News/Press
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| 4.1.12 Honored to announce I have been included in the latest issue of SHOTS MAGAZINE. "The Spring 2012 issue of SHOTS brings together the captivating work of over 40 international photographers in their varied response to the issue’s theme 4 Elements (Earth, Water, Wind, Fire). Also featured is Russell Joslin’s interview with Russian photographer Anka Zhuravleva. Full of images, inspiration and ideas, this is an issue you don’t want to miss!" 3.31.12 "IN YOUR DREAMS " PHOTOPLACE GALLERY Exhibition dates: April 17 - May 12, 2012 A gorgeous exhibition monograph is available from: blurb books Juror's Statement: "It was a pleasure and honor to act as juror for In Your Dreams; a theme I hold very close to my heart. With approximately1650 submissions, it was incredibly difficult to narrow down the selections to a mere 75. Overall, the work was strong, thus images that evocatively dissected mysterious elements within unconscious existences dictated the final selections. Selected images adhered to using universal metaphor, symbols or personal attributes of one’s own dreams or nightmares, which when viewed as a group create what may represent a continuous, collective flow of dreaming. Together, these images pose the question of what is real versus imaginary, conscious versus unconscious and further encourage us to stretch our perception. There were many images I was drawn to and wished there was room to include. It takes a good deal of courage to tackle a theme such as this honestly and authentically so I’d like to congratulate everyone who submitted in addition to those who were selected to exhibit." Susan Burnstine http://www.susanburnstine.com 1.1.12 Wishing everyone a very joyful and adventurous 2012! Also wanted to add my latest print "Infinity Birds, New York" has been selected for the upcoming 5th Annual International Juried Plastic Camera Show at the Rayko Photo Center in San Francisco. http://raykophoto.com/gallery/exhibitions/gallery-upcoming-exhibitions/ The image was shot using a lo-fi plastic film camera and hand printed in the darkroom with a emphasis on experimentation and pushing traditional techniques. If interested limited edition prints are available. 12.3.11 Hello everyone, This Wednesday (Dec. 7th) there will be a screening of the 8min short/trailer of "HIGHWAY" here in NYC. Time: 7:00pm until 10:00pm Where: 116 MacDougal (The old Gaslight Cafe!), 116 MacDougal between Bleecker St. & Minetta Ln., New York, NY Films from directors Sam Roden & Nicholas Syracuse, Ballard C. Boyd, Catherine Stratton, and Adam Taylor. 2-for-1 drinks til 9PM! Tickets - $10 at the door; free for all members of Big Vision Empty Wallet. To find out how to become a member, visit bigvisionemptywallet.com/join 116 MacDougal Street used to be the The Gaslight Cafe, where Gregory Corso, Bob Dylan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, LeRoi Jones, Jack Kerouac, Ray Bremser, and many others would read poetry. Join us for an exciting evening of drinks, networking and film screenings at this historic venue! 4.13.11 I'm honored that famed photographer Dan Burkholder has selected work from my "Highway" series for the current PhotoPlace Gallery exhibition titled "Black and White". "You wouldn’t think a so-called “seasoned” photographer like myself would need reminders about the significance and beauty of black and white photography. But a reminder it was, and a terrific one at that. Sitting down with Lightroom and the 1200+ entries was a glorious visual feast. The images thrust me onto another plane of appreciation for those practitioners who have honed their vision into shades of gray, embracing one of photography’s earliest and most honored ways of expressing the photographic image. Photographer Ruth Bernhard observed, “With color you see the subject — with black and white you see the form of the subject.” The black and white photograph distills our range of perception, forcing a contemplation of the shapes, the light, and the stories behind the image before us. The image’s design is in its tonality; the composition is in its tonality; everything about the image is defined by humble tonality. Put simply, it’s magical!" Dan Burkholder Exhibition dates: April 26th - May 21st, 2011 Reception: May 13, 5-7 pm. www.vtphotoworkplace.com 3.15.11 I am pleased to announce a selection of my work will be shown at the FotoDC sponsored "Flash" Exhibition, selected by Amanda Maddox, Associate Curator of Photography at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC. The show will be located in Crystal City from March 17-April 17. It is opening this Friday, so if you are in the DC area I would love to see you there!!! www.fotoweekdc.org In his seminal text On the Road, Jack Kerouac declared “it’s an anywhere road for anybody anyhow.” This maxim applies to many contexts and travelers alike, but it resonates with a tradition specific to the history of modern and contemporary photography. On the open road, zigzagging across state lines, such pioneering photographers as Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, and Walker Evans located moments of irony, mystery, and chance. Their idiosyncratic observations of life, taken from car windows and street corners, mesmerize with a quiet lyricism. Other photographers, such as Jeff Wall and Philip-Lorca diCorcia, tell stories of how we live by staging images on the street. Roads and streets serve as familiar terrain in these works by five local photographers. Alongside American highways, Nicholas Syracuse and Daniel Kempner isolate an anonymous population that comprises the everyday fabric of the nation. Jeff Deemie and Mark Parascondola go behind the scenes in two towns—a small Texas community and a long-abandoned Spaghetti Western stage set in Spain—to reveal the waystation as a complex, elusive landscape. The journey itself (and all of the places in between) takes center stage in Brady Robinson’s featured projects Transfer and Shift. For Robinson, and for the other photographers, the seemingly unremarkable byways constitute an anywhere road. These roads lead us to vital places, and to the heart of things. Amanda Maddox, Associate Curator of Photography and Media Arts at the Corcoran Gallery of Art 5.1.10 Images from the Twilight Road/Highway series have been chosen for exhibition at PhotoPlace Gallery, Middlebury, Vermont, in the PhotoPlace Open, 2010. " Juror Keith Carter chose forty works for the gallery exhibition, from over 1700 photographs submitted by nearly 300 photographers. The exhibition will be on view at PhotoPlace Gallery in Middlebury, Vermont, between May 21st and June 19th. An artist's reception will be held on Friday, June 11th, from 5-7 pm. Keith also selected an additional thirty-five photos for display only in the "On-Line Gallery Annex." All seventy-five works will be reproduced in a full-color catalogue available for purchase from Blurb Books." - PhotoPlace Open, 2010 This is going to be a great show and since Vermont is one of the few states I've yet to see I hope to be able to make it for the reception! 3.23.10 Harper Collins has just released: Let's Ride: Sonny Barger's Guide to Motorcycling that features Nicholas's work of the original Hell's Angel and outlaw motorcycle legend Sonny Barger. 2.26.10 Rayko Photo Center: 2010 International Juried Plastic Camera Show. Mertit Award presented to Nicholas Syracuse for "Highways, Missiouri" and featured in the printed and online issue of the S.F. Weekly Arts Calender. SF Weekly: Rayko Gallery, 2010 Plastic Camera Show ................ Artist Profile, ALLZAH: ART by Bill Hardy The first thing that caught our attention was the music. Somewhere between the giant steel dragon and the blood red room at the Art-o-Matic show in Southwest DC last autumn there was the sound of human voices and simple instruments, and Heather and I followed it to a remote chunk of wall space with some quiet black and white photographs. Quiet, until you looked closely at the faces and the atmosphere of the images. There was a distinct, very human energy emerging from these photographs, and in concert with the rhythmic singing they created a sense of timelessness, of many human lives over many generations. Presented traditionally, almost classically, Nicholas Syracuse’s photographs were shot with common materials many serious photographers use—mostly Fuji and Kodak 400 speed black and white films with a medium-format camera—yet his images were anything but ordinary. Faces that beamed, glowered, or just confronted the camera with honesty; inanimate objects imbued with a palpable life force; a bolt of lighting pulsing against a sky as black as doom—these were moments of truth, seized by a photographer who was completely open to the energies around him. 'Throughout Syracuse’s imagery is a strong current of affection for his subjects. He finds the heroic in what could otherwise be presented as broken or worthless. His lens captures lives without taking away their dignity; witnesses without passing judgment.' Heather and I met Nicholas Syracuse at a coffee shop in Waldorf. A tall, charming young man with the unmistakable air of an artistic spirit, he was full of enthusiasm for his latest projects and forthright about his methods and his experiences traveling, meeting people, and making photographs of them. Syracuse was born to roam the world—he had just returned from New Orleans and was already looking forward to his next road trip. His largest series of photographs is his ongoing American Road project, with photographs from Seattle, San Francisco, Phoenix, Texas, South Carolina, Indiana, and many points in between. The music that was playing at the Art-o-Matic was put together for the show by Syracuse and DJ Zhyin, is something Syracuse wants to incorporate into a traveling multi-sensory exhibition—still photography, 8mm film projections and soundtrack that includes sounds recorded on his travels. Syracuse sees the music and imagery as reinforcing each other to make the experience of the road more visceral. Born in Arizona and raised in the DC area, Syracuse persued photography studies at the Corcoran School of Art in DC. and The Northwest Photographic Center in Seattle. Outside Art-o-Matic where we were first introduced to his work, Syracuse has exhibited at the Washington Center of Photography here in D.C. and other galleries throughout America, including New York, San Francisco, New Orleans and New Orleans. He’s photographed musicians for both RCA and MetalBlade Records, and did video work for HR (Paul “Hunting Rod” Hudson), formerly the front man for the seminal DC punk band Bad Brains that is featured in the recent documantary by Small Axe Films. Four images from the American Road series—67 Years Old, San Francisco; Mechanic, Terre Haute, Indiana; Tobacco Field, Tennessee; and Kingman, Arizona—were also recently published in George Washington University’s GW Review. "Syracuse has almost a sixth sense about the life going on around him. He suddenly sees something—a piece of plastic by the road, a dog running by—and he shoots by instinct. Often that impromptu shot reveals unexpected layers of meaning." Possibly his most recognizable photograph, Syracuse’s portrait of a woman in a Tennessee tobacco field is the epitome of this. She is surrounded by huge leaves, wiping the sweat of the soil from her face with the tail of her t-shirt and momentarily revealing deep cleavage in a black lace bra. This fieldworker is also a sensuous and alluring woman. Like so much of the world, she has an un-guessed-at complexity lurking just below the surface. And like so many of Syracuse’s images, this one was unplanned—another moment when a deeper truth revealed itself and the photographer was tuned in enough to catch it. Syracuse clearly has an attraction to strong personalities, and records some of the lesser seen corners of the country in the faces of people far removed from squeaky-clean suburbia. He is particularly proud of having been able to capture a portrait of Hell’s Angels founding leader Sonny Barger riding his motorcycle—honored, really, that Barger allowed him the chance. And Syracuse didn’t waste the opportunity: the character of the man—the miles he’s seen—radiate from the image. It’s not hard to understand why people let Syracuse photograph them. He has an almost mystic calmness and projects an open, non-judgmental energy. His mission is not to assess the world or to speak for it, but to discover it. For Syracuse, “being on the road is a state of mind, freeing my senses and opening my mind to a broader perception.” Living in that broader perception, he waits for the impulse to shoot—and sometimes even he is surprised by the sliver of truth that emerges in the print. ............... Fall Church News Press, Ellipse Art Center: "Further dabbling in the Delta brings us to the work of Nicholas Syracuse who grew up along route 1 in Virginia and now splits his time between DC and New Orleans. Syracuse who has two excellent images in this show; with my favorite being " Gumballs and Crushed Chicklets U.S. 1 New Jersey. Here we find a couple of untouched gumballs on the roadside, with a multitude of other crushed confections in the blurry background. It literally has an edgy feel to it. A sort of malevolent playfulness. Gumballs being a something of a childhood pursuit, and the crushing there of the adult passing cars offer some clear clues as to what metaphoric message is. With the untouched gumballs literally the focus of gumballs of the image, your almost forced to give it a positive, survivor's spin to it. When you wear on their nerves, and they want you to grow up, they tell you to go "play in traffic". The image seems to be commenting about the playful pleasures of childhood, and how we should cherish the few pieces that manage to survive the process." |
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