My image, The Reader (below) will appear in the Capture Brooklyn show put on by the organizers of the NY Photo Festival at the powerHouse gallery . The show opens September 23rd and runs through October 15th. So if you are in NY for the opening on the 23rd come down and say hi, or stop by and check it out!

The Reader

I spend a fair amount of time in the little town of Telluride and those who follow this here blog may recall that I participated in a bookbinding and box making class at the Ah Haa last fall (check out the fruits of that labor). While I’d given them work in years prior for their silent auction, this year Lauren asked if I’d like to be included in the main event, the live auction. I felt honored and I hope that my print will help raise a little much needed cash for the small local arts organization.

Check out the print below just before it got shipped out yesterday and see the most recent image from the Hotel Delmano series here.

30″x34″ Flowers at the Hotel Delmano #1 print (1 of 5)

Stripped Shirt

Regarding Review LA: this being my first portfolio review I could only guess what the experience would be like, but I have to say it scarcely could have been better. It goes without saying that if you’re not open to hearing criticism (especially at this early stage) then a portfolio review isn’t a worthwhile way to spend your time. However, I was ready and excited to hear from others how I might improve, refine and develop some of my latest work, a fair amount of which hasn’t even graced this very blog. As a result, I found it was eye-opening and inspiring to look more objectively at my own work.

Main Palm

Amidst all this introspective evaluation and shoe gazing, the most enjoyable part of the weekend was getting the chance to meet and spend a little time hanging out with some of the other photographers in the hotel lobby, where everyone was killing time between reviews chatting and checking out each other’s work. In particular, I got the chance to hang out a bit with Liz Kuball during the public showing at Photo LA. She was at Review LA showing her beautiful California Vernacular project. I had seen an image or two of hers floating around places like 20×200, so it was cool to see so much more of the collection in person. I also got to meet and talk with Susan Worsham who’s Some Fox Trails in Virginia is lovely and quietly unsettling in a wonderful way, as well as Sarah Windels and Andrew Ti. All in all there was a lot of work to see and some cool new people to keep up with.

Garden Hose

Untitled (Green Painted Room)

La Fete

Untitled (Frond)

Paradise

© Ryan McGinley for the NY Times

If your in LA and interested in seeing all the work being reviewed, there is a showing open to the public Friday Jan 15th from 5-8pm. Come down and say hi.

Hold Tight Cover

Hold Tight Interior and Selection of Prints

UPDATE

I just read that the Met will be showing an exhibition celebrating the 50th anniversary of Robert Frank’s The Americans beginning September 22nd and running through the end of the year. The exhibition is currently in San Francisco and ending it’s tour here in NY. Not to be missed!

Either way, I encourage anyone who makes a living from creative work to send an email to Google expressing your disapproval. I know what you are thinking, it is naïve to think that any grassroots effort on our part will in any way effect the practices of a corporation the size of Google. However, if we sit idly by and watch it happen, we are tacitly expressing our approval of this type of treatment making it ever more difficult for creative people to make a living creating.

UPDATE 6/25/09

So it seems that all of a sudden there is a new browser competing for our searches: Microsoft’s Bing. I’m not entirely sure that Microsoft is any less of a megalomaniacal corporation than Google, but here’s to hoping that they’ll at least give Google a run for their money and possibly contest their dominance (which obviously has a great deal to do with the reasoning behind their unethical behavior as noted above: it is because they CAN). A little competition would be good for everyone involved, so I’ll be giving Bing a try and who knows maybe I’ll end up preferring it.

I was also pleasantly surprised to find that Aperture’s exhibition The Edge of Vision was also still on display. The collection got me thinking about the abstract potential of photography, being that it is most often such a literal medium. But it is really not much of a stretch at all, considering how an early innovator like Edward Weston* with his semi-abstract landscapes and still lives, forced you to pause, if only for a moment, to reconsider what it is that you are seeing in a photograph. Since the jury is still out on whether or not I’ll be posting the copyrighted work of others on this blog, I thought I’d dig into the archive and share an abstraction of my own, even though it is really just cross-processed and out of focus. Enjoy.

Untitled (barrier) 2008

* As a side note, i just read yesterday that James Danziger is working on what he describes as a revisionist approach to showing Edward Weston for his gallery Danziger Projects. Exciting!

Other standouts in my opinion were, without a doubt, the abstract color images of Enrst Haas, which reminded me of what I love about William Eggleston. Additionally, there was some beautiful if albeit less socially or politically relevant images by Rene and Radka – who prove once again that you can shoot fashion and still be recognized as artists. In the satellite show of the Tobacco warehouse I found some lovely images by Naho Kubota from her series Minimum Structure.

I’ve left out the images that go along with this post, after attending the panel on the relevance of blogging in the photographic community where the question was posed about the potential copyright issues associated with blogging about others’ work. The panel (consisting of: Jorg Colberg, Cara Philips, Laurel Ptak, Andrew Hetherington and Brain Ulrich) are all preeminent bloggers in the photographic community and promptly dismissed the issue when it was raised. However, I believe it is more complicated than they would admit on stage and am taking the time to think about it thoroughly before moving forward. More on this later…