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| Los Angeles is the place to be in mid-January. Photo LA is underway January 10–13, this year in a bigger venue—the Barker Hangar near the Santa Monica Airport. Now in its 17th year, it’s the longest-running art fair in LA and continues to grow. “Last year 8,500 people came to the show; this year we’re expecting 10,000,” says Stephen Cohen, owner of Stephen Cohen Gallery in LA, and head of Artfairs, Inc., which also organizes the Photo Miami and ArtLA fairs. More than 75 galleries are participating this year, including several representing video and new media artists, as well as more foreign galleries and publishers, according to Cohen. In conjunction with the fair, Center (formerly known as the Santa Fe Center for Photography), is holding its annual portfolio reviews at the Santa Monica Art Studios. Reviewers include Karen Sinsheimer, curator at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and Virginia Heckert, associate curator of photography at the J. Paul Getty Museum. A new, rather outsider event is also at the Santa Monica Art Studios that weekend: LA’s first Vernacular Photography Festival. The festival was spearheaded by Anais Wade, director of D3 Projects in Santa Monica, a new art space with a focus on interactive art projects and community involvement. Wade, a transplanted Parisian and former manager of Culver City’s David Gallery, has organized a modest event, with about a dozen mostly West Coast dealers, but is confident it will grow. The rise in collecting vernacular images coincides with that of the digital age, Wade observes, adding, “Collectors often have this powerful feeling that they are rescuing these little squares of photo paper from obscurity.” Not that the market for famous works is going flat. Launched eight months ago, Lumière Gallery in Atlanta is going full steam. Lumière’s owner, Bob Yellowlees, is a collector who’s served on the boards of several museums and non-profits. In addition to exhibiting and dealing in museum-quality prints by Kertész, Edgerton, Lange, Siskind and Strand, among many others, he’s been inviting artists and scholars from all over the country to present their work in conjunction with other area cultural organizations. “Our focus is to advance the understanding of photography and sculpture through our exhibitions, formal lectures, and our programs for at-risk youth,” he says. At the end of January, these programs will be environmental in theme, with an exhibition of Robert Glenn Ketchum’s work. Ketchum will lecture about the show at Atlanta’s Carter Center. For decades a debate has raged about whether the Reverend Levi Hill of Westkill, New York, was the inventor of the first color photograph. Okay, maybe not raged—let’s just say that many photo historians have politely disagreed with one another about the claim that Hill produced the first naturally colored daguerreotypes in 1850. Last year the Getty Foundation awarded a $31,500 grant to the Smithsonian to unravel this mystery. A team of scholars, aided by the state-of-the-art technology at the Getty’s Conservation Institute (infrared and x-ray spectroscopy), examined the 62 Hillotypes in the Smithsonian’s collection and—at last—the Getty and Smithsonian have announced that Hill’s claim has been verified! Kind of. “A flawed genius” is how Dusan Stulik, senior scientist at Getty’s Conservation Institute, describes Levi Hill. Hill did create several colors in his photographs, but then—it turns out—he cheated and added additional pigments by hand. Genius or charlatan, you decide. Copyright ©2008 photograph. All rights reserved. No reproduction or republication without written permission. |
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