Accepting entries for photo-based work featuring dresses for the December issue of Fraction Magazine. This group exhibition will be curated by Melanie McWhorter (of melanie photo blog). Deadline is Friday, November 7, 2008, 5pm MTN.
The dress has been a subject of curatorial consideration throughout the last 20 years, exhibitions like Empty Dress: Clothing as Surrogate in Recent Art (presented by Nina Felshin and the Independent Curators International in 1994), have mostly dealt with the use of clothing as symbols, containers of specific meaning related to class, gender and desire. While these prior exhibitions laid the critical groundwork for the consideration of clothing in contemporary art by addressing a broad spectrum of garments and media, Fraction Magazine is pleased to announce an upcoming online exhibition that will specifically investigate these issues as they relate to the woman’s dress as signifier within the medium of photography. The exhibition aims to reveal the “collective consciousness” associated with how the dress, an undeniably rich surrogate, is exploited in contemporary photography.
We are now accepting submissions of photographs (in digital format) that explore / address / feature dresses of any kind.
To send scans, please attach them to the email labeled Lastname_image1.jpg, Lastname_image2.jpg and so on. In the body of the email, please list your name, email address, title of each scan with beside the respective numbers and size and medium of the final print. A brief description of the project is optional. Please limit submissions to five scans per photographer.
The images should be 72dpi and no bigger than 800 pixels on the longest side. Email submission to cfw@fractionmag.com.
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query dress show. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query dress show. Sort by date Show all posts
1.04.2009
Dress Show...finally
I finally emailed the text (with editing help from a couple of friends) to Joshua Spees at Fraction Magazine for the call for work from November for The Dress Show. I am very excited about the way the exhibit looks and about the new design of the online magazine.
I will also be publishing some other images that I could not include in the curation, here over the next few days. The new issue is due out on January 12, 2009.
11.07.2008
Dress show deadline today
If you want to submit to the dress show I am curating for Fraction Magazine, the deadline is today. Here is the info. Email if you have questions.
10.27.2008
Dress Show Call for Entry Deadline November 7th
I have received some wonderful submissions for the Dress Show I am curating for Fraction Magazine. It is not too late to enter, the deadline is November 7th. If you missed it, here is the info for submission.
2.15.2008
Dress show curation
Years ago, I started to notice the recurring use of the empty dress in contemporary art. I was not the only one. Years before my observation, Independent Curators Incorporated in New York organized and circulated an exhibition curated by Guest Curator, Nina Felshin who wrote the introduction-- and other writings on the topic-- to the beautifully designed catalogue for the exhibition Empty Dress: Clothing as Surrogate in Recent Art. I have collected photos for a few years now and for lack of funding and a space (at this time); I elected to start the show here beginning with not a photograph, but a photo realistic painting by Joanne Teasdale.
6.17.2009
Un-Natural Nature of Food Now on Fraction
Many of my friends tend to cringe when I start talking about my copy of How to Survive in the Wilderness and my reasoning about eating meat -- "If I can't kill it, I should not eat it". With books like The Omnivore's Dilemma or Fast Food Nation, and films like Food, Inc., it's clear this pattern of thinking is happening on a broad scale, and I am perhaps more susceptible to suggestion than I like to think.-- from the curator's statement, The Un-Natural Nature of Food
I am pleased to present my second group show with Fraction Magazine, titled The Un-Natural Nature of Food. Curating for this show and the previous Dress Show for the internet has some of the same restrictions associated with a physical location, but also allows for more interactive dialogue rarely afforded in a three-dimensional space. The curator adds another layer of meaning to the works by placing them in context with other pieces. I am appreciative to all the photographers who graciously submitted images into my hands.
This exhibit includes the work of
Jonathan Baustein
Micah Beree
John Cranford
Adrain Chesser
Jake Chessum
Jason Demarte
Dornith Doherty
Jonathan Feinstein
Taj Forer
Cynthia Greig
Gabriela Herman
Hin Chua
Jason Houston
Melissa Kaseman
Erika Larsen
Ben Lerman
Amanda Lucidon/The Press Enteprise
Paho Mann
Justin Maxon
Mark Menjivar
Kevin Miyazaki
Dan Nelken
Colleen Plumb
Susana Raab
Paul Salveson
Lex Thompson
Jerry Uelsmann
Brian Ulrich
Nicholas Vroman
Natalie Young
6.30.2008
12.29.2010
Interview with Photobook Designer Elizabeth Avedon
I first met Elizabeth Avedon when she was the Gallery Director at photo-eye. Since the time Elizabeth departed Santa Fe, she established her own blog which has become a recognized voice in the photography community featuring portfolios and interviews, including my first interview about my photography. I am delighted to turn the tables on Ms. Avedon and allow her to discuss her profession: Book, Exhibition and Web Design + Curatorial Consultant. Here she discusses the photobook, print-on-demand, and some of her favorite projects.
Melanie McWhorter: At what point is it important to involve a designer in your project?
Elizabeth Avedon: There are different stages for a designer to step in for every project. It really depends on the artist/photographer. Some photographers will start talking to me years before they actually are ready to begin the layouts, others hand me a complete, finished edit when I first meet them. I can easily begin to sequence the work for them from that, but I think it's an important step in the overall process for the designer to be involved in the edit of the work from the start, to get a feel for the point of view of the photographer. Many times the designer will see an interesting "book" the artist hadn't imagined for themselves. Other times the photographer will be overly critical in their edit, second guessing themselves and their audience, leaving out images that may show important steps in the evolution of their work. Other photographers may not be critical enough with their work, unable to edit out images because of the people, place or action going on which may not actually come across so well in the image as they think. They are still visualizing the moment, but we don't see it in the frame. It's important for everyone to have an outside eye.
MM: Are most of your clients individuals and do you consult with them one-on-one or are most publishers?
MM: What do you feel is the role of a designer in a creating a photobook?
MM: Will you give an example of a book that transformed from its original plan into a different book?
EA: One example, and one of my favorite projects I've ever worked on, was AVEDON: 1947-1977 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a 30-year retrospective of Richard Avedon's fashion work. This book was a labor of love for everyone involved in its making. It was almost a 10-year project, five of which were just printing and editing thirty years worth of contact sheets - printed round the clock by Kazutaka Nakamura, Jeff Niki, Harry Mattison and overseen by then Studio Manager, Gideon Lewin. Designer Marvin Israel originally began editing the contact sheets with Avedon around 1970, I assisted them at an early point in the process a couple of years later (Marvin had been my teacher at Parsons and I worked as his assistant on-and-off), and a couple of years after that I took over the project.
The editing seemed endless, but in a good way. The photographs were extraordinary! Viewing all of the original contact sheets of Susy Parker, Dorian Leigh and Dovima; early Paris Collections; Marlene Dietrich, Katherine Hepburn, Lena Horne, Sophia Loren, Elizabeth Taylor, Jean Shrimpton; and the first photos of Twiggy and Penelope Tree coming on the scene, among so many others. There were cartons and cartons of contact sheets for each year, for each decade, for 30 years. We would have some of the early choices printed along the way even before we would finish the decade we were working on, so early on we had some of the best images from each year already beginning to take shape.
The original intention for this book was to be an encyclopedia of fashion for those 30 years. Each photograph was going to have a list of everyone involved in that image, maybe common practice now, but never done in the 70s. The captions were meant to include the name of the model, fashion editor, dress designer, hair stylist, etc. I'm skipping over the years of printing and editing, and editing and printing, years of creating layouts on the floor, on the walls, everywhere. Because Director Richard Benjamin and his wife, actress Paula Prentiss, then later Musician John Phillips and his wife, actress Genevieve Waite were renting the space upstairs from the Studio (that years later became the loft space to work on "In The American West") we worked in a loft down the street from the Studio just for this book and later to build models of the museum exhibition spaces.
Back to the early book dummy. It was huge. A huge book all about the models, the editors, and the famous hair dressers. It just didn't feel right to me. At this point we were in about the sixth year of this project, my fourth, and we now had a huge thick book dummy of really beautiful prints (in those days using rubber cement to stick prints back to back to create pages and using giant paper clips to cover over changes). I remember RA inviting Jacqueline Kennedy over to the loft for tea with us to show her the dummy, hoping she would give permission to include a portrait of her in the book (she didn't). There was something about watching an 'outsider' look through the book, that convinced me it wasn't quite right. Sort of like holding your work up to a mirror-for some reason you're able to see what's wrong with it.
I was very young at that time and did not always speak up when I disagreed, but I brought up my thoughts about what I was feeling about the overall book. I edited down the dummy using the giant paper clips, clipping spreads together, just leaving the best of the best photographs. It became a much slimmer volume, but seemed to have much more impact. Now it was a "photography" book, it was now all about the images, no longer about a big book of fashion. It was unheard of to consider fashion photographs as fine art photography back then, but the images held their own as photographs as far as either of us were concerned, and not because of who was in them or who did their hair! I would suppose the recent headline "CHRISTIE’S SETS NEW WORLD AUCTION RECORD OF $1,153,011 FOR RICHARD AVEDON, DOVIMA WITH ELEPHANTS" is vindication for those early critics, although it no longer matters. Those images, that took so many years to edit, became the basis for Richard Avedon's first retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the most beautiful show I was fortunate to be able to design.
MM: Has the increase of desktop publishing and print-on-demand had an effect on your role as designer?
Of course, I love to see "Real Photography" books by Steidl, Twin Palms, Radius Books, Nazraeli Press. But if someone has good work and isn't lucky enough to be offered a publishing deal because the economy doesn't allow for it right now, I love the idea they have the opportunity to create their own book. If they are good at marketing or publicity, there's no reason their book can't be seen or receive recognition.
I've enjoyed the work I've done with Blurb. For example, I worked with photographer Jessica Hines on the design of her Blurb book, My Brother's War. Both her work and the book design gained a lot of attention this past year. She won the Grand Prize for the Lens Culture International Exposure Awards 2010 for this series. Mary Virginia Swanson and Darius Himes, co-authors of the upcoming Publish Your Photography Book, incorporated examples of the various states of my design process for My Brother's War into their current book lecture. In order to demonstrate the evolution of this book design, they show examples such as the positioning and sizing of the book's title, image choice and positioning of the art for the book cover, chapter headings and various font options before settling on the final "look" for the book.
I asked Jessica, who is also Professor of Art at Georgia Southern University, to help explain what my role as Book Designer was in the process for her. Maybe it will be useful to someone else contemplating their own book. Here are Jessica's comments:
Speaking from my own experience as a complete novice to photobook publishing, I needed help on every level – from understanding what "page count" means in the publishing world -- which was not what I expected -- to choice of font(s), size of font(s), placement of the text, the size of the photographs and where exactly the photographs fall on the page once the book is printed. The designer helps the artist make decisions on book trim size and whether to use a square, portrait, or landscape format, to considerations of overall book dimensions and the final weight of the book. A designer's keen eye for playing two pictures together on apposing pages or whether to leave a blank page next to the strongest images is another important skill that the untrained individual might overlook. A good designer knows how to create a design that "breaks through the clutter" so that your book will stand out among the rest of the books on the shelf. -- Jessica HinesThe role of the designer is to create a presentation that allows the work to be seen in its most clear form – a good design allows the work to "speak" without interference. The best designers are those who are capable of feeling the essence of the project and creating a design that does not compete with the work, but rather flows along with it. A good designer is a sensitive person who not only understands the work, but is also open to dialog with the artist and who makes design suggestions that will ultimately benefit the work.
MM: What was one of your favorite projects that you have completed ?
EA: The AVEDON: 1947-1977 fashion retrospective, mentioned above, was my favorite project of all time I've completed. It was a huge accomplishment, my first time for everything. I was very young, yet I designed not only an important book at that time, but one the most successful Museum exhibitions at that time, that was perfect in every way. Second to that would be In the American West, the book and original exhibition at the High Museum in Fort Worth. I try to bring that same level of skill I used for both of those huge projects to every undertaking, no matter how small it is, otherwise what is the point in doing it.
1.12.2009
New Issue of Fraction
copyright, Susan Worsham
copyright, Bryce LankardI am so happy and relieved that the new issue of Fraction is out. The new issue has five of the photographers who were reviewees at photoNOLA; Sarah Wilson, Allison V. Smith, Victoria Ryan, Frank Relle, Bryce Lankard; a book review of Vanishing America by Josh Spees; and a reflection on PhotoNOLA by David Bram. Finally, the DRESS SHOW (and yes, I am shouting). I am so happy to finally present my selections for this long-awaited (by me, at least) online exhibition.
11.12.2008
Consumerism
Now that I am working on the Dress Show for Fraction, my next theme to obsess over is consumerism, for now with this definition:
the concept that an ever-expanding consumption of goods is advantageous to the economy. (from dictionary.com).
The first two images shown here are by Susana Raab from her portfolio Consumed.
8.14.2008
7.31.2008
7.10.2008
7.08.2008
6.03.2008
Dress Show - Sarah Small
Ariella and Crow © Sarah SmallI have been obsessed with Sarah Small's work for years. I especially love this one because I am also obsessed with birds. I wish I had the nerve that Sarah has to present her world in such a gritty and theatrical way. You can see more at http://www.sarahsmall.com/.
4.23.2008
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