Tonight and Tomorrow Night in Photo Land

WEDNESDAY APRIL 14


APA|NY Image Makers Lecture Series with Robert Tardio + Jeff Mermelstein
SoHo Apple Theater
103 Prince St (between Mercer and Greene)
6:30pm-8:00pm
Join us after the lecture at Puck Fair Bar. We'll provide some snacks + cash bar
298 Lafayette Street (just south of Houston)

ASMP ProSpeaker Series Presents Jonathan Torgovnik

At SOHO PHOTO 15 White Street (between Church Street and West Broadway. Doors open at 6:30pm - 9:00pm.

Jonathan Torgovnik will present work form his recently completed long-term project "Intended Consequences: Rwandan Children Born of Rape" from Rwanda, which will include his Emmy nominated short multimedia film. He will also show images from a recent assignment covering the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti. His presentation will be followed by a Q&A.

Jonathan Torgovnik is an award winning photographer whose work from various projects and assignments has been published in Newsweek, Aperture, GEO, The Sunday Times Magazine, Stern, Paris Match, and Mother Jones among others. Torgovnik has been a contract photographer for Newsweek since 2005 and is on the faculty of International Center of Photography. He is the author of two books: Bollywood Dreams (Phaidon, 2003) and Intended Consequences: Rwanda Children Born of Rape (Aperture, 2009).

The event is free, but donations are requested, as all proceeds from this event will be donated to Foundation Rwanda, Torgovnik's non-profit that supports secondary school education for children born of rape during the Rwandan genocide.


Peter Hay Halpert Fine Art at The Chelsea Hotel Presents
Mikael Kennedy · Shoot The Moon · 500 Polaroids from 6pm-8pm at The Chelsea 222 West 23rd Street, Suite 524.
Shoot the Moon consists of 500 Polaroids taken between 1999 and 2009. As he moved about - living and traveling in New England, driving from Massachusetts to Washington, hanging around Portland, Oregon, even flying off to Serbia, and then coming to New York - Kennedy photographed with an obsessive intensity.


THURSDAY APRIL 16
PDN's 30 2010: Our Choice of New and Emerging Photographers to Watch
SVA Theatre, 333 West 23 Street
Free and open to the public
Seminar: 6:30 - 8pm
Reception: 8 - 9pm

In a panel moderated by Holly Hughes, editor of Photo District News (PDN), photographers chosen for the 2010 “PDN's 30” list will offer their perspectives on getting started in the photo industry. They will discuss how they go their first jobs and paid for their first promotional efforts, as well as what they learned in school and what they wish they had been taught. Panelists include three photographers selected to be part of PDN's 30--Adrian Mueller, Elizabeth Weinberg and Wayne Lawrence--along with Jeanne Graves, deputy photo director, Men’s Health; and Brian Smith, artisan of imagery for Sony.

Eirik Johnson: Sawdust Mountain

Four years photographing throughout Oregon, Washington and Northern California, this book and exhibition focuses of the tenuous relationship between industries reliant upon natural resources and the communities they support.
Aperture Gallery
547 W 27th Street, 4th Floor
6pm-8pm

Moments from Israel: Rina Castelnuovo

Andrea Meislin Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of Rina Castelnuovo. Although Castelnuovo considers her work photojournalism, her moving images have captured the daily life of Israeli people in a way that few other photographers – fine art or otherwise – have.

Castelnuovo was recently awarded First Place, International News Picture Story in the Best of Photojournalism 2010. She has been photographing for The New York Times in Israel since the mid-nineties, as well as for Time Magazine, Stern Magazine, and the Associated Press since the eighties. Her work presents a look into the complex forces that drive the ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. The award-winning series focuses on the West Bank settlements and outposts, which Israel has promised to dismantle as part of its commitment to a two-state solution.
Andrea Meislin Gallery
526 West 26th Street, Suite 214
6pm-8pm

CHRISTOPHER GRIFFITH - "States"

Christopher Griffith had nothing less than a radical reinterpretation
of American iconography in mind when he assembled a crew to travel the sideways and byways of a forgotten America to shoot everyday, utilitarian things found dotting our contemporary landscape. Searching out abandoned gas stations, remote industrial plants, budget motels, strip mall car lots, utility fields, roadside ditches, and
even graveyards, Griffith and his team constructed huge backdrops around each painstakingly selected specimen,creating stark, decontexturalized and utterly magnificent renderings of the myriad of things we see and forget without noticing.
Randall Scott Gallery
111 Front Street #204
Brooklyn
6:00pm-8:30pm

ASYLUM: PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHRISTOPHER PAYNE

Massive state-funded mental hospitals, many of them among the largest and most elaborate structures ever erected in America, were a prominent feature of the American landscape for more than a century. Once sources of civic pride before becoming warehouses of neglect, the asylums were emptied towards the end of last century, and now sit crumbling, keeping their secrets. Many of them are already gone. Architectural photographer Christopher Payne was granted unprecedented access to document the abandoned buildings and interiors over a period of six years, and the resulting book, ASYLUM: INSIDE THE CLOSED WORLD OF MENTAL HOSPITALS (MIT Press, 2009), has become something of a phenomenon, touching people in unexpected ways. Remarkable both as photojournalism and as art, the images of ASYLUM are elegiac, emotionally gripping, and possessed of a cinematic sensibility.
Clic Gallery
255 Centre Street
6:00pm - 9:00pm

Plastic Water Bottles Really Annoy Me

I recently received an email from the amazing still life photographer James Worrell who made a great little film about plastic water bottles. I have always loved his still life work, so I asked him about his career, and he was gracious enough to respond.
How did you become a photographer?
I have been a photograper for as long as I can remember, since that first instamatic as a kid to the used Watson Press Camera in college. It was when I was living in LA about to start my MFA program at CalArts that I became a commercial photographer. Faced with well over 50 grand in loans I dropped out and started assisting two great photographers in LA and found my calling.

Whose work inspires you (past or present)?
Sugimoto, John Baldasari, Joel Peter Witkin, Vic Muniz, Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Craig Cutler, Carlton Davis, Robert Tardio, Christopher Griffith

What brought you to still life?
I had always been attracted to objects and to arranging of objects. In undergrad my work took many elements and contructed them into a single object, usually a group of photographs to be viewed as one image. I assisted pros for about 3 years in my early 20s and of course, we all wanted to be fashion photographers. But I took an immediate liking to the still lifers, less people involved and less attitude. The technical side
of commercial still life really complimented my fine art background and after about 6 months of assisting I knew I would be a still life photographer.

Your work is so clean and your colors so strong. How did your style evolve?
When I started shooting in the early 90s I became obsessed with clean, simple still life. At the time it seemed to me that everything was over lit and over fussed. It was in the days of shooting chrome and getting a clean shot, especially on white, was and is trickier than one might think. I started using color as a natural way to add something to the photos without adding more stuff. This in turn became a bit of obsession with color, monochromatic color schemes in particular. My style is always evolving but always seems to have a bit of those first years mixed in.

What's the best advice anyone has ever given you?
I had been assisting for a few years and was getting burned out, I really wasn't a great assistant anymore but was caught in that classic Catch-22 of not having any money
but needing money to start my own business, etc. One of my regular gigs was assisting Carlton Davis, he sat me down one day and said James, it's time. You need to go out on your own and you need to do it now. If you wait too much longer you will get stuck as a full time assistant. I will continue to hire you as an assistant when I can but it's time.
He kicked me out of the nest in such a gentle, encouraging way, I will never forget it. It was terrifying, it was some of the best advice I have ever gotten.

What made you do the water film? Was it your first?
I have been a fan of stop action and fast cut video for years. With the economy in the tank and the rise of the internet it seemed a perfect time to experiment with new ways of using photography. How are we going to stand out in the crowd in this economy? The regular forms of promotion are not working and nobody has any money. So I have begun experimenting with unconventional promotions and it has been a blast. I started last year by doing a poster, something everyone tells you not to do. Then I began self publishing my own "magazine" on Magcloud.com a really great way to make a substantial promo for a reasonable amount of money. I have made magnets, bookmarks, greeting cards and have just published a blurb book. The stop action video is one idea I have been bouncing around for a while and has turned out to be the most rewarding of the things I have tried this year.

What was your aim?
I began it purely as a promotional vehicle, to show what I can do, but I am an environmentalist and a music lover so I just did something I wanted to do. Plastic water bottles really annoy me.

How hard/easy was it? How have you promoted it?
it wasn't that hard but video editing is time consuming. The 1 minute 17 second film took me 3 days to storyboard, shoot and edit. I have promoted it on line via email to my existing clients and friends, to hopeful clients and to other cool blogs. It's on YouTube, my website, various blogs, etc.

Are you going to do more?
Yes, I had so much fun with this one I am already working on a new one.