From Dec. 14 through Dec. 28, Village Music in Wellington will present a solo photography exhibit entitled “Enveloped by Clouds” depicting the illustrious beauty of clouds with their majestic and billowing formations.

“Meet the Artist” on Thursday, Dec. 14 at 6:45 p.m., which will be followed by the Village Music Jazz Trio at 7:30 p.m.

Also on exhibit will be a selection from Savicky’s recent solo show at the Delray Beach Public Library entitled “Abstract Reflections and Sky & Water.”

“Abstract Reflections” exemplifies amazing images of light and shadow reflected by everyday objects. “Sky and Water” depicts images in nature from the beautiful northeast. Savicky’s work can also be viewed at photageart.com.

Savicky recently published two books: “Enveloped by Clouds: A Photographic Spiritual Journey” and “Abstract Reflections: A Modernist Perspective.” Both books catalog the photo exhibits and are available for purchase along with the photographic prints.

A Boynton Beach resident, Savicky received a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Queens College in New York and a PhD in clinical social work/social welfare at Adelphi University, a certificate in interior design from the Parsons School of Design, and most recently received a B.Msc in metaphysics. Over the course of her career in both public service and interior design, she continued in drawing, design, and now photography and painting.

Village Music is located at 10410 W. Forest Hill Blvd. in the Shoppes at Wellington Green near Barnes & Noble. For more info., contact Village Music at (561) 798-5334 or visit www.villagemusicwellington.com for reservations and information.

The photographer Larry Fink, who has died aged 82 from complications of kidney disease and Alzheimer’s disease, spent his life capturing the disparity and similarity between the US’s haves and have-nots. Throughout a career that spanned six decades, his images of New York socialites, Hollywood’s elite, Andy Warhol and Studio 54 clubbers, boxers, loggers and farmers provided social commentary imbued with humanism.

His parents were leftwing intellectuals and radicals who railed against the capitalist system while living the life of bon vivants, and this inherited dichotomy infused their son’s work.

When teaching at Parsons School of Design in New York in the late 1960s, one of Fink’s students, an “uptown girl”, introduced him to the debutante balls and ostentatious society parties of Manhattan. He inveigled his way in and shot in black and white, holding his flash away from the camera, bouncing light at odd angles, creating out of kilter, deep shadows.

This technique caused his subjects to stand out against the velvety blackness yet look lost, isolated and alienated. Fink strove to reveal the humanity behind the masks. He wanted to “find the dignity of man[kind] and feel the soul of the individual within”.

In 1973, Fink and his then wife, the artist Joan Snyder (whom he had married in 1968), bought a 10-acre farm in Martins Creek in rural Pennsylvania. One day he went out to buy a lawnmower from a shop run by a local family, the Sabatines. They hit it off and Fink began to photograph the family’s rituals: their birthdays, baptisms and the chaotic warmth of their hardscrabble lives.

The Sabatines were the polar opposite of New York’s upper crust, but each exhibited the same joy, desire and melancholia. It was Fink’s photographs of these complementary juxtapositions that formed the exhibition Social Graces at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1979, to great acclaim. A book of the same title was published in 1984, one of 13 monographs published during his life.

Each year, from 2000 to 2009, Fink brought his idiosyncratically sensual vision to Vanity Fair’s Oscar party. This time invited, he would appear from nowhere, shoot, and melt into the shadows, never asking permission. He captured actors off-guard, but he was not there purely for celebrity. He was as interested in the plus-ones and the waiting staff, and the collision of the two worlds.

Despite his success – he received numerous honours, including two Guggenheim fellowships and his work has been exhibited extensively worldwide – as a young man it did not occur to the self-styled “Marxist of Long Island” that photography could be a career. “My heroes were Che, Mao, and Kerouac,” he said, “I thought that a worldwide revolution was actually in the works. I mean, my mommy told me. So, I was just taking the photographs for a better world.”

Born in Brooklyn, Larry and his younger sister Elizabeth, who became a civil rights lawyer, were both raised with a strong social conscience. Their mother, Sylvia Fink (nee Caplan), was a former Marxist activist who, during the depression, had a job with the Works Progress Administration organising symposiums on art and politics. Their father, Bernard Fink, ran his family’s insurance business, though his heart was not in it. He, like his wife, and despite their socialism, enjoyed evenings of grand parties and fine restaurants, and Sylvia cherished her mink stoles.

At the height of McCarthyism, the family moved to the suburbs of West Hempstead on Long Island. There, the 13-year-old Larry took up photography and, as a reward for winning a student competition, his father gave him a Rolleiflex camera and built him a darkroom. His parents took Fink to jazz clubs, and he took his camera. He captured the greats of the era, such as Coleman Hawkins and Billie Holiday, and a lifelong passion for jazz, and the harmonica he constantly played, was born.

His parents wanted him to receive a liberal education and sent him to board at the progressive Stockbridge school, in Massachusetts. He then attended Coe College in Iowa but dropped out after eight months. He moved into a brownstone overlooking Tompkins Square Park in New York’s East Village and hung out with and photographed the local beatniks.

Fink and his friends went to Mexico: “We went to find truth, universal justice and drugs,” he said. “We just found drugs.” As did the border police at Laredo, Texas, in Fink’s pockets. He was arrested for smuggling a quarter ounce of marijuana into the US and was placed on probation. Fink credited his kindly parole officer with keeping him on the straight and narrow, and encouraging him to pursue photography.

He took a job at a photo studio but was fired almost immediately due to a lack of discipline. Fortunately, the owner knew Sylvia Fink and, recognising her son’s talent, told her to, “see Lisette”.

At that time, the renowned street photographer Lisette Model taught privately (Diane Arbus was one of her students). Fink studied with her, but he would smoke pot and goof around, and after four months she kicked him out. However, her teachings remained with him. Fink said, “If Lisette saw a woman lying in an alley, she would say to me ‘Don’t judge her, because she is you, and someday you will be her.’” She taught Fink “empathy and universality between all souls”.

Despite the success of Social Graces, in its immediate aftermath Fink struggled to make a living. He received commissions, but often the high contrast results were too stark, too strong for the client, and for a short while work dried up. He continued to teach (he taught all his life, including at Bard College in New York state from 1988 until retirement in 2017), and even took jobs photographing weddings. He charged $2,000 for 10 prints but would never compromise his style: “People get good results if they have a happy family and not so good results if they don’t”.

But work soon picked up and he contributed to magazines such as GQ, Condé Nast Traveller, the New Yorker and Glamour. As well as parties and portraiture, he photographed political conventions, civil rights marches and the beauty of life in his beloved Pennsylvania.

His marriage to Joan ended in divorce, as did his second marriage to Pia Staniek. He is survived by his third wife, the artist Martha Posner, whom he married in 2000, his daughter, Molly, from his first marriage, and grandson Elijah.

Paul Nicklen is a world-famous wildlife photographer. He’s won pretty much every major award shooting polar bears, leopard seals, and other rare animals in some of the world’s coldest, most menacing climates for National Geographic. Naturally, he has a massive following on social media, particularly on Instagram where you can see his incredible, intimate portraits of penguins, narwhals, seals, and bears in their natural habitats. He’s lived an amazing life, but he’s also living a kind of double life; the Internet is teeming with impostors of Paul Nicklen operating hundreds of scams in his name. And he’s pretty sick of it.

“Why are these companies that are drowning in billions and billions of dollars, the biggest, best tech companies in the world with the biggest and brightest minds, not able to tackle something so simple?” he told me recently for an episode of The Perfect Scam.

Bear in mind, Nicklen often spends days…weeks…even years trying to make a rare image of an animal in her remote home.  So he’s a patient man. But with social media imposter scams, his patience has run out.

Nicklen has been dealing with this for almost 10 years.  Much of the time, the scams are garden variety:  “Can you Venmo money to my account” and so on.  But because Nicklen has a special relationship with his fans — people who are fans of animals, and of Mother Nature — the crimes can be much more intimate.  And devastating.

“About six years ago … these kids called my office…and they said, ‘Just so you know, our mother has left our dad. They wired the ‘fake you’ the money,” they told him. “We know it’s not you, but she’s in love with the scam version of you, and she’s waiting for you in a city to go on this, this, you know, this journey of this love affair with you.’ And that’s when it just ripped my heart out. I mean we’re talking to the tune of almost $100,000 that was sent, like life savings. That just was a punch in the gut…And that’s when I started to get pretty angry about this.”

Angry, yes. But able to end the scams? Hardly.  A few weeks ago, Paul was forced to post this picture on his Instagram account:

Criminals used Photoshop to attach an image of Paul’s head to the body of someone else who had suffered a skiing accident. 

The imposter then started soliciting donations for Nicklen’s alleged medical bills.  When the photographer heard that a fan had sent thousands of dollars in response, he took to Instagram to issue yet another warning post about scams.  He’d recorded a video pleading with fans never to send money in response to social media solicitations six years ago.

The social media imposter problem is hardly new; but it is rampant. Facebook told us that they work hard to stop such crimes. The firm said that from April through June 2023 – that’s just three months – they’d removed 676 million fake accounts on Facebook.

But that’s not good enough, says Kevin Long, who owns a company named Social Imposter that exists just to help celebrities try to deal with the issue.  We spoke to him for this episode, too. He’s very busy.

“If it was Taylor Swift, there would probably be thousands (of imposters) a day on various networks,” he said. “I mean last week for instance, I had a client that was normally in the 250-account range per week, and I had over 1000 accounts for that person last week.”

Nicklen might be the perfect target for such an imposter scam because…while he’s got millions of followers …his fans still see his work as deeply personal and emotional.

“I’m like, why me?” he said. “But the fact that I have such an intimate relationship with my followers, that they not just love me, but they love animals, they love nature….I’ve had people come up to me in the airport or my lectures or whatever it is, just crying, crying with love, passion, fear, concern for the planet, and they feel like they’re on this journey with you. It’s very intimate. And so I think what happens is when …the scammers write somebody…and say, ‘Thank you for your love, your support.’ … I think that they feel that connection.”

Celebrity imposters are not the only problem, however.  Friends with only a few followers can also be impersonated and used for crimes. You’ve almost certainly experienced this yourself, if you’ve ever received a connection request from someone you thought you were already connected to.  When you accept such a request, a plea for money often follows soon after.

Members of the military are often targeted for impersonation because their accounts can be used to facilitate romance scams.  In this episode, we also speak with Kelly Anderson, whose husband recently had his Facebook account hacked and used in multiple scams.

“It’s incredibly stressful,” she said. “It’s…so very frustrating, and progressively more and more maddening. I was getting ready to throw the computer out the window because there is no option to talk to a person.”

This episode was fun to work on, as it was amazing to hear first-hand from Nicklen about his incredible adventures in wildlife photography — I wasn’t going to let a chance to speak with him go by without a bit of discussion about the many times he’s been in mortal danger just to make a photo.  Please click play below, or click here, to listen to this episode of The Perfect Scam.  Also, do yourself a favor and visit Nicklen’s Instagram account or view his stories on National Geographic and other publications.

This year has already seen stunning examples of wildlife photography, both humorous and otherwise. But the winners of the Society of International Nature and Wildlife Photographers (SINWP) takes the medium to new heights.

This year, the grand prize for the SINWP Bird Photographer of the Year competition went to Gianpiero Ferrari of England for his image, “Winter Fieldfare.” The winning photo earned Ferrari a Newell voucher worth £250, an Anthropics Collection valued £229.95, Topaz Photo AI valued at $199, a PermaJet voucher valued at £100, and an annual Professional Membership to SINWP.

“The shot is from my home garden in Leicestershire, UK. After a snowfall during the night, several Fieldfare came in the garden to take advantage of the apple that I provided,” a release announcing the winner states. “This one was very aggressive and took over the entire garden chasing away all the other birds. I started to take some pictures from the house through a window, but I was not happy with the composition. I thought a ground level composition would have been much better. So first I had to build a pile of snow to use as a background and then lay on the ground under a camouflage blanket, waiting for the bird to return to eat the apples.”

It seems Ferrari’s dedication paid off in the end. The image was taken using a Canon EOS-1DX, and it perfectly captures the territorial bird’s haughtiness and it lords over its meal.

Other winners of the 2023 SINWP Bird Photographers of the Year competition include Robert Gloeckner from Florida and Kevin Rooney from England, who took second and third place, respectively. Gloeckner’s entry, appropriately titled “Tucked In,” shows a baby wrapped in its mothers wings. Meanwhile, Rooney’s photo depicts an Oxpecker doing what it does best, pecking at a buffalo. The bird have a symbiotic relationship with buffalo and similar large mammals, one that Rooney captures in detail.

“My photo of the Oxpecker cleaning the nose of the buffalo was taken in Mara North Conservancy in Kenya, north of the main Masai Mara Reserve,” Rooney said in the release. “We were sat in a land cruiser amongst a huge herd of buffalo watching the Oxpeckers fly from one to another cleaning flies and ticks from the noses, eyes and ears of the buffaloes. My camera on the day was a Canon 7D Mark II with a Canon 100-400mm zoom lens attached, either positioned on a bean bag or taken hand held.”

Vince Burton of the United Kingdom, Alain Poirot of France, and Bjørn H. Stuedal of Norway each took home Judge’s Choice awards. More entries showcasing exquisite avians can be seen on SINWP’s website, which shows photographs that landed in the Very Highly Commended, Highly Commended, and Commended categories.

Further, the contest was in aid for The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and entries required a minimum donation of £1 per image, which went to the organization.

Image credits: Society of International Nature and Wildlife Photographers

Eduard Sánchez Ribot never goes without his camera. When he’s not splitting time between his home bases of Barcelona and Paris, the still-life photographer travels the world, capturing simple and saturated images for clients such as Loewe, Atmos, and Margiela. On a recent two-week trip to South Korea—his first time in the country—Ribot found comfort and calm behind the lens, making sense of the novelty and noise through art.

“This is simply a collection of what my eye could detect after long walks and an excess of information and inputs,” says the artist of the results. His photographs, often slightly blurred and sepia, appear to give their subjects haloes, turning a hanging striped shirt or a grassy knoll into hallowed objects. Foggy cityscapes seem otherworldly. Even an overlooked sign dripping with rust makes the eye rest easy, the mundane turned new under his gaze. In seeking tranquility, the artist reignited his creativity with this photo diary. “Shapes and colors coming together to create palettes and beauty that I am not used to excites me and confirms once again that I am doing what I love.”

For Document, Ribot shares with us a few token photos of his trip, emblematic of his perennial search for serenity.

Left: Random covered box, Seoul.

Right: Gyeongbokgung Palace Drum Logo, Seoul.

Left: Big cloud between Seoul’s skyscrapers. Right: T-shirt worker in the Bus, Andong-Si.

Left: Fire truck in a street in Seoul.

Right: Second day, Seoul from the hotel room.

Left: Two of the Royal Tombs in Gyeongju.

Right: Used purple mop, Seoul.

Right: Jeongbang Waterfall, Jeju Island.

Left: Clothes in a bag, Seoul.

Right: Graphic poster somewhere in South Korea.

Left: Busan from the tallest tower of the city Haeundae LCT The Sharp.

Right: Fishes in Busan.