The Leica As Teacher

By Mike Johnston, The Online Photographer

Apropos the video we linked the other day, I would just like to throw this out there for what little it's worth...if any young or beginning photographer of real ambition within the sound of my voice would like to radically improve his or her photography quickly and efficiently, I suggest shooting with nothing but a Leica and one lens for a year. Shoot one type of black-and-white film (yes, even if you're completely devoted to color and digital, and hate film and everything it stands for. You don't have to commit to this forever; it's an exercise). Pick a single-focal-length 50mm, or 35mm, or 28mm. It doesn't have to be a "good" lens—anything that appeals to you and that fits the camera will do. Carry the camera with you all day, every day. Shoot at least two films a week. Four or six is better (or shoot more in the spring and fall and less in the dead of summer and winter). The more time you spend shooting, the better. The amount of film you shoot is related but not so important. (Photographing is like jogging: benefit accrues to time spent doing it, not how fast you go or how much ground you cover.)

Proof the rolls of film by contact and file them sequentially in a notebook. Get or make between one and six workprints per roll, however you choose to do it (even if you scan your picks and look at the pictures on a computer screen), and, every five or ten rolls or so, have one nice print made, or make it yourself. Craft well, but don't crop and don't fuss; just take what the camera gives you.

If you don't like this idea, no need to get all scornful or whimpery with me. If there are, say, 30,000 people reading this (approximately our average daily readership, an astounding fact that still mystifies me), a couple of thousand might think this suggestion is a sound one; 50 to 100 might read this and sincerely intend to follow the suggestion; and, maybe, one, two, or three people will actually follow through and do it. So if you're among the other 28,000, no need to bother defending or rationalizing your opposition. You're solidly in the majority as it is.

To read the complete article on Mike's blog, click here.

En Foco Photo Competition: People/Places/Things

En Foco, Inc and Canson Infinity invite fine art and documentary photographers of any nationality or ethnicity to submit work to People/Places/Things, an international competition celebrating En Foco's 35th Anniversary. Our aim is to identify and promote talented emerging and mid-career artists working today, creating cross-cultural dialogue, and providing artists with exposure and access to those that may be able to envision opportunities beyond the scope of this competition. All photo-based works are eligible. The deadline is June 24, 2009.

For full details including submission policy and prizes visit the En Foco site.

Starting With Fashion, Ending With Art

By ROBERTA SMITH

Five years after Richard Avedon’s death at 81 the International Center of Photography is setting the record straight. Avedon was indeed a great artist, and his fashion photographs are his greatest work.

This may not be quite the way Avedon wanted it. His own pursuit of greatness often involved playing down the half-century of fashion magazine work he did for Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue as little more than a day job and emphasizing his portraiture, which he produced voluminously. At least that’s how it seemed with his last big New York retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 1994; that 50-year survey included, shockingly, fewer than a dozen examples of the fashion work.

“Avedon Fashion: 1944-2000” is the corrective, the first museum exhibition devoted exclusively to his fashion work. Its nearly 180 images and ephemera confirm Avedon’s place in the history and the art of his time.

Avedon’s fashion photographs from the late 1940s to the early ’60s are everything you want great art to be: exhilarating, startlingly new and rich enough with life and form to sustain repeated viewings. Their beauty is joy incarnate and contagious. The best of them are as perfect on their own terms as the best work of Jackson Pollock or Jasper Johns from that era, and as profoundly representative of it.

As with these painters Avedon’s work represents an important turning point and a new kind of self-consciousness of his medium. He makes us aware of its process on different levels, while also questioning its values and deflating its pretensions. His images have a new tautness; you see them as energy-producing wholes in which every detail and bit of surface is articulated. Like Abstract Expressionist painting, they show us an art form learning from and then moving beyond European conventions.

Please visit the New York Times story to read the rest of the article.

Avedon Fashion: 1944-2000” continues through Sept. 6 at the International Center of Photography, 1133 Avenue of the Americas, at 43rd Street; (212) 857-0000,
www.icp.org

Richard Avedon
Veruschka, dress by Kimberly, New York, January 1967
© 2009 The Richard Avedon Foundation

Sight Unseen

SIGHT UNSEEN
International Photography by Blind Artists
May 02, 2009 - August 29, 2009
At the California Museum of Photography

Curated by Douglas McCulloh

SIGHT UNSEEN presents work by the most accomplished blind photographers in the world. It is the first major museum exhibition on a rich subject full of paradox and revelation. This exhibition occupies the ground zero of photography.

Artists
Ralph Baker, New York, New York
Evgen Bavcar, Paris, France
Henry Butler, New Orleans, Louisiana
Pete Eckert, Sacramento, California
Bruce Hall, Irvine, California
Annie Hesse, Paris, France
Rosita McKenzie, Edinburgh, Scotland
Gerardo Nigenda, Oaxaca, México
Michael Richard, Los Angeles, California
Seeing With Photography Collective, New York, New York
Kurt Weston, Huntington Beach, California
Alice Wingwall, Berkeley, California

The inherently conceptual work of SIGHT UNSEEN proposes a surprising central thesis-blind photographers possess the clearest vision on the planet. "Heaven gives its glimpses only to those/Not in a position to look too close," writes the poet Robert Frost. Many of these artists curate their own private, internal galleries of images. Then they use cameras to bring their inner visions into the world of the sighted. "I photograph what I imagine," writes Evgen Bavcar. "You could say I'm a bit like Don Quixote. The originals are inside my head."

To read more about this amazing exhibition please visit the museum's website.

Time.com also has the work featured on their site–A spectacular new exhibit at the University of California, Riverside raises extraordinary questions about the nature of sight.

LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph

The third annual LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph is set for June 11, 12, and 13 in beautiful Charlottesville, Virginia. Join us for 3 days of peace, love, and photography as we transform historic downtown Charlottesville into a "living image" and celebrate the careers of three legendary photographers: Martin Parr, Gilles Peress, and Sylvia Plachy. These three renowned photographers will each create a solo gallery exhibit and appear on-stage individually at the historic Paramount Theater to discuss their lifetime of work and show images from their careers. Please visit our website at www.look3.org for more details on these artists and the LOOK3 programs.

Returning in 2009 are the LOOK3 Workshops and Project Critique Sessions. Photographers of all skill levels will find invaluable instruction and experience by enrolling in classes taught by master photographers David Alan Harvey, James Nachtwey, Nina Berman, Eugene Richards, and Larry Fink. Maggie Steber and Scott Thode will lead the Project Critique Sessions to help students edit and develop working photography projects.

Other highlights include our "Masters Talks" series with presentations by Simon Bruty, Yolanda Cuomo, Eugene Richards, Callie Shell, George Steinmetz, and Philip Toledano. Paolo Pellegrin will mount a special outdoor show created just for LOOK3, and nature photographer Tom Mangelsen's majestic images will hang from the trees along the downtown pedestrian mall.

With 3 days filled with exhibitions, outdoor projections, film screenings, on-stage interviews, and special events, LOOK3 creates the perfect setting to share ideas and be inspired. Attendees will be surrounded by photography - in the trees, projected in storefront windows and on buildings, and in all the galleries. BE PART OF IT!

For more information and to buy passes, visit www.look3.org