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.

To call the AIPAD Photography Show just another art fair would be a tremendous understatement. The annual photography exhibition, now in its thirty-second year, is famously regarded as one of the most important international photography events occurring today. Fittingly so – this year’s event draws seventy-five of the world’s leading fine art photography galleries, presenting a wide range of museum-quality work, including contemporary, modern, and 19th-century photographs, as well as photo-based art, video, and new media.

Join Aperture at the Stephen Daiter Gallery booth, #107, at the AIPAD Photography Show for two very special book signings. On Friday, March 30, John Gossage will be signing copies of his classic monograph, The Pond, reissued by Aperture in 2010, and on March 31, Alex Webb will be signing copies of his books, including his latest, The Suffering of Light (Aperture, 2011).

Beyond Aperture’s happenings at the Stephen Daiter Gallery booth, the show boasts a ticketed Opening Night Gala benefiting inMotion (tickets will be available at the door), and a strong schedule of panel events, featuring conversations with internationally recognized Dutch artist Rineke Dijkstra—in advance of her June 2012 Guggenheim Museum retrospective—as well as a panel titled “How to Collect Photographs: What Collectors Need to Know Now,” moderated by Steven Kasher of Steven Kasher Gallery.

AIPAD Photography Show
Park Avenue Armory
New York, New York

Show Hours and Admission

Thursday, March 29 from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Friday, March 30 from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Saturday, March 31 from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Sunday, April 1 from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Show tickets are available for purchase at the Park Avenue Armory during Show hours.

AIPAD Opening Night Gala
Park Avenue Armory
New York, New York

Wednesday, March 28 from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m.

Tickets will be available for purchase at the Gala.
You may purchase tickets at the Park Avenue Armory by credit card or cash only.

The first edition of The Pond-published by Aperture in 1985 and one of the most important photography books in the history of the medium-included an original gelatin-silver image printed by John Gossage himself and tipped onto the cloth cover of the book. This was a special and luxe addition to an already stunning book, which, ironically, came about because the budget wouldn’t allow for it.

The Pond‘s funding was maxed out with the book’s cloth binding, high-end paper, and extra-long dust jacket with custom color inks. It simply didn’t allow for any more extras, like a tip-on image, which is typically printed as an extra sheet with the rest of the pages of the book. Since what happens underneath a dust jacket is not immediately visible, and, in fact, many readers don’t ever remove it, adding more features there can drive costs up without necessarily adding more perceived value to a book. In short, adding a manufactured tip-on just didn’t make financial sense.

However, it does make for a nice surprise for those who take the time to remove the jacket, and John saw that if he printed the tip-ons himself, he could add this feature without affecting the book costs significantly. As he put it, “It required my effort. But it was just some trouble, and so I did it.” This meant, though, that he needed to make over 2,500 prints! Faced with days in the darkroom, John decided to include six different images so he wouldn’t grow bored. He chose images that commented on the interior of the book, but that weren’t included within, in order to keep attentive readers on their toes and intrigued. Five out of the six images were a series of frames of a string blowing in the wind. The sixth image was a wild card: a menacing junkyard dog behind a fence. While all the images spoke to the kind of beautiful imperfection in the borderland between man and nature surrounding the pond, the dog seemed to guard the book in a very direct way, quietly growling at the viewer.

John made extra copies of each of the prints so that the printer would have more than 2,500, in case any damage occurred during production. After the book was made, the printer returned the leftover images to John.  In the end, he got a disproportionate number of dog prints back. This meant that fewer of these prints were tipped onto books that went into circulation, making a copy of The Pond with a dog print tipped onto the cover even more rare.

It also means that John has some extra copies of vintage dog prints. To our great surprise and honor, he has generously donated one of these prints, along with a first edition of the book, to Aperture for this year’s Benefit and Auction. Now you have a chance to own this amazing, storied print and first edition book, and at the same time support Aperture’s publications, exhibitions, and educational programs.

Blog post by Denise Wolff

For more information on our Benefit as well as bidding online and in-person, please click here.

Don’t miss your last chance to buy tickets to the 2010 Aperture Benefit and Auction and SNAP! Benefit Party on November 1st! This year there are a number of available ticket packages to choose from. Enjoy Aperture’s Silent and Live Auctions as well as the Benefit dinner honoring photographer Richard Misrach, Steven Ames and Julie Saul from 6:00 to 9:30PM.

Or join us for the SNAP! Benefit Party, from 9:30 to 11:30PM, and dance the night away to music spun by special guest DJs and downtown fixtures Tim Barber of Tinyvices.com, AJ Slim and Jeannie Hopper of LiquidSoundLounge.com and ARTonAIR.com. This year the SNAP! Benefit Party will also include Aperture’s first ever Emerging Artists Auction featuring works by artists Jen Davis, Mark Lyon, LaToya Ruby Frazier, among others, an open bar and gourmet bites as well as an exciting selection of raffle prizes including theater tickets, dinner for two and many more!

© John Gossage

The highly anticipated exhibition John Gossage: The Pond opens on this week at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Gossage’s influential body of work was recently acquired by the Smithsonian and marks the first time these photographs are exhibited in a museum setting.  The Pond initially was a photography book first published by Aperture in 1985, and is being reissued in September 2010 to coincide with this milestone exhibition.  The new edition, co-published with the museum, consists of an essay by photo historian Gerry Badger and an introduction by Toby Jurovics.

Meant to recall Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, The Pond consists of photographs of a small, unnamed pond between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, Maryland taken between 1981 and 1985.  Gossage wanted to portray a more all-embracing view of the landscape, exploring the less idealized spaces that border America’s cities and suburbs.  What he found in these sometimes unruly and mundane places were moments of grace and elegance.

John Gossage: The Pond
August 27, 2010-January 17, 2011

Smithsonian American Art Museum
2nd floor South
8th & F streets NW
Washington, D.C. 20004
(202) 633-7970

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Download a podcast of Gerry Badger and John Gossage in conversation here!