Critical Mass + Photolucida

It's that time again!

Don't miss out on an opportunity to show your work to some of the best and most influential people in photography and art. Critical Mass is a great way to put your work front and center to dealers, collectors, fellow photographers and dare we say movers and shakers?
How can you not participate? You don't even have to travel to be part of this event.

Angela Bacon Kidwell, one of our newest artists at the gallery participated last year and made the top 50. See how easy that was? If you have a body of work that you think should be seen by some of the worlds best, put it out there. I'll look forward to reviewing it when it comes through.

I mean seriously - here is the list -

Andy Adams, Editor/Publisher, Flak Photo
Jeanne Adams, Ansel Adams Galleries
Laura Addison, New Mexico Museum of Art
Kate Alpers, Art Historian, University of Arizona
Paul Amador, Amador Gallery, NYC
Kathy Aron Dowell, Kathy Dowell Art + Service
Daniel Augschoell, Ahorn Magazine
Susan Baraz, Co-Chair, Lucie Awards
Jayne H. Baum, JHB Gallery, NYC
Jen Bekman, Jen Bekman Gallery, NYC
Nathalie Belayche, Food for your Eyes, Paris
Linda Benedict-Jones, Carnegie Museum
Harvey Benge, Curator / Photographer
Chris Bennett, Newspace Center for Photography
Ellen Boerner, Independent Curator
Howard Bossen, Kresge Art Museum
Ellen Boughn, Stock Agency Strategist
David Bram, Fraction Magazine
Leslie K. Brown, Curator, PRC, Boston
Elizabeth Brown, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle
Paul Buckley, Penguin Group, USA
Susan Burnstine, Black and White Photography Magazine
Alessandra Capodacqua, Studio Marangoni Foundation
Clinton Cargill, NYTimes Magazine
Jean Caslin, Caslin Gregory & Associates
Jim Casper, LensCulture
Darren Ching, Klompching Gallery/Photo District News Magazine
Brian Paul Clamp, ClampArt Gallery, NYC
Joerg Colberg, Conscientious
Alison Collins, Iris Gallery of Fine Art, Boston
Linda Connor, Photographer/Educator
Daniel Cooney, Daniel Cooney Fine Art, NYC
Sean Corcoran, Museum of the City of New York
Tony Decaneas, Panopticon Gallery, Boston
Rodrigo Corral, Rodrigo Corral Design
Lucy Davies, photography critic, Daily Telegraph
Luca Desienna, Gomma Online
Alexa Dilworth, Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University
Crista Dix, wall space Gallery, Seattle
Catherine Edelman, Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago
Natasha Egan, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago
Jon Feinstein, Humble Arts Foundation
Jim Fitts, Photographic Resource Center
Melanie Flood, Melanie Flood Projects
Roy Flukinger, Harry Ransom Center
Harris Fogel, Mednick Galleries, University of the Arts, Philadelphia
Taj Forer: Daylight Magazine
Hannah Frieser, Light Work
Andy Freeberg, Photographer / Previous CM Book Award Winner
Jason Fulford, Photographer / J & L Books
Aprile Gallant, Curator, Smith College Museum of Art
Helen K. Garber, Photographer / Consultant
Diana Gaston, Associate Curator, Fidelity Investments
Judi & Bernard Gerson, Galerie BMG
Christian Gerstheimer, El Paso Museum of Art
Anna Gianesini, FotoGrafia Festival Internazional, Rome
Hamidah Glasgow, Executive Director, The Center for Fine Art Photography
Fabian Goncalves Borrega, Art Museum of the Americas, Washington D.C.
Olivia Lahs-Gonzales, Sheldon Art Galleries, St. Louis
David Haberstich, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution
Bruce Haley, photographer, Features Editor, ARTWORKS Magazine
Lisa Hatchadoorian, Nicolaysen Art Museum, Casper, WY
Gary Hesse, Independent Curator / Consultant
Tom Hinson, The Cleveland Museum of Art
Cherie Hiser, Photolucida Board
Lisa Hostetler, Milwaukee Art Museum
Jason Houston, Orion Magazine
Lisa Hunter, writer, The Intrepid Art Collector
Konstantinos Ioannidis, Art Historian, Athens
Karen Irvine, Museum of Contemporary Photography
Michael Itkoff, Daylight Magazine
Cory Jacobs, Independent Editor / Curator
Ann Jastrab, Rayko Photo Center, San Francisco
Jen Jenkins, rep, Giant Artists
Brooks Jensen, Lenswork Publishing
Tom Jimison, Curator, Baldwin Photographic Gallery
Whitney Johnson, The New Yorker Magazine
Jessica Johnston, Assistant Curator, George Eastman House
Maya Jones White Sturgeon Art Gallery, Vancouver, WA
Russell Joslin, SHOTS Magazine
Ron Jude, Co-Founder, A-Jump Books
Mindaugas Kavaliasuskas, Kaunas Photo / F Galerija, Lithuania
Arlette Kayafas, Gallery Kayafas, Boston
Eric J. Keller, Soulcatcher Studio, Santa Fe
Anne Kelly, photo-eye Gallery, Santa Fe
Gerardo Montiel Klint, Photographer / Educator, Mexico City
Debra Klomp Ching, Klompching Gallery, NYC
Lisbeth Neergaard Kohloff, Colorado Photographic Arts Center, Golden, CO
Paul Kopeiken, Paul Kopeiken Gallery, Los Angeles
Thomas W. Kuhn, Educator / Critic, Dusseldorf
Marten Lange, Photographer / Publisher, Farewell Books
Zuzana Lapitkova, Central European House of Photography, Bratislava
Shane Lavalete, Photographer / Publisher, Lay Flat
Sam Lee, Sam Lee Gallery, Los Angeles
Jain Lemos, Photography & Publishing Consultant
Andy Levin, 1000 Eyes Magazine
Russell Levin, Levin Gallery, Monterey
Maren Levinson, rep, Red Eye Agency
Stu Levy, Portland Art Museum Photo Council, Photolucida Board
Stephanie Lewis, Educator
Jim Leisy, Portland Art Museum Photo Council, Photolucida Board
Kevin Longino, Watermark Fine Art Photographs & Books, Houston
Karsten Lund, Independent Curator
Celina Lunsford, Fotografie Forum International, Franfurt
Mary Ann Lynch, Not for Profit Photography
Allen Maertz, Blue Sky Gallery exhibition committee, Portland
Lee Marks, Lee Marks Fine Art, Shelbyville, IN
Nadja Masri, GEO Magazine
Michael Mazzeo, Michael Mazzeo Gallery, NYC
Mary McClean, Knopf Art Department, Random House
Melanie McWhorter, Books Division manager, photo-eye Books
Raymond Meeks, Photographer
Kate Menconeri, Independent Curator
William Messer, Independent Curator
Jennifer Miller, Independent Photo Editor
Kevin Miller, Southeast Museum of Photography
Evan Mirapaul, collector
Robert Morton, Editor / Book Packager
Laura Moya, Director, Photolucida
Claire Annette Mussard, Curator / Consultant, Switzerland
Ruben Natal-San Miguel, collector
Julianne Newton, Visual Communication Quarterly
Brady Nichols Sloane, Independent Curator
Deborah Paine, Mayor's Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs, Seattle
Joaquim Paiva, Collector
Paul Paletti, Paul Paletti Gallery, Louisville, KY
Ann Pallesen, Gallery Director, Photo Center Northwest, Seattle
Stephen Perloff, Photo Review
Mark Pinsukanjana, Modernbook Gallery, Palo Alto, CA
Terry Pitts, Cedar Rapids Museum of Art
Jan Potts & Elizabeth Corden, Corden Potts Gallery, San Francisco
Phillip Prodger, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA
Christopher Rauschenberg, Blue Sky Gallery / Photolucida Board
Shawn Records, Photolucida Board
Mary Ann Redding, Curator, Palace of the Governors / New Mexico History Museum
Rixon Reed photo-eye Books and Prints
Richard Renaldi, photographer
Ema Ribeiro, Lab65 Gallery
Doug Rickard, Founder / Publisher, American Suburb X
Arianna Rinaldo, Freelance Photo Editor
Conor Risch, Photo District News Magazine
John Rohrbach, Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, TX
Miriam Romais, En Foco
Laura Russell, 23 Sandy Gallery, Photolucida Board
Dana Salvo, Co-owner, Clark Gallery, Lincoln, MA
Tina Schelhorn, Galerie Lichtblick, Cologne
Jennifer Schlesinger, VERVE Gallery of Photography, Santa Fe
Martha Schneider, Schneider Gallery, Chicago
David Schoemer, Hassla Books
Randall Scott, Randall Scott Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
Camille Seaman, Photographer / Previous CM Book Award Winner
Becky Senf, Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ
Ariel Shanberg, The Center for Photography at Woodstock, Woodstock, NY
Elizabeth Shank, Silverstein Photography, NYC
Carla Shapiro, Educator / Photographer
P. Elaine Sharpe, Independent Curator
Mark Sink, Gallery Sink, Denver, CO
Karen Sinsheimer, Santa Barbara Museum of Art
Mike Slack, Ice Plant Books
Mark Sloan, William Halsey Gallery, College of Charleston
Susan Spiritus, Susan Spiritus Gallery, Newport Beach, CA
Amy Stein, Photographer / Previous CM Book Award Winner
Joni Sternbach, Photographer / Previous CM Book Award Winner
Jennifer Stoots, Stoots Fine Photography
Alex Supertano, Independent Curator
Lisa Sutcliffe, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Mary Virginia Swanson, Consultant and Educator, M.V. Swanson & Associates
Martha Takayama, Tepper Takayama Fine Arts, Boston
J.D. Talasek, Curator and Director of Exhibitions, The National Academy of Sciences
Barbara Tannenbaum, Chief Curator, Akron Art Museum
Paula Tognarelli, Griffin Museum for Photography, Winchester, MA
Leya Simmons Oswald, Oswald Gallery, Jackson, WY
Laura Valenti, Newspace Center for Photography / Photolucida Board
Annie van Avery, Photographic Center Northwest
Herman van den Boom, Hexgalleries, Belgium
Michael Van Horn, Curator, The Joseph Monsen Collection
Marie Via, Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester
Anna Walker Skillman, Jackson Fine Art, Atlanta
Jennifer Ward, Exhibitions Coordinator, FotoFest
Kate Ware, New Mexico Museum of Art
John Weber, The Tang Museum, Skidmore College
Carla Williams, Editor, Exposure
Rick Williams, Educator
Clint Willour, Executive Director / Curator, Galveston Arts Center
Rhonda Wilson, Seeing the Light, Rhubarb-rhubarb, Birmingham, England
Bryan Wolf, Photolucida Board
Laura Wzorek, Center, Santa Fe
Carol Yarrow, Photographer
Del Zogg, Works on Paper Study Center, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Manfred Zollner, fotoMAGAZIN

for more information - log onto the PhotoLucida website.

Brad Moore

Brad has a creative vision. Clever, insightful, full of structure, yet oddly quirky. His document of the Inland Empire in Southern California has me obsessed by shrubbery. Yes - that fabulous way Southern Californians landscape. He takes the idea of a cypress to a whole new level. Not that that is all the images are about, I don't want to dismiss the intelligence of the work that way. I find on a human scale, I look at who we are and what we do to control our surroundings, and Brad's work showcases nicely the way we brick and mortar ourselves into a community. I am drawn to the structuring of the natural world, not only by the work he's capturing, but how he has photographed it. I love the abstracts. Greenery in a desert. He has a way with the architecture as well, but for me - it's a perfect shrub.

John Mann

John Mann is a great guy. Talented too.

A participant of Review Santa Fe, I was treated to his really inventive work, Folded in Place, images of cartographic goodness. As a geeky scientist, and map lover, I was excited to see science and art meet at a somewhat original median. The three dimensional nature of the work leads to creation of newly found worlds, civilizations and ideas of how we inhabit this planet.
He has an upcoming show at Rayko Photo Center this December, and I am always looking for a good excuse to get to the Bay Area. This might be the right enticement....
see what you think.

In his words -
"Folded in Place highlights the abstraction of the landscape traditionally offered by these means, while creating a tangible photographic “place” in each image that is occupied by a mapped construction. The images therefore provide precise photographic and mapped information at the same time as they offer an abstraction of the landscape itself. The viewer is shown a landscape that is simultaneously understood and unknown, a landscape in which the map obtains a new geography of its own. "

Graham Miller

I had seen Graham's work as I review for Critical Mass, and got the opportunity to meet him in Santa Fe. I was thrilled to see such a solid body of work, beautifully crafted, with a compelling story.

My mother the mystery writer would be pounding away on her typewriter crafting text to accompany each image. So much information, yet so much left yet unsaid. These are brilliant narratives, visual treats.

I kept thinking of how I wanted to talk about this body of work, but it can't be said any better than in Graham's own words.
From his Artist Statement -

"The inspiration for Suburban Splendour came from numerous sources. Images materialized from encounters observed while driving, walking to the shops or visiting friends, from eavesdropping and casual conversation, but more often than not the photographs were inspired by literature and cinema. Films by Paul Thomas Anderson, Jim Jarmusch, and Ray Lawrence all contributed, as did writing by Richard Ford and the lyrics of Paul Kelly. But the background soundtrack, which remained constant, was the voice of the American short story writer Raymond Carver. Carver's vision depicts ordinary blue collar people living lives of quiet desperation, people who are feeling their way in the dark with the hope that maybe next week things will get better. Reading his work, now nearly twenty years after his death, it seems to me that his writing taps into a sense of contemporary isolation that reflects the anomie, uncertainties and vulnerabilities of existing in a world changed after 9/11, and on a planet which contemplates an undecided environmental future.

Melancholy has always appeared to be just under the skin of the suburban vernacular. We are no happier now than we were fifty years ago. Life seems a process of replacing one anxiety for another; one desire for another and the elusive dream of happiness is continuously postponed. What if happiness is not a final destination that we plan to arrive at and then stay, but a fragile and fleeting emotion, an intermittent state that evaporates leaving us with a lingering backdrop of what Julia Kristeva calls "a sad voluptuousness, a despondent intoxication"?

We all experience within us what the Portuguese call saudade, or the German sehnsucht. Nick Cave in 'The Secret Life of the Love Song', describes saudade as a vague but inconsolable longing, an unnamed enigmatic yearning and an inexplicable sadness which lies at the heart of certain works of art. "The writer who refuses to explore the darker regions of the heart," he says "will never be able to write convincingly about wonder, the magic and the joy of love…so within the fabric of the Love Song, within its melody, its lyric, one must sense an acknowledgement of suffering."

The compressed cinematic frames of Suburban Splendour try to articulate something of the soft lament that Cave and Carver allude to. These characters are troubled, but not irretrievably lost; they carry a dignified endurance and a sense of bruised optimism. These people are survivors. They have a desire, as we all do, to be transported from darkness into light."

News for Artists we Love

Exciting News! A number of our favorite artists are showing this summer. I want to congratulate them on their success.

Here's a rundown of some news and must see (according to me) shows.

Flak Photo -

Angela Bacon Kidwell's series Fish Woes gets a daily dose of Flak.







Fraction Magazine -

Melanie McWhorter has curated a great online exhibition called - The Un-Natural Nature of Food
starring some of our new favorite artists -

Jonathon Blaustein
Taj Forer
Cynthia Greig
Jason Houston
Erika Larsen
Mark Menjivar
Kevin Miyazaki
Susana Raab
Nicholas Vroman
Natalie Young

Catharine Stebbins, one of our Collectible participants, is up at Newspace Center for Photography in Portland, Oregon. Her stunning work can be seen from July 3rd thru 2 August.




















Jen Bekman has curated a great show at PCNW, Photo-Op opening on 13 July thru 4 September,2009. For a full list of participants, click here.

We are excited to see work from Mary Ellen Bartley, Liz Obert, Kevin Miyazaki, Shawn Records and Lacey Terrell among other luminaries already well known to Ms. Bekman through her numerous projects.

So go forth and view art, incredible photography and support the galleries and exhibition spaces that encourage them.

Liz Kuball

I grew up in California.
Yup, Southern California. Can you tell? I hope not.

Liz didn't grow up there, but loves living there. She gets to. She can have my spot.

In her statement for California Vernacular she discusses the fact that as weird and out of place everything is in Southern California, she wouldn't go anywhere else. "...you'd become disillusioned and go back home, and some do, of course, but many more of us stay and instead of growing bitter, we hang on - hang on to world that, to us, is even more fantastic than the one we thought we'd find, because it's real in its absurdity and because we have stories to tell."

California Vernacular reminds me of what I have happily left behind, yet gives me a sense of melancholy, like I actually might miss it when its gone. I find it alluring, and exactly what growing up in Newport Beach was like. I always preferred the seedy neighbors, Huntington or Laguna Beach. Now that was so so so long ago, for they have both gone upscale like everything else in SoCal. Nothing was too perfect, there were no McMansions. Everyone had their vision of paradise, and it didn't always look right from door to door. But it was human. and that's what I really enjoy most about this work. It's humanity, honesty and lack of perceived perfection that we all believe happens in that strange corner of the world.

Liz has recently received an Honorable Mention from Jen Bekman's Hey Hot Shot, and has been part of the Humble Arts Collector's Guide to Emerging Art Photography, as well as A Field Guide to the North American Family, by Garth Risk Hallberg.

Kevin Miyazaki

I was excited to meet Kevin in Santa Fe at the Santa Fe reviews.
I had heard about his work, Camp Home and seen his 20x200 from Jen Bekman Projects. Couldn't wait to put a face to the work I had so admired.

Camp Home was everything I hoped it would be, and Fast Food was as clever and creative as everything Kevin touches.

Camp Home is a story of family, of the past and of the present. History at its most gut wrenching. Japanese American families taken from their homes, placed at Tule Lake (among other locations). But this story is not just about the wrongs we committed. Its about how we have managed to give additional families a new life, and how we moved on from that horrible moment. Kevin bridges the gaps, connecting us to the residents now.
Kevin's words -
“In the series Camp Home, I document the reuse of buildings from the Tule Lake internment camp, where my father’s family was sent during World War ll. The barracks used to house Japanese and Japanese American internees were dispersed throughout the neighboring landscape following the war. Adapted into homes and outbuildings by returning veterans under a homesteading movement, many still stand on land surrounding the original camp site. In photographing these buildings, I explore family history, both my own and that of the current building owners – this is physical space where our unique American histories come together. Because photography was forbidden by internees, very few photographs of homelife were made by the families themselves. So my pictures act as evidence, though many years later, of a domestication rarely recorded during the initial life of the structures."

Fast Food. Hot Topic. Current event. We are all looking at what we ingest now in many ways. Epidemic obesity, health issues, cancer, ecoli, and the list continues.
Kevin looks at what we leave behind, buildings abandoned, as disposable as the containers we use to consume. My dream is to showcase Susana Raab's color work and the stark contrast of Kevin's black & white images, really looking at what we have become. and maybe where we go from here.