Through September 12, 2010

From the ICP website:
This is the inaugural installment of a new annual series focusing on significant recent works by contemporary artists, photographers, and filmmakers. These five artists are not concerned only with the photographic medium, whether it is the formal qualities of photography in transition or the newly defined digital features of the photographic print. Instead, they also focus on the subjects of photography, and its means of defining and describing critical social, political, or even philosophical issues. Organized by Brian Wallis, ICP Deputy Director for Exhibitions & Chief Curator, the "Perspectives" series continues ICP's ongoing exploration of the most exciting projects by emerging and less familiar photographers initiated in its award-winning Triennial exhibitions.

ICP
1133 Avenue of the Americas at 43rd Street
New York, NY 10036
212.857.0000

Manchester Art Gallery

Now - Monday 30 August 2010

Text from the Manchester Art Galleries Site:

Dorothy Bohm was born in Konigsberg, East Prussia (now Kaliningrad) in 1924, she has lived in England since 1939. She studied photography at Manchester College of Technology (graduating in 1942) and went on to work at Samuel Cooper portraiture studio, before opening her own studio, Studio Alexander, in Market Street, Manchester in 1946. 

In the late 1940s, having successfully established her portraiture studio, Dorothy discovered a love for open air photography. She regularly spent time in the artists' colony of Ascona in the Ticino, Switzerland where she developed her photographic techniques. 

By the 1950s she had completely abandoned studio portraiture for 'street photography'. She travelled widely with her husband Louis Bohm (a fellow émigré from Nazi Europe, whom she met when they were both students in Manchester). Her work of this period provides fascinating insights into the changing face of post-war Europe, as well as the USA, the USSR and Israel. 

The first time Dorothy experimented with colour photography was in Mexico in 1956. But her first cohesive body of colour work didn’t happen until the early 1980s, when she explored the potential of Polaroid photography to memorable effect. A small section of the exhibition is devoted to this transitional period in her career. 

It was in 1984, on a visit to the Far East, that Dorothy used Kodak colour film for the first time and thereafter abandoned black and white entirely.

Since then, although the human figure in its natural setting is still the primary focus of her work, her approach has become more painterly and allusive, with an ever greater interest in spatial and other forms of ambiguity. 

To this day, however, Dorothy Bohm continues to use photography in its purest, unmanipulated form.

In addition to her work as a photographic artist, Dorothy Bohm was intimately involved with the founding of The Photographers’ Gallery, London in 1971, and was its Associate Director for fifteen years. Her exhibition Dorothy Bohm: Colour Photography 1984 – 94, held at the gallery in 1994, was one of its best-attended exhibitions ever. In 2009, Bohm was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society. 


This major new exhibition has been curated by Dorothy Bohm's daughter Monica Bohm-Duchen, freelance writer, lecturer and exhibition organiser, together with consultant Colin Ford , writer, broadcaster and founding Head (until 1993) of the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television (now the National Media Museum) in Bradford.

The show will tour to The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in 2011.

New Topographics tour organized by George Eastman House and Center for Creative Photography begins June 13

Pivotal 1975 exhibition is second most-cited photography exhibition in history

ROCHESTER, N.Y. — The landmark exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape — originally mounted in 1975 at George Eastman House International Museum of Photography & Film — is being recreated for an international tour by the Center for Creative Photography at The University of Arizona and George Eastman House. New Topographics signaled the emergence of a new approach to landscape photography, ultimately giving a name to a movement and style. As evidence of its influence, it is considered the second most-cited photography exhibition in the history of the medium. The New Topographics tour will open at George Eastman House June 13 (on view through Sept. 27, 2009), and then travel to eight venues in the United States and Europe.

At the core of this re-examination will be a selection of more than 100 works from the original show. The 10 photographers featured three decades ago are again gathered together: Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel Jr. The current exhibition demonstrates both the historical significance of their photographs and the continued relevance of this work in today’s culture.

References to New Topographics — the exhibition and the style — abound in photographic practices, exhibitions, and histories. “New Topographics Photography” remains a category for art-book listings and “New Topographics” is the name of an active group on Flickr, displaying “work that shows human activity and interaction within the landscape.” In recent years The New Yorker has described “New Topographics” as “a distinct sort of landscape photography that combined a documentarian's clear-eyed sobriety with an artist's aesthetic discipline” and The New York Times noted the Eastman House exhibition “put this movement on the map.”

“Although its ambitions were hardly so grand, New Topographics has since come to be understood as marking a paradigm shift,” said Dr. Britt Salvesen, director and chief curator of the Center for Creative Photography and co-organizer of the current project. “The show occurred just as photography ceased to be an isolated, self-defined practice and took its place within the contemporary art world. Even today, the catchphrase ‘New Topographics’ — a suggestive idea more than a precise adjective — is used to characterize the work of artists not yet born when the exhibition was held. New Topographics helped to redefine American photography.”

Arguably the last traditionally photographic style, New Topographics was also the first photoconceptual style. In different ways, the artists engaged with their medium and its history. At the same time, they grappled with culturally significant contemporary issues, such as environmentalism, objectivity, and national identity. In an Artweek review in 1975, critic Robert Woolard called the exhibition “very important,” and its ideas “vital and fundamental.”

“The question persists as to why this unassuming exhibition came to be so widely known and understood as the seminal event in which photography’s landscape paradigm shifted away from the sublime, ushering in a new era of theoretical approaches,” said Dr. Alison Nordstrom, curator of photographs at George Eastman House, who is co-organizing the exhibition with Salvesen. “Of those who did see the exhibition, few seem to have thought themselves in the presence of a turning point; paradigm shifts are rarely recognized except in retrospect.”

The influence of New Topographics can be traced by looking again at the original pictures and at the circumstances in which the 10 artists were brought together. At the core of this re-examination will be the works from the 1975 show, which was curated by William Jenkins in collaboration with the artists. Jenkins’s concept achieved currency primarily through the exhibition catalogue (which today is being sold at rare-book sales for upwards of $1,000, far beyond its original $6.95 price tag). “By revisiting the photographs, we can assess their cumulative effect and consider their impact as objects,” Salvesen said. “This reprise also provides a unique opportunity to assess the original exhibition’s aims, consider its influence on young photographers today, and examine the international implications of an American impulse in photography.”

This presentation of New Topographics will also include prints and books by other relevant artists to provide additional historical and contemporary context. Timothy O’Sullivan appears in his role as a 19th-century precursor cited by both Adams and Baltz, while Walker Evans illustrates the idea of “documentary style” that he introduced to American photography in the 1930s. The conceptual aspect of New Topographics is illuminated by the photo-based books of Ed Ruscha, a key figure in Jenkins’s catalogue essay; Robert Smithson’s Instamatic snapshots of defiantly anti-monumental sites; and Dan Graham’s magazine layout/slide show Homes for America; and the groundbreaking 1972 study Learning from Las Vegas, by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour.

The new presentation and international tour of New Topographics is as follows: George Eastman House (June 13–Oct. 4,2009); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Oct. 25, 2009–Jan. 3, 2010); Center for Creative Photography (Feb. 19–May 16, 2010); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (July 17–Oct. 3, 2010); Landesgalerie Linz, Austria (Nov. 10, 2010–Jan. 9, 2011), Photographische Sammlung Stiftung Kultur, Cologne (Jan. 27–April 3, 2011); Jeu de Paume, Paris (April 11–June 12, 2011); and the Nederlands Fotomuseum Rotterdam, the Netherlands (July 2–Sept. 11, 2011); and Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, Bilbao (November 2011–January 2012).

The new presentation and international tour of New Topographics is made possible by a generous grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art. A catalogue is being published by Steidl and CCP in conjunction with the exhibition, featuring a primary essay by Salvesen, which traces the prevailing cultural and aesthetic ideas that gave rise to the exhibition, as well as the interconnections between the participants, and offers a broad-based view of the photography world in the mid-1970s. Also featured will be an essay by Nordstrom outlining the significance of New Topographics in Eastman House’s history and influence on photographic history to date.

From the Museum of Modern Art website:
Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) is one of the most original, accomplished, influential, and beloved figures in the history of photography. His inventive work of the early 1930s helped define the creative potential of modern photography, and his uncanny ability to capture life on the run made his work synonymous with “the decisive moment”—the title of his first major book. After World War II (most of which he spent as a prisoner of war) and his first museum show (at MoMA in 1947), he joined Robert Capa and others in founding the Magnum photo agency, which enabled photojournalists to reach a broad audience through magazines such as Life while retaining control over their work. In the decade following the war, Cartier-Bresson produced major bodies of photographic reportage on India and Indonesia at the time of independence, China during the revolution, the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death, the United States during the postwar boom, and Europe as its old cultures confronted modern realities. For more than twenty-five years, he was the keenest observer of the global theater of human affairs—and one of the great portraitists of the twentieth century. MoMA’s retrospective, the first in the United States in three decades, surveys Cartier-Bresson’s entire career, with a presentation of about three hundred photographs, mostly arranged thematically and supplemented with periodicals and books. The exhibition travels to The Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.

Street photography is the focus of an exhibition opening in Manchester this month, celebrating the 60-year career of Dorothy Bohm one of Britain’s most enduring and influential figures.

Dorothy Bohm has lived a full and colourful life. Born in Konigsberg in East Prussia to a Jewish-Lithuanian family in 1924, she was sent to England before the outbreak of war to escape Nazism. By 1942 she had graduated from Manchester College of Technology and started work in a portrait studio in the centre of the city, before opening her own business, Studio Alexander, in 1946. Since then, she has travelled widely, living in Paris, New York and San Francisco before settling in London’s leafy Hampstead in 1956, where she still lives today. Further trips took her to Soviet Russia, Egypt and the Far East, photographing contemporary life along the way, and she also managed to fit in time to have two daughters and co-found The Photographers’ Gallery in 1971. She was its associate director for the next 15 years, then in 1998 founded the Focus Gallery for Photography.

Her black-and-white photography was justly celebrated early on, and in 1969 her street images were exhibited alongside work by Don McCullin, Tony Ray-Jones and Enzo Ragazzini at the ICA. André Kertész, no less, encouraged her to switch to colour film in the late 1970s. “I find that colour requires a different sensitivity,” she wrote. “Reality and unreality mix more harmoniously. The emotional appeal of colour to me is very strong, it does not say the same thing as black-and-white.”

And now Bohm’s work is being given its first really major retrospective in the UK, The World Observed, showing for four months from 22 April at the Manchester Art Gallery, and in 2011 it will travel to The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich. Including work from all 60 years of her career, the exhibition will also feature a reconstruction of her first studio and darkroom.

www.manchestergalleries.org
www.dorothybohm.com

The Amador Gallery exhibit "Kobe," is a series of black and white photographs by Ryuji Miyamoto which display the architectural devastation wrought by the Great Hanshin earthquake upon the city of Kobe, Japan in 1995.

Over the years, Ryuji Miyamoto has kept a watchful eye on Japan's cities as they underwent vertiginous changes. His intention has been to photodocument the demolitions and reconstructions of whole quarters of the cities. Although he tries to photograph the architectural qualities of the cities, he often focuses on the aspect of destruction: the pictures of Kobe after the 1995 earthquake are his most renowned series.

Amador Gallery
41 E. 57 Street, 6th Floor
New York, NY 10022

ImagePrint v8.0 is a RIP designed for Epson models with some very handy features for wedding and events photographers, says Kevin Carter

Offering features such as borders, frames, layout packages and free access to a raft of first-rate profiles, ImagePrint is a RIP intended solely for photographers. As with rival software programs, it replaces the manufacturer's driver for complete control over the printer, either locally or over a network, so when purchasing a licence you specify a particular model. However there's a twist - the price is based on the format. For example, the license for the popular 17-inch Epson SP3800/3880 is priced at $895 (£570), while the roll-fed SP4880 is $1495 (£953). Support is mainly limited to Epson professional printers, although some pro-orientated HP and Canon models have been added recently and I'd expect to see more in future.

As an ICC colour managed application with support for both RGB and CMYK, ImagePrint can use the vast majority of ICC colour profiles, including your own custom-made profiles. But one of the big attractions of the program is access to ImagePrint's library of profiles, which includes some 27,000 profiles for over 400 papers. A number of profiles are shipped on the disc for your specified printer, but a download manager application is included to gain access to the library. Selecting and downloading the appropriate profile takes no more than a few minutes.
ImagePrint offers a range of greyscale and soft-proofing profiles for Photoshop, plus colour profiles for five lighting temperatures (daylight, tungsten, cool white fluorescent (CWF), CWF portrait and mixed lighting), across a range of Fine Art papers from Hahnemuehle, Canson, MOAB, Ilford, Epson and many others. If a particular profile isn't available Colorbytesoftware will build it for free (although wisely, it doesn't say how many times).

User's guide
I was expecting the user interface to be complicated but it has a very minimalist look and is reasonably intuitive. Colorbytesoftware's approach is to keep it as simple as possible. But relative simplicity masks enormous flexibility and if you are to use the program to its fullest extent, you will need to refer to the manual or watch online videos. There are number of floating windows, and not all of them open by default.
Images are selected from the browser and, providing you've selected the appropriate paper size from the main toolbar, you can add what you like by print size from the Layout window. You can add the same image as many times as you like, or add a mix - ImagePrint will do the rest. You can also position the image on the paper yourself, cramming on as many different sizes as you can. If one doesn't fit, ImagePrint will automatically add another page. If you're printing from cut-sheets, for instance using the SP3800, you can align mixed size photos with precision for the Rotatrim, saving paper waste and time. For a wedding or event photographer this is a hugely compelling feature and a real game changer.
Another attractive and unique feature is ImagePrint's ability to produce split tone prints with the greyscale profiles. I was able to add a split tone defining both the shadow and highlight tints and the point of separation, or blend, with ease. Two colour/tint pickers allow for easy selection, although I found it's easier to click on a point than drag the picker. A slider is used for the blend and the preview is updated in a real-time, making accurate selections possible. If I have a niggle it's that the image is low-resolution, and somewhat slightly disconcerting in use. But for wedding and fine art photographers the greyscale profiles and split-toning feature will have enormous potential.

Other features include adding borders and text, although this requires some skill and a concerted reading of the instruction manual. None of it seems really difficult, but don't expect to be able to knock something up on the fly. And if you do go wrong, you can always take a step back - none of the adjustments are destructive though. A border browser has some templates but with my installation, selecting this window caused ImagePrint to crash.

Crop marks are pretty simple to add and can be used for canvas wraps. Canvas users will also be interested in the ability to adjust the number of print-head passes - the default setting is four, but for media with pitted or highly absorbent surfaces it can be doubled to eight. Both choices have a high-speed option, like the original Epson driver, but unless otherwise required the 4-pass setting is sufficient for most needs. Like the choice of droplet size, either 1440 or 2880dpi, the number of print-head passes is made from the print dialog, so it can't be altered until you literally pass over to the IP driver. Still, without the frustrating resetting often seen in rival printer drivers, IP remembers the last setting making mistakes less likely.

Conclusions
Best of all was the quality of output. I have to say that that I've tried several high-end printer calibration solutions and although it is possible to calibrate for specific lighting, it's time-consuming and expensive. I also have to admit that I find Epson profiles pretty good all-round but there is room for improvement, as ImagePrint abundantly and consistently demonstrates.
One the downsides is that, to prevent misuse, a dongle is shipped with the software. As the discs are mailed from the USA, there's a possibility of VAT and import duties. But considering the support for custom-profiles and the ease of use overall, there's little here not to like.

CONTACTS
Price, based on printer size:
13-inch $695
17-inch $895
24-inch $1495
44-inch $2495
60-inch $2995
Discounts are available for multiple licenses and flexible licensing on exchange for larger or smaller printers.

NEEDS
Intel Mac running OS X 10.4 or later.
Windows Vista, XP, 2000
colorbytesoftware.com.

Text from The British Journal of Photography website:

One of the first predecessors to modern cameras was invented in the 1800’s and were known as Daguerreotype’s, named after the inventor Jacques Mande Daguerre . One of first and most pristine examples of a Daguerreotype has surfaced in a private collection that was previously not known to exist. The camera is called the world’s oldest and most expensive.

The wooden sliding-box camera was made in Paris in September 1830 by Alphonse Giroux, the brother in law of the inventor of the camera. The camera is signed by Jacques Mande Daguerre to verify that the device is authentic.

The camera was found in Northern Germany and is in outstanding condition and even has the manual written in German that goes along with the camera. The whole works is up for auction at a starting price of 200,000 euro. The final sales price is expected to be 500,000 to 700,000 euro.

January 7 - February
 13

Two concurrent photography exhibitions featuring, respectively, a selection of rarely shown photographs by Diane Arbus and new work by William Eggleston. The installation of Arbus's work, In the Absence of Others, brings together a group of photographs of empty interiors and artificial landscapes spanning the 1960s. The Eggleston exhibition is titled 21st Century.

Cheim & Read
547 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001

'Weegee-It's a crime to take photographs this good...'

11.25.09 - 01.09.10

From the Michael Hoppen Gallery website:

An exhibition of early photographs by Weegee the Famous and selected artists.

Always in the right place at the right time, Weegee’s lense was perpetually aimed the visceral and sometimes violent city of New York. In 1993, Wilma Fellig, Weegee’s widow, bequeathed his entire archive of original prints to the ICP in New York, and we are delighted to offer selected pieces of this unique photographers work which includes many images never previously seen in the UK.

Weegee photographed New York in the 1930s and 1940s in the same iconic and instantly recognisable way Woody Allen was to film the city in the 1970s. Weegee’s voyeuristic eye sought out theharsh realities of the urban experience, but also the joie de vivre and carefree attitude which typified the years between the wars.

Born in 1899 in the Austrian province of Galicia, which is today part of Ukraine, Weegee (real name Usher, then Arthur Fellig) was the second of seven children from Jewish parents. Weegee's family left Europe in 1910 for the Lower East Side ofManhattan, where Weegee grew up. He left home at 15 and in 1917 got a job in a photo studio and became assistant to a cameraman. In 1921, he got a part-time position at the New York Times and its legendary agency Wide World Photos, soon afterwards switching to Acme News pictures. Eventually, frustrated with the lack of recognition for his work, and not having his name on photographs, he became a freelance news photographer by late 1935.



Weegee’s images bridge the gap between art, evidence and photojournalism. His nickname was a phonetic rendering of ouija,as in ouija board, due to his sixth sense of being able to arrive at a scene minutes after the occurrence of a crime. In 1938, Fellig was the only New York newspaper reporter with a permit to have a portable police-band short wave radio. The trunk of his car was a carefully maintained darkroom, to enable himto deliver his freelance images tothe newspapers as speedily as possible. He worked predominantly at night listening closely to radio broadcasts, often beating the NYPD to the scene. It also meant he was on hand to document the raucous night life in the Bowery, Harlem and The Village, and he went on to document the society events and functions of the era.

Hisphotographs were taken with the very basic press photographer equipment, a Graflek and blue flashbulbs which gave his work such graphic qualities. He had no formal photographic training being entirely self taught, and was a relentless self-promoter.

As an adjunct to Weegee’s work, we will also be showing further images by Sergei Vasiliev, and Stan Healy.

Sergei Vasiliev's graphic and unflinching photographs show the grim reality of the Russian prison system and some of the characters that inhabit it. The tattoo motifs which Vasiliev was helping to document for the KGB represent the uncensored lives of the criminal classes, ranging from violence and pornography to politics. This was an underclass with its own caste and judicial system, and the history of each individual was instantly recognizable to the other.

Edward ‘Stan’ Healy was born in Missoula, Montana and as a local newspaper photojournalist documented crime scenes and local news stories. Healy has been praised for anability to capture a story in a single image and do so with an eye for composition. However, he also had a taste for the provocative and disturbing, and his images can be shocking. all the more so because of the parochial backdrop of mid 20th century Missoula- a small Midwest city whose boom years at the forefront of the logging industry were sadly over.

We strongly advise early viewing of this unique exhibition. Prepare to be shocked, amused and informed!

All pictures will be for sale.

National Public Radio features the work of Roy DeCarava, who died recently at the age of 89, with Black-And-White America, an online gallery plus an interview and audio about the man and his work.

At The Metropolitan Museum of Art

September 22, 2009–January 3, 2010

From the Met website:
This exhibition celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Americans, Robert Frank’s influential suite of black-and-white photographs made on a cross-country road trip in 1955–56. Although Frank’s depiction of American life was criticized when the book was released in the U.S. in 1959, it soon became recognized as a masterpiece of street photography. Born in Switzerland in 1924, Frank is considered one of the great living masters of photography. The exhibition will feature all 83 photographs published in The Americans and will be the first time that this body of work is presented to a New York audience. In addition, the exhibition includes contact sheets that Frank used to create the book; earlier photographs made in Europe, Peru, and New York; a short film by the artist on his life; and his later re-use of iconic images from the series

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street
New York City

The Joy of Portraits

September 9 - November 7

In 1976 Keizo Kitajima made his impressive debut with photographs capturing Koza in Okinawa, a town near the US military base, in the period just after the end of the Vietnam War. Subsequently, he expanded his purview to include Tokyo, New York, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union, just as that nation was on the verge of collapse.

The Joy of Portraits, featuring portrait work from each of these series, presents the most complete picture to date of the extraordinary photographer Keizo Kitajima's work from 1975 - 1991, including many previously unseen images.

Amador Gallery
41 E. 57th Street
New York, NY 10022

212 759 6740

Harman Technology is introducing a new online print service aimed at black-and-white shooters. The service is available for UK and European customers. For more details, visit ilfordlab.com.

Ilford Lab Direct allows photographers to upload their digital files and receive back silver gelatine prints, using Ilford's black-and-white chemistry and paper.

Film photographers can also use the site to download order forms for 35mm and 120 film processing to be used with Ilford Photo's direct mail order service. The service is operated from the Ilford Photo's manufacturing site in Mobberley, Cheshire, and processing of digital files takes up to five working days.