Showing posts with label Louisiana. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Louisiana. Show all posts

26/09/22

Called to the Camera: Black American Studio Photographers @ NOMA - New Orleans Museum of Art

Called to the Camera: 
Black American Studio Photographers
New Orleans Museum of Art
September 15, 2022 – January 8, 2023

The New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) presents Called to the Camera: Black American Studio Photographers, a major exhibition focusing on the artistic virtuosity, social significance, and political impact of Black American photographers working in commercial portrait studios during photography’s first century and beyond. Organized by NOMA, the exhibition focuses on a national cohort of professional camera operators, demonstrating the incredible variety of work that they produced and their influence on the broader history of photography. Featuring more than 150 photographs spanning from the 19th century to present day—many of which have never been publicly exhibited and are unique objects.

The exhibition explores how Black studio photographers operated on the developing edge of photographic media from its earliest introduction in the United States. They produced affirming portraits for their clients, while also engaging in other kinds of paid photographic work exemplary of important movements in art like pictorialism and modernism. Called to the Camera features work by over three dozen photographers located across the country, demonstrating how the Black photography studio was a national phenomenon. The exhibition includes an interspersed selection of works by modern and contemporary artists, illustrating connections between the historical legacy of Black photography studios and what we consider to be fine art photography today.

Photographers whose works are featured in Called to the Camera include James Van Der Zee and Addison Scurlock, who worked on a national stage, as well as photographers who were active regionally, among them Florestine Perrault Collins and A.P. Bedou (New Orleans, LA), Reverend Henry Clay Anderson (Greenville, MS), Morgan and Marvin Smith (New York City), and Robert and Henry Hooks (Memphis, TN). Among the contemporary photographers included in the exhibition are Endia Beal, Elliott Jerome Brown Jr., and Polo Silk. 

The exhibition features a range of different types of images, from some of the earliest daguerreotypes of significant Black Americans (such as Frederick Douglass) to early hand-painted gelatin silver prints and panoramic photographs, as well as camera equipment, studio ephemera, and an immersive re-creation of a noted studio’s reception room.
“Chief among NOMA’s goals is to support important projects that amplify the histories of under-represented communities,” said Susan Taylor, Montine McDaniel Freeman Director of the New Orleans Museum of Art. “Called to the Camera does exactly that: it articulates a story that is both local and national, centering the importance of Black photographers in their communities and in the history of photography.”

“As we continue to build our notable photography holdings to make our collection and our exhibition program truly reflect our audiences, this thoughtfully researched national exploration of Black American studio photography is a vital contribution to this work,” added Russell Lord, Freeman Family Curator of Photographs at the New Orleans Museum of Art.

Brian Piper, exhibition curator and Assistant Curator of Photographs at the New Orleans Museum of Art added, “Building on the foundational work of scholars like Dr. Deborah Willis, this exhibition gathers original works by a professional class of Black photographers linked by a shared set of visual and cultural concerns. By bringing these objects—many never before exhibited—into the art museum, we can help reframe the history of American photography and place Black photographers and sitters at the center of that story. Called to the Camera is, in part, an argument for a reconsideration of how historians and institutions evaluate and display photography.”
The exhibition is organized into five sections across 6,000 square feet that proceed chronologically and thematically from the 1840s to present day. The first section emphasizes the pivotal role Black American photographers played in photography during the 19th century, focusing on the establishment of commercial studio practices in the United States by photographers like James Presley Ball and the Goodridge Brothers. The second gallery evokes early 20th century commercial studios and domestic interiors, providing a contextual framework that illustrates the ways in which Black Americans used photography after 1900 to shape both private lives and public expressions of self. From there, the exhibition focuses closely on the practices of a half-dozen photographic studios, providing insights into both similarities and differences across geographies and exploring how these artists used a range of photographic processes and aesthetic styles through the end of the 1960s.

As a whole, the exhibition considers other work that portrait studio photographers engaged in during this time, including photojournalism, advertising, and event photography. Beyond portraits, Called to the Camera demonstrates how Black American studio photographers worked on the vanguard of fine art photography and argues that the business of the studio cannot be divorced from the rest of these photographers’ practices. 

Called to the Camera: Black American Studio Photographers is curated by Dr. Brian Piper, NOMA’s Assistant Curator of Photographs. The exhibition draws works from both NOMA’s institutional holdings as well as works loaned from both notable public and private collections including the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; National Museum of African American History and Culture; the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University; and Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

Called to the Camera: Black American Studio Photographers
Called to the Camera
Black American Studio Photographers
Exhibition Catalog
Available for pre-order, arriving October 2022
Called to the Camera is accompanied by a catalog distributed by Yale University Press featuring over 100 color plates and essays by leading scholars of photographic and Black American history including Dr. John Edwin Mason, Carla Williams, Russell Lord, and Brian Piper.
The exhibition is sponsored by Catherine and David Edwards; Kitty and Stephen Sherrill; Andrea and Rodney Herenton; Tina Freeman and Philip Woollam; Milly and George Denegre; and Cherye and Jim Pierce. Additional support is provided by Philip DeNormandie; Aimee and Michael Siegel; and the Del and Ginger Hall Photography Fund. This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. Research for this project was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

NEW ORLEANS MUSEUM OF ART - NOMA
One Collins C. Diboll Circle, City Park, New Orleans, Louisiana 70124

14/04/19

Timothy Duffy @ New Orleans Museum of Art - Blue Muse

Timothy Duffy: Blue Muse
New Orleans Museum of Art
April 25 - July 28, 2019

Timothy Duffy
Timothy Duffy
(American, b. 1969)
John Dee Holeman, Hillsboro, NC, 2015
Tintype, 14 x 14 in.
Courtesy of the artist

Timothy Duffy
Timothy Duffy
(American, b. 1969)
Pat Cohen, Bourbon Street Queen, Hillsboro, NC, 2015
Tintype, 14 x 10 in. 
Courtesy of the artist

The New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) presents Timothy Duffy: Blue Muse. Using a photography process invented in the United States in the nineteenth-century, Timothy Duffy creates masterful one-of-a-kind tintype portraits of American musicians, preserving the faces of American roots music for future generations. 
“Tim Duffy’s choice of the tintype aligns with a distinctly American history of photography, while his subjects represent one of the most important legacies in the United States,” said Susan Taylor, NOMA’s Montine McDaniel Freeman Director. “His work to preserve this part of southern culture is monumentally important. We look forward to sharing it with the city of New Orleans.” 
Featuring artists from the American South, including local New Orleans legends such as Alabama Slim, Little Freddie King, and Pat “Mother Blues” Cohen, NOMA’s premier of Blue Muse features 30 of Duffy’s original unique tintypes. In order to give these underrepresented cultural figures even greater visibility, Blue Muse also includes an outdoor component in which the museum partners with a number of local sites to install enormous images on buildings around New Orleans, introducing the public to these musicians. 

Timothy Duffy’s tintypes are an artful extension of his other occupation, as founder and Executive Director of the Music Maker Relief Foundation, which provides support and promotion for Southern American musicians. “In making these photographs, in compelling us to pay attention, look closer, know their faces, and learn their names, Duffy has enlisted one American tradition, the tintype, in the service of securing another,” Said Russell Lord, NOMA’s Freeman Family Curator of Photographs. 

The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated book, Blue Muse, published by UNC Press and the New Orleans Museum of Art. 

Timothy Duffy
Blue Muse: Timothy Duffy’s southern photographs
UNC Press in association with the New Orleans Museum of Art
Foreword by Russel Lord
Introduction by William Ferris
152 pages, 60 color plates, 12 x 12 in.

NEW ORLEANS MUSEUM OF ART - NOMA
One Collins C. Diboll Circle, City Park, New Orleans, Louisiana 70124

11/03/09

Lise Sarfati - The New Life (2003)

In the serie of color photographs taken through United States -from Austin to Asheville, Portland to Berkeley, Oakland, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Louisiana and small towns in Georgia- each portrait dramatizes the complexity of adolescent identity showing an intensity that adults will never be able to experience again. Lise Sarfati explores the dividing lines between good and bad, happiness and sadness, innocence and perversity, reality and fantasy. With a minimal choregraphy, she activates connections with her subjects in their everyday spaces and situations – bedrooms, backyards, kitchens, grocery stores. The title The New Life refers to Dante Aligheri and Beatrice Portinari, who were children when they met in 1274 in Firenze "She died and La Vita Nuova is a poem of love for Beatrice, with whom he was in love all his life" - A book has been published La Vie Nouvelle The New Life -Twin Palms publisher, 2005.
Grew up in France, Lise Sarfati lives in Paris. She obtained a master’s degree in Russian studies from the Sorbonne. She was the official photographer of the Academy des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Sarfati moved to Russia and photographed there for ten years. She received grants from both the Fiacre and Villa Medicis. She received the Prix Niepce in Paris and the Infinity award of International Center of Photography in New York for her work.
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15/12/96

Harold E. Edgerton Photography Exhibition at A Gallery For Fine Photography, New Orleans - "Stopping Time, the original photographs of Dr. Harold E. Edgerton"

Stopping Time, the original photographs of Dr. Harold E. Edgerton
A Gallery For Fine Photography
December 26, 1996 - January 31, 1997

Harold E. Edgerton (1903, Fremont, Nebrasca – 1990, Boston), professor at MIT, is the inventor of the electronic flash. He was also a photographer. Harold Edgerton devoted his career to recording what the unaided eye cannot see. His photographs illustrate such moments as: a bullet seen the instant it explodes through an apple or a perfect coronet formed by a milk-drop splash. These photographs have become classics of modern art and science.

Dr. Harold Edgerton was the first to take high-speed color photographs and was a pioneer of multiflash and microsecond imagery, which he used to take detailed photographs of humming birds in motion, as well as the progression of athletes' movements. These wondrous images have shown nobody was never able to see before in photographs that are as remarkable for their precision as for their beauty.

A GALLERY FOR FINE PHOTOGRAPHY
322 Royal Street, New Orleans, LA 70117