Boxer’s Hands, 1933 © Willard Van Dyke

Exhibition on view:
June 16–September 30, 2012

Monterey Museum of Art
559 Pacific Street
Monterey, CA
(831) 372-5477

Group f/64 was a pioneer photography crew of seven residing in northern California. They abandoned the soft-focus, pictorial style of photography popularized in the early twentieth century and instead promoted “straight” photography, communicating by means of realism, high contrast, and extreme detail. Monterey Museum of Art presents In Sharp Focus: The Legacy of Monterey Photography, which examines Group f/64 and their successors. Legendary artists Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Alma Lavenson, Willard Van Dyke, and Edward Weston are included in the exhibition. These photographers transformed American photography by relinquishing interpretive manipulation by progressing towards pure, sharp images with a maximum depth of field. Joining these legendary artists will be works by: Henry Gilpin, Rod Dresser, John Sexton, and Michael Kenna.

One of the founding members of Aperture and Group f/64 Ansel Adams is featured in Aperture issues 169 and 168. Cunningham’s work can be seen in the Aperture published, The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the Unconscious. Weston is featured in Aperture issues 188 and 140, appears in Aperture published The Edge of Vision as well as Edward Weston: Nudes.

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

• Time’s Lightbox profiles ‘Act’: Meditations on the Disabled Body by Denis Darzacq, a two-year project of photographing “people who have had trouble finding a place in society from the beginning of their lives,” he says. The Paris-based photographer known for his high-energy images and dynamic subjects will be giving an artist talk at Aperture this Monday, April 16, 2012 at 6:30 pm, FREE.
• Kathy Ryan, editor of The New York Times Magazine Photographs, shares the fascinating backstory of a photograph of Mohammad Ali with his future wife Lonnie that ran in the Sunday Magazine, taken at “the moment Cassius and I met,”  Lonnie wrote in an email to the photographer, Steve Schapiro.
• The New Yorker‘s photo department shares a collection of reader-submitted, “Hand-Picked Instagrams,” (as Wall Street Journal did last week, and more publications probably will in the future) alongside a thought-provoking essay by Ian Crouch, “Instagram’s Instant Nostalgia.” This, in the same week New York Times’ Bits Blog reports Facebook will buy Instagram for $1 billion.
• The British Journal of Photography reports on a controversial ad campaign for photographers’ rights launched by the French organization Union des Photographes Professionnels – Auteurs. In related news this week, the American Society of Media Photographers has filed a class action lawsuit against Google, PetaPixel reports, for “scanning, indexing, and storing copyright work without permission of the copyright holders” for their ambitions Google Books project.
• DIY gallerists take note: Phototuts+ shares “An Expert Guide to Matting and Framing a Photo,” which should be useful after you’ve watched their video lecture on Ansel Adams–delivered by Allan Ross who was Adams’ darkroom assistant for many years–and printed a bunch of restrained, expertly metered black-and-white landscape photographs of your own.
• American Suburb X shares a number of Nan Goldin readings this week, including an essay by Nan on actress and close friend Cookie Mueller who died of AIDS in 1989, as well as a fascinating in-depth paper by Mihaela Precup, “The Wound Which Speaks of Unremembered Time: Nan Goldin’s Cookie Portfolio and the Autobiographics of Mourning.” All great reads; our only quibble is: where did they come from? [UPDATE: ASX has appended the source of one of the pieces, created originally by Dirck Halstead at the once-pioneering web journal digitaljournalist.org]
• The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announce their 2012 Fellowships in photography, PDN Pulse reports. Ten photographers, including Doug Dubois of the monograph All the Days and Nights, and John Gossage, whose exhibition The Pond and a Little Romance opens today in Chicago, join the ranks of past recipients Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Robert Adams, Richard Mosse, Brian Ulrich, and Penelope Umbrico.

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

• Time magazine’s Lightbox features Manish Swarup’s photograph of a Tibetan exile self-immolating during a demonstration in New Delhi in their Pictures of the Week, reminding of Malcolm Brown’s iconic image of a Buddhist monk who set himself aflame in protest in 1963, and the photojournalistic ethical issues that go with it.
• Conscientious explores the challenges of still portraiture and points to a new study published by the British Psychology Society which finds that “the same people are rated as more attractive in videos than in static images taken from those videos.”
• NPR’s The Picture Show features “A Lifetime of Photos in a Little Email Retrospective,” images by “somewhat hermetic” Dennis Darling who relishes “staying under most radar” and rarely publishes or exhibits his work for other than those on his small email chain.
• The New Yorker‘s Photobooth commemorates Edward Steichen’s would-be 130th birthday with a slideshow of the seminal photographer’s images published in their magazine across the years.  Several limited edition prints from his early work are available at Aperture.
• “Taking a photograph is a response… it’s a pre-rational response, it’s an intuitive emotional response, it’s spontaneous, it’s immediate,” says Alex Webb of The Suffering of Light in Part 4 of 6 of the Q&A  session with Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb by David Chickey of Radius Books at The National Museum Of Singapore on March 9, 2012, now all posted on Invisible Photographer Asia.
• APhotoEditor suggests, “Perhaps Most Photographers Don’t Understand the Value of Usage,” posting a reader-submitted story in which an “ex-student lied about having [her] permission and gave the image to the college, which then used the image on a billboard advertisement that wraps around a 20 story building on a very busy road in the city.” How was this resolved and did she get paid?
• Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier Bresson, Robert Frank, Stephen Shore, Nan Goldin, William Eggleston, Alec Soth, Diane Arbus are all photographers you should… IGNORE? That’s according to Bryan Formhals’ brash OpEd piece on LPV Magazine “10 Oeuvres Aspiring Photographers Should Ignore.”  Wired and the Click got a kick out of the post, which was inspired by “The 10 Most Harmful Novels for Aspiring Writers.” We think self-willed ignorance is more harmful than knowing one’s precedents and counter with this oldie but goodie: those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

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

• LensBlog explores why Rodrigo Abd‘s photograph of a young Syrian boy expressing grief over the death of his father landed on the front page of three of the most prominent national papers in the United States.

• Time magazine’s photo blog Lightbox celebrated it’s one year anniversary, revisiting their first post and the continuing saga of War is Personal by legendary photojournalist Eugene Richards, of the controversial 1994 Aperture monograph Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue.

• Conscientious, GalleristNY and LVP Magazine weigh in on Cindy Sherman’s retrospective at MOMA and on the “unanimity” among critics in New York reviewing it.

• One year after a devastating tsunami hit the coast of Japan on March 11, 2011, The New York Times does a “Side-by-Side look at Distruction and Renewal.” The Big Picture at Boston.com, Huffington Post, National Geographic, and The New Yorker ran similar posts, as did Time’s Lightbox, featuring a slideshow of photos by James Nachtwey, whose work is in The New York Times Magazine Photographs (Aperture 2011) edited by Kathy Ryan.

• NPR prompts the question: “You know Ansel, But Who is Robert Adams (And Why Should You Care)?” Bob Adams, of the recently reissued Aperture monographs The New West and Summer Nights, Walking, has a traveling retrospective The Place We Live now on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

• Sarah Palmer was just announced winner of the Aperture 2011 Portfolio Prize for her series As a Real House. Read her 2009 review of Eirik Johnson’s Sawdust Mountain, Robert Adam’s Summer Nights and Joel Meyerowitz’s Legacy, from when she was editor at Metropolis Magazine.

• Finally, Jonathan Blaustein‘s intensely personal column on APhotoEditor.com reviewing Donald Weber‘s beautifully put together photobook Interrogations is one of the best-written posts we’ve read all week. Interrogations will also be reviewed in the upcoming second issue of The Photobook Review.

Opening reception:
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
6:00–8:00 pm

Exhibition on view:
Friday, March 2, 2012–Saturday, April 21, 2012

Aperture Foundation
547 West 27th Street, 4th Floor
New York, New York
(212) 505-5555

Sondra Gilman and Celso Gonzalez-Falla, two individuals that Art News ranks among the top ten photo collectors in the world, have amassed hundreds of the most iconic images reflecting the diverse nature of the past century of photography. Aperture Foundation pleased to announce the opening of Shared Vision: The Sondra Gilman and Celso Gonzalez-Falla Collection of Photography, featuring over two hundred of those photographs that form one of the world’s best private collections. An exhibition organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Jacksonville, a cultural resource of the University of North Florida, curated by Ben Thompson, MOCA’s curator, and Paul Karabinis, assistant professor of photography at UNF.

Gilman and Gonzalez-Falla’s collaboration hinges on a few underlying principles— mainly, to acquire works of major importance by leading photographers of their generation, and to focus on vintage prints. Although each of the collectors brings a different point of view to the photography—Gonzalez-Falla analyzes color and form, while Gilman responds to images on a more visceral level—these distinct approaches merge into a single, shared vision and emanate from the same goal: to collect photographs that move and inspire them.

Prominet photographers in the collection include Ansel Adams, Eugène Atget, Margaret Bourke-White,Walker Evans, Loretta Lux, Sally Mann, Richard Misrach, Doug and Mike Starn, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Alfred Stieglitz.

The exhibition, organized by MOCA, a cultural resource of the University of North Florida, curated by Ben Thompson, MOCA’s curator, and Paul Karabinis, assistant professor of photography at UNF, is supported by Sondra Gilman and Celso Gonzalez-Falla, The Haskell Company, Marilyn and Charles Gilman III, and Joan and Preston Haskell. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog published by MOCA and produced by Aperture Foundation. This catalog features selected photographs from the exhibition, with historical context about each image and the photographer, curatorial remarks from Ben Thompson and Paul Karabinis, and an exclusive interview with the collectors.

Related Items: 

Young Girl, 1962. © Dorothea Lange

The Summer Show

Exhibition on view:
July 7–September 3, 2011

Scott Nichols Gallery:
49 Geary Street
Fourth Floor
San Francisco, CA
(415) 788-4641

The Scott Nicholas Gallery is currently exhibiting photos from their own collection. The Summer Show features works by legendary and contemporary photographers, including many published by Aperture: Wynn Bullock, Imogen Cunningham, Dorothea Lange, Edward Weston, and (Aperture founding member) Ansel Adams. Aperture books from these photographers include Wynn Bullock: Masters of Photography and Edward Weston: Nudes. The second photogravure edition of Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother is available from Aperture. Many of these artists’ works can also be found in Aperture’s golden anniversary book, Photography Past/Forward: Aperture at 50.

Legendary photographer Pirkle Jones died on Sunday, March 15 at the age of 95. Noted for his documentation of the people and changing landscape of Northern California and his controversial series on the Black Panther Party, he was part of the first class of photographers to enter California School of Fine Arts after WWII. There, he studied with Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and Minor White, all who later went on to help establish Aperture magazine in 1952.

Death of a Valley, a collaboration between Jones and Dorothea Lange which chronicled the disappearance of the Berryessa Valley in California as a result of the Monticello Dam, was published as a single issue of Aperture magazine in 1960. Jones later described the project as “one of the most meaningful photographic experiences of my professional life.”

In 2001, Aperture published Pirkle Jones: California Photographs. Featuring his portraits, landscapes, and architectural photographs, Jones documented everything from flea-market finds to some of the most important American social movements of the twentieth century. The same year, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art hosted the companion exhibition, Pirkle Jones: Sixty Years of Photographs.

Tim B. Wride, curator of the exhibition and author of the book essay, wrote:
“Pirkle’s visual legacy is one that can be characterized as masterful, meaningful, and ethical. His talent was singular, prodigious, and honorable. His eyes beheld an abundance of beauty, wisdom, curiosity, and commitment. His heart was open, enfolding, and comforting. A gift. “

Aperture also remembers Jones’s generosity of donating prints to the foundation to help raise funds. His dedication, vision, and love of the craft will be missed. For more information on his life and work, click here.