Search results for ""Author Alison Nordström""

Poignant, multilayered portraits of America’s future farmers A new book by award-winning Minneapolis-based photographer R.J. Kern (born 1978), The Unchosen Ones features portraits of future farmers in America’s heartland. Kern’s subjects are Minnesota 4-H members posing with their farm animals. Each one spent a year raising an animal, which they then entered into a 4-H competition. Kern first photographed them in 2016, and none of the children who sat for him succeeded in winning an award, despite the obvious care they had given to their animals. The formal qualities of Kern’s lighting and setting endow these young people with a gravitas beyond their years, revealing self-directed dedication in some, and in others, perhaps, the pressures of traditions imposed upon them. These beautiful portraits capture a certain America, a rural world and a time in life when the layered emotions of youth are laid bare. Four years later, in 2020, Kern returned to photograph and interview his young subjects. The new images are poignant when juxtaposed with the originals, tapping into the mindset of America’s agricultural youth. The diptychs of the children are punctuated by lush landscapes of the farms where these children have grown up. As he took the second group of photographs, Kern inquired about what his young subjects had carried forward from their previous experience. What were their thoughts, their advice, their dreams and their goals for the future? How do they fit in future agricultural America?

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Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award, College Art Association, 2012The Gernsheim Collection is one of the most important collections of photography in the world. Amassed by the renowned husband-and-wife team of Helmut and Alison Gernsheim between 1945 and 1963, it contains an unparalleled range of images, beginning with the world's earliest-known photograph from nature, made by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826. The Gernsheim Collection includes some 35,000 major and representative photographs from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; a research library of some 3,600 books, journals, and published articles; about 250 autographed letters and manuscripts; and more than 200 pieces of early photographic equipment. Its encyclopedic scope—as well as the expertise and taste with which the Gernsheims built the collection—makes the Gernsheim Collection one of the world's premier resources for the study and appreciation of the development of photography.Published to coincide with a landmark exhibition staged by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which owns the collection, this volume presents masterpieces of the Gernsheim Collection, along with lesser-known images of great historical significance. Arranged in chronological order, this selection effectively constitutes a visual history of photography from its beginnings to the mid-twentieth century. Each full-page image is accompanied by an extensive annotation in which Roy Flukinger describes the photograph's place in the evolution of photography and also within the Gernsheim Collection. Flukinger also provides an enlightening introduction in which he traces the Gernsheims' passionate careers as collectors and pioneering historians of photography, showing how their untiring efforts significantly contributed to the acceptance of photography as a fine art and as a field worthy of intellectual inquiry. Appreciations of the Gernsheim Collection by Alison Nordström and Mark Haworth-Booth confirm its singular importance as a collection of outstanding breadth and depth in the history of photography.

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The photographs of "Upstate" explore the community, culture, landscape and architecture of one of the oldest regions in the country. Located on the shores of the upper Hudson River, the city of Hudson was the first city chartered in the United States in 1785 and it developed rapidly as a thriving whaling and merchant seaport. After an economic downturn in the early 19th century, Hudson’s economy rose again during the mid-century through heavy industries such as iron factories and mills. The Hudson River School, a mid-19th century art movement embodied a group of landscape painters such as Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church, portrayed the natural beauty of pastoral landscape in the Hudson Valley and themes of discovery, exploration, and settlement. During the 20th century, Hudson’s economy suffered with effects of the Great Depression and the closing of its factories and loss of manufacturing jobs. In recent decades, Hudson has experienced new economic growth, revitalization and transformation through a migration of newcomers from larger cities. In many ways, the ups and downs of Hudson’s cultural and economic landscape reflect the experiences of industrial cities across America.

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