Chernobyl Photo Book Review On Lens Culture

Lens Culture looks at the recent “Chernobyl: The Hidden Legacy” Photography book on Trolley Books. The review includes a gallery of images featured in this volume by Pierparolo Mittica. “Photographer/author Pierpaolo Mittica states the premise of his passionate personal mission to investigate, research, document and expose the catastrophe that remains and continues 21 years after the nuclear explosion at Chernobyl in 1986.”

Read the entire review and view the gallery on the Lens Culture website.
Image © Pierpaolo Mittica

On the Street: The New York School of Photographers

Phoenix Art Museum
Norton Photography Gallery
Now until September 2, 2007
New York City exerts a powerful hold on the American imagination. The site of triumph and tragedy, home to the fabulously wealthy and the desperately poor, boasting modern technology and historical tradition, New York represents the contradictions inherent in our national identity. As such, it has always posed an irresistible challenge to photographers, notably those who came to be known as the “New York School.” On the Street brings together a lively group of 60 black-and-white images of the city’s street life seen through the lenses of 18 New York School photographers from the 1910s through the 1960s – such as Diane Arbus, Weegee, Lisette Model, Helen Levitt, William Klein, and Garry Winogrand – from the collection of the Center for Creative Photography.

Norton Photography Gallery – Upcoming Exhibition
September 15, 2007 – December 30, 2007
Debating Modern Photography: Triumph of Group f.64
In 1934, a heated debate between photographic factions considered the future of the medium. A small group of California photographers were challenging the painterly, soft-focus photography style of the pictorialists. They argued that the appropriate direction for the photographic arts exploited characteristics inherent to the camera’s mechanical nature: sharp focus and great depth of field. Their subjects – arranged still lives, industrial and architectural views, close-ups from nature, and portraits – were selected for their photographic potential, with rich textures and strong forms. This small association of innovators – named Group f.64 after the camera’s smallest aperture, which produces the greatest depth of field – included Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Willard Van Dyke, Alma Lavenson and others. This exhibition endeavors to revive the controversy, not only to acknowledge the pictorialists’ arguments, but to illustrate how avant-garde the work of Group f.64 once was. It includes images by members of Group f.64 and such pictorialists as Anne Brigman, William Dassonville, Johan Hagemeyer, William Mortensen and Karl Struss.
Image © Louis Faurer