As of today, December 13th, 2010, a repeal of the heinous 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' act looks to be beyond hope. The act prohibits any homosexual or bisexual person from disclosing his or her sexual orientation or from speaking about any homosexual relationships while serving in the United States armed forces. Any person supporting this inhuman, impractical and absurd effort, rooted in religion, makes me about as mad as anything. I am humbled to publish a selection from Jo Ann's series 'Proud to Serve'.

'Proud to Serve' is a portrait project featuring Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) American service members who served their country in silence or were discharged under the current law, 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell'.

There are roughly 65,000 gay service members currently serving in the armed forces. Since 1994, nearly 14,000 service members have been discharged for being gay. There are more than one million gay veterans.

Documentary photographer Jo Ann Santangelo is putting a human face on the statistics of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell'. Over the last two years she has visited the homes and documented the stories of these men and women. More than half of the portraits featured in 'Proud to Serve' took place on Jo Ann's recent, twenty-eight day, 10,167-mile road trip around the United States. All images are available in a self-published eighty-two page, full-color, limited edition photography book.
 
'Proud to Serve' is currently on exhibit at The LGBT Center 208 West 13th Street, NYC.

View the full screen magazine photo feature.

Another accomplished youngster. I'd seen one of Argentinian photographer Alejandro Chaskielberg's images illustrating a fiction piece in the New Yorker earlier this year. More recently, when I saw he was part of the Brighton Photo Festival, I visited his website and was just as thrilled by his work as I was the first time I saw it. I am particularly drawn to this series, 'Borders'; as Alejandro puts it, he is working with photography "in the border of the reality. Creating fictional scenarios with real people and situations." Chaskielberg shot on 6x6 positive film with a Rolleiflex.

Other projects include a unique series on the Argentine financial crisis in 2001, and more recently his ongoing project 'The High Tide: Native Islanders and the Community of the Paraná River Delta' which documents the Guaraní culture, and for which he received the 2009 Burn Emerging Photographer Grant. Chaskielberg was included in PDN's 30, 2009, 'Our Choice of New and Emerging Photographers to Watch'. And speaking of watching, here's Chaskielberg being interviewed in Brighton.

View the full screen magazine photo feature.

© Alejandro Chaskielberg

aCurator is proud to present images from the digital exhibition '100 Portraits - 100 Photographers: Selections from the FlakPhoto.com Archive'.

November 6-13th is Fotoweek DC, and as part of the event, the city of Washington will be transformed into a nighttime gallery. The festival has traditionally leaned toward photojournalism but is introducing an art photo component with the 100 Portraits projection this year. Andy Adams, editor and publisher of FlakPhoto.com and Larissa Leclair, photography writer and curator, are presenting an exhibition drawn from the digital archive that has developed over four years of daily updates on Flak Photo. In the new tradition of online curation and celebrating the burgeoning online photo community that Flak represents, the two made their selections together in a series of Skype video chats.

"As an added fine art component to the NightGallery projections, this screening features 100 dynamic portraits from an exciting group of contemporary photographers in all stages of their careers, each selected from the digital archive on FlakPhoto.com. Our decision to highlight work from this website celebrates the role that a thriving online photography community plays in the discovery and dissemination of work produced by significant artists in the Internet Era. Contemporary photo culture is marked by a continuous flow of images online, and our aim is to take a moment to recognize some of the noteworthy photographs published in this ever-expanding archive over the past four years. In this context, projected several times larger than life, these portraits look back at us and embody a louder voice in the discourse of the gaze." - Andy Adams + Larissa Leclair

100 Portraits -- 100 Photographers: Selections from the FlakPhoto.com Archive from FlakPhoto.com on Vimeo.

ClampArt is very pleased to present an exhibition of work by artist Lori Nix, her first solo show at the gallery.

Since the mid-1990s, Lori Nix has been building tiny dioramas in her studio in Brooklyn which she then photographs with a large-format 8 x 10-inch camera. The monumental prints that are produced showcase the wondrous and obsessive care that goes into every minute detail of Nix's breathtakingly convincing miniatures.

For her newest body of work, "The City" (2005-2010), Nix has been constructing indoor, post-apocalyptic, urban scenes imagining what the city may look like when all the humans are dead and gone.  As critic, Sidney Lawrence, wrote in 'Art in America':  "The implications of Nix's tableaux never seem to stop.  Oddly endearing, terrifying and often electrifyingly plausible, they prod us to ponder the fact that, like it or not, our fate is uncertain."

Due to the great pains the artist takes in attending to every last feature of her constructions, some of the artworks, such as her new masterpiece, "Map Room," require up to six months to realize. Thus, Nix's scenes are highly planned in advance, and her output notably small.  ClampArt has been patiently waiting three years for the artist to produce enough work to mount a solo exhibition.

Lori Nix has received several photography awards. She is a 2004 New York Foundation for the Arts Individual Artist Grant recipient.  In 2001 she was awarded a residency at Light Work (an internationally recognized photography organization in Syracuse, New York). Nix was a 1999 recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Grant; a 1998 recipient of a Greater Columbus Ohio Arts Grant; and she participated in the Artist in the Market-place program at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in 2000.  Museum exhibitions include 'Fresh! Contemporary Takes on Nature and Allegory' at the Museum of Glass, Tacoma, Washington; 'Picturing Eden' and "Vital Signs" at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York; Katonah Museum of Art's 'I Love the Burbs' in Katonah, New York; and 'Innocence' at the New Britain Museum of Art, New Britain, Connecticut; to name just a few. Her work is represented in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; George Eastman House, Rochester, New York; Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas; and the El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, Texas; among many others. - Brian Clamp, Director.

The City opens at ClampArt, NYC, on November 4th and runs through December 18th, 2010.

View the full screen magazine photo feature.

aCurator is proud to support Aperture Foundation.

Paul Strand (born 1890, New York; died 1976, Orgeval, France) was one of the great photographers of the twentieth century. As a youth, he studied under Lewis Hine at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, going on to draw acclaim from such illustrious sources as Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen. After World War II, Strand traveled around the world - from New England to Ghana, France to the Outer Hebrides - to photograph, and in the process created a dynamic and significant body of work. During the 1970s, major exhibitions of his work were displayed internationally, cementing his reputation as one of the greatest American photographers.

'Paul Strand in Mexico' is an exhibition of over a hundred photographic works including vintage prints and previously unseen documents and ephemera related to Strand's time in Mexico and is accompanied by a printed volume that documents the complete photographic works made by Strand during his 1932-34 trip to Mexico as well as a second journey in 1966 -- a total of 234 photographs, 123 of which have never before been published.

The exhibition is at Aperture through November 13th but you can see Strand's 'The Mexican Portfolio', presented by Aperture, at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, through January 2, 2011.

When reviewing the book 'reGeneration²' from Aperture earlier this year, I noticed the mysterious photograph by Kalle Kataila. Investigating further I discovered this ethereal body of work that engulfed me and took me on a journey across the world and through time. Kalle is "a Helsinki-based photographer whose work is based around concepts of landscape and how personal narratives attribute to our understandings of these spaces." Born in 1977, Kalle is young yet thoroughly well collected and exhibited - across Europe, in the US, China, Russia and Korea, both as part of the reGeneration² touring show and independently, and with work in the Finnish State Art Collections, Museé de l'Elysée in Lausanne and more. He's also a member of the impressive Helsinki School.

The reGeneration² exhibition travels to Milan in November and comes to New York in January 2011.

View the magazine full screen photo feature.

Buy a print of 'Shepherd'. Buy 'reGeneration²'.

Read an interview with Kalle from the National Post, Canada.

Shepherd, 2008 © Kalle Kataila