New York Photo Festival (May 14May 18, 2008) Photography

Photography, one of the most important visual media of our lives, has been surprisingly uncelebrated, particularly in the United States. New York City, home to the most influential commercial and fine art photography community, has lacked—until now—a large-scale event dedicated to photography. The inaugural New York Photo Festival (May 14May 18, 2008) delivered a dynamic, high-quality event in what is arguably the photographic capital of the world. This event celebrated both contemporary photography and the creative, inspirational talents of the people who produce this work. The New York Photo Festival 2008 took place in DUMBO, an off-the-beaten-track, but easily accessible neighborhood on the Brooklyn waterfront between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges.

Festival Curators for NYPH 09 include photo editor Jody Quon (New York Magazine); editor, publisher, and curator Chris Boot; William A. Ewing, Director of the Musée de lElysée in Lausanne; and Jon Levy, founder of Foto8 and publisher of 8 Magazine as well as founder of HOST Gallery in London.http://www.nyphotofestival.com/

New York Photo Festival (May 14May 18, 2008) Photography

Photography, one of the most important visual media of our lives, has been surprisingly uncelebrated, particularly in the United States. New York City, home to the most influential commercial and fine art photography community, has lacked—until now—a large-scale event dedicated to photography. The inaugural New York Photo Festival (May 14May 18, 2008) delivered a dynamic, high-quality event in what is arguably the photographic capital of the world. This event celebrated both contemporary photography and the creative, inspirational talents of the people who produce this work. The New York Photo Festival 2008 took place in DUMBO, an off-the-beaten-track, but easily accessible neighborhood on the Brooklyn waterfront between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges.

Festival Curators for NYPH 09 include photo editor Jody Quon (New York Magazine); editor, publisher, and curator Chris Boot; William A. Ewing, Director of the Musée de lElysée in Lausanne; and Jon Levy, founder of Foto8 and publisher of 8 Magazine as well as founder of HOST Gallery in London.http://www.nyphotofestival.com/

Leonard Freed Jews of Amsterdam Documentary Photography

1958 Joden van Amsterdam, de Bezige Bij, Netherlands

Leonard Freed: An American in Amsterdam ...

Freed’s first official book, entitled Joden van Amsterdam, appeared in 1958. Whether by chance or grand design, the book, hot off the press, landed in the mailbox of their recently-built apartment in Amsterdam West precisely on the day Leonard and Brigitte got married. It had been Freed’s own idea to make a photo book on Jewish life in Amsterdam – at least what was left of it after the Second World War. Of the 80,000 Jews who had lived in the capital in 1940, after the Shoah there were only 14,000 still alive. When Freed visited Amsterdam for the first time in 1952 as a young Jewish American, he was confronted with the deep wounds and social dislocation of a Europe just emerging from the war. During that first trip to Europe he fell in love with a Dutch girl. He visited her parents’ home, only to discover that the family had been rabid National Socialists during the war. “Can you imagine that?” Freed said. “As a naive Jewish boy from another world I suddenly found myself sitting at table with people that I could not help but find very friendly and likeable, while of course from the Dutch point of view I should have kept my distance from collaborationists like that.” (5) The way that he recounted this distressing experience, with a mixture of empathy and journalistic detachment, was typical of Freed. The ‘light irony’ of which Hofland spoke was not so much dictated by Freed’s character, as the way that life and history presented themselves to him, full of dilemmas, paradoxes and unforeseen outcomes.

Henk Hofland very clearly remembers Freed playing with the idea of doing a photo essay on the Jews of Amsterdam. “I introduced him to my fellow editor at the Algemeen Handelsblad, Max Snijders. He was well informed on this subject. They worked together to do the book.” It must have been an interesting duo, because Snijders (1929-1997) was known as a flamboyant, very self-assured journalist who could talk his way into any situation, while Freed was a man of few words, who preferred to stay in the background. Both were 27, but ambitious in their own way. The publication is proof that there was no lack of synergy when the two came together. While in 1958 there were sensitivities on both the Dutch and Jewish sides about something as explicit as picturing the contemporary Jewish community, Freed and Snijders succeeded in finding a good balance between the shame and guilt of the Dutch and the resignation and reticence of the Jewish community. In his nuanced, almost didactic text Snijders explains how in the thirteen years since the war Jewish life had again taken up its course: “A new community has grown up, less colourful, but hardly less kaleidoscopic.” It was very much the concern of the author and photographer to sketch things as they were at that moment, to paint a picture of a living community. It was explicitly stated that the book was not a catalogue, census or inventory, but was intended to reflect “an aura”. Yet in Joden van Amsterdam Freed could not escape from primarily depicting expressions of colourful orthodox Jewish life although – even back before the war – the Jews in Amsterdam were largely assimilated and secularised. But for a photographer folklore always makes a more interesting picture than a college lecture hall full of students, where there is nothing explicitly Jewish to be seen, while they were perhaps all Jews.

Leonard Freed Jews of Amsterdam Documentary Photography

1958 Joden van Amsterdam, de Bezige Bij, Netherlands

Leonard Freed: An American in Amsterdam ...

Freed’s first official book, entitled Joden van Amsterdam, appeared in 1958. Whether by chance or grand design, the book, hot off the press, landed in the mailbox of their recently-built apartment in Amsterdam West precisely on the day Leonard and Brigitte got married. It had been Freed’s own idea to make a photo book on Jewish life in Amsterdam – at least what was left of it after the Second World War. Of the 80,000 Jews who had lived in the capital in 1940, after the Shoah there were only 14,000 still alive. When Freed visited Amsterdam for the first time in 1952 as a young Jewish American, he was confronted with the deep wounds and social dislocation of a Europe just emerging from the war. During that first trip to Europe he fell in love with a Dutch girl. He visited her parents’ home, only to discover that the family had been rabid National Socialists during the war. “Can you imagine that?” Freed said. “As a naive Jewish boy from another world I suddenly found myself sitting at table with people that I could not help but find very friendly and likeable, while of course from the Dutch point of view I should have kept my distance from collaborationists like that.” (5) The way that he recounted this distressing experience, with a mixture of empathy and journalistic detachment, was typical of Freed. The ‘light irony’ of which Hofland spoke was not so much dictated by Freed’s character, as the way that life and history presented themselves to him, full of dilemmas, paradoxes and unforeseen outcomes.

Henk Hofland very clearly remembers Freed playing with the idea of doing a photo essay on the Jews of Amsterdam. “I introduced him to my fellow editor at the Algemeen Handelsblad, Max Snijders. He was well informed on this subject. They worked together to do the book.” It must have been an interesting duo, because Snijders (1929-1997) was known as a flamboyant, very self-assured journalist who could talk his way into any situation, while Freed was a man of few words, who preferred to stay in the background. Both were 27, but ambitious in their own way. The publication is proof that there was no lack of synergy when the two came together. While in 1958 there were sensitivities on both the Dutch and Jewish sides about something as explicit as picturing the contemporary Jewish community, Freed and Snijders succeeded in finding a good balance between the shame and guilt of the Dutch and the resignation and reticence of the Jewish community. In his nuanced, almost didactic text Snijders explains how in the thirteen years since the war Jewish life had again taken up its course: “A new community has grown up, less colourful, but hardly less kaleidoscopic.” It was very much the concern of the author and photographer to sketch things as they were at that moment, to paint a picture of a living community. It was explicitly stated that the book was not a catalogue, census or inventory, but was intended to reflect “an aura”. Yet in Joden van Amsterdam Freed could not escape from primarily depicting expressions of colourful orthodox Jewish life although – even back before the war – the Jews in Amsterdam were largely assimilated and secularised. But for a photographer folklore always makes a more interesting picture than a college lecture hall full of students, where there is nothing explicitly Jewish to be seen, while they were perhaps all Jews.

Helen Levitt has died at the age of 95 Photography

Lees verder ...

Helen Levitt, New York City's Visual Poet Laureate, Has Died at the Age of 95

Helen Levitt, one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century, who documented the drama of daily life on the streets of her native New York for over seven decades, died in her sleep at her home in Manhattan on Sunday, March 29. She was 95.

Miss Levitt had her first solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1943. Her photographs have since appeared in Edward Steichen's landmark 1955 show The Family of Man and in more recent exhibitions of great importance, including MoMA's Photography Until Now and the National Gallery of Art's On the Art of Fixing a Shadow in Washington, D.C., both celebrating the invention of photography. She has been the subject of retrospective exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the International Center of Photography, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

From the 1930s through the 1990s, Miss Levitt permitted the publication of only a few books of her photography, but beginning in 2001, she allowed powerHouse Books to publish four volumes of her work to great acclaim: Crosstown (2001); Here and There (2004); Slide Show (2005); and Helen Levitt (2008).

Miss Levitt's incomparable oeuvre includes seven decades of New York City street photography in black-and-white, as well as little-known color work showcased for the first time in Slide Show. Like Lartigue, Kertész, and Cartier-Bresson, Miss Levitt wielded her camera as a seamless extension of her eye, able to capture fleeting moments of life with unsurpassed lyricism and style. As Adam Gopnik remarked in his 2001 New Yorker feature on the artist, "Levitt's photographs, like her city, though occasionally they rise to beauty, are mostly too quick for it. Instead, they have the quality of frozen street-corner conversation: she went out, saw something wonderful, came home to tell you all about it, and then, frustrated said, 'You had to be there,' and you realize, looking at the picture, that you were."

See also Read the New York Times obituary. Read Sybil Miller's feature in photo-eye Magazine...

John Szarkowski, former director of the photography department at The Museum of Modern Art, once observed, "At the peak of Helen's form, there was no one better."

"At least a dozen of Helen Levitt's photographs seem to me as beautiful, perceptive, satisfying, and enduring as any lyrical work that I know. In their general quality and coherence, moreover, the photographs as a whole body, as a book, seem to me to combine into a unified view of the world, an uninsistent but irrefutable manifesto of a way of seeing, and in a gently and wholly unpretentious way, a major poetic work." —James Agee HeBooks has published several volumes of her work: Click to view all titles »

An Alternative (III) for Martien Coppens Monsters van de Peel ... Op de grens van land en zee Company Photography

Coppens, Martien. ; Snoek, Paul. - Martien Coppens. Op de grens van land en zee.
Venlo, Chemische fabriek L.van der Grinten, 1964. Linnen. 46o. Met illustraties in z/w. Oplage 1500 genummerde exemplaren.

Martien Coppens was born in 1908, son of a clog maker from Lieshout, a village a stone's throw from the town of Eindhoven. Very soon he developed a remarkable interest for photography (on one of his school reports it is mentioned that the photography could actually use a bit less attention) and follows, exceptionally, an education abroad, in Munich. After some wandering, he establishes himself as independent photographer in Eindhoven. He works on request, but has a preference for free work and for what he callls artistic photography. His photos are authentic and realistic, although the quality of his work was not appreciated by all people at that time. Martien Coppens focused his camera quite often at Brabant farmers and workers, at church buildings, and at landscapes, such as De Peel, but he was also interested in the dynamics of a city such as Eindhoven and her industrial activity. He was an enterprising man who published about seventy photo books, of which some were well accepted by the public.

Martin Parr and Gerry Badger : The Photobook: A History volume 1/ Memory and Reconstruction : The Postwar European Photobook
Martien Coppens was responsible for a number of topographical photobooks during the 1930s and 1940s, documenting the architecture, landscape and art of his native Brabant. These were in a similar vein to the Publishing house Contact's De Schoonheid van ons Land (Our beatiful Country), showing a comparable focus on the cultural heritage of Holland. As the title of Contact's series implies, the kind of photography employed was traditional, large-format, topographically precise, with an emphasis on the picturesque, on heritage and continuity rather than change.It was this kind of rhetoric that was employed by Coppens for his 1947 book Impressies 1945 (Impressions 1945), but his subject was radically different. He still concentrated on the Dutch landscape and architectural heritage, and photographed it in his usual romantic style, but now his theme was the Dutch heritage interrupted by the discontinuities and disruption of war. He chose the lighting carefully, often a combination of sun and cloud that would allow him to set a ruin picked out by sunlight against a glowering, cloudy sky. Add luscious gravure printing, and Coppens's ruins look less like real buildings than stage sets. In all of his work, and in this book in particular, Coppens opposed the prevailing trend in Dutch photography of the time, which was progressing towards a gritty, Existensial realism, and he was criticized for it by other photographers.Coppens, who habitually dealt in nostalgia, photographed this devastated landscape in the only way he knew, even exaggerating the romantic rhetoric of the ruin. But like Jean Cocteau and Pierre Jahan in La Mort et la statues, Coppens demonstrated that there were many different ways in which artists and photographers could come to terms with what had happened to Europe.

Exhibition review: Ruud van Empel Photography

By Lenka Scheuflerová / PRAGUE DAILY MONITOR / 25 March 2009

When I first saw the portraits by Dutch photographer Ruud van Empel in their real size at Leica Gallery Prague, I recollected the time when I was little and my mother dressed me in my nicest dress and took me to the photographer from time to time. Wearing beautiful dresses and looking directly at the camera, many of the children in Empel's portraits give the impression of such "official" photographs taken for a family album. The only exception is that the children are not standing in a photo studio surrounded by the same borrowed toys, but they are in a forest, surrounded by nature, holding a flower or maybe a squirrel in their hands.

At a second look, however, you can feel there's something strange about the photos, although you do not know what. After a more thorough examination, you will notice some small details, like that their faces are unnaturally smooth and that one of the little girls does not have eyebrows at all… What a trained eye may also find disturbing in some of the children is the unnatural reflections of studio flashes in their eyes, which makes the kids seem as if they had been crying.

Ruud van Empel uses the method of photographic montage. "To produce these portraits, he took photos of several children, let's say five or six, and then combined their faces in a graphic computer programme to create a new, non-existing child," Leica Gallery Prague deputy director Věra Weinerová said.

Using his computer as a paintbrush, Empel creates artificial landscapes for which high-quality processing is typical. Thanks to that, you can spend quite a lot of time in front of each of the photographs, discovering more and more details - dewdrops here, a spider there, small beetles sitting on leaves, a little bird at the back, perfectly illuminated although in the shadow of trees.

The author focuses on perfect arrangement of individual objects rather than on what they look like in reality. It happens then that some of the objects are not in proportion to others in terms of size, but this is offset by a perfect harmony of colours and shapes. Every potentially empty space, like the corners, is filled with details - mushrooms, the Moon, diagonally arranged objects of the same colour - to achieve an aesthetically balanced composition. The resulting images are too perfect, perhaps an impression of what childhood should be like, of a fairy tale, or of a paradise.

Ruud van Empel won fame already in the past as a 3D graphic designer in television. Now he applies the 3D method in his photographs, which seems to be bringing him success as well.

"His photographs sell at unbelievable prices," said Jana Bömerová, head of Leica Gallery Prague. "He cooperates with four large famous galleries. He produces 12-piece numbered series, each gallery gets three pieces, and the photos sell in a few days," she added.

Ruud van Empel (Breda, 1958) produced television series as well as theatre posters and stamps. His photographic montages inspired by naive realism are deliberately too perfect and include an excessive number of details and colours - whether placed in a jungle or in a modern office.
In his photographs, Empel focuses on specific topics that he deals with in stages - civil servants in the series The Office (1996-2001), window views in Frame Story (1998-2000), fatal women in Study for 4 Women (2000) and The Naarden Studies (2002).

In his first exhibition in the Czech Republic, at Leica Gallery Prague, Empel presents a selection of portraits of children from his latest series Study in Green. Lees verder ...

Exhibition to last till 18 April 2009
Leica Gallery Prague, Školská 28, Prague 1
open daily from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.
admission CZK 50, reduced admission CZK 30

Lenka Scheuflerová
is a staff writer and translator at the Monitor.
She likes writing about business, finance and photography.
You can reach her at lenka@praguemonitor.com

Exhibition review: Ruud van Empel Photography

By Lenka Scheuflerová / PRAGUE DAILY MONITOR / 25 March 2009

When I first saw the portraits by Dutch photographer Ruud van Empel in their real size at Leica Gallery Prague, I recollected the time when I was little and my mother dressed me in my nicest dress and took me to the photographer from time to time. Wearing beautiful dresses and looking directly at the camera, many of the children in Empel's portraits give the impression of such "official" photographs taken for a family album. The only exception is that the children are not standing in a photo studio surrounded by the same borrowed toys, but they are in a forest, surrounded by nature, holding a flower or maybe a squirrel in their hands.

At a second look, however, you can feel there's something strange about the photos, although you do not know what. After a more thorough examination, you will notice some small details, like that their faces are unnaturally smooth and that one of the little girls does not have eyebrows at all… What a trained eye may also find disturbing in some of the children is the unnatural reflections of studio flashes in their eyes, which makes the kids seem as if they had been crying.

Ruud van Empel uses the method of photographic montage. "To produce these portraits, he took photos of several children, let's say five or six, and then combined their faces in a graphic computer programme to create a new, non-existing child," Leica Gallery Prague deputy director Věra Weinerová said.

Using his computer as a paintbrush, Empel creates artificial landscapes for which high-quality processing is typical. Thanks to that, you can spend quite a lot of time in front of each of the photographs, discovering more and more details - dewdrops here, a spider there, small beetles sitting on leaves, a little bird at the back, perfectly illuminated although in the shadow of trees.

The author focuses on perfect arrangement of individual objects rather than on what they look like in reality. It happens then that some of the objects are not in proportion to others in terms of size, but this is offset by a perfect harmony of colours and shapes. Every potentially empty space, like the corners, is filled with details - mushrooms, the Moon, diagonally arranged objects of the same colour - to achieve an aesthetically balanced composition. The resulting images are too perfect, perhaps an impression of what childhood should be like, of a fairy tale, or of a paradise.

Ruud van Empel won fame already in the past as a 3D graphic designer in television. Now he applies the 3D method in his photographs, which seems to be bringing him success as well.

"His photographs sell at unbelievable prices," said Jana Bömerová, head of Leica Gallery Prague. "He cooperates with four large famous galleries. He produces 12-piece numbered series, each gallery gets three pieces, and the photos sell in a few days," she added.

Ruud van Empel (Breda, 1958) produced television series as well as theatre posters and stamps. His photographic montages inspired by naive realism are deliberately too perfect and include an excessive number of details and colours - whether placed in a jungle or in a modern office.
In his photographs, Empel focuses on specific topics that he deals with in stages - civil servants in the series The Office (1996-2001), window views in Frame Story (1998-2000), fatal women in Study for 4 Women (2000) and The Naarden Studies (2002).

In his first exhibition in the Czech Republic, at Leica Gallery Prague, Empel presents a selection of portraits of children from his latest series Study in Green. Lees verder ...

Exhibition to last till 18 April 2009
Leica Gallery Prague, Školská 28, Prague 1
open daily from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.
admission CZK 50, reduced admission CZK 30

Lenka Scheuflerová
is a staff writer and translator at the Monitor.
She likes writing about business, finance and photography.
You can reach her at lenka@praguemonitor.com

How Does Photography Change Our Lives? How Has Photography Changed Your Life?

How Does Photography Change Our Lives? How Has Photography Changed Your Life?



WASHINGTON, DC.- The Smithsonian Photography Initiative invites the public to participate in an unprecedented online dialogue about the impact of photography on history, culture and everyday lives. Visitors to “click! photography changes everything” at http://click.si.edu are encouraged to submit their photos and stories about the many ways photos shape experience, knowledge and memory.

The Smithsonian Photography Initiative recently started selecting stories and images submitted by site visitors on an ongoing basis to be regularly uploaded to the “click!” Web site. In addition, on a bi-monthly schedule, it is issuing more specific and theme-based calls for visitor-contributed content. New images and stories will join an archive of written and filmed commentaries that the Initiative began collecting last year from invited experts investigating how photography has changed the progress and practice of their diverse fields—from anthropology to astrophysics, from media to medicine, from philosophy to sports.

The Initiative is collecting and sharing images and narratives that shed light on how photography influences who people are, what people do and what people remember. Has a photograph been used to document property loss, inspire a hairstylist, sell a house, beat a traffic ticket or helped with the decision about where to go on vacation? Has a single photograph ever influenced what someone believes in or who someone loves? Visitors can go to http://click.si.edu and follow the easy steps to share their stories about the power of photography and to see images and read stories submitted by others.

General public entries will appear alongside those by invited experts such as Stewart Brand, founder and editor of the legendary Whole Earth Catalog, who understood how photography could change the way people viewed Earth and their life on it; Diane Granito, an adoption specialist and founder of the Heart Gallery, who explains how commissioning and exhibiting compelling photographic portraits of foster-care children helped the children find new families and homes; and Lauren Shakely, publisher at Clarkson Potter of a string of best-selling cookbooks, who describes how and why photography can change the kinds of food people crave.




“click!” also presents seven videos—available online, as downloadable podcasts and on YouTube—that feature Smithsonian curators, historians and scientists speaking about photography at the Institution. Visitors to the site can see and hear Lonnie Bunch, the director of the new National Museum of African American History and Culture, explain the role photography plays in building a new museum about cultural identity. In another video, Lisa Stevens, curator of primates and pandas at the National Zoo’s Department of Animal Programs, describes how photography, in addition to turning pandas into celebrities, spreads knowledge about little-known species, generates funds and raises public awareness of conservation issues.

At this transitional moment—as digital technology alters the form, content and transmission of photos—the goal of “click!” is to provide a unique opportunity and gathering place for experts and the public alike to reflect on the history, spread, practice and power of photography.

“click! photography changes everything”
In March 2008, the Initiative launched “click! photography changes everything” as an interdisciplinary Web site. The goal of “click!” is to stimulate an unprecedented dialogue about the ways photography enables people to document and actively interact with the world. Later that year, the second phase of “click!” launched, inviting the public to actively participate in a dialogue about the role photos have played in history and their everyday lives, a dramatic alteration of the traditional one-way, curator-to-visitor dynamic.

Marvin Heiferman serves as creative consultant and curator of “click! photography changes everything.” His vast experience organizing major exhibitions about photography and visual culture includes exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the International Center of Photography and the New Museum. “click!” is his first online exhibition project.

Support for “click! photography changes everything” has been provided by several private individuals and foundations, including the Comer Foundation, PhotoWings, The Henry Luce Foundation and the Trellis Fund. Night Kitchen Interactive of Philadelphia is the Smithsonian Photography Initiative’s Web-design firm for http://click.si.edu. Video Art Productions of Washington, D.C., produced the videos for the Web site.

Typo-Foto Photo / Graphics Graphic Design Photography

TYPO-FOTO ELEMENTAIRE TYPOGRAFIE IN NEDERLAND 1920-1940

Dick Maan and John Van Der Ree: TYPO-FOTO. ELEMENTAIRE TYPOGRAFIE IN NEDERLAND 1920-1940. Antwerp: Veen/Reflex, 1990. First edition. Text in Dutch. A near-fine hardcover book in full decorated cloth in a fine dust jacket: the four corners of the boards have all been gently bumped. Out-of-print and very uncommon.
9 x 11.75 hardcover book with 112 pages and 135 color and b/w examples of Dutch avant-garde typography from 1920-1940, including many rare and unusual examples.

This is the best anthology of Dutch typography to my knowledge. Beautifully designed and printed, this book gets my absolute highest recommendation. Includes individual sections and biographies devoted to these pioneers of modern typography: Piet Zwart,Paul Schuitema,Gerard Kiljan, Cesar Domela Nieuwenhuis, Dick Elffers, Wim Brusse, Cas Oorthuys, Henny Cahn and Willem Sandberg.

Contents:
Typo-foto Elementaire Typografie
Inleiding
Piet Zwart
Paul Schuitema
Gerard Kiljan
"foto als beeldend element in de reclame"
Cesar Domela Nieuwenhuis
Dick Elffers
Wim Brusse
Cas Oorthuys
Henny Cahn
Willem Sandberg
Het "Graffies-nummer" van "De 8 en Opbouw," 24 juni 1939
Reacties op het "Graffies-nummer"
Nabeschouwing
Biografische gegevens
Bibliografie

Also included is a bound-in 8-page facsimile of the Dutch graphics newletter from June 24 , 1939: "De 8 en Opbouw," which includes a review of Zwart's "Het boek van PTT" as well as work by Elffers, Brusse and Sandberg.