DariusHimes

Santa Fe’s local (award-winning!) alternative weekly newspaper is the Santa Fe Reporter, and Julia Goldberg who is the editor of the paper is a good friend of mine. A couple months ago she asked if I would write a short piece on a photographer on the theme of “adventure” for their annual Summer Guide. After trifling through a short list of local photographers I really admire, I settled on the idea of interviewing Greg MacGregor, who I’ve long admired and who has a history of making (safe) bombs, blowing things up, and photographing the process. (He’s also a motorcycle aficionado and has been helping get a ‘76 BMW up and running. Thanks Greg!)

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Two recent pieces have gone up online:

Will Steacy, a photographer based in New York City, maintains a blog and regularly asks people in the photography industry to put together a Top Ten list based on whatever criteria they want. A couple weeks ago he asked me to put together a list, which he has just posted here.

Rob Haggart, the force behind A Photo Editor, the well-known and influential blog, has just posted an interview with me about publishing art and photography books here.

The Center for Fine Art Photography has asked me to jury their first ever Online Portfolio Show. The call for entries opens today, June 19, and closes on July 17.

“Fifteen photographers will be chosen to display their twelve-image portfolio in The Center for Fine Art Photography’s special Online Portfolio Show and be included the Center’s new publication Artists ShowCase, volume 1, issue 1.  The show will be featured on the Center’s web site at www.c4fap.org from September 1 – September 30, 2008 and will remain online for the next two years.”

The fifteen winning portfolios will be exhibited online, a book of the the winning portfolios will be produced with a introductory essay by myself, and one of the fifteen winning artists will be asked to exhibit their prints in the Center’s gallery space in Fort Collins, Colorado in 200. It’s quite a package deal.

There is no theme to the online show, so simply pull together a great portfolio and submit it before the deadline.

The good folks at flakphoto (in particular, Andy Adams) have teamed up with CENTER, the non-profit that hosts Review Santa Fe each year, to feature the work of the RSF photographers all summer long. Flakphoto will showcase 55 photographers over an 11 week period, from June 16-August 29.

The good folks up at The Santa Fe Workshops have asked me to teach a workshop about (wait for it) photography and books (my two favorite subjects)! The class is almost filled, so hurry up and sign up.

Review Santa Fe, the esteemed and juried portfolio review event that takes place every summer in Santa Fe, happened weekend before last, from June 5-7th. Hosted and sponsored by CENTER, the event brought in over 100 photographers from around the world and dozens of top notch industry professionals, from gallerists and curators to publishers and magazine editors (you can see the list of reviewers here and the list of photographers here). The great thing about Review Santa Fe is that it is juried, which means a certain level of work can be expected. The other great thing is that reviewers come expecting to see really good work, and they are not let down, which means that more and more reviewers are interested in coming each year.

Some particularly strong work: Colleen Plumb, whose project “Animals Are Outside Today” explores the presence, both overt and implied, of animals in our daily lives. I particularly enjoyed seeing her book maquette, which was hand-bound in cloth and images printed as ink-jets (that’s the artist hold her book).

Rachael Dunville was in town, whose work I’ve followed since meeting her at PhotoLucida last year (another great portfolio review event). She has an amazing body of portraiture that has the same intensity of connection with her subjects as the true greats of photography–I’m thinking of Peter Hujar, Disfarmer and Diane Arbus in particular. (I wrote about her small self-published book in my year-end round-up of books. They are still available, but in short supply from her website or photo-eye.com.)

Another favorite was Phillip Toledano, who already has a published body of work (Bankrupt, Twin Palms Publishers) and anothe book forthcoming (Phonesex, Twin Palms Publishers). But his ongoing, loosely (or at least more intuitively) edited series of landscapes and portraits and daily details were the most intriguing. The two below are part of a smaller part of work called Arctic Circle.

Another gem from the weekend was seeing a copy of Celebrating the Negative: Photographs by John Loengard and watching gallerist Terry Etherton describe the very limited portfolio for those interested. John Loengard was a long-time Life magazine editor and published Celebrating the Negative as a trade edition in 1994 (Arcade Publishing). The book was a visual exploration of the negatives behind some of history’s most iconic images. Loengard photographed each negative with a pair of hands, oftentimes held by the original photographer. Each portfolio contains eighteen of Loengard’s photographs, an essay discussing each of the original pieces, and a signed copy of the trade edition of the book, all housed in an elegant clamshell box.

These photographs remind me of the absolute elegance that a b&w negative has (yes, there is some nostalgia wrapped up in that statement). They do, as a matter of fact, represent the original work, the first generation of all gelatin silver prints, though never the exhibited piece. Learning to read a negative was a primary experience for several generations of photographers; seeing the negatives of so many iconic images is really wonderful.

Below: Terry Etherton showing the portfolio to Stephen Bulger.

I loved discovering this (back by the bathrooms on the 4th or 5th floor or perhaps a different floor completely. I forget where I was). It was a display of previous biennial catalogues and other Whitney Museum publications from years’ past.

The display below immediately brought to mind Paul Graham’s newest offering, A Shimmer of Possibility. What a great serendipitous confluence of books.

This is an item for this weekend’s calendar: The Look3 Festival of the Photograph (in Charlottesville, VA — 2.5 hours south of DC) starts this Thursday, running through Sunday with a full schedule of classes, presentations, and exhibitions. I’m involved on a couple levels: Julie Blackmon and I are presenting on Friday afternoon at 1pm on the collaboration between artist and publisher (Domestic Vacations was just published by Radius Books this Spring!). ALSO, Leah BenDavid-Val and myself have co-curated an exhibition of photography books from the past several years. At the rate that great photobooks are now being published, this is an abbreviated and playful list. I’ll post photos of the event venues while there. Come down and say hi!

From the website: “Selections include works by photographers Alec Soth, Stephen Shore, Richard Misrach, Daido Moriyama, Luigi Ghirri, Boris Mikhailov, Alex Webb, and many more, with publishers Steidl, Nazraeli, Phaidon, Hatje Cantz, Aperture, Fraenkel Gallery, and others. Books will be on display to inspire both seasoned and aspiring bookmakers.”

Beaumont Newhall remains one of the most influential figures in the development of fine-art photography. Newhall was born on June 22, 1908, in Massachusetts, and in his mid-20s he began working at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City as a librarian. It was in 1937 that he was asked by MoMA’s legendary director, Alfred Barr, Jr. to work on the first ever comprehensive and retrospective exhibition of photography. The exhibition surveyed the first 100 years of the photographic medium and deftly balanced technical developments with artistic influences and developments. The accompanying catalogue, The History of Photography, became (through its many subsequent editions) the history textbook of choice for many decades thereafter. Newhall became the first director of MoMA’s photography department in 1940.

Newhall then went on to serve as curator (and later as director) of the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House from 1948 to 1971. It was during this time that Newhall built one of the preeminent collections of photography in the world.

It was also during this time that he wrote (anonymously at first) a food column in the local newspaper, the Brighton Pittsford Post. Radius Books is publishing a collection of these columns later this year — complete with recipes, reminiscences and photographs by the Newhall circle of artists. I’ve been working on this project closely with David Scheinbaum and Janet Russek, co-executors of Beaumont’s estate. One of the pleasures that have surfaced in our discussions has been getting to see some of the catalogues that Beaumont produced while working at MoMA, including a first edition, first printing of The History of Photography!

(below) Three exhibition catalogues from shows that Newhall curated during his time at MoMA: Edward Weston, Paul Strand, and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

(below) The title and table of contents spreads from the Cartier-Bresson exhibition catalogue.