Saturday, May 31, 2014

Cantor Museum - Watkins' Stanford Albums

Cantor Arts Center presents an exhibition in celebration of the 150th Anniversary of the Yosemite Grant 
April 23–August 17, 2014   Stanford, CA

Carleton Watkins: The Stanford Albums, an exhibition featuring more than 80 original mammoth prints from three unique albums of Watkins’s work: Photographs of the Yosemite Valley (1861 and 1865–66), Photographs of the Pacific Coast (1862–76), and Photographs of the Columbia River and Oregon (1867 and 1870). The exhibition will be on view April 23 through August 17, 2014. Also featured will be cartographic visualizations developed in collaboration with Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis and the Bill Lane Center for the American West, which provide dynamic context for the geography and natural history of Watkins’s photographs.
 The exhibition is accompanied by a  mammoth volume of the same title published by Stanford University Press. It includes all 156 images from the albums—a definitive collection of Watkins’s highest achievements—and 17 essays by Stanford-affiliated contributors.

8 May interview with three contributors on Modern Art Notes Podcast with Tyler Greene.
 Inspiring exhibition slides:




150th Anniversary - Yosemite National Park


Processed Views is a cautionary extrapolation of what can happen due to Americans' lack of stewardship and respect for the land. The history of Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove is an encouraging model. The National Park Service is celebrating the 150th Anniversary of the Yosemite GrantMaterials on display range from Lafayette Bunnell’s account of the ‘discovery’ of the Valley, in 1851, to John Muir’s famous Century Magazine articles (published in 1890) that led to the creation of Yosemite National Park on October 1, 1890.
Carleton Watkins, Yosemite Valley
Charles Leander Weed, Yosemite Valley



Thursday, May 8, 2014

We Agree with Stephen Colbert




Processed Views on Antron.com

Thanks, fellow photographer, Jing Yu for the heads up about our post in Antron.com

Processed Views on Lenscratch

We appreciate you kicked off the Lenscratch Collaborative Exhibition with our Processed Views.


In light of tomorrow’s Collaboration Exhibition, I thought it to be appropriate to share some collaborative work.  Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman, from Chicago and Milwaukee respectively, have been collaborating as a team for over thirty years.  Through this process they explore unified interests that strengthen their conversations and ideas between each other.  Collaborating as a way of making photographs always poses questions of leaders and button pushers, but in the case of Barbara and Lindsay they develop and divide work evenly.  Whether shooting together or separately, depending on the project, they always regroup to edit and exhibit together.
Today I’m excited to share their project Processed Views, which I have been privileged to see behind the curtain.  Through constructed landscapes made strictly from foods that make the chubby kid inside me drool, Barbra and Lindsay develop a commentary on today’s food culture and its digression from all things natural.  These handmade models are elaborate creations, holding their own as not only photographs but also sculptures.
Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman  began working together on photographic projects when they met as students at the Institute of Design in Chicago. They have developed an extensive body of collaborative work, chronicling rites of passage and documenting the psychological landscapes and social architecture that surround us.  The confluence of history, myth and popular culture is an ongoing theme in their collaborative work.
Exhibiting nationally and internationally, their photographs are in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Walker Art Center and the Milwaukee Art Museum. Ciurej is a photographer and graphic designer in Chicago. Lochman is a Milwaukee-based photographer and lecturer at the University of Wisconsin.
Thanks, fellow photographer and Lenscratch editor, Grant Gill.



Processed Views on Our Age is 13

Thank you, Molly Been, for this post in Our Age is 13 blog.

Monday, May 5, 2014

Saturated Fat: Marketing Anti-Fat Righteousness

























"Everything in moderation" was my advice growing up, but history indicates Americans joyfully embrace righteousness and the more-is-more senario.  Nina Teicholz discusses the links between science, marketing, politics and saturated fat in her recent article, The Questionable Link Between Saturated Fat and Heart Disease.
"Saturated fat does not cause heart disease"—or so concluded a big study published in March in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine....The fact is, there has never been solid evidence for the idea that these fats cause disease. We only believe this to be the case because nutrition policy has been derailed over the past half-century by a mixture of personal ambition, bad science, politics and bias.Our distrust of saturated fat can be traced back to the 1950s, to a man named Ancel Benjamin Keys, a scientist at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Keys was formidably persuasive and, through sheer force of will, rose to the top of the nutrition world—even gracing the cover of Time magazine—for relentlessly championing the idea that saturated fats raise cholesterol and, as a result, cause heart attacks....Critics have pointed out that Dr. Keys violated several basic scientific norms in his study....Our half-century effort to cut back on the consumption of meat, eggs and whole-fat dairy has a tragic quality. More than a billion dollars have been spent trying to prove Ancel Keys's hypothesis, but evidence of its benefits has never been produced. It is time to put the saturated-fat hypothesis to bed and to move on to test other possible culprits for our nation's health woes.
Ms. Teicholz has been researching dietary fat and disease for nearly a decade. Her book, "The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet," will be published by Simon & Schuster on May 13, 2014.
Saturated Fat Foothills, from Processed Views