Bond Street Gallery closes its doors

I'm sad to report that on Saturday November 1st, Bond Street Gallery will close its doors. Amani Olu, the founder of Humble Arts Foundation, did a great job as curator and director to support new art photography.

Isolation/Identity exhibit as part of Jersey City Studio Tour

I've been neglecting my poor blog as last week I had been preparing for my exhibit as part of the Jersey City Artists Studio Tour. From the Jersey Journal:

ART ON THE LOOSE

From barks to Barack, studio tour hosts variety

Monday, October 06, 2008

CHARLES HACK

JOURNAL STAFF WRITER

"With 600 registered artists showing at 90 venues, this year's Jersey City Artists Studio Tour held over the weekend was the largest in its 18-year history, Jersey City Art Curator Greg Brickey said.

Brickey estimated the tour, which attracted 10,000 visitors this year, has added 100 artists each year during the last four years.

"There is a whole new population of young hipsters here and a lot of them are artists and musicians," Brickey said.

Visitors to Van Vorst Park could pick up a portable radio from a desk and listen to a composition by sound artist Damian Catera.

Catera placed microphones around the park to pick up live sounds, such as people talking and dogs barking, and created his own music that was transmitted from one of three low power FM radio transmitters in the park.

At a former warehouse at 150 Bay St. in the Powerhouse Arts District residents threw open their double doors to their cavernous live/work loft spaces to show diverse works. For example, Canadian photographer Daphne Chan's portraits explore the feeling of isolation of her subjects and Cheryl Renee Riley's wall hangings and furniture are inspired by African art.

Brickey said some of the tour's highlights included the first exhibition at the Beacon complex of a sculpture curated by Jim Pustorino of the Victory Arts Project.

Another highlight was Jersey City artist Ron English's wall-sized exhibit "ABRAHAMOBAMA" that fuses the faces of Abraham Lincoln and presidential hopeful Barack Obama shown at the Canco lofts on Dey Street, he said."

About an hour before the studio tour ended on Sunday, a reporter stepped into my studio, perused the art, peppered me with questions while he frantically wrote in his notebook, then ran out. The whole thing took about two minutes. I wasn't sure what would come of that so thank you to Charles Hack for the shout out.

Participating in the tour was, as always, a great experience and this year was the best. It was the first time I had exhibited work from my project Isolation/Identity so I was curious and a little nervous about the reception it would receive. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive which was balm to my ears and made all the hard work worth it. When that feedback is accompanied by a sale, it's even better (and goes a long way to supporting and producing new work). You can never predict who will attend a studio tour so I was pleased to meet many artists, photographers and collectors. Hopefully some of those connections will lead to good opportunities so I'm crossing my fingers for now.

Jill Greenberg shows her version of John McCain

Then Jill Greenberg shot the version below for her website:

When The Atlantic called Jill Greenberg, a committed Democrat, to shoot a portrait of John McCain for its October cover, she rubbed her hands with glee.

She delivered the image the magazine asked for—a shot that makes the Republican presidential nominee look heroic. Greenberg is well known for her highly retouched images of bears and crying babies. But she didn’t bother to do much retouching on her McCain images. “I left his eyes red and his skin looking bad,” she says.

After getting that shot, Greenberg asked McCain to “please come over here” for one more set-up before the 15-minute shoot was over. There, she had a beauty dish with a modeling light set up. “That’s what he thought he was being lit by,” Greenberg says. “But that wasn’t firing.”

What was firing was a strobe positioned below him, which cast the horror movie shadows across his face and on the wall right behind him. “He had no idea he was being lit from below,” Greenberg says. And his handlers didn’t seem to notice it either. “I guess they’re not very sophisticated,” she adds.

The Atlantic didn’t select the diabolical looking McCain for its cover. Greenberg is hoping to license that image to some other magazine (she negotiated a two-week embargo with The Atlantic so she could re-license images from the shoot before the election).

Warned that the image is just the kind of thing that will stir up the anti-media vitriol in the conservative blogosphere, Greenberg said, “Good. I want to stir stuff up, but not to the point where I get audited if he becomes president.”

That said, she goes on to explain that she’s thought about replacing McCain’s mouth with bloody shark teeth and displaying the image on a billboard with the message that the candidate is a bloodthirsty war monger.

Given her strong feelings about John McCain, we asked whether she had any reservations about taking the assignment in the first place.

“I didn’t,” she says. “It’s definitely exciting to shoot someone who is in the limelight like that. I am a pretty hard core Democrat. Some of my artwork has been pretty anti-Bush, so maybe it was somewhat irresponsible for them [The Atlantic] to hire me.”

The follow-up from PDN, "After our posting Friday, media outlets around the country picked up our story. Hundreds of you (including, evidently, a lot of first-time PDN readers) posted comments. The reaction was overwhelmingly critical of Greenberg. Even among professional photographers, many said Greenberg acted unprofessionally.

Atlantic editor James Bennet released a statement saying Greenberg "disgraced herself, and we are appalled by the manipulated images she has created for her Web site of John McCain." He told Fox News that the magazine would not pay Greenberg for the shoot and was considering legal action. The writer of The Atlantic's cover story, Jeffrey Goldberg, wrote on his blog that Greenberg "betrayed this magazine, and disgraced her profession."

Bill Hannigan of VAUGHAN HANNIGAN tells PDN today that the agency is no longer representing Greenberg, a decision that was "mutually agreed upon." UPDATE: Greenberg has also left the Montage Agency and is now repped by ArtMix Photography.

(With the upcoming Election 2008 Art Gotham show coming up in October, I've been looking at how photography and images of the candidates have been used. This one of John McCain certainly has me chuckling.)

17 Year Old Fashion Photographer

From Jezebel; "When you hear the words "17-year-old fashion photographer" your gag reflex probably goes into effect, especially when you learn that her mother's a fashion writer who started bringing her along to shows when she was in grade school. But Isabelle Erb actually seems like a nice kid who's super passionate about photography. She's homeschooled, and "instead of dashing off to St. Bart’s on school breaks, Isabelle has gone on church missions to Malawi and New Orleans." Isabelle is a photographer for the website totallycool.net. and something of a mascot to the other shutterbugs in "The Pit," which, incidentally, sounds horrible. Are we pettily aware of how good this will look on a college application? Yes. But do we resent it? Not as much as usual!"

NYPD's finest

Since I've rediscovered the joy of cycling I became interested in participating in New York's Critical Mass. While Critical Mass is viewed as a monthly political protest-rides, I couldn't imagine the situation would escalate to this.

The NY Times has an article about the incident. Bike Snob has a interesting take on the situation, "And one of the most important truths I’ve learned is that where there are crowds there is stupidity. When large numbers of people get together, stupid things happen, and you’re almost always better off simply getting as far away from the crowd as possible."

The Last Lecture

Randy Pausch, 47, the terminally ill professor who inspired many with his 'last lecture', died yesterday. His speech at Carnegie Mellon University after a pancreatic cancer diagnosis became an Internet phenomenon and bestselling book.

There's an abridged version from his appearance on Oprah.