© Mark Cohen

As manufacturing has disappeared from many American cities, old factories that once held heavy machinery have attracted artists and galleries, and many former sites of industry now host fledgling arts communities. In the former steel town of Bethlehem, PA, the non-profit group ArtsQuest has been celebrating the city’s art scene through its annual InVision Photo Festival. Attendees at this year’s festival, taking place November 3 through 6, will be greeted by large-scale photos by fine-art photographer Mark Cohen, author of Grim Street and an InVision Artist in Residence. Cohen’s images will be displayed outdoors at the festival headquarters and other festival venues.

The festival includes talks by Sam Abell, the National Geographic photographer, Theo Anderson, Frank Smith and David Rehrig, among others. Judy Linn will be speaking and signing copies of her book Patti Smith 1969.

On Saturday photographer Michael Soluri, known for his multi-year documentation of the NASA space shuttle, will be making a special presentation in conjunction with (how’s this for smart programming?) a microbrew tasting.

There will also be portfolio reviews and workshops. The festival kicks off November 3 with a SlideLuck Show. A calendar of events, a guide to all the exhibitions taking place throughout the Lehigh Valley, and ticket information can be found at www.artsquest.org/invision/

Harry Benson, Ron Haviv, Douglas Kirkland, Susan Meiselas, Doug Menuez, Corey Rich, Ryszard Horowitz and David Black  are among the photographers who have donated signed prints to the silent auction to be held Friday October 28 as part of the PhotoPlus Bash.   At the event, sponsored by Unique Photo and Fujifilm, guests can also purchase raffle tickets to win prizes valued at over $100 apiece. All proceeds from the benefit will be presented to the Red Cross in support of its ongoing relief and rebuilding efforts in Japan.

PhotoPlus describes the event, which will take place at the Highline Stages, as an evening of “photography, friendship and fun.” Music will be provided by DJ Cresce and the band Tyburn Saints, whose album is titled “For the Benefit of Strangers.” (Very fitting for the occasion.)  For more information on the event, visit the Bash/Benefit web site.

Tickets are $35 in advance or $50 on site. To register for PhotoPlus Expo & WPPI NYC and purchase tickets, go to the PhotoPlus Expo web site, www.photoplusexpo. (If you’re already registered, you can still purchase tickets here. )

Among the awards given out at the 24th annual Eddie Adams Workshop, held October 7 through 10 in Jeffersonville, New York, were two prizes created in memory of photographers Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros, who were killed in Misrata, Libya on April 20, 2011.

The Chris Hondros Fund, created after his death to support young photojournalists, gave a $2500 prize and a print to Workshop attendee Enrico Fabian.  The Tim Hetherington Memorial Award, a $2,000 prize, was given to Dominic Bracco II. The prize was funded by a collection taken at a gathering of Hetherington’s friends and colleagues held at New York’s Bubble Lounge days after his death.

Each year, the intensive, four-day Workshop ends with a memorial to photojournalist Eddie Adams, the Workshop’s founder, and six of his Vietnam-era colleagues who were killed covering war. This year, the memorial was made more poignant with the addition of tributes to Hondros and Hetherington.

Hondros, a 1993 Workshop alumnus, was remembered with a screening of short interview excerpts from the 2007 documentary In Service: Pittsburgh to Iraq. In one segment, Hondros, who had covered the Iraq war for Getty Images, spoke about the gap between American and Iraqi culture, saying, “Our government is infatuated with Iraq but our people are not.”

Jamie Wellford, international photo editor at Newsweek, told the audience that Hetherington had been looking forward to attending this year’s Workshop. On the day he died, Hetherington had emailed Wellford, but he didn’t receive it until after Hetherington’s death, because it  “spent a week in digital purgatory.” Wellford introduced a screening of Hetherington’s 19-minute film Diary. Made in 2010, it is a kaleidoscopic, deeply personal compilation of footage showing Hetherington’s view of his life as a war photographer.

Among the other prizes given out during the Workshop to Barnstorm participants:

The Colton Family Award, for the student who best embodies the spirit of the workshop, a $1000 Award and a spot on the Black team at next year’s Workshop:
Scott Mcintyre

$1000 Cash Awards From National Geographic (two):
Kiana Hayeri And Arthur Bondar

$500 Awards From LIFE Magazine (Two):
Gregory Gieske, David Maurice Smith

Assignments from Newsweek, People, Sports Illustrated, Esquire Digital, AARP and AARP Bulletin, AP, Getty Images, The Los Angeles, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other newspapers and publications were also given out. Additional awards of services or gift certificates were offered by Altpick, B& H Photo, Mac Group and PDN.

A full list of 2011 participants is available on  www.eddieadamsworkshop.com.

–with reporting by Jill Waterman

© Danny Goldfield. Photo: Ben, Burundi.

After months of controversy, the Park51 Islamic Cultural Center  opened in lower Manhattan on September 21 with a photo exhibition that celebrates New York’s diversity. “NYChildren” is an ongoing project by photographer Danny Goldfield, who is photographing a New York City child born in every country in the world.  The hundreds of visitors and international journalists who crowded into the refurbished storefront for the opening last night got to see the 169 photos Goldfield has taken in New York City since he began the project in 2004. It’s a feel-good debut exhibition for Park51, dubbed “the Ground Zero mosque” by protesters who opposed the opening of an Islamic cultural and prayer center within a five-minute walk of the September 11 Memorial site.

The day after the opening, Goldfield was still amazed by the crowd at the event. “I don’t know how many journalists I talked to last night,” he told PDN. He noted that some in last night’s crowd may have been wary visiting the space. “My hope is that they’ll step through the threshold and be in this pristine white gallery with 169 photos and feel more comfortable.”

Goldfield, who describes himself as “a proud Jew,” says his NYChildren project was inspired by the idea that bonding with our neighbors can strengthen communities.

(more…)

The winner and finalists for the 2011 W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography will be announced on Wednesday, October 19th at a ceremony in New York City.

The event, which is open to the public, will take place at the Asia Society, 725 Park Ave (at 70th Street). Admission is free, and on a first come, first served basis.  The doors will open at 6 p.m. The ceremony will begin at 6:30 after a reception.

The Smith Grant is presented annually to a photographer whose past work and proposed project follows the tradition of W. Eugene Smith, the renowned photojournalist who died in 1978. Recent winners include Darcy Padilla, Lu Guang, and Mikhael Subotzky.

For 2011, the amount of the grant will be $30,000. An additional $5,000 in fellowship money will be awarded, at the discretion of the jury, to one or more finalists deemed worthy of special recognition.

Update: The keynote address at the W. Eugene Smith Grant presentation will be given by journalist and author Sebastian Junger, co-director with Tim Hetherington of the documentary Restrepo and author of War. On the 10th anniversary of the war in Afghanistan, there will be a presentation of work by 2007 Smith grant recipient Stephen Dupont’s Generation AK: The Afghanistan Wars and The Perils of Freedom.

More information is available at www.smithfund.org.

Friends of Anton Hammerl, the South African-born, London-based photographer and photo editor who was killed by pro-Qaddafi forces in Libya in April, have set up a Web site, www.friendsofanton.org,  to raise money for his three children. Tax deductible donations made to the site, which is sponsored by the non-profit Reporters Without Borders, will be used for the future education of Aurora, 11, Neo, 7, and Hiro, six months old.

Several photographers have donated prints which are being sold through the site; they include Joao Silva, Greg Marinovich, David Burnett, Teun Voeten, Frank Fournier, Andrew Testa and Teru Kuwayama, among others.

“Many people wanted to contribute to the future of Anton’s children,” says journalist Colleen Delaney, one of the volunteers behind the creation of the site. “There has been so much good will and the photo and journalism communities wanted to help.”

Photographer David Brabyn, another volunteer, says in a press release, “Everyone has worked tirelessly to get this project on the road – from the talented photographers who are donating their works, right down to web-based companies such as Emphas.is and PhotoShelter, who advised us, donated the account and waived transaction fees.” The site has also been supported by The Steven Vincent Foundation, digitaltechparis.com, Human Rights Watch and Committee to Protect Journalists.

Hammerl was working in Libya alongside photojournalist Manu Brabo and reporters Clare Morgana Gillis and James Foley on April 5 when the four went missing. While the other journalists were held in prison, Hammerl’s whereabouts remained unknown for six weeks. Upon their release in June, Gillis, Foley and Brabo informed Hammerl’s family that they had seen him shot by Libyan forces the day they were detained.

Related story:
Anton Hammerl Presumed Dead, Family Announces

Organizers of the Burning Man festival at Black Rock City have effectively shut down photography at this year’s event, according to a lament on the San Francisco Chronicle web site.

Rules for this year’s festival prohibit photographs of any people without signed model release forms, or pictures of the outlandish structures at the festival without the written consent of the artists. If you take pictures, you have to surrender all rights to the organizers of the festival, and refrain from distributing the pictures in any media–including Facebook–without their written permission.

The rules come off as an affront to all manner of rights and personal freedoms (at a festival that was built on those very principles, no less). And it’s a shame that a few bad apples have managed to spoil things for everyone (by going to Burning Man just to take and distribute pictures of naked, uninhibited women).

But maybe there’s a silver lining. The new rules just might be what we need to force aspiring documentary photographers to think outside the Burning Man box, and to save us from yet more of the same-old, same-old Burning Man pictures.

The Bronx Documentary Center, the new non-profit photography exhibition space in the South Bronx, will hold a silent auction on September 12 to raise funds for an exhibition of photographer Tim Hetherington’s final images from Libya. Hetherington was killed on April 20 in Misrata, Libya in a rocket attack that also killed photojournalist Chris Hondros.

Proceeds from the event, to be held at the Bubble Lounge in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood, will also benefit education initiatives and public programs at the BDC, according to a release by BDC founder Michael Kamber and project director Danielle Jackson. The Hetherington show is also supported by Committee to Protect Journalists and Foto Care.

Kamber, a photojournalist, founded the BDC as a “new place for photography, film and new media from around the globe.”  Located at Cortland Avenue and 151st Street in the South Bronx, it began hosting events this summer, including a showing of Zana Briski’s documentary, Born Into Brothels, and a talk by New York Times photographer Joao Silva, who lost his legs while embedded with US troops in Afghanistan.

In anticipation of its first exhibition in September, the BDC’s site, powered by Tumblr, has been updated throughout the summer with photographs documenting the surrounding neighborhood as well as photography news. Tonight the BDC will host a “Movies at Sundown” event, featuring the film Fernando Nation, to be followed by Q & A with the director, Cruz Angeles.

You can buy tickets to the fundraiser here.

–Kayla Epstein

In a special presentation before a packed room at PDN’s Outdoor Photo Expo in Salt Lake City on Friday, photographers Frans Lanting and Art Wolfe talked about their careers as nature photographers who have focused on conservation. Photographer Patrick Donehue moderated the presentation. Both Lanting and Wolfe are self-taught photographers, and each is extremely committed to preserving the beauty and disappearing elements of the natural world. During the presentation they spoke of their shared belief that one person can make a difference.

What follows are highlights and images from Lanting and Wolfe’s presentation.

In his early career, Frans Lanting discovered “pure magic” in the work of nature illustrators, Dutch wildlife photographers and landscape photographer Ernst Haas, and set out to develop his own esthetic point of view.

A well-known image Lanting recently made in Namibia caused people to wonder whether it was a painting or not, he recalled. He explained that it’s actually simple to make a painterly image if you can anticipate the pattern. “To me photography is about recognizing patterns, it’s subliminal,” he said.

This is evident in his Horseshoe crab image, pictured here. Lanting realized that he could apply this way of seeing to different habitats all over the world, and through this engage viewers with the content of the photographs. “If you want to get ideas of the natural world across, you better have a very graphic style that will attract a lot of eyeballs,” Lanting told the audience. (more…)

How To Impress Females (In The Bird World) from Tim Laman on Vimeo.

This multimedia piece by wildlife photojournalist Tim Laman about the highly adapted mating rituals of Birds of Paradise and Bowerbirds, both of which live in the New Guinea region, was a hit when it premiered at the recent LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph in Charlottesville, VA. Laman, who is also a field biologist, is currently nearing completion on a major, cross-platform project about Birds of Paradise. To see more of his work visit timlaman.com.