TOM CHAMBERS: Bogota Fotografica Festival

Prom Dress #3, 2005. Photograph (c) Tom Chambers

Photographs were displayed across the city of Bogotá

Fetch, 2008. Photograph (c) Tom Chambers
(click to enlarge images)

"In the spirit of the Fotomuseo's mission to bring photography into the lives of the Colombian people, my photographs were displayed on the exterior of public buildings and along the thoroughfares of Bogotá. Most remarkable was the piece Fetch, measuring 24 by 65 feet, displayed prominently on the front of the Archivo de Bogotá. A bit of a surreal experience, perhaps a parallel to my photography, to view my work on such a large scale."

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TOM CHAMBERS was born on a farm in the religiously conservative area of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. After high school he joined the Navy and spent a year on a patrol boat base in Vietnam which profoundly affected his outlook on life. Chambers earned a BFA from the Ringling School of Art and Design. His work has been widely exhibited throughout the United States and has received numerous awards and honors.

Chambers recently participated in the biennial, Fotográfica 2009 Bogotá, sponsored by Fotomuseo, the National Museum of Photography in Bogotá, Colombia. Fotográfica 2009 Bogotá was a gathering of sixteen international photographers, twenty-four Colombian photographers, and a cadre of university professors and museum curators from around the world. These fine art photographers exhibited their work related to the theme of the Portrait. Photographs were displayed in different venues across the city of Bogotá, including major museums, historical buildings, and galleries. Museum curators, university professors, and intellectuals from Colombia, Canada, England, France, Spain, and the USA provided lectures about current issues in photography.

In the historic Candeleria district of Bogotá, Chambers exhibited a body of his work at the Museo de Bogotá. Teaching a class at the Universidad Nacional, he explained the process of creating his photomontages to several hundred students. In a public conversation at the Universidad Central with Guatemalan photographer Luis Gonzalez Palma, Tom and Luis compared and contrasted the themes and symbols in their photographic work.

"Throughout my stay I was well taken care of by Fotomuseo Director Gilma Suarez and her attentive staff, as well as warmly embraced by the people and arts community in Bogotá. The experience was both artistically and intellectually stimulating. If you have the opportunity to participate in a future Fotográfica festival, I would highly recommend this experience. I made some great friends and I had a blast."

Tom Chambers Website
Tom Chambers "Charmers"
Chambers Inspires Songwriters
FotoMuseo in English

NANCY NEWHALL: Photography Review

"Hands of Ann and Ansel Adams". Photograph (c) Nancy Newhall
Courtesy of Scheinbaum & Russek Ltd

"Buckminster Fuller". Photograph (c) Nancy Newhall
Courtesy of Scheinbaum & Russek Ltd

"When I married Beaumont, I married photography"

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NANCY NEWHALL played a major role in legitimizing photography as a fine art. She worked closely with her husband Beaumont Newhall and well known photographers Ansel Adams, Paul Strand, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Edward Weston and Minor White. It was only after her death in 1974, her own photographs were revealed.

Beaumont Newhall founded the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in 1935, and was curator and director of George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, from 1948 to 1971. Nancy assisted her husband (she assumed the role of MoMA's curator of photography during Beaumont's wartime service), was a founding member of Aperture magazine, wrote extensively about photography and curated independantly.

Newhall's photographs were recently shown in the exhibition "Nancy & Beaumont Newhall: A Centennial Celebration" presented by Scheinbaum & Russek Ltd in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In his current review in Art News, Tom Collins writes, "Beaumont Newhall's part in bringing photography to prominence in America is well known. This show, titled "A Centennial Celebration," convincingly places the contributions of Beaumont's wife, Nancy, on the same level as his. Born in 1908 and married in 1936, they both devoted their lives, in tandum and individually, to curating shows, charting and commenting on the evolution of photography, and making pictures themselves." Read the entire Art News Review

View "Nancy & Beaumont Newhall" Exhibition On-line
Nancy Newhall Bio
Scheinbaum & Russek Ltd

HEUNGMAN: Shanghai, City of Shadows

Photograph (c) Heungman/All rights reserved

Photograph (c) Heungman/All rights reserved

Photograph (c) Heungman/All rights reserved

Photograph (c) Heungman/All rights reserved

HEUNGMAN was born in China, brought up in Hong Kong and lives in New York City. He received a BA in Cinema and Television Arts from California State University and BFA in Photography from the Art Center College of Design in L.A.. He was a successful commercial photographer for many of the 15 years he lived in New York City. His work was published in Rolling Stone, Spin, and Paper Magazines. He shot numerous musicians; Usher, Moby, Lil' Kim, Ben Harper, The Black Crowes, Duran Duran and celebrities Hugh Grant and Conan O'Brien, as well as many advertising campaigns such as Tommy Hilfiger.

Missing his "roots", Heungman returned to Shanghai for several years, documenting the city around him. He applied his early love of American film noir in his series "The New Noir". He's exhibited this work in galleries from Austria, China to New York City.

"Shanghai is the natural capital of international neomodernism because, without obvious parallel, it is an interrupted city. Not only is it undergoing a self-conscious process of rebirth, it is doing so with explicit reference to its previous age of cosmopolitan flourishing. It is doubling back upon itself, across a hiatus. In its restoration structures, which typically wrap or encase the old brick and metal skeleton of the early 20th century in the glass, light and digital electronics of fashionable art spaces, leisure venues and creative industries, Shanghai's 1930s and 1990s incarnations click seamlessly together, as if assembling the precision-engineered pieces of a cryptic historical jigsaw puzzle...the still photography of Heungman's Shanghai Noir series engages in a stubborn exploration of broken neomodern duration. At its most elementary, it exploits high-contrast (chiaroscuro) black-and-white imagery and noir aesthetics as a time-code, translating the city's futuristic highrises edifices back into the historical period implied by its style of perception. More subtly, the aspects of Americana (replete with both Gothamite and Hollywood references) disorient and cosmopolitanize, entangling the city's local storyline in wider and more incomprehensible structures of trans-regional fatality. The city's harsh – even infernal – incandescence is cast adrift within an oceanic vastness of pitiless, world-swallowing night. The heavens are an absolute nothingness (so everything is permitted)." Read the complete piece by NICK LAND

HEUNGMAN: WEBSITE
New York: INES DESEROUX GALLERY
Shanghai: ART LABOR GALLERY

MUENCH FAMILY: Three Generations of Photographers in Monument Valley

Father
The Double Arch, Arches Nat'l Park, Utah.
Photograph (c) Josef Muench/All rights reserved
(Click Image to Enlarge)

Son
Wilson Arch, Moab, Utah. Photograph (c) David Muench/All rights reserved

Grandson
Stevens Arch, Utah. Photograph (c) Marc Muench/All rights reserved

JOSEF MUENCH was born in Bavaria in 1904. At the age of 11 he received his first camera and began a lifelong interest in capturing nature on film. He arrived in the United States with his brother in 1928 and eventually settled in California.

In the 1930's, Monument Valley remained virtually unknown (except to the Navajo whose name for it is Tsé Bii' Ndzisgaii Valley of the Rocks) until Muench took some of the most memorable photographs of it beginning in 1936 and returning over 350 times to photograph there. In 1938, he met with the editor of Arizona Highways Magazine who ran Josef's photograph of the Rainbow Bridge National Monument. Not long after, Muench's name became synonymous with Arizona Highways Magazine where he worked for more than 50 years, using mostly his 4x5 camera.

Later he also photographed in Africa, Alaska, Asia, Canada, Europe, Hawaii, the Rocky Mountains and beyond. The unmanned Voyager Expeditions, launched in 1977, included his photo of a snow-covered Sequoia redwood taken in Kings Canyon National Park. Josef Muench died in 1998 at the age of 94, but his legacy remains.

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DAVID MUENCH, an innovator in landscape photography, has said that nature is his greatest teacher. Son of the founding father of color landscape photography, Josef Muench, and father of Marc Muench, David contributes to the world of photography by illustrating the beauty of land. Best known for his unique view of the American western landscape, he has presented us with the clear lakes and wild rivers of this country for more than 50 years. Muench's formal schooling included the Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York, The University of California at Santa Barbara and the Art Center School of Design, Los Angeles, California.

No permits or plane tickets were contemplated when Muench first traversed the Western landscape with his adventurous parents. His father photographed, while his mother, Joyce, wrote about their experiences. The family would travel from their home in Santa Barbara to the eastern Sierras, still one of David’s favorite places, or to the desert Southwest, taking airboats up the Colorado River or animal pack trips deep into the canyon lands.

William Conway, the former president of the Wildlife Conservation Society, praised David as one of the most “prolific and sensitive recorders of a rapidly vanishing natural world” while setting the standard and raising the bar for color landscape photography. David was commissioned to provide photographs for 33 large murals on the Lewis and Clark Expedition that hangs in the Jefferson Expansion Memorial in St. Louis. He is widely published in more than 60 books and publications.

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MARC MUENCH, as a third-generation photographer, could easily have fallen under the shadow of his talented father and grandfather. Instead, he's emerged as an acclaimed landscape and sports photographer in his own right since finishing his studies at Pasadena Art Center College of Design.

Muench estimates that his family has archived 250,000 individual 4x5 transparencies over the years, which is the primary statistic that drove the family studio to a digital workflow. Muench explains that their first foray into digital photography was to hire an employee to run the drum scanner they had purchased and digitize their work. Since that time their family photography studio has fully embraced digital work from capture to print.

Working alongside his parents at the studio, Marc has collaborated on and published several landscape photography books with his father, and his photography has appeared on the covers of Time, National Geographic, Traveler, Arizona Highways, Ski, Skiing, Outside, and Sierra Magazine. He was designated as a Kodak Photo Icon and recently published his 9th book. Marc leads 5 day intensive Photography Workshops, exploring areas like Patagonia, Scotland and Utah, among other remote and beautiful landscapes.

Marc Muench "Wild Utah" Photography Workshop October 1-5, 2009
Muench Stock Photography
Monument Valley in Vanity Fair Magazine

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

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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

RAYMOND MEEKS: Photolucida Seminar

Untitled. Photograph (c) Raymond Meeks

"We moved to Portland from our lovely rural life in Montana this past September. The timing seemed right for all of us. There's nothing poetic in this. It's still not home, that takes time, but a really great, caring community. "

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RAYMOND MEEKS photographs are masterful. His accomplished printing techniques have evolved over the years while working in platinum and silver metals, wet plate collodion and hand-applied surface preparation for digital printmaking. He's now come full circle and returned to printing primarily on silver gelatin from sheet and roll films.

Meeks recent work has been exploring a constantly shifting landscape, where dormant fields of reposed soil serve a restorative promise, a certain catharsis from our pasts and a metaphor to the synchronistic relationship between the health of the land and the condition of its inhabitants. He has incorporated some of these images into his latest edition of hand crafted original Artist Books as well as a new Nazraeli Press 'one picture book' titled Doctrine of an Axe which will be released in May, 2009.

Likeness of Reality, is six pages of original inkjet prints on uncoated paper, in an edition of 15, signed and numbered. All design, printing and binding is completed by Meeks. The book is wrapped in a thin waxed vellum. The book contains one of two inkjet prints. They are Meeks own technique of printing carbon inkjet prints on transparency film that he's specially conditioned to accept ink and backed with enamel. I've seen this print technique in the past and they are really beautiful and unique. As of now, one of the two prints that is included with this book is a choice, but as one print or the other sells out, this will not be a personal selection.

VIEW "Likeness of Reality" and print choices ($460.00)

TIME / PLACE: A SEMINAR WITH RAYMOND MEEKS

RAYMOND MEEKS workshop, in conjunction with Photolucida, is a special opportunity to explore the intuitive process with fine-art photographer Raymond Meeks. Meeks' attention to the intimate details of life and home, as well as poetry and the use of metaphor in his imagery will be the starting point for discussion, feedback, and response. This workshop is ideal for students wishing to cultivate a more emotional and organic response to the world through their image-making. Raymond Meeks Seminar Monday, April 27th 10am-4pm $175 Portland, OR Ph: # 503-963-1935

Raymond Meeks Website
An INTERVIEW with Darius Himes

NICHOLAS VREELAND: HH The Dalai Lama

Photograph (c) Nicholas Vreeland/All Rights Reserved

42nd Street, NYC. Photograph (c) Elizabeth Paul Avedon

THE DALAI LAMA VISITS USA APRIL- MAY 2009
Photograph of H.H. The Dalai Lama by Nicholas Vreeland

VEN. NICHOLAS VREELAND, born in Geneva, Switzerland, a protégé of Henri Cartier - Bresson, son of American ambassador, Frederick Vreeland, and grandson of fashion icon, Diana Vreeland, has lived in Germany, Morocco, Italy, Paris, New York and India. He's fluent in Tibetan, Italian, French, Spanish, English, German, and Hindi, among other languages. He studied at NYU film school, initially worked for Irving Penn, before later working for Richard Avedon, and photographed Maharajahs and Tibetan Rinpoches over many years carrying a huge Deardorff 5 x 7 throughout India. His elegant portrait of the Dalai Lama in his flip flops above was used as a billboard all over New York City during His Holiness's 2003 visit.

Vreeland studied Buddhism at The Tibet Center, the oldest Tibetan Buddhist Center in NYC, under the tutelage of scholar Khyongla Rato Rinpoche. In 1985, he became a full-time Buddhist monk, living at the Rato Dratsang monastery in Karnataka, India. After 14 years of study, Vreeland holds the Ser Tri Geshe Degree, one of only three Westerners to ever achieve this honor. In 2001, he had the special distinction of editing An Open Heart, a New York Times Best Seller List book by His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

Vreeland helped organize and arrange, along with the Gere Foundation, HH The Dalai Lama's 1999, 2003, and 2007 Teachings in NYC. The Dalai Lama is touring the U.S. beginning in Santa Barbara, Ca April 26 and May 3 in NYC. HH The Dalai Lama's U.S. Schedule in April-May 2009

India Photos

Buddhist Photo Journal
Rato Foundation Photographs
Rato Dratsang Foundation Exhibitions
An Open Heart by The Dalai Lama, Edited by Nicholas Vreeland

SMITHSONIAN PHOTOGRAPHY COLLECTION

Smithsonian Institution Archives Collections Storage

The Smithsonian Photography Initiative announced The Bigger Picture their new blog which presents an inside look into the Smithsonian’s photography collections. The blog is produced by the Photography Initiative in collaboration with guest contributors from throughout the Smithsonian.

"Photography and the Smithsonian were born within a decade of each other in the mid-19th century. The Smithsonian now has more than 13 million images in 700 collections throughout its 19 museums, nine research centers and the National Zoo. The Bigger Picture uses these collections and the Institution’s experts to stimulate an active conversation about the medium, its history and its meaning in people’s lives. The blog is intended to present multiple perspectives about the impact of photography and highlight the work of curators, photographers, historians and other Smithsonian staff members. It invites the general public to participate in the dialogue by commenting on Smithsonian posts."

The Bigger Picture is great for those of us who love to research vintage photos and a chance to meet the people behind the scene responsible for accumulating, editing and storing them for us.

The Bigger Picture: http://blog.photography.si.edu
SPI Photo Search: http://photography.si.edu/SearchImage.aspx

APRIL: Snakes

Charmers, 2003. Photograph (c) Tom Chambers / All Rights reserved

Snake Scare, 2009. Photograph (c) Emily Zoladz / All Rights reserved

PHOTOGRAPHS: Tom Chambers and Emily Zoladz

SHIHO FUKADA: Pulitzer Nomination

Photograph by Shiho Fukada for The New York Times

"Tibetan monks leaving morning prayer on Wednesday at Rongwo Monastery in Qinghai Province, China. The Tibetan New Year has come, but many Tibetans, angry over the events of the past year, are rejecting official efforts to drum up festivities." Shiho Fukada was detained for 20 hours after taking this photograph.

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SHIHO FUKADA, a native of Tokyo, now based in Beijing, China, has a degree in English literature from Tokyo's Sophia University and worked in fashion and advertising before becoming a photojournalist. Fukada's stark photograph of Tibetan monks was recently published on the front page of The New York Times. I thought it was a powerful choice for photo editor Michele McNally to select for the cover of the Times newspaper.

Shiho's work includes portraits of child labor in Bangladesh where poverty pushes an estimated 6 to 7 million children to work, comprising one-fifth of the country's labor force. She also spent months in the Bangladesh brothels photographing both the child prostitutes and women who were sex workers for 50 years .

Her website includes her award winning photographs of the grief stricken families taken after the 2008 earthquake that struck China's Sichuan Province. At least 9,000 children were crushed to death by the falling school buildings. This photographic series received The New York Times Grand Prize, Photo of The Year by Editor & Publisher Magazine in 2008. The China earthquake photographs, like most of her work, began as her own personal project, not an assignment. Her work has also received recognition from the New York Press Photographers Association, The National Press Photographers Association in Photojournalism award, the Best of Photojournalism award for her multimedia work, PDN Annual, Communication Arts and Unicef Photo of The Year.

In the U.S., Shiho has covered the Iowa caucus for New York Magazine, photographed male exotic dancers and the life of migrant farm workers. In between assignments on the road, she recently completed a photo essay about the demise of the biggest labor town in Japan which has become a dumping ground of old men since the Japanese economy, once 2nd largest in the world, is now deteriorating at its worst pace since the 1970's during this financial crisis.

Shiho has been nominated for The Pulitzer Prize by The New York Times.

http://www.shihofukada.com
The New York Times slides: A Day of Mourning in Tibet
The New York Times 5/29/2009

ADRIAN PANARO: Out My Back Door

Out My Back Door #5
Photograph (c) Adrian Panaro/All Rights Reserved

"My family and I were living in a loft three blocks south of the World Trade Center, at Trinity Place and Rector Street, and witnessed the first plane hitting the North tower from our six year old's school PS 234, at Greenwich and Chambers Streets. We weren't permitted to go home for about 6 weeks and when public policy dictated it was safe, our eyes and noses told us otherwise. We hoped things would improve, but in the end we decided to move out to New Mexico. "

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PHOTOGRAPHER ADRIAN PANARO now divides his time between New York and New Mexico. The destruction on 9/11 rendered his downtown residence/studio, like the rest of the neighborhood, uninhabitable and in 2002 he and his wife Tina moved their family to New Mexico.

Panaro began his professional career in New York City in the 1970's. After traveling extensively throughout Afghanistan, India and Nepal and attaining his undergraduate degree in Anthropology, he began working for Richard Avedon. During his 3 years with Avedon, he learned the fine points of studio lighting, participated in the preparation for and mounting of Richard Avedon's major retrospective Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, while also serving for a time as studio manager. Panaro next worked with fashion photographer Bill King in Paris and New York.

When Adrian branched out on his own as a free-lance editorial and advertising photographer, his work was published in The New York Times, New York Magazine, Details Magazine, and various international publications. Those early portraits of artists, writers and musicians included everyone from photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, artist Andy Warhol, to the legendary rock and roller Chuck Berry.

Since moving to New Mexico, his work has expanded, and taken him into a much different direction. "Due to my being an expatriate and from the experience of 9/11, I found myself drawn back to the original impetus that led me into photography as a medium of self expression."

ADRIAN PANARO

May 1st through May 30, 2009
Group Exhibition:Walter Randel Gallery
287 10th Avenue, NY, NY.
http://www.wrgallery.com

Adrian Panaro: http://www.adrianpanarophotography.com
ArtInfo: Robert Mapplethorp, Silver Gelatin Print, 10 x 10 inches

HEARST 8 X 10 BIENNIAL EVENT

Photographs (c) Elizabeth Paul Avedon /All Rights Reserved.

Soma Watanabe, son of photographer Hiroshi Watanabe, explores the Alexey Brodovitch Galleries at the Hearst 8 X 10 Photographers Biennial Meet The Artists Event. More event photos can be viewed HERE. Congratulations to:

8 WINNERS
Brad Carlile Andy Freeberg Mark Kessell
Edith Maybin Louie Palu Benedikt Partenheimer
Nicholas Prior Hiroshi Watanabe

10 HONORABLE MENTIONS
Anoush Abrar & Aimee Hoving Christoph Bangert Rachael Dunville
Roger Eberhard Blake Fitch Jan-Claude Louis Will Steacy
Maura Sullivan David H. Wells David Zimmerman

http://www.hearst8x10.com

ROB HAGGART: A Photo Editor

Magazine Interview via aphotoeditor.com

In The American West, Book Design

Layouts on my Desk

If you haven't followed Rob Haggart's, A Photo Editor blog, you've been missing some of the most interesting and informative updates for professional photographers, photo editors and all other readers. Haggart, the former Director of Photography for Men's Journal and Outside Magazine, is a voice of sanity amid the current chaos on the state of magazine and book publishing today, ongoing copyright issues, industry news, and a good resource for creative professionals in general.

This week, "A Photo Editor" posted Richard Avedon's 1976 groundbreaking portrait series THE FAMILY, depicting the most powerful figures in the American political, military, media, and corporate elite at that time. Before the Annie Leibovitz Clinton Administration portraits in 1993's Vanity Fair, and before the recent NY Times portraits of Obama’s Cabinet, this series was commissioned by Jann Wenner for Rolling Stone Magazine.

THE FAMILY: http://www.aphotoeditor.com
All three series: http://petergrahamcom.blogspot.com

An Interview With Rob Haggart

APhotoEditor Interview
Rolling Stone Magazine

SONAM ZOKSANG: Tibet

 Boy from Kham, Tibet

  Photograph (c) Sonam Zoksang /All Rights Reserved

His Holiness the Dalai Lama and President Barack Obama
Photograph (c) Sonam Zoksang /All Rights Reserved

Monks waiting for His Holiness The Dalai Lama, Sera Monastery
Photograph (c) Sonam Zoksang /All Rights Reserved

SONAM ZOKSANG was born in Kyirong, Tibet in 1960 after the Chinese invasion of Tibet. His parents escaped to India when Zoksang was one month old. He grew up in refugee schools, got a degree in Buddhist Dialectics, and taught himself photography. In 1985 Zoksang moved to the US, where he now runs Vision of Tibet. Active in the Tibetan Community as an advocate for human rights and political change, he is on the Board of Directors of the US Tibet Committee and has been president of the Tibetan Association of New York and New Jersey.

Sonam Zoksang’s mission is to tell the story of his homeland through photography. He does this by documenting Tibetans and Tibetan life, both in and out of Tibet. Whenever possible, he travels to Tibet to document the conditions in his Chinese-occupied homeland. He often takes pictures of Tibetan refugee communities in India, as well as in the US and other countries. Zoksang’s slide presentations at schools and cultural and community centers are always well-attended; he seeks out these opportunities as he feels education is particularly important. His photos have been widely published in books, magazines, and newspapers, and are widely exhibited, one major show having been in a US Congressional building in Washington DC. That exhibition was forced to close after less than one week due to political pressure.

 

Sonam has an enormous archive of photographs he's taken over decades of travels with H.H. The Dalai Lama, as well as very elegant landscapes of Tibet and India. I keep the Boy From Kham (center) with his hopeful face posted on my wall at all times.

Sonam Zoksang PhotoGallery

HIROSHI WATANABE

Coliseo Gallo de Oro 2. (c) Hiroshi Watanabe

"A current that underlies my work is the concept of preservation. I make every effort to be a faithful visual recorder of the world around me, a world in flux that, at very least in my mind, deserves preservation, and that I constantly seek to expand"

HIROSHI WATANABE is a California-based Japanese photographer. Born in Sapporo, Watanabe graduated from Nihon University in photography in 1975 and moved to Los Angeles, where he worked producing television commercials. He obtained an MBA from UCLA in 1993, but two years later his earlier interest in photography revived; from 2000 he has worked full time at photography.

Watanabe's first published book was I See Angels Every Day, monochrome portraits of the patients and other scenes within San Lázaro psychiatric hospital in Quito, Ecuador. This won the 2007 Photo City Sagamihara award for Japanese professional photographers. In 2007 Watanabe won a Critical Mass award from Photolucida that allowed publication of his monograph Findings.

Hiroshi Watanabe is One of 8 winners in the current Hearst 8 X 10 Photography Biennial.
8 X 10 Exhibition : April 1-Sept. 2009 The Alexey Brodovitch and Hearst Gallery, Hearst Tower Galleries, 300 West 57th Street, NY, NY www.hearst8x10.com

Hiroshi Watanabe's photograph Vietnam War Memorial, Washington DC is included in George Eastman House Exhibition Seeing Ourselves through 2010. Podcast by George Eastman House: “SEEING OURSELVES”

Hiroshi Watanabe's Upcoming Exhibitions

June 18 –September 05, 2009 “Hot Fun in the Summertime” (Group Show)Bonni Benrubi Gallery 41 E. 57th Street 13th Floor, New York, NY 10022

July 1 – December 31, 2009 “Ideology in Paradise” Friends' Center, Angkor Hospital for Children, Siem Reap, Cambodia. Angkor Hospital for Children sponsored by Friends Without A Border is a Pediatric Hospital providing free treatment and care to the children in the Siem Reap area. Please donate to the Angkor Hospital for Children.

September 5 – October 28, 2009 "American Leitmotiv" (b&w photographs of the US) AD-Galerie, route de la Gare,1, 1272 Genolier, VD, Switzerland

Web: www.hiroshiwatanabe.com

TOD PAPAGEORGE: Deutsche Börse Photography Prize

Photograph (c) Tod Papageorge/Courtesy Pace/MacGill, New York

TOD PAPAGEORGE is one of four artists nominated for this year's Deutsche Borse Photography Prize. Originally an English Literature major at the University of New Hampshire, and, since 1979, Yale's Director of Graduate Studies in Photography, he is the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships, two NEA Visual Artists Fellowships, author of important essays and many articles on photography, and a photographer whose work has been collected in major collections all over the world, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Tod Papageorge's photographs are up for the prestigious 2009 Deutsche Borse Photography Prize now being exhibited at The Photographers Gallery, London. This exhibition runs through April 11, 2009. The Photographers Gallery, 16-18 Ramillies St, London W1F 7LW.

Interview by Richard B. Woodward BOMB MAGAZINE

Interview by Christine Smallwood: THE NATION
Insight BLOG
Steidl Book Passing Through Eden

Tod Papageorge at PACE/MACGILL

Sent from Tod Papageorge: A ROBERT FRANK INTERVIEW

Deutsche Borse Prize: THE GUARDIAN VIDEO CLIP