REVIEW 2013: ASMP-NY Portfolio Review

  from 2010 ASMP-NY Portfolio Review

Hudson River Photography

 Photograph (c) Joseph Squillante/All Rights Reserved

from 2010 ASMP-NY Portfolio Review

The Innocent. Casualties of the Civil War in Northern Uganda
Photograph (c) Heather McClintock/All Rights Reserved

ASMP NY’s FINE ART PORTFOLIO REVIEW 2013

"For eight years ASMP members have had their fine art photography reviewed by influential members of New York's photography/arts community: gallerists, curators, collectors, publishers and dealers. Recent participating organizations included the International Center of Photography, Center for Photography at Woodstock, Aperture, and New York Foundation for the Arts; galleries included Jen Bekman, Flowers, Howard Greenberg, Steven Kasher, Yossi Milo, and Yancey Richardson; individuals included Elizabeth Avedon, A.D. Coleman, Julie Grahame, and Mary Virginia Swanson."

Tuesday, February 5th, 2013
Calumet Photographic - 22 W. 22nd St. NYC

Details to Sign-Up here

Read more about the 2010 ASMP-NY Portfolio Review

ALEXANDER VREELAND: Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation Uganda Visit

Families affected by HIV and AIDS at Kawolo Hospital, Uganda

Photograph (c) Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation

Families affected by HIV and AIDS share stories, Kawolo Hospital, Uganda

Photograph (c) Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation

Families share stories at EGPAF get-together, Kawolo Hospital, Uganda
Photograph (c) Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation

Alexander Vreeland and Foundation President / CEO Pamela Barnes
plant a tree at Kawolo Hospital. Photograph (c) EGPAF

In 1993, ALEXANDER VREELAND founded Kids for Kids, an annual fund-raiser for the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric Aids Foundation, which over the years has raised over twenty-two million dollars for HIV treatment and research. He first served on the Foundation's Advisory Board, and then joined the Board of Directors for over five years. This October, Vreeland traveled to Uganda with board member and television correspondent Willow Bay and Foundation President and CEO Pamela Barnes. Vreeland wrote about his personal experience speaking with the families of HIV and AIDS patients at Uganda's Kawolo Hospital:

"At Kawolo Hospital, in a suburb outside the capital of Uganda, I looked around a group of doctors, nurses, mothers and children and I found myself surrounded by people who understood my story.

Shortly after the birth of my daughter Victoria, she was diagnosed with pneumonia. The second time that she got severely sick, Sandra and I immediately took her to the emergency room at St. Vincent's Hospital in New York City. After a preliminary examination the intern on duty told us that it looked like PCP, the AIDS pneumonia. He was right. Over the next days we discovered that Sandra, Victoria, and our older son Reed had HIV. My life changed dramatically on that fall day in 1988.

In Mukono Health Clinic #4, we sat in a cleared out maternity ward. The walls of the ward were pealing and the small windows were cracked. I shared my story with the small group that had assembled, and numerous people in the room offered us a window into their lives as well. They stood up, one after another, and in soft, broken English talked about their lives. I could relate to their stories: a tall, elegant woman in a green, tribal pattern outfit spoke about her fear of revealing her HIV status to her own family; a seventeen-year-old girl in a white and navy blue school uniform talked poignantly about choosing to change schools to avoid the social pressure and stigma that she was faced with once her classmates discovered her diagnosis; an inhibited, college-age man wearing glasses shared that he had been near death several times and that he struggled to be consistent taking his medication; a social worker talked to the group about trying to find the words to help a teenager discuss his HIV status with his girlfriend.

At the clinic I also heard the stories of those who were not able to readily express them: I saw a stunned mother, standing over her day-old twin daughters--they had just been told that they had HIV; I heard the story of a child who was caring for his mother as she was suffering from repeated cases of PCP and numerous opportunistic infections. They stood up one at a time. Most were able to speak in English, while others needed to be translated from their native tongue. Even though they were likely invited by the clinic's organizers to share with the group, I could tell from their expressions that they did not expect to be speaking to people who had actually lived very similar stories.

The stories and medical realities in these poor African Hospitals today are not so different from my first experiences in the Pediatric AIDS clinics at New York Hospital and Bellevue Hospital in the late '80s. At that time the only medicine available were capsules of AZT, and they were not yet available in children's dosages or in a child-friendly format. PCP was still a death warrant for most children. No one knew how long anyone with the virus was going to live, but we knew lists of people who were either about to pass away or had already left us.

My time in Uganda made me extremely proud of what the Foundation is doing. I can still remember attending a board meeting in the late '90s when it was announced that a research project, in part funded by the Foundation, had discovered that Nevirapine had been found to block the transmission of HIV from mother to child in about fifty percent of cases. The board embarked upon an entirely new facet of our mission. With funds from the Gates Foundation, we started to implement the treatment in the countries with the greatest need.

My concern at the time was that helping to block transmission during birth was only one small part of what we needed to do to combat the virus. It seemed inhuman to me to diagnose a mother's HIV status, help her have an HIV-free baby, and then walk away. She probably had a husband and other children who were living with HIV. They surely needed medicine, most probably counseling, and possibly even a little help to keep their kids in school.

Well today, the Foundation's program in Uganda is helping with all these issues and many more. They are confronting the complexities of this illness and bringing help to afflicted families, partly by giving families tools to help themselves." – Originally posted in The Huffington Post

Vreeland divides his time between Paris and New York with wife, Lisa, their seven-year-old daughter, Olivia, and his three grown children Reed, Victoria, and Diane.

+ + +

Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric Aids Foundation
Poet Sandra Isham Vreeland

Kids for Kids brings together children, families, celebrities, and corporations to rally in support of the Foundation's lifesaving programs to eradicate pediatric HIV and AIDS. Attendees enjoy samplings from NY's greatest restaurants, mingle with world-class artists, photographers, and celebrities, and experience both old-fashioned and cutting-edge carnival activities.

BRYAN MELTZ: African Resettlement in Georgia

Photograph © Bryan Meltz/ All rights reserved

Photograph © Bryan Meltz/ All rights reserved
Click image to enlarge

Photograph © Bryan Meltz/ All rights reserved

This project began in 2006 after working as a still photographer for a PBS documentary about refugee resettlement in America. I have had the privilege of getting to know these families, and been witness to their overwhelming spirit and resilience as they assimilate to American life, while still preserving the traditions of their culture.

+ + +

BRYAN MELTZ is a contributing photographer to the international photojournalism collective WIR Pictures and has collaborated with nonprofit organizations such as Engeye Health Clinic in Uganda, Just Cause, and AbsolutelyPositive, an AIDS service organization in Atlanta. She graduated with a Visual Journalism degree from The Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, California and in 2005 was the recipient of the Yarka Vendrinska Memorial Scholarship Award for emerging female documentary photographer. Her editorial clients include Time Magazine, Rolling Stone, Financial Times, The Fader, Vibe, Blender, XXL, Mass Appeal, and Vice Magazine.

In the past twenty years nearly 50,000 refugees have resettled in and around Clarkston, Georgia, located ten miles east of Atlanta. It's estimated over 75 languages are now spoken in this small Georgian town. The majority of people resettled are from the African nations of Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Rwanda, DRC, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Board of Health estimates show over 71% are female, and all of those are survivors of civil conflict, war, torture, trauma, rape and/or genocide.

"The Somali Bantu are becoming the largest African group from a single community to settle in the United States at one time, with nearly 13,000 arriving since 2004. Those who made it to America passed through rigorous security checks—a process that took from months to a year or more—and when they arrived they were confronted with a new world of difficulties. The Bantu, who were denied access to education and jobs, were almost completely untouched by modern life. Few could read or write in any language, and almost none spoke English. Most had never seen a light switch, a telephone, a set of stairs, or a building that wasn’t made of mud."

Meltz's portrait series Home Far From Home: Refugee Resettlement in Georgia has been recognized by the International Photography Awards, American Photo Images of the Year, annual Out of the South juried exhibit and a solo show at Composition Gallery in Atlanta. Bryan was one of 100 photographers invited to participate in Review Santa Fe 2009.

Bryan Meltz Website
Engeye Health Clinic

HEATHER McCLINTOCK: Innocent Casualties

Alema Rose, Aler IDP Camp, Uganda, 2006. Copyright (c) Heather McClintock/All Rights Reserved

"I would like to give you a message. Please do your best to tell the world what is happening to us, the children, so that other children don’t have to pass through this violence." —A 15-year-old girl who escaped from the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda

+ + +

HEATHER McCLINTOCK was raised on a dairy farm in Vermont. She received her BA in photography from New England College in New Hampshire, and Arundel, England, then relocated to New York City to work in prestigious commercial studios. A desire to pursue humanitarian relief work led to her involvement with documentary photography. Heather first visited northern Uganda in 2005, where she focused on the strength and grace of the Acholi people, ravaged by both mental and physical cruelties resulting from a brutal twenty-year civil war. She returned in 2007. Her Uganda work garnered many awards, including the 2006 Center for Photographic Art Artist Project Award and her partnership with Blue Earth Alliance.

“Stepping over the edge and pursuing documentary photography is intrinsically not supposed to be about oneself… but of course life is never so black and white. The situations we find ourselves in as photographers inevitably point and entwine that outer lens back onto ourselves. How do we photograph differently so people won’t turn away from more pain seen in another’s eyes? Are we taking that nebulous something; pride, dignity, humanity, away from someone more than we are actually helping? In northern Uganda, I lost all hesitancy and self-doubt when asking for everyone’s permission to photograph them. ‘We want our plight to be seen. Show these images. Bring people back to help us. Please.’ We are graced with a huge amount of responsibility when we don’t look away from another’s plight, another’s soul. We have been entrusted with the burden of helping people with our images. And most disturbingly, we can leave these places. Are we then strong enough to continue to persevere on their behalf from the outside? If they can survive with such strength and grace, how dare we do anything less? Seeing their pain IS the point. Their stories of devastation and dignity reflect the ambiguity and mystery within each of us.” (quote from Geoffrey Hiller's VervePhoto)

I first met Heather two years ago at the Santa Fe CENTER for Photography's Portfolio Review. I was humbled by her photographs. Her first solo exhibition The Innocent: Casualties of the Civil War in Northern Uganda was recently shown at Gallery FCB in New York City and her photographs are included in Child Soldiers, Edited by Leora Kahn published by powerHouse Books.

To purchase prints: Gallery FCB
Heather McClintock: http://www.heathermcclintock.com