News

Stephen Wirtz Gallery announces an exhibition of Polaroid images by renowned
photographer Barbara Crane.

Exhibition dates:  September 9 - October 16, 2010
Opening reception Thursday, September 9, 2010, 5:30-7:30 PM

During the early 1980's, Barbara Crane spent a few hot summers lugging around a heavy Super Graphic 45 camera and boxes Polaroid film though the summer festivals of Chicago. The closely cropped photographs, exposing subtle gestures of human interaction usually lost in the sea of glistening human flesh, where published in a small book by Aperture last year. Crane separates her subjects from the chaos that they are surrounded by to expose beautiful moments of intimacy.

"The display in these photographs comes from the spark of individual people, not from a style celebrating apathy and malaise, robots on the assembly line of consumerism. These photographs celebrate summer days, steamy Chicago nights, endless desires fulfilled and postponed. Photography has often been called mirror and window: it is also a prism reflecting the intersections between the photographer, subject, and viewer. Prisms are faceted; Barbara Crane creates diamonds of perception and feeling." - Richard Gordon

“I have treasured these pictures for their depiction of universal experiences, yet they are also a record of a specific moment in time as communicated via the unique – and now, sadly obsolete – photographic medium of the Polaroid. These images were shot during the heat of summer days, very close to the subjects, as I struggled to carry a hand-held 4 by 5 Super Graphic 45 camera, boxes of Polaroid sheet film, and a Polaroid film back. These photographs are truly labors of love.” - Barbara Crane

At the Phila. Photo Arts Center this Fall, events include a "Sideluck Potshow," discounts on workshops and courses, the exhibition "True Fiction," and lectures.

The photography show will include work by Gregory Crewdson, Bradley Peters, Taryn Simon, Elaine Stocki and others. Classes include Portrait Studio Lighting, Printing with Shades of Paper, and Using Multiples.

They are also launching Philly Photo Day to celebrate their one-year anniversary, The Philadelphia Photo Arts Center (PPAC) is designating October 28, 2010 as Philly Photo Day.  they are asking anyone to take a picture in Philadelphia on this day, and submit it electronically to PPAC.  they hope to receive hundreds if not thousands of images that will constitute a broad portrait of Philadelphia on that day. Then on November 9, 2010 PPAC will open an exhibition of the submitted images in the Gray Area at the Crane Arts Building.

http://www.philaphotoarts.org/

The exhibition and sale will feature 20 winning books.  Of the 20 winning entries, four books will be selected as Best in Show. Photographers awarded Best in Show will also exhibit up to four photographs (depending on size) in the gallery.  An online catalog of the winning works, with links to the photographers’ websites or online storefronts will remain on the Davis Orton Gallery website for one year.

JUROR: PAULA TOGNARELLI

EXHIBITION DATES

November 18 to December 19, 2010 with an opening reception Saturday, November 20, 2010, 6 to 8 p.m.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE

The Submission period begins August 1, 2010 and ends on October 1, 2010.  
Entries must be in-hand or postmarked by October 1.
Once entered, all submissions are final; no changes or edits may be made to your book.

SUBMIT

Yael Ben-Zion's first monograph, 5683 miles away, has recently been published by Kehrer.

5683 miles is the distance between Tel Aviv and New York. From this distance, Yael Ben-Zion (*1973) has been looking back at her homeland for the last ten years, considering the meaning of »normal life« in this charged place. In repeated visits to Israel, Ben-Zion has created nuanced and layered images that capture the texture of Israelis’ day-to-day life. Shifting seamlessly between interiors and exteriors, portraits and still life, it is her sensitivity to details that ties the work together. While personal and intimate in nature, the photographs allude to the complexity of the political climate in Israel, and question its emotional and social consequences. As opposed to providing answers, however, "5683 miles away" offers a poetic reflection on the way people spend their lives.

I had the good fortune to sit down recently with Assistant Curator of Photographs at the Yale Art Gallery, Joshua Chuang, who gave me a preview of the long-awaited Robert Adams retrospective. (There was one in 1989 organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, but the last twenty years of work obviously got left out.) The event will not only consist of the touring institutional exhibitions, but will also be paired with a series of painstakingly-produced books. Chuang has worked on the entire endeavor directly with Adams himself and Director Jock Reynolds, as well as the master printers at Meridian Printing in Rhode Island over the past few years.

You have probably taken note already that the Yale Art Gallery has made fine new editions of books from the Adams oeuvre, like denver, What We Bought, and Summer Nights, Walking, the latter done in partnership with Aperture, the book’s original publisher. Out in just a couple weeks from now is What Can We Believe Where?, the little brother, in a way, to the massive, three-volume retrospective collection that will be the final word on the photographer’s work: The Place We Live. That compendium will not be available for public purchase until about June, 2011. The title of the larger publication is taken from the well-known essay for The New West, written by John Szarkowski, and is a roughly chronological summing up and coming together of all of Adams’ major bodies of work, from 1964-2009, mostly known, but some unseen. It will give present and future (“lifer”) students of photography with a more whole, rounded view of the artist’s life work, making connections more visible, where they were once not entirely clear. Seeing it all together, edited over years (not months) helps us understand why and what the photographer believes and feels about the world around us.

The books are printed fantastically, with incredible attention to detail, with Adams giving the final word from Oregon on each plate. We will also get to have most of his well-written statements of purpose finally in one publication, in the back of the first two volumes. The smaller book, What we Can Believe Where?, is printed tritoneon a more matte, somewhat more porous-looking paper with a fine stochastic screen. The three-volume set is printed tritone with a more traditional 300-line screen on a slightly more glossy paper, but with new, non-ywlloewing inks. (Look at some of your older black-and-white photo books printed with vegetable-based inks, and you might detect a yellow "ghosting" on blank pages opposite printed images that wasn't visible before with the non-environmentally-friendly petroleum-based inks, which had other problems.) Chuang says that these are the first volumes to have been printed with these specially-formulated inks. The pictures look as good, if not better in some ways, than Adams' fine silver-gelatin prints. This is not merely due to the inks, but to the incredibly dedicated printers and the insistence on a standard of accuracy by the artist and the curator, who also happens to be a photographer, himself.

The first venue for the exhibition is this fall in Canada at the Vancouver Art Gallery, then on to the Denver Art Museum, and then Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The show will wrap up on the East Coast at Yale (but not for a couple more years) before heading to Europe. We will have to sit tight until then, getting lost in time and place in these wonderful new books of photographs.

 From the current title’s introduction by Robert Adams:

“What does our geography compel us to believe? What does it allow us to

believe? And what obligations, if any, follow from our beliefs?”

Robert Adams: The Place We Live, A Retrospective Selection of Photographs will be at the Vancouver Art Gallery from September 25, 2010 through January 16, 2011