WATER 2019 : PhotoPlace Gallery

Jurors Award 

Point 660, 2, 08, 2008

© Olaf Otto Becker

Directors Award 

Rage 

© Lynn Savarese

Honorable Mention

Untitled #3. Into the Deep

© Sandra Chen Weinstein 

Honorable Mention

Running  

© Leslie Jean-Bart

Honorable Mention

Raising Goosebumps #2
© Cate Wnek

 Andrew, Rio Celeste No. 2

© db Waltrip

 

Water #6

© David Reinfeld

Nature of Water 3

© Benjamin Bobkoff

 Alien Twins

© Aimée Hoving

 Celadon

© Sarah Schorr

~ WATER ~ 

Juror: Elizabeth Avedon 

PhotoPlace Gallery

Seventy percent of the world's surface is covered by water. It shimmers, it soothes, it heals, it brings joy. It can be devastating in its destructive force, and equally devastating by its absence. How fortunate we are to be able to travel to places where clean water is still abundant that we can swim and play, document and create art, in and around it. It is easy to take for granted, considering it may soon be our most expensive commodity. The magic of the submitted images ranged from the very realistic, documenting the fragility of our disappearing glaciers, to the mysterious, focusing on the beauty and perfection of even the smallest precious drop.

The Juror's Award "Point 660, 2, 08,2008” goes to Olaf Otto Becker, who photographed the measuring station Swiss Camp, Greenland, where glaciologists and climate researchers work on predicting the planet's future. "Point 660, 2, 08,2008” is a formidable landscape and popular tourist spot where taking photographs of one another may soon be over. In one hundred years Becker’s photographs may be all that's left to view of this extraordinary world.

The Director's Award goes to Lynn Savarese and her black and white image "Rage" at Fossar: Icelandic Falls. Lynn has photographed some of the world’s more colossal waterfalls, this one being one of Iceland’s tallest.

Honorable Mentions goes to Leslie Jean-Bart, Sandra Chen Weinstein, and Cate Wnek.

View the entire Gallery + Online Gallery exhibition here. Thank you to all who entered.  — Elizabeth Avedon

~ WATER ~ 

Juror: Elizabeth Avedon

 thru August 10, 2019

PhotoPlace Gallery

3 Park Street

Middlebury, Vermont

View the entire Gallery + Online Gallery exhibition here

Many images are available for purchase!
Inquire: photos@photoplacegallery.com 

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The Water Project: TheWaterProject.org
FreshWater Watch: freshwaterwatch.thewaterhub.org
4ocean Clean-up:  https://4ocean.com

 Northwestern Glacier

© Frank Zurey

 Nymph, 2019

 © Paola Telesca

 

Sea Lion

© Caren Winnall

View the entire Gallery + Online Gallery exhibition here

 

Many images are available for purchase!
 

Inquire: photos@photoplacegallery.com 

PHOTOS DAY OR NIGHT: THE ARCHIVE OF HUGH MANGUM: By Sarah Stacke

The grid of nine photos on one glass plate negative and the sequence shows the actual order Hugh Mangum’s clients entered his studio on a particular day. Images courtesy of Sarah Stacke and Hugh Mangum Photographs, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University

 "This has long been one of my favorite Hugh Mangum portraits."– Sarah Stacke

Images courtesy of Sarah Stacke and Hugh Mangum Photographs, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.

Images courtesy of Sarah Stacke and Hugh Mangum Photographs, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.

Image courtesy of Sarah Stacke and Hugh Mangum Photographs, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.

Image courtesy of Sarah Stacke and Hugh Mangum Photographs, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.

Images courtesy of Sarah Stacke and Hugh Mangum Photographs, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.

 Photos Day or Night: The Archive of Hugh Mangum
by Sarah Stacke, with texts by Maurice Wallace and Martha Sumler

Red Hook Editions, 2018 / Book Design: Bonnie Briant

 

I was recently introduced to Sarah Stacke's extraordinary book, "Photos Day or Night: The Archive of Hugh Mangum," brilliantly designed by Bonnie Briant. The book is a close-up look at the life and work of early 20th century Southern American photographer Hugh Mangum. Photo archive curator Stacke collaborated with Mangum’s granddaughter, Martha Sumler, and the result is a stunning look at never-before-seen photographs and ephemera from their family archive. This is now one of my favorite photography books!

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"Inside his photo studio, Hugh Mangum created an atmosphere–respectful and often playful–in which hundreds of men, women, and children felt comfortable being whoever they wished in that moment of photographic description. As a result, Mangum's images of early twentieth-century Southern society show personalities as immediate as if they were taken yesterday. . ." – Sarah Stacke

"Born in 1877, the year the Civil War’s Reconstruction period ended, Mangum died in 1922, only three years after the First World War and two years after women gained the right to vote. During his lifetime the final battles of the Indian Wars were waged and the first law limiting the number of immigrants allowed in the U.S. was passed. The personalities in Mangum’s images collectively, and often majestically, symbolize the triumphs and struggles of this pivotal era. An itinerant photographer primarily working in his home state of North Carolina and the Virginias, Mangum cultivated clientele from across racial and economic divides. Though the American South of his era was marked by disenfranchisement, segregation, and inequality, Mangum portrayed all his sitters with candor and heart. Above all, he showed them as individuals. A century after their making, Mangum’s photographs allow us a penetrating gaze into faces of the past, and in a larger sense, they offer an unusually insightful glimpse of the South at the turn of the twentieth century. His “portraiture hints at a counter-history…few white Southerners besides Mangum dared to reflect,” writes Prof. Maurice Wallace of the University of Virginia, in the book.
 

Notably, the camera Mangum used was designed to create multiple and distinct exposures on a single glass plate negative. The sequence of the images on a single negative represents the order Mangum’s diverse clientele rotated through the studio, thus representing a day’s work for  this gregarious photographer.
 

In the years Stacke has spent with the Mangum Collection––imagining the distinct personalities and lives, their relationships to each other and to Mangum––the collection has evolved to represent a family album to her. Not only as its own entity, unfurled by the welcoming and harmonious spirit of Hugh Mangum, but also in the way she’s formed relationships with the images and individuals in them." 

– Red Hook Editions

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Sarah Stacke is a photographer, photo archive curator and writer based in Brooklyn, New York. In 2012 she received a master’s degree from Duke University tailored to analyze photographic representations of African and African-American communities. For her capstone project Sarah extensively researched Hugh Mangum’s archive and curated the first-ever solo exhibition of his work, which was shown at Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) in 2012. Shortly thereafter she wrote pieces for The New York Times and Aperture about Mangum and curated a major installation of his work at the Asheville Art Museum. Sarah has been an instructor at CDS since 2013 and is an adjunct professor at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism and the International Center of Photography, where she teaches a course about the role archives play in society.

In her photography work, Sarah looks at daily life in communities whose geographic borders were formed during periods of colonization. Often spending time with a community over the course of months or years, she looks at the intersection of culture and memory and questions how land, and the loss of it, shapes identities. Select clients include National Geographic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, BuzzFeed and Photo District News.

Sarah Stacke

@sarah_stacke

Red Hook Editions

@redhookeditions

CANDELA: Pine Tree Ballads by Paul Thulin

 Pine Tree Ballads by Paul Thulin (Candela Books)

 Pine Tree Ballads by Paul Thulin

 

Pine Tree Ballads by Paul Thulin

Pine Tree Ballads by Paul Thulin

In the early 1900s, artist Paul Thulin's great-grandfather settled on an island off the coast of Maine because it resembled his homeland of Sweden. Over a century later, his family returns to the same area, Gray's Point, each summer.

Throughout his life, Thulin's great-grandfather shared exquisitely detailed accounts of early settlers at the New England apple orchard; Such characters include a one-legged ship cook, a widowed schoolteacher, and an ingenious Native American blacksmith. The tales were an intricate mix of facts and lore that fueled the imagination and, on occasion, had the power to transform daily floorboard creaks and shadows into enduring ancestral spirits.

Pine Tree Ballads is a poetic memoir, featuring the artist’s daughter, wife, mother, and grandmother as a single protean character (or multiple characters?) vibrating in time, navigating the mysteries and menace of a shared ancestral forest. This deeply personal photographic sequence is part visual narrative of family myths and part origin story. Pine Tree Ballads is fueled by both truth and imagination, which, in many instances are the fundamental ingredients of our personal history. The "docu-literary" structure of this monograph celebrates and fully exploits the duplicitous nature of photography/text to be simultaneously interpreted as both fact and fiction. At the surface, this project explores the emotive, contextual, and material constructs of history, culture, personal identity, memory, and folklore.

Pine Tree Ballads is Thulin’s first book

With an afterword, by poet Dora Malech

More Books from Candela

PaulThulin.com

Text Courtesy Candela Books

URBAN DANCE: Visual Rhythm of Cities

New Jersey from the series ’New York to Los Angeles’

Photograph © Ashok Sinha

Pride: Gold Masks

Photograph © Margaret McCarthy

No Matter Where | Glasgow-1

Photograph © Sheri Lynn Behr

Pretty Girls, Bronx, 2018

Photograph © Paul Kessel

URBAN DANCE: Visual Rhythm of Cities

Co-curated by John A. Bennette with Orestes Gonzalez

Juried by Alexa Dilworth, Aline Smithson, Jonathan Blaustein

 

Plaxall Gallery, Long Island City, NY

 Gallery Hours: Saturday and Sunday 2:00-5:0pm

Thursdays 6:00-10:00pm

Now through July 21, 2019

Click image below to view all the Artists

ARNOLD NEWMAN PRIZE for New Directions in Photographic Portraiture

Photograph by Viktoria Sorochinski, series “Daddy“

2018 Arnold Newman PrizeWinner

Prepare your Entry for the "Arnold Newman Prize for New Directions in Photographic Portraiture," a $20,000 prize awarded to a photographer whose work demonstrates a compelling new vision in photographic portraiture. In addition to the winner, the jury selects three finalists each year who are invited to participate in an exhibit at the Griffin Museum of Photography.

The Jurors are: Paula Tognarelli, Director of the Griffin Museum of Photography • Elizabeth Avedon, Independent Curator, PhotoBook + Exhibition Designer • Jessica Dimson, Deputy Photo Editor, The New York Times

The Prize is funded by the Arnold and Augusta Newman Foundation and administered by Maine Media Workshops + College.

  

 ENTER HERE

 mainemedia.edu

PHOTOLUCIDA: Critical Mass 2019

Photograph: Chloe Aftel @chloeaftel

Get your best work ready because Photolucida's Critical Mass 2019 is now open for submissions!

Entering it’s 16th year, Critical Mass was created as a way to facilitate connections between emerging photographers and industry professionals with an aim at creating career-changing opportunities! With 200 museum curators, gallerists, publishers and more on the jury there is no better way to get your work seen in this digital day and age.

This year Photolucida is offering some amazing awards: A solo show at Blue Sky Gallery during Portland Photo Month, the Rauschenberg Residency Award, a Top 50 Exhibition at the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel, CA curated by Elizabeth Avedon, and publication in issue #63 of GUP Magazine for a selection of finalists. All finalists will also receive this special issue of GUP after it is published!

Deadline to submit is July 15th at noon PST! 

https://www.photolucida.org/critical-mass/entry-details

P.S. I'm thrilled to be curating the Critical Mass 2019 Top 50 exhibition at the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel, CA! EA

GREG KAHN : Havana Youth

 Havana Youth by Greg Kahn (Yoffy Press)

Smoke Machine at Fiesta Unica

Photograph © Greg Kahn

Miramar, Havana

Photograph © Greg Kahn

Havana Youth by Greg Kahn (Yoffy Press)

"In Havana Youth, Greg Kahn explores Cubans born after 1989, who have only known a time after the USSR dissolved and left the Caribbean nation with few resources and a growth-crippling, US-led economic embargo. Those kids, born during what is called “The Special Period”, are now in their twenties and developing a sense of individuality in a society that was historically focused on collectivism. This is their cultural counter-revolution, and they are redefining what it means to be Cuban." –Yoffy Press

 HAVANA YOUTH

Photographs by Greg Kahn
Introduction by Ariana Hernandez-Reguant

Yoffy Press 2019

Hardcover, 11.25 x 8.5 inches
144 pages + additional softcover zine
Edition of 500

ISBN: 978-1-943948-12-3
Trade Edition (unsigned):  $50.00
Signed by artist: $60.00

Greg Kahn is a Washington, DC - based American documentary fine art photographer. In August of 2012, Kahn co-founded GRAIN Images with his wife Lexey, and colleague Tristan Spinski. His work concentrates on issues that shape personal and cultural identity. His Pulitzer Prize nominated project, “It’s Not a House, It’s a Home,” explores how the foreclosure crisis in Florida defined a new class of homelessness. His recent project in Cuba considers how governance molds individuality.

KWAIDAN: Stories and Studies of Strange Things by Lafcadio Hearn. Illustrated with Photographs by Hiroshi Watanabe

  “The Story of Mimi-Nashi (Earless) Hoichi”

KWAIDAN: Stories and Studies of Strange Things

Photograph © Hiroshi Watanabe

“The Story of Aoyagi”

KWAIDAN: Stories and Studies of Strange Things

Photograph © Hiroshi Watanabe

 “The Story of O-tei”

KWAIDAN: Stories and Studies of Strange Things

Photograph © Hiroshi Watanabe

“The Dream of Akinosuke”

KWAIDAN: Stories and Studies of Strange Things

Photograph © Hiroshi Watanabe

KWAIDAN: Stories and Studies of Strange Things by Lafcadio Hearn and Hiroshi Watanabe

Photo illustrated by Hiroshi Watanabe. Limited Edition with a silver gelatin print from 1 of the 4 photos above, in an edition of 25. Cased in slip case.

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KWAIDAN: Stories and Studies of Strange Things presents the complete text of Hearn’s classic 1903 book of Japanese ghost stories, collected during travels in his adopted homeland and presented in English for consumption by Western audiences. This edition pairs the original stories with twenty-eight photographs from celebrated photographer Hiroshi Watanabe, as well as an introduction from horror expert Paul Murray. Watanabe’s photographs provide illumination and illustration for these eerie tales. This new edition of a classic text is likely to appeal to worldwide fans of Japanese folklore, supernatural stories, and contemporary photography.

 KWAIDAN:
Stories and Studies of Strange Things

by Lafcadio Hearn and Hiroshi Watanabe

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 A Limited Edition of 25 / $250. in U.S.

Slip-cased with a silver gelatin print from one of the 
4 photographs above.

In the US order directly from Hiroshi Watanabe : 
contact@hiroshiwatanabe.com 

In the UK order from Beyond Words / £200.00
https://www.beyondwords.co.uk/kwaidan-limited-edition

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 Making of KWAIDAN “The Story of Mimi-Nashi Hoichi”

Buddhist spell is written over Hoichi’s body while 

the spell checker dictates for accuracy of the scriptures.

 

Making of KWAIDAN “The Story of Aoyagi”

Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things is a new edition book of short classic Japanese ghost stories written by Lafcadio Hearn over a century ago. Hearn (1850-1904) was an Irishman who was born in Greece, grew up in Ireland, and emigrated to the US where he became a writer. He later moved to Japan and married a Japanese woman, had children, and became a professor. He traveled all around in Japan with his wife and heard many strange traditional folklore stories. Kwaidan is a collection of those short stories that he wrote in English for western population. He died in Japan soon after the publication of Kwaidan. Those stories are now visually revitalized by accompanying photographs by award winning photographer Hiroshi Watanabe, who has lovingly brought this edition into print for the Unicorn Publishing Group.

Hiroshi Watanabe was born in Japan. He graduated from Department of Photography at Nihon University in 1975. He moved to Los Angeles after graduation and became involved in the production of TV commercials for Japan. He later established his own production company and produced numerous commercials. He received an MBA degree from UCLA Business School in 1993. In 1995 his passion for photography rekindled, and since then he has traveled worldwide extensively photographing what he finds intriguing at that moment and place. In 2000 he closed the production company in order to devote himself entirely to the art. Since then, his work has been published and exhibited around the world, and he received numerous awards. His work is in the permanent collections of many art museums such as Philadelphia Museum of Art, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, George Eastman House, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, San Jose Museum of Art, New Mexico Museum of Art, North Carolina Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 2016, He received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.

 KWAIDAN: Stories and Studies of Strange Things

by Lafcadio Hearn and Hiroshi Watanabe

144 pages with 28 Photographs by Hiroshi Watanabe

$32.00 Hardback, trade edition
Unicorn Publishing Group

Available On Amazon

MYTH OF A WOMAN : Agnieszka Sosnowska

 My Belt, Héraðsandur, Iceland, 2011

© Agnieszka Sosnowska

 Self Portrait for Rodin, Kleppjárnsstaðir, Iceland, 2012 

© Agnieszka Sosnowska

 Self Portrait. Mjóifjörður, Iceland, 2013

© Agnieszka Sosnowska

 Longbow Practice. Self Portrait. Kleppjárnsstaðir, Iceland, 2018

© Agnieszka Sosnowska

 

“The Icelandic landscape is beautiful, but brutally unforgiving. There is majesty in the black cliffs and glaciers, but harsh winds and long winters render them dangerous for part of the year . . . a place both alluring and treacherous, Iceland is the perfect metaphor for Agnieszka Sosnowska’s photographs about the dichotomies of womanhood.” 

– Kat Kiernan, Myth of A Woman monograph 

Self Portrait. Nude, Landsendi, Iceland, 2015

 © Agnieszka Sosnowska

 Rúnar. Fremrasel, Iceland, 2018

© Agnieszka Sosnowska

 The Doll. Self Portrait. Reykjavik, Iceland, 2018

© Agnieszka Sosnowska

Photographer Agnieszka Sosnowska, exhibition of over fifty photographs, Myth of A Woman, is opening at the National Museum of Iceland May 4th, 2019. The core of the almost fifty photographs began with Sosnowska's intention to interpret the poem, “Móðir mín í kví, kví,” in a series of self-portraits in the East fjords of Iceland shot in many of the same places from where these stories originated.

Throughout Iceland’s history, women that bore children from circumstances that were not acceptable at the time - either shamed by the pregnancy or afraid their families or society would dismiss them - would leave their newborns out in the wilderness to die of exposure. “Móðir mín í kví, kví,” tells of a woman haunted by the voice of her abandoned child and driven to madness by her choice. Sosnowska has stated she is unable to bear children and this painful fact had affected her sensibility. In this way she connected with these Icelandic women and their sacrifices; to have the ability of motherhood taken away from you by means out of your control can be consuming. The result is a unique body of work, using a 4X5 view camera to create these mythical images.

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I was deeply touched by Agnieszka Sosnowska’s intensely personal self-portraits in a 2015 photo-documentary on LensCulture, years before meeting her in person at The Icelandic Photography Festival 2018. I was honored to have the opportunity to curate this exhibition, creating a path through her personal journey. I spoke with Ms. Sosnowska, currently living on a farm outside of Egilsstaðir, Iceland, about her early work and recent and past influences:

EA: What age did you begin to photograph?

AS: I was 18 years old when I started making self-portraits as a student studying photography. I am 47 years old now and am still creating them. My professors at Massachusetts College of Art were Abe Morell, Laura McPhee, Barbara Bosworth, Nick Nixon, and Frank Gohlke. Their work ethic as professors and working artists was and still is intense. As teachers they constantly questioned why you are doing what you are doing. The program was tough. You had to deliver new work on a weekly basis and the critiques were brutally honest.

As a student, I would take the bus from Mass Art to the Arnold Arboretum in Jamaica Plain to photograph. I was visually interested in the trees and unusual plants that grow there. It took years of traveling and growing up to acquire the skills and courage of how to photograph people. To gain a person’s trust and comfort for a photograph is truly an art form.

Over time I started to place myself into the pictures at the Arnold Arboretum. I wanted to play with the composition and scale in nature. It was a matter of convenience to use myself. This convenience turned to challenge. I realized that it was not where I positioned myself into the frame but how I reacted to what was around me. What was the story? What was I trying to say? How could I make it convincing?

EA: Who were your mentor’s or photographers you admire?
AS: I am mostly influenced by filmmakers, painters, musicians and writers. As a teenager I loved Jim Jarmusch films. “Down by Law” and “Stranger Than Paradise,” taught me that black and white can be complete colors to tell a story. In college I discovered Frida Kahlo paintings. She taught me that your life can be a story. It is important enough.

The music of Kate Bush and PJ Harvey have inspired narrative in my thought process. Listening to Bush’s “Hounds of Love” as a teenager and Harvey’s “Let English Shake” was a visual experience. Those albums are masterpieces. “Into the Wild” by Jon Krakauer had a huge influence on my life. Fifteen years ago while camping in the wilderness of Iceland I would read passages from this book to my husband. This book awakened me. You can live life or wait for it to take you.

I am drawn to photographers that work with people or a place over a long period of time. It means something to them. It isn’t a project that the artist sets out to conquer. They are living it. They are the story they are telling. In order for me to keep looking at an image I have to feel it. There has to be a real connection. No matter how unbelievable the photograph might appear, you end up believing it.

Contemporary photographers I deeply admire are…Chris Killip. His 4X5 series entitled “In Flagrante” is an inspiration. He understands what it means to become part of a community in order to tell a story about it. LaToya Ruby Frazier. Her self-portraits. Wow! What a series. In my opinion she is the most important photographer living today; Mike Brodie. His portraits of his friends train hopping. He is a poet. Nan Goldin. Her portraits of her lovers and friends. Her honesty is uncompromising.

These photographers deliver such honesty in their work that it stays with you. Their photographs are able to connect and communicate to a wide range of viewers. They have something to say. Their language is universal and it stays with you long after you see it.

EA: Has living on your farm in Iceland changed your perspective?

AS: Absolutely. My husband, Runar, and I made a conscious lifestyle choice to live as we do. He and I have nothing in common as far as hobbies go but what joins us is our love of nature. We both wanted the same lifestyle and we took a chance on each other. We own 400 hectares of land with lakes. It is private and isolated even by Icelandic standards. It is very quiet and special. I can't imagine living anywhere else. I have become self reliant and independent. When problems arise, you have to solve them yourself. It’s made me stronger both physically and mentally.

EA: Why did you choose to live in Iceland?

AS: Since immigrating to Iceland 10 years ago I’ve been asked this often. My reasons range from the rural lifestyle that I’ve adopted here, a good job, beautiful nature, and more often my response ends on the topic of Icelandic women. In my eyes the female spirit in Iceland encompasses strength and community. This strength has served as an inspiration in my life as an immigrant in this new land I now call my home. 

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A catalogue will accompany the exhibition, Myth of a Woman, with a preface by Inga Lára Baldvinsdóttir, Museum Exhibitions Director; a foreword by Icelandic poet, Ingunn Snжdal; an introduction by Kat Kiernan, Director, Panopticon Gallery; and an essay by Agnieszka Sosnowska. 31 duo-tone images, 9.5 x 11,” 41 pages, soft cover (Fall, 2019).

MYTH OF A WOMAN
Agnieszka Sosnowska
May 4th. 2019 – Sept 1, 2019
Curated by Elizabeth Avedon
 

Þjóðminjasafn Islands

National Museum of Iceland, Reykjavнk 

Agnieszka Sosnowska is represented in the U.S. by Panopticon Gallery