I attended last night’s AIPAD opening and was pleased to see many APAG members including the APAG Board, Grayson Dantzic, Julie Grahame, and Ernest Londa, Advisors, Howard Greenberg and Andrew Smith. Members, Valdir Cruz, Diana Edkins, James Garfinkel, Daniel Kramer, Peter Kunhardt Jr., Scotia Macrae, Patrick Montgomery, Marvin Newman, Emma Winter, and Kore Yoors, Past speakers Denise Bethel, Gail Buckland, Peter Mustardo, Jeff Rosenheim and others,

Also, despite the fire that recently destroyed much of the archive of Linda Troeller, it was great to see both Linda and Lothar Troeller. A gofundme.com account has been started to help. Also, Peter Mustardo of www.thebetterimage.com offered to talk wtih her to see if he can be of any help. Many thanks to Peter!  – by Mary Engel

Lucien Aigner, Leniel Hooker, Max Manning, Jim Brown, and manager Raleigh “Biz” Mackey, Newark Eagles, 1939.

NEW HAVEN, CONN.- The Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy, Andover, the Yale University Art Gallery, and Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library have acquired the Lucien Aigner Collection, an extraordinary archive of photographs, negatives, recordings, film, books, magazine clippings, letters, and journalistic writings.

A pioneer of 1930s photojournalism, Lucien Aigner (1901–1999) belonged to the generation of photographers that included Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Alfred Eisenstaedt, and Erich Salomon. Embracing the introduction of 35mm film and fast, small, lightweight cameras, these artists changed the face of photography, making candid images that captured contemporary life with powerful immediacy.
Born in Hungary in 1901, Aigner began his career as a reporter, then became a photojournalist for Az Est, a Budapest daily newspaper. At the age of 25, he moved to Paris to work for James Abbe, an American freelance photojournalist. Though this job was short-lived, Aigner remained in Paris and established himself as an enterprising photojournalist—and early practitioner of the Leica camera—whose pictures of world leaders and events, as well as the city and its people, appeared in prominent photojournals such as Vu, Picture Post, and LIFE. In 1939, before the invasion of France, he immigrated to the United States, where his work appeared in such publications as the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, Look, Coronet, and Pageant. He became an announcer and eventually a producer and director at the Voice of America in the late 1940s. During the McCarthy era in the early 1950s, he was forced to leave his job. For the next 20 years or so he operated a portrait studio in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. In 1970, Aigner rediscovered a suitcase that—having survived WWII occupation—contained approximately 50,000 of his 1930s negatives. He had not opened it since 1950 when his brother, leather goods designer Etienne Aigner, emigrated from Paris and returned it to him. Several years later, the photographer closed his portrait studio to focus on the cataloguing and indexing of his collection of over 100,000 negatives. Following his death in 1999, Aigner’s family continued to catalogue, research, and care for this vast collection.

Consisting of tens of thousands of negatives and thousands of prints and contact sheets, this rare and comprehensive collection is made all the more unique by Aigner’s extensive writings that accompany virtually every image or series of images and explain the circumstances under which they were shot, and often the current events that surrounded the photo shoot. Considering himself as much a journalist as a photographer, Aigner paired text and pictures to vividly describe a range of themes, from European cafés to American prisons; from Bastille Day celebrations in Paris to amusement rides in Coney Island; from rehearsals at the Paris Opera Ballet to street life in Harlem. Documenting major European and American political and cultural events, Aigner’s archive includes portraits of world leaders and celebrities including Louis Armstrong, Josephine Baker, Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Sara Delano Roosevelt, and Haile Selassie, among numerous others. A master at timing, Aigner’s candid portraits reflect his desire to reveal the essential vulnerability of prominent figures.

For more info:

http://artdaily.com/news/86357/Photojournalist-Lucien-Aigner-s-archive-acquired-by-Yale-University–Addison-Gallery#.V54lk7grKUl

Harry Belafonte                 Whitney Houston                       Leontyne Price

Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture Acquisition of Jack Mitchell Photographs

Twenty-five Jack Mitchell photographs of important African American artists and performers are now a part of the permanent collection of the new Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

The acquisition includes lifetime vintage silver gelatin and color photographs made by Jack Mitchell over a career spanning five decades. Mitchell died in 2013 at age 88. His first ever cover photograph for a major magazine was of Haitian dancers for the May 1951 issue of Color Magazine.

The subjects include singer-songwriter Harry Belafonte, the Katherine Dunham Dance Company, actress Gloria Foster, singer Whitney Houston (in her first photo session with a professional photographer), dance company founders Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, dancer/actress Carmen de Lavallade, writers Audre Lorde and Toni Morrison, singer Odetta, actor Melvin Van Peebles, opera singer Leontyne Price, hip hop group Public Enemy, designer Willi Smith, La MaMa theatre founder Ellen Stewart, singer Donna Summer, actress Cicely Tyson, actor Ben Vereen, and dancer George White.

The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture opens September 24, 2016, on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and will reflect the richness and diversity of the African American experience. Jack Mitchell’s photographs are also in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, the Andy Warhol Museum, the John Lennon Museum, Harvard University, the Metropolitan Opera Portrait Gallery, and many others.

View all 25 photographs on the Jack Mitchell Archives website, here:

http://www.jackmitchell.com/announcements.php

Craig B. Highberger

Executive Director, Jack Mitchell Archives

http://www.jackmitchell.com

Photographer Profile – Chester Higgins, Jr.: “I believe the spirit of things exists in everything”

By David Schonauer Tuesday April 12, 2016

When something ceases to live, what is left behind?
It’s a philosophical question. It’s a religious question. And for Chester Higgins, Jr., it’s a photographic question.

Higgins has been an esteemed figure in the New York photography world for decades. A staff photographer for the New York Times from 1974 to 2014, he has been called one of the premier African American photographers of his generation, though the description is perhaps too limiting. Among his six books are Black Woman, Some Time Ago: A Historical Portrait of Black America (1850–1950), and Feeling the Spirit: Searching the World for the People of Africa.

His most recent book, Ancient Nubia: African Kingdoms on the Nile, is the result of a long-time interest in that region of the world — he has traveled to Africa every year since 1971 — and his next one, which he hopes to complete this year, is a visual narrative about the birth and evolution of spirituality and pre-biblical faith along the Blue Nile in Ethiopia and Egypt. It is called Before Genesis.

At age 70, Higgins, as inquisitive as ever, has been working on other projects as well, though he says he’s been spending too much time at the doctor recently. “The good news is that whatever he’s doing is working,” he adds. One of those projects has involved investigating spirituality in a new way — by photographing leaves.

For the past several years, Higgins has been collecting leaves that have fallen from trees in the autumn and begun to decay. His black-and-white photographs of them are exquisitely lit and abstracted in Photoshop to the point at which the leaves become nearly unidentifiable objects. They capture something essential, what Higgins calls “the spirit of the thing.”

“I believe the spirit of things exists in everything, including plant life and animal life,” he says. “So I started challenging myself to see if I could translate this spirit into an image.”

His goal, he says, is to see “the macro in the micro,” the universe in the withered residue of foliage.

His ideas are influenced by the years he has spent in Africa, surrounded by the artifacts of life and faith left by cultures that have long since disappeared.

“My love of Egyptology has stretched me and made me realize that reality is more like theater,” he says. “We are acting out a part, and our egos make us think that we are the central role in the drama, when in fact we are just going through a ceremony that comes out of the past.”

Recently, the Studio Museum in Harlem asked Higgins to contribute work to its annual “Harlem Postcards” project, in which artists interpret the neighborhood through various mediums. “In previous days, I would have gone up to Harlem and shot a representational photograph of the place,” says Higgins. “But I’ve become consumed with this other project, so instead I walked around Harlem last year picking up leaves that were dying and falling.”

The image he ended up creating, called “Harlem Spirt,” is on view through June 26. Higgins sees a connection between it and the other images he has made throughout his career as a newspaper photographer and artist, among them a striking portrait of a Muslim woman in New York and a photo of Maya Angelou dancing with poet Amiri Baraka over the ashes of Langston Hughes in the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

“What has always driven my photography is the search for the spirit of things,” he says.

The Camera Never Lies About the Photographer

Higgins grew up in rural Alabama — in the town of New Brockton — and, he says, became a photographer by accident. If you believe in accidents.

He attended the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University), where he saw a picture by the school’s official photographer, P. H. Polk, that made a deep impression on him.

“He had photographed black country people, farmers in the 1930s. They were very dignified portraits. Today you wouldn’t think that was significant. But at that time, in Alabama, the only photographs of black people you saw featured convicted felons and prostitutes,” he says. “Seeing Polk’s pictures for the first time, I realized how different they were from every other photograph I’d ever seen. And I liked that.”

Higgins studied with Polk, but never considered photojournalism as a career until he saw how powerfully persuasive it could be when used wrongly.

“When I was at Tuskegee, the civil rights movement was in full swing, and we students would sometimes go to Montgomery to protest.” he says. “Then one day I looked at a newspaper that had pictures of us, these young citizens petitioning our country. Except that’s not how the photographer chose to show us. He made us look like thugs, potential rapists and arsonists causing trouble.”

He came to know an important truth about photography. “I learned that the camera never lies about the photographer,” he says. “I had a choice: I could wail against the racism of the pictures or I could go and create photographs that would tell a contrary story.”

After graduating in 1970 Higgins went to New York in search of a teacher.

Discoveries From the Ancients

“In those days there were really no photography schools,” he says. “I went to all the newsstands and looked at the magazines that used pictures well, and I called up each photo editor and said, ‘I’m a student from Alabama and I want to be a photographer, but there’s no place I can learn. I am not looking for a job. I’m looking for someone to show me how to be a better photographer.’”

He found that person at Look magazine, the bi-weekly competitor of Life magazine. Its director of photography at the time, Arthur Rothstein, had created iconic photos of depression-era America as part of the Farm Security Administration, and he saw promise in Higgins. He mentored him and introduced him to prominent curators and photographers, including John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art and Cornell Capa, who a few years later would found the International Center of Photography.

Higgins made his first trip to Ethiopia in 1973, after learning that that African heads of state were gathering for an Organization of African Unity meeting in Addis Ababa. Thereafter he returned annually. “I used my vacation time to travel to Africa each year,” he says.

He didn’t go to get away, however.

“When I travel to Ethiopia or Africa, I’m not in search of something exotic, I’m in search of reflections of myself. In Ethiopia, I’m no longer in a society where I am a minority. I am the majority,” he said in an interview in the Times in 2015.

In the 1980s Higgins began photographing mummies in the Cairo Museum and became absorbed by the culture of ancient Egypt and the religion that it was built around — one, he notes, that is based in nature.

“Reading about this complex belief, in which deities represented aspects of nature, brought me back to the celebration of the seasons I had witnessed in my childhood,” he said in a recent interview. “The ancients honored the spirit in all things, a philosophy I apply to my image-making today.”

Higgins’s work in Africa is, he says, a search: He looks for what he calls “evidence of humanity’s spiritual legacy.” In Africa, he finds that evidence in ruins and enduring ceremonies. In Harlem, he found it in a leaf.

http://www.ai-ap.com/publications/article/17279/photographer-profile-chester-higgins-jr-i-be.html

http://www.gordonparksfoundation.org/news-and-events/gala/the-gordon-parks-foundation-10th-anniversary-awards-dinner-and-auction