Willie Williams Remembers Unsung Heroes

On February 19, William Earle Williams celebrated the opening of his exhibition Unsung Heroes: African American Soldiers in the Civil War at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in Durham, NC. We are celebrating as well. This is an exhibition Light Work curated two years ago. Laura Guth, who curated the exhibition for us, describes in her essay that “there is a notable absence of a comprehensive record to commemorate and honor the contribution of the more than 180,000 African American soldiers who […] ultimately shaped the outcome of a Union victory in the American Civil War. This […] is the driving force for Williams’s work. […] Just as monuments symbolize an imperative to remember, Williams’s photographs serve to restore forgotten or unmaintained sites to our national memory.”

Since the initial exhibition at Light Work, the exhibition has traveled to many venues, including the Emily Davis Gallery at the University of Akron in Akron, OH; the Cantor-Fitzgerald Gallery at Haverford College in Haverford, PA; the Emerson Gallery at Hamilton College in Clinton, NY; and the Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center in Auburn, NY. The exhibition will remain on view at the Center for Documentary Studies through April 19. After this it will travel to the Art Gallery at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey in Pomona, NJ.

While the exhibition catalogue, Contact Sheet 140, is available through the Light Work store, the artist also has produced two special limited editions of the catalogue. The Special Bound Edition is set in a black metal spiral bound that allows publication to open flat unlike the soft-cover, perfect-bound edition. It is protected with clear acetate dust wrappers. This edition is limited to 50 signed copies and costs $25. The Limited Print Edition includes a signed silver gelatin print and comes in a brown cloth slipcase with 22-karat gold leaf title embossed in brown leather on spine. The print edition is limited to 30 signed copies and costs $450. Both items are available directly from the artist. Special Edition Details

Unsung Heroes: African American Soldiers in the Civil War
February 19 – April 19, 2009

The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University
1317 W. Pettigrew Street
Durham, NC 27705
(919) 660-3663

CNY Pride Family exhibition looking for venues

Three years ago Light Work collaborated with the Syracuse University LGBT Resource Center and local artist Ellen M. Blalock to create portraits of twenty LGBT families in the Central New York area. The project culminated in CNY Pride Family, an exhibition that challenges damaging myths and stereotypes about LGBT people and their families through first person accounts and positive images. After being on view at Syracuse University and most recently at Colgate University, it is now available as a traveling exhibition to community centers, libraries, colleges, and universities.

The exhibition including the portraits may be viewed online. For information about how to rent the exhibition, please contact Amit at the LGBT Resource Center at (315) 443-3983.

Priya Kambli, 2009 AIR, Wins Critical Mass Book Award

Priya Kambli will be visiting Syracuse as a Light Work Artist-in-Residence in December 2009. In the meantime, Priya will be hard at work on the monograph she is producing in conjunction with Photolucida as a 2008 Critical Mass Book Award Winner.

The monograph will feature work from her series Migration, a multi-year, multi-cultural, multi-generational series about a family who has strong roots both in India and America. In the series, Priya uses photography to ease the sense of disconnection that sometimes results from moving from one culture into another.

Congratulations on your win, Priya!

Light Work in premiere issue of Color Magazine

B&W Magazine has just premiered a sister publication, Color. Editor John Lavine describes color photography as “a vibrant and dynamic field, with content and concerns obviously related to but also different than that of black and white photography.” The emergence of a new publication dedicated to art photography is always exciting. We look forward to what is to come. As you are checking out the new publication, take a peek at the inside back cover, where our ad showcases the 2009 Light Work Fine Print Program with prints by Arno Minkkinen (platinum print), Marla Sweeney and Krista Steinke (pigmented inkjet prints), and Garie Waltzer (piezography print). And of course do not ignore the magazine’s content, especially Carol McCusker’s account of the history of color photography (part one of two). Carol wrote an essay on Lisa M. Robinson for The  Light Work Annual in 2007. You can view Lisa’s images and read Carol’s essay at our online collection.