How might the verbal atmosphere artists create around their work affect or complicate our understanding of it? Would our perception of Diane Arbus’ photographs change were we to hear what she had to say about them?

This Saturday, May 5, 2012 at 5:00pm, as part of the PEN World Voices Festival (now through May 6, 2012), MoMA is screening A Slide Show and Talk By Diane Arbus. The 40-minute film was compiled by Neil Selkirk, Doon Arbus, and Adam Shott from an original 1970 recording of a slide presentation given one year before the photographer’s death. It has been shown less than a dozen times publicly and offers us the rare opportunity to hear the photographer lecture on her images. Nearly 40 years after publication, Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph which features 80 of those images, remains one of our most popular photobooks.

Following the screening, novelist and president of PEN American Center, Francine Prose along with Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Hours, Michael Cunningham, and Doon Arbus discuss how the photographer’s “precise use of language” illuminates her pictures. They will also read from the recently released book, Diane Arbus: A Chronology, which was primarily composed of exerpts from her letters, notebooks, writings, and journals. Through her own words, they explore the nature of her observation.

In the film, according to Yale Daily News, which reviewed a screening at Yale University Art Gallery last month, Arbus said on that topic: “I do it because I think there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.”

Screening:
Saturday, May 5, 2012
5:00–6:30 pm

Film ticket: $12, $10 seniors, $8 students. MoMA members free but a screening ticket is required. Tickets are released one week in advance starting at 9:30 am at MoMA’s main lobby information desk. Please view MoMA’s ticketing policy here.

Museum of Modern Art
Theater 1
11 West 53rd Street
New York, New York
(212) 708-9400

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

• LightBox presents an essay written by Tim Hetherington, who was featured in Aperture issue 204, from the new book Photographs Not Taken, one year after the photographer’s death in Libya. The collection, compiled by Will Steacy (one of Aperture’s Green Cart Commissioned photographers), also features essays by Roger Ballen, Ed Kashi, Mary Ellen Mark, Alec Soth, Peter van Agtmael and more. Additionally, PDN features an 8 image retrospective by Hetherington, whose work is now on view at Yossi Milo Gallery in New York (through May 12, 2012).
• This week in commentary: LPV Magazine  digests Instagram articles by Om Malik, the New Yorker’s Ian Crouch and New York Magazine’s Paul Ford, finds out, “Facebook Buys Instagram, Some Photographers Sad.” APhotoEditor reads Paul Melcher‘s poignant article on La Lettre de La Photographie alongside Marc Andreessen‘s WSJ piece “Software Will Eat The World,” and explores “how a company with 13 employees and no profits [Instagram] can replace a now bankrupt company [Kodak] that once employed over 120,000 people with annual sales of $10 billion as the ‘manufacturer’ of a device to bring photography to the masses.” In related news, NPPA opens a mobile phone photo contest, calling for entries through Sunday, April 22, 2012, while Magnum Photos has deployed another team to Rochester to document the once-vibrant home of Kodak as part of their Postcards From America series.
• Poynter investigates the controversy over the Pentagon delaying the LA Times from publishing photographs of US soldiers posing with the body parts of Afghan corpses, a story which has since elicited over 2000 comments on the Times’ website.
• Sophie Calle, featured in Aperture issues 191 and 142, talks to the Guardian about her best shot from the series Voir La Mer, in which she “took 15 people of all ages, from kids to one man in his 80s, to see [the sea] for the first time.” She photographed them from behind so as to not obstruct their initial encounter, and she captured the entire process, including their reactions, on video. Her current exhibition, Historias de Pared (at Museo de Arte Moderno Medellín through June 3, 2012) is reviewed on Fototazo.
• In honor of Albert Hoffman’s infamous Bicycle Day (April 19), LIFE Magazine shares a number of never-before-published dream-like photographs that were to accompany an original 1966 article titled, “New Experience That Bombards the Senses: LSD Art.”
• American Suburb X shares journal entries from William Gedney on “Kentucky, Sex and Diane Arbus,” alongside scans of the archival material culled from the Duke University Rare Books and Manuscript Library.  Speaking of rare books, ICP Library profiles some of the innovative and experimental photobooks they found and photographed at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair last week.
• Time Magazine releases their annual list of “The 100 Most Influential People in the World,” alongside a portrait gallery of 24 of the honorees.  Included this year is artist Christian Marclay, of the monumental video installation recently purchased by MoMA, The Clock, and the 2007 Aperture monograph Shuffle, which takes the form of a deck of cards. The Clock will be shown for free this summer from the middle of July to mid-August at Lincoln Center’s David Rubenstein Atrium. Stake out your places now!

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.

© Diane Arbus

After the overwhelming response to the previous screening, Aperture and the School of Visual Arts present: A Slide Show and Talk by Diane Arbus [1970] and a screening of Who is Marvin Israel? [2005]. Read the article by Hilton Als titled Arbus Speaks from The New Yorker’s Book Bench column.

Who is Marvin Israel? [2005] is a short documentary on the life and work of the enigmatic Marvin Israel (1924–1984), artist, designer, art director, and teacher. Israel’s influence on Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, and Lee Friedlander, among others, is explored in the words of those who knew him. Directed by Neil Selkirk.

The Slide Show and Talk by Diane Arbus is an original audio recording of a 1970 slide presentation by Diane Arbus in which she speaks about photography using her own work and other photographs, snapshots and clippings from her collection. Compiled and edited by Neil Selkirk, Doon Arbus, and Adam Shott.

This program coincides with the release of Diane Arbus: A Chronology and newly reissued Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph and Untitled: Diane Arbus on the fortieth anniversary of the original publication.

Thursday, November 15, 2011
Doors at 7:00 pm, Screening at 7:30 pm
First come; first serve.

This event is free and open to the public. Guests are encouraged to arrive early to the screening- there are limited seats available.

SVA Theatre
333 23rd Street (between 8th and 9th Avenues)
New York, New York

© Diane Arbus

Aperture and the School of Visual Arts BFA and MFA Photography, Video and Related Media and MPS Digital Photography present: A Slide Show and Talk by Diane Arbus [1970] and a screening of Who is Marvin Israel? [2005]. Read the article by Hilton Als titled Arbus Speaks from The New Yorker’s Book Bench column.

Who is Marvin Israel? [2005] is a short documentary on the life and work of the enigmatic Marvin Israel (1924–1984), artist, designer, art director, and teacher. Israel’s influence on Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, and Lee Friedlander, among others, is explored in the words of those who knew him. Directed by Neil Selkirk.

The Slide Show and Talk by Diane Arbus is an original audio recording of a 1970 slide presentation by Diane Arbus in which she speaks about photography using her own work and other photographs, snapshots and clippings from her collection. Compiled and edited by Neil Selkirk, Doon Arbus, and Adam Shott.

This program coincides with the release of Diane Arbus: A Chronology and newly reissued Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph and Untitled: Diane Arbus on the fortieth anniversary of Arbus’ death.

Thursday, October 6, 2011
7:30 pm
This event is free and open to the public.

SVA Theatre
333 23rd Street (between 8th and 9th Avenues)
New York, New York

Julie Saul © Elliot Black Photography

Art dealer Julie Saul was honored for her contributions to photography at last year’s Aperture’s 2010 Benefit. This year she commemorates her gallery’s 25th anniversary with the exhibition 25 Years/25 Artists and an accompanying catalogue. The show features a single photograph from each year of her gallery’s history and will be on view through Friday, August 26th. Among the artists include Luigi Ghirri, Maira Kalman, Sally Gall, Penelope Umbrico and James Welling.

What are some of your favorite photobooks?

Some of the earliest books when I first became interested in photography. There were very few books published on photography so you could virtually own all of the photography books back in the 70s. There was Diane Arbus, there was George Platt Lynes there was Danny Lyon…but there were very few books so you ended up spending a lot of more time really scrutinizing the individual images than you do today because now there are so many you can barely flip through the books that you own. Perhaps my favorite photobook was one given to me when I left the Met’s department of 20th century art where I interned in 1982. They gave me this gorgeous huge George Platt Lynes book that I think was one of the first books published by Jack Woody with Twin Palms, and I loved that book. Then I did a show of his work later at my gallery and somebody stole it! It had been signed by everybody in that department and that was truly one of the worst losses that I have had.

What has been your favorite show you’ve seen this summer?

La Carte D’Après Nature at Matthew Marks, curated by Thomas Demand. I love the fact that it was curated by an artist. I think shows curated by artists are very interesting and it gives me a whole new insight into Thomas Demand’s work. It also includes 50 prints by one of my favorite photographers who I have shown a couple of times over the years- Luigi Ghirri.

You were the first American dealer to show Ghirri’s work, correct?

I was. And I still think that he is a completely brilliant and under-recognized (although probably not for long) European artist. He’s sort of the William Eggleston of Europe in the 70s, and from what I’ve seen from European work of that time, particularly of Italian work, it was very romantic, it was black and white. Ghirri had this very conceptual point of view and worked in color and really understood media so I think that it’s great that he’s finally getting the attention he deserves. Seeing his work in the context of the Matthew Marks exhibition will really be an important step for him.

What are some of your most meaningful relationships that you have had with artists over the years?

Often a long relationship is a good relationship and you can get used to each other and you get closer to each other just like a long term [romantic] relationship. If you look at my 25th Anniversary show, the first artist I ever showed, Andy Bush, is still with the gallery and we’ve certainly had our ups and downs over the years but I’ve been able to gain an understanding of the way he works and thinks by having such a long term relationship. I would say that what makes a good relationship is the artist’s ability and willingness to really collaborate with you. Not to see the gallery as a battlefield, but see it as a matrimonial bed, a place of collaboration, sharing resources and ideas. One of the more fun things I’ve done is working with Maira Kalman who had never really had gallery representation before because she normally does books, theater design, textile design and applied arts. So for her it has been a great adventure, and for me to figure out how to promote some of these works, because she has never thought about trying to fit within the traditional gallery system, its been really fun.

Although you represent artists working in a variety of media, what made you want to specialize in photography?

I started with a specialization in photography because I felt like it was important to have a distinct identity within the larger New York art world. Within my larger academic studies in art history I did my thesis on a Bauhaus photographer, but as you know the Bauhaus is about work in many different media. Moholy Nagy believed that every medium has its proper application so he thought for representational art, photography was the medium and for abstract art, painting was the medium. I identify with, and show a great deal of, photography but my interests and enthusiasms are by no means limited to strictly photography. And furthermore a lot of the artists I represent, actually enjoy working in the way that I described, different media for different projects. I’m very interested in artists who take a very freewheeling approach to the medium.

What are some of things you are most proud of exhibiting over the past 25 years?

Well I think the 25th Anniversary show itself is a good example of that. We do eight or nine shows a year and I’ve had the difficult task of choosing one work from one show during a year where literally hundreds of works have been exhibited.

More information about Julie Saul Gallery.

Click here to buy tickets to Aperture’s 2011 Benefit and Auction, honoring Bruce Davidson, Gerhard Steidl and Robert Anthione.

Interview by Aperture Work Scholar Aliza Sena.

Rene Magritte in Bowler Hat (Multiple Exposure), 1965,  © Duane Michals

This summer Pace/MacGill Gallery is exhibiting portfolios by six legendary artists: A Box of Ten Photographs by Diane Arbus, Portfolio by Robert Frank, Fifteen Photographs by Lee Friedlander, A Visit With Magritte by Duane Michals, Portfolio I by Robert Rauschenberg and Fifteen Photographs Garry Winogrand.

Aperture has featured many of these photographers in one form or another, particularly Diane Arbus. Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph is a 25th anniversary edition survey of her work, Diane Arbus: Magazine Work is a remarkable collection of portraits, Diane Arbus: Untitled demonstrates Arbus’s remarkable visual lyricism, and the upcoming Diane Arbus: A Chronology is the closest thing possible to reading a contemporaneous diary by the daring, influential, and controversial artist. She was also featured in issues of Aperture magazine: Aperture 199 and Aperture 168.

You can also see Duane Michal’s work in the recently released publication Photographic Memory: The Album in the Age of Photography, a book that traces the rise of the album from the turn of the century to the present day, showcasing some of the most important examples in the history of the medium.

Check out our website for more books and magazines featuring these six prolific photographers, and head over to Pace/MacGill Gallery to see the amazing portfolios.

Pace/MacGill Gallery:
32 East 52nd Street
New York, NY
(212) 759-7999

Exhibition on View:
July 14 – August 24

Zen Photography workshop at Apeiron, ca. 1979. Front row, 3rd from left: workshop leader John Daido Loori; 5th from left (hand above eyes): Apeiron founder Peter Schlessinger, who later helped Loori found the Zen Mountain Center in Woodstock, New York. Both were students of Minor White. (Photograph courtesy Apeiron archives)

Forty years ago, shortly after working for a year and a half as an editorial assistant at Aperture (and using many of the contacts he’d made there), Peter Schlessinger opened a photography-workshop center called Apeiron Workshops. Located two hours north of New York City in Millerton, N.Y., and based on methods of focusing attention taught by Aperture’s editor, Minor White, Apeiron offered immersive residential programs of various lengths. Its summer programs offered workshops with an A-list of creative photographers of the time, including Berenice Abbott, Robert Adams, Diane Arbus, Paul Caponigro, Linda Connor, Judy Dater, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Ralph Gibson, Emmet Gowin, Robert Heinecken, Elaine Mayes, Lisette Model, Aaron Siskind, Frederick Sommer, and Garry Winogrand, plus Magnum photographers Charles Harbutt, Mary Ellen Mark, Susan Meiselas, Gilles Peress, and Burk Uzzle. Eventually, Apeiron would also run longer (three-month) spring and fall programs, teach in the public schools, offer a selection of traveling exhibitions, run specialized workshops for teachers, and offer theoretical conferences. During its 12-year tenure, Apeiron published Linda Connor’s first book, Solos, and mounted one of the largest NEA-funded photographic surveys, The Long Island Project. Always run on a shoestring and the heroic commitment of its near-volunteer staff, it closed in 1982 as interest rates hit 18 percent and President Reagan slashed the NEA’s funding.

This coming Labor Day weekend, a reunion open to all who ever participated (as staff, students, workshop leaders, artists-in-residence, or special-project staff) is being held at a conference center in the mountains outside Asheville, North Carolina. Anyone who falls into one or more of the aforementioned categories is encouraged to contact Benjamin Porter at apeironreunion@gmail.com or call him at 828-281-1825 for full information.

Sway, 2009 by Jowhara AlSaud

Today is the first day to bid online for items in Aperture’s largest auction ever. Browse Aperture’s Auction Catalog which features photographic works by a diverse range of artists including Jowhara AlSaud, Diane Arbus, Bruce Davidson, Joel Meyerowitz, Richard Misrach, Graham Nash, Mickalene Thomas, Brian Ulrich, James Welling, Kehinde Wiley, Michael Wolf, and Hank Willis Thomas. For the first time ever Aperture is also presenting an Emerging Artists Auction with works by Timothy Briner, Jen Davis, Cig Harvey, Mark Lyon, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Will Steacy, among many others. Online bidding will remain open through Monday, November 1st at 12:00 noon EST.

Aperture’s 2010 Benefit and Auction will take place at The Lighthouse, Chelsea Piers on November 1st honoring Richard Misrach, Steven Ames, and Julie Saul. Immediately following the Benefit Dinner and Live Auction, the SNAP! Benefit Party co-chaired by Hank Willis Thomas, Carolyn Francis, and Giovanni Tomaselli of Polaroid, will feature special guest DJs, a raffle, an open bar, lite bites and treats.

Click here to preview auction items and bid online

Click here for more details and to purchase tickets to the 2010 Benefit Dinner & Auction

Click here for more details and to purchase tickets to the SNAP! Benefit Party