Centre for Contemporary Photography’s new winter exhibition set to open

Jul 11, 2023 By Admin in Photography

10 July 2023

Vic’s Centre for Contemporary Photography’s new winter exhibition Walking Through the Darkness, opens next Friday 21 July.

Li Yang, From the series 404 NOT FOUND, 2016, Inkjet prints.

According to the CCP, Walking Through the Darkness ’embraces the potential of photography to bring stories out of the darkness and into the light through the medium’s capacity to explore, comprehend and record new landscapes and impressions, to remember and ensure posterity across time and absence, or to combat censorship and draw attention to forgotten or suppressed histories.’

Darren Tanny Tan, Lingchi #2, 2021. Archival pigment prints.

The exhibition features works by emerging and established artists from Australia and abroad, working with photography and film today, including Rushdi Anwar Liss Fenwick, Todd Hido, Rinko Kawauchi, Fassih Keiso, Morganna Magee, Darren Tanny, and Vanessa Winship, among others.

In addition, the exhibition will feature a camera obscura, representing the link to the origins and early histories of photography.

Morganna Magee (b.1983, Australia), Dandenong Creek, 2021. Part of the series Extraordinary Experiences (2020-ongoing), Inkjet prints.

Curator Catlin Langford says the exhibition reflects on photography’s origins.

“The artists in this exhibition use photography and film as a means of journeying: reflecting on past histories, contemplating experiences and place, as well as capturing and communicating those things which are usually hidden or unseen. In doing so, their works evoke new ways of thinking and seeing,” she says.

A launch event is set to take place on Friday, 21 July, from 6-8pm, followed on Saturday 22 July, between 2-3pm when exhibiting artists will discuss their work in the gallery spaces in a tour led by Curator Catlin Langford.

Chloe Dewe Matthews (b.1982, United Kingdom) In Search of Frankenstein, 2016-2018. C-type prints and canvas wallpapers. Images of Mary Shelley’s manuscript courtesy of the Bodleian Libraries.

Other events include a launch of exhibiting artist Morganna Magee’s new publication Beware of People who Dislike Cats on Saturday, 29 July between 2-4pm, in addition to a range of talks and workshops for all ages.

You can find out more about the exhibition here.

Houston’s Unlikely International Photography Scene and How It Came to Be Is Examined In New Book

Jul 11, 2023 By Admin in Photography

1970s Houston may have seemed like an unlikely place for an international photography community to develop — but according to Tracy Xavia Karner, it was a dream waiting to come to fruition.

Karner’s new book titled Making a Scene! How Visionary Individuals Created an International Photography Scene in Houston, Texas (Schilt Publishing) tells the story of how Houston became a top city for creating, collecting and exhibiting photography.

In particular, the book focuses on Anne Wilkes Tucker‘s curation of a world-renowned collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Wendy Watriss and Fred Baldwin’s founding of FotoFest, now an internationally recognized festival and how a small cooperative of artists grew Houston Center for Photography into a model nonprofit. All this and more is detailed through in-depth interviews with members of the arts community, paired with archival documents and photographs.

I chatted with Karner, an associate professor and department chair at the University of Houston’s sociology department and an expert on visual media, to learn more.

The front cover of *Making a Scene!* shows opening night of the FotoFest Biennial 2020 exhibition “African Cosmologies: Photography, Time, and the Other,” at Silver Street Studios. (Photo by Os Galindo, courtesy FotoFest)

Haley Berkman Karren: This book is a love letter to the photography scene in Houston. What inspired you to write it?

Tracy Xavia Karner: I found the scene when it was in ‘full flower’ — around 2005. It was a vibrant, active community of talented photographers, committed donors and passionate collectors. As a visual sociologist, I’ve always been drawn to photography, so this community was an instant fit for me. I joined Photo Forum, the photography support group at the MFAH, and the Advisory Council at HCP, and attended all the photography events I could.

When Anne began talking about retiring, and then Wendy and Fred stepped back from FotoFest, it occurred to me that we might lose the oral history of how this amazing community came to be. I had just finished a project, and thought this might be a good one for me to take on.

Little did I know it would take me 10 years to do so. But if I’d waited any longer, I might not have been able to interview Fred Baldwin, Clint Willour and Petra Benteler, who have since passed, and their stories would have been lost.

What made you the right person to tell the narrative of the past half-century of the photography scene in Houston?

As a sociologist, I’m trained to study communities — how ‘scenes’ develop and either flourish or whither.

When I came to Houston and discovered FotoFest, the photography department at the MFAH, and Houston Center for Photography, I was impressed and intrigued because Houston seemed like an unlikely place for such an important photography community to develop. Anne Tucker arrived in Houston in 1975, and Wendy Watriss and Fred Baldwin moved here in 1980.

Somehow they had a vision and made it happen.

Initial FotoFest staff members: Petra Benteler, Fred Baldwin, Harla Kaplan, and Susie Morgan at Benteler Gallery, 1985 (Courtesy Harla Kaplan)

What was the writing process like?

It was fascinating. It was like unraveling a mystery as I searched for how this photography community developed. I wanted to trace ‘who did what and when’ to make it successful. I began by interviewing Anne Tucker, and then continued to interview anyone I could find that had been involved in the early days of promoting photography in Houston.

I also spent hours in the MFAH archives reading through Anne’s early correspondence with photographers and galleries, and her curatorial and exhibition notes. I loved finding the wall text from a companion exhibition to Anne’s first Target Collection of American Photography exhibition that attempted to explain the difference between photography and art photography. That is a conversation that is still going on, and it was wonderful to see how it was articulated in the 1970s.

I also spent time at the Menil Collection archives, where I was able to find a lot of the FotoFest materials. Not only were they very interesting, but they showed how well Wendy and Fred kept their supporters informed. There were long handwritten letters, sometimes on fancy hotel stationary, from Fred to Dominique de Menil.

I went through boxes in the back room of Houston Center for Photography, where I found exhibition files including images from the infamous NASA exhibition and fundraiser that all the astronauts attended. Archives are this amazing view into the past.

For me, they are like a treasure hunt. You never know exactly what you will find, but the hunt is exhilarating.

It is safe to say that the photography revolution began with Anne Tucker, who is heavily profiled and quoted in your book. What was it like spending extensive time with her, and even going through her letters, personal photos, and archival documents?

Spending time with Anne and learning about her life was a pleasure. I had, of course, admired her accomplishments and knew her socially from photography events.

Interviewing Anne was an insightful experience, particularly about her early life. Perhaps most striking was the fact she had been raised by a blind nanny who was always asking her to describe what things looked like. This fostered Anne’s skill of attending to visual elements and retaining them for recall, which she used throughout her career.

One of my favorite moments with Anne was when she invited me to go through her personal archive of photos to select images for the book. We sat side-by-side, looking through her flat files, seeing some photographs she made, her family photos and images of her by numerous photographers — including the contact sheet from her sitting with Irving Penn.

Anne Wilkes Tucker, 1984 (Courtesy Gay Block)

Who did you enjoy interviewing the most? Are there any fun interview stories that you would like to share?

I enjoyed talking with everyone I interviewed. They were all such interesting people with varied backgrounds and different careers.

While I interviewed Anne the most times, I had the longest interviews of my entire career with Wendy and Fred. They had both had so many adventures in life and photography with so many stories to tell. I was just riveted.

I was so lucky to interview Fred, Clint Willour and Petra Beneteler before they passed. They each played an important role in the photography community. I was able to travel to Germany and interview Petra in her home. She was so gracious and just delightful. We spent three days together going through her memories of her gallery in Houston and her involvement with starting FotoFest. Petra still had all the press clippings from the first FotoFest biennial in 1986 — a testament to how important that time was to her.

The MFAH organized a fantastic book launch and panel with Anne Tucker, Wendy Watriss and you. It was incredible to see these dynamic women speaking about how they nurtured the photography scene. What do they think of the book?

They have both been quite complimentary and have talked about how good it is to have this community documented in a well-researched book. I did ask them both to read early drafts for accuracy, so they were integral to the process all along. The book really is a collaborative work. Anne and Wendy nurtured and created the Houston photography scene — I just documented it.

What surprised you the most about writing this book?

There was so much about the early days that I had been unaware of.

When I was starting the process, I told Wendy that I wanted to write about this community built by women — her and Anne. Wendy quickly disabused me of that notion. And indeed, after doing the research, it became clear that FotoFest was originally Fred’s project. Wendy was always involved, but more in the background, until the mid 1990s when she took a more active role.

I was also unaware of how important Petra Benteler had been to the beginning of FotoFest, and that she had opened what is thought to be the first European photography gallery in the US in Houston in 1980. Reading all the newsletters and interviewing all the early Houston Center for Photography members made it seem like such a tight group of friends, eager and hungry to know more and do more with photography. I felt such a passion for the medium come through the early writings.

And, it surprised me a bit how much I enjoyed doing archival research. This is my first project to use archives so extensively, and I’m totally hooked now.

Wendy Watriss and Fred Baldwin in their Houston darkroom looking at slides in their Menil Collection house, 1980s (Courtesy Wendy Watriss)

What is the biggest lesson you learned from writing this book?

The importance of events. When people gather around a common shared interest, magic can happen.

Many of the turning points in the story happened because people were in the same space at the right time. Anne’s mother came to a talk at the MFAH that led to Beaumont Newhall recommending her daughter to the director. Wendy and Fred met at a party. Donors came forward after attending an impressive exhibition at the MFAH and FotoFest. Many of the early HCP folks met in photography classes taught by Geoff Winningham at Rice or George Krause, Ed Hill, or Suzanne Bloom at University of Houston.

Given the COVID-related shutdown and social isolation, I think this lesson is even more poignant now. I hope Houston will have more events and parties that bring people together. . . and of course, I hope lots of them will focus on photography, as I can’t wait to see what happens next.

Making a Scene! How Visionary Individuals Created an International Photography Scene in Houston, Texas by Tracy Xavia Karner is published by Schilt Publishing, and is available in stores and online for $40.

Author’s note: Haley Berkman Karren is an independent curator and writer as well as an art advisor and appraiser with Karren Art Advisory. She focuses on modern and contemporary art, photography and digital art. She is a former curatorial assistant at the Menil Collection and has contributed to Houston Center for Photography’s Spot Magazine and juried the HCP exhibition Learning Curve 11.

Amapola Gallery Showcases Forty Member’s Creations

Jul 11, 2023 By Admin in Printmaking

If you are looking for that special gift for a friend, lover or family member, Amapola Gallery in Old Town has artistic work from over 40 New Mexican artists to choose from. The gallery was created …

Unfazed: Cats in Art | The Art Institute of Chicago

Jul 11, 2023 By Admin in Art World News

Perspectives Summer Program engages youth

Jul 10, 2023 By Admin in Printmaking

“PERSPECTIVES” Summer Program allows youth to explore the creative discipline of Visual Arts.

Sculpture Milwaukee kicks off 2023-24 season

Jul 10, 2023 By Admin in Sculpture

For people who love to experience art wherever they go – not just in the four walls of a museum or gallery – Sculpture Milwaukee is hoping its 7th season

An Artist’s Guide to Visiting Santa Fe

Jul 10, 2023 By Admin in Native

Santa Fe, New Mexico landscape — Courtesy of Santa Fe Tourism

During the weeks I spent learning to write in Santa Fe, New Mexico, my afternoons took on a predictable rhythm. Between classes, I’d sit in a courtyard on St. John’s College campus, reading Willa Cather and Cormac McCarthy. I might take a break to run the nearby Atalaya Trail, weaving through sagebrush and piñon pines.

More than likely, I’d get caught in a sudden summer rainstorm. Clouds often brooded over the Sangre de Cristo mountains, allegedly named because of the bloody tint they take on in the southwestern sunset. By evening, the thunderhead clouds would retreat and leave the sky scrubbed clean. With a day of lectures and workshops behind us, our cohort of writers would head downtown for smoky margaritas.

Attending grad school residencies in the nation’s oldest capital convinced me that Santa Fe is an enchanted place— the ideal escape for artists, art appreciators, and anyone even remotely creatively inclined. Sage and wildflowers bloom along winding roads lined with adobe homes. Bundles of drying chile peppers hang from eaves.

Dale Ball Santa Fe New Mexico Hike Scenery — Hikers find a spot to rest while enjoying the beauty of the Dale Ball Trails

Photo Courtesy of Tourism Santa Fe

The city is compact with a highly walkable downtown. Despite its small size, Santa Fe ranks alongside New York and Los Angeles as one of the country’s top art markets. It’s a place where artistic traditions and mediums converge, from Native American painting to Pueblo pottery to contemporary sculpture.

In fact, artists of all stripes have long been drawn to Santa Fe. The city’s creative roots reach back much further than its 1610 founding. Early Pueblo tribes crafted pottery and wove baskets and blankets in the area. After the 17th-century Spanish conquest, Pueblo villages began making the turquoise and silver jewelry that’s still sold in galleries and street markets all over Santa Fe.

In recent history, transplants, including the abstract painter Agnes Martin and the aforementioned novelist Willa Cather, have drawn inspiration from the landscape’s light, texture, and color. As New Mexico’s most well-known resident artist Georgia O’Keeffe put it, “There is so much more space between the ground and sky out here[—]it is tremendous.” She was right; the sky does seem to stretch out endlessly above the city.

Inside the Museum of International Folk Art

Photo Credit: Tira Howard

The author Julia Cameron, best known for her cult-popular book, The Artist’s Way, also lives here. In her bestseller about how to establish a creative practice, Cameron prescribes the Artist Date: a block of time set aside to, in her words, “nurture your inner artist.”

If this sounds too woo-woo for your taste, think of the Artist Date as creative exploration—and there is, in my opinion, no better place for such an endeavor than Santa Fe. You don’t have to be an artist to design your own retreat in the city. All you need is a weekend and the willingness to absorb the visual, musical, and culinary magic of New Mexico’s capital.

Start by dipping into Santa Fe’s extensive—and borderline overwhelming—palette of visual art. A meandering walk along Canyon Road (with a stop for sustenance at The Teahouse’s garden patio) will lead you to contemporary, abstract, modern, western, and Native American art galleries.

New Mexico Museum of Art Santa Fe — The New Mexico Museum of Art’s Plaza Building. Opened in 1917, the museum is an “enlarged and modified version” of the structure that architects Isaac Hamilton and William Morris Rapp designed for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition in San Diego

A few minutes down the road in the city center, you’ll find the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts and, a block away, the New Mexico Museum of Art. Both museums neighbor Santa Fe’s central plaza, a historic hub where musicians play in a gazebo and teenagers lounge beneath leafy trees.

You will, of course, want to pay your respects to O’Keeffe while you’re there. A short walk from the plaza, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum is the world’s only museum dedicated to an American female artist. O’Keeffe’s two homes—in Abiquiú and Ghost Ranch— sit some 40-plus miles northwest of Santa Fe and are open to visitors. If you’re up for a drive, they’re well- worth the day trip to see her studio up close, along with the landscape that infused her work for decades.

Just off the historic Santa Fe Trail and rising above the city, “Museum Hill” is home to even more art. Visit the Museum of International Folk Art—the largest collection of global folk art in the world—before rambling through the Santa Fe Botanical Garden. For fans of contemporary work, SITE is an artist-led space that curates rotating exhibits. And if you want to get weird, there’s Meow Wolf, an interactive experience that bends and blows the mind with 70 rooms of immersive art.

But an Artist Date is about more than looking at others’ works, as Cameron would remind you. It’s about pleasure and play. As you plan your excursion, she admonishes, “Think delight. Think fun. Do not think duty.” If music is what moves you, the Santa Fe Opera offers open-air performances set against a mountain backdrop. Or maybe flipping through novels and magazines at the locally owned indie bookstore Collected Works will inspire you. Perhaps the earthy flavors of New Mexican dishes are the keys to unlocking your previously untapped artistic genius. Anything’s possible.

Santa Fe Restaurant Sazón New Mexico Art — James Beard Award–winning chef Fernando Olea serves up modern Mexican cuisine at Sazón. The restaurant’s walls are adorned with works from some of Mexico’s finest artists, with many pieces available to purchase.

Santa Fe’s food scene blends Mexican and indigenous Pueblo cuisine, resulting in dishes like carne adovada and enchiladas drowned in the ubiquitous green chile sauce. (A New Mexican senator is currently lobbying to make roasted green chiles the state’s official scent.)

For classic New Mexican fare, try La Choza or its sister restaurant, The Shed. James Beard Award–winning chef Fernando Olea is behind Sazón, which serves dishes based on indigenous Mexican tradition. In between meals, sip a cortado at Iconik Coffee’s Lupe location. The cafe’s white stucco courtyard and jumble of potted plants invite whatever doodling, reading, or composing that you’re inclined to do. In the evenings, order a mezcal negroni at La Reina or a smoked- sage margarita at Secreto Lounge, a cozy bar tucked into the historic Hotel St. Francis.

Above all, let the landscape work its magic on you. Hiking Atalaya Trail above the city, you might just feel like sitting down to sketch the expanse spread beneath you. Even those who don’t identify as creative may be surprised to find themselves reaching for a camera in Santa Fe, hoping to capture the way the shadows move across adobe walls and pink clouds pile up over the Sangre de Cristo range in the evening.

Writing about the New Mexican landscape, O’Keeffe said, simply: “It’s the most wonderful place you can imagine.” This might be hyperbole, but then again, who can argue with her paintings? You’ll have to go see for yourself.

The Hole x Storage Wars

Jul 10, 2023 By Admin in Art World News

Art, unfortunately, spends a ridiculous amount of time not being enjoyed. There are great swaths of time in which paintings lie in wait, impotent, in dark and cool crates, until it comes time for them to be displayed or purchased. Many, many brilliant works of art are assigned to this fate, banal and lame, ensconced in plywood. Kathy Grayson, longtime lover of and attendant to art, takes inspiration from this stillness. In curatorial project, Storage Wars, to be debuted at The Hole on La Brea Ave from June 24-August 19, Grayson has stacked these crates to the ceiling and granted visitors access to art that has been kept in the dark.

Featuring masterpieces that just don’t quite fit for some reason, the project invites artists and collectors to display works from storage– whether they be unsold, unpaid or a work that they decided to keep for themselves. Boxes, usually utilized to protect and to withhold, are used as frames upon which art is displayed for consumption. Over twenty artists will be on display in this curatorial exhibition, which aims to negate the often unfortunate side-effects of contemporary art marketing and distribution.

In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, Grayson remarked: “Art should be for everybody…You should use your art gallery to broaden the audience of art. Everybody should be able to walk into a contemporary art gallery and have a meaningful experience with art. It should be as popular as music or literature.” Indeed. In order to open art to everyone, sometimes you just have to open the box.

Artist Thomas Dambo, creator of Isak Heartstone, will build a new troll sculpture in Teller County

Jul 10, 2023 By Admin in Sculpture

The beloved Isak Heartstone troll in Breckenridge is about to get a new friend in Teller County. Danish recycle artist and activist Thomas Dambo will return to the state this month for the project.

My 5 Early Landscape Photography Mistakes

Jul 10, 2023 By Admin in Photography

As we consume social media, YouTube videos, and online articles, it is easy to think everyone else out there knows what they are doing. I made many mistakes early on in my landscape photography journey. I still make mistakes today! I’m going to share some of those early mistakes I made and things I wish I’d started doing sooner.

One of the things I enjoy about landscape photography, and photography in general, is that I am always learning something, improving something, and making better images with every passing year.

But part of learning is making mistakes. Making mistakes can be discouraging, especially when everyone else might look like they are doing fantastic and can do no wrong! Even today, I still make mistakes: sometimes a technical error in the field, forgetting to change my ISO to something reasonable, using a poor choice for aperture, or any number of things.

Let’s look at five mistakes I made early on in my practice of landscape photography. Some center on gear and others on techniques I used incorrectly or should have been using.

Using a Cheap Tripod

This is a piece of advice all landscape photographers get when they start out: “buy a quality tripod.” I think all landscape photographers subsequently ignore that advice. I know I did!

First, I used my Dad’s old tripod, like film days old, and not even that great of a tripod to start with, pieces actually fell off of it while hiking on a trail, just strapped to the pack.

After going through a series of other tripods, I finally bought a quality tripod and have been using and happy with an FLM-CP30-S4 for a couple of years now. I should have listened to the seasoned landscape photographers and first started with a quality tripod.

Why a quality tripod? Because you need a stable surface to photograph from if you want to do long exposure photography for water scenes, giving clouds an ethereal look, or even seascapes.

On workshops I’ve led, I’ve seen people show up with tripods with thin, unstable legs, loose center columns, and tripod heads that wouldn’t securely hold their camera. A quality tripod will be the stable platform you need and last you a long time. Just start with a quality tripod.

Rushing the Shot

When I started my landscape photography journey, I would show up to a popular location, set up in a spot where hundreds, no thousands of photographers before me, had created an image, and take the shot. I was in a rush to take the photo and didn’t really take the time to look around. Yes, I got the image, but it wasn’t unique and didn’t really tell a story.

I have no issue with wanting to capture that iconic shot (I still do), but once you have that one, take the time to work the shot more. Look for interesting angles, high, low, left, right, or look for smaller details or unique ways the light is falling during the particular time you are there. Take your time and think about what story this location has for you. Think about how to compose your image to tell that story.

Taking this extra time will help you transform your photos from something everyone else has to something more unique.

Overusing a New Skill

As we learn new skills, we are eager to put them to use! I remember when I learned exposure bracketing. I bracketed every composition whether it needed it or not, sometimes five-stop brackets.

I’d come home from an outing with hundreds and hundreds of images, even though I only visited two spots. Not only was that cumbersome to go through, but it also added work to the editing process and was often unnecessary.

Instead, I should have thought more about what situations warranted exposure bracketing and only used that technique when the situation warranted it, not for every composition I did for a couple of months. It is good to learn new skills. Just remember to understand when to use them and why.

Not Understanding the Histogram

Early on in my journey, getting a good exposure of a scene seemed more like guesswork. This probably plays into why I overused exposure bracketing early on; surely, I would get a decently exposed shot if I shot every composition with five different exposures!

Until I started using the histogram, either via playback review or live view as I adjusted camera settings, I had never been super confident in my exposure. Learning to use the histogram was probably the single most important thing I did to start getting consistent exposure in my landscape photography images.

The histogram is a tonal chart that lets you easily see where your shadows, highlights, and midtones are in an image — nearly real-time feedback on whether you are overexposing or severely under-exposing an image. If you aren’t familiar with it, it’s well worth heading off to learn more about it and starting to use it for your landscape photography.

Not Using Lens Filters

Another hardware lesson. I wish I would have started using lens filters for my landscape photography sooner. While I don’t like to push people towards gear very often, a polarizing filter made a big impact on my images.

I gravitate towards water scenes, specifically waterfalls, so the polarizing effect of a good circular polarizing filter does help cut down glare from the water and the moisture on nearby rocks, making the images much more pleasing to my eyes.

Adding to that, having at least one neutral density filter, say an ND64 filter, can be very handy for the landscape photographer to help you photograph a waterfall during brighter parts of the day and still get a smooth, long-exposure effect.

I’ve been through several filter brands over the years and have settled on magnetic filters as my preferred filter setup. I am currently using Kase Magnetic filters, and they have made it easy to attach, remove, and stack filters in the field.

What Mistakes Have You Made?

Those are five of the early mistakes I made as a landscape photographer. Even today, I still make mistakes, but again, to me, that is part of the fun of photography — always learning, always improving.

How about you? What mistakes have you made as a landscape photographer?

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