Laura Letinsky, Untitled, #35, from the Morning and Melancholia series, 2001
In honor of this time of year –- that of visiting with friends and family, overeating, shopping, and giving thanks –- we’ve put together an image set on our collections page to represent a few characteristics of Thanksgiving. The advanced search feature of the collections site allows for searches by artist, medium, title, date, description and even credit line. We entered the terms “food,” “dinner,” “Thanksgiving,” “family,” and “turkey,” and various others, into the description field to yield the images below. We were quite excited and pleased with the results. (Notice the live turkey in Amy Stein’s Backyard!)
Did you know that by registering and logging into the collections page, you can create and save your favorite images and sets, and share them with other users? Registration is simple. Just enter your email address and hit submit (no personal information required).
Log in today and enter share ID: su95k9r4 to see the rest of the images in our MoCP Thanksgiving Montage set. Start creating your own sets today!
Amy Stein, Backyard, 2007
Russell Lee, Lumberjacks at Dinner, Camp near Effie, Minnesota, 1937
In our search to share more videos with our blog readers, we found this succinct, but informative video of MoCP collection photographer Henry Wessel, via Artbabble and the SFMoMA. Wessel speaks frankly about how he found his images – mostly by shooting out of the driver’s side window of his van while driving across the country. He explains that he would photograph anything that catches his eye. And if you’ve ever seen his photographs, you know that not just any “eye” can catch these moments so skillfully and beautifully. Enjoy!
More Wessel images in the collection.
Visit Artbabble – a great site of videos of all kinds from artists, museums, and more.
Still from Sylvie Levey’s Shanghai Waiting for Paradise
Thursday, November 19, 6 pm
Ferguson Lecture Hall
600 S. Michigan Ave.
1st Floor
Films screened: Mathieu Borysevicz’s Taian lu(12 Min); Shu Haolun’s Nostalgia (70 min); Sylvie Levey’s Shanghai Waiting for Paradise (26 min)
Taian lu is a poetic account of a pregnant woman’s journey through the city of Shanghai. Nostalgia is an ode to the traditional Longtang and Shikmen housing structures that are rapidly disappearing from the neighborhoods of Shanghai. Shanghai Waiting for Paradise follows three generations of the Wang family living under one roof in the old city of Shanghai as they are confronted by the imminent demolition of their home.
With the release of a three-volume retrospective publication and two current exhibitions in Manhattan, Bruce Davidson has been attracting some much-deserved attention. Randy Kennedy discusses Davidson’s endurance and photographic prowess in his Sunday NYT feature. Kennedy interviews Davidson in his New York apartment where an entire room is filled with boxes of prints and contact sheets collected over more than fifty years. Of his subjects and compositions, Kennedy says Davidson is as meticulous as he is contemplative. Davison prowled “for the perfect picture in a succession of circumscribed worlds he found and entered: tent circuses, Brooklyn gangs, East Harlem tenements, Jewish cafeterias, the civil-rights-era South,” and more recently, carefully chosen landscapes.
Bruce Davidson, from the Subway Series, 1980
In considering his photographic methods, Davidson reveals, “I always felt that my best way with the camera was to stay longer, to get to know things. Not for a picture story, per se, but for a series of images that are kind of like charcoals that catch fire and burn into each other.” Look forward to more fascinating work from Davidson – even at 76, he shares that he plans to photograph for at least ten more years.
In an effort to increase our ever-expanding collection of contemporary photographs, the MoCP has recently acquired works by John Opera, Ben Golden, Anthony Haughey, and several portfolios featuring works from various artists. We have picked a few of the new images and artists to share with you below.
John Opera, Rotating Ice Disk, 2005
Midwest Photographer Project artist John Opera (above) showed us his lush landscapes and entrancing abstractions at this summer’s exhibition MP3: Volume II. His images explore the transcendentalist notion of the importance of the individual soul and the acquisition of self-knowledge via the divinity of nature. By contrasting and pairing figuration and geometric abstractions, Opera probes the powerful links between emotion, intellect, and perception.
Damien Hirst. AIDS/HIV Drugs, 2008, from the Elton John AIDS Foundation Photography Portfolio I
Ruud van Empel, World #33, 2008, from the Elton John AIDS Foundation Photography Portfolio I
The Photography Portfolio I, a portfolio of the Elton John AIDS Foundation, is a collection of photographs donated to the Foundation by photographers Nan Golden, Rudd van Empel, Sally Mann, Richard Misrach, Sam Taylor-Wood, Damien Hirst, Shirin Neshat, Katy Grannan, Juergen Teller, and Thomas Struth. Ruud van Empel (above) portrays black children amidst a colorful mixture of nature from all over the world – often originating from botanical gardens. His interests lay in the fact that, currently, the depiction of black children as an image of innocence and beauty has no precedent in the Western tradition of visual art and popular culture. (From the Ruud van Empel site.)
Patrick Stearns, Westside Light Rail series, November 17, 1995, from The Great Northwest Portfolio
The Great Northwest Portfolio features work by fifteen of the Pacific Northwest’s most accomplished and photographers: Paul Berger, Stu Levy, Phil Borges, Susan Seubert, Christopher Burkett, Patrick Stearns, Peter de Lory, Christopher Rauschenberg, Ford Gilbreath, Glenn Rudolph, Craig Hickman, Terry Toedtemeier, Cherie Hiser, Carrie Mae Weems, and Ann Hughes. Patrick Stearns (above) photographs construction projects during many phases, often for commissioned projects in Oregon. His personal and historical ties to the Oregon area inspire “a contemporary yet timeless quality” to his images of these local projects. (From the Oregon Arts Commission.)
Many prints from these portfolios are the first in the MoCP’s collection of some of these artists. We feel lucky and happy to have acquired these new works and to be able to make them available to you 24/7 at mocp.org/collections.
Photographer Brian Ulrich posted last week to his blog (via Stephen Dirado) this very candid video of Lee Friedlander. On an apparent road trip with his friend Mark Schwartz, Friedlander can be seen eating an interesting (?) tuna lunch and photographing some wildlife. The two share many laughs with the help of narrative commentary from Schwartz. In some very quick research, we found this article from a Cleveland news site regarding Friedlander and Schwartz’s friendship.
