Zone Zero: Pure black, as defined by the Ansel Adams Zone System

Black Friday: The day after Thanksgiving Day in the United States, one of the busiest shopping days of the year

Zone Zero Friday: A day to consider fine art photography-related purchases to use as holiday gifts

I was hoping this year’s post would be filled with some great offers submitted by users and announced by artists and galleries… not so much. The economy affects artists as much as anyone else, and there’s not much room to discount when it comes to these kinds of purchases. But I’m going to do my best to give a quick run-down of some budget-conscious photography-related gift ideas.

One discount that has been announced – and the source is appropriate, considering the Zone Zero reference – is from the Ansel Adams Gallery, offering 15% off any item purchased on November 27 – just use discount code AABlackFriday at checkout for your discount.

And since Brooks Jensen first suggested the Zone Zero Friday concept, I should mention some of the great products available from Lenswork. A subscription to either the print or extended versions of the magazine would be a great present for any photography enthusiast. Lenswork has also re-introduced their Folios with digital printing. Alumni Stu Levy and Jeff Curto, among others, have folios available at reduced prices right now. There are also some great holiday deals on back issues to complete your collection. Just click on the Holiday Specials page. And of course Brooks offers his folios and images from the recently-completed New 100 Prints Project.

A number of photography books have been introduced in the last year. I recommend you visit Photo-Eye to browse their great selection. Errata Editions has announced a second release of limited edition reprints.

For portfolios and prints, you can read my post from last year for online sources. But in light of current economic hardships, I really want to recommend that if you’re interested in purchasing artwork you visit your local gallery. There’s usually at least one art gallery even in the smallest of towns that will have work by local photographers for sale. This not only benefits the artist, it helps these great resources for local art and culture.

Finally, since there’s no advertising on this blog, once again I feel justified in reminding you that my own work is available for sale in a variety of formats. Just contact me – I’ll be running a number of different discounts over the holiday season and into the new year.

And one last idea. If you don’t like the idea of trying to choose a print or even a book for someone whose taste you might not be entirely familiar with – give them a gift certificate for a local portraitist. Everyone from Olan Mills to the highest-end portrait artist will sell you one, and a new family portrait will never go out of style as a treasured present.

A tip: If you’d like someone to consider a fine art photography gift for you this year, leave a comment with something you’d particularly enjoy – and then include a link to this post in your holiday wish list this year. Maybe someone will notice your request and give you something you really want this year.

I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted, but it’s been a trying month and neither writing nor photography have been foremost on my mind. But as difficult as things have been, I have plenty to be thankful for today – family, friends, health. I am thankful for Alyssa Stefanko, who was born to model Zak and his wife Jessica this past weekend. I am thankful that somehow I was able to pack and move a three-story house and I’m not paralyzed. I am thankful that despite all the issues those I love are dealing with, they are alive and healthy and have the wherewithal to deal.

I’m also thankful to you, dear blog readers. Since I backed off from commercial portrait work, my main artistic interaction has gone from my clients to you. So I’m excited to give you a couple of announcements that are targeted right at you.

First, you’ll notice something new on the sidebar over to the right. Above the twitter feed, there’s now a button you can click on to subscribe to my updates by email. If you’re not into that, remember that you can also get updates by subscribing in an RSS feeder, or by checking out my twitter feed, where new posts are always automatically announced.

Second, I am beginning work on a 2009 Annual Portfolio, which will showcase some of my work from the past year. I will be mailing these to a select group of clients, colleagues, friends, and family – but as a loyal blog reader, if you’re interested in receiving a copy, just let me know and I’ll hook you up.

Tonight I’ll be preparing my second annual Zone Zero Friday post, then getting an early night so that I can get out to the doorbuster sales. But first – food! And family, of course. Again, happy Thanksgiving to all.

As I’ve said before, my mother’s large family has been in an uproar the last few months in the lead-up to my grandmother’s ninetieth birthday. In the last post, I described the creation of the Family 2009 series, which was really just a starting point for a project I’ve mentioned before, a book I presented to my grandmother for her birthday. The idea was to have an individual portrait of every member of our family, from my grandfather down to my youngest cousin, accompanied by snapshots of each of them throughout their lives as well as other photographs meaningful to our family.

Since I know some of you might be interested in putting together a similar project, I’m going to give you the step-by-step of how I went about completing the album.

Layout

The first step was choosing a format, then adapting a layout to fit. I chose to have the final album printed as a 12″x12″ book, so the format was pretty easy to work with. The publisher I used offers a set of downloadable Photoshop templates for each format. This gave me a blank square file with guidelines already set up so that I could be sure any images would be within the printed area of the paper. Before I could lay out each of the pages, I had to think about how I wanted the album to flow. This was the general setup I came up with:

• A title page with two horizontal portraits (one of my grandparents soon after their marriage, and one of them with their children after their children were adults but before grandchildren began arriving).
• A spread with two vertical portraits on the left (each of my grandparents’ parents) and a comprehensive family tree on the right.
• 18 spreads – one for each member of the family. On the left side, four snapshots meaningful to the subject; on the right, a single large vertical portrait.
• After these spreads, a page with four portraits of my grandparents as a couple throughout their life.
• Then three pages with 9 small square photos (laid out 3×3) of family life over the last 60 years.
• The last page was a timeline of meaningful events in our family’s life: births, deaths, marriages, divorces, and important celebrations and other milestones.

Using this table of contents, I was able to design my individual page templates. I ended up designing six: two horizontal portraits, two vertical portraits, two different templates with room for four photographs apiece, one large vertical portrait, and the 3×3 grid of small snapshots. (I didn’t use a template for the family tree or timeline pages; these were just blank files with the image or text dropped into them.)

It was important to have these templates designed before beginning with any of the content. If I had tried to lay out each page as I got the photos, it would have been daunting. As it was, before I had taken a single photo or done a single scan, every page of the album was sitting there waiting for me.

In creating the templates, I simply made large black outlines in the appropriate sizes; the outside mats were white, and the inside was empty, so that I could align the images once I had them scanned into Photoshop.

The Portraits

In creating the new portraits, I used a simple set of guidelines: natural light, white backdrop, black and white. I also felt it was important that these portraits have a certain formal weight; therefore I asked the subjects not to fake a smile. I’ve found that the easiest way for a subject to assume a natural expression is to ask him or her to take a deep breath and then exhale, and then hold that face. Many will smile, but it will be a natural smile. Those whose natural expression is more serious will usually look far more attractive with that serious but natural expression, than they will with a forced smile.

Of the eighteen people to be included in the album, I was able to execute new portraits of twelve. My grandfather and one of my cousins have passed away in recent years, and four others were unavailable. For each of these I chose to use the most recent formal portrait I could find. For my grandfather, the last portrait that was made of him individually; for one cousin his wedding portrait; for another his senior portrait; and for the other three I was able to use portraits I made last year. Obviously these six did not have the same attributes of the other twelve, but they did have the most important: each was a formal, individual, portrait with a certain weight to it. Those that were in color I converted to black and white, so that there was a flow to them.

The Snapshots

My task was now down to collecting and scanning 99 photos (18×4 + 9×3). Luckily I have good access to the bulk of our family archives, and it only took me two weeks to identify and scan about 70 or 80 of that number. For the rest I identified exactly who I still needed the most photos of, and then asked around for pictures of that person. In at least a couple of cases I was able to pull photos off Facebook, and in all the rest other family members came through for me.

The Family Tree

Being the family genealogist in my father’s family, I already have my own personal data entered into an excellent, simple, and free program – Legacy Family Tree. It was the work of a matter of hours to enter the information on the rest of my mom’s family, and then I was able to use the program’s automatic features to create image files that could be combined to create one that spans six generations. That graphic I just dropped into one of the blank 12×12 files.

Publishing

For the actual printing and binding, I used a service I’ve used before and that I can’t recommend highly enough – SharedInk. Specifically, I utilized their Professional Photographers service. But if you’re not a pro there are plenty of resources for you. SharedInk has a non-professional service; some other photo book publishers include Blurb, Snapfish, PhotoWorks, and MyPublisher. With some of these you can upload your own file layouts like I did; with some you can only upload your jpegs and use their pre-set layouts. Depending on your preference, you’ll want to check on your options before deciding on a publisher. And of course if you are a pro, I do recommend making the investment to joining SharedInk’s professional program – they offer a generous trial period so check it out.

Once I had my files uploaded to SharedInk’s site, it was a matter of choosing the cover (black linen), setting up a title (I went with a simple “The Adams Family” in silver – though I could also have uploaded another file to use for an inlaid photo), and ordering the book. Less than two weeks later it was in my hands.

The Benefit

As a family, we have thousands of photographs – I expect if you come from a large and close-knit family you know exactly what I mean. But there is a real difference in knowing these photos are lying in boxes in the closet, or even collected in loose albums in the bookcase – and having a bound book printed with beautiful photos from the life of your family.

If you have any big events coming up, or even if you’ve just been trying to decide on the perfect meaningful Christmas gift this year, I really recommend you give some thought to creating your own published family album.

As my family has been anticipating the celebration of my grandmother’s ninetieth birthday, the time seemed right to do a series of portraits of each member of the family. Obviously not all the family could be photographed: death has hit us twice in the last few years, one cousin was out of reach, and scheduling conflicts made it impossible for me to get to Birmingham to photograph another cousin and her children. Still, with twelve completed portraits (including a self-portrait), I managed to document current likenesses of two-thirds of our family.

This set of portraits served as the basis for the book I mentioned in the last post as having presented to my grandmother on her birthday. Later I’ll write more on the process of turning twelve 8×10s into a fully-fleshed family album.

The entire Family 2009 series can be seen here.

A portrait decades in the making… surrounded by (in reverse order) her grandparents, parents, husband, and children.

This past weekend was a whirlwind, with a huge party, lots of immediate and extended family coming into town, and a whole lot of time spent eating and visiting and playing outside with the little ones. Aside from a not-too-formal family portrait taken as the party was wrapping up, I mostly enjoyed the weekend as a grandson rather than a photographer – though for the shots I did snap, feel free to look up the album on my personal Facebook page.

The highlight of the weekend for me was the presentation of a book I had made up for my grandmother, which included new portraits of many of the family along with a selection of photos from our family archive. (This is separate from the Echoes of My Grandmother project, which is still simmering on the backburner.) I’ll have a bit to write about the book over the next few days.

For now, though, a huge “happy birthday!” to my grandmother as she enters her tenth(!) decade.

In conjunction this morning’s list of photography exhibits at major museums across the US, this is a list of the major photography museums across the US, along with the exhibits they have underway or planned for this season. Since most of the museums have a number of exhibits on at once, I am giving a central link to the museum’s website and only listing the names of the exhibits – if you are interested in them, you can click through to find out all there is to know about these fascinating programs.

Center for Creative Photography (Tuscon, Arizona)

• John Gutmann: The Photographer at Work

California Museum of Photography (Riverside, California)

• And Howe: Photography by Graham Howe, 1968-2008
• Lewis Baltz: The Park City Portfolio
• Lisa Oppenheim: Open Source
• Off the Grid Americans: Keliy Anderson-Staley
• Yo Youth Media Showcase 2009
• Smoke and Mirrors: The Magic of the Autochrome

Museum of Photographic Arts (San Diego, California)

• Through the Lens: Selections from MoPA’s Educational Programs
• Picturing the Process: The Photograph as Witness
• Beloved Daughters: Photographs by Fazal Sheikh

Southeast Museum of Photography (Daytona Beach, Florida)

• Anthology
• Journal: A Mother and Daughter’s Recovery from Breast Cancer by Annabel Clark
• (re)Collection: The Growth of a Museum Collection (1981-1998)

Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago, Illinois)

• Reversed Images: Representations of Shanghai and Its Contemporary Material Culture

Griffin Photography Museum (Winchester, Massachusetts)

• A Requiem: Tribute to the Spiritual Space at Auschwitz: Photographs by Susan May Tell
• Hand to Hand: Photographs by Zeva Oelbaum
• Panopticon: Photographs by Jessica M. Kaufman
• Suite Niagara: Photographs by Keith Johnson
• Midwest Memories: Photographs by Jim Whitehead
• Off the Wall: Fashion Photography in Black and White
• Three Concerned Women: Photographs by Susan Bank, Stella Johnson and Rania Matar Curated by Constantine Manos
• Monika Merva: City of Children
• Chinatown: Metaphor and Memory, Robert Welsh
• Super Heroes
• This Family of La Antigua: Steph Plourde-Simard
• Parish Dobson: Places of Memory

International Center of Photography (New York, New York)

• Dress Codes: The Third ICP Triennial of Photography and Video

George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film (Rochester, New York)

• Machines of Memory: Cameras from the Technology Collection
• What We’re Collecting Now: The Family Photographed
• Picturing Rochester
• Where We Live
• How Do We Look?

O. Winston Link Museum (Roanoke, Virginia)

• George Warner: A Few Things I’ve Seen
• Jared Soares: On the Block

What follows is a listing of all major museum exhibits across America over the next several months that have photography as their primary focus. Because the listing is exceptionally long, I am placing it behind a cut. The museums are in alphabetical order by state, then city, then the museum name.

Please let me know if you are aware of an exhibit I have missed. The museums surveyed for this list are those listed at the Artcyclopedia resource.

A listing of the American museums devoted to the photographic arts will be given in a separate post later this afternoon.

June Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art (Auburn, Alabama)

Elvis at 21, New York to Memphis: Photographs by Alfred Wertheimer - October 10, 2009 – January 9, 2010

With almost cinematic luminosity, Wertheimer’s rich black-and-white photographs capture the future legend in rehearsal and performance, reading fan mail, visiting with a high school sweetheart, sitting alone in a diner, and riding the rails on a trip back home. The poignant images portray an innocent period in Presley’s life soon to vanish in the wake of his superstardom, and constitute an important visual document of post-World War II America.

Montgomery Museum of Fine Art (Montgomery, Alabama)

Photographs by Yousuf Karsh (1908-2002) - Through January 31, 2010

This is a rotating exhibition in the museum’s Williamson Gallery and Orientation Lobby. The current exhibits are Stars of the Silver Screen (through November 29) and Soldiers, Statesmen, and Politicians (December 5 through January 31).

Phoenix Art Museum (Phoenix, Arizona)

Face to Face: 150 Years of Photographic Portraiture - Through January 10, 2010

Face to Face: 150 Years of Photographic Portraiture explores the photographic portrait – the stories portraits can tell, the ways photographers convey the essence of their subjects and the impact of the relationship between photographer and subject.

J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles, California)

In Focus: Making a Scene – Through October 18, 2009

Photography, although commonly associated with truthfulness, has been used to produce fiction since its introduction in 1839. The acceptance of staging, and the degree of its application, has varied greatly depending on the genre and the historical moment, but it has persisted as an artistic approach. The photographs in this exhibition, drawn exclusively from the J. Paul Getty Museum’s collection, make no pretense about presenting the world as it exists; instead, they are the productions of directors and actors who rely on stagecraft and occasional darkroom trickery to tell stories.

MOCA Grand Avenue (Los Angeles, California)

Robert Frank’s “The Americans” – Through October 19, 2009

From the Permanent Collection: Describing the emotional scope of Frank’s portfolio, Kerouac wrote: “After seeing these pictures you end up finally not knowing whether a jukebox is sadder than a coffin.” Frank’s photographs, which have become landmarks in the history of photography, were created with a hand-held Leica camera, often with a wide-angle lens, resulting in compositions that appear unplanned, spontaneous, and are ultimately revealing. In this 50th anniversary year of its publication, MOCA presents a rare showing of the complete set of photographs comprisingThe Americans, in the order carefully devised by Frank for the book.

Palm Springs Art Museum (Palm Springs, California)

Modern Moments: Recent Gifts in American Photography – Through November 8, 2009

The Palm Springs Art Museum recently received three major photography gifts that have brought national attention to our growing collection. Some of the most stunning works from these gifts have been organized into this exhibition, which features compelling works from post-World War II American photography. The three collectors who have donated these significant photographs are Patricia and Patrick Kennedy, Jeanne and Dan Fauci, and Pamela and Joe Bonino.

Asian Art Museum (San Francisco, California)

Photographic Memories – Through January 17, 2010

The second installation of this display highlights a new group of historical photographs from the Asian Art Museum’s collection. The images reflect varied perspectives on the lives people led in Asia, and record travels people took there at the end of the nineteenth century. These views are controlled by the lens of Western and local photographers and are informed by their personal visions, official missions, and commercial motivations. The subjects range from formal portraits of princes to picturesque landscapes and architecture. The majority of the 41 works on view document life in colonial India. The remaining works feature China, Japan and Korea as their subjects. Most of the photographs date from 1850 to 1910. Together, they succeed in being more than personal memories. The photographs offer a glimpse into the ambivalent relationships between the colonizers and colonized (in the case of India), touch on issues such as perceptions of the ‘other’, and comment on the political and social realities wrought by modernity and a changing world at the turn of the century.

de Young (San Francisco, California)

Toward Abstraction: Photographs and Photograms – Through November 15, 2009

Just as abstraction has played a vital role in the history of modernist painting and sculpture, so too has it found expression in works by leading photographers of the 20th and 21st centuries. Toward Abstraction features the work of Edward Weston, Arthur Siegel, Harry Callahan, Lee Friedlander, Imogen Cunningham, and Robert Mapplethorpe

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco, California)

Richard Avedon: Photographs 1946-2004 – Through November 29, 2009

Whether photographing politicians, artists, writers, fashion models, or movie stars, Richard Avedon revolutionized the genre of portraiture. He rejected conventional stiff-and-staid poses and instead captured both motion and emotion in the faces of his subjects, often encapsulating their intrigue in a single charged moment.

The Provoke Era: Postwar Japanese Photography – Through December 20, 2009

The tumultuous period following defeat in World War II proved fertile ground for a generation of Japanese photographers who responded to societal upheaval by creating a new visual language dubbed “Are, Bure, Boke” — rough, blurred, and out of focus. After the war, Japan experienced a complete overhaul of its national identity, catapulting itself from empire to democracy. Named for the magazine Provoke, which sought to break the rules of traditional photography, this exhibition traces how Japanese photographers responded to their country’s shifting social and political atmosphere.

Photography Now: China, Japan, Korea – Through December 20, 2009

Drawn entirely from SFMOMA’s collection, Photography Now showcases pictures by 30 contemporary artists working in China, Japan, and Korea.

Reynolds Gallery (Santa Barbara, California)

Zwelethu Mthethwa: Images of Africa – Through October 31, 2009

Work by South African photographer Zwelethu Mthethwa gives a glimpse into the lives of adults and children living in poverty in contemporary Mozambique.

Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (Boulder, Colorado)

Andrea Modica, Fountain - Through January 17, 2010

Andrea Modica’s work is neither defined as documentary photography or portraiture. Her work lies somewhere in-between those two modes of image making. Over ten years Modica has been witness to the Baker’s family life, specifically the four children who are growing up and learning the family slaughterhouse business. The artist uses a large format camera, which makes it virtually impossible to capture candid moments that are typical in most documentary works. Skillfully, Modica relaxes, she expects to spend significant time in the moments before the shutter snaps.

National Portrait Gallery (Washington, DC)

Faces of the Frontier: Photographic Portraits from the American West, 1845-1924 – Through January 24, 2010

The American West was dramatically reconstituted during the 80 years between the Mexican War and the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924. This exhibition tells the story of these changes through 100 portrait photographs of the defining men and women of this period. It chronicles such events as the completion of the transcontinental railroad, on-going conflicts between Native Americans and non-natives, the emergence of the national parks movement and the admittance of 19 new states west of the Mississippi.

Phillips Collection (Washington, DC)

Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens – Through January 10, 2010

Man Ray translated the 20th-century modernist taste for African art into photographs that reached a popular audience. About 60 of his photographs, many never before exhibited, along with more than 40 photographs by his contemporaries, including Cecil Beaton, Walker Evans, and Alfred Stieglitz, will appear side-by-side with 20 of the African objects featured in the images. The exhibition explores the pivotal role of these photographs in shaping the perception of non-Western objects as fine art.

Boca Raton Museum of Art (Boca Raton, Florida)

Clyde Butcher: Wilderness Visions and Stephen Althouse: Tools and Shrouds – Through November 8, 2009

Clyde Butcher’s compelling black and white photographs chronicle some of America’s most beautiful and complex ecosystems. For more than thirty years, self-taught photographer Butcher (American, born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1944- ) has been preserving the untouched landscape on film, and for twenty of those years he has concentrated on Florida. The exquisite beauty of his work draws the viewer into a relationship with nature. His images are captured with 8 x 10 inch, 11 x 14 inch, and 16 x 20 inch view cameras. The large format allows him to express in elaborate detail, the textures that distinguish the beauty of the landscape. This exhibition presents work from the last twenty-five years ranging from the forests of the Pacific Northwest, to the rocky country of Utah and Colorado, to the woodlands of the Chesapeake region and the wetlands of Florida.

Tools and Shrouds debuts a series of 27 large format black and white photographs by Stephen Althouse completed during the last decade. Althouse transforms familiar objects into symbols of human experience and spiritual striving. Born in Washington, DC in 1948, Althouse’s childhood in rural Bucks County, Pennsylvania has been an influence on his art. The product of a Quaker education, Althouse received his MFA in sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, and studied at Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia. The sculptural tradition of making and manipulating subject matter is carried over into his photography, and is further explored in these enigmatic and powerful images.

Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art (Gainesville, Florida)

Highlights from the Photography Collection: Portfolios – Through February 28, 2010

The organizational concepts of the portfolios featured here are typically diverse. Monographic portfolios by individual artists such as Jerry Uelsmann and Ken Josephson provide special insights into the artists’ work when seen together rather than as isolated examples. Additionally the portfolio format encourages artists to create concentrated thematic groupings, such as Eliot Porter’s China portfolio or Mark Klett’s Amid Generations series of photographs in the environs of Tallahassee.

Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville (Jacksonville, Florida)

Through the Lens: Contemporary Photography from the Permanent Collection – Through January 3, 2010

Polk Museum of Art (Lakeland, Florida)

The Surreal Photography of Jerry Uelsmann – Through January 17, 2010

Jerry Uelsmann is arguably the most important photographer working today. Fifty years ago he began creating beautiful montages by hand in the darkroom. When he began combining multiple negatives onto a single print, his work was considered an intense challenge to the world of photographic art. Today, he is understood to be a true visionary and pioneer, paving the way for much of the most daring contemporary photography. Yet the power and beauty of his work is still stunning even in this age of digital cameras, printers and software.

Photography from the Permanent Collection – Through January 17, 2010

Photography has quickly become one of the strongest collecting areas for Polk Museum of Art. Over the last ten years, seventy outstanding photographs or photogravures have been added to what was already a solid collection. This exhibition includes work by artists of international stature such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Chuck Close, Herman Leonard, and Barbara Morgan, as well as many of the best photographers in Florida and throughout the South such as Clyde Butcher, Birney Imes, Joshua Mann Pailet, and Anna Tomczak.

Museum of Fine Arts (St. Petersburg, Florida)

Legends in Photography: Major Works from the Museum’s Collection – Through January 31, 2010

This exhibition of more than sixty images gives insight into the depth and breadth of the MFA’s noted photography holdings. The photographs range from the early days of print photography, as in a 19th century salt print by Edouard Baldus, and classic western landscapes by William Henry Jackson and Carleton Watkins, to later 20th century color photographs by William Christenberry and Stephen Shore.

Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art (Tarpon Springs, Florida)

Arnold Newman: One World/One People and Angelo Mantas: Epitaph/Roadside Memorials in America – Through November 8, 2009

An exhibition of 53 portraits created over six decades by photographer Arnold Newman, one of the most renowned, revered and influential photographers of the 20th century.

An exhibition of 33 photographs taken by artist Angelo Mantas to document roadside memorials found along highways from Florida to Washington, California to New Hampshire.

Vero Beach Museum of Art (Vero Beach, Florida)

Sanctuary: Anna Tomczak Photography – Through December 27, 2009

Anna Tomczak photographs still life assemblages created with flowers from her garden, mementos from family and friends, and flea market treasures. Tomczak reuses and reinvents her objects, making them part of her daily life as well as her art. Catholicism, mysticism and psychic energy are also elements that inform her work. She uses the Polaroid large-format transfer process to lend a tactile quality to the photographic imagery.

Cornell Fine Arts Museum (Winter Park, Florida)

Andy Warhol Personalities – Through January 3, 2010

Andy Warhol Personalities features Polaroid photographs in the Permanent Collection taken by Warhol during the 1980’s of socialites, celebrities, and patrons, including Carolina Herrera, Pia Miller, and Ric Ocasek. For Warhol, these photos served as a kind of “sketchbook,” a quick way to record source material for future use. One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, Andy Warhol (1928-1987) figured prominently in the Pop Art movement of the 1960s, which saw a shift away from traditional distinctions between fine art and popular culture. His renown as a painter, printmaker, and filmmaker, however, was often overshadowed by his “celebrity lifestyle.” The Polaroids on view document his diverse social circle as well as his creative process.

Andre Kertesz: On Reading – Through January 3, 2010

Andre Kertesz: On Reading features more than 100 photographs by the legendary Hungarian photographer André Kertész, considered one on the most influential art photographers of all time. In this series of photographs, made over a fifty-year period in Hungary, France, and the United States, Kertész examines the power of reading as a universal pleasure and illustrates the poetry and choreography of life in public and private moments.

High Museum of Art (Atlanta, Georgia)

Alec Soth: Black Line of Woods – Through January 3, 2010

In the tradition of photographers like Walker Evans, William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, Minneapolis-based photographer Alec Soth seeks to expose and elevate ordinary aspects of American life. His poetic images capture the harsh beauty of disenfranchised people and places, underscoring the realities of living in such a vast and varied country.

Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (Atlanta, Georgia)

Photographs from MOCA Georgia’s Permanent Collection – October 10, 2009 – December 31, 2009

Morris Museum of Art (Augusta, Georgia)

William Christenberry: Photographs, 1961-2005 – Through November 8, 2009

Widely recognized as a pioneer in the field of color photography, William Christenberry has used this expressive medium to explore the American South for forty years. While pursuing this artistic quest he has drawn inspiration from Walker Evans, and influenced a generation of emerging photographers. William Christenberry: Photographs, 1961—2005 surveys his poetic documentation of southern vernacular architecture, signage, and landscape using a wide range of cameras, from his earliest Brownie photographs of the early 1960s to his later work with a large-format camera. Combining never-before-seen photographs, both old and new, with images that are now iconic, this exhibition comprises fifty vintage photographic works and one sculpture. Together, they convey the breadth of his singular photographic vision. Discuss the artistic objectives of his long-term interpretation of the Southern landscape with Michelle Norris of National Public Radio, Christenberry explained: “What I really feel very strongly about, and I hope reflects in all aspects of my work, is the human touch, the humanness of things, the positive and sometimes the negative and sometimes the sad.”

Booth Western Art Museum (Cartersville, Georgia)

Lasting Light: 125 Years of Grand Canyon Photography – Through October 25, 2009

Created by the Grand Canyon Association and organized for travel by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Services (SITES), Lasting Light: 125 Years of Grand Canyon Photography showcases 60 photographs covering the photographic history of the Grand Canyon. Included are images of early photographers dangling from cables to get the perfect shot along with more modern images that are bold and dramatic, revealing the canyon’s awesome views.

Columbus Museum (Columbus, Georgia)

Now and Then: Snapshots of the South – Through January 31, 2010

The second edition of the Now and Then series juxtaposes historic and contemporary images addressing a variety of enduring aspects of everyday life in the South. Including images that speak to Southerners’ longstanding connections with the land and its history, religion and the celebration of the eccentric, the exhibition evokes a unique sense of place as projected through the lens of cameras both past and present.

Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art (Savannah, Georgia)

The Master Eye: Photography from the Rhoades Collection – Through January 8, 2010

The photographs in this exhibition include iconic examples from pioneering 19th-century practitioners and major 20th-century photographers, who wielded their cameras to capture images of arresting landscapes, richly textured narratives, elegant fashion scenes, singular still lifes and powerful portraits. Featured photographers include Mathew Brady, Eadweard Muybridge, Man Ray, Robert Mapplethorpe, Herb Ritts, Annie Leibovitz and other celebrated masters.

Southern Illinois University Museum (Carbondale, Illinois)

Masters of Photography from the Museum’s Collection – Through May 31, 2010

The “Masters of Photography” exhibit, curated by Lori Huffman, Curator of Collections at the Museum, features twenty-five photographers and thirty images. They illustrate the range of photographic styles and subjects from the social realism of Jacob Riis and Dorothea Lange to a celebrity photograph of Gloria Swanson by Edward Steichen, from urban documentation by Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans and Helen Levitt to imaginative landscapes by Henri Cartier-Bresson and W. Eugene Smith. The earliest photographer represented is Jacob Riis (1849-1914); the latest include Bruce Davidson (b.1933), Jerry Uelsmann (b. 1934), and George Krause (b. 1937).

Krannert Art Museum (Champaign, Illinois)

Gestures in Space and Light – Through January 3, 2010

The exhibition takes its cue from the creative tension that inheres in the photographic process—though a medium that holds time in place, its images, nevertheless, elude capture—motions continue, light brightens or fades, and memories are born. As studies in light, form and pattern, the photographs on display blur the boundaries between the natural and built environments, between representation and abstraction, and between the concrete and the conceptual. In so doing, they extend beyond the gallery, and open us up to new ways of seeing.

Effacement: Huang Yan’s China in the 21st Century – Through July 3, 2010

In a photographic series, scenes from classical Chinese landscapes were digitally manipulated and reproduced on four whitened faces. The subject, merged with conventional landscape, is fugitive, his identity lost. Huang’s engagement with commercialized culture may be identified with an aspect of Euro-American modernist art. Nonetheless, Huang’s photographs and porcelains are bound up with local and specific meanings, which uncover the mutual implication of Asian modernity and orientalist fantasies.

Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, Illinois)

Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage – October 10, 2009 – January 3, 2010

This exhibition is the first to comprehensively examine the little-known phenomenon of Victorian photocollage, presenting work that has rarely—and in many cases never—before been displayed or reproduced. Playing with Pictures showcases the best albums and loose pages from collections across the United States, Europe, and Australia; 40 pages are shown in frames on the wall, while 11 separate albums are displayed in cases, accompanied by “virtual albums” on computer monitors for visitor interaction.

Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago, Illinois)

Elements of Photography – Through Spring 2010

Elements of Photography presents photographic and video works from the MCA Collection with a focus on elemental materials of nature: light and water. Also the fundamental elements of traditional photography, the works included in the exhibition foreground the inherent relationship between the photographic process and the natural world.

Snite Museum of Art (Notre Dame, Indiana)

Darkness and Light: Death and Beauty in Photography - November 1, 2009 – December 21, 2009

Since the medium’s invention in 1839, photographers have focused their cameras on all aspects of our world. Certain genres have become very popular, such as portraits, landscapes, urban views, the human figure, contemporary society, violence, and major events both public and private. Running through all these images are underlying themes, including those of both death and beauty. This exhibit, selected from the Museum’s permanent collection of photographs, will examine various aspects of these two ideas in thought-provoking images from around the world, ranging from 1844 to the present.

Dubuque Museum of Art (Dubuque, Iowa)

John Vachon and the Great Depression in Dubuque - Through November 8, 2009

Working as a photography file clerk for the Farm Security Administration in 1936, Minnesotan Vachon came under the spell of some of the finest photographers in the country who were hired by the government during the Great Depression years to document the lives of rural Americans. As part of his assignments, Vachon came to Dubuque in April 1940. [...] The hallmark of Vachon’s style of photography is the portrayal of real people and places encountered on the street, unembellished by air brushing, staging, or other beautifying devices.

Spencer Museum of Art (Lawrence, Kansas)

Big Shots: Andy Warhol, Celebrity Culture, and the 1980s - Through January 24, 2010

Big Shots highlights a recent gift from the Andy Warhol Foundation of rarely seen photographs by Warhol, dating from 1970 to 1986, presented within the context of the dynamic period of art and cultural production during which they were made.

Hansen Museum (Logan, Kansas)

Nashville Portraits: Photographs by Jim McGuire - October 9, 2009 – December 6, 2009

This exhibition of sixty black and white photographs was selected from thousands of portraits shot over a period of more than thirty years by one of the country music’s most celebrated photographers, Jim McGuire. The exhibition reflects a continuing project that commences in 1972 with a portrait of musician John Hartford, and it documents many of the leading figures in the world of country music, from such icons as Bill Monroe, Minnie Pearl, and Lester Flatt to contemporary stars like Emmy Lou Harris, Nanci Griffith, and Marty Stuart.

Ulrich Museum of Art (Wichita, Kansas)

Snap: Andy Warhol Photographs, 1970-1987 - Through December 18, 2009

The figures portrayed in this show include both celebrities and unidentified individuals. Among the more famous sitters are actress Liza Minnelli and hockey star Wayne Gretzky.

Wichita Art Museum (Wichita, Kansas)

This is My Land: A Photographic Portrait of America by James Yarnell - October 18, 2009 – March 7, 2010

Soar above the landscape of the United States with the aerial photographs of James Yarnell. With pilot and writer Martin Caidin, Yarnell was commissioned by Olive Ann Beech to photograph from the air a cross-country tour of the U.S. The book This Is My Land was published in 1962.

Speed Art Museum (Louisville, Kentucky)

City/Country: Photographs from the Henry V. Heuser, Jr. Collection - Through October 11, 2009

Beginning in the 1970’s, Heuser became especially interested in the work of contemporary American photographers and through the years has built a collection containing hundreds of photographic works. This celebration of Heuser’s achievement as a collector and museum supporter, will feature work by some of the country’s most important photographers, including Harry Callahan, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Ray Metzker, Aaron Siskind, and Garry Winogrand.

Hattie Bishop Speed: A New Museum for Louisville - Through March 14, 2010

This exhibition of vintage photographs documenting the construction of architect Arthur Loomis’ building vividly captures Hattie Bishop Speed’s vision for the new art museum. Classic in its use of traditional materials, yet modern in its incorporation of cutting-edge technology, the creation of the Speed Art Museum was a major event in the history of Louisville and the Commonwealth of Kentucky when it opened in 1927.

LSU Museum of Art (Baton Rouge, Louisiana)

Living Color: The Photographs of Judy Cooper - Through November 1, 2009

Living Color is a retrospective of the work of New Orleans photographer, Judy Cooper, documenting her engagement with the personalities and, by extension, the cultural forces that have contributed to the city’s rich and diverse cultural heritage.

Of People and Places: Contemporary Works from the JPMorgan Chase Art Collection - November 15, 2009 – February 14, 2010

Of People and Places is an exhibition of over 40 works from a global collection with great breadth and depth, including artists Andy Warhol, Ana Mendieta, Cindy Sherman, Joseph Beuys, Diane Nemerov Arbus and Kori Newkirk.

New Orleans Museum of Art (New Orleans, Louisiana)

The Art of Caring: A Look at Life Through Photography - Through October 11, 2009

Through photography and film, this thought- and emotion-provoking exhibition provides a visual discourse on how key life events are celebrated and honored, and how pivotal life decisions are made by a number of different cultures. Each stage of life is depicted by simple everyday situations experienced in moments of joy and gratification as well as by poignant events of passage. The unfathomable scale of devastation inflicted upon humanity and our environment by both man-made and natural disasters also is intrinsic to this life story.

University of Maine Museum of Art (Bangor, Maine)

Roadside Ghosts: Photographs by Dave Anderson - Through December 31, 2009

Through the use of natural light and unconventional camera angles, Anderson emphasizes the beauty of locations off the beaten path and the often abstract nature of mundane objects. Above all, the artist offers a prolonged contemplation of his chosen subjects—a stretch of farmland, a ramshackle Ferris wheel, or a plastic grasshopper. What many may only catch in a fleeting moment or glimpse in their peripheral vision, Anderson records with great patience and reverence.

Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, Massachusetts)

Viva Mexico! Edward Weston and His Contemporaries – Through November 2, 2009

Photographer Edward Weston’s early biographer, Nancy Newhall, described Mexico as his “Paris,” because Weston’s short time there had such a lasting impact on his career. In the mid-1920s a vibrant photography movement in Mexico City centered around Weston and his Italian-born lover, Tina Modotti, and, during the 1930s, on the Surrealist-inspired work of Mexican native Manuel Alvarez Bravo, as well as the American photographer and documentary filmmaker Paul Strand.

Boston University Art Gallery (Boston, Massachusetts)

Missionary Photography in Korea: Encountering the West through Christianity – Through October 25, 2009

As the largest-ever showing of Korean missionary photographs in the U.S., this exhibition features a rare set of images taken in Korea from the late 1880s through the early 1940s—a period spanning the final decades of Chosŏn Korea and most of the era of Japanese colonial occupation. The arrival of the first Western missionaries in the late 1880s initiated a silent transformation that resulted in the establishment of new religious, social and cultural identities. Far from being mere two-dimensional black and white records of their subjects, the photographs reveal personal, human connections, as well as the larger, complex interplay between two sociopolitical and ethical systems.

Danforth Museum (Framingham, Massachusetts)

New England Photography Bicentennial 2009 – Through November 8, 2009

Every two years, the Danforth Museum of Art celebrates photography as an art form through a highly selective exhibition of photographers who reside throughout New England. Juried by Phillip Prodger, Curator of Photography, at the Peabody Essex Museum, and Barbara O’Brien, former editor of Art New England and former Director, Trustman Art Gallery, Simmons College, Boston, the 2009 New England Photography Biennial showcases exciting and innovative photography by both established and emerging artists.

deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (Lincoln, Massachusetts)

Out of the Box: Photography Portfolios from the Permanent Collection – October 24, 2009 – October 2010

Selections from eleven portfolios will be featured, ranging from the very first photographs to enter DeCordova’s collection in 1980 – an abstract portfolio by Calvin Kowal – to well-known leaders in the field such as Larry Fink and Neal Slavin. In addition to the most recently acquired photographs from 2009 – a portfolio by Jo Sandman – Out of the Box will also highlight the entire PRC Portfolio, published in 2008, including luminaries such as Emmet Gowin, Laura McPhee, Arno Rafael Minkkinen, Abelardo Morell, and Patti Smith, among others.

New Bedford Art Museum (New Bedford, Massachusetts)

Kimberly Witham: Transcendence – Through January 17, 2010

Speaking about her work, Witham has said: “As I photographed these animals and birds, I began to notice intricacies of which I was never aware. The creatures in these photographs are so common in suburbia that they often go unnoticed; they are considered neither beautiful nor precious.”

Provincetown Art Association and Museum (Provincetown, Massachusetts)

Paula Horn Kotis: Photographs – Through November 15, 2009

A survey exhibition of photographs by Paula Kotis, whose has traveled the world, capturing the human condition in images of artists, celebrities, refugees, and Holocaust survivors. Until a recent exhibition at the Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown, her exceptional work had rarely been publicly shown.

Peabody Essex Museum (Salem, Massachusetts)

Valerie Belin: Made Up – October 17, 2009 – February 7, 2010

Internationally-acclaimed photographer Valérie Belin comes to PEM for her first solo show in the United States. Featuring 20 exquisite, monumental images,Valérie Belin: Made Up explores a photographer’s ability to manipulate perception of artificiality and reality. In her images of mannequins, models and still lifes, Belin’s work treats the iconic and the banal equally and displays both on a disarmingly large scale. Belin’s mid-career retrospective was received with enormous popular and critical praise across Europe – she is rapidly becoming a leader in the world of photography

Mount Holyoke College Art Museum (South Hadley, Massachusetts)

Lisette Model and Her Successors – Through December 13, 2009

Lisette Model’s searing images and eloquent teachings have influenced three generations of photographers, including the star-studded roster of artists featured in this exhibition. A native of Vienna, she lived in France before moving to New York in 1938. On view in the exhibition are many of her most iconic images that collectively convey a portrait of America at all social levels, from Coney Island and jazz clubs to local hangouts and Fifth Avenue.

The Clark (Williamstown, Massachusetts)

Steps off the Beaten Path: Nineteenth-Century Photographs of Rome and Its Environs – October 11, 2009 – January 3, 2010

At the end of the nineteenth century as Rome was on its way to becoming a modern city and the capital of a unified Italy, a group of photographers began aiming their lenses at the streets, recording everyday scenes alongside the ancient ruins and Baroque churches of the eternal city. Their innovations foreshadowed what would later be called “street photography.” This exhibition gathers works by Vincenzo Carlo Domenico Baldassarre Simelli, Gustave Eugène Chauffourier, A. De Bonis, and Edmond Lebel, little known today but among the most accomplished Italian photographers of the time. The fleeting images they recorded convey a sense of intimacy and innocence capturing the charm of Roman byways, in contrast to the more conventional views of their peers. Many of the scenes they documented were subsequently swept away by modern development.

Williams College Museum of Art (Williamstown, Massachusetts)

Edward Steichen – Episodes from a Life in Photography – Through November 8, 2009

Featuring 90 photographs created throughout Steichen’s prolific career, Episodes includes unique hand-crafted prints, still lifes, “natural” abstractions, designs for textiles, and a rare presentation of twenty-five photographs for Thoreau’s Walden.

Ralph Lieberman: Photographs – Through November 28, 2009

Lieberman’s elegantly constructed compositions are inspired by architecture that he has encountered from Europe to the Williams College campus. His photographs focus attention on the highly individual character of these unexpected spaces, as well as a range of architectural forms and styles. Ralph Lieberman lives and works in Williamstown, Mass.

Alec Soth: NIAGARA – October 10, 2009 – January 10, 2010

Alec Soth: NIAGARA presents a selection of photographs from his series that depicts sobering contemporary views of life on both the American and Canadian sides of Niagara Falls. Using a large-format camera, Soth creates lushly detailed photographs that often belie the bittersweet subject matter of romance associated with the Falls—the “aftermath of passion,” as Soth describes it.

University of Michigan Museum of Art (Ann Arbor, Michigan)

Warhol Snapshots, 1973-1986 - Through October 25, 2009

This exhibition of Warhol’s photographs will direct focus to the signs of the times reflected in the mirror’s surface: the spirit of the seventies and eighties that Warhol and his art embodied. Those depicted include his friends, followers, and fellow denizens of the underground, the famous faces of his era as well as those not destined to be remembered.

The Lens of Impressionism: Photography and Painting Along the Normandy Coast, 1850-1874 - October 10, 2009 – January 3, 2010

This exhibition advances a new argument for the origins of what was called “the new painting,” namely that a unique convergence of forces—social, artistic, technological, and commercial—along the Normandy coast of France dramatically transformed the course of photography and painting (as well as of the region itself). Within this framework, the invention of the camera and the development of early fine art photography in that particular setting will be seen as the specific catalysts that brought about a new approach to painting.

Detroit Institute of Arts (Detroit, Michigan)

Avedon Fashion Photographs 1944-2000 - October 18, 2009 – January 17, 2010

This exhibition is a comprehensive study of Richard Avedon’s (1923-2004) fashion photographs that includes a selection of over 200 images representing his stylistic evolution over a period of 50 years. Both iconic and lesser-known photographic prints, as well as never-before-seen material including contact sheets, magazine layouts, personal ephemera and archival material are included.

Photography – The First 100 Years: A Survey from the DIA’s Collection - Through January 3, 2010

This historical survey of photographs from roughly the early 1840s to 1940 is taken from the DIA’s outstanding photography collection. The exhibition includes many well-known works from the medium’s history by both European and American photographers, including iconic images by Julia Margaret Cameron, Hill and Adamson, Lewis Hine, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, and Edward Weston.

Kresge Art Museum (East Lansing, Michigan)

Class Pictures: Photographs by Dawoud Bey - October 24, 2009 – December 20, 2009

In these forty intimate color portraits, the photographer Dawoud Bey closely collaborated with the high school students from diverse economic, racial and ethnic backgrounds to create a compelling portrait of contemporary American youth. Their own texts accompany the photographs and together, portray a remarkable and compelling complexity and strength.

Flint Institute of Arts (Flint, Michigan)

The Fine Art of Kansas City Jazz: Photographs by Dan White - November 21, 2009 – January 3, 2010

Tweed Museum of Art (Duluth, Minnesota)

Andy Warhol: Pop and Polaroid - Through May 16, 2010

The photographs range from celebrity portraits to painting subjects that collectively demonstrate the range of Warhol’s aesthetic interests and the reach of his curious nature roving eye. Especially notable are the Polaroid portraits that reveal the artist’s frank engagement and fascination with extroverted personalities.

Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum (Minneapolis, Minnesota)

Xavier Tavera: Farsas - Through January 3, 2010

This exhibition features three bodies of work by Minneapolis-based photographer Xavier Tavera. The series-Enmascarados, Luchas, and El Circo-show Tavera’s interest in both quickly captured and highly staged portraiture. In both cases, Tavera’s work reveals the productive role of the sitter in the making of his or her own image. With subjects ranging from professional wrestlers on their way to the ring to a dramatically costumed young girl seated atop a horse before a painted sky, Tavera’s work illuminates the overarching, somewhat farcical artifice that is identity itself.

Minneapolis Institute of Arts (Minneapolis, Minnesota)

Josef Sudek and Czech Photography - Through February 28, 2010

Josef Sudek (1896-1976) is Czechoslovakia’s best known and influential creative photographer. He worked from the 1910s through the 1960s, producing ethereal landscapes, modernist still lifes, and sweeping panoramas of the city of Prague. Subsequent Czech photographers acknowledged Sudek’s pioneering work and contributed, in their own way, to the rich photographic legacy of their country.

Lauren Rogers Museum of Art (Laurel, Mississippi)

Eudora Welty in New York – Through November 15, 2009

Eudora Welty in New York features fifty black-and-white photographs by Eudora Welty, one of the 20th century’s greatest American authors. The photographs illuminate the artist’s ties to New York City at the outset of her professional career. It includes a re-creation of Welty’s first solo exhibition of her Mississippi photographs, mounted in New York City in 1936, as well as a dozen of her New York images, capturing American in the depths of the Great Depression and revealing a compassion and sensitivity towards her subject that became a hallmark of her writing.

Museum of Art and Archaeology (Columbia, Missouri)

Faces of Warhol - Through June 6, 2010

This three-part exhibition is ongoing. Of the remaining exhibits, Constructing Gender runs through February 7, 2010. The final installment,Accessing the Private, runs from February 9 through June 6, 2010.

Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City, Missouri)

Hide & Seek: Picturing Childhood - Through February 21, 2001

Since photography’s inception in 1839, children have been popular subjects for the camera. We look to pictures of children as collective memories of childhood itself—a phase of life to which we can never return. This exhibition explores our fascination with childhood as it has been pictured throughout photography’s history and up to the present day.

Sheldon Concert Hall (St. Louis, Missouri)

William Christenberry: Southern Artifacts - Through January 23, 2010

This exhibition presents an overview of photographs and selected sculpture by internationally recognized artist William Christenberry from the 1960s onwards.

Missoula Art Museum (Missoula, Montana)

Teresa Tamura – Made in Minidoka: The Incarceration of Japanese Americans in Idaho - Through December 31, 2009

This exhibition features a selection of photographs from the larger body of work Tamura has generated over the past decade. Tamura, the daughter of second generation Japanese Americans, was born and raised in Nampa, Idaho, a small town just a two hour drive from the remnants of the Minidoka Relocation Center.

Montana Museum of Art and Culture (Missoula, Montana)

Capture the Moment: The Pulitzer Prize Photographs - Through October 23, 2009

The largest and most comprehensive exhibition of Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs ever shown in the United States at The University of Montana.

Great Plains Art Museum (Lincoln, Nebraska)

People of the Plains and Searching for the Real Nebraska: A Photo Essay on the Great Recession – Part 1 - November 6, 2009 – December 13, 2009

Exhibitions feature work by John Evasco, Bruce Thorson, Patrick Breen, Kyle Bruggeman, and Clay Lomneth.

Sheldon Museum of Art (Lincoln, Nebraska)

Altered Land, Photography in the 1970s - Through January 3, 2010

In the latter part of the 20th century, many American landscape photographers began to shed their 19th-century Romantic ideals about the natural purity of their subject. They started taking greater stock of the rising tide of human intervention on the land. Bracketing their purist ideals, they created work reflecting the inescapable tension between the environment and human presence.

Nevada Museum of Art (Reno, Nevada)

Carleton E. Watkins:  Yosemite Photographs - Through October 11, 2009

Discover the sites and landscapes of Yosemite as seen through the lens of nineteenth-century photographer Carleton E. Watkins. This small exhibition features views of Yosemite icons such as Half Dome, Yosemite Valley, the Merced River, and the redwood tree nicknamed Grizzly Giant. The sheer size of Yosemite’s natural monuments challenged artists, such as Watkins, to create equally large-scale works that reflected the epic scale of the future national park.

Faces: Chuck Close and Contemporary Portraiture - Through October 18, 2009

A leading figure in contemporary American art since the 1970s, Chuck Close is celebrated for his successful efforts to reinvigorate the field of modern portraiture. Best known for the monumental faces he has painted, photographed, and most recently woven into tapestries, Close has developed a formal methodology based on color and structural analysis that radically departs from traditional modes of portraiture. Featured alongside works by Close will be a selection of portraits by some of the twentieth and twenty-first century’s leading artists including Cindy Sherman, Shirin Neshat, Gerhard Richter, and Andy Warhol. These artists are noted for the innovative ways they approach issues of identity, autobiography, and narrative in their works.

Joan Myers: Western Power - Through December 6, 2009

Photographer Joan Myers recognizes that as consumers we often take the source of our power supply for granted, paying little attention to how energy is generated and distributed. In her series of panoramic photographs, Western Power, Myers makes visible a range of power plants—fueled by uranium, oil, gas, coal, water, solar, wind, and geothermal energy—throughout the Western United States.

The Grid: Bernd and Hilla Becher - Through February 7, 2010

German husband-and-wife team Bernd and Hilla Becher are best known for their photographs of large-scale industrial buildings that are typically arranged in grids. Using a large-format camera, the Bechers have photographed hundreds of industrial structures—including water towers, grain silos, houses, and warehouses—with the aim of maintaining a straightforward and objective point of view.

Currier Museum of Art (Manchester, New Hampshire)

Brett Weston: Out of the Shadow - October 10, 2009 – January 3, 2010

Brilliant, visionary, and prodigious, Brett Weston (1911-1993) was among the most important photographers working in the twentieth century. In the first major exhibition in 30 years dedicated to Weston’s prolific body of work, Brett Weston: Out of the Shadow concentrates on the photographer’s distinct creative spirit. See how Weston captured the magic of black and white prints through more than 100 exquisitely printed vintage photographs from the 1920s through the 1980s all handcrafted by the artist.

Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum (New Brunswick, New Jersey)

Four Perspectives Through the Lens: Soviet Art Photography in the 1970s-80s - Through March 28, 2010

This exhibition presents a selection of more than sixty photographs from the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Soviet Nonconformist Art by Francisco Infante, Vladimir Kupriyanov, Boris Mikhailov, and Aleksandr Slyusarev, four major Soviet artists working with photography in 1970 –1980s. Photography was not officially considered an art in the Soviet Union at that time, and it was not taught in art schools. On the other hand, the amateur status of artistic photography, unrestricted by professional conventions or censorship, allowed great creative freedom and presented wide opportunities for experimentation. Soviet photographers made exceedingly canny, inventive, and highly individual use of the medium, expressing ideas that were both specific and universal in character.

Noyes Museum of Art (Oceanville, New Jersey)

Weird NJ Photography Exhibition - October 16, 2009 – February 28, 2010

Princeton University Art Museum (Princeton, New Jersey)

Emmet Gowin: A Collective Portrait - October 24, 2009 – January 17, 2010

The exhibition celebrates the ongoing creative career of a great artist and legendary Princeton professor who retires at the end of 2009. Emmet Gowin is held in the highest esteem as a photographer of the family (his own), the man-altered landscape of the nuclear era, and details of nature that he observes with the close, unsparing scrutiny of a true lover. Among the photographs in the exhibition will be works by Gowin’s mentors; work by Gowin himself ranging in time from his student years to the present; prints he has contributed to the Spring Portfolio produced annually by Princeton’s advanced photography students since 1987; and photographs by twenty students from throughout Gowin’s thirty-five years at Princeton.

The Albuquerque Museum (Albuquerque, New Mexico)

Ghost Ranch and the Faraway Nearby: Photographs by Craig Varjabedian - Through October 11, 2009

Georgia O’Keeffe Museum (Santa Fe, New Mexico)

New Mexico and New York: Photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe - Through January 10, 2010

Beginning in the 1910s, when Alfred Stieglitz began making photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe, to the end of her life, in 1986, O’Keeffe was sought out by numerous American photographers, who made her a subject in their work. When The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, closed in 2006, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum was fortunate to receive its collection of photographs of O’Keeffe. On display will be selections of these works, along with other photographs of O’Keeffe from the Museum’s collection, taken at various times in her life by photographers such as Ansel Adams, Yousuf Karsh, Alfred Stieglitz, Tony Vaccaro, Todd Webb, and Don Worth.

Harwood Museum of Art (Taos, New Mexico)

The Artist and His Photographs: The Photographic Studies of E.I. Couse - Through October 18, 2009

This exhibition features over 25 photographs taken by Couse – many of which contain motifs which can be linked directly to specific paintings.

Risk Hazekamp / Valley of the Gods: Contemporary Analog Photography In and Around Taos - October 9, 2009 – January 24, 2010

Risk Hazekamp participated in the Harwood Museum’s Artist in Residence program during the summer of 2009. The exhibition “Valley of the Gods” includes work created during her stay in Taos. Hazekamp uses photography to explore issues of identity and in particular, the way in which gender and identity intersect. By evoking and drawing upon mass media and popular visual language: advertising, fashion and movie genres, she questions the construction of gender-identities.

Albany Institute of History and Art (Albany, New York)

Life Along the Hudson: Photographs by Joseph Squillante – Through January 3, 2010

Joseph Squillante has spent the past three decades traveling the entire length of the Hudson. Like the Hudson River landscape painters before him, some of his photographs capture the beauty and romantic quality of the river while others focus on people who live and work along its shores, including farmers, fisherman, and biologists. Just as the photographs of the Adirondacks by Seneca Ray Stoddard in the late 1800s aided in the designation of the area as a state park, Squillante’s photographs of the Hudson River raise public awareness of the river’s importance.

Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn, New York)

Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present – October 30, 2009 – January 31, 2010

Who Shot Rock & Roll is the first major museum exhibition on rock and roll to put photographers in the foreground, acknowledging their creative and collaborative role in the history of rock music. From its earliest days, rock and roll was captured in photographs that personalized, and frequently eroticized, the musicians, creating a visual identity for the genre. The photographers were handmaidens to the rock and roll revolution, and their images communicate the social and cultural transformations that rock has fostered since the1950s. The exhibition is in six sections: rare and revealing images taken behind the scenes; tender snapshots of young musicians at the beginnings of their careers; exhilarating photographs of live performances that display the energy, passion, style, and sex appeal of the band on stage; powerful images of the crowds and fans that are often evocative of historic paintings; portraits revealing the soul and creativity, rather than the surface and celebrity, of the musicians; and conceptual images and album covers highlighting the collaborative efforts between the image makers and the musicians.

Burchfield Penney Art Center (Buffalo, New York)

Photographs of Clara E. Sipprell – Through November 22, 2009

Clara Sipprell (1885-1975) was a successful portraitist and her still-lifes, landscapes and cityscapes were exhibited nationally and internationally. This exhibition features photographs from all phases of her career including portraits of the artist by her family.

From the Western Door to the Lower West Side: The Photography of Milton Rogovin and the Poetry of Eric Gansworth – Through January 3, 2010

This exhibition coincides with a new publication of poetry by Eric Gansworth of Canisius College, Buffalo, NY, illustrated with Milton Rogovin’s photographs of Native Americans of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) community of Western New York and Ontario, Canada. The photographs are documents of contemporary life and the social history on the reservations outside of Buffalo, near the Cattaraugus, Tonawanda and Tuscarora reservations and the Lower West Side of Buffalo. Specific tribes include the Seneca, Mohawk and the Tuscarora. The photographs were taken between 1963 and 1993.

Fenimore Art Museum (Cooperstown, New York)

Walker Evans: Carbon and Silver – Through December 31, 2009

In Walker Evans: Carbon and Silver, exhibition curator John T. Hill presents a new perspective on this work by comparing gelatin silver contact prints with contemporary ink-jet prints made from digital files. The enlarged prints reveal intricate details less accessible in the earlier versions of the images, including gelatin silver prints, books and magazines.

The Picker Art Gallery (Hamilton, New York)

Edward Curtis: Photogravures from The North American Indian – Through October 11, 2009

Twenty photogravures from Colgate’s Special Collections Library are featured in Edward Curtis: Photogravures from ‘The North American Indian.’The photos demonstrate the range of tribes and geographical areas that Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952) studied for The North American Indian, 20 volumes and portfolios of photographs and writings that he published between 1907 and 1930. Curtis hoped “to form a comprehensive and permanent record of all the important tribes of the United States and Alaska that still retain to a considerable degree their … customs and habits.” His work has often been criticized, however, for romanticizing and re-staging the past.

Remember? Photographs before Digitization – Through December 20, 2009

Remember? Photographs before Digitization provides an opportunity to enjoy the qualities of photography that get lost in reproduction. Digital photographs are ubiquitous on the internet and counted in the billions, and this show reminds contemporary viewers of the allure of original photographic prints produced by laborious processes in the darkroom. The exhibition of approximately 90 photographs offers an overview of art photography in Colgate University’s holdings, drawn from the collections of the Picker Art Gallery and Case Library. It includes daguerreotypes, albumen prints, and silver gelatin prints from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day.

Hecksher Museum of Art (Huntington, New York)

Photography from the Collection – Through January 3, 2010

From the time of its invention in 1839, photography has fascinated the public with its ability to capture the actual appearance of people, places, and things. The holdings of The Heckscher Museum include documentary photographers such as Berenice Abbott, N. Jay Jaffee, Neil Scholl, and the Russian photojournalist Mark Markov-Grinberg; street photographers such as Larry Fink, Leon Levinstein, and Gary Winogrand; and nature photographers such as Stuart McCallum and the environmental artist Barbara Roux. Experimental work by Man Ray, who created photographic images without using a camera, and Joe Constantino, who works with infrared techniques, is also represented. Other highlights of this installation include Eadward Muybridge, who used the camera to document human and animal motion, and Stanley Twardowicz, who experimented with abstraction photography.

Long Island Moderns: Artists on the North Shore from Edward Steichen to Cindy Sherman – Through January 10, 2009

This exhibition celebrates the rich, yet often overlooked, role of Huntington and the North Shore of Long Island in American art. For more than a century, Long Island has attracted and inspired innovative artists of the highest caliber who have created groundbreaking works of enduring importance. While the art produced on Long Island’s East End has been well documented, the artistic history of Huntington and the North Shore are understood only piecemeal despite the fact that significant artists have worked here.

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (Long Island City, New York)

Robert Bergman: Selected Portraits – Through January 4, 2010

Bergman’s epic series of portraits documents the physical and spiritual manifestation of Americans at the approach of the millennium. Of this series Toni Morrison has written, “Occasionally there arises an event or a moment that one knows immediately will forever mark a place in the history of artistic endeavor. Robert Bergman’s portraits represent such a moment, such an event. In all its burnished majesty his gallery refuses us unearned solace and one by one by one each photograph unveils us, asserting a beauty, a kind of rapture, that is as close as can be to a master template of the singularity, the community, the unextinguishable sacredness of the human race.”

Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art (New Paltz, New York)

The Hudson River – A Great American Treasure: Greg Miller – Through November 29, 2009

This exhibition presents twenty recent color photographs of Hudson Valley landscapes by Orange County, NY-based photographer Greg Miller. Depicting views of the river and environs from New York City’s George Washington Bridge to the river’s small upstate tributaries, Greg Miller’s views of well-known-and less well-known-vistas capture the complexity of this important tourist destination, venue for trade and industry, and site of this country’s first significant conservation efforts.

Panorama of the Hudson River: Greg Miller – Through December 13, 2009

Greg Miller has recently created a complete photographic panorama of the Hudson River, including both banks and stretching from Manhattan to Albany. The exhibition will include the Monroe, N.Y.-based artist’s photographs of the riverbanks of the Hudson River, paired with those from the 1910 photographic panorama developed for the Hudson River Day Line Steamer company.

Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, New York)

Looking In: Robert Frank’s “The Americans” – Through January 3, 2010

This exhibition celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Americans, Robert Frank’s influential suite of black-and-white photographs made on a cross-country road trip in 1955–56. Although Frank’s depiction of American life was criticized when the book was released in the U.S. in 1959, it soon became recognized as a masterpiece of street photography. Born in Switzerland in 1924, Frank is considered one of the great living masters of photography. The exhibition will feature all 83 photographs published in The Americans and will be the first time that this body of work is presented to a New York audience. In addition, the exhibition includes contact sheets that Frank used to create the book; earlier photographs made in Europe, Peru, and New York; a short film by the artist on his life; and his later re-use of iconic images from the series.

Museum of Modern Art (New York, New York)

New Photography 2009 – Through January 11, 2010

Although the six artists in this installation—Walead Beshty, Daniel Gordon, Leslie Hewitt, Carter Mull, Sterling Ruby, and Sara VanDerBeek—represent diverse points of view, working methods, and pictorial modes ranging from abstract to representational, their images all begin in the studio or the darkroom and result from processes involving collection, assembly, and manipulation. Many of the works are made with everyday materials and objects, as well as images from the Internet, magazines, newspapers, and books. Some of the artists also work in other mediums and their pictures relate to disciplines such as drawing, sculpture, and installation. As traditional photographic techniques are being quickly replaced by digital technologies, the artists included here examine the process and structure of making photographs.

New Museum (New York, New York)

Intersections Intersected: The Photography of David Goldblatt – Through October 11, 2009

Over the last fifty years, David Goldblatt has documented the complexities and contradictions of South African society. His photographs capture the social and moral value systems that governed the tumultuous history of his country’s segregationist policies and continue to influence its changing political landscape. Goldblatt began photographing professionally in the early 1960s, focusing on the effects of the National Party’s legislation of apartheid. The son of Jewish Lithuanian parents who fled to South Africa to escape religious persecution, Goldblatt was forced into a peculiar situation, being at once a white man in a racially segregated society and a member of a religious minority with a sense of otherness. He used the camera to capture the true face of apartheid as his way of coping with horrifying realities and making his voice heard. Goldblatt did not try to capture iconic images, nor did he use the camera as a tool to entice revolution through propaganda. Instead, he reveals a much more complex portrait, including the intricacies and banalities of daily life in all aspects of society. Whether showing the plight of black communities, the culture of the Afrikaner nationalists, the comfort of white suburbanites, or the architectural landscape, Goldblatt’s photographs are an intimate portrayal of a culture plagued by injustice.

Studio Museum in Harlem (New York, New York)

We Come with the Beautiful Things: Expanding the Walls 2009 – Through October 25, 2009

We Come with the Beautiful Things is comprised of twelve raw, distinct visual narratives. Using black-and-white photography as a medium, each artist has created a body of work that articulates and documents their surroundings in a cleverly threaded patchwork of unique themes. These young photographers’ themes range from issues rooted in race and sexual identity to abstract perspectives on the body.

Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, New York)

Roni Horn aka Roni Horn – November 6, 2009 – January 24, 2010

For more than thirty years, Roni Horn (b. 1955) has been developing work of concentrated visual power and intellectual rigor, often exploring issues of gender, identity, androgyny, and the complex relationship between object and subject. Because the artist chooses not to privilege any one medium, Horn’s art defies easy categorization. Materials – often used with remarkable virtuosity and sensitivity – take on metaphorical qualities and relate key themes with great visual power. Horn’s interest in doubling and identity, for example, is central to understanding her approach to the genres of portraiture and landscape. Image-specific photographic portraits and ethereally beautiful abstract cast glass sculpture relay aspects of both. Similarly, Horn’s intricately cut and pigmented drawings suggest something of the elemental nature of the earth that relates in turn to how the landscape of Iceland, where Horn has traveled and made work since 1975, has informed her practice.

Nasher Museum of Art (Durham, North Carolina)

Beyond Beauty: Photographs from the Duke University Special Collections Library - Through October 18, 2009

Through the work of significant and well-known 19th century photographers as well as the work of contemporary documentary photographers, Beyond Beauty will trace the history of the photographic print from albumen, platinum, gelatin silver, photogravure and color photographs to the most recent “born digital” examples.

Andy Warhol Polaroids - November 12, 2009 – February 21, 2010

There may never have been an artist and a technology so better suited to each other than Andy Warhol and the Polaroid camera. Producing images by the thousands, the Polaroid camera allowed Warhol to revel in mass produced art as well as the fabulousness of instant celebrity. Most of Warhol’s Polaroids were never formally exhibited during his lifetime, but nearly 300 Polaroids and 100 gelatin silver black-and-white prints, taken by Andy Warhol from 1969 to 1986, will be on display.

Hickory Museum of Art (Hickory, North Carolina)

Ebony: Faces of African Americans in Catawba County - Through January 3, 2010

Students from Catawba Valley Community College share photographs of African Americans living and working in Catawba County.

Plains Art Museum (Fargo, North Dakota)

Stories of the Somali Diaspora: Photographs by Abdi Roble - October 15, 2009 – January 10, 2010

This exhibition features 55 black-and-white photos by Abdi Roble, a self-taught Somali photographer from Mogadishu, currently of Columbus, Ohio. Roble’s images capture the transition of Somali immigrants as they adapt to life in the United States. Alongside Roble’s work are items from the Museum’s education collection of Somali artifacts, including prayer mats, musical instruments, and baskets.

North Dakota Museum of Art (Grand Forks, North Dakota)

Chuck Kimmerle: Unapologetic Landscape - Through October 11, 2009

Kimmerle was born and raised in Minnesota, and has been a photographer for more than 20 years. He moved to Grand Forks in 1996 while working as a photojournalist. His subsequent travels throughout the rural areas of the plains gave him an appreciation for the intricacy of the landscape, and the motivation for this ongoing project.

Akron Art Museum (Akron, Ohio)

Nuclear Enchantment: Photographs by Patrick Nagatani – October 10, 2009 – February 14, 2010

Fascinated by his new home state’s marriage with the nuclear industry, Patrick Nagatani began the Nuclear Enchantment series when he moved to Albuquerque in 1987. This exhibition, featuring around 25 works from the series, is drawn entirely from the collection of the Akron Art Museum.

Cincinnati Art Museum (Cincinnati, Ohio)

Image Conscious: Photography and Contemporary Art – Through October 11, 2009

Discover the changing role of photography in contemporary art through a small selection of works from the Art Museum’s permanent collection. From politics and ecology to gender and sexuality; from consumerism and the body to the conceptual engagement with other media, visitors will have a chance to see how contemporary artists have explored these diverse topics through their use of photography.

Cleveland State University Art Gallery (Cleveland, Ohio)

Toplu: Landscapes of New Turkish Suburbia – Through October 10, 2009

This is an exhibition of CSU Assistant Professor Mark Slankard’s photographs of new residential developments on the outskirts of the Turkish cities of Ankara and Istanbul.

Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (Cleveland, Ohio)

Hugging and Wrestling: Contemporary Israeli Photography and Video – Through January 10, 2010

In Hugging and Wrestling, a vivid portrait of Israel emerges through the perspectives of nine artists who respond to the complex shifting realities of the country today. The images are both beautiful and powerful, some deeply personal, others more philosophical, some political. With distinct points of view, the artists portray a land rich in history, and the convergence of multiple cultures, beliefs, and ways of life. But while the artists embrace Israel, they wrestle with political discord, religious divisions, and social inequities. They search for personal and collective identity in a vibrant, evolving, contemporary culture, while wrestling with the vulnerabilities of a country with contested territories where conflict is imminent and ever present.

Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art (Norman, Oklahoma)

The Creative Eye: Selections from the Carol Beesley Collection of Photographs, in Honor of Michael Hennagin - November 7, 2009 – January 3, 2010

This exhibition features photographs from former OU painting faculty member Carol Beesley’s 30-year collection. A recent gift to the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, the collection is a significant addition to the museum’s photography holdings. It includes work by many of the most important figures in the history of modern photography such as Edward Weston, Frederick Sommer, Laura Gilpin and Paul Camponigro, as well as work by well-known contemporary artists William Wegman, Sally Mann and Jerry Uelsmann.

Hallie Ford Museum of Art (Salem, Oregon)

Requiem: By the Photographers Who Died in Vietnam and Indochina - Through November 8, 2009

Organized by photojournalists Horst Faas and Tim Page to honor and remember the 135 photographers who died while working in Vietnam between 1945 and 1975, the exhibition includes work by such notable photojournalists as Robert Capa, Larry Barrows, and a host of other international photographers who contributed significant pictures before they lost their lives.

Allentown Art Museum (Allentown, Pennsylvania)

New Visions: Black and White Photography in Contemporary Art – Through January 10, 2010

In a unique collaboration, three of the leading art and educational institutions in the Lehigh Valley–the Allentown Art Museum, Lafayette College and Lehigh University–will present complementary exhibitions showcasing powerful examples of contemporary photography drawn from the outstanding collection of Arthur and Anne Goldstein. The exhibitions, comprising over 100 superb works in total, will include some of the most important names in contemporary photography, as well as exciting new artists.

Information on the partner exhibits can be found by following the exhibit link.

Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)

Frederick Sommer Photographs – Through January 3, 2010

Over his long life Frederick Sommer (American, 1905–1999) crafted a body of art inflected by surrealist ideas and distinguished by his meticulous love for the art of photographic printing, his broad knowledge of art history, and a keen sense of how the parts of a picture come together to produce meaning. This exhibition surveys five decades of his photography, including disorienting compositions such as Arizona Landscape (1943), a horizonless image that only gradually resolves its components into a desolate desert scene, and equally bewildering subjects such as Max Ernst (1946), in which Sommer experimented with layered negatives, superimposing an image of a rock onto a portrait of the pioneering Dada and surrealist artist to create the illusion of a human morphing into rock.

Woodmere Art Museum (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)

Third Woodmere Triennial of Contemporary Photography and Severo Antonelli – Through January 3, 2010

Philadelphia possesses one of the most significant concentrations of top-tier photographers in the nation. Woodmere’s Triennial exhibitions, initiated in 2003, bring together works by the finest of these artists in a popular celebration of a medium whose power to move us keeps growing. This year’s Triennial curator is Stephen Perloff, founder and editor of The Photo Review.

Woodmere Art Museum’s collecting and exhibiting of photography began in earnest with the 1986 acquisition of the collection of Severo Antonelli (1907-1995), famed South Philadelphia photographer and founder of the Antonelli Institute of Photography. While Antonelli’s photographic output included high achievements in the industrial/commercial sphere, his reputation was founded on his imaginative portrayal of the human figure and face. His figurative works range from playful to provocative and his portraits successfully penetrate the character and personality of the sitter. Woodmere possesses more than 100 of Severo Antonelli’s photographs, spanning his entire career.

Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania)

Documenting Our Past, The Teenie Harris Archive Project, Part Three – Through November 1, 2009

In honor of the 101st birthday of the great chronicler of African American life in Pittsburgh, this exhibition pairs classic photographs by Charles “Teenie” Harris with prize-winning snapshots by children living in Pittsburgh neighborhoods today. Following in the footsteps of the legendary Teenie Harris, these local children have photographed the meaningful people, places, and things in their lives. In keeping with the theme of a child’s vision of Pittsburgh, the Teenie Harris images are selected by his son Charles A. Harris, including scenes of his own childhood. The children’s work is sponsored by the Housing Authority of the City of Pittsburgh and the citywide “Gathering of Peace” antiviolence initiative.

Palm Springs Modern: Photographs by Julius Shulman – Through January 31, 2010

Palm Springs Modern: Photographs by Julius Shulman offers a glimpse of the mid-century architecture and elegant lifestyles of Palm Springs. The exhibition features 100 photographs by renowned Los Angeles–based photographer Julius Shulman, who died this year at the age of 98. His iconic images capture buildings by such Modernist architects as Richard Neutra, Albert Frey, and John Lautner.

Digital to Daguerrotype: Portraits of People – Through January 31, 2010

Most photographs are of people—this has been true since the invention of photography. This exhibition of more than 70 works from the permanent collection and local private collections reveals how photographers from the past 160 years have explored the human subject, through an exceptional range of practices: from daguerreotypes, to black-and-white silver gelatin prints and color chromogenic prints, to digital inkjet prints. Included are rarely exhibited gems by masters of the medium—such as Julia Margaret Cameron, August Sander, Alfred Stieglitz, Robert Frank, and Garry Winogrand—alongside the work of little-known photographers.

Frick Art and Historical Center (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania)

Icons of American Photography: A Century of Photographs from the Cleveland Museum of Art and Children’s Hospital 1951: Photographs by Esther Bubley – Through January 3, 2010

This exhibition presents 58 photographs chronicling the evolution of photography from a scientific curiosity in the 1850s to one of the most potent forms of artistic expression of the 20th century.

Complementing this exhibition, the Frick will present an exhibition entitled Children’s Hospital 1951: Photographs by Esther Bubley, a selection of about 20 photographs by Esther Bubley (1921–1998), on loan from the Children’s Hospital Foundation. In 1951, Bubley, a master of artistic composition and storytelling, was hired by the Pittsburgh Photographic Library to live at the hospital and take photographs of the doctors at work over a period of several weeks.

Palmer Museum of Art (University Park, Pennsylvania)

Big Shot Shuffle: Photographs by Andy Warhol – Through January 24, 2010

During the early 1970s, the Polaroid Corporation briefly manufactured the Big Shot, a camera specifically intended for close-up portraits. The Big Shot’s fixed focal length forced users to “shuffle” back and forth until the desired focus was achieved. Although the camera failed to gain widespread popularity, Warhol was an early enthusiast of the somewhat unwieldy apparatus, in part because of its ability to produce images with nearly standardized compositions and lighting, which made them useful as sources for larger silkscreened portraits.

Newport Art Museum (Newport, Rhode Island)

VISTA Redux: Photographs, 1969 by Federico Santi - Through October 25, 2009

Focus on Four: Rhode Island Photographs by Gertrude Käsebier, Lewis Hine, Charlotte Estey and Aaron Siskind - October 24, 2009 – January 18, 2010

Rhode Island School of Design Museum of art (Providence, Rhode Island)

Joe Deal: New Work - Through January 3, 2010

This exhibition debuts two beautiful new bodies of landscape photographs by distinguished artist Joe Deal. His series West & West: Reimaging the Great Plains (2005–07) captures the expansiveness of this subtle terrain and its dramatic skies. The related series Karst and Pseudokarst (2005–08) began with an image of a lava tube from West & West, and drew Deal to explore further the dark and confined underground landscapes in areas bordering the Great Plains.

Gibbes Museum of Art (Charleston, South Carolina)

Daufuskie Island: Photographs by Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe - October 23, 2009 – January 10, 2010

Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe’s fascination with Daufuskie Island began during visits to the neighboring resort island Hilton Head with her husband, Arthur Ashe, in the 1970s. Her interest resulted in a compelling group of photographs that document life on Daufuskie through sensitive, intimate portraits of island residents.

Columbia Museum of Art (Columbia, South Carolina)

Ansel Adams: Masterworks from the Collection of the Turtle Bay Exploration Center, Redding, CA - October 23, 2009 – January 17, 2010

This collection of 47 gelatin silver prints by Ansel Adams (1902 -1984) represents a selection Adams made late in his life to serve as a representation of his life’s work and what he felt were his best images. Called “The Museum Set,” the full selection of 75 images reveals the importance Adams placed on the drama and splendor of natural environments. Included in Ansel Adams: Masterworks are many of Adams’ most famous and best-loved photographs that encompass the full scope of his work: elegant details of nature, architectural studies, portraits, and the breathtaking landscapes for which he is revered.

Reece Museum (Johnson City, Tennessee)

Big Rock Candy Mountain – Through December 18, 2009

Master of Fine Arts candidate Tammy Mecure has been photographing the tourist towns and the natural beauty of the Smoky Mountains to explore human kinds deepest desires such as being close to animals and being transported to new fantastic places for escape. Some of her themes include the image of the hillbilly, Dolly Parton as a cultural icon, and the historical versus popular image of the American Indian in Cherokee, NC, among many others.

Frist Center for the Visual Arts (Nashville, Tennessee)

Twilight Visions: Surrealism, Photography, and Paris - Through January 3, 2010

Including more than 120 photographs by such artists as Man Ray, Eugène Atget, Brassaï, Hans Bellmer and André Kertész, Twilight Visions will celebrate Paris as the literal and metaphoric foundation of Surrealism. In addition to examining the revolutionary social, aesthetic and political activities of the movement between the world wars, the exhibition will focus on works—predominantly photographs as well as select films, books and period ephemera—that evoke the mystery of the chance encounters experienced by the Surrealists as they wandered through the labyrinthine city streets.

Austin Museum of Art (Austin, Texas)

Chuck Close: A Couple of Ways of Doing Something – Through November 8, 2009

A Couple Ways of Doing Something features Chuck Close’s intimate portraits of leading contemporary artists, paired with Bob Holman’s witty and beautifully typeset poems. The daguerreotypes offer an immensely revealing study of the subjects, extending the hyperrealist tradition of portraiture for which Close is renowned. In keeping with the exhibition title, Chuck Close has included examples of his other works taken from each daguerreotype in a variety of media, including photogravures, digital pigment prints, and large-scale tapestries. In an additional departure for Close, many of the portraits were produced in tandem with praise poems by Bob Holman, founder of the Bowery Poetry Club. Together, they form composite portraits of their subjects—an influential and highly creative circle of friends and colleagues—from Andres Serrano to Cindy Sherman.

Amon Carter Museum (Fort Worth, Texas)

Circle of Friends: Portraits of Artists – Through November 29, 2009

With the advent of American modernism, artists began making portraits of one another with increasing regularity. Photographers made portraits to document the members of their artistic communities, but in so doing they also created works that embody their artistic and personal ambitions.

Masterwork of American Photography: Moments in Time – Through January 3, 2010

Journey through photography’s history in an exhibition of works from the medium’s early years to the present day. Taken together, these images from the Carter’s permanent collection reflect the diversity and richness of an American visual tradition and explore photography’s unique relationship to time.

Edward S. Curtis: The North American Indian – December 12, 2009 – May 16, 2010

In 1900, Edward S. Curtis undertook the momentous task of documenting American Indian cultures across the United States. Over the next thirty years, he took over 40,000 photographs and collected information about more than eighty tribes, ranging from the Inuit people of the far north to the Hopi people of the Southwest.

San Antonio Museum of Art (San Antonio, Texas)

Culinary Delights – Through February 21, 2010

Culinary Delights features the photographs of nationally acclaimed photographer David Halliday, who lives and works in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Utah Museum of Fine Arts (Salt Lake City, Utah)

Desert Secrets: Photographs from the UMFA’s Permanent Collection - Through January 31, 2010

Using both traditional photographic techniques as well as newer forms of digital imaging and surveillance technology, the featured photographers engage themes of technological intrusions into the land; nuclear testing; clandestine military operations; conspiracy theories; and the mysterious appearance of the desert landscape itself.

University of Virginia Art Museum (Charlottesville, Virginia)

Abstract Photography: Selections from Glenstone – Through January 3, 2010

Abstract Photography presents works by seven artists dating from the 1970s to the present. The exhibition demonstrates how over the course of thirty years photographers have rejected certain modernist aesthetics in favor of conceptual theory, resulting in eventless imagery devoid of specific narrative. Such works as Index (1973) by William Wegman and How Many Pictures (1989) by Louise Lawler exemplify these tendencies while Vik Muñiz’s Equivalents (1993) and Wolfgang Tillmans’ Himmelblau (2005) further develop the syntactic investigations of these earlier images in works that are decidedly of the twenty-first century. In these pictures, photography as document is disrupted and expanded and the intimacy of a singular object gives way to seriality and monumentality.

Chrysler Museum of Art (Norfolk, Virginia)

Norfolk and Western Railway Photographs by O. Winston Link – Through October 18, 2009

This exhibition displays power and majesty of the steam-powered locomotive as seen through the remarkable eye of photographer O. Winston Link.

Lora Robins Gallery of Design from Nature (Richmond, Virginia)

Ansel Adams: The Man Who Captured the Earth’s Beauty – Through December 6, 2009

The exhibition consists of more than twenty black-and-white photographs taken by Ansel Adams (American, 1902–1984) from 1927 to 1960. His dramatic images serve as profound reminders of his reverence for the beauty of the earth and the healing force of nature in our lives.

Henry Art Gallery (Seattle, Washington)

Inside-Out: Portrait Photographs from the Permanent Collection - Through October 25, 2009

When a subject and a photographer come together and agree that a likeness will be made, a complex dynamic is set in motion. Vanity comes into play, as does the subject’s comfort or discomfort at being scrutinized by the camera. The influence of popular culture may also affect body posture and expression, as can the relationship between the photographer and the sitter. Do they know each other? And if so, is there trust or intimacy between them? This exhibition contains a selection of photographs largely from the noted Monsen collection – including images by Imogen Cunningham, Patrick Faigenbaum, Nan Goldin, and others – that suggests a broad definition of portraiture. From pictures of artists’ friends and family members to formal studio portraits, the works in this exhibition assert photography’s capacity both to register a subject’s physical characteristics and hint at the complexity within.

Seattle Art Museum (Seattle, Washington)

Everything Under the Sun: Photographs by Imogen Cunningham – Through August 29, 2010

Imogen Cunningham (1883–1976) was one of the most well-known photographers from the Northwest. Working at a time when women photographers were few, Cunningham dedicated her life to her art. Drawn entirely from the Seattle Art Museum’s permanent collection, this exhibition of 60 photographs from 1915 to 1973 reveal Cunningham’s inquisitive eye—from portraits of Frida Kahlo, Alfred Stieglitz and other well-known artists of her time to portraits of her husband on Mt. Rainier, considered some of the first known photographs to be published of a male nude taken by a female photographer (in 1916) and much more. Spanning the artist’s career, the photographs on view demonstrate the breadth and range of Cunningham’s artistic vision and showcase one of the strengths of SAM’s photography collection.

Haggerty Museum of Art (Milwaukee, Wisconsin)

Persian Visions: Contemporary Photography from Iran – October 14, 2009 – January 17, 2010

Persian Visions: Contemporary Photography from Iran is an exhibition of more than 60 works of photography and video installations by 20 of Iran’s most celebrated photographers. The exhibition gathers personal perspectives of contemporary Iran filtered through individual sensibilities, while simultaneously addressing public concerns.

Paine Art Center and Gardens (Oshkosh, Wisconsin)

Seeing Ourselves: Masterpieces of American Photography from George Eastman House Collections – Through October 18, 2009

This exhibition features over a hundred iconic images from the internationally acclaimed George Eastman House collection of Rochester, New York. Spanning more than 150 years of photography, Seeing Ourselves dramatically illustrates our country’s landscape, people, and historic events through works ranging from vast western landscapes to important documentary photographs to intimate celebrity portraits. Artists represented include such masters of American photography as Ansel Adams, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, Richard Avedon, Lewis Hine, Dorothea Lange, and more. The exhibition is the largest presentation of masterpieces of American photography ever shown in Wisconsin.

Racine Art Museum (Racine, Wisconsin)

Wisconsin Photography 2009 – Through November 28, 2009

RAM’s Wustum Museum of Fine Arts continues a Racine tradition with the opening of Wisconsin Photography 2009. Featuring 90 pieces by 45 Wisconsin photographers and video artists, this year’s show continues to introduce the museum’s visitors to a wide range of photographic media and artists’ viewpoints.

University of Wyoming Art Museum (Laramie, Wyoming)

American Heritage Center Exhibition: In Pursuit of Equality – Through December 23, 2009

Curated from the American Heritage Center collection, In Pursuit of Equality tells the story of three women, Nellie Tayloe Ross, Thyra Thomson, and Liz Byrd, who through their actions as elected office holders, challenged and changed the conventional understanding of equality in Wyoming. More specifically, it will look at Ms. Ross’ election as Governor, Ms. Thomson’s advocacy for the Equal Rights Amendment, and Ms. Byrd’s struggle to have Martin Luther King Jr. Day recognized in Wyoming. The exhibition features photographs and three historic documents. It was curated by Matt Francis, Assistant Archivist at the American Heritage Center.

This image is from a forthcoming series that is still slightly under wraps, but it’s been forever since I’ve posted so I thought I would give you a teaser.

Bad news for some of my critics – I have not shut down, stopped working, or died. In fact, life is part of the problem… there have been some MAJOR family issues going on the last couple of weeks, and by the time I get home in the evenings I am dead on my feet. Doesn’t make for good blog writing behavior. On the upside, I am working on a major personal project (which will be unveiled in about four weeks), and planning for another major project (details of which will be unveiled around early November).

On  another note, I’d like to mention that Darren Dale has started selling some of his fine art work through his blog, A Photographic Journal. Details about the series and a special free print offer are available here.

Hopefully I’ll be back to semi-regular posting soon, and look for a major series over the next week or so on this fall’s museum scene.

I’ve had a lot of response on the announcement of new releases in the Errata Editions Books on Books series. So, keeping in mind that the closer you are to a project the more you know about it, I’d like to link to Jeff Ladd’s announcement on his 5B4 blog.

I’m happy to see that Jeff will again be blogging from on press in China, as he did last year.