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• Issue #72
• Article

You will find six new Special Exhibits up on I Photo Central, added to the other current 18 exhibits that were already on display. We have also continued to change images and add to our essays for all our Special Exhibits, so they are all worth another peek, especially if you have not looked lately.

"Bodies of Light: 20th-Century Female Nudes" is provided by Vintage Works, Ltd. The female body had long been used for artistic inspiration. From classic Greek sculpture to photography, artists have explored sensuality. The photographers represented in this portfolio range from the very well known (Karl Struss, Laure Albin-Guillot, Germaine Krull, Alfred Cheney Johnson, Ergy Landou, Jack Welpott, Elliot Erwitt and Frantisek Drtikol) to up-and-coming contemporary artists (Robert Asman, Ted Jones, Margaret Cressman, Paul Cava and Lynn Bianchi) to anonymous or nearly unknown creators.

The Special Exhibit "European Panorama & Mammoth Photochroms" has been created by Christopher Cardozo Fine Art. In 1889, brilliantly colored photographic prints made by a carefully guarded, patented Swiss process won a gold medal at the World Exposition in Paris. To a public familiar only with black & white photographs, these full-color prints were astounding in their day for their clarity and realism. Photochrom, a magic word that triggered in our grandparents a curious collector's zeal, as well as a strong yearning for faraway places, was developed in Zurich, Switzerland in the mid-1880s by the firm of Orel Fussli & Co. (Photoglob). Dated around the turn of the last century, these rare prints include grand scenes of Switzerland, Germany, France, Spain, Morocco, Italy, India, Austria and Belgium, and range in size from 6.5" x 17.5" to 16.5" x 20.5".

Just in time for the baseball season, Charles Schwartz, Ltd. has completely revised his Special Exhibit: "Great Sports Photographs". This is a diverse group of sports photographs from around the world, with a little something for everyone--from 19th-century prints and cased hard images to rare, Pulitzer Prize-nominated exhibition photographs by some of the greatest sports photographers (Frank Hurley, Bill Meurer, Charles Hoff) to stop action images by experimenter Harold Edgerton.

Vintage Works, Ltd. has also added two new Special Exhibits focused on individual artists: "Joel D. Levinson: An Independent Vision of the Human Condition" and "Ted Jones: Master of the Gum Process".

Levinson is a well-known photographer with several books and over 31 one-man shows to his credit. His work is in the collections of over two dozen major museums and institutions. As fellow photographer Lou Stoumen said of Levinson's work, "Levinson's sensibility is drawn to the human condition. He works in the great tradition of realist photography...His best pictures stick in the mind and are felt in the heart." The vintage work in this online exhibition spans most of Levinson's three earliest bodies of work, including images that he took at flea markets and swap meets all over California, "Black Market" (or Mass Media Series) and a series of still lifes. The images all exhibit his fine sense of ironic humor and warm sensitivity. The prints were all made in very limited amounts around the time he was shooting this material.

Jones might be called a renaissance man: he is an Emmy award-winning cinematographer and film maker, an accomplished sculptor (seven one-man shows, plus an invitation to demonstrate his skills on the White House grounds) and a freelance photographer with picture credits including Time, Fortune and LIFE magazines. Jones is currently working in 19th-century non-silver photographic printing processes, particularly the gum-dichromatic process. He has even applied modern computer technology to a number of these 19th-century techniques. A retrospective show of Jones' gum prints was curated by Leif Preus of the Preus Fotomuseum, Norway, and was exhibited throughout Scandinavia during a two-year traveling show. The work is simply astounding for its virtuosity. Jones often uses multiple color passes and an artist's brush (used to manipulate the image while still wet) to create images that often have more in common with fine art graphics than photography. Yet these images are still grounded in the world of the real, albeit often overlaid with a strong dose of fantasy. Jones often prints in large sizes (some larger than life-size) that are very rare for this medium, which has to be worked quickly before a print dries. His images range from urban landscapes that share much with Edward Hopper's desolate vision to portraits and nudes that that take as much from Demachy's classicism as from Nan Goldin's personal sociology.

Finally, Charles Schwartz, Ltd. has also put up another new Special Exhibit entitled "Vintage New York and Central Park Photos for Under $1,000". Well almost. Some of the images actually go up to $1,200, but who is quibbling when you can find such an interesting selection of New York City images for as little as $60.

You can see these fine new exhibits, along with 18 others at: http://www.iphotocentral.com/showcase/showcase.php . We are constantly changing and updating these exhibits as we get in new items, so if you have not looked at them in the last few days, you probably have not seen a lot of the material on display even in the older Special Exhibits.