“There has been much talk about climate change. But not much about where we will see its first impact: water.

Flooding. Drought. Contamination. Water is the vector of climate change. By 2010 an estimated 40 per cent of the world’s poorest people will lack access to clean water. Two hundred million may be physically or economically displaced.

This is not the future. This is now.

The Prix Pictet is a major new global prize in photography that focuses on perhaps the greatest single issue of the twenty-first century: sustainability. The award is sponsored by Pictet & Cie, in association with the Financial Times.

With a single annual prize of CHF 100,000, the Prix Pictet will reward photographers and the images they use to tell stories of urgent global significance. Each year the Prix Pictet will focus on a distinct sustainability theme. The theme for 2008 is water.”

Pretty serious business. And pretty cool, too. David is shortlisted with an amazing list of photographers who span the world. Congrats, David.

I was unaware of this photographer until this morning, when an obituary from Stephen Bulger Gallery in Toronto arrived in my inbox. This is such a lovely, romantic image that speaks to the joys of making photographs….

FORWARD

–adverb
* toward or at a place, point, or time in advance; onward; ahead: to move forward; from this day forward; to look forward.

–noun
* Sports: a player stationed in advance of others on a team.
* Finance: something bought, as a security, for future delivery.

–verb (used with object)
* to send forward; transmit, esp. to a new address: to forward a letter.
* to advance or help onward; promote.

–verb (used without object)
* to advance or play a mechanism, recording tape, cassette, etc., in the forward direction.

FOREWORD

–noun
* a short introductory statement in a published work, as a book, esp. when written by someone other than the author.

AFTERWARD
-adverb
* at a later or subsequent time; subsequently.

AFTERWORD

-noun
* a concluding section, commentary, etc., as of a book, treatise, or the like; closing statement.

James Welling (b. 1951) has quietly created a well-deserved following for himself in international photography circles and is also one of the few photographers featured in this year’s Whitney Biennial. The wall label for the Welling is particularly enlightening:

“The various steps involved in the creation of these works are instructive: Welling first arranged and exposed plumbago blossoms on black-and-white sheet-film negatives then printed each one using a different assortment of colored gels. Each work is, then, like the result of a performance in the darkroom, where the admixture of infinitely shaded hues seems to pulse, swell, and bleed around and through the spiky branches—a performance that can be repeated, varied, and completed by each viewer in the act of looking. They are also exuberant displays of analogue technical wizardry that constitute an implicit rebuke to the surfeit of digitally manipulated photography that is less than truthful about its methods and effects.”

That last sentence is brilliant!

Mark Wyse, another well-established but relatively little-known southern California artist, was included with a single (and singular) image. Here’s the wall label for Mark Wyse’s piece:

“A professional printer as well as a photographer, Wyse makes technically assured yet enigmatically reticent images showing traces of past life or activity. The title of the series, Marks of Indifference, refers to an essay on photography and Conceptual Art by the artist Jeff Wall and is used by Wyse not only to denote the idea of the camera as a blank recording device in works by Warhol and Acconci of the 1960s but also the very subjects of his pictures and the larger question of photographic meaning and intentionality. In this example, a tomblike room is seen at an oblique angle, focusing on the jagged lines left when a shelf was ripped from a wall. In one sense, the remnants of the act of removal captured in the image are an apt metaphor for photography itself—a mute presence that stands in for an absence. The paradoxical sense of enclosure and openness, surface incident and emptiness, is typical of Wyse’s photographs, which reflect ambiguously upon the relationship between the mix of conscious and unconscious intentions that is the stock and trade of photography’s relation to the world.”

The sentence that I’ve placed in italics is a potent statement about what photography does; the conflation or collapse that so often happens in the minds of most people between the photograph and what is in the photograph (or the perceived subject of the photograph) is elegantly pointed out in Wyse’s work.

“Recent years have seen much hand-wringing about the future of the medium, as 150 years of analog photography rapidly give way to its digital successor. Traditional photography’s “slow” techniques and the carefully produced prints and books made for the exhibition and dissemination of images now seem as quaint as etchings to a culture increasingly dominated by screens over which pass an ever shifting array of text, still and moving images, and live transmissions. In the face of this epochal transformation, attention has turned to artists such as Hiroshi Sugimoto and James Welling who long ago fused an interest in Conceptualism with a loving attention to the material bases of analog photography.

The work of the younger artists that conclude this exhibition, from Josephine Pryde’s blushed fourteen-part meditation on photography, time, and luxury anti-aging products to Mark Wyse’s sepulchral study of marks left by shelves torn from a wall, assume as a matter of course that photography cannot help but reflect on its own status and condition. It is not accidental that their works and those of their colleagues seen here also eschew digital manipulation—the ideas that go into their pictures come out of a direct engagement with process that equates extending a tradition with its continual questioning.” —from the exhibition statement.

The 2008 First Edition winners have just been announced, and they are:

Juliane Eirich
Derek Henderson
Roc Herms Pont
Kate Orne
Colleen Plumb

(below, Fairgoose, by Colleen Plumb)

Download the pdf: 2008_MacGregor_Boom

The second generation rocket bicycle Greg built and rode last year:

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.

“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.