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Barbara Tannenbaum Visits Photolucida in Portland, Oregon

"I spent April 23-26 doing every curator’s favorite part of the job—looking at art. I was in Portland, Oregon, at Photolucida, one of three major American photography conferences. These meetings bring curators, dealers and publishers face-to-face with fine art photographers and their works. Photography is the only medium that does this type of event! Reviewers sit at individual tables and every 20 minutes another artist sits down with a portfolio to view and discuss. Also offered are lectures and exhibitions. In Portland, there were 60 reviewers and 160 artists.

I love these events. Seeing original art is so much more revealing and satisfying than looking at reproductions (remember when you look at the images accompanying this!). I get the all-too-rare opportunity to spend time swapping information and news with colleagues and artists from around the country. And the reviews are like pop quizzes. You have about 5-7 minutes to digest work you’ve never seen before, figure out how you can best help the artist and decide how to express your opinion in a kind but direct way—to verbalize what makes good art and how to make it into better art.

Of course. every artist secretly dreams of being “discovered” and made into an instant art star! Most of them, being experienced professionals, are content to receive serious critical responses from 20 or 30 of the top people in the photo world. And each year, some artists receive offers of shows, books or representation.

There were a number of projects that showed great promise but were still gestating. Some of my favorites of those that seemed “ripe” are listed below (in no particular order, and not at all well represented by reproduction on the web).

*To view photographs from each artist, click HERE.

(1.) In both his fine art and commercial photography, New York-based Stephen Mallon addresses salvage, reclamation and the recycling culture and industry. He had exclusive access to the salvage of Flight 1549, the plane that landed in the Hudson River.
www.stephenmallon.com

(2.) Elaine Ling’s Bhodi tree images were taken in Africa. This Toronto photographer, who works in both color and black and white, explores “the shifting equilibrium between nature and the man-made across four continents.”
www.elaineling.com

(3.) Laurie Lambrecht shot her Homage to Roy Lichtenstein series while an assistant to the famed painter. Her vibrant, wild images of the artist’s working method and sources contrast with the spare, elegant portfolio of shots of bare trees around Lake Geneva in Switzerland she also brought with her from New York.
www.laurielambrecht.com

(4.) Trained as a printmaker before he took up photography, Aaron Rothman has made some of the most incredibly beautiful digital prints I have ever seen. This Arizonan has been photographing the desert and recently added the construction projects encroaching upon it to his on-going series about “the space of the landscape, the palpability of light, and the awareness of being in relation to time--both the immediate present and the geologic past and future.”
aarothman.com

(5.) Mary Farmilant’s portfolio showing the inside of closed hospitals in Chicago, complete with small vials of hospital scents and a CD of hospital sounds. Farmilant, who worked as a nurse for a decade in one of these hospitals before turning to photography full-time, has firsthand knowledge of America’s health care crisis.
www.maryfarmilant.com/

(6.) A book about Stephen Strom’s Earth Forms, images of the southwest desert, will be released in September by British publisher Dewi Lewis. Strom attempts to capture “a land shaped by millennial forces and yesterday’s cloudburst into undulations of color and form.” Also a noted astronomer, he has lived in the desert for almost two decades.
www.stephenstrom.com

(7.) Relics, Brad Temkin’s large black and white prints, interpret mysterious remnants of human intervention in the landscape across several continents and decades. This Chicago-area artist received his BFA from Ohio University. The Akron Art Museum owns 13 images from his Private Places series about Chicago gardens, which were the subject of a book in 2005.
www.bradtemkin.com

(8.) Borderline, by Desiree Edkins of Scottsdale, instantly reached me on an emotional level. Ostensibly photographs of Edkins’s daughter, this series clearly addressed much deeper and broader issues including the artist’s relationship with her mother, the fragility of our mind’s mooring in the external world, and the perils and tensions of childhood.
www.desireeedkins.com"

Image Credits
Top - Laurie Lambrecht, Pencils, 1990
Bottom - Stephen Strom, Creosote + Hillsides

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