Out of the Shadows

I wrote way back in 2011 about the photographer Vivian Maier.

To refresh your memory, In 2007 26-year-old real estate agent John Maloof walked into an auction house and bid on a box of 30,000 prints and negatives from an unknown photographer. Realizing the street photographs of Chicago and New York were of unusually high quality he purchased another lot of the photographer’s work totaling some 100,000 negatives, thousands of prints, 700 rolls of undeveloped color film, home movies, audio tape interviews, and original cameras.

Over time it became clear the photos belonged to a Chicago nanny who had photographed prolifically for nearly 40 years, but who never shared her work during her lifetime. Since the discovery Maier’s photographs have received international attention with collections touring in cities around the world as well as the publication of a book. Finally, a show of Maier's work has come to Seattle, open now at the Photo Center NW, and running through the end of March. See it!

Additionally, a documentary called Finding Vivian Maier is nearing completion and looks to be a fascinating film. Can't wait.

Emotional Baggage

In the early 1980's photographer Jon Crispin first came across Willard lunatic asylum, in upstate New York. Crispin immediately wanted to photograph the abandoned 19th-century building and worked for a long time to gain lawful access. Eventually he was allowed to tour the building accompanied; he took a friend along to distract the security guards while he poked around.

Willard was one of several asylums built in response to the campaigning of Dorothea Dix who, in 1841 began a self-funded investigation into treatment of the insane poor. Her efforts forced 20 states nationwide to provide funded care for the mentally ill. Willard was the first to be built for the chronically insane. If you came here, you were unlikely to leave.

Willard’s intake came chiefly from New York City, via a specially built train line. Others arrived by boat from all over the country, docking on Seneca Lake. Patients were kept clean, fed and exercised.
Within eight years, its inmate count of 1,550 made Willard the largest asylum in the country. At its height, this figure reached 4,000.

In 1995, as the building was being prepared for demolition, a local preservationist discovered hundreds of suitcases embalmed in dust and cobwebs in the attic space. The suitcases had belonged to patients who had lived and died there, and were filled with the items each had chosen, or had had chosen for them, when first admitted. 

Acquired by New York State, they were moved into storage and catalogued. Two years ago Crispin was invited to photograph the suitcases and their contents. To date he has photographer around 100, with more than 300 to go. His photographs, along with some of the objects, are embarking on a small museum tour, currently on display at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. The best place to see a large array of these gorgeous and haunting images is on Crispin's website.

Roman Vishniac Rediscovered

Roman Vishniac was a Jewish photographer who was born in Russian and died in New York in 1990, aged 92. The International Center for Photography in New York recently became the repository of the Vishniac archive of some 30,000 objects: negatives, prints, film footage, memorabilia and correspondence.

This trove has resulted in a well-deserved retrospective at the ICP, and has stimulated new research into his work and life. The scope of his photographic accomplishments has proven to be even greater than was previously thought - the show of photographs and objects has been widely praised as magnificent and revelatory.

Vishniac fled Russia after the Bolshevik revolution and settled in Berlin, where he studied to be a biologist. Nazi restrictions on Jews prevented him from completing his scientific education, so from 1935 to 1938 he traveled on assignment for a Jewish relief organization as a photographer, documenting the lives of poor Jews in eastern Europe. The charity sought photographic evidence of desperate need, hoping this would help raise money for these doomed villages. Instead, these images became a rare record of an extinguished way of life.

In 1940 Vishniac, his wife and their two children arrived in New York and settled on the Upper West Side, where he opened a photo studio. His subjects ranged widely from portraits of Marc Chagall to images of a single pine needle. Eventually his haunting, beautiful photographs of Eastern Europe were published as a book, “A Vanished World”, in 1983. These images are well represented in the retrospective, as are many images never before seen, including his photos of a thriving Nazi-era Berlin, images of happier Jewish communities in the Netherlands, and photos of the Jews who survived the war.

The exemplary Travel and history blog Poemas del rio Wang recently posted an appreciation of Vishniac.

The show "Roman Vishniac Rediscovered" is on view at the International Centre for Photography until May 5th 2013.

Gerull

I've spent a productive few hours digging through the work of Benjamin Gerull, a landscape and architectural photographer living and working in Munich. He brings his adventurous spirit and splendid eye to places you thought you knew. For all of its architectural beauty, you never see this side of Barcelona in travel photos. His work was recognized as part of the European Prize of Architectural Photography in 2009. Lots more here.

Jacques Leonard

In 1950 French photographer Jacques Leonard - already well known for his adventures as an intrepid traveler, racehorse trainer, filmmaker, and writer - fell in love with the painters' model Rosario Amaya. Amaya was a Gypsy, and had grown up in a Romani shanty-town on the edge of Barcelona. Together they settled in the neighborhood, from where he continued his career and conducted a lifetime study of the community around him. For the rest of his life, between the 50s and 70s, Leonard had the unique opportunity to document the quotidian life and customs of the well

guarded Gypsy community who lived in the Montjuic barracks of Barcelona.

His legacy remained in storage for years, until 2009 when his children discovered thousands of negatives and handed them to the Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona. The Leonard archive held nearly 18,000 negatives, including more than 3,000 studies, portraits and snapshots of the gypsy community he lived with. The Arxiu Fotogràfic opened the enlightening exhibition Jacques Leonard: Gypsy Barcelona on June 2nd. The show runs through January 2012.

Flourishing Remnants

Until the 1970's the Beall Greenhouses on Vashon Island was the nation’s largest grower of roses and orchids. When the business went bust, the 25 acres of greenhouses and plants were left to themselves. Today, the corroding glass and steel structures are covered with both native flora and exotic plants grown wild. The Vashon-based photographer Heather Joy and her partner the painter Matthew Olds have recorded the collapsing greenhouses and their reclamation by mother nature in a new show titled Flourishing Remnants. Learn more about the artists and their work here.

At Vermillion Gallery, 1508 11th Avenue on Capitol Hill until July 2. The opening reception is on Friday June 3 from 6-9pm.

New Camera

I've been obsessing about a new camera. I would like a good one that fits in my pocket, and that I can use easily while riding my bike. Maybe you have an idea?

To save a few bucks I supposed I could try to make a camera out of an egg. Francesco Capponi did exactly that, converting an egg into a single-use pinhole camera. Capponi shared his photos in the MAKE Flickr pool and posted full instructions on how to make one, but it’s not an easy process. In order to create four good photographs, Francesco destroyed fifty eggs.

If I want the thing to last, perhaps I should build one out of Legos? After more than a year of experimentation, Alabama-based photographer Cary Norton recently completed the Legotron, Mark I a working camera made entirely from Lego bricks. The lens is a 127mm ƒ4.7 he got on ebay for 40 bucks, and it's focused by sliding a box-inside-a-box forward and backward.

I'm open to all ideas.

Femme nu a Seattle

A lovely photo from French photographer Lucien Clergue, with 1980's era Seattle in the background. Discovered on the luscious photostream Melisaki. Also not to be missed, this photo of cartoonist Saul Steinberg, with himself as a Little Boy, on Long Island in 1978. "Pulse Pause Repeat."

Back to The Future

A beautiful ongoing project by Argentine photographer Irina Werning. She is mining the photo albums of friends and family, and working with them to revisit the scenes of childhood photographs. The resulting series, Back to the Future, is a fascinating look at how people change as they age, and how they stay the same.

Landscape Permutations

Vancouver, BC photographer David Semeniuk asks "What does it mean when different sites, at particular points in time, can easily substitute for the same place?" We may not recognize a place we've seen many times before. A place we've never visited seems strangely familiar. Semeniuk pastes a photo from one location atop a photo from somewhere else, and in the resulting image the two places are almost indistinguishable. His series Landscape Permutations is a lovely - and somewhat creepy - meditation on the way that contemporary urban landscapes have lost their specificity.

Shadows of a Fleeting World

"I think photography should not be an imitation of paintings, but it should contain a feeling similar to that of poems." Dr. Kyo Koike, Seattle Camera Club

In 1924 the Seattle Camera Club was founded by a group of Japanese immigrants to the Pacific Northwest. While camera clubs were a popular phenomenon at the time, the work of the Seattle Camera Club stood apart for its stunning quality and unique sense of poetry. The group deliberately practiced pictorialism, a style of fine art photography interested in the effects of transient light and Japanese compositional elements. They developed innovative darkroom techniques to create unique soft-focus photographs that reflected contemporary painting styles, especially Impressionism. The records of most camera clubs have long disappeared, but the Seattle Camera Club’s works were saved thanks to the foresight of the late Robert Monroe, who for 17 years was the director of Special Collections in the University of Washington Libraries and a founder of the Book Club of Washington.

The show Shadows of a Fleeting World at the Henry Art Gallery presents over 100 works by Seattle Camera Club photographers and others in the Seattle area who worked who worked side by side with the SCC during the movement’s heyday in the 1920's, including prominent Seattle photographers like Imogen Cunningham. The show opens with a panel presentation on February 11 and runs through May 8.

Vivian Maier

Vivian Maier, evidently one of America’s more insightful street photographers, has at last been discovered, more than 2 years after she died.

Ms. Maier was born in New York in 1926, lived in France, and returned to New York in 1951. Five years later, she moved to Chicago, where she worked for about 40 years as a nanny, principally for families in the North Shore suburbs. On her days off, she wandered the streets of New York and Chicago, most often with a Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera. Apparently, she did not share her pictures with others. Many of them, she never saw herself. She died in 2008, leaving behind hundreds of undeveloped rolls.

John Maloof, a 29-year-old Chicago real estate agent, acquired a boxful of negatives at an auction in 2007. They had been in a commercial storage locker whose contents were seized for non-payment. Maloof was looking for Chicago scenes for an illustrated history of the Portage Park neighborhood for Arcadia’s Images of America series.

He didn’t find any pictures of Portage Park. Indeed, he wasn’t exactly sure what he had found. “I didn’t know what ’street photography’ was when I purchased them,” he wrote on his Vivian Maier blog. Eventually he posted the images to the Hardcore Street Photography group on Flickr, and watched as the responses poured in.

He is now about one-tenth of the way into the task of scanning and archiving 100,000 negatives of hers in his possession, and he has yet to develop several hundred rolls of black-and-white film and about 600 color rolls. Another large collection — including 12,000 negatives and 70 homemade movies — is in the hands of Jeff Goldstein and his collaborators at Vivian Maier Photography.

Maier is currently being honored with a one-woman show, “Finding Vivian Maier,” at the Chicago Cultural Center. A documentary film, also titled “Finding Vivian Maier,” is in the works.

If you've been slow to discover this emerging phenomenon, as Gurldoggie has been, take some time simply to look at her remarkable photos.

Daniel Beltrá

Photographer Daniel Beltrá has made a career out of traveling to the world's precious ecosystems to document scenes of environmental devastation. Based in Seattle, Beltrá has traveled from Indonesia to the Arctic to the drought-ridden waterways of Brazil to the marshes of Louisiana to capture images of nature fouled by industry run amok. Yet his photographs are so well composed, so energetic, so artful in their composition that they lure your eye into lingering before you quite realize the extent of the devastation you're seeing.

He was recently named first runner up for the Veolia Environment Wildlife Photographer of the Year award, and two just weekends ago Beltrá was the subject of a lengthy article in the Seattle Times. His blog also features hundreds of his images, arranged by geography.

Bicycles in Iran

For those of us getting used to the idea of a wet winter bike commute, gorgeous photos of the bicycles of Isfahan by the Iranian photographer Alieh Sâdatpur. Via the highly literate travel and photo blog Poemas del Río Wang.

100 Books

Two interesting books released recently which use the number 100 as an organizing principle.

Seattle 100: Portrait of a City is the culmination of a three-year project by Seattle photographer and filmmaker Chase Jarvis. Jarvis spent 36 months photographing a curated collection of creative people in and around Seattle. The book compiles 100 of his black-and-white portraits of the Seattle-based artists, musicians, writers, scientists, activists and filmmakers. Many of the photos are beautiful, and it's a worthy attempt to capture a snapshot of a city’s culture through its people. Jarvis is donating a portion of his proceeds from sales of the book to the King County arts and culture organization 4culture.

The Exquisite Book is a project dreamed up by designers Julia Rothman , Jenny Volvoski and Matt Lamothe, inspired by the Surrealist parlor game Exquisite Corpse. The editors asked 10 groups of 10 artists to contribute a page to the book. The first artist was given a few words to inspire their drawing, and each of the following artists only saw the page that immediately preceded their own. Each artist was given two weeks to complete their page, and the whole process took approximately five months. In addition to the three progenitors, the book features beautiful contributions by Caitlin Keegan, Lisa Congdon, Eunice Moyle, Tom Neely, Kelly Lynn Jones, Susie Ghahremani and Lorena Sim.

The book was designed by the New York design team ALSO and just published by Chronicle Books.

Pictures of Clouds

The swirling photos of Hurricane season remind me of the “Clouds” photo series by the ever inventive Vik Muniz. Back in 2000, the Brazilian-born Muniz launched a public art project to coincide with a show at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the premiere of a full-length documentary about his work. Four times during a six day period a skywriter drew a series of clouds over the Manhattan skyline using an outline of a cloud designed by Muniz.

Muniz's aesthetic involves using unusual materials to create portraits and objects which he eventually photographs. The result is never what it seems at first sight - he deliberately deceives the spectator's eye and forces him to look again.

The fleeting nature of skywriting isn't so different from the fluid nature of pictures on the internet, the drawing of a cloud where we would expect to see a real cloud, the digital image of a storm briefly but powerfully representing a real event. The image is not the object. The map is not the territory.

Tina Modotti

Today (...or maybe tomorrow?) is the birthday of Italian photographer, model, and political radical Tina Modotti.

Modotti was born Assunta Adelaide Luigia Modotti Mondini in Udine, Italy on August 16 (or 17), 1896. Her father was a militant member of a banned socialist group, and was blacklisted from working when Modotti was a teenager. When she was 16, the family immigrated to San Francisco.

Attracted to the performing arts supported by the Italian émigré community in the Bay Area, Modotti experimented with acting, appearing in several plays, operas and silent movies. In 1918, she entered into a relationship with Roubaix "Robo" de l'Abrie Richey. Modotti moved with him to Los Angeles in order to pursue a movie career, and the couple entered into a bohemian circle of friends that included Ricardo Gomez Robelo and the photographer Edward Weston.

By 1921, Modotti was Weston's favorite model and, by October of that year, his lover. Ricardo Gomez Robelo became the head of Mexico's Ministry of Education's Fine Arts Department, and persuaded Robo to come to Mexico with a promise of a job and a studio.

Robo left for Mexico City in December 1921 hoping to mount an exhibition of his and Weston's work. While she was on her way to be with Robo, Modotti received word of his death from smallpox. In March 1922, determined to see Robo's vision through, she mounted a two week exhibition of Robo's and Weston's work at the National Academy of Fine Arts. The sudden death of her father forced her return to San Francisco later that same month. On July 29, 1923, Modotti set sail for Mexico City with Weston and his son Chandler, leaving behind Weston's wife Flora and their three children. She agreed to run Weston's studio free of charge in return for a mentorship in photography.

Modotti flourished in post-revolutionary Mexico. Living with Weston, she befriended and modeled for Diego Riviera and threw herself into radical politics, including the unsuccessful campaign against the execution of the Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927. She was constantly developing her practice as a photographer, using her connections to create an expanding portrait business. Kenneth Rexroth called her "the most spectacular person in Mexico City."

In 1927, Modotti joined the Mexican Communist Party and more of her work became politically motivated. Her photographs began appearing in publications such as "Mexican Folkways" and the radically motivated "Frente a Frente" and "El Machete." In December 1929, an exhibition of Modotti’s work was billed as "The First Revolutionary Photographic Exhibition In Mexico." Within a year she was deported from Mexico.

She moved around Europe for a while, finally settling in Moscow where, by most accounts, she joined a branch of the Soviet secret police. When the Spanish Civil War erupted in 1936, Modotti left Moscow for Spain, where she stayed and worked until the collapse of the Republican movement. In April 1939 Modotti left Spain and returned to Mexico under a pseudonym.

Modotti died in Mexico City in 1942 under suspicious circumstances - her death attributed by various sources to suicide, murder or heart failure. Her grave is located within the vast Panteón de Dolores in Mexico City.

Miroslav Tichý

Czech photographer Miroslav Tichý is currently featured in a retrospective show at the International Center of Photography in New York. Tichý is an absolutely unique figure in modern photography - since the late 1950's he has lived in isolation in Kyjov, Moravia, using his hand-made cameras to take photographs almost exclusively of local women. The cameras are fashioned from cardboard tubing, string, and thread spools.

Tichý develops the photos and mounts them on frames of cardboard and scrap paper, adding finishing touches in pencil. Over more than 50 years he has developed a body of strikingly poetic, dreamlike images of feminine beauty in a small Czech town.

Of the unusual quality of his photography, Tichý says:

Photography is painting with light! The blurs, the spots, those are errors! But the errors are part of it, they give it poetry and turn it into painting. And for that you need as bad a camera as possible! If you want to be famous, you have to do whatever you're doing worse than anyone else in the whole world.

This is the first American museum exhibition devoted to the work of the reclusive and mysterious photographer. The show, which includes a number of Tichý's homemade cameras as well as approximately 100 of his photographs, runs through May 9.

(It's like Déjà vu all over again. This post may remind you of a similar post from a few years back.)

World Pinhole Day

This Sunday, April 25 is the 10th annual Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day. Pinhole photography is a venerated low-tech hobby that uses a simple camera with no lens. Instead, the homemade cameras use a very small aperture which projects an image upon film or paper. The imprecise mechanisms can produce beautifully unpredictable images. The pinhole enthusiast Dippold has very clever and concise instructions and a template that you can download to make your own camera out of cardboard. Pinhole camera clubs around the world are sponsoring events all week. The nearest events to Seattle are in Westport and Wenatchee, but you can visit the World Pinhole Photo Day website to find classes and events near you.

Thanks to Cloudy Images for the pinhole portrait of St. Paul's Cathedral!

Jazz Loft Project

In January 1955 the photographer W. Eugene Smith quit his well-paying job at Life Magazine, left his wife and four kids and sunk wholeheartedly into his obsession with the New York jazz scene. He moved into 821 Sixth Avenue, a dilapidated, five-story loft building in the City’s flower district which was a late-night haunt of musicians, including some of the biggest names in jazz— Charles Mingus, Roy Haynes, Sonny Rollins, Bill Evans, Roland Kirk, Alice Coltrane, Don Cherry, Paul Bley and Thelonious Monk among them—and countless fascinating characters. Smith holed up in his apartment and turned his camera to his new surroundings.

Between 1957 and 1965, Smith shot 40,000 photographs at the Sixth Avenue loft, documenting the nocturnal jazz scene as well as life on the streets of the flower district, as seen from his window. He wired the building like a surreptitious recording studio and created 4,000 hours of audiotapes, capturing more than 300 musicians. Also dropping in on the nighttime scene were cultural figures like Norman Mailer, Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Salvador Dalí, as well as pimps, prostitutes, drug addicts, thieves, cops, building inspectors and drug dealers.

The jazz scene declined after the mid-60's, and Smith left the building in 1971 to move to Japan and find his way back into commercial photography. After more than 50 years, Smith's photos and recordings are finally being organized into an accessible body of work. The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in cooperation with the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona has created "The Jazz Loft Project," devoted to preserving and cataloging Smith's photographs and tapes, and obtaining oral history interviews with all surviving loft participants.

The project has an extensive website and blog, and a travelling exhibition of more than 200 prints is currently on display at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, along with listening stations that give access to remastered selections from Smith’s tapes. All of the photographs featured in the exhibition are included in the new book The Jazz Loft Project. The project is also the subject of a ten-part radio series produced by WNYC, episodes of which can heard here.