Editor’s Note: This is the first of what hopes to be many posts by our intern/workstudy students! The first is by Kassia Karr, a 4th year BA/MA student in interdisciplinary studies, focusing on South Asia, at BU. As you can see by the above image and at her Web site, she is also a very talented photographer! She’s been away from the PRC for about a year. We’re glad to have her back!

When I landed at Logan Airport in May, it was windy, rainy, and cold: 55, maybe 56 degrees. I had been in transit for over 36 hours, and when I realized that the only ‘warm’ piece of clothing I possessed was a single, well-worn cardigan, I was ready to hop the next plane back to India.

After returning to New England weather, what could possibly cheer me up? Coming back to work at the PRC, of course! I jumped right back into my position as a PRC intern after a year’s absence from Boston. I had left the day after last year’s “Exposure” exhibition, and returned a little over a week before this year’s show. The center was a busy place, with artwork to be hung, condition reports to be filled out, newsletters to be sent, numerous letters to be folded and stamped, etc. The opening reception had a great turnout despite the threat of rain. If a girl in a bright blue skirt handed you a glass of wine or a beer, that was me. Yes, interns wear many hats, including that of bartender.

While I was gone I kept up with PRC happenings via our very active Flickr site. From 7000 miles away I was able to look at images from the 2007 PRC Benefit Auction, the installations for the AD AGENCY, student, and New England Survey exhibitions, and shots of various photographers from our lecture series. I regularly updated my Flickr account as well, giving people back home a little glimpse of my life and travels during my year abroad. I also enjoyed perusing our contacts’ Flickr sites and user-driven groups like the New England Survey photo pool. I was happy to see my friend and local photographer Derek Vincent contributing some of his work to the pool.

Despite the mediocre weather, I’m happy to be back in Boston and back at the PRC. There’s a busy summer ahead, as it’s time to start organizing the 2008 PRC Benefit Auction set for October 25th. I am looking forward to the work ahead!

ABOVE IMAGE: Hanukkah in Madurai. December 2007. Photo by Kassia Karr

From the “This Just In” department: Renowned photographer and uber educator Stephen DiRado has agreed to lead the Photographic Resource Center’s Fall 2008 installment of the Portfolio Project Seminar. This program provides an in-depth opportunity to share and receive feedback on your work in a small group setting and supportive environment. For this installment Mr. DiRado has offered up the use of his legendary personal studio, in which he has been conducting salon style photo gatherings for many years. More details will be available on prcboston.org shortly.

In the meantime check out Stephen’s website, stephendirado.com for more on his work. Read Alec Soth’s interview with Stephen or read an article published by Clark University, where Stephen has been teaching for more than 20 years.

The image above is from his “Dinner Series,” a wonderful long term project in which the artist captures intimate moments–partly candid, partly constructed–from meals shared with friends and families. Anyone whose grown up around a dinner table populated by a larger than life family can attest to how formative this space can for developing identity and relationships.

As you can see, we have a snazzy new blog banner above! We’re getting ready for an official launch of the blog soon, so for those lucky few who have stumbled upon us, we’re hoping to expand our audience even more! In honor of this, I thought it might be fun to delve into the PRC Flickr archives and share with you some past PRC logos and assorted designs.

The above scan is of a PRC button with our 5th anniversary logo on it. This logo appeared on the PRC newsletter in 1981 and on a special promo piece. I just love the phrase “and still developing!” I worry that such an analogy might be loosing its meaning in today’s digital realm, and ask you dear readers, what would the equivalent phrase be today?

I am not quite sure when the PRC square came into being, but it’s likely around the time the newsletter changed from the descriptive “PRC Newsletter” to “in the loupe” (hmm, another pre-digital analogy?). As you can see in our PRC Flickr archive set here, the squared circle was popular for a while in our graphic treatment (and still is, see the upper right photo taken by an AIB graphic design student for our new membership brochure). I had a blast riffling through old files and gathering such ephemera for our 30th anniversary exhibition and a special web site and historical display case.

Variations on the PRC green can be found in the PRC gallery foyer and oddly enough, in my springtime coat. Interestingly, a spicy green is used by another of our sister institutions, as you can see in a photo from my recent trip to Houston. I could tell you the pantone #, but then I’d have to…

Please feel free to share any of your own photo-graphics stories or historical tidbits in the comments!

Leslie K. Brown here. Today, almost in preparation for next Thursday’s opening of New England Survey at the PRC, I had the distinct pleasure of hearing British landscape photographer Jem Southam speak at Wellesley College’s Davis Museum. Southam’s Upton Pyne exhibition opens Wednesday evening at the Davis Museum, but today he spoke to Patricia Berman’s photohistory class. Besides myself and Bruce Myren, and Davis curator Dabney Hailey, others in attendance included Laura McPhee and her MassArt class as well as MFA curators William Stover and Karen Haas. Jem is known for his contemplative, photographic observations of a single location over many years. Upton Pyne is his 6-year study of a single pond.

Among other accomplishments, Jem was a past PRC Leopold Godowsky Jr. Color Photography Award winner. These awards are administered by the PRC and are by nomination. Jem was one of the 1992/1993 cycle winners, along with several other names you might recognize. It was great to catch up with him and Dabney graciously invited me to lunch. We ate outside at Jem’s insistence. At first I thought it would be too cold, but, true to Jem’s wonderful form and presence, I was glad to convene with nature. Jem teaches at a very unique program in the UK through the University of Plymouth/Exeter School of Art and Design (read more about the Land and Water program here, which includes scholar Liz Wells among others). I encourage you to check out the exhibition (up through June 8th) and if Jem ever speaks anywhere near you, please go, it is an incredible experience! What an amazingly sweet person to boot!

Here is a great link from the Victoria & Albert Museum on Jem Southam and two of his most recent series, Upton Pyne and the Painter’s Pool.

You can read an interview with Jem Southam here.

ABOVE IMAGE: Jem Southam enjoying the winter sun outside of the Davis Museum.

Leslie is off to points West and I’m spending a few days in New York City. I devoted some time to making the big museum circuit and have to call out a few interesting things.

At the Met, I checked out Depth of Field: Modern Photography at the Metropolitan.

Depth of Field was a broad selection works by moders photographers including Cindy Sherman, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Rineke Dijkstra, Adam Fuss and Thomas Ruff. I always enjoy the Bechers’ typological arrays, in this case 20 water tanks. In a very different vein was Adam Fuss’ giant photogram titled Now! of water being poured over photographic paper during exposure. It looked like a landcsape and an abstraction at the same time, and had detail you could get lost in for days. Taking up a large wall at the end of the gallery was Thomas Ruff’s Jpeg ny02, a tremendously enlarged JPEG image of the destruction of the World Trade Centers on Sept. 11, 2001. The scale of the piece makes all the artifacts of the JPEG compression clearly visible and forces you to squint and step back and forth to try and focus the image.

Also on view at the Met is Lee Friedlander: A Ramble in Olmsted Parks, which is worthy of a post all its own, but not today.

A few short blocks uptown I found myself at the Whitney Museum, currently in the throes of its Biennial. I dodged the crowds and made for the permanent collection on the top floor, where I’m always happy to view paintings by Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth. I lucked into small show of Demuth called Chimneys and Towers: Charles Demuth’s Late Paintings of Lancaster. Although some seem to take a Freudian view of Demuth’s chimney compositions, I like to view them alongside the Bechers’ work, as documents of a type. Also interesting, I saw some of Demuth’s sketchbooks and learned that the prismatic lines that cut across his paintings appear more or less fully realized in the sketches, and were actually incised in the fiberboard he painted on.

A mile or two downtown, not far from the NY Public Library, lies ICP, currently showing The Collections of Barbara Bloom and Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art. Bloom’s work is hard to categorize, and is a good example of ICP stretching the bounds of “photography.” ICP presents a retrospective of Bloom’s multi-media work and archives of indescribable paraphenalia, much of it stamped with her name, logo or likeness. Downstairs has been completely taken over by Archive Fever, which I will describe by way of quoting ICP’s web site:

Organized by renowned scholar and ICP Adjunct Curator Okwui Enwezor, Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art will present works by leading contemporary artists who use archival documents to rethink the meaning of identity, history, memory, and loss. Over the past thirty years, successive generations have taken wide-ranging approaches to the photographic and filmic archive. The works presented here take many forms, including physical archives arranged by peculiar cataloguing methods, imagined biographies of fictitious persons, collections of found and anonymous photographs, film versions of photographic albums, and photomontages composed of historical photographs. These images have a wide-ranging subject matter yet are linked by the artists’ shared meditation on photography and film as the quintessential media of the archive.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. You have to see it - experience it - to understand.

To make a long story longer, I have to note that big museums, like verything else in NYC, are far from cheap. The Met suggests a donation of $20 (although you can get in for less if you don’t mind a dirty look), the Whitney’s rate is $15 (includes free audioguide to the Biennail - you’ll need it), and ICP comes in looking cheap at $12. But, members of the Photographic Resource Center and other allied institutions can get in to ICP at the low price of zero, thanks to the little-known Connections Program.

Free admission for Connections members can be had at ICP, The George Eastman House, The Griffin Museum of Photography, and the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego. Additional benefits are available at the rest of the 20 or so member institutions. I’d say that’s quite a deal.

School of the Museum of Fine Arts prof Jim Dow came to support his students at the 350+ packed opening for the 2008 PRC Student Exhibition, originally uploaded by PRCBoston. 

Did you know? All of our installation slides (well, now digital images) of our exhibitions are taken by THE Jim Dow? Since the PRC became a gallery in 1985, the amazing Jim Dow has been volunteering his time and film to take documents of all of our exhibitions. As a side bar,the Center for American Places just published his book, Marking the Land, featuring over two decades of his photographs from North Dakota.  (It was just named one of the best books of 2007 by American Photo Magazine.)

Here is Jim, pictured with Education Manager, Michael Christiano. Jim is legendary for his history of photography class given at SMFA and Harvard and is constantly going to NYC to photograph gallery shows for his inspiring lectures.  Jim and I have been giving an annual seminar on demystifying the jurying process dubbed “Answering the call (for entry).”  Usually given before the deadline for our juried show in January or early February, this is a great opportunity to hone your entry and see what happens after you send in your submission.  You can read more about this annual program here.  See you next year! - Leslie