Shay McAtee

My friend Shay McAtee has been working on a project about Autism for a good long while, and the result is an exhibition that will be part of the San Pedro Art Walk in San Pedro, Los Angeles on Thursday evening, June 3rd. The body of work is titled, The Spirit Within: Stories from the Autism Spectrum and it comes out of her parallel passions for many years. First, as an occupational therapist for children with Autism, and second, as a photographer. These paths merged when Shay realized that she had an insiders view of families and children and wanted to create images to give a window into their lives. The work will be at the Finding Art Center through June 27th.

Autism can affect the way individuals interpret and interact with the world, as well as the ability of others to understand and interact with these very complex individuals. This project is an attempt to provide insight and bridge the gap between these two worlds.



As an occupational therapist, I have had the pleasure of working with children for over 30 years, including those on the autism spectrum. In talking to parents in waiting rooms, during treatment sessions and in family meetings, a common theme has been their desire to have their child seen and appreciated for who they truly are, while continuing to help them achieve their highest potential



The portraits in this exhibit have been selected from a larger group of photos, which, accompanied by interviews of the parents, are part of a book project. The portraits are not so much about autism, as they are about the individuals who carry this diagnosis. They are an invitation to look into the eyes of those who often have difficulty looking back into yours. They are an invitation to see beyond the external behaviors, to see the child within … to see the spirit within.



Ryan is a 5 year old boy with autism, who has very limited spoken language. He had just finished his OT session and was ready to go home. But his mother and his OT were talking. He was unhappy and began to lightly toss toy blocks against the wall. His OT noticed this, came over and started tossing the blocks with him. He stopped, looked up at his OT and smiled. His mother said “He so loves it when someone gets him”. Hopefully this project will help us all to better “get” Ryan and other individuals on the autism spectrum.

Calls for Entry

Crista Dix, of Wallspace Gallery, will juror an new Low-Tech exhibition at the Center for Fine Art Photography. Entries Due: July 13th

While many of the low-tech processes have come in and out of favor, they remain a steadfast part of the photographic cannon. The Center is currently celebrating the low-tech processes and is interested in exhibiting the best low-tech images that photographers are producing. This call is open to all subjects and styles of photography that include a low tech means of image making or printing. This includes, but is not limited to; toy, Holga and Diana cameras, Pinhole, Wet Plate Collodian, Photograms, Callotypes, Cyanotypes, Polaroid and other traditional processes.
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F-Stop Magazine #42 is a portfolio issue, jurored by Amber Terranova of PDN Magazine. Due date is July 1st.
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Aperture Portfolio Prize

The purpose of the Aperture Portfolio Prize is to identify trends in contemporary photography and specific artists whom we can help by bringing them to a wider audience. In choosing the first-prize winner and runners-up, we are looking for work that is fresh and that hasn’t been widely seen in major publications or exhibition venues.

First prize is $5,000. The first-prize winner and runners-up are featured in Aperture’s website for approximately one year. Winners are also announced in the foundation’s e-newsletter, which reaches thousands of subscribers in the photography community.The entry period for the 2010 Aperture Portfolio Prize begins Friday, May 14, 2010, and the deadline is Wednesday, July 14, 2010, at 12:00 noon EST.
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PhotoPlace Gallery in Middlebury, VT, seeks photographs exploring the theme of Flight. Juror: David Bram, Fraction Magazine

Due date: June 21st

From birds to ballerinas, from airplanes to dust motes, subjects that capture the experience of lessening gravity’s pull will constitute this juried exhibition. Forty photographs will be selected for exhibition on the walls of PhotoPlace Gallery and on the gallery website by juror David Bram. An additional thirty-five images will be chosen for PhotoPlace's "On-Line Gallery Annex." All selected work will be included in a full-color exhibition catalogue available for purchase from Blurb Books. To help artists defray costs, PhotoPlace Gallery offers to mat and frame work selected for exhibition free of charge, providing artists print their images to our pre-cut mat and frame sizes.

Graham Miller

I first saw Australian photographer, Graham Miller's project, Suburban Splendor, at Review Santa Fe last year. There is an beautiful quality to his prints, sumptuous and cinematic, yet intimate. A recent post on Flak photo drew me back to his site, and to another banquet of images with his series, American Photographs. The series shows an insight into American culture, that perhaps only an outsider can find. I'm interested in the ambiguity of images. The way that all photographs have elements of fabrication and truth making.

Graham is also the co-founder of FotoFreo, a biennial international festival of photography based in Fremantle, Western Australia.

Suburban Splendour materialised from encounters observed while driving, from the direct observation of daily life, from eavesdropping and casual conversation, but more often than not the photographs were inspired by literature and cinema. Films by Paul Thomas Anderson and Ray Lawrence contributed, as did writing by Richard Ford and the painting of Edward Hopper. But the background soundtrack that remained constant was the voice of the American short story writer Raymond Carver. Carver's vision depicts ordinary blue collar people living lives of quiet desperation, people who are feeling their way int the dark with the hope that maybe next week things will get better.

Images from Suburban Splendor






Graham is also part of the movie, Photography Hijacked, that will hopefully find a broader audience in the near future.

Photography Hijacked from jack pam on Vimeo.

Images from American Photographs

Ann Summa

"There's a legend in Mexico that says when God was flying over the country distributing homosexuals, he got tired over the state of Oaxaca and left most of them there."

Los Angeles photographer, Ann Summa, explores a fascinating cultural phenomenon to create portraits of Muxes, men living as women, who are often the last male child and become the help-mate to aging parents.

Ann is an habitual world traveler. She studied photography in Japan, teaches photography at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, and lives part time in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Her commercial work specializes in environmental, corporate, and celebrity portraiture, but she finds time so shoot work as an advocate for women's health issues. Her fine art work looks at fringe cultures, from punk rock to women who own pit bulls to facets of Mexican culture.

In Zapotec cultures of Oaxaca , a muxe is a physically Male individual who dresses and behaves in a feminine manner; they may be seen as a Third gender. Some marry women and have children while others choose men as sexual or romantic partners. According to anthropologist Lynn Stephen, muxe "may do certain kinds of women's work such as embroidery or decorating home altars, but others do the male work of making Jewelry. Many now have white-collar jobs and are involved in politics."



"We are the third sex. There's men and women and there's someone in between, and that's who I am"



In Oaxaca, the rarely married muxes are often considered a family blessing, prized as family caretakers, and, along with widows, are considered acceptable partners when it comes to premarital sex for young Catholic boys. "Sleeping with a muxe does not make a man gay," Summa says she's been told. "It makes him feel more macho."



Many indigenous Zapotec residents still honor Mayan dual-sex gods and cross-dressing Aztec priests, stands out among the others in mostly mestizo Catholic Mexico. Oaxaca has a matriarchal-based society; women are responsible for running most of the businesses here. As a result, most gay people find the state the most welcoming in the country.

Heather Oelklaus

Colorado photographer, Heather Oelklaus, has a sense of humor and a sense of the world from the inside out. Her work explores the past and the present, and the spaces in between. I believe taking a picture really does make it last longer.

Heather also is spent 2009 creating a blog that combined 1 year+Dictionary+Photography: Heather and two photographer friends selected random words out of the dictionary and photographed their interpretation of the selected word each day for a year. I personally liked finding out about the word in the morning so I could just think about that word that day. Some people liked having all the words for the whole week so it can ferment in their minds… But I like to play by strict rules. I think it made me more observant. And it made me venture out. If there was a word like “wig” or something, then I might have gone to a wig shop. And during the day I wouldn’t normally do that. So it helps you get out of your comfort zone a little bit.

I am featuring images from two of Heather's series, Better Homes & Icons and Lightning, which showcase her range of interests. Heather has books of both of these projects on her site.

The “Better Homes & Icons “ series started out as Polaroid Emulsion Transfers and has evolved into a body of work that includes sculpture, installation, mixed media, and traditional and alternative photographic techniques. Many of the pieces are inspired from 50’s advertisements and from stories people share with me. Months of planning is taken before an image is put to film. The humorous nature of the work draws the viewer in to take a closer look at the underlining stereotypes of home, community, and the roles each family member is expected to play.

images from Better Homes & Icons












The Lightning series is an on going passion. El Paso County in Colorado is a hot spot for cloud to ground lightning. Nothing beats the sound of thunder. It crawls up my spine and gets me to my feet. As a child, my family would sit on the porch and watch the storms in the distance. I remember my father getting out the tripod and his 35mm camera and pointing it at the storm. Once we found out that he had color film loaded in his camera, we poked fun and made jokes about why would anyone use color film to photograph the lightning that to us appeared as black and white. I’ve been shooting lightning for 7 years and my father takes great joy in teasing me about using color film to photograph the black and white lightning.

Images from Lightning

ToBernd /YourHilla

I was recently asked to participate in an interesting project, ToBernd /YourHilla, along with 8 other photography blogs around the globe.

"The German artists Bernd and Hilla Becher, who began working together in 1959 and married in 1961, are best known for their "typologies": grids of b/w photographs of variant examples of a single type of industrial structure. The rigorous frontality of the individual images gives them the simplicity of diagrams, while their density of detail offers encyclopedic richness. At each site the Bechers also created overall landscape views of the entire plant, which set the structures in their context and show how they relate to each other. The typologies emulate the clarity of an engineer's drawing, while the landscapes evoke the experience of a particular place".
From the introduction to the exhibition "Bernd and Hilla Becher: Landscape/Typology" at The Edward Steichen Photography Galleries, 2008.





THE PROJECT:
In the TOBERND,YOURHILLA project, each slot of a 3x3 logo grid evoke one of the storage silos documented by the couple and arranged into grid for comparation of form and design. If the typologies documented by Bernd and Hilla emulate “the clarity of an engineer’s drawing”, these logos allude to the forces of the composition to get a visual representation to be used as one-way identity. Once the nine signs will be assigned, the digital manipulation will mirrors itself in a systematic community auto-generated.



THE GENERATIVE LOGO.
In the art world, the term “generative” refers to a system of creation defined by computer software algorithms in order to get autonomous processes. Taking the cue from this idea, this series of generative logos was born performing a series of common software’s batch actions on a series of photographs by the Becher’s couple. The strict research for hidden visual forces into the photographic work, find a similar visual parallelism into the logos, turning an outwardly random but mathematical process into a series of consistent visual forms to be vectorialized in logotypes.

The logo featured by Lenscratch


TOBERND,YOURHILLA is curated by elviegraphisme .