ADAM BARTOS: Travel Work

Teotihuacan, Mexico (agave plants), 1981
Courtesy of Adam Bartos/Gitterman Gallery

Mombasa, Kenya (park), 1980
Courtesy of Adam Bartos/Gitterman Gallery

County Road 80, Southampton, NY, 2010

Courtesy of Adam Bartos/Gitterman Gallery

Martin's Marine, Bay Shore, NY, 2010

Courtesy of Adam Bartos/Gitterman Gallery

"Adam Bartos’ interest in the 19th century travel work of Samuel Bourne, Robert MacPherson, and others, led him to Egypt, Kenya, and Mexico with a large format camera and color film. His images are thoroughly modern, yet their energy is inspired by the lucid depiction of form and light that the earlier photographers achieved. His attention to the picture plane creates a tension that resonates between the photograph as both his expression of a place and an object in and of itself. None of the photographs are constructed wholly from incident or narrative."–Gitterman Gallery

Adam Bartos | March 1–May 5
Gitterman Gallery
New York, NY

MONA KUHN: Bordeaux Series | Flowers Gallery, New York

Mona Kuhn | Bordeaux Series
February 23 - March 24

Artist Talk • Saturday February 25th • 4 PM

Flowers Gallery
529 West 20th Street
New York City

Paysage 7, Bordeaux Series, Photograph © Mona Kuhn

Mona Kuhn 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.

Stone 1, Bordeaux Series, Photograph © Mona Kuhn

EA: How did the idea of including landscapes fit into this series?

MK: They are landscapes I took of the region in-between the portraits, to inform a little bit about the area. When I had the beautiful light, I was photographing my friends. When it was raining, and there are a lot of summer thunderstorms that go though there, I would go out and photograph the thunderstorms. A couple of them are dramatic thunderstorms images and large clouds and high contrast, and some are of pathways that create this idea where this room is where all the people have gathered. So you have a little bit of a maze like feeling with the landscapes that lead somewhere, but you don’t know where.

Paysage 9, Bordeaux Series, Photograph © Mona Kuhn

"It started with a group of friends in France that go truffle hunting. I realized that I would love to photograph this path, kind of bringing them to my work. It’s not that I want truffle hunting in my work, but I transferred that into the idea of almost a tale, a little like Hansel and Gretel. You’re going somewhere, there’s this house in the photograph, but no one knows where you are going. In a more philosophical way, I was looking at those pathways also as the passages of entering and leaving life. Not that’s what you see in the images, just what was in the back of my mind...To celebrate black and white, I made prints that are 38” x 72,” very large black and white silver gelatin prints on fiber paper. They are like the most traditional black and whites you can possibly have. They are perfect. I am so excited about those black and whites."–Mona Kuhn

Read my Interview With Mona Kuhn here

CRUEL AND UNUSUAL: Prison Photography Noorderlicht Gallery

PREVIEW NEWSPRINT CATALOG HERE
Buy It Here

Cruel and Unusual is a curatorial collaboration between guest curators Pete Brook and Hester Keijser. The exhibition showcases the work of Araminta de Clermont, Amy Elkins, Alyse Emdur, Christiane Feser, Jane Lindsay, Deborah Luster, Nathalie Mohadjer, Yana Payusova, Lizzie Sadin, Lori Waselchuk, and others.

Cruel and Unusual
18 February - 1 April, 2012
Noorderlicht Gallery
9711 JB Groningen, Netherlands

Photograph © ARAMINTA DE CLERMONT
Series: Life After. Title: Passport (Achmed), 2008

CRUEL AND UNUSUAL:
Prison Photography Exhibition
Part I + Part II

Prison Photography's Pete Brook
Talks Blogs, Prisons, Road Trips and Photography
February 18th 4:00 - 6:00 pm

MICHAEL AVEDON: VMAN and the Artists

Portrait of Artist Chuck Close
Photograph (c) Michael Avedon

In ART RUBY, photographer Michael Avedon states, "Photography is largely in part a mystery to me. I am drawn to faces, and when I received my first camera as a gift from my grandmother that is where I began. Friends’ faces, strangers’ faces, my own face. As of recently I have found a particular interest in photographing artists at work in their studios. Each space ends up being a reflection or extension of the artist within it, and it therefore seems to be the ideal natural environment to capture some sort of truth about that person." Read "Meet Michael Avedon: Art Ruby's Newest Contributor"

25th Issue of VMAN | Guest Edited by Carine Roitfeld, includes
The Artists Are Present: Photographs by Michael Avedon

The Artists Are Present...these 6 rising artists are just starting to make a name for themselves, as is the young man who shot them, Michael Avedon, 21-year-old grandson of iconic photographer Richard Avedon.–VMAN

As guest editor of VMAN's 25th issue, Carine Roitfeld, former editor-in-chief of Vogue Paris, featured photographs by Michael Avedon of emerging artists shot with his preferred black & white 35mm film. Also check out "Michael Avedon: A Portrait of the Artist" which includes one of my favorite self-portrait's ever!

RICHARD GERE: 2012 George Eastman Award

Portrait of Richard Gere © Michael Weschler Photography

Richard Gere Receives the George Eastman Award
By Elizabeth Avedon for Le Journal de la Photographie

“It's a great honor to receive this prestigious award. In light of past recipients and the valuable work the Eastman House has done in film preservation, photography and the captured image, I'm very grateful to have been recognized by such a distinguished group.” –Richard Gere

February 16th, Richard Gere received the the George Eastman Award for Distinguished Contribution in the Art of Film, as well as for his International Humanitarian Leadership, from George Eastman House in Rochester, NY.

Gere is known as much for his leading rolls in films such as American Gigolo, An Officer and a Gentleman, Cotton Club, Pretty Woman, Primal Fear, Unfaithful, The Hunting Party, and Chicago, as for his ongoing commitment as advocate and supporter of numerous humanitarian causes through his Gere Foundation.

Dr. Anthony Bannon, Director of George Eastman House, said about Gere's nomination, “We have a special interest in inviting Mr. Gere to receive this honor, as he embodies the spirit of all four of the major awards this institution bestows, including the George Eastman Award, the George Eastman Honors (which is presented to those who excel in both motion picture and photography) and the Eastman Medal of Honor (which is awarded for exemplary public service). We admire Mr. Gere’s own considerable photographic skills. I am also well aware of Mr. Gere’s work on behalf of the people of Tibet and his relationship with H.H. The Dalai Lama, and I have followed both his career and his advocacy for many years. I read with interest his recent statements before Congress, and must tell you they very much echoed a conversation I had with the late Manute Bol when he visited Eastman House to speak about the crisis in Darfur.”

George Eastman House, the world’s oldest museum dedicated to the art, history and science of photography and motion pictures, was the first museum to create a school of film preservation, the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation. Established in 1947, their motion picture archive contains the leading silent film collection in the world. With nearly 30,000 titles, the collection includes significant holdings from Metro Goldwyn Mayer, various independent studios, personal film collections of Cecil B. DeMille and Martin Scorsese, the Merchant Ivory Archives, the Technicolor Archives, as well as lesser known documentaries, shorts, newsreels, and avant-garde works. In addition, Eastman House is home to more than 400,000 photographs representing the history of photography, making Eastman House the world’s most consequential non-government, independent collection of still and moving images.

The George Eastman Award was first presented in 1955, and past recipients include Charlie Chaplin, Gary Cooper, Cecil B. DeMille, John Ford, Greta Garbo, Harold Lloyd, Louise Brooks, James Stewart, Gregory Peck, Lauren Bacall, Lillian Gish, Audrey Hepburn, Mary Pickford, Isabella Rossellini, Martin Scorsese, Meryl Streep, Gloria Swanson, Jessica Lange, and Graham Nash.

Also Read
An Interview With Richard Gere
by Elizabeth Avedon

Le Journal de la Photographie: 2•16•2012

NEW DELTA RISING: Magdalena Solé

New Delta Rising | Photographs by Magdalena Solé

University Press of Mississippi,
Dreyfus Health Foundation, Rogosin Institute, 2012

Photograph (c) Magdalena Solé

Photograph (c) Magdalena Solé

Young Ladies SlowExposures 2011 Exhibition
Photograph (c) Magdalena Solé

Photograph (c) Magdalena Solé

I have returned to the Delta a dozen times.
Always for the same reason: the people.

New Delta Rising | Photographs by Magdalena Solé
An exploration of life in the Mississippi Delta

The Mississippi Delta has been called "the most southern place on earth. Award-winning photographer Magdalena Solé spent a year interviewing and photographing hundreds of residents in the Mississippi Delta. The deep connection she felt comes through in the compelling images in this book. Solé captures their personal dignity, resilience, and resourcefulness, along with the closeness of family and community she found among them. (publisher)

"People in the Delta have stories, music, love and deep care for their community, irrespective of the hardship they endure. I was drawn to the people I encountered. They were unlike most I had known. They allowed me to slip into their midst as if they had known me for a long time, and we could share stories, laughter, sorrow and silence. This didn’t happen one time, it happened every day in every town." – Magdalena Solé read more here

The Wall Street Journal

Photo-Op: Delta Hues "Ms. Solé's lushly colorful and formally striking images are restless. The people of Clarksdale are lively and in motion, contrasting sharply with their crumbling surroundings."

New Delta Rising
Photographs by Magdalena Solé

Text by Barry H. Smith and Tom Lassiter

CRUEL AND UNUSUAL: Prison Photography Exhibition Part II

Photograph © Stephen Tourlentes

Series: Of Lengths and Measures. Year: Ongoing (1996-present)

Title: Comstock, NY State Prison.Year: 2009

Photograph © Joseph Rodriguez
Series: Juvenile. Title: Juvenile Hall Intake

Photograph © Lizzie Sadin

Series: Mineurs en Peines. Year: 1999-2007. Title: Surveillance camera, Black Canyon School, Arizona. Video surveillance of solitary confinement cells where young inmates can be held for a week. They are placed there if they display aggressive behavior to either staff or inmates or attempt suicide.

Photograph © Lloyd Degrane

Stateville in a basement storage area- Electric Chairs (no longer in use) one from the State the other from Cook County- during an electrocution a prisoner's hair would catch fire and sometimes their eyeballs would melt, so a helmet, on each chair, was placed onto their heads so that witnesses wouldn't be subjected to such visual horror –1993.

Photograph © Scott Houston

Series: Chain Gang. Year: 2003. Brian Gawlik looks out the window of his cell at Estrella Jail after performing chain gang duty. Brian was convicted for possession of a " dime bag of weed" and sentenced to four months. During lock down, inmates stay in 8x12 foot cells for 23 hours a day unless they are out on assigned chain gang duty.

Photograph © Richard Ross

Series: Juvenile-In-Justice. Year: 2006-2011

"Time-out room” in the education wing, South Bend
Juvenile Correctional Facility, South Bend, Indiana

"Prisons are "home" for over 9 million people on this planet, and their numbers are likely to increase in the coming decades. As Curators, we hope this show will act as a moment to ask ourselves what our different societies should hope to achieve by (mass) incarcerating those who transgress." – Curators Pete Brook and Hester Keijser

+ + +

Cruel and Unusual is a curatorial collaboration between guest curators Pete Brook and Hester Keijser. The exhibition showcases the work of Araminta de Clermont, Amy Elkins, Alyse Emdur, Christiane Feser, Jane Lindsay, Deborah Luster, Nathalie Mohadjer, Yana Payusova, Lizzie Sadin, Lori Waselchuk, and others.

Noorderlicht Gallery is producing a 'must-have' catalog for Cruel and Unusual, designed as a newspaper by Pierre Derks in an edition of 4,000. Along with visuals from the main exhibition, the catalog contains articles, interviews, ephemera and material from photographers Pete Brook encountered during his crowd-funded road-trip through the U.S (here), capturing the chaos, interactions and visual excitement he saw in photographers’ studios, contact-sheets and home-towns while on the road.

Newspaper Catalog Available Here

Cruel and Unusual
18 February - 1 April, 2012
Noorderlicht Gallery
9711 JB Groningen, Netherlands

Prison Photography's Pete Brook

Talks Blogs, Prisons, Road Trips and Photography

February 18th 4:00 - 6:00 pm

CRUEL AND UNUSUAL: Prison Photography Part I here

LISE SARFATI: She

Christine #21 San Francisco, CA 2005. Photograph © Lise Sarfati
Courtesy Rose Gallery, L.A. and Brancolini Grimaldi, London

Sloane #15 San Francisco, CA 2007. Photograph © Lise Sarfati
Courtesy Rose Gallery, L.A. and Brancolini Grimaldi, London

Christine #10 Hollywood, CA 2006. Photograph © Lise Sarfati
Courtesy Rose Gallery, L.A. and Brancolini Grimaldi, London

Sloane #66 Oakland, CA 2009. Photograph © Lise Sarfati
Courtesy Rose Gallery, L.A. and Brancolini Grimaldi, London

La Lettre de la Photographie

Excerpts from my Interview with Lise Sarfati:

French-born Lise Sarfati has lived and worked in the United States since 2003. She produced six important series of photographs in America, each followed by major exhibitions. Two upcoming shows of her third series, She, will open shortly in London and in L.A., with a Twin Palms monograph to follow in the Spring, 2012.

Publisher Jack Woody (Twin Palms) confided about Sarfati’s work, "When I look at the women in her photographs I suspect in some way they are all self-portraits. Lise sees in these women an incredible endurance, confronting their circumstances across the surfaces of the indifferent western landscape they have come to occupy."

Q: What was your intention behind your series, She?

The ordinary and the singular. Universality. Anti-heroines. Projections and situations....My intention was to show a bit of the futility of our daily life, the simplicity of situations and our movements in our environment and to oppose this simplicity to another field: that of interiority, emotion, psychological relationships. It is to receive the emotion (of the 4 women) and to mix them with mine. I also had autobiographical elements that allowed me to situate myself emotionally: I have 3 sisters.

My point of view was not generic but I wanted to be immersed in a particular story between four women from the same family. This story had to have a generational dimension...In She and Gina are older, about 40 years of age, while Sloane and Sasha are younger, around 20. They are all sisters...The classic image of the mother is that of a woman drowned by the love for her little one. In She however, the mother, the daughter, the sister and the other sister can be rivals or enemies, competitors or indifferent.

Christine, the mother is the axis of this construction, the only woman who tries to satisfy her dreams. At first married to a Jehovah’s Witness in Arizona, she leaves her husband and her two daughters to live a fully liberated sexual life and becomes a dominatrix on the west coast. Then, she projects herself into a new dream: to become a rock star.

Gina cultivates a masculine/feminine sexual ambiguity and wears a black wig to look like her sister Christine. Sloane, Christine’s daughter, changes her appearance constantly going from a blond wig to discolored hair. She has been a nanny for two years. Sasha, Sloane’s sister, is perpetually depressed, enclosed in her cocoon and inclined to melancholia.

The environment is an important element. Christine is photographed in Oakland in the ghetto in a house she shares with a roommate. We meet Sloane in the ghetto in Oakland in the house of a friend of her mother’s. All these houses look alike with their wooden windows and their chimneys. They are the interiors of Hopper paintings. We see Gina coming out of a grocery store, these are environments linked to the 1970s. The only images of projection that are out of the ordinary are those of Christine in the desert...read the entire Interview with Lise Sarfati, La Lettre de la Photographie

She: Photographs by Lise Sarfati
Brancolini Grimaldi, London February 3 - March 17
Rose Gallery, L.A. March 31 - May 2012

She: Lise Sarfati, Text Quentin Bajac
Twin Palms Publisher, Spring 2012

SYLVIA PLACHY: New York City Panoramas

Hanging out in the Bronx, 1989
Photograph © Sylvia Plachy/Edges

Mannequin Under a Crashed Car, Midtown
Photograph © Sylvia Plachy

Love In the Afternoon, Central Park
Photograph © Sylvia Plachy

Anonymous in the Subway
Photograph © Sylvia Plachy

Theater of the Street the Bronx, 1989
Photograph © Sylvia Plachy

Newlyweds on top of the Empire State Building
Photograph © Sylvia Plachy

New York City Panoramas | Photographs by Sylvia Plachy

Sylvia Plachy's New York City Panoramas can be seen at the recently reopened South Street Seaport Museum. After being closed for nearly a year, two of their sixteen new galleries are dedicated to photography exhibitions curated by Elisabeth Biondi.

"Sylvia Plachy seeks and finds her images wherever she goes. She captures fleeting moments in time with her roaming eye. She says the panoramic frame intensifies her perceptions. It allows her to get close to her subjects, to be inside their space, and to be surrounded by it — unorthodox, whimsical, and close. One senses that she does not simply compose her photographs so much as she inhabits them. They read like private pictographs — lyrical memories of what, and how, she saw." Read all of Elisabeth Biondi's piece about the exhibition on La Lettre de la Photographie, including work by Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao.

Sylvia Plachy Photographs

New York City Panoramas | Curated by Elisabeth Biondi
South Street Seaport Museum
12 Fulton Street, NYC
until Spring 2012