WIPI News - Archive 4

2000 Women in Photography - a Millennium Project

NOMINATIONS

Note that these women were selected primarily on the basis that they were already well-represented in the photographic literature. Life dates, country of affiliation and type of photography have not been double-checked. Finally, it should be noted that this list is merely a starting point along the way to identifying the 2000 women in the field of photography who best deserve recognition as the best of the best. Now closed.

2000 Women in Photography - a Millennium Project - The Nominees

See Nomininees update April 1, 2001 ( NOW CLOSED)

From Jean Ferro, WIPI President:

A friend, Warren Jason, wrote to me and asked if I knew about and wanted to attend "Burning Man 2000" in Black Rock. What? Who? Where? Never heard of this. Warren was going to Burning Man to film the event. So I looked into it and realized this is one of the most cutting-edge and interesting underground art gatherings since the 60's "Love In's." What makes this so special is that it comes from the "Techie" minds. The people who labor and create this wonderful system of the internet, computer software and hardware, without whom there would be no online resource for us. So it is with thanks to them that I present this portfolio of images by Leanna Wolfe (Anthropologist/Photographer) who attended "Burning Man" on Labor Day. Also a very special thank you to Vanessa Hua, journalist, San Francisco Examiner, who gave us permission to reprint her wonderful and informative articles. There is also a wonderful portfilio/article in WIPI Features From Abroad - Russia by Julia Sorokina

BURNING MAN DRAWS ARDENT SOULS 25,000 gather to form a brief, manic, doomed community.

BLACK ROCK DESERT, Nev. - Start-up geeks Marc Vonholzen, Patrick Anseremet and Denis Leroi had nowhere to go and all night to get there.

Within the span of an hour, the three men first pondered a nickname for Leroi, then wandered to a wall of rubber gloves with which to grope strangers, then to a rave dance party, then to Dr. MegaVolt, a performer who shoots bolts of lightning from his hands and feet at the annual Burning Man arts festival in Nevada's Black Rock Desert.

And Thursday night was just beginning, one marked by fireworks, mobile light sculptures and other amazing sights and experiences.

The trio were among the 25,000 people who flocked to Burning Man, 120 miles north of Reno. All week, the tech set, artists, thrill junkies and others seeking an artistic excuse began to gather at the event, which takes its name from the burning of a 50-foot-tall wooden man on Saturday night.

The journey began weeks and months ago, as Bay Area residents geared up for Burning Man, created on Baker Beach in 1986. Last week, the stream of RVs and SUVs crammed with bicycles and other comforts of home chugged all the way to the Black Rock Desert.

Continue with story - Tech crowd gets tribal September 3, 2000

Click Here for Article 1 in series: Burning Man August 20, 2000

Click Here for Article 3 in series: Desert festival reaches its fiery climax September 3, 2000

WIPI News #4 - Archive 4

Off the Map 6/2000 - L.E.S. Girls Club
by Jill Waterman
Website

This article first appeared published in Fotophile Magazine.

Girl Power is on the loose in the streets of New York City, as members of the Lower East Side Girls Club fervently petition for a home.

A community organization founded in 1995 by a group of local women, L.E.S. Girls Club currently offers programs and services to 150 girls from 8 - 18. One of the motivating forces behind the formation of this group is the long-standing inequity in the neighborhood between services for boys, who have had three full-service boys clubs and numerous boys only sports leagues, with those of the girls. Girls Club Executive Director, Lyn Pentecost, described a premise of the founders thus at the recent Willow Awards Celebration: The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.

Since their founding, the organization has been run out of a number of temporary spaces, ranging from kitchen tables to the back room of a 5 & Dime on Avenue D. For the past year and a half L.E.S. Girls have been based out of the Cornelia Connolly Center for Education on East 4th Street. From this locale two directors and a dedicated staff of associates and instructors co-ordinate programs and events across the grid of Manhattan, while simultaneously lobbying towards their ultimate goal of a permanent space. They are already well along in a million dollar fundraising campaign, which will enable the purchase of a city owned lot on Sixth Street and Avenue D. Here they plan to construct a seven story, full-service center with facilities for sports and fitness; arts, media and entertainment programming; health and career services; as well as office space and retail establishments that will be an enhancement to the community as a whole.

At present, many of the clubs' programs and activities are held in spaces facilitated by supporting organizations. An after-school photography program alternates meetings between classrooms of neighborhood schools and the darkroom of the Middle Collegiate Church. Sports programs in basketball, fencing and swimming have used facilities at the 14th Street Y.M.C.A., the Grand Street Settlement House, the Institute for Collaborative Education, the Pitt Street Pool, the BGR Boys Club among other locations. Several of the sports programs have recently faced suspension due to lack of available space.

One of the Girls Club's most elaborate programs is Sweet Things, an entrepreneurial training program and mother / daughter baking company. Last year this enterprise received a large dose of stability with the allocation of space and purchase of professional kitchen equipment from a prior business that occupied the basement of their current headquarters. Two different programs provide girls with access to the world outside the bounds of their neighborhood. Ladies Who Lunch / the Museum Club brings girls and mentors to cultural centers throughout the metropolitan area and the Summer Leadership Institute Program brings girls into the workplaces of numerous professional women from many fields of endeavor.

In addition to these and other programs, the organization has developed a series of special events that celebrates collaboration and empowerment while increasing awareness of the group's needs and mission.

The Willow Awards, now in its fourth year, is a major fundraising event during which inspiring leaders, mentors, volunteers and mothers are honored with the presentation of a miniature column, symbolic of the Girls Club's envisioned home.

The Girls Congress of the Lower East Side is an annual public event with a day-long program produced by a collaboration of several organizations involved in girls programming. The most recent Congress, Girl 2000: Change is Coming held on Saturday May 6, was organized around the theme of Advocacy. Performers, artists, activists and advocates presented workshops and speeches, culminating in a lively parade through the Lower East Side and a rally in Tompkins Square Park. The girls became an integral part of the programming, with a performance by L.E.S. Girls Club Drum Corp. and plentiful documentation by participants from the Girls Club Photography Program.

Seven girls shot 26 rolls of film during the Congress, developing the film and making work prints themselves during subsequent class meetings in the darkroom.

A small sampling of images presented here highlights the talent of the girls and the energy of the event. Beginning on June 14, work from fourteen current members of the Photo program will be on exhibit at the Tompkins Square Park Public Library. An admirer of the girls' photography has already purchased one print from the show. In addition, the program recently received their first job offer, to make portraits of participants during an upcoming neighborhood Summer School program.

Looking to the future, two dynamic programs specific to the image are planned for next fall. Here's Looking at You Kid, a weekend festival of Film and Video, is scheduled for Oct. 19 - 22 at Anthology Film Archives. This four-day event will bring together girls from across New York City for workshops and discussions on film technology and themes. Suggestions for films to include in this program as well as volunteer support are currently being welcomed.

From Nov. 10 - 12 the photography weekend, Share Our Vision, will feature a silent auction of contemporary photographs, a guest lecturer on Collecting and the symposium, Community Photography: The Camera as Catalyst., to be held on Saturday Nov. 11 in the Great Hall at Cooper Union. The auction will be displayed between a number of local galleries with an opening reception on Friday evening Nov. 10. Donations of photographs to be included in the auction are currently being accepted. Prints may be delivered to Margaret Bodell Gallery, 13 East 7th Street, New York, NY 10003, (212) 477-1820.

The attention generated by such ambitious programming is sure to set a standard for the type of programs to be anticipated once the L.E.S. Girls Club has a permanent home. For further information or to find out how to be involved please contact the L.E.S. Girls Club office at (212) 982-1633, and stay tuned for their web-site at http://www.girlsclub.org.

WIPI Features From Abroad - Russia
Archive 4

My way to photography was natural and unpredictable simultaneously. My predilections are rather those of a writer, than of an artist and I have never thought that the photo could occupy such a large place in my life as it is now.

I could call my father my first teacher, who was engaged in an amateur black-and-white photo, taking pictures of nature and people when he was young. He demonstrated skills of using the simple camera "Smena", and then - the camera "FED" to me. I would not say, that I was engaged in photography - mostly I photographed only in summer, spending my holidays on the Ladoga lake or in Crimea. Usually I took pictures using black-and-white film and a slide film ORWO CHROM . These were usual "memory photos", dedicated to landscapes. "Explosion" has taken place five years ago, when my friend, having noted some "scintilla" in my summer snapshots gave me the mirror camera of "ZENIT - TTL" as a present and the first colour negative film "Konica". With these treasures I went for a holiday to the Karelian isthmus (near Finland) and it was this first film that became a "door" in the world of photography.

It will make the western reader laugh, especially a professional photographer, but it was the quality of colour reproduction of modern photo materials that was a shock for me rather than potentialities of the mirror cameras. Having printed out the first snapshots, I saw natural colours of the sky, rainbow, thunderstorm clouds, water and birds, I saw, that the photograph can depict the finest state of the nature. And from this moment I simply "have fallen ill with photography.

I sometimes think what the creative task of the person with the camera is, as seen by him. For someone it is a way to depict the appearance of a modern world and a man in detail, using a perfect engineering "to improve" slightly an image in favour of a customer. For someone it is a way to express his perception of the world, having distorted the appearance of the surrounding world and having given it fantastic and unrecognisable features with the help of achievements of photo engineering. For me the essence of photography is to depict the perfect harmony, which is poured out on us from the ambient nature and shows itself in the majestic pictures of the sky, and in a small-sized, not always noticeable things - like branches, webs, leaves, birds. The state of mood, which I experience, being in the countryside with the camera in hands, could be called some kind of meditation. A person, stranding in a forest, can admire subtle states of nature, but his thoughts early or late, this way or another dissolve in the business of the day. The photographer looking at a leave or a flower through the range finder, focuses on their shape, on their variability in miscellaneous lighting, on an angle, at which their shape appears perfect or exotic.

I have noticed, that my state of mood quite often is transmitted to the people, who look at my photographs, - they experience some kind of calmness and delight - not with photos, but with the surrounding world. I think that my activity is rewarded, when a person, having seen snapshots, starts to look at the sky, to pay attention to the perfect shape of a living world, located around of us, or extracts a camera from a larder being deserted there for a long time.

I consider my friend who presented me a photo camera to be my second teacher and inspirer, and the main inspirer, as before, is nature itself. Two books "Light and lighting" by David Kilpatrick Á "Landscape photography" by John Wade influenced my technical skills in photography. I still work with the camera "Zenit - TTL". It is the old Soviet camera with good optics and ugly mechanics; it is very heavy and with a very rigid trigger mechanism. It is worth noting, that the overwhelming majority of the Russian amateur photographer is compelled to use photo engineering of the same class and level.

In 1998 some of my works were published in the magazine "MLM - perspective" (and I was even paid for the publication). I have presented a pair of snapshots to the magazine of spiritual orientation "Potok". As I consider myself to be not very technically skilful fan and I apply to publishing houses to propose my works very seldom. Besides, after crisis of August, 1998 very many periodicals were closed.

The difficulties of economical existence of the inhabitants of Russia have long ago become a general problem, but these difficulties to no small degree have an effect on photography. I rarely take up with photography, as I can hardly afford to purchase even a cheap film. When printing photographs I can not use a high quality photo-services and I use a cheap "stream" photo saloon, where the employees (got used to print pictures with festive meals and barbecues) not only multiply colourless prints, but quite often scratch negatives. I ve received the proposal to organize small photo-exhibitions in a concert hall and in the library twice, but had no financial possibility to print snapshots of the eligible format. Speaking about creativity of women photographers in Russia, it is necessary to note, that in the country experiencing economical and political transformations, for any artist it is difficult to be engaged in creativity, and taking into consideration a long-term patriarchal principals, it is even much more difficult, especially when she is engaged in non-commercial photography. I know two art organisations in St.-Petersburg, which give the artists and photographers a possibility to exhibit their works - gallery "Borei" and club "Polygon". Yet, I do not consider myself to be a professional photographer to offer them my works. But, as a person searching for comprehensions and response, I would like to show my photos to everyone, who can be touched and inspired with the beauty of the world and nature.

email: chesterj@spb.cityline.ru
website: http://www.julsor.narod.ru/

Sincerely yours, with best regards
Julia Sorokina

WIPI News #5 - Archive 4

Photographers (amateur or professional) We Want You!

Since 1985, Women in Photography members have volunteered as photography instructors with Through Children's Eyes, Inc. The small, nonprofit (501(c) (3) corporation uses basic 35 mm photography, writing, and performance arts as educational tools with elementary school children. The program is designed to develop visual awareness, communication skills, and pride in workmanship.

Recent projects include an Earth Day Internet PhotoGallery by children in YMCA programs in Atlanta, Boston, and Minneapolis, sponsored by ememories.com, and a series of programs in King County, Washington taught byWIPI Past Director Nancy Clendaniel.

Through Children's Eyes, Inc. programs are made possible through volunteers, sponsors from the photographic industry, as well as community and business supporters.

Over the last 15 years, children from the US and several countries have participated in programs. Exhibit sites range from local schools and libraries to the United Nations and Washington, DC. We are developing a web site to include a retrospective and current projects PhotoGallery, and to provide information on our program.

For more information, or to volunteer for their current program "Seeing America - Through Children's Eyes" e-mail Program Director Winifred Meiser.

Check the Shutterbug Magazine website for the Sept. 99 Business Trends column "Shooting From the Heart," an in-depth article by Maria Piscopo on the Through Children's Eyes, Inc. program.