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

• “Imagine a place where a thousand of your best photo friends and heroes have taken over an artsy southern town,” says Andrew Owen, managing director of this weekend’s Look3 Festival in Charlottesville, VA, “and over three days you take in a dozen gallery exhibits, eat at outdoor cafes between talks by legendary photographers, see new work from photographers working all over the world, and return home exhausted and inspired.” That’s where we’ll be for the next few days, in part presenting a special exhibition, the Aperture at Sixty Library, which will showcase highlights from Aperture’s many years of publishing. La Lettre de La Photographie profiles exhibitions at the festival by Hank Willis Thomas, Alex Webb, Bruce Gilden, Stanley Greene, and many more. NYTimes‘ LENS blog takes a closer look at Thomas’ work, LA Times‘ Framework interviews Mitch Dobrowner, whose work is also featured at Look3, and Time‘s LightBox speaks with guest curators Vincent Musi and David Griffin.
• More in festival coverage, Flak Photo offers four free days of live streaming lectures and panel discussions from the Flash Forward Festival, emerging photographers from Canada, the US and the UK, in Boston, MA at Fairmont Battery Wharf, June 7 – 10, 2012, presented in part by the Magenta Foundation. Download the festival catalogue here, and check out the full calendar of events.
• Meanwhile in Europe, PhotoEspana has gotten underway. Of particular interest: Image Anxiety, curated by Chinese independent curator Huang Du, and of course, the annual Photobooks of the Year exhibition. In other international festival and fair news, the word is out that Paris Photo will launch a Los Angeles edition in April, 2013 at the Paramount Studios, as reported by the LA Times and the British Journal of Photography.
• NPR’s Claire O’Neill heads on a trip to the New York Times’ “Lively Morgue,” their basement newspaper archive which contains five-to-six million photographic prints and contact sheets, overseen by Jeff Roth, mined and disseminated on the Times’ brilliant Tumblr site by photo editor Darcy Eveleigh and others.
• “Sometimes it takes me two hours to get down a street, because there are so many things to photograph and people to meet,” writes Magnum photographer Jacob Aue Sobol in his latest entry from Beijing for Leica Camera Blog’s fascinating Arrivals and Departures series, unfolding live. Follow Sobol’s journey along the Trans Siberian Railway, “from the Russian forests to the Mongolian desert and finally through the mountains to Beijing,” shooting black-and-white every step–quite literally–along the way with the Leica’s new digital monochrome-only camera. Episode five, offers up a stunning gallery of images–dynamic, saturated street photos that remind us of work by Eikoh Hosoe from Barakei.

• Another historical archive of photographs has emerged in New York at the New York Public Library. A “visual encyclopedia” of 41,000 prints by Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and others have recently been found, many digitized and now made available to the public on a special NYPL site. Originally compiled and organized  in the 30s and 40s by Roy Stryker, founder of the Farm Securities Administration’s photography project, many of the prints were in a public lending library until the 50s. ”Incredibly,” writes James Estrin for NY Times’ LENS blog, “anyone with a library card could check out an original print of a Dorothea Lange image and put it on their wall for a while. It’s easy to imagine that some were never returned.”
• Find images of the once-in-a-lifetime Venus in Transit event which happens every 105 years or so, from LA Times‘ Framework, Boston‘s Big Picture, WSJ‘s Photo Journal, Conscientious, and The Atlantic‘s In Focus. Marvin Heiferman, author of the new book Photography Changes Everything (Aperture 2012), shared this great link on his twitter feed, “a history of photographers who’ve already tracked the Transit of Venus.”

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.

Dorothea Lange/Library of Congress

Check out this podcast about Dorothea Lange on NPR.org. Linda Gordon, author of Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, discusses Lange’s life and work with the FSA during America’s Great Depression. Click here to see her most iconic photograph, Migrant Mother, available as a limited-edition print from Aperture.

Untitled Film Still #43, 1979, © Cindy Sherman

Exhibition on view:
Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West

Sunday, March 29–Monday, June 8, 2009

MoMA
Special Exhibitions Gallery, third floor
11 West 53 Street
New York, New York
(212) 708-9400

Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West is now on view at the Special Exhibitions Gallery at MoMA. The exhibition’s theme evolves around the importance of photography in shaping our collective imagination of the West.

Since 1850, photography has certainly played a fundamental role in the revolution of the American West, and has helped form and change our perception and image creation of the West’s physical and social landscape, through a variety of photographic traditions and genres.

Into the Sunset brings together over 120 photographs, dating from the ninetieth to the twenty first century, that integrate a range of different artistic strategies and motifs. The photographs, which are organized thematically, illustrate a piece of cultural heritage, and help us understand how general ideas about the West, as Manifest Destiny and the “land of opportunity,” have evolved through the years.

The exhibition features work of approximately seventy renowned photographers including Aperture-published Robert Adams, Katy Grannan, Dorothea Lange, Timothy O’Sullivan, Cindy Sherman, Joel Sternfeld, Edward Weston.

In conjunction with the exhibition, MoMA also holds lunch lectures and discussion panels on Monday, April 6 and Thurday, April 9 both at 12:30 p.m.

In addition, the museum offers a special lecture for deaf and hard-of-hearing visitors, as a part of Interpreting MoMA, on Thursday, May 14, at 5:30 p.m. 

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.

Backyard of the home where Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor lived in Berkeley, CA. (L-R) Wayne Miller; Joan Miller; John Dixon; Meg Patridge; Dan Dixon; Chrissie Gardner; Rondal Partridge. Photo by Tim Wagner

As part of the ongoing celebration of the 75th anniversary of The New Deal, Dorothea Lange, one of the founders of Aperture magazine and famous for the legendary Migrant Mother, the photograph that sums up the Great Depression, was honored by Fotovision with a garden party on September 21, 2008 at Lange and Paul Taylor’s home in Berkeley. Guest speakers were Dan and John Dixon (sons of Lange and her first husband, Maynard Dixon), photographer Wayne Miller (90, co-curator of the seminal Family of Man show), his muse Joan Miller, Rondal Partridge, (91, photographer, son of Imogen Cunningham, and Lange’s assistant while she worked for the FSA), and Chrissie Gardner (88, Lange’s assistant during her project on the Japanese Internment at the beginning of WWII). Filmmaker and daughter of Ron Partridge, Margaret Partridge, and photographer Ken Light were co-moderators.

The circle of family and friends told stories of Dorothea’s coffee klatches (she made coffee cakes by the dozens), her photos (legendary), and swapped insider gossip about her, like the story of when she was invited to Shirley Burden’s daughter’s wedding, he being one of last of the Vanderbilts and a major photo supporter for Aperture and MoMA. Dorothea reportedly wore a $12.50 Montgomery Wards dress but glowed, even when sitting between Fred Astaire and Nat King Cole, who talked over her head the whole evening. Shirley had asked her to be the wedding photographer, and though she declined, she took photographs of the occasion which she sent to him later.

Dorothea was famously social and held a party for Edward Steichen while he was curating the Family of Man exhibit in 1955. She invited all the important west-coast photographers so that he would not leave them out of the exhibit and, as a result of her efforts, that landmark show had works by Lange, Ansel Adams, Ruth Marion Baruch, Shirley Burden, John Collier, Matt Farbman, Consuelo Kanaga, Otto Hegel, Wayne Miller, Homer Page, Ron Partridge, and Edward Weston.

Click below to see additional photos from the party.

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California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver recently announced that Aperture co-founder Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) will be inducted into The California Museum‘s California Hall of Fame on December 15th, 2008.

This group, which Gov. Schwarzenegger says “will inspire millions of their fellow Californians, and people all over the world, to dream, work, and achieve,” also includes Dave Brubeck, Jane Fonda, Theodor Geisel (“Dr. Seuss”), Robert Graham, Quincy Jones, Jack LaLanne, Julia Morgan, Jack Nicholson, Linus Pauling, Leland Stanford, and Alice Waters. Lange, along with the aforementioned inductees who made careers in the Golden State, will be joining fellow Aperture co-founder Ansel Adams, who was inducted last year.

Lange used her time away from her professional portrait studio in San Francisco to document the plight of the poor. Her work, which chronicles American history, includes images from the Great Depression, the internment of Japanese Americans, and post-war industrialism.

Lange’s most famous portrait, Migrant Mother, epitomizes Lange’s ability to capture emotion and translate it to imagery.  It is available to purchase from Aperture’s collection of limited-edition prints online here.

Congratulations to Dorothea Lange, and all of the inductees, for this incredible honor!