Dave Anderson has photographed in tough places—a surviving Ku Klux Klan bastion in Texas, New Orlean’s post-Katrina Ninth Ward—but his photographs are rarely gritty. His Aperture monograph One Block, which documents the rebuilding efforts of one block of Ninth Ward residents, focuses less on the neighborhood’s despair and more on its hopes for renewal. Anderson knew that to photograph amidst such hardship he would have to tread lightly: “I was super-cognizant of ‘photographers fatigue’–people were sick of photographers showing up night and day and making grand promises,” he mentioned in a Color magazine profile. That Anderson spent time living and forming relationships with the residents he photographed is evident in the work—the subjects appear at ease, comfortable sharing their struggle to rebuild with Anderson and his lens.

Anderson produces videos as well as photographs—he is the man behind Oxford American’s SoLost web series, a video exploration of “the side roads, backrooms, cellars and psyche of the modern South,” which so far features 29 four-to-seven minute mini-documentaries on subjects ranging from a couple constructing a medieval castle in Arkansas, to Alabama menswear designer Billy Reid, to photographer William Eggleston. SoLost is a one-man operation, which accounts for the easy rapport between Anderson’s camera and his subjects, and why these videos feel like privileged glimpses into the richness and diversity of life in the American South.

Anderson will give a lecture about his image-making projects at The Center for Photography at Woodstock, this Friday, July 13 at 8pm. If you’re in the area, it will be worth checking out.

›› Watch a video of Anderson speaking about One Block with Aperture, and head to the Aperture store if you’re interested in purchasing a copy.

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

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

• Time magazine’s Lightbox features Manish Swarup’s photograph of a Tibetan exile self-immolating during a demonstration in New Delhi in their Pictures of the Week, reminding of Malcolm Brown’s iconic image of a Buddhist monk who set himself aflame in protest in 1963, and the photojournalistic ethical issues that go with it.
• Conscientious explores the challenges of still portraiture and points to a new study published by the British Psychology Society which finds that “the same people are rated as more attractive in videos than in static images taken from those videos.”
• NPR’s The Picture Show features “A Lifetime of Photos in a Little Email Retrospective,” images by “somewhat hermetic” Dennis Darling who relishes “staying under most radar” and rarely publishes or exhibits his work for other than those on his small email chain.
• The New Yorker‘s Photobooth commemorates Edward Steichen’s would-be 130th birthday with a slideshow of the seminal photographer’s images published in their magazine across the years.  Several limited edition prints from his early work are available at Aperture.
• “Taking a photograph is a response… it’s a pre-rational response, it’s an intuitive emotional response, it’s spontaneous, it’s immediate,” says Alex Webb of The Suffering of Light in Part 4 of 6 of the Q&A  session with Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb by David Chickey of Radius Books at The National Museum Of Singapore on March 9, 2012, now all posted on Invisible Photographer Asia.
• APhotoEditor suggests, “Perhaps Most Photographers Don’t Understand the Value of Usage,” posting a reader-submitted story in which an “ex-student lied about having [her] permission and gave the image to the college, which then used the image on a billboard advertisement that wraps around a 20 story building on a very busy road in the city.” How was this resolved and did she get paid?
• Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier Bresson, Robert Frank, Stephen Shore, Nan Goldin, William Eggleston, Alec Soth, Diane Arbus are all photographers you should… IGNORE? That’s according to Bryan Formhals’ brash OpEd piece on LPV Magazine “10 Oeuvres Aspiring Photographers Should Ignore.”  Wired and the Click got a kick out of the post, which was inspired by “The 10 Most Harmful Novels for Aspiring Writers.” We think self-willed ignorance is more harmful than knowing one’s precedents and counter with this oldie but goodie: those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

In the clip above, Alex Prager, in conversation with gallerist Yancey Richardson (September 30, 2010 at Aperture as part of the Parsons Lecture Series), talks about wandering through the Getty Center one day, never before having considered photography, stumbling upon William Eggleston’s print of old shoes under a bed and being completely moved and inspired to pick up a camera for the first time.

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Out of 100 nominees from around the world, an international jury has selected photographer Alex Prager, who was showcased at MoMA’s New Photography 2010 exhibition, as winner of the Foam Paul Huf Award 2012. Simon Baker, chairman of the jury, said:

Prager’s work is original, intelligent and seductive. She thoroughly deserves her place in the company of former Foam Paul Huf winners, which is fast becoming a who’s who of contemporary photographic practice.

The annual € 20,000 prize is awarded to a photographer under 35 years of age, who then goes on to present their work in a solo exhibition at the Foam Museum. Prager’s saturated, cinematic, stylized and glamourously surreal photographs will be on view in Amsterdam August 31, 2012 – October 14, 2012.

Foam Amsterdam
Keizersgracht 609, 1017 DS
Binnenstad, Netherlands
+31 20 551 6500

Prager will also have a multi-city solo exhibition, Compulsion, on view simultaneously at Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York, M+B Gallery in LA, and Michael Hoppen Gallery in London, April 5, 2012 – May 19, 2012.  Huffington Post has a behind-the-scenes photo exclusive of the show and Q&A with the photographer.

Yancey Richardson Gallery
535 West 22nd Street 3rd floor
New York, NY 10011
(646) 230-9610

M+B Gallery
612 North Almont Drive
Los Angeles, California 90069
(310) 550-0050

Michael Hoppen Gallery
3 Jubilee Place,
London SW3 3TD
+44 (0)20 7352 3649

A1-29 (A1-The Great North Road), 1982, © Paul Graham

Photographer Paul Graham has been named the 2012 recipient of the Hasselblad Award, the first British photographer to win the prominent international prize.

Graham, hailing from Buckinghamshire, is a pioneer of color documentary photography in 1980’s Britain, influencing successive generations of young photographers. Self-taught, he grew up studying the works of American pioneers, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Paul Strand. A-1 The Great Road North, a color series shot along the British motorway and Beyond Caring, a string of photographs shot in unemployment offices, were projects that brought Graham to critical and international acclaim in the early 80’s.

More recently, Graham’s work has become purposely abstruse as he challenges preconceived notions of the ‘style’ of documentary photography. The most exaggerated example is American Night. The series, shot in 2003, explores social and racial issues of the United States through over-exposed images that appear almost invisible. “The photography I most respect pulls something out of the ether of nothingness,” Graham states. American Night is featured in Graham’s body of work that is a part of the exhibition trilogy, The Present, now being exhibited at the Pace/MacGill gallery in New York City.

With the acceptance of this award, Graham joins the ranks of noted past winners and Aperture published photographers, Robert Adams, William Eggleston, and Nan Goldin.

Graham discusses his career and fresh photography in Aperture issue 199.

The irony is not lost on me—as a photo-editor who has devoted many years to a medium known for stilling, or capturing, time, decisive or otherwise—that I should be equally consumed by another medium, one that defies any notion of “capture,” that I am seduced by dance’s very impermanence, especially in the case of Merce Cunningham. Cunningham’s choreography never leaves even a storyline to hang onto in its wake, but rather evinces a kind of isness, as if each dance has an ineffable essence that might somehow be touched, experienced, and that remains vital and resonant long after the curtain falls, so that endings are somehow intangible.

Cunningham’s sensibility was as much about time as about space—or, better, it was about the coexistence of the two and, unlike what transpires in much photography, time is liberated from illustration in a Cunningham dance. Things don’t have to happen in any narrative sense. Time is more about duration—which is in part why John Cage, and the other composers with whom Cunningham collaborated, had such freedom. In photography, conversely, the precise moment at which a picture is created may make all the difference—from evidentiary images to sports coverage to street shots to dance photography.

Which gets me thinking about the ephemeral—an idea that rarely pertains to the photographic object. (more…)

Untitled, 1965, © William Eggleston / Eggleston Artistic Trust / Cheim & Read Gallery

In 1976 Memphis-native William Eggleston ushered in a new age of photography with his ground-breaking use of color. The Museum of Modern Art hosted its first one-man color photography exhibition featuring Eggleston’s work. This particular display is known for prompting the acceptance of color photography as well as legitimizing and popularizing the refashioned medium.

With a focus on the mundane, Eggleston has the ability to capture the vibrant nature of seemingly ordinary objects and individuals; a blue tricycle, a light bulb hanging from a red ceiling, a woman’s bouffant hair-do. The normality of his subjects is deceived with his use of rich colors and appealing angles.

Eggleston has gone through his archives and reconsidered some of his work. In an era of new technology, he has decided to enlarge 36 of his most well-known photographs along with some never-before-seen images. By playing with the scale, moving from 16-by-20 inch prints to 44-by-60 inches, Eggleston claims to see things that he never knew were there. Christie’s will be selling the new-fangled oversized photographs to benefit the Eggleston Artistic Trust.

Eggleston’s work has appeared in Aperture issues 169, 181, and 196.

Public viewing:
March 8–11, 2012

Auction begins:
Monday, March 12, 2012
5:00 pm

Christie’s
Rockefeller Center
20 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, NY
(212) 332-6868

Red Ceiling or Greenwood, Mississippi, 1973 by William Eggleston

The most comprehensive retrospective to date of William Eggleston’s work will be on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, entitled Democratic Camera: Photographs and Video, 1961-2008. Although beginning his photographic career in black and white, Eggleston quickly turned to color—predominantly thought at the time to be for amateurs—and proved that it indeed deserved a place in art institutions. Democratic Camera only furthers the fact that Eggleston is the master of color photography and has secured an important place in art history for his quintessential American scenes. His inventive use of color turns the mundane into an unforgettable image, and blazed the path for future photographers, curators, critics, and authors alike. A portfolio of Eggleston’s little-known and intensely vibrant drawings was featured on the cover and in Aperture magazine, Issue 196.

Click here to see all of the LACMA public programs about William Eggleston.

William Eggleston: Democratic Camera
Photographs and Video, 1961-2008
On view: Sunday, October 31, 2010 – Sunday, January 16, 2011

Los Angeles County Museum of Art
5905 Wilshire Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90036
(323) 857-6000

Photograph by Stephen Shore

Pioneers of Color, an exhibition opening this week at Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York, showcases the influential work of master photographers Stephen Shore, Joel Meyerowitz and William Eggelston. Juxtaposing three distinct artists whose works have come to define color photography’s emergence onto the photography scene in the 1970s, this show celebrates the bold images that laid the foundation for contemporary photography today.

In addition Edwynn Houk Gallery will host a conversation with Kevin Moore, the curator of Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970 – 1980., currently on view at the Cincinnati Museum of Art, as well as the Hatje Cantz-published exhibition publication of the same title, and photographer Joel Meyerowitz on Saturday, March 6th.

Pioneers of Color: Stephen Shore, Joel Meyerowitz, William Eggleston
February 25th – April 24th, 2010

Opening reception
Thursday, February 25, 6:00PM – 8:00 PM

Artist Joel Meyerowitz and curator Kevin Moore in conversation
Saturday, March 6, 3:00PM

Edwynn Houk Gallery
745 Fifth Avenue
New york, New York
(212) 750 – 7070

View Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places

View Joel Meyerowitz’s Legacy

For the first time ever, the cover of Aperture features a drawing, not a photograph, as the cover image. In issue #196, these vibrant abstract works from William Eggleston are published for the first time and showcase a rarely seen part of the artist’s career. Also featured is a selection of William Klein’s work from 1956, soon-to-be-published in Rome (Aperture, October 2009), an examination of the role of monuments in photography by Mark Alice Durant, a review of ICP’s Year of Fashion from Holly Brubach, and Luc Sante‘s investigation into the early-twentieth-century photographic postcard. Philip Lopate also examines Sally Gall‘s new images of insects, Rob Hornstra documents less-than-fortunate Russians, photographer Gerald Slota and playwright Neil LaBute collaborate to create some very chilling scenarios, Debbie Fleming Caffery documents her native Louisiana, and more.

Pick up your copy at newsstands nationwide, buy the issue here, or click here to subscribe to Aperture.

Reader challenge: What exact medium does William Eggleston use to make these drawings?