Seattle Photographer Daniel Sheehan

This past week I got another assignment for The Chronicle of Higher Education here in Seattle. This time it was a portrait of Rafael I. Pardo, an Associate Professor at Seattle University School of Law. The news article was headlined “Supreme Court Considers Case About Excusing Student Debt Through Bankruptcy” and it was about a case which is scheduled for arguments this week.  Professor Pardo teaches in the fields of bankruptcy, commercial law, and contracts. Much of his research explores the relationship between educational debt and financial distress, particularly within the bankruptcy system. His recent research has also analyzed bankruptcy courts and their institutional role within the federal judicial system. The case before the Supreme Court this week weighs federal rules for dismissing student debt in bankruptcy proceedings against the authority of a judge’s final court orders. Pardo has been working on the case, United Student Aid Funds Inc. v. Espinosa, and it highlights the complex and sometimes contradictory nature of bankruptcy law that makes student loans as difficult to excuse as court-ordered child support. Pardo says that the standard for applying “undue hardship” in loan repayment is inconsistent.

For more, read the article by Eric Kelderman in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

For an assignment for The Chronicle of Higher Education last week I photographed Sunil K. Aggarwal, above, who is in his final year of an M.D.-Ph.D. program at the University of Washington. They were running an article on him because of his efforts to convince the American Medical Association to help get marijuana reclassified as a drug with medical benefits.

” For more than 30 years, the federal government has classified marijuana as a highly dangerous drug with no medical uses, and for more than a decade, the American Medical Association has endorsed that classification. But this month, the association called on the government to reconsider the drug’s current status alongside heroin and LSD, and to consider its medicinal potential.” from the article by Katherine Mangan in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

This video by John Kelly helps me to put off what I really need to be doing right now.

So a little more on Robert Frank’s influential book “The Americans”.

Looking In: Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through Jan, 3, 2010.

Frank shot 767 rolls of film on his 10,000 mile road trip across America in the mid 1950’s, a total of 27,612 individual shots in total. He then edited it down and made over 1,000 work prints of different images and after 2 years finally selected the 83 images that actually were printed in the book. Editing is so important and perhaps the hardest skill for a photographer to learn. How to edit your own work. I hope to make it to NY to see this exhibit before it comes down. There is an interesting review of the Frank exhibit at the Met in the Wall Street Journal.

Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans” celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Americans, Robert Frank’s influential suite of black-and-white photographs made on a cross-country road trip in 1955–56.

“In the first room at the Met is a wall of about 80 work prints, most of which have never been exhibited before. They were at one time candidates for “The Americans,” and most were edited out over the two years he spent on the winnowing process.

Almost every one of these outtakes is wonderful—and these are only a sample of the 1,000 work prints he made, themselves a tiny fraction of the rough diamonds still buried in the contact sheets. Many photographers would feel lucky in a lifetime to have captured a handful of the images that Mr. Frank rejected.

Why he chose to publish one picture over another will have many of us studying the excellent essays in the catalog to gain a better hold on his reasoning. Everything was sacrificed to the flow across pages and the four sections of the book. The icon of riders looking at us from a New Orleans trolley car is followed by another frieze-like composition of busy pedestrians on Canal Street moving in apparent isolation.”

City Hall, Reno, Nevada, 1956

My friend Jason Eskenazi wrote me with a request.
Dear Dan,

As you know I worked at the MET for almost 2 years as a security guard. In the last months I guarded the Robert Frank show almost everyday. Ive been asking famed photogs what photo of the 83 images in the Americans really does it for them or that they can say they were ‘born’ out of, is their hands down favorite. I’m trying to get 83 photographers to respond to this survey question.

I finally quit and Im on my to Turkey.

Hope all is well.

JE

He presented me with a dilemma. I went back to the book and went through it again through all 83 images evaluating my emotions and thoughts.

I responded to him with these thoughts.

Nina has photographed something we all need to be aware of especially here in the Pacific Northwest.

British Columbia is in the midst of a mountain pine beetle epidemic with millions of trees dying from the pine beetle infestation. Nina Berman narrates her portfolio of images from her Consequences by NOOR climate change project, British Columbia l Pine Beetles

Since 1990, more than 36 million acres of pine forests in British Columbia have been decimated by the mountain pine beetle. Experts predict that by 2014 at least 80 percent of the pines in British Columbia will be dead. No larger than a grain of rice, the pine beetle is endemic in Rocky Mountains of western North American. Winter temperatures below minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit once kept the beetle in check. Warming trends have permitted the beetle larvae to survive the winter and proliferate at an astounding rate in forests from Mexico to Canada. Mature pine trees, weakened by drought, cannot withstand the onslaught, and as the beetle multiplies, younger trees also are falling prey. Dead trees are fodder for wild fires. The beetle kill has wreaked havoc on the economy of regions dependent upon logging and tourism. Authorities acknowledge that man cannot stop the rampage of the pine beetle. The beetle will eat until it runs out of food or until deeply cold winter temperatures return to kill its larvae. ?I felt,? says Berman, ?like I was seeing a cataclysmic shift in our understanding of what forests look like.

Nina’s portfolio is part of a larger project from Noor.:

From the frontiers of climate change comes Consequences by NOOR. Featuring the work of nine, internationally acclaimed photographers, this exhibition documents the devastating effects of climate change around the globe. These stunning photographs show not what might happen in the future but what is happening today.

The subjects include: a massive pine beetle kill in British Columbia, genocide in Darfur, the rising sea level in the Maldives, Nenet reindeer herders in Siberia, Inuit hunters in Greenland, a looming crisis in Kolkata, India, coal mining in Poland, oil sand extraction in Canada and the deforestation of the Amazon Rainforest by Brazilian cattle ranchers.

Consequences by NOOR premiers at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, December 7 through December 18, 2009.

Consequences by NOOR goes on tour in 2010 and is available for booking. View our PRESS PAGE for information.

Evan Flory-Barnes conducts his ensemble in the premiere performance of his large chamber composition ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF A CELEBRATION at Town Hall in the final presentation of the 2009 Earshot Jazz Festival.

What a great performance by the orchestra moving through a fusion of jazz, hip-hop, and classical music, complete with modern dancers and freestyle break dancers. The Seattle bassist and composer is excited premiering the large chamber work, a snapshot of the abundance of inspiration that can thread artistic mediums together in Seattle. The premiere of Acknowledgement of a Celebration features 35 musicians and ten dancers set to Flory-Barnes’s new compositions.

Flory-Barnes performs with an inclusive passion and expressive intensity, as though he were completely immersed in music. He regularly brings his trio, The Teaching, to the Lucid jazz club in the University District for an open community jam and hang. The Teaching appeared in the 2008 Earshot Jazz Festival at the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center.

WAYNE HORVITZ: THESE HILLS OF GLORY

Soloist Carla Kihlstedt (violin) and the Odeonquartet, a world-renowned chamber group featuring Seattle Symphony musicians, perform Wayne Horvitz’s new chamber-music work, These Hills of Glory

The Earshot Jazz Festival is in it’s final week and so I am looking forward to staying home in the evenings starting next week for a least a little while. It has been a lot of fun covering the festival. I have seen and heard a lot of different styles of mostly jazz being played but the music of Wayne Horvitz was something very special.

Pianist Cristina Valdes performs the world premier of Wayne Horvitz’s For Piano Alone in Four Parts

The Odeon Quartet consisting of Gennady Fillmonov, violin, Artur Girsky,violin, Heather Bentley, viola, and Helene Ferret, cello, perform the world premier of Robin Holcomb’s Carry Over

Wayne Horvitz joins the Odeon Quartet and Carla Kihistedt on stage at the end of the performance of These Hills of Glory