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Charlottesville : LOOK3 2015

Preview

Kathy Ryan is the photo director for The New York Times Magazine and Scott Thode is a photographer. They are married and the curators of this year’s LOOK3 festival in Charlottesville, which runs June 10 – June 13, 2015.

These are some highlights from the LOOK3 Festival this year:

This year marks the 150th Anniversary of the Jefferson School, the former African American school in Charlottesville. LOOK3 is joining in the celebration by having Andrea Douglas, the Executive Director of Charlottesville’s Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, talk about the visual history of the school and Vinegar Hill, the historic area where it is situated. There will be a pasting of vintage graduation photos on the Violet Crown Cinema Wall. Douglas will also be showing images from a recently discovered body of photographs by Gundars Osvalds, a local photographer who documented the Vinegar Hill area in 1963 just prior to an urban renewal project that razed the neighborhood.

The powerful work of Zanele Muholi will be featured on the Freedom of Speech Wall, one of the most important venues we have at LOOK3. It is a permanent two-sided wall in Charlottesville on which people can write comments with chalk. For LOOK 3 we have created a wall of Muholi’s images right across from it, for people to respond to. It is an activist approach that appealed to Muholi. She has documented stories of violence against the black lesbian and transgender communities of South Africa. The wall will display portraits from her Faces and Phases portrait series, and a new series, Of Love & Loss. She founded Inkanyiso in 2009, a nonprofit organization concerned with visual activism and media advocacy on behalf of the LGBTI community.

One of the most important photography books published this year is Songbook by Alec Soth. Photographs from this book will be exhibited at Second Street Gallery. These images were made by Soth as he traveled the U.S. from 2012 – 2014 in search of people striving to connect with each other. In addition to the installation of prints on the gallery wall, we will be projecting slides of all the images in the book using a Kodak Carousel Projector.

In this year’s festival two photographers look back to rediscover work in their archives. Larry Fink’s The Beats and David Alan Harvey’s Tell It Like It Is are photo essays they did when they were just starting their careers and it is fascinating to see how this early work is a precursor of what was to come. Fink, who won this year’s International Center of Photography Infinity Award for Art, began this historic work featuring “delusionary revolutionaries” in 1958 at the age of 18 in Greenwich Village. Larry’s talk at the Paramount with the novelist Donald Antrim is sure to be memorable. Harvey’s Tell It Like It Is was originally shot in 1967 when he was just 23 and in graduate journalism school in Missouri. This black and white photo story documenting one month in the life of a family in Norfolk, VA will be a revelation to viewers who know Harvey primarily for his lush, color work. Two other shows of Harvey’s will also be featured at McGuffey Arts Center this year, Haenyeo (Sea Women) and Rio.

This is the first time a sports photographer will be featured at LOOK3. Who better to celebrate than Walter Iooss, who has been photographing legendary athletes for over 50 years? Iooss’s iconic images of Michael Jordan, Serena Williams, Pele, and other superstars hold court in The Haven, a community space that occupies a beautifully renovated church.

Vincent J. Musi is part of the heart and soul of LOOK 3. He has been the “Voice of the Festival” since the beginning. Vincent’s work and talk at the Paramount Theater will take a quirky look at our relationship to animals through the world of exotic pets and domestication. He likes being an animal photographer “despite the fact that his subjects growl, bark, roar, bite, hiss, claw, poop, and pee on him.” His exhibit, Estuary, features strikingly beautiful images from the eight years he spent photographing South Carolina’s ACE Basin.

Piotr Naskrecki is an entomologist and photographer based at Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. He makes delightful portraits of invertebrate insects, arachnids, and their kin. In Naskrecki’s hands, the creatures become witty, mischievous characters with lots of personality. These pictures are installed on the TREES in the downtown mall in Charlottesville.

Monica Haller has built a body of work authored collaboratively by her and dozens of people who have been directly affected by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This collection of deeply personal photographs, writings, and memorabilia, titled The Veterans Book Project, will be presented at LOOK3. This library of approximately 50 books will be presented in an intimate setting at “The Garage” where people will be able to sit on couches and chairs to read them.

While the exhibits are wonderful at LOOK3, the heart of the festival beats at The Paramount Theater where each artist can be seen giving a talk or in conversation with someone. This is perhaps the thing that really distinguishes LOOK3 from other photography festivals. We emphasize hearing directly from the artists, getting their insights on their art and life.

There have been huge changes since we last curated the festival four years ago. Cell phone photography and Instagram were in their infancy in 2011. Now they are a huge part of the photographic dialogue. Friday night’s evening screenings at the nTelos Wireless Pavilion will consist solely of cell phone photography. This work will incorporate painting, sculpture, film, dance, and music. There will be lots of heartfelt stories, memorable pictures, and timely photographic projects shown that night.

Saturday night’s screenings will feature exciting new work by both renowned and emerging photographers including Bieke Depoorter, Katy Grannan, Olivia Locher, Adam Magyar, Andrew Moore, Christopher Payne, and others. They are all connected in the sense that they are doing some of the most meaningful and provocative work today.

We just got some great news. Sally Mann will be joining us on Friday, June 12, to give a reading from her extraordinary new, best-selling memoir Hold Still at the Paramount Theater.

 

http://www.look3.org

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