Contact Archives

This summer (July 2-August 6), in the Mott Haven section of New York City’s South Bronx, the Bruckner Gallery is presenting Departure, a group show by (from left to right in photograph below): Danny Ramon Peralta, Miguel Anaya, Mark Nevers, Bashira Webb, Lyric R. Cabral with images from their respective essays: “My Mexican-American Family, Texas”, “The Movement, Harlem”, “Elderly Addictions, a SRO hotel in Harlem”, “Ma (My Mother), Chelsea”, and “Afro-Punk, New York.” The gallery exhibition is curated by Chet Urban.*

© Robert Pledge

The five “concerned photographers” first met five years ago at The Point, a community arts organization in Hunts Point and coalesced as a group in 2005 when accepted into the Jocelyne Benzakin Fellowship. The program coordinated by Lacy Austin at the International Center of Photography gave them access to “mentors” — all respected members of the photojournalism community — including Frank Fournier, Alice Gabriner, James Nubile, Robert Pledge, Hillary Raskin, Fred Ritchin, and Joseph Rodriguez.

In 2007, they were the collective recipients of the Howard Chapnick Grant “for the advancement of photojournalism” for The Bridge — a project that replicates the model that they have formed together in order to serve young people in neighborhoods where photography is not generally practiced and photographic education is not available. The same year they also won a Lucie Award.

The group continues to work with “mentor” Fournier, in his South Bronx studio, as a loose collective of socially oriented photographers exploring their communities yet developing their own individual voices.

For more info, see Frank Fournier and JB Fellows, July 2007.

*Directions: 1 Bruckner Blvd (corner of 3rd Avenue.), Bronx , NY info@brucknerartgallery.com

ABOVE: Cornell Capa at home in New York on 5th avenue. BELOW: At the Marc Riboud ICP opening in 1974. © 2008 David Burnett	© 1987 Annie Leibovitz

Cornell Capa died peacefully at home, in the early morning on Friday May 23, 2008, at the age of ninety, after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease.

“The legacy of the ICP, what he did, is so tremendous, and totally changed the understanding and interest in photography in this country and beyond,” Robert Pledge, a friend and the head of Contact Press Images declared to PDN. “The history of every art form… is always shaped by incredible individuals, and in our field he’s one of those rare, special, amazing people.”

Born in Budapest, Hungary in 1918. When eighteen, he moved to Paris with his brother Robert and eleven years later rejoined his mother Julia in New York where, in 1940, he married Edie Schwartz (who died shortly after September 11, 2001). In 1954, after the death of his brother in Indochina, Cornell joined Magnum Photos. He later presided over the famed international photographers’ cooperative (1956-1960). As a photographer, he contributed major essays to Life magazine. In 1966 he established the International Fund for Concerned Photography and eight years later founded the International Center of Photography that he directed for two decades, till 1994.

Cornell will lay in the Amawalk cemetery, NY, beside Edie, Julia and Robert.

Telerama, May 68 special issue, April 2008, France	FNAC Compilation, 2008, France

Very few major events remain ingrained in our memory through the images of a single photographer — such as those taken on D’Day by Robert Capa on the beaches of Normandy. Rightfully, the French — and the world for that matter — visually define the May 1968 student uprising in Paris through the photographs of Gilles Caron. The daring 28 year-old photojournalist, who had barely been in the trade for a couple of years and who would go missing in Cambodia two years later, left us with an extraordinary legacy that includes his coverage of the Six Day and Vietnam wars (1967), the haunting secession attempt of Biafra from Nigeria (1968), the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland, and the first anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia (1969).

Over the last two months newspapers, magazines, books, and television programs have been looking back with abundance at the turmoil that engulfed France forty years ago and deeply changed the country’s political, social and cultural landscape. More than 120 covers and pages bearing Caron’s photographs have so far been printed in French publications alone.

Click here to see a more extensive gallery of Caron’s published work.

El Pais, April 19, 2008, Spain