time, Life, Fortune and many other mid-20th-century photography showcases, with a subgroup of more personal images of his 67-year marriage to Florence Shay, a rare-book dealer in Highland Park.

The photos of Florence, who died in 2012 of cancer, are included in "My Florence: A 70-year love story," published in January. These are among the most poignant images in the show: vivacious and flirty in Las Vegas, hard at work at her book shop, in the latter stages of terminal illness.

More immediately accessible to many viewers will be Shay's candid and uncannily revealing portraits of many of the 20th century's leading figures, including Marlon Brando, Muhammad Ali, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. In every case, Shay, now 92, captures his subjects in some unguarded moment that suggests an aspect of his or her personality that was rarely glimpsed.

The show also includes some of Shay's hidden-camera work. "I once shot some photos at a Mafia trial in Columbus, Ohio, in a courtroom where cameras were not allowed," Shay says. "I later got a letter from the prosecutor that said: 'Mr. Shay, the next time you are seen in Columbus, you will be subject to arrest for using a camera in the courtroom. P.S.: How did you do it?' "

Through April 4 (free)

Monroe Gallery of Photography will feature several of Art Shay's photographs during the AIPAD Photography Show at the Park Avenue Armory (Booth #119), April 16 - 19, 2015.

Monday, March 9, 2015

Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission to place historical marker to honor Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Eddie Adams



Eddie Adams covers action in South Vietnam Eddie Adams covers action in South Vietnam in 1965 for The Associated Press.
Associated Press

Eddie Adams covers action in South Vietnam in 1965
for The Associated Press 


Via The Pittsburgh Post Gazette
Three Western Pennsylvania historical sites were among 22 selected by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission to receive the familiar blue and gold commemorative roadside markers.

Markers will be placed at or near the site of George Westinghouse’s gas wells in Point Breeze, in New Kensington to honor Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Eddie Adams and in Erie to memorialize the iconic “Don’t Give Up the Ship” battle flag from the War of 1812.

Dates for installation and precise locations of the markers are not determined until local interests have raised money to pay for the markers, said Howard Pollman, spokesman for the commission. The cost ranges from $1,400 to $1,875.

“They are usually placed as close as possible to the place where the event took place or the person lived,” he said.

Mr. Westinghouse began to experiment with natural gas extraction in the 1880s, when he also was pioneering electricity generation. He drilled four wells at the site of his Point Breeze estate.

“At the time the fuel was unsafe and dangerous to use,” the commission said. “Over the next few years, Westinghouse patented over 30 inventions for the distribution, safe use and metering of natural gas. His work was instrumental in the expansion and availability of natural gas as an important widespread energy source.”

Mr. Adams is best-known for a photograph, taken in 1968 during the Vietnam War, of a Vietnamese police chief firing a bullet into the head of a Viet Cong prisoner from arm’s length range on a Saigon street. The image appeared worldwide, including on the front page of The New York Times, and galvanized opposition to the war in the U.S.

The Pulitzer Prize he won for the image was one of about 500 photography awards he received during a career that saw him cover 13 wars.

The commission said Mr. Adams got his start as a photographer in his hometown of New Kensington, shooting photographs for his high school yearbook and as a staff photographer for the local newspaper. He died in 2004 and was buried at Greenwood Memorial Park in Lower Burrell.

Seven Erie women created a battle flag in the summer of 1813 for Oliver Hazard Perry to fly on his ship, the Lawrence, in the Battle of Lake Erie.

The slogan was from the last words of Capt. James Lawrence and became a rallying cry for the ship’s crew, which helped to defeat the British in the pivotal battle.

Replica flags with “Don’t Give Up the Ship” are displayed throughout Erie, which held a yearlong celebration of the battle’s bicentennial in 2013.

Mr. Pollman said the marker likely will be placed near the Erie Maritime Museum, home to a full-sized replica of the Brig Niagara, which also took part in the battle.

The commission selected the 22 markers from a pool of 50 applications. Currently, nearly 2,300 historical markers are in place throughout the state.

More information on the Historical Marker Program, including application information, is available online at www.pahistoricalmarkers.com.


Monroe Gallery of Photography will host a major exhibition of Eddie Adams' photographs in Spring, 2016, in conjunction with a new book of Adams' Vietnam photographs by the University of Texas Press .

Friday, March 6, 2015

On Friday, March 6, 1964, Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali


Black Muslim leader Malcolm X photographing Cassius Clay, Miami, 1964
© Bob Gomel



 
Day later, bolstered by his mentor Malcom 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.”

Recently, Bob recalled: It was February 26, 1964 in a Miami restaurant after Clay won the heavyweight championship from Sonny Liston. Howard Bingham, Ali's personal photographer is seen at the far right above Ali.  Clay's brother Rahaman is seated to Cassius's left (only a fist is visible in the famous frame.) The name and exact location of the restaurant are paled into insignificance.”



Related: Ali vs. Liston in Miami Beach: The Night ‘the Greatest’ Was Born

              YouTube: March 6, 1964: Cassius Clay becomes Muhammad Ali

Wednesday, March 4, 2015

Alyssa Adams talking about her career in photography, the Eddie Adams Workshop, business, networking, and more


Friday, March 6, 11 AM Eastern

Join Robert Caplin and Alyssa Adams, deputy photo editor at TV Guide, for a LIVE video podcast recording in NYC. They'll be talking about her career in photography, the Eddie Adams Workshop, business, networking, and much more.

This event is open to the public to attend both in person locally in NYC or online at http://thephotobrigade.com/LIVE.



Monroe Gallery of Photography is proud to represent the Eddie Adams Estate. Watch for a major new book relase of Adams' Vietnam photographs and a major exhibition in Spring, 2016 at Monroe Gallery.

Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Exhibition of Photographs by Andreas Feininger



Unloading coffee at Brooklyn dock, New York, c. 1946
Andreas Feininger


ANDREAS FEININGER

February 13 - April 5

Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar, is pleased to announce an exhibition of photographs by Andreas Feininger. The exhibition opens Friday, February 13 and continues through April 5.

Feininger’s pictures of New York in the 1940s and ’50s helped define, for all time, not merely how a great 20th century city looked, but how it imagined itself and its place in the world. With its traffic-jammed streets, gritty waterfronts, iconic bridges and inimitable skyline, the city assumed the character of a vast, vibrant landscape. Featured in the exhibition are many of Feiniger's most iconic New York cityscapes, as well as many other 

Andreas Feininger was born in Paris, educated in the Bauhaus, and trained as an architect and structural engineer. He began using the camera in the early 1920’s as a “mechanical sketchbook” for building designs. Son of the acclaimed artist Lyonel Feininger, Andreas Feininger turned to photography full-time in 1932.

Andreas Feininger devoted his life to a full exploration of both the science and art of photography. His creative vision is rooted in the conviction that the camera is superior to the eye, and that the photograph can, and ideally should, portray the world more graphic than reality itself. From his earliest photographs, through two decades as a LIFE magazine photographer, to recent images taken in the 1980’s, few photographers in the 20th century have displayed the range of Andreas Feininger. 

Feininger’s work is characterized by an unusual sensitivity to form and an extraordinary sense of composition. His photographs reveal hidden structure and beauty in panoramic urban and industrial landscapes. Feininger has said “The city has attracted me since my earliest days as a photographer. But in time this love has grown to include all the aspects of the city - not only its buildings, but also its people, cars, traffic jams, confusion, and even ugliness. I see the city as a living organism: dynamic, sometimes violent, and even brutal.” 

Andreas Feininger has been the subject of over 50 books, including several text-books which he has authored. He was a leading staff photographer at LIFE magazine, completing over 430 assignments. His work has appeared in numerous other publications throughout the United States and Europe. In 1983, the British Broadcasting Corporation included Andreas Feininger in a six-installment television documentary about the most important living photographers; the other featured photographers were: Ansel Adams, Bill Brandt, Alfred Eisenstaedt, André Kertész, and Jacques-Henri Lartigue.

Feininger’s photographs are in many important collections, including: The Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, Victoria and Albert Museum of Art, The Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg, the Museum of the City of New York, The New York Historical Society, and The International Center of Photography, NY. Andreas Feininger died in Manhattan in February 1999. He was 92.