Edition Announcement #197 - Kurt Tong

Good afternoon collectors! It's Sara, sending salutations to you all from Jen. She'll be back as soon as she can but for today I'm pleased to introduce two new editions from current Hot Shot and Blurb Photography.Book.Now Editorial Prize winner Kurt Tong. This man is on a roll!

If you're in NYC, be sure to see his work in person at the JB Gallery as part of the Hey, Hot Shot! 2009 First Edition Exhibition before it closes this Saturday, September 19th. We'll be opening A Square by Hosang Park the following Friday, September 25th, from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. Be there or be square! (Sorry, I couldn't resist.) In celebration of all this photo-goodness, and more to come, we're throwing our first-ever HHS! Confab and Print Trade on Tuesday, September 29th, from 6:00 to 8:30 p.m. at White Rabbit; we'd love to see you there. More info to follow but, please, save the date!

Today's photography editions, Gosling Lake and RAF Vulcan XL-361 are from Farewell in Labrador, a finely-tuned collection of landscapes, portraits, interiors and still-lifes. The series tells the tales of this remote corner of the East Coast of Canada: the closing of an air base and the scattering of jobs and families, a cod moratorium that inhibited locals' livelihoods, a government settlement program that brought the Inuit and Innu nomadic cultures to the brink of extinction and the general dispersing of youth in the search for greater opportunities. They are stories unique to Labrador's geographic location and cultural and social history but similar to that of many places in the world as progress ramps forward.

Kurt—although I regretfully missed the opportunity to meet him—strikes me as an immensely compassionate individual. Before becoming a photographer, he was trained as a health visitor and co-founded Prema Vasam, a charitable home for disabled and disadvantaged children in Chennai, South India—and his photographs reflect this about him. The series is contemplative and reveres the place and culture he has documented, replacing what all-too-easily could be pity with hope and empathy.

For me, these photographs together recall Antoine de Saint-Exupery's Wind, Sand and Stars, so I will leave you with these passages:

A man cannot live a decent life in cities, and I need to feel myself live. I am not thinking of aviation. The aeroplane is a means, not an end. One doesn't risk one's life for a plane any more than a farmer ploughs for the sake of the plough. But the aeroplane is a means of getting away from towns and their book-keeping and coming to grips with reality.

...Always and everywhere I have seen men attach themselves more stubbornly to barren land than to any other. Men will die for a calcined, leafless, stony mountain. The nomads will defend to the death their great store of sand as if it were a treasure of gold dust. And we, my comrades and I, we too have loved the desert to the point of feeling that it was there we had lived the best years of our lives ...it was here in the desert he possessed his veritable treasures—this prestige of the sand, the night, the silence, this homeland of wind and stars.

You will have to allow for the substitution of "icy coast" for "desert" and "snow" or "sea" for "sand" in these instances, but it seems that Labrador too is a beloved homeland of wind and stars.

Wednesday Editions: Kurt Tong

Previous Newsletter : Edition Announcement #196 - Chad Hagen