Women to take the floor in 'What She Said'

By Mary Louise Schumacher of the Journal Sentinel

Women don’t tend to get their due in the art world. Art created by women represents a fraction of the work in major museum collections and in important art shows, such as the Whitney Biennial in New York.

It’s a discrepency that exists in Wisconsin, as well. Group photography exhibitions are often dominated by men here, say the organizers of “What She Said: Wisconsin Photography Now,” an exhibition that promises to showcase the work of four women artists who explore issues of identity.

The four Wisconsin artists include Jessie Eisner-Kleyle, whose series “We Were Not Born Women” pairs images with stories collected from women across the country about the definitions of femininity and the objects associated with their transition to womanhood. Jessica Kaminski’s “The Home Project” challenges notions of rootedness and belonging. Jenaille Northey’s “Love Letters” project distorts imagery associated with romance novels. And Nicole Peaslee’s “Fractures” series uses the natural world as metaphor.

“What She Said” is curated by Milwaukee photographers Jessica Z. Schafer and William Zuback. It opens Thursday at Effjay Projects, an increasingly important regional venue founded by former Milwaukee artist Frank Juarez (Get it – Eff-jay?), 604 Erie Ave., Sheboygan. A gallery talk and artists’ reception will be held June 2 from 5 to 8 p.m.

Well, happy 2012!!!  Enjoy the break?  I did too.  Headquarters are gearing up to move to New Orleans, Louisiana, so the blogs have been neglected.  I apologize. 

Luckily Brian Lee Whisenhunt over at Manic Thrift Store Shopper has been sending me headlines that you should be aware of.  I do enjoy the ability to copy and paste a blog entry when needed.  So, thanks, Brian.  



For his project Vanishing Cultures, photographer Dennis Manarchy is traveling around the country documenting various cultures and taking pictures of people vanishing from the American experience, such as Native Americans, cowboys and Medal of Honor winners from World War II. You've heard this before, until you get to the part where he's doing it with a camera that he built, a one-of-a-kind, 35-foot-long camera called “Eye of America”. It has to be towed by a truck. Styled like an old fashioned large format camera, it’s so large that a person can work comfortably inside it. The negatives measure 6×4.5 feet. The detail in a portrait subjects’ eyeball alone is a thousand times greater than what you get with the average negative. Resulting portraits will be featured on prints 2 stories tall.


Check out the camera, then visit The Foundation for the Preservation of American Culture website for a published itinerary of the trip, sketches of the exhibit and other information. 

Jurying: A Guide for Beginners

Amy Weh
Two Sheep (detail)
mosaic

Wouldn't you think it's be soooo easy to go in to any art exhibit and pick what you like, to toss out money to artists whose work impresses and moves you?  You would be wrong.

Gabrielle Meyer
Red Blossom
yarn and shaped line

In July, I was invited to be the Awards Judge and Guest Artist for the Wisconsin Regional Art Program 2011 conference, and August 9 was my big day, to look at the exhibit and award thousands of dollars in cash to regional non-professional artists.  The Wisconsin Regional Art Program began in 1940 under the guidance of John Steuart Curry to encourage the creative growth of rural non-professional artists in Wisconsin.  Aaron Bohrod was Curry's successor, so clearly, this is no hillbilly craft fair.  (Damn those art history classes. If only I'd have not known these artists, I'd have just sailed through it!! I kid. )   On September 24, I'll speak at the conference, and that afternoon will give out the awards.  There's a reception the evening before, so what I'm saying here is that I'll meet these artists.  I'll speak to and mingle with them.  They might ask me "why didn't you choose my piece?" or "what was it you liked about my work?"  Point being, I had to bring my A-game.  (And "A" stands for "art".)

Lynn Block
Garden Bouquet
mixed: watercolor, acrylic, bleach, gel pen

I considered many many things in the weeks leading up to my session, mostly having to do with organizing my time, thoughts and criteria.  It's a huge show (168 pieces), and it's not all photography.  I know with what criteria to judge photography, but sculpture?? Collage?? Art quilts?? I've also been hearing some interesting things lately, specifically on LinkedIn, about juried art shows, if the fees are worth it, and a general WTF skepticism regarding jurors as a whole.  I had to do right by these artists.

I decided on the following criteria for getting through the show:

1. Be quick.  Rely heavily on first impressions.


2. See all the pieces in the show before beginning to award.  Make notes and choose from those notes.

Steve J. Gyarmaty
Blooming Frost #154digital photo

3. Choose pieces based on their artistic merit (i.e: compostion, use of materials, presentation, technical prowess.) DO NOT select based on your emotional reaction to pieces.

Polly Edgar
The Map of a World
watercolor and ink

Every single rule I'd so painstakingly and scientifically created went straight down the drain once I got in there.  I spent almost 3 hours in the exhibit, looking at and relooking at work.  I began by going through and - in an effort to be neat - instead of writing on my award sheet, I made notes on my list of artists. A * meant I wanted to award something, but wanted to see everything before beginning. A \ meant "not today." Some pieces I would star on my list, but they wouldn't stand up as strongly on my second and third viewings.  Others I slashed, then gave large awards to upon second viewing. I went around the Pyle Center probably 10 times.  I lost count.  At one point I didn't even know which floor I was on.  And, when I got to pieces like Amy Weh's Two Sheep I awarded immediately, certain of the fact that the response I had would not be surpassed by anything else that day.  Steve J. Gyarmaty's photo Blooming Frost #154 floored me, but because I've made this image, and each of my photographer friends have made this image - BUT NOT THIS BEAUTIFULLY.

Frederick Kuck
Iguana (detail)
recycled stainless steel

Helen Wolk
 In Memory of Lucy
ink on Arches

I realized too that trying to leave my emotional side in the car was just stupid.  How do we respond to art?  Of course, we appreciate the manipulation of material.  The mastery of composition.  But what stops you?  An oil painting on a perfectly stretched canvas, or an image of a boy that looks like your child? To deny one's heart in the evaluation of art is fallacy, and the surest way toward art that moves no one.  Polly Edgar's watercolor and ink Map of the World appealed to my whimsy, my fairy tale side, and made me giggle out loud, while Helen Wolk's ink In memory of Lucy and Sandra Belozercovsky's earthenware pieces Going Home made it hard for me to not cry. Lynn Block's Garden Bouquet made of watercolor, acrylic, bleach and gel pen excited me in its execution, in its reuse of everyday objects.  Gabrielle Meyer's Red Blossom, a modern yarn and shaped line structure in shape, color and structure, and Frederick Kuck's Iguana, a sparkling realistic scuplture made from spoons that does not in fact look like an iguana made from spoons were pieces that surprised and enchanted me, not just because these are non-professional rural artists, but because these were fabulous works of art.

Tessa Ganser
Keeper
acrylic paint

Christopher Welty
Alien Human
drawing

There were also pieces on display by some extraordinarily talented high school students.  Had I been able to give those awards, Tess Ganser, Julia Morgan, Christopher Welty and Julia Rose Bruce would have been my choices, and in that order.  The control of media in addition to the depth of composition and maturity of subject made this side show home to some of the best works in the Pyle Center.  I'm excited to see really young artists make good -  jot those names down - you'll see more from these kids.


It was amazing.  I saw some really really great work that, sadly, didn't have price tags. I encourage you to go see this show - it's up until September 24 and will inspire you and move you, surprise and encourage you.  I got to judge sculpture, painting, prints, fabric art and, of course, photography and I loved every minute of it...even the $20 parking ticket I got for taking so long.

Great work, artists....I can't wait to meet you.

(all images taken onsite with my iPhone.  Please, do not judge these works by these images...)

Shoot First, Focus Later...The Lytro Camera

image by Eric Cheng
Lytro's light field camera lets a user explore different focus points
after an image is taken, as in this picture.

by Steve Lohr

published June 21 2011
New York Times

With an innovative camera due out later this year from a company called Lytro, photographers will have one less excuse for having missed that perfect shot.

The company’s technology allows a picture’s focus to be adjusted after it is taken. While viewing a picture taken with a Lytro camera on a computer screen, you can, for example, click to bring people in the foreground into sharp relief, or switch the focus to the mountains behind them.

But is Lytro’s technology just a neat feature, or is it the next big thing in cameras?

The founding team of the Silicon Valley start-up and investors who have put in $50 million are betting on the latter. The technology has won praise from computer scientists and raves from early users of its prototype camera.

“We see technology companies all the time, but it’s rare that someone comes along with something that is this much of a breakthrough,” said Ben Horowitz, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, a major investor in Lytro. “It’s superexciting.”

Lytro’s founder and chief executive is Ren Ng, 31. His achievement, experts say, has been to take research projects of recent years — requiring perhaps 100 digital cameras lashed to a supercomputer — and squeeze that technology into a camera headed for the consumer market later this year.

Mr. Ng explained the concept in 2006 in his Ph.D. thesis at Stanford University, which won the worldwide competition for the best doctoral dissertation in computer science that year from the Association for Computing Machinery. Since then Mr. Ng has been trying to translate the idea into a product that can be brought to market — and building a team of people to do it.

The Lytro camera captures far more light data, from many angles, than is possible with a conventional camera. It accomplishes that with a special sensor called a microlens array, which puts the equivalent of many lenses into a small space. “That is the heart of the breakthrough,” said Pat Hanrahan, a Stanford professor, who was Mr. Ng’s thesis adviser but is not involved in Lytro.

image by Fred R. ConradRen Ng, chief executive of Lytro

But the wealth of raw light data comes to life only with sophisticated software that lets a viewer switch points of focus. This allows still photographs to be explored as never before. “They become interactive, living pictures,” Mr. Ng said. He thinks a popular use may be families and friends roaming through different perspectives on pictures of, say, vacations and parties posted on Facebook (Lytro will have a Facebook app).

For a photographer, whether amateur or professional, the Lytro technology means that the headaches of focusing a shot go away. Richard Koci Hernandez, a photojournalist, said that when he tried out a prototype earlier this year, he immediately recognized the potential impact.

“You just concentrate on the image and composition, but there’s no need to worry about focus anymore,” Mr. Hernandez said. “That’s something you do later.”

“That was the aha! moment for me,” said Mr. Hernandez, an assistant professor of new media at the graduate school of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. “This is game-changing.”

Mr. Hernandez, who is not affiliated with Lytro, was one of several photographers who tested prototypes. His model, he said, was sheathed in a black plastic shell, so he did not see its design. But he said it was the size of a standard point-and-shoot camera. The picture resolution, he added, was indistinguishable from that of his other point-and-shoots, a Canon and a Nikon.

Eliminating any loss of resolution in a camera like Lytro’s, which is capturing light data from many angles, is a real advance, said Shree Nayar, a professor at Columbia University and an expert in computer vision. Mr. Nayar is familiar with Mr. Ng’s work, but he said he had not seen anything Lytro has done in more than a year.

“If they have been able to recover most of the lost resolution, then their image refocusing application is a very cool feature,” Mr. Nayar said. “But it is an open question how popular it becomes.”

At Lytro, the view is that the technology, once it gets into people’s hands, opens the door to many possible new features and uses. Among its other advantages, the new camera is much faster than conventional ones because there is no “shutter lag” — waiting for the autofocus device to work and the shot to be taken. Those fractions of a second, of course, are often when the dog darts off or the child’s smile becomes a frown.

Lytro cameras can also capture plenty of data for 3-D images, which can be viewed on a computer screen with 3-D glasses.

Lytro is not saying what the price of its first camera will be, but insists it will be for the consumer market, which suggests a price of a few hundred dollars. The company is also not being more precise about when the camera will ship. It will initially be sold through online retailers like Amazon.com and Lytro’s Web site.

But to gear up, the company is rapidly adding to its 45-person staff in Mountain View, Calif. Its recruits include veterans of Microsoft, Google, Apple, Intel and Sun Microsystems.

One Lytro convert who caught the attention of the Valley digerati was Kurt Akeley, who joined the company last September from Microsoft Research. Mr. Akeley, 53, was one of the early engineers at Silicon Graphics, a pioneer in computer graphics, and is one of the lead developers of OpenGL, a popular set of graphics programming tools.

Mr. Akeley, a consulting professor at Stanford, was familiar with Mr. Ng’s work and said he was lured by the challenge and technical opportunity. Lytro, Mr. Akeley said, has “a powerful technology with legs — great things can happen.”

Lytro chose to design and market a camera itself, instead of licensing its technology to a camera giant like Canon or Nikon. It will farm out the manufacturing to a company in Taiwan, but it wanted to control the details of the camera itself — much as Apple does.

“We can just make a better product this way, and really show what we can do,” Mr. Ng said. “The big camera makers are mostly polishing existing technology, and we didn’t want to do this in an incremental way.”

You're gonna want to play with this image....and then with this camera. Keep up to date with specifications, release dates and, of course, pricing as they come available at the Lytro blog.

The Hasselblad H4D-200 MS

Generally when I title a post with the name of a camera, one can expect a love letter to a camera I own and use.  This is not one of those posts.  


From the hard-hitting journalists at Fox News comes news of the new Hasselblad H4D-200MS, a 200-megapixel digital camera.  Honestly, if anyone was going to do it, it was going to be Hasselblad, the Swedish camera company that has been the purveyor of photographer's wet dreams since 1841.  Moon landing?  World War II Swedish military aerial surveillance?  The one name that will make any photographer clutch chest, throw hand to forehead and swoon??  All Hasselblad.

A 40MP photo taken with a Hasselblad H4D-40.
Photo credit Kirsten Visima

The new H4D-200MS is no exception.  It captures six shots simultaneously and combines them into an astounding super-resolution picture. The company says the camera was designed for studio photographers, whose work requires the ultimate in resolution, extremely fine details and exacting color reproduction. "The H4D-200MS is ideal for capturing images of stationary items such as cars, jewelry, artwork and other high end products where there is no room for compromise in image quality," Hassleblad stated in a press release announcing the camera. It features extended multi-shot capabilities and all the benefits of the H4D family of cameras such as True Focus, Ultra Focus and Digital Lens Correction, to name just a few. 


While F.W. Hasselblad and Co. started as a trading company, in 1877 the founder's son, Arvid Viktor Hasselblad, used his interest in photography to implement the photographic division of the company. Hasselblad's corporate website quotes him as saying "I certainly don’t think that we will earn much money on this, but at least it will allow us to take pictures for free." With their newest baby priced at $45,000 (yes, that's US dollars), nobody's taking pictures for free anymore.  

Bell and Howell Dial 35

http://bluemooncamera.com

Once upon a time, a young girl happened upon a land of magic, beauty and wonder. Actually, I'm not sure how I came across the Blue Moon Camera and Machine website, but I knew I had found something magical the minute I fell down that particular rabbit hole.  A place where film is still processed - all kinds of film from far and wide! - and a place where the beauty of the camera is as appreciated as the imagery it creates.  They also sell typewriters.  The site itself is a doorway to a land (Portland!) where your wildest photographic dreams can come true, without that irritating look from the slag at your local photo lab, and what I found there that moved me the most was the Bell and Howell Dial 35 camera.

It's a half-frame 35mm camera, which means that the shutter exposes one half of the 35mm negative, the film rewinds and then you work your way through the other half of the 35mm negative.  Like following breadcrumbs, really.  I was immediately mesmerized.  I mean, LOOK AT IT!  And using each frame of a 36 exposure roll of film means 72 images on one roll!!!  And 72 tiny images to boot.  Please.

flickr user TimVo

A short tangent at this point in the story to explain to you some of my more interesting personality quirks may be necessary.  I can develop a little tunnel vision when there's something I really want, and a lot competitive, well, any other time.  Having obsessed over the Bell and Howell 35 for fair amount of time, when one popped up on eBay in September 2007 (yup, I checked my feedback) I needed it.  BAD.  I emailed the seller and asked about the possibility of doing a Buy It Now but he said he'd prefer to see how the auction played out.  I could have told him at that point exactly how the auction would play out and that I would be the victor, but I don;t think that's what he meant. It came down to me and one other bidder, until my competitive nature kicked in, and then all I had to fear was my own instability.  I walked away with the camera (not literally, of course, it's eBay) for the bargain price of $127.   At the time that was really upsetting, but there are a few others posted on various sites for more than that, so thank you to blogging for making me feel better about that!! 

flickr user anavrina

The camera is a dream.  So much of it is automatic, and it's the most amazing thing anyone at this party has ever seen.  The setup is inspiring to new combinations, nrew setups, new comparisons, and the images are gorgeous enough that a devoted group of followers have created and regularly contribute to a Flickr page of images taken with the Dial 35. 


Processing the film is no big whoop, and it'll print the same, just two half images on your piece of 4x6 lab paper.  You can choose whether or not to give the photo lab tech a shout out regarding the oddity of the images, but the printer should be running those scans as normal. Of course, if they get their panties in a bunch over it, you can always just ship the film to Portland...and live happily ever after.

And now for something completely different...

Chris Silas Neal

Yes, I know, this is a photography blog.  One that hasn't had many posts lately - I know that, too. There's so much going on in the world, my state, hell, my town and neighborhood, right now, that is acting as a great distraction for me, and this makes posting about my old cameras less than a priority.  What is a priority are politics, rights, and changes that would surely hurt more people than they would help, all in the name of fiscal responsibility.  As I've been caught up in the back and forth, and the "what the hell?", another new blogger has caught my attention, and he's a historian, so it really kind of fits.  Doesn't it?

William Cronon.  A Professor of History at UW-Madison, and the president-elect of the American Historical Society, wrote an Op-Ed piece to the NYT, published Monday.  That's where it all started. Not being the educated sort, the Republican Party of Wisconsin filed an open records request for his emails - any emails using the terms "rally, recall, collective bargaining" or the name of any Republican politician who has found him or herself embroiled in this bad decision among others.

Cronon responded on his blog, and it's brilliant.  Really.  Read it.  Read everything he's written. He's intelligent, he's somewhat objective, he's cool-headed.  And he makes some amazing discoveries.

I'm clearly NOT a political writer.  I'm an artist and educator who has been moved by recent events, so much that I'm addressing them on both of my blogs today. I'm trusting you to follow the links provided and make your own decisions.  And maybe you'll learn something.  I know I did.

I promise, we'll return shortly to our regularly scheduled programming.  A post about making work that you don't want to make but have to make seems like a logical jump...