Check out D-backs’ legend Randy Johnson’s new photo exhibit at Scottsdale museum

By in Photography

Check out D-backs’ legend Randy Johnson’s new photo exhibit at Scottsdale museum

SCOTTSDALE, AZ (3TV/CBS 5) — You may know Randy Johnson for his time on the mound with the Arizona Diamondbacks, but did you know the former pitcher is also a well-known photographer?

Just in time for spring training, you can soon see the artwork of the Diamondbacks’ legend. Beginning Friday, Johnson’s photography will be on display at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art.

Johnson started photography in the early 1980s before his time with the team. “I think a lot of people think I just got into it when I retired but I started photojournalism at USC while I was playing baseball on a scholarship there. I was learning about film photography and working for the college newspaper,” he said. “Then I gradually transitioned into my baseball career when I got drafted by the Montreal Expos in ‘85 out of college. Then photography took a backseat.”

After retirement, Johnson says he enjoyed traveling to Africa, which is the focus of the exhibit. “I’ve been there about five, six times. It’s a vast continent. There’s just so many areas to travel to and see so many different things and that’s what I’ve tried to capture here,” he explained.

An open reception will be held for Johnson’s exhibit on Friday, Feb. 23 from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Tickets are free, but you must reserve yours. To reserve or find out more information, click or tap here.

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Dreamy Santa Monica Pier Photos Look Like a Wes Anderson Film

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Dreamy Santa Monica Pier Photos Look Like a Wes Anderson Film

pier burger stand in santa monica pier

Santa Monica Pier is a favorite spot amongst both tourists and locals to Southern California. The colors of the beach, the food stands, the Pacific Pier amusement park make for a uniquely quirky mix that can only be found there. French photographer Helene Havard, who visits the area often, set out to capture the vibrancy of this area. By working with her signature, Wes Anderson-like colors, she heightens the dreamy quality of these laidback scenes.

“Santa Monica Pier is a place I find magical, especially at sunset. I used to come here, as I live in French Polynesia and go very often to Cali either for pleasure or to fly to different countries,” Havard tells My Modern Met. “Each time I come to LA, I like this place for the retro feeling it has. Everything seems from another time. It feels a little bit surreal according to my taste.”

In Havard’s pastel-toned images, Santa Monica Pier looks like a place where it’s always Sunday afternoon. People line up for hot dogs and burgers, ride the world-famous ferris wheel, walk on the sand, and simply bask under the warm California sun. While these places have long been used as film locations, Havard further elevates the cinematic potential of this place with simple creative choices, like narrative framing and a unique palette.

Scroll down to check out Havard’s tribute to Santa Monica Pier, and follow her on Instagram to stay up to date with her latest photographic adventures.

French photographer Helene Havard, who visits the Santa Monica Pier often, set out to capture the vibrancy of this area.

stand at santa monica pier

stand at santa monica pier

By working with her signature, Wes Anderson-like style, she heightens the dreamy quality of these laidback scenes.

stand at santa monica pier

stand at santa monica pier

“Santa Monica Pier is a place I find magical, especially at sunset,” she tells My Modern Met.

ferris wheel and stand at santa monica pier

ferris wheel and stand at santa monica pier

stand at santa monica pier

stand at santa monica pier

ferris wheel and stand at santa monica pier

ferris wheel and stand at santa monica pier

“Each time I come to LA, I like this place for the retro feeling it has. Everything seems from another time. It feels a little bit surreal according to my taste.”

santa monica beach

santa monica beach

In Havard’s pastel-toned images, Santa Monica Pier looks like a place where it’s always Sunday afternoon.

santa monica pier

santa monica pier

santa monica beach

santa monica beach

santa monica pier stands

santa monica pier stands

santa monica beach

santa monica beach

santa monica beach and pier

santa monica beach and pier

santa monica beach

santa monica beach

Helene Havard: Website | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube 

My Modern Met granted permission to feature photos by Helene Havard.

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Close-Up Photographer of the Year Embraces the Natural World in Macro

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Close-Up Photographer of the Year Embraces the Natural World in Macro

Close-up Photographer of the Year celebrates five years of captivating entries from photographers. This year, the contest brought 12,000 entries from 67 different countries. The individuals who participated zoomed in close on the natural world to capture macro marvels that left viewers in awe.

Isopods, birds, fish, slime molds, butterflies, and sunny lily pads in a Mexican cenote were among this year’s submissions that covered the gamut of flora and fauna. The images boasted each photographer’s skill and patience that was put toward unveiling the intricate beauty that often goes unnoticed by the naked eye.

The competition’s diverse categories have celebrated a multitude of natural wonders covering the astounding, delicate, and ethereal patterns in nature. Close-up Photographer of the Year continues to inspire and amaze, reminding us of the boundless beauty that surrounds us, waiting to be discovered through the lens of a camera.

For those excited about the beauty of macrophotography, the contest’s website showcases the top 100 photos, inviting viewers on a visual journey through the wonders of the natural world.

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Wild, Touching — and Even Funny: Best Underwater Photographs of 2024 » Explorersweb

By in Photography

Wild, Touching — and Even Funny: Best Underwater Photographs of 2024 » Explorersweb

Marine photographers from all over the planet submitted to a contest that will pull your heartstrings in every direction imaginable.

The Underwater Photographer of the Year contest dates back to 1965. While this year’s winners and finalists scored shots that would have been impossible to imagine back then, they also captured timeless themes and intimate moments from all over the Blue Planet’s namesake habitat.

Sweden’s Alex Dawson won the grand prize with a haunting shot of whale skeletons surrendered to the Greenland sea by indigenous hunters.

The UPY pointed out that “from a stable population of over 100,000 minke whales in the North Atlantic, the hunters of Tasiilaq typically take less than a dozen.”

The UPY also published a heap of photos in each of this year’s 13 categories, including “Wrecks,” “Macro,” and my personal favorite, “Behavior.”

And don’t worry if you get a little teary over the “Save our Seas” category. There’s always an entry like “Home sweet home” or “Aquatic primate” to buoy your mood.

a monkey swimming with eyes wide open

Photo: Suliman Alatiqi

This year’s contest attracted a record number of entrants. ”The collection is a great reminder that while underwater photography is a specialist discipline, there is huge diversity within it,” said the UPY.

Check out all the winners, runners-up, and commended entries on the UPY website.

Ray Francis, Celebrating Blackness

By in Photography

Ray Francis, Celebrating Blackness
image

A founder of the Kamoinge Workshop, he made lush, powerful photos that document and honor members of the African diaspora.

In the late 1970s, in Montreal, photography students were obsessed with getting deep blacks — “max black” — in our prints, squeezing the full range of tones out of our black-and-white photo paper. Knowing that light meters were designed to average a scene out to gray, we recalibrated ours to make the shadows in our shots as darkly lush as an Ansel Adams moonrise.

Few of us realized there might be more to blackness than a lack of light. We didn’t understand that in the right hands, the deep, deep blacks might speak to far more than a darkroom technique — to issues of race and segregation.

Four hundred miles south of us, in New York, Ray Francis was printing shots that had the bold shadows we were striving for. Thirty-two of his prints are on view now in “Waiting to Be Seen: Illuminating the Photographs of Ray Francis,” at the Bruce Silverstein gallery in Chelsea, a posthumous show that is Francis’s first solo presentation. He died in 2006, at 69.

Ray Francis, “Untitled,” 1970s. Francis, a founder of the Kamoinge Workshop, split his faces between light and deep darkness. His posthumous solo exhibition is at the Bruce Silverstein Gallery.via Bruce Silverstein Gallery

In 1963, he helped found the Kamoinge Workshop in New York, a collective dedicated to “photography’s power as an independent art form that depicts Black communities,” according to the Workshop, which is furthering its mission today. The photos on view at Silverstein suggest that, in the circle of Kamoinge, depicting Black people was likely to involve thinking about black tones in a print.

Francis’s images, with their reflections on race, seem to get a special energy and power because of their links to art photography that cared so deeply about the darkness in a black-and-white print.

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A Forthcoming Documentary Examines How Civic Life in America Is a Matter of ‘Join or Die’

By in Art World News

A Forthcoming Documentary Examines How Civic Life in America Is a Matter of ‘Join or Die’

“This is Bob. Bob is a big fan of clubs,” the narrator opens in the trailer for the forthcoming documentary Join or Die. “And this is a film about why you should join one and how Bob discovered that the fate of America depends on it.”

Bob, or Robert D. Putnam, is an acclaimed political scientist who has deeply influenced our understanding of how society and government work. A professor at Harvard and author of fifteen books, Putnam analyzes a swath of economic, social, political, and cultural trends using loads of data, heralding the idea of social capital, or the networks within society that enable it to function effectively.

Two-and-a-half decades ago, Putman wrote the prescient book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, a powerful insight into how Americans are becoming increasingly disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, and democratic structures. He tilts a mirror toward our own social behaviors, and Join or Die posits that its importance has only amplified since.

 

All images © ‘Join or Die’

Directed and produced by Rebecca Davids and Pete Davis, Join or Die follows “the half-century story of America’s civic unraveling” through Putnam’s work and interviews with numerous influential figures like Hillary Clinton, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and scholar Eddie Glaude, Jr. The film explores provocative questions like, “What makes democracy work? Why is American democracy in crisis?” Then, it poses a call to action: “What can we do about it?”

The project collates striking statistics that Putnam has gathered during his career about the incredible drops in collective involvement, such as a 50 percent decline from the 1970s to the 1990s in the number of times Americans attended a club meeting the previous year. Or a 50 percent decline from the 1970s to the 1990s in the number of Americans who took a leadership role in any local organization.

“The places that have better government are the places that have a long history of social networks and social capital,” Putnam says. He adds in another clip, “Organization—connections with other people—is the only way you get big change.”

Check out the trailer on the film’s website. (via Swiss Miss)

 

A gif from the trailer for the documentary 'Join or Die' featuring images digitally collaged onto colorful backgrounds of people in groups and clubs.

A still from the trailer for the documentary 'Join or Die' featuring old footage of people playing cards.

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 A Forthcoming Documentary Examines How Civic Life in America Is a Matter of ‘Join or Die’ appeared first on Colossal.

Ozerkevich shares work on early French sports photography

By in Photography

Ozerkevich shares work on early French sports photography

The Atletas (year unknown). The arrows, added by Ozerkevich, indicate places that have been edited. | COURTESY OF OZERKEVICH

When you edit a photo to make your body look different or certain features more prominent, you follow a tradition of retouching photos that may be at least 140 years old, according to Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History Rachel Ozerkevich. On Feb. 15, Ozerkevich shared her research on early publicized photography during a presentation titled “Aesthetes and Athletes: Media Debates and French Sports Images, 1881-1917.” Ozerkevich explained that this 36-year period in France saw a massive rise in popular press and marked the beginnings of sports publications printing photography in their pages.

The use of handwork — the editing of images through drawing, cutting or otherwise altering the original physical image — truly captured her attention in the aesthetics of French sports imagery. Often this handwork was used to make photos resemble illustrations more palatable to audiences unfamiliar with photography. Ozerkevich explained that “our biases and beliefs about ideal bodies, beauty and national belonging owe a lot to sports imagery. We know how to read all the images we see in the sports media because the earliest sports-image makers relied on artistic conventions.” Before showing a small sampling of these images, Ozerkevich warned the audience that they might look different from our modern conception of photography. “We have art directors, photographers and editors literally playing with photographs. They’re playing with lines, shapes, layouts and the interplay between text and image,” she said. Indeed, each of Ozerkevich’s example images had been directly drawn on to create the desired effects.

Ozerkevich is currently developing her research into a book, and each chapter of her project focuses on different examples of retouched images and explores the techniques used to manipulate them. A photograph from the 1900 Paris Olympic Games showed a moment from the diving competition on the Seine where one of the figures had been entirely drawn into the image. “Retouching involved everything from highlighting important areas to blurring out or minimizing extra confusing details, to cropping or cutting out areas that might detract from a central narrative,” Ozerkevich explained. She also emphasized the importance of inspecting these photographs physically because digital copies can lose the texture and signs of alterations.

As she examined the societal impact of editing the body, she focused on female weightlifters and the ways that their photographs were retouched to maintain gendered stereotypes about beauty ideals and proportions in women. Speaking about a posed photo of a family of female weightlifters who referred to themselves as the Atletas, Ozerkevich said, “These images of the women show dramatic evidence of having been drawn on. There are pen and scratch marks around the women’s waists, busts, chins and arms, which literally slimmed their bodies.” The photographer Edmond Desbonnet published the photo in a magazine called La Culture Physique. Ozerkevich added that “[the Atletas] were too fit. They were too muscular and thereby too far removed from mainstream ideals of female beauty…much of Desbonnet’s drawing, then, has to do with making their bodies conform a little bit more to these widely accepted beauty ideals.” This example illustrates how long the press has been distorting women’s bodies to present an ideal that has long been shaping popular perceptions of beauty standards.

Ozerkevich’s last example was, in many ways, the most troubling. It was a 1905 picture of a woman dressed in traditional North American indigenous clothing, showing off her costume and form. Ozerkevich revealed that the woman who performed under the name Osceola was a white European performer who “appropriated generic Indigenous regalia and narratives in her complex self-fashioning.” She explained that through this cultural appropriation, “Osceola was engaging with discourses about indigenous otherness, exoticism and eroticism, and… capitalizing on popular fears about women’s physical and intellectual liberation.” Ozerkevich is in the process of searching for additional information about Osceola, but this example demonstrates the critical role that race and culture play in our understanding of sports imagery and history.

In a 45-minute presentation and brief Q&A session, Ozerkevich managed to reveal a condensed history of altering photography as well as establish the clear and necessary connection between sports photography, popular culture, body image and art history. Her upcoming articles and book are sure to leave readers more aware and considerate of the images they encounter daily and the historical traditions that inspire them.

ArtCentre Of Plano Presents Photographs Of Sarah Carson

By in Photography

ArtCentre Of Plano Presents Photographs Of Sarah Carson

The ArtCentre of Plano is presenting the photographs of Sarah Carson this March in honor of Women’s History Month. Carson’s exhibition will be held at both the ArtCentre of Plano and the Courtyard Theater.

Sarah Carson, a photographer based in Dallas, has created an extensive portfolio spanning both black/white and color photography. She also possesses a collection of black/white images embellished with oil paint. Carson’s photographic subjects range from the Texas Rodeo and Red Canyonlands to New York Cityscapes, English Castles, an Italian Horse Race, the marvel of Petra and Eastern Europe during the Soviet era. 

Sarah Carson: Vivid Memories

On exhibit at the Courtyard Theater and the ArtCentre of Plano from March 5 to March 30, 2024. 

  • Opening Reception: Thursday, March 7, 5 to 7 p.m., Courtyard Theater
  • Lunch & Learn: Wednesday, March 20, 2024, 12 to 1 p.m., ArtCentre of Plano

“The photographs in this exhibition are, indeed, some of my most vivid memories,” said Carson. “And I hope that they speak with my voice in a special way to you.”

Carson’s exhibitions have been held in various cities including Boston, New York, Miami, New Orleans, Houston, Dallas, Santa Fe and Budapest, Hungary. Her work is featured in exhibition books and specialized publications. From 1994 to 2012, Carson conducted photography workshops during spring and autumn at Montestigliano, a large farm-estate near Siena, Tuscany. Each year, the participants’ Italian work was showcased in a Dallas gallery or art center.

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Wedding Photographer Accused of Not Delivering the Photos

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Wedding Photographer Accused of Not Delivering the Photos
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A wedding photographer allegedly scammed several couples — turning up late on the big day, leaving the job early, and sometimes ignoring them forever.

According to a report by WCNC, several brides in Charlotte, North Caroline have accused local wedding photographer Ali Robbins, who owns Alivia Photography of never delivering the photos of the big day.

Some of the brides have reportedly got the police involved over the incidents.

In one alleged example, WCNC reports that Samantha Lem hired Robbins to shoot her wedding day. Initially, the bride said that everything seemed to be running smoothly with the photographer.

However, on her wedding day, Lem claims that Robbins failed to arrive on time and showed up hours late.

“She showed up to our wedding… she did show up two hours late,” Lem tells the news outlet.

The next day, Robbins showed the couple a “sneak peek” of the beautiful shots that she took at the wedding.

However, after that, Robbins allegedly never spoke to them again and never delivered the images. This is despite the fact that the photographer had already shot the wedding and even showed the couple a preview of the images.

“We could not get hold of her. I tried multiple times,” Lem tells WCNC.

“Our photo gallery was due December 16, and we never received it from her.

“We are also supposed to receive the wedding video from her by February 17.”

Lem says she texted and emailed Robbins. However, she claims that Robbins changed her number multiple times and could not get hold of her.

Finally, Lem’s wedding planner got involved and managed to contact Robbins. However, Lem still did not receive the full photo package from Robbins.

‘Showed Up Late, and Left Early’

According to WCNC, Lem reached out to the police at this point and filed an incident report. Lem also shared her experience with Robbins on social media and discovered that other brides allegedly had similar encounters with the wedding photographer.

WCNC reports that Harley Davis was one of the other brides who hired Robbins to shoot her wedding in 2017. Although Harley eventually received the photos, she says she had other grievances with the wedding photographer.

Similarly, Robbin allegedly showed up to the wedding hours late — and then left the job two hours early at 16:00.

“She did finally show up at the venue at 13:00. when she was supposed to be there at 09:00,” Davies tells the news outlet.

“She left right at about 16:00. She came up and said ‘I have to go.’”

According to the contract Davis signed, if Robbins had to leave, a photographer of the same skill would replace her.

However, Davis claims no photographer replaced her and Robins did not issue a refund. Robbins told her she would gift a lifetime free booking for the mishap.

Eventually, Davis and Robbins reconnected in a parking lot so the bride could get the photos from her.

“She handed me a $50 gift card and said ‘Sorry, but I will not be giving you lifetime free sessions because I’ve heard you’ve been telling everyone what happened,’” Davis explains.

“I don’t like that you’ve been spreading that around.”

WCNC says they attempted to reach out to Robbins multiple times on the phone as well as other social media platforms. However, she did not respond for comment.

Image credits: Feature photo licensed via Depositphotos.

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