STING: St. John The Divine Rehearsal

Sting Rehearsal with Ira Coleman on bass, St. John the Divine Cathedral
Photograph (c) Eleonora Alberto

Performing at Rehearsal, left, Kathryn and Peter Tickell on fiddles,
Sting, Ira Coleman on bass, guitarist Dominic Miller
Photograph (c) Eleonora Alberto

Sting Rehearsal with Music Director Robert Sadin and the Newark Boys Chorus, St. John the Divine Cathedral Photograph (c) Eleonora Alberto

"Winter is about inspiration and imagination"–Sting
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STING Winter Concert Rehearsal. St. John the Divine Cathedral's medieval architecture was the setting for Sting's private "family and friends" winter concert rehearsal last night. (I was a lucky friend of a friend). The Gothic/Romanesque backdrop of the Cathedral only added to the haunting beauty of the songs performed from Sting's album "If On A Winter's Night" that included madrigals to traditional Gaelic folk music.

Sting was accompanied by an ensemble of 35 musicians, including friend and long time colleague, guitarist Dominic Miller, Ira Coleman (double bass) and four remarkable musicians from his hometown (Sting called them "Geordies") in Northeast England, near the Scottish border : Kathryn Tickell (fiddle and Northumbrian pipes) and brother Peter Tickell (fiddle) Julian Sutton (melodean) and Mary MacMaster (metal string Scottish harp). With Robert Sadin as Music Director, the guest artists included Vincent Ségal (cello), Daniel Hope (violin), Chris Botti (trumpet), Ibrahim Maalouf (trumpet), Cyro Baptista (percussion), Bijan Chemirani (percussion) and the three fabulous backup singers from NYC and Australia. The Newark Boys Chorus joined all of them for a beautiful chorus. I'm sorry to those I've left off. The evening was unbelievably beautiful and perfectly conjured up the seasons holiday Spirits.

Photographer Eleonora Alberto was there to photograph the performance which included her husband, Brazilian percussionist Cyro Baptista. She was gracious enough to allow me to post some of the evenings highlights. Many thanks to Susan Forristal for the invite.

MELANIE McWHORTER: Nuclear Family Reaction

fuzzy jacket, 2007
Photograph (c) Melanie McWhorter /All Rights Reserved

stressful morning, 2007
Photograph (c) Melanie McWhorter /All Rights Reserved

new nails
Photograph (c) Melanie McWhorter /All Rights Reserved

ty, 2008
Photograph (c) Melanie McWhorter /All Rights Reserved

MELANIE McWHORTER was "born and raised in a small mill town in upstate South Carolina. She received her BA in History from Lander University, a modest liberal arts collage in Greenwood, SC. After graduation, she found a job as a school photographer and later a brief stint as a dude ranch photographer in Jackson, WY. She is a regular contributor to the online magazines Fraction and photo-eye and maintains her own photo-related blog. She manages photo-eye’s Book Division, curates exhibitions of local photographers in photo-eye Bookstore and organizes the monthly First Wednesday Salon." Her photography was recently exhibited in Through the Lens: Creating Santa Fe. Melanie is co-founder of Flash Flood, a new media collective that investigates and promotes the intersection of photography and culture in the state of New Mexico. I love Melanie's series "Nuclear Family Reaction" and spoke with her about this work recently:

You know I'm a big fan of your Nuclear Family Reaction work. Can you tell me about these images?

MM: Most of the photos that I include in the portfolio are of my children, although I have a few of my husband Tom and some self-portraits. This project stemmed from an earlier project with my daughter in 35 mm and in black and white. These were more closely cropped and more of body studies than environmental portraiture. I started shooting color and medium format at some point and decided this was the way to go. It was an evolution in my aesthetic and my relationship with my family and internal struggles. It, like many of my projects, was a catharsis for me--a selfish projection of an internal struggle that I force others to absorb. It was also convenient. Like someone once told me, photograph what you know (or what is around you).

Who has been an influence on your work or you consider a mentor?

MM: My first photography book was of Imogen Cunningham’s work with Unmade Bed on the cover. I had the Masters of Photography calendar on the wall while shooting dude ranch photography in Jackson, WY. When I moved to Santa Fe, I was hired by Rixon Reed at photo-eye. This was both awe-inspiring and depressing at the same time. I thought, “if there are so many good photographers (and bad ones) out there producing work and photography books, how do I have a chance?” I got over that and I now think that there is room for almost all of us.

That said, I really love Dutch and Swedish photography. There is some great work coming out of these regions, especially in books. I really like Erik van der Weijde, Lars Tunbjork, Anna Clarén, Gerry Johansson, and many more and books from publishers like GUN Gallery, Journal and Episode. My portfolio Dealing with 35 is really influenced by Swedish portraiture. I would say that Stephen Gill is always stuck in my head when shooting projects like Highway 14 or the Railyard. I love to capture upturned ground and the transformation of the land. My husband can tell you how much I love to shoot mounds of dirt.

Two women that I would like to note who have inspired me are Debbie Fleming Caffery and Mary Virginia Swanson. Debbie’s images, I think, influenced some of the earlier black and whites from Nuclear Family Reaction. Both of these women are strong, full of personality and seem to give of themselves beyond what is required or necessary.

Would you tell me about FLASH FLOOD and how it originated? How long has it been in the works?

MM: I had an idea. I am an idea person, it is the actualization that is usually difficult for me. This idea was to start a cooperative that promoted the intersection of photography and New Mexico. I mentioned this idea to Jonathan Blaustein. Elizabeth, as you know about Jonathan, he gets excited easily and can be a real motivator. He followed up on this idea and it was born. Originally we had conceived of 7 members, but we invited David Ondrik, Jennifer Schlesinger, and Jesse Chehak on board and it just felt right. New Mexico is important photographically, both historically and contemporarily. We want to embrace both while incorporating other fields, like anthropology, history, economics and culture. I think it will be important to all in New Mexico as well as internationally.

We welcome submissions for Flash Flood from individuals who live in the state and those who do not, but who have photographed here. It is so exciting and we have some fantastic stories and features scheduled for the upcoming monthly issues and aspire to have a printed version in the next year. Anyone can email us at contact@flash-flood.org to join our email list or to submit work or find us on Facebook or Twitter, like everyone else.

You were a Reviewer at the recent Photolucida CRITICAL MASS Top 50 photography review. What was the overall tone of the work you reviewed?

MM: There are a lot of very good photographers out there working, but it is so difficult to be outstanding. The work that I found to be the most original or inspiring for me was Erica Allen, Tony Chirinos, Susan Worsham, Jenn Ackerman, Simone Lueck, Phillip Toledano, and Alejandro Cartagena.

Was there any work you were already familiar with through your reviews for the Photographers Showcase?

MM: I do not have a list, but I would guess about one-third of the work I had seen at some point whether it was photo-eye or other sources. Many of these photographers run the circuit of reviews. They are willing to invest the time and money in their work. Like Sally Mann and Charlie Rose agreed on his show, it is tenacity and not talent that make you successful.

You were also a Reviewer in Italy's Fotofestival di Roma. What did you do there?

MM: I was officially the lead juror for the photography book competition and I delivered a lecture on Photo Book publishing. I also got to see Nan Goldin, Rinko Kawauchi and Juliana Beasley speak while there.

What are you working on now?

MM: My most recent project is Dealing with 35, mind you, I am now almost 37 so it has been a while. It is simply another project trying to work out some changes in my life. Coming to middle age and how wonderful and scary that is.

My photographs from Nuclear Family Reaction will be in a group exhibition with Kay Denton, Juanita Hong, Debbie Miracolo, and Andrea Land titled The Sweet Escape Jan 15 – Mar 13, 2010 at the Morean Arts Center, St. Petersburg, FL.

Melanie McWhorter WEBSITE

Melanie Photo BLOG

FRIENDS OF FRIENDS PHOTOGRAPHY AUCTION: Angkor Hospital For Children

Dahomey Children, Dahomey, 1967
Photograph (c) Irving Penn /All Rights Reserved

Seeing Eyes 2002
Photograph (c) William Wegman /All Rights Reserved

Angkor #26, Angkor Wat, Cambodia 1993
Photograph (c) Kenro Izu /All Rights Reserved

Turbulent Dreams
Photograph (c) John Dugdale /All Rights Reserved

Untitled 2007
Photograph (c) Richard Gere/All Rights Reserved

Revelation 2004
Photograph (c) Sean Perry /All Rights Reserved

DECEMBER 1st
13th ANNUAL FRIENDS OF FRIENDS PHOTOGRAPHY AUCTION
Benefiting the Angkor Hospital For Children

KENRO IZU, during a series of photography trips to Cambodia’s Angkor monuments, was forever changed by his encounters with ill, malnourished and disfigured children in desperate need of medical care. Izu founded Friends Without A Border in 1996 and dedicated himself to building a pediatric hospital in Siem Reap, Cambodia. Angkor Hospital for Children (AHC) was completed in 1999 and has since treated over 650,000 children. Absentee and Phone Bids

ALL AUCTION PHOTOGRAPHS

FRIENDS WITHOUT A BORDER

CHRIS VERENE: Family / Twin Palms Publishers

The Same Day They Signed The Divorce Papers, A Tornado Hit The House

Twin Palms Publishers

My Twin Cousin's Husband's Brother's Cousin's Cousins
Photograph (c) Chris Verene /All Rights Reserved

The Pregnancy Test
Photograph (c) Chris Verene /All Rights Reserved

CHRIS VERENE follows the lives of his family and friends in his new monograph FAMILY, published by Twin Palms. “Verene walks right into the lives of his folks, showing you how they are, without any embarrassment on either side. Their togetherness is taken for granted so openly that the viewer feels at each moment like one of them, a member of the clan. Verene’s color [is] tender, warm and sensual, though stops well short of being glamorous . . . flooding them all with a strange, sweet romance. These pictures convey his bittersweet fondness for a smaller world in which he grew up but no longer shares, but which has lessons to teach him about the inroads of aging, disability and other difficulties. People do what they can to help each other and themselves, all from ‘leaking boats.’ Meanwhile, the dark room and the night bring tidings of their isolation. Many viewers are familiar with visits back home in this mood, which Verene renders luminous and fatal.”–Max Kozloff, The Theater of the Face: Portrait Photography Since 1900

Verene first received recognition in 2000 appearing in The Whitney Biennial and the publication of CHRIS VERENE by Twin Palms Publications with concurrent exhibits at The Pat Hearn Gallery, Colin DeLand American Fine Arts Co., and The Paul Morris Gallery. Verene’s work is in the collection of The Whitney Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Jewish Museum,, The Walker Art Center, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among others. In 2001, Verene was the recipient of the first Pollock/Krasner award given for photography. His work has been featured in ARTFORUM, Art In America, ArtNews, The New York Times, The Village Voice, Vanity Fair, Harper’s, Vogue, and The New Yorker, among others.

FAMILY Twin Palms Publishers

THOMAS BROENING: Closer To Where We Want To Be

Photograph (c) Thomas Broening /All Rights Reserved

THOMAS BROENING WEBSITE

MARK JENKINSON: On Death Row

Lethal Injection Chamber, (Executioner's view), Huntsville, TX
Photograph (c) Mark Jenkinson /All Rights Reserved

Colonel Donald Hocutt, (ret.) Executioner, Parchman State Penitentiary, Mississippi Photograph (c) Mark Jenkinson /All Rights Reserved

Gas Chamber, Carson City, NV
Photograph (c) Mark Jenkinson /All Rights Reserved

Lethal Injection Chamber, Angola, LA
Photograph (c) Mark Jenkinson /All Rights Reserved

Shareef Cousin, on his first day on Death Row, Angola, LA
Photograph (c) Mark Jenkinson /All Rights Reserved

I photographed Shareef on his first day on Death Row. He was seventeen years old. It later came to light that witnesses who were able to exonerate Shareef were not allowed to testify at his first trial. Eventually he was granted a new trial and the D. A. declined to retry him. After three years on Death Row, the murder charges against Shareef were dismissed.

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Mark Jenkinson's editorial, corporate and advertising photography, an estimated 30,000 plus photographs, have been published in virtually every major magazine in the world. He's won numerous awards including the Meade, AR 100, and Society of Publication Design awards. His photographs have been exhibited at the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, San Francisco Art Institute, Light Gallery, Daniel Wolf Gallery, O.K. Harris Gallery, Parsons School of Design, Rhode Island School of Design, Cooper Union and others. He teaches in the Photography and Imaging Department at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts.

Jenkinson spent over ten years photographing on America's Death Row. "This project began as an outgrowth of my "Hidden Interiors" project, starting with photographs of execution sites. Eventually I became consumed with the subject of capital punishment and began a long term personal project photographing convicted murders, families of victims, executioners, and prosecutors. Most of this project has been financed by my commercial work, but a few magazines (Esquire, German Playboy, Newsweek and Time) have commissioned major features of the subject. I started the project as a death penalty abolitionist, but have come to understand that the issues are not the abstract arguments I started with. The issues became far more complex and personal once you spend time with a parent whose child had been brutally murdered, an inmate who's facing a fast approaching date with death, or a Warden who has been charged with executing a man he believes to be innocent. Nothing is so simple except that is final."

MARK JENKINSON WEBSITE
Mark Jenkinson's Blog Photography Essentials

RICHARD BARNES: Artifactual

 from Animal Logic
Photograph (c) Richard Barnes /All Rights Reserved

 from Animal Logic
Photograph (c) Richard Barnes /All Rights Reserved

from Animal Logic
Photograph (c) Richard Barnes /All Rights Reserved

National Geographic Gallery: Photograph by Richard Barnes: A queen's pet gazelle was readied for eternity with the same lavish care as a member of the royal family. In fine, blue-trimmed bandages and a custom-made wooden coffin, it accompanied its owner to the grave in about 945 B.C. Egyptian Museum, Cairo, CG29835

National Geographic Gallery: Photograph by Richard Barnes: The embalming house for the Apis bulls, sacred animals in the great city of Memphis, survives in ruins near the village of Mit Rahina. For 40 days the body of each bull lay in natron on a massive stone bed in a courtyard where the sun could help desiccate and disinfect it.

"Photographer Richard Barnes spent more than ten years documenting the way we assemble, contain, and catalog the natural world. Barnes's behind-the-scenes photographs are haunting reminders that there is nothing natural about a natural history museum."

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RICHARD BARNES monograph ANIMAL LOGIC collects four related species of his photographic work that touch on themes relevant to science, history, archaeology, and architecture. Through his lens, sights and objects normally hidden from public view—half-installed dioramas, partially wrapped specimens, anatomical models, exploded skulls, and taxidermied animals in shipping crates—take on a strange beauty. Barnes peels back layers of artifice to reveal the tangle of artistry, craftsmanship, and curatorial decisions inside every lifelike diorama and meticulously arranged glass case. Animal Logic investigates both the human desire to construct artificial worlds for 'the wild' and the haunting and poignant worlds the real wild constructs. Barnes's camera freezes migrating starlings to reveal the visual poetry hidden inside their dense formations. His extraordinary photographs of birds' nests constructed from detritus—string, plastic, milkweed, tinsel, hair, dental floss, pine needles—sculpturally embody our often complicated relationship with nature. Animal Logic presents more than 120 of Barnes's photographs and includes essays by Jonathan Rosen of the New York Times and curator Susan Yelavich, which explore the themes that emerge from Barnes's unique body of work.

AN INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD BARNES

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC PHOTO GALLERY

RICHARD BARNES

EMILY SHUR: Flak Photo Today

EMILY SHUR, one of my favorite contemporary photographers, returned from Japan a couple of weeks ago with a new group of photographs. And Andy Adams, one of my favorite photography colleagues, posted an early view of this work on his site Flak Photo. You can view rough scans of Emily's recent trip on her BLOG here and here, view Emily's Website and sign up for your Daily Flak Photo here

HALLOWEEN: Andrew Phelps

Photograph (c) Andrew Phelps/All rights reserved

ABOUT / PHOTOBLOG / WEBSITE

JANELLE LYNCH: Riu Llobregat

Copyright (c) Janelle Lynch /All Rights Reserved

Copyright (c) Janelle Lynch /All Rights Reserved

Copyright (c) Janelle Lynch /All Rights Reserved

With this body of work, Riu Llobregat, I continue the process of exploring and mapping themes of absence and loss as I have done over the last decade in the landscapes of the United States and Mexico.

JANELLE LYNCH received her MFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts. Her work has been exhibited at the George Eastman House Museum, Rochester, NY, the Festival International de Mode et de Photographie à Hyères, France, and Foto Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. A solo exhibition of these photographs, Riu Llobregat, opened at 3 Punts Galería in Barcelona this past September. She used a Deardorff 8-x-10 inch field camera and color negative film to make this work. Lynch was one of 100 photographers invited to participate in Review Santa Fe 2009.
Janelle Lynch Website

FLASH-FLOOD: Issue One

Flash-Flood Issue One

Flash-Flood Issue One Contributor's: Jonathan Blaustein, Jesse Chehak, David Ondrik, Jennifer Schlesinger and Melanie McWhorter. Flash-Flood is a new media collective that investigates and promotes the intersection of photography and culture in the state of New Mexico. Flash-Flood

RUSS MARTIN: Nature Category

Shaggy White Dahlia
Photograph (c) Russ Martin/All rights reserved

The Hosta Project
Photograph (c) Russ Martin/All rights reserved

Wilted Hostas
Photograph (c) Russ Martin/All rights reserved

RUSS MARTIN won first place in the International Photography Award (The Lucies) in the Nature: Flowers category for his Hosta Flowers series. The Hosta Project 2006-2009 won the PX3 PRIX DE LA PHOTOGRAPHIE PARIS in the Nature category. View the Hosta Project Book. Martin is represented by Contemporary Works. Russ Martin Website

MATTHIAS VRIENS-McGRATH: Matthew Avedon in the Maldives

Matthew Avedon, the Maldives. Photograph (c) Matthias Vriens-McGrath

Matthew Avedon, the Maldives. Photograph (c) Matthias Vriens-McGrath

Matthew Avedon, the Maldives. Photograph (c) Matthias Vriens-McGrath

MATTHIAS VRIENS-McGRATH is a NYC/LA based Dutch fashion and fine art photographer. His signature style "uses humorous erotic overtones to inject personality and wit" into his photographs. Matthias has had solo exhibitions in NYC and the Netherlands. In addition to his work as a photographer, he has also been Creative Director of Giorgio Armani and Senior Art Director at the Gucci Group.

Matthias Vriens McGrath

Matthew Avedon: DNA, New York

Matthew Avedon 2013 Update