365 Art Project, February 4, 2017

Tall, handsome, naked as a child. 11×14″, deconstructed Polaroid SX-70 prints and mixed media on cardboard.

January 23, 2017 (4)

Potential For Violence, series. 4 matchbooks and mixed media. 1×2″ Cyanotype,

Source: January 23, 2017 (4)

Lost Downtown – Peter Hujar’s Portraits

This modest volume (just 15 photographs) of Peter Hujar’s portraits of his Lower East Side celebrity friends is a soft-spoken, unpretentious gem. The book was a perfect companion to my Sunday morning cup of tea. Peter’s portraits capture his group of friends in a very gentle manner. Many of the personalities are known for…

via Lost Downtown – Peter Hujar —

HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON TALKING ABOUT THE DECISIVE MOMENT – ALL Photographers MUST WATCH!!

Henri Cartier-Bresson  is standard viewing and hopefully still standard reading in todays photographic education, but what he says and the force and passion behind it speak volumes more.

Henri Cartier-Bresson (French: [kaʁtje bʁɛsɔ̃]; August 22, 1908 – August 3, 2004) was a French photographer considered the master of candid photography, and an early user of 35 mm film. He helped develop street photography, and approvingly cited a notion of the inevitability of a decisive moment, a term adopted as the title for his first major book. His work has influenced many photographers.

Click on this link 

to read the article on 121clicks.com and to watch the amazing video.

Self Portraits And Change

A thought provoking and emotional blog post from my good friend and colleague Ron Cowie.

A Working Artist

2004 was a terrific year. My wife Lisa and I were expecting a child and moving out of Boston at the same time.  I was present enough in my life to recognize that although these huge changes were good things, change has aspects of real terror attached to them. Becoming a father was full of concern and stress. Will I do okay? Who am I now? What will I become?

So, with that in mind, I loaded up the 5×7 camera and played around with it. I didn’t have a major agenda and the images I made pretty much sat around for ten years before I really looked at them. I just started scanning and processing them now. I’m now 45, Lisa has been dead for seven years, our child celebrated her 10th birthday last year, and I remarried five years ago. With that came a boy, who is now…

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The Surreal, Fantastic Art of Frederick Sommer

Frederick Sommer (September 7, 1905 – January 23, 1999), was an artist born in Angri, Italy and raised in Brazil. He earned a M.A. degree in Landscape Architecture (1927) from Cornell University where he met Frances Elisabeth Watson (September 20, 1904 – April 10, 1999) whom he married in 1928; they had no children. The Sommers moved to Tucson, Arizona in 1931 and then Prescott, Arizona in 1935. Sommer became a naturalized citizen of the United States on November 18, 1939.

Considered a master photographer, Sommer first experimented with photography in 1931 after being diagnosed with tuberculosis the year prior. Early works on paper (starting in 1931) include watercolors, and evolve to pen-and-ink or brush plus drawings of visually composed musical score. Concurrent to the works on paper, Sommer started to seriously explore the artistic possibilities of photography in 1938 when he acquired an 8×10 Century Universal Camera, eventually encompassing the genres of still life (chicken parts and assemblage), horizonless landscapes, jarred subjects, cut-paper, cliché-verre negatives and nudes. According to art critic Robert C. Morgan, Sommer’s “most extravagant, subtle, majestic, and impressive photographs—comparable in many ways to the views of Yosemite Valley’s El Capitan and Half Dome by Ansel Adams—were Sommer’s seemingly infinite desert landscapes, some of which he referred to as ‘constellations.'”^[1] The last artistic body of work Sommer produced (1989–1999) was collage based largely on anatomical illustrations.

Frederick Sommer had significant artistic relationships with Edward Weston, Max Ernst, Aaron Siskind, Richard Nickel and others. His archive (of negatives and correspondence) was part of founding the Center for Creative Photography in 1975 along with Ansel Adams, Harry Callahan, Wynn Bullock, and Aaron Siskind. He taught briefly at Prescott College during the late 60s and substituted for Harry Callahan at IIT Institute of Design in 1957–1958 and later at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Valise d’Adam, 1949

Anatomy of a Chicken, 1939

Chicken Parts, 1939

Chicken Parts, 1939

Cut Paper, 1974

Flower and Frog, 1947

Found Painting, 1949

Max Ernst, 1946

Medallion, 1948

Moon Culmination, 1951

The Giant, 1946

Venus, Jupiter and Mars, 1949

Paracelsus, 1959

Joel-Peter Witkin: An Objective Eye

 

An important documentary from director Thomas Marino, taking a profound and introspective look into the life and art of controversial artist, Joel-Peter Witkin. Along with in-depth interviews with Joel-Peter Witkin, the film features interviews from prominent artists, photographers, and scholars who share insight into the impact of Witkin’s work and influence on modern culture. The film is available for Rent/Streaming below, and DVD’s & Blu Rays.

See the full film here:  http://muvi.es/w4557

The Time is Now!

Tim Bartlett, Photographer

4×5 Instant Film is a thing of the past. Yet, thanks to the tremendous efforts of Bob Crowley and New55, it can once again be a thing of the instantaneous present!

Be a part of returning a former photographic capability, both creative and technical, to use by supporting the Kickstarter campaign:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bobcrowley/new55-film

This is THE CHANCE to make this happen and the opportunity is only happening NOW.

What kind of work can be made with this unique process? An example, and more here.

Learn more about the project on the New55 page.

Don’t forget to share with your friends and others who may have an interest in supporting this. Send out the Kickstarter page or a quick link to my blog and tell them you want to see instant!

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Carrie Mae Weems – Testimony of a Cleareyed Witness – NYTimes

I had the distinct honor of assisting this amazing photographer a few times during my time in graduate school in California many years ago. Carrie Mae Weems taught me many things, but mostly I witnessed, and was influenced by, her drive and passion as an artist. Her 30 year retrospective has finally arrived at the Guggenheim Museum and here is a great piece in her work from the New York Times.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/01/24/arts/design/carrie-mae-weems-charts-the-black-experience-in-photographs.html?referrer

http://www.charlesguice.com/portfolio_roaming.html

http://jezebel.com/guggenheim-finally-honors-a-black-female-artist-with-ne-1509971659

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25771370

Kitchen Table Series

 

Whiskey barrel selection with famed bar owner/manager and craft cocktail master Jackson Cannon

Famed mixologist Jackson Cannon recently invited me on a trip to Louisville Kentucky to photograph and experience the process of selecting whiskey barrels from the esteemed Four Roses Distillery. Jackson is Bar Director for Eastern Standard Kitchen and Drinks, Island Creek Oyster Bar, and Owner of The Hawthorne in Boston, Massachusetts.

The lobby of the renowned Brown Hotel.

Happy hour at the bar across the street Van Winkle 13 year rye only $5.95 a glass!

The modest entrance to the Four Roses bottling facility.

Straight from the barrel by whiskey thief.

Similar in look to a wine tasting, but far more intense and not for the faint of heart. That being said, I am now a whiskey drinker and truly appreciate the breadth of variety that each barrel can present.

A capful of water approximates the amount of dilution an ice cube achieves. This significantly changes the taste and feel of the whiskey, opening up hidden nuances of flavor.

A tour the bottling facility.

Barrels are filled and signed. (i am honored to have my signature included for my part in the day)

Many barrels have seepage as they are filled and expand.

Years are categorized and temperature controlled.

Taking a breather the Four Roses Distillery

Some interesting vintage bottles at one of the many bars we visited to talk shop and sample the wares.

On the way out of town we stop at the “liquor mart”. The whiskey, bourbon and rye selection is expansively different in Kentucky than in the rest of the world.

THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN WHISKEY

text by Gary Regan and Mardee Haidin Regan

The origins of whiskey can be traced back to the Medieval monks of both Ireland and Scotland, but now, those two countries make their own distinctive styles of their native spirit. So it is with American whiskey–the original concept may have been imported from far away lands, but some 300 years later, American whiskey, a spirit that can’t be made without corn, an indigenous American grain, is a product unto itself.

American whiskey started its life as a raw, unaged spirit that had, as its main attribute, the power to spur the courage of the first colonists. And through the years, whiskey has developed into the complex, big-bodied, distinctively American bourbons, ryes, and Tennessee whiskeys that today, are savored by connoisseurs, sipped by grandmothers, tossed back by barflies, and “discovered” by almost every American as he or she reaches that magical age of twenty-one. American whiskey, itself, has reached maturity in relatively recent years, after spending a 300-year adolescence being molded by every major event that has affected its native country. And at times, the reverse is true–whiskey has affected the nation itself.

Whiskey-making was one of the first cottage industries in the land; it was responsible for George Washington mustering federal troops for the first time, and whiskey went with the early pioneers as they traveled westward to explore new territories. Whiskey was a spirit of contention during the Civil War, and was, in part, the reason that Grant never served a third term in the White House. Whiskey spurred the women of America to lead a crusade that led to Prohibition, and has played a part in every major war this nation has seen. In short, where America has been, so has American whiskey–and where whiskey has traveled, so have Americans been influenced by its presence.

Bourbon, in fact, is so darned American, that, in 1964, Congress itself recognized it as “a distinctive product of the U.S.A.” And although straight rye, and Tennessee whiskeys haven’t attained such a prestigious honor, they too have traveled the same dusty trails that led to today’s superhighways and are as distinctively American as any bourbon whiskey.

When the first immigrants arrived on this continent, their love for alcohol in almost any shape or form led to a chain of events that would culminate in the creation of distinctive American whiskeys. By tracing the thirst the settlers wanted to slake we can plot the development of American whiskey from the early days of the settlers in Virginia and New England all the way through time to today. Furthermore, we can track the creation of bourbon and Tennessee whiskey back to their very roots–a rare opportunity when the subject is food or drink.