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.

Carl Corey
carlcorey.com

Carl Corey is a Guggenheim Fellow in Photography and the recipient of over 100 awards from the photography and publishing communities including National INDIE Book Publishers Best Photography Book, The Crystal Book Award, Midwest Publishers Gold Book Award, New York Art Directors Club, Communication Arts, Print Annual and USA National Best Book Awards. Carl’s work has been featured in many of photography’s most prestigious periodicals, including Camera Work Bicentennial Edition, Communication Arts, Columbia Journalism Review and Visual Communication Quarterly. Carl’s work is in many art collections and museums.

Corey’s photographs have been the subject of five monographs including: Rancher (Bunker Hill / GalleryPrint, 2007), The Tavern League: A Portrait of the Wisconsin Tavern ( The Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2011), For Love and Money: A Portrait of the Family Business (WHS Press, 2014), The Strand ~ A Cultural Topography of the American Great Lakes (Cottage Industry Arts 2021) and Pants On Fire (Cottage Industry Arts 2024). He is a featured photographer in Contemporary Photography in New York City, edited by Marla Hamburg Kennedy (Rizzoli, 2011).

photo@studiosaid.com
studiosaid.com

Awarded a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship in 1981 for “a year of independent study and travel abroad,” Saïd lived with the pastoral Huweitat bedu in Arabia. He sought to replicate the sojourns of al-Muttanabbi, a 10th century poet from Iraq who celebrated a purity of Arabic language that thrived far from urban centers. The experience transformed his creative centers from a focus on verbal poetry and onto that of the visual language and poetry. Saïd’s subsequent “Desert Portfolio” was first exhibited in 1984 at Vision Gallery, San Francisco and comprised the first solo exhibit of photography at the Jordan National Museum of Fine Art, Amman.

A practicing architectural photographer, Saïd was commissioned by Harvard emeritus professor Oleg Grabar and the Palestine Welfare Association (Geneva) in 1992  to document the 7th-century Umayyad mosaics in the Muslim shrine Dome of the Rock-Qubbat al-Sakhra, Jerusalem-alQuds. Two volumes resulted, “The Dome of the Rock” and “The Shape of the Holy” published by Rizzoli and Princeton University Press respectively in 1996.

Awarded a Fulbright Senior Scholar Grant in 2005, Said engaged the surviving Umayyad aesthetic legacy in Bilad al-Sham (Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria). With that archive and his visions of geometry and inter-connectedness, he works to this day.

Saïd Nuseibeh was raised in San Francisco, California and Chattanooga, Tennessee. He attended Reed College (BA in English Literature, 1980) in Portland, Oregon and Bir Zeit University, Bir Zeit, Palestine.

Ken Hawkins
kenhawkins.com

Ken Hawkins is a photojournalist who has covered politics, disasters, and conflict zones—including Vietnam, Nicaragua, and El Salvador—since 1970, working globally for publications and agencies such as TIME, Sports Illustrated, Fortune, Forbes, Paris Match, Stern, the New York Times, Newsweek, Wired, and the British Broadcasting Corporation. For over two decades, his work was represented by the premier photo agency SYGMA Paris/New York.

Ken has served on the boards of several nonprofit agencies relating to the arts, social action, and photojournalism. He was a founder of the Atlanta Photojournalism Seminar in 1973 and worked with the organization for thirty years. Ken also served as the Atlanta/Southeast chapter president of the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP), sitting on its national board and executive committee, and serving as ASMP’s national secretary.

In 2016, Hawkins authored “Jimmy Carter – Photographs 1970 – 2010” with a foreword by Carter White House Deputy Press Secretary Rex Granum.

Alan Fisher (1913-1988)

Robin Matt
Alan Fisher Instagram

Born in Brooklyn, NY in 1913, a graduate of Brooklyn Technical High School, Alan Fisher became a noted, award-winning daily news photographer in New York City while still in his twenties, taking many iconic photos of people and events, some of which are to be seen in the collections of the Library Of Congress, and elsewhere.

He began freelancing for the New York World Telegram around 1934, and shortly thereafter became a staff photographer for that paper. In 1940 he began working for the daily tabloid, PM.

His career took a new direction when, at the U.S. entry into WWII, he was tapped to work for Nelson Rockefeller’s diplomatic mission to Brazil (OCIAA), where he documented Brazilian daily life, agriculture and industry to introduce America’s new ally to the U.S. public. In the course of his duties, Fisher created many striking portraits of Brazilian farmers, workers and indigenous people. In 1944 he accompanied the FEB (Brazilian Expeditionary Force) as a war corespondent documenting their military achievements in Italy.

After the war, Alan Fisher commenced a long career as a Foreign Service Officer, serving two long tours of duty in Brazil, first in Rio De Janeiro, and later, starting in 1966, in Sao Paulo as a U.S. Consular official. In between, he managed the motion picture division of the USIA in Washington D.C.

Upon retiring to Sarasota, Florida in 1972 he kept his hand in as a part-time staff photographer for the Sarasota Journal and the Sarasota Herald Tribune.

Alan Fisher died in 1988 at the age of 75.  An archive of an estimated 1500 photos is being curated by his nephew, Robin Matt.

Cyrisse Jaffee
https://njayjaffee.com/

N. Jay Jaffee (1921–1999) was a New York photographer who captured the lives of ordinary (and sometimes famous) people, city streets and country landscapes, political movements and private moments. As Janie Welker, curator at the Heckscher Museum in Huntington, New York, noted: “He saw and recorded human activity: a lonely, windswept boardwalk; a whimsical sculpture; men sunning themselves amidst the city grime; the crisp balance of lines and light in a sparkling cityscape; a teddy bear on a clothesline. His photographs not only record the instant, they communicate the substance. The images are exquisite, enduring expositions of lights and shadow, visual textures in balanced tension. They are also filled with wit and humor, and a profound understanding of the ironies in all of our lives.”

In the 1940s and 1950s, Jaffee began photographing the Brooklyn neighborhoods in which he grew up. Manhattan also beckoned, as did Queens, and eventually Long Island. His formal training came after he had been photographing for some time. He attended classes taught by Sid Grossman, of the legendary Photo League, and met with Edward Steichen, then curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1950, two of his photographs were included in the MOMA group show “Fifty-One American Photographers.”

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Jaffee continued documenting street life in New York, as well as Paris, Canada, New England, and elsewhere. His commitment to social justice, including the anti-war and civil rights movements, led him to photograph political demonstrations, rallies, and concerts. His work also included portraits of well-known subjects, such as Yoko Ono, Pete Seeger, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Sid Grossman, Dan Weiner, Felrath Hines, and Stan Brodsky. Jaffee’s later work focused on images of the land and seascapes—dramatic or serene—poetic statements about the beauty and mystery of the natural environment.

Jaffee’s photographs have been acquired by major museums and institutions, including MOMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian, National Portrait Gallery, Library of Congress, National Museum of American Art, New York Public Library, Bibliotheque Nationale, George Eastman House, and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Exhibits include a major solo show, “Inward Image,” at the Brooklyn Museum in 1981; a 50-year retrospective in 1999, “From Coney Island to Caumsett,” at the Heckscher Museum of Art, and “N. Jay Jaffee Photographs: From Public to Personal” at the University of Maryland in 2014.

Jaffee’s work has been featured in college courses at Yale University, Skidmore College, and Binghamton University. His photographs have also appeared in many magazines and books, including American Century of Photography: From Dry-Plate to Digital, edited by Keith David, and Cityscapes: A History of New York in Images by Howard B. Rock and Deborah Dash Moore. His book of early photographs, “N. Jay Jaffee: Photographs 1947-1956,” was published in 1976.

John Milisenda

“60 Years of Family Photography”

“The subjects in my photography are my mother, father and developmentally disabled brother. I have been photographing them for over 55 years. My family photography has been in over 100 shows and are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Harry Ransom Collection and Bibliotheque de nationale, Paris. These Images have also appeared in the New York Times, and Smithsonian Magazine. My mother and father are deceased.”

Michael Benari
https://benarifoto.com/

Michael Benari is a widely-exhibited artist who lives and works in Boston and New York. He works in two media, photography and painting. The photographs are black and white using film or digital; the paintings are works on paper using oil stick and squeegee.

Meryl Meisler
http://www.merylmeisler.com
Gallery Representative: ClampArt
info@clampart.com

Meryl Meisler was born in 1951 in the South Bronx and raised in North Massapequa, Long Island, NY. Inspired by Diane Arbus, Jacques Henri Lartigue, and her dad Jack and grandfather Murray Meisler, Meryl began photographing herself, family, and friends while enrolled in a photography class at The University of Wisconsin – Madison. In 1975, Meryl moved to NYC and studied with Lisette Model, continuing to photograph her hometown, NYC street life, the infamous New York discos and sordid nightlife. A 1978 C.E.T.A. Artist Grant supported her portfolio on Jewish identity. After C.E.T.A., Meryl began a three-decade career as a NYC Public School Art Teacher. Upon retirement, she began releasing large bodies of previously unseen work, including three books, A Tale of Two Cities: Disco Era Bushwick (Bizarre, 2014), Purgatory & Paradise SASSY ‘70s Suburbia & The City (Bizarre, 2015) and New York PARADISE LOST Bushwick Era Disco (Paradise Pictures Press, 2021) Meryl lives and works in New York City and Woodstock, NY, continuing the photographic memoir she began in 1973 – sweet and sassy with a pinch of mystery. Her photography is represented by CLAMPART.