We’re getting ready to reveal some amazing new offerings here at Light Work! Today we wanted to give you a sneak peek of our new website and tell you a little about the new things we’ll be rolling out in late November, including:

• A whole new website, better looking and better functioning.

• A totally redesigned blog with all new features and giveaways.

• Several exciting new subscription options.

• Many new can’t-do-without-them prints and books in our store to launch the 2011 Subscription Program.

We’ll be telling you more soon!

Former Light Work Artist-in-Residence Demetrius Oliver watched yesterday as his piece Jupiter was installed on a 25-by-75-foot billboard on the High Line at West 18th Street. The following image gives some sense of the scale of the piece as well as the material it was printed on. Click the images to enlarge them.

On watching the piece go up Oliver commented, “It was strange watching them [the installers] working with the vinyl. With prints, we are taught to have a certain amount preciousness. They were literally walking onto top of it, but it’s okay because the vinyl is a very durable surface.”

Artist Blanche Bruce and several local student music groups will add a musical component to the work when they perform John Coltrane’s Jupiter September 11, 18, 21, and October 2, 2010. Oliver’s installation will remain on view until October 6.

Click here for more information about Jupiter and events surrounding its installation.

Light Work will host an exhibition of Oliver’s work in January 2011.

Our current Artist-in-Residence, Keliy Anderson-Staley, will be at Light Work through the end of August. She is actively seeking subjects in the area to pose for her ongoing series of tintype portraits. Click here for more info on Anderson-Staley’s work and details on how to contact her for a tintype sitting in Syracuse.

Anderson-Staley arrived with her husband, writer Matt Williams, to help her move and organize the van full of supplies and chemistry necessary for her work. Williams sent us the following email about Anderson-Staley’s project, and his words provide an intimate view on the continuing project:

“. . . I’ve watched Keliy photograph for many years, but watching her in action at Light Work, I was really struck by just how performative her process is. So much of the meaning of her tintype project is contained in the shoot itself: Preparing the sitter, posing the image, bringing the model into the darkroom to see his or her face appear as a positive on the tin. She is a chemist, a magician, a traveling salesman, and I can almost imagine her at home in the nineteenth century, seeking out new subjects to experience the wonder of her strange technology. Invariably her models talk about the magic of the process, the strangeness of their own appearance, the uncanny historicity of their own face. They see themselves as ghosts, as their own great-grandparents, as a double from the pages of a history book. I sometimes even think that Keliy wants to show them who they really are, and wants to liberate their image from the routine visual experience they have of themselves.

Portrait photographers often talk about finding the image that best represents a person, or about capturing the “essence” of an individual, but this is a myth. The human face changes too quickly, is too infinitely expressive to be reduced to one static image. In one portrait shoot, Keliy might capture vastly different expressions or moods. Although she tells her models not to smile, a smile may creep in nonetheless, or a cloud of emotion appears across the brow—these emotions reveal a living face pulled out of time, a moment (10 seconds, 30 seconds) retained forever in the liquid of the chemistry.

She is a teacher when she works, but a collector, too, and one who will never be content with the size of her collection. The human face is an inexhaustible subject. When I see Keliy’s portraits hung side by side, I search for patterns: variety, similarity, difference, echoes of features, unexpected resemblances. Each face, with its intense gaze, seems to belong to a person looking at a mirror. The model is actually looking into Keliy’s lens, and really, she and we are the ones doing the looking. No two faces are ever the same, a fact we know about ourselves but that the project makes so tangibly clear. I’m amazed sometimes by how little people can resemble themselves in a photo, and how little two photos of the same person can resemble each other.

As this tintype portrait project enters its fifth year, and the number of people Keliy has photographed climbs into the hundreds, I have heard her ask herself why she it still doing it; why isn’t it finished? The answer in part, I think, is that a project like this could never be complete. The more I look at the faces the more I feel compelled to keep looking, and I sense a similar drive keeps Keliy photographing. A collection of human faces, if it is to avoid sampling based on categories and types, has to include every face. But I think it is also because Keliy finds faces more beautiful than anything, and her quest is to capture that beauty, to keep finding it in new individuals.” —Matt Williams

Image: Erica, 8 x 10 tintype, made in Syracuse during Light Work residency, 2010

This weekend’s New York Times Magazine features an image by April 2010 Light Work Artist-in-Residence Brian Ulrich. Rolling Acres Mall, 2008, accompanies Roger Lowenstein’s article “Paralyzed by Debt” about the phenomenon of deleveraging. If you can’t wait until Sunday, the piece is already available online here.

At left is Rolling Acres Mall, 2010, which is a photograph of an architect’s drawing of the same location before it was built.

New York-based artist Patterson has been working on his artist book, Redheaded Peckerwood, for the last two months at Light Work, starting in May when he was an artist-in-residence. Redheaded Peckerwood is based on the true crime story of 19-year-old Charles Starkweather and 14-year-old Caril Ann Fugate, who murdered ten people, including Fugate’s family, during a week-long killing spree across the state of Nebraska in 1958. The series was made during several road trips following the path of Starkweather and Fugate, from their hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska to the point of their capture in Douglas, Wyoming. The resulting images include significant places and things from their story. The project is part road trip, part time machine, and mostly a testament to the thin line between fame and infamy, truth and representation.

It’s been fun and exciting for us to watch as Patterson has utilized almost every aspect of our facility to make this book come together. After perfecting the images in our digital lab and finalizing the layout in InDesign, Patterson used one of the 4880s in our public access digital lab to print the entire guts of the book. (For the paper geeks out there, the book is printed on Moab Legion Paper, Lasal Photo Matte 235. After talking to Patterson about the project, Moab generously donated enough paper for him to print an edition of 10 of the books.)

Watch here as our 4880 produces one sheet of the 144 pages in the book, which features 64 images. It took about 15 hours to print each book.

Throughout the project, Patterson has been working with Jared Landberg, a local book binder and photographer with considerable book binding skills. Together they have hand folded, sewn, and trimmed the book.

Watch here as Landberg sews one of the copies of Redheaded Peckerwood.

Yesterday, Patterson screen-printed the cover of the book with John Wischmann, another local artist. The book cover features an image, in negative, of Starkweather and Fugate on a gray book cloth, which references the photographic negative.

Redheaded Peckerwood also contains facsimiles of artifacts from the case, including a map, a poem, a list of dirty jokes, and a confession letter, all of which Patterson has painstakingly re-created down to the aged look of the paper, where appropriate. To make the facsimile of the confession letter for example, Patterson hand-traced each letter using a photograph of the original document and a light table.

The first few books will be “cased-in” this weekend. We’re hoping that Patterson will bring us a finished book on Monday! There is some time pressure to finish at least a few of the books soon, as Redheaded Peckerwood will be exhibited during this year’s Recontres d’Arles in France.

Andy Adams over at Flak Photo always has high quality features on the site, along with the daily gem that you get in the form of the Today’s Flak Photo. I especially enjoy the Review Santa Fe 2010 feature, going on through July 9, because I had the pleasure of meeting most of the featured artists at the event at the beginning of June. It’s great to see these 25 artists, including former Light Work  Artist-in-Residence Chad States, get this kind of exposure!

All the artists are worth a click, but make especially sure to click through to Amber Shields’s website and take an in-depth look at her Visions of Johanne series, a touching and poignant commentary on aging in America.

—Mary Goodwin

Image: Amber Shields, Hallway, 2009