DAVID ELLINGSEN PHOTOGRAPHY

I’m very pleased to be included in a group exhibition opening today at the Robert Berman Gallery in Santa Monica, California.

Susan Baraz (who, among other things, is Co-Chair of The Lucie Awards and Head of Judges for the International Photography Awards) contacted me to see if I was interested in this event, Another Nude Show. Susan often refers fine art photographers to a selection of galleries including the Farmani Gallery and the Paul Kopeikin Gallery. Have a look at her Phototherapy site for details. An excellent resource for photographers and anyone interested in photography.

Anyway, after 1/2 a second, I agreed.

I am really excited…not only am I included in a show along with Joel Peter Witkin, Ruth Bernard and Tracey Emin, but this exhibition is running in conjunction with MOPLA Month of Photography Awards and the XTO Awards. I cannot make it down so if you happen to be there let me know how it goes…the details as listed on the gallery’s site are as follows:

ANOTHER NUDE SHOW
April 3 – 30, 2010
D5 Gallery

A Group exhibition exploring the imagery of the nude form including works by
Robert Graham, Ruth Bernhard, Horst P. Horst,Man Ray, Joel Peter Witkin, Francesco Scavullo, Sante D’Orazio, Raymond Pettibon, The Mac, John Altoon, Ben Talbert, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Frederick Wight, William Tunberg, Ralph Goings, Stephen Verona, John Colao, Ron English, Manuel Ocampo, Jorg Dubin, Ellwood T. Risk, Britt Ehringer, Eliza French & Jeff Charbonneau, Robert Sean Coons, Dennis Mukai, David Trulli, Greg Gibbs, Andrew George, Vic Huber, Rafael Serrano, Jon Cournoyer, Sally Mann, Jock Sturges, Marc Fichou, Ken Aronson, Brett Aronson, Steven Teitelbaum, Randal Haworth, Tiphaine Popesco, Eric Schwartz, Christine Lissman, David Ellingsen, Bill Durgen, Toby Burrows, Bill Phelps, Gail Greenfield Randall, Irene Hardwicke Olivieri, Edouard Chimot, Max Turner, Emil Jean Kosta Jr., Mel Ramos, Alejandro Gehry, Thomas Ruff, Nobuyoshi Araki, Tracy Nakayama, Tracey Emin, Vanessa Beecroft, Tom Wesselmann, and many more.

In conjunction with the MOPLA Month of Photography Awards & XTO Image Awards

Congratulations to the winners.

The results for Rodeo 2, CAPIC’s latest photography competition, have been announced. I was honoured to be one of ten judges from across Canada to adjudicate this contest. The whole process was executed on-line, a wonderfully efficient process for judges across the country, with almost 100 photographs to examine and rank. Nice to see such participation. Based on a scale of 1 through 5 we worked through them in the first round…with a tie-breaking vote for 2nd and 3rd place a week later (a tight race between 5 talented photographers!).

Nice to arrive to the studio this morning to find an email notifying me that I have won in the “Photography-Professional” category of Creative Quarterly’s annual competition. Known as “The Journal of Art & Design”, CQ’s mandate is inspiration…where it comes from and how it manifests itself. “Creative Quarterly publishes the best work being done internationally in graphic design, illustration, photography and fine art. Our hope is by representing both the next generation and those currently working in the marketplace there will be a sharing of ideas. Ideas that spawn new ideas. Join us in building a new creative community where we share and grow together.”

The work…from the series Future Imperfect… will be published in the June issue.

I have a soft spot for Photolucida…a great event run by a great bunch of people in my fave US city Portland…and when they have news I’m going to be re-posting it here as well.

An important branch of the Photolucida organization is Critical Mass, a program of “exposure and community”.
“The aim of Critical Mass, and all Photolucida programming, is to provide participants with career-building opportunities and to promote the best emerging and mid-career artists working today”.

Basically, you sign up, pay your fee, get your work seen by the who’s who of the industry, and maybe get an award or two. Regardless of the end result, your work is put in front of lots of important people in the fine art photo world. Pretty great for any photographer working today. I’ve had excellent experiences with them and encourage others to get down there and show off their work. It was through Photolucida’s Portfolio Reviews that I received the invitation to show in China.

I digress…back to the whole point of this post…the winners of the Critical Mass Book Award have just been announced. Congratulations to Alejandro Cartanega and Birthe Piontek for their beautiful work…they deserve the accolades. I’ll be excited to get the books when they are published.

I have been nominated as a finalist at the 4th International Arte Laguna competition in Venice, Italy. An exciting bit of news offering great exposure in Europe. It was the Future Imperfect series again for this competition.

About Arte Laguna:
“The Italian Cultural Association MoCA (Modern Contemporary Art), in cooperation with Arte Laguna, organizes the Fourth International Art Prize “Arte Laguna”, directed to the promotion and valorization of contemporary art.
The Prize is organized under the patronage of the Foreign Office,  Region of Veneto, Province of Treviso, Province of Venice, Municipality of Venice, Municipality of Mogliano Veneto, Venetian Ca’ Foscari University, Ascom of Treviso, NIKON, Venetian Academy of Fine Arts, European Institute of Design (IED). The Prize is subdivided in three sections: painting, photographic art, sculpture. Participants can chose the theme of their artworks.”

I have been one of those selected from 2300 entries to exhibit in the group show “Elements of Water” opening on March 5th, 2010. This exhibition will be at the Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, Colorado, USA.

The entries were juried by John Paul Caponigro, an acclaimed educator, curator and artist in his own right. As his biography says, Mr. Caponigro’s motivation comes from “inspiring conscientious creative interaction, my life’s work is a call to connection with our natural world, with each other, and with ourselves.” That got my attention.

Woodstock Times Review

From the Woodstock Times.
By Paul Smart.
12/17/2009

ORGANIC IMPERFECTIONS
With all the speed of our being swallowed by the current digital age, it’s easy to forget much of what’s being lost these days.
Galerie BMG’s current exhibition through January 11, “Hibernus…a winter study” by Canadian photographer, David Ellingsen, utilizes what was once one of the prime materials for certain specialized visual artists…Polaroid film.
Stuff’s gone now, like the warmth of recordings released on vinyl, or 16mm film screenings with the projector rattling and the dust motes dancing in a stream of near liquid narrative light. Like Brownie snapshots or hand-written letters, for that matter. Remember aerograms?
For the current show’s series of richly textured and mystery-evoking floral works, Ellingsen has collected natural plants during the final stages of their being and then used an archaic Polaroid 55PN film, as fine-grained, textured and rich with organic imperfections as the collection it’s being used to capture, to make it lasting art.
Talk about two eras ending, and an artist’s use of his tools, his means, to comment on his subject matter, the end. Or vice-versa.
The resulting photographs, created in-studio and hand-processed in the darkroom, are solarized during the development process and printed to archival, museum exhibition standards.
The results speak to what the artist has referred to as his lifelong ambition to find a way of combining the elements inherent in his boyhood on a communal island north in British Columbia, where he learned to appreciate the juxtaposition of seemingly oddly matched elements, from water and ice and nature versus technology to the rural and urban he now sees coming together in his adopted city. Or these lively new floral works about the natural process of death and decay.
The Vancouver-based photographer has augmented a strong career in commercial and editorial work with a burgeoning fine art career that has seen his works appear in numerous solo and group museum and gallery exhibitions, and win awards and prizes from a variety of organizations including the International Photography Awards in Los Angeles, Black & White Magazine in San Francisco, PX3 in Paris and Applied Arts in Toronto.

Hibernus….a winter study will be on display through January 11, 2010. Winter gallery hours at 12 Tannery Brook Road are Friday noon-5 p.m., Saturday and Sunday 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday noon-5 p.m. or other times by appointment. For more information, call 679-0027 or visit www.galeriebmg.com.

A quick thank you to Marc Koegel and Vancouver Photo Workshops for hosting a lecture with me…the first in the series “Careers in Photography”. Focusing equally on both the commercial and fine art sides of my work, I had 50+ people arrive on a rainy evening to hear about my experiences over the last 10 years. I was honored by their interest in me and my career to date. Lots of great questions and interaction.

A few people have been asking me for the list of the photo competitions I mentioned as being important (of the ones I am aware of anyway) so here they are again:

International Photography Awards
http://www.photoawards.com

Applied Arts
http://www.appliedartsmag.com/

Black & White Magazine
http://www.bandwmag.com/

Center for Fine Art Photography
http://www.c4fap.org/

Photo District News
http://www.pdnonline.com

PX3
http://www.px3.fr/

Canada Council Art Bank
http://www.artbank.ca

Lightwork
http://www.lightwork.org

Well, that was quite the trip.

(Quick recap for those who have not read this Blog before: I had been invited to be an exhibiting guest artist at the 2009 Lishui International Photo Festival in Lishui, China. A bi-annual event in a city of 2.5 million in western China, the Festival runs from November 28th to December 3rd. It will be the first public exhibition of my new fine art series, Future Imperfect. 30 artists were invited from North America.)

And now on with the show…
After 26 hours of travel to the city of Lishui in China (about 6 hrs south of Shanghai) I finally arrived at the hotel just after 8pm, more than a little exhausted. I wanted nothing more than a long shower and a warm bed, but as soon as I put my bags down at the front desk the volunteers whisked me away to the Opening Ceremonies, which were already underway. I was expecting a conference room or something of that sort, so I was a little surprised to be ushered into a shiny new stadium where more than 10,000 people were in the stands watching the goings-on. Surreal after a trip like that. Television cameras, huge video screens, award presentations that seemed like they belonged on the Grammys…recipients rising up out of the stage to the top of a pyramid-like podium, hands raised in the air. Chinese generals, cultural dignitaries and a musical tribute with 100 dancers, singers and a lighting show that would put Vegas to shame. And all for a Photography Festival…hooray China!

Here’s the stage from where I was seated…

…and when I turned around (yes those bleachers are full!).

There were about 60 international guests at the hotel for the festival and the next morning we all got up early, had breakfast (Thousand Island dressing DOES look like yogurt) and were whisked off to Baiyan Forest Park, one of two main sites for the festival. A beautiful park at the edge of the city with a string of classical Chinese buildings which contained the galleries.

Entrance to the park’s festival site…

…and the view of some of the galleries.

Me with my work…

…and guests wandering through.

Following a morning wandering around the galleries we were taken for an official Welcome Luncheon Banquet and then back to the galleries to meet with curators and other experts from China. Lastly we headed to a converted oil factory to see the exhibits of the featured Chinese photographers. Beautiful work, including Lu Guang, the winner of this year’s W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund Grant…a deserving honour for some moving work. A quote from the website about his work: “Lu Guang has been documenting the ecological disasters in China resulting from the rapid growth of the economy since 2005, focusing on environmental pollution and the problem of schistosomiasis. Over the last three decades, peoples’ living standards have constantly been on the rise in the country. At the same time, industrial pollution has brought serious consequences for public health and for the environment at large.”

The remaining days were filled with photography trips into the surrounding picturesque countryside, exploring the city of Lishui itself and connecting with the photographers and curators from China and North America. I’m going to list a few of my favorites from the festival below. There was so much beautiful work there but these caught my eye…

Joni Sternbach’s “Surfers” tintypes (you may recognize these from the recent October cover of PDN).

Chris Raeker’s “Midnight Carnival” series

Stephen Berkman’s ambrotypes, “Predicting the Past”

Mariette Pathy Allen’s “The Gender Frontier”

Mark Jaremko’s “Nightscapes”

Fellow Canadian Elaine Ling was there with her brand new book “Mongolia”

Wu Qi’s “The Heavy Dust”

There were MANY Chinese photographers with stellar work but it seems a lack of web support for them. Apologies, but there are no links for the following Chinese artists. You’ll have to hit the festival site)

Zhang Chao’s “Ugly”
No link available. See Lishui Festival site.

Fu Weixin’s “Run with the Dream”
No link available. See Lishui Festival site.

Su Jian’s “Mother of the Family”
No link available. See Lishui Festival site.

Well, that’s all for now. If you’re still with me, thanks for your interest. It was a great event.
Thanks again to Yan Li and the volunteers who were the ultimate hosts.
I’ll leave you with my “Photo of the Day” from Day 2…couldn’t resist.

I will be giving a lecture with Vancouver Photo Workshops on the evening of Tuesday, December 15th from 7 to 9pm.

“Welcome to this new and exciting lecture series centered around the busy working lives of contemporary commercial and fine-art photographers. With this new lecture series, VPW aims to bring you influential and inspirational photographers, all eager to share their thoughts and advice on what it takes not only to be a successful photographer, but also a successful business owner. The first event of this new series will feature acclaimed local photographer David Ellingsen.
David is not just a very competent and unique photographer, he also runs a very unique business, focusing on commercial assignments as well as fine-art collections. David will show a large inventory of his images, and discuss how his photographic career has evolved to what it is today. He will be talking about running his commercial photography business alongside his fine-art career. David will be able to answer all your questions including any advice relating to running a successful photographic business.
Come and join us for this rare opportunity and be prepared to get inspired!”

See the full write-up and register here.