Women Photographers at National Geographic on Exhibit at Newseum, New York

The exhibit represents 36 photographers work in 66 framed photographs and 25 portfolio prints on viewing tables

Newseum/New York
Address: 580 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10022
October 5, 2000 - January 27, 2001

Gallery Hours: Mon. - Sat. 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.
For more information call 212-317-7596 or visit online www.newseum.org. Admission is free.
(see the Carole Glauber Review in the WIPI Book Review section of F2 eZine)

"International Images of Suffering and Dignity, 1977-2000"

Helen M. Stummer, solo exhibit New Jersey Center For The Visual Arts

The exhibit encompasses an overview of Stummer's work documenting suffering and dignity which began in 1977 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Photographs also include Newark, NJ, which was the basis of her book "No Easy Walk, Newark, 1980-1993." (see WIPI book review) before she moved on to Maine, Guatemala and France.

NJCVA is located at:

68 Elm Street
Summit N. J. 07901
telephone 908-273-9121

January 5 - February 8, 2000

web site: http://www.hmstummer.com
e-mail: hmstummer@earthlink.net

Black & White World: The Top Ten list

Top Ten Photo Web Sites
Reviewed by Mason Resnick
B&W Photography by Amie Vanderford-Pfaff

"We won't presume to totally understand what's going on in Amie Vanderford-Pfaff's studio images. What we can comment on is that they are well-executed if mysterious posed set-ups. For the curiosity-seekers."

Basic criteria for selection for Top Ten:

• Compelling topics, presented well;
• Photography must be in black and white (yes, sometimes the obvious must be clearly stated);
• Fast download time (keep eye candy to a minimum);
• Well-designed site (in other words, we like good HTML);
• Popularity (if we get requests for a specific site, we'll factor that into our choice).

What Women Want - Paramount Pictures

Helen K. Garber, Photograph of "Leigh Hennessy Flying"

Featured in the new Paramount Film, What Women Want with Mel Gibson and Helen Hunt. The photograph decorates the office of Helen Hunt's character (creative director of leading advertising agency) and can be seen throughout the scene in Hunt's office. The photo is Garber's Company Home page logo and can be seen at http://www.helenkgarber.com/

The 10th Los Angeles Photographic Print Exposition
January 18 -21, 2001

This is the Tenth Anniversary of the photography exposition which has become a world class event. The largest and longest running photographic art exhibition in the West will present seventy galleries and private dealers from over twenty cities. This year's event will accommodate more galleries than ever before, including those from Belgium, Denmark, France, and the Czech Republic. The finest photographic art, dating from the earliest 19th Century photographic experiments to the most contemporary photography and photo-based art, will be exhibited for sale. This is an unparalleled opportunity for collectors, curators and the curious to view thousands of images from all over the world. Over 6000 people attended last year's fair according to Stephen Cohen, the director-organizer of the event.

Santa Monica Civic Auditorium
1855 Main Street
Santa Monica, California

Public hours:
Friday, January 19th, 12-8 pm
Saturday, January 20th, 12-8 pm
Sunday, January 21st, 12-6 pm

Tickets for the Opening Night Preview Benefit for LACMA are $35 each, and can be purchased by calling 323.932.5846.
Tickets may also be purchased at the door.
Tickets for Photo L.A. 2001 are $12 for one day and $20 for three days and can be purchased at the door.
Lecture Tickets are $5 per person, per lecture.
Collecting Seminars are $50 per person, per seminar and include a 3 day pass
for inforamtion see: STEPHEN COHEN GALLERY

SCENE/SEEN - Symmetry between Eugene ATGET and James OGDEN
by Sylvia White

This article started out as a review of

EUGENE ATGET - The Man in the Street in Paris
(Getty Museum , Getty Collection - Aug - Oct, 2000 Los Angeles)

with emphasis on the importance of an American woman photographer, Berenice Abbott, in saving and promoting this Frenchman's work. However, just when I was ready to submit the review, I was introduced to Jacqueline Darakjy, a Frenchwoman who has saved and is promoting the work of an American photographer, James Ogden, which would otherwise have been lost to history.

The symmetry of these efforts was too remarkable to ignore.

PART 1 - EUGENE ATGET

"Thirty years ago, the name of Eugene Atget was never heard outside specialist circles. Now he is the most celebrated of all the photographers of "Old Paris". His work is enlisted to serve the most varied purposes; major monographs have been written on him; and- the final accolade- the public at large knows his name. His personality and his work give rise to constant controversy. He is, in fact, universally famous. But this fame was late in coming: when he died in 1927, there was not one single line in the press to mark the occasion. If it had not been for the crucial promotion of his work by the American photographer Berenice Abbott, that fame might never have come at all.

Toward the end of his life Atget met Man Ray, his neighbor on rue Campagne-Premiere in Paris and, through him, Berenice Abbott, a young American who had come to France to study sculpture, but who became Man Ray's girl friend and pupil. She seems to have been one of the first people to understand Atget, and to appreciate the importance of his work. On Atget's death in August, 1927 Abbott bought 1,797 of his glass plate negatives. For the next several decades she campaigned tirelessly to make Atget's work known on this side of the Atlantic. In 1968 she sold the plates, together with 10, 000 prints, to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Thanks to this purchase, and to Abbott's publications, America was more prompt than France to appreciate Atget's stature as an artist." from the introduction to ATGET PARIS edited by Laure Beaumont-Maillet published by Hazan and drawn from the archives of the Biblioteque Nationale de Paris

This exhibition of Atget's work, 66 prints from the Getty's permanent collection, gives the viewer a sampling of the eccentric pictoral encyclopedia of Paris which the photographer spent 30 years assembling, wandering the streets daily with an 8X10 view camera and glass plates and leaving a body of work contained in 8,500 negatives.

Establishing himself as a photographer in 1890 after a less than stellar career as a traveling actor, Atget began making studies of plants, animals and landscapes which he sold as "documents for artists" to architects, designers and artists such as Maurice Utrillo for use in their work By 1897 Atget changed his focus to the textures of neighborhoods which were beginning to disappear from Paris. He shot from street level the facades of commercial buildings: factories, shops, restaurants and markets - the stage of common French workers who were themselves often missing from their workplaces. By the end of WWI (1918) Atget's work moved from the prosaic to the poetic, shifting from documentation to the study of atmosphere as seen in open spaces such as parks and botanical gardens.

Historical reference: Street Photography

Charles Marville 1816-1879 active 1850-1870 Paris
Eugene Atget 1857-1927 Active 1890-1927 Paris
Berenice Abbott 1898-1991 " 1923-1980 NYC
Walker Evans 1903-1975
Gary Winogrand 1928-1984

PART 2 - JAMES C. OGDEN

James C. Ogden ( 1877 -1929) and his wife Minnie were Kentucky -born missionaries who heard the call to carry their religious message to China at the turn of the century, arriving in Shanghai in 1905.

It took 4 months traveling by steamboat and overland with packhorses to reach western China and the little town of Tatsienlu where they met another American missionary family, the Dr. Albert Sheltons. Together the two couples spent another grueling month in a caravan of coolies, sedan chairs and pack animals loaded with medical supplies, crossing high snow-covered passes and inching along windswept paths where a false step meant a plunge to one's death. Finally they reached Batang on the Tibetian border where they would eventually build their mission.

Ogden had degrees in architecture and agriculture and he used these skills to build a dispensary, then an orphanage, a school, a hospital and surrounding gardens, with hand tools and manual labor. Despite his busy schedule preaching, building, raising a family, and helping Dr. Shelton care for the sick, he found time to document the lives of the people of this far-flung corner of the world, their customs, rituals and manners. Chinese army officers sitting in proud formation for their formal portrait, Tibetan monks smiling benignly, Chinese bodyguards glaring at the "devil westerner"- all exhibit a surprising immediacy which draws the viewer into their lives as if they were in the same room with the viewer at the moment of being seen. In addition to these, Ogden's gallery of family, friends, colleagues and converts completes the story. This is not a tourist's view of the exotic "other" but a record of the deep bond between this man and his chosen people, of the love and acceptance that was shared by them for over twenty years.

These photographs are all the more poignant when one realizes that they were taken by a man who suffered continuously from severe bouts of depression which hospitalized him on several occasions. Besides his ill health, and tensions among the personnel at the mission, he worried about his daughter Ruth who had an illegitimate child by another missionary, as well as his son Harold who had gotten a Tibetan girl pregnant. And if all that were not enough, he had made a series of bad investments on the stock market which did not give the return he expected. These overwhelming problems eventually led him to suicide in 1929 while at home in California on leave.

This exquisite body of work - over 800 negatives - would have been lost forever if not for the care and devotion of Jacqueline Darakjy .

Born near Poitiers, France in 1942, Jacqueline began photographing as a young teenager when her archeologist uncle took her along on his frequent trips to ancient sites around the Mediterranean, including Greece, Italy and Sardinia. She was fascinated by the people they met and places they visited and her passion for capturing the life of a place began at this time. In the late 60's she met and married Robin Darakjy, an American serving in the USAF in France. Eventually they made their way to Los Angeles, where, in the early 80's Jackie met Dorothy Shelton (daughter of Dr. Albert Shelton) who was then teaching at Claremont College. Dorothy asked Jackie to make some prints of her father's negatives (Dr. Shelton also photographed the mission in Tibet). It wasn't until the late 80's however that Jackie just happened to be riding with a friend one day and he stopped by the house of Harold Ogden in Glendale. Harold was cleaning out his garage and was throwing out boxes of moldy old negatives. Jackie looked at a few and asked if she could have them, but he was reluctant. She persisted until finally he handed them to her, saying, "Here, take them and I never want to see them again!"

After cleaning and proofing them over a period of 10 years, she realized the treasure she possessed and began exhibiting the work in gallery shows. "James Ogden captured the soul of Tibet and the trauma already happening to its people at the hands of the Chinese." she explains. "I was so taken by what little I saw that day in his son's garage, that I couldn't let this visual history of a place be destroyed forever."

Jacqueline Darakjy (WIPI Charter Member) welcomes inquiries and comments regarding this extroadinary portfolio of historical images filmandpixels@hotmail.com

James Ogden approx 1926 "Chinese Army Officers" Collection ofJacqueline Darakjy

Eugene Atget, Au Port Salut, 1907, "Atget Paris" written by Laure Beaumont-Maillet Format: Hardcover, 3823rd ed., 109pp. ISBN: 3823803638 Publisher: te Neues Publishing Company Pub. Date: October 1998

Berenice Abbott, Cheese Store, 1937, plate #168 "A World History of Photography" written by Naomi Rosemblum Hardcover - 696 pages 3rd edition (February 1997) Abbeville Press, Inc.; ISBN: 0789200287 ; Dimensions (in inches): 1.70 x 11.83 x 9.19

Review by Sylvia White, e-mail SylviaWhite@hotmail.com