The City in Winter: Photographs by Draper Professor Peter Lucas

Draper adjunct Peter Lucas, who teaches "International Studies in Human Rights," will be showing his most recent photographic project, "The City in Winter" at the New School's Skybridge Art & Sound Space. The opening reception is this Wednesday, February 15.

The Skybridge Art & Sound Space

Eugene Lang College / The New School

65 West 11^th Street / 66 West 12^th Street

Third Floor Passageway

THE CITY IN WINTER

Photographs by Peter Lucas / Graphic design by Garry Waller

February 15 – March 21, 2011

Opening Reception: Wednesday, February 15^th, 5:00 – 9:00 p.m.

The Skybridge Art & Sound Space is proud to present The City in Winter, a recent photographic project by Peter Lucas.

In 1990, the late Belgian poet Francois Jacqmin published a book of poems entitled Le Livre de la Neige (The Book of the Snow). Each poem is ten lines; a classical format the French call dizain, a mode of writing that opens a space for expression but withdrawals from any overt meaning or resolution. With each poetic image, Jacqmin evokes a subtle philosophic query, a deft meditation on the ephemeral nature of existence, and a hushed description of the elemental condition of wintertime.

Using Jacqmin’s poems as inspiration, Lucas began to photograph New York during the winter to find visual equivalents. Since the poems are essentially quiet and placeless, he intuitively chose moments when nothing seems to happen and no location in particular can be marked. Shooting with negative space to accommodate the overwriting of poems, each image has been thoughtfully designed by graphic artist Garry Waller. The resulting photo/poems explore the possibility of opening each image to a deeper dimension, a fragment of a story, a whisper of something else, beyond the visual silence of the city in winter.

NYUAD Lecture Series in NY: Contemporary Photography in the Middle East

Contemporary Photography in the Middle East

February 8, 2012

Exhibition Opening | 5:30-6:30 PM
Artist Talk | 6:30-8:00 PM

Location: 19 Washington Square North

Yasser Alwan Cairo-based Photographer
Shamoon Zamir Associate Professor of Literature and Visual Arts, NYUAD

In conversation with Shamoon Zamir, Yasser Alwan discusses his first retrospective exhibition of photographs hosted by NYU Abu Dhabi, which features images from Egypt as well as his 25 years of travel throughout the Middle East and North Africa. The photographs focus on the common and the quotidian; ordinary people going about their daily lives in a world that has been steadily decaying around them until they discover their collective strength lies in their individual weakness.

Part of the series on The New Middle East

Space is limited. Please RSVP to 19wsn.rsvp@nyu.edu.

Visit NYUAD Events for more information.

Send Us Your Halloween Pics!

We'll post you in your festive finest here and on Draper's Facebook page.

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Krull the Warrior King (Kristyn Goldberg's canine companion) in one of his favorite Halloween disguises: the Pumpkin Jester...

Fall Orientation Pictures on Facebook

Draper is now easier to find on Facebook--check out our page (http://www.facebook.com/#!/DraperMAProgram.NYU) and help us tag recent pictures of our fall 2011 orientation party.

Flickr Commons Photofinds for the 4th of July

Happy 4th! Enjoy the long weekend!

"Uncle Sam's Birthday. 1776- July 4th 1918. 142 Years Young and Going Strong"
From the U.S. National Archives Collection

"Family Enjoys a Fourth of July Holiday in a Park at Sleepy Eye, Minnesota" (1975)

Photo by Flip Shulke, Part of U.S. National Archives Collection

"Youngsters on the July 4th Holiday at the Kosciusko Swimming Pool in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant District" (1974)

Photo by Danny Lyon, Part of the U.S. National Archives Collection

"Marion Duncan in costume for 4th of July play: Tavares, Florida" (1890)
Part of the Collection of the State Library and Archives of Florida

Happy First Day of Summer!

In honor of the solstice today, here are some photofinds from the Flickr Commons to celebrate summer:

Snack Bar in Summer Community of Broad Channel on Jamaica Bay. 05/1973
Flickr collection of US National Archives

"Bay Clams Are the Specialty of the House"
Photograph by Arthur Tress (1940 - present)

A Summer Shower c. 1907

Flickr collection of the National Archives, UK

"A summer shower in the woods, Miyanoshita, Japan."

Photograph taken by Herbert Ponting (1870-1935)

At the Oldlands' Summer Cow Camp: July, 1972

Flickr collection of the US National Archives

"15 Miles South of Their Piceance Creek Ranch. 3 Generations of Oldlands Have Ranched Here"

Photograph by David Hiser (1937 - present)

Congratulations to Peter Lucas, Winner of a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship

Photos by Orizon Carneiro Muniz, Courtesy of Peter Lucas

Draper congratulates Professor Peter Lucas on being one of eight professors at NYU to be awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship for 2011. "Appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise," Peter and the other recipients were selected from a batch of over 3,000 applications.

Peter teaches "International Studies in Human Rights" for Draper each fall, but is also affiliated with the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) program in GSAS and the Open Arts program in Tisch. When not teaching at NYU, Peter--an accomplished photographer and filmmaker--often works on projects highlighting memory, trauma, and personal narrative in Rio de Janiero, Brazil.

It is for one of his photography projects--The Last Hour of Summer--that Peter was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship. As he explains on his website, the project started with the discovery of 200 black and white photos that he found and bought at a flea market in Rio:

"Most of the pictures were women on the beach at Ipanema. Although we did not know who the photographer was at first, he took two self-portraits of himself in the mirror. He also dated his pictures on the verso. The time frame of 1962/1963 correlates with that golden period just before the 1964 military coup in Brazil and represents the “Last Hour” before the change.

With some clever research in Ipanema we eventually found people who were able to identify the late Orizon Carneiro Muniz as the photographer. Muniz was not a professional photographer, but a local weekend photographer with a deep love for women and the beach. In an attempt to find the people in the pictures, we mounted an exhibition in 2007 at Casa Laura Alvim on the beach in Ipanema. With substantial press coverage of the show, we finally met many friends that Muniz photographed. Over 45 years later, most of the people in the photographs are still living in Rio.

...

Among the people we met at the exhibition was a friend who had the remaining photos from Orizon Carneiro Muniz. There were 5000 more photographs. I purchased the photos and negatives in 2009. Using the entire archive as a visual base, we are planning a feature-length documentary film with production beginning in 2011. There are several stories in the pictures but the essence of the film will be documentation and remembrance of those incredible years just before the coup when Ipanema emerged as a global cultural sensation."

Using Muniz' photographs, Peter developed a series of exhibitions and also a book (co-authored with Mauricio Lissovsky) called The Last Hour of Summer: The Lost Photos of Ipanema, which is forthcoming from Brazil's Casa de Palavra press. With the support of the Guggenheim fellowship, he will be able to finish the documentary film that these photographs also inspired.

As Peter explained in a recent article for CLACS, the film will combine several narratives, using Muniz's found photos as a point of departure to examine the cultural and historical moment of Ipanema on the threshold of the military coup in 1964.

"Using the entire archive for the film, we will then interview other people who will speak on the political nature of these images. The photos were largely taken in the years just before the military coup in Brazil in 1964. Brazilians sometimes refer to this time as the “last hour.” As documents of this last moment before the dictatorship, the photographs evoke innocence, beauty, hope, naiveté, wonder, and youth. The photos also represent the last hour of the classic black and white snapshot before the widespread introduction of Kodacolor film in 1964. Photographic historians and photographers will then be interviewed to speak about the images from the perspective of personal photography.

Spiraling further out, the fourth story involves the cultural history of Ipanema in the early 1960s. While these photos were being taken, Tom Jobim was writing his most famous songs a few blocks away and in 1964, Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto would win the Grammy and introduce Bossa Nova to the world. As Americans discovered Ipanema, the first surfers from California arrived in Brazil in 1964 and they began to surf the waves at Arpoador, the first beach at Ipanema. And the final story is how these photos also documented this threshold moment when Brazilian women begin to change in so many ways. Their style, their beauty, and the way they walked the beach would forever captivate the world."

To see images from The Last Hour of Summer and Peter's other photographic essays, check out his website: http://peterlucas.net/

Photography and Film Panel at Barnard, 3/28

The Barnard Center for Research on Women invites you to attend:

The New Woman International:

Representations in Photography and Film

a panel with Kristine Harris, Elizabeth Otto, Vanessa Rocco, and Clare Rogan
moderated by Linda Nochlin
Monday, 3/28, 6:30 pm
James Room, 4th Floor Barnard Hall
Barnard College
3009 Broadway (at 117th Street)
New York, NY

During the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, a range of iconic female forms emerged to dominate the global pictorial landscape. Female athletes and adventurers, chorine stars, flappers, garçonnes, Modern Girls, neue Frauen, suffragettes, and trampky were all facets of the dazzling and urbane New Woman who came to epitomize modern femininity in photographs and on film. This construct existed as a set of abstract ideals, even as it varied when translated across national contexts and through a range of key historical moments including First Wave feminism, colonialism, the First and Second World Wars, political revolutions, and the rise of modernism.

This panel, moderated by art historian Linda Nochlin, will examine the nuances of visual representations of this transgressive and border-crossing figure from her inception in the later nineteenth century to her full development in the interwar period and beyond.

Kristine Harris is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Asian Studies Program at the State University of New York at New Paltz and recently was a Visiting Associate Professor in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago.

Linda Nochlin, moderator, is Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

Elizabeth Otto, assistant professor in the Department of Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York, is an art historian who focuses on issues of gender, visuality, and media culture in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially in Germany and France.

Vanessa Rocco is an adjunct assistant professor in the History of Art and Design at Pratt Institute.

Clare I. Rogan is Curator of the Davison Art Center at Wesleyan University, where she also teaches courses on history of photography, the history of prints, and museum studies.

This event is free and open to the public. For more information, please contact the Barnard Center for Research on Women at (212) 854-2067 or visit our website, www.barnard.edu/bcrw.

Flickr Commons Photofinds: Spring Break!

As many of you head off to warmer climes for Spring Break, those of us left in the city will just have to make due with these pics of sandy relaxation:

Tourists on the Public Beach (Monroe County, FL) circa 1975
U.S. National Archives Collection


Atlantic City Beach circa 1905
Photo by William M. Vander Weyde, George Eastman House Collection


Constitution Beach - Within Sight and Sound of Logan Airport's Takeoff Runway 22R (1973)
Photo by Michael Philip Manheim, U.S. National Archive Collection



Barbados Flip 1955
The National Archives UK Collection

Your Weekly Flickr Commons Photofinds: Group Photos

"Rebecca Wolinksy"
Part of the Jewish Women's Archive collection of Jewish-American Women and WWII

Collection of Seminole dolls in the process of being made by Mary Billie:
Big Cypress Reservation, Florida (July 15, 1980)
State Library and Archives of Florida



Children's tea party at Marlborough, Queensland, 1900-1910
State Library of Queensland, Australia

CFP: Photography, Gender, & the Politics of Representation (Princeton, Due 3/1)

BEND!

An Interdisciplinary Symposium
Princeton University, April 22-23, 2011

Keynote Speaker: Professor George Baker, Department of Art History, UCLA

The past decade has witnessed widespread institutional and scholarly efforts to historicize the relation between art and feminism, and between art and identity politics. These efforts unfold in a present that is often characterized as “post-gender” and/or “post-racial.” Just as categories of identity seem to lose traction in cultural discourse, so boundaries between artistic media become unfixed. Yet photographic representation is increasingly pervasive, and increasingly bound to the performance of subjectivity.

This symposium aims to consider the interrelated production of gender and photography, along with their dissolution as stable categories of inquiry. An interrogation of photography today requires looking within as well as beyond the boundaries of traditional art-historical frameworks. It compels us to account for the political and social dimensions in which photography participates, and demands that we re-consider the mise-en-scène of photography’s production as art.

How has the evolution of photography—from b/w to color, from analogue to digital, from mass media to social media—served to articulate or blur aesthetic and subjective differences? What politics of representation emerge when the individual can be both agent and object of photographic voyeurism, exhibitionism, and surveillance? Might photography's expanded field offer the potential for reshaping feminist politics today?

We invite participants to explore historical, existing and possible relationships between photography and the (re)production of gender, from the perspectives of visual culture, philosophy, (art) history, and art practice. Papers might consider photography in relation to:

gender bending - histories and politics of sexuality - performance and/or portraiture - the construction of masculinity - women artists - representations of gender, race, and class - advocacy, activism, and political practice - feminist politics, ethics, and aesthetics - medical and biological discourses - capitalism, terrorism, and war

We welcome submissions from graduate students and emerging scholars in all fields and disciplines. Please submit a CV and 300-word abstract for a 20-minute paper by March 1, 2011 to Frances Jacobus-Parker, Elena Peregrina-Salvador, and Mareike Stoll at princetonphotography2011@gmail.com.

Flickr Commons Photofinds: Early Spring

Our photofinds this week were all found by doing a keyword search for "early spring" in the Flickr Commons. Enjoy the nice weather today!

Pasque Flowers - This Early Blooming Spring Flower Survives
the Late Snow Storms of the Rocky Mountains, 05/1972
Photo by David Hiser; Part of the U.S. National Archives Collection




An Unconscious Woman on the Ground, circa 1900
Powerhouse Museum Collection



A Field of Flowers and Mount Tabor, 1915
Oregon State University's Collection

Flickr Commons Photofinds for Valentines Day

CWAC Valentine's Day, 1944

Galt Museum and Archives

As avid readers of our venerable blog will remember, last semester we posted weekly gems from the Library of Congress' Flickr collection. The LoC collection is notable not only for its hidden treasures, it is also remarkable in that it was integral to the development of the Flickr "Commons," a copyright free, social tagging experiment that has vastly expanded in the last few years. (More on the Flickr/LoC partnership here, for all you open-access, social-tagging enthusiasts.)

From now on, our photo finds will be drawn not only from the LoC collection, but the larger Commons. Participants in the Commons range from the Brooklyn Museum and the National Maritime Museum to the Bergen Public Library and NASA, so the photo collection is exceptionally diverse. It's a great resource, so check it out sometime and send us your favorite finds to post.

For now, though, some Valentine's Day inspired photos (all of these came up in a keyword search for "valentine"):

McCall Style and Beauty (1939)
Part of the George Eastman House Collection

Meisje met jonge leeuwen in Artis (1961)
From the Nationaal Archief Collection


Valentine Dance, School (1956)
Library of Virginia

Library of Congress Photo Finds of the Week: Famous Faces

A few images of famous personalities:

Billie Holiday, 1947
(William Gottlieb)


President Theodore Roosevelt with Reporters, 1912
(Bain News Service)

Actress Doris Day, 1946
(William Gottlieb)


Babe Ruth, Knocked Out by Pitch, 1924

Library of Congress Photo Finds of the Week: December

As we near the end of 2010, here are some photos that were found in the LoC Flickr page in a keyword search for 'December.'


These first three are by photographer Jack Delano:

Skating, vicinity of Brockton, MA: December, 1940



Street in Christiansted, St. Croix? Virgin Islands: December, 1941

C & NW RR, working on a locomotive at the 40th Street railroad shops, Chicago:
December, 1942

The last photo was taken by the Bains News Service:

Winter Bathing, New York: December, 1912

Library of Congress Photo Finds of the Week: Thanksgiving Maskers

Our Thanksgiving-themed weekly photo finds are all part of the LoC's George Grantham Bain Collection and feature "Thanksgiving Maskers." According to this article, Masking was a popular Thanksgiving tradition in the early 1900s. Per the article,

Before Halloween became the holiday it now is in the United States, children would dress up in masks on the final Thursday in November and go door to door for treats (think: fruit!), or scramble for pennies. The tradition was known as Thanksgiving Masking.

Below are some shots of a Thanksgiving Masking celebrationaround 1910:

Thanksgiving Maskers, ca. 1910

Scramble for Pennies, Thanksgiving, ca. 1910

Thanksgiving Maskers, ca. 1910

Library of Congress Photo Finds of the Week

Your Draper staff is quite enamored with the Library of Congress' digital historic photo collection on Flickr. We'll be posting great finds from their collections weekly. We hope you enjoy--let us know if you find any particularly interesting gems that you'd like to have posted here as well.

Selections from "Photochrom Travel Views" Collection

Stabur Bygdo, Christiania, Norway, Photochrom ca. 1890

Fantoft Church, Bergen, Norway, Photochrom ca. 1890

General view, Copenhagen, Denmark, Photochrom, ca. 1890