PDN - August 2011

PDNEWS

Online News Digest

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authorities ordered removal of images by an Israeli photographer, Amit Sha’al. http://bit.ly/k3E Yh4

From Kratsman’s series “Targeted Killing.”

Israeli Photographer Wins
$50k Robert Gardner
Fellowship
Harvard University’s Peabody
Museum of Archaeology and
Ethnology has awarded the
2011 Robert Gardner Fellowship
in Photography to Miki
Kratsman, an Argentinean-born
photographer who has lived
in Israel since 1971. During his
fellowship, Kratsman will create
a body of work that considers
how Palestinians appear to
outsiders. http://bit.ly/iLzOtH

South African Photographer Presumed Dead in Libya

Anton Hammerl was shot by Qaddafi’s forces in an extremely remote location in the Libyan desert on April 5 and could not have survived without medical attention, according to other journalists who were with him when he was shot. They reported the shooting to Hammerl’s family after Libyan authorities released them on May 18, after detaining them for six weeks. http://bit.ly/kiGdkD

Hetherington, Hondros Loved Ones Choose Memorial Charities The families and friends of photographers Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros, who were killed in Libya on April 20, have designated charities to which donations could be made in their memories. Hetherington’s parents selected three non-profit organizations, all of which Hetherington supported in his work. The fiancee of Hondros has established a fund in his memory to support aspiring photojournalists. http://pdnpulse.com/2011/05/2241.html

MoMA Photo Director Peter Galassi
Retires After 30 Years

Galassi, who retired in July, organized or co-organized more than 40 exhibitions during his career, highlighting the work of Andreas Gursky, Jeff Wall, Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander and Henri Cartier-Bresson among many other photographers. http://bit.ly/lNKds5

MoMA’s longtime
photo curator
Peter Galassi.

ESPN, W, N Y Times Magazine Win National Magazine Awards for Photography W won the award for general excellence in magazine photography. ESPN The Magazine won the Feature Photography award for “Bodies We Want,” a portfolio of nude photos of athletes, and the prize for News and Documentary Photography went to The New York Times Magazine for “The Shrine Down the Hall,” a photo essay by Ashley Gilbertson. http://bit.ly/mMNYLJ

Rihanna’s Lawyers Give David LaChapelle a Spanking Attorneys for singer Rihanna have asked a federal court in New York to throw out David LaChapelle’s $1 million copyright infringement claim against the pop singer, on the grounds that LaChapelle is “trying to monopolize a whole genre” of images–namely pictures of sadomasochistic scenes. http://bit.ly/mQzzVr

PDN: What do the organization’s donors value? How do you keep them
involved?

BOOT: Many of our patrons are themselves collectors, successful people in their own right who are inspired by great photography, interested in connecting with photographers and ready to contribute to work they believe in. Some have a civic interest in supporting the work of the organization as a whole, while others have interests in particular photographers or projects. I think it’s important for us to develop relationships with patrons where we present them opportunities for involvement that are rewarding to them, and often that’s a case of marrying the right patron to the right photographer.

We just got a major National Endowment for the Arts grant. Historically we’ve had some support from them, but this was a grant of $140,000 towards our education and public programming in 2012. I think the endorsement that we’re getting from institutions like the NEA is very helpful to how individual patrons see us making progress.

PDN: You are working on rebuilding the Aperture Web site. What can
Aperture offer in the digital space that is unique?

BOOT: Doing anything online that’s unique is going to be difficult! But we need to offer a site that people want to return to again and again, and we’re not doing that at the moment. It’s a good, functional site in terms of providing information about our activities and projects, where you can buy books and prints. But we need to do more than that, and we’re figuring it out at the moment. What we do online needs to enhance and serve the community-building mission. We’re also working on how to make the archives of the magazine available online. That’s a major project for us, to build the support to digitize our history.

PDN: What does the future hold for Aperture magazine? BOOT: The magazine is at the core of what we do. It could be that in ten years’ time there is simply no reason to produce a print version of the magazine but for the foreseeable future we are committed to it being a printed magazine. An electronic version is now available and that’s doing really well, particularly outside the U.S. where the postage rates are expensive. We’re working on some new ideas of how to focus its purpose, especially in relation to the many great photo magazines now being published.

PDN: You mentioned the NEA grant for the education programs. Will you make education and public programming more of a focus as you try to build Aperture as a meeting point for the photography community? BOOT: Definitely. Aperture was founded to promote understanding of the medium, to advance the medium, to create a common ground for dialogue about the medium and about individual photographers’ work. I think our job now is the job Aperture set out to do in the first place, and education and public programming are key to that. The magazine, the book publishing program, the print program, they are all tools for doing that. All our work has an educational slant.

PDN: Do you feel that Aperture is sufficiently engaged with the younger
generation of photographers?

BOOT: No doubt we could do more, but I’ve been amazed since I got here how large a proportion of the people coming to our events are young people. In my first week of doing this job, the Regeneration 2: Tomorrow’s Photographer’s Today exhibition opened. And what made a big impact on me was when 40 of the photographers featured in the exhibition, this pick of the crop of 2010 art school graduates, were in town for the exhibition. And Aperture hosted a portfolio day, inviting in gallerists and editors, and introduced the photographers to them. I know that some people’s lives changed that day as a result of the connections we helped make. I was inspired by how Aperture, and what we do in the space, can really add value to people’s lives.