Photographer Fran Meckler is passionate about her social documentary work—she’s visited more than 70 countries over her career. Her latest images were made during a two-week trip to Papua New Guinea where she documented in vivid color the changing landscape, the lives of many different tribes and what is still left of tribal life in the 21st century, and the mystery of that very foreign culture.
In a new exhibition at the World Affairs Council in San Francisco, Fran will show 25 images from the trip, printed by The Image Flow.
Dennis Gray was introduced to photography right about the same time his father started sneaking him into the Stockton sport races in the trunk of his car—he was 14. “I got a Nikon F, one of the first ones they made in 1959, and at the same time, my father bought a go-kart that he and I raced. We were both gear heads,” recalled Dennis. “He snuck me into the races so he didn’t have to pay the $2 entry fee.”
Michael Jennings and Cecilia Malaguti are the couple behind Neatline Maps, a vintage and rare map dealer in the San Francisco Bay Area. They came to The Image Flow to make a digital archive of their collection—which consists currently of over 300 maps—both for their online store, and as a way to preserve the maps and the stories they represent. The reproductions are being made with TIF’s medium format Hasselblad, which offers extreme resolution and sharpness.
Michael and Cecelia became interested in maps through their training as archaeologists—Michael works for the nonprofit Center for Digital Archaeology in Marin. They started out collecting a few maps they particularly enjoyed, but a year ago, they decided to turn their hobby into a business.
Stuart Schwartz recently spent three days with his family in Umbria, Italy, as part of a scouting trip for a new workshop next summer focused on the Slow Food movement and the local Italian lifestyle.
“My goal is to create a workshop in which we’ll create an accurate portrait of Umbria—the people, lifestyle, landscape, and architecture—but also get an intimate experience of what it’s like to actually live in Umbria, if even for only a short time,” writes Stuart.
Photographer and collage artist Ken Graves is best known for his black-and-white street photography of San Francisco at the transition from the 1960s to the 1970s. Graves passed away earlier this year at the age of 74, leaving behind a legacy of more than 50 years of work. Almost two dozen pieces are part of SFMOMA’s permanent collection, and now the Anglim Gilbert Gallery in San Francisco has put together a new exhibition, The Home Front, to pay tribute to this great California artist.
Don Whitebread owns a decent telescope but admits he’s not much of an astronomer. He bought the telescope to do astrophotography, and then realized it didn’t give him the opportunity to play with time in the way he’d imagined.
“The work I’m doing, I feel like I’m capturing a particular moment. It’s a long moment, but still, it’s a moment in time when these stars happen to line up with this foreground and it creates a composition,” he said.
The work he’s referring to is part of an ongoing collection called Starlight. He shoots mostly with a medium-format Hasselblad and black and white film—digital cameras don’t allow for the type of exposure he’s after. Each exposure requires an exposure of around an hour and a half. The result is a glimpse of thousands of stars moving across the night sky.
It’s been a busy summer at The Image Flow with two sessions of our Summer Photo Camp for Kids and the Angel Island Summer Photo Excursion. All of these kids photography workshops are geared toward middle school-aged shooters, one of my favorite ages to teach because they’re able to handle more challenging concepts and assignments and they learn so fast.
The goals of the workshops are simple: Teach kids how to use their camera on manual mode and how to do basic post-processing in Lightroom—I find that even my intermediate students benefit from the review and practice of using their cameras with the exercises I give them. In the Angel Island workshop, which is made up primarily of students that already have some photography experience, we do some work with Photoshop as well.
Jeff Greenwald, an Oakland-based photojournalist, author, and founder of the nonprofit Ethical Traveler, has been photographing in Nepal since 1979. He first visited Camp Hope, one of Kathmandu’s most progressive earthquake refugee camps, in the fall of 2005.
“One of the kids—a very smart and completely charming 10-year-old girl named Laxmi Sherpa—asked to borrow my camera … such a request would normally give me pause. But Laxmi had impressed me with her honesty and sense of responsibility—so I handed it over,” said Jeff.
That afternoon was the beginning of his project with Looking Glass Photo. The idea was simple: Provide cameras to the children Camp Hope and teach them how to document their daily lives.
Balancing your photographic pursuits with the ups and downs of daily life can be a difficult task. Keeping pace with a photography series requires not only dedication but also a clear direction to ensure building success. Here, workshop student James Clift talks about how creative assignments with concrete deadlines can help expand the horizons of the intermediate photographer.
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