3.25.2015

RADCLIFFE "RUDDY" ROYE: PhotoJournalist and Documentarian PDN Video

Photojournalist Ruddy Roye and Arianna Huffington on the Red Carpet for the White House Correspondents Dinner with Sarah Koenig, @gracehelbig, @dooce, Steven Johnson, @nashgrier, @marcusjohns, @ariannhuff, @ruddyroye, @jeromejarre, @huffingtonpost #WHCD  


"Photographer Ruddy Roye has attracted over 143,000 Instagram followers despite – or perhaps because of – his gritty, difficult subject matter and the long captions he posts to help humanize his subjects. Using Instagram largely as a tool of social activism, Roye draws attention to racial and economic injustice primarily in New York City, and often in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, where he lives."

“A lack of black images [and] black photographers has created this void for people like me,” says Roye, who was born and raised in Jamaica. “Instagram has allowed me a light that didn’t exist before.” In this video, he explains how he found his Instagram voice, and discusses the professional risks he is taking by refusing to look away and remain silent." – PDN PULSE

Ruddy Roye discusses photojouranlism with my SVA Photography students, sharing his own personal history, his beautiful black and white portraits and introducing his Jamaican "Dancehall" series.

Photo District News (PDN) has featured one of my favorite photojournalist's PhotoJournalist's Radcliffe "Ruddy" Roye! Known for his documentary photography specializing in editorial and environmental portraits and as a "Photographer with a Conscience," Roye changes the hearts and minds of everyone he encounters. More about Roye's photographs here


WE SHALL OVERCOME: The Road To Freedom Civil Rights Photographs at Fahey/Klein

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. speaking to 25,000 civil rights marchers at end of Selma to Montgomery, Alabama march, March 25, 1965. Photograph © Stephen Somerstein

Martin Luther King Jr. with John Lewis, Reverend Jesse Douglas, James Forman and Ralph Abernathy and Group Entering Montgomery, 1965. Photograph © Steve Schapiro

The Selma March, 1965
Photograph © Steve Schapiro

Selma Organizer, 1965
Photograph © Steve Schapiro

Eddie Brown being carried off by the Albany police, 1962
Photograph © Danny Lyon

Police Car Window, Atlanta, 1963
Photograph © Danny Lyon

Myrlie Evers at her husband's memorial service, June 15, 1963. Photograph © Flip Schulke

 The bullet hole in Medgar Ever’s home where he was assassinated in Jackson, Mississippi, June, 1963. Photograph © Flip Schulke

Stop Police Killings, Selma, 1965
Photograph © Steve Schapiro

Coretta Scott King, Ebenezer Baptist Church, attending her husband's funeral, (LIFE cover) on April 19, 1968. Photograph © Flip Schulke


Documenting The Road To Freedom

Civil Rights Photographs By
Danny Lyon • Flip Schulke
Steve Schapiro • Stephen Somerstein

The exhibition focuses on the historic 1965 March from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama to demand free-and-clear voting rights for African Americans. These powerful photographs capture the heroes of the Civil Rights movement – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and James Baldwin – but also the countless grass-roots organizers and anonymous marchers who risked everything to trudge a long, dusty, and violent path to equality.

Exhibition
March 26 thru May 2, 2015

148 North La Brea Avenue
Los Angeles

CHRISTIE'S PHOTOGRAPHY DEPARTMENT: Browse Spring Sale March 27–31, 2015


Christies Auction • Sale 3726 • March 31, 2015 
20 Rockefeller Plaza, New York

It Is Free to Browse the Preview
    Preview Viewing Times
      • Mar 27, 10am - 5pm
     • Mar 28, 10am - 5pm
    • Mar 29, 1pm - 5pm
     • Mar 30, 10am - 2pm


Posted on Istagram by Darius Himes, International Head of Photographs, Christie's / Former Director, Fraenkel Gallery / Co-Founder, Radius Books / Co-Author, "Publish Your Photography Book". Follow https://instagram.com/dariushimes

3.19.2015

NEIL SELKIRK: An Exclusive Interview with the elusive Photographer and Arbus Master Printer

 Robert Kennedy Announces for President, 1968
Photograph © Neil Selkirk. All rights reserved

Arbus, Avedon, Selkirk 
Poster for The Minneapolis Institute of The Arts, 1993

G. Gordon Liddy and Timothy Leary for Interview Magazine
Photograph © Neil Selkirk. All rights reserved.

Neil Selkirk and Marvin Israel reviewing prints of "Masked Man at a Ball N.Y.C. 1967" in Diane Arbus's Darkroom, Spring 1972. Photograph by Cosmos Sarchiapone

Marvin Israel and Diane Arbus photographed at her 1971 Master Class by her student Cosmos Sarchiapone.

Diane Arbus: Monograph. Edited and designed by Doon Arbus and Marvin Israel. Published by Aperture in collaboration with the landmark posthumous retrospective exhibition of Arbus' work at the Museum of Modern Art in 1972.

"If people know the work of Diane Arbus from the books, they have been looking almost entirely at reproductions of prints I made. All the books thus far are nearly 100% my prints. My philosophy has always been “if you can tell the difference between mine and hers, I’ve failed.”
 

L'Oeil de la Photographie
edition March 18, 2015

Neil Selkirk, born in London in 1947, is an accomplished portrait photographer and masterful documentarian. He studied Photography at the London College of Printing, graduating in 1968; later studying with photographer Diane Arbus in her 1971 Master Class. Selkirk worked as an assistant to many of fashion photography’s most iconic figures (Richard Avedon, Hiro and Chris Von Wangenheim) before his own distinctive style succeeded in drawing editorial assignments from major magazines that include Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Interview, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, among others.

I spoke with Selkirk in his New York studio last week about his upcoming exhibition, Certain Women, at Howard Greenberg Gallery and the history of his career through the decades. He is the only person ever authorized to make posthumous prints of the work of Diane Arbus.

Elizabeth Avedon : What year did you come to America? 

Neil Selkirk : Before the end of school in London, I came looking for a job during the two-week Easter vacation. March, 1968. While I was here, Lyndon Johnson withdraws from the Presidency, Martin Luther King Jr. is shot, Newark erupts in riots. I had just interviewed with Irving Penn, I’m walking east on 40th Street towards Fifth Avenue, passing the New York Press Club. The door opens and Bobby Kennedy walks out. He’s just announced for the presidency. With cameras on him, but no crowd, he’s shaking hands with imaginary people so it would look as if he was engaged. I’m standing there with my camera snapping away thinking, “This is Bobby Kennedy!”. So incredibly much happened in the two weeks I was in New York, there was just no question of not coming back.

EA : You once told me some advice you were given about looking for a job in New York. What was it again?

NS : David Montgomery, a fashion photographer in London, said, “Don’t call first. Arrive at the door.” And it was fantastic advice.... My first real day looking for a job in New York I got job offers from Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Melvin Sokolsky, and Bert Stern. All four of them. I was on a tourist visa and I had to go back to London. I accepted the job at Penn, they applied for my visa, but were turned down. They never  appealed, and they never informed me that I didn’t have a job.

I worked for Avedon in London a few weeks later as a local assistant. They had just banned cigarette advertising on television in England and the advertising agencies were trying to find someone to do still photographs that would cost as much as a TV commercial so they could mark it up 15%. So they hired the most expensive photographer in the world, Richard Avedon, to come to London and take pictures of dog’s  heads; a hand holding a cigarette by the head of the dogs, Red setters, Golden Retrievers and some Labs. And that’s what we did for a week. I can’t imagine what they must have paid him.

The great thing about the job was that in the evenings when we weren’t doing these ads, we photographed Anjelica Huston and Julie Driscoll. Polly Mellon, the fashion editor was there - it must have been for Vogue. Julie Driscoll was a pop singer with Brian Auger and Trinity. Musically they were a very hot band at the time. At the end of the shoot, Dick (Avedon) gave her a kiss and she, being very, very English, said in her slightly Cockney accent, “Oh, I bet they’ll be awful,” which is a totally English way to say “Thank you.” He just froze. He sort of straightened, and said, “When I take pictures, they’re good.”

Anjelica Huston was photographed in her father, director John Huston’s house, which is where without knowing it I encountered my first Arbus photograph, an image that shattered me in a way that I had never been affected by a work of art before or since.

We were driving back from the house in a taxi and Dick received a message that said something like, “Mick Jagger can’t do it tomorrow, but he can do it Thursday,” Dick said, “We are shooting on Thursday. If he wants his picture taken, he can come to New York.” I don’t think he ever photographed Jagger. Never did.

I became the Avedon studio guy in Europe. As a result of that, I worked for Hiro in Paris, shooting the Collections for Harpers Bazaar.   

EA : What did you do when you couldn’t get a visa to work for Penn?

NS : When I finally found out that my job in New York with Penn had fallen through I took a job working for Adrian Flowers in London. Flowers was a big name in London’s photography scene in the 1950s through the early 90’s. His studio in Chelsea’s Tite Street was the place to be photographed for advertising and editorials for actors, celebrities and artists.

We’re on the set in Adrian’s studio photographing. I’m off to his right, and I’m probably a pretty good assistant, but he is really uptight about me having worked for Dick and he said, “Neil, I know you’ve worked for all the greatest photographers in the world, and you’re an intimate of Richard Avedon’s, but would you please pass the film holder!” I must have been behaving like a complete jerk. Later, when I approached him with “They want me to go to Paris to work for Hiro for two weeks.” He said, “What if I say no?” I said, “Then I’ll quit.” He should have said, “Get out,” but he folded.

So now I’m in Paris with Hiro and he hires me to work in New York. They had an immigration lawyer and I was able to get a trainee visa. I worked for Hiro for about 9 months in New York. Then Michael O’Neil, who was Hiro’s assistant, left to go on his own and I became the first assistant. I worked there until I left abruptly in July 1971.

EA : What did you do after you left Hiro?

NS : The day after I was fired I got a call from Tina Bossidy, the stylist for Chris Von Wangenheim, who was a rising star in the fashion photography world at that time. She said, “Hello, my name is Tina. I work for Chris Von Wangenheim. We are looking for somebody to assist Chris in Europe.” And I said, “Well, how about me?” She said, “But you work for Hiro” and I said, “Not since yesterday.”

We immediately shot off to Rome and Paris. When we were in Paris, we were in the Harpers Bazaar studio where Chris was shooting the Collections. Suddenly, out of nowhere, Avedon came in  the studio and confided to Chris that Diane Arbus had killed herself. Chris then took me aside and broke the news to me. That was July of 1971. I had done Diane’s class the previous winter.

I sent a postcard to Marvin Israel, art director and intimate friend of Arbus’, that just said, “If anything is going to be done in the way of a show or book, I’ll be back in November and I will be happy to help in any way I can.” I spent the rest of the summer and fall in England and when I got back in November of ’71, Marvin and Doon Arbus, Diane’s daughter,  asked me to work on what became the monograph Diane Arbus and the 1972 posthumous Arbus retrospective show at the Museum of Modern Art.

They needed someone to go through all of her photographs to find the negatives because there was no indication on any of the prints of the associated negative numbers. It still remains a complete mystery how she found her own neg when she wanted to make a print. So I spent the winter going through all her contact sheets looking for the negatives of all the photographs she had ever printed. Finally, in the spring, I started to print for the book and the show.

The show opened at the Museum of Modern Art in November of 1972. It was incredibly successful. I think it was the most successful one artist show the Modern had ever had in any medium, not just photography. It was estimated that over seven million people worldwide saw the exhibition.

Initially, nobody wanted to publish the book. Just before the show was scheduled to open, Michael Hoffman at Aperture said he would publish it, and it immediately went to seven printings. Now it’s one of the most successful photography books of all time. It’s sold half a million copies or so.

[“Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph” Fortieth-anniversary edition, 2011. “The monograph of eighty photographs was edited and designed by the painter Marvin Israel, Diane Arbus’s friend and colleague, and by her daughter Doon Arbus. Their goal was to remain faithful to the standards by which Arbus judged her own work, and to how she hoped it would be seen. Nearly fifty years has not diminished the impact of these pictures; they penetrate the psyche with the force of a personal encounter, and transform the way we see the world. This is the first edition in which the image separations were created digitally; the files have been specially prepared by Robert J. Hennessey using prints by Neil Selkirk.” – Aperture ]

EA : While you were printing for the show, did anyone realize that it was going to change the face of Photography?

NS : No, it was being done because everybody involved had a sense of mission and commitment to do it, because we cared.

I have a couple of memories:

Marvin came down to Diane’s darkroom every morning to look at the prints, which was in the basement of an apartment building. I would finish printing at 2 or 3 in the morning and then meet him four hours later at like 7 o’clock in the morning. I remember he came in one morning and pushed the door open and said, “They shot Wallace!” He was jubilant. 

I remember walking down 7th Avenue from her darkroom and there was a bar called The Buffalo Roadhouse.  It was always on the other side of the road. I remember watching people at 2 or 3am in the morning, just when I finished printing, and thinking, “One day I’m going to be able to buy a beer.“ I literally never went in. I remember cracking open a penny jar to get on the subway which was 35cents and taking 35 pennies. They told me they wouldn’t take pennies.

Nobody had any money, its incredible how little money there was. I was paid something like $3,000. for the year – for the total year – I believe it came from the Museum of Modern Art, plus I got all the film left in Diane’s closet. I got a bunch of 120 film and $3,000. for the year.

None of us could afford anything. We needed one more 16 x 20” processing tray and we couldn’t buy it. We didn’t have the 15 bucks or whatever it was. So I called the Avedon Studio and said, “Have you got a tray you don’t need” and I wound up with this beaten up ancient developer tray of Dick’s which I then used to print the Arbus museum exhibition prints and is now one of the star trays in the book “Developer Trays" (powerHouse Books, 2014).

EA : You are and have been the connecting link to Diane Arbus for all of us through your prints of her work.

NS : I’m very conscious of that as a responsibility. I have always been obsessive about matching every aspect of the character of her prints whenever possible. If people know the work of Diane Arbus from the books, they have been looking almost entirely at reproductions of prints I made. All the books thus far are nearly 100% my prints. My philosophy has always been “if you can tell the difference between mine and hers, I’ve failed.”

They try to get as many original prints as they can for the exhibitions. About 40% of the 1972 MoMA show were my prints. Many more of Diane’s prints have been found since then; there were whole troves of prints that no one knew existed at the time of the MoMA show.

EA : Tell me about the Master Class with Diane Arbus. Is that how you met her?

NS : No, I’d already met her at Hiro’s and Avedon’s studio. She and Marvin would sometimes drop by. In fact she came into Hiro’s one day and asked, “If I give a class would you come?” Paul Corlett, another Hiro assistant, and I said, “Sure!” She asked a lot of people around Westbeth, the artist’s building where she lived, too.

She interviewed and ultimately accepted everybody who applied. My girlfriend, she was probably my wife at that point, had a really, really awful Shepherd mix which I dragged around everywhere. I didn’t know that Diane hated dogs. She later said - essentially that everybody’s work was so bad that she was afraid if she did the class she’d get contaminated. It was so great. She said wonderful things.

Diane’s last Master Class was at Westbeth. Marvin sat in with her on a lot of occasions. Anne Tucker, subsequently photography curator at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, was in that class; Paul Corlett and Cosmos, a widely known eccentric Greenwich Village photographer, were in that class. I think the assignments were based on a class she did with Lisette Model ten years before; and she just reviewed stuff and talked.

A lot of the text in the Aperture monograph is taken from Ikkō Narahara’s recordings of the class. Marvin said the trouble was his English was so bad that he always turned the tape recorder off when she was just about to say something fabulous. You could see something great coming and “plunk” he turned the recorder off.

I felt at the time I didn’t know if I was getting anything out of it. I always thought that I would find out years later. The thing is, I was, subsequently, after her death, so completely swamped by being totally immersed in all of her photography within a year, that I would never know. The immersion in her work completely changed everything for me because I was trained in England as a commercial photographer.

I basically went where Diane had gone, because they were the places that were interested in good photographs. So I went to Esquire and then very gradually, actually started using stuff that I learnt assisting in the commercial world to make glitzy pictures. Then Marvin told Ruth Ansel at the New York Times Magazine she should be using me. I took a portfolio up there of all the stuff I’d been doing for Esquire. She looked through all the work and said, “What’s this in the back of the box?” I said, “It’s just stuff I’ve been doing on the street.” She pulled it out and said, “This is great! Will you do this for us?”  So then I started working for the New York Times Magazine and taking unembellished photographs.

The first job I did for the Times, I think it was Maurice Nadjari, Governor Rockefeller's Special Anti-corruption Prosecutor. I got the photograph I wanted, I made a beautiful big print, I dry mounted it, I overlaid it, I did the whole thing to make it look incredible, took it in and Ruth said, “Wow, this is fantastic” and she ran it in to the editor, and the editor said, “Fantastic” so they ran the picture. After that for a period of years, I delivered a single photograph for each job, and they printed it. It was so amazing, and it lasted until eventually I shot Henry Kissinger who looked in the portrait as if he had doubt. They wanted something a little more heroic so then they asked for the contact prints....I was never able to work the old way again.

So one’s magazine career turns out to have been an endless struggle to get good work published…

Marc Balet, who was Creative Director at Andy Warhol’s Interview came to me and said would I shoot for them. I did a lot of quite good political stuff for them. It was mostly political stuff for the Times Magazine as well. I did all the Watergate people, I would keep getting these calls from Vanity Fair saying photograph this person, photograph that person, photograph the next person, and I did.  A lot of them were really good pictures but they rarely ran the stories.

I used to say, “The best magazines only lasted six months.” What I think I was trying to get at was the idea that quite often, really smart people manage to launch a magazine with very high ideals and standards, but frequently they simply fail, or are so radically watered down in order to survive that they cease to be anything but a shadow of their original concept. The first six months can be an exhilarating time for everyone involved.

The Village Voice did a fashion supplement called View and that lasted six months. The Movies lasted six months. Spy lasted longer but succumbed. Paper and Wired and Colors have survived by adapting, but working on the first issues was thrilling.

There was a magazine that started up by David Bruel called Avenue. It was delivered by limousine to all the doorman buildings between Fifth, Madison, Park from like 57th Street to 86th Street. It was super, super high end, and they just wanted great photography, there were no  restrictions whatever.

I found myself doing this wonderful shtick. Everybody I photographed, and they were all people of social significance in that area…. I suddenly realized, after a couple of assignments, that I had hot dog vendors in the picture, so I started deliberately including them in subsequent shoots; the shadowy figures actually delivered real substance. Then someone from Time Inc took over from David Bruel and he said, “Wait a minute. There’s a hot dog stand in the background!” I said, “Yeah, there’s always a hot dog stand.” I never worked for them again.

At around that time, I had two young children, I started doing corporate work. It paid ten times as much as magazine work. It was almost all traveling. I used to get up in the morning and go to the airport for years. But I simply did not have the time, and in fact could not afford to do all the editorial work. I had a really good gig working for corporations, doing annual reports and things like that. It was completely steady for almost twenty years. I made plenty of money, owned two houses, it put the kids through college. And that business died just as I was ready to get out. In the meantime I had been able to pursue and finance projects of my own devising that are turning into books.

EA : OK, we’ve turned the recorder off several times to tell each other some great stories from the past. Can’t we do a book of everything we can’t say on record?

NS : Isn’t it amazing what isn’t said? For ten or twelve years I did the Dow Jones Annual Report, the Wall Street Journal’s annual reports basically. My favorite place to have lunch was the cafeteria at the Wall Street Journal because everybody who worked there knew everything. I was so aware of how much we never hear about because for various reasons it isn’t published - it can’t be published. It was just amazing all the things these people knew! It’s incredible what you can’t say. I can’t remember what it is I just realized I couldn’t tell you.

It is an indication of how you can’t trust most books that are about anyone in the form of a biography. I don’t know if you are familiar with Heidegger on Aristotle, but I have a great quote that I saved. “What was Aristotle’s life?’ Well, the answer lay in a single sentence:

‘He was born, he thought, he died.’ And all the rest is pure anecdote.” ― Martin Heidegger

Biography presented as truth is bullshit. That’s what’s so great about the “Slide Show and Talk By Diane Arbus” which is essentially a film record of an event. The soundtrack is an original audio recording of a 1970 slide presentation by Diane in which she speaks about photography using her own work and other photographs, snapshots and clippings from her collection. It was compiled and edited by Doon Arbus, Adam Shott and myself.

Even though it was essentially recorded on only one evening – in other words it’s not legitimate to say that this is “her” in the broadest sense – but it’s so much closer, just to hear her voice. It’s so important. You get a clue, where as everything that’s been written doesn’t give you anything like the sort connection….  the attachment one feels from a little bit of somebody talking to someone else about something that interests them.

EA : Is the slideshow a DVD?

NS : It’s not on a DVD. It would be, could be. It’s on hard drives - because it was too big – it’s very complicated - we’re inept.  We would schlep around the world with these hard drives and computers and have back-ups ready and all. It was always deeply stressful making sure it showed up on the screen. There’s a lovely story here. 
+  +  +

Neil Selkirk’s Certain Women are on view at Howard Greenberg Gallery from March 19 – May 2, 2015. A hand bound, limited edition book containing forty-four original, individually signed prints accompanies the show.


March 19th to May 2nd, 2015
Howard Greenberg Gallery
41 East 57th Street, New York

NEIL SELKIRK: Certain Women : Howard Greenberg Gallery

Ruth V.  
Photograph © Neil Selkirk. All rights reserved. 
The prints are embedded in 3/4" thick slabs of 40x50" glass.

Terry E. 
Photograph © Neil Selkirk. All rights reserved. 
The prints are embedded in 3/4" thick slabs of 40x50" glass.


edition March 18, 2015

Neil Selkirk : Certain Women at Howard Greenberg Gallery

“On the day of her portrait each of these women had a child between the ages of ten and twenty,” reads the first line in Neil Selkirk’s hand bound, limited edition book, Certain Women, the same title of his exhibition on view at Howard Greenberg Gallery from March 19 – May 2, 2015. “That is the only thing you know about them. They are all anonymized. You don’t know what her name is, who she is, where she was photographed, when she was photographed.”

“Although in most cases I have spent only ten minutes or so in the presence of these women, since then I’ve been living with them off and on for twenty-five years, but quite intensely for the last five,” Selkirk tells me. “Recently I just started contacting them. Two of my favorites turned out to be related. I just called one, as she still had the same phone number. She has absolutely no recollection whatever of the event - which is exactly what I wanted. I wanted it to be inconsequential. That’s not true. I didn’t want to impose myself on the situation.” 

“The photographs were taken using an ancient 12 x 15” wooden field camera built in the late eighteen or early nineteen hundreds, modified to accept standard 11 x 14” film holders. I chose the camera in part for its massive, daunting presence, it imposed on both subject and photographer a palpable sense of gravity. I was deliberately diffident, and avoided dominating the moment, which tended to leave each subject in communion with herself, gazing, not so much into a lens, as into a mirror that offered no immediate reflection.”

Selkirk, a masterful portrait photographer, first developed the film in his darkroom in the old fashioned way. The negatives were then drum scanned and he made the prints from the resulting digital files using seven different monochrome piezographic inks that he mixed himself. The combination of the huge, luscious film negative, and the unprecedented tonal range of this archival digital printing technology has produced images of exceptional depth and radiance.

A hand bound, limited edition book containing forty-four original, individually signed prints accompanies the show.

EA: Were all of the women shot in New York?

NS: It started out in New York and then I just started going further and further afield; to the Carolina’s, Maryland, Virginia, and I went to Indiana, and eventually all the way to Montana.  Montana was essentially the end. I was there maybe a week or ten days. It was so good, there was just no point in continuing. It was twenty years I was shooting them.

EA: Why didn’t you photograph these women with their children?

NS: It’s about the women in complete remove from the children. It’s about THEM. It was random in that I photographed everybody who said yes. I asked a lot of people I knew, or ran into, did they know anyone. They would say, “I know so and so, so and so” and then I’d ask them. And it was really interesting; it just sort of spread.

Essentially I didn’t try to make anybody comfortable. I would show up at somebody’s house, obviously I’d arranged it, and I said “I want you just the way you are, nothing special” and I’d look around and decide where I’m going to take the picture. I’d say give me 20 minutes or half an hour to set the camera up and I’ll whistle when the time comes. Almost invariably that’s what happened. I would get the camera set up and find what the picture was. My philosophy has always been not to root desperately looking for the perfect place. The right place to take the picture the philosophy says is “right here, right now.”

So if you are standing outside, I’m going to do it “here”.  I’ve taken a lot of pictures and I know what the consequences of “here” are going to be. It’s very consciously not trying to find a story that I want to tell. It’s taking me as far out of the process of editorializing by use of the background as I possibly can. Obviously you’re making decisions all the time, but if you say I’m not going to go round and round and find the most perfectly lit location, I’m just going to take the picture of the woman from “here.” And then we’ll see whether they are worth looking at.

Describing the prints embedded in massive three quarter inch thick slabs of forty by fifty-inch glass, Selkirk says, “They feel great, like this exquisite thing to the touch. The mothers images are eternally suspended, as if frozen in perpetuity in amber.”
March 19th to May 2nd, 2015
Howard Greenberg Gallery
41 East 57th Street, NY


3.14.2015

ANNA AGOSTON: "Untitled" Living Plant Elements Found In Nature

Photograph © Anna Agoston

 Photograph © Anna Agoston

 Photograph © Anna Agoston

"Untitled" 174 black-and-white macro photographs of living plant elements found in nature... 

A resident of Brooklyn, New York, Anna was born and raised in Paris, France. Always passionate about art, she qualified as an architect DPLG (government-certification) at the Ecole d'Architecture Paris Malaquais, and went on to earn the M.Arch.II degree in architecture at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. There, she studied fine art photography under Professor Jim Dow of the Department of Visual and Environmental studies, and photographed her first series, “Dorm.” In October 2013, Anna made her lifelong passion, fine art photography her main professional occupation. I met Agoston at the 2015 powerHouse Portfolio Review.

RAPHAEL SHAMMAA: Images For Their Own Sake | powerHouse Portfolio Review

Man in White Tee Shirt
Photograph © Raphael Shammaa

Café Scene
Photograph © Raphael Shammaa

Girl Texting
Photograph © Raphael Shammaa

The Bus Trip Home
Photograph © Raphael Shammaa

Woman With Dark Eyes
Photograph © Raphael Shammaa

"When we travel within, we leave the world behind for a while. The images in this series are of people on that sort of journey and in that sort of personal space. They may look at us but they don’t see us. They travel strictly alone, none but them seeing what they see, or feeling what they feel."
 

I was born in Cairo, Egypt and grew up under the Farouk monarchy. At the ripe age of almost seventeen, having completed my secondary studies, I boarded a ship for Marseilles. I was on my way to study architecture in Paris, or so I thought. After a stint at L’Ecole des Beaux Arts and knocking around Paris for five years, I was introduced to fashion photography and fell in love with that world. I bid farewell to gloomy weather and my even gloomier prospects, and packed my bags  for photography school in Vevey, Switzerland. I completed the course in a brief six months and got myself hired as an apprentice to a respected photographer for two years; I was then hired by the French magazine Marie-Claire to assist in the famed Collections shoots in Paris. It was a heady experience. It had all gone so fast – and so well when a long forgotten immigration application appeared on my doorstep in the form of a visa to the US. My father had always said: GO TO AMERICA. So I did, leaving everything and everyone behind –  an accumulation of heartaches, hopeful beginnings and a mixed bag of memories. I landed in New York on November 26, 1961 at 5:30 PM, heartbroken and, in my wallet, two hundred borrowed dollars as my stake in a new life. Within a week the money was gone. It was Christmastime; job prospects were grim. I finally found work as a photographer’s assistant. Still dissatisfied with my lot, I decided on a new path forward, on broader avenues for potential income. But this time, by leaving photography behind, I was  in effect leaving myself behind. After further adjustments things opened up and I found myself free from having to think in terms of mere survival. I had finally arrived. All of that is behind me now and here I am free to use a camera again, looking at the world through one eye again, happy to show you my  stuff if only to catch a comment here, an exclamation there, happy to watch your eyes glide over my images slowly and silently. I refer to my work as Images For Their Own Sake; they refer to nothing and no one outside of themselves and simply refer to how grateful I feel to function as myself again.



   

3.08.2015

LESLIE JEAN-BART: Reality + Imagination powerHouse Portfolio Review

Photograph © Leslie Jean-Bart

Leslie Jean-Bart at powerHouse 2015 Portfolio Review

Photograph © Leslie Jean-Bart

 Reality + Imagination

"The tide and sand constantly moving while merging with all the different disparate elements on their path, ever changing to create what’s to be in the instant. These images were created during that fraction of space and time. It is a dance between the reality within these defined boundaries and the constant filtering of these occurrences by the imagination. The aim is to interpret the reality presented on the spot and in doing so challenge the imagination. This aim is extended as an invitation as well to the viewers, to be part of the process and create the opportunity to make the image their own. The hope is to have an ongoing process that’s alive." – Leslie Jean-Bart

Born in 1954 in Haiti, Leslie Jean-Bart received a BA in American History in 1976 as well as a Master degree in Journalism in 1977 from Columbia University. He traveled to various part of the world as a freelance and commercial photographer for over 25 years winning awards for various books and cover arts he has contributed to.  But his formal education in the arts took place at Sotheby’s and Christies where he had full access to all media of arts and took complete advantage of that exposure to learn during the combined eight years he worked at both places as a photographer.


I met Leslie Jean-Bart at the
2015 11th Annual powerHouse Portfolio Review

LAWRENCE SCHWARTZWALD: The Art of Reading | powerHouse Portfolio Review

 Bus Driver Reading in Tribeca, January 7, 2013
Photograph © Lawrence Schwartzwald

Reading on Subway Platform, January 10, 2014 
Photograph © Lawrence Schwartzwald

Amy Winehouse, Cafe Florent, July 30, 2007
Photograph © Lawrence Schwartzwald

Reading on Bowery, October 8, 2014
(Photographer Jay Maisel's building)
Photograph © Lawrence Schwartzwald

Reflection of Books on Bus, February 26, 2014
Photograph © Lawrence Schwartzwald

 LAWRENCE SCHWARTZWALD
The Art of Reading 

I met Lawrence Schwartzwald at the

Lawrence Schwartzwald | Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/lschwartzwald