My Last Day at Seventeen: Doug DuBois in The Irish Times

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Syracuse University’s own Doug DuBois received a thorough write-up in The Irish Times about his current exhibition My Last Day At Seventeen, which is on view through December 23 at the Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh, Co. Cork, Ireland.

We’re proud to say that many of the prints from this exhibition were made at Light Work/Community Darkrooms. For more information about printing with us, visit our Digital Services page.

TONY 2012: Transforming Video at the Everson Museum of Art

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Transforming Video

Anneka Herre, Carl Lee, Jennifer Hsu, Mike Celona, and Yvonne Buchanan

November 4, 2012 at 2:00pm

Free and open to the public

TONY: 2012 video artists use single-channel and immersive installations to explore issues related to the environment, culture, race and our relationship with technology. Join the Everson Museum of Art for Transforming Video, an artist screening and discussion of what inspires these artists and how they transform their ideas using the medium of video.

Presenting artists include Anneka Herre, Carl Lee, Jennifer Hsu, Mike Celona, and Yvonne Buchanan.

More info at www.everson.org

James Suits Receives SUNY Thayer Fellowship

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Light Work Employee to be Honored with Fellowship and Reception

We are proud to announce that Light Work’s own James Suits recently received the SUNY Thayer Fellowship. Suits, a Syracuse based SUNY Empire State College student studying fine art, will be honored tonight at a reception at Central Arts Gallery, where he will share the work that won him the fellowship.

Reception hosted by SUNY Empire State College.

Refreshments will be served. Please RSVP.

Date: 10/24/2012

Time: 5:30pm

Location: Central Arts Gallery, 6333 State Route 298, 3rd Floor East Syracuse , NY 13057

Cost: free

Contact Name: Michelle Moretin

Contact Phone: (315) 460-3142

Contact E-mail: Michelle.Moretin@esc.edu

Thayer Fellowship

The Thayer Fellowship was established in 1985-86 by the late Walter N. Thayer, chairman of Whitney Communications, New York City, in honor of his wife, Jeanne C. Thayer, a SUNY trustee from 1974 to 1984 and an active supporter of the arts. The Thayers wanted to assist SUNY’s most talented young artists at the most difficult period of time for a young professional, when the struggle to make a living can overwhelm even the most dedicated individual. The fellowship helps the artist take advantage of important opportunities. Nearly 100 applications for the awards are received each year. The applications are evaluated by a panel of experts in the various arts disciplines. The finalists are then interviewed in person by the panel, and their work is reviewed during performances, readings, screenings and exhibitions. At the end of this process, the jury panel determines the winner.

ASMP WNY's 2012 Photography Business Bootcamp in Syracuse

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ASMP WNY‘s 2012 Photography Business Bootcamp, a five-part series hosted by Newhouse School at Syracuse University and Light Work. Mark your calendars!

Community Darkrooms Member Spotlight: Ben Cleeton

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Community Darkrooms Member Spotlight

Ben Cleeton – Second Generation Member

Nineteen-year-old Ben Cleeton is a second generation Community Darkrooms member, student at Onondaga Community College, intern at the Syracuse Parks and Recreation Department, and a photographer with an impressive eye for detail, composition, and tonality ranges.

When Ben became interested in photography he was quickly steered to Community Darkrooms by his father, Bill Gandino, who first came through our doors in the 1980s when he was a staff photographer at Syracuse University. Gandino has work in the Light Work Permanent Collection and he taught black-and-white courses for Community Darkrooms from 1982–1990. His best-attended class was a Landscape Photography and Wine Tasting course that was supposed to be a few hours in duration but lasted much longer.

Gandino’s guidance to Community Darkrooms proved valuable for Ben – he has flourished both in the traditional black-and-white darkroom, where he enjoys printing class assignments on his favorite paper, and in the digital lab where he applies the skills he learned in the darkroom to his digital files. “I like to be able to come into Community Darkrooms and immerse myself in my work” Ben explains, “someone is always here to help me with technical questions, and it is reassuring to ask for the opinion of another member when I have aesthetic questions about my work.”

Community Darkrooms has the second round of fall workshops and classes starting next week! Take a look at www.communitydarkrooms.com and sign up for a positive do-it-yourself learning experience.

Light Work Annual 2012: Ohm Phanphiroj

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Underage #4, 2010, Ohm Phanphiroj

Ohm Phanphiroj’s recent photographic work focuses on underage prostitution in Bangkok, Southeast Asia’s “City of Angels.” His project Underage draws attention to an overlooked group in the discussion of prostitution in Thailand–local boys…Most of the boys confront the camera from the center of the frame in a stance of little-boy bravado…Some of the subjects turn away from the camera conveying a sense of introspection and sadness. No matter the pose or expression, their youthfulness is haunting.

–Jennifer Pearson Ymashiro, Director of honors and a lecturer in the Department of Art at Miami University Hamilton

Read the rest of the essay in Contact Sheet 167: The Light Work Annual 2012.

Subscribe to Contact Sheet here.

Light Work Annual 2012: Sherry Millner

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Through the simple and profound gesture of literally tearing up photos–snapshots of family vacations and daily life–Sherry Millner reveals hidden complexities of photography as, in her hands, the photographic image is cast free, no longer domesticated and fixed within a conventional habitus. Shards of images combined in a collage-like compositional matrix resonate in a different rhetorical register, pluralizing reference…Here, one absence stands for another, marked by the tear.

–Thomas Zummer, scholar, artist, and curator

Read the rest of the essay in Contact Sheet 167: The Light Work Annual 2012.

Subscribe to Contact Sheet here.

Light Work Annual 2012: Calla Thompson

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Untitled (sign 1), 2011, Calla Thompson

…Calla Thompson has achieved something quite remarkable in her Asylum series. With the seemingly simple, yet decidedly deliberate, decision of creating her photomontages within the tondo format, she has managed to conflate these two major aspects of pictorial configuration. The desire to bridge contradictions is not only apparent in Thompson’s formal choices but also in the title for her series as well as her subject matter. She wants “asylum” to be understood in its multiple and contradictory meanings, as a safe haven, refuge or sanctuary in a “Storm without end” on the one hand, and as an institution or place where one is held against one’s will on the other.

– Andrea Inselmann, curator

Read the rest of the essay in Contact Sheet 167: The Light Work Annual 2012.

Subscribe to Contact Sheet here.

Dennis Morris: Growing Up Black

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In this selection from his archive, Dennis Morris gives us a beautifully well-judged and eloquent portrait of the black diaspora, frozen at a particular moment in time. It is pregnant with anticipations of what is still to come, infused with future possibilities. We are invited to read these images backwards and forwards. Growing up black in the 1970s, they suggest, was not so much a state of being as a state of becoming.

— Stuart Hall

Growing Up Black charts not just the history of Black Britain but Britain itself. Published by our friends at Autograph ABP, the renowned photographer Dennis Morris captures intimate moments within the black community, his images recording the frequently contested history of the first generation to call themselves black.

Dennis Morris started his career as a photographer at an early age. He was 11 years old when one of his photographs was printed on the front page of the Daily Mirror. As a young boy in the church choir, he was given a camera which was to spark his lifelong passion for photography. Growing Up Black is a beautifully designed, thought provoking monograph which documents domestic life in 1960s and 70s Hackney, East London, where Morris moved with his family aged 4.

To accompany the black and white photographs and Morris’ own text are four compelling essays by key commentators on black culture – essayist and broadcaster, Professor Stuart Hall; writer and lecturer Kobena Mercer; author, broadcaster and award winning columnist, Gary Younge; and Director of Autograph ABP, Mark Sealy.

Limited to an edition of 500 with a signed silver gelatin print by Dennis Morris, Growing Up Black blurs the boundaries between social commentary and art object and reveals the foundations of Dennis Morris’ photographic journey.

Find more information about the publication here.

Light Work Annual 2012: Jen Davis

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Untitled No. 16, 2005, Jen Davis

…Davis, over and over again, suspends time, makes the presence of the camera disappear, and leaves us with her variously charged observations of one individual momentarily alone with herself in the world. The mundane is here raised to the level of various small dramas. We are reminded in looking at these pictures of how the physical presence of this one woman looking intently at herself mirrors the ways in which so many women look at themselves and see not the photoshopped representations of commercial culture, but something more dimensional, complex, and far more engaging.

– Dawoud Bey, artist and writer

Read the rest of the essay in Contact Sheet 167: The Light Work Annual 2012.

Subscribe to Contact Sheet here.

Light Work Annual 2012: Dana Popa

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The pictures have few clues, just shadows and light, and the unsettling quality of the color in the images. In the peeling concrete walls and the shabby materials, in the absence of anything that seems to belong to anyone, there is the silence of space that hides what happens there. The facts are not exactly hidden from us, but it is hard to look at them all the time or even very often, particularly the statistics.

– Wendy Watriss, curator, writer, photographer, author, and co-founder and artistic director of FotoFest International

Read the rest of the essay in Contact Sheet 167: The Light Work Annual 2012.

Subscribe to Contact Sheet here.

Light Work Annual 2012: Cui Fei

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Tracing the Origin VIII, 2010, Cui Fei

Much like breath itself, Cui Fei’s work rises and falls between two and three dimensions. Large wall-hung paper works recall ancient scrolls. Other work is sculptural in itself or its presentation–sheets of paper laid over low platforms or cascading down steps or written directly on the floor. Photographic processes let some projects flatten the image while others billow with shape and shadow.

– Nancy Keefe Rhodes

Read the rest of the essay in Contact Sheet 167: The Light Work Annual 2012.

Subscribe to Contact Sheet here.