Meet photo-artist Ellen Jantzen, our 1,000th follower on twitter, resplendent in her new ACP t-shirt! Thanks, Ellen! Follow her @FissionFoto.

Ellen Fleurov, Executive Director of Pittsburgh’s Silver Eye Photography Center & ACP portfolio reviewer, shares the news that Atlanta photographers Marilyn Suriani, Billy Howard, Thomas England, Corinne Adams, Kathryn Kolb and Wynne Ragland, Jr., have all donated work to the Silver Eye Center for Photography 2010 Benefit Photography Auction. To see their work and 95 other lots by artists like Richard Misrach, Debbie Fleming Caffery, Ralph Gibson, and Elijah Gowin, go to silvereye.auctionanything.com.

Big photography news last night with the announcement that Magnum Photos has sold its print archive to Michael Dell. Magnum Director Marc Lubell discusses the archive. Here’s the NYT’s story:

“You could see the handwriting on the wall,” said Mr. Lubell, who took over as director six years ago, “and the handwriting was shrinking and shrinking.” With the proceeds from the sale the agency — which represents the work of 13 estates and 51 current members, including well-known photographers like Bruce Davidson, Eve Arnold, Susan Meiselas, Martin Parr and Alec Soth — will try to recreate itself as a media entity on the Web, relying less on publications and more on its ability to tell its own stories of world events and trends.

© Magnum Photos

© Paul Fusco

Great news from the High Museum:

The photography department has acquired twenty photographs by photographer Paul Fusco from The Robert F. Kennedy Funeral Train (1968). On June 8, 1968, Robert Kennedy’s body was transported by train to Washington, D.C., for burial at Arlington Cemetery. On board the train was Paul Fusco, a photojournalist on assignment for LOOK Magazine. As the train made its way down the Eastern Seaboard, thousands of mourners came out to line the railway tracks and pay their final respects. Fusco documented the mourners, taking approximately 2,000 pictures during the eight-hour train journey. Fusco’s photographs simultaneously tell individual stories while capturing the collective emotion of the American public. Unfortunately, Fusco’s photographs were never published by LOOK, and the magazine folded three years later. Fusco was able to retain 200 of the pictures, but the rest were donated to the Library of Congress along with LOOK’s photographic archives. The portfolio remained unpublished until 1998, when it was featured in GEORGE magazine to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Kennedy’s death. The images have since been published in two separate books and have been exhibited internationally. This portfolio of 20 cibachrome prints is part of a limited edition of 15 sets that have been made expressly for museums. It is the first work by Paul Fusco to enter the High’s collection, and it will complement the Museum’s prominent archive of more than 300 photographs that document pivotal events of the civil rights era.

The Frankencamera is a camera that runs open source software to produce HDR images, in camera. Seems like there are endless possibilities for what it might be able to do, as it’s as much a computer as it is a camera. Here’s the story on NPR.

Before this morning, I couldn’t have told you who invented the CCD sensor, which enabled the digital photography revolution. Cheers to Boyle and Smith, winners of the Nobel Prize!

The official announcement of the Artadia Atlanta short-list is out, with three local photographers making the grade. Congrats, all! (Photographers in bold, w/ links to their sites.)

The 15 Artadia Awards 2009 Atlanta Finalists are: Tristan Al-Haddad, Corrine Colarusso, Don Cooper, Ruth Dusseault, Sarah Emerson, Scott Ingram, Benjamin Jones, Stuart Keeler, Alexander Kvares, Fahamu Pecou, Rocio Rodriguez, Danielle Roney, Jerry Siegel, Larry Walker, and Angela West.

The Atlanta Journal Constitution profiled Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry this weekend, focusing on their ACP 10 Public Art Project “Within Our Gates” which opens this weekend. If you’re unfamiliar with the project, Drew Jubera wrote a great piece about the artists, the site, the project, and what the installation is all about.

Atlanta Celebrates Photography

Husband-and-wife art project

By DREW JUBERA

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sunday, September 28, 2008

After scouting sites all over Atlanta for the public art project they’d been commissioned to create, Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry both were knocked out by a 100-foot-tall abandoned concrete water tower in the Old Fourth Ward.

“It was kind of this undiscovered jewel in the backyard of the city,” McCallum said.

But staring up at it from the patchy grass out of which it seemed to sprout, the two had different notions about what to do with it.

McCallum first envisioned something displayed on the tower’s century-old exterior.

Tarry’s reaction: “You don’t expect me to climb up there, do you? As much as I’m attracted to it, I’m not climbing up that ladder.”

Yet it didn’t take long for the husband-and-wife artist team to agree on a concept: archival video and audio of the civil rights movement displayed on the tower’s interior and viewed from a platform constructed above a shallow pool of water.

The result: “Within Our Gates,” a high-profile, signature exhibit for the 10th annual Atlanta Celebrates Photography, a monthlong festival of exhibitions, lectures and other events throughout the metro area and beyond that opens officially this week. (For a festival schedule, log on to www.acpinfo.org.)

Both in their 40s, McCallum and Tarry have come to similar aesthetic accords many times during their decade-long artistic partnership.

“The most important part of us working together is the trust,” Tarry said from the couple’s Brooklyn, N.Y., apartment, where they live with their 5-year-old son. “Even though I might say, ‘No way, Jose, I’m not doing that,’ I never 100 percent dismiss him and his idea. I always chew on it and come back to it.”

McCallum added, “There are times when we’re both moving in different directions. We try to allow each other to do that, with the sense that we’ll come back to common ground.”

The results have often prompted charged, even controversial, responses from viewers and public officials.

In their 2006 video “Exchange,” the couple — he’s white, she’s black — swap each other’s blood through transfusions to subvert the historic “One Drop Rule” of racial purity.

In 2001, they set up photographs of black worshippers from a nearby church in the pews of a predominantly white church, invoking the spirit of the black congregants who in 1820 were forbidden to sit on the main floor.

A 2000 project in New York, “Witness: Perspectives on Police Violence,” included five emergency call boxes with speakers that played the recorded voices of brutality victims and their families. Then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani panned it.

“They have this ability to interrogate complicated ideas that we often don’t have a vocabulary to talk about,” said Andrea Barnwell Brownlee, director of the Spelman Museum of Fine Art.

A group exhibit at the Spelman Museum last year included “Cut,” the couple’s symbolic and penetrating video of them wordlessly cutting each other’s hair. Brownlee said it prompted more discussion than any other piece in the exhibit. It was also the only piece in the exhibit that the museum purchased.

“When it comes to cutting-edge, contemporary art, they push boundaries that really play with our comfort levels,” Brownlee said.

Atlanta Celebrates Photography, a nonprofit dedicated to the photographic arts, has featured public projects at past festivals. But for its 10th edition, Executive Director Amy Miller said, it wanted “something with teeth, that was socially responsible.”

Project curator Lisa Kurzner approached McCallum and Tarry after hearing them lecture last year at a local gallery about their work, including the 2003 video “Endurance,” a poetically stark chronicle of homelessness in Seattle.

McCallum and Tarry saw in Atlanta Celebrates Photography an opportunity to expand on their most recent work, which grew out of research for a memorial to Malcolm X: oil-painted copies of civil rights-era photographs, overlaid with silkscreen copies of the same photos.

“We were open to just about anything,” McCallum said. “But it was when we discovered the water tower that things became exciting.”

The long-abandoned tower, blocks from the King Center, once provided water for a nearby cotton compress warehouse, now converted into Studioplex, a mixed-use artist center. The tower itself seemed converted into shelter for the homeless. The circular interior was furnished with a ratty couch, fire pits, bottles.

But shafts of light also poured from small windows around the 70-foot-tall, rotundalike ceiling. The pebbled walls were colored by leeching minerals. Booming acoustics magnified the faintest sound.

“The minute they walked in they said, ‘This is the place,’ ” Kurzner said. “It was like being in the Chartres Cathedral.”

The artists spent days going through the vast film, TV and radio archives at the University of Georgia. They avoided footage of more recognizable leaders from the civil rights era. They concentrated instead on faces, crowds, interactions.

“We’re probably the first artists who’ve used the archive in this manner,” McCallum said.

The title, “Within Our Gates,” is taken from the 1920 film by black director Oscar Micheaux, a kind of African-American response to D.W. Griffith’s silent classic “Birth of a Nation,” which glorified the rise of the Ku Klux Klan.

“The idea of borrowing the title ‘Within Our Gates’ is saying, ‘OK, this our backyard. This is within the community. This is the kind of turbulence and struggle that was seeded here,’ ” McCallum said.

“It’s not trying to present itself as a documentary of the Fourth Ward. It’s gaining inspiration from this community as a kind of seeding place for the movement.”

Tarry sees that inspiration as “more of a meditation on asking questions. Watching people passionately involved in political decisions and asking, ‘Am I involving myself in the discourse of my day? Am I carrying on the legacy of the past?’

“Hopefully that question will be continually asked.”

“Within Our Gates”
Art installation by Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry, in conjunction with Atlanta Celebrates Photography, a metrowide, monthlong visual arts festival. Saturday-Oct. 4 inside the water tower at Auburn Avenue and Irwin Street in the Old Fourth Ward. Opening reception: 7-9 p.m. Saturday. Artists’ talk: Oct. 5 at 2 p.m. at TUBE Creative, 704 McGruder St., Studio N (near the water tower), 404-659-0088. For other info: 404-634-8664, acpinfo.org

This article may also be viewed at the AJC site here.

Somewhat surprisingly, the show, titled “Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement 1956-1968,” is a first for a major museum, said Steven Kasher, a photography dealer and curator in New York and the author of a photographic history of the movement.

“To really survey in depth the photography of the civil rights movement, and do new research, there’s never been anything like it to tell the truth,” Mr. Kasher said.

via When Images Galvanized a Nation, by Shaila Dewan

Atlanta’s Lumière Gallery and Bob Yellowlees are featured in “Eye On the Scene” by Joanna Lehan in Photograph Magazine for Jan/Feb ‘08.

Launched eight months ago, Lumière Gallery in Atlanta is going full steam. Lumiere’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 Kertesz, Edgerton, Lange, Siskind and Strand, he’s been inviting artists and scholars from all over the country to present their work in conjunction with other area cultural organizations.”

ACP will be collaborating with Lumière Gallery on January 24th at the Carter Center. Susbcribe (or refer to) the ACP Programs Calendar to keep up-to-date. We’re hoping to bring an interview with Ketchum to the ACP blog in late January.

William Boling, artist, lawyer, and friend of ACP, was profiled in the AJC last week.

On a metaphorical level, Boling marshals his compositional skills and eye for color to build a case for the poetry hidden in the mundane. Given his preference for the marginal and misbegotten, many of these poems seem like elegies. That goes for the eBay photos — temporary and meant to be discarded — in the online “peel.”

“It’s a digital reliquary for an evanescent photography,” he says.

Above image: © William Boling

ACP 9 Spotlight Speaker Shiela Pree Bright in “Wear This Flag & Talk to Me” by Tom Patterson:

“Josh Phifer, an 18-year-old Winston-Salem State freshman from Charlotte, posed for Pree on Monday afternoon. In talking about the session afterward, he said, “I took her idea a step further and tried to show how I feel as a black person about America. For one of my poses I had the flag enveloping my body, and I held my fist up. For another one I held out the flag and looked down at it, to represent the struggle of black people in the past and how much I’ve gained by that struggle.””

We’re upgrading the web server today, which means that some of the content at acpinfo.org is inaccessible. We will post again here, when everything’s up and working.

Update: Most everything is back up and working, but I need to work the kinks out of UTF-8 character issues in MySQL.