In the rush of the holidays, which are this year sandwiched between two major photography fairs for us (AIPAD Photography Miami and Photo LA), I myself have hardly felt the spirit that such a time should bring out in each of us. But I am working on it.

In Miami, every hotel and restaurant was decked out in Christmas and Chanukah tinsel and decorations, as if to make up for the unseasonable weather there (sunny and in the 80s F). But this is hardly what the season should really be about. It should be about reaching out to others with charity, warmth and love.

Of course, up here in the Northeast where I live just north of Philadelphia, it is not exactly looking like Christmas either (although we may have an ice storm shortly as I write these words). But what the landscape looks like and just how the decorations are hung shouldn't be all that necessary to the holiday spirit.

What are necessary are an open heart and a spirit of kindness and brotherhood. That's what this season is really all about no matter your religious (or non-religious) orientation.

Keep this in mind when you are buying all those "things". Reserve some of your funds and this next year maybe even some of your time for those of our brothers and sisters who are less fortunate than us. I am not suggesting that you become a "Scrooge" to your family, but rather engage them in opening their hearts to others. It may be the most important gift you can give them.

Be creative. Brainstorm ideas on how to do this with your family and friends. There are so many people in need all over the world, perhaps unnecessarily. And don't feel bad if you think it is too late for this holiday season. Here's a secret: people need your help all year round--perhaps even more AFTER the season of "giving" has passed.

And, as I suggested two years ago (http://www.iphotocentral.com/news/issue_view.php/106/99 ), it wouldn't hurt to start demanding that all our politicians, all over the world, stand up for peace and for justice. I am fully aware though that in many places this would be very dangerous indeed. And we need to press such nations to provide basic liberties within their own cultural systems--freedom of speech and the right of citizens everywhere to demonstrate without fear of reprisals for their own views.

If we are to compete with certain radical elements, we must provide a better example than they do, including providing basic humane aid to maintain a reasonable standard of living for all the world's people. That will be the point that our holiday season--whatever it is called--will truly be one of joy and happiness.

So, Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, Joyeux Noel, Happy Kwanza, Happy Solstice, Eid al-Adha, Muharram, Happy New Year and Bonne Annee. If I missed one or two greetings, I apologize and offer you my best wishes of the season.

 

IT'S A GIRL! German photo dealers Annette and Rudolph Kicken have a new baby girl. Mother and daughter are doing fine. It was the reason that neither of them were in the Kicken booth at Art Basel Miami. Congrats to the parents.

WHAT'S IN A NAME ANYWAY? Is it Art Basel Miami? Art Basel Miami Beach? ABM (sounds like a new missile guidance system)? ABMB? The folks at Art Basel are going to be lost without their founding director, Sam Keller, especially with this name thing getting a bit out of whack this year. No one could quite figure out what to call the show this year after years of calling it and grimacing at the same time: "Art Basel Miami". Suggestion: leave it alone.

LEONARD VERNON LEAVES THE SCENE. Los Angeles collector Leonard Vernon, a founding member of the Getty Museum Photographs Council, has died. Weston Naef emailed council members about the passing: "Leonard and his wife, Marjorie, were serious collectors of photographs long before the Getty jumped on board in 1984 and his presence will be greatly missed. As a family, the Vernons have lent support and encouragement to museums from Santa Barbara to San Diego and from Malibu to Riverside. With its holdings in depth of Ansel Adams, Josef Sudek, Edward Weston and many, many other photographers, the Vernon Collection has been a generous lender to numerous Getty exhibitions, including Edward Weston: Enduring Vision that is now on view. A service was held at Hillside Memorial at 11:00 a.m. on Wednesday, October 31."

MARVIN COHEN PASSES AWAY. Yet another Getty Photographs Council loss: new member Marvin Cohen passed away. With his wife, Anne, Cohen was an avid collector of studio glass, contemporary ceramics, art deco furniture, and photography. The Cohens' interest in photography began in 1989 with classic mid-century black-and-white photography, but evolved to include large-scale color work. Anne will remain on the council.

JACK NAYLOR PASSES AWAY. Nearly immediately after selling his photography and photographica collection at Guernsey's in New York City this October, Jack Naylor, who attended the auction in a wheelchair, passed away. Jack was a dear man and a longtime collector known affectionately by everyone in the photography field. His health had been rapidly deteriorating over the past year. He claimed to have taken the famous photograph of Margaret Bourke-White in front of a plane in a heavy leather jacket, and was friends with photographers Bourke-White, Bradford Washington and Harold Edgerton--among others.

MARKET TEST. Christie's will test the market for Diane Arbus and William Eggleston photographs next year when it sells the Bruce and Nancy Berman collection of over 2,500 photographs across three separate auctions. The Arbus group will sell in the April 2008 auction and the Eggleston's in October 2008. The rest of the collection from early American masters such as Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange to post war luminaries will be sold off in April 2009. The collection is one of the largest and most important of its kind to be privately held in Southern California. Selections have been publicly exhibited, most recently at the J. Paul Getty Museum in the fall of 2006. "Where we live: Photographs of America from the Berman Collection" was an exhibition of 170 prints by 24 important contemporary artists. The catalogue from this show was reviewed in an earlier E-Photo Newsletter.

NEW DIGS. The Southeast Museum of Photography opened its new building in Daytona Beach, FL last month. The facility will more than double the museum's gallery, support and program spaces in the new Mori Hosseini Center on the Daytona campus of Daytona College. Located directly on International Speedway Boulevard, the complex will also house Daytona College's renowned culinary program and restaurant. The center promises to be an important landmark cultural destination, and a major addition to the cultural life of Florida.

 

The special End-of-the-Year Holiday sale on I Photo Central, brought to you by all of the website's photography dealers, has been extended for one more week. These items are available at special sale prices (from 20 to over 60% off the regular list price) only until December 22nd. Many of the items' regular list prices were reduced earlier, so the actual net reductions may be well over 40% to 80% in many instances. These are all final prices, so no other discounts apply. Shipping/insurance will also be added, plus you will be responsible for any applicable taxes or customs fees.

There are some great deals, so check them out soon at: http://www.iphotocentral.com/sale/sale.php .

If you want to do further sorts on the sale list, you can go to the Search Images page at http://www.iphotocentral.com/search/search.php and put HolidaySale1 into the key word field. Then you can also use the other search fields, such as price range, country, date range, etc. When you have all your choices made, simply hit the Search button (not the Show All Images button). When you put in the key word, you must have the capital letters in properly and no space between the words or the number "1". Also make sure you do not have any extra space after the key word. This way if you are bargain hunting, you can put in a range from $1 to $500, or if you want to focus on the top end, just put in a range from $1000 (or $5000) to No Limit.

We are also running a special Holiday Book Sale offer on most of the books posted up on line at a 20% discount price. You will also save shipping costs if you order $250 or more per dealer. There are many very low priced photography books listed on the site that can fill in your library or make great holiday presents. And many more books will be added to the list over the next month (and beyond), so keep checking back.

The Book Sale can also be found at: http://www.iphotocentral.com/sale/sale.php .

While the books can be searched on the regular Search pages with the drop-down menu on media (just select "books"), we expect to soon have an entirely separate photography bookstore--the first such multi-dealer version on the web.

I encourage bookstores with a photography orientation to contact me at 1-215-822-5662 for details on how to join I Photo Central and put inventory into this new internet resource. And I encourage our newsletter readers to go and see the many rare photography books currently on sale on the site. Many are rare first editioned and signed copies. Others will make great additions to any research library.

 

By Matt Damsker

ODALISQUES & ARABESQUES: ORIENTALIST PHOTOGRAPHY 1839-1925.
By Ken Jacobson. 2007, Quaritch Ltd., London; 308 pages, approximately 500 illustrations, 85 full-page tritones; hardback. ISBN No. 978-0-909550852-5-3. Bernard Quaritch Ltd., 8 Lower John St., Golden Square, London, W1F 9AU; phone: +44 (0)20 7734 2983; fax: +44 (0)20 7437 0967. Email information: a.payne@quaritch.com ; http://www.quaritch.com .

Ken Jacobson's passion for 19th-century photography long ago trumped his original career path in scientific research (with degrees in chemistry and biophysics from Princeton University and King's College, respectively). Now, after decades as a photography collector and historian, Jacobson has produced an important work with this study of Orientalist photography from North Africa and the Middle East.

As Jacobson notes: "The chosen title for this book incorporates two powerful symbols of the Orient, both of which had an allure for Westerners in the 19th century merely because of the degree of exoticism they embodied." Indeed, the odalisque, or female slave, had provoked the Western imagination ever since Ingres' great painting, "La Grande Odalisque," was exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1819. As for the arabesque--an intricate geometric pattern, based on flowing lines, which adorns Eastern art and architecture in response to the Islamic prohibition against figurative imagery--it represents something of a countervailing motif to the odalisque.

The fascination with these uniquely Orientalist symbols, and the Mysterious East in general, resulted in many of early photography's most evocative images. Jacobson chronicles how, a mere 80 days after the daguerreotype process was announced to the world in 1839 in Paris, the painter Horace Vernet presented the ruler of Egypt, Mohammed Ali, a photograph taken of the exterior of Ali's harem compound. Astonished, Ali at first condemned the photo as the devil's work, but soon allowed the Europeans access to the harem to take more pictures. The floodgates opened quickly, and Oriental motifs defined much of photography's early efforts, while Oriental style and the powerful swirls of the arabesque made their way into the homes of bourgeois Europe.

Jacobson's points out, though, that "only a small body of successful studies of the Orient remains from photography's first ten years," but he has marshaled his research to provide a great deal of excellent information, not least of which is a table of the photographers working in the Middle East and North Africa prior to 1860. Many important names are here, of course: Felice Beato, Alphonse Durand, Roger Fenton, Francis Frith, James Robertson, and so on, although most of the photographers listed were studio artists or else stuck to photographing monuments (which stood still, after all, during the necessarily long exposure times).

As Jacobson notes, Eastern photography did not begin to flourish until 1840, when William Henry Fox Talbot's positive/negative paper process and other practical modes had taken hold. Jacobson details the intricacies of process and how they influenced subject matter--for example, the chiaroscuro quality inherent in paper negatives imparted an abstract element that foretold photographic modernism in, for example, the Jerusalem images of Auguste Salzmann, who emphasized structure, mass and line in his studies of Eastern ruins. By the time Francis Frith was photographing in Egypt in 1856--and largely because of his work--an aesthetic richness had taken hold in Orientalist photography that would bring it closer to the reality of the street and indigenous populations.

Jacobson's narrative is a compelling one, as he chronicles the increasing skill with which photographers would portray local people as the 1870s wore on, especially the photographs of the mysterious H. Bechard, or the superb odalisques of Claude-Joseph Portier. By the time of what Jacobson calls "High Orientalism," beginning in the 1900s, "a few practitioners pushed the Eastern fantasy to its limits. They produced visions that were a hybrid-cross of the most implausible Orientalist paintings and the exuberant spirit of the new medium of cinema."

Mannered as it may have been, this era, on the eve of modernism, brought heightened drama and a new glamour to things, especially in the studio work of Rudolf Lehnert and Heinrich Landrock.

As a purely informational work, Jacobson's study offers a great deal--detailed biographies of more than 90 key photographers, an extensive bibliography, and depictions of the stamps, logos, numbering style and signatures of many artists, which is a boon to the attribution of anonymous or mistakenly identified works. Just as important, though, is Jacobson's willingness to take on the conventional wisdom of the postcolonialist condemnation of Orientalism by the likes of Edward Said and others, who dismiss 19th-century photography of the Middle East as steeped in an implicit agenda of Western superiority and exploitation. Jacobson has done his homework, and cites the ambiguity of photographic images, especially over time. Steeped in scholarship and a collector's fervor, Jacobson's book adds not only to what we know, but also to what we must debate.


Matt Damsker is an author and critic, who has written about photography and the arts for the Los Angeles Times, Hartford Courant, Philadelphia Bulletin, Rolling Stone magazine and other publications. His book, "Rock Voices", was published in 1981 by St. Martin's Press. His essay in the book, "Marcus Doyle: Night Vision" was published this past November.

(Book publishers, authors and photography galleries/dealers may send review copies to us at: I Photo Central, 258 Inverness Circle, Chalfont, PA 18914. We do not guarantee that we will review all books or catalogues that we receive.)