Thank you, thank you, thank you & a call for entries

Of course the recent silence here on this blog has been a direct result of our portfolio Reviews occurring here in town, bringing together 160 photographers and 60 Reviewers for a full four days of photo overload.

I tell you, it's no small task organizing such an event so I just want to give a public shout out to Laura Moya, our absolutely incredible Director. The reason these Reviews seemed to run so smoothly and were so productive for those involved is simply because of the labor and thought that Laura put in to organizing the whole thing.


note: no, I don't have any idea who this guy is, but I chose this version because I feel he got the intensity right for us.

And of course, while congratulations and appreciation go out to all of our wonderful participants and Reviewers, another huge thank you to Bryan Wolf, Janet Stein, and our great team of volunteers who did just that- volunteered their time, enthusiasm, and labor to make this happen.

oh, and the call for entries:

photolucida is looking for any pictures made at our Reviews as long as they don't feature me doing anything embarrassing. I saw a lot of iphones and cameras around that closing party... maybe we should make up a little slideshow?

email 'em my way and we'll make something happen.

And again, thanks to all.

CM Top 50: Andy Freeberg

© Andy Freeberg

• Name, location

Andy Freeberg, Mill Valley, California

• Is photography your day job? If not, do you want it to be?

Yes, I work primarily as a magazine photographer and specialize in environmental portraiture and also do some corporate/annual report work.

• Can you remember/describe the first print you ever made? Why photography? Why do you do this?

I think the first print I made was some sort of seascape in high school. I was hooked pretty quickly. When I got to college, U of Michigan, I began working at the student run daily newspaper. It was my front row ticket to any concert or sporting event and I was able to go backstage and meet many of my favorite jazz musicians and engage with them by taking their picture. Photography continues to be my excuse to travel the world and meet interesting people.

© Andy Freeberg

• How did your project develop?

I went to Russia last year with the idea that I was going to do some sort of “before and after” project. I had a nice set of black and white photos that I had taken in St. Petersburg in the 1980's and I thought it might be interesting to revisit some of those spots, since Russia has changed economically and politically in such a dramatic way. The idea wasn't coming together too easily so I went to look at the art at the Hermitage, which is one of the great museums of the world. I noticed that the guards at the museum mostly sit in chairs which are placed around each of the gallery rooms. It was intriguing to me how they became part of the experience of viewing the art. I went back a couple of days later and began photographing them

© Andy Freeberg

• It's early yet, but have you had any concrete opportunities arise from your participation in Critical Mass? Shows? Publications? Print sales? High fives at a party?

One of the reviewers, Laurel Ptak, posted my photos on the I Heart Photograph blog in December and it spread through the internet from there. Over 10,000 people have visited my website since then. Three magazines, in Russia, Germany, and France, are publishing images. I have one show through CM reviewer and gallery director, Ann Pallesen, at PCNW in Seattle in May. Three prints were bought by a major East coast museum and a couple of handshakes but no high fives.

© Andy Freeberg

• Who are your favorite photographers, images, websites, projects, or blogs, etc. that inspire?

Robert Frank, Henri Cartier Bresson, Elliot Erwitt, Gary Winogrand, Diane Arbus, Sally Mann, Edward Curtis, Joel Sternfeld...and many others..

© Andy Freeberg

• Do you have a favorite youtube video that you'd like to share? It doesn't have to be photo-related.

CM Top 50: Will Steacy

© Will Steacy

• Name, location

Will Steacy, New York City

• Is photography your day job? If not, do you want it to be?

Yes, but I always got my hands dirty in many other things...I don't sleep.

• Can you remember/describe the first print you ever made? Why photography? Why do you do this?

Growing up I had a darkroom in my basement from 6th grade on, so in terms of first prints it's all a bit fuzzy, but in middle school and high school I used to go to hardcore shows every weekend and take pictures of the bands and print that stuff up in my basement. I would send them in to all the hardcore zines and they ended up in a couple. That meant the world to me back then. My father is a lifelong newspaper man and so is his father, and my father back in the day at one point used to take pictures for a newspaper and while his is on the editorial side now, he was always taking photographs. So as a kid I was always exposed to that and I have had a camera in my hand since I was 6 years old, a darkroom in my basement since 6th grade, etc, etc. I always hated school and wanted to drop out since 1st grade, how I actually went on to college I don't know, but in 11th grade I had a month long internship with a photographer and didn't go to school for that month and instead took pictures or was in the darkroom printing all day, and I still remember the moment when I was fixing a print and had the feeling like, this is what I fucking want to do, I will be a happy man if I can spend the rest of my life doing this. But of course mid afternoon daydreams as 16 year old (you dont want to know what else I would daydream about...) and being 28 now and somehow making this life happen, a lot has happened and its a lot of hard work living this day dream.

© Will Steacy

• How did your project develop?

It originally began as a collaboration with a writer. I was interested in what happens when words and images are blended together and how the two play off each other and they become a whole other medium. We traveled together on and off for almost a year and our experiences were recorded in two different forms, words and photographs, and of course felt by two different people, and I was interested in that tension where one experience or happening was seen and expressed with different eyes and how those play off each other.

© Will Steacy

• It's early yet, but have you had any concrete opportunities arise from your participation in Critical Mass? Shows? Publications? Print sales? High fives at a party?

Nothing that I know of. But perhaps like in some 80s movie a hot chick out of nowhere with a shinning light on her will come up to me at a bar and be like, "Hey, I saw your pics in Critical Mass, they were awesome, you wanna get out of here and take a ride in my Ferrari, you can drive, and then we'll go back to my place, I have a fridge full of beer and a camera that has a sticky shutter, maybe you can help me loosen it up?" That would be a great night!

© Will Steacy

• Who are your favorite photographers, images, websites, projects, or blogs, etc. that inspire?

Taryn Simon, David Simon and The Wire, Dorothea Lange, Paul Graham, Charles Bukowski, Mike Tyson, Franz Wright, De Kooning, PL DiCorcia, Joel Sternfeld, Robert Hass, Phil Perkis, Miles Davis, Hunter Thompson, New Orleans, Francois Truffant, Jim Morrison, Jack Johnson (the boxer), Walker Evans, Jacob Holdt, Blind Willie Johnson, Raymond Carver. As for blogs I'm always keeping up with We Can't Paint, Justin James Reed, Shane Lavalette, Tema Stauffer, Amy Elkins, Nina Corvallo, Brian Ulrich, Flax Photo and 40 Watt, of course, among others.

© Will Steacy

• Do you have a favorite youtube video that you'd like to share? It doesn't have to be photo-related.

Shane Lavalette's CM08 Reviewer's Scrapbook:

© Matthew Baum

Shane Lavalette's CM08 Reviewer's Scrapbook

featuring work by:

Matthew Baum
Davin Ellicson
Adam Lampton
Alison Malone
Graham Miller
Eric Percher
Cara Phillips
Dustin Shum
Will Steacy
Carlo Van de Roer

Shane Lavalette (b. 1987) grew up in a small town just outside of Burlington, VT. Currently, he is living in Cambridge, MA, studying for a degree from Tufts University and The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His photographs have been exhibited and published widely. Most recently, his work was featured in Humble Arts Foundation's book The Collector's Guide to Emerging Art Photography, launched at VOLTA NY. His project "Slí na Boirne" was recently selected as one of the winners of the prestigious Yousuf Karsh Prize in Photography, juried this year by Anne Havinga (Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh Curator of Photographs, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), Leslie Brown (Curator, Photographic Resource Center) and Emily Isenberg (Director, LaMontagne Gallery).

For the last few years, Shane has been writing about photography. His Journal, which has one of the highest readerships of photography-related blogs, focuses primarily on fine art photography and issues concerning contemporary photographic practice. By featuring individual photographers, books, exhibitions and exclusive interviews with artists (including photographers Mark Wyse, Michael Schmelling, Matthew Monteith, Brian Finke and Mike Mandel), the blog is both an archive of his own personal interests as well as a platform for critical discourse.

Shane is also the founder and editor of Lay Flat, a new publication of photography and writing on the medium.

and more...

kudos:

© David Paul Bayles

David Paul Bayles at 23 Sandy this month

Lucas Foglia, Damion Berger, Brian Ulrich, Peter van Agtmael, Rania Matar, Brian Widdis, and many more among the winners and finalists at Center

Pelle Cass receives a residency at Yaddo

Paula McCartney and Amy Stein in the fine print program at MoCP

Andy Freeberg and Dona Schwartz in the 2010 Discoveries of the Meeting Place at FotoFest

congrats all...

wow.

Let me pause for a moment to sing the praises of these previous participants of our Reviews and Critical Mass who I've noticed out in the world:

Hiroshi Watanabe
Andy Freeberg
Louie Palu
and
Brad Carlile

have all been named winners in the recent Hearst 8x10 Photography Biennial

and

Will Steacy and Rachael Dunville received Honorable Mentions.

Oh, and Will, Sarah Small, and Shen Wei have also appeared on the photo-based online reality show, Viewfinders.

Doug Dubois has a new book out with Aperture. (Stay away from Powell's. They've only got one copy on the shelf and I'm going to try to pick that one up today.)

Ron Jude, one of our Much Beloved and Appreciated Critical Mass Reviewers, received some sweet kudos from publishing icon, Michael Mack, Director of publishing at Steidl.

and, last but not least,

Suzanne Opton

and

Brian Ulrich

can cross "Receive Guggenheim Fellowship" off their to-do lists.

wow.

Huge congrats to all. Oh, and please, pass on any other shows, awards, accomplishments, etc. that I've missed.

CM Top 50: Ian van Coller

© Ian van Coller

• Name, location

Ian van Coller, Bozeman, Montana

• Is photography your day job? If not, do you want it to be?

Yes, I teach photography at Montana State University. I find the academic environment very stimulating. My students are awesome and they keep me motivated.

• Can you remember/describe the first print you ever made? Why photography? Why do you do this?

When I started photographing at 13 years old I wanted to be a wildlife photographer. I was particularly interested in birds. The first print I remember making was a Cibachrome print of a Lilac Breasted Roller. Early on in South Africa I met some camera club folks who were very supportive and showed me how to make prints in their darkrooms.

Why photography? That's a good question I'm not quite sure how to answer. I have enjoyed making images as far back as I can remember. Maybe it is about photography's natural relationship with time and memory. For me photography is about constructing memories of my past and trying to figure out who I am and where I fit.

© Ian van Coller

• How did your project develop?

My three projects that have made the top 50 of Critical Mass have been a linear progression from each other. They all relate to very personal experiences of growing up in South Africa during the apartheid era. I usually make work that relates to my personal experience.

© Ian van Coller

• It's early yet, but have you had any concrete opportunities arise from your participation in Critical Mass? Shows? Publications? Print sales? High fives at a party?

I have not had anything concrete come from critical mass. I keep hoping for that book prize. Getting a book published seems like an impenetrable process to me. Portfolio reviews have been more successful for me as there is more opportunity to develop a personal relationship with curators. I definitely encounter lots of people who know my work from Critical Mass though. I will probably keep submitting work to Critical Mass because I see it as a way to keep challenging myself to produce high quality work.

© Ian van Coller

• Who are your favorite photographers, images, websites, projects, or blogs, etc. that inspire?


At the moment I am obsessed with portraiture and issues related to identity. I have probably been most influenced by the writings of Geoffrey Batchen and Okwui Enwezor. Some of my favorite photographers include Seydou Keita, Samuel Fosso, Lolo Veleko, Fazal Sheikh, Tina Barney, Jackie Nickerson, Pieter Hugo, Bill Henson, Philip Lorca DiCorcia, Lorna Simpson, Michal Chelbin, Philip Toledano and Luis Gonzalez Palma. I also love the paintings of Kehinde Wiley, Mustafa Maluka, and Walton Ford and the prints of Enrique Chagoya.

I have 3 current favorite photo Blogs. Verbal Hmmm by Daniel Cuthbert, because it is one of the few blogs I know that focuses on African Photography. The Daily Polaroid by one of my former students Camden Hardy and Next Blog by one of my current students Zak Allen. Zak spends hours clicking that next blog button and compiling what he finds interesting into his own Blog. Fun idea.

© Ian van Coller

• Do you have a favorite youtube video that you'd like to share? It doesn't have to be photo-related.

I don't spend much time on youtube though I do love this Malcolm McClaren video:

CM2008 Top 50: Pelle Cass

© Pelle Cass, from the series Selected People

• Name, location

Pelle Cass
I live in Brookline, Mass. It’s a suburb that’s kind of tucked right into Boston proper. It’s green with lots of parks, although it has an urban feel. I take a lot of my pictures here and in downtown Boston.

• Is photography your day job? If not, do you want it to be?

My main goal in life is for photography to be my day job.

• Can you remember/describe the first print you ever made? Why photography? Why do you do this?

When I was twelve and a friend of the family named Armand, gave me a Yashica A twin-lens-reflex camera and some plastic tanks and trays. I was kind of lonely and isolated: my parents, being kind of proto-hippies (this was around 1966), took us kids out of school, bought a boat to live in, and rented a slip at Dinner Key Marina in Miami. I didn’t have much to do. I liked figuring out how to work the Yashica and I ejoyed fiddling with the dials and clicking the shutter, to the annoyance of my father, who said I'd wear it out. I had very little interest in actual photographs, although I enjoyed the sensation of taking pictures. I developed film in the gift tank, and made contact prints in brittle Bakelite trays, red as I recall. I distinctly remember how gray and ugly my first pictures were, and how the single-weight paper curled up into a tube. The combination of me not being interested in the images themselves but being fascinated by physical object must mean something!

© Pelle Cass, from the series Selected People

• Why photography?

I think it's the combination of art and science that appeals to me. I've always been artistic, but never was more than average at drawing or sculpture, and I'm too disorganized (or artistic!) for scientific rigor. Photography, which is both technological and artistic, happens to fit my talents and temperament pretty exactly. But it doesn't quite answer why I think it's something worth doing. I like photography for its modernity, it is always linked to the now, and how it always retains a scintilla of documentary truth. No matter how I fool around with photography and try to trick it into doing things it's not quite meant to do, it stays linked to the real world somehow. I am as far from a documentary photographer as you can get, but it's the link to reality that I value the most. But almost as important to me is a simple thing that is hard to express: somehow, the way a lens renders whatever is in front of it is absolutely fascinating.

© Pelle Cass, from the series Selected People

• How did your project develop?

Selected People developed in three ways. How I got the idea for the technique I use, how the work grew out of the other pictures I had been doing, and how this project fits into what other people have done and are doing.

The Idea and the Technique
In a way, the idea for Selected people just dropped out of the blue. Last spring, I was looking out my window at the park across the street. It was a cool spring afternoon, and people occasionally drifted by in ones and twos, walking the dog or out to buy milk. It was quiet, peaceful, and rather boring. In my boredom, this occured to me: an untold number of people must have walked on every square of pavement and innumerable small gestures and glances--the eventless minutia that makes up the bulk of life--must have occurred over and over for as long as there were people. It struck me as almost supernatural. And it seems amazingly weird that humans are only able to apprehend a person on the street for a moment or two. Then they are forgotten as soon as they pass by. I realized I could document this and condense a many hours into a single still picture. I thought about what David Hockney said about how a still photograph was untrue to experience because it only represented a hundredth of a second and your eye darts around as it takes in a scene. And I thought about how time-lapse photography captures the fact of accumulation over time, but blurs it into a nonsensical frenzy. I thought I could do something that was more true to experience, in its way, than photography or film.

So, for the picture Saturday and Sunday, the first one I did in this series, I went out to my front porch, put my camera on a tripod, and took hundreds of pictures over two days and six hours of people who happened by. I also took a picture of the empty street. Working in Photoshop, I simply left in the figures of my choice.

I did a few pictures in this method, before I realized that I could mimic experience in another way. I could simulate attention. In other words, if you are a photographer, you might only notice people taking pictures and forget everyone else who walked by. So I did a picture that only included people taking pictures or looking at their snapshots. Then I thought, if you were thinking about clothes, you might notice what colors people were wearing. Then I did a series isolating various colors. All these pictures are partly about attention, sorting figures in photoshop the way your mind filters things according to your interests. I suppose my pictures are also a way to sort data.

My Past Work
The pictures developed another way: in the context of my own work. Before this series, I did a project called Pins and another called Color People. In Pins, I would frequently make a collage of magazine photos, then kind of index the colors with ball-head pins--red pin in red flower, green pin in leaf, etc. I was thinking about pixels and color fidelity because I was new to digital photography. Then, in Color People, I used Google image search to collect pictures of people whose names were colors: John Violet and Daniel Pink, for example. Then I arranged the photographs into grids with a square of the appropriate color next to each portrait. So after Color People, it was a natural progression to want to collage real people into color order. I liked the idea of imposing an arbitrary system on a street scene. I also really wanted to work outdoors and not be tied to the computer and the studio. (It didn't work out that way, because I work on each picture in Photoshop for about a week.)

© Pelle Cass, from the series Color People

The Bigger Context

I also wanted this work to fit into photographs of the past in a way that my earlier work did not. A lot of my earlier work didn't look like photography; it looked like collage, which seemed European, somehow. I liked collage because I felt that there were already too many photographs in the world. It truly surprised me that suddenly I was doing "street photography" and making social observations like Walker Evans's subway pictures, Harry Callahan's figures in Chicago canyons and like P.L. DiCorcia's Heads series, I was making a real scene into a staged scene without changing anything, but by using a corny photo technique. And I liked how my new pictures played with the idea of typology by assembling similar things in the same frame, satirizing and paying homage to the Bechers.


• It’s early yet, but have you had any concrete opportunities arise from your participation in Critical Mass? Shows? Publications? Print sales? High fives at a party?

I was asked to submit for a European prize competition and exhibition, got a few nice emails, and find that when I write to someone in the photo biz, they tend to write me back and might have seen my work. I get ten hits a day on my web site directly from Critical Mass, too. I can say with total honesty that, whatever else, being honored by Critical Mass has made me a little more of a cheerful person.

• Who are your favorite photographers, images, websites, projects, or blogs, etc. that inspire?

Artists I would Google if I you don't know them: Olaf Breunning, William Lamson, Lisa Ann Auerbach, Tom Friedman, Tom Sachs

My Favorite blog: i heart photograph

© Pelle Cass, from the series Selected People

• Do you have a favorite youtube video that you’d like to share? It doesn’t have to be photo-related.

I do have a favorite, but I doubt anyone wants to watch Tennis Tips: How to Hit the Backhand Volley.

Well, since they won't let me embed it, I guess we can't find out. Thanks much, Pelle.

Kerri Rosenstein's CM08: Reviewer's Scrapbook

© Ferit Kuyas

Kerri Rosenstein's Scrapbook

featuring work by:

Pelle Cass
Ellie Davies
Karen Glaser
Ferit Kuyas
Christine Laptuta
Richard Laugharn
Jonathan Luckhurst
Lou Raizin
Kelly Shimoda
Brian Shumway
Brent Townshend
Antonio Turok
Carlo Van de Roer
Manuel Vazquez
Mi Zhou

Kerri Rosenstein primarily makes drawings, sculpture and installation work of an often non-representational, somewhat conceptual nature. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She is represented by Richard Levy Gallery in Albuequerque, New Mexico.

Rosenstein has also been the gallery director/curator/exhibitions coordinator for several different arts venues, namely and most recently Gallery Saintonge (in affiliation with Rocky Mountain School of Photography) in Missoula, Montana (2005-2008). She was also the Gallery Director of Farm Artspace, a contemporary gallery which exhibited works of all media (2002-2004).

Rosenstein maintains various roles as an arts educator. She has worked in academic settings such as The University of Montana, as well as alternative environments such as Caldera, an Oregon-based nonprofit program providing arts education and mentorship for underserved youth. For RMSP, Rosenstein has been the creative director of the Portfolio-in-Progress Reviews—a professional and artistic development course/event designed to integrate student progress into a working environment with the assistance of established professionals working in a diverse realm of photographic means.

photo show fever

© Christina Seely

oof... I guess the talk was last night. Sorry Seattle. I meant to note it ahead of time. In any case, go see the show while you can.

© Alexis Pike

Alexis Pike at Blue Sky

© Chris Rauschenberg

Chris Rauschenberg at Elizabeth Leach

FALL RIVER BOYS

an exceptionally handsome new book by a great photographer (and one of our Much Beloved and Appreciated CM08 Reviewers):

Fall River Boys by Richard Renaldi

Charles Lane Press

"Renaldi's photographs in Fall River Boys are moving not only because they're purely and simply beautiful; they're moving because we know that, at least in theory, anything could happen to any of these boys. Without boys like the ones Renaldi has photographed, American literature- and maybe even the American dream itself- would not exist, not as we know it."
-Michael Cunningham