LEICA GALLERY, LOS ANGELES: Exhibition Mary Ellen Mark, SEAL, Yariv Milchan

  Amanda and her Cousin Amy, Valdese, N.Carolina, 1990
Mary Ellen Mark - Leica, My First Camera

 Me
SEAL - Stopping Time

Emotions in Motion
Yariv Milchan - Leica. An Affair

MARY ELLEN MARK - Leica, My First Camera

SEAL - Stopping Time
YARIV MILCHAN - Leica. An Affair

Leica Gallery, L.A. is pleased to announce its inaugural exhibition of three photographers: award winning international photojournalist MARY ELLEN MARK, Leica photographer and Grammy award winning singer/songwriter SEAL and Los Angeles fashion and celebrity photographer YARIV MILCHAN. Through August 31, 2013

MARY ELLEN MARK

 
The exhibition includes 50 iconic gelatin silver prints spanning both Mark's work in cinema as well her profoundly affecting social documentary portraits. Included are several of Mark's iconic Indian Circus images as well as significant environmental portraits from the South, Seattle, as well as New York Street photographs.

In addition to her deep affection for photographing people on the margins of society, Mark has long sustained her career by bringing her talents to Hollywood and European film sets. On display at Leica Gallery are several of her powerful set and backstage portraits capturing intimate moments of movie stars such as Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper and Johnny Depp. Mark's photographs have been exhibited in galleries and museums from New York to China, with work in the local permanent collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum, California Museum of Photography (Riverside), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Mark has 18 published books to her credit, including Indian Circus, Falkland Road, and Streetwise.

SEAL 

SEAL grew up in England and quickly established himself as a great singer of soul music. Over the span of his illustrious singing and songwriting career SEAL has won 4 Grammy awards, an MTV Video Music award and sold over 20 million albums worldwide. Seal is presently a Coach for The Voice Australia.

A self proclaimed "photography geek" and ambassador for Leica, Seal views his photographic practice as a means of connecting to people and "stopping time." SEAL has been a loyal Leica Camera collector for 25 years. He started shooting 35mm on the original M3 and more recently with the digital Leica Monochrome. His work on display at Leica Gallery includes environmental portraits from the streets of Varanasi, India as well as self-portraits.

YARIV MILCHAN

 
Photographer and film producer Yariv Milchan is Israeli born, educated in France and attended college in Los Angeles. Milchan describes himself as a "self taught photographer" beginning with early internships with world famous fashion photographers that eventually led to jobs with Vanity Fair magazine. Yariv's photographs share a depth and beauty whether he focuses his lens on the stunning California landscape or the sinuous curvature of a woman's back. The common thread always sewing his body of work together is his love of capturing great light, nature and beauty. His exhibition presents a selection of both his landscapes and portraits. (Text courtesy of the Leica Gallery, L.A.)

Through August 31

Leica Gallery, Los Angeles

Women Photographers with their Cameras

O'Keeffe with her Leica, Abiquiu, New Mexico, 1966
© Todd Webb Courtesy of Evans Gallery and
Estate of Todd & Lucille Webb, Portland, Maine
www.toddwebbphotographs.com

Dorothea Lange and the Zeiss Jewell Camera, 1937
Courtesy of the Scott Nichols Gallery
Copyright © Rondal Partridge
www.rondalpartridge.com

Dorothy Bohm at 18 years old, Manchester, 1942
Copyright ©Dorothy Bohm Archive
www.dorothybohm.com

“I get out my work and have a show for myself before I have it publicly. I make up my own mind about it - how good or bad or indifferent it is. After that the critics can write what they please. I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.”
– Georgia O'Keefe

Women Photographers With Their Cameras
was entirely inspired by Alan Griffiths
Luminous Lint

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 Photography

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)

+ + +

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