Sometimes you enter a world where you find that (as Garth and Wayne said) you are not worthy. That happened last week when I saw an astounding exhibit of photographs at the Gage Gallery on Michigan Avenue in Chicago until December 20th. John White is a longtime Chicago Sun Times Photographer, who, based on Jim Kirks logic, was fired a few years ago and has been freelancing ever since. From Wikipedia:
White was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Photojournalism in 1982 for his “consistently excellent work on a variety of subjects.” He was selected as a photographer for the 1990 project Songs of My People”. White has also won three National Headliner Awards, was the first photographer inducted into the Chicago Journalism Hall of Fame, was awarded the Chicago Press Photographer Association’s Photographer of the Year award five times, and, in 1999, received the Chicago Medal of Merit.
WOW. Good thing Jim Kirk was smart enough to fire him! Can’t have people like that working for your newspaper!!!!
For more info: http://www.roosevelt.edu/gagegallery
John’s exhibit is a career retrospective, including photos of Jesse Jackson, Bill Clinton, Nelson Mandella and many everyday people from Chicago. They are all beautifully displayed, with a caption book to carry around with you when you are looking at them. Each one is a small masterpiece of finding and capturing the “decisive moment.”
The exhibit is part of a yearlong series of shows documenting photojournalism in Chicago, which will end next year with an exhibit titled “Chicago Reader in Black and White”, a collection of photographs taken by Reader photographers in the days when the Reader meant something. It will run from June 4 to August 28 of next year. So, at that time I will have some photos on the same walls as John White. I am definitely not worthy!!!
On another note, I have been working on a video project all summer. The beginning of it is here. More will be added to it as it is finished. It is sad to say that this could become a never ending project!! http://natkin.net/films/gunviolenceproject/
Please let me know what you think, and pass the link around to anyone you think might be interested.