Wednesday, April 22, 2009
APOLLO 11 4OTH ANNIVERSAY APPROACHING
Friday, April 17, 2009
MAJOR MARK SHAW EXHIBITION CONCURRENT WITH THE NEW BOOK, "CHARMERD BY AUDREY"
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
STEPHEN WILKES' PHOTOGRAPH ON COVER OF THE NEW YORK TIMES SUNDAY MAGAZINE
Thursday, April 9, 2009
EDDIE ADAMS FILM 'AN UNLIKELY WEAPON" OPENS IN NEW YORK AT QUAD CINEMA
An Unlikely Weapon: The Eddie Adams Story
By Nick Pinkerton
©The Village Voice
April 7, 2009
AP Photo hall-of-famer Eddie Adams is a textbook immortal for one Pulitzer frame: his snap of South Vietnamese General Nguyen Ngoc Loan's expedient point-blank execution of a Viet Cong captive. Director Susan Morgan Cooper's tribute to Adams embellishes on original interview footage of the man, who died in 2004, seen here perambulating near his East Village studio. What comes across is a professional, self-effacing, and no B.S. guy. (Disappointed by a charity book collaboration with Caroline Kennedy: "Speak Truth to Power? What the fuck does that mean?") The shame is that there isn't enough candid Adams to quite fill out a film. Infinitely more interesting than listening to antiwar platitudes from the likes of Morley Safer is watching Adams negotiate with his own conscience and an empathy for cut losses that bypasses political righteousness—for the retired Gen. Loan, for the Vietnamese boat people of his 1977 photo essay, and so on. The drama, inevitably, slackens when documenting Adams's move off the war-of-the-week beat to paychecking for the likes of Penthouse and Parade. No slight to Cooper—aside from some misguided musical cues, this is solid work, if essentially PBS/American Masters material. That said, watching oblivious Lilliputian "rocker" Dave Nararro show off his mural of the famous execution ("a reminder of human suffering") for some Cribs cameraman is pretty priceless.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Pulitzer Prize Winning Rocco Morabito Passes Away
Morabito's health had been declining and he was in hospice care, the Florida Times-Union reported.
His dramatic photograph tagged "Kiss of Life" by a Jacksonville Journal copy editor, appeared in newspapers around the world in 1967. The photo showed an apprentice electrical lineman, who had come into contact with a 4,160-volt line, being resuscitated by a fellow lineman as he dangled from the top of the pole.
His Pulitzer Prize was for Spot News Photography.
Morabito worked his way into photography for the paper following his decorated service as a B-17 ball-turret gunner in World War II. He had an earlier job with the Journal as a 9-year-old newsboy, selling papers.
His famous photo was taken as he was returning from covering a railroad strike. Before shooting the pictures, he used his car radio to tell the paper to call an ambulance.
In 1958, Life magazine devoted a full page to another Morabito photograph that showed children in an elementary school reciting the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag. Standing with those children, head erect, eyes forward, paws over heart, was a pet rabbit.
Morabito worked for the Journal 42 years, 33 of them as a photographer, until retiring in 1982.
Saturday, April 4, 2009
BOOK TOUR AND RETROSPECTIVE EXHIBITION IN CONJUCTION WITH NEW BOOK, "CHARMED BY AUDREY"
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Article in the current The New Yorker on Eddie Adams
More of Adams’s old friends showed up—the Pulitzer laureates John Filo, who took the 1970 Kent State photograph, and Nick Ut, who took the 1972 picture of a naked Vietnamese girl covered in napalm (Kim Phuc, whom Ut took to the hospital before he delivered his film, and with whom he has since become friends). Ut, who is Vietnamese, met Adams through his brother, Huynh Thanh My, also a photographer, who was killed in 1965, while covering a battle between the Vietcong and the SVN Rangers for the A.P. “After my brother was killed, Eddie always worried about me,” Ut said. “He took care of me very well.” Pete Hamill, who was sent to Vietnam by the Post, met Adams in 1965. “We would hang out at the Caravelle Hotel bar, up on the roof—beautiful views of Saigon,” Hamill said. “And at the A.P. bureau—in those days you would hope to convince some pilot to mail your story for you, or you would file by cable at the bureau.” He talked about Adams’s politics: “Eddie wasn’t partisan. He had been a marine. When he finally left Vietnam, he worked for Parade, doing portraits. He didn’t want to cover any more wars, understandably. He wanted to be taken seriously as someone other than the person who had taken the photograph of the execution of a Vietcong suspect. But he knew he couldn’t get away with it.”
Hamill said he doubted that there could be a contemporary equivalent to Adams’s execution picture. “The most famous photos out of Iraq are Abu Ghraib, and those are by amateurs,” he said. “In Vietnam there was an amazing amount of freedom given to the press. Some soldiers would be going out and you’d say, ‘You got room?’ With Iraq and Afghanistan there’s no way to get out there—there’s nothing. They’re fortresses.”
Monday, March 30, 2009
Helen Levitt, Acclaimed Photographer of New York City, Has Died at the Age of 95
Miss Levitt had her first solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1943. Her photographs have since appeared in Edward Steichen's landmark 1955 show The Family of Man and in more recent exhibitions of great importance, including MoMA's Photography Until Now and the National Gallery of Art's On the Art of Fixing a Shadow in Washington, D.C., both celebrating the invention of photography. She has been the subject of retrospective exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the International Center of Photography, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Miss Levitt's incomparable oeuvre includes seven decades of New York City street photography in black-and-white, as well as little-known color work showcased for the first time in Slide Show. Like Lartigue, Kertész, and Cartier-Bresson, Miss Levitt wielded her camera as a seamless extension of her eye, able to capture fleeting moments of life with unsurpassed lyricism and style. As Adam Gopnik remarked in his 2001 New Yorker feature on the artist, "Levitt's photographs, like her city, though occasionally they rise to beauty, are mostly too quick for it. Instead, they have the quality of frozen street-corner conversation: she went out, saw something wonderful, came home to tell you all about it, and then, frustrated said, 'You had to be there,' and you realize, looking at the picture, that you were."
John Szarkowski, former director of the photography department at The Museum of Modern Art, once observed, "At the peak of Helen's form, there was no one better."
NPR has a slide show of Miss Levitt's photographs.
Thursday, March 26, 2009
BEHIND THE PHOTOGRAPHS
Bill Eppridge with his photograph of Robert F. Kennedy after assassination attempt, June 5, 1968 in the Ambassador Hotel
A very interesting exhibit will be on view in April during MOPLA (Month of Photography - Los Angeles). During the month of April The Pacific Design Center will feature 35 photographs from Tim Mantoani's "Behind The Photographs" project.
"Behind The Photographs" was borne from Tim Mantoani’s desire to record the living legends of photography. "We have come to a point in history where we are losing both photographic recording mediums and iconic photographers,” Tim comments. “While many people are familiar with iconic photographs, the general public has no idea of who created them. Behind Photographs became a means to do that, the photographer and their photograph in one image.” Tim used a soon to be extinct photographic medium, the 20×24 Polaroid record his subjects holding a print of their most iconic photograph.
A few of the living legends included are Harry Benson, John Dominis, Bill Eppridge, John Filo, Stuart Franklin, Karen Kuehn, Ormond Gigli, Elliott Landy, Neil Leifer, John Loengard, Joe McNally, Steve Schapiro, Sal Veder, and Stephen Wilkes.
Visit Tim Mantoani's website for more information.