MOCA Art Party-Tucson-12/19/14-6-9 PM

Brink Creative Digital is sponsoring an ART PARTY to benefit the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Tucson, Arizona.  The party is at Brink's fabulous offices (1100 S. 6th Ave, Tucson) and features a curated group of artists who are selling their work, with 50% of every piece sold going to MOCA.  In addition to myself, artists include: Henny Garfunkel, Isaiah Toothtaker, Pat Foley, Jeff Smith, Ojal Streeling, Clif Taylor, Jeffrey Jonczyk, Michael Berman, AKERS GNP, Albert Chamillard and George Strasburger.

Klaus Nomi performing at Hurrah's, NYC, 1980 by Harvey Wang

To The Printer!

From Darkroom to Daylight was sent to the printer in China this week.  It will be published by Daylight Books in Spring 2015.  The book is a beautiful and important document of what has happened in photography over the past few years told in eloquent stories and images.

Alan Trachtenberg, author of Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans and other writings, and professor of English and American Studies, Yale University contributed this quote for the back cover:

 “What all photographs have in common is the essential role of light and light-sensitive materials in the production of an image, but there are many routes toward that end. This collection of interviews and personal narratives, accompanied by Harvey Wang’s splendid portraits, offers a revelation and hence an invaluable record of key issues in how and why photographers today choose to go one way or the other, toward film or digital methods, toward darkroom or daylight.”

Adam Purple book at Phoenix Art Museum

The Garden of Eden, 1979 by Harvey Wang

Adam Purple  and The Garden of Eden, 1982 by Harvey Wang

Adam Purple & The Garden of Eden by Amy Brost with photographs by Harvey Wang is included in an exhibition of self-published photobooks in the Doris and John Norton Gallery for the Center for Creative Photography at the Phoenix Art Museum in Arizona.  INFOCUS, the Photography Support Organization of Phoenix Art Museum, invited photographers to send examples of their self-published photo books. The exhibition explores the range of ways artists are using newly available commercial technologies in order to make books. The jury chose 151 books from 15 countries in the Americas, Europe, Asia and Australia to be displayed. See more about the exhibition at www.infocus-phxart.org/photobooks

The book is about Adam Purple, who in 1975 set out to plant a garden behind his tenement building at 184 Forsyth Street, at a time when the Lower East Side was a crime-ridden wasteland. It was a massive undertaking. While clearing nearly 5,000 cubic feet of debris using only simple tools and raw muscle power, Adam began to create his own topsoil from materials he found at the site and around the city. By 1986, his world famous eARThWORK had grown to 15,000 square feet. Adam 'zenvisioned' the Garden expanding until it replaced the skyscrapers of New York. For Adam Purple--social activist, philosopher, and urban

gardener/ revolutionary—the Garden was the medium of his political and artistic expression. When the Garden was slated for demolition to make way for a housing project, many prominent New Yorkers wrote letters and made statements of support for Adam and the Garden. Nevertheless, The Garden of Eden was razed on January 8, 1986, and the new housing project did not include an apartment for Adam or space for a new garden. In terms of his revolutionary ideas about sustainability and living as humble members of the natural world, Adam was ahead of his time. He has not yet been properly recognized as an important environmental artist.

A Painter and His Poets: The Art of George Schneeman

My 1978 photograph of George Schneeman painting Allen Ginsberg is featured at this exhibition at Poet's House (April 22-Sept 20, 2014) which is the first major retrospective of George Schneeman's collaborative works with prominent poets of the second-generation New York School, among them Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman, Larry Fagin, Maureen Owen, and Michael Brownstein.

Allen Ginsberg sitting for George Schneeman in 1978.  Photograph by Harvey Wang

VISIONS OF MARY FRANK at Film Forum

VISIONS OF MARY FRANK, a film by John Cohen premiered at New York's Film Forum on April 16.  It runs until April 22.  The film was shot by John and myself, and edited by Edmund Carson.  In the film, John Cohen – filmmaker, photographer, musician, ethnographer – visits with his friend Mary Frank in her Chelsea studio and at her Woodstock home, talking about her life and art. Married young (originally to Robert Frank and, since 1997, to musicologist Leo Treitler), and pregnant at 17, she’s brutally honest about often having put her art before all else, about the early influence of dance upon her brushstrokes, and about being (in Cohen’s words) “hot in a cool world.” Her paintings, her political activism, and her past (the film includes wonderful footage of her with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac) tell the story of a deeply-felt, well-lived life.

John Cohen by Harvey Wang

Mary Frank by Harvey Wang

John Cohen shooting Mary Frank in her studio by Harvey Wang

John Cyr's Developer Trays

John Cyr's terrific book "Developer Trays" was recently published by Powerhouse Books.  I am pleased that John included my very unique "canoe" tray in his book. 

From the publisher:

Developer Trays is master photography printer John Cyr’s tribute to the craft and art he has spent his career perfecting. As sure as the age of silver has come to an end, there remain few but extraordinary and dedicated darkroom practitioners such as Cyr who continue to work with chemistry and processes more or less unchanged since the early days of the medium.

With an unrivaled passion for the darkroom and all its accouterments Cyr set out to document the actual developer trays of many of the world’s most renowned photographers. Cyr celebrates in stunning large-format color photographs the intimate materiality of the developer tray itself and the ephemeral presence of the artist within it. This revelatory work showcases the ubiquitous developer tray as an essential vehicle of analog photography that defies modern digital photographic advances: its material nature and functionality will not become obsolete.

Trays from many of the giants of photography, including: Ansel Adams, Eddie Adams, Wynn Bullock, Bill Burke, Bruce Davidson, Elliott Erwitt, Emmet Gowin, David Graham, Sid Kaplan, O. Winston Link, Sally Mann, Eugene Richards, Stuart Rome, Mark Seliger, Neil Selkirk, Aaron Siskind, Jerry Uelsmann, Minor White, and Joel-Peter Witkin.

John Cyr "Harvey Wang's Developer Tray"

Sunset Park Chinatown

Photographs from a recent City Journal assignment about the burgeoning Chinatown in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

FROM DARKROOM TO DAYLIGHT at The Center for Creative Photography

I screened an unfinished version of my feature "From Darkroom to Daylight" at The Center for Creative Photograph in Tuscon at their special "Next Conversation" event for an audience of photographers, museum curators, artists, publishers, collectors and gallery owners.  The reaction was wonderful, and a lively hour-long Q&A followed the screening.

Adam Bartos by Harvey Wang

David Goldblatt by Harvey Wang

Howard Hopwood, Ilford by Harvey Wang