Ken Probst: Pornegrafik

New monograph at the New Orleans Photography Workshops Library

Several years ago, photographer Ken Probst was hired to photograph pornographic film actors for publicity pictures and video boxes. Once on the sets of California's most notorious industry, he began to photograph behind the scenes, revealing the absurdities, pathos, and business of the pornographic film industry. These photographs, whether they portray an elaborate sexual situation or actors waiting between takes, are remarkable documents that observe the banality of manufacturing desire.

Joel Sternfeld: Sweet Earth

New monograph at the New Orleans Photography Workshops Library

As laissez-faire market forces sweep the globe and the earth's future seems endangered, the dream of living in concert with nature and with one another is increasingly essential. A common human longing throughout history, the utopian community ideal has taken root firmly in America over the past 200 years. In Sweet Earth: Experimental Utopias in America, Joel Sternfeld looks at 60 representative historic or present American utopias.

Neither a conventional history nor a conventional book of photography, Sweet Earth brings together what might otherwise seem disparate, individualized social phenomena and makes visible the community of communities. This tradition of thinking has ancient, universal precedents. When Thomas More wrote Utopia in 1516, he gave a name to an idea that had included the Epic of Gilgamesh, Plato's Republic and the Old Testament's and he started an argument. Francis Bacon (who believed in utopia through science) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (utopia through nature) soon joined the debate, but it was the harsh changes in daily life engendered by the factory systems of the early Industrial Revolution that brought an urgency to the discussion, as seen in the writings of David Owens, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels. While the early social theorists were largely European, it was in the fluid environment of young America that true utopian communities were built and utopian experimentation flourished. In the years between 1810 and 1850, hundreds of secular and religious societies bravely tried to build a "perfect" life for their members. In the 20th century, experimentation began again, reaching a fever pitch in the turbulent days of the Vietnam War. Some of the late-1960s communes still survive and continue to flourish. The 1990s and the early years of the new millennium have become yet another hotbed of social experimentation. The co-housing movement is sweeping America with at least 70 communities fully completed and occupied and numerous others planned. At the same time, the rapid global expansion of sustainable communities known as ecovillages has been widely adopted in America.

This book by one of America's foremost artists includes a photograph of each community and is accompanied by brief text that summarizes the most salient aspects of the history or organization. A book that functions both as art, as well as a hopeful guide to alternative ways of life.

Joel Sternfeld: Walking the High Line

New monograph at the New Orleans Photography Workshops Library

Sometimes like a river of grass, sometimes like the wheat fields of the Canadian prairies, the High Line is a unique ruin that simultaneously permits contemplation of nature and the city. Since March 2000, photographer Joel Sternfeld has been documenting the abandoned elevated railway line which runs for 1.5 miles along the West Side of New York City, from 34th Street down along the edge of the Hudson River, through West Chelsea's tree-lined blocks and art galleries, and into the heart of the Meat Packing District. Walking the path of this real-time landscape, Sternfeld has created a suite of images in which the landscape is read as both a social and cultural indicator.

Polymer Photogravure workshop with Josephine Sacabo | May 13-15 2011

Upcoming workshop at The New Orleans Photography Workshops

The New Orleans Photography Workshops will offer an extended week-end workshop on Polymer Photogravure with Josephine Sacabo on May 13-15, 2011.

Polymers are a new method of making gravures without using strong chemicals - in fact they are exposed in sunlight or a UV light and processed in water. The results are as beautiful as copper gravures.

The workshop will cover the making of polymer photogravures from film negatives or digital files.

Complete information at neworleansworkshops.com/artists/josephine/photogravure.html

Andreas Gursky: Architecture

New monograph at the New Orleans Photography Workshops Library

A Japanese power plant, dilapidated slums, the patterned facades of an apartment complex in Paris--in the work of German art photographer Andreas Gursky, born in 1955 in Leipzig, both private dwellings and the domains of industrial and political power are made into sometimes awe-inspiring and always overpowering forces of urban life. Gursky's signature mix of epic sweep and extreme detail is ideally suited to the portrayal of large-scale architecture, eliciting its most salient features: The capacity to dwarf, to impress, to alienate and to daunt. Where many of us will habitually blank out architectural environments which cannot be accommodated by the naked eye, Gursky's approach is to photograph them in order to render them comprehensible: "My preference for clear structures is the result of my desire, perhaps illusory, to keep track of things and maintain my grip on the world." Architecture is a collection of breathtaking images by the world-famous photographer, taken between 1988 and the present day, and treating all aspects of architectural structure, from the inside out. Each of the 75 color photographs is accompanied by commentary by renowned German authors Aleida Assmann, Jan Assmann, Elisabeth Bronfen, Sonja Fessel, Paul Nizon, Alfred Nordmann, Mirjam Schaub, Rudolf Schmitz, Monika Schmitz-Emans, Peter Schneemann and Thomas Zaunschirm. The resulting conjunction of text and image attractively demonstrates the depth and breadth of Gursky's concept of architecture.

The Fine Art Digital Print

This workshop teaches the professional skills necessary to craft exhibition-quality prints with an Epson printer.

While modern 'prosumer' printers are capable of producing high quality digital prints, they don't work optimally out of the box.
The two-day weekend course teaches participants the workflow necessary to get the prints they envisioned out of their Epson printer.
The focus is on printing with both color and black/gray pigment inks on coated and rag papers.

Topics include:
* Fine Art printing tools and color workflow
* Color management concepts, monitor calibration and paper profiling
* Black and white printing workflow
* Hardware, ink and media

December 11 & 12, 2010
Tuition: $240

Joel Sternfeld, Stranger Passing

From Publishers Weekly
Photographer Joel Sternfeld turns his exacting eye to American faces, social classes, character types and stereotypes in Stranger Passing. Sternfeld who wowed critics in 1987 with American Prospects devotes a remarkable (and remarkably large) volume to 60 hard-edged, full-color studies of individuals from Manhattan to Malibu, Austin, Texas to Appalachia, in candids and portraits by turns comic, disturbing, angry, pathetic and silly. A surprised lawyer struggles with bundles of laundry; a lumberjack shows off his truck, his logs and his belly button; and "two men on vacation in Bigfoot, Montana" smile through big mustaches at their tiny dog.
Journalist Ian Frazier (On the Rez) and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art curator Douglas R. Nickel contribute short essays.

Joseph Rodríguez, Juvenile

From Publishers Weekly
A former inmate himself, Rodríguez (East Side Stories: Gang Life in East L.A.) follows a variety of teenagers, judges, public defenders, district attorneys, probation officers and social workers who make up California's juvenile court system. Framed by a searing introduction by the former editor of YO! (Youth Outlook), and by a short account of Rodríguez's own experiences in jail, it's almost impossible to approach these stark and somber photos with any other emotion besides deep sadness at how much the juvenile court system has moved from minimal rehabilitation to something much worse. In this 9½"×9¾" collection (which unfortunately lacks page numbers) of 91 duotone photographs, Rodríguez slowly focuses on particular individuals-such as Lance, who escaped being prosecuted as an adult, at age 15, only a few years before Proposition 21, or Katrina, who appears both preternaturally old in full makeup, or heart-tuggingly young while playing solitaire on her bed. The restrictiveness, deprivation and uncaring bureaucracy that these teenagers face comes through in photos of the bareness of a prison cell, words scratched into the arms and legs of a self-mutilating teen or a counselor demonstrating how to make a ridiculously thin bed on top of a wooden table. As Bernstein says, "What fuels [Rodríguez's] photographs of young people behind bars and on the street is his ability to look with them," providing exactly the kind of humanizing that the present system is fast losing. Certainly one of the most moving photographs in the book is Rodríguez's own 1968 mug shot: rumpled and defiant, he is also very, very young.

Product Description
The Federal Bureau of Investigation recently reported that youth violence in inner cities is declining. However, even as violence declines, incarceration rates rise and prison terms lengthen. For his second powerHouse Books monograph, Juvenile, photographer Joseph Rodríguez spent several years following a dozen youths, from arrest, counseling, trial adjudication, and incarceration, to release, probation, house arrest, group homes, and the search for employment and meaning in their lives. Additionally, Rodríguez documented some of the people who work in the juvenile justice system: judges, public defenders, district attorneys, probation officers, and social workers. Many of these kids face great obstacles, including a criminal justice system with decreasing political interest in offering second chances for renewal. Through the power of his photographs, Rodríguez shows us how these kids struggle and how they fight to change their lives. "A couple of years ago my mother was cleaning out my old room when she came across some letters I had written back in the early 70s while I was incarcerated on Rikers Island. They were the usual prison letters of remorse and forgiveness. I look at these letters now and remember how I felt as a young man struggling to find my way. Coming out of prison was a daunting experience. I had been placed on probation for drug possession. There was little support for my transition back into society probation officer gave me was, 'Oh, you better get a job.' But I did get a second chance; I found photography. Eventually I moved out of the community where I had gotten into trouble, educated myself, and became a productive member of society. These experiences became my motivation for this documentary project."