I received this book: Dorothea Lange, A Life Beyond Limits (by Linda Gordon) from the author's publicist.
I have to say it felt like Christmas to get this nice big book in the mail before it was available to everyone else! This new biography of Dorothea Lange is a must have for any photographer or art lover's library. For me, learning about the amazing woman behind the camera makes her photographs even better.
"Perhaps the biggest surprise about Lange’s personal life was that she was by no means the saintly, self-effacing personality that many had assumed, extrapolating from her photography. On the contrary, she was driven by ambition, sometimes irritable, often demanding—yet uncommonly sensitive and generous."
Lange, a photographer I have always admired, is brought to life through the pages of this book. As photographers we often attempt to reveal much about our subjects while shielding ourselves. I enjoyed this look at the woman behind the camera.
This is the first time I've received something at no charge and mentioned it on my blog. So... I feel like I can't stay much more about it without being a sell out! While it was a cool experience, I by no means plan to turn my blog into advertising. I will continue to write about my life & photography - so don't worry about having to read lots of random product reviews!
So, speaking of female artists I adore - I was flipping through the free on demand movies and came across this:
http://www.mylifetime.com/on-tv/movies/georgia-okeeffe Ok, I'll be the first to admit that lifetime movies are usually all man-hating and not so good, but I really liked this one... even if they were a bit hard on poor Stieglitz. Last I checked it was still on comcast's free on demand so take a look! I knew that O'Keeffe was Stieglitz's muse but seeing, though these actors, out how he thrust her into the spotlight was revealing. I particularly liked the mention that his photographic work was fading out of the public eye and she worked hard after his death to establish his legacy... what an interesting relationship.
Side note, what is with the heavily airbrushed photo of Joan Allen (O'Keeffe)? She almost looks like a child in the artwork but we only see her as an adult in the movie - what is the deal?
Congrats to my friend Brooke Holland (her photo above) on having her photographs not only in the Boston Young contemporaries show - but also int the Boston Globe "G" section & online!
Also a BIG congrats to all of my AIB friends and new MFA grads at the Art Institute of Boston! SO sorry I can't be there tonight to see you graduate - break a leg! :)
I have had the busiest two weeks! I have a baby shoot, bump shoot, wedding shoot, engagement shoot & food shoot to edit! (This is just after finishing & posting another wedding's photos yesterday) Also, Sunday I had a booth at the Hyatt Regency Boston wedding show. It was actually a great show, and I met a lot of wonderful couples! I was lucky to have had two friends, Dee & Inga, come along to help. After the show, Inga came back with me for wine & sushi on the porch. As we drove from Boston to Salem dark clouds descended but that didn't stop us. It might have rained, but after, when a rainbow appeared, the photographer in me couldn't help but run for a camera!
Matt Held couldn’t give his oil paintings away except to people who might use the stretchers for firewood. Then came a virtual art bazaar named Facebook.
In November he started a Facebook group. It’s called, “I’ll have my Facebook portrait painted by Matt Held.”
Now he has 3,300 virtual friends, his paintings are selling, plus 150 people electronically clamoring for his Facebook’s “status update.”
“I mean,” he said, with contented irony, “is it a form of a stalking?”
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Held’s story, along with his art and that of a dozen colleagues who use the emerging social networking technologies to make and to disseminate their work, is on display in Status Update, a fascinating new exhibition curated by Debbie Hesse and Donna Ruff under the auspices of the Arts Council.
It is mounted, appropriately enough, at Haskins Laboratories. The scientific think tank at 300 George Street wants to know if the new technologies are an assist to literacy or are retarding it. The show is on view on the 9th floor, until Aug. 1.
Nothing’s retarding Matt Held. After he painted his wife’s portrait based on her Facebook representation, the response was so great, he’s had to limit himself to painting 200 portraits. Real ones, but based on Facebook offerings, which could be the real person, or not. His work is being seen, and around the world, he said, instantly, by his “friends” from Jerusalem to the Congo.
“All the gallery system,” he said, “including the receptionists who used to throw my slides in the trash, all that now is bypassed and bulldozed.”
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In addition to “Steve,” the eponymous picture at the top, one of the lucky people whose portrait Held has painted is fellow New York-based artist An Xiao. Her work, “Nothing to Tweet Home About (Self Portrait in Postcards)” poses the question: What does a very old medium, like writing on a postcard, have in common with the newest, Twitter?
Xiao’s candid answer: “The easier the communication device, the more trivial the message being sent.”
Thus she is sending dozens of postcards to the Haskins Laboratories throughout the run of the show, and she is Twittering away about their status as well. Several postcards on display have these messages; “I’m so addicted to Subway sandwiches. My gosh!” and “Can’t tell you how sleepy I am.”
During a panel discussion about the status of “status updating,” and the other technologies, Xiao and Haskins Laboratories chief Phil Rubin both said that whereas in other gatherings people are asked to turn off their cell phones, the audience of some 50 were asked not only to keep theirs on but to Twitter away.
Xiao is a serious conceptual artist. She, like Cat Balco, another of the participants, who teaches painting at the University of Hartford, doesn’t have the answers. Xiao wants to find out if the aggregate of the postcards and the Twitters will add up to a genuine portrait of herself.
Balco’s old-fashioned oils on canvas, like this one titled “Skin,” were included in the show, according to Hesse, because her subject, a kind of metaphorical take on the neural networking patterns happening inside the brain, is a mirror of the social networking that has seized the art world in the last six months or so.
“I think,” she said, “we are hardwired to create and to connect.”
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Yet she is also something of a critic of Internet-based art. “When I paint, I don’t know the result. I’m discovering, I’m learning. I genuinely feel that when I work with the paint, I’m coming up with structures, ideas that aid me in understanding myself and the world. The Net-based art can be just the execution or implementation of a pre-existing idea.”
For a more in-your-face, or at least in-your-screen, satire of the phenomenon, click on the play arrow to view Jeremiah Teipen’s video “Social Networking.”
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It’s a faux social networking page where the ID image is the first 1,000 people who came up on a Google search.
Rachel Perry Welty (on the left with fellow Net artist Katie Ring) updated her Facebook status via her iPhone every 60 seconds for about 16 hours on March 11, 2009. That amounted to 550 updates along with a photo for each update.
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“My aim,” she said, “was to give a completely comprehensive answer to the Facebook prompt, ‘What are you doing right now?”
She got hundreds of requests seeking her as a friend. “I don’t think what I was doing was very fascinating - her messages, like Xiao’s were fairly quotidian, or shall we say boring? — “but people appeared,” said Welty, “to be confirmed that they were like me.”
Welty’s previous work includes a video performance based on all the wrong numbers or messages she received over a four-year period. “I do this karaoke based on them,” she said, “lip-synching the messages and I found it difficult, but also poignant.”
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Xiao, along with artist/panelist Sharon Butler of Eastern Connecticut State University, suggested that the best Twitterers were indeed people who saw the medium as an outlet for performance. “I mean when you stand in front of 300 people,” said Xiao, “how long can you tell them what you ate, that you’re sleepy, and so on?”
“Artists are innovators,” said Butler, “but as in all genres, some is good, some is not, but much of it is thought provoking. How much is resonant and will last for the ages? Who knows?”
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This guy does. Len Zimmerman, neither artist nor professor but interested visitor and member of the public, said, “Look, I find this all interesting, but I don’t Facebook or Twitter. I just read the newspaper. I think there should be more real, human faces, like this, in person, not Facebook people but actual people facing and talking to each other.”
Other artists not mentioned above who are exhibiting include: Kevin Van Aelst (his T-shirt images are behind Butler above), Greg Garvey, Heather D. Freeman, Keith Johnson, and the curators themselves Hesse and Ruff.
Oh, where did the curators find the artists in the show? “I got them all,” said Hesse, “through Facebook.”
Regular viewing hours at Haskins are 10 p.m. to 4 p.m
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My work, "status update" has been selected for an exhibition bearing the same name!
Status Update: An exhibition that explores emerging online networking technologies and/in art.
Curated by Debbie Hesse and Donna Ruff
Start Time: Thursday, April 23, 2009 at 6:00pm End Time: Saturday, August 1, 2009 at 6:00pm Location: Yale's Haskins Laboratory, New Haven, CT www.haskins.yale.edu
I don't even have all the details yet but when I do I'll post them. In the meantime I will be busy printing and framing! They want 3 of the "status update" photographs (above) and 3 of the "Facebook Portrait Project" photographs (below)
These are the top 6 favorites for "The Facebook Portrait Project." Anyone else care to cast a vote? (Top to bottom: John, Andrea D., Cindy, Andrea L., Chris, Jenny )
View more of this project in flickr: My Favs: http://www.flickr.com/photos/katie223/sets/72157604813313817/ Facebook Project: http://www.flickr.com/photos/katie223/sets/72157603822472642/
Wednesday (7/11) I went to Bingo in Medford (where I live) to check it out. I actually played with some friends (Kaleen didn't really want her picture taken) and the regulars (mostly senior citizens). It is held at the VFW (see above). I plan on going again with a mini-portfolio in hopes that I can find myself some portrait models.
Thursday (7/12) I heard Joyce Tenneson speak at the Griffin Museum of Photography. http://www.townonline.com/multimedia/x1181169971 Something I continue to notice about famous photographers is that they seem amazingly self-confindent. I wonder if this confidence has always been there or if it is due to their fame. Joyce also said that the only reason her young assistants aren't where she is - is because they give up too easily. So it seems you also need a drive like electricity flowing through your veins to get yourself there. She also spoke about how she learns from her subjects - like how she conquered her fear of growing older by connecting with the amazing women of "Wise Women." I think that is a very interesting photographer-subject dynamic and it started me thinking about my own work. Do I learn from my subjects? I am definatly working out my own fears of old age with my work at the Soldier's home. Yet at this point in my life that has meant dealing with the death of my grandmother and my grandfather's altizhemers rather than any fear of my own aging.
Speaking of the Soldier's Home I have continued to help them with their photography club. Here are some recent photographs I've made of the residents.
Another thing Joyce said that was particularly interesting to me was that she thinks all young women artists do self portraits. It's "part of the journey." The strange thing was that I had recently been thinking about self portraiture and had made one just a few nights before.
(me up at 2AM obsessed with re-reading residency notes and deciding where to take my work)
Speaking of I need to get a "residency reaction" emailed to Sunanda, my adviser, time to do that. I'll post it when I'm done.
One last note about the past 2 weeks is that I met with my new mentor and she is awesome! I am working with Sandra Stark. http://www.sandrastark.com/
I think she will be a good combination of challenging/pushing me, and praising my work when it is deserved. She also has great photographer suggestions for me - many of these artists were already on my "list" so I feel like she's placing me in the context I want to be in. Lots more on working with Sandra soon!
Ok, I'll be the first to admit that lifetime movies are usually all man-hating and not so good, but I really liked this one... even if they were a bit hard on poor Stieglitz. Last I checked it was still on comcast's free on demand so take a look! I knew that O'Keeffe was Stieglitz's muse but seeing, though these actors, out how he thrust her into the spotlight was revealing. I particularly liked the mention that his photographic work was fading out of the public eye and she worked hard after his death to establish his legacy... what an interesting relationship.
E
