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Ruth Orkin (1921-1985)

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A self-taught photographer, Ruth Orkin is perhaps best remembered for her iconic image titled “An American Girl in Italy,” 1951. She was a photojournalist and a filmmaker, and produced many notable celebrity portraits. Later in life, Orkin taught photography at the School of Visual Arts and the International Center of Photography.

Eugène Atget (1857-1927)

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Eugène Atget was a French flâneur and a pioneer of photography noted for his determination to document all of the architecture and street scenes of Paris before their demolition by urban modernization. Most of his photographs were first published by American artist Berenice Abbott after his death. An inspiration to a wide range of artists, Atget’s genius was only recognized by a small number of young artists in the last years of his life, and he did not live to see the wide acclaim his photography would eventually receive.

Robert Giard (1939-2002)

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Robert Giard is best remembered for his figurative and portrait photography. He received a B.A. from Yale (1961), then an M.A. in Comparative Literature from Boston University (1965). For a time he taught intermediate grades at the New Lincoln School, but by 1972, he began to photograph, concentrating first on landscapes of the South Fork of Long Island, portraits of friends (many of them artists and writers in the region), and nude figures.  His most famous work includes formal portraits of significant gay and lesbian authors, including Edward Albee, Allen Ginsberg, David Leavitt, and Michael Cunningham, among others.

Bill Armstrong’s work on display at The Heckscher Museum of Art

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A blurry image of a black figure standing in the middle of a multicolored hallway.

Bill Armstrong’s work is featured in “Modern Alchemy: Experiments in Photography” at The Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, New York from December 6, 2014 – March 15, 2015.

“Modern Alchemy: Experiments in Photography” focuses on 20th and 21st-century artists who have pushed the boundaries of photography in myriad ways, creating images that have a complex relationship to objective reality. Beginning with Man Ray’s portfolio “Electricité” (1931), the exhibition traces 20th-century experimentation with photograms, multiple exposures, combination printing, tonal contrast, unusual perspectives, cropping, and chemical processing, often resulting in the creation of images that are abstract. Contemporary photographers have expanded the medium’s limits even further, reviving older techniques such as the camera obscura, experimenting with long and multiple exposures, darkroom processing, and cameraless photography, or exploring digital technologies. Bill Armstrong, Harry Callahan, Robert Heinecken, Chris McCaw, Abelardo Morell, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Maggie Taylor, Edmund Teske, and Jerry Uelsmann are among the featured artists.

The Heckscher Museum of Art
2 Prime Avenue
Huntington, New York 11743
631.351.3250
http://www.heckscher.org/exhibition_listings

Browse Bill Armstrong’s series “Film Noir”
Browse all of Bill Armstrong’s work at ClampArt


Blog post by:
Brian Paul Clamp, Director

David Plowden

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David Plowden was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He made his first photograph—which notably was of a train—when he was just 11 years old.  He was introduced to the darkroom in the late 1940s while he was a student at the Putney School in Vermont. Plowden studied economics at Yale University, and after graduating with a BA in 1955, he took a job with the Great Northern Railroad as the Assistant Trainmaster out of Wilmer, Minnesota. In 1958 and 1959 he worked as an assistant to photographer O. Winston Link, and from 1959 to 1960 he studied photography privately with Minor White and Nathan Lyons in Rochester, New York.  A substantial portion of Plowden’s archive is held in the Yale Collection of Western Americana at Yale University’s Beinecke Library.

Chris Ironside | “5 Questions,” Novella Magazine

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From Novella Magazine‘s interview with Chris Ironside:

NM: If you could eat, pray, love your life where would you go and why?

CI: New York City. When I was younger my first introduction to New York was through the television show “Fame.” I was in love with the series and I wanted to go to the High School of Performing Arts when I was old enough. That dream was never realized, but nowadays I do get to New York several times a year. I love the energy of the city and the creative inspiration that comes from being there as the city has a real sense of being so immediately alive all of the time. And then there are the people who I find to be interesting, stylish and attractive.

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View all of Chris Ironside’s work at ClampArt

Jen Davis | “Our Seven Favorite Photography Shows From 2014,” Slate

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From David Rosenberg and Jordan G. Teicher’s article for Slate:

We see a lot of work while researching stories to run on [our blog] Behold, the majority online. But every now and again we have the chance to head out and see some work hanging on the walls of galleries and museums in and out of New York. Here are a few of our favorites from 2014.

Jen Davis, “Eleven Years”: Jen Davis has been working on a series of self-portraits that examine body identity for 11 years. It’s fitting then, that she referenced that period of transition and self-reflection as the title of that series “Eleven Years,” that opened at ClampArt last May and has also been published as a book by Kehrer. Looking at a life—anyone’s life—edited down to a small collection of images can be a profound experience for both the photographer and viewer. Davis’ images strike a cord for their vulnerability, further enhanced by her talent for composition and beautiful lighting.

View the original article

See the exhibition “Eleven Years”
View all of Jen Davis’ work at ClampArt

Heeler

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Burns, Colorado
2012

Signed, titled, dated, and numbered, recto

Toned gelatin silver print

40 x 30 inches, sheet
(Edition of 15)
$3800.00

24 x 20 inches, sheet
(Edition of 15)
$2000.00

20 x 16 inches, sheet
(Edition of 25)
$1500.00

14 x 11 inches, sheet
(Edition of 25)
$1000.00

Amy Touchette | “Ode to Light,” BagNews

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From Amy Touchette’s article for BagNews:

The people of New York are what drew me to photography. The medium itself only played a supportive role. When I moved to New York City in 1997, my favorite thing to do was ride the subway. Each subway car seemed to hold a distillation of the world’s diversity, and that was an unusual setting for me. I was raised in a suburb of Syracuse, New York, in a homogenous school district, and although I had lived in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco before I moved to New York, I wasn’t used to being so engaged by humanity.

People watching became a daily hobby as I went about my life as a New Yorker. I didn’t question why. I just knew it stirred an energy in me that was positive. Four years later, when September 11th happened, I had a desperate urge to feel that energy as much as possible, as often as possible. I was living on Bleecker Street in Manhattan in an area that was blocked off to cars for a week or so after the attack. Outside my door was a scene out of an apocalyptic Hollywood movie: streets, eerily empty of cars, riddled with posters of dead people and their family’s despondent pleas to find them, and an indescribable stench of death and destruction constantly wafting in the air, the memory of which still haunts me.

View the original article

Browse all of Amy Touchette’s work at ClampArt

Before the Camera

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February 19 – March 28, 2015

Artist’s reception:
Thursday, February 19, 2015
6:00 to 8:00 p.m.

ClampArt is proud to present “Chuck Samuels: Before the Camera.” While his work has been exhibited internationally quite extensively since 1980, this is the artist’s first solo show in New York City.

Based in Montréal, Samuels frequently photographs or films himself, and his work often touches upon art history, feminism, and psychoanalysis. For this early body of work being presented at ClampArt, Samuels created twelve astonishingly faithful reconstructions of portraits of nude women from the history of photography by such modern masters as Paul Outerbridge, Man Ray, Edward Weston, and Richard Avedon, among others. However, in place of the female subjects, Samuels has staged himself “before the camera.”

Going so far as to replicate the precise size and style of display of the original artworks, Samuels caps his deconstructive statement by asking women to click the shutter release on the camera, finalizing his gender inversion. While everyone is aware of the ubiquity and violence of female objectification in Western culture, by parodying these iconic art historical images with his own body, Samuels establishes himself as an erotic object, confusing a typically implicit male gaze. As Deborah Bright writes in her groundbreaking book “The Passionate Camera”: “Samuels’ photographs expose the consistent heterosexist underpinnings of elite culture and taste as he vamps and camps through official photo history. Even better, he overtly homosexualizes those master photographers whose signature styles remain carefully preserved.”

Samuels’ photographs are part of the collections of La Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; Le Musée de la Photographie, Charleroi, Belgium; the George Eastman House, Rochester, New York; the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography (now part of the National Gallery of Canada), Ottawa, Ontario; Le Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec; Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts; and the Cinémathèque québécoise, Montréal; as well as many private collections.

Chuck Samuels would like to thank the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec their support in the form of a travel grant.

Brian Finke | “Special Books,” L’Oeil de la Photographie

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From L’Oeil de la Photographie:

Established in 1798, the duties of the U.S. Marshals include apprehending fugitives, transporting and housing prisoners, and protecting witnesses and federal judges. Finke gained unprecedented access to document the Marshals in 2010 after re-connecting with a childhood friend—Deputy U.S. Marshal Cameron Welch. It did not take long at all for Finke to find himself in the thick of things. His first ride-along included a 120-mph pursuit of an escaped convict in Huntsville, Texas.

View the original article

View the exhibition, “U.S. Marshals”
Browse all of Brian Finke’s work at ClampArt