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• Issue #134
• Article

During the last month well over 200 new photographs and nearly 100 photo books have been added to the I Photo Central website, including many classics. Plus, numerous Special Exhibits have also been added. To see everything that has been added, click here: http://www.iphotocentral.com/search/result_list.php/16/30/0 .

Some of the 19th-century works include an important set of 100 Eadweard Muybridge collotypes (one of the most complete groups to ever be offered on the market since they were originally released), important paper and daguerreian stereos, important tintypes and ambrotypes (including a full-plate tin of a grocery store in what looks like a Western town and an ambro of a Japanese soldier/aesthete with book and wine glass and decanters), daguerreotypes (including a Southworth & Hawes portrait of Dr. James Jackson), and albumen and platinum prints by anonymous and well-known photographers, including Baldus, Shaw, Bracklow, Beato and Kimbei. To see all the 19th-century work added recently in the last month, just click http://www.iphotocentral.com/search/result_list.php/17/0/1840/1899/30/0 .

Twentieth-century works include: an important surrealist image by Raoul Ubac, early nudes by Drtikol, modernist Japanese images, and important work from Doisneau, Halsmann, Cartier-Bresson, Atget, Kertesz and Karsh. To see all the 20th-century work added recently in the last month, just click: http://www.iphotocentral.com/search/result_list.php/17/0/1900/1989/30/0 .

New contemporary works by Michael A. Smith, Arthur Tress, Vladimir Birgus, Mitch Dobrowner, Claudia Kunin and Stanko Abadzic have been added to the I Photo Central website and their respective Special Exhibits. To see this new work that was just added to the websites, click here: http://www.iphotocentral.com/search/result_list.php/21/0/2000/2009/BBB/30/0 .

Several new Special Exhibits have also been added to the website.

Michael A. Smith has been working in photography since 1966. His photographic journeys during the past 36 years have taken him to every state in the continental United States, western Canada, and Europe. The results of these remarkable odysseys are included in the permanent collections of over 100 museums in the United States, Europe and Asia, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Stedelijk Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

His commitment to the medium has resulted in over 200 exhibitions. In addition, he has twice received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and he has been the recipient of major commissions to photograph four American cities. In 1981, Smith's first book, the two-volume monograph, "Landscapes 1975–1979", was awarded Le Grand Prix du Livre at the Rencontres Internationale de la Photographie in Arles, France. In 1992, Smith was honored with a 25-year retrospective exhibition at the International Museum of Photography at the Eastman House in Rochester, NY. To mark the occasion, "Michael A Smith: A Visual Journey--Photographs from Twenty-Five Years" was published.

His latest work, which was photographed earlier this year, is a series of powerful portrait studies of inmates who have been charged with violent crimes made at Sheriff Joe's Maricopa County 4th Avenue Jail in Phoenix, AZ. Smith subsequently interviewed them as well. Sheriff Joe has the deserved reputation for being the toughest sheriff in America. In his jails the inmates are not allowed to have cigarettes or coffee. There are no "adult" magazines. According to Smith, these photographs were all made with an 8x10-inch view camera. "Each of the 98 inmates I photographed volunteered to have his portrait made. My goal when making these photographs was not to show the inmates looking strange or "criminal"; neither was it my intention to romanticize them. I wanted to show them in a straightforward manner, as directly and as honestly as I could. Although the area where the inmates could stand was circumscribed, I asked them to stand however they felt relaxed and comfortable. There was no further direction."

You can see this Special Exhibit and read more of Michael Smith's biography and interesting comments about this work and his subjects by clicking here:

http://www.iphotocentral.com/showcase/showcase_view.php/157/1/1 .

Arthur Tress has been producing important, cutting edge work since his staged street photography in the 1960s-70s. While there is already an exhibit up on this work, we have added another Special Exhibit on a new facet of his creativity: his large-scale color work based on now destroyed installations that he created in New York City and Paris. This installation work--most of which Tress himself pulled together and spray painted in an abandoned hospital on New York's Welfare Island--is a largely unknown facet of this artist's extensive career, because the hospital was torn down without the work being shown to the public. The photographs are the only documentation of these stunning compositions and are prime examples of some of the cross-fertilization of different art forms/media that has taken place over the last few decades.

You can see this Special Exhibit by clicking here: http://www.iphotocentral.com/showcase/showcase_view.php/155/1/0/0 .

Modernist New York photographer Walfred Moisio has recently been getting attention and we are pleased to announce that we are the exclusive representative of the estate's vintage prints and we can also offer the limited edition prints that the estate is printing on two sizes of silver gelatin paper (11 x 14 and 16 x 20 inches).

In the midst of the Great Depression, Mosio put himself through Columbia University (1928-1933), where he earned a BA in Fine Arts. After graduating in 1933, Moisio joined the Emergency Relief Bureau, Home Relief Division. Later in 1935 he moved to 373 Bleecker Street and taught photography for the WPA Federal Arts Project. In 1940 he coordinated an exhibition of his students' work at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. Beginning in 1942 Moisio also began to freelance, photographing for the New Yorker, Esquire, Time, Look, Harpers' Bazaar, Vogue and the New York Times. While contemporaries such as Berenice Abbott, who also worked for the WPA, and Walker Evans may have influenced his work, he had his own take on this tumultuous era, capturing a wholly original point of view of New York and its street life. One image, "St. Mark's in the Bowery Church Graveyard", has more than a striking semblance to Evans' famed "Saratoga Springs" photograph.

Many of his images show viewpoints from high vantage points and extreme angles, much like Russian constructivist photography of the same period. Moisio's creative take on New York City was no doubt influenced by his art background and also from living with his wife Shari Frisch de Misky, a promising abstract painter with Russian roots, who was also a book designer and illustrator. It probably didn't hurt that they were living in the midst of the important Greenwich Village art scene of the 1940s and '50s.

Patricia Garcia Gomez, writing for the online magazine ZooZoom, described Moisio this way: "Moisio's ability to depict the essence of time and place within his honest and documentary style of photography is captivating. In this way he explored the social issues of the time. However, whilst you see casual traces of racial integration, sexuality and economic status, you do not feel he is politicizing his photographs. What you feel in looking at his New York is an optimism of spirit and gesture that feels both timelessly enduring and long ago lost in the City we experience today."

You can see this Special Exhibit and read more about this New York modernist by clicking here:

http://www.iphotocentral.com/showcase/showcase_view.php/159/1/0/0 .

If you have an interest in fashion images, you should definitely check out our two new Special Exhibits, Fashion Photography through the Ages, Part I and Part II. The higher level Part I can be found at:

http://www.iphotocentral.com/showcase/showcase_view.php/111/1/1 and the more modestly priced images in Part II, which are all under $500, at http://www.iphotocentral.com/showcase/showcase_view.php/156/1/0 .

Another new Special Exhibit is devoted to images relating to music which span both the 19th and 20th centuries. "Let There Be Music" can be found at: http://www.iphotocentral.com/showcase/showcase_view.php/158/1/0 .

Of course, lots of other new photographs have been added to the current Special Exhibits, so you should check them all out by going here: http://www.iphotocentral.com/showcase/showcase.php . There are not only photographs for sale, but also in-depth essays that accompany each Photo Exhibit.