Catherine Leutenegger on WIPNYC

Studio Thierry Froidevaux, Lausanne, 2005 ©Catherine Leutenegger

Catherine Leutenegger is currently the artist featured on Women in Photography.

Young Women: Submit!

Professional Women Photographers is pleased to announce their 5th Annual Student Awards Program for young women enrolled in a New York City High School with an enthusiasm for photography. Submissions are accepted in two categories: 9th and 10th grades or 11th and 12th grades. The theme for this years awards if "Feminine". The following prizes will be awarded in each category: $500 first prize, $250 second prize, $125 third prize, and an honorable mention. Students who are awarded will have a weeklong exhibition at the HP Gallery at Calumet Photo. For submission details, please visit: http://www.pwponline.org/outreach/awards.php. (tx, Dina!)

Nina Berman's Homeland in Chicago

from Homeland ©Nina Berman

Nina Berman's "Homeland" exhibit is now on view at Gage Gallery at Roosevelt University in Chicago - through May 22, 2009.
You can revisit our conversation with Nina, by clicking here.

Diana Kingsley

Siberia, ©Diana Kingsley

Diana Kingsley is in a solo exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City through February 28, 2009.

From the press release:

Leo Castelli Gallery is pleased to present In Pari Delicto, an exhibition of new photographs by Diana Kingsley, her third solo show at the gallery. Kingsley, continuing to mine the terrain of the slight incident and the small indignity, has ratcheted up a sense of the absurd while maintaining the cool formalism and deadpan humor of her previous work.

The exhibitions title, In Pari Delicto, a somewhat archaic legal term meaning “in equal fault,” connotes an elegance and charged sensuality belying the prosaic resignation of the phrase’s meaning. Dress gloves, cigarettes, sterling silver sets, and thoroughbreds anachronistically symbolize sophistication, while barely disguising a standoff between ordinary, commensurable forces: incumbent and invading, animated and inert, covetous and restrained. In the slow unfolding of non–events each side acts in a balletic concert; no side is privileged.

Diana Kingsley: In Pari Delicto
January 9 – February 28, 2009
Leo Castelli Gallery
18 East 77th Street
New York, NY

PhotoNOLA Showcase Winners Annouced

Fastfood © Susana Raab

Susana Raab and Sarah Wilson are the two award winners from the PhotoNOLA reviews in December 2008!

NYMPHOTO is proud to say that Sarah participated in Nymphoto's "Filtered" exhibit and that we have had the pleasure of featuring Susana Raab in Nymphoto Conversations last year, you can re-visit that interview by clicking here.

If you head over to photo-eye you can see showcases featuring Sarah and Susana's work, as well as purchase prints.

Congrats Susana & Sarah!

A Conversation with Garie Waltzer

Shanghai, Overpass #1 and Paris, Eiffel Tower ©Garie Waltzer

Rona and I had the pleasure of seeing Garie Waltzer's photographic prints in person and were instantly drawn to the entire series of wonderfully crafted urban landscapes. Garie has traveled extensively throughout the world, exploring the the dense histories with modern complexities. We're honored to present a conversation with Garie, a photographer who is recipient of many artist grants including the National Endowment of the Arts and from the Ohio Arts Council.

Nymphoto: Tell us a little about yourself.

Garie Waltzer: I grew up in New York- first the Bronx, then Long Island. My father had a music store (Banner Music) on Broadway between 48th and 49th street, where he sold and repaired instruments, gave lessons and did a lot of schmoozing. My uncles were all musicians - a few who played Broadway musicals, so backstage passes were dreamy highlights of my childhood.

I don’t remember ever not thinking of myself as an artist – I was always drawing or painting. I had a painter friend when I was 15 who thought of the German Expressionists as his soul mates, and we’d take the LIRR into the city, go to the museums, hang out in the Village, and talk about art. I still have a great painting of his from that time, which I’ve carted around with me everywhere I’ve ever lived! A close friend when I was 10, was Arthur Leipzig’s daughter. I had no idea at the time that he was a magazine photographer, with work in The Family of Man. I remember going to her house and looking at his b+w photographs hanging in their living room, one in particular of my friend. I knew these photos were special, and mused, “I wish my father took pictures of me that looked like that”! Years later, I went to a retrospective of Leipzig’s work at the Howard Greenberg Gallery, and hanging in the entranc eway to the show was the small photo of my friend as a child – the same image that had hung in their living room long ago.



Istanbul, Street and New York, Coney Island ©Garie Waltzer

NP: How did you discover photography?

GW: When you look back, the path is pretty clear. I can see myself with my new Brownie camera at age 10, a Sinclair dinosaur sticker on the back. I still have my very first photos taken on a 5th grade field trip of the tugboats around the Statue of Liberty. I remember sitting for hours, nerdy as hell, with a huge National Geographic book my family had of American landscapes. After high school, my plan was to study painting, but I was repeatedly drawn to the power and immediacy of photography during the volatile years of the late 60’s when I was a student at SUNY Buffalo, a large state campus that came to national attention in ’68/‘69 during the anti-war demonstrations that surrounded the trial of the Buffalo Nine. I would have long conversations with fellow students about what it meant to be an artist during these times as I struggled to find a way to make work that was connected to what was happening in the world. It was at that time that I saw an exhibit of photographs by Milton Rogovin, made in the Lower West Side neighborhood of Buffalo, and was blown away by their tangible power. I also saw a wonderfully idiosyncratic exhibit of collaborative images by the painter Charles Gill and the photographer Donald Blumberg, both faculty at Buffalo. They were very huge photographs on canvas that had been painted into. I knew this was the arena for me. During my last year at Buffalo, I took a photography class with Donald, and when I finished school, the first thing I did was buy darkroom equipment and move back to the city.


Tokyo, Hanayashiki Amusement Park ©Garie Waltzer

NP: Where do you find inspiration?

GW: There is nothing I like better than exploring a new city. Wandering its streets, looking for keys to understanding the place- studying its energy, synergy, physical peculiarities, the magic of its people walking their daily paths. I am often inspired by books- by other artists’ work- and by good conversation over a glass of wine - but the thing that really gets me going is a crazy busy chaotic place to photograph.


Tokyo, International Forum ©Garie Waltzer

NP: How has teaching influenced your work?

GW: I taught for about 30 years at a large county community college in Cleveland. I loved the students, and loved getting to know them through their pictures. The richness and breadth of human narrative oozing out of a really diverse classroom of students was almost operatic; turning students on to thinking critically about their images and their power was endlessly compelling. I learned a lot over the years about balancing something you value (teaching students) with the necessities of survival in an increasingly bureaucratic educational system. A lot of change happened in those 30 years: the role of photography in our culture, its position in the art + communications worlds, its technological morphing, not to mention the ways we teach photography- the pace of change only increasing, and the traditional boundaries between media shifting and blurring. Being in the midst of all that change was gratifying when it wasn’t making me nuts. Teaching takes you out of yourself, it’s endlessly collaborative, and that’s what I loved the most and miss the most about it.


Odessa, Gazebo ©Garie Waltzer

NP: How did this project come about?

GW: I had been working in a radically different way before I left teaching: using a color electrostatic printer as a camera and making large allegorical images that were cut and collaged and painted into- very physical, and evocative. And then there had been a period of about ten years in which I was consumed with running the photo department, building new facilities and dealing with technological change, during which I had not made much new work. In returning to my studio, I revisited old impulses to make work that was more concretely connected to the world I saw, more observational and outward looking. I had never thought of myself as a landscape photographer, but in fact, that’s where the work took me. I had amassed a large inventory of images made over that decade, primarily of the made landscape, it’s structure and spirit. Determined to “catch up” on my printing, I went back to these images and picked up new threads in the visual narrative. This was the jumping off point for a continuing body of work that is about the inhabited landscape.

I am photographing civic spaces - parks, plazas, pools and busy intersections - recording the confluence of time, place and populace. The images explore place as an intricately detailed organism with structure, flow, synchronicity, and collective narrative. They often use elevated vantage points and deep vistas, creating bird’s eye views that hover above the fray. I am interested in capturing the gestalt of a place simultaneously with the specificity of detail that is abundant, embedded and particular to the ways we inhabit a place.



Kunming, Street and Shanghai, Overpass #3 ©Garie Waltzer

NP: What's next?

GW: I have a show of this work coming up in Miami, Florida at Chelsea Galleria, 2441 NW 2nd Avenue, Miami (opening Feb. 14 - March 10) and another at Akron University Galleries, Akron, Ohio (opening March 2 - April 17). Akron’s "Seen in China" will include work made in China by five photographers, including Daniel Traub, Linda Butler, Peikwen Cheng, and Joe Vitone. I’m also working on a project with Leslie Rose Close, a landscape historian, photographing cultural landscapes in New York. She just wrote a wonderful essay to accompany my work in Light Work’s Contact Sheet 2008 Annual, due out soon. Inspired by Philip Lopate’s Waterfront : A Walk Around Manhattan , I recently photographed the Hudson River landscape near the Statue of Liberty, homage to my first tugboat pictures.

Last year I worked on a great project to photograph the University Circle neighborhood of Cleveland for the George Gund Foundation’s annual report. Photographing in my own town, something I haven’t been doing for a while, was inspiring, so when I was recently asked to participate in a project called Lake Effect, to photograph Lake Erie, I gladly agreed. The light is wonderful today, two feet of snow covers the ground, and it’s 5 degrees below zero- the crusty post-industrial landscape of Cleveland is so beautiful it could break your heart.

NP: Thank you very much, Garie!

To see more of Garie's work, go to : www.gariewaltzer.com

Also, opening on Saturday, the 14th:

Garie Waltzer: Walking on Air
Chelsea Galleria
February 14 through March 10
2441 NW 2nd Avenue, Miami, FL

Nadja Bournonville

Where everything starts, ©Nadja Bournonville

Nadja Bournonville, Part Two Amor Omnia Vincit

Pierogi 2000
177 North 9th Street, 718-599-2144
February 6 - March 8, 2009

From the press release:

"Part Two–Amor omnia vincit

"Love conquers all, as a working hypothesis, or the innermost core of pain."

—P.O Enquist, The book about Blanche and Marie

For Nadja Bournonville, the photographs of "Amor omnia vincit" have become a series of questions rather then answers, like stories left wide open. They question both the personal and universal experience of love—the distance between need and desire, the restless hunt for intimacy, and our hope to be truly known by the other; and, on the other hand, the vertigo—the fear of falling, being left and rejected.

After reading P.O. Enquist’s "The book about Blanche and Marie,” Bournonville decided to divide her project into three parts inspired by the question books written by the main character, Blanche. Each page of these books is said to start with a question and it is through her sometimes erratic answers that a story gradually unfolds. In Part One, "One for every wish," I was occupied with the question I applied as a child to every situation, why? The curiosity and playfulness of this question drove my search forward through continuous reading, questioning and image making. Part two has developed similarly, where the scenes built up within the images act as spaces for thoughts and ideas regarding the impossible possibility of love. (Bournonville, 2009)
This will be the first exhibition of Bournonville’s photographs in the United States.

Op-Ed Wanted!

Nymphoto is looking for additional contributors for its Op-Ed Series. Don't be shy, apply!

What is Nymphoto Op-Ed?

Nymphoto Op-Eds are written by artists, curators, bloggers, collectors, historians,critics and students; the Op-ed pieces share the reflections and opinions of its authors relating to & about photography. We are interested in a broad range of opinions & experiences and are encouraging everyone involved in the arts to submit.

If you you would like your op-ed published on the Nymphoto Blog please submit it via contact(at)nymphoto.com along with a CV and a link to your web-presence (if you have one).
Please note that we are primarily looking for op-eds written by women in photography or by men writing about subjects relevant to women artists.

You can find the Nymphoto Collective's Mission Statement at: www.nymphoto.com.

Upcoming: Tema Stauffer & Francesca Romeo @ Daniel Cooney

Jacob (Red Brick Alley) © Tema Stauffer

Francesca Romeo & Tema Stauffer
Daniel Cooney Fine Art Gallery

511 West 25th Street, Suite 506
New York, NY
Feb. 19-April 18, 2009
Opening Reception: Thursday, Feb. 19 6-8 p.m.

You can revisit our conversation with Tema, by clicking here.

(via Daniel Cooney Fine Art)

Daniel Cooney Fine Art is very proud to announce a two-person exhibition of photographic portraits by Francesca Romeo and Tema Stauffer.

Romeo knows her subjects intimately as they are fellow artists and patrons of the bar she owns on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Drawing upon the aesthetic of both film noir and classical painting, she is interested in documenting her circle of friends that are emblematic of the new bohemia. She seeks out subjects that are affected by gentrification and that exhibit characteristics contrary to the mainstream in order to elicit a sense of psychological malaise.

Stauffer is exhibiting selected images from a work-in-progress inspired by the song, “A Ballad of Sad Young Men.” All of the subjects are photographed on Main Street in Binghamton, a small industrial city located in central New York well past its heyday. The young men she photographs are high school students and transient early twenty-somethings. Her approach contrasts to Romeo’s because she finds her subjects on the street and introduces herself as a photographer. While lacking a familiarity, there is a sexual tension that surfaces in the exchange between the photographer and the subjects.

Francesca Romeo has exhibited her work at PS 122, Art in General, A.M. Richards Gallery, Brooklyn and the University of Southern Illinois. She received her MFA from Pratt in 2005.

Patricia Coffie @ Mary Boone

Head over to Mary Boone Gallery to see Patricia Coffie's Solo Debut Show. While acknowledging the work of Cindy Sherman, Seydou Keita & Kara Walker, Patricia Coffie also creates intensely personnel and vibrant works that stand out.


Head of State I & Daydreams © Patrica Coffie; courtesy Mary Boone Gallery, New York

Patricia Coffie
Mary Boone Gallery
745 Fifth Avenue
- through February 14, 2009


Where are all the Black Roses? © Patrica Coffie; courtesy Mary Boone Gallery, New York