Spring is here!
Tag: Photography
Frist exhibit gives face to homelessness
An upcoming exhibit at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts will offer a look at the human side of homelessness.
“Seeing Ourselves: Photographs of Safe Haven” opens Friday, Jan. 9, and features 22 color and black-and-white photographs taken by members of homeless families while living at the Safe Haven Family Shelter. The photographs, organized by the Frist Center, are on view through May 3 in the Conte Community Arts Gallery, with no admission charge.
“The photographs selected for Seeing Ourselves represent life patterns and happenings that are experienced by people living in a variety of circumstances,” says Andee Rudloff, educator for outreach at the Frist and curator of the exhibition. “Instead of simply documenting the conditions of homelessness, the images remind us that we all share common hopes, dreams and goals.”
In April 2008, the Frist partnered with Safe Haven, which provides interim housing and job training to homeless families. Nashville-based photographer Allen Clark and the Frist’s outreach educators led a two-week photography workshop for participants, who ranged in age from 3 to 65, to learn about composition, visual storytelling and photographic technique. Writing exercises, including poems written to accompany their images, and preliminary drawings helped residents form ideas for pictures.
On the final day of the workshop, each resident was provided a Holga 120N camera, a toy-like camera that uses medium format film, and invited to create and capture the compositions they had planned.
The gallery guide features images and text, as well as a resource list that includes Web site addresses, for those in need of homeless services in the Nashville area.
“While the Frist Center brings art from all over the world to Nashville, the abiding commitment is to the community,” said Susan H. Edwards, the Frist’s executive director and chief executive officer.
“One of the founding tenets behind creating an art center was to serve the broadest possible constituency and to demonstrate through art the many ways we are connected.”
Contact Nancy DeVille at 615-259-8304 or ndeville@tennessean.com.
Leonard Nimoy to appear in Alabama to discuss his erotic photography
Leonard Nimoy to appear in Alabama to discuss his erotic photography
In the words of Dave Barry, 
I am not making this up.
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – Actor and photographer Leonard Nimoy, right, will lecture on his photographic works at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 6, 2009, as the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Department of Art and Art History’s 2009 John Morton Visiting Artist.
The lecture, free and open to the public, will take place in UAB’s Volker Hall, 1670 University Blvd., Birmingham. www.uab.edu/news
Interesting critiques of Nimoy’s artwork follows …
Prior to the lecture, at 5:30 p.m., a reception for the artist will be held in the UAB Visual Arts Gallery, 900 13th St. S. Tickets to the reception are $100. For more information contact the UAB Department of Art and Art History at 205-934-4941.
Nimoy, well known for his role as Mr. Spock on the television/film series “Star Trek,” first experienced the magic of making photographic images as a teenager in the early 1940s. The family camera, a bellows Kodak Autographic, is a cherished part of his collection. His darkroom was the family bathroom in their small Boston apartment; his subjects, family and friends. Nimoy studied at UCLA with Robert Heineken in the 1970s.
Nimoy’s photographic works include “The Full Body Project,” an examination of concepts of beauty and sexuality, “The Shekhina Project,” a photographic essay about the feminine essence of God, “The Black & White Project” and classic nude/dance, self portraits, landscapes and hands series.
During an artist-in-residence appointment at the American Academy in Rome, Nimoy produced a series based on the Antonio Canova sculpture of Paulina Bonaparte Borghese. Of Nimoy’s “Shekhina” images, noted art critic Donald Kuspit wrote, “… Nimoy’s fascination with the female body involves an element of temptation as well as transcendence … One body represents — by reason of the often stark contrast between light and dark, covered and uncovered flesh — what it took Titian two bodies to represent … what is really unusual about his female figures is that they signify profane and sacred love simultaneously.”
ED WRITES STUFF (and nonsense) 