Heritage Auction Galleries will offer a broad selection of both classical and contemporary photographs in its first-ever art photography auction. On-line bidding begins November 14th and ends at 10 pm (CST) the evening before the physical auction. Floor and web-cam bidding begins Friday, December 12th at 10 am (CST). The final session begins at 2 pm (CST). Please request a free printed catalogue at http://www.HA.com . You can also view the catalogue online at: http://fineart.ha.com/common/auction/catalog.php?SaleNo=5015 .

Highlights include the only known formal portrait of Jacqueline Onassis made after 1963 (Estimate $8,000-10,000) and a rare Jock Sturges 'Portfolio for the Defense', with four signed prints in an unfinished limited edition ($6,000-8,000). A pristine 40 x 30 in. portrait of Ernest Hemingway by Karsh, printed by the artist specifically for the consignor in 1968 after visiting Karsh's exhibition in the Canadian Pavilion at Expo '67, will also be in the auction ($25,000-30,000)

Also on offer is an unusual Fifty Year Commemorative Portfolio of Paul Strand's 1931 film 'Redes' by Ned Scott. The portfolio, which is cased in the original wood veneer slipcase, contains two folios of 20 platinum prints by Paul Strand and 12 silver prints by Ned Scott, printed and signed by Ned Scott with a commemorative text folio by several contributors, including Manual Alvarez Bravo. All of this is in Spanish, signed and inscribed to Gunter von Fritsch, the film's editor. This lot also includes 43 vintage 5 x 7 Ned Scott film stills taken on location; 19 4 x 3 vintage 'snaps' of the film set; 34 35 mm contact proof strips; and one 35 mm film transparency of a young boy holding a set clapper; all from the estate of Gunter von Fritsch and offered for the first time at auction ($30,000-50,000). A group of three vintage images relating to Robert Kennedy, Jr.'s assassination is also on offer, plus a photo of J.F.K. in his office by Jacques Lowe.

Original photographs by other important 20th-century artists in the sale include: Harry Callahan, Helmut Newton, Baron Adolf De Meyer, Lewis Hine, André Kertész, Clarence John Laughlin, Barbara Morgan, Ansel Adams, Arthur Siegel, Louis Clyde Stoumen, Arthur Wesley Dow, Brett Weston, Dorothy Norman, Charles Harbutt, Edward Quigley, Margaret Bourke-White, W. Eugene Smith, Ray Metzker, Bradford Washington, David Douglas Duncan, Todd Webb, Ralph Gibson, Inge Morath, Alfred Cheney Johnston, Paul Caponigro, Lee Friedlander, Ilsa Bing, Walker Evans, Paul Burty Haviland, Edward Steichen, Eugene Atget, Imogen Cunningham, Horace Bristol, Ruth Bernhard, David Heath, Minor White, Wynn Bullock, Edward Weston, Manuel Bravo, Ralph Meatyard, Weegee, Cole Weston and many others.

Nineteenth-century American landscape photographers represented in the auction include: William Henry Jackson, Carleton Watkins, George Barker, Isaiah Taber and Charles Savage.

Heritage offers the opportunity for registered bidders to bid online one-month before the floor bidding begins. The floor offers live-on-line-web-cam bidding as well. The lots can be previewed Heritage Auctions-Design District Annex, 1518 Slocum Street, Dallas, TX, on Thurs - Sat, Dec 4, 5, 6 from 10 am-5 pm; Sunday, Dec 7, noon-5 pm; and Monday-Friday, Dec 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 from 10 am-5 pm. There will be a discussion and reception on Tuesday December 9th from 5:30 pm-6:30 pm. Lorraine Anne Davis and Hank O'Neal will discuss O'Neal's career and the general topic of Collecting Photographs.

For more information on the sale, condition reports, etc., contact Lorraine Davis at lorrained@ha.com , or by phone at 1-214-409-1714 or 1-800-872-6467, ext. 1714.

 

Bloomsbury Auctions, London will hold a two-part auction of photographs at 2 pm on November 20, 2008. The first half of the auction will be dedicated to a selection of remarkable photographs of London, taken by established international photographers. The second part will offer a fine selection of contemporary, 20th- and 19th-century photographs.

Prints by William Henry Fox Talbot, George Washington Wilson, Henry Dixon and Alvin Langdon Coburn provide a fascinating insight into the history of London architecture and its cityscapes, while a selection of works from John Thomson's Street Life in London give a fascinating portrayal of 19th-century London life.

George Rodger and Bill Brandt provide moving examples of the importance of photojournalism in London during the WWII (estimated at £800-1200). The pound sterling is worth about $1.64 at the current moment. Grace Robertson's and Thurston Hopkins' vintage prints provide an endearing portrayal of street life in 1950s London, while Roger Mayne's contrasting raw view of London's East End provide an unusual opportunity to purchase rare vintage prints from private collections. Burt Hardy's 'Night Scene at the Elephant and Castle, London' and Jürgen Schadeberg's 'A Peculiar Londoner' round out some of the vintage London images that will go up for auction here.

Highlights also include Yousuf Karsh's famous portrait of Winston Churchill from 1941 (£1500-2000) and significant events such as 'Coronation, Piccadilly Circus' 1953 by Wolfgang Suschitzky.

Collectable vintage prints by Lutz Dille, Swapan Mukherjee and Colin Jones provide a rounded view of the evolving cosmopolitan metropolis. Exhibition photographs by the film-maker Horace Ové from the significant show 'How We Are, Photographing Britain', Tate Britain, will be offered at auction for the first time (£1000-1500).

David Bailey's infamous Box of Pin-Ups, 1965 represents London in the swinging sixties in a highly collectable lot including 21 film stills from GG Passion (£2000-3000).

Jill Furmanovsky, Gered Mankowitz, Eric Watson and Rankin (b.1966) evoke the explosive mood of the rock and roll and punk scenes that characterised the lives of young Londoners throughout the 1970s- 90s, as seen in prints such as 'The Clash, Serpentine Gallery, London', 1978 (£1000-2000).

Cutting-edge emerging artists include Stephen Gill and Daido Moriyama. Another example of such work is a visceral birds-eye-view of the Thames created by Ebru Erülkü as a gigantic c-type print titled 'Above London #1', 2005 that measures 125 x 163 cm (£3000-4000).

In the second part of the sale, contemporary photographers include Alec Soth, Sam Taylor-Wood and Joel Meyerowitz. Jazz portraits by William Claxton, who sadly passed away last month (see http://www.iphotocentral.com/news/article_view.php/159/150/898 ), will be showcased in lots featuring portraits of Chet Baker and Billie Holiday (£1500-2000).

Answering a revival in collecting Polaroids is 'Big Nude', 1993 by Helmut Newton (£2500-3000), alongside other fashion studies by Steven Meisel and unusual fresson prints by Sheila Metzner (£3000-4000).

The founders of Magnum will be featured, including Henri Cartier-Bresson's 'Gandhi the day before his assassination, Birla House, Delhi, India', 1948 and rare vintage works by Robert and Cornell Capa.

The auction includes classic photographs by Alfred Stieglitz, Frantisek Drtikol, André Kertész, Brassaï, William Klein, Emmanuel Sougez, Édouard Boubat, Man Ray, Paul Strand, Imogen Cunningham, Leonard Misonne, Clarence John Laughlin, Barbara Morgan, Sasha or Cami Stone and Berenice Abbott.

Five lots are dedicated to the seminal photography publication Camera Work, the highlight of which showcases the work of its editor Alfred Stieglitz in a selection of plates from no.36, 1911 (£10,000-15,000). Other lots include works by Edward Steichen, Paul Strand and Alvin Langdon Coburn (£1500-1200).

Nineteenth-century images include mammoth plates from Francis Frith, an 1843 daguerreotype of Turkey by Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey, and other photographs from Rev. Calvert Jones, Eugene Atget, Julia Margaret Cameron and Captain Linnaeus Tripe.

The sale will start at 2 pm on Thursday November 20th. Previews will
be held in London, from November 15-20, and by appointment. The specialist in charge is Zoe Bingham who can be reached by email at zoe.Bingham@bloomsburyauctions.com and by phone at +44 (0) 20 7495 9494. The auction catalogue can be ordered from the auction house or can soon be found online at: http://www.bloomsburyauctions.com and clicking through to upcoming Sale Calendar and Catalogues at the menu in the upper left.

 

Newsletter readers can now finally see our Annual End-of-the-Year Holiday sale on I Photo Central, which is brought to you by all of the website's photography dealers. For those of you who were trying to connect to the web links below earlier, they are now functional. Remember the sale was only supposed to start November 1st, so more photos may be added later. These items are available at special sale prices (from 20 to over 60% off the regular list price) from today until December 19th. 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 during this same time period. 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.

And, just a further reminder, 129 new images have been posted up to the I Photo Central website in just the last week alone. You can see some of those great new items at: http://www.iphotocentral.com/search/result_list.php/16/14/0 .

 

Beginning Friday, October 31 through January 15, 2009, a major new exhibition on Lee Friedlander's New Mexico photographs can be viewed at the Andrew Smith Gallery at 203 W. San Francisco St., Santa Fe, NM. The work can also be seen online at I Photo Central at: http://www.iphotocentral.com/showcase/showcase_view.php/190/14/0 . For an even more complete view of Friedlander's work on the I Photo Central website, just go to: http://www.iphotocentral.com/search/result_list.php/256/Lee+Friedlander . Currently 86 images are available for purchase.

Lee Friedlander ranks as possibly America's greatest photographer. For over 50 years he has prodigiously photographed what he calls the "American social landscape" with an unflinching eye for realism. Friedlander first began photographing in New Mexico in the late 1960s. Today this work is part of an ongoing series of Western landscapes he has been working on for decades.

The exhibit features photographs taken between 1995 and 2005 in Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Gallup, Chimayo, and Diablo Canyon, where Friedlander's fondness for vernacular urban and wilderness areas is evident.

Lee Friedlander will be in the gallery for the opening reception this Friday, Oct. 31, 2008 from 5 to 7 pm to meet the public and sign copies of his newest publication, "Lee Friedlander: New Mexico", published by Radius Books, Santa Fe, NM (2008).

 

BE-HOLD AUCTION RESCHEDULED FOR NOV. 5TH

The 52nd Be-hold catalog/internet auction of photographs will take place Wednesday, Nov. 5th, starting at 1 p.m. (Eastern Standard Time). The catalog and web absentee auction will take place on Wednesday, Nov. 5th, starting at 1 p.m. (EST). Subscription forms for the print catalog, color scans, condition reports, the actual catalogue on line, and further information can be found on the be-hold web site at http://www.be-hold.com , by calling Larry Gottheim at 1-914-423-5806 or emailing him at behold@be-hold.com .


PHOTO REVIEW BENEFIT AUCTION IS ONLINE NOW

The Photo Review Benefit Auction is now online at: http://www.photoreview.org/auction.htm . You can preview the work and submit absentee bids. You can also take advantage of the "end this auction" feature by bidding the high estimate through November 6, 2008, 5:00 pm. A preview at the University of the Arts, Dorrance-Hamilton Building, Broad and Pine Streets, Philadelphia, PA, will be held on Friday, November 7 from 11 am-5 pm, and on Saturday, November 8 from 11 am-6 pm. The auction will take place on Saturday, November 8 at 7 pm at the University of the Arts in the Dorrance-Hamilton Building on Broad and Pine Streets in Philadelphia. Proceeds from the auction, a popular event since 1983, fund such activities as an annual juried competition for emerging photographers. Admission is free with purchase of the fully illustrated catalog, available through The Photo Review, phone 1-215-891-0214; fax: 1-215-891-9358; email: info@photoreview.org . Buyers may preview the auction on-line, and place bids at http://www.photoreview.org/auction.htm . No buyer's premiums are added to this non-profit money raising auction.


VILLA GRISEBACH AUCTION ON NOV. 27TH

On November 27 at 3 pm, Villa Grisebach Auktionen will hold its fall auction in modern and contemporary photography in Berlin with around 250 lots for sale. A printed catalogue is available from the auction house, and it can also be viewed on their website a few weeks before the actual auction. A preview exhibition of selected works from the collection will be held at Villa Grisebach Auktionen GmbH, Fasanenstraße 73, 10719 Berlin from November 22–26, Sat.-Tues. 10am-6:30pm, Wed., 10am-5pm. For details, see https://www.villa-grisebach.de/en/catalogues/listview/ . For more information, contact Franziska Schmidt (head of the photography department), phone: +49 30-885 915-0, extension -27; fax: +49 30-885915-4627 (from the U.S. dial 011 then the number); or email: f.schmidt@villa-grisebach.de .

 

By Matt Damsker

GEGOSSENES LICHT--CAST LIGHT, SCULPTURE
IN PHOTOGRAPHY, 1845-1860.
2008, catalogue published by Galerie Daniel Blau, Munich, Germany. Approximately 100 plates. ISBN No. 978-3-00-024045-4; information: http://www.danielblau.com ; email: contact@danielblau.com .

As Daniel Blau points out in this catalogue's helpful end note, the emergence of photography in the mid-19th century resulted in an immediate proliferation of one-of-a-kind works of art--many of them images of original artworks, especially sculpture, with its three-dimensional presence. Indeed, these images were of value as more than reference material; early acquirers sought them to hang on their walls as treasured objects, and many of the examples Blau has collected in this catalogue are truly classic renderings of classic sculpture.

For example, J. Reynolds' and Adolphe Bilordeaux's 1855 details of the Napoleonic friezes that decorate Paris's Arc de Triomphe are carefully composed and lit to convey the fine detail and elegant context of the sculpture, while Solon's photos of statues of the Virgin and of the saints found in Parisian churches isolate the objects in a way that renders them worthy of decorative display. Then there is Edouard-Denis Baldus, who brought a first-rate eye for chiaroscuro and texture to his renderings of some of the Louvre's great statuary.

The inestimable trove of sculpture found in Paris, elsewhere in France and in Italy was certainly the richest vein of artwork photography from the medium's early days. Henri le Secq's and Bisson Freres' studies of architectural details are evocative in their use of available light, perspective, and in their eye for the ornate wonder of columns, cornices, archways, and stone. In Italy, the cameras of Fratelli Alinari captured the first great images of Florentine domes, piazzas and statuary, while more naturalistic images of Rome's aesthetic treasure and urban complexity began to flow from the lenses of Giacomo Caneva (a wonderful study of a garden-wall ruin in the Villa de Medici), Pompeo Molins (street folk candidly arrayed against the ancient walls) and James Anderson (a high-vantage 1853 shot of the Vatican and St. Peter's, seen over modest homes and rooftops).

Indeed, Anderson and Robert MacPherson were adept at rendering Roman statuary in close and potent detail, but also produced expansive, painterly, large-format images of vast gallery space in the Vatican Museum and elsewhere. As for the many ancient temples and eternally popular images of the lava-preserved Vesuvius victims of Pompeii, Firmin-Eugene Le Dien and the great Gustave Le Gray are well-represented in this catalogue, as are the some of the first photographic images of Egypt's pyramids, the Sphinx, and the statue of Ramses II at Abu Simbel by Maxime Du Camp.


FRANK PAULIN: OUT OF THE LIMELIGHT.
Introduction by Max Kozloff. Silverstein Publishing, New York. 175 pages; 175 black-and-white plates. ISBN No. 978-1-60461-922-5. Information: http://www.silversteinphotography.com .

It would be hard to imagine a better example of the "pure" American photographer than Frank Paulin. Born in Pittsburgh in 1926, he came of age in New York and Chicago, spent World War II in the U.S. Army in Europe, and came back to enroll in Chicago's Institute of Design, where his skills were further developed under the tutelage of Harry Callahan, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and eventually in New York, under Alexey Brodovitch at the New School. By the 1950s, he was exhibiting at the pioneering Limelight gallery in New York, and his doggedly unsentimental yet compassionate street photography has been with us ever since, although it took this recent exhibition to really "discover" him.

Perhaps it's just as well, from Paulin's perspective. The mark of his purity and dedication to the medium lies in the fact that he has kept to himself to the point of relative obscurity. We don't know much or hear much about him, but the venerable Max Kozloff, in his introduction to this book, makes sure we grasp what differentiates Paulin from the more iconic likes of Robert Frank, Weegee, Arbus, Winogrand or Friedlander.

"Unlike his astringent colleagues," writes Kozloff, "Frank Paulin's outlook, on the whole, was good-humored, even enthusiastic. For him, the town was a place where 'things happened,' most delightfully when least expected. There is no one general emotion evoked by his art, only curiosity. People's lives unfold for him…He is more interested in the foibles of his fellow citizens than their fears…For those of us accustomed to the bad weather and anxious expressions that came out of New York photographs at that time, Paulin offers a minority judgment--that people were by and large OK--normal human beings, in fact."

For Paulin, then, the beauty of the well-dressed lovers kissing on a Battery Park bench in 1955 is refracted by the good-natured nonchalance of the rotund, cigar-chewing old man--a beefy immigrant soul--seated next to them, a foot or so to the left. What would otherwise be an echo of countless other "kiss" photographs becomes a mixed study in having, not having, passion, and friendly dispassion, set against the big backdrop of a New York spring. Similarly, the couple glimpsed in a Times Square café window--pensive and unsure, to judge from the woman's middle-distance glance--are clearly set in their lives, and we can only imagine. The busy confluence of signage and intersecting planes all pressed against the glass, with its vague reflection of the street, out-Friedlanders Friedlander, in its own way.

Despite Kozloff's observation, there is a fair amount of anxiety evident in Paulin's shots of couples, often seen through café windows, but the point is never forced on us, and the image of a young woman in a phone booth on Halloween in Greenwich Village--she wears a mask across her eyes, but her expression is clearly one of happiness as she talks to whomever on the phone--is an antidote to Robert Frank's shots of brooding youth. Just as the shot of two poor black children holding hands in New Orleans is a reminder that youth can outshine poverty. And Paulin's image of an old couple and a young woman at different café tables is charged with self-conscious mood and an inspired compositional flair, built from an out-of-focus foreground and razor-sharp background--indeed, it's a painting as much as a photo, and on par with Hopper as much as with Avedon. So it is with many of Paulin's best photos: they are unquestionably spontaneous examples of street observation, but they are also carefully composed, with multiple layers and strong, suggestive narratives. They hold to the best tradition, yet go their own way.


REVISITING CLASSICS: NATURAL CONNECTIONS:
PHOTOGRAPHS BY PAULA CHAMLEE.
Essay by Estelle Jussim. Lodima Press, Revere, PA; hardbound; 42 black-and-white plates; ISBN No. 0-9605646-6-7 (hardcover), 0-9605646-7-5 (special edition). Information: http://www.lodimapress.com ; Paula Chamlee: 1-610-847-2005.

This was Paula Chamlee's first photography book (several others have followed from Lodima Press) and remains the cornerstone, in a way, of her artistry, which has further flourished in her images of the Texas panhandle farm where she grew up, and in her studies of San Francisco, Tuscany and elsewhere. Of them all, "Natural Connections" has the feel of a rigorous, primary journey--through the influence of Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and toward an exceptional command of the large-format black-and-white landscape tradition they pioneered.

Chamlee, who began as a painter and now partners with photographer husband Michael A. Smith from their Bucks County, PA, home, emerged in 1994 with these starkly beautiful images of Canada, Utah and California canyonlands and forest, all shot on Super XX film and printed on Azo paper. The result is a rich yet even tonality full of extraordinary detail, with tremendous depth of field and careful composition that portrays these earthly vistas and microcosms as states of mind as much as of matter. That's because Chamlee doesn't seek the dramatic, looming effects of Adams so much as an overall, meditative depiction of a rugged reality that is painterly in its detail and broad in its effect on the eye.

Thus, the primordial misting of marsh areas in Yellowstone, or the shadowed gooseneck canyons of San Juan, UT, or the treed mountainsides near Aspen, CO, invite the viewer to wade into these photographs rather than be awed by them, picking out the remarkable details of rock formation and vegetation, earth and atmosphere, from a coolly detached vantage point. Indeed, for all the immense cliffs and infinitely variegated canyons she captures, Chamlee conveys an equal, if more intimate, power in her study of a grassland near Palouse, WA--a superbly sensitive image in which every wispy blade and wildflower are sharply etched in the wide, deep frame. As Estelle Jussim notes in her essay, "Reality, abstraction, power, delicacy, rhythmic chords of contrast, visual music--here is a photographer with a vast repertory." That's true, and Chamlee, who has recently turned to filmmaking, in Iceland, apparently, is an artist worth visiting and revisiting.


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 in the fall of 2005.

(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.)

 

By Alex Novak

I was sad to see that The New York Times reported that Rives Herbert Mitchell, a noted collector of early photography and ephemera, had passed away on October 25th. I actually counted Herb as one of my own clients. I remember him as a gentle soul, whose interest and good taste in beauty and 19th-century images was exemplified in his collecting. He once bought a wonderful hand-colored daguerreotype of "Danae", a female nude with a shower of gold coins, probably made by Bruno-Auguste Braquehais. In the past, before real art and photography criticism went out of favor as it seems today, we might have called Mitchell a sensitive and true connoisseur. He just loved and found pleasure in interesting and beautiful things.

According to his attorney, Mitchell died from complications of Parkinson's disease. He was 83 at the time of his death. Mitchell was born in Bangor, ME, on November 18, 1924.

At the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia, where he worked from 1960 to 1991, and in his apartment, he assembled an extremely eclectic collection--most of which will now go to the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Met had already added to its photography collection 3,866 stereographic views of New York City that Mitchell had donated in 2007. Most of these stereos are early images of Central Park. Some of them were published in the Winter 2008 issue of the Museum Bulletin, "Creating Central Park," by Morrison H. Heckscher.

Mitchell often referred to his collections as his children. He is survived only by his sister, Dorothy Mitchell of Seattle, WA, and that collection of his "children".

 

Photojournalist Alex Rivera died October 23rd in Durham, NC at the age of 95. Rivera's photography work was focused on covering the civil rights movement, but he also did public relations work at North Carolina Central University.

Rivera was born in Greensboro, NC. His father, a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), greatly influenced his photographic direction. He attended Howard University and then worked for the Washington Tribune.

In 1939, Rivera was recruited to create the news bureau at the North Carolina College for Negroes, which later became North Carolina Central. He served in naval intelligence during World War II, and then afterwards returned to photojournalism.

Rivera covered the last lynchings in South Carolina and Alabama, and legal challenges to school segregation. He won a Global Syndicate Award in 1955. He returned to the university in 1977 and led the public relations office until he retired.

 

By Alex Novak

I do not regard this newsletter in any way political and never thought I would use it for that purpose, so pardon me for this one instance (especially my many good Republican friends). But I have come to feel that the American Presidential election this time out particularly will be too crucial for any of us to pass up the opportunity to influence its outcome.

In the past I have felt that John McCain was a decent man. While I was never impressed with his astuteness, I did appreciate his forthrightness and courage in battling for issues that--at least in his mind--were the right things to do. And I genuinely hope he goes back to doing things that way in the future.

Unfortunately, I feel the way he has run for President has been disorganized, chaotic and frankly--at times--demagogic. Yes, there are always unfortunate distortions of each candidate's positions, but the Republican Party and the McCain campaign, if not the man himself, has stooped to new lows with its under-the-radar campaign of slurs made by robo-calls and email. These smears have created an atmosphere of hatred, bigotry and divisiveness that can only harm our country. His further choice of Sarah Palin, herself a dangerous, divisive demagogue and anti-intellectual, as a running mate clearly indicated the degree he would stoop to win at any cost. It is a sad commentary on a man who was defeated by similar tactics in 2000 in South Carolina.

On the other hand, I continue to be impressed with Barack Obama's intelligence, coolness under fire and organizational abilities. He has surrounded himself with strong but moderate advisors, and understands how to listen and make good, balanced decisions. Neither the U.S.A., nor the world needs another cowboy in the White House. If you want a beer with someone, go ask your neighbor, or even Sarah and Todd Palin. But what we need in the White House now is the leadership, intelligence and skill of Barack Obama and his running mate Joe Biden. I urge all of my readers to vote for them and to do all that is possible to help get them elected. Take nothing for granted this time. It is too important not to vote for balance, effectiveness, honesty and intelligence in these very troubling times.