Karin Rosenthal, Belly Landscape 1980

First Doubt: Optical Confusion in Modern Art, a new show by Joshua Chan, curator at Yale University Art Gallery, with 114 pictures drawn from the Allan Chasanoff collection, looks at optical confusion in pictures. A topic that is often talked about in classes but rarely investigated as thoroughly as this. With pictures from Ansel Adams to Lee Friedlander all dealing with a confused optical space, the viewer is challenged to look out and figure out sometimes very beguiling space. The show is up through January 4, 2009 but will be reconfigured three times during the run. Worth a look.

Flies over Niagara, 2008

The beginning of new work shot while AIR at CEPA in Buffalo.  

Three days of graduate students and critiques was an exhausting blast.

Do Not Open is available at the CPW auction 10/11/08.

On Friday I head to Woodstock, NY to give the fifth workshop of the summer (technically the last workshop on the last days of summer) Photographing the Social Landscape.  Sunday I am in Rochester to conduct a seminar with graduate students at Visual Studies Workshop, then on to Buffalo for my residency at CEPA.  Good news arrived yesterday that MAC Group (Leaf USA) has shipped the Aptus 75 for my work in Buffalo and Niagara Falls.

I thought that the digital age was going to make decisions easier, quicker and better.  I shot a bunch of stuff digitally while at Penland and two things have happened: I left my charger there so I cannot get into my (now dead) computer to see what I did, plus my external HD is formatted for PC and the Mac will not recognize it.  Thus I sit with pictures in two devices with no means to access until the charger arrives.  Additionally the film shot is on my desk waiting to go to the lab which is now 30 miles away (the last local lab closed July 15).  Ugh.

Rain.

Day three of the workshop hostage crisis.  36 hours of rain and more promised today, the woodworkers are making biblical references in their measurements, and while NC needs the rain desperately, there are eight photographers aching to to get outside to make Landscape Photographs.  With any luck we may get to Spruce Pine (or Spice Prune as it is known to many) to take in the sights.  More later (with pix)

Penland Schoolof Crafts is about one hour north and west of Ashville, NC in the blue Ridge Mountains near Spruce Pine.  An idyllic place with green and more green and small mountains and trees that won’t quick.  The nights are dark and noisy with screech owls and aktydids.  Searching for landscapes means finding places where the horizon is more than a hundred yards away; not a usual occurance.  The school attracts world class craftspeople in the traditional crafts (in an effort to preserve them) and photography.  I am teaching a digital color workshop without computers at a traditional craft school…go figure.  More later.

Yuma Rocks along with nearly 200 others will be auctioned off to support the PRC Boston’s best photographic concern.  Link to the PRC to see the catalog published soon.  Great work is available, have a look.