Feature - Aline Smithson

I was amazed to realized I had not yet featured today's photographer.

Aline Smithson is an enthusiastic, generous, and important member of our local photographic community. She also runs the excellent Lenscratch blog, which I'm sure you all read regularly. It is with great pleasure that I feature work from her Hollywood at Home and Recreating History series.

Aline's work will be shown at an upcoming show at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Boston.

Recreating History:









Hollywood at Home:

Le Weekend

Tonight's the PDN 30 group show opening at the Icon from 6-9, which I'll be headed to in 25 min. or so. Expect a photo from each in standard wood frames at 11x14 or so. We know how these things go.

Then, Saturday is the aforementioned Scot Sothern opening at DRKRM.

Also on for Saturday is the Pieter Hugo opening at Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Culver City from 5-7. Pieter's all around awesome and he'll be showing his new series on Nollywood - that's right, the Nigerian movie industry.


Copyright Pieter Hugo


After that, there's a show opening at the Loft at Liz's above Liz's Hardware on La Brea, featuring Aline Smithson of Lenscratch and the following photographers also from 7-10pm:

Aline Smithson
Amanda Keller Konya
Franklin Londin
Gwen Samuels
Jad Najjar
Mike Saijo
Willa Mamet
Paul Papanek



There are other things going on of course as part of MOPLA so check out their site if you need more photo fix. (pun intended)

Opening - Scot Sothern's Lowlife @ DRKRM

Copyright Scot Sothern

Scot Sothern's Streetlife opens at DRKRM this Saturday from 7-9pm. He is also an extremely capable writer and you owe it to yourself to head over to ASX and read an excerpt from his forthcoming book and check out more of his work. I guarantee it will draw you in. This is work that can't be made by the faint of heart or stomach (or the sober, maybe). In Scot's words from his blog:

These images, shot mostly in Southern California between 1986 and 1990, record the existence of the many disenfranchised Americans, hawking their souls for the price of a Big Mac and a fix. With these portraits, paragraphs, and full disclosure, I hope to reveal the struggle and never changing plight of the street prostitute, victims of a culture that deems them criminal and expendable.

DRKRM Gallery
2121 N. San Fernando Rd. Ste. 3
Through May 23

Art Pet Peeve

Please, people, stop using the word "subvert" in your artist statements. This is not the French Revolution. Your photos, paintings etc. are not overthrowing or destroying anything.

Feature - Yoko Kanayama

Congratulations to Yoyko Kanayama, a recent CalArts MFA graduate, for an honorable mention in Center's Project Launch competition. Her series, Urban Forestry comprises photos of Ficus Trees around LA. At first glance, they reminded me of Paul Graham's work from American Night but then I asked Yoko to explain her process to me:

What you are looking at are photographs viewed through silk screened Plexiglas. I take the photos with a 4 x 5 color negative and make a traditional c-print. Then I use Rapidograph ink to trace trees from the image on a sheet of Frosted Mylar. From this Rapidograph drawing, I expose the silkscreen and use translucent white ink to make silkscreen prints of trees on the Plexiglas. This process gives the work a little bit of a 3D effect.

Photo Reads

Dalton Rooney started a new blog called Photo Reads, where he lists interesting articles he's found along with an interesting quote or two from each.

This one, from an article he links to over on ASX particularly struck my fancy:

And the viewers, despite any pitfalls or roadblocks put in their way, could still to some extent be there too. This has always struck me as somewhat amazing: That magic little black box enables one to leave, in a small way and for a short while, one’s own time and space and to occupy, maybe only superficially, another time and space: a then and there that really existed as well as a here and now.

- Charles Harbutt

That is exactly what is so magical about photography for me - its ability to transport me to a different reality, if only for a second. This explains why I don't like the vast majority of soft-focus, blurry, grainy or noisy photographs. My eyes don't see that way and thus, I can't believe the photo and experience that jump.

Go take a look at what Dalton's serving up. There's a Twitter account for it too if that's your thing.

Emily Shur in Fraction

Copyright Emily Shur

Local Emily Shur has a great series up in the new issue of Fraction, as well as an interview. Check it out.

Quote of the week

From an excellent article on The Brooklyn Rail by the ARTSEEN editors.

What has been lost, as Ms. Stewart and Ms. Smith both seem to recognize, is faith in the mysterious, non-linguistic channels through which art accomplishes its unique task, including its resistance to colonization by language. It is art’s ontology to function visually and to evoke the tactile, to engage both the mind and body of the viewer. Instead, many of our institutional guardians have sought a prescriptive approach to ensure that visual art works “properly.” These gatekeepers want to dwell in the more easily manageable world of ideas, rather than in the messiness of reality and the tangled threads of aesthetic impulses.

Via

Whoop!

Copyright Massimo Vitali

I just saw M+B is going to have a Massimo Vitali show up in June, which is pretty exciting. These are prints you'll want to see.

Workshops

Copyright Jay Reilly


OC lifestyle photographer, Jay Reilly, previously featured on WCST also teaches workshops on the basics, lighting, shooting kids and shooting for stock. A quick look through Jay's site will quickly convince you that he'd be a good teacher.

Be sure to click on that photo above for a larger view.

PhotoEspaña - Ugo Mulas

This is a post I wrote but never published, mostly because I was just too busy to really cover the festival in depth, as I had intended. I loved this show, though, so I thought I post it now:


The first official selection opening (there are more openings per evening than you can imagine or hope to make it too that for part of the "off festival" of PHE) I was able to attend was the Ugo Mulas show at the BBVA building. You have no idea how supportive of the arts major companies and especially banks are in Spain. Many have incredible collections and are big sponsors of events such as PHE. Don't get me started on how ridiculously supportive the Spanish government is of the arts in comparison to ours.

I'd never heard of Ugo Mulas before, but I've made a point to attend all of the official selection openings and have made some nice discoveries. Mulas has been my favorite. A photographer's photographer, Mulas shot portraits (many of artists), landscapes, fashion, commercial work, and experimented with the technical aspects of chemical photography (more on this in a minute).

I particularly liked his quote that I didn't write down but basically said that he worked commercially to pay the rent and only shot what he considered legitimate or noble work 10% of the time. He said he felt, though, that if he had to shoot the commercial stuff to live, he might as well pour all of his effort into it, which felt more honest.

I've always thought that if, Picasso for example, were looking down from somewhere at his current shows, he'd likely be screaming, "What, what are you thinking putting that preparatory drawing up on a museum wall?! That was never intended to be shown!" Well, there was an example of that in the Mulas show also, where they'd printed his bracketed shots large for some bizarre reason, rather the one where the exposure was "correct." I think a curator's job for dead artists is to at least try to figure out what the artist would have intended for their own shows and present that but back to the good stuff.

In one piece, Ugo finds himself sitting across from Giacometti at an outdoor cafe as he is told he's just won the grand prize for sculpture at the 1962 Venice Bienale and starts shooting. This sequence of four photos shows the incredible range of emotion shooting through Giacometti's being and feels quite human in that we can all understand that feeling of having one's work and effort recognized.



My favorite section of the show was his Verifications series for which he took photos "whose subject matter was photography itself...meant to clear the meaning of those operations I have been repeating for years, hundred of times a day, without never stopping to consider their inherent value and always seeing only their utilitarian side."

Now I'm not always the biggest fan of text accompanying work, but I'll admit it does make sense at times and this is one instance of text perfectly complimenting or even enhancing the visual experience. You can see the whole series along with the text that was presented at the show here and I highly recommend spending some time with this, which would become his final work.

I particularly loved Mulas calling Friedlander's work his "quest." That hit home. Other notables from Verifications:

I could also say that this homage to Niepce represents 36 opportunities lost, or rather, 36 opportunities refused, in an age where, as Robert Frank writes talking about photojournalism, the air has been tainted by the smell of photography.

Maybe here, as in the subsequent self-portrait with Nini there is the obsession of being present, of seeing myself while I am seeing, of taking part and being involved. Or rather there is the awareness that the camera is not part of me, but is an additional medium whose significance cannot be either overestimated or underestimated. Precisely for this reason, it is a medium which leaves me out just when I am most present.

PhotoEspaña is an incredible festival in an amazing city and I highly recommend a visit. It opens your eyes to amazing bodies of work you never new existed or, as in the case of Evidence, had never gotten the chance to see. I can't recommend a visit enough. Too bad the airlines are charging 1980's prices for flights these days...

Feature - Joni Sternbach, SurfLand

It is with great pleasure that I feature Joni Sternbach's tintype portraits of surfers. What could be more suitable for our geographic location and culture? I love the prevalence of long boards in these - very fitting for the process she employs, but maybe also because my surfing skills aren't so hot. All of the images below were shot here in California and many of them are from a recent trip out and not yet up on her website.

Enjoy, and hit up those beaches on this sunny, warm weekend we have ahead of us.


All images Copyright Joni Sternbach

Hossein Farmani's Response

Hossein took the time to respond to my postings here and here and in all fairness, I thought I would post it separately here at the top of the blog.

Hossein's Reponse:

Wesley,
Thank you for asking me to respond to you post.

You are right we failed in getting 160 great photographers from LA. We, through print advertising (23 ads), email blast, newsletters, our websites and word of mouth announced MOPLA's intention months ago. None of you or commentators send in your work. I am not personally familiar with your work. but if you think your worthy of an exhibition then you should put your calculator aside and send your works in for consideration. I am always open for constructive criticism but this posts are not one in my opinion.

MOPLA is a community event. Its not a for profit event. Its all volunteer based. Its an event to put the photography community on the map so YOU and the rest of the community can benefit.

I challenge you and invite you, to gather 50 or 20, or as many as you can, great photographer's work, together find a venue, put an exhibition together and MOPLA will publicize it for you. Do your part! Volunteer to help.

We are doing this to promote the art that has given us so much. I write the check each year to support it, a few hundred thousands dollars.

If you and your readers love photography and are part of LA photography scene. Why don't you get involve. This is as much your event as anyone else in LA.

Publishing profanity on your site does not offend me, offends the hard working photography community that is trying to do something good in this town, in this difficult times. I am used to negative people hiding behind their computers and sending anonymous emails.
There are cowards that like to complain about everything and blame everyone for their short comings and there are doers that get involve and make something better because they believe they can.

MOPLA will have a life of its own like many other events that I have envisioned, thanks in big part to positive, supporting community that has embraced them. I hope you and your reader join the rest of the community in making MOPLA a big success.

See you at the opening!

My reply to Hossein:

Hossein - I'm glad you responded as all of the feedback I've gotten in response to my posts from other local photographers has been supportive of my position, which I did try to present as constructively as possible. I will admit that my attention grabbing logo up there may have been a bit much and so I apologize for that. I tried to be as respectful as possible in the posts, while offering up my views of what wasn't working.

It brings me great joy that you are offering a chance to put on a show of local photographers' work (although I do not consider myself a curator) as part of MOPLA from that which has appeared on WCST or perhaps through a contest that I, and other local members of our community might create, if MOPLA does not plan to do so already for next year's edition.

I would love to get involved in the event and I know others that would too, but it was never made clear that this was open to us for collaboration. It seemed last year and this, that MOPLA was a top-down type of event, again with no call for entries or requests for ideas or help. I have been on the mailing list and have read each notice with care and interest but never saw such an invitation to our community.

With such a short time-frame, I doubt that organizing, printing, framing and locating a venue for an additional show would be possible for this year, though I will make some inquiries. Actually, the venue is probably the bottleneck here so if you have any ideas or connections, I'd be happy to organize something for at least the second half of MOPLA.

Otherwise, I know for certain that I and others would welcome the chance to volunteering our time and effort towards making MOPLA a success in years to come.


So, in short, it appears MOPLA is open to our volunteering and proposals for exhibitions in the future, so contact them! I'll keep you all posted on my own involvement, including hopefully helping to organize a juried call for entries for next year's event. Get involved and make MOPLA something special for our local photographic community each year.

MOP"LA" Continued...

If you haven't read my post from yesterday and the comments on it, please go do so before continuing here. I contacted both of the co-founders of MOPLA so that they were aware of the issue at hand and heard nothing back yesterday. Instead of responding, they changed the language on their site from:

"With the support of the Photography Community, MOPLA will showcase the work of 160 Photographers who live, work and/or have extensive bodies of work relevant to Los Angeles (emphasis mine)"

to:

"With the support of the Photography Community, MOPLA will showcase the work of 160 Photographers worldwide."

There. All better.

Well, yes, had they just said that from the get go, no issue would have been raised really. My main problem lied in the fact that they purported to represent local photographers and were not doing so - that someone actually had come up with the (correct, in my mind) idea to make the festival about the local scene and then chose later not to follow through.

Now, it still does not address the issue of why MOPLA chose not to do this in the first place. We have such photographic talent in this city, as I hope this blog demonstrates on a regular basis. It would have been nice, were MOPLA to actually celebrate and showcase our community and if it were to better reach out to us, through things such as a juried show for local photographers to be showcased, as I mentioned in yesterdays post.

Hossein Farmani did just write me back saying he will respond shortly. I'm curious to hear what he has to say and will be happy to post it here out of fairness, if he agrees. I'm happy he's chosen our fair city for his next endeavor (read his bio to see just how much he runs in the photo world) and hope it progresses into something wonderful for photography in Los Angeles.

In all fairness to MOPLA and as I said in the comments yesterday, at this point and with things kicking off in a little over a week, there probably wasn't much more they could have done to rectify this. I can only hope that at the very least my suggestions fell on open ears and some of it was absorbed so that next year, we can consider MOPLA a home-grown event showcasing the wonderful talent we have in LA.

After all, We Can Shoot Too.


Related post - Eric over at PixFeed weighs in here.

MOP"LA"

I was happier than most to see MOPLA's creation last year. Despite the growing pains and initial mistakes any such endeavor would experience, I was excited to welcome this celebration of photography to Los Angeles.

It struck me as funny back then that there would be no juried show as part of the festival, where local photographers could submit and be showcased. Instead, someone made executive decisions as to who was included. While this is fine and quite normal in the art world, I hoped that year two would bring Angeleno photographers an opportunity to submit and be considered.

Instead, what we've got is this:

The Month of Photography Los Angeles will deliver the most comprehensive celebration of the Los Angeles Photography Community to date. With the support of the Photography Community, MOPLA will showcase the work of 160 Photographers who live, work and/or have extensive bodies of work relevant to Los Angeles (emphasis mine) through our Exhibitions and Projections. The city of Los Angeles turns 160 years old in April 2010. The theme for MOPLA 2010 is 160/160 - Celebrating 160 years of Los Angeles through 160 Photographers.

Well, the problem with this is that it isn't true. Before delving into this, I'd like to preface it by saying that I've exhibited alongside and know personally some of the photographers I'll be naming. I'm a fan of much of their work. The issue is that these fine photographers DO NOT "live, work and/or have extensive bodies of work relevant to Los Angeles."

Some may have shows up at Los Angeles galleries and while that's great and all, it certainly gives the impression that nepotism or plutocracy is at play here.

PDN, a New York institution, will present a show of the PDN 30, just like last year. While I think this is great and all, to includ all 30 photographers in the list of 160 that purportedly are local or have worked locally is preposterous. It means that nearly 20% of those represented are represented as a favor to PDN and not because they have anything to do with our local photographic community. PDN is a magazine and a sponsor of the event and as such, appears to have been rewarded with 30 slots that should have gone to Angelenos.

I see there are currently 91 photographers that have been chosen as the group of 160. Were we to take out the 27 or so PDN selections that have nothing to do with LA and the remaining 10 photographers (see below) that have nothing to do with our fine city, save for local galleries putting on shows of their work or their agency being based here, that leaves us with just 54 photographers that match MOPLA's description, leaving 106 slots to be filled.

I call on MOPLA to fill these locally and partly through a juried exhibition. For obvious reasons, I won't enter and wouldn't expect to be selected. They can start with this blog and look at all the fine featured work that has appeared since its inception if they need any inspiration.

Included photographers who do not "live, work and/or have extensive bodies of work relevant to Los Angeles:"

27 of the PDN 30 photographers (to be conservative, though I don't see any outside Alex Prager who are local so it could be 29)

Bill Sosin
David Bacher
Eva Kolenko (Bay area at least...)
Evelyn Hofer
Ginny Mangrum (Bay area at least...)
Jamey Stillings
Jon Johnson
Morgan Silk
Robert Bueltman (Bay area, at least...)
Robert Stivers

91
-27
-10
----
54 out of 160*


*My apologies if I overlooked something in compiling this list - I made a serious effort to research each one. I tried to be conservative and even left those that grew up or studied here but do not "live, work and/or have extensive bodies of work relevant to Los Angeles" since they are local in my mind. Still, we end up with just 52-54 out of the 91 named so far.

I welcome this fledgling event to our local community but wish they would execute better. Selecting outsiders when you state that you are selecting local photographers is an insult to our community. Finding 160 talented local photographers should not require too much effort if that is actually your intent. I'd be happy to make suggestions.

I know there are people that will not be happy with this posting. It probably won't do me any favors as a photographer, but having started WCST to help foster a greater photographic community in Los Angeles, how can I not speak out publicly about something that makes false claims and does just the opposite?

We are a thriving photographic community.


UPDATE: It was just pointed out to me by a fellow photographer/blogger that the entire roster of the LA-based agency, Sharpe + Associates is on the list; not just some of them. Hmm...