Report on the Opening Night of the Photo Independent and Fabrik Expo Show
Last night I had the great pleasure to attend the opening of this important annual event, held at the Reef in Downtown Los Angeles.
It is a great opportunity to get in touch with old friends and make some new ones as well. The ever so gracious host, Chris Davies of Fabrik Media with his great staff, did a fabulous job making everyone feel welcome and taken care of.
Especially noteworthy this year was the attraction called Skulpturengarten, which even included a set of nature scenes on large panels by Sandra Mann – photography as sculpture. Other attractions were architectural shots by Richard S. Chow, abstracts by Jonas Yip, the work by Cathy Immordino, which has a special appeal, as it combines old and new elements; check it out below. On the even more edgy side, there were nudes and other provocative images by a number of gifted photographers; I was particularly impressed by the work presented by Vlad Kenner, Carl Shubs, and Milan von Brünn. A special treat was the series Dressed by Jerry Weber: his fascinating work that touches many subjects – especially gender, culture, and fantasy – was ably enhanced by the presence of some of his models in costume, as you can see in my images below.
Since I am on the Editorial Board of The PhotoBook Journal, I was also looking out for interesting books. Jonas Yip, Richard S. Chow, Ara Oshagan, and Douglas Stockdale were ably conversing with many interested guests concerning previous and new book projects; check out our forthcoming book reviews for more details. Not only that, but the renowned printing company Dual Graphics of Brea, California, whose work goes back all the way to Ansel Adams, was present to consult with potential authors.
A most enjoyable event; as announced in previous posts, the show continues through Sunday, October 7. Don’t miss it!
Gerhard Clausing
Dennis Keeley, Chair of Photography at Art Center College of Design, in conversation with Chris Davies (right)
Jonas Yip
Richard S. Chow
Cathy Immordino
Upper picture: Douglas Stockdale, whose books are printed by Dual Graphics. Craig Evans, lower picture right, explains the finer points of quality printing to a potential customer.
Where does reality end and fantasy begin?
All photographs above Copyright © 2018 by Gerhard Clausing
Remembering Hannes Wanderer
Hannes Wanderer — Photo Courtesy of and © Nathaniel Grann
We are very sad to note the untimely death this month of Hannes Wanderer, publisher of Peperoni Books, as well as proprietor of 25books, a bookstore on Brunnenstrasse in Berlin.
Hannes was a very special and unique person. He was totally committed to the cause – publishing and promoting photobooks, albeit to the exclusion of much else. Whenever you would go to his store, you would experience a gracious storyteller and teacher, who along the way persuaded you of the value of some of the photobooks available each time, as well as their contexts. He shared his tremendous understanding of the fields of photography and publishing, and freely gave advice if and when you wanted it, also about potential projects the visitor might have been contemplating. Stories about crowded subways in Japan, rural rituals in the American midwest, a mother in Russia and stories told to her child, a German fellow who started a family that grew and thus resulted in a three-volume set of photobooks. Well, he was able to still let me have a proof copy of the first volume of that latter set, and I have the other two as well (einer-zwei-drei by Fred Hüning); they were snapped up quickly, since the assessment of the market that Hannes had was quite realistic, and he shared all that with you each time. He had a special sensitivity toward the needs of each visitor, shown by the stories that he was able to tailor to the visitor’s goals and purposes – a rare talent. I particularly enjoyed his tales about the printing craft, especially about his collaboration with his brother in Lower Saxony, where I briefly lived as a child.
60 is way too early an age at which such a treasure should be lost to us. We will hold Hannes Wanderer in the highest esteem, as a member of the photographic community, and especially as an honest, gracious, and enthusiastic human being!
Gerhard Clausing
Survey of Contemporary Landscape
Diane Reeves, Pyramid, Nevada
The investigation and image capture of the landscape dates back to the earliest photographs made by a camera in 1826 by Joseph Nicephore Niepce and the landscape still remains as one of the classic photographic genres.
Photographers have romanticized the landscape as part of the Pictorialist movement in the early 1900’s and incorporated it into the Modernist movement of the f/64 group in the 1940’s through the late 1960’s. The landscape photograph evolved with the Conceptual art movement, harking back to the New Topographics exhibition in 1975 at the George Eastman House exhibition. Today landscape photographs have become ubiquitous, either in the multitude of family vacations or the documentation of the surrounding urban/rural environments posted on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr or other social media.
The images in Contemporary Landscape in this on-line exhibition are a broad investigation of the myriad ways in which we investigate the landscape through art and photography. It is a photographic survey of current landscape practices; whether investigating “classic” unadorned nature or the gritty urban landscape, as an abstract concept or a straight rendition while being created using digital capture, analog/film, digital manipulation or in combination with other medium and artistic expressions.
The 13 artist/photographers in this exhibition include: Paul Anderson, Jan Brueckner, Ellen Butler, Frank Cancian, Gerhard “Gerry” Clausing, Jim McKinniss, Jim Koch, Stan Kuran, Janos Lanyi, Scott Mathews, Marc Plouffe, Diane Reeves, Douglas Stockdale.
Cheers!
Douglas Stockdale, Exhibition Curator
Survey of Contemporary Landscape
Jan Brueckner
Frank Cancian
Jim Koch
Stan Kuran
CONNECTIONS
copyright Jim Koch
CONNECTIONS exhibition
Photography is a medium that allows us to connect: to communicate with other individuals as well as with the world as our ever-present backdrop. While in our current time digital processes seem to create distance, the medium of photography cuts through this digital omnipresence and enables us to address human concerns and to draw parallels and achieve insights that are at the core of our existence. Time, place, light, and emotions inspire the photographer to create images which are intended to engage the viewer in our shared human experience, and a multitude of human emotions can be elicited through images that range from the tangible to the abstract and metaphorical.
The images in CONNECTIONS present individual interpretations of the myriad ways in which we connect to each other through photography. As the images were created, a connection between the subject and the photographer was established. A second level of connection may be shown or implied through the elements depicted in the photograph. A third connection then is created by the viewer’s interpretation of the image. Thus the process of CONNECTIONS is indeed a multifaceted and creative one that reaches beyond the depiction itself and is intended to share human experiences and interpretation, facilitated though the medium of photography.
Artists & photographers who are included in this exhibition include: Diane Andrus, Diane Reeves, Douglas Stockdale, Ellen Butler, Frank Cancian, Gerhard Clausing, Jan Brueckner, Janos Lanyi, Jim Ashcroft, Kathy Shapiro, Jim Koch, Marc Plouffe, Michael Weitzman, Paul Anderson, Raquel Landworth-Kleinhenz, Robert Staeck, Roger Bennett, Scott Mathews, Stan Kuran, & William Edwards (listed by first name). Copyrights belong to each artist/photographer.
Curated by Douglas Stockdale
Exhibition:
Diane Andrus
![ellen butler Anne [right]](https://thephotoexchange.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/ellen-butler-anne-right.jpg?w=720)
Frank Cancian
Jan Brueckner
Jim Ashcroft
Kathy Shapiro
Michael Weitzman
Raquel Landworth-Kleinhenz
Robert Staeck
Stan Kuran
Medium Festival Accepting Submissions for Size Matters; Some Portfolio Review Openings
Our media partner, the Medium Festival of Photography in San Diego, Oct. 18-21, 2018, is accepting submissions for the Size Matters Exhibition throughout July. They also have a few openings for portfolio reviews left at this point.
Size Matters is the signature exhibition of the annual Medium Festival, presenting a curated selection of works smaller than 10″. The exhibition echoes our belief in small gatherings, small works, and exhibitions that highlight these values. The 2018 exhibition will be held at Sparks Gallery in San Diego’s Gaslamp district with an opening reception on Oct. 20 from 7-10pm. The exhibition juror is Brian Clamp, director of ClampArt in New York City.
Three awards are given to participating photographers, including a $500 Purchase Award where the selected work of art will be donated to a prominent museum collection. The Director’s Choice Award will include two VIP Passes to the 2019 Medium Festival, and an honorable mention will receive a significant award from our supporters.
Photo Independent 2018: Los Angeles Oct. 5-7 and Paris Nov. 8-11
PHOTO INDEPENDENT IN LOS ANGELES
AND LAUNCHING IN PARIS
Photo Independent is excited to announce it will also be launching a Paris edition this fall. Applications now open!
Photo Independent Paris will be located at the Carousel du Louvre (at the Louvre Museum), and will be sharing the venue with fotofever, a gallery-based photo fair — who will be celebrating their 7th edition this year.
Both fairs will be celebrated alongside Paris Photo and many other photography events in November during what is known as PARIS PHOTO WEEK in Paris.
FROM THE NEWS RELEASE:
As the leading photographic art fair worldwide for affordable, contemporary photography, Photo Independent is here to support photographers gain the exposure they are seeking.
Connect with the European Market
Sharing a venue with fotofever, who attracted over 10,000 visitors in 2017, will enhance the exposure for photographic artists participating in Photo Independent Paris, and their ability to connect with collectors and lovers of photography in Europe.
We are offering previous exhibitors of Photo Independent Los Angeles the first opportunity to apply for the Paris edition, as there is a limited number of photographers we can accommodate this year.
Photographers who are interested in participating in both Los Angeles and Paris will receive a discount to participate for both fairs.
Please, if you are interested in participating in Paris, don’t hesitate to apply, as we ARE limited in the amount of photographers we can showcase for this year.
More information about Photo Independent Paris can be found on our website at photoindependent.com.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact Chris: chris@photoindependent.com. There are also discounts for participating in both Los Angeles and Paris fairs.
LACP Exposure 2018 – Portfolio Reviews, Workshops, Seminars – July 20-22, Registering Now
Registration for Exposure Weekend 2018 conducted by the Los Angeles Center of Photography is now in progress. The portfolio reviewers and workshop/seminar presenters this year are a particularly interesting group. You can get your work assessed, learn some new things, and meet some more fellow photographers! Highly recommended!
EXPOSURE 2018
Friday – Sunday, July 20-22, 2018
Hotel MdR in Marina del Rey, CA, near LAX airport
Registration is now open for the following portfolio reviewers, workshops, and seminars:
Photo by Julia Dean
Portfolio Reviewers still available:
Chad Attie, Gallery Director, Eastern Star Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Sherrie Berger, Photo Consultant, Los Angeles, CA; Jonathan Blaustein, Contributor, NYTimes Lensblog and A Photo Editor; Kyle Bradley, CEO/Founder, Nava Print Studio, Chicago, IL; Susan Burnstine, Contributor, B+W Magazine (UK); Marisa Caicholo, Founder/Curator of Building Bridges Art Exchange, Los Angeles, CA; Catherine Couturier, Owner/Director, Catherine Couturier Gallery, Houston, TX; Chris Davies, Founder/Director, Fabrik Projects Gallery and Photo Independent, Los Angeles, CA; Michael Dawson, Owner, Michael Dawson Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, Crista Dix, Founder/Director, Wallspace Creative, Santa Barbara, CA; Christy Havranek, Photo Director, Huffington Post; Virginia Heckert, Curator, Department of Photographs, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA (Almost SOLD OUT); Anne Kelly, Gallery Director, photo-eye Gallery, Santa Fe, NM; Randi Kreeft, Gallery Director, the Loft at Liz’s Art Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Dhyandra Lawson, Curatorial Asst., Department of Photography, LA County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Douglas Marshall, Independent Curator/Appraiser; Kristina Newhouse, Curator, University Art Museum, Long Beach, CA; Cindy Rowe, Art Producer, Saatchi & Saatchi, Torrance, CA; Aimee Santos, Editorial Picture Editor, Shutterstock; Cheyanne Sauter, Executive Director, Art Share LA, Los Angeles, CA; Hannah Sloan, Founder/Director Sloan Projects; Sybylla Smith, International Curator, Educator and Consultant; Aline Smithson, Founder/Editor, Lenscratch (Almost SOLD OUT); Mackenzie Stevens, Curatorial Assistant, Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (Almost SOLD OUT); Douglas Stockdale, Founder/Editor, The PhotoBook Journal; Yessica Torres, Curator, Dab Art, Ventura, CA.
Cool workshops and seminars, including:
Friday, July 20
10:00 am – 4:00 pm – Workshop – Now What? Re-energizing Your Photography Career with Aline Smithson
10:00 am – 1:00 pm – Seminar – Steps to Success for Photographers with Sherrie Berger
02:00 pm – 5:00 pm – Seminar – The Business of Gallery Representation with Crista Dix
Saturday, July 21
09:30 am – 5:00 pm – Workshop – Concept Aware: Enhance Your Creative Practice with Sybylla Smith
10:00 am – 1:00 pm – Seminar – Fine Art Digital Printmaking: Why and How with Cheryl Kelleher Walsh & Eric Joseph
02:00 pm – 5:00 pm – Seminar – Untangling The Web of Social Media with Paul-Michael Carr
Sunday, July 22
09:30 am – 5:00 pm – Workshop – Pushing Your Work Forward with Jonathan Blaustein
09:30 am – 1:30 pm – Workshop – Street Shooting on Venice Beach with Julia Dean
01:00 pm – 4:00 pm – Workshop – A to Z Grantwriting with Linda Vallejo
SoCal Photo Exchange is a proud media sponsor of Exposure 2018
Laguna Art Museum: Oskar Fischinger and the Interconnectedness of the Arts
Yesterday I had the good fortune to view some paintings of German-born Southern California artist Oskar Fischinger (1900-1967) at the Laguna Art Museum. I also met his son Richard Fischinger and his son’s wife, Mary.
At a time when we are starting to see censorship of critical art in this country (Rob Rogers, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette), it behooves us to think back to what happened in Europe in the early 20th Century, when art that did not fit the political preferences of a narrowly-focused government was labeled “degenerate” (entartet, which actually means “outside of the [politically approved] style of art”) and therefore forbidden. Oskar Fischinger had to leave Germany in the 1930s because his works did not match the preferences of the people in power.
How are his paintings and inventions relevant to our thinking about photography and other arts?
Fischinger’s works are an artistic mirror of concurrent technical and artistic developments. In a time long before the ease of digital manipulations, he set hand-drawn photographed animations to music, independently and also with some major studios. Some of these animations can be seen and purchased from the Center for Visual Music currently. He was well versed in camera work and invented a wax-processing machine that projected colorful light patterns that could be manipulated for special effects. In this respect, his work was very much in parallel with his contemporaries Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray, as well as Kandinsky, Klee, Feininger, Mondrian, and Miró. His paintings are a wonderful kaleidoscope of his time, in that they reflect the wonders of industrial achievements and space exploration through the 1960s, and the ideas are expressed in artistic forms that are now called “mixed-media”.
The two paintings below shows some of these effects as displayed at the Laguna Art Museum. I immediately felt a kinship with Oskar Fischinger, as my own work in the last few months has taken me to similar levels of abstraction. I recently showed the work “Overture” at a meeting of the Photographers’ Exchange Group in Irvine, and some members could immediately hear music in their minds. The image “The Arrival” certainly also intimates some kind of travel in time and space, although, as may be the case in all of these works, they may also be a metaphor for internal mental processes.
Oskar Fischinger, “Snow White – Red Circle,” 1943
Gerhard Clausing, “Overture,” 2018
Oskar Fischinger, “Satellite,” 1950-60
Gerhard Clausing, “The Arrival,” 2018
Oskar Fischinger also painted a lot of “Heads” in his time, some of which were visualized full of associative symbols and objects. Especially the example which Richard Fischinger showed me on his cellphone (of an Oskar Fischinger painting in his collection), shown below, reminded me of the current work of my friend Sandra Klein, who enhances large photographic silhouettes of herself and her mother with needlework and a variety of other objects as a comprehensive artistic metaphor combining past and present; both works transcend media as well as time and space.
So it is definitely inspiring to look in on the work of a universal talent from the last century, since the work and its implications can affect our own present and future work, as well as our assessment of art as part of our own expression and understanding of life. To talk with Richard Fischinger was also instructive; he was always warned by his dad to be mindful of the dangers of authoritarianism. My thanks to Richard and Mary for their insights.
The selection of paintings by Oskar Fischinger will be shown at the Laguna Art Museum through June 17, 2018. For those interested in delving deeper into this subject, a dissertation was written by Martina Dillmann at the Universität Frankfurt in 2004 (in German) that also includes a thorough inventory of the paintings.
Mary and Richard Fischinger at the Laguna Art Museum, June 7, 2018
Douglas Stockdale – Artist talk at Fabrik Projects June 2nd
Middle Ground exhibition, Fabrik Projects, photograph by Don Webb II
One of the requests that apparently reoccurred during my opening reception is for an artist talk about this exhibition and artist project. The artist talk is now scheduled to coincide with the exhibition closing reception at 4pm on Saturday, June 2nd (2018) at the Fabrik Projects gallery.
To talk about myself and my art projects is not always the easiest thing for me to do. To write about it as I have on this blog is okay, perhaps something I am more comfortable with in that I have an opportunity to develop what I write and the edit before I commit to publishing it. Even then when I have some second thoughts, I can come back and edit what I wrote. I am also very comfortable teaching a workshop about a subject that I am very familiar with, such as my book development class with LACP. Talking about myself and my art projects, perhaps not so much.
What does help if I start taking some notes to outline what I want to convey, then leaving plenty of time for questions and answers. I am going to try to cover the basics about this artist project: what, where, when, how and maybe the most critical; why. I also suspect that this will be a walking talk, not a formal group sit-down, which will help me a little bit more in that it’s a bit easier for me if I can walk and talk about the exhibition.
The photograph above is the exhibition space that I had envisioned for this project in how the photographs (barriers) would ring around a room and thus surround the viewer. One of the many exhibition trade-offs; larger prints but then less images in this space. It will be interesting to get some more feedback during my talk as I already plan to defer to some open ended questions for the group.
Location: Fabrik Projects; 2636 S. La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles (near Culver City)
Artist talk & reception: Saturday, June 2nd, 4 -7pm
Cheers & hope to see you there!
Doug Stockdale, Associate Editor
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