Elizabeth Houston, Director,
Hous Projects / New York City

Hous projects is a contemporary art gallery founded in 2007 by Elizabeth Houston and John Houshmand.
It features an exhibition program that has been created to show and promote a diverse group of international artists.
Hous projects has partnered with the Queensland Centre of Photography, Australia exhibiting a small established group of Australian artists in its first exhibition: human.Two solo exhibitions followed by Australian artists Marian Drew and Charles Robb. Starting with the group exhibition Mineral: Contemporary Photographers and the Non-Silver Process Hous Projects began to integrate the exhibitions with a diverse group of artists from around the world. Recent Fairs, photo la 2010, Art Los Angeles Contemporary, Los Angeles Art Fair and SCOPE New York Art Show, NYC (Mar. 3 thru 7, 2010)

www.housprojects.com

Pamela Schoenberg, gallery owner,
DNJ Gallery/ Los Angeles, CA

by Sarah Schmerler
Want to get a job done? Ask a busy person. Contemporary photographers whose work is represented in Los Angeles by Pamela Schoenberg know this old adage to be true. A multi-tasker by nature, Schoenberg has run a contemporary photograph gallery since 2007 in West Hollywood, raised three young children, pursued her own career as a black-and-white documentary photographer (in sites ranging from Israel to South Central LA), and made it all look easy. Relatively. "I answer e-mails and do work for the gallery at 9 o'clock at night, after the kids go to bed," Schoenberg says. Her day typically begins at the gallery at 10 am. "I have a subscription to most every photo art magazine there is, and I look through them an hour before bed; I flag things; I research them on the Internet later. I find artists I like." While most dealers (male or female) cave in to the pressure to keep family out of the foreground, Schoenberg hangs it on a banner on the front door. Her gallery's name, dnj, actually represents the initials of the names of her three children: Dora, Nathan, and Joey, ages 11, 9, and 5.

Schoenberg grew up in the Orthodox Jewish section of Cincinnati called Amberley Village, and her religion continues to play an important role in her life. After getting two undergraduate degrees (one in history, the other in photography) from Washington University in St. Louis and her M.F.A. from Mills College, in Oakland, California, Schoenberg went on to pursue an in-depth photography project in Israel documenting the acculturation of Ethiopian Jews. She divided her time between temporary caravan sites south of Jerusalem and Bezalel Academy to the north, but by 1995, the project completed, she returned to the U.S. and settled in Los Angeles. That same year, she met her husband, E. Randol Schoenberg, a litigation attorney soon to be embroiled in a court case of years-long duration involving the (now famous) re·patriation of five Gustav Klimt paintings to their rightful, pre-Holocaust heirs. From 1995 to 1998, Pamela Schoenberg worked in museum education programs; developed and implemented photography curricula in schools both Jewish and secular; became pregnant with her first child--and, while pregnant, made a documentary series on the ethnically and culturally diverse communities along LA.'s Vermont Avenue (thanks to a grant from L.A. Cultural Affairs).

Schoenberg's husband's case raged on from 1998 to 2004, a period during which two more children were born and Schoenberg pursued her own photography-when time allowed. But by 2006, with her children a bit older and her husband's court battle won, Schoenberg decided she was ready to break new ground in terms of her career: "I wanted to get back into the art world, but I decided I didn't just want to be an artist," says Schoenberg. "I wanted to see the ideas that were out there in the world." dnj was started in 2007; the gallery focuses completely on contemporary photography, including work that Schoenberg likes, but that is often quite different from her own. She shows new documentary photographers, like Dylan Vitone and Chris Verene, but also artfully over-exposed images by Maria Luisa Morando, and detail-and color-saturated plant studies by LA-based photographer Jane O'Neil (who works with a portable scanner rather than a camera). Broadening her own view, in fact, has proved one of Schoenberg's greatest rewards as a dealer. "I'm being exposed to different processes and images. I purposefully try to choose different genres," says Schoenberg. "I feel that it can
only make my own work improve."

www.DNJGallery.net     facebook       twitter

Melanie Light, Executive Director,
Fotovision, San Francisco, CA

Ms. Light is founding Executive Director of Fotovision. She is also a writer, co-author of Coal Hollow as well as writings about photographers such as Hansel Mieth, Donna Ferrato and Micha Bar Am. She is currently working on a project about the Great Cental Valley in California.

Fotovision is a Bay Area nonprofit created to support photographers interested in documenting their world. Our mission is to advance documentary photography and storytelling. We do this through education, dialogue and community. Our vision is to inspire and enable positive change by creating a global photographic community that gives voice to the human condition.
The curriculum is designed to span the various skills and techniques needed as a long-term, in-depth photo project is developed: fieldwork, editing, funding and marketing, book publishing, multi-media issues and more. We create opportunities for photographers to hear lectures by master photographers like Sebastião Salgado, James Nachtwey, Eugene Richards, Alex Webb and others. In addition, we give Bay Area photographers and people interested in documentary the rare opportunity to study with these masters in small groups.

Fotovision utilizes a unique network of community partnerships to deliver workshops throughout the Bay Area and to draw on a rich community of highly accomplished and dedicated documentary photographers, printers, publishers, and arts administrators. Currently, workshops are offered in Emeryville, San Francisco, and Napa at advanced, intermediate, and beginning levels.

From time to time, Fotovision will offer open portfolio reviews, and other events in order to give the photographic community a space and time to convene and share their work. In addition, Fotovision produces lectures and master workshops by exceptional practicioners of the art of photography. These events present an opportunity for the community to understand both their artistic processes and the challenges they faced in order to pursue their obsession with telling a visual story through photography.

The founders of Fotovision have deep and distinguished roots in the photojournalist and documentary world of photography as well as many years of teaching in prestigious photojournalism programs.

lightstalkers bio     www.fotovision.org    Fotovision Past Events

Laurie Frank, gallery owner
Frank Pictures Gallery / Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, CA

LAURIE FRANK founded her gallery (then called Still/Moving) in 1968 with Floyd Byars with a focus on the still photography of motion picture cinematographers and film directors. The gallery showcased the photographic work of academy award winning cinematographers Vilmos Zsigmond (Close Encounters) and Haskell Wexler (One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest), directors Harold Becker (Sea of Love) and Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas) with an eye towards exploring the relationship of the individual artist to the collaborative medium of film. In 2000 Laurie Frank moved the gallery to a space on the courtyard of Les Deux Cafés in Hollywood where she expanded its mandate to include painting and sculpture as well as photography under the name Media Rare Gallery.

In 2002 Media Rare moved again to its present location at Santa Monica’s prestigious Bergamot Station Arts Center, under a new name, Frank Pictures Gallery. The gallery’s roster of artists includes legendary photographers Horace Bristol, Jeff Dunas, Robert Stivers, Andy Summers, and Lynn Goldsmith, noted California artists Laddie John Dill, Larry Bell, Andy Moses as well as Texas based Annabelle Livermore (Laura Bush’s favorite painter), and Hollywood hyphenates Val Kilmer (actor-collagist) Joel Grey(actor-photographer), Yul Brynner (actor-photographer), Ione Skye (actress-painter) and Jerzy Skolimowski (Director-painter).

Frank is also an accomplished screenwriter and director outside of her gallery. She co-wrote the films Making Mr. Right and Love Crimes for the big screen and Heavy Petting, a sitcom pilot for the Fox Network and Skin Deep for Aaron Spelling Productions for CBS, as well as episodes of The Red Shoe Diaries. She directed Charlie Barnett in his Comedy Special for Cinemax and has directed shorts for Saturday Night Live including Prose and Cons, featuring Eddie Murphy's premier on celluloid. Her three shorts for the American Film Institute debuted then first-time actors Johnny Depp, Sherilyn Fenn and Max Perlich. She was writer-director-producer of the first live action interactive episodic series for a major studio when she created Angels & Outlaws for MGM, conceived to be a platform for a television series and feature film franchise. Ms. Frank wrote three of the first live-action games on CD-ROM. Her games for Digital pictures: Prizefighter, Make My Video: INXS and Make My Video: Marky Mark won gold, silver and bronze medals in the New Media Invision 1994 Multimedia Awards. Previous to moving to Los Angeles, Ms. Frank co-produced and directed four shows on female sexuality for the CBS award winning series, The Body Human (Daytime Directing Emmy). She was Associate Producer of ABC News Close-up, the network's documentary unit and was field producer and director for Relations, a prime-time pilot on ABC. She began her career as a writer for McCall's Magazine; she went on to become a founding editor of You Magazine. She is a contributor to English publications The Sunday Times of London and The Tattler. She is a graduate of Yale University and the American Film Institute. In 2005 she became a member of the Board of Directors of PEN USA, the international society of published writers.

www.frankpicturesgallery.com

Mary Goodwin, Associate Director
Light Work, Syracuse, New York

Mary is a photographer, writer, and editor. She holds an MFA in photography from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, a BFA in photography from Herron School of Art, Indianapolis, and a BA in German literature from Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts. Goodwin’s writing about photography has been published in Contact Sheet, The Light Work Annual, American Photo, photo-eye Booklist, and numerous exhibition catalogs. At Light Work, she curates exhibitions, edits Contact Sheet, and administers the residency program.

The activities of Light Work include an Artist-in-Residence program, exhibitions, publications, grants to Central New York artists, projects for mid-career artists, and maintaining a collection of contemporary photographic works. Each year Light Work produce five issues of the publication Contact Sheet that are distributed to artists, museums, galleries, and subscribers across the country and internationally. Each publication includes reproductions of an artist's work along with interpretative texts about the work. These publications are instrumental in creating opportunities for artists and presenting their work to a larger audience. Public lectures and gallery talks by visiting and exhibiting artists are presented throughout the year.

www.lightwork.org          ContactSheet publication