The Center for the Legacy of Photography, a joint venture of George Eastman House and the Image Permanence Institute at Rochester Institute of Technology, will be center stage (literally) at this year’s AIPAD Photography Show New York from March 26 to 29.  

One of the most important international photography events, the annual AIPAD Photography Show is being held at Manhattan’s Park Avenue Armory, and is presented by the Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD).    

This year, AIPAD will include an exhibition titled Cause & Effect, featuring vintage photographic prints from the George Eastman House collections. Cause & Effect is presented by the new Center for the Legacy of Photography (CLP), which is made possible by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The CLP focuses on collecting and sharing knowledge about photographic materials of the 19^th and 20^th centuries.  

The exhibition will provide insight into historic cause-and-effect relationships of materials and processes. Work such as an early salt print by Hill & Adamson will be shown side-by-side with later prints in platinum and carbon. Sequences of prints by Alvin Langdon Coburn will reconstruct aesthetic choices made by the artist, and variant prints of Lewis W. Hine’s famous Powerhouse Mechanic image will be on view.  

In addition, CLP Co-Director Grant Romer will take part in the panel discussion What Makes a Photographic Print a Masterpiece (Why Process and Print Quality Matter) on Saturday, March 28 at 10 a.m.  

Complete details on the event are available  here.

For those planning to be in New York in late March, please stop by booth 310 at the AIPAD Photography Show-we look forward to seeing you there!

Images

Alvin Langdon Coburn (British, 1882-1966)
Alfred Stieglitz
Negative before 1907
Platinum Print
George Eastman House collections/Gift of Alvin Langdon Coburn

David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson
(Scottish, 1802-1870 & Scottish, 1821-1848)
Agnes and Ellen Milne
Negative ca. 1845
Platinum Print
Later print by Alvin Langdon Coburn
George Eastman House collections/Gift of Alvin Langdon Coburn

Lewis W. Hine (American, 1874-1940)
Powerhouse Mechanic
Gelatin Silver Print
George Eastman House collections

The spring season of professionally administered portfolio reviews for photographers wishing to advance their understanding happily is upon us now.

Coming up in just a few weeks, at the end of this month, is the new Palm Springs Photo Festival in Southern California, just a couple of hours inland from Los Angeles. Now in its fourth season, the festival has been remarkably without flaw. It is run by an artist who is a work of art himself, the indefatigable Jeff Dunas, polymath as publisher, fashioniste and glamouriste, and chronicler of the legendary blues music performers published by Aperture in a fine book and seen in an equally excellent exhibition, State of the Blues, toured worldwide by Eastman House. Dunas’ current work, befitting his peripatetic vision, collects the poetic and funky ways he hears America singing.

Jeff Dunas

Multi-lingual, Dunas is married to a former international model now landscape designer and photo artist Laura Morton. Dunas does a fine job organizing the festival, and he has put together a fabulous staff team, but truth be told it is Laura who makes sure that God is really there at the festival – paying attention to the details agnostics usually ignore. Actually, there must be divine intervention for the festival is flawless.

Anyway, I wouldn’t miss it. The Palm Springs Festival begins March 29 and ends April 3. Among the guest speakers and reviewers and workshop leaders this year will be Duane Michals, Larry Fink, Debbie Fleming Caffery, Keith Carter, and John Paul Caponigro. I am looking forward to being on the festival stage in a public conversation with the wonderful Magnum and National Geographic photographer Steve McCurry, with whom I did one of the Phaidon 50 books several years ago.

I will review during Photolucida in Portland April 22 – 27 and in Santa Fe at the Center June 4 – 6.

I hope to see you at one of these great events.