Posts Tagged “MIT”

It’s an incredible time for Boston photo fans. I’ll never blog it all properly, but here’s a passel of updates on photography stuff of the recent past, present and near future.

The DeCordova (sculpture park and) Museum has three (three!) photography shows up right now: a solo exhibition by Lalla Essaydi, a wonderful collection of Jules Aarons‘ work, and an array of portfolios curated by ace photographologist Leslie K. Brown.

The Photographic Resource Center just opened an exhibition of the winners of the Leopold Godowsky, Jr. Color Photography Awards, named in honor of a co-inventor of the recently canceled Kodachrome film.

Also at the PRC, the Fall photography lecture series continues next week with Roger Ballen.  Ballen follows Keith Carter, who last week delivered a charming lecture that conveyed and illustrated “seven mantras” for creativity and life.  Carter observed, “The search for beauty is huge in peoples’ lives. Not so large in graduate schools.” It reminded me of both Arno Minkkinen’s bus station and Andrea Robbins and Max Becher’s travel philosophy, both observed at past PRC lectures.

Gallery Kayafas is showing the work of Caleb Charland right now.  Charland makes beautiful prints that play with concepts from physics using elemental substances like water, ice, fire, and oil. The work reminds me a bit of that of John Chervinsky, whom I first met at the PRC satellite gallery at the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics.

Continuing a line from Charland through Chervinsky, we can’t help but arrive at the MIT Museum’s new Harold “Doc” Edgerton Digital Collections, opening this weekend.

And lastly for the moment but surely not leastly, next week, the MFA opens an exhibit of Harry Callahan’s photographs.

Maybe Central Square isn’t going to the dogs after all.  This weekend I caught a performance of a stage adaptation of one of my favorite books ever, Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams.  The show is closed now, and you can read better reviews of it in the Phoenix for example.  I enjoyed it a great deal, but more than that, I’m happy that it was put on in a new theater space in my neighborhood in collaboration with another neighbor, MIT.

If you don’t know, the Central Square Theater opened this summer or fall at 450 Mass Ave, on or near what I think was once the site of Pho Republique.  The production of Einstein’s Dreams is the work of something called the Catalyst Collaborative, a joint venture of MIT and Underground Railway Theater (URT) for “creating and presenting plays that deepen public understanding about science, while simultaneously providing an artistic and emotional experience not available in other forms of dialogue about science.“  How cool is that?  In addition, I spotted MIT Prof. Robert Jaffe’s name on the advisory board – you might remember him from another excellent MIT arts collaboration, the MIT-Photographic Resource Center gallery at the Center for Theoretical Physics.  And yes, the show did feature blackboards.  The next Catalyst Collaborative joint is going to be Bertolt Brecht’s Life of Galileo – with puppets! – in conjunction with the Cambridge Science Festival in the spring.

One should’t have to choose, but I’d probably take a theater over a police station as a neighbor.  But I’d certainly rather have police patrolling the neighborhood than actors.

It was a photographic version of the colorful phrase, drinking from the firehose.  Thursday night I attended a lecture by Magnum photographer Paul Fusco and then Friday, an opening of a show by National Geographic photographer Cary Wolinsky, both events presented by the Photographic Resource Center.

Paul Fusco spoke softly but passionately to a packed BU auditorium where he discarded the podium and sat on the stage, insisting on near-total darkness so the images (projected from an authentic slide carousel) could be seen best.

First, Fusco showed images from his RFK Funeral Train project.  In 1968 (a time, he noted, that was full of both hope and uncertainty, not unlike the present) he was assigned to photograph Bobby Kennedy’s funeral and boarded the train carrying RFK’s casket from New York to Washington.  It turned out that nearly the entire route was lined with mourners, and Fusco photographed them from the train window.    It’s an incredible slice of history and a collective portrait of the people of America at the time.  Buy the book or at least look at the website.

Next, he showed work that has not yet found a publisher, a series he calls Chernobyl Legacy.  The beauty of Fusco’s composition and use of light does little to make these pictures any easier to look at, but at the same time you can’t turn away. In Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, Fusco photographed the hospitalized and institutionalized childen and adults terribly damaged by the fallout from the 1986 nuclear accident. Fusco’s passion for looking this event unflinchingly in the face and sharing it with the world was evident and contagious.

Among others, I ran into Jason Liu, one of the artists in Hudson Street Gallery’s current show, and David Strasburger, one of whose prints I bought at the PRC’s auction last month.

The next day, I attended the opening of the second exhibition of the MIT-PRC joint gallery space at MIT’s Center for Theoretical Physics.  That’s 6-304 for your Institute types, just go to the end of the Infinite Corridor and go up to the third floor, you can’t miss it.  Nor should you.  A new space has been constructed by enclosing the courtyard of building six, and the design of the space, even without the excellent artwork, is both inspiring and livable.  I wrote about the first exhibition in this space last year.

Cary Wolinsky showed work from two series: Sand House and Varanasi.  In Sand House, he documents a colonial-era house in Namibia that has been invaded by the adjacent desert and filled halfway up with sand.  You have to see this to fully understand the surreal beauty of it.  (And you should also check in with Max Becher and Andrea Robbins on how surreal the German presence in Namibia can be)  Varanasi is an Indian city on the Ganges and home to the fabric-dying industry documented in Wolinsky’s photos.  It’s part of his wider ongoing interest in textiles and fabrics and a body of work called “Fabric of Life.”

Besides the PRC show of Wolinsky’s photos, the MIT CTP space also has art and photographs by Sol LeWitt, Ansel Adams, director emeritus Robert Jaffe, and others.  Also don’t miss the LeWitt floor installation that you can see from the bridge to building 6C.

There’s ace photographologist Leslie K. Brown at left, setting the story straight on B&W films.  Also present were PRC director Jim Fitts and Jason Landry, currently the PRC’s interim education manager.  I was also lucky enough to see photographers John Chervinsky and Peter Vanderwarker, and one third of conceptual/political art trio Triiibe.  The official opening of this show is next week, so check it out.

More synchronicities and reveries.

Last week, I joined some good folks from two of my favorite TLAs, PRC and MIT for a reception at the new gallery space at MIT’s Center for Theoretical Physics, which was created in collaboration with the Photographic Resource Center. I found my way to building 6 and eventually to the spiffy new space where there would be an exhibition of photographs by John Chervinsky.

I had seen some of Chervinsky’s work that featured chalkboards and allusions to scientific principles, so I knew it would be right at home in an MIT physics setting, but I did not expect that the space would include several large chalkboards in the common area, full of, sure enough, fancy physics equations. Actual chalk and slate boards, not glossy whiteboards, not fancy interactive printing wallboards from the MIT Media Lab. How quaintly low-tech for MIT.

At right, Time Machine by Chervinsky, Chervinsky (not me!) in front of a board of physics stuff at the MIT CTP, and Blackboard #11 by Meggan Gould, an artist featured in PRC’s Northeast Exposure Online (NEO) this month. Click for more on each.

Physics and art, arguably poetry – where was Alan Lightman? PRC/CTP, please invite Prof. Lightman to the next event!

Back to black. Boards, that is. Talking with photographer and professor Robert Jaffe, I learned that these were no ordinary blackboards – MIT had these boards specially made with sound baffling to make the constant clacking of chalk less bothersome – and further, that physicists have a violent disdain for whiteboards, exactly why I’m not sure.

Myself, I have a different kind of MIT backgroud and a different feeling about whiteboards. When I went to business school at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, I entered a world where would-be consultants and other future masters of the universe could barely hold a conversation without using either powerpoint or a whiteboard. I drank heavily of the kool-aid and inhaled deeply of the marker fumes and was converted. I can barely function in the office without my board and markers, and often think about installing some at home, possibly even in the smallest room. Plus, as someone who wears black a lot, I am always apprehensive around chalk and chalk dust.