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"Scrappin Upstate", a project facilitated by photojournalist Brenda Ann Kenneally, opens March 8th in Troy, New York. The installation is part of her ongoing "Upstate Girls" project, in which she has worked with women in tough situations in North Troy (next to state capital Albany) for the past seven years, documenting their lives and loves, their joy and pain - in school, at home, in jail, in hospitals, in court. She says, "The years that I documented The Upstate Girls have produced nuanced stories that are a mirror for young working class young people in America to realize their common strengths and identify moments where social change is possible." This particular series consists of scrapbooks made by some of her subjects,  in which current pictures and writing are paired with copies of pages form Victorian-era ladies' scrapbooks, full of ephemera like calling cards from the women who once peopled the bustling, thriving city of North Troy. This city was supposed to be a  prototype for Industrialed America; after all, it was the home of Uncle Sam, whose grave you can go visit today. At the end of the 19th century, Troy was one of the richest cities in the country. Today, most households in the neighborhoods where the Upstate Girls live receive public assistance, have loved ones in prison, and survive on minimum wage (or close to it)  made from service jobs.  Troy was once the "Collar City," and was a major manufacturing hub. Today, despite the colleges and a private school there, Troy appears to be a city well into decline, with abandoned buildings, shops that only last a few months, and drugs taking over blocks. Kenneally, however, is part of a bright spot, or several of them, being created in Troy today. The venue for this exhibition is also one of those bright spots, The Sanctuary for Independent Media, a repurposed old church that houses screenings, art shows, live music and lectures as well as a successfull teen video workshop. The "Scrappin' Upstate" workshop began at the aptly-named Sanctuary during “Troy Night Out,” in 2009. The young people who created the pages lived as extended family in homes directly on the block of the Sanctuary.

More of Kenneally and her colleagues' pro bono endeavors are collected on the website, The Raw File, such as a recent show, "This Time in America," at Art Basel in Miami, and also "The Tribe", which is a series about the foreclosure crisis in my own backyard in New Haven, CT: http://www.therawfile.org/stories/thetribe.html Many of the photographs are organized and edited into slide shows with audio from interviews with the subjects, thus giving them a voice and making the full scope of the powerful stories apparent to any viewer.

See the scrapbook project at

The Sanctuary

3361 6th Avenue

Troy, NY

March 8, 2011 - June 4, 2011

http://www.mediasanctuary.org/node/2339

And more online here: http://www.therawfile.org/stories/happy2011.html

From March 27th to April 1st, thousands of photographers will gather in Palm Springs for seminars, workshops and highly regarded portfolio reviews with museum curators, gallery directors, magazine editors, art directors and advertising agency creatives at the Palm Springs Photo Festival. 

For $75 a day, your pass includes:

* Admittance to 11 Seminars during the week

* Daily Symposiums: The Business of Fine Art, The Convergence Conference, Advocacy the Arts,  PDNPresents: Strategies for the Emerging Photographer

* Two Networking events with wine tastings from prominent California wineries

* Unlimited access to Sponsor Headquarters. See the latest from Canon, Epson, Blurb, Samy’s Camera, Fuji, X-Rite, onONE Software, Blend Images Agency, Aperture Foundation, and Marshall Electronics!

* Access to the Open Portfolio Review Sunday, March 27 at the Hyatt Regency. Over 80 photographers will be presenting their work!

* Invitation to our Opening Reception immediately following our Open Portfolio Review.

For more information about the festival and registration, click here. 

On January 27, 2001, "Nickel Empire: Coney Island Photographs 1898-1948" opened to the public at Schroeder, Romero and Shredder (somewhat of a scary name for a dealer in works on paper.) The photographer E.E. Rutter is featured, as this image of George C. Tilyou’s famous Funny Face is on view. The exhibition of  photos is supplemented with a charred wooden horse from the Steeplechase ride that survived one of the park’s infamous fires.

From the gallery's website: "Nickel Empire consists of over two dozen vintage photographs of Coney Island dating from 1889 to 1948, displaying in rare clarity the twentieth century’ s great American playground, once described as 'Sodom by the sea.' Coney Island was a sanctioned escape from—and alternative to—everyday reality. The various rides, reenactments of disasters, freak shows, and other amusements highlight America's obsession with a bliss tinged with danger, and the thrill we find in spectacle. The photographs in the exhibition include scenes of scale models of rides, incandescent night views, people at play, and the great Bowery fire, among others. Machines of industry were turned into instruments of play and let loose the bright forces and dark possibilities of a vast democratic culture that was astonished, delighted and appalled by Coney Island. Also on display is the charred remnant of a Steeplechase wooden horse, now a monument to America's lost innocence."

Through February 26, 2011 at Schroeder Romero Shredder

531 W 26th St, New York, NY 10001

212-630-0722

Gallery hours are Tuesday-Friday, 10 – 6; Saturday, 11 – 6

http://srandsgallery.com/index.php?/exhibitions/nickel_empire_coney_isla...

Connect 2011 offers the opportunity to meet top photographers, curators, art directors, editors, gallery directors, ad agency creatives, educators and industry leaders in the spectacular desert environment of Palm Springs, California for this year’s Palm Springs Photo Festival. Show your portfolios, study with legendary photographers, attend cutting-edge seminars / symposiums and enjoy evening projections by world famous image-makers. network with the master photographers, industry insiders and your contemporaries at several great parties and enjoy the warm Palm Springs weather. Walk away with a renewed passion for the art of image making.

For more information, visit; www.palmspringsphotofestival.com

According to Artinfo, via Huffington Post, a promise to color photography has been made in the form of the William Eggleston Museum in Memphis, Tenn.: "Preparation for the new institution has been spearheaded by New York-based intellectual property lawyer Mark Crosby, who rallied a group of philanthropists around the idea. Crosby has already raised $5 million in pledged start-up funds. "They're not creative types, or even fans of Eggleston especially," Crosby told the Commercial Appeal of the anonymous donors, "but they're Memphians who have a public mission." The museum is expected to open in 2013, in one of three midtown Memphis sites: Overton Park, Overton Square, or the Crosstown neighborhood. It will house the offices of the Eggleston archive -- overseen by the Eggleston Trust, which is headed by the photographer's son Winston -- as well as gallery spaces to show the photographer's work and the work of other contemporary artists. In exchange for storing and maintaining the archive, the museum will have the research and display rights to more than 60,000 photographs. "At first I thought it was some kind of vague idea," Winston Eggleston told the Commercial Appeal of being approached about the museum. "I didn't realize that it was such a serious thing." With Eggleston's legacy ever more firmly cemented in the history of photography and art -- particularly after his expansive 2008 retrospective at the Whitney, which toured the country -- it is easy to see why other Memphians are giddy about reclaiming a local hero. "You've got the world leader, the man who really placed color photography among the acceptable forms of art... not through elaborate, hard-to-understand subject matter, but by capturing the everyday," Memphis mayor A C Wharton said. "Eggleston truly is Memphis." According to John Szarkowski, however, when it comes to Eggleston's photographs, while they may be of Memphis, they are not Memphis. "It would be marvelous to think that the ordinary, vernacular life in and around Memphis might be in its quality more sharply incised, formally clear, fictive, and mysteriously purposeful than it appears elsewhere," the curator continues in his essay -- but of course this is not the case. The new museum will offer the unique opportunity to observe the gap -- between reality and its sharply focused photographic representation -- firsthand." (above, fromhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/artinfo/move-over-graceland-memph_b_811830... )