'Edward S. Curtis and One Hundred Masterworks'

Palm Springs Art Museum is presenting the extraordinary "Edward S. Curtis: One Hundred Masterworks exhibition," featuring vintage photographs that represent an important historical documentary of the Indians of North America; and "Changing the Tone: Contemporary American Indian Photographers," which showcases works by living artists of Native American heritage. The exhibitions are on view now through May 29, 2016


http://www.examiner.com/article/edward-s-curtis-one-hundred-masterworks-at-the-palm-springs-art-museum

Willard Worton 'Portals of the Past' at the de Young

 Tower of Jewels, 1915

For those who love the PPIE and the glory of that era, this exhibit is a must see. Photos range from 1904 through 1915; this man was a photographic genius and I have to say that I like his photos better than the more crisp modern black and white.

My main criticism of the exhibit is that the curator didn't seem to realize how photographers like Wooden were influenced by Stieglitz's early romantic photography. I felt that a some of the photos were a direct homage to Stieglitz. But that's a minor quibble. The whole PPIE exhibit is fantastic but this gives us a look at the SF that was - and alas, is no more: 

http://www.examiner.com/article/willard-worton-s-portals-of-the-past-at-the-de-young?CID=examiner_alerts_article

'She Who Tells a Story' at the Cantor Arts Center

Boushra Almutawakel (Yemen, b. 1969), Mother, Daughter, Doll from The Hijab Series, 2010. Series of nine pigment prints. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Museum purchase with funds donated by Richard and Lucille Spagnuolo Photography © 2014 MFA, Boston

"She Who Tells a Story, " now open at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford. presents the work of 12 women photographers from Iran and the Arab world. The artists explore identity, narrative, representation, and war in daily life, presenting the Middle East through Arab eyes. 

http://www.examiner.com/article/she-who-tells-a-story-at-the-cantor-arts-center?CID=examiner_alerts_article

Friday Links

Donald Kinney's show comes down this weekend and I highly recommend that you get over to see it while you can. This is one of the best best photography shows that I have seen in a long time in one of the most beautiful libraries in the Bay Area. Donald poetic eye and feeling for the Northern California landscape needs to be seen to be fully appreciated.  Mill Valley Library, 375 Throckmorton, Lower Level
http://www.examiner.com/article/donald-kinney-exhibits-his-photographs-of-marin-county

Land artist Walter De Maria dies of stroke, aged 77

The “uncompromising” creator of The Lightning Field and The New York Earth Room shied away from the spotlight. He studied history and art at the University of California, Berkeley from 1953 to 1959. Trained as a painter, De Maria soon turned to sculpture and began using other media. De Maria and his friend, the avant-garde composer La Monte Young, participated in "Happenings." and theatrical productions in the San Francisco area. One of his Boxes for Meaningless Work (1961) is inscribed with the instructions, “Transfer things from one box to the next box back and forth, back and forth, etc. Be aware that what you are doing is meaningless.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_De_Maria

http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/Land-artist-Walter-De-Maria-dies-of-stroke-aged-/30150

The artist Andy Goldsworthy is creating a new work for the Presidio of San Francisco, the national park that was formerly a military base. The artist will hang a felled tree covered in cracked clay from the ceiling of a building within the park that was once used by the Army to store explosives.

According to the Presidio Trust’s website, Tree Fall will be “a fully reversible” work installed in the Powder Magazine building, “a small (25 feet by 30 feet) and currently inaccessible masonry structure”. “The gunpowder room would’ve been a fairly dangerous place to be, so [the work] will have that sense of caution to it,” Goldsworthy says. Due to be completed by the end of August, Tree Fall will be the artist’s third project in the park, following Spire, 2008, and Wood Line, 2011.

“What I find so fascinating about the Presidio is that, in the heart of this military machine, there was a huge planting programme,” Goldsworthy says, referring to the fact that the park’s 300-acre forest was planted by the US military between 1886 and 1900. “They had quite a sophisticated sense of landscape,” he says. “They read the landscape in the way that sculptors do—or at least the way I do.”

http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/Andy-Goldsworthy-to-make-third-work-for-San-Francisco-Presidio/30137

Amazon gets into the act and launches a virtual art gallery. http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/-Amazon-to-launch-virtual-art-gallery/29989

Another theft of art from a museum. Did somebody declare July "Art Theft Month" and not tell the rest of us? Thieves stole ten paintings from the Van Buuren Museum on the outskirts of Brussels on 16 July, including Kees van Dongen’s The Thinker, 1907, valued at more than €1m. What makes the loss particularly poignant is that the paintings came from a family collection, lovingly assembled by the Van Buurens.             
http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/Ten-paintings-stolen-from-Brussels-museum/30123 

The saga of the theft from the Dutch museum gets sadder and crazier - apparently it only took them 3 minutes to break in. And then, mommy dearest burned the art to protect her son. I guess that priceless art isn't so priceless when you don't have a buyer.
http://artdaily.com/news/63996/Three-minutes--pliers-all-spectacular-Dutch-art-heist-suspects-needed--prosecutors-#.UfKqrlOYUXw

Donald Kinney at the Mill Valley Public Library

 One of the best photographers in the Bay Area, if not California (!) will be showing a selection of his work at the Mill Valley Public Library. The reception is Tuesday and everybody who can attend, should attend.

Donald writes the photo blog "A Photo A Day" which is a daily hymn to the beauties of Northern California. His work is lyrical and insightful but with typical modest, he downplays just how beautiful it all is. He is able to capture the elusive ripples of water at his beloved Lagunitas Creek, the blanket of fog as it flows over the Northern California hills. His writing is as beautiful as his images.

When he was 16, Donald was able to meet the late, great Ansel Adams. He saw the photographer working in the Carmel area, followed him to where he was having breakfast but Donald was too shy to approach the man. However, he left a message on his windshield and Adams replied some days later. "A few days later
a postcard arrived in the mail--it read;  “Can’t decipher your signature, but sure, I’d love to see your photos--just give me a call when you want to come over”.

Let him tell you in his own words. "Somehow I got enough courage to call him, and about  an hour later I was sitting in his front room with him giving me pointers on how I could improve each image. Of course, my photography at that point was pathetic,  but it inspired me to read his books...A few months later I felt I had to show him my new attempts, so I re-invited myself to his home and after he
had looked through my new work he complimented me on how much I had improved.  The moment was probably the finest in all of my short sixteen years."

Like many of us, Donald was not independently wealthy and so, being able to follow his heart took many years. But he retired about ten years ago and ever since then, is up at 4 a.m., following the light, the sun, the fog, the panorama of nature that surrounds us in the Bay Area.

I think I began following his blog though his images of Lagunitas Creek. His ability to capture the color, the shape of ripples on water, the patterns, the subtle changes of light and weather were mesmerizing.

I believe that Donald subconsciously picks up the Japanese reverence for nature but another friend of mine, painter Dale Erickson sees the influence of 19th century landscape painters Kensett and Heade.

The show is packed into a small narrow hallway and in order to maximize this opportunity, Donald has framed the pieces into diptychs and triptychs. This does not work for me as I prefer fewer larger images. But it's understandable that he wants to give those who attend the exhibit a chance to see as many images as possible.

This piece won a prize a prize at the Marin County Fair, complete with a  $100 gift certificate given by "Digital Rain/Digital Image Magic" a local business here in San Rafael. Donald told me that some might think that the image was Photoshopped but it wasn't. He was in the right place at the right time - made possible by his dedication to getting out there and photographing every day

Donald: "I realize that many of you live at great distances, unable to attend the opening on Tuesday, so if you can't be here in the flesh I'll invite you to be here in Spirit. A bunch of friends; some whacky dudes and gals, and even some relatives I haven't seen for 10 years have said they will be stopping by. I still have people I need to invite, but consider yourself invited. RSVP not required. I'm going to bring wine for all of you alcoholics. "

http://aphotoaday.blogspot.com

http://www.photographingmarincounty.com/exhibit/index.html

all images @ Donald Kinney. Used with permission.

Weekend picks for June 13 - 16

Photographs from the Iraqi invasion at the de Young, a Sunday lecture at the Museum of the African Diaspora, Leibovitz at the San Jose Museum of Art and a call for artists from the San Francisco Center for the Book:

http://www.examiner.com/article/bay-area-weekend-picks-for-june-15-16

The Contemporary Jewish Museum presents 'Beat Memories. The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg'

On March 25, in 1957, Allen Ginsberg helped make literary history. when 520 copies of his poem "Howl" were seized by U.S. Customs agents on charges of obscenity. Ginsberg and his publisher, City Lights, would fight those charges -- and win.

The current exhibit of his personal photographs at the Contemporary Jewish Museum won't make artistic history but they will help illuminate the private life of Ginsberg and his band of famous friends. The focus is on the personal lives, a disappointment to those who are looking for more documentation of the history that Ginsberg lived through as a poet and an activist.


http://www.examiner.com/list/the-cjm-presents-beat-memories-the-photographs-of-allen-ginsberg

The week ahead: Modernism, Walt Disney, RayKo Photography Center Show

Kraemer's work, now up at Modernism, is stunning. The range of work in the current exhibition dates from 1993 to 2013, with the older work just as fresh as the current batch. The exhibition announcement features “This Much,” a large (74” x 95 ½”) breakthrough work in pastel, acrylic and charcoal on paper from 1993.

The "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" show at the Disney Museum was more interesting that I thought it would be. I think that "Peter Pan" was the first cartoon that I remember seeing, which lead to some interesting experiments in thinking that I could fly. Hey, I was only 7. But the show was a revelation to see how skillful and detailed the early cartoons were.

http://www.examiner.com/article/the-week-ahead-modernism-walt-disney-rayko-photo-centerhttp://www.examiner.com/article/the-week-ahead-modernism-

Gary Winogrand at SFMOMA

 When Gary Winogrand died at age 56 of gall bladder cancer, he was considered one of the greatest documentary photographers of his era. A native New Yorker, he walked the length and breadth of America's streets, taking what seemed to be casual snapshots of people going about their daily business.

Garry Winogrand (14 January 1928, New York City – 19 March 1984, Tijuana, Mexico) was a street photographer known for his portrayal of America in the mid-20th century. John Szarkowski called him the central photographer of his generation.

But the bulk of his work was unknown. That is not to say he was unknown or unappreciated. By the time of his death in 1984, he had a Guggenheim fellowship, was featured in Edward Steichen's classic "Family of Man" exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, and later figured prominently in two major photography shows, also at MoMA, curated by Steichen's successor John Szarkowski, one of Winogrand's early champions.

New York. 1962

In 1964, with the support of the first of three Guggenheim fellowships, he traveled for four months to fourteen states and recorded an America in transition. By photographing people indirectly through car windshields, he caught an American in uneasy transition between eras.

At the time, Winogrand tapped into the tumultuous zeitgeist of the 1960's, an era soon to come to a roiling boil. He applied for his grant in the early 60s, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, when nuclear war suddenly had become a terrifying possibility.

In his grant application Winogrand complained that the mass media "all deal in illusions and fantasies. I can only conclude that we have lost ourselves and that the bomb may finish the job permanently, and it just doesn't matter, we have not loved life.  I look at the pictures I have done up to now," he wrote in 1963, "and they make me feel that who we are and what we feel and what is to become of us just doesn't matter. I cannot accept my conclusions, and so I must continue this photographic investigation further and further."

Coney Island, 1952

But the bulk of his output, his enormous output, was unknown. At his death, Winogrand left behind 2500 undeveloped rolls of 36-exposure 35mm film (mostly Tri-X), 6,500 rolls of film that had been developed but not contact-printed–not to mention 300 apparently untouched, unedited 35mm contact sheets.

Guest curator Leo Rubinfien, an old friend and student, along with Erin O'Toole, a curator at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art, and Sarah Greenough, senior curator of photographs at the National Gallery of Art, have mined this treasure trove to produce the first major Winogrand retrospective in almost three decades. The show took the three curators three years to put together, because those 6,500 undeveloped rolls were bolstered by 4,100 rolls that Winogrand had processed but not transferred to contact sheets, for a total of nearly 400,000 unknown images.

LA, Venice Beach. 1980-84

The touring exhibit which opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art this week, and accompanying catalog, consist of more than 400 images derived largely from Winogrand's later days roaming the streets of Los Angeles with his Leicas. While he may be best known for his New York City scenes, these photos prove that Winogrand had an astute eye for images that illuminated America's increasingly troubled society.

Winogrand gives us no answers. But he wasn't looking for answers. "The fact that photographs — they’re mute, they don’t have any narrative ability at all. You know what something looks like, but you don’t know what’s happening, you don’t know whether the hat’s being held or is it being put on her head or taken off her head. From the photograph, you don’t know that. A piece of time and space is well described. But not what is happening." (interview with Bill Moyers, WNET, 1982)

One thing is clear - the era of "Mad Men" was much more perplexing and unhappy than the world deified on TV by Don Draper and his chauvinist, cigarette puffing cohorts.

The massive exhibit is overwhelming, which is fitting given how prolific Winogrand was. The show is organized in a loosely linear fashion: "Down From the Bronx" (earlier work shot primarily while he was living in New York), "A Student of America" (his work from the mid-'60s through the '70s, from all over America), and finally "Boom and Bust" (mostly shot in Southern California, and much of which has never been viewed).

Hanging on the walls, intermingled with his photos, are Winogrand's original contact sheets, pieces of this three Guggenheim Fellowship applications, letters to his daughters, and other personal artifacts.

The final summation, if one can make a final summary of such a prolific photographer, was encapsulated by John Szarkowski, in his book on Winogrand, “Fragments from the Real World.” (MoMA, 1984).

New York. Opera. 1952

 "When we consider the heedless daring of his successes and his failures we become impatient with tidy answers to easy questions, and with the neat competence of much of what now passes for ambitious photography. Winogrand has given us a body of work that provides a new clue to what photography might become, a body of work that remains dense, troubling, unfinished, and profoundly challenging. The significance of that work will be thought by some to reside in matters of style or technique or philosophical posture. There is no original harm in this misunderstanding, and useful work may come of it, but it will have little to do with the work of Garry Winogrand, whose ambition was not to make good pictures, but through photography to know life."

http://www.examiner.com/list/gary-winogrand-at-sfmoma

All images courtesy of SFMOMA: Barry Winogrand Archive, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona; © The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Source: http://www.sfmoma.org/exhib_events/exhibitions/452#ixzz2NHIHUBRd San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
http://www.sfmoma.org/

Weekend Picks for March 8th - 10th

Hooch, Harlots, & History: Vice in San Francisco at The Old Mint: The San Francisco Historical Society hosts an historical presentation of the wilder side of the Baghdad on the Bay, featuring Duggan McDonnell, "Broke Ass" Stuart Schuffman, Woody LaBounty, and Laureano Faedi.

 From: http://lenacorazon.com/2011/07/31/row80-lady-criminals-of-19th-century-san-francisco/

Before San Francisco was the jewel of the West, it was a hard-drinking, hard-fighting dirty town. This historical recreation will feature rare archival footage of the vice side of San francisco, live music, food and one complimentary drink included with admission. Additional drinks available with $5 donation to the San Francisco Museum & Historical Society.

The Old Mint. 88 5th St, San Francisco, CA 94103

Chaotic fragments of color and texture define their own internal rhythm in the mixed-media images of Southern California artist Allison Renshaw. Her first Bay Area solo show, "Better Than Candy," features her recent work on a theme of convergence. As in our day-to-day reality, genres, cultures and styles collide, and new stories emerge. Through April 6. Mirus Gallery, 540 Howard St., S.F. (415) 543-3440. www.mirusgallery.com.

At the de Young Museum: Eye Level in Iraq: Photographs by Kael Alford and Thorne Anderson

Thorne Anderson, Thawra, Baghdad, Iraq, April 18, 2003. Digital inkjet print. High Museum of Art, Atlanta. © Thorne Anderson
This exhibition presents the photographs of Kael Alford (American, b. 1971) and Thorne Anderson (American, b. 1966), two American-trained photo journalists who documented the impact and aftermath of the US-led allied invasion of Iraq in 2003. They made these photographs during a two-year span that began in the months leading up to the allied invasion in spring 2003 and covers the emergence of the armed militias that challenged the allied forces and later the new central Iraqi government.

The photographs were made outside the confines of the U.S. military’s embedded journalist program, in an attempt to get closer to the daily realities of Iraqi citizens. The photographers wanted to show Iraq from an important and often neglected point of view. This shift in physical perspective placed them in great danger, but they sought to learn how the war, and the seismic political and cultural shifts that accompanied it, were affecting ordinary people.

Baghdad fell to the allied forces on April 9, 2003. A decade later, reflecting on why this work was made, Kael Alford has stated “I consider these photographs invitations to the viewer to learn more, to explore the relationships between public policy objectives and their real world execution and to consider the legacies of human grief, anger, mistrust and dismay that surely follow violent conflict. I hope that these images will also open a window on the grace of Iraq and perhaps help to give a few of these memories a place to rest.”

http://deyoung.famsf.org/

'The Radical Camera; New York's Photo League, 1936 - 1951' at the CJM

They wanted to change the world, one photograph at a time.

Rosalie Gwathmey (1908–2001, born Charlotte, North Carolina)
Shout Freedom, Charlotte, North Carolina, c. 1948 Gelatin silver print
Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, Photo League Collection, Museum Purchase with funds provided by Elizabeth M. Ross, the Derby Fund, John S. and Catherine Chapin Kobacker, and the Friends of the Photo League 7 ⅞ x 6 3/4 in.

"The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League, 1936–1951" now open at the Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM) presents the contested path of the documentary photograph and the League during a tumultuous period that spanned the New Deal reforms of the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War.

Arthur Leipzig (born 1918, Brooklyn, New York)
Ideal Laundry, 1946 Gelatin silver print
The Jewish Museum, New York, Purchase: Esther Leah Ritz Bequest. 10 x 8 in.

That could have been the motto of New York’s Photo League, founded in 1936 by young Jewish-American photographers Sid Grossman and Sol Libsohn. Young, idealistic, mostly Jewish, they believed in the expressive power of the documentary photograph and progressive, socialist ideas and art.

A unique complex of school, darkroom, gallery, and salon, the League was also a place where you learned about yourself. Sid Grossman, one of the founders, pushed students to discover not only the meaning of their work but also their relationship to it. This transformative approach was one of the League’s most innovative and influential contributions to the medium.

Sid Liebling, Butterfly Boy. New York. 1949

Photo credit: courtesy Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio,

The group eventually had over 300 members, including legends in the field such as Berenice Abbott, Weegee and Aaron Siskind.

Their work resulted in a street-level, popular history of the era, told through documentary photographs of the marginalized. criminalized, and dispossessed. In its early years the League was committed to the idea of photography as honest and unmediated. A “true” and “good” picture was one in which aesthetic qualities did not overwhelm the content or subvert its message. The Leaguers were inspired to make inequity and discrimination tangible in their work.

Photographs, with titles such as "Shoemaker’s Lunch" and "Salvation Army Lassie in Front of a Woolworth Store," exposed issues of class, poverty, racial inequality, and lack of opportunity.

Vivian Cherry (born 1920, Manhattan, New York)
Game of Lynching, East Harlem, 1947.Gelatin silver print
Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, Photo League Collection, Museum Purchase, Derby Fund 6¼ x 9 in. (15.9 x 22.9 cm)

Vivian Cherry’s disturbing images of boys playing at lunching were the first photographs to link certain kinds of violence in children's games with racism.

The series was published by ’48 Magazine of the Year; Photography republished them in 1952, commenting, “The pictures are not pretty, but they do represent an attempt to . . . use a camera as a tool for social research.”

Sid Grossman, interviewed in the film, “Ordinary Miracles,” said that their desire was to “get close to people as human beings, to try to push them in a progressive direction."

The images range from the street life of the lower East side to farming communities hard hit by the dust bowl. The sensitive and compelling images of African-Americans were the first to document their lives with respect. showing their humanity and strength while coping with extreme poverty.

During its fifteen-year existence (1936–1951), the Photo League would mirror monumental shifts in the world starting with the Depression, through World War II, and ending with the Red Scare. Throughout those tumultuous times, its members engaged in lively debate and ongoing experimentation in the streets to propel documentary photography from factual images to a more subjective, poetic reading of life.

  Consuelo Kanaga (1894–1978, born Astoria, Oregon)
Untitled (Tenements, New York), c. 1937 Gelatin silver print
The Jewish Museum, New York, Purchase: The Paul Strand Trust for the benefit of Virginia Stevens Gift

Presented in collaboration with another major Photo League collector, The Jewish Museum in New York City, “Radical Camera” offers nearly 150 photographs created around and during the league’s lifespan, as well as videos, oral histories and interactive displays.

The Cold War politics of the McCarthy era eventually destroyed the group. Shocked and dismayed at the attacks upon the organization, they mounted an exhibition entitled “This Is the Photo League,” which showcased the diversity and quality of its members’ work.

The retrospective opened in December 1948 with photographs by more than ninety past and present members. While it achieved a measure of critical attention, the effort came too late. By now, the political atmosphere was by now far too toxic. Membership and revenues dwindled and the group was ostracized.

Sid Grossman, the League’s great teacher and mentor who led passionate debates about the rolerole of the personal and subjective in the documentary image, was particularly victimized and disillusioned by the blacklist. He resigned in 1949 and retreated to Provincetown, Massachusetts.

There he continued to teach photography and to make art, but his reputation faded. Shortly before he died in 1955, at age forty-three, he commented with some irony on a late series of “pictures of birds” he had made in Cape Cod. They were, he acknowledged, scarcely the kind of documentary subject that he would have pursued earlier in life.

“Yet this material,” he said, “was quite harmonious with my past history as a photographer, visually and emotionally.” Grossman perhaps felt obliged to explain that these photographs, with their allover pattern of flickering light and agitated movement, drew upon the contemporary language of abstract expressionism. More poignantly, the birds’ feeding frenzy suggests the poisonous atmosphere that had finally forced him out of the League.

In 1950, the Photo League officially closed its doors, a casualty of the Cold War.

Although short lived, the Photo League’s influence was significant. The sense of artistic “presentness” and the assertion of the photographer’s identity in the work of artists such as Diane Arbus, Louis Faurer, Helen Levitt, and Robert Frank are, in many ways, the legacy of the Photo League as was the subjective, poetic renderings of social themes that would characterize the next generation of street photographers.

Review: http://www.examiner.com/article/the-radical-camera-new-york-s-photo-league-1936-1951-at-the-cjm
At the Contemporary Jewish Museum. http://www.thecjm.org/
Through January 31, 2013

Masao Yamamoto at the Robert Koch Gallery

I prefer the intimate experience of looking at small prints. I print and display my own photographs small for that very reason. When I walked into the Robert Koch Gallery last evening I was more than pleased to see the entire gallery devoted to an exhibit of Masao Yamamoto's exquisitely crafted photographs, most no larger than 4X6 inches.

Everything about the exhibit played to exactly what I love about photography: intimate view of subjects presented in a manner that invites the viewer into that intimacy while offering a fresh and often unique perspective.


Yamamoto's vision and process transcends the generations of photographic pursuit. Many of his images evoke pictorialism and classic figure study, but they are in fact beyond all that and firmly planted on a most contemporary point of view.


"If I take small photos, it’s because I want to make them into the matter of memories. And it’s for this reason that I think the best format is one that is held in the hollow of the hand. If we can hold the photo in our hand, we can hold a memory in our hand. A little like when we keep a family photo with us." -(quote from an interview posted to lensculture)

The work of Masao Yamamoto is on view through December 24, 2010 at the Robert Koch Gallery, 49 Geary, San Francisco.

Photos by Masao Yamamoto, courtesy of Robert Koch Gallery

Mark Menjivar at Portland's Ampersand Vintage

Famous Fridge Photographer Mark Menjivar will be showing some of his photos at the Ampersand Vintage Gallery on SE 39th and Alberta in Portland, Oregon starting next week. Mark's documentary photographs of American's refrigerators is a fascinating study of how our lifestyles are interconnected to our food habits.

From the Artist's Statement:

You Are What You Eat is a series of portraits made by examining the interiors of refrigerators in homes across the Untied States.

For three years I traveled around the country exploring the issue of hunger. The more time I spent speaking and listening to individual stories, the more I began to think about the foods we consume and the effects they have on us as individuals and communities. An intense curiosity and questions about stewardship led me to begin to make these unconventional portraits.

A refrigerator is both a private and a shared space. One person likened the question, "May I photograph the interior of your fridge?" to asking someone to pose nude for the camera. Each fridge is photographed "as is." Nothing added, nothing taken away.

These are portraits of the rich and the poor. Vegetarians, Republicans, members of the NRA, those left out, the under appreciated, former soldiers in Hitler’s SS, dreamers, and so much more. We never know the full story of one's life.

My hope is that we will think deeply about how we care. How we care for our bodies. How we care for others. And how we care for the land.

MARK MENJIVAR: You Are What You Eat

Ampersand Vintage

Sept. 23th thru Oct. 25th, 2009

Opening Reception Wednesday, Sept. 23th, 6-10 PM

2916 NE Alberta St, B Portland, OR

503.805.5458

ampersandvintage@mac.com

Visit Mark Menjivar's website.

In a Beautiful World

The first photograph that greets you at Nicole Morgenthau’s website is one of sheer exuberance: it’s a scene of quintessential Americana, and more specifically, of the wild, wild West, where there are wide open spaces and blue skies and amber waves of grain, where cowboys wander and trains rattle on tracks stretching for miles across the plains, and where you can’t help but kick up your heels and shout.

Though the motifs in Ms. Morgenthau’s work vary—Americana and the wild West here, tropical paradise there, everywhere an ephemeral glimpse into a moment—the photographs illustrate life experienced in the natural world with abundant joy.

These are images that make you feel happy just to look at them: a child lying in the brilliant green grass with her dog, a lime hanging on a tree in front of a coral-pink wall, a man with a smile so beautifully bright that you feel welcomed. In the images, a personality emerges: of one who is lively and curious, of one who will introduce you to the world as a beautiful place.

Ms. Morgenthau says that grew up in a not beautiful place, in the suburbs of New Jersey, where there wasn’t much that was visually stimulating. Craving a chance to see the world, she went West to college—and found what she was seeking. “You seek out what you want,” she told me.

What Ms. Morgenthau had always wanted was to create beautiful things, even as a tiny child, and so she started making art early: painting, drawing, sculpting. Now in her photography, she still seeks that beauty, whether it be found in a smile or in a scene outdoors. Her favorites among her work show people who are happy, vibrant with good energy, framed by (or maybe somehow interacting with) a beautiful landscape.

Sometimes it takes patience:

I love that high desert landscape, and I go there and hang out and wait for the good light. . . .you can’t count on good light. . . Fishing is a good metaphor. You can wait and wait and wait, and think it’s going to be perfect, and then the sun goes down, and it turns to muck. It helps to be patient.

In many of the pictures, there’s what I think of as a painterly effect in the use of intense, clean color, which gives a stronger voice to the image. Ms. Morgenthau says she tries to take a simple approach:

When things look cheesy. . . . it’s often because they are fake . . . . There’s enough beauty going on in the world without having to overdo it. I take advantage of beautiful vivid colors, like the lime tree and the red house in Mexico.

I used to shoot black and white in the days of film, but as clients demanded more color and we move to being more digital, you just have to be really careful about what you choose. If there is color, it has to be beautiful color.

I wondered whether Ms. Morgenthau sees the world differently than other people. Her response was that she doesn’t believe she does, but that she takes the time to look at what is there:

A lot of people don’t, and aren’t aware of their settings, they become aware only if it’s drop dead gorgeous and blasts them in the face.

This view of the tiny beautiful details that make up the world seeps into every aspect of her life:

We’re only here for a short time, and we take advantage of what’s around us, we’re open to different opportunities, not just visually, but when you’re more aware of your surroundings, you can’t not care about what’s going on around you. Being an artist, you have an opportunity to make change because of what you’re aware of and it’s really hard to ignore, the good and the bad.

And that truly is what art does for us, isn't it, that it wakes us up, it shows us different views of humanity and of the world, and it makes us think about what happens, and it makes us aware of ourselves, and it ignites all kinds of transformations, from the tiny ones that occur in our inner landscapes that become the great changes in our lives, and so that maybe we shift direction, and when enough of us shift in that way, the greater effect might be a change for the good in the world.

[photographs by Nicole Morgenthau.]

"The Botany of Nests"

Western Tanager, Piranga ludoviciana, Western Foundation of Vertebrae Zoology

Every time I visit Strybing Arboretum I stop at the Helen Crocker Russell Library to see what is hanging. I love the show up right now, photos of bird nests by Sharon Beals.

The prints are fascinating. I particularly liked the Golden Masked Tanager who’s nest is in a wild honeycomb, the House Sparrow who’s nest is made of yarn and other things foraged from a backyard, and the House Wren’s abandoned nest with chicks (which are now just skeletons).

The detail and clarity of the prints is astounding. They are printed larger than life and engage the viewer with the subject.

The show is on exhibit until June 30, 2009.

http://www.sfbotanicalgarden.org/library/page6.html