New photography exhibit puts a century of queer men in love on display

By in Photography

New photography exhibit puts a century of queer men in love on display
Musée d’art et d’Histoire Geneve (MAH).
© Loving by 5 Continents Editions.

Queer love has been around forever, but it can be hard to picture what it looked like even a century ago. Now, thanks to a new exhibition at the Musée d’art et d’histoire (MAH) in Geneva, Switzerland, visitors can see firsthand via a collection of 400 photographs of men in love, dating from between 1850 and 1950.

The collection is the product of couple Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell. 20 years ago, the duo stumbled upon a photograph of two men embracing at an antique store in Dallas, Texas. They couldn’t help but see themselves in the photo, and they decided to take it home.

“When we found the first, we had no expectation there would ever be a second,” Nini told The Art Newspaper.

But there was a second. And a third, and a fourth, and so on, until their collection reached its now massive scope of more than 4,000 historical photographs of men in love, originating from 36 different countries.

Musée d’art et d’Histoire Geneve (MAH).
© Loving by 5 Continents Editions.

“We felt [it] was our obligation to keep these photographs. To keep them safe,” Treadwell said. “Our goal is to continue to have museum exhibitions wherever we can that will propel us into telling this story and sharing the history that love is love. Love has been around forever.”

In 2020, Nini and Treadwell turned their collection into a popular photography book, Loving: A Photographic History of Men in Love 1850-1950, that featured more than 300 of the photographs they’d found over the past two decades. They also released a short documentary telling the story of their collection.

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Now, their collection has been adapted to an exhibition, also titled Loving, which features nearly all the photographs from the book, along with 80 never-before-seen pictures that Nini and Treadwell have collected since the book was released.

“In these pictures it’s fantastic the number of different stories it could activate,” said MAH director Marc-Olivier Wahler. He gave a 1951 photograph of two soldiers sitting close together on a bench as an example.

“You wonder, they’re in the army and are they really together? Then suddenly you see the entangled feet. And all these possible stories — what happened to them, what happened to this photograph? Where was it found? It’s endless.”

Musée d’art et d’Histoire Geneve (MAH).
© Loving by 5 Continents Editions.

Loving is on display at MAH through September 23. Get a sneak peek at the photographs for yourself:

Musée d’art et d’Histoire Geneve (MAH).
© Loving by 5 Continents Editions.
Musée d’art et d’Histoire Geneve (MAH).
© Loving by 5 Continents Editions.
Musée d’art et d’Histoire Geneve (MAH).
© Loving by 5 Continents Editions.
Musée d’art et d’Histoire Geneve (MAH).
© Loving by 5 Continents Editions.
Musée d’art et d’Histoire Geneve (MAH).
© Loving by 5 Continents Editions.

Maps, Everyday Ephemera, and Watercolor Drawings Record José Naranja’s Travels with Fantastic Detail

By in Art World News

Maps, Everyday Ephemera, and Watercolor Drawings Record José Naranja’s Travels with Fantastic Detail

All images © José Naranja, shared with permission

Rather than scrolling through photos from a recent trip, José Naranja (previously) remembers his travels through exceptionally detailed sketchbooks with notes, illustrations, and ephemera collected during his visits. The artist and author is an avid tourist and dedicated observer, and he saturates the blank pages of his Moleskines with watercolor and ink drawings of airplanes, film characters, and maps. Like most of us, Naranja was unable to travel during much of the last few years, although he’s resumed his adventures and frequented Thailand and other parts of Asia, which are reflected in his latest spreads.

Currently, Naranja is working on an experimental illustrated oracle deck that envisions the year 2050 through the lens of science, art, and philosophy, all tinged with his signature fantastical approach. The artist’s latest book, The Nautilus Manuscript, is available now, and you can follow updates on his work on Instagram.

 

An open sketchbook shows drawings of pens, pouches, notes, and ephemera with pens and watercolors nearby

An open sketchbook shows a drawing of an airplane and map with notes on the page and pens and watercolors nearby

A hand draws portraits of two film characters, Amelie and Faye Wong. There's writing surrounding them

An open sketchbook with three stamps, a chart, and drawings of a man and insect with magnifying glasses. A pen is on the table nearby

An open sketchbook with three cat stamps on the page next to notes and a yellow and red pattern on the right side. Pens are on the table nearby

An open sketchbook shows a drawing of a map with notes and patterns on the page and pens nearby

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Maps, Everyday Ephemera, and Watercolor Drawings Record José Naranja’s Travels with Fantastic Detail appeared first on Colossal.

Desert Dreamers 10: The Artists

By in Native

Desert Dreamers 10: The Artists

“Easter Sunrise” (1970) by John W. Hilton.
PHOTO COURTESY PALM SPRINGS ART MUSEUM

One of the earliest paintings of the Mojave Desert — an 1853 oil titled “Jornada del Muerto,” or “Journey of the Dead” — depicts a stretch of the Old Spanish Trail (the “back way” to Vegas) as an uninhabitable hellscape: drier than dust, void of life, the ground crackling under a broiling sun. Yet the artist, George Douglas Brewerton, cast onto this Martian scene a golden glow that 170 years later still stirs a strange sense of longing.

He captured something special, and by the turn of the century, writer John Van Dyke put it into words. “It is stern, harsh, and at first repellent,” he wrote in his seminal 1901 tome, The Desert. “But what tongue shall tell the majesty of it, the eternal strength of it, the poetry of its widespread chaos, the sublimity of its lonely desolation? And who shall paint the splendor of its light; and from the rising up of the sun to the going down of the moon over the iron mountains, the glory of its wondrous coloring? It is a gaunt land of splintered peaks, torn valleys, and hot skies.”

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“Old Palm Springs” (circa 1925) by Sam Hyde Harris.
PHOTO COURTESY PRIVATE COLLECTION

Writers such as Van Dyke, Charles Francis Saunders, and J. Smeaton Chase conveyed the mesmerizing beauty of the desert to influential effect. In their wake came many more dreamers, often “lungers” and loners in search of a healing climate and solitude but also artists, who found something closer to heaven than hell. It was an extreme landscape, sure, but a place where they could tune their palettes to sandy washes, colorful mountains, and otherworldly plant life and rock formations.

In his book Our Araby: Palm Springs and the Garden of the Sun, published in 1920, Chase predicted the Coachella Valley would blossom as an artist colony like those that had formed on the Monterey Peninsula and in Santa Barbara and Laguna Beach. “Our Araby,” he wrote, “with its marvelous display of tone and color — tone the most elusive, color the most unearthly and ethereal — is a land of enchantment to the painter, and its fame has spread from one to another until, now, every winter and spring sees painters of note studying these desert landscapes, so fascinatingly different in their problems of conception and handling from anything that commonly come in the artist’s way.”

Indeed, by the time Chase published his petite volume, several notable artists were living and working in the area, including James Swinnerton, John Frost, and Alson Skinner Clark. All the artists had distinctive styles and particular interests. Swinnerton was known for painting smoke trees, Clyde Forsythe for old mining camps, Gordon Coutts for that distinctive glow over opaque mountains and blue skies. Other landscape painters, including Fernand Lungren of Santa Barbara and Lockwood de Forest of New York, visited the desert repeatedly over many years to capture its mercurial moods over time. Their impressions recorded the landscape prior to the desert’s postwar development.

When Palm Springs emerged as a weekend retreat and resort destination, some of the painters exhibited and sold their work at The Desert Inn, where proprietor Nellie Coffman opened the area’s first art gallery. A second wave of painters — Paul Grimm, Marjorie Reed, and Sam Hyde Harris among them — expanded the scene.

While new generations of painters carry on the landscape tradition, the legacy of many early artists still resonates. Palm Springs Art Museum recently mounted a major exhibition of paintings by Agnes Pelton, and earlier this year, the Brigham Young University Museum of Art hosted a three-day symposium on the life and works of Maynard Dixon. Even relatively minor figures earn an occasional nod. Desert Island Country Club in Rancho Mirage christened its new restaurant The Penney to honor the late resident and landscape painter Frederick Penney.

Here, we introduce some of the personalities who helped propel our desert as an enduring hub for artists.

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Early artist Carl Eytel draws in the desert with his burro.
CHARLES FRANCIS SAUNDERS, COURTESY SANTA BARBARA BOTANIC GARDEN

Carl Eytel  (1862–1925)

The Artist of the Palm Tree

The first and arguably most influential artist to call Palm Springs home was Carl Eytel, a German immigrant who wasn’t a particularly good artist at all.

Eytel spent much of his childhood sitting in Stuttgart’s Royal Library, reading and daydreaming about the American West. He fantasized about cowboy life, made countless drawings of cattle, and yearned to travel. Eventually, he saved enough money to cross the Atlantic and found work with a German-speaking cattle rancher in Kansas. After briefly returning to Germany to study art, he continued on to California, finding ranch work in the San Joaquin Valley in 1898 before settling in Palm Springs in 1901.

“He longed for the sand and sage and colored hills of the Mojave and Colorado deserts toward which his thoughts had been directed for so long, and where he felt a special place had been set aside by the Almighty for those who could understand solitude and immeasurable space,” journalist Ed Ainsworth wrote of Eytel in Desert Magazine.

Eytel made a modest home in a tiny cabin near Tahquitz Creek with the permission of the McCallum family, pioneers in the pre-incorporated “village.” Here, he dedicated his life to sketching and painting the desert. He worked during the week and displayed his paintings for tourists to buy on weekends. His depictions of California fan palms — “primly dressed, with their vivid green crowns and drab tan skirts,” the artist once described — were most popular.

Eytel’s prolific journals reveal a nomadic life roaming the Coachella Valley and the Southwest with his mustang, Billy. He traveled from Palm Springs to Idyllwild and Hemet via Round Valley (near today’s Palm Springs Aerial Tramway); to Joshua Tree via Whitewater Ranch; and to Death Valley via the Mojave Desert. He also ventured into Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah and befriended Navajo, Hopi, Chemehuevi, Serrano, and Cahuilla people. He scribbled Native terms in his notebooks and became one of few settlers in the Palm Springs area to speak passable Cahuilla. (After Eytel died in a Banning sanitarium, he was buried, at his request, in the Cahuilla Indian cemetery.)

Armando’s Bar

Ink drawing by Carl Eytel.
PHOTO COURTESY PALM SPRINGS HISTORICAL SOCIETY

“Few knew more intimately [the desert’s] Indians, its mountains, its mesas” than Eytel, the writer and desert biologist Edmund G. Jaeger told Palm Springs Villager, the forerunner to Palm Springs Life. “His mind habituated to see loveliness in form and color and found expression in literary work and in painting in oil and watercolors. He also did considerable excellent pen drawing.”

Eytel shared his knowledge of the land and influenced the work of writers such as Jaeger and Charles Francis Saunders, as well as painters, particularly James Swinnerton and adventurer/homesteader Cabot Yerxa. Most notably, he collaborated with George Wharton James on the 1906 publication of Wonders of the Colorado Desert, which included 300 of Eytel’s drawings and a generous helping of lore from his journals.

As the desert’s elements chipped away at his health, Eytel gave most of his sketchbooks and journals to Jaeger, who in turn presented them to Lloyd Mason Smith, the first director of Palm Springs Desert Museum (now Palm Springs Art Museum), where they remain in the permanent collection.

tacquila palm springs

Maynard Dixon contemplates his next masterpiece.
PHOTO COURTESY PALM SPRINGS HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Maynard Dixon (1875–1946)

The Man Who Painted Poems

The most celebrated of the early desert painters is Maynard Dixon, best known for his paintings of the Navajo country of New Mexico and the deserts around his homes in Mount Carmel, Utah, and Tucson, Arizona. However, the California native (born near Fresno) was hopelessly drawn to the Colorado Desert and painted around Box Canyon in Mecca as well as the Indio Hills and Chocolate and Orocopia mountains.

He had a cottage near the Salton Sea where he welcomed fellow painters James Swinnerton, John Hilton, and Clyde Forsythe. He and Swinnerton famously feuded over the depiction of clouds, with Dixon declaring that his friend’s clouds had been “lousy” for 30 years and he’d never learned to paint them. Swinnerton returned the insults in good spirit, but, Dixon told journalist Ed Ainsworth in Desert Magazine, “We never spoke a decent word to one another in public.”

Armando’s Bar

“Evening on Orocopio (Painted Canyon), Imperial Valley” by Maynard Dixon, March 1940.
PHOTO COURTESY PRIVATE COLLECTION

Dixon, who started his career as a commercial illustrator and was married for 15 years to the documentary photographer Dorothea Lange, experimented with postimpressionism and cubism as he matured his own style. In addition to the landscape, he depicted Native Americans and Hispanic and Anglo settlers and their horses. He also became a respected muralist.

“I aim to interpret, for the most part, the poetry and pathos of the life of Western people seen amid the grandeur, sternness, and loveliness of their country,” Dixon told Anthony Anderson, the art critic at the Los Angeles Times at the time. “My objective has always been to get as close to the real nature of my subject as possible — people, animals, and country.”

In November 1945, Scripps College’s Florence Rand Lang Galleries mounted a 50-year retrospective of Dixon’s work. Although he was too unhealthy to attend, he sent a letter to be read at the opening in which he shared his experiences of the West and the silent desert. He wrote, “I must find in the visible world the forms, the colors, the relationships that for me are most true of it and find a way to state them clearly so that the painting may pass on something of my vision.”

He found it all in great measure.

tacquila palm springs

James Swinnerton and his untitled desert landscape with smoke trees in a wash, circa 1935.
PHOTO COURTESY PALM SPRINGS HISTORICAL SOCIETY

James Swinnerton (1876–1974)

The Dean of Desert Artists

Gregarious, acclaimed cartoon artist James Swinnerton was beginning to recover from a toxic mix of alcoholism, tuberculosis, and exhaustion when he made his way to The Desert Inn, Nellie Coffman’s fledgling sanitarium (later resort) in Palm Springs.

Swinnerton created the long-running Little Jimmy and Canyon Kiddies comics and illustrated political and sports figures for William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers and magazines for more than seven decades. However, early in his career, when Swinnerton was 28, the New York nightlife had almost consumed him, and Hearst put him on a train to Colton, California, to get healthy. From that point on, Swinnerton began, as we say today, working remotely.

Back in his native state (he was born in the pioneer town of Eureka), he stopped drinking, started walking in the Mojave Desert, and soon came to Palm Springs to finish his recovery and commit himself to painting the desert.

“I’ve kept strictly to the landscape,” Swinnerton reflected in a 1963 interview with Armed Services Radio, noting that he’d been painting landscapes all along in the backgrounds of his cartoon art. “I took up desert painting because, first, going to the desert gave me my health back in the [tuberculosis] situation, and second, I thought it was a misunderstood land, the most despised of all the landscapes. … I found some beauty there.”

Armando’s Bar

Untitled painting by Swinnerton.
PHOTO COURTESY PALM SPRINGS ART MUSEUM

Soon after he arrived, Swinnerton met Carl Eytel, and they began taking camping trips to paint the San Jacinto Mountains, Box Canyon, and the Salton Sea. Eytel educated Swinnerton on the ways of the desert, and Swinnerton shared his bounty of food and art supplies.

In the summers, Swinnerton retreated to the San Gabriel Mountains north of San Bernardino, but his subject remained pure nature. “The real purpose of painting is to call attention to the beauty of nature,” he told his friend John Hilton, a fellow artist and a writer for Desert Magazine. “A successful painting is a signpost reading, ‘Yonder is beauty! Go see for yourself.’ ”

For several decades, Swinnerton lived in Flagstaff, Arizona, and frequented the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, and the Hopi and Navajo Indian reservations. There, he favored saturated colors — deep reds, intense oranges, turquoise skies, purple shadows — to emphasize the power and majesty of the formations. However, the warmth of the Sonoran Desert drew him back in late winter and early spring to capture his favorite subjects — puffy smoke trees and prickly ocotillo plants — in bloom. On these trips, Swinnerton switched to more blond tones and wispy brushwork.

“There is no end to the beauty of sand and rocks and sagebrush,” Swinnerton
explained to Hilton. “All of the serious work I have done has been on the desert, and there is enough there to occupy me the rest of my life.”

tacquila palm springs

Light master John W. Hilton was also a musician.
PHOTO COURTESY PALM SPRINGS HISTORICAL SOCIETY

A strange sequence of events led to the multitalented John Hilton becoming a desert painter. After being expelled from art school in Redondo for making a nude drawing of a classmate, he appeared with his quartet, the California String Ticklers, on KHJ, the Los Angeles radio station where he heard program manager “Uncle John” Daggett recite a poem about night in the desert. The poem compelled Hilton to convince his father, a missionary, to drive them to Black Rock, northwest of Barstow, to experience the “silent blue night” that Uncle John described.

There, in the Mojave, Hilton’s love affair with the desert ignited.

He switched studies from art to gemology and enjoyed a career as a gemologist for the Golden State Gem Company — that is, until the stock market crashed, the Depression set in, and he found himself liquidating possessions to survive.

Hilton came to the Coachella Valley to collect on a debt but learned on arrival that the man who owed him had died. The man’s daughter gave Hilton an assortment of curios as a gesture. Later that day, when he stopped at Valerie Jean Date Shop, people began picking through his newfound bounty, and the proprietor, his friend, convinced Hilton to open a rock shop across the street. “That is how I became a part of the desert,” he explained in the March 1963 issue of Desert Magazine, “and how it became a part of me to the point where the long-submerged desire to paint came out.”

Hilton’s shop became a gathering place for painters including Maynard Dixon, James Swinnerton, and Clyde Forsythe. “The desert painters as we know them today had found each other through the rankest amateur because I had a centrally located place where they could all camp in the yard and cook spaghetti and sing at the top of their lungs.”

Hilton learned everything he could from them, particularly Dixon, who encouraged him to abandon his photorealistic brushwork in favor of daubing knifework. Hilton also started mixing beeswax into his paints to achieve his signature textural quality and mastered the glow of “magic hour.”

A perfectionist, Hilton had an annual New Year’s Eve tradition of inviting friends to Box Canyon to burn paintings he deemed unworthy. “It was a holocaust of art,” his friend and journalist Ed Ainsworth wrote in Palm Springs Villager. “This remarkable man was his own severest critic.”

In 1950, Hilton and his wife, Barbara, moved to the High Desert, where he became founding president of the Twentynine Palms Artists Guild. However, his love of the Coachella Valley never wavered. He wrote, “I can never forget that it is a short way back to the valley where two snowcapped mountains guard the pass, where a sea below the level of the sea mirrors rose-colored mountains reflected in the sunset, where canyons of wild palms will still beckon, and dunes still put on their spring finery.”

tacquila palm springs

Steven Willard was among the early photographers who captured the desert on film.
PHOTO COURTESY PALM SPRINGS HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Stephen H. Willard (1894–1966)

The Desert’s Ansel Adams

A photograph in the Palm Springs Art Museum collection shows a 22-year-old Stephen H. Willard stranded on a dirt path in the desert, surrounded by creosote bushes and changing a tire on his vehicle. Shot in 1917, before automobiles had demountable rims, the image demonstrates the lengths he’d go — with the weight of his C.P. Goerz 8×10 Format Bellows Camera — to freeze the most captivating views of the desert in its most dramatic light.

Willard, an Illinois native who grew up in Corona, began making the 68-mile trip to Palm Springs in 1914 as a teenager, armed with a camera that his father gave him. It opened his eyes to nature, inspired a career, and set him on course to become the preeminent photographer of the Coachella Valley and Mojave Desert regions.

Willard briefly enrolled at Pomona College and served a year as an army photographer in France during World War I. He returned to Palm Springs in 1919, published the booklet The Desert of Palms, and married Beatrice Armstrong.

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“While Winds and Sands Are Resting” (1925) by Stephen H. Willard.
PHOTO COURTESY PALM SPRINGS ART MUSEUM

For the next couple of decades, Willard traveled by car and burro to remote areas of the Colorado and Mojave deserts and amassed a prodigious body of images. He became an unlikely promoter of Palm Springs, having pioneered the paint-on-photo technique and replicated the colored images as postcards to sell at the Palm Canyon Trading Post. (The postcards remain collectible today; see one on page 10.)

“The idea held by most people that every mile of the desert is like every other mile could not be a more mistaken one,” a 21-year-old Willard wrote in an article for the 1915 American Annual of Photography. “Let one take his camera, canteen, blankets, and provisions, and go out for a week’s stay in the desert solitudes, and he will always come back deeply impressed by its supreme majesty and mystery.”

Willard, who spent summers and maintained a studio at Mammoth Lakes, also had a notable impact on environmental preservation. In the 1930s, his atmospheric black-and-white photographs were used to promote Death Valley and support a proposal that led to the creation of Joshua Tree National Monument (now a national park).

In 1947, as Hollywood and tourism transformed Palm Springs, Willard moved
from his south Palm Springs home and studio — now enveloped by Moorten Botanical Garden — to Owens Valley, where he died in 1966. In 1999, his daughter, Beatrice “Bettie” Willard, donated his archives — more than 16,000 items, including photographs, glass and film negatives, hand-colored lantern slides, photo-paintings, postcards, correspondence, maps, and photographic equipment — to the Palm Springs Art Museum.

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Painter Agnes Pelton settled in the Cathedral City Cove.
PHOTO VIA PALM SPRINGS LIFE ARCHVES

Agnes Pelton (1881–1961)

The Desert Transcendentalist

Agnes Pelton earned her living by making landscapes like the other early artists of the desert. Only she called them “tourist paintings.” She happily painted them with precision and passion, but what truly drove and distinguished Pelton were her imaginative, vaporous abstractions.

Born to American parents in Stuttgart, Germany, Pelton wielded a vivid imagination for as long as she could remember. Her earliest drawings reflected her moods, feelings, and inclination to experiment.

After studying under Arthur W. Dow at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, she might have been content to paint landscapes, flowers, and portraits. However, the art world was turning toward new schools of painting, and Pelton leaned in. She was invited to exhibit two of her Symbolist-inspired paintings in 1913 at the International Exposition of Modern Art (now the Armory Show), a scene-shifting survey of the avant-garde that included works by Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, and many others.

A follower of Agni Yoga, Pelton continued to develop her ideas through abstraction while living and working in a lighthouse on Long Island, New York, and fine-tuned them after settling in Cathedral City.

When Pelton arrived in 1932, Ed Ainsworth wrote in Palm Springs Villager, “She visioned the great stars in the clear air and the healing sunshine pouring its beneficent rays upon a world of serried dunes.”

Pelton built her studio/house with a corner fireplace, plenty of light and space, and inspiring surroundings. (The house is now owned by Peter Palladino and Simeon Den, who established the nonprofit Agnes Pelton Society, which hosts tours and talks.)

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“Mother of Silence” (1933) by Agnes Pelton.
COURTESY PALM SPRINGS ART MUSEUM

Here, the artist painted in solitude under the sky, returning to the studio to “work over” her pictures “many times to get the effect I want,” she told the Villager. The desert’s distinctive glow had an immediate and lasting effect on Pelton and her art. “The vibration of this light, the spaciousness of these skies enthralled me. I knew there was a spirit in nature as in everything else, but here in the desert, it was an especially bright spirit.”

She was known to take in the night sky from her garden, cataloging her visions in a vocabulary of curvilinear and biomorphic forms, brilliant orbs, and delicate veils.

“The aim of these abstract paintings over many years,” she said, “has been to give life and vitality to the visual images [that] have appeared to me from time to time in receptive moments, as symbols of fleeting but beautiful experiences.”

The 2020–2021 exhibition Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist at Palm Springs Art Museum put the artist’s cosmic vision on display with all its abstract forms, curious symbolism, and allusions to the desert landscape.

Audubon Photography Awards Creates AI Versions of the Winning Images

By in Photography

Audubon Photography Awards Creates AI Versions of the Winning Images
Mated Pigeon
Mated pigeons groom one another. This photo, left, by Liron Gertsman won the grand prize. An AI representation of the image generated by DALL-E, right.

The Audubon Photography Awards has recreated its winning photos with artificial intelligence (AI) to see how the synthetic images match up to the real work of photographers.

The National Audubon Society approached the photographers that won the 2023 Audubon Photography Awards and asked them to describe their photos in a few sentences to “someone who can’t see the image.”

Then, with their permission, Audubon fed those descriptions into the AI image generator DALL-E and compared the generated images alongside the real photos.

Comparing Real Photos to AI Photos

AI photo compared to real photo
A diving chinstrap penguin, left. The photo by Karen Blackwood won the amateur award. Recreated by DALL-E, right.
AI photo compared to real photo
A dunlin avoids a crashing wave. The photo, left, by Kieran Barlow won the Youth Award at the 2023 Audubon Photography Awards. Generated by DALL-E, right.

In an article for Audubon, Photoshelter chairman and co-founder Allen Murabayashi warns that AI technology poses “fundamental questions” to wildlife photography.

“Soon we may not be able to tell if a bird photo is real or fake,” he writes.

“It’s not just photographers, but also conservationists who must contend with these developments. Photography has long been used to build wonderment of the natural world and to bolster arguments for protecting declining species, addressing habitat decline, and boosting public trust in the reality of climate change.”

AI photo compared to real photo
This photo, left, of an Atlantic Puffin on a lava rock rock taken by Shane Kalyn won the Professional Award. DALL-E goes in much closer, right.
AI photo compared to real photo
A female Baltimore Oriole carries nesting material in a real photo, left, taken by Sandra M. Rothenberg. It won the Female Bird Prize at the 2023 Audubon Photography Awards. DALL-E’s attempt, right.

However, Murabayashi insists AI will not replace photography as the technology will not “end our drive to document everyday wildlife moments.”

“For all the transformation AI may bring, I find it unlikely that it will turn human effort, expertise, and experience into quaint anachronisms,” he says.

“The joy of observing a bird and the effort to trek into the backcountry to capture an exquisite photo remind us of nature’s beauty and necessity. It’s up to humans, not AI, to act accordingly to preserve our world.”

AI photo compared to real photo
A Verdin catches a caterpillar on a cactus, left, the photo by Linda Scher wonn top prize in the Plants for Birds Award by. Recreated with AI, right.
AI photo compared to real photo
A brown pelican avoids a shark below, left, a photo that won the Fisher Prize and taken by Sunil Gopalan. Recreated with DALL-E, right.

This is not the first time a photo competition has tested to see whether AI can replicate the work of its winners. Last year, the Royal Meteorological Society challenged viewers to take the Turing test to see if they could tell which work was from the winners and which was AI-generated.

Eye on the Arts: James Brooks bursts onto the art scene in vibrant color

By in Native

Eye on the Arts: James Brooks bursts onto the art scene in vibrant color
“Pinky” – acrylic on canvas.

By Marc Gave | New Pelican Writer

In my daily Facebook post, “The Artist’s Life,” I write about a staggering variety of visual artists, many of whom made art for decades and are no longer with us. Of those who are still working, the majority have produced a sizable body of artwork in one recognizable style or in a specific range of styles and media.

James Brooks with a sampling of his recent works. [Courtesy]

When writing about a young up-and-coming North Lauderdale artist such as painter James Brooks, the story is only beginning to be told. He is exploring his main medium, acrylic paints, along with watercolors, and extending his range.

This South Florida native states that he “always had a knack for art. I began drawing and coloring when I was around three. My grandfather is a retired architect, and I believe I inherited my talent from him. It came naturally. I won a contest at Broward Mall at a very young age.”

Eventually, Brooks attended the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, which helped launch his career as an artist. He now lives in the area where he grew up. Previously, he was a resident of Coconut Creek and before that of Coral Springs, where he recently exhibited his work at the Coral Springs Museum of Art and is a member of its Artist Guild.

While he creates paintings on commission – especially animal pictures and pet portraits – and left to his own devices, Brooks says his “inspiration can come from anywhere and anything: from nature, from going to the movies. It’s like a sixth sense.”

When he addresses the easel, he strives to work outside of traditional norms, rendering his subjects “in colorful, eccentric ways but with a classy elegance.” Brooks said he’s considering experimenting outside his traditional media. “Perhaps I’ll work in oils – or coffee.”

One experiment he has recently undertaken is applying three-dimensional flowers to canvas. “I bought silk flowers at a local store, spray-painted them, and glued them onto the canvas. It’s a long process, as it takes the flowers several hours to dry. But I got the idea and wanted to challenge myself to see what I could do with them.”

Inspiration comes from encountering other artists’ work as well. “It gets me to see different people’s perspectives, giving me experiences beyond what I can experience firsthand.”

One such recent experience was a visit to the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg. “It was very amazing to see his out-of-the-box paintings.” Brooks said. Another visit was to the immersive Van Gogh exhibition last year in Miami. “I felt myself transported to his world.”

While he doesn’t strive to imitate their styles, they do greatly enhance his vision and his approach to painting.

Brooks finds Broward County to be very supportive of the arts. “It is open to art and artists in an ever-expanding way. This works in two positive ways: letting our (artists’) voices be heard and building a public appreciation for artists. As art is my passion, I paint from my heart, and I believe my art has a healing factor as well.”

He continues, “My biggest thrill comes when I inspire other artists who haven’t painted in a long time to return to their work.”

Visit Artist Touch – James Brooks Facebook page to see more of his work.

Unique outdoor patriotic photography exhibit in Normal Heights

By in Photography

Unique outdoor patriotic photography exhibit in Normal Heights

freedom on the fence

Award-winning, local gay artist Todd Bradley presents “Freedom on the Fence,” a captivating outdoor photography exhibition that captures the essence of the Normal Heights community’s beliefs and personal interpretations of freedom and America. This unique and thought-provoking event will take place on the picket fence at the home of David and Mindy Hayes, hosts of an annual Fourth of July event. The photography exhibition will run briefly from July 1 to July 4 evening.

“Freedom on the Fence” brings together the diverse voices of the Normal Heights community, showcasing their perspectives on freedom and what America means to them. Through a series of photographs taken over a year, Todd Bradley artfully captures the spirit and diversity of the neighborhood, all while emphasizing the unity that binds the community together.

This four-day unconventional exhibition fosters community engagement and highlights artists’ challenges finding traditional gallery spaces to showcase their work. Art institutions have been closing at alarming rates lately. And the scheduling for solo shows at museums or galleries is often years away. Artists like Todd Bradley have turned to innovative methods to bring their art to the public.

The exhibition features photographs of community members taken over the last year, with a significant portion captured during the Fourth of July ice cream social at the Hayes’ home. Other images were taken in the studio with a black background. Participants were allowed to express their thoughts on democracy by selecting a framed blackboard with “Freedom is” or “America is” or by writing their own message. The chosen images strikingly portray the neighborhood’s diversity and the richness of our nation.

“Freedom on the Fence” will display large 2-foot by 3-foot images printed on vinyl strapped onto the white picket fence at the Hayes’ home on the corner of 35th Street and North Mountain View Dr. This daytime exhibition will be a focal point of the annual Fourth of July celebrations in Normal Heights. The exhibition will open to the public on Saturday, July 1, in the morning and will remain on display until the evening of July 4.

To celebrate the exhibition and strengthen the community bonds, a special reception will be held on July 4 at 11 a.m., coinciding with the annual ice cream social. Attendees will be able to engage with the artist, Todd Bradley, to gain deeper insights into the stories behind the photographs and participate in the project by voicing their opinions on a chalkboard about Freedom or America while having their portrait taken.

“Freedom on the Fence” encapsulates the true spirit of Normal Heights, showcasing the community’s shared values while respecting the diverse perspectives within. Join us in this celebration of art, freedom, and community.

City of Seattle’s Food Equity Fund invests $2 million in 21 community-initiated projects

By in Native

City of Seattle’s Food Equity Fund invests $2 million in 21 community-initiated projects
Photo credit: Young Women Empowered

The City of Seattle is investing $2,000,000 to support community-led projects through the Seattle Department of Neighborhoods’ (DON) Food Equity Fund General Grant. Twenty-one community groups will receive awards ranging from $49,688 to $100,000 to advance projects that increase equitable access and opportunities to grow, learn about, and/or eat healthy, affordable, and culturally relevant foods. The projects are varied and include food distribution, Indigenous food sovereignty gatherings, youth food justice cohorts, sustaining community farms, supporting food entrepreneurship, hosting intergenerational community dinners, Black-led early childhood cooking segments, and more.

“Partnerships with local cultural organizations are core to our One Seattle vision, leveraging City support and resources to help meet the unique needs of our diverse communities,” said Mayor Bruce Harrell. “We know that food insecurity remains high in our region which is why the Food Equity Fund is a critical investment in the health and wellbeing of our community, ensuring that every neighbor can access fresh, affordable, and culturally relevant foods.”

“We are honored to invest in these community-driven visions for creating access to culturally relevant food,” said Jenifer Chao, Director of Seattle Department of Neighborhoods. “These projects make it clear that the organizations and individuals leading this work know exactly what their communities need in order to thrive.”

The Food Equity Fund was developed in 2021 in response to recommendations from the Sweetened Beverage Tax Community Advisory Board to increase investments in community work led by those most impacted by food and health inequities: Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) communities, immigrants, refugees, low-income individuals, families with young children, youth, and elders. The fund is supported by the Sweetened Beverage Tax. 

For 2023, approximately $2.3 million is available for funding through the Food Equity Fund and those funds are distributed through two grant programs: General Grant and Capacity Building Grant. The General Grants announced here have a maximum award amount of $100,000. Capacity Building Grants, which are currently open on a rolling basis through October 31, have a maximum award amount of $20,000 and are focused specifically on community organizations with annual budgets under $500,000.

Seattle Department of Neighborhoods received 86 eligible applications for the 2023 General Grant, reflecting a total of $8 million in funding requests. The grant review process included community leaders with expertise in racial justice, food systems advocacy, and health disparities.

To learn more about the Food Equity Fund visit:  http://www.seattle.gov/neighborhoods/programs-and-services/food-equity-fund-.

What Grantees Are Saying

“We are ecstatic to have been awarded funding from the 2023 Food Equity Fund. Since the beginning we’ve worked around food equity, bringing our community together through multicultural kitchens and other aspects of the food system in our center. These funds will open new opportunities and greatly contribute to our efforts of having our community design the project, using their untapped skills, and most importantly, leading their own future. ¡Si se puede!”

Peggy Hernández, Co-Director, Lake City Collective

“One of the strongest community-driven outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic was a resurgence in Indigenous ecology and food sovereignty. Young leaders were able to gather outdoors and plant thousands of native seedlings, food and medicine bundles were distributed to elders, and we remembered the practices of our ancestors to restore our well-being through our relationship with the land. Through the generous support of the Seattle Department of Neighborhoods’ Food Equity Fund, the Na’ah Illahee Fund is able to continue this work through our Yahowt Program, of ‘lifting up the sky, together’. This grant will enable the urban Indigenous people of Seattle to continue to have the resources to gather, learn, and practice the traditional ecological knowledge that is a cornerstone of what food equity means in the Pacific Northwest.”

Susan Balbas, Executive Director, Na’ah Illahee Fund

“The Food Equity Fund will be instrumental in Basilicas’ programming for the next two years, helping us both to sustain current food justice and community education initiatives, and to start new initiatives centered around food justice and youth leadership. This fund will support a new food distribution support program called MINT, the Bridge to Youth Leadership Program, and will continue to support Basilica in paying our team a livable wage. Meals in Need Today (MINT) will work by providing hands-on support, education, and promotion for food distribution events in Seattle. The program will build a well-connected network of food distributors, educators, and community members to help produce, prepare, and distribute healthy produce in Seattle, while also putting more BIPOC community members in leadership positions in Seattle’s food distribution network.”

Jordan Jackson, Co-Founder, Basilica Bio

2023 Food Equity Fund – General Grant Awards

The following community organizations will receive Food Equity Fund General Grant awards for 2023:

$100,000 to Basilica Bio to sustain and expand programming that supports education around food and environmental justice in schools; connects students and community members to experiential learning opportunities; and delivers accessible food and environmental justice workshops in a STEM context. This grant will support a new Community Classroom Initiative Bridge to Youth leadership program, Meals in Need Today (MINT) food distribution programming, and the addition of new team members.   

$100,000 to Black Dollar Days Task Force for the recurring costs of the Clean Greens Youth programs at South Shore Community Center and behind the Amy Yee Tennis Center. This funding will also support the implementation of the Community Herb Bank, organic honey processing, environmental trainings, workshops, and community gatherings. 

$100,000 to Black Farmers Collective to support long-term sustainability and community programs at the organization’s farms. The grant will also support staff in building community, running educational programs, and growing food for and by BIPOC folks with a focus on uplifting and distributing resources within the Black community.  

$100,000 to Casa Latina for 60 Latino immigrant workers to participate in a cohort-based program based in the organization’s community kitchen. Cohort members will build food service skills and prepare and share cultural meals with their fellow workers each week, who will access and enjoy nutritious, homecooked foods. 

$100,000 to Cham Refugees Community to educate and train youth interns and empower individuals to take leadership roles in advancing Cham Refugees Community’s mission of increasing equitable food access through community identified solutions and access to healthy, local foods for all community members. This grant will support a series of intergenerational community dinners and increase capacity in their community garden. 

$100,000 to Eritrean Community in Seattle and Vicinity to create a cultural and traditional gardening co-op at their community center. Farming is a large part of the Eritrean legacy, and this project will allow for generations of farming history and gardening techniques to live on in the following generations. 

$100,000 to FEEST for the Student Organizer program, which will engage up to 25 students per year to increase their understanding of food justice and develop their organizing and leadership skills. FEEST will promote access to fresh, free, culturally relevant food for low-income youth and youth of color in South Seattle through food justice trainings and food provision, embodying the type of food access they want to see in schools.

$100,000 to InterIm CDA to support the Intergenerational Food Equity and Food Access Project in the Danny Woo Garden in Chinatown International District (CID). This culturally relevant, intergenerational learning and food production project will help increase and exchange knowledge between youth and elder Asian and Pacific Islander generations about growing and eating culturally relevant produce, creating infrastructure that supports ongoing food security, and growing produce that supports the nutritional and food accessibility needs of low-income elders in the CID. 

$100,000 to Lake City Collective for the creation of a “Cook It Yourself” recipe kit that includes community gatherings around family recipes and a youth-led zine that will capture their recipes and stories. Funding will also support Si se puede Foodpreneurship Cohort to provide information about starting a food business and renovation to the Collective’s Garden which serves as a source of culturally relevant vegetables and as an education tool to teach community how to grow traditional produce adapted to their urban environment. 

$100,000 to Na’ah Illahee Fund to advance food security and food sovereignty in Seattle’s urban Indigenous community. Through integration with the Native Youth Trails Program the group will plan and implement community events on the Indigenous lands of the Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center in Discovery Park as well as increase community knowledge and skills in traditional harvesting practices. These will include planting parties of native traditional foods and medicinal plants, community traditional foods workshops, annual virtual Indigenous Food Sovereignty gatherings, Buffalo harvesting, and honoring luncheons for the community. 

$100,000 to Rainier Beach Action Coalition to expand the services offered by an existing Farm Stand to better support BIPOC farm partners in collecting and distributing their produce to Rainier Beach residents. The organization plans to complete tenant improvements to their Food Hub and will make available dry and cold storage, a washing and packing station, and transportation to farmers in order to increase access to free, fresh, and culturally-relevant fruits and vegetables. 

$100,000 to Union Cultural Center to pilot the Nourishian Training Program, which will provide life skills and job skills to young adults ages 17 – 25 in the Rainier Beach area. Life skills include meal planning, shopping on a budget, basic cooking skills, and nutrition knowledge. 

$100,000 to yəhaw̓ Indigenous Creatives Collective to steward a South Seattle site on the ancestral homelands of the Duwamish, Muckleshoot, and Suquamish peoples, in Coast Salish territories. They will host a series of seasonal Creative Residencies, where interdisciplinary Indigenous artists and thinkers are invited to complete a self-determined project on site. They will also partner with the University of Washington to understand the best locations and formats for food plant growth and build an Indigenous community garden with Native plants.  

$97,969 to Young Women-Empowered (Y-WE) Y-WE Grow’s mentorship-based empowerment programs focus on environmental justice and healthy food systems in BIPOC communities, serving diverse young women ages 13-24 through a lens of healing and belonging. Through urban farming and food justice activities, participants gain knowledge, skills, and resources around growing and eating healthy, culturally relevant food. This work is an ongoing expansion of our existing Y-WE Grow program and paid summer internships, which engage youth who are most impacted by systemic inequity and lack of access to nature.

$99,650 to Wa Na Wari for Love Offering: Community Meal Program. The program provides free-of-cost African diasporic food and Native American-inspired soul food made by Black/Indigenous chefs every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday at Wa Na Wari from 4-6pm. Love Offering promotes economic stability for BIPOC caterers, increases access to nourishing meals, and cultivates community and a sense of belonging around cultural dishes. 

$99,532 to Look, Listen, & Learn TV for the production and distribution of the cooking segments for upcoming seasons of our Black-led children’s TV show. With this Food Equity Fund grant, they will film local children and adults collaboratively preparing and enjoying healthy snacks and tasty treats for up to three seasons of Look, Listen and Learn. 

$96,066 to Ethiopian Community in Seattle to address food inequities in the Ethiopian community by offering increased access to Ethiopian cultural food through cooking demonstrations, sharing of meals, provision of bags of ingredients from ethnic shops, and storytelling. The program will especially focus on youth and young adults who have expressed their need to learn more about Ethiopian food and the rich culture that surrounds it. 

$99,000 to Queer the Land to empower the QT2BIPOC (Queer, Trans, Two Spirit, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) community through stewardship and sustainability. This grant will support managing a community garden and greenhouse where community members can volunteer and actively participate. Through partnerships, Queer the Land will offer workshops on plant care, nutrition, and herbal remedies. They will create a thriving, inclusive space where the community can learn, grow, and celebrate together while fostering a deeper connection with the land.

$88,595 to It Takes a Village for monthly events where participants will learn about food economics, creative development, food service job skills, and growing food in small spaces. The group will deliver 300 hot meals to community members and host six cultural events focused on food, storytelling, and creative arts that engage and feed community members. 

$69,500 to First Tongan Senior Nutrition Association to support over 80 seniors a week with food distribution and community meals for Pacific Islander and other low-income seniors near the Highland Park neighborhood. Over the next two years, they will continue to be a place for elders to gather, communicate in their familiar language, stay healthy, and feel less lonely.

$49,688 to Concord International Elementary Native/Indigenous Students Club to hire Native and Indigenous educators and Elders to share traditional ecological knowledge with Native/Indigenous students and families at Concord International Elementary. Funding will support field trips to forage and learn about traditional and culturally relevant ingredients and medicines. In addition, they will work with local Native and Indigenous chefs and restaurants and traditional medicine practitioners to provide access to traditional and culturally relevant foods and medicines for students and their families as well as lessons in food and medicine preparation.

V&A’s new centre reveals pivotal role photography plays in reflecting and shaping our world

By in Photography

V&A’s new centre reveals pivotal role photography plays in reflecting and shaping our world

In May, London’s Victoria and Albert Museum opened the much-anticipated second phase of its Photography Centre. Set to be the UK’s largest permanent photography display, it will survey the medium’s past, present and future. With plans to rotate displays across seven galleries, it reflects the V&A’s renewed commitment to photography.

The centre has the feel of a museum within a museum and is clearly designed to cultivate debate, as it also houses a dedicated reading and research room that aims to examine the relationship between photography and the book as a form of publishing. The centre’s archive has been opened to researchers and the public alike.

The centre will provide not just a new home for the V&A’s extensive photography collection (which dates back to the 19th century), it will also go some way to cementing the status of photography as a leading form of expression within contemporary visual culture.

An Indian woman pulling a fishing net up a beach in the wind.
Longing for Love from the series A Myth of Two Souls by Vasantha Yogananthan.
V&A

The V&A’s new addition will, like London’s long-established Photographers’ Gallery, contribute to our understanding of the pivotal role that photography has played in reflecting on and shaping our world.

A quick tour

Sidestepping the pitfalls of categorisation by genre, the opening rooms, Photography 1840s – Now, present a more idiosyncratic curation of images. Visitors are presented with juxtaposing images under a programme of changing themes, starting with Energies: Sparks from the Collection.

The theme prompts visitors to meditate on the way the medium captures the energy of a subject in an image. It also asks them to consider the way images are manipulated through photo-chemical processes.

A desert scene with copper-red sand and dusty landscape.
Untitled from Hoda Afshar’s Speak the Wind series.
V&A

It will be interesting to see to what extent this approach will produce new perspectives on the diversity of images held in the V&A’s collection. Navigating darkened galleries with backlit displays, it becomes clear that these unique commissions and new acquisitions will become the site for developing knowledge of the medium – expanding notions of photographic practice by making links between historical and future techniques and processes.

The works selected for another theme, Photography Now, set a political agenda and echo pressing themes for our times: climate change, socio-political conflict, gender and identity and the legacy of colonial histories.

A woman walking towards a wall-sized photograph of a woman's shadow.

Self Portrait as Walking Woman with Bag by Tarrah Krajnak.
V&A

A foray into decolonising the canon is exemplified in the work of Sammy Baloji. In his mirror prints, fragmented images of raw copper ore float over archive photographs of the Congo’s colonial past.

Also compelling are the evocative images from Speak the Wind, Hoda Afshar’s combination of poetic landscapes and human subjects that attempt to make visible the invisible force of a mythical malevolent wind known as “Zar”. These works expose the physical and cultural traces of the Arab slave trade from Africa to the Persian Gulf.

Elsewhere there is an emphasis on the fascination many contemporary photographers have with the medium itself. A number of the showcased artists create a dialogue with the past by adapting some of the earliest techniques in novel ways.

Notable are the performance self portraits by Tarrah Krajnak, who combines projected images with the cyanotype process. This is an early form of photographic printing using coated paper and light, later widely known as blueprinting. Krajnak uses it to explore personal identity in relation to Peru’s traumatic political past.

Collotypes (a 19th-century photographic-based printmaking technique) by Antony Cairns constitute a “translation” between old and new, taking images of urban spaces which are frozen on defunct e-reader(kindle?) screens and then reproducing them on paper.

It is positive to see a significant number of female photographers represented in the Photography Centre.

A black and white fuzzy image of a radio telescope.
Radio Telescope, Effelsberg XV September 12, 2013 by Vera Lutter.
V&A

Vera Lutter’s unique monochrome negative of a radio telescope – inscribed directly onto light-sensitive paper through an extended period of exposure using a large pinhole camera – is a reminder that photography is inextricably linked to time through the actual processes employed (exposure times, developing, printing and so on).

Concluding these rooms is the monumental sculptural photo installation, Giant Phoenix VI, by Noémie Goudal. Her complex process explores the deep time of paleoclimatology, which reconstructs the climates of ancient history. Goudal photographs trees and then inserts scale photographs back into the real world and photographs them again.

The resulting images are then layered as fragments onto towering metal panels that, when viewed from different positions, simultaneously break up and reform the picture plane, alluding to the fragility of the image and the subject it depicts.

A huge undertaking

The photograph is deeply entangled in our contemporary experience, playing a crucial role in recording and informing our understanding of the world. Which means photography has a number of overlapping histories: as a technology of seeing, a social document and an aesthetic practice.

The silhouette of a girl running from leaping flames towards the camera.
Riot Girl by Vinca Petersen.
V&A

So how do we begin to unpick and present these interwoven histories in a way that does not leave one overshadowed by another? And how best do we present each photograph to stimulate thought and action beyond the confines of the gallery? It will be interesting to observe how the V&A’s new Photography Centre navigates these challenges now that the gallery is open to the public.

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