One of my landscape nature images of a clearing storm (a retreating supercell storm) taken in 2010 received an Honor of Distinction (3rd Place) in the 2014 Black and White Spider Awards today (10/18/2014). Very honored to be among all of the photographers whose work was recognized this year by the international jury.
Medium Festival of Photography - Open Show LA
The inaugural OPEN SHOW San Diego takes place in an outdoor courtyard at the Lafayette Hotel. Open Show LA and Medium Festival of Photography present a special event featuring four Eye to Eye Portfolio Review photographers.
Come join us Saturday evening October 25th if you are in San Diego for the weekend.
FEATURED PRESENTERS
Brenda Biondo | www.brendabiondo.com
John DuBois | www.johndubois.net
Stephen Strom | www.stephenstrom.com
Michael Sakasegawa | www.sakeriver.com
Source: http://openshow.org/losangeles/
Summer Update - Critical Mass 2014 - Spider Awards - Galleries
A multi-year effort - "Thrown from the Past" a photographic study of a closed silk mill in western Maryland - was selected as a Critical Mass Finalist for 2014.
A black and white version of the lead image of the series (one of the main throwing machine lines) was a nominee in the 2014 Black and White Spider Awards for 2014 in the Fine Art category and recently juried into the Vermont Photoplace Gallery's Black and White exhibition by juror Karen E. Haas, Lane Curator of Photographs, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. It was also accepted into the A Smith Gallery's "forgotten" exhibition by juror Blue Mitchell.
Manifest Gallery International Photography Annual Vol. 3
about the INPHA 3
For the third annual International Photography Annual publication Manifest Gallery received 1143 submissions from 340 artists from across the U.S. and beyond. The publication includes 70 works by 54 artists from 5 countries including England, Canada, Switzerland, Greece, and the United States.
An image (part of the Nowhere, after... series) of mine ("Somewhere, Everywhere") was selected for inclusion in this publication which is planned for release in early to mid 2015. This image was also the Duncan Miller Gallery's YourDailyPhotograph Emerging/Contemporary photograph September 7th and juried (Juror: Christy Karpinski) into The Kiernan Gallery Voyages Exhibition in 2013.
Encouragement for some new stuff I'm working on...
Manifest Gallery is an artist for artists non-profit that I've submitted to in the past. It was a real pleasure to get an email notification this week letting me know that my submission was accepted into Manifest's International Photography Annual (v3). The artist list isn't posted yet but should on the gallery's website next week. I also don't know yet what was selected but here's the images I submitted. It's a gallery of 5 images -- click below to see the full set.
It's from something I've been working on that started out as a visual journal from travels away from home and continues to evolve from the range of scenes that I come across still on those travels. Duality started out as a fun exercise looking at a hotel bed right after getting up (and too many of those I'd have to say) and then took a turn relating/contrasting them to similar shapes and forms found in water and especially ocean surf. The work took another turn after I branched out to include other things (like the chairs no one uses in these rooms) found in a hotel room while traveling. I almost didn't submit this, went back and forth on the decision all the way to the deadline. Then the deadline was extended and I got to work on it some more. Still a work in progress but it is expanding in interesting ways I hadn't expected.
Thoughts on an Exhibition
I've been working on a project the past few years based on some visits to a closed silk throwing mill in western Maryland. A few select images from this work have appeared in several galleries over the last year. For this I'm very grateful for the privilege of sharing the work in the company of many other talented photographers.
The recent selection of three of my images from this series for the Annual Exhibition at The Houston Center for Photography is a high point in the development of this work. I've worked through the sequencing of the images many times and revisited the images that I wanted to highlight several times as well. Over time developing the project the images follow I see now as an evolving understanding of the meaning of the photographs in the body of work. Today it has come to be a study of the people who worked at this mill and those who followed later as observers and interpreters. The mill is not an "abandoned" place, it has an owner and caretaker working to preserve the place and its story. I hope this work can become part of that effort.
I also had an artist's statement for this project and included it with the submission for the exhibition. One thing the Center requested of the exhibiting artists was to record brief audio files that could be listened to while viewing the images at the Center. It was a profound learning experience for me to do three 1-to-2 minute recordings for each photograph. I thought it would be a straight-forward task - it was, after four hours invested in making the audio files. Turns out talking about a work in real time is very different from experiencing an image visually and different still from writing about it. The entire experience taught me to do more of this while working on images - it helped me to develop my ideas around the work more clearly.
It was also a pleasure to go to the opening, meet lots of new people and also to see all of the images selected as prints and not just pixels on a screen.
One other lesson: get out and look at real work whenever you can.
Thanks for stopping by.
Opening thoughts on my site...
For the last few years I've known I needed to refine and present a more deliberate presence online for the work I was doing. Experimenting with different sites that share and discuss images served a purpose - mainly to satisfy people when the question "do you have a web site" was asked.
The time I had available was largely devoted to creating (and inevitably editing) images that would make their way online at some point.
This new site I hope to be an adjunct and an aid to developing and improving my image making - focusing on projects, portfolio development and more thoughtful contribution to the photographic scene online.
Certainly the tools have improved immeasurably for making this effort.
thanks for visiting and looking forward to the next steps on this journey...
--john