Friday, February 19, 2010

W. Eugene Smith at the New York public Library Lincoln Center

The Jazz Loft Project at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center through May 22, 2010.

Photographs by W. Euegene Smith

In the early 50's Smith moved into a loft building on sixth Avenue, which had already become a hangout for artists, writers and especially jazz musicians, who rehearsed and jammed there. Among the visitors to the loft: Thelonious Monk, Zoot Sims, Bill Evans, Steve Swallow, Robert Frank, Salvador Dali, Norman Mailer and Diane Arbus and more. he shot over 40,000 frames on 35mm and recorded thousands of hours of music and sounds between 1957 and 1965.

This book is a stunning mix of New York history, jazz and photography. Check it out, there will be more than 200 images, several hours of audio, and 16mm film footage of Smith working in the loft. It's well worth a glimpse into history.

excerpt from the book:

January 29, 1960

W. Eugene Smith sits at the fourth-floor window of his dilapidated loft at 821 Sixth Avenue, New York City, near the corner of Twenty-eighth Street, the heart of Manhattan’s wholesale flower district. He peers out at the street below, several cameras at hand loaded with different lenses and film speeds. His window faces east from the west side of Sixth Avenue. The dawn light begins to rise behind the Empire State Building and other Midtown skyscrapers looming over the modest neighborhood. Three musicians stand together on the sidewalk below talking and laughing. One holds an upright bass in its case, another has a saxophone case slung over his shoulder, and the other is smoking a cigarette. It is six o’clock in the morning; the temperature is a moderate thirty degrees. The musicians are going home after a night-long jam session. Smith snaps a few pictures.

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Monday, October 26, 2009

Congratulations to Lu Guang


Congratulations to Lu Guang for winning the coveted Grant in Humanistic Photography by the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund. He has created striking imagery over the past 5 years documenting the ecological disasters in China.

Born in 1961 in Zhejiang Province, China, Lu Guang has been enamored with photography from the moment he held the camera for the first time in 1980 when he was a factory worker in his hometown of Yongkang County. From 1993 to 1995, he studied at the Fine Arts Academy of Tsinghua University in Beijing. A freelancer since 1993, his focus has been stories on major social and environmental issues in his own country. His photographic projects include essays on gold diggers, small coal mines, the SARS epidemic, drug addiction, AIDS villages in Henan Province, the Qinghai-Tibet railway.

Lu Guang has been documenting the ecological disasters in China resulting from the rapid growth of the economy since 2005, focusing on environmental pollution and the problem of schistosomiasis (bilharzia). Over the last three decades, peoples' living standards have constantly been on the rise in the country. At the same time, industrial pollution has brought serious consequences for public health and for the environment at large.

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