Man Ray Exhibit Coming to the Jewish Museum..November 15th Opening

The constant motif of Man Ray’s life was liberation, change, and transgression: whether in name, medium, style, or content, he sought to free the object or subject of its limitations, just as he sought to free himself from his own personal origins and outsider past. The exhibition will demonstrate how the artist’s assimilation, his emergence from an immigrant world of stereotype, ethnicity, and fixed identity, produced a dynamic polarity of revelation and concealment. It will examine the myriad means he used to create this willful construction of veiled identity, revealing a hide-and-seek game of encrypted self-reference seen throughout his oeuvre. His relentless chronicling of his career through self-portraits exemplifies this conundrum, as does his autobiography, “Self-Portrait,” which, without dates or reference to his family or origins, purported to chronicle his life. Alias Man Ray argues that issues of identity are central to the interpretation of Man Ray’s work, and that through his lifelong need for anonymity, his constant self-remaking and chronicling, the artist managed to shadow if not totally occlude his personal history.

Guest Speaker at Upcoming Monthly Meeting...October 21

Come to Unique Photo on Route 46 and hear Emily Schlipf of Black Dog Photography of Hoboken....Business meeting begins at 6:30 PM

Her topic is: Manage Your Business: Time-Saving Technology Tips

Do you spend most of your day managing your business? Wish you could spend more time with your family or on the golf course? Emily will introduce you to surprisingly simple technologies that will save you time in the studio. Learn how to work more efficiently using electronic communication, online sales, and digital presentations.

Emily Schlipf is a successful photographer in Hoboken, New Jersey, who began her photography career in 2003 when a local studio, Black Dog Photography, hired her to automate and organize its workflow. Today, Black Dog Photography is a thriving studio with 2 locations and 4 photographers. Emily continues to find new and innovative ways to manage the business’ workflow and has become widely known for her work in weddings and boudoir. Her images have been published in the New York Times, Palisades Magazine, Professional Photographer, Manhattan Bride and (201) Bride. Her images are also currently featured in Fujifilm marketing materials. Emily is an active member of the Professional Photographers of America and recently became a Certified Professional Photographer.

Kandinsky on Your Holiday List..

Definitely plan to go to the Guggenheim to see the fabulous Kandinsky exhibit. You can order tickets online to avoid waiting. Pretty crowded-try and go during the week.

His color palette alone will inspire you whether you're shooting portraits, landscapes or a wedding!

Take time to view the online exhibit information before going to have a good background of understanding.

A small photo exhibit is also on display showing images from Kandinsky's time in Germany with his longtime lover who was a painter and photographer.

The great Irving Penn, photographer, dies in NYC at age 92

There's so much to say about Irving Penn, the great innovator, that I thought I'd pull some copy straight from one of his obituaries. Take time to look up some of his iconic fashion images. If you are a wedding or studio portrait photographer, he's required studying for his beautiful lighting and posing.

From the Times Online....."In a career that lasted more than 60 years, Irving Penn marked himself out as one of the fathers of modern-day fashion, portrait and still-life photography. Along with the late Richard Avedon, his great colleague and rival, Penn brought about a change in postwar portraiture and fashion photography that was to have repercussions up to the present day.

For the first hundred years of photography, politicians, generals and actors had visited portrait studios in search of nobility and fine looks, expecting their cowardice or their pimples to be deftly retouched. They were paying to have their vanities gratified. Penn broke that compact between photographer and sitter. Penn’s subjects left themselves open to the photographer’s interpretation in the same way that Dora Maar left herself open to Picasso’s frantic interpretation.

It may be the norm today but in breaking that contract, Penn wanted to expose the life behind the achievement. He shot Martha Graham, WH Auden and Stravinsky, for example, posed in stark tight corners. bringing a drama to the composition and focusing all attention on those faces, assessing without flinching precisely the price, the damage of struggle, the achievement and the life itself.

Penn made a very handsome living at Vogue taking direct and austere photographs of beautiful models, focusing attention on the elegance to which many women aspired. His fashion photography influenced many, notably Norman Parkinson. But at the same time Penn was also one of the 20th century’s most distinguished practitioners of the time-honoured genre of still life. Following in the tradition of Chardin and other still-life painters, he brought his rigorous eye to the subject in photographs of great wit, simplicity and edginess. Taking such unpromising subjects as old cigarette butts, bones, street trash and lumps of tofu, he set about making a body of work that could shock as much as it could delight."

Georgia O'Keefe..

OK, so I am an art museum maniac. When I do have the time I see as much as I can as I did this past weekend. The Cezanne exhibit at the Montclair Art Museum is fantastic--focus is his American following of artists in the years after his death--how they incorporated his genius into their works.

Alfred Stieglitz, by 1910, was using his magazine, Camera Works, to reproduce artwork by Cezanne, Picasso and other artists of the day. He understood the close connection between painting and seeing with light using a camera.

This exhibit led me to The Whitney and the Georgia O'Keefe exhibit with its focus on the abstract nature of her work. Of course she was greatly influenced by the photographic style and studies of her husband Stieglitz. O'Keefe claimed to crop and enlarge her paintings similarly to how a photographer would

his/her photographs.

A room was dedicated to the very famous Steiglitz photographs of O'Keefe's hands, torso and body. She got a little too much notice for those images and in later years worked hard on projecting an image of herself as a "strong" woman, not just a beautiful one.

Photography in NYC...Robert Frank

If you have time, definitely see photographer Robert Frank's exhibit on his timeless book, The Americans, first published in the US 50 years ago in 1959. All 83 photographs from the book are on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art until the end of December. Interesting the way the images are mixed with displays of the book itself, correspondence with colleagues such as Jack Kerouac who wrote the introduction and contact sheets displaying Mr. Frank's rather messy (my word) organizational style. He might like Lightroom!!

The editing process is pretty fascinating and although some of the images look "dated" remember at the time they were totally new and perhaps even shocking.

The first image in the book and in the show was taken in Hoboken New Jersey--windows with a flag. Many other "local" images of interest along with others from the south, southwest and midwest that Mr. Frank shot on his cross country road trips.

He was an outsider using the camera to look inside America-its politics, religions, social mores customs and more.

Go!!!

Conde Nast closes publications..

Conde Nast gave the magazine world a shock today when it closed its prestigious Gourmet magazine; also closed Modern Bride and Elegant Bride. Ad sales won't let the publisher maintain these pubs.

Web sites seem alive and well. Still need advertising dollars to make them work.

What do you think? How does this reflect other trends in the world of weddings? Any thoughts??