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.”

According to Time Magazine’s LightBox, “The very day after the 2011 LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph ended, this year’s guest curators—National Geographic photographer Vincent Musi and Washington Post visuals editor David Griffin—started to put together the slate of artists who will appear [for the 2012 iteration.]” This weekend, the visions of Musi and Griffin come to fruition as Charlottesville, Virginia plays host to LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph 2012.

LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph returns June 7 through 9. Pinned as a “celebration of photography, created by photographers, for those who share a passion for the still image,” LOOK3 is sponsored by BD, National Geographic magazine, and Canon USA, and hosted this year along Charlottesville, VA’s Downtown Mall. The Festival features exhibits and on-stage appearances of three “INsight” photographers, as well as exhibitions, outdoor projections, workshops and interviews over three days and nights.

INsight artists Alex Webb, Donna Ferrato, and Stanley Greene will be featured in 2012, three artists who have met the standards of having produced a significant body of work, and who are understood to possess the capacity to inspire others in the field. The weekend’s masters talks will be given by Ernesto Bazan, Hank Willis Thomas, Lynsey Addario, Bruce Gilden, Robin Schwartz and Camille Seaman, as well as Aperture Foundation’s Executive Director Chris Boot, whose more than 25 years in photography has yielded countless books commissioned, edited or published since 1984.

Aperture will be further present, assembling a special exhibition, Aperture at Sixty Library, which will showcase highlights from Aperture’s many years of publishing—first through the eponymous magazine then, starting in the 1960s, through books—that will reflect on one of the most comprehensive and influential libraries in the history of photography.

LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph
June 7 through 9, 2012
Downtown mall and other venues
Charlottesville, Virginia

Chris Boot MASTERS TALK
June 8, 2012, 11am
The Paramount Theater

Aperture at Sixty Library
June 7 through 17, 2012
200 Water St

———

›› 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.

Photo by Stanley Greene

Those Who Fell Through the Cracks, a photography exhibition by Stanley Greene and Kadir van Lohuizen, will debut August 20th at the Lawndale Art Center in Houston before traveling from Texas to Louisiana. Stanley Greene, whose recent book Black Passport was published by Aperture this past Spring, worked in collaboration with Lohuizen documenting New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Mural size prints from the project will be installed on the interior and exterior of a highly innovative 24′ itinerant truck. As the truck drives east from Houston, the photographs’ messages will be broadcast across the region, bringing awareness to a need for systemic change.

The exhibition’s opening in Houston is part of a series of events and exhibitions taking place throughout the city on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Other events include an August 21st talk with Stanley Greene and Kadir van Lohuizen at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

As previously announced, an exhibition of photographs by Richard Misrach entitled After Katrina is on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston through October 31. The exhibition is accompanied by a book entitled Destroy This Memory, which will be published by Aperture this month.

Those Who Fell Through the Cracks
A mobile exhibition by Stanley Greene and Kadir van Lohuizen
On view at the Lawndale Art Center October 20 – 26

Lawndale Art Center
4912 Main Street
Houston, TX 77002

Click here to purchase Stanley Greene’s Black Passport

Click here to view Richard Misrach’s Destroy This Memory

© Stanley Greene

As part of the IRIS Nights Lecture Series hosted by The Annenberg Center for Photography in LA, Stanley Greene — photographer of Black Passport — will be showing and speaking about his work throughout his career on Thursday, July 22.  The program is offered free of charge, and attendees need to register online to reserve a spot.

Stanley Greene was born in New York in 1949. As a teenager, Greene was a member of the Black Panthers and an anti-Vietnam War activist.  He has photographed wars and poverty in Africa, the former Soviet Union, Central America, Asia and the Middle East.

Stanley Greene
Thursday, July 22, 6:30 – 8:00 pm

The Annenberg Space for Photography
2000 Avenue of the Stars, #10
Los Angeles, CA 90067

Click here for more information and to make a reservation