ERNEST STONE | 1918-1992

erneststone.com

Contact Melissa Berman at erneststoneart@gmail.com

Ernest Stone was a very public figure in New York City in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s —

a top 40 disc jockey with WMCA, broadcast personality on WNET Channel 13, actor,

and founding member of Off Broadway’s respected repertory company New Stages.

But privately, he led a second creative life, as a photographer. Walking miles each day

through the neighborhoods of NYC, he was an intrepid chronicler of a city in a time of

transition and upheaval, on the razor’s edge between the classical and the modern.

For two decades, Stone, who was born and raised in Flatbush Brooklyn to immigrant

parents, explored his adult home of Manhattan capturing the landscape, politics,

counter-culture and people. He also experimented in abstracts, still life, and a

personal study of the shifts in a post-war Europe.

Except for a one-man show at the Rina Gallery in 1974 (entitled “New York A to Z”), Stone

eschewed the business side of fine art, preferring to keep his work almost entirely private.

Just before his death in 1992, he told his niece he was “ready for my work to be out in

the world.” Today, she is working with Augusta Edwards Fine Art to present his story and

his extensive archive, including a series of collages that supplement his photography in

intriguing ways.

Erwan Illian was an amateur photographer in the 70’s.
As he traveled to Paris, then later to the American South, landing finally in New York City in 1978, Photography was a way to discover the new world around him. Even though he never made a living as a photographer, he continued to pursue it “on the side” until he eventually stopped in 1982. Later he moved to Northern California and became a cabinet-maker.
He is now looking for ways to preserve and present some of that work, while working on a book around photos taken at CBGB’s circa 1979/1982.

BARBARA ALPER 

barbaraalper.com

Email:  barbara@barbaraalper.com

Barbara Alper is a freelance and fine art photographer with multi-faceted documentary, conceptual, and narrative portfolios. She has published photos in many distinguished journals, magazines and newspapers, such as Barron’s, Newsweek and Time, including a lengthy association as a news and feature photographer with The New York Times. Her commercial clients include Columbia University and the New York Botanical Garden, among others.

Alper is a prolific street photographer, and her artistic projects include the series Rockaway Beach, Sea Samba, and The Gulf Channel.

She has participated in numerous solo and group exhibits in Japan, Europe, Scandinavia, Australia and domestically; her photographs are included in major collections around the world, among them The Victoria & Albert Museum in London, Maison Européenne de la Photographie, FNAC, the Bibliothéque Nationale in Paris, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the International Center of Photography, The New York Public Library and The Brooklyn Museum in New York, as well as private collections.  She is represented by Getty Images Archive and Getty Images Gallery as well as Ffoto in Toronto and Tepper Takayama Fine Arts in Boston.  A Conversation with Alper about her Vintage work can be found on Ffoto’s website:

Barbara holds a B.A. in Social Work from Michigan State University, studied at the MIT Creative Photo Lab, Cambridge, MA and with renowned photographers Harold Feinstein and Lisette Model.

Based in the San Francisco Bay Area we’ve had the most amazing and fun experiences working together for over 35 years for our editorial, commercial, and non-profit clients, creating portraits and photo-journalistic images of an incredibly diverse group of people, as well as having eight solo exhibits of our documentary projects and being part of several group shows. We are curious about people and their stories, cultures, and lives, and its a wonderful thing that photography has given us the opportunities to meet them through our photo shoots, projects, and traveling. With portraits and photo-journalism often done on the same story our strengths are in storytelling, showing the relationships between people and the empathy they have for each other, producing images with hope, and getting people to reveal themselves in a genuine way. 

We collaborate in numerous ways when working on a project or a quick photo shoot – from meeting with the client when that’s possible, to scouting locations, to creating and discussing the concept, to the shoot itself when we are trading cameras back and forth trying different ideas to see what’s working and what’s not, as well as trying a variety of lighting schemes and compositions. Our clients include Stanford University, TechWomen, Goodwill Industries, The Silicon Valley Community Foundation, The Family Caregivers Alliance, and The Girl Scouts of Northern California.

Sofia Loren, 1967 – Copyright Santi Visalli