livebooks blog

"Eden" by Women In Photography exhibitor Kelli Connell ©Kelli Connell

Miki Johnson: Tell me briefly about the goals of WIPNYC and why it was important to be able to offer this grant.

WIP: Women in Photography is an online exhibition project designed to highlight the work of emerging, mid-career, and established artists. Our goal is to be a resource for curators, editors, and publishers, and also to create a visual dialog between women artists working in the photographic medium.

We have both been overwhelmed by the positive response to the site. Both of us have spent a great deal of time thinking about what we want the site to contribute to the photographic community. The next logical step in our programming was a grant. Because like the site, it allows us to both support and call attention to the work of women artists.

MJ: What is the main goal of this grant?

WIP: The main goal of the grant is to provide funding to one female photographer in support of a project. I think funding is a problem for artists working in all mediums, unless you have independent means or are extremely successful in the commercial art world. Photographers must pay for film, processing, equipment, travel, in addition to the high cost of creating work for exhibition or self-publishing. We both have struggled to fund our own work and find great importance in these types of opportunities. With so few grants available, it just seemed great to be able to give back.

MJ: How will you determine the recipient? Do you have any tips for photographers planning to submit?

WIP: We will select the recipient based on the quality of work, and the need of the applicant along with the strength of their project proposal. The most important thing is to submit five of your strongest images from a cohesive body of work as well as make sure to write clear, concise, and persuasive project goals. The grant is open to women at any stage in their career, except students. It is open to the artists previously shown on WIPNYC.org as well.

MJ: And the grant recipient will also be exhibited at WIPNYC.org?

WIP: The grant recipient will have a solo show on the site in June. In addition, we will have an award reception, including a slideshow presentation of the grant recipients’ work at the National Arts Club in New York City.

Because the solo shows we feature are online, we can reach a broader audience. Our visitors do not need to be in a specific city because they are accessing the work worldwide. The site traffic has grown dramatically with each show, which is one of the benefits of exhibiting work online. Several of our artists have seen a noticeable increase of traffic on their own sites. Being featured on the site has led to many things, including magazine assignments and inquiries from publishers and galley representation.

• How much Photoshopping is too much? Judges of a Danish photo contest seemed to think that they have the answer. Last month, Danish photojournalist Klavs Bo Christensen was disqualified from the Danish equivalent of Pictures of the Year contest because the photographs that he submitted “went too far” in digital manipulation. The incident, not surprisingly, sparked a lot of discussions in Denmark and eventually among the English-speaking blogosphere. According to NPPA, Jens Tønnesen, the webmaster for the Danish Union of Press Photographers, decided to explain the story to people outside of Demark, and did an English translation of an article he posted on the Pressefotografforbundet website, where you can see the three images in question placed side by side with their RAW files. Check out interesting comments about this story at PDN Pulse and The Online Photographer.

• Robert Adams, who is known for his landscape photography of the American West, has won the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography and received a $60,000 prize at an official ceremony in San Francisco on April 15, 2009. The Foundations’s citation describes Adams as “one of the most important and influential photographers of the last forty years.” An exhibition of Adam’s work will open at the Hasselblad Center, Göteborg Art Museum in November, 2009. Ansel Adams, Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, and William Eggleston are some of the previous award winners.

• Paul Melcher, named one of the “50 most influential individuals in American photography” by American Photo, explained in a post on the Black Star Rising blog why the Chris Usher v. Corbis case is important to all photographers. While Usher won the case, he was only compensated for “a lousy $7 per image” for the 12,640 images that Corbis has permanently misplaced. Melcher argues, with great reasoning, that what this ruling means is that agencies or publishers will no longer have to worry about losing photographers images because “it will be cheaper for them to trash them than to return them to you.”

Covenant House headquarters in Manhattan during a candlelight vigil for homeless teens. ©Nina Berman/Do1Thing.org

Miki Johnson: Tell me how you’re working with other non-profit organizations.

Najlah Hicks: We’re working with two major non-profits. The first and the biggest is the Covenant House International. Covenant House is the largest provider of services to homeless teens. Our second partner is StandUp For Kids, which is an all-volunteer group that helps teenagers on the ground. We believe that in order to produce good work, we have to partner with a non-profit that is on the ground every day and has a long history of working with this population.

Again, we’re not experts on homelessness. For us, it’s very important to figure out who the expert on homelessness is and then partner with them. Working with those organizations gave us access to kids that we would never have access to otherwise. We ended up partnering with over a dozen non-profits. But the biggest is Covenant House, and we drove all donations to them.

All of the photographers or editors we work with, even Pim Van Hemmen and I, the co-founders, we’re all volunteers. We raised –- we’re still calculating what’s coming in –- but we know so far about $30,000 in cash donations, and tens of thousands of items were donated nationwide. And we didn’t charge Covenant House a penny.

Our idea for long-term is to pick a cause each year. It could be AIDS, it could be cancer, it could be famine, but always something that affects youth and children. Then we find who’s doing the best work in the non-profit world and we partner with them.

MJ: I was blown away to see the big names on your list. Why were photographers and editors so eager to collaborate with you?

NH: A lot of people thought we would have to give them a hard sell. I didn’t have to give them any sell at all. We asked somebody and boom, they’re already on top of it. That’s how we ended up with 32 Pulitzer Prize winners and 75 editors, photographers, and designers.

Leandra Hollaway and Michael Cunningham check out their new room at a friend of a friend's. ©Judy DeHaas/Do1Thing

We started off with photographers we had worked with at the Heart Gallery. Nina Berman, Mark Peterson, Ron Haviv, many of the VII photographers, Martin Schoeller, Bob Sacha. Those guys knew first-hand the power of what they’re doing. The kids that they photographed at the gallery are getting adopted. So when I told them, look, this is what we want to do, it was an immediate yes. Then they contacted their friends, who contact their friends, who contacted their friends. It took literally less than two weeks to get a phenomenal team to come together and do it all for free. If you were to quantify what this would cost, it would be a million-dollar project.

And now these photographers want to go back. They want to do more. They want to follow these kids. Want to know if they can stay long-term. This photographer Mark Peterson was shooting for three months, documenting this one teenager, and will continue to document her. He’s looking to do a two- or three-year project on her. Again, all for free.

I think what happens is, when you get to the point when you’re in your 30s, 40s, and 50s, you realize you’ve covered everything that you can cover: famine, wars, floods, fires. You get to the point where you ask, When I leave this life, what do I want to be able to say about my work? Yes, I documented history. That’s great. But how much greater is it to be able to say that I changed the history of a life?

• The Unlikely Weapon, a documentary film about the late photographer Eddie Adams, opens in New York’s Quad Theatre today (April 10) and will be screened across the country in coming months. Adams is most remembered for his iconic image of Saigon police chief General Loan shooting a Vietcong guerrilla at point blank, which won him the Pulitzer Prize and World Press Photo, and for starting one of the best PJ workshops in the country. Check out this article and slideshow of Eddie’s work on NPR and this New Yorker story about his recent retrospective.

• Just as we thought the Fairey poster saga was dying down, we read about some new development at Conscientious. Apparently Fairey posted a long comment a few days ago explaining his views on the use of Mannie Garcia’s photo in the HOPE and PROGRESS posters, in an effort “to protect the rights of all artists, especially those with a desire to make art with social commentary.” New York gallerist James Danziger wrote an open letter in response to this, essentially saying how disappointed he was with Fairey’s denial of the source of the image.

• According to Reuters, Iranian-American photojournalist Roxana Saberi, who has been detained in Iran’s infamous Evin prison since January, has been charged with espionage and her trial will begin next week. In Iran, espionage can carry the death penalty. U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Rodham Clinton expressed her concerns to the news and demanded Saberi’s immediate release.