January 24, 2017

Laugh, 6×6″ mixed media on board

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