Books & Talks
Her new book focuses on places, not faces.
Posted by: Seattle Met staff on Dec 07, 2011 at 09:00AM
Photo: John Keatley
Do you see what I see? Annie Leibovitz in 2009.
Back in 2009 we had famed photographer Annie Leibovitz in front of a camera, posing for a Seattle Met shoot after the release of her new book Annie Leibovitz at Work. When isn’t she at work? Since her first magazine job—a plum gig shooting for Rolling Stone at age 21, through the years spent crafting celebrity photo portraits for Vanity Fair, Leibovitz has been on the go, cementing her status as a “living legend.” (A Library of Congress–certified living legend.) It wasn’t until she had children “and a life I liked being in” that she learned to resist shooting everything in sight, Steve Wiecking wrote for Seattle Met. He quotes Leibovitz: “‘I had spent years, decades, looking at everything as if it was a photograph. I’m looking at you right now and…I can’t help myself.’ She raised her hands to form a makeshift frame near my face. ‘There’s my rectangle, there you are, I’ve taken the picture,’ she said. ‘It’s not like you stop taking pictures. It’s just you’re not picking up the camera to do it.’”
For her latest photo book, Pilgrimage —which she’ll page through at Elliott Bay Book Company on December 12 —Leibovitz picks up the camera for an entirely new subject. No Hollywood A-listers in this collection. Instead, she visited the homes of Virginia Woolf, Charles Darwin, Emily Dickinson, and Sigmund Freud to capture the spaces where her intellectual heroes lived and worked. She explored Yosemite Valley, honoring one of her favorite photographers, Ansel Adams, and traveled to Concord to capture Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond. And though she couldn’t ask the Niagara Falls to pose, the book still has Leibovitz all over it. "It was an exercise in renewal,” she says. “It taught me to see again.”
Annie Leibovitz will read from Pilgrimage and sign copies at Elliott Bay Book Co on Dec 12 at 7.
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Posted by: Laura Dannen on May 02, 2011 at 11:00AM
The new shot heard ’round the world: New York firefighters celebrate the end of Osama bin Laden in Times Square on Sunday night, May 1, in this New York Times photo by Michael Appleton.
To infinity, and beyond: From Lisa Grossman at wired.com: This stunning 360 degree panorama of the night sky was stitched together from 37,000 images by a first-time astrophotographer. Nick Risinger, a 28-year-old native of Seattle, trekked more than 60,000 miles around the western United States and South Africa to create the largest-ever true-color image of the stellar sphere. The final result is an interactive, zoomable sky map showing the full Milky Way and the stars, planets, galaxies and nebulae around it. Read more at wired.com/wiredscience.
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A West Seattle photographer documents the disaster in a new exhibit.
Posted by: Laura Dannen on Apr 21, 2011 at 10:00AM
Photo courtesy Daniel Beltrá.
“I waited an hour in the air to get the boat drifting in the oil. It gives scale to the image.”—Daniel Beltrá says of this May 2010 shot, Oil Spill #17, taken 40 miles off the coast in the Gulf of Mexico.
A year ago yesterday, BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 and sending 4.9 million barrels of crude oil into open water. And Madrid-born, West Seattle photographer Daniel Beltrá was there to document it.
On assignment for Greenpeace, the international conservation photographer took to the skies in a Cessna just two weeks after the explosion, snapping photos from 3,000 feet as the oil started seeping across the Gulf. There’s a painterly quality to his images—a contrast of cerulean and orange (the sheen of the crude) with relief wells and boats parked right in the middle of the mess. Each image is stunning in its beauty, and incredibly sad—particularly a shot of eight pelicans coated in oil, huddled against the back of a plywood box awaiting a wash at the International Bird Rescue and Research Center in Ft. Jackson, Louisiana.
Sixteen of Beltrá’s photos, titled Spill, are on display at the Seattle Aquarium through August 7, and the timing couldn’t be better (Friday is also Earth Day). It’s an ongoing disaster, Beltrá says. He notes the 6,000 birds found dead (“How many weren’t found?”) and the rising death toll of dolphins in the Gulf: 200 since January 1, 2011. There may be another trip to the Gulf in his future.
Spill is on display thru Aug 7 at Seattle Aquarium.
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Books and Readings
A local photographer wins a national award and gets a showing this Sunday on Bainbridge.
Posted by: Eric Scigliano on Jun 25, 2010 at 08:00AM
A Tongass diner eyes a tasty salmon.
Photo: Amy Gulick from ‘Salmon in the Trees,’ courtesy of Mountaineers Books.
We knew North Bender Amy Gulick’s Salmon in the Trees: Life in Alaska’s Tongass Rainforest was special when it appeared in April. After all, how many nature books begin with lines like “In the end, give me rainy, strange, bar-fight-nasty K-town life,” from a “Letter From Ketchikan” by famous fish and fossil artist Ray Troll? Troll is one of nine sages, scientists, and free spirits to match their words (and, in his case, drawings) to Gulick’s limpid images of life human and wild in soggy Southeast Alaska. Add the voices of sundry humpbacks, brown bears, sea lions, and seabirds (CD included), and you have a multimedia, multi-layered portrait of this country’s vastest intact forest, where the salmon really are in the trees—and in everything else that grows out of the soil they enrichen.{display:image for:post image:1 align:left height:170}
Even Lower 48ers are impressed. Salmon in the Trees recently won silver in the Independent Publisher Book Awards. Find out why Sunday at Islandwood, Bainbridge Island’s idyllic eco-school, when Gulick gives a (naturally) multimedia show.{display:image for:post image:2 align:right height:170}
June 27, 7pm, Islandwood, 4450 Blakely Ave. NE, Bainbridge Island, 206-855-4300. Free.
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