Eich speaking at 66th POYi Awards in Los Angeles

Matt Eich is one of the featured speakers at this year’s POYi Education, Exhibition and Awards Program, held July 10-11 at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles, CA. Matt was the recipient of this year’s Community Awareness Award and is scheduled to give his presentation at 4p on Saturday, July 11, which will also be his 23rd birthday. Luceo’s Kevin German also took home a 2nd Place in Sports Feature Story and an Award of Excellence in Olympics Feature this year. For those in Los Angeles, please stop by and see the fantastic work of this year’s winners.

Banks for The FADER Issue #62

David Walter Banks photographs producers Tha Bizness for The FADER’s recent issue on newstands now.

Brinson for New York Times

Kendrick Brinson had the opportunity to peer into the Atlanta Masonic Center this week for an interesting story about race within the mysterious organization. Apparently, Masons Lodges tend to be segregated, but one white Atlanta lodge, the Gate City Lodge No. 2, accepted Victor Marshall, a black man, last fall and other lodges are none to pleased. Now Gate City has filed a state suit seeking an injunction to prevent its charter from being revoked. More images on Brinson’s personal blog.

Banks for New York Times

David Walter Banks photographs an international biotechnology conference for The New York Times.

Banks for New York Times

David Walter Banks photographed Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, for the New York Times.

Luceo’s Biannual Meeting in Two Acts

ACT 1

Biannual means twice a year.  A synonym of semiannual.  I promise you this much having scoured the dictionary to be sure it didn’t mean something that occurs every other year.  That word, to the credit of those who framed the English language, bears no resemblance to biannual.  Impossible to cross wires or mistake it for the word we have chosen to describe the timeframe in which our meetings happen.  Thankfully biEnnial sounds nothing like biAnnual.  

With that business out of the way, it comes as a pleasant treat to all of us at Luceo to have bumped our meeting timeframe up from once to twice a year.  We’ve been that busy and, in spite of our weekly conference calls, the lock-in method for getting stuff done just can’t be replaced.  

This summer we took advantage of the days following the Look3 festival to book up a hotel suite, order in some pizza, and hash out the big plan for the next six months.  No announcements are forthcoming just yet, but the meeting minutes span some six pages of single-spaced fun and our listserve is popping like its got a fresh new set of sparkplugs.  

It’s interesting that after 14 hour days of talking about photography that everyone would be so compelled to blow off steam by picking their cameras up off the ground to make more photographs.  No rest for the weary, or something like that.  Could be OCD, could be a nervous tick, but it’s exciting to see that we have no shortage of enthusiasm for the practice of making pictures.  

Act 2

Look3 Recap

Luceo is pleased to have been included in this year’s Look3 festival and, now that we’re all back to our grinds in our respective home-cities, a little recap is in order.  Our group multimedia installation, Still Hoping, made its debut in the Look3 Theater and we’re very proud to have had the opportunity to share that space with the heavy hitters at The New York Times and Mediastorm –just to name a few.  It’s only been a year and a half since we all locked ourselves into an apartment for a week and plotted out Luceo’s future and we’re very pleased to see the fruits of our labor come together at such a unique event.  

Kevin German, David Walter Banks, and Matt Eich also represented Luceo in a few other venues.  German and Eich had their own respective installations in the POYi gallery and Banks and Eich both had projections that were included in Slideluck Potshow’s contribution to the festival.  

The weekend turned out to be a good opportunity to catch up our friends from the MJR Collective as well as Miki Johnson from the Resolve Blog.  Her write-up, here, really sums up our sentiments about the state of the industry and our own approach to staying optimistic and productive in these times of upheaval.  That is something that, on a larger scale, Melissa Lyttle and the listserve and blog at Aphotoaday.org have been instrumental in doing for years.  We’re thankful to her for including our piece on today’s edition of that blog and also for keeping that forum and community alive and well.

And, of course, a huge thanks is in order to the Gina Martin and Jenna Pirog at National Geographic as well as Will May and Maryanne Golon from the festival.  Your support and encouragement was crucial to bringing our work to Look3 this year. 

 

Eich’s work in the POYi Gallery

German’s work in the POYi Gallery

Slaby for The Wall Street Journal

 

 

Matt Slaby photographed people and places impacted by the closure of New Frontier Bank in Greeley, Colo. The bank was recently forced into receivership after what the FDIC describes as “unsafe or unsound banking practices and violations of law and regulations.”   Many eastern Colorado farms and business were impacted by the closing of the bank and are now unable to transfer their loans to other institutions. The fallout threatens commercial and agricultural businesses that have historically relied on the bank for short-term credit.  The essay appears in the June 16th issue of the Journal and a nice edit of the work also appears on the Photo Journal blog.

Luceo on Multimedia Muse

The anonymous folks curating the Multimedia Muse blog seem plugged in enough to uncover the still-to-be-officially-announced url to our collaborative entry into this year’s Look3 festival and they’re featuring it front-and-center on their blog.  Have a look for yourself.  Whoever handles that blog most certainly has a good ear to the ground and we’re excited to be their feature du jour.