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

• The New York Times covers Mary Ellen Mark’s series Prom, first featured in Aperture issue 187, now a monograph by Getty Publications, and shares a trailer from Martin Bell’s accompanying documentary. The Sunday Review publishes an essay by Mark, “Prom Night,” and posts a slideshow of images from the series. LensBlog follows up with a Q&A with the photographer on shooting with one of five existing, finicky, but rewarding 20×24 Polaroid Land Cameras for this series and her earlier monograph Twins (Aperture 2005).
• In their weekly Modern Art Notes Podcast, ArtInfo‘s Tyler Green talks to Mitch Epstein, who he calls “one of America’s most prominent and most honored photographers,” about shifting focus from American Power to trees in New York City, now on view at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. in Chelsea. Epstein will be in conversation with Sondra Gilman and Celso Gonzalez-Falla of the Shared Vision collection at Aperture on Wednesday, April 11, 2012.
• “Is your phone’s camera the only camera you need?” asks the Wall Street Journal, profiling new apps and accessories that make that possible. They also share cell phone snapshots by professional photojournalists, and invite readers to do the same.
• “In an environment where seconds count, there are glorious triumphs and heartbreaking defeats,” writes Michael M. Grynbaum for LensBlog on staff photographer Richard Perry‘s hectic images from the New York City subway. Can’t help but think back to Bruce Davidson’s series from the 1980s and resulting monograph Subway (Aperture 2011), save for the striking dissimilarities between now vastly different transit systems.
• Simon Bray shares a few key points on Phototuts+ on “Why Returning To A Photographic Location Is Such A Good Idea,” whether it’s months, weeks, days, or hours apart. It’s something Richard Misrach did when he began a three year project photographing the same scene from his from porch at all hours of the day for the monograph Golden Gate, which is soon to be released by Aperture as a stunning 16×20″ oversized edition.
• Fototazo interviews Luca Desienna, Chief Editor of Gomma Magazine, on the occasion of the announcement of the eight winners of the call for entries for their exciting new publication of black and white photography MONO, Volume 1 (November 2012). Lightbox at Time shares a slideshow of images by the winners and explains briefly what entailed Gomma’s “search for the best  new black-and-white photographers.”
• The National Press Photographers Association launched a new blog, Ethics Matters, opening up the often circular discussion on how much image manipulation is too much, focusing specifically on new HDR technology which allows cameras to combine multiple frames into a single image, often for a more saturated color effect. This, as Aperture is in the process of acquiring a HDR camera for our own digital media reporting purposes. Stay tuned!

In the mid-70s, Mitch Epstein was exhibiting some of his earliest work, some of the images first to elevate color photography into the realm of fine art, joining the ranks of Stephen Shore and William Eggleston. Right around that time, Sondra Gilman, who, along with her husband Celso Gonzalez-Falla, has been repeated ranked among the top photo collectors in the world by ARTnews, purchased her first photograph.

She had “tripped over a [Eugène] Atget show” at MoMA, she tells New York Social Diary in an interview (accompanied by dozens of images of the collection at home in their Upper East Side townhouse), and “literally had an epiphany.” She ended up buying three $250 prints at a time when photographs “had no value.” Since then, the couple’s collection has grown to several hundred vintage prints, and their value, surely to no one’s surprise today, has grown astronomically.

On Wednesday, April 11, 2012 Aperture Foundation presents a conversation with Gilman and Gonzalez-Falla alongside Epstein, whose work features prominently in the Shared Vision collection (at Aperture through April 21, 2012). This ambitious exhibition, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Jacksonville, curated by Ben Thompson and Paul Karabinis, brings together their most iconic images reflecting the diverse nature of an entire century of photography. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by MOCA and produced by Aperture, including historical context for each image and photographer as well as curatorial remarks.

Epstein, who won the Prix Pictet in 2011, the Berlin Prize in Arts and Letters in 2008, and the Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award in 2004, also appears in the New York Times Magazine Photographs, edited by Kathy Ryan, and Aperture issue 168. A former student of Garry Winogrand at Cooper Union in the early ’70s, his work has since landed in the collections of the MoMA, the Whitney, the Getty Museum, SFMOMA, and Tate Modern in London. While his projects often start as independent explorations or excursions, he has a strong inclination to “engage with issues beyond self-reflexive ones,” he tells BOMB in a lengthy interview about how some of his latest projects including American Power, progressed from an editorial assignment, to a print series, to a book.

Watch a great video shot at Tate Modern of Epstein discussing his latest series and exploring what makes a strong photograph. Check out photos from our the walkthrough of the Shared Vision exhibition with Marcelle Polednik, Director of MOCA Jacksonville and the collectors, and the VIP walkthrough during last weekend’s AIPAD Photography Show. And find images of the installation as well as an index of the work on view at DLK Collection.

Shared Vision: A Conversation with Sondra Gilman, Celso Gonzalez-Falla, and Mitch Epstein
Wednesday, April 11, 2012 at 6:30 pm
FREE

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

All photos by Aperture Foundation Work Scholars. The deadline for the summer session application is April 15.

——-

Sondra Gilman and Celso Gonzalez-Falla’s collection of iconic photography drew a crowd to Aperture Gallery Tuesday night for the opening reception of Shared Vision presented by MOCA, on view through Saturday, April 21, 2012.

The exhibition, featuring work by Robert Adams, Eugène Atget, Minor White, Walker Evans, Loretta Lux, Sally Mann, Richard Misrach and more, was culled from one of the world’s best private collections of photography 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. It’s also accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog published by MOCA and produced by Aperture Foundation, featuring a selection of images from the collection, historical context and curatorial remarks.

Of course, the show wouldn’t be complete without the help of our many  indispensable Work Scholars.  Regan Hillman shares what her experience behind the scenes was like.

——-

As the Exhibitions Work Scholar, I had the great opportunity to handle and hang this amazing selection of photographs from Sondra and Celso’s collection.

The process of getting the exhibition on the wall included many steps.  First, paper cut-outs of the works, scaled to one-seventh of the original size (including the frame) were organized into their respective sections and arranged on paper walls also scaled to one-seventh of those at our gallery in Chelsea.  Because we could move our paper replicas into different orders and arrangement, this mock-up version helped us to get a visual of how the photographs would look when installed.  After a paper layout was completed, I made a virtual rendering of the space in a computer program that allows you to build a space using the measurements of the gallery and import the pictures onto the walls.  While the paper mock-up could be moved around easily, the virtual rendering from the computer program gave us a sense of how the space would look in three dimensions.

To prepare the text for the exhibition we worked closely with the Design and Copy Editing departments to produce captions and an extensive gallery guide.  Then the many, many crates and boxes containing the exhibition arrived.  The hanging process, though tedious, went smoothly with the help of our installation team.  I loved walking into the gallery each morning and seeing another section hanging on the wall.

It was extraordinarily rewarding to see the process through from beginning to end.  What had started out as multitude of one-inch square images on a checklist, eventually—with much work and deliberation—became an exhibition: visually engaging, full of information, and with a wealth of original examples from the history of photography.

 

Regan Hillman is a pursuing a Master’s degree in Art History at CUNY Hunter College.  She received her B.A. in Painting and Art History at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.  She plans to write her M.A. thesis this summer on modern and contemporary painters who have made stained glass windows for Gothic cathedrals. When not busy at Aperture or school, Regan enjoys exploring her Brooklyn neighborhood and the green expanses of Prospect Park.

 

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.

Boys at the Lake, Central Park (1992) © Bruce Davidson/Howard Greenberg Gallery

Don’t miss out on our 2011 Benefit, Auction, and SNAP! Party! Taking place on Monday, October 17, the evening will begin with a cocktail reception and silent auction of classic and contemporary photographs. Then, a dinner, brief award ceremony, and live auction conducted by Denise Bethel, Senior Vice President and Director of Photographs, Sotheby’s. Finishing the night, there will be a Benefit Party hosted by SNAP! New Collectors Program.

Come mingle with fellow photography lovers and celebrate Aperture Foundation. We look forward to having you join us for this special event!

Click here for tickets and more information on our 2011 Benefit & Auction

Click here for tickets and more information on our 2011 SNAP! Benefit Party

Detail from Untitled, 2008 by Richard Misrach

Mark your calendar’s for Aperture’s 2010 Benefit and Auction and help us salute luminaries in the field of photography. This year’s honorees include photographer Richard Misrach; collector and philanthropist Steven Ames; and gallerist Julie Saul. The event will be co-chaired by Sondra Gilman and Celso Gonzalez-Falla. Our first-ever benefite party, hosted by SNAP!, Aperture Young Patrons Program, will be co-chaired by Carolyn Francis, artist Hank Willis Thomas, and Giovanni Tomaselli of Polaroid, sponsor of SNAP!

Monday, November 1, 2010

The Lighthouse at Chelsea Piers

Proceeds from Aperture’s Benefit, Auction, and Party are essential for maintaining the quality of Aperture’s publications, exhibitions, and education programs. Join us!