Jeffrey Price Speaking at Norwalk Camera Club on January 13, 7:30pm

Club members are invited to come to Norwalk Camera Club’s special presentation by Jeffrey Price on Monday, January 13th at 7:30pm.

Jeff will talk about the changes in photography since the 1960’s, the changes in the photography market and the importance of the presentation of picutres for display.  He will also talk about and will bring with him a few originals from the Famouse Photographs Archives in his collection.

About Jeffrey Price

Jeffrey Price, Artists’ Market & Famous Photographers Archive

“Art is a window through which we can see more than is visible to our eyes”
-Jeffrey Price

Jeffrey Price is owner of Artists’ Market, of Norwalk, Connecticut. Founded in 1971, the gallery has been a respected part of the Connecticut art community for over forty years. Jeffrey is a well-known specialist in photography M. C. Escher’s art, and has lectured on visual history to audiences ranging from schoolchildren to scientists. Jeffrey is currently a member of the Norwalk Arts Commission.

Born in England in 1952, Jeffrey’s childhood memories are of academic life around the intellectual communities of Cambridge, Princeton, and eventually Yale, where his father, Derek de Solla Price, was Avalon Professor of the History of Science. An early interest in art led to a degree in art history at The University of Connecticut, and then to ownership of Artists’ Market. Jeffrey has organized exhibits of photographs by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, as well as the work of Dutch printmaker, M. C. Escher. Jeffrey’s own photographs have been honored with Kodak’s National Award for Experimental and Creative Photography, and have been published and collected for over 30 years.

Famous Photographers Archive is a collection of mid-century photographs from the Famous Photographers School of Westport, which was active from 1961 – 1974.

The following is from the press release regarding this collection:
For a single decade Westport was the center of an exploding evolution in photography and education.  Richard Avedon showed how he had photographed The Beatles with psychedelic effects for LOOK magazine. Irving Penn set up a studio with his camera focused on a still life of pouring wine, Alfred Eisenstaedt explained how he took the cover shots for many of the first issues of LIFE Magazine.
Ten of America’s greatest photographers gathered in Connecticut to teach the world to take pictures and to show students how some of the most memorable photographs of the twentieth century had been created. The school they founded, Famous Photographers School, closed its doors in 1974, and for fifty years its legacy of historic photographs was all but forgotten, carefully stored in filing cabinet drawers in an industrial warehouse. Now, for the first time, photographs from this forgotten archive are on exhibit at Artists’ Market in Norwalk, and a unique window into the past has been opened at last.
In 1948 Westport’s Albert Dorne and the great American illustrator Norman Rockwell came up with the idea for a correspondence school for art, and with a group of their colleagues they founded Famous Artists School. The timing was perfect: servicemen were coming home from war and America was growing fast. Within ten years the school was one of the most successful of its kind, and expansion plans included building a state-of-the-art headquarters on the riverside in Westport (now home to Save the Children) and branching out into other fields of art and education. Schools were organized for writers, for illustrators and for cartoonists, and ten of the greatest photographers of the time were recruited as the guiding faculty of Famous Photographers School.
Today their names are legendary and read like the chapters in a history book of photography: Avedon, Penn, and Eisenstaedt; Philippe Halsman and Bert Stern, Frank Lloyd Wright’s photographer Ezra Stoller, and the founder of the National Press Photographers Association, Joseph Costa. Today, photographs by these historic figures are seen more often in books and museums than on gallery walls, so an opportunity to see and collect vintage prints that were made over fifty years ago, pictures that were selected to teach future generations of photographers the secrets of the masters, is not to be missed.