11.28.2011

LINDA TROELLER: MUCALINDA | Self-Portraits + Self-Reflection

Linda, Ansel Adams Bookmaking Workshop, Yosemite, Ca, 1974
Photograph by
David Bales

Self-Portrait. San Jose Purua Hot Springs, Mexico, 1976

Linda Troeller's "Healing Waters" (Aperture) won 'Pictures of the Year' Book Award for Excellence. Cover, "Floating, Terme di Saturnia, Italy, 1996"

Mucalinda: Self-Portrait + Self-Reflection


"Mucalinda was a serpent king that emerged from the earth and protected Buddha with his hood from a storm. The book title is a metaphor of coming to terms with the multiplicity and the convergences of my life, an affirmation of the different moments which are represented in these self-portraits and portraits by other photographers."

"Self-reflection is reassurance for our psyche. French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan coined the term “the mirror stage,” which refers to early development in which an infant sees his own likeness, watches it move as he feels his body move, and thus realizes for the first time that he is the master of his own corporal form."

"Florence Nightingale, the civil war nurse, wrote that color, form and light provoke a physical effect on well-being. Photographers enter into that realm of light with their eyes and sensation. Photography can connect us to ‘oneness,’ and a ‘source.’ Research shows that photographs are recorded in the frontal lobe of the brain, which control heartbeat, blood flow, and hormones. This optic –unconscious relationship brings us visions of places yet to be discovered, universal, and yet rare. I experienced this kinship with my first camera, a Rollei, at the age of twenty at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico when Georgia O’Keeffe told me, “Let the powers out there guide you.” The impulse to snap the shutter directly links us to mythic absorption which is what the Mexican painter, Leonora Carrington named “down below.” She said if I wanted to heal from a breakup and grow as an artist I would “take the waters in San Jose Purua and Ixtapan or mushrooms in Palenque” to access things internal, archetypal, redeemable. – Linda Troeller, Mucalinda


Linda Troeller Exhibition Curated by Sabine Kutt
Art Basel/Miami Beach Dec 1- 3


Self-Portrait, Lobby, Chelsea Hotel, NYC, 2006

"Artist. Model. Author. Muse. Linda Troeller plays many parts in her photographic life. Throughout a prolific career photographing and publishing books on female sexuality, healing-water spas, the AIDS epidemic, and her home in New York’s legendary Chelsea Hotel, Troeller has regularly served as a subject for the camera, her own and those of her colleagues. Mucalinda: Self-Portrait + Self-Reflection, a collection of images by Troeller and other photographers from the 1970s to today, is an intimate, illuminating assessment of one artist’s deep engagement with seeing and understanding herself through the camera’s lens."

"Troeller’s dual roles behind and in front of the camera make her an anomaly in a community where most hide behind their viewfinders. But her exceptional beauty, along with the strength, openness, and willingness to collaborate with other artists on subtle, spiritual levels manifested in each photograph, made it inevitable that she would inspire other photographers as a subject. In each fearless image Troeller depicts the creative arc of a soul in love with photography and life.”–Toby Kamps, Mucalinda

Toby Kamps, Senior Curator, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Texas

MUCALINDA: Self-Portraits + Self-Reflection
view and purchase here

Linda Troeller’s vast corpus of self-portraits spanning the length of her artistic career serve as testaments to the many faces that composite the idea of self. The compulsive remaking of her own image through the expanse of time (or timelessness) falls within the artist’s desire to inscribe her likeness on the visual field. It is as if Troeller is making up for the lack of the emancipated female subject in art historical discourse. Her images often elicit a dreamscape, as her body is often pictured in nature, floating in water or suspended in between the horizon line of ground and air. The transcendent quality of Troeller’s self-portraits point to her desire to achieve the liberated female subject in art through the constant re-imaging of her own body within the pictorial frame. – Kalia Brooks, Mucalinda

Kalia Brooks, Adjunct Professor, New York University, Tisch School of the Arts, Photography and Imaging Department, Exhibition Director, Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA)

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Upcoming News
Linda Troeller Exhibition Curated by Sabine Kutt
Art Basel/Miami Beach Dec 1- 3

Exhibition Mucalinda: Self-Portrait + Self-Reflection
Hellenic Centre for Photography, Athens and
Tenerife Photography Festival, Canary Islands, Spain
through the end of 2011


Linda Troeller will teach "Self-Portraiture and Poetry" with Maureen Alsop in Palm Springs, California, April 2-5, 2012.
Many thanks to Linda for allowing me to excerpt from her book, Mucalinda: Self-Portraits + Self-Reflection

11.26.2011

FOTOVISURA GRANT: Deadline December 5

Teresa Beatriz, Federico Nicolás y Ana, Trampolín, 11.26.2011
Photograph (c) Adriana Teresa

FotoVisura Grant Competition
Photographers: for Outstanding Personal Photography Project
Students:
for Outstanding Student Photography Project
Enter Here

11.18.2011

NICK BRANDT: Selected New Work 2010-2011


Line of Rangers Holding Tusks of Killed Elephant, Amboseli 2011
Photograph (c) Nick Brandt

Elephant Skull, Amboseli 2010
Photograph (c) Nick Brandt

Ranger with Tusks of Killed Elephant, Amboseli 2011
Photograph (c) Nick Brandt

Calcified Reflected Flamingo, Lake Natron 2010
Photograph (c) Nick Brandt

Calcified Caped Dove, Lake Natron 2010
Photograph (c) Nick Brandt

"The photos, darker in tone than previous work, reflect the further ongoing diminishing of the natural world of Africa."–Nick Brandt

Currently on display at photo-eye Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is a group exhibition which includes new work by Nick Brandt. photo-eye's Anne Kelly spoke to Brandt about these striking new images:

"The three photographs of rangers are all holding tusks from elephants killed at the hands of man within the Amboseli/Tsavo ecosystem. The rangers in the photos are part of the team from
BIG LIFE FOUNDATION, the non-profit organization I started in Sept 2010 in an effort to help try and halt the alarming and massive escalation of poaching in East Africa. So far, working within the Amboseli ecosystem of Kenya and Northern Tanzania, the Big Life teams have successfully dramatically reduced the level of poaching and other killings of animals in the region. The problem remains rampant elsewhere." Read photo-eye's Anne Kelly Interview here.

11.11.2011

MONA KUHN: PARIS PHOTO 2011 Book Signing + La Lettre Interview

Mona Kuhn's Bordeaux Series (Steidl, 2011)

INTERVIEW here

PARIS PHOTO: Mona Kuhn signs her newly released monograph, Bordeaux Series, Nov 12 Steidl, Booth D34 from 16:00 to 18:00 and Flowers Gallery, Booth D54.

Read the entire Interview here:
La Lettre de la Photographie 11.11.11

Mona Kuhn, born in São Paulo, Brazil of German descent, now living in Los Angeles, spends her summers in the beautiful countryside near Bordeaux, France. In a house nestled in the pine forest, lit only by oil lamps and candles, she’s been photographing friends, family and friends of friends, nude in a small room for the past three years to create her latest work, Bordeaux Series.
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I spoke with Mona about her new series and her experience working with preeminent photography publisher, Gerhard Steidl:

"With this idea of keeping the palette very classic, black and white and red, I thought the portraits also needed to be kept very simple. Traditional portraiture was a little scary to do because suddenly I’m competing with all the portraiture done before."

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"I was a little worried because I had a lot of prints of nudes to show him and we were in the lobby of this hotel. I was thinking this is not going to work so well. In the past I have always shown him the work in a sequence, instead of showing in a box that you flip, flip, flip. I like sequencing it on a long table so you can look at each image and you can see how they communicate with each other. I talked to someone at the hotel to see if they had a conference room with a table we could just use for ten minutes. They didn’t!"

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"The thing with Gerhard that is so insane, is that I dream of a book and that book is 100% of what I was dreaming. Then when I go to Steidlville in Germany and I show him what I’m thinking about, he always adds another 50% that I could not have seen before, envisioned or dreamed, which is really incredible."read my entire Interview with Mona Kuhn here:


11.09.2011

MICHAEL AVEDON: A Portrait of the Artist

Julian Schnabel
Photograph (c) Michael Avedon

Philippe Pasqua
Photograph (c) Michael Avedon

Philippe Pasqua
Photograph (c) Michael Avedon

Photograph (c) Michael Avedon

Photographer and School of Visual Arts student, Michael Avedon, works primarily with black & white 35mm film. He's begun to develop his own perspective over the past three years, photographing everything from a series on contemporary artists to surfing video's and fashion shoots, informed by the photographic history of his grandfather Richard Avedon.

Self-Portrait-Bio
Michael Avedon Website

11.08.2011

GILLES PERRIN: Africa

Ceremonial Masques, Burkina Faso, 2009
Photograph (c) Gilles Perrin


Ceremonial Masques, Burkina Faso, 2009
Photograph (c) Gilles Perrin

Ceremonial Masques, Burkina Faso, 2009
Photograph (c) Gilles Perrin

Ceremonial Masques, Burkina Faso, 2009
Photograph (c) Gilles Perrin

Portrait, The Omo Valley, Ethiopia
Photograph (c) Gilles Perrin

"I produce social and documentary photography. My work is centered around making photographs and witnessing the condition of the world around me. I try to show a certain reality, which matches my vision and my emotions. My desire is to show the contradictions and paradoxes; the counterbalance of a world in progress which is impossible to deny. I am interested in the reality we don’t see."–Gilles Perrin

Africa has a place of honor this year at Paris Photo 2011 and although Gilles Perrin is not showing his Burkina Faso Ceremonial Mask photographs there, his exhibition "WOMEN" is in Rueil-Malmaison at Espace Renoir.

Femme - Photographies de Gilles PERRIN
à l'espace Renoir
27 rue Guy de Maupassant
92500 Rueil-Malmaison

SLIDELUCK POTSHOW BENEFIT AUCTION: Ruben Natal-San Miguel and many others

Lady Money Sings the Blues, Harlem 2011
Photograph by Ruben Natal-San Miguel

Edition 3/7 has been donated by Ruben Natal-San Miguel and Finch & Ada for the Second Slideluck Potshow Annual Benefit

Tickets are still available for the Slideluck Potshow Benefit on Wednesday 11/9. The online auction closes tonight, so get your bids in and come out tomorrow night for a wonderful evening of food, fun, and photography. A lot of other wonderful works up for auction tomorrow. Dinner, Drinks, Auction: Sandbox Studios, 121 Varick St. NYC

LA LETTRE de la PHOTOGRAPHIE | Paris Photo 2011

11.06.2011

JERRY ATNIP: Gone South

No 214 Tennessee
Photograph (c) Jerry Atnip


No 193 Georgia
Photograph (c) Jerry Atnip

No 184 Georgia
Photograph (c) Jerry Atnip

No 197 Texas
Photograph (c) Jerry Atnip

“Many photographers feel that they need to travel to faraway or exotic places to capture great images. I also travel the world on assignments, but enjoy recording the land I was raised in. I find I’m never at a lack for interesting subject matter throughout the South.”–Jerry Atnip

Jerry Atnip, a commercial and fine art photographer for over 35 years, was born in San Antonio and is now based in Nashville. He's spent the last few years traveling throughout the South exploring the back-roads and highways searching for the nuances that shape this unique part of the country. The thirty-nine images in his recently released book,
Gone South: A Collection of Images from the American South (Nashville: CIA Publishing, 2011), are a part of a much larger body of work which includes scenes from Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky and Texas, on exhibit now at Nashville's Surroundings Gallery. Atnip describes the South in the introduction to the book as “a transitory area where the past and the present exist in a familiar tandem.

Gone South: A Collection of Images from the American South is available as both a regular trade book and as a Limited Edition (of 200 copies), which includes a signed and numbered print. Both can be ordered at JerryAtnip or CIA Creative.

No 226 Tennessee
Photograph (c) Jerry Atnip


"Jerry Atnip’s exhibition of photographs, Gone South: A Collection of Images from the American South, opened Friday evening at Nashville’s Surroundings Gallery...The ensemble of images, most of them moody black-and-white, a few dashes of color here and there, looks unplanned, as if stabbed on a bulletin board, so many snapshots, simple statements of the commonplace carefully saved. Railroad tracks, gulls, tree limbs against the sky and against each other, water in its many modes, a clapboard house, steps almost absorbed by the hill they climb, a tire swing hanging from a tree, and a timeless horse worthy of Paolo Uccello.

All respectful echoes as much of the South’s finest writers as of her photographers— Faulkner, Shelby Foote and Andrew Lytle as well as Eudora Welty, Walker Evans and Al Clayton. No axes to grind, nor politics to shout. No sound at all. Neither angst nor sermons. Just a dream-like serenity invoking nostalgia for times us older folks would like to pass on to the youngsters, but seldom succeed in doing.

Over thirty years of experience, Jerry Atnip’s photographic subjects include “people, architecture, corporate, music, travel” and, I expect, many other diverse subjects. Since 2002, he has won twenty-one awards in shows of various kinds, has mounted over seventy exhibitions in places as far-flung as Abu Dhabi, Paris, Geneva, Budapest, and throughout the U. S. Since 2006, his bibliography includes thirty-four citations, and his work has been widely acquired by private, corporate and academic collections."–excerpted from a Review by Marshall Fallwell, Jr.

11.03.2011

WILLIAM CLIFT: Photographs + Books

Charis, Bandelier, N.M., 1974
Photograph Copyright (c) William Clift

Intuition precedes everything. When I look back at my first photographs taken around 12 years old, I'm surprised certain things are there so early in one's life. You have no idea where the hell it comes from.

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WILLIAM CLIFT is recognized for his exquisite New Mexico landscapes, of Mont Saint-Michel, France, for documentation of our nation’s courthouses, the New York State Capitol in Albany, and the Hudson River Valley. Past publications include, Certain Places (1987), A Hudson Landscape (1993) and A Particular World (2008). He grew up on Boston's Beacon Hill and now lives with his family in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

As early as 10 years old, Clift was already working in his own darkroom from images he'd taken with his Brownie camera. He saved his money summer after summer caddying until he'd saved enough to purchase a Polaroid camera in 1956. As film was expensive, he was very careful to take only a very few images. Not taking quantities of pictures has seemingly become a habit that's lasted throughout his career.

At 12, he photographed the luminous image, Barbara's Table, Boston, Mass., 1956 (the frontispiece of his book, Certain Places) with his Poloroid. At 15, he took his first photography workshop with Paul Caponigro. He became the youngest member of the Association of Heliographers (named after the 1929 sun-imagery process) founded by Walter Chappell, along with Caponigro, Marie Cosindas, and a few other established photographers.

WILLIAM CLIFT's latest book, A Particular World, may be one of the most exceptional photography books of this decade. An assembly of 25 color photographs by William Clift taken with a Polaroid Spectra camera of his family and home.

A PARTICULAR WORLD, 1987-2007
Designed by Eleanor Caponigro. Pearmain Press, 2008
Available at Photo-Eye Books

William Clift Website
21 Questions with daughter, Carola Clift

11.02.2011

LORI WASELCHUK: Grace Before Dying

Photograph (c) Lori Waselchuk from her series Grace Before Dying

A person is a person through another person. My humanity is caught up, bound up, inextricably, with yours.–Desmond Tutu

11.01.2011

ROBERT CLARK: Evolution

Hanged with a leather chord and cast into a Danish bog 2,300 years ago, Tollund Man was probably a sacrifice. Like other bodies found preserved in Europe's peat bogs, he poses haunting questions. How was he chosen? Who closed his eyes after death? And what god demanded his life? Photograph © RobertClark/Institute


Hanged with a leather chord and cast into a Danish bog 2,300 years ago, Tollund Man was probably a sacrifice. Photograph © RobertClark/Institute


Monk at Ta Prohm. 2008. City: Siem Reap, Cambodia
Photograph © RobertClark/Institute


Ground finches by Darwin on the Galapagos Islands. The diversity of the finches beaks in such an isolated environment help lead Darwin to the theory of natural selection. Photograph © RobertClark/Institute


(left) Genomics uses information technology such as a DNA chip to discover the similarities in this chimpanzee's hand to ours. (right) Vestigial rear foot of a whale-like creature now called Dorudon. Photograph © RobertClark/Institute


Robert Clark is a freelance photographer based in NYC. Early in his career, Clark documented the lives of high-school football players in Odessa, Texas with author H. G. "Buzz" Bissenger, for the book Friday Night Lights. The book was a best seller and became a major motion picture and NBC television series.

In 2003, Anne Wilkes Tucker of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, brought Clark back to Texas to capture the first year of a new NFL team, the Houston Texans. The documentary and portraiture project resulted in one of the museum's most popular exhibits and the publication of a collectible, black-and-white photo book, First Down Houston: Birth of an NFL Franchise. Clark was the principle photographer for First Lady Hillary Clinton's book, An Invitation to the White House.

His coverage of the attack on the World Trade Center, witnessed from his rooftop in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, was recognized at the World Press Photo awards in Amsterdam. He also received a National Magazine Award for "Best Essay" for his National Geographic cover article, Was Darwin Wrong?

His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Time, Sports Illustrated, GEO, Vanity Fair, Stern, and Der Spiegel and
graced some 40 book covers and more than a dozen National Geographic covers. Clark continues his association with National Geographic and is working on a book documenting the birth of the science of evolution. –Robert Clark website