Howard Bingham has been the influence of my photography and film making over the last ten years or more.  As a child, due to the influence of education from both parents and extended family, I found history and news to be an interest and strength of mine in school. When my father placed me in a shutterbug class at Glendale Community College in a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona at the age of 10, I began using the camera as a way of telling historical stories.

Renowned photographer Howard Bingham is a George Eastman House Board of Trustees member.

Howard Bingham, born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1939 where his father was a minister and Pullman car porter for the railroad, moved the family to south central Los Angeles in 1943 in search for a better life.  After graduating from Centennial High School in Compton, California in 1956, Bingham attended Compton Junior College, initially as music major, while also showing an interest in photography.  Due to substandard grades in a photography courses, Bingham was subsequently forced out of school.

His interest in photography was not over.  Bingham’s interest grew once he noticed his neighbors, the Hodsons, were involved in the photographic arts. Bingham states, “I would see many beautiful women going in and out of the house and that’s what really sparked my love for photography.”  Bingham soon began working for a weekly community newspaper. In 1962, young Howard met a young boxer around the same age named Cassius Clay, (soon changing his name to Muhammed Ali) while on assignment.  Upon their meeting, Bingham took Ali on a tour around Los Angeles, which turned into a lifelong friendship. 

With Bingham becoming Ali’s personal photographer, the two traveled around the world supported by great entourages with Bingham documenting Ali’s life successes and failures. The two have been close friends now thirty-eight years. Anyone who knows these two as well as they know themselves would say they were brothers.

As time passed, Bingham’s photographic and film opportunities grew.  Howard met Bill Cosby for the first time during the filming of the prime time show I Spy with Ali leading to camera guild as a still photographer in 1969. The guild created opportunities for work on such films as The Candidate, All the Presidents Men, The Electric Horsemen and Ghost Dad and Ali. Bingham also became an essential photographer for magazines as Life, Look, Time, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated People, Ebony and other international magazines.  His work also is recognized by the several years he spent documenting significant people such as the Beatles and many other legends; and events, not to exclude moments in history surrounding the civil rights movement.

Bingham has also published books; Muhammed Ali: A Thirty Year Journey which chronicles Ali’s life and career, and the book Howard Bingham’s Black Panthers, 1968. Bingham is also quite a humanitarian, having a scholarship named after him at the Rochester Institute of Technology for minority photographers as well as a media center soon to be named after him in Watts, California for young people living in south Los Angeles to learn photography.

Although Bingham has obtained the highest of heights within the forty-six years of when he first picked up the camera, he remains the icon and model for countless aspiring photographers and filmmakers worldwide. 

At 70, Bingham is still active as being on the board of trustees at Eastman House in Rochester, New York, traveling from coast to coast while simultaneously juggling numerous projects.

No matter what keeps him busy Bingham still manages to accommodate time to leave Los Angeles to go visit his life long best friend Muhammed Ali in Scottsdale, Arizona.  Bingham is “The Greatest” and I don’t think Ali would dispute that title.

Right now we are all working on the Fall show, Where We Live, that celebrates Rochester’s 175th Birthday. The exhibition is full of great photographs of our fair city, with a fun mix of objects from the collection, as well as contemporary work by local artists, submissions from ordinary Rochesterians, and of course, postcards.  We have a lot of postcards in the collection and they are fascinating. I love looking at the idealized visions of place and reading the snippets of news or anecdote scrawled on the back.  Postcards are fun, collectable and can teach us a little bit about travel, tourism and social history. As part of Where We Live Eastman House is going to display close to 100 postcards of Rochester from the early 1900’s to the present and I’ve selected a few to preview on the blog.  

I love how turquoise Eastman House used to be!

“Rhubarb” is British theatrical slang for the undistinguishable babble you might hear in a busy pub, but it is also the name of the International Photographic Festival held annually in Birmingham, UK, from which I have just returned. There were lots of memorable exhibitions including Nadav Kander’s portrait series, Obama’s People, currently breaking all attendance records at the Birmingham Art Museum. The long weekend began with a lively debate titled “Photography is Dead.” The panel was ably chaired by Stephen Mayes, CEO of the VII photo agency in New York, and included, in addition to myself, Jon Levy, publisher of the London based magazine of photojournalism and documentary photography, Foto8; MaryAnn Camilleri of Magenta Publishing for the Arts, a Toronto-based foundation specializing in emerging Candian artists; John Cross of Peter Bailey Company photo agency; and photographer Brian Griffin. Conclusion? “Photography is dead. Long live photography.” and that technical matters can change everything about image capture except its cultural meaning and our desire to do it.

The heart of this event is the international reviews: three days in which more than 30 curators, publishers, gallerists and critics representing ten different countries meet one-on-one with twelve artists a day to see and discuss new work. It’s a remarkable experience; the energy level is high, as is the quality of work. I thought our readers might like to see some of the variety of work that caught my eye.

Kurt Tong is a young British artist from Hong Kong who has photographed the marvelous paper objects representing such things as cars, fountain pens and ipods that are traditionally burned at Chinese funerals. He uses the simplest photographic style imagineable, but the theoretical implications of photographing simulacra are not lost on him or the viewer.

Edmund Clark is a well known British photojournalist who has just returned from Guantanamo. He documents both the prison and the navy base that supports it, giving us solid visual images by which to understand this dark and mysterious American place.

James Morris’s recent work in Iran is a study of both landscape and people, like Ed Clark, giving us a picture of a place we now barely know.

I loved Marko Dutka’s Portrait of Genius, photos of striking eighty-something artist’s model Daphne Self after self-portraits by Titian, Dürer, Rembrandt and others. Dutka’s comments on gender and power are brilliantly embedded in his strong and beautifully lit images.

As we concluded in our panel, photography is alive and well. I think anyone looking at these photographs would agree.

Several of the artists featured in Nature as Artifice travelled to Rochester to help us install the  exhibition.  We had a great time hosting our Dutch guests and hope to work with them again. We have some ideas for future projects but in the meantime we asked Cary Markerink & Theo Baart to write something about their project for the blog. They sent a great description of the project and images of their Snelweg series installed in different venues. Enjoy!

Snelweg: Highways in the Netherlands                                 by Cary Markerink & Theo Baart

The Netherlands is a small country with a population of 16 million people. It would easily fit four times into New York State. Space is scarce. Since the 1970s the country has been transformed into a big suburbia, interconnected by a grid of highways and railroad-tracks.  We were looking for a metaphor for this transformation of the Dutch landscape (and in a broader perspective Dutch culture) and we decided the highway could showcase the changed country in it’s frantic rush towards economic progress.

Kunsthal, Rotterdam 1996

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Install week is over and the summer shows are up and look fabulous!  It is pretty magical to see an  exhibition  take shape. There are always moments when you are sure it will never be ready in time, but hard work and a dedicated prep team ensure success. After a hectic week we finished cleaning plexi and hanging wall text just in time for a lively and well attended panel discussion and members opening reception for Nature as Artifice.  I don’t have any pictures from those events yet, but I do have some to share from the docent training sessions that took place Friday afternoon. Click here if you are interested in becoming a docent at George Eastman House.

Maarje van den Heuvel talks to docents about Nature as Artifice.

Curator, Alison Nordstrom, talks to Docents about New Topographics.