27 Hours in NYC

I was in the city to do a little business, research, and socializing. In between, I managed to go to AIPAD, visit 2 photo shows at the Met, and spend time at Parsons/The New School. AIPAD was what I expected. It was useful to see all the photography galleries converged into one place. There was lots of polished work and people. Some highlights included seeing a few early Thomas Barrow color photograms and of course classic gems like Watkin and Atget. I also liked the still lifes of fruit by Sharon Core. Very few galleries had only solo exhibits up. An exception was Alec Soth's gallery from Minneapolis. Soth's work was big, highly polished, and I think primarily of Parisian people and places. It was all from the Fashion Magazine series. As one critic wrote, Soth's portraits will perhaps be the images to stand the test of time (my words). I wonder what Lee Witkin would think about all these photo galleries now? In visiting Parsons/The New School, I spent some time with Lars in the graduate studios. It was informative looking at the grad work and learning more about the history, faculty, and culture of Parsons. The following morning I visited the Met with the intention of seeing Lee Friedlander: A Ramble in Olmstead Parks. The show had many layers and could be read from so many points of view. Brilliant! The Met also had another photography show up entitled Photography on Photography.

I thought this was a great show and saw many important and influential artist on art photography and my teachers including Robert Heinecken, who was Patrick Nagatani's teacher. I was personally moved by several of the works including Moyra Davey. I had to buy her artist book/writings entitled Long Life, Cool White. I was not familiar with her work and related to her photographs, which are personal, reflective, influenced by books and writing, family, and are modest in scale (gasp!) I also enjoyed the photograph by Christopher Williams of an interior of a dishwasher (it reminded me of an advertisement) The wall text included all the technical aspects and tools involved in making the picture. It was quite a long list. Photography on Photography was a refreshing counterpoint to AIPAD. After the Met, I hopped a train to the Eastern shores of Maryland and had a lovely photography free weekend with friends.

Blogging from SPE in Denver, Colorado

I arrived in sunny Denver yesterday for the Society of Photographic Educations' 45th National Conference Agents of Change: Art and Advocacy. There has been a lot to see and take in. So far one of the highlights of the conference has been Jessica Liebermans' lecture Traumatic Images. Liberman is an Assistant Professor of Visual Culture at RIT and gave a brilliant presentation. A one sentence summarization of the lecture might be: " Photographs inherently share the same structure as trauma." Professor Lieberman had a lot of interesting points including her own term "traumatic facticity."Patrick Craig Manning says that "she is the only person that he has read/heard talk that speaks to his work." Professor Libermann mentioned by the way, that research is being done on developing a traumatic pill that will erase our unpleasant memories. Wow, as someone pointed out in the lecture, "How would we decide what was pleasant and what was not"?

As usual, there are a lot of organizations and companies in the trade show and I have a pile of info on the latest digital papers, catalogs for books, equipment, etc. etc. One of the vendors that stood out to me was a Berkley based custom digital book maker called Edition Studios One. I have been interested in digital publishing for several years now and have had digital books made with Lulu, Apple, and Blurb (though I have never got Blurb to transfer another blog of mine to book form correctly and hence I have not printed with them yet). Edition Studios One is a very small company that looks like it may provide something between the bigger on-line publishers and a traditional fine art book maker. I am looking forward to learning more about their services.

Later today one of my former mentors in graduate school, Patrick Nagatani, will be recognized as the honored educator. There will be a University of New Mexico reunion tonight in Patricks' honor.