PhotoNOLA PhotoBOOK Fair
Tuesday, Dec 8, 6-8pm | Virtual part of the Festival Pass
The New Orleans Photo Alliance and its 15th annual PhotoNOLA Festival are pleased to announce the 2020 PhotoBOOK Fair! We are excited to continue one of PhotoNOLA’s newest traditions in a new format. This year’s fair will be held virtually and will be hosted by former NOPA President Thom Bennett at the NOPA Gallery Photo Book Library.
The online fair will feature six authors and publishers who will present their latest books:
Brittany Markert’s In Rooms Portfolio
Isaac Diggs’ and Edward Hillel’s Electronic Landscapes
Jonathan Blaustein’s Extinction Party
Rebecca Senf’s Making a Photographer: The Early Work of Ansel Adams
St Veronica’s Photography and Wisznia Architecture’s The Stephens Garage Collection
Zatara Press’ Then and There: Mardi Gras 1979 – Harvey Stein
After the initial presentations, Fair attendees will have the opportunity to visit virtually with the authors and publishers for Q&A. To register for the Fair, please purchase a Festival Pass.
Brittany Markert
In Rooms Portfolio Book
In Rooms is a photographic and experimental film project by Artist Brittany Markert. The newest Portfolio Book, in the spirit of a professional portfolio, includes the artist’s favorite prints from her Sold Out books In Rooms Vol. I & II. The book closes a 12 page interview section paired with unpublished diary self portrait prints and handwritten text. This book is designed as a meditation to unlock the unconscious mind and give reader’s a glimpse into the world of In Rooms.
Bio
Brittany Markert (b.1987, USA) is a traditional black and white photographer, darkroom printer, 16mm filmmaker, bookmaker & educator. Her photographic project In Rooms has been exhibited in the USA, France, Denmark, & Belgium including Brandts Museum, The Ogden Museum of Southern Art and The Untitled Space (NY). Her work is held in private collections in 20 countries across the globe. In 2017 Brittany broadened her focus to curating female identifying artists & 16mm filmmaking, continuing her photographic work’s dialogue on mental health, our inner dialogue & Jungian shadow work. All work is printed by the artist herself in the darkroom.
Electronic Landscapes: Music, Space and Resistance in Detroit
Isaac Diggs & Edward Hillel
Electronic Landscapes: Music, Space and Resistance in Detroit (EL) celebrates Detroit’s techno, house and hip-hop musicians who construct home studios, renovate buildings and sustain community despite increasing pressure from land development and speculation. It sheds a fresh light on the city’s cultural significance and further contextualizes its current resurgence. Readers are invited to glimpse rarely seen aspects of Detroit’s electronic music culture, and to reflect on historic and contemporary places in Detroit’s landscape related to it. Featured musicians discuss their process and the significant link between race, space and cultural production, a theme expanded upon in critical texts by scholars Dora Apel and Carla Vecchiola, and internationally renowned DJ, John Collins.
Photographer and educator Isaac Diggs explores the urban fabric of cities in the United States and abroad. He has published books on Lagos and Los Angeles, and his photographs have been exhibited nationally and in Japan. Isaac received his B.A. in English Literature at Columbia University, M.F.A. in photography from Bard College and is core faculty at the School of Visual Arts in New York. His work is represented in public and private collections.
Photographer and multidisciplinary artist Edward Hillel focuses on themes including community, human rights, memory and place. Working in the spheres of archival research, documentary or performance, his process is a form of social practice, questioning hegemonic narratives within a framework of dialogue and collaboration. His work is represented in public and private collections, and has been widely exhibited and published.
Jonathan Blaustein is an artist, writer, and educator based in Taos, New Mexico. He received his MFA in Photography from Pratt Institute in 2004, and has exhibited widely in galleries and museums the US, and in festivals in Europe as well.
His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Library of Congress, the State of New Mexico, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among other institutions.
And his work is available at Obscura Gallery in Santa Fe.
Jonathan is a weekly columnist at the popular blog aPhotoEditor.com, and spent six years as a photo critic for the New York Times. He has also written about art and photography online for The New Yorker, VICE, The Washington Post, and Hyperallergic. He taught photography at UNM-Taos for many years, and currently runs the Antidote Photo Retreat at his family horse farm outside Taos.
“Extinction Party,” his first monograph, was published in March 2020 by Yoffy Press in Atlanta, and was featured in multiple publications, including the Washington Post, LensCulture, Photograph Magazine, The Albuquerque Journal, and the Santa Fe New Mexican.
His work is available at Obscura Gallery in Santa Fe.
Making a Photographer: The Early Work of Ansel Adams
Rebecca A. Senf; With a foreword by Anne Breckenridge Barrett
An unprecedented and eye-opening examination of the early career of one of America’s most celebrated photographers
One of the most influential photographers of his generation, Ansel Adams (1902–1984) is famous for his dramatic photographs of the American West. Although many of Adams’s images are now iconic, his early work has remained largely unknown. In this first monograph dedicated to the beginnings of Adams’s career, Rebecca A. Senf argues that these early photographs are crucial to understanding Adams’s artistic development and offer new insights into many aspects of the artist’s mature oeuvre.
Drawing on copious archival research, Senf traces the first three decades of Adams’s photographic practice—beginning with an amateur album made during his childhood and culminating with his Guggenheim-supported National Parks photography of the 1940s. Highlighting the artist’s persistence in forging a career path and his remarkable ability to learn from experience as he sharpened his image-making skills, this beautifully illustrated volume also looks at the significance of the artist’s environmentalism, including his involvement with the Sierra Club.
Dr. Rebecca Senf is Chief Curator at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, in Tucson. Her B.A. in Art History is from the University of Arizona; her M.A. and Ph.D. were awarded by Boston University. In 2012, her book Reconstructing the View: The Grand Canyon Photographs of Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe was released by University of California Press; in 2017, her book To Be Thirteen, showcasing the work of Betsy Schneider, was published by Radius Press and Phoenix Art Museum. Senf is an Ansel Adams scholar, and recently published a book on Ansel Adams’s early years, called Making a Photographer, copublished by the CCP and Yale University Press.
David Armentor:
Gulf coast native David Armentor has been working in the photographic medium since 2002. He received a BA from Louisiana State University where he learned the craft of traditional photographic print making. After graduation he taught photography classes for the Baton Rouge Arts Council and worked as a freelance photographer until moving to Seattle, WA, where he continued his photographic endeavors with the Benham Gallery as the gallery manager and guest artist. He now resides in New Orleans, LA, and is the founder of St Veronica’s Photography, an art consulting firm which specializes in alternative photographic processes.
Tammy Mercure
I have been living in and photographing the American South for over ten years and have focused on portraits of people and how they relate to their landscape.
In 2007, I moved to East Tennessee. I began documenting the tourist area around the Great Smoky Mountains. It is the most visited national park with even more people visiting the surrounding towns. Following the economic crisis, it was a time when many older attractions began closing and new ideas were tried for survival. The old symbols of the hillbilly and Dolly Parton and bears were still there while the replica of the Titanic crashed into the parkway.
After a couple years, I expanded to the rites and rituals of the surrounding areas. In the quiet of the rolling hills, I sought out the loud. I photographed burnout contests, civil war reenactments, county fairs, the Redneck Olympics, small town July 4th parades, and more.
In 2014, I moved to New Orleans. I am continuing my work on rites and rituals, gravitating to the small town festivals that celebrate industry like the Rayne Frog Festival and the Morgan City Shrimp and Petroleum Festival and the ceremonies of the city.
This year, having moved to the town of Violet, about 15 minutes from the lower 9th ward in da parish, I am expanding to the landscape outside the flood wall and the changing landscape from coastal erosion and sinking land.
Having grown up in Iowa, I have a great connection with the cars and trucks I have driven over the years. A car meant freedom and showed some of my personality outwardly. Over the years, I have continually photographed people in their cars. For this work, I concentrated on Sundays on the lakefront where car enthusiasts gather and the organized car shows in various parking lots around the city.
The Stephens Garage Collection – Catalogue
The Stephens Garage Collection is a collaboration between St Veronica’s Photography and Wisznia | Architecture + Development that explores and pays homage to the American automobile and its culture through lens based visual art. The collection was commissioned to celebrate the spaces of The Garage, a mixed use development in the heart of the Central Business District of New Orleans.
St Veronica’s Photography realized the client’s vision through individual portfolios and installations created by 10 artists exploring themes such as: contemporary highway symbols, a vacation road trip, the art of parking, and the abstraction of automobile pieces and parts, all while providing the viewer a sense of place unique to Gulf Coast Louisiana.
The artist roster is made up solely of New Orleans based artists, each bringing their unique strengths to the collection. Whether playful, process heavy or narrative, all works are realized in a uniquely New Orleans way.
Then and There: Mardi Gras 1979 – Harvey Stein
Company Description:
Zatara Press is an independent small press photobook imprint based around the medium of “Uniquely Designed and Collaboratively Crafted Artist’s Styled Photobooks”. Our photobooks are poetic art objects designed around the minimalist Japanese aesthetic view of Wabi-Sabi.
Link to Book For Sale:
https://zatarapress.com/product/thenandthere/
Book Specifications:
183 x 220 mm or 7.2 x 8.7 inches
47 Color Photographs
88 Pages + Cover
Hardcover
Zatara Press 2020
ISBN: 978-1-7338406-1-3
Trade Edition: 400 Copies
Retail Price: $40.00 Unsigned
$45.00 Signed
3rd Person Harvey Stein Biography:
Harvey Stein has had a wide-ranging career as an engaged photographer working in the documentary tradition, utilizing the medium to create photographs that capture the spirit and vitality of the people and places he depicts. His prime focus is to relate to his fellow human beings in intense and close-up images. Through enduring documentary investigations of groups as varied as identical twins, Coney Island people, the street life of Harlem, artists in their studios, people living with AIDS, and life and death in Mexico, his projects have resulted in compelling and evocative in-depth photobooks that help illuminate the human condition and reveal his commitment to building connections through photography. Among Stein’s nine published books are Parallels: A Look at Twins (1978), Coney Island 40 Years (2011), and Mexico Between Life and Death (2018). Stein’s photographs are in over 60 museum and corporate collections; he has had 88 one-person exhibits. He currently teaches at the International Center of Photography in New York City and conducts workshops worldwide. His website is harveysteinphoto.com; Instagram @stein.harvey.
3rd Person Product Description:
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person.
Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
-Oscar Wilde
In Then and There, the well-known photographer Harvey Stein documents a crucial aspect of public behavior at the 1979 New Orleans Mardi Gras. Shooting with an instant SX-70 Polaroid camera, the process allowed Stein to directly interact with his subjects, who perform, observe, and even share in the photographic process. The 47 portraits are made just feet away from each person, mostly at dusk, sharply revealed by the light of the camera’s flash bar. His subjects creatively present themselves in diverse colorful masks, makeup, and revelry. Each portrait is a glimpse into a layered and hidden personal identity made possible by the collaborative choices of the photographer and the subjects acting in front of the camera. The raw excitement of Mardi Gras flows through each portrait with the people physically filling the entire frame of the Polaroid as if the print itself were a stage just for them. Mardi Gras allows both the subject and the photographer a moment of freedom to observe a transformation into another reality of being. Stein investigates these many themes throughout the book, and captures those flamboyant moments of lightning in a bottle with each Polaroid.
3rd Person Andrew Fedynak Bio:
Andrew Fedynak (Hartford Art School MFA and ICP One-Year Certificate Program) is a photographer, photobook publisher, and educator based out of Richmond, Virginia. Formally of Asheville, North Carolina, his projects are often centered on his personal views regarding the practice of Zen. These Fine Art Documentary photographs are regularly found around his home in the American South, and in other locations as moments occur. He prefers to see his finished projects in a book format, many of which have then been published, and exhibited globally. These books reside in the collections of many institutions such as Candela Gallery Collection, Museum of Modern Art Library, SCAD Atlanta – ACA Library Artists’ Book Collection, Virginia Museum of Fine Art Library, Yale University – Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and Walker Art Center Library.
Fedynak created Zatara Press in 2014 to publish uniquely designed and collaboratively crafted “Artist’s Styled Photobooks” centered around the aesthetic design principles of Wabi Sabi. To ZP, photobooks are poetic art objects as well as statements or narratives. As a publisher, and photobook designer, he is called upon to review portfolios at festivals such as Photolucida, PhotoNOLA, Medium Festival of Photography, and Review Santa Fe as well as being a selector for contests such as Photolucida’s Critical Mass, and as a PDN 30 Nominator. Each year he continues to design photobooks for ZP, and other publishers, while also working on his own personal photographic projects.
This event is included in the PhotoNOLA2020
