Tony Bannon's Posts

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.

My mind is wandering as I am traveling across the country, thinking about how easy it is. I know we get upset about airline glitches, but really: What a time we are living. And what interesting crossroads we face. New choices every day. Choices about how we structure our lives, from play to products; wonderful opportunities, different challenges. Our students know better than most how the past streams behind us, whizzing away. And in its wake: We struggle to live in the present, if even we think about it, likely creating lives with assumptions closer to Newton’s than to even Einstein’s. Products are obsolete before they wear out. Repairs are a thing of the past. We discard our records, delete our email, never print out images, and trash our environment – both material and virtual. We discard our history and threaten our future. And to make matters worse, we know that during the past 25 years we have nurtured a chronic, civic amnesia. An entire generation – likely now two – have tossed away a good bit of their history.

Now more than ten years ago, Terry Faulkner, one of the architects of Eastman Kodak Company’s remarkable transformation from analog into digital, described the change from traditional photography into a new media as a “disruptive technology substitution.” By that he meant that things would no longer be the same. Pictures would look different; they would be made differently, and they would be taken differently. “New business models will be required,” he reasoned, “and there will be a major shakeout” – not only in the photography business, but also with all those who use digital technologies in any way.

Picture making and distribution really has changed. Where once one took and then processed and created a picture and only then distributed it to loved ones and friends or to other media, photographers now open their shutter upon a scene and send the signal to their family or to their magazine, without reviewing a print: Distribute right now, then print.

Similarly, digital technologies have influenced such basic strategies as problem solving. Where once one was advised to previsualize the means toward an outcome, one now need not imagine the outcome before beginning a process. Solutions, like a networked application, are discovered by swarming through several solutions toward an outcome, testing these trials as they are created:

Networked, not point to point. New tools. New responses. Different systems. New architectures for virtual priorities. Interesting crossroads. The plane is landing.

I’ve just returned from stimulating opportunities to look at photograph portfolios at Photo L.A., sponsored by the Santa Fe Photography organization called Center, and from Fotofusion, sponsored every year in Delray, FL by the Palm Beach Photo Workshop.
These are gatherings where picture-makers gather to share their work with professionals in the field, seeking advice and ideas. There’s passion and commitment in these places that energizes everyone who participates, and a wonderful range of participants, from teenagers to retirees, all eager to commit to making great pictures. And there’s inspiration here, too, from men and women who have found in photography fulfilling opportunity to communicate and share.

Gone this year was any trace of cynicism, any indulgence in irony, the tiresome aesthetic of banality. Present was a good dose of beauty and hope. Present, too, was the strong voice of the amateur. It is true that many who travel to these portfolio review sessions seeks advise about how to connect and advance a career in photography. But many more just want to make better pictures of events and people and places found particularly meaningful – family, friends, and the landscape, for instance. This is about a dignity of expression, a true heart of feeling and meanings. And while these are themes that reoccur, so many images I saw were energized by a search for ways to see uniquely, to more articulately develop ideas, or to connect to the long sound of other voices which have found wonder in a face, a flower, or even a sunset. Continue Reading »

The 6Sight Summit drew leaders in digital imaging from round the world recently for a two day exchange in Monterey, and I had an opportunity to share news about the Leadership Award George Eastman House received from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services. The award will allow the Conservation Department at the Museum to create a modified Wiki that we will design and organize to share information on the material aspects of the photograph – information equally necessary to the connoisseur, the collector and the conservator. Click here to read my remarks. The announcement attracted press attention right away, which showed me the general interest in organizing and distributing information about our material culture.

Alexis Girard, leader and founder of 6Sight and its parent institution, Future Image, is organizing a significant gift to Eastman House of early digital imaging hardware and software and associated materials, such as manuals and workbooks. This gift, planned for next year, will point to the need for another Wiki, complimentary to the Wiki on the materiality of the photograph. In fact, the rich and deep documentation that will accompany the Girard gift of pioneer digital objects will create a foundation for data we anticipate will be submitted to the Wiki on digital imaging. Eastman House now has set out to raise funds necessary for both the digital and the legacy Wiki, a task that will be made easier through our association with Future Image. Continue Reading »

I am looking forward to reading your thoughts. For ours is a time rich with the possibility to listen, and to make clear our positions.

As director of one of the great collections in the world, I represent a profound instrument for communication. The photographs and moving pictures, the books and technologies, and the objects that reflect the legacy of George Eastman are vehicles ready to carry the curious to most any intellectual, emotional, spiritual destination they might venture to travel.

This is particularly true today. For where once it could have been said that museums sat back and waited for their audience to come to them, now museums have stepped forward into their communities to ask how best they might serve. In the past, it could have been said that museums believed their prime responsibility ended with the collection and care of objects held in support of mission. Exhibition and interpretation for the public in these museums was a secondary objective. Now it is clear that our responsibilities just begin with collections and their exhibition.

Both museums and newspapers were masters at making declarations. Neither was very interested in the two-way street of communication. Their pronouncements were entirely one way. Continue Reading »