New Directions 2010 Submissions due 15 November

Pardon the interruption, but I wanted to make sure ya'll knew this was the last week to get your submissions in for New Directions 2010 and in front of Carol McCusker of Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, California.

Do Not Delay! Get 'em in soon.

Remember, the show hangs in Seattle and Portland in January and February, and will be showcased online as well.

I am so excited with the number of entries that have come in, as well as the quality of images! It will be tough for Ms. McCusker to make her choices.

Did I mention our Best of Show winner receives $100 credit from Blurb to produce a book? Who doesn't want that?

For more information about ND10 - Down + Out, log onto the website.

All of our submissions are considered for gallery representation to both wall space and 23 Sandy in Portland.

Some previous participants of ND now represented by the gallery - Joseph O. Holmes, Priya Kambli, Joelle Jensen, and Bill Vaccaro.

we look forward to your seeing your work.

Images shown Jennifer Schlessinger, Bill Vaccaro, Joelle Jensen and Joseph O. Holmes.

Lishui Photo - Carol Isaak

Carol Isaak was a participant of PhotoLucida in April of last year. I got the opportunity to sit down with her for 20 minutes and review her work. Her focus, China, showcased an outsider's view of a foreign landscape. Bright color, beautiful architecture, and a sense of place fill her images with life.

She is headed to Lishui, and will continue her travels and add more dimensions to her visuals. By incorporating sound, she hopes to give us as viewers a transported vision. Not unlike when we head to our own International District, or Chinatown. Documenting a changing culture is difficult, but I applaud her for her efforts. She has done a nice job of showcasing a beautiful culture.

Here is more on Carol's vision -

Core Sample: China

I photograph NOW. My worldview is as a “social documentarian.” I look at societies thru their material culture in order to understand the population primarily by documenting their objects, as well as documenting the lives of women, some men, and some children.

My photographs are not timeless; quite the opposite. Markers anchor us to a specific time, especially images of material culture. We recognize the time-signs by historical references, garments, vehicles, architecture, juxtapositions, or by something in process that inevitably gets completed.

My goal is to present bodies of work that tell the backside, or the inside of the story, the private side, the small picture, not the global, general big picture. I search for the intimate, which reveals something larger. Core Sample: China describes certain visual conventions (like the pierced spaces in window coverings), and the contrast and tensions between the different realities that are lived and aspired to. But it is a country in flux, and that movement is vital to its wellbeing as the population explores long suppressed traditions and newly government-encouraged innovations.

Lishui Photo - Alejandro Cartagena

Alejandro Cartagena's name is everywhere these days. Just announced yesterday, he is on the list for PhotoLucida's Critical Mass top 50. Today he was slated as a book finalist from CM50. An International Discovery at FotoFest in Houston , Alejandro has been highlighted on Joerg Colberg's blog, Conscientious, PDN online, Lenscratch, a participant in Review Santa Fe, and the list goes on and on. He is also joining Taj Forer in Lishui China to showcase his work on Suburbia. I am excited to see how is work is viewed there. What will be the response to the social and economic similarities of expansion and population growth, how it affects their surroundings, and how fundamentally changed the environment becomes....

Here is Taj Forer's statement about Alejandro -

Alejandro Cartagena's 'Suburbia Mexicana' is both aesthetically beautiful and politically, socially and environmentally poignant. The work is timely, deeply personal yet globally relevant. Cartagena's engagement of the real challenges the viewer to contemplate the timeless theme of how we dwell as a society (or collection thereof) with the natural environment. The fast-paced development examined by Cartagena through his photographs is not unlike many blossoming urban and suburban development projects currently found throughout China. The cultural challenges facing communities affected by such government-sponsored development initiatives is uncannily similar throughout the world. By focusing on his hometown of Monterrey, Mexico, Cartagena turns his lens on the complex and nuanced global phenomenon most commonly referred to as "progress." His vivid, straightforward, large-scale color photographs afford the viewer a moment to pause, experience and reflect upon the complicated and far-reaching implications of development. From issues of resource management to changing cultural values, Cartagena's photographs delve into the newness and unknown realities of Mexico's suburban expansion.

Lishui Photo - Mark Tompkins

Mark Tompkins work, Dialogues, will be on view in China this month as part of the Lishui Festival. Strong black and white images with text, Tompkins images tell stories and keep us engaged in the images.

about the series DIALOGUES -

By creating dialogues between image and text, this body of work takes on the age-old challenge of depicting multiple perspectives on a subject in a single composition. These conversations address the mystery and irony of the strong story lines that scribe through our lives, often uninvited; story lines on time and death, love and fear, work and play, god and meaning. Each composition organically expands the storyline of the image with the text, and so generates an unusually multifaceted narrative while still leaving plenty of room for the viewer to personalize it – to experience it from their own set of evoked memories, dreams and ideas.

Lishui Photo - Steven Strom

Steve Strom has had some great success this year, between shows, his new book, and now a trip to showcase his beautiful work in China. His day job as an astronomer keeps him a visionary, finding needles in haystacks, looking at broad perspectives to find the tiniest fragment of being. HIs work takes on the stunning desert landscape, finding life and patterns in the empty space most pass over as desolate and void. His work will be a colorful open discussion of landscape and abstraction. I am looking forward to having a bit of the desert with me in China.

here is more on his series -

Images in the portfolio, Earth Forms attempt to capture what is nearly beyond the camera’s grasp: a desert land

shaped by millennial forces and yesterday’s cloudburst into undulations of color and form – its history reimagined in light that at once penetrates and sculpts.

For the poet Joy Harjo, “the(se) photographs are not separate from the land or larger than it. Rather, they

gracefully and respectfully exist inside it. Breathe with it. The camera is used to see with a circular viewpoint which becomes apparent even though the borders of the images remain rectangular. The land in these photographs is a beautiful force, in the way the Navajo mean the word beautiful, an all-encompassing word, like those for land and sky, that has to do with living well, dreaming well, in a way that is complementary to all life.”

I bring to this landscape the sensibilities of an astronomer who has lived in the desert for almost 20 years, and in whom the desert has lived for more than 30. My tools are simple: a 35mm SLR or 4x5 view camera, and long focal length lenses whose power to compress vast desert spaces can create an illusion of intimacy, of comprehension: inviting viewers to look deeply into what light and earth together form.

Lishui Photo - Jessica Kaufman

My path has crossed with Jessica's on many photo review occasions, from Houston to Portland, and her work has always stood out. She was asked by the Lishui Festival to show her lovely work in China, and I am happy to highlight her work here. Her series, Panopticon, is well crafted, luscious, silver prints of open spaces.

Here is Jessica's statement on Panopticon -

No one

bears witness for the

witness.

–Paul Celan

I approached this series as I have all others: with the intention to investigate, or call attention to, how

identity shifts and changes when catalyzed by experience, and more dramatically, trauma. For this

project, I again was drawn to the landscape as muse, but uncharacteristically chose one loaded with

meaning, burdened with a history so cumbersome that I initially was afraid to pursue it.

The title of this series, Panopticon, refers to an 18th century circular prison model that allows for

secret surveillance of all prisoner activity through natural illumination. The subject matter is the

grounds of Nazi concentration camps. Far from being documentary in nature, these photographs are

decontextualized excerpts through which I sought to dispose of most recognizable clues to the

specific places, and focus on the surrounding, and surviving, environments in order to recast them as

sites for new meaning. The resulting images, mutated through a technical process that relies on decay

as an operative force, do suggest trauma, but don’t require a reaction that encompasses a response to

iconic horror. Instead, I make this work in the hope of inspiring a dialogue between the viewer and

imagery that fuses indeterminate disturbance with transcendent beauty.

Lishui Photo - David Wolf

David Wolf and I met in Portland at PhotoLucida. We had a lovely conversation, and I enjoyed his body of work, Nurturing Time. His architectural, colorful and textured images were perfect for a rainy spring day in April. He is also one of the lucky invitees to Lishui, and I am looking forward to them brightening up a cold November day.

Here is more about his series - Nurturing Time.

“Nurturing Time, Life in a Backyard Garden” inhabits the place where still life and landscape meet.

The project’s working method bridges the disparate practices of found and staged photography to explore how we regard our natural surroundings as we nurture, shape and control them. The series depicts the human presence in Nature in the form of arrangements made from flowers and plants selected from the photographer’s garden, and places them amidst the cycle of growth, decay and rebirth that unfolds there.

To create the assemblages I isolate the plants individually, and arrange and combine them to make associations or suggest contradictions. A simple cardboard box serves as both neutral container and conceptual envelope to display the arrangements. This working practice is itself a metaphor for how we contain and manipulate Nature.

Beyond typology, “Nurturing Time” offers us the richness of the garden and illuminates our connection to it. The assembled flower boxes resonate with a range of emotion, reflecting our own experience of the cycle of life that embraces vitality and decay, abundance and loss. Memory—Time’s shadow—is present here, too, as events and lives are evoked and memorialized by these images.