Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation have joined forces to launch two new photobook awards in 2012, celebrating the book’s contribution to the evolving narrative of photography. Entries will be accepted from July 15 through September 10, 2012. A pre-selected shortlist of thirty titles will be profiled in The PhotoBook Review; exhibited at Paris Photo at the Grand Palais and at Aperture Gallery in New York; and tour to other venues, to be determined. Winners will be revealed on November 14, 2012, Paris Photo opening day.

FEATURING TWO PRIZE CATEGORIES

First PhotoBook
A $10,000 prize will be awarded to the photographer/artist whose first photobook is deemed by an independent jury to be best of the year.

PhotoBook of the Year
PhotoBook of the Year will be awarded to the photographer/artist, and publisher responsible, whose book is deemed by an independent jury to be the best of the year.

THE JURY

The awards will be judged in two stages. An initial jury will meet in New York to select the shortlisted entries in both categories. Jurors will include Phillip Block, Julien Frydman, Chris Boot, Lesley A. Martin, and James Wellford. The final winners will be decided by a separate jury that will meet in Paris before Paris Photo begins, including Els Barents, Roxana Marcoci, Edward Robinson, and Thomas Seelig.

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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.”

This year, Aperture was pleased to invite its Trustees and Patrons to join us for a series of exclusive activities surrounding Paris Photo 2011.

Celebrating Paris as the capital of photography during the Fair, our supporters enjoyed visiting Diane Arbus’ retrospective at the Jeu de Paume, guided by museum’s director Marta Gili. They  also went on a behind-the-scenes tour of one of the most comprehensive libraries of contemporary photography at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, guided by Irène Attinger, head of the library. At Le Bal, they met with the director Diane Dufour, who presented this new space for documentary photography and new media. The Patrons joined the private opening reception of the Aperture Presents exhibition at the Montblanc store. They followed tours by curators Simon Baker (Tate Modern, London) and Anne Lacoste (Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne), collector Artur Walther, and publisher Markus Schaden presenting their exhibitions at Paris Photo. And of course, their trip would not have been complete without gathering in a typical Parisian atmosphere for a cocktail reception and piano concert by Mio Chiba at the home of Dr. Michèle Verschoore.

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The Patrons Group at Paris Photo, meeting with Jeffrey Fraenkel and joined by Martin Parr

For more information about Aperture’s Patron Program and to join online, please visit: http://www.aperture.org/membership.

Aperture will be hosting a multitude of events and book signings at this year’s Paris Photo photography fair. Join us for these special occasions, or stop by Aperture’s booth throughout the fair for a fantastic selection of special editions, prints and books.

BOOK SIGNINGS:

Friday, November 11, 2011 2:00 pm – Horacio Fernandez The Latin American Photobook 4:30 pm – Hank Willis Thomas Pitch Blackness 6:00 pm – Penelope Umbrico (photographs)         Saturday, November 12, 2011 2:00 pm – Richard Mosse Infra 3:30 pm – Brian Ulrich Is This Place Great or What 4:30 pm – Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb The Suffering of Light and Violet Isle 6:00 pm –  Rinko Kawauchi Illuminance     Sunday, November 13, 2011 2:00 pm – The New York Times Magazine Photographs Signing

APERTURE ALSO PRESENTS:

An exhibition at Boutique Montblanc
Wednesday, November 9 – Sunday, December 18, 2011
7 Rue de la Paix

Launch for the Photobook Review
Thursday, November 10, 10:30 am
Paris Photo Booth E26

Launch for The Latin American Photobook at Le Bal
Thursday, November 10, 2:00 pm
6, Impasse de la Defense

The ninth edition of Paris Photo, the world’s largest photography fair, opened this Wednesday night and the Aperture booth made its debut in the main salon! Many Aperture photographers from around the world stopped by, including Josef Koudelka, Susan Meiselas, Martin Parr, Michael Wolf and others below.

Celso Gonzalez-Falla, Aperture's Chairman of the Board, and Bill Hunt from Hasted Hunt Kraeutler Gallery

Silvio Wolf and photo critic Gigliola Foschi

Michael Wolf and his son

Lesley Martin, Aperture Publisher, and Martin Parr

Visit the Aperture booth #A36 to see our stunning limited-edition print collection and newly released books. Don’t miss book signings every day with artists Lalla Essaydi, Michael Wolf, Bill Armstrong, Teun Hocks, Hank Willis Thomas, and Silvio Wolf and many more!

Paris Photo 2008 honoring Japanese photography, just ended yesterday. It was a truly successful fair for Aperture! Here are a few highlights from the Aperture booth and our book signing event at colette.

On Thursday, legendary Japanese photographer Eikoh Hosoe dropped by the booth to sign copies of the recently launched first edition facsimile reissue of Barakei. Lucky visitors also had the chance to discover his new book projects.

Later in the afternoon, photographer Michal Chelbin signed her latest acclaimed book Strangely Familiar: Acrobats, Athletes, and Other Traveling Troupes.

On Friday, the notorious colette store hosted a special evening celebrating Aperture photographers and a stunning new season of books and prints. Michal Chelbin, Elena Dorfman, Takashi Homma, Erwin Olaf and Michael Wolf were there to sign books and party among 200 collectors and fans eager to meet them.

Erwin Olaf

Takashi Homma

Opening night at Paris Photo is a smashing success with many friendly faces stopping by the Aperture booth!

Sondra Gilman, Celso Gonzalez-Falla, Aperture board of trustees chairman and Aperture’s own Kellie McLaughlin

Artist Eikoh Hosoe, Aperture Executive Director Juan Garcia de Oteyza and Aperture Publisher, Lesley A. Martin

Eikoh Hosoe

Josef Koudelka

Paris Photo is the largest photography fair in the world, visit the Aperture booth ED02 to see our latest books, stunning limited-edition prints and you never know who else…..

More to come tomorrow!

Book Signing with Michal Chelbin, Aperture Booth, Paris Photo:

Thursday, November 13, 5:00 p.m.