Nowhere Near Here at Fotofest

by Brian Piana

Nowhere Near Here is a an exhibition of new photographic work by Texas artists held concurrently at Fotofest and Houston Center for Photography. The artists, selected by Menil Collection curators Toby Kamps and Michelle White, all currently live and work in Texas, although the work on display is often set outside of the Lone Star State.

I have visited the Fotofest portion of the exhibit – presenting the work off 11 artists – on two occasions. When Fotofest fills it's exhibition space to capacity, which includes a second floor, there's a lot of work to take in. Thankfully, I believe this exhibition is worth a repeat visit, and I found myself returning to the work of three artists in particular.

Houston photographer Chris Akin presents inkjet prints of photographs taken in California and New York. His very keen eye finds moments of visual harmony in often very unexpected places, such as the appearance of a fluorescent light tube leaning out of a trash can in front of a crosswalk. These photographs are formal studies, and if you allow yourself to look past the literal objects presented, there's a wonderful chorus of line, shape, color, and space.

Chris Akin, For Dan Flavin, from the series New York, 2010. (Photo by BP)

Akin's images are the closest to abstraction in the exhibition, and I'm sure that's why I respond to them as well as I do. The painter in me sees the shapes and pattern in his photos and thinks about Ellsworth Kelly and the trapeze swings (and this subsequent Red Blue Green painting). Those more knowledgeable in photography – and the artist himself – reference the work of William Eggleston as an obvious influence. I fully admit to not knowing much about Eggleston, so after viewing the show I did some internet research and found this wide-ranging interview with the photographer. At one point, he declares that you can't teach composition, and that's exactly the strength of Akin's images.

The exhibition literature reveals that Akin also draws and paints, and his photographs certainly reference an abstract painter's strategy in composing a canvas. I was caught off guard by my own enthusiasm towards these photographs, but I came to realize that if I worked more with traditional photography, these are the types of images I would try to make.

Chris Akin, Sink Behind Dominic's Fresh Produce, Moss Landing, California, from the series Who's Afraid of California, 2009. (Photo by BP)

During my first visit to Nowhere Near Here, I ventured upstairs using the back stairwell, which led me directly into Austin artist Mike Osborne's oversized photographs of Houston streets. They're really big for photographs – 44" x 55" – and are presented in a rather unique fashion. Rather than framing these inkjet prints (which would clearly cost a hefty sum), Fotofest and Osborne have mounted them directly to the wall thanks to four small magnets and some strategically placed screws embedded into the drywall. Osborne took these images with a tripod-mounted, large-format view camera, which allows for greater control over perspective issues and a higher amount of detail (and thus larger prints).

There is clearly some bravado in this work, with the prints being as large as they are and presented in an unprotected manner. I like that bravado, but for all the effort that must go into to capturing these images with a large format camera, I'm not sure the subject matter always warrants the oversized treatment. For instance, there's a photo of a group of policemen standing around a car. It's a familiar type of image to anyone who watches a local news program or reads a local paper, except here the image is nearly 4 x 5 feet. It reads a bit like a snapshot, and I struggle to find the advantage of having this image printed so large. Is it simply big for big's sake?

Installation view of Mike Osborne. Left: HPD, 2010. Right: Pennzoil Place, 2010. (Photo by BP)

Hanging directly right of the policemen image, however, is a striking photo of the entrance to Philip Johnson and John Burgee's Pennzoil Place towers. Here, devoid of figures and a narrative, the focus is squarely on the patterns created by the architecture and Osborne's framing. This image works at this larger size, and I found myself thinking of Sarah Morris' geometric paintings, which often take their cues from skyscrapers and the urban grid. Here again, my subconscious traces an aesthetic of a photograph back to abstract painting, but at least in this case – as opposed to with Akin's images downstairs – the scale of the work makes for a more immediate comparison to painting.

Mike Osborne, Weed Wacker on Gray Street, 2010. (Photo by BP)

Pennzoil Place is my favorite image from Osborne, but there are others that largely shift away from figurative representation and focus more on pattern and shape. Weed Wacker on Grey Street does have a figure in it, but the stark building facade and accompanying cast shadows make for a really interesting formal study of pattern and line. Yet for all of the interest I have in that piece, Osborne also offers up Man from the Back, which is a huge print of the back of a man's head. Perhaps the lines in his hair are visually interesting, but I'm not convinced it's a photo warranting an oversized reproduction.

The final work I encountered on my visit was that of Japanese-born, San Antonio artist Mimi Kato, whose One Ordinary Day of an Ordinary Town is a visual tour de force and unlike anything else in Nowhere Near Here. For this massive piece, Kato has blended hundreds of photographs of individual characters into a brightly-colored, illustrated cityscape. Comprised of 3 scenes (of three panels each), the piece portrays the bustling activities of a town in morning, afternoon, and evening. Each of the nine individual panels is quite large – 43"w x 74"h – and the scale of the work, combined with Kato's illustrative style and composition strategies, promotes an aesthetic of a modern-day japanese tapestry. Unfortunately, Fotofest lacks the 32 uninterrupted feet necessary to hang them all together, so Scene 3: Rosy Tomorrow is hung separate from the first six panels.

Installation view of Mimi Kato's One Ordinary Day of an Ordinary Town, 2010. (Photo by BP)

Aside from the interesting contrast between the photographic figures and the rather flatly illustrated backgrounds, what a viewer quickly realizes is that all of the characters in these scenes are played by the same person. My assumption was this was the artist (and that turned out to be correct), but such assumptions are not always wise to make. In this case, however, the woman seen getting dressed in the apartment above the restaurant, the group of people brawling in the street at the vegetable stand, and even the rabbit stealing a carrot from the garden are all played by Kato. Such role-playing immediately recalls the work of Cindy Sherman, while the compositing of a figure into a fictional landscape reminded me of French photographer Gilbert Garcin, who recently showed at Fotofest as part of Matter of Wit.

Mimi Kato, Scene 1: Golden Sky, Golden Start (detail), 2010. (Photo by BP)

Kato's statement gives further insight into her characters and the physical spaces represented in One Ordinary Day in an Ordinary Town, but the piece is engrossing even without the backstory. Her self-described "one-person performance" is unique, humorous, and captivating. I was actually happy to have seen Kato's work last while visiting Nowhere Near Here, as it provided an unexpected and memorable finish.

There are many more artists in the exhibition than I have singled out here, and I would encourage anyone to take in this latest installment of the Talent in Texas series. Nowhere Near Here continues at both Fotofest and Houston Center for Photography through April 23rd.

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Proposed: Houston Should Have a Comics Art Festival, part 4 of 4

Great job--you made it this far! We're almost done.

(If, however, you have not read part 1, part 2, and part 3, go back and read them now!)

Why have this festival in Houston? Houston is off the beaten track for comics-as-art. None of the important publishers are here, and few comics artists of note are here. There is a small scene, but it is pretty fragmented. But these are not disadvantages. We want people to travel to Houston for the festival. High quality out-of-town guests will make Houstonians more excited about coming to check out the festival. And artists who travel to Houston to participate in the critique portion spend money in Houston's hotels and restaurants.

Also, Houstonians have a love of oddball, noncanonical art. We demonstrate this every spring at the Art Car Parade. We embrace things like The Orange Show and Cleveland Turner, The Flower Man. Comics is an artform that has stuck its big toe in the door of art, but it isn’t all the way there. The unrespectable, slightly funky odor of comics might be just the thing to appeal to a Houston audience.

And once we get the “public”, whoever they may be, into a festival, we start doing something really wonderful. We begin show them comics as art. Comics as a means of personal expression. A very different conception of how they may have thought of comics before. We expand their aesthetic horizons. We blow their freaking minds with amazing examples of comics art. This is the goal of the festival.

A truly successful comics festival will create inspire people to read more comics, and for experienced comics readers, to try something different. It may inspire a few local artists and writers to put pen to paper and create their own comics. If it could help catalyze a local comics creative scene, that would be mission accomplished. It might encourage critical and scholarly work on comics from local writers and the academic community here. And I’d like to see the art collecting community in Houston embrace this artform as something worth collecting--and in doing so, encourage local galleries to sell comics art and local museums to display it.

To sum up, what I propose a festival devoted to comics-as-art, structured around art exhibits, critiques, and slide shows, using FotoFest as a general model. This is an idea I want to launch out into the public and see what other people think of it. I welcome your feedback. Thank you.

Proposed: Houston Should Have a Comics Art Festival, part 3 of 4

If you haven't read part 1 and part 2, read those first.

Could a festival like this work in Houston? We obviously couldn’t count on high levels of public funding. So if we can't look to Europe for a successful model (at least as far as funding goes), where can we look? A highly successful art festival here in Houston is Fotofest. Founded in 1986, Fotofest is a biennial photography festival that features six official exhibits, over a hundred exhibits at “participating spaces”, and a large-scale critique for emerging photographers.

So if we do an exhibit-oriented comics festival, how do we fund it? Fotofest provides a model for that. Foundations are their largest funding source. Earned income comes from selling prints, but mostly from photographers paying to participate in critiques. Events include parties and galas and auctions. The government sources include the NEA and the HAA, a nonprofit organization owned by the city and funded out of the hotel tax.

An art exhibit festival needs to have a space where we can display the artwork for at least a month, which rules out a lot of otherwise great locations. Fotofest has used Williams Tower, their own offices, the Winter Street Studios, etc. The participating shows for FotoFest tend to be in art galleries, museums, or public art spaces. A comics art festival would also want to have exhibits in book stores, comic shops, and libraries.

FotoFest calls its critiques “the meeting place.” They bring over a 100 photographers, editors, curators, scholars, and critics to look at the work of photographers, some aspiring or emerging, others more seasoned. I would like to see a similar thing for the comics festival. In addition to providing feedback about their work, it would be a place where artists could network professionally with top tastemakers in the field.

One thing I would want to bring over from the academic conference format are slide shows. But I would want the slide shows to be accessible to non-specialists. Pecha Kucha and TED are both good models for this. In fact, a Pecha Kucha night as part of the festival would be an exciting event. However it is formatted, brief, well-illustrated slide presentations would be a key part of the comics-as-art festival that I envision.

Concluded in part 4

FotoFest: How to Run an Art Festival, part 3

Robert Boyd

In the previous two parts, I talked about how FotoFest began and how their finances worked. This time around, I want to discuss a variety of adds and ends that didn't quite fit into the previous posts, including one of the most interesting aspects of FotoFest, the participating galleries.

But first, as we talked, I started wondering why they had never built a photography museum. Over the years, they had had venue problems. For a while, they were in the Brown Convention Center, which in addition to being charmless is also really expensive for an event of this duration (Brown is fine for weekend conventions, but to rent part of for six weeks is very costly). But it had the advantage of putting all the exhibits in one place. Some of the places they display are not ideal (Winter Street Studios, for example). If they had a museum building, they Biennial would have a home every other year. And they do have a collection of prints, which could form the basis for a permanent museum collection.

"It's a wonderful idea but it's just not our way of doing things," Fred Baldwin explained. "This ship does not stop."

When you look at FotoFest from the inside, perhaps the most important part of it is the Meeting Place--the gigantic gathering of photographers and photography professionals that meet for critiques and to make contacts. This was one of the things about the Arles Festival that appealed strongly to Baldwin and Watriss, and one that were determined to create here. (By the way, visualseen has a really great first-hand piece about this year's Meeting Place, written by one of the portfolio reviewers,  Tracy Xavia Karner.) But for the general public, the Meeting Place is invisible. What we see are the six official FotoFest exhibits and, in this most recent biennial, the 113 (!) participating exhibits.

Pretty much every gallery in town is a participating space. In addition, most museums and non-profit galleries participate. And finally, a lot of places that you don't usually associate with art exhibits are participating spaces. The primary requirement to be a participating space is that you are serious about it--you can't be a restaurant and hang five photos and be a participating space. "I'm not sure we've ever refused anybody [who asked to be a participating space]," Baldwin said. "On the other hand, we don't encourage every restaurant to become a FotoFest exhibition."



Cover of volume 2 of the FotoFest catalog, which includes some of the participating spaces

But the weird thing is that FotoFest is not involved in the curating of the non-FotoFest exhibitions. (I guess with 113 of them, it would be impossible). What the exhibitors get is identification (signage and those FotoFest posts you see around town), listing on the website, and for a price, inclusion in the catalog. It seems like there is a real risk of damaging the brand if the participating spaces put up really bad shows (and with 113 of them, they can't all be good).

The risk of bad, even embarrassing shows from the participating spaces would keep me up at night. But I think two things are happening that mitigate this risk. First, FotoFest has established itself well, and the spaces that participate work hard to live up to the FotoFest reputation. (Competition probably pushes them to do a good job as well.) Second, even if there are bad shows, in the end people remember the really good ones.



For example, this beautiful MANUAL show at Moody Gallery. Still, from my point of view, there is risk of brand damage. FotoFest has always thrived on risk, as we have seen. And the participating spaces make FotoFest feel HUGE without demanding much in the way of resources from the FotoFest organzation. The diversity (both in type of venue and location) helps make FotoFest more accessible to the public--and that, I'm guessing, has a more positive impact on the FotoFest brand than any occasional bad exhibit would have as a negative impact.

FotoFest: How to Run an Art festival, part 2

Robert Boyd




Last time around, we looked at how FotoFest launched itself. They assumed they would be a major operation right from the start, and acted accordingly. Now I want to look at how the organization is run, starting with the financials. Non-profits must file a form 990 with the IRS each year. This form contains within it most of the information one might find in an income statement and balance sheet issued by a publicly-traded corporation, but not in the same format. If you want to see it in that format, you can pay GuideStar (sort of the non-profit equivalent of Edgar). If you don't want to pay, you can download the 990s from GuideStar and still get a rich collection of data.

The most recent 990 for FotoFest was for the period from May 1, 2008 through April 30, 2009. Their revenues for that period were $786,323, with expenses of $865,375, so that year they ran a deficit. This period started just after the 2008 FotoFest (March 7 to April 20, 2008), so I think we saw a kind of weird financial situation. I'm guessing that a lot of the bills for the 2008 FotoFest came due after May 1, 2008--and thus were registered in that tax year. But I bet most of the revenue associated with FotoFest 2008 came before May 1! Before we dive in deeper, I want to compare FotoFest to a few other arts organizations in town that are registered nonprofits (and thus produce 990s).

On the tiny end, Box 13 had total revenues of $62,161 in 2009. Because their revenues were less than $500,000, they were able to use form 990-EZ, which is too bad (for me) because it lacks a lot of detail. Their assets were $5440--they don't own that cool building they are in. FotoFest is similar--they are renters, not owners. Their net assets were $456,824, and they consisted mainly of office equipment and photos that they own (and sometimes deaccession to raise money). The Art League, on the other hand, owns a beautiful new building, making them asset rich ($1,182,820 as of May 31, 2009) but weirdly enough, revenue-poor ($262,182). The ran a relatively large deficit that year ($137,840)--they could probably use some contributions, people! (Or at least stop by and drink some coffee at Inversion.) The CAMH has one big fat asset, its building. Its net assets as of June 30, 2008 were $7,424,659, with revenue of $2,662,376 and a deficit of $332,911. Diverseworks is, in size, closest to FotoFest: assets as of August 1, 2008 were $459,910 (they are evidently renters), revenue was $780,652 and that year they ended up with a $67,830 surplus. All the above visual art organizations, including FotoFest, are involved in displaying art as well as other artistic endeavors (art classes, art studios, etc.). None of them are art-collecting institutions. The MFAH is, and that is reflected in the value of their assets as of June 30, 2008: $1,146,624,730! (Their many buildings also add a lot to this total.) Their revenue that year was $52 million, and they ran a $6 million surplus.

So, back to FotoFest. I mentioned that revenue and expenses are likely to be "lumpy" because their big event happens every two years. The 2009 return didn't include a FotoFest and had revenues of $783 thousand. But the 2008 revenue was $1,590,893--more than twice as much. When FotoFest comes around, people open their wallets.

Who is opening her wallet? Let's look at 2008, since it was a high revenue year. Of that $1.59 million, $1.43 million came in the form of "gifts, grants and contributions received." Form 990 includes a schedule of contributors. These are only contributors who contributed at least $5000 or 2% of the total contributions, whichever is higher. In FotoFest's case, they are only required to show contributions equal or greater than $31,817 (in 2008--the totals were much lower in 2007 and 2009). They only had five contributors who met that minimum in 2008--well-known foundations like The Brown Foundation ($105,000), the Cullen Foundation ($150,000) and the Houston Endowment ($150,000). It's worth noticing that the Houston Arts Alliance gave $55,900. They are a 501 (3)(c) funded by the city--specifically by the hotel occupancy tax.

If we look at 2009, we can start to see some of the deep-pocketed individuals (as opposed to foundations) who contributed to FotoFest. They did a Form 990 EZ in 2009, which meant they were required to list every donor who gave $5000 or more. The big foundations gave a lot less that year. On one hand, it may be that FotoFest asked for less (it being an "off-year"), but we must also consider that the foundations' endowments took huge hits that year. The foundations are still the major donors, but six individuals or married couples gave more than $5000 that year.

 How much of the contributions are from the deep pocket people? In 2009, they received $763,815 in contributions. Of that, $403,050 came from foundations and individuals contributing more than $5000. So the proletariat contributed $360,765. When you stuffed a dollar into the donations box, you did your part.

One thing you notice when you look at these tax forms is that FotoFest spends all the money they get. And why not? They aren't a corporation--they are not going to pay out dividends. They ask for the money they need. Sometimes they get a little more than that, sometimes a little less. The foundations look closely at their books and operation.

"In your proposal to the foundation, you include your budget, you include last year's 990, as well as the year end report," Wendy Watriss explained. She laid out how much money comes from the various sources:

30% foundations
8% from corporations (in-kind donations and cash)
25% earned income (we'll return to this)
20% events (mainly a fine print auction with Sotheby's, but they also have an education event)
11% government
6% individuals

One can imagine that this differs greatly for different organizations and festivals. I think this speaks to the longevity of FotoFest. They know their way around foundations, and since foundations (as we have seen) are able to write the biggest checks,their time and effort cultivating them has a good ROI. The earned income also reflects 20 odd years of doing this--they know how to make money. (Not that making money is their goal.)

They have workshops and portfolio reviews (the Meeting Place) for which they charge photographers to attend. The portfolio reviewers include museum curators, publishers, gallery owners, editors, directors of non-profit organizations and photo agencies--so for photographers, this isn't just a place to get feedback. Serious professional connections can be made at The Meeting Place--not to mention sales. There are potential tangible benefits, and that attracts serious photographers from all over. This is an aspect of FotoFest that is largely invisible to the public, though.

Another revenue generator is the catalog(s) they publish for each festival. 

This year, there were two volumes (I think that's how it has been for recent festivals). One is for the official FotoFest exhibits and one for the participating spaces, and they cost $35 if you buy them through the FotoFest website. These are large, beautifully designed books with a stunning variety of photographs in them. 

What does all this revenue pay for? I think anyone who has been to the biennial can see that it is a complex and probably expensive event. Form 990 breaks it down somewhat. In 2007 (which included the 2008 biennial). Salaries and wages cost $156,206 (six salaried employees plus two contract workers--they depend a lot on volunteers and short term contract workers during the biennial. They spent $111 thousand on contract labor, and $159 thousand on professional fees--which presumably include the professionals brought in for the Meeting Place). Legal fees were $36 thousand, as was shipping and postage (presumably shipping the artwork accounts for most of that). Printing and publication was $170 thousand--catalogs, which as I mentioned are large and luxurous, as well as mailers and brochures. Travel soaked up $323 thousand. This seems crazy, but I suspect it includes the hotel rooms they purchase for the show, which Watriss said accounts for $200 thousand in hotel rooms for the Doubletree and Lancaster hotels. Because fo the complexity of the Biennial, FotoFest ends up adding a whole additional section, "Statement 2," to the expenses section of Form 990. 

So they know what things cost, what their budget is each year, and what to ask for from the foundations. Does it always work? No, because sources of income aren't always dependable.

"We had Kodak as our sponsor in 1992 with a contribution of $500,000," Baldwin explained. Remember the largest contribution in 07-08 was $150,000. "Then in '94, we got zero from Kodak because they fired their CEO [Kay Whitmore], the guy who was funding us. And that created a major crisis for us. It took us two years to dig out of that hole."

"After '92, we downsized by 45 to 50% in staff and operating costs," Watriss added.

"We came out of that stronger than ever," Baldwin said. "The fact that we went through it and survived added to our reputation."

I thought I'd be able to handle this in two entries, but I think I'll need a third. I want to briefly discuss the participating spaces and a few other odds and ends.

FotoFest: How to Run an Art Festival, part 1

Robert Boyd

I have always been interested in the economics of art, and since getting an MBA, also interested in the nuts and bolts of running an artistic enterprise. This puts me in a minority among people interested in art--artists in particular would rather not hear about it, even though they are the people most affected by these issues, the most vulnerable, the ones with the most to gain and lose. This spring, as I was attending FotoFest exhibits (both the main exhibits and the ones at the many participating spaces), I found myself wondering about the economics of art festivals and biennials. Clearly there are a lot of models, including the purely commercial model of Art Fairs (or comic book conventions, for that matter), as well as a variety of non-profit and semi-commercial affairs.

I decided the best way to find out about how a FotoFest-style art festival is run would be to sit down with the people who run FotoFest and ask them. Wendy Watriss and Fred Baldwin, who cofounded FotoFest in 1985 and still run it today, generously gave me two hours of their time and didn't flinch when I asked them nosy questions about FotoFest finances and operations.

I'm dividing this post into two three parts because there is a lot to cover. Also, there is a logical reason. Part one will cover starting the festival. This was not something I would have thought was important to how the festival is run now, 25 years on, but they convinced me otherwise. Part two will deal with the financing of FotoFest. And part three will deal with other issues, including the partnerships with the "participating spaces."

When you start a non-profit enterprise, you basically have two choices--either you start big or you start small and try to grow it to the right size (whatever that is). One reason to take the latter approach is that growing it gradually allows you to acquire the operational skills you will need to run a bigger operation. But as anyone who has seen a business grow can attest, there are different competencies needed for small start-ups than are needed for large, more mature operations--and the transitions between those states can kill a business. The competency you acquire in the start-up stage may not only be irrelevant but positively counterproductive in the more mature stage of the operation. That's why there are serial entrepreneurs--people good at starting businesses who sell out before the business becomes too big, then move onto to the next opportunity. Do these people exist in the non-profit arts institutional world? Maybe, but Watriss and Baldwin are decidedly not like that.

The other obvious reason to start small and grow gradually is that it allows you the time you might need to build up a donor list. You establish a reputation, get the attention of some foundations, grow some, get attention of more donors, etc. A nice neat virtuous cycle. It seems logical, but it doesn't take into account a powerful psychological motivations of donors. If you start small and grow gradually, by the time you reach certain targeted donors, you are no longer the new kid on the block. Donors may not feel excited about supporting your organization at that stage.

A third reason to start small is that the public may need time to become used to the ideas you are presenting them. If your curatorial ideas are outside the mainstream or unfamiliar to people, you could end up with a lot of deserted exhibitions. Start small and find your audience, then grow from there. Very logical. FotoFest categorically rejected these cautious, conservative ideas.

"We decided that in order to make it work in Texas, it had to be big," Baldwin said. "Some people tried to persuade us that Houston was not a photography town, you needed to educate the public and start off with Ansel Adams and work up.

"We decided to do the opposite."

Baldwin, a professor of photojournalism at U.H., and Watriss got the idea for the festival in the early 80s. They had been to the long-running photography festival in Arles, where they made some contacts, got some magazine assignments, and sold some photos to European museums. They liked what they saw. "On the plane back, we decided to do something like this in Houston," Baldwin said.

Also in the early 80s, Jacques Chirac instituted the Mois de la Photo (Month of Photography) in Paris, in which photos would be shown in all the municipal museums in the city for a month.

"We combined those two ideas for FotoFest in the planning stages," Baldwin explained.

At this point, they were at the stage where a lot of projects founder. They had a great idea. Period. Now they had to gain credibility and introduce Houston to the idea. They took a series of fairly audacious steps to achieve these two goals.

First, they drew up the names of three hundred people who had given money to the arts in Houston. They wrote these people letters explaining the FotoFest idea. They got no response whatsoever. Instead of giving up, they instead concluded that this was the wrong approach to take, and went in an entirely different direction.

Next, they brought over the director of the Mois de la Photo to meet with the mayor and the city council. While he was in town, they also introduced him to a few representatives from the business community. This got some interest going.

The next step was to invite four very famous photographers (Ikko Narahara, Franco Fontana, William Klein, and Helmut Newton) to come to Houston in February, 1985, to photograph the rodeo. They made certain that this was a huge social event and that as a huge social event, it was associated with FotoFest (the first official FotoFest was already scheduled for 1986). The Houston Chronicle captures the flavor of the event:

Back in 1962 a gorgeous American model known then as the girl with the $100,000 face" posed for a French Vogue fashion layout photographed in Paris by the already famous Helmut Newton.

Considering inflation and the way she still looks, Houston socialite-wife-mother-thoroughbred horse breeder Dolores (Mrs. Stuart) Phelps could be tabbed the million-dollar face" today.

Helmut Newton, even more famous than ever, this time was in Houston and delighted to be having a reunion with his former photo subject. [...]

Newton was one of a group of premier international photographers who have been focusing their cameras all this week on the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo and other Bayou City vistas. [...]

French Consul General Didier Quentin took center stage at the party to read a telegram of congratulations from Paris Mayor Jacques Chirac [and] City Councilwoman Eleanor Tinsley, representing Mayor Kathy Whitmire, read a Foto Fest proclamation. Heading out with husband Jim Tinsley for the opening performance of the rodeo, she wore a chic cowgirl's scarf knotted at the neckline of her navy jacket.

Camera International publisher Lorenzo Merlo of Amsterdam introduced the photographers who were brought to Houston by Foto Fest: Ikko Narahara of Japan. He and wife Keiko are staying with Betty and Freck Fleming of Paradise Bar and Grill fame and driving publicist Barbara Dillingham's little red Toyota truck. Japan's Consul General Taizan Araki was among the guests at the party.

Franco Fontana of Italy, a color and landscape specialist who lives in Modena and has compiled books about his home town and Bologna. Former honorary Italian consul Achille Arcidiacono is playing host to the Italian contingent which also includes photographer Ernesto Bozan and art magazine publisher-photo collector Franco Panini. Houston photographer Ed Daniel, doing yeoman service with a camera at the party, also is chauffeuring the Italians.

In absentia, William Klein, an American photojournalist who has lived in Paris for a number of years and done books on Rome, Moscow, Tokyo and New York. Houston next? He and wife and son arrived the day after the party and are house guests of Gay Block.

Joe and Christina Hudson were to take the visitors to their ranch in Brazoria County. (Betty Ewing, The Houston Chronicle, 2/23/1985) 

Many more socialites and prominent Houstonians were mentioned in this article. FotoFest was extremely canny in bringing these four world-renowned photographers to Houston, and lining them up with the local aristocracy. Houston was an insecure city in the mid-80s (and in many ways still is). The city was then riding very high on high petroleum prices--as the oil business grew and got rich, so had Houston. (Oil prices would crash one year later. If they had decided on a "start small" model, they might have expired then and there.) Urban Cowboy chic had happened, partly as a result of the fascination with brash, wealthy Houston. But Houston was feeling culturally not up to snuff. Where were our writers and artists, our great cultural institutions, especially compared to New York and L.A. and Chicago? FotoFest played off this insecurity. The social and political leaders loved the fact that a bunch of the world's greatest photographers were here, in their homes, at their parties.

Lesson learned: if you want the rich in Houston to open their wallets, don't send them a letter. Instead, let them party with Helmut Newton. The party described above was paid for by foundation grants (!), but the party itself was the seed for raising real money for the 1986 festival.

I was talking recently with someone who runs a tiny alternative art space, and she was fretting about how to make it grow, how to fulfill her ambitions for it. So I suggested becoming a 501 (c)(3). But she was reluctant because a 501 (c)(3) had a board of directors and she was reluctant to hand her vision over to them. But she also complained that she didn't want to be in the position where she would have to host a fund-raising gala. The way she pronounced the word "gala" said it all. The thought was simultaneously distasteful and terrifying. But FotoFest succeeded right from the beginning by embracing that aspect of a non-profit's existence. These moves allowed them to start big--the inaugural festival had 60 exhibitions.And despite various hiccups, FotoFest has been running every other year ever since.


In Part II, I'll discuss how it runs. We'll look at what it costs to put on and where the money to put it on comes from. (Get ready to dive into some tax documents with me! Oh boy!)


FotoFest 2010 opening night

FotoFest Opening Night

Click here for a larger image.

Poke and Topiary Text Lead

With a name like "Topiary Text Lead," you know you are going to see a show that makes you say "huh?" I'm sure this title means something to the curator, but it comes off as a nonsense phrase, three random unrelated words. This show is up at Space125 Gallery, which is a space for artists who receive individual artist fellowships from the Houston Arts Alliance. Given that the criterion for being exhibited is that you have a grant from the parent organization, the incoherent title makes more sense. These artists really have nothing in common, and lumping them together doesn't do any of them any favors. If I saw some of them in different contexts, I might like the work better.

The exception is Kia Neill (who did "Stampede" at Box 13), and she manages to avoid the incoherence of the rest of the show by having work that necessarily has be separated from the other work. She is the only sculptor in the show, and in this show works with pieces of velvet. So they are laid flat on little plinths, instead of jumbled together on the walls with the other art.

The work was in this over-bright exhibition space, but I noticed when I took a flash photo of one of the pieces how different it would look under different light. The velvet really catches light.


Kia Niell, Untitled (Multicolored Velvet), velvet, thread, polyester fibers, left--ambient light, right--flash photo

I know it looks like the flash is just washing out the colors, but what is actually happening here is that the little ridges in the piece are catching light that in the un-flashed photo are in shadow. The point I'm making is that you could get startling effects with this piece by putting spotlights on it from different angles. I assume that's intentional, but even if it's not, I like it. (Of course I really just wanted to rub my hands on this piece, but as a good citizen, I restrained myself.)

After I left Space125, I went over to FotoFest. I didn't have high hopes for Poke because of the theme--social media. First of all, most "media" art in galleries kind of bores me. A gallery is just not a good place to watch a video, for example. (Obvious exceptions would be pieces by Tony Oursler or Nam June Paik, whose work is simultaneously sculpture and video.) Second, an art show about social media just sounds like an attempt for a gallery to latch itself onto the latest cool thing. So no expectations going in.

Was I wrong--this show was great fun. The art is likely to have a shelf-life of five minutes, but for those five minutes, I loved it. You walk in and projected on the wall is a grid of hundreds of first person YouTube statements. Of course it is a cacophony of "information"--literally like watching a thousand YouTube videos of people speaking to the camera all at once. But it was so cool to look at. This piece was by Christopher Baker, but in a way, it was also by his many, many unwitting collaborators. And really, it's the unwitting collaborators that make these pieces so fun.


Penelope Umbrico, Suns from the Internet, 2008-2009

Penelope Umbrico's "Suns from the Internet" couldn't exist without unwitting collaborators. What Umbrico did here was to type the word "sun" into Flickr's search engine, download the many (thousands!) of photos of sunsets, sunrises, sunny skies, etc., crop them so just the sun is showing, print them out and make this utterly fantastic mosaic.


Penelope Umbrico, Suns from the Internet detail, 2008-2009

Aside from looking great, it made me think about how important the sun is to us humans. Not just in the obvious way that we wouldn't exist without it (indeed, the existence of life and civilization on this planet can be seen as an accidental result of the birth of this particular star), but that we all have a kind of personal relationship with it. Not too many of us worship it as a god these days, but we still pay technological tribute to it as if we did.

Jon Rafman's piece "Kool-Aid Man iSecond Life" hardly even seems like a work of art. It's more along the lines of a collection of prank calls. I don't mean to put it down, because really it's hugely entertaining. What he did was somehow create a Kool-Aid man avatar for himself, and then went into Second Life to see what kind of weird or cool stuff he could encounter--interesting avatars, weird landscapes, violence, sex, furries, etc.


Jon Rafman, Kool-Aid Man iSecond Life detail, digital video, 2009

(Let's see if PhotoBucket lets me keep that image up.)


Jon Rafman, Kool-Aid Man iSecond Life detail, digital video, 2009

So Rafman is sort of being a tourist in other people's weirdness. And that is awesome -- crash-through-a-brick-wall awesome.

There were other pieces in the show I liked--but you should get yourself downtown and check them out yourself. I have to admit that some of them looked like they might be interactive, but I couldn't figure out how to interact.  Whatever. I liked enough of this show to recommend it without reservations.