SAN ANTONIO – A nationwide photography contest for K-12 students is now open for submissions.

Last year, Lily Thomas, a then-10th-grade student from San Antonio, won the contest.

Hosted by the K12 Enrichment Program, this contest’s theme is “In Focus.”

Students will be able to enter photos in three categories:

• DSLR Lens Master – Students will be judged on their technical and artistic skills using a DSLR camera. Criteria judges will consider include composition, lighting and technical quality.
• Smartphone Shots – For students at any skill level, judges will consider photos that make you smile. Criteria for this category will
• Film Photography – For those who shoot on film, judges want to see your skill and style reflected. Criteria for this category will include composition, lighting and technical quality.

For those who participate, students can meet peers with similar interests from across the country, connect with their judges and have a chance at prizes.

The 1st, 2nd and 3rd place prize packages are valued at $1,200, $500 and $400, respectively.

Students must submit their photos by 4 p.m. on Oct. 16 for consideration. For more information and to see a list of rules, click here.

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Another gray, rainy weekend, the third in a row. It still feels heavy and sticky outside, thankfully not as hot, but where are the crispy fall days we expect in October? Fallen leaves litter our lawn, the beginning of a colorful patchwork quilt, that will continue to thicken. Yellow and red and a faded green appear in our surrounding woods.

A couple of news items in town. The select board has formed an Improving Governance Task Force to boost confidence in our town government. Without knowing much more than I read in the paper, really? I didn’t realize we had such concerns about how our town is run. Proposed by Susan Silk, who was appointed to the task force, along with Cindy Mitchell and John Christensen, they will advertise for two additional members. I suppose I should be embarrassed that as someone who lives in and writes about West Tisbury, I had no idea that we had a crisis of confidence. I’ll investigate and let you know.

The other thing on my mind is a thank-you to the Historic District Commission for keeping the cemetery fence pickets in good, old-fashioned wood.

I was in the library and stepped into the Community Room to see the new art exhibition, “Sisters at Work — Wool, Silk, Paper, and Paint.” They are indeed sisters, who have produced a beautifully arranged exhibition of watercolors by Lynn Hoeft and fiber art pieces by Kris McDermet. They will be at the library this Saturday, Oct. 7, from 12:30 to 2:30 pm, for an artists’ reception. It will be interesting to hear them talk about their work.

Other events at the library include “Moving Storytime” at 10:30 am on Thursday, Oct. 5. The program by Clare Page will have dancing, reading, imagining, and creating a dance together. At 4:30 pm, there will be a piano concert by Julian Loida. Friday at 3:30 pm, all are invited to a salsa dance class. On Saturday, beside the artists’ reception, photographer and human rights activist Jonathan Moller will speak about his new book, “Young Cuba,” at 3:30 pm.

The library will be closed on Monday, Oct. 10, for Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

Kanta Lipsky has written and illustrated a children’s book called “Pinkletink the Froggie.” She will celebrate at a launch party this Saturday, Oct. 7, 4 to 6 pm. It will be held at Tending Joy, Ingrid Maidoff’s store in North Tisbury.

I stopped at Howes House last week, looking for my husband. His truck was parked outside. When I went in, I saw Jennie and Susan, but not Mike. “Where’s Mike?” I asked. Jennie’s reply: “We locked him in the closet.” I laughed at the idea, but quickly realized they weren’t kidding. Around the corner was my husband, wielding tape measure, planning out some new shelves, directed by Bethany. Since he was there …

If you have any West Tisbury Town Column suggestions, email Hermine Hull, hermine.hull@gmail.com.

If you are interested in learning more about long-exposure photography this is a fantastic and extensive lesson to get you started.

We have all seen beautiful landscape photos with smooth-as-glass water or the light trails from a car’s tail lights and headlights. Well, you can also eliminate people and cars in a usually busy area by leaving your exposure on for several minutes.  

You will need an ND filter if you are shooting during the day. An ND filter (neutral density) filter is like sunglasses for your camera. There are different shades of darkness depending on the amount of light and what effect you are wanting to create. The prices range from low to pretty high depending on the brand. There is some math involved to get the proper shutter speed time, but if you’re like me and you don’t want to do the math, there are a couple of apps that do the math for you, such as Lee Stopper and Nisi. 

A tripod is required if you want the main subject to be in focus. There is so much creativity to be had in long-exposure photography, and you can make your photos stand out by getting creative with effects or removing people and cars from a normally busy area, like mentioned above. You can also create incredible lighting effects or “paint’ with your own lights,such as a flashlight or colored LED lights, like this famous TikToker.

You can create long exposure at night without an ND filter as well. Get out and experiment. You can get really creative with long-exposure photography, and it’s not a typical photo that anyone can take.

This was taken in 1981 at a Berni Inn steakhouse in Harrow, London. I think it’s a Beefeater now. These people had just walked in out of the rain. They were a bit wary of me, but stood there for a few seconds and I was able to grab one frame before they disappeared. It was for the magazine New Society, founded in the early 1960s to document society in ways understandable to general readers, avoiding jargon – a mirror of its stablemate, New Scientist. The art editors had almost complete freedom to commission and choose pictures.

The brief was to find the lower middle class, to accompany an article about this growing demographic. But the problem was that nobody wanted to admit to being lower middle class. There was no pride in it, like there was in being working class. People just looked baffled when I approached them, so I started to gloss over that part and simply said I was shooting for a magazine feature about how people lived in north London.

I was mostly doing editorial work at that time after producing work for an exhibition on Welsh seaside towns in the late 1970s, which proved traumatic. The gallery director who commissioned it left and their replacement absolutely hated what I was doing. He said it was too depressing, was worried his funding would be cut and attempted to bury it by showing amateur photographers’ work alongside mine. Then the pictures went unseen for 40 years. The experience was so bad that I didn’t do another gallery project for decades. But the shots resurfaced in 2021 thanks to an exhibition at Turner Contemporary in Margate.

When you’re taking pictures, you’ve got to be pretty alive at that moment. I was asking everybody’s permission because I was using a Rolleiflex and a flash with a big, heavy power pack. There’s an old saying about using flashes: they’re like taking a revolver to the opera – they’re quite conspicuous! I much prefer to blend in, which means you get a different kind of shot. But if you hang around, you can usually get people to ignore the camera and carry on with what they’re doing. I got several quite interesting pictures of some teenagers who were probably underage drinkers sitting in the bar that night, too. None of these images made it into the magazine – they used one I took at a nearby garden centre instead.

But they’re finally on display in a new show of my analogue work up to 1990 – the year Photoshop was released. I was self taught and started photography when I was 14. There’s quite a lot of pre-digital artwork in the show as well as photographs in a photomontage style that I used in political satire for Private Eye and the New Statesman. It was all done in the darkroom, using cut-out pieces of red paper to build up a jigsaw of an image. I learned how to retouch it and airbrush – words that are now more familiar from Photoshop and digital retouching, but they are exact equivalents of what I used to do in the darkroom, including burning and dodging, too. There were just a handful of people doing it in London in the 1970s and 80s. It was a very creative period and a lot of the time you were chosen because of your political attitude – except at Private Eye, where you had to be funny as well. They didn’t care if the work was well done. They went to a great deal of trouble to make it look as though the mag was pasted up on a kitchen table.

When I did my fine art degree, a lot of the tutors were very suspicious of me. They would come around and say: “Yeah, that’s quite interesting, Mike, but why aren’t you doing something more worthy, like painting?” I fought back as much as I could, and there were a few lecturers who supported me, but it was an uphill struggle. Fortunately, my degree show was seen by a curator who offered me an exhibition. And then some of the work got into the V&A, where it remains.

I think a lot of photographers who worked for New Society did some of their best work for it. They were using Magnum photographers, Martin Parr – and many of the pictures, like this one, stand up on their own, without an explanation. They transcend the need to illustrate an article. They show a different view of Britain in that era.

Being There: Photographs 1968-1990 by Michael Bennett is at the Coningsby Gallery, London, until 7 October

Michael Bennett’s CV

Born: Sevenoaks, Kent, 1954
Trained: Leeds Polytechnic, Fine Art
Influences: “Diane Arbus, August Sander, André Kertész, JH Lartigue, Robert Doisneau, Henri Cartier-Bresson, W Eugene Smith, Elliott Erwitt, Margaret Bourke-White”
High point: “Photographing the Beatles’ producer Sir George Martin”
Low point: “Travelling up in the lift alone with Rupert Murdoch in the old Times building”
Top tip: “The route to fulfilment, originality and happiness lies in looking at other people’s work as little as possible”

Sarah Meister ’94

Naima Green

Meister has championed photographers in her roles at MoMA and Aperture

In 1966, Ernest Cole, a Black man from South Africa, smuggled his photographs of life under the country’s system of apartheid with him when he left for the U.S. The next year he published some of those images in House of Bondage, now regarded as one of the most important photobooks of the 20th century. Cole went on to photograph in New York, a handful of other U.S. cities, and the American rural South, though little of that work was ever shown. 

Sarah Meister ’94, then a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, in 2019 shepherded MoMA’s purchase of 38 of the photographs Cole made in South Africa and the U.S. A selection of those works is now on view at the museum.

In Cole’s South African photography, Meister says, “He conveys an acute awareness of what the horrors and injustices and indignities of that system meant.” In Cole’s New York work, she adds, “You sense his curiosity as a witness to a spectacle. He looked as an attentive observer at arguably less brutal but still deeply divided culture that he was increasingly becoming a part of. His work helps you understand the overt and subtle forms of discrimination in each of these cultures better.”

Cole’s works were one of the last major acquisitions Meister made for MoMA. In 2021, she was tapped as the executive director at Aperture, a nonprofit publisher devoted to photography.

At the time she moved to Aperture, she had been in conversation with MoMA’s publication department on reissuing House of Bondage and doing a book of Cole’s work from the U.S. Meister was able to bring those projects with her to Aperture, which republished House of Bondage last year and is preparing to issue Ernest Cole: The True America, a book featuring the U.S. work.

Cole is just one of the photographers whose work Meister has championed in her career. A course on the history of photography with professor and MoMA curator Peter Bunnell sparked her interest in the field, and after graduating from Princeton she started as an intern at MoMA in the photography department. 

Meister rose through the ranks at the New York museum and was promoted to curator in 2009. She organized shows on a range of figures from Dorothea Lange, famous for her work in the Great Depression, to a group of amateur photographers in São Paulo in the middle of the 20th century, the subject of the last show Meister did before moving to Aperture. She also recorded a series of lectures for the course Seeing Through Photographs, which MoMA launched on Coursera in 2017.

Now Meister leads Aperture, where she oversees a staff of 40. Started by Lange, Ansel Adams, and Minor White as a quarterly magazine in 1952, the institution continues to play a major role in the world of photography. The art form has always been “at the center of the conversation” there, Meister says, “whereas at MoMA the medium often found itself in the shadow of painting and sculpture.”

In addition to its quarterly magazine, Aperture publishes books of photography such as those by Cole. It also organizes exhibitions — including several at the Princeton University Art Museum’s gallery on Hulfish Street — and gives awards to emerging artists. 

“I believe that photography makes a difference in our world like little else,” Meister says, “and when you allow yourself to focus on it, you open up possibilities for grappling with the world around us.” 

Whether hobbyist or professional, photography can be a pursuit that takes up a lot of your time and energy, and when you finally put the camera down, you might not have the desire to pick it up again for a while. That can be a mistake, though, as you possess a special set of skills that put you in a position to document your life and the lives of your family and friends. This great video essay discusses the importance of doing just that. 

Coming to you from Rick Bebbington, this awesome video essay discusses the importance of using your photography skills to document your life in order to preserve memories and create a legacy. I think this is something most of us would agree is important, but it can be difficult to actually put it into practice. One of the best ways to do this is to simply make it a habit. Instead of waiting for big events and milestones to pull out your camera, force yourself to document at least one thing in your life every single day. Not only will this condition you to be more regimented, you, your family, and your friends will probably love having memories of those little moments that might have otherwise been forgotten. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Bebbington. 

Building Stories by Alastair Philip Wiper

Alastair Philip Wiper’s latest photography book, Building Stories, published by Danish Architectural Press, explores the hidden stories within the world of architecture. From nuclear test sites to Steve Jobs’ childhood home and the toilet of a late Albanian dictator, Wiper’s hyper-realistic, cinematic images transport readers into a realm where buildings have personalities, each with its own compelling narrative.

For thirteen years, Alastair Philip Wiper captured the eerie beauty of both overlooked and famous structures around the world. Ordinary supermarket parking lots in Denmark, top-secret government laboratories in the U.S., the works of Marcel Breuer in France, and towering skyscrapers in Hong Kong, are just a few of the protagonists in his photographs, which are created through long exposures of several minutes, and feature vibrant colors, moody atmospheres, and a touch of black humor.

‘I want to bring viewers into a fantasy world where their interpretation of the buildings escapes reality, and people make up their own stories about the personalities of these buildings, those that designed them, and those that use them,’ shares the British photographer. 

‘Apple-2’ house used in atomic bomb test at the Nevada National Security Site, Nevada, USA, 2022 | all images by Alastair Philip Wiper

technology, infrastructure, and humanity through the lens of Alastair Philip Wiper

Building Stories follows Alastair Philip Wiper’s previously acclaimed works (find more here) including Unintended Beauty (2020, Hatje Cantz), in which he vividly portrayed hidden industrial interiors such as shipyards, sausage factories, and particle accelerators (see designboom’s previous coverage here). Wiper’s unique perspective is underscored by his deep understanding of lines, symmetry, color, and a touch of fantasy. He engages with the machines, technology, and infrastructure that surround us, using them as a lens through which to explore humanity’s needs, desires, dreams, and questions of the universe.

When asked if his work can be considered architectural photography, Wiper replies,‘I suppose it’s about trying to capture the spirit of the building, whether or not that’s the spirit the architect wanted to be captured. I’m definitely trying to reflect an atmosphere or a sense of wonder. (…) I’m often taking pictures of things that have typically been designed for functional reasons and drawing out another side of them.’ 

2004 Olympic aquatic complex, Athens, Greece, 2015

Chalet l’Ours II, Avoriaz, France, 2012

the Danish National Archives (Landsarkivet), Copenhagen, Denmark, 2022

underground nuclear fallout shelter, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, 2022

Pal’s sudden service drive-through burger restaurant, Tennessee, USA, 2022

By Railfan & Railroad Staff

The Center for Railroad Photography & Art announced last week that it was receiving a major financial gift totaling more than $1 million from the estate of the late Ronald C. Hill. It is among the largest gifts ever to the non-profit dedicated to railroad imagery. 

Hill was a masterful photographer who spent decades capturing dramatic images of railroading in the North American West. He died on January 23 at the age of 85. 

“We’re over the moon and feeling tremendously grateful and humbled by Ron’s generosity,” said Scott Lothes, president and executive director. “As one of the West’s premiere railroad photographers, Ron had already made a lasting impact when he donated his collection to us. Words can’t fully express how grateful we are for Ron’s great confidence and trust in the Center.”

Hill was born in Illinois in 1937 and later moved to Colorado, where he would do some of his most memorable work. But he wasn’t contained by the boundaries of the Centennial State. Beginning in the 1960s, Hill crisscrossed the west in pursuit of dramatic images of mainline railroading, hitting such iconic mountain railroads as Montana’s Marias Pass, British Columbia’s Kicking Horse Pass and California’s Cajon Pass. 

Over the years, he authored 12 books, including “Railroading West: A Contemporary Glimpse,” “Rails in the Northwest” with Dave Stanley, “Mountain Mainlines of the West,” and “Rio Grande in the Rockies.” Most of those titles focused on his own work, but he also co-authored “The Railroad Artistry of Howard Fogg” with Al Chione about the legendary rail painter. Hill served as president of the Colorado Railroad Museum from 1981 to 1994. 

Hill became a member of the Center in 2015 and presented at its annual conference at Lake Forest College in 2016. In 2020, Hill donated his photo collection to the Center for Railroad Photography & Art. The collection includes more than 27,000 slides, negatives, and prints. 

Lothes also thanked Center board chair Bon French; board member Michael Schmidt, who befriended Hill in his later years; Tim Tonge, a long-time friend of Hill who is helping with the remainder of Hill’s collection; and Jeff Brouws, who was friends with Hill for more than 50 years and helped bring the photographer’s collection to the Center.

“Above all, we are grateful to Ron Hill—a masterful photographer and a vital, colorful member of the railroad history scene and the railfan community—for his landmark gift that will support our programs for decades to come,” Center officials wrote in an announcement of the gift.