JAMES KARALES: Howard Greenberg Gallery

Rendville, Ohio, 1956

Gelatin silver print; printed c.1956. Signed, titled, and dated with "vintage 1-2" in pencil, photographer's stamps and "Life" in pencil on mount verso. Courtesy of the Howard Greenberg Gallery

 Untitled, date unknown

Gelatin silver print. Not For Sale. Courtesy of the Howard Greenberg Gallery

 Lower East Side, New York, 1969

Gelatin silver print. Signed in ink with photographer's stamps on mount verso. Courtesy of the Howard Greenberg Gallery

"James Karales (1930 - 2002) graduated from Ohio University with an M.F.A. in photography in 1955. His first job was as an assistant to W. Eugene Smith where he learned darkroom skills from the master. Early in his career, his work began to attract attention, most notably from Edward Steichen, the director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, who purchased two prints. Beginning in 1960, Karales was a photographer for LOOK magazine for 11 years, and became known for his landmark essays on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who granted him unprecedented access to his family. When LOOK closed in 1971, Karales became an independent photographer. His work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art and the International Center for Photography in New York." 

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"James Karales’ photographs of the Civil Rights movement put him on the photo world map, but some of his other major themes are the focus of an exhibition at Howard Greenberg Gallery to December 14, 2013. While his iconic image of the Selma to Montgomery march are on view, the exhibition delves deeper into his lesser-known surveys of the integrated mining community of Rendville, Ohio; logging in Oregon; and the aftermath of the Andrea Doria disaster. Many of the images were taken for LOOK magazine and are on public view for the first time. The exhibition includes work from 1956 to 1969."

James Karales

Exhibition: Nov 7 – Jan 4, 2014

Howard Greenberg Gallery
41 East 57th Street
New York, NY

Vietnam, 1963

Gelatin silver print; printed c.1963. Signed, titled and dated with "Vintage 1-2" in pencil, photographer's stamps on mount verso. Courtesy of the Howard Greenberg Gallery. "In 1965, Karales traveled to Vietnam to photograph the U.S. Special Forces, where he told the story of the war though faces of the people. A 1963 image shows a young Vietnamese boy carrying a baby on his back in a cloth sling."

 BOOKS

The exhibition of work by James Karales coincides with the publication of a new book by Steidl, with text by Vicki Goldberg, Howard Greenberg, and Sam Stephenson. The book, James Karales, aims to show that Karales’ stature as a photojournalist and social documentary photographer par excellence is based on much more than one image from Selma.

Another book published earlier this year, Controversy and Hope: The Civil Rights Photographs of James Karales (The University of South Carolina Press, April 2013), includes a forward by Civil Rights leader Andrew Young, who was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s aide. He writes, Karales’ images reveal “the complexity of emotions intertwined with the hopes and hardships of the struggle.”

Text and images courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery

BILL EPPRIDGE: 1938-2013

 Bill Eppridge, 2010

Photograph (c) Elizabeth Paul Avedon/All rights reserved

 Robert Kennedy, New York City
Photograph (c) Bill Eppridge/Courtesy Monroe Gallery

 Bobby Kennedy with crowd during the 1968 Presidential race
Photograph (c) Bill Eppridge/Courtesy Monroe Gallery

 Bobby Kennedy campaigns into the night, 1968
Photograph (c) Bill Eppridge/Courtesy Monroe Gallery

The Kennedy campaign travels through the Watts section of Los Angeles on the last day before the primary, 1968. Photograph (c) Bill Eppridge/Courtesy Monroe Gallery

 Robert Kennedy

Photograph (c) Bill Eppridge/Courtesy Monroe Gallery

Busboy Juan Romero tries to comfort Presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy. The burned master vintage print used for reproduction in LIFE Magazine of Senator Robert F. Kennedy Shot, Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles, Ca, June 5, 1968. Photograph (c) Bill Eppridge/Courtesy Monroe Gallery

 Read

 TIME LightBox: In Memoriam

Iconic LIFE Photographer Bill Eppridge  

Read
NY TIMES Lens
The Moment a Photographer Became an Historian

Photographs by Bill Eppridge, courtesy of the Monroe Gallery, Santa Fe

GORDON PARKS: The Making of an Argument New Orleans Museum of Art

Gordon Parks, Untitled, Harlem, New York, 1948

Courtesy of The Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks: The Making of an Argument

An exhibition that explores Parks' first photographic essay, "Harlem Gang Leader," for Life Magazine in 1948

In 1948, Gordon Parks began a professional relationship with Life magazine that would last twenty-two years. For his first project, he proposed a series of pictures about the gang wars that were then plaguing Harlem, believing that if he could draw attention to the problem then perhaps it would be addressed through social programs or government intervention. As a result of his efforts, Parks gained the trust of one particular group of gang members and their leader, Leonard "Red" Jackson, and produced a series of pictures of them that are artful, emotive, poignant, touching, and sometimes shocking. From this larger body of work, twenty-one pictures were selected for reproduction in a graphic and adventurous layout in Life magazine.

At each step of the selection process – as Parks chose each shot, or as the picture editors at Life re-selected from his selection-any intended narrative was complicated by another curatorial voice.

Curator Russell Lord notes, "By the time the reader opened the pages of Life magazine, the addition of text, and the reader's own biases further rendered the original argument into a fractured, multi-layered affair. The process leads to many questions: 'What was the intended argument?' and 'Whose argument was it?'." Gordon Parks: The Making of an Argument examines these questions through a close study of how Parks' first Life picture essay was conceived, constructed and received.

The exhibition includes vintage photographs, original issues of Life magazine, contact sheets and proof prints all made available by The Gordon Parks Foundation. Additionally, the exhibition is accompanied by a catalog also entitled Gordon Parks: The Making of an Argument by Russell Lord, Freeman Family Curator of Photographs at NOMA, a foreword by Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr., Executive Director of The Gordon Parks Foundation and an afterword by Irvin Mayfield, Artistic Director of the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra. (text courtesy of NOMA)

The New Orleans Museum of Art

 September 12, 2013 – January 19, 2014