Four of my images (above) from the series Young and Abandoned, portraits of orphans on the verge of institutionalization in rural Jiangsu Province, China, will be included in an exhibition at Fe艺术iv’Art (Feztiv Art) in Shanghai, China, from January 22-26th, 2010. There is an opening on January 22 at 6:30 pm. I’ll be there.

The festival was created by the Artdidact, the Artistic Commission of the French Junior Chamber International of Shanghai, whose aim is “to take part and contribute to the progress of the global community by giving to the young the opportunity to develop their leadership skills, their social responsibility and the necessary solidarity for taking actions to produce positive changes. Members of the JCI identify and realize projects to serve the positive evolution of their city in all fields: arts, social, economics, cultural, community…”

The subject of the exhibition is “China Youth,” and the pictures will be on display at Art + Shanghai Gallery at Fumin Lu, Lane 22, House 2, (Near Yanan Lu). Phone: +86-21 6248 4388. In the off-chance that someone in Shanghai is reading this, I hope to see you there.

David Walter Banks (previously interviewed) wrote in to tell us about the upcoming Luceo Images and MJR publication and one-night exhibition at 25CPW in New York City. The event will take place Thursday, Janaury 21, 2010, from 6-10pm at 25 Central Park West at the intersection of 62nd Street. The folks at Luceo and MJR are good friends of dva. The groups both have a ton of photo mojo, and it’s great to see their efforts combined. I asked Banks a few questions about the publication and event. His answers are excerpted below:

dvafoto: What got Luceo and MJR together? How long have you been working on this project?

David Walter Banks/Luceo: Various members of LUCEO and MJR have become friends over the past couple years, and had some time to spend together at LUCEO’s last two biannual meetings in NYC and then again at the LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph in Charlottesville. The show and publication have been at least 6 months in the making that I can remember….

Why a publication?

Both groups have strong editorial ties as well as work that leans more toward the fine-art world, so the publication was a mix between the two. The idea was to create something tangible and lasting instead of just a one-night event. It’s also the concept of taking the idea of a magazine, and creating a limited edition collectible art piece out of it. A publication that in our eyes warrants large-scale reproduction and display space on a gallery wall. To this end, the focus is more on the print piece instead of the show itself, but the catch is that you have to attend to receive the publication.

Will we be seeing new work? Whose work will be in the show (all the photographers in each collective or just a selection?)?

The piece and show will feature work from each photographer involved in the two groups, as well as the craftsmanship of the designer and editor we had the good fortune of collaborating with. The show will feature some old work and some new, but certainly all in a different presentation than before.

The release says “Issue One” — will Issue Two also be Luceo and MJR, or is the first issue testing the waters for something bigger? When will we see #2?

We’re not ready to announce anything yet, but the door is open, and this will certainly not be the end of our collaborations with MJR, who have been the driving force behind the publication….

I wouldn’t say the show is just testing the waters, because I do believe it is an end and not just a means, but it is a sign of what’s to come. Both of these groups have similar feelings about collaborating and building bridges within the photographic community and beyond. I believe each group will build from this experience and take that forward into future endeavors.

Luceo is: David Walter Banks, Kendrick Brinson, Matt Eich, Kevin German, Tim Lytvinenko, Daryl Peveto, Matt Slaby
MJR is: Mustafah Abdulaziz, Ying Ang, Matthew Craig, Julius Metoyer, Gareth Phillips, Brandon Thibodeaux

Studio 360 interviewed Dva favorite and friend Jason Eskenazi about his life as a Metropolitan Museum of Art security guard and his relationship to the art all around him. It culminates in his experiences with the brilliant exhibition Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans (which is on view through January 3rd, and which I get to see in a couple days!).

You’ve got to listen, only 5 and a half minutes. Beautiful.
And he alludes to new work coming, cannot wait.

(h/t Tom Leininger)

Incredibly last minute announcement but I will be in New York City next week, December 21st through 23rd, for a quick visit with publications, editors and friends and to continue my project I See A Darkness. I will have new work and portfolios to share, including an under-wraps book project that will begin immediately upon my return to Serbia in January. (Did I even mention that I’m back in Seattle for the holidays? It’s been busy.)

If you are in the City and feel like meeting up to see work, see an exhibition (I’ve got Ballen, Frank, and Mosse on my schedule right now) or grab a beer, be in touch! It’ll be a crazy quick visit but it might be my only one this year.

The website had just been a teaser for the Dec. 7 premiere of Consequences by Noor, a multi-faceted essay “on the devastating effects of climate change around the globe.” Released to coincide with the Copenhagen climate change talks currently going on, Noor has scheduled a number of exhibitions and events in Copenhagen. The work is now available online: Nina Berman’s “Pine Beetles,” Kadir van Lohuizen’s “Brazil’s Range War: Assault on the Amazon,” Jan Grarup’s “And then there was silence,” Stanley Greene’s “Shadows of Change,” Jon Lowenstein’s “In the Oil Sands,” Philip Blenkinsop’s “The Fires Within: The Burning Coalfields of Jharia, India,” Francesco Zizola’s “A Paradise in Peril,” Yuri Kozyrev’s “Karabash and the Yamal Peninsula,” and Pep Bonet’s “Poland’s Coal Industry.” Additionally, if you happen to be in Copenhagen, there are 50,000 copies of a special English-language newspaper devoted to Consequences, produced by Danish newspaper Information. The sidebar of the site also says that Consequences will be on tour in 2010. Hopefully I’ll get to see it in person.

Beyond the fantastic work by each of the photographers involved in Consequences, I’m particularly interested in the distribution model for the work. Rather than focus on getting the photojournalism out to a wide audience in the traditional publishing model, Consequences’ goal seems to be getting the work seen first by people in power to make a change. I think it’s a valuable strategy. While there is a strong role for these essays to play in informing the general public about specific effects of global climate change, the public may well have reached a point of saturation for these sorts of stories. A strategic shift in intended audience, from mass public to people with influence and power, could have momentous results. Colin Powell famously cited the influence of Platon’s photos in his endorsement of Obama. More to the point, Nick Nichol’s photos of the forests of Gabon helped persuade the country’s president to create a nature preserve comprising 1/10th of the Gabon’s land. I’m sure the Copenhagen summit attendees have been staring at spreadsheets and white papers for months leading up to this summit, heads dizzy with hard data and statistical models. The photos in Consequences will put a face on the abstract issues of global climate change for those most able to make a difference in the international environmental agenda. The photographers’ work will likely have great effect during these first few days.

Picture Black Friday

Picture Black Friday is a photojournalism project that aims to revisit and analyze a combination of forces- a worsening economy, financial desperation, excitement, fear, absurdity, and a distinctly American cultural tradition- that culminate the morning after Thanksgiving.

Having been on a couple Black Friday stakeouts too many, Picture Black Friday strikes me as a wonderful idea. Yes, the hordes of people lined up to buy a cheap laptop or Wii is part of the story, but much more happens the day after Thanksgiving. The project, which will be exhibited on Conscientious and Too Much Chocolate, hopes to get photographers documenting the day “on their terms”, independent (or not) of the usual consumerist portrayal.

(via Conscientious)

Asim Rafiqui’s “The Spinning Head” blog remains one of my favorite places for analysis of contemporary photojournalism. One of his latest pieces, “Offering Silence To The Oppressed Or How Photography Can Become A Weapon Of Repression,” offers up an important counterpoint to the praise lately heaped on the recently opened London exhibition of Israeli and Palestinian photographers, Beware the Cost of War (more at 100eyes). The exhibition presents images of conflict without captions or credits. Rafiqui’s central points, buoyed by John Barger’s visual-philosophical framework, are that:

• The exhibition removes context, so that we never know who is the occupier, and who the occupied…
• The exhibition removes chronology, so that we never know whether the act occurred this year…
• The exhibition removes history, so that we never know what it is that violence represents…
• The exhibition removes the ugliest of constant and material facts…

Well worth a read.

Edit: To be clear, both 100eyes and Lens’ presentations of the work include captions of the pictures. The captions remain separate from the pictures, but exist nonetheless. Also, Conscientious Redux continues the conversation.

I just got late word that Jonas Bendiksen’s groundbreaking multimedia exhibition for his The Places We Live project is now being exhibited in Washington, D.C. at the National Building Museum. It will be there until November 15, and I really wish I could get there to see it. Jonas showed me hand-made models for this exhibition back in 2007 and I’ve been yearning to see the real deal (room size projection ‘cabinets’ with audio piped in) ever since. Aperture posted about the first unveiling of the exhibition at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo when it opened a year or so ago.

Unfortunately, this sounds like the only stop for the exhibition in the States for now and it “will travel next to cities in Europe and Asia.” But in lieu check out again this video of Bendiksen talking about the work (from the beautiful harbor in Oslo!).

Just hitting the airwaves, the Noorderlicht Photography Festival, one of the great photojournalism events of the year, has been forced to remove an essay curated by Magnum’s Stuart Franklin. The festival’s press release (warning: pdf) states, in part,

The Associated Press does not object to the exhibition as such, but to the content of Franklin’s accompanying essay. This essay acknowledged that criminal acts were committed by both sides [Palestinian and Israeli], but assigned the principle responsibility for the extent of the bloodshed to Israel. Both Franklin and Noorderlicht believe this conclusion is justified by the critical reports [regarding the matter] from Amnesty International and the United Nations…”

The AP believed Franklin’s text expressed a political statement, and further that having AP photos in the exhibition, the essay associated a political statement with AP’s photos, which violates Associated Press guidelines. Whatever the case, this is the first time in Noorderlicht’s twenty years that an essay has been removed due to potential legal threats.

(via Conscientious)

 

The 2009 Women In Photojournalism contest winners have been announced, and the NPPA has published a gallery of the winning images, which will be exhibited during the Women In Photojournalism seminar taking place June 10 in Las Vegas. I’m surprised I haven’t seen this linked elsewhere; maybe it isn’t considered a prestigious contest…. Regardless, it’s great to see a seminar and contest that directly addresses gender in the photojournalism field.