Amit Gupta speaking about his blog.

The Apple Store in Soho featured the seventh NYC Photobloggers event yesterday night at 7:30pm. Great discussions were held about the art of photoblogging. Lots of the jb family have presented there before such as Jen Bekman, Eliot Shepard, Jake Dobkin, Joe Holmes, Youngna Park, Laura Holder, David Gallagher, Jesse Chan-Norris (our tech guru!). Last night’s line up includes Jay Parkinson of darkshapesprowl.com, Kevin Walsh of Forgotten NY, Kara Canal & Amit Gupta of Photojojo, Ed Leveckis of leckis.net, Matt Weber of Urban Photos, and Justin Ouellette of chromogenic.net. The event was hosted by Jake Dobkin and sponsored by Gothamist and NYC Photobloggers.

The Morning News recently interviewed Peter Haakon Thompson, who was in the
Best Midwestern group show at jen bekman in the summer of 2004.

The interview is about Peter’s (so far) eight-year process of self-examination; he’s been recording his “private relationship to places that are essentially public.” He uses the tangible nature of his surroundings to evoke that which is intangible: emptiness, invisibility, aloneness. Along with his interview, the Morning News also created a new gallery with 20 of Peter’s works called Essentially Public, which can be seen here.

Peter’s also involved in two non-photographic undertakings; “the A Project, which is an effort to create solidarity among artists in their neighborhoods through the use of window signs with a large red ‘A,’ and Art Shanty Projects, a public art community/gallery existing for five weeks on frozen Medicine Lake in suburban Minneapolis that is based on the tradition of ice fishing and ice fishing houses.”

Here is a great opportunity to check out some work by jen bekman artist Dana Miller! Dana will be participating in open studio hours on Saturday, May 6th and Sunday, May 7th where the public can come in and see her photographs in person. Here are the important details:

Dana Miller’s Open Studio Weekend
195 Chrystie Street (between Stanton + Rivington)

Studio 601

The hours you can visit are: May 6th, 3-9pm and May 7th, 1-6pm. (That’s today and tomorrow!)
Stop by and say hi!

For all of you out there who couldn’t make it last Sunday to the Jen@Joe reception, check out some pictures we put up on Flickr. (Thanks to Antony Van Couvering for playing photographer!)

Hello everyone! This is just a reminder to keep Sunday, April 30th from 2-4 pm free so you can join us for our Jen@Joe reception. Join fellow friends of jen bekman and Joe, The Art of Coffee for socializing and refreshments at the Joe location on 13th between University Place and Fifth Avenue.

Hope to see you there!

How exciting! Page 14 of the April 26, 2006 edition of the New York Sun featured photos of the SVA Mentors dinner. And who is right smack in the middle? Ms. Bekman herself! The dinner which was held af the The Modern (the restaurant in MoMA) was hosted by Stephen Frailey, the SVA Photography Dept. Chair AND a Hey, Hot Shot! panelist.

Nicholas Fevelo Lobster Liberation

As mentioned a few weeks back, Jen has been acting as a mentor for the SVA Mentors program in its photography department. We posted some work by Jen’s mentee Nicholas Fevelo, BUT I failed to tell you more about the program and where you can see the work in person!

Taken from the SVA Mentors site:

SVA established the Mentors program in 1992 to introduce new talent to the New York City arts community. Stephen Frailey, chair of the BFA Photography Department and curator of the exhibition, says, “Students at SVA learn from professionals on a daily basis, but Mentors goes even further. This is a unique opportunity to take their work to a new level and reach a new audience. In a sense, students know the city is watching, and it shows.”

The Mentors show, including Nick’s work, will be on view at the SVA Gallery (located at 601 West 26 Street, 15th floor) until April 29th. For more information check out the SVA Mentors site.

Photography from Tema Stauffer

jen bekman artists Ben Donaldson and Tema Stauffer are included in the April edition of Group Show! Group Show is a monthly online gallery featuring the work of 24 emerging and established photographers.

Also included in the April Group Show is Casey Kelbaugh. Kelbaugh is a photographer known for founding a great project for the arts/photography community called Slideluck Potshow.

For those unfamiliar with the event, Slideluck Potshow is a slideshow and a potluck to which members of NYC’s arts, photography, and media communities bring food, drink and slides. The evening begins with a couple hours of dining on the home-cooked delights of participants, while drinking and mingling. Following the potluck everyone gathers to watch the slideshow of participants work. The location changes with every event and the next is yet to be determined. Each event has a particular theme and submissions follow a deadline so if you are interested make sure you check the Slideluck Potshow website as more details become available.

Some good news. . . . Blueeyes Magazine, the online documentary photography magazine devoted to publishing new long-term project work, recently relaunched after a year absence.

Issue number 11 is now available via the Blueeyes website, and features work by Toshiki Senoue and Allison V. Smith

Blueeyes was created in 2003, by a group of friends from the Missouri School of Journalism in response to declining editorial space for documentary images. They write on the stie “Blueeyes is a movement against negative trends in photojournalism that have limited the freedom, self-expression, and evolution of documentary photography as a young medium of mass communication. The magazine strives to publish longer, more personal, and more intricate bodies of work, in direct contrast to the traditional models of the newspaper photo story or the over-simplified, stereotypical coverage of broadcast journalism outlets. While many publications, both in print and online, are happy to regurgitate the same pictures from the same photographers ad nauseam, we are trying to champion unpublished and unheralded work from mainly younger photographers. All of this is in a simple effort to understand our selves and our world more clearly.”

Bruce Grant, Fearful Symmetry # 2

Well-known photographer and critic Bruce Grant, who received an honorable mention for the Winter ‘06 Edition of Hey, Hot Shot! at jen bekman, will lead an open Postive Focus critique at Safe-T-Gallery at 111 Front St. in DUMBO, Brooklyn on April 11th at 7 pm.

Positive Focus was founded to provide a Brooklyn community of emerging photo-artists with a supportive environment for artistic development, youth education and community outreach services. So if you are not already a member, this is a great opportunity to check it out (i.e. bring work and they might critique it if there is time).

Here is a little clip of what nyc.photobloggers.org contributor, Tim O’Connor had to say about Grant’s work:

Bruce Grant’s pictures have an unforced grace that comes very close to feeling casual. You suspect they might be fun to take. His subjects – mostly ordinary objects and patterns encountered on long walks through his native Philadelphia – are familiar to any American urban dweller. But you have not seen doors and air conditioners, signs and telephone poles, walls and chainlink fences like these before.

If you’re interested in seeing more of Bruce Grant’s work, check out his fotolog and Flickr pages. You can also find the complete post about this event on nyc.photobloggers.org here.

Nicholas Fevelo Lobster Liberation

A very nice young man came into the gallery on Friday. His name is Nicholas Fevelo and he also happens to be an aspiring photographer AND Jen’s Mentee for the SVA Mentoring program. We had the chance to look at his senior thesis projects entitled Lobster Liberation and Gifts: Responses to Found Flowers.

Nick, who hails from Staten Island, based his photography around the idea of gift giving. I really wish you could have seen the movie he put together documenting his attempt to give away flowers (yes, that’s right, free flowers) to people on the street. It’s amazing how genuinely surprised New Yorkers can be to random acts of kindness.

Nick writes in his statement: “in a tradition of art as a gift, this work employs flowers, seeds and lobsters to question the motivations behind the nature of gift giving. The photographs document interventions while blending photography, sculpture and performance calling attention to photography’s relationship to the former two.”

We asked Nick to send us some images so that readers of the jen bekman blog could see all his hard work. Lobster Liberation is a photographic narrative which Nick describes as “a reminder that freedom comes in many capacities. “ In Liberation he plays “fate changer” and pokes fun at conceptual art practice by “returning two lobsters to the sea by moonlight.”

 

For those of you who are heading south some time soon, jen bekman artist Holly Lynton is participating in a group show at Rocket-Projects in Miami called THE SOCIAL BODY, opening this Saturday April 8th.

Here is the description:
“This exhibition explores the common disparity between the classical
and conceptual uses for the body and its actual use in everyday life.
The body has typically been isolated and idealized through art,
whether to provide a model for representational scale and beauty, or
to show how the body belongs to the person, as do all of the
significations attached to it. Useful as both of these approaches may
be, they also push us away from any comprehension of how the body
exists as a means of social expression. In most cases, we cannot help
but contribute to the context of social expression which the body
controls. From an early age, we are made superconscious of the type of
body that we have, how we perceive its merits and its shortcomings,
and how others perceive them as well. The disparity between one manner
of perception and the latter fills in many of the gaps of early
socialization. Bodies have a language all of their own, which may be a
product of ethnic or sexual identity, a response to the population in
which we move, and to a sense of our innate self-worth.”

Sounds like an interesting show! Holly’s work at jen bekman has included many self portraits shot at very close range and explore events in her day to day life. For images of Holly’s work check here.

This is not a perfect representation of the logo since it’s a screengrab from a .pdf. (The posting of which is surely going to make its designer Frank Mikus a little crazy.) I think the new logo for jen@joe is so delicious, I couldn’t wait to get the proper file from him.

I’m super excited about the whole project overall – more wall space to hang gorgeous photos is always something I’m happy about, but also: I adore Joe, its friendly staff and its fabulous owner, Jonathan Rubinstein, who impresses me with his entrepreneurialism, his enthusiasm and his curiosity. I’m loving the jen@joe opportunity for a million reasons!

Intern Christine is loving it too, as she posted about over the weekend. Read her blogging debut Improving the Mood of NYC (One Cup O’ Joe at a Time).