Friday, August 7, 2015
Photojournalist Whitney Curtis featured on Lens Blog; to appear on Civil Rights panel discussion
Photojournalist Whitney Curtis is featured in today's New York Times LENS:
"Whitney Curtis has covered Ferguson, Mo., for The New York Times since the day Michael Brown was shot and killed by a local police officer a year ago. Her photos of the protests that followed were published on the front page of The Times, and in many other publications around the world. And they were featured on Lens. For the last few weeks she has been photographing in Ferguson, looking for what has changed, and what has not, over the last year. She spoke with James Estrin earlier this week about her recent experiences there. The conversation has been edited."-- Full article here.
Monore Gallery of Photography is honored to present a special panel discussion on the role of photojournalism in the civil rights movement up to the present day. Freelance photojournalist Whitney Curtis, veteran LIFE magazine reporter Richard Stolley and interim director of the UNM Art Museum and dean of the College of Fine Arts Kymberly Pindar will share their experiences on Friday, September 18, starting promptly at 5:30. Seating is limited and will be on a first come basis. The discussion at Monroe Gallery will take place in the gallery during the final week of the exhibition "The Long Road: From Selma to Ferguson", which closes on September 27.
Many of the now iconic photographs of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States were once front-page news. The year 2015 brought renewed attention to many of these historic images not only from the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's march and the acclaimed film "Selma" but also as Baltimore, Charleston, and Ferguson, Missouri, and other American cities grapple with conflicts across the racial divide and produce new images that have confronted American society anew with questions of equality.
Richard Stolley already had a distinguished career in journalism when he joined Time magazine in 1953. As a reporter for Time and LIFE he covered numerous civil rights stories during the 1960's, of which he has said "There would not have been a civil rights movement without journalism. I think LIFE magazine was the most influential publication in changing American attitudes toward race because other news magazines would tell you what was happening and LIFE magazine would show you. LIFE photographers captured images of people spitting on black kids. Those people landed in a great big photo in the magazine, their faces distorted with hate, and spit coming out of their mouths. That image is going to change peoples' attitude in a way that words never could. That is exactly what LIFE magazine did week after week after week."
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. A resident of St. Louis, Whitney was not surprised by the outpouring of anger and emotion after a police officer killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. What she did not expect, however, was to be caught in the middle of it. She covered the 2014 protests extensively, often on assignment for The New York Times. Her image of image of Rashaad Davis from the Ferguson, Missouri protests was awarded 1st place Domestic News 2014 in NPPA's Best of Photojournalism Contest.
Kymberly Pindar is the interim director of the UNM Art Museum and dean of the UNM College of Fine Arts. Pindar is co-curator of the exhibition "Necessary Force: Art of the Police State" which will run from September 11 through December 12, 2015 at the UNM art museum. This exhibition interrogates law enforcement’s longstanding history of violence, and the systemic forces that continue to sanction and promote the violation of civil rights in this country. Dr. Pinder holds two master’s degree and a Ph.D. in art history from Yale University.
Related:
Review: The Long Road: From Selma To Ferguson
The Santa Fe New Mexican Pasatiempo: "The Long Road: From Selma to Ferguson couldn’t be more timely"
Thursday, July 30, 2015
Review: The Long Road: From Selma To Ferguson
THE Magazine
August, 2015
“There is no scientific or anthropological basis for race.”
–Maya Angelou
The is only one race: human. Being a bigot based on any
other concept of so-called “race” is similar to being a climate change denier.
Both are premised on what could be called belief-desires on the part of the
willfully ignorant, rather than on any sort of scientifically, empirically, or
reality based truth.
The Long Road: From Selma to Ferguson—an elegant
exhibition of fifty-five photographs documenting the faces and places of
America’s Civil Rights era alongside today’s rising BLACK LIVES MATTER movement
is a timely contribution to the local cultural scene by the Monroe Gallery. The
curation of the prints is thoughtful, and rich in response to the face-toface
with the ethnically biased police brutality that is confronting the nation.
Whitney Curtis’ image of a twenty-three-year-old African-American activist
backing away from three heavily armored St. Louis County cops with large
weapons drawn, makes an iconic, Leon Golublike, presentation of the point. A
1961 LIFE magazine image by Paul Schutzer of Freedom Riders on an interstate
bus escorted by National Guardsmen with rifles and bayonets carries the tension
of violent possibility held at bay, and echoes of the future found in the sign
of one protester on the 1965 Selma March preserved by legendary LIFE
photographer Steve Schapiro, that reads simply “Stop Police Killings.”
Relevant today, because the domestic terrorism of
African-Americans hasn’t ceased since they were forcibly enslaved and brought
in chains to this continent by Euro-American colonizers. A uniquely American
ethnic hate and systematized terrorism campaign has been carried out ever
since. For centuries now, law enforcement, judges, the Klu Klux Klan,
skinheads, and Nazi-wannabes have conducted a long brutal pogrom of slavery,
lynchings, scape-goating, church burnings, and institutionalized hatred against
African-Americans. This was tragically capped most recently by the nine murders
of Reverend Clementa C. Pinckney and eight parishioners at the African
Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina by a
twenty-one-year-old white supremacist espousing the belief-desires of a “black
and white races” ideology of “racial hierarchy” woven into a hate and anger
fueled action based on nothing but differences in skin tones. Children, when
your ideology drives you to kill, the first thing to kill is your ideology.
The point of color in painting or people is visual
pleasure and UV protection. The late, satirical Klan paintings of Phillip
Guston are more relevant than ever today. Women of the Klan Bow Their Heads in
Prayer, taken in South Carolina by Charles Moore and Segregationists, (again by
Steve Schapiro) from a 1964 gathering in St. Augustine, Florida have a similar
sense of the bleak stupidity of bigots on the wrong side of history. The
exhibition does a great job of branching out to include images connecting the
Selma March with anti-war, gay rights, labor, and feminist actions, making it
clear that the crux of the matter is not the distraction of an erroneous race
concept, but rather the still unattained dream of a reality based upon the
self-evident and scientific truth that all people are created equally and are
endowed with certain inalienable human rights and liberties that they must not
be denied. Images of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and his courageous entourage
figure prominently. Pinckney joins him, now. Photographer Bill Eppridge’s
moving image of activist James Chaney’s mother and younger brother at Chaney’s
funeral is a study of dignity in grief that hits a universal human note far
beyond any individual ancestry.
As King knew, no people holds a monopoly on evil or good.
There are no fine hierarchical lines to be drawn between races because there is
no place to draw them. Our homeland is the planet. We are all relatives in one
species, and our major differences across ethnicities are simply cultural.
Ancient tribalism is real, for sure, in fanatics’ belief-desire systems, but is
based on nothing actual. Worldwide, it is supported most evilly by cultural
ideologues and used in contemporary times, along with poverty and terrorism by
a multi-ethnic cabal of nationalists and other politicians in collusion with
banksters and financiers to divide and conquer various populations, and to
enforce strict differences in access to wealth, resources, and territory. Economic
differences (and growing disparity) are what they’re trying to hide.
It’s as ugly a situation as the eight shots to the back
at short range that an unarmed Walter Scott took as he fled a now-indicted
police officer, or the scenes of the crazed cracker cop in McKinney, Texas
tackling an unarmed fourteen-year-old African-American girl to the ground at a
pool party, and pointing his gun at her unarmed friends. Or Mike Brown’s body
lying dead on the ground in the middle of the street for hours, or Freddie
Gray’s severed spine. Nina Berman’s chilling Will I Be Next glimpses a
black-haired boy looking out of the doorway next to the title text on a placard
placed at the site of the Eric Garner strangulation in 2014. It’s a good
question, unfortunately. —Jon Carver Wednesday, July 29, 2015
Monroe Gallery in "Best of Santa Fe" 2015
Arts & Culture
Best of Santa Fe 2015
July 29, 2015
Best Blast from the Past
Monroe Gallery
112 Don Gaspar Ave.
992-0800
Charming and ethereal, powerful and thought provoking, no two visits to Monroe Gallery are the same. The product of owners Sid and Michelle Monroe’s love for great photojournalism of the Time/LIFE era keeps the inventory simultaneously pragmatic and poignant. “I just can’t think of anything more compelling or dynamic than chronicling our human history, our progress and our failures; our agonies of defeat and extraordinary moments of elevation,” Michelle says. Through Sept. 27, Monroe hosts The Long Road: From Selma to Ferguson, which began as a commemoration of the historic march. “We thought we had finished this show in 2013,” the gallerist continues. “Events started to unfold in Ferguson and Staten Island, in Cleveland with Tamir Rice, that presented such an extraordinary/terrible opportunity to make it a bigger conversation about how far we’ve come and what accomplishments have we let slip.” (EL)
photo by Enrique Limon
Wednesday, July 8, 2015
Bob Gomel shares never-before-seen pictures of The Beatles
Houston photographer shares never-before-seen pictures of The Beatles
Via KHOU
All of The Beatle's photographs by Bob Gomel are available as fine art prints from Monroe Gallery of Photography.
Friday, July 3, 2015
" documenting the history of the movement from the 1960s to the present day through more than 50 compelling images"
Steve Schapiro: On the Road, Selma March, 1965
The Santa Fe New Mexican: Pasatiempo
"The Long Road: From Selma to Ferguson couldn’t be more timely"
The Albuquerque Journal: Venue North
"Exhibit lays out emotional images from civil rights movement, along with some from today that are strikingly similar."
Steve Schapiro: "Stop Police Killings", Selma March, 1965
The Long Road: from Selma To Ferguson July 3 - September 27, 2015
The Fourth of July
Martin Luther King Jr.: "You can get so busy in life that you forget holidays and other days, and it had slipped my mind altogether that today was the Fourth of July. And I said to him, "It is coincidental and quite significant, and I think when I get to Atlanta and go to my pulpit, I will try to preach a sermon in the spirit of the founding fathers of our nation and in the spirit of the Declaration of Independence." And so this morning I would like to use as a subject from which to preach: "The American Dream."
"The American Dream" Delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia, on 4 July 1965
"It is found in those majestic words of the Declaration of Independence, words lifted to cosmic proportions: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by God, Creator, with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." This is a dream. It’s a great dream.
The first saying we notice in this dream is an amazing universalism. It doesn’t say "some men," it says "all men." It doesn’t say "all white men," it says "all men," which includes black men. It does not say "all Gentiles," it says "all men," which includes Jews. It doesn’t say "all Protestants," it says "all men," which includes Catholics. It doesn’t even say "all theists and believers," it says "all men," which includes humanists and agnostics"
Thursday, June 25, 2015
"how news coverage from Ferguson, Mo., ended up in one of the world's foremost art photography shows"
©Whitney Curtis
Via Full Frame
Global Images and the stories behind them
The Christian Science Monitor
By Ann Hermes, Staff Photographer
Boston — It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the range of photo exhibits – from new experimental artists to historic documentary works – at the Association of International Photography Art Dealers show in New York City. What is harder to find at AIPAD are modern works of photojournalism. This is part of the reason that scenes from the racial turmoil in Ferguson by photojournalist Whitney Curtis stood out. Her work was exhibited by the Monroe Gallery of Photography there. To get a better sense of how images from Ferguson moved from the pages of a newspaper to a framed exhibit at an international art photography show, I caught up with gallery owner, Sid Monroe. Here are some excerpts.
Whitney Curtis' photographs from Ferguson are featured in the exhibit "The Long Road: from Selma to Ferguson", Monroe Gallery, Santa Fe, July 3 - September 28, 2015
Tuesday, June 16, 2015
Santa Fe Public Radio "At Noon" features Margaret Bourke-White exhibition
The exhibition Margaret Bourke-White: Pioneering Photographer was featured on "At Noon" June 15, 2015.
The work of trail-blazing photo-journalist Margaret Bourke-White is on display in downtown Santa Fe. The Monroe Gallery of Photography opened in Santa Fe in 2002, re-locating from Manhattan where it stood near the targeted World Trade Center towers on September 11th, 2001. The Monroe Gallery specializes in classic black & white photography with an emphasis on humanist and photojournalist imagery. Sid Monroe co-owns the gallery with his wife, Michelle. The Bourke-White exhibit at the Monroe Gallery runs through June 28th.
Listen here.
Listen here.
Saturday, June 13, 2015
Happy Birthday Margaret Bourke-White
by Oscar Graubner
Margaret
Bourke-White was born on June 14, 1904, in New York City, and graduated from
Cornell University in 1927. Choosing photography as a profession, she
immediately began her dramatic career by experimenting with industrial
subjects.
THE Magazine Review: Margaret Bourke-White: Pioneering Photographer
EDDIE ADAMS DAY 2015
via New Kensington Camera Club
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 Æ’-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.
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.
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/
For more information visit http://eddieadamsday.com/
Thursday, May 28, 2015
REVIEW: Margaret Bourke-White: Pioneering Photographer
June, 2015
IMAGINE, IF YOU CAN, A WORLD IN WHICH PHOTOGRAPHS WERE A
RARE FORM
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
"I take my responsibility as a photographer much more seriously"
My Most Important Photograph: Spc. Robert Acosta, 20, photographed at his home
in Santa Ana, Calif., April 13, 2004
©Nina Berman-NOOR
Via TIME Lightbox
Best known for documenting the aftermath of the Iraq War and the militarization of American life, Nina Berman tells us about the most important photograph she's ever made.
"I thought I could add some complexity into the narrative by investigating what it meant to be wounded, who these troops were, what it meant to return home at such a young age and make the transition to disabled veteran."
Tuesday, May 26, 2015
Eddie Adams exhibition of photographs opens at the Dublin Arts Council
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.
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
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
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.“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
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