As part of SAJA‘s annual convention to be held from June 17-20th, 2004, we invite you to submit your best photography for our annual photo exhibit. The exhibit will be displayed during the gala dinner on June 19th at Columbia University's Lerner Hall. The slide show this year will be 10 minutes long with a special soundtrack arranged and composed by Sagar Jethani of Blue Screen Music.

Click the PDF you see to the right, for the entry form and a gist of our policies. Please adhere to these rules as it will make it easier for us to showcase your work. Deadline for submissions is May 31, 2004.

If you are curious about the breadth and scope of the work submitted last year, check out this short movie:

Become a member of SAJA. Click here to see how you can quickly sign up. If you are interested in attending the conference and the various workshops, register by May 7 for the early-bird discount.

Via John Laxmi

One of my favorite documentary photographers – Eugene Richards – has an exhibit now through May 8 at the Leica Gallery in New York City. Read Vicki Goldberg's article in today's New York Times.

April 18, 2004
Photojournalism Without Apologies
By VICKI GOLDBERG
‘Fat Baby and Other Tales'

Leica Gallery, 670 Broadway at Bond Street. Through May 8.

WHILE photography blossoms and spreads unchecked in the art galleries, photojournalism and documentary photography generally shiver in a winter of discontent. Outlets for photojournalism, in decline in this country since the demise of the weeklies Life and Look in the early 70's, continue to shrink in favor of celebrity portraiture. War and its surrogates are the only other expanding areas for photojournalists. Documentary photographs are accused of lying and documentary photographers of exploitation, condescension, pandering and related unsavory activities. Yet they continue to try to report the world as it is or as they see it, some hoping to change it, some struggling with doubts they harbored long before the critics arrived.

Eugene Richards, 59, one of the most respected American photojournalists, has photographed a couple of circles of Dante's hell and come back to tell the tale. In spite of all his experience, he says that, in fact, he never trusted photography. You won't catch him saying the medium is truth, or that it's nuanced, or gives people room to change dramatically or, in the end, that it's enough. Photography can let the ideas loose and start the discussion, but he doesn't believe you can change anything, though you do the best you can. In a recent interview he remarked that the crack addicts in “Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue,” his 1994 show and book, “did what they were going to do all along — they died.”

That this is the view of a man at the top of his profession gives an idea of the difficulties photographers can face when confronting situations in need of repair. Still, he has never stopped. Evidence of his perseverance can be seen at the Leica Gallery on lower Broadway in “Eugene Richards: Fat Baby and Other Tales,” which presents 52 black-and-white images from three of his books.

There are glimpses here of mental and physical illness, teenage gangs and drug busts, as well as of marriage, birth, gay love and old age — a gamut from bleak to dire, with a few detours into tenderness and joy. “The Fat Baby,” a new book from Phaidon, includes some unpublished photo essays and has a number of less taut and clamorous images — a few that merely mark time, a few that strain for effect. (The book's title comes from the chapter about famine in Niger.)

Mr. Richards's camera cuts a rude fragment from a scene, finding a jagged piece that concentrates its emotional force. He has honed a style that mirrors — with disjunctions, displacements, extreme croppings, surprises and surprising angles, and sometimes an almost unbearable in-your-face closeness — the shattered or merely alienated lives he often observes.

For instance: in the center of the floor of a Mexican mental institution a long puddle of urine advances toward us; there are legs and silhouettes beside it and the reflection of a man in its middle. In a picture from Boston in 1975, the lower half of a boy leaping across a gap on his bike hangs down from the top edge of the frame just above a scribbled sign that says “Kill Niggers.” In Africa, an ancient woman, seen from waist to shoulder in profile, has the wrinkled skin of an elephant and a pendulous breast. She is carrying her grandson on foot for miles to save his life.

Mr. Richards can also adroitly register the evanescent signs of happiness, sorrow and exhaustion: the moment when a pregnant woman's eyes grow wide as she listens to her baby's heartbeat through a stethoscope; the shell-shocked eyes of a nurse in an emergency room; his first wife in the hospital, laughing despite the black scar from surgery for breast cancer, which would ultimately kill her.

If such disturbing images, as highly personal and as jarring as they are, have a vaguely familiar look, that is partly because, from the early 1970's on, Mr. Richards made the style so powerfully expressive that scores of young photojournalists followed him. His work can strike sparks; in 1994 “Cocaine True” practically lit a fire. A black media watchdog group accused Mr. Richards of being bigoted. He had few defenders; he recalls that it was “a kind of lonely year.” He finally met with the group's representatives and convinced them that when he was photographing a subject like crack he just didn't notice anyone's color.

Two of the addicts later got clean and invited him to their wedding; similarly, an elderly doctor he photographed has become a kind of surrogate father. Sometimes the photographs are aggressively intimate, as in the view of one eye, the nose and mouth of a crack addict who is missing a number of teeth and holds a needle between those she still has, or the close-up of a man leaning atop his new baby to kiss his wife, still evidently shocked by the birth experience.

Mr. Richards says he can get so close because people can tell he's not judgmental. And, he says, “my biggest problem is I'm so uninteresting that all these people forget I'm around.” While he was photographing a 17-year-old pregnant woman and her boyfriend, they would quarrel and throw rocks at each other and even start to make love — at which point he would get out, certain her father would murder him if he caught him there.

He does tend to fade into the woodwork: slight, nearly bald, with a shaved monk's tonsure and a thin beard and mustache, glasses, a voice so quiet it is barely audible at times, and an unassuming, receptive manner. This is not the expected kit bag of someone who has found his way into a crack den, the home of a child abuser and the operating room in a remote Serbian hospital. But he started down this path as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War, studying with the master photographer Minor White while waiting to be carted off to prison. Unexpectedly, he was offered the option of volunteering for Vista, a social service organization, in Arkansas, where civil rights were words you didn't bother saying out loud.

He photographed, wrote for a small newspaper and ran a day-care program. Vista sent two black women — he's white — to help him at the center. He wrote to say they couldn't do that; they said that was a racist remark. Eventually he was beaten so badly he suffered massive seizures and lost “an entire archive” of his memory, which he says he has replaced with stories, because everyone needs memories. For a while he was addicted to phenobarbital to prevent the seizures, giving him some sense of the power of drugs.

Photographing the down side is a hard way to make a living and has steadily become harder. Photo essays, Mr. Richards's métier, have nearly vanished as publications demand a grand-slam picture to do it all at one blow. Sixteen years ago, when he was already happily remarried and his son was newly born, his year's income was $8,000. “When you're a creative person,” he says, “you don't notice how little you're making.” Most years he makes from $20,000 to $50,000 after expenses. Advertising work and occasional grants free him to photograph as he wants. Many documentary photographers do commercial work or teach to supplement their incomes.

His own parents struggled financially and quarreled constantly, mostly about money. As a boy in Dorchester, Mass., he would try to break the television set so that they would be mad at him rather than at each other. “You can grow up angry,” he says, “and you have to find some way to express it.” He thinks about this. “Being a social critic is a way of getting all the anger out.” When he's working, he says, everything's alive, all his feelings are alive, he gets upset but keeps going; he does his job. Any real distress hits him later.

He speculates that his early awareness of struggle is one part of what drives him to make his kind of pictures, though no one can quite pin down what makes a photographer seek out nursing homes and blind men and babies dying of AIDS to make them somehow beautiful, somehow comprehensible, somehow visible to those who were not there and would not, perhaps even could not, look if Gene Richards did not show the way.  

Via John Laxmi

Late as this post may be, it's an exhibit not to be missed (click on the link below for the NYT article). The NYTimes review mostly pans the Magnum (a premier photo agency) photo exhibit but it is nonetheless an important collection to peruse should you find yourself in NYC.

Since the exhibit runs through September 6, perhaps we could arrange a trip during the SAJA Convention. Registration for the convention is now open. Discounted (Early Bird) registration is from April 15 to May 7. Advanced registration is from May 8 to June 11. While on-site registrations may be possible, save the disappointment and register early because the SAJA convention almost always sells out!

THE NEW YORK TIMES
April 2, 2004, Friday

PHOTOGRAPHY REVIEW; Pictures of the Picturesque, Not Necessarily of the Truth

By KEN JOHNSON

Before television, Pop Art, Deconstructionist theory and the digital revolution, it was possible to believe unreservedly in photojournalism. It was back then, in 1947, that the renowned photojournalists' cooperative Magnum Photos was founded by the photographers Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and David Seymour.

Magnum's mission was to liberate its members from the formulaic requirements of mainstream magazines and newspapers, to enable them to bear witness more directly and truthfully to the tumultuous unfolding of 20th-century history.

Times have changed, however, and today hardly anyone takes for granted the transparent veracity of journalistic or any other kind of photography. Even Magnum's Web site acknowledges, ”In today's ‘information age,' if the reader can be enjoined to enter the quest for meaning, then one has succeeded.” Which brings us to ”Magnum's New Yorkers,” an exhibition of pictures by Magnum photographers at the Museum of the City of New York.

Culled from the Magnum archives by the museum's curator of photography, Bob Shamis, the show's 130 pictures by 35 photographers are meant to add up to a portrait of New York. Dating from the late 1940's to 2002, the pictures show people from many walks of life in all kinds of situations: celebrities and crack addicts, politicians and strippers, Wall Street businessmen and East Village bohemians, political protesters and fashion models and so on.

While perusing this occasionally diverting but ultimately enervating display, you may wonder if this photographic panorama truly represents New York and its huge and hugely diversified population. Of course it doesn't, and probably no selection of 130 photographs could. There's just too much to cover, especially if you stretch it out over 50 years. But the show — in which, by the way, there are no photographs involving technical deceptions, digital or otherwise — also affirms deeper doubts about photojournalism itself and its ability to tell us the truth about our world.

What photojournalism mostly trafficks in — or, at least, the photojournalism in this exhibition — is not the truth but the picturesque. Photojournalists don't bring us the news: they give us professionally processed images and stories — polished, plausible fictions — that we effortlessly understand because they are so much like stories and images we've seen before.

This explains the many photographs of famous people in ”Magnum's New Yorkers”: James Dean walking through a wintry Times Square with his overcoat collar turned up and a cigarette dangling from his lips; a luminous close-up of the young Marilyn Monroe; Grace Kelly emerging like a goddess between two men watching her from the foreground; Miles Davis coolly blowing his horn in a smoky jazz club. At their best such images become icons permanently installed in our culture's fantasy life.

Beyond images of the glamorous, rich, powerful and famous, pictorial clichés run in every direction: boys jumping into the East River; a sprawling inner-city family picnicking in Central Park; children playing in the spray from a fire hydrant; the sleeping man's bald head down on a cafeteria table; Fulton Fish Market workers romantically silhouetted against the early morning sun; a woman and her child visiting a man at the Tombs; a young man throwing himself into the mosh pit at a punk rock concert; a recently arrived Chinese immigrant breakfasting in his briefs on a fire escape above the Bowery; women examining handbags piled on a street vendor's display table.

There are, as well, the expected sorts of quirky and incongruous pictures: the long neck and little head of a llama sticking out of a car window; the short, stout, conservatively dressed white man standing next to the tall, slender, black dude in a plaid suit; the masked man in a maid's outfit in the parlor of a private club for sadomasochists.

All these and many others have human interest and sometimes genuine entertainment value, and they are all made with impeccable professionalism.

Yet there is not one that looks different from thousands of similar photographs that we have seen before in magazines and newspapers. The deadening familiarity extends even to the kinds of gritty investigative work that the most adventurous photojournalists pursue. See, for example, the portrait of a hollow-eyed young woman hungrily watching a glass pipe pass from hand to hand in a squalid crack den, from a series on addiction by Eugene Richards.

All the photographs mentioned above were made, of course, by particular photographers: the show includes pictures by the four Magnum founders as well as notables like Cornell Capa, Bruce Davidson, Elliott Erwitt, Inge Morath, Susan Meiselas and many others whose names you may know. (Magnum now has 62 active members.) Yet a curious sense of anonymity prevails throughout the show. It's as if a single collective mind, the generic mind of photojournalism, were being channeled by different people with only superficially varying inflections.

To put all this into perspective it may help to think of two photographers who are not in this show but who made some of the most compelling New York photographs ever: Diane Arbus and Gary Winogrand. Both pursued particular kinds of subject matter, Arbus seeking out socially marginal people and Winogrand compulsively stalking beautiful women on the street. But what distinguishes the work of each is not what they were looking at but how the formal qualities of their pictures reflected their deeply idiosyncratic ways of experiencing the world.

It's been said before, but it's worth repeating: what changes your world is not seeing different things but seeing things differently.

”Magnum's New Yorkers” is at the Museum of the City of New York, 1220 Fifth Avenue, near 103rd Street, (212) 534-1672, through Sept. 6.

Twenty years ago Weston Naef, the curator of the J. Paul Getty Museum‘s photo collection in Los Angeles, established a permanent home for some very important photographs. Today, not only does he overlook the work of social documentary photographers Lewis Hine and Dorothea Lange, he is also responsible for the abstract imagery that made avant-garde photographer Maholy-Nagy famous.

Now through July 25, these images and more can be seen in a show called Photographs of Genius At the Getty.

“Presenting the work of innovative photographers who profoundly influenced their contemporaries and succeeding generations of artists, this exhibition celebrates the 20th anniversary of the Museum's department of photographs. It includes selected prints by 38 major photographers whose work is held in depth by the Getty, including Julia Margaret Cameron, Carleton Watkins, Eugène Atget, Alfred Stieglitz, Walker Evans, and Diane Arbus. “

If you are in LA, check it out!

It has been a busy couple of weeks and my posts here on TIFFINBOX have really trickled to a few drops. I hope to change that as soon as I get a few things sorted out at work and home.

Meanwhile, I missed posting this note about IDENTITY, a photo exhibit in NYC. David Wells, a photojournalist who has spent a great deal of time in India, told me about the show. His wife Annu is one of the artists showcased.

Sepia International and The Alkazi Collection in New York presented Identity, three concurrent exhibits by photographers. Two of the three photographers have Indian roots.

Annu Palakunnathu Matthew examines “the ‘staged' photographic document and its power to reinforce cultural stereotypes.” She combines images by Edward S. Curtis and digitally altered facsimiles using her own image. According to the press release, Matthew creates fabricated pairings that explore both the notion of originality and that of identity.

Sunil Gupta‘s work represents his journeys as a gay man with HIV from his homeland in India to his adopted homes in England and Canada. Known for his diptychs, Gupta's “narrative juxtapositions explore the inherent tensions which have shaped his experience of being a gay Indian man living in the West.”

The show ran from the end of January to the middle of March this year.