Thank You, MAM -- Milwaukee Art Museum Mounts "Color Rush" Photography Exhibition

On a chilly night in southeast Wisconsin, tonight the Milwaukee Art Museum provided a warm welcome to guests who enjoyed free Thursday admission to the new exhibition "Color Rush: 75 Years of Color Photography in America."

The exhibition is a preamble to MAM's 125th Anniversary celebration set for the warmer days of spring.

"Color Rush" introduces visitors to the earliest uses of color photography, starting in the early 1900s and leap-frogging a few decades at a time. The first main exhibition room features the early 1930s photos crafted as feature magazine covers and advertising. A cover for a summer 1932 edition of Vogue popped from the walls (the closest image and timing for an Olympic-themed moment as the cover debuted when the Los Angeles 1932 Olympic Games launched).

My docent host (girlfriend's mother) also pointed out the vivid holiday cookie visuals shown enlarged beside the eventual use of the photograph as part of a lifestyle magazine advertisement. The exhibition has a lot of these -- fine examples, mind you -- juxtaposed with early "hard news" color photos of the Hindenburg disaster. Impressive! Another sports-related magazine cover showcased a figure skating couple in flight above an unseen ice rink. Slick!

As the exhibition advanced to the post-war years and into the 1970s, with a few sets of color slides and some Kodak history, I got that funny feeling that's hit me at other photo exhibitions. Driving home and talking about the exhibition, it hit me again, with the questions I've asked before: Why do museums decide that "art" photography requires the photographers' subjects to be destitute, drug users, or trashy? Why must "museum quality" photography appear at the dregs end, or the Architectural Digest perfect end, of the photo spectrum?

The middle ground in this exhibition featured hotel interiors, urban landscapes and other (for this blogger) ho-hum images.

I guess this is my way of saying that after the High Museum of Art exhibition "Up & Down Peachtree" (photos by Martin Parr), recent Dorothea Lange images in the news, and MAM's exhibition, I'm now tired of photos of the poor, or snapshots of "the ordinary" appearing as "art." What sealed it for me was the "behind the curtain" parental advisory slide show of brothel employees, bodybuilders and dope heads in various stages of undress. What does this have to do with the color photography process?

Fortunately, "Color Rush" includes some dramatic and (never seen by my eyes until tonight) panoramic landscapes by Ansel Adams. It was also fun to discover the surprising pumpkin patch shopper while a three-story house burned in the background in a 1970s color photo by Joel Sternfeld.

Though going to the exhibition I had no specific hopes nor expectations, it was a moderate let down that more iconic color images, or perhaps early color images from cinema, did not make the cut. In that drive home conversation, I found myself asking "what about Annie Leibovitz's landscapes and portraits?" and "what about modern color photography in National Geographic as influenced by early color images in the same or similar publications?"

Is the exhibition "Color Rush" worth a look-see? Absolutely! And the information shared in the exhibition is something I will have to keep processing to see what develops.

Photos via MAM, as well as Vogue UK and www.kpraslowicz.com

So Money, Baby!

Though their website does not seem to have it archived, NPR aired a "Morning Edition" report this week during which they reported news from BOCOG (Beijing's Olympic organizing committee) -- in spite of their carmine-hued national flag and gargantuan spending/budgets, China's Games emerged in the black with a whopping $176 million profit.

According to the Associated Press, some of this profit is to be attributed to hefty sales of souvenirs, coins and stamps.

Stamps?

Reading that stamps helped clear BOCOG of decades of debt made me chuckle as it was like searching for a needle in a haystack to find a post office, let alone collectible philatelic items, in Beijing!

During my month-long Games assignment last year, we encountered only two post offices -- both temporary counters set up for international visitors -- with one each at the Beijing International Media Center (BIMC ... short for "you couldn't get IOC accreditation consolation destination") and one in the massive Main Press Center/International Broadcast Center (MPC/IBC). They did have some interesting postal collectibles. But not enough stamps were moving to explain even a small percentage of Beijing's reported Games profit (thinking there was one person in line mailing a post card -- everyone else was e-mailing home, methinks).

Speaking of their profits, Beijing's results are right up there with another most profitable Olympic enterprise: The Games of the XXIIIrd Olympiad at Los Angeles. Almost 25 years ago the City of Angels welcomed the world with tremendous success, to the tune of a $235 million profit, according to the Southern California Committee for the Olympic Games (SCCOG).

Their site details how this tremendous financial windfall created a vast Olympic legacy enjoyed over the last 25 years (and for the foreseeable future).

In just a few weeks, SCCOG and the L.A. Sports Council are throwing a party to celebrate "LA84-XXV" -- the 25th anniversary of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games.

It hardly seems possible it's been a quarter of a century since the grand Opening Ceremonies, and this celebration on the floor of Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. David Wolper (the man who brought dozens of grand pianos out of nowhere into the stadium -- the single moment that got me hooked on the Games) is the producer of the evening's festivities to commence July 18. They even got the Millennium Biltmore Hotel to roll back prices to $84 per night for the weekend!

My hope is that timing will permit travel to the LA84-XXV gathering, and will certainly blog about it more. Anyone else going? If so, drop me a line and we'll get toast the Games inside the 1932 and 1984 Olympic palace.

We'll also have to do the same at the Bird's Nest in 2033 -- marking calendar now to dust off Olympic stamp collection then, too.

Credit: Bird's Nest photo via Olympics.org; LA Memorial Coliseum photo via SCCOG; Monopoly card via Parker Brothers and Bankrate.com