Capture and Create: Gladwin’s Hinckley-Smith receives international recognition for her fine art photography
Photography
Mountain basketball and an earthquake wedding: Wednesday’s best photos
Dakar, Senegal
The environmentalist Modou Fall, known as Plastic Man, wears a custom-made suit composed of recycled bags to raise awareness about plastic waste, recycling and pollution
Photograph: Jérôme Favre/EPA
Artist brings across the marvels of nature through stone photography
Daily themes to focus our work
Daily themes in photography have been a great way to bring focus to my work and that of many other photographers I know.
Why participate in daily themes?
Having a subject matter to already focus on can help motivate us to pick up the camera and create an image (or several). Maybe it isn’t your typical genre, but it still gets you out there creating.
Sharing is a great way to be inspired. Since we all have different views and ways of thinking, coming up with out-of-the-box ideas for a theme helps us all start thinking beyond the typical image we might create. This can help us all get and be a little more creative.
Themes can help you figure out what you enjoy photographing. And, what you don’t. This is a great way to hone in on what you truly love to photograph.
Where to find daily themes
There are plenty of photography themes that get posted in private groups, on social media and on photo-hosting sites like Flickr. Follow hashtags on Instagram or Twitter as well.
Join the Photofocus Community. We have four daily themes per day you can participate in.
Benefits of participating
One of the biggest benefits is the interaction with fellow photographers. It’s fun to connect with others who have not only photography in common but possibly other interests that are shown in the images that are posted for themes.
It is a fun way to experiment. Many times you’re not going to be creating images that will go into your portfolio. That means trying things you’re curious about. Whether it’s techniques and settings you’re unfamiliar with or learning new post-processing options. Give it a go and have fun with it.
Create your own themes
If you don’t feel confident enough yet to join in with a group of other photographers, create images for themes for your eyes only. Create a time frame to play and go back after that period of time to see your improvement.
Check Out These Breathtaking Entries In The Astronomy Photographer Of The Year Competition 2023
In just a few months, the Royal Observatory Greenwich will crown the winners of Astronomy Photographer of the Year. To tease the momentous occasion, they have shared the shortlist selection from over 4,000 entries by amateurs and professional photographers hailing from 64 countries around the world. The competition is organized by the Royal Observatory Greenwich, with Liberty Specialty Markets and BBC Sky at Night Magazine, and it is now in its 15th year.
There are nine main categories in the competition: people and space, skyscapes, aurorae, our Sun, the Moon, objects in the Solar System, stars and nebulae, galaxies, and an award for people 16 years old or younger. Each of them will have a winner, a runner-up, and a highly commended prize.
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There are also two special prizes: the Sir Patrick Moore Prize for Best Newcomer and the Annie Maunder Prize for Image Innovation. The latter is awarded for the best-processed images from open-source data from established telescopes. Among the winning entries, one will be picked to be the overall winner, a talented astrophotographer who will take home a £10,000 prize.
As always, we can only share a small selection of the shortlist with the photographers’ captions, so here are our favorites.
People & Space
Pandora’s Box – The Milky Way viewed behind a graffiti of Pandora by Wild Drawing (WD), a Balinese artist on the Greek island of Naxos.
IMAGE CREDIT: © DEREK HORLOCK
Aurorae
Arctic Gates – The Northern Lights over the mammoth sundial Arctic Henge, which is inspired by Norse mythology.
IMAGE CREDIT: © DANIEL VIÑÉ GARCIA
Our Sun
China Space Station Transits Active Sun – The Sun photographed showing the transit of the China Space Station (CSS). The image of the CSS was produced by selecting the nine clearest photos from captured video frames.
IMAGE CREDIT: © LETIAN WANG
Our Moon
Ball of Rock – This is a composite of an image of the Moon 78 percent illuminated and an image of the full Moon. Assembling close-up shots to create a mosaic of the whole Moon is complex as the perspective changes slightly during a lunar orbit.
IMAGE CREDIT: © RICH ADDIS
Stars & Nebulae
The Majestic Tarantula Nebula – Capturing the Tarantula Nebula’s intricate details and vibrant hues is a challenging task that requires precision and patience. Narrowband filters have been used for the nebulosity and RGB filters for the stars, so they are in natural colors.
IMAGE CREDIT: © STEEVE BODY
Galaxies
NGC 3521: Marquise in the Sky – NGC 3521, a flocculent intermediate spiral galaxy, is surrounded by dust and has numerous star-forming areas and a luminous center. Rarely seen hydrogen alpha jets have been captured.
IMAGE CREDIT: © MARK HANSON; MIKE SELBY
Skyscapes
Celestial Equator Above First World War Trench Memorial – Star trails above the preserved First World War trenches in Canadian National Vimy Memorial Park, Northern France. Taken over five hours, the camera captured the rotation of the sky revealing the colorful stars.
Image Credit: © Louis Leroux-Gere
A larger selection of the shortlisted images is available on the Royal Observatory of Greenwich website.
Ketchum gallery celebrating a decade of fine art photography
Local father-and-son duo Jeff and Kyle Lubeck are not only celebrating a decade of fine art photography this week—they are also opening a new exhibit on work capturing the iconic McGowan Peak in the Sawtooth Mountains.
Jeffrey H. Lubeck’s Exhibit of Fine Art Photography has been in business since the last weekend of June 2013. The pair’s show on McGowan Peak will premiere from 5-7:30 p.m. on Friday, June 30, at their MESH Gallery, located at 420 Fourth St. East in Ketchum.
Refreshments will be served and the public is welcome to attend. MESH Gallery is housed in what was the original Catholic church in Ketchum, built in 1884.
‘You have to create a dream world’: Life in black and white
Artist Shahidul Alam: ‘Photography does things that words cannot do so effectively’
“People hug me in the street. They say: ‘You were so brave!’ I don’t think so.”
Shahidul Alam takes a sip of almond milk, his mellifluous voice resonating through the sunlit sitting room of a mutual friend. “The things I said are not earth-shattering. They are things we should all be saying. They seem remarkable because others are silent. We have a tradition of resistance in Bangladesh. For people not to speak is a problem.”
In August 2018, the photographer, artist, teacher and civil rights activist was arrested, imprisoned and tortured for 107 days by the Dhaka police after criticising his country’s Awami League government in an interview on Al Jazeera. So Alam knows why his compatriots remain silent.
Although Bangladesh is a democracy, its draconian restrictions on freedom of expression are regularly denounced by organisations such as PEN and Amnesty International. Yet Alam, though still on bail, refuses to play it safe. Since his release in November 2018, after a global campaign that included Arundhati Roy, Amal Clooney and Sharon Stone, his photographs, many focused on Bangladesh’s battle for civil rights, have travelled the world, including to the V&A in London and the Rubin Museum in New York.
Born in Dhaka in 1955, Alam went to the UK when he was 17, a year after his country won independence from Pakistan. In Britain, while studying to be a research chemist, he started taking pictures on the side. Always compelled to fight for social justice, he realised “the power of the medium” to “do things that words cannot do so effectively”.
Since then, Alam’s images have seared themselves on the collective retina of south Asia and beyond. Whereas Bangladesh is often viewed as the victim of poverty and natural disasters, Alam spotlights its resilience, courage and inventiveness. When reporting the devastating cyclone of 1988, for example, his shot of a woman cooking on the roof of her flooded hut encapsulated the nation’s refusal to surrender. In 2011, in his tribute to indigenous rights campaigner Kalpana Chakma, who was “disappeared” by the army in 1996, he lasered images of her fellow activists — Kalpana’s Warriors, as the sequence was known — on to straw sleeping mats, tugging his audience into the absent woman’s intimate world. Such intriguing, ambiguous images typify a vision that fuses the political acuity of reportage with the unpredictable flair of art.
His latest project, Singed But Not Burnt, a book published by Kolkata-based gallery Emami Art and accompanied by shows in India and Chicago, proves his political fire is undimmed. Its cover bears “Woman in Ballot Booth” (1991). Captioned “A woman avenges Noor Hossain’s death by casting a vote”, the black and white photograph of the figure marking her paper, head bowed, is Alam’s tribute to an activist murdered by police in 1987 during a protest.
The book’s final pages document “The Cry of the Imprisoned” (2020), an artists’ performance on the Dhaka streets protesting the latest law under which hundreds of writers, artists and journalists have been imprisoned.
Although these images testify to Bangladesh’s “tradition of resistance”, they also map a continuum of repression. Does Alam ever feel the struggle is hopeless? “No,” he replies firmly. “I can see changes in the offing. There is an awakened public in Bangladesh. The middle class was very, very protective of its comfort zone. But the BNP [Bangladesh Nationalist Party, chief opposition to the Awami League] are now standing in the streets and people are gathering around them. There are more and more dissenting voices.”
He pauses, a slight figure in his candy-pink panjabi, immaculately embroidered by his partner, the writer and human rights activist Rahnuma Ahmed. Given the menace, why continue to risk his freedom? “The fact that I’m out here, talking to you, is dependent on the fact that there was a global campaign for my release. Many others were ‘disappeared’ without [anyone] knowing about them.”
Alam’s project Crossfire (2010), present in Singed But Not Burnt, testifies to those cruel fates. These are oblique yet hackle-raising pictures — bullet holes in a muralled wall; a stained, crumpled gamcha (working man’s cloth) used as a blindfold before torture and death. Less oblique is the shot of a camera-wielding crowd — many of them Alam’s own students — photographing the police trying to close down Crossfire when Alam showed it at Drik, the exhibition space and picture library he founded in 1989.
As well as Drik, Alam founded the Pathshala South Asian Media Institute, the region’s renowned photography school; Majority World, a picture agency for photographers from Asia, Africa and Latin America, whose name illustrates Alam’s rejection of western condescension; and Chobi Mela, an international photography festival. In the book, a moving conversation between two of his former students, curator Tanzim Wahab and photographer Munem Wasif, both of whom now have international careers, testify to a teacher who held them “mesmerised”.
Alam’s empathy pulses through every shot in Singed But Not Burnt, from a barefoot ballerina-straight young woman striding across a desolate construction site with a basket of earth on her head, to human traffickers, languid of limb, sharp of eye, on a river boat. “I am not parachuting in to take pictures,” responds Alam when I ask how he evades objectification. “I am photographing our community. It’s my world too.”
His awareness that human choices underpin our economic system has fed his current project: a film about the deaths of migrant workers in the UAE. “Around 3,500 corpses return each year but the Bangladeshi government isn’t talking about it.” Alam’s film will include footage of the workers’ families as well as scenes in Qatar where, he observes, of the reported $220bn spent on staging the 2022 World Cup, “almost none went to the workers”.
“People like you and me — we deprive other people. Somehow we’ve decided the place of the subaltern is to stay where they are. If they’ve been born there, they die there.”
His work illuminates the nuanced reality of people who are so often invisible to those who benefit from them. It’s unlikely the film will make him any more popular with the Bangladesh authorities than the rest of his work. How long can he remain singed but not burnt? “Photographers have to be at the front line,” he replies calmly. “It’s about finding that space where you will feel the heat but stay alive. Martyrs do not make good reporters.”
At Wrightwood 659, Chicago, to July 15, wrightwood659.org, then at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Delhi, from July 17, knma.in
Dupain sale smashes estimates in resurgent photography market
Elizabeth Fortescue
Jun 28, 2023 – 1.24pm
Arguably the most democratic art form will receive a boost in early September when the State Library of NSW opens its photography gallery.
A sweeping survey drawn from the State Library’s impressive collection will inaugurate the new space in specially excavated galleries below the Mitchell Library.
Stan Giddens painting the Sydney Harbour Bridge, 1945. Alec Iverson’s photograph for ACP Magazines will be in the inaugural hang of the State Library’s new photography gallery.
The library’s collection boasts almost 2 million photographs dating from 1845 to the present. That means in-house curator Geoff Barker was not stuck for choice when he assembled what will be the first hang.
Barker’s favourite images include Alec Iverson’s giddy-making picture of Stan Giddens painting the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1945.
In Victoria in March, Monash Gallery of Art rebranded as the Museum of Australian Photography (MAPh). MGA had been dedicated exclusively to photography for 30 years. The first show at MAPh is a career survey of Sydney-based photographic artist Anne Zahalka.
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The display features a life-size replica of Zahalka’s Newtown studio, complete with items of her furniture and many of her books and archives. It’s on until September 10.
The State Library of NSW’s new photography gallery and the MAPh are significant additions to the photographic landscape. Institutions play a role in the market because of their remit to filter out and show what their curators consider to be the best and most interesting art.
“A market is not just what occurs at auction,” Smith & Singer auctioneers chairman Geoffrey Smith said. “It’s not in a bubble, it’s co-dependent – what books are being published and what’s on at galleries. If they’re not being shown, then how do people get excited about that?”
The Bathers, by Anne Zahalka, is on display in the photographer’s survey exhibition at the Museum of Australian Photography in Melbourne.
Internationally, auction houses routinely devote entire sales to photography. In Australia’s far smaller market, photography is more likely to be found among other types of artworks in any given auction catalogue.
That says a lot about the relative lack of development of the photography market here. The upside is there’s a whole market waiting to be explored.
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The highest price paid for a single Australian photograph at auction is $122,000 for Vale Street, 1975, by Carol Jerrems. (The price includes buyer’s premium, as do all the other prices in this article.)
Jerrems died in 1980 of a rare liver disease. She was only 30, but still managed to create an extraordinary body of work grounded in the women’s movement and the counterculture. In Vale Street, Jerrems depicted three young people in St Kilda, Melbourne, defiantly nude from the waist up.
Vale Street was printed in an edition of nine. The image that brought the record price was not one of the nine, but a signed artist’s proof. The sale was in November 2019 and the auction house was Sotheby’s (now Smith & Singer).
A print of Vale Street can be found in the National Gallery of Australia’s collection. The NGA purchased the print from one of Jerrems’ first exhibitions in the 1970s.
An examination of recent prices fetched at auction shows that buyers will pay good money for the photographs they really value.
In Deutscher and Hackett’s May 3 auction, for instance, Merv Bishop’s famed image of former prime minister Gough Whitlam and traditional elder Vincent Lingiari sold for $34,364 after being estimated at just $18,000 to $25,000.
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“That’s a work of great documentary power,” executive director Damian Hackett said.
Max Dupain’s Sunbaker, snapped on Culburra Beach on the NSW south coast in 1937, is a landmark work in Australian photography. Its auction price varies according to the condition of the print, when the print was made, and whether Dupain signed and dated it.
“Sunbaker” by Max Dupain is one of Australia’s most famous photographic images. This particular print, Sunbaker (1937, printed 1970s), signed and dated, sold for $49,091 in May.
“Photography collectors are very, very particular about condition,” Hackett said. (A print of Sunbaker sold through Leonard Joel this week; see details below.)
Photographers can also be perfectionists. Hackett said acclaimed artist Bill Henson reprints particular photographs that are faded or in bad condition, so their owners can offer them to market looking spic and span. Henson’s auction record of $62,000 was set in 2017 by Mossgreen Auctions.
Up there with Jerrems in terms of auction values is Tracey Moffatt, the celebrated Indigenous photographer and contemporary artist. Hackett said his firm was “talking to someone” who was contemplating parting with their version of the first image in Moffatt’s acclaimed Something More series of nine photographs.
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Something More dates from 1989. Moffatt’s top auction price of $270,000 was set in 2021 when Deutscher and Hackett sold a full set of Something More.
Accessible market
Brook Andrew is an Indigenous photographer and artist who was the artistic director of the 2020 Sydney Biennale, titled NIRIN. Andrew’s most acclaimed photographic works include Sexy and Dangerous, 1996.
A print of the work set an auction record for Andrew in 2007 when Bonhams & Goodman sold it for $84,000. Sexy and Dangerous depicts what appears to be a historical image of a young Aboriginal man, his torso overlaid with Chinese and English writing as well as body decoration.
Hackett described the photography market as accessible. “You can put together a very decent photography collection for not very much money at the moment,” he said.
But he warned against expectations of fast gains. “Everyone has been saying the photography market is really going to climb one day, and they’ve been saying that for a long time,” he said.
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Hackett said photography was well suited to online auctions “because it’s all about the image, it’s not about the texture” like painting usually is. Paintings really need to be seen in the flesh, but a photograph on the screen is very similar to what you will get when you buy it.
Sometimes Hackett feels “strange” calling a work a photograph when it’s really a piece of contemporary art using the photographic medium. It’s a good point in an age when so many contemporary artists are embracing every kind of medium available to them.
Another interesting feature of the market was that one or two leading photographers refused to grant copyright for their works to be illustrated in auction catalogues, and this potentially damaged their prospect of sales, Hackett said. There is one photographer whose work he will not put in an auction catalogue because of this issue.
The photography auction market has been something of a rollercoaster, according to Smith.
“At the end of the 1990s and in the early 2000s, Australian photography was a darling of the art market,” Smith said. “It was popular and avidly collected. Tracey Moffatt’s Something More 1 (a print of number one in the series) sold for $117,500. It was an extraordinary moment – I remember being there.
“Then the GFC came along and the market retreated. It’s taken longer to recover from that setback. It wasn’t until 2019 that we saw a renewed interest in Australian photography.”
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In July 2019, Smith & Singer sold Petrina Hicks’ bizarre but compelling Shenae and Jade, 2005, to the National Gallery of Victoria for $26,840. Shenae and Jade is a portrait of a pristine young girl with a budgie protruding from her mouth. (Hicks’ auction record to date, set in 2021 through Deutscher and Hackett, is $46,636 for Shenae and Jade.)
Shenae and Jade, 2005, by Petrina Hicks. This lightjet print (edition 5 of 8), measuring a large 135 x 127.3cm, sold for $26,840.
Together with Jerrems’ Vale Street, those results recalibrated people’s attention on photography, Smith said. “But what it always takes is for significant works to be brought forward, and this was the case. It did bring out other works.”
Last November, Smith & Singer sold a Julie Rrap photograph for $42,955 after estimating it at $10,000 to $15,000.
On Tuesday night, Leonard Joel sold a Dupain Sunbaker for $28,000 on an estimate of $15,000 to $20,000.
Results in the Leonard Joel sale for works previewed last week in Saleroom included $118,750 for Vietnamese/French painter Vu Cao Dam’s Le Cavalier, 1978. The estimate was $80,000 to $100,000.
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Vincas Jomantas’ beautiful sculpture Girl with Birds, 1958/1976, went for $45,000 on an estimate of $25,000 to $35,000. The work was being deaccessioned by the National Gallery of Australia.
Melbourne street artist Rone’s Untitled (Jane Doe), 2013, estimated at $15,000 to $20,000, sold to an online bidder for $30,000.
Jeffrey Smart’s Drawing Study for the Waiting Bus, c.1986, was passed in with expectations it would sell after the auction. It was estimated to fetch $20,000 to $30,000.
Center for Railroad Photography & Art launches online image archive
MADISON, Wis. — The Center for Railroad Photography & Art has unveiled its online archive of digital images from the center’s expansive collection.
Odyssey, the CRP&A’s new online portal, is now available here.
The image management system was selected by the CRP&A staff in June 2022, and in the intervening year the Center and the platform’s developers have worked to customize and implement the software. The Center has provided previews of the archive during this year’s “Conversations” event in Lake Forest, Ill., and a recent members-only online presentation.
“The Center’s archives and digitization efforts have grown tremendously over the past few years, and Odyssey’s large storage capacity limit offers opportunities for even further collection development,” Adrienne Evans, director of archives and collections., said in a CRP&A announcement. “We recently finished migrating all of our digital collections from Flickr to Odyssey and we’re excited to introduce everybody to the new portal. Being a new system, we’ll constantly make improvements as we expand the galleries to include more images from our growing collections.”
Scott Lothes, the Center’s president and executive director, said the organization was “excited to begin sharing more of our collections through Odyssey” following the lengthy search and development process.
“Our collections team has digitized tens of thousands of photographs in the past couple of years alone,” Lothes said. “We have so much to share with you.”
A search guide is in development and will be available soon; follow the center on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for updates. Visit the CRP&A website for more information on the Center.
