PhoozL (With Joel Meyerowitz) (deadline: June 4, 2012, 11:59 pm EST)

History> The inauguration of a recurring “super-judged” photo contest run by the photography education and entertainment site PhoozL, which features assignments, critiques, competitions and more, created by Harald Johnson.

Concept> Legendary photographer Joel Meyerowitz, author of the monograph Legacy, will judge images pertaining to the theme “Seeing the Light.” In this video, he explains that he’s looking for “something surprising, something unexpected, some ordinary event that becomes extraordinary because the light changes it in just such a way.”

Details> No processing/editing or capture date restrictions. Grand Prize Winner receives a priceless one-on-one review of their photography by Joel Meyerowitz himself. Second-Place Prize is a Course Technology PRT Free Book Certificate or voucher redeemable here. Third-Place Prize is a one-year gift subscription to Aperture magazine. 

How To Apply> Entry is FREE to members (18+) registered with the website. Submit up to five (5) photos relating to the theme online by June 4, 2012, 12:59 pm EST.

Brighton Photo Fringe OPEN 2012 (deadline: June 4, 2012, 5:00 pm BST)

History> Every two years, Brighton Photo Fringe co-ordinates a city-wide festival of exhibitions and events in partnership with Brighton Photo Biennial, supporting photographers and lens-based artists and showcasing the best of current photographic practice.

Concept> Emerging-to-midcareer artists, currently living or working in the UK are invited to submit any lens-based work that has not yet been exhibited anywhere in the UK for a solo exhibition opportunity at Brighton Photo Fringe.

Details> Clare Grafik, Adam Broomberg, Oliver Chanarin, and Susanna Brown are judging the work. In addition to a high profile solo exhibition, winners receive a £500 artist’s fee, a production budget and travel expenses within the UK. 

How To Apply> Entry fee is £15 per submission. Email a link to up to 20 images in JPEG format at 72 dpi, along with details of the production of submitted work, a statement of up to 500 words about the work, a statement of up to  250 words about how the work will be presented, and an artist’s CV by June 4, 2012, 5:00 pm BST.

Photo Levallois 2012 (deadline: June 9, 2012, 11:59 pm GMT +2)

History> As part of the Photo Levallois Festival, which will take place in October and November 2012, the city of Levallois will be awarding a photography prize to support young international contemporary creation, and discover and promote new talents.

Concept> Photographers under 35 years of age are invited to submit new work of any contemporary photographic process which has not been previously exhibited or published.

Details> The panel of judges consisting of five personalities from the art world including one representative of the city of Levallois, meet in June 2012 and announce the winner the same day. First prize winners are awarded a sum of €10,000 and the opportunity to exhibit their work during the Photo Levallois Festival at L’Escale Gallery.

How To Apply> To submit, download the full rules and regulations, and mail in at least 15 photographs consistent in content and form of presentation, along with a supporting letter up to 1000 words, a letter of recommendation, and a signed copy of the regulations by June 9, 2012, 12:59 pm GMT +2.

Center Forward: International Call For Entries (deadline: June 20, 2012, 11:59 pm MDT)

History> Founded in 2004, The Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, CO is a nonprofit organization supported by donations, grants, and memberships. With offices, classrooms, and two galleries, the Center provides ongoing juried exhibitions of fine art photography by artists from around the world.

Concept> Photography’s “ability to capture our cultural changes, the environments we inhabit, and the thoughts we keep play[s] a vital role in giving us greater insights into our world and ourselves. In the 2012 Center Forward exhibit we are interested in exploring this unique quality of photography, therefore the theme is open and all subject matter is welcome.”

Details> Fine art photography gallery Directors Ann M. Jastrab and Hamidah Glasgow select work to be exhibited in the Center’s Main Gallery exhibition, Online Gallery exhibition, and Print Catalog. Two artists selected by the jurors will also receive $425 each along with a LiveBooks Website award valued at $399.

How To Apply> Entry is $20 for the first three images for members, $35 for non-members. Each additional image (unlimited) may be submitted for $10 a piece.  Download the upload guidelines and submit online by June 20, 2012, 11:59 pm MDT.

© Sylvia Plachy

The Center for Photography at Woodstock
59 Tinker Street
Woodstock, NY
(845) 679-9957

Lecture: Saturday, June 2, 8:00 pm
Admission: $7 / $5 for members, seniors, and students.

Photographer Sylvia Plachy, a contributor to the Village Voice and The New Yorker for many years, will be discussing her career as a master storyteller.

Workshop: Saturday, June 2–Sunday, June 3
Click here for tuition costs.

In conjunction with this lecture is the workshop, Editing the Photo Essay. Participants will be able to edit and sequence their photographs alongside Plachy, in order to begin to build a photo essay, book, or exhibition.

This Side of Paradise

Exhibition on view through June 5, 2012
Thursday – Sunday, 1:00 – 7:00 pm
FREE

The Andrew Freedman Home
1125 Grand Concourse
Bronx, NY
(718) 293-8100

No Longer Empty, a not-for-profit arts organization, presents a group exhibition in the newly reopened Andrew Freedman Home. The Home was once built to be a haven for the rich elderly who had lost their fortunes. Bequeathed by millionaire Andrew Freedman, the Home provided not only food and shelter but all the accoutrements of a rich and civilized life style – white glove dinner service, a grand ballroom, a wood-paneled library, a billiard room, and a social committee who organized concerts, opera performances, and the like.

Referencing this quixotic history, This Side of Paradise references the past and reconnect the vision of Andrew Freedman to today’s Bronx and its realities. Sylvia Plachy is one of the featured artists and she is showing photographs that were published in 1980 for an article written by Vivian Gornick for The Village Voice. The images capture the lives of the residents at this time, showing them at their social hour, reading, or in silent contemplation.

Sylvia Plachy has appeared in Aperture issues 207 and 206. She also has two Aperture-published books, Self Portrait with Cows Going Home and Goings On About Town: Photographs for the New Yorker.

© Kate Elliott, Courtesy The Photographers’ Gallery

Likely few would consider animated GIF images–those primitive computer animations often just a few pixels wide–fit enough for a photography exhibition. Perhaps that’s because there has yet to be a space fit enough to exhibit them. Now, London’s Photographers’ Gallery, which finally reopened this May with double the exhibition space after an 18-month, £9.2m renovation, offers digital facilities to support a rapidly evolving medium.

One of the main reasons behind the renovation which began in 2010, Gallery Director Brett Rogers says in a video interview with the Guardian, was to develop ”facilities that are fit for purpose in the 21st century, to show works of a larger scale, but also to reflect the conditions in which most people experience photography.”

The Soho gallery was the first independent public space in Britain devoted to photography when it was founded in the 1970s. Today, in addition to three floors of gallery space, room enough for the commanding, large-scale prints in their inaugural exhibition of Edward Burtynsky’s oil photographs (on view through July 1, 2012), they’ve also built what they call a “digital wall.”

This display, located near the gallery entrance, is made up of eight large screens presenting a running program of digital images visible from the outside street. Wendy McMurdo, one of 40 artists that includes Penelope Umbrico, was asked to produce a moving image GIF for the wall by Katrina Sluis, the galley’s new curator of digital programing. McMurdo writes on the FOAM blog on the “joy” of contributing to their inaugural digital exhibition Born in 1987: the animated GIF (on view through July 1, 2012). This initiative, McMurdo says, demonstrates the gallery’s “recognition that it is in the digital and social domain that photography must, ultimately, discover its new purposes and new meaning.”

On the other hand, the Photographers’ Gallery is also offering opportunity to counterbalance what Edwin Heathcote for the Financial Times calls the “culture of browsing and glancing”–when people end up scanning thousands of images a day–that has come to prominence with such development. One room in the space is dedicated to exhibiting a single image that will change four times a year.

Moreover, their new education center doubles as a camera obscura, which in conjunction with the digital wall, Rogers says, should “enable people to reflect on the history of optics,” in its entirety.

Burtynsky: Oil
Exhibition on view:
May 19 – July 1, 2012

Born in 1987: the animated GIF
Exhibition on view:
May 19 – July 1, 2012

This Sunday, June 3, 2012 at 3:00 pm, join Katrina Sluis for a FREE discussion on “Curating the Digital Image.”

The Photographers’ Gallery
16 – 18 Ramillies Street
London, UK W1F 7LW
+44(0)20 7087 9300

Aperture aggregates the best posts from this past week in the photography blogosphere.

• Life shares a slideshow of black-and-white, mid-century images, “Orange Crush: In Praise of the Golden Gate Bridge,” to celebrate the  iconic bridge’s 75-year anniversary this Sunday, May 27, 2012. Coming soon: Aperture commemorates with a beautiful, oversized reissue of Richard Misrach’s monograph Golden Gate, in which the photographer shot the bridge in large format from his front porch at all times of the day for three years.
• New Yorker‘s PhotoBooth and Time’s LightBox both share selections from the recently released 870,000-image archive of historical New York City photographs by the department of records. Both feature work by Eugene de Salignac of the Aperture monograph New York Rises (2007). A limited edition print of “Brooklyn Bridge, showing painters on suspenders, October 7, 1914” is featured on the cover of the monograph and in Time’s selection.
• More on Gordon Parks this week, who was featured in David Campany’s essay in Aperture issue 206 and currently has a retrospective at the International Center of Photography, celebrating the centennial of his birth. PDN shares a 10-image gallery of his work, while La Lettre de la Photographie publishes a 1993 interview with Parks conducted by John Leongard, on what it was like photographing Black Muslims for Life magazine in the 60s.
• Fototazo posts a lengthy recap of their group book discussion of Walker Evans‘ American Photographs with Flak Photo’s Andy Adams, focusing on essays from Gerry Badger’s The Pleasure of Good Photographs. The discussion, which is hosted on Facebook, continued Monday with the essay ”A Certain Sensibility: John Gossage, the Photographer as Auteur.” Stay tuned for a discussion of the essay ”Without Author or Art: The ‘Quiet’ Photograph” on Monday, June 4, 2012.
• Rebecca Norris Webb, who spoke at Aperture gallery on Friday, March 23, 2012 during a co-lecture with Alex Webb, writes on the process of putting together her monograph My Dakota, launched on May 24, 2012 at the International Center of Photography, for Time’s LightBox. Work from the book will be exhibited at the Dahl Arts Center in Rapid City, South Dakota, June 1 – October 13, 2012.
• Photoshelter Blog interviews a multitude of industry professionals and posts “7 Myths About Portfolio Reviews Debunked,” which could be similarly useful to emerging photographers as their May 10 piece “Photography Through the Eyes of Art Directors,” featuring work from Alex Prager.
• Appropriately timed, American Photo Magazine posts their annual list of Top 10 Photographers who shoot weddings, which is where most our staff here seems to have taken off for the long weekend. A companion piece at PopPhoto takes a closer look at these photographers’ gear and process.

Freischwimmer 130, 2009 © Wolfgang Tillmans

Exhibition on view through August 19, 2012

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen
3050 Humlebæk
Denmark

Over the past three years, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen, has collected the work of over 50 emerging artists, who are being unveiled in Pink Caviar, an extensive exhibition offering a fresh, contemporary approach to the narrative of modern art.  The exhibition features a diverse group of work covering a plethora of genres: small drawings and grand sculptures, photography and installation, as well as painting and video. This collection maintains a future perspective, striving to become more and more interesting as time elapses.

Following the Pink Caviar opening, Louisiana is hosting a two-day art festival on May 25 and May 26. Two Days Art will present a mixture of lectures, interviews, performances, music, tours, readings, as well as a meet-and-greet with photographer Hans-Peter Feldmann.

Artists featured: Rosa Barba, Yael Bartana, Sophie Calle, Vija Celmins, Thomas Demand, Olafur Eliasson, Andreas Eriksson, Simon Evans, Öyvind Fahlström, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Poul Gernes, Sigurdur Gudmundsson, Shilpa Gupta, Jacob Holdt, Roni Horn, Elliot Hundley, Matthew Day Jackson, Chris Johanson, Isaac Julien, Jesper Just, Zilvinas Kempinas, Rosy Keyser, Anselm Kiefer, Per Kirkeby, Yayoi Kusama, Klara Lidén, Michel Majerus, Gerold Miller, Marilyn Minter, Nicolai Mircea, Sigmar Polke, Sheng Qi, Tal R, Daniel Richter, Thomas Ruff, Allen Ruppersberg, Yorgos Sapountzis, Dayanita Singh, Tove Storch, Thomas Struth, Al Taylor, Wolfgang Tillmans, Marcel van Eeden, Francesca Woodman, Erwin Wurm.

Sophie Calle was featured Aperture issues 191 and 142. Hans-Peter Feldmann was featured in Aperture issue 203.

FEATURING:

The Mushroom Collector, Jason Fulford, discusses his obsessive and genre-defying project.  (cover)

An interview with influential French publisher Robert Delpire about his formidable achievements over the last fifty years as a pioneer in photography magazine and book publishing, films, and advertising. Information on related exhibitions here.

Young South African photographer Daniel Naudé’s series Animal Farm that chronicles mankind’s dominion over animals.

Excerpts from Martin Parr’s new book, Up and Down Peachtree, a whimsical look at Atlanta, Georgia’s popular culture.

Award-winning photojournalist Stephanie Sinclair’s images documenting women’s issues from around the world.

Sylvia Plachy captures and notes fleeting moments at the Kentucky Derby and a nearby cemetery.

Best-selling author Francine Prose on Judy Linn, best known for her photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith.

Vintage Congolese nightlife photos by Jean Depara.

Click here to subscribe now and get a free book!

Untitled (Man with Glasses and Bow Tie), 1969 © Vivian Maier, Courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

On view through May 26, 2012

Steven Kasher Gallery
521 West 23rd Street
New York City, NY

When street photographer Vivian Maier passed away in 2009, she left behind over 120,000 negatives and 2,000 undeveloped rolls of film. Maier made hundreds of thousands of distinguished street photographs throughout New York City and Chicago during her life. Now, three years later, many of her undeveloped rolls of film have been processed and printed.

Vivian Maier: Unseen Images features a selection of the newly developed film, shot in the 1960s and 1970s. Thirty-five prints of the recently discovered work are debuting at the Steven Kasher Gallery.

The new book, Vivian Maier: Street Photographs, edited by John Maloof, is excerpted in Aperture’s latest issue, 207.

The Centre National des Arts Plastiques (CNAP) in France presents Número tres: de la casa a la fábrica, a group show of photography and video exploring the interplay of professional and domestic spheres and spaces as well as their representation, featuring work by Robert Adams, Darren Almond, Maria Thereza Alves, and many more.

Número tres, which opens next Thursday, May 31, 2012 at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge in Barcelona (on view through September 30), was inspired in part, and plays off of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1975 film Numéro Duex. Godard’s acclaimed experimental piece explores links between work and home, machines and people, and the power struggles of an ordinary French family. It presents two juxtaposed “observations” shot on video and played back on two side-by-side monitors which were then simultaneously recorded on 35 mm film.

Given the delocalized role of the factory in today’s multinational economy and society, Número tres offers an opportunity for the reconsideration of these links. “Through a selection of contemporary representations of domestic life, urban landscapes, and gestures of love and labor,” according to the press release, “the exhibition traces new paths from house to factory, from home to work, between these two spaces that are so far apart and yet so close.”

In related programing, CNAP presents Número cuatro/Pantallas paralelas, a panel discussion exploring art, texts, and theoretical work that addresses the privatization of public space, and the publicizing of private space, curated by Pascal Beausse, Curator of Photographic Collections, CNAP and Pascale Cassagnau, Curator of cinema, video, new media, CNAP. More info on date and time to be announced here.

Robert Adams, whose classic monographs The New West (2008) and Summer Nights, Walking (2009) were recently reissued by Aperture, also has a traveling retrospective, The Place We Live, currently on view through June 3, 2012 at LACMA, organized by the Yale University Art Gallery, profiled here by Time’s LightBox.

Adams’ work is also featured in Aperture issues 197, 180, 169 and 168.

Número tres: de la casa a la fábrica
Exhibition on view:
May 31 – September 30, 2012

La Virreina Centre de la Imatge
La Rambla 99
Barcelona, Spain

The Alice Austen House, a fantastic and under-acknowledged resource for photography in New York City, is an exhibition space and museum dedicated to the ground-breaking, absolutely independent and unique photographer Alice Austen (1866-1952). One of America’s earliest and most prolific female photographers, Alice Austen broke away from the constraints of the Victorian era to create her own independent life.

Help the Alice Austen House take some much needed steps toward its own preservation and restoration via the 2012 New York initiative Partners in Preservation.  All you need to do is go to http://www.PartnersinPreservation.com and VOTE – a vote for this site will help direct national funding to keep the Alice Austen House vital and able to continue its programming of exhibitions and education in a beautiful, unique historic space. Voting ends tonight, 11:59PM EST on Monday, May 21.

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Through June 14, 2012 the Alice Austen House Museum is pleased to present Foreclosed: Documents from the American Housing Crisis. The exhibition includes works by: Bruce Gilden, Lauren Greenfield, Todd Hido, Imara Moore, John Moore, John Francis Peters, T.J. Proechel, Brian Shumway, Brian Ulrich and Guillaume Zuili, examining how artists are using photography to record the aftermath of the housing bubble; from its’ beginning in 2006 to the dramatic effects it still has on the American Landscape today. The artists and photographers in the exhibition depict the ruins of rich and poor neighborhoods, as well as the families affected by the economic downturn. As a result, the exhibition aims to explore the disintegration of the American dream and how it effects a culture where home ownership is no longer a reality.

Foreclosed: Documents from the American Housing Crisis
On view through June 14, 2012

The Alice Austen House Museum
2 Hylan Boulevard
Staten Island, NY 10305

Aperture aggregates the best posts from this past week in the photography blogosphere.

• “It is almost impossible for me to shoot a photo where someone is NOT taking a picture or posing for one,” writes Martin Parr on his blog in a post titled, “Too Much Photography.” Prime examples of this can be found in his series Tourism Inc. which is being published by Reporters Without Borders for the 20th anniversary of their “100 Photos for Press Freedom” collection, accompanied by an exhibition at Galerie Photo Fnac Forum des Halles in Paris, La Lettre de la Photographie reports. His photographs of Atlanta for the High Museum’s “Picturing the South” series are also featured in the upcoming summer issue of Aperture 207.
• In further commentary on CNN’s controversial edit of Stacy Kranitz’ series on Appalachia, Joerg Colberg writes, “If we wanted to know what a place looked like we would need an infinity of photographs, taken from all possible angles excluding nothing, seeing everything at the same time,” a notion he thinks antithetical to the practice of photography, but increasingly possible, not only as Parr points out through the proliferations of cameras, but with the help of the Google Street View car, profiled by the Times here. Check out art made with photos pulled from the Street View service by Aaron Hobson, Jon Rafman, and Michael Wolf of the monograph Transparent City (Aperture 2008). And stay tuned for the upcoming re-issue and expanded edition of A New American Picture by Doug Rickard coming from Aperture in fall 2012.
• Perpetual shooting brings us to the post on APhotoEditor asking, “Is It Time To Eliminate Stills From Your Shoot?” due to the ease and success with which quality still images may be pulled from video footage as a result of the recent proliferation of HDSLR cameras on the market. Now with no need to pick the decisive moment, soon no need to pick where to focus, who’ll need photographers? Have a look through SFMOMA’s page “Is Photography Over?” and read about the dialectical relationship of aesthetics and distribution/media on Fotomuseum Winterthur’s blog Still Searching.
• On a different note, watch this great video from Feature Shoot, “Inside the World’s Only Tintype Photography Studio,” a photo gallery and walk-in commercial tintype portrait studio. Owner/photographer Michael Shindler says, ”I think what people seem to be looking for now is a kind of photography where the process itself is going to impart its own flavor to the finished image, a little bit of uncertainty.”
• American Suburb X  shares Kelly Dennis’ 2005 essay, “Landscape and the West – Irony and Critique in New Topographic Photography,” which explores the work of Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Art Sinsabaugh and more. After reading, check out new-New Topographic photography in Camps & Cabins at G. Gibson Gallery in Seattle, the third solo show by Eirik Johnson, author of the monograph Sawdust Mountain (Aperture 2009), on view through May 26, 2012.
• LENS blog profiles the opening of “Gordon Parks: 100 Years” at the International Center of Photography, celebrating the centennial of the legendary photographer’s birth with an exhibition of his work presented not inside the center, but in their windows, on view to the street. Parks was featured in an essay by David Campany on “Precedented Photography” in Aperture issue 206. His writing also appears in the requisite volume, Photography Speaks: 150 Photographers on Their Art.
• Fototazo posts Part II of their three-part interview with Oregon-based photographer Blake Andrews of the popular blog B. During this exchange, they invite him to create a competition for photographers to rank and sequence famous photographs, and predict the most popular sequence. The results of the contest will be published on Fototazo and Andrews’ blog. Part III of the interview will be published on Fototazo May 24, 2012.