Last weekend, Light Work had the pleasure of hosting the MARK10 closing event for the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA). The three-day event brought together over one hundred artists, curators and arts administrators for coaching in professional practices, lectures, panel discussions and networking opportunities.

The NYFA group of artists, coaches, and presenters included a number of familiar faces, such as Ellen M. Blalock (AIR 2002), Lida Suchy (AIR 1994, LW Grant 2010), and Willson Cummer. But there were also a few surprises that reached further back into Light Work/Community Darkrooms history. Tatana Kellner was published in Light Work’s publications in the seventies, long before she participated in our residency program in 1992. Sylvia de Swaan completed residencies, received the LW Grant multiple times, and has served on our board. Carla Shapiro and Carlos Loret de Mola both were thrilled and surprised to see our state-of-the-art facility, that looked completely different from the modest darkrooms they worked in during their college years at Syracuse University many years ago. This made for a celebrated homecoming that was sweetened as they shared how formative their experience at Community Darkrooms was.

The MARK10 event was a sounding success and a pleasure to host due to the relentless efforts of NYFA MARK10 organizer and instructor Amber Hawk Swanson, and on a local side, the MARK10 liaison and CRC communication specialist Courtney Rile.

The MARK program is now in its third year and provides New York artists from all different disciplines with training in professional practices. It is a unique training and networking opportunity. The six-month program for 2010 was organized through partner organizations in five regions in New York State: Cultural Resources Council, Syracuse (Central New York), East End Arts Council, Riverhead (Long Island), Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo (Western New York), The Arts Center of the Capital Region, Troy (Capital Region), and Women’s Studio Workshop, Rosendale (Hudson Valley).

Image: Ellen Blalock, MARK10 participant, Skylar, 2002, from the series The Father Project

We’re coming up on the end of our 37th year supporting emerging and under-recognized artists at Light Work. The Light Work Annual Fund is a great way to help us in our mission, which over the years has made these other numbers possible:

25,000 artists, students, and patrons have made work at our state-of-the art imaging facility.

350 artists from all over the world have been hosted in our renowned Artist-in-Residence program.

400 exhibitions have been featured in our galleries.

3,500 pieces currently comprise The Light Work Collection, almost all donated by former Artists-in-Residence.

155 issues of Contact Sheet published, plus 50 exhibition catalogues for the Robert B. Menschel Photography Gallery.

110 artists have received the Light Work Grants in Photography.

You can make a donation to The Light Work Annual Fund online any time day or night by clicking here. Please note that Light Work’s fiscal year runs from July 1 to June 30. To maximize the impact of your support, please make your donation before June 30, 2010.

Thank you for your support, which will help us to continue our good work into the new year and beyond.

Image: Lenard Smith (May 2010 Artist-in-Residence), AIR, 2010.

Light Work will be at NEXT at the Merchandise Mart in Chicago from April 30 to May 3. Along with a great list of exhibitors, NEXT is presenting a fantastic slate of programming to sweeten the experience.

Many of our former Artists-in-Residence will have work represented at NEXT. For example, we’re looking forward to seeing the Barry Anderson (Light Work AIR 2006) installation at the Cara and Cabezas Contemporary booth. In a brief interview with Anderson this morning, the artist talked about the installation, which will be a new piece called Starchild. The two-channel video is shown on two separate screens with special frames around them, so the work offers a sculptural element not seen in previous installations by the artist. The imagery, Anderson explained, hints at religion and magic and references one of his influences, the experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger. Above, a still from Starchild.

2008 Light Work AIR Deana Lawson will be represented in the exhibition Partisan, which will be in Booth 12-561/563 of Art Chicago. Her image Family Portrait, a print of which is in the Light Work Collection, will be featured prominently in the exhibition, which focuses on politically-motivated art.

Please stop by Booth 7-8034 and check out the latest prints from our Fine Print Program, which includes work by Elijah Gowin, Suzanne Opton, Doug Dubois, and Stanley Greenberg. We’ll also have several of our signed books available in the booth.

We received this wonderful email from Jon Reis this week about lessons learned from Garry Winogrand:

“I had an occasion to visit Rockport, Massachusetts, recently with my wife, Dede Hatch, who was delivering some artwork to a local gallery. I remembered that in 1976 when I was 27 years old I was in the same seaside town where I did an intensive week-long Garry Winogrand workshop. Then, the ten or twelve students all had their Leica’s in their hands and everyone wanted to watch him work the peak summer tourist onslaught. How DID he make such consistently interesting photos? . . . What was the secret to his vision?

One of the many truisms he spoke was to ‘shoot pictures that had not been made before.’ Garry used to say ‘If you seen a photo before, don’t take it again.’ Like the other students I snapped a few of Garry himself at rest not far from Rockport Motif #1. (Now that he is gone I wish I had shot more.)

At night during the photo critique of the day’s take one student asked ‘What made Atget such a great photographer?’ The wise-cracking Winogrand shot back, ‘Why, it is where he stood!’

Being in Rockport again 34 years later, I had fun recreating the pose with the help of Dede. Tree is doing well!”

Jon’s exhibition, By the Way: Two Decades of America Observed 1973-1993, is on view at the Robert B. Menschel Photography Gallery at Syracuse University until December 2010. His generous gifts to the Light Work Collection include over 100 pieces.

Light Work is pleased to announce the results of the Light Work Annual Student Invitational, featuring photography students at Syracuse University. Jason Houston from Orion Magazine served as our juror to select a Best of Show winner: Varvara Mikushkina, a junior in SU’s Transmedia Program.  Houston also selected four Honorable Mentions: Elif Yoney (first year graduate student), Erin Geideman (freshman), Hannah Nast (freshman), and Rose Cromwell (freshman). Over thirty students from the College of Visual and Performing Arts and the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication submitted excellent work to the invitational. The exhibition will be presented on Light Work’s flat panel screen from April 1 through May 29, 2010. Congratulations to the winners, and our thanks to all participants and our juror.

Juror’s statement by Jason Houston:

It is difficult to select ‘the best’ from such a diverse series of images. There are sports images that captured the peak of action, emotional and intimate documentary portraits, creative fictional scenarios, poetic landscapes, and thought provoking fine art images. Photographs are made for so many different reasons and in so many different contexts. Still, a good photograph will always be a good photograph.

The images I chose as Best of Show and for Honorable Mention transcend their genre and hold up without context. They show technical skill and creative vision, but also, and more importantly, go beyond the literal retelling of what is happening around us. They interpret. They help us see and they show us something new about the world.

For Best of Show I selected the portrait of the man drinking from a tea cup made by Varvara Mikushkina. It has the wonderful feeling of being both deliberate and natural. The fundamentals such as great color, composition, and lighting are balanced by the spontaneous moment captured by Varvara’s camera—a moment that engages us, yet promises only to introduce us to the subject’s character. The intimacy makes it feel familiar, but we are kept ever so slightly off balance by the opposing tilts of the head and the cup, and by his partly covered expression. We are left to wonder about his mood and seek the source of his gaze. We explore the image for clues, drawn in to where we notice details such as the tentatively balanced spoon on his thumb or the slightly skewed art on the wall above his head. It is an image you want to look at.

Image: Varvara Mikushkina, Deda and Tea, 2009, pigmented inkjet print, 16 x 20″