Christopher Felver

Last updated

Christopher Felver (born October 1946) is an American photographer and filmmaker who has published several books of photos of public figures, especially those in the arts, most notably those associated with beat literature. He has made numerous films (as director, cinematographer or producer), including a documentary on Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder, released in 2013.

Contents

Photography

Christopher Felver has photographed numerous writers, intellectuals and filmmakers such as Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, Noam Chomsky, Gregory Corso, Clint Eastwood, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Dennis Hopper, Oliver Stone, Elizabeth Taylor, Hunter S. Thompson and Kurt Vonnegut. [1] [2]

His photography has been exhibited internationally, with solo photographic exhibitions at the Arco d'Alibert, Rome (1987); the Art Institute for the Permian Basin, Odessa, Texas (1987); Torino Fotografia Biennale Internazionale, Turin, Italy (1989); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1994); Roosevelt Study Center, Middelburg, Netherlands (1998); Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles (2002); the Maine Photographic Workshop (2002); Robert Berman Gallery, Los Angeles (2007); the San Francisco Public Library (2018) [3] and other galleries and museums.

His works have also appeared in major group exhibitions, including The Beats: Legacy & Celebration, New York University (1994) and Beatific Soul: Jack Kerouac On The Road, New York Public Library (2007). [4] [5] [6]

A collection of his photographs is held by the University of Delaware. [7]

Books

Some of Felver's books include American Jukebox: A Photographic Journey (Indiana University Press, 2014), a collection of photographs of musicians and singers including Emmylou Harris, Ozzy Osbourne, Odetta, Taj Mahal, and Eartha Kitt; Beat (Last Gasp, 2007) an intimate memoir of image, text, and reminiscence; The Late Great Allen Ginsberg (Thunder's Mouth Press, 2002); The Importance of Being (Arena Editions, 2001), 400 portraits of eminent figures in American arts, letters, music, and politics; Ferlinghetti Portrait (Gibbs Smith Publisher, 1998); Angels, Anarchists & Gods (Louisiana State University Press, 1996), featuring the American avant-garde; The Poet Exposed (Alfred Van der Marck Editions, 1986), a monograph of contemporary American poets; and Seven Days in Nicaragua Libre (City Lights Books, 1984), co-authored with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, based on a week they spent together in Nicaragua with Minister of Culture Ernesto Cardenal. [8] [9] [10]

His latest book, Tending the Fire: Native Voices and Portraits, a collection of photographs of Native American poets and writers, was published by University of New Mexico Press in April 2017. The book includes an epilogue by Felver, in which he writes, “Native Americans today are as modern as the Space Age, and each in their own way carries forth the cultural heritage ‘from whence they came.’ Their abiding legacy as the first people of this continent has found its voice in the hard-won wisdom of their art and activism." [11] [12]

Film

Felver directed the 2013 film Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder about poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, which was reviewed in The New York Times and other publications. [13] [14]

He participated in the 53rd Venice International Film Festival, and screened films in festivals and museums around the globe, including presentations at the Library of Congress (2006), the Pan African Film Festival, Los Angeles (2006), Lincoln Center, New York (2005), the Mill Valley Film Festival (1996, 2002), Santa Fe Film Festival (2001, 2005), Northwest West Film Festival, Portland Art Museum (2001), Walker Museum of Art, Minneapolis (2000), Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C. (2000), KQED San Francisco (1984, 1999), and WGBH Boston (1984).

The National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., New York Public Library, and the Museum of Fine Art in Boston have presented retrospectives of his films: Cecil Taylor: All the Notes (2005), Donald Judd’s Marfa Texas (1998), The Coney Island of Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1996), Tony Cragg: In Celebration of Sculpture (1993), John Cage Talks About Cows (1991), Taken by the Romans (1990), West Coast: "Beat & Beyond" (1984), and California Clay in the Rockies (1983). [15]

In 2022, Felver two documentary films: Spirit of Golf (2022) documenting Felver's quest for the "essence of the Auld Scots' game from Pebble Beach to St. Andrews;" and Inside Outside: Anthony Cragg (2022) celebrating Sir Tony Cragg’s sculpture, illuminating his development and thought-processes over the arc of his career.

Other

Felver appears as a guest lecturer at universities and art centers. From 1987 to 1989, he was a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome.

His work is collected by numerous libraries and museums, including Stanford University Special Collections; Bancroft Library at University of California, Berkeley; The New York Public Library; Donnell Media Center; San Francisco Public Library; University of California Santa Cruz, Special Collections; University of Buffalo, Poetry/ Rare Books Collection; University of North Carolina Special Collections; San Diego State University; University of Delaware Special Collections; UCLA Special Collections; and University of New Mexico Special Collections, and Yale Collection of Western Americana. [6]

Awards

In 1997, Felver received the Best Art Documentary Award at the Cinema Arts Centre International Independent Film Festival, Huntington, New York. [6] In 2018, he was awarded the Gold Medal in the Photography category of the Independent Publisher Book Awards for his book Tending the Fire: Native Voices & Portraits. [16] The same book was also a 2018 finalist (for books published in 2017) in the Photography category of the INDIES Awards of Foreword Reviews. [17]

Representation

His photographs are represented and distributed worldwide by Corbis. [18]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lawrence Ferlinghetti</span> American poet (1919–2021)

Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti was an American poet, painter, social activist, and co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. An author of poetry, translations, fiction, theatre, art criticism, and film narration, Ferlinghetti was best known for his second collection of poems, A Coney Island of the Mind (1958), which has been translated into nine languages and sold over a million copies. When Ferlinghetti turned 100 in March 2019, the city of San Francisco turned his birthday, March 24, into "Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day".

Robert Frank was a Swiss American photographer and documentary filmmaker. His most notable work, the 1958 book titled The Americans, earned Frank comparisons to a modern-day de Tocqueville for his fresh and nuanced outsider's view of American society. Critic Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Guardian in 2014, said The Americans "changed the nature of photography, what it could say and how it could say it. [ ... ] it remains perhaps the most influential photography book of the 20th century." Frank later expanded into film and video and experimented with manipulating photographs and photomontage.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edward Steichen</span> American photographer, artist, and curator

Edward Jean Steichen was a Luxembourgish American photographer, painter, and curator, renowned as one of the most prolific and influential figures in the history of photography.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul Strand</span> American photographer (1890–1976)

Paul Strand was an American photographer and filmmaker who, along with fellow modernist photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, helped establish photography as an art form in the 20th century. In 1936, he helped found the Photo League, a cooperative of photographers who banded together around a range of common social and creative causes. His diverse body of work, spanning six decades, covers numerous genres and subjects throughout the Americas, Europe, and Africa.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sally Mann</span> American photographer

Sally Mann HonFRPS is an American photographer known for making large format black and white photographs of people and places in her immediate surroundings: her children, husband, and rural landscapes, as well as self-portraits.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gordon Parks</span> American photographer, musician, writer and film director

Gordon Roger Alexander Buchanan Parks was an American photographer, composer, author, poet, and film director, who became prominent in U.S. documentary photojournalism in the 1940s through 1970s—particularly in issues of civil rights, poverty and African Americans—and in glamour photography. He is best remembered for his iconic photos of poor Americans during the 1940s, for his photographic essays for Life magazine, and as the director of the films Shaft, Shaft's Big Score and the semiautobiographical The Learning Tree.

Irving Penn was an American photographer known for his fashion photography, portraits, and still lifes. Penn's career included work at Vogue magazine, and independent advertising work for clients including Issey Miyake and Clinique. His work has been exhibited internationally and continues to inform the art of photography.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Doris Ulmann</span> American photographer (1882–1934)

Doris Ulmann was an American photographer, best known for her portraits of the people of Appalachia, particularly craftsmen and musicians, made between 1928 and 1934.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elsa Dorfman</span> American portrait photographer (1937–2020)

Elsa B. Dorfman was an American portrait photographer. She worked in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was known for her use of a large-format instant Polaroid camera.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arno Rafael Minkkinen</span> Finnish-American photographer

Arno Rafael Minkkinen is a Finnish-American photographer who works in the United States.

Malick Sidibé was a Malian photographer from a Fulani village in Soloba, who was noted for his black-and-white studies of popular culture in the 1960s in Bamako. Sidibé had a long and fruitful career as a photographer in Bamako, Mali, and was a well-known figure in his community. In 1994 he had his first exhibition outside of Mali and received much critical praise for his carefully composed portraits. Sidibé's work has since become well known and renowned on a global scale. His work was the subject of a number of publications and exhibited throughout Europe and the United States. In 2007, he received a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale, becoming both the first photographer and the first African so recognized. Other awards he has received include a Hasselblad Award for photography in 2003, an International Center of Photography Infinity Award for Lifetime Achievement (2008), and a World Press Photo award (2010).

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to photography:

Mario Algaze was a Cuban-American photographer who photographed musicians and celebrities, in rural and urban areas, throughout Latin America.

Rosalind Fox Solomon is an American photographer based in New York City.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charlie Phillips (photographer)</span> Jamaican restaurateur and photographer (born 1944)

Ronald "Charlie" Phillips, also known by the nickname "Smokey", is a Jamaican-born restaurateur, photographer, and documenter of black London. He is now best known for his photographs of Notting Hill during the period of West Indian migration to London; however, his subject matter has also included film stars and student protests, with his photographs having appeared in Stern, Harper’s Bazaar, Life and Vogue and in Italian and Swiss journals. Notable recent shows by Phillips include How Great Thou Art, "a sensitive photographic documentary of the social and emotional traditions that surround death in London's African Caribbean community".

Marie Cosindas was an American photographer. She was best known for her evocative still lifes and color portraits. Her use of color photography in her work distinguished her from other photographers in the 1960s and 1970s. Most of her photographs were portraits and pictures of objects like dolls, flowers, and masks.

Gary Schneider is a South African-born American photographer known for his portraiture and self-portraits. According to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, which awarded him a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013, his "early work in painting, performance, and film remain integral to his explorations of portraiture. He strives to marry art and science, identity and obscurity, figuration and abstraction, the carnal and the spiritual."

Jessica Todd Harper is an American fine-art photographer. She was born in Albany, New York in 1975.

Cara Romero is an American photographer known for her digital photography that examines Indigenous life through a contemporary lens. She lives in both Santa Fe, NM and the Mojave Desert. She is an enrolled citizen of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe.

Janine Wiedel is a documentary photographer and visual anthropologist. She was born in New York City, has been based in the UK since 1970, and lives in London. Since the late 1960s she has been working on projects which have become books and exhibitions. In the early 1970s she spent five years working on a project about Irish Travellers; in the late 1970s two years documenting the industrial heartland of Britain. Wiedel's work is socially minded, exploring themes such as resistance, protest, multiculturalism and counterculture movements.

References

  1. ↑ "The Timeless Portraits of Christopher Felver". COOHP. December 21, 2015.
  2. ↑ Felver, Christopher. BEAT, Last Gasp, 2007.
  3. ↑ title=The Imagination of American Poets – Portraits by Christopher Felver, San Francisco Public Library
  4. ↑ "Other Events," New York Magazine. May 23, 1994
  5. ↑ "Beatific Soul: Jack Kerouac On The Road," New York Public Library. November 9, 2007 - March 16, 2008
  6. ↑ "Christopher Felver portrait collection". www.lib.udel.edu (University of Delaware Library). Retrieved 26 May 2015.
  7. ↑ "American Jukebox: A Photographic Journey". Publishers Weekly. Retrieved 26 May 2015.
  8. ↑ "Chris Felver's images in 'American Jukebox' shot in snap". SF Gate. July 6, 2014. Retrieved 26 May 2015.
  9. ↑ Holliday, Taylor. "Photography" (Review of The Importance of Being), The Wall Street Journal, November 30, 2001.
  10. ↑ "Tending the Fire: Native Voices and Portraits" News Release, University of New Mexico Press, February 2017.
  11. ↑ Jagareski, Rachel. "Tending the Fire: Native Voices and Portraits" Foreword Reviews, April 25, 2017.
  12. ↑ "A Beat-Generation Star Who Won't Answer to the Name". New York Times. Feb 7, 2013. Retrieved 26 May 2015.
  13. ↑ Bowen, Chuck (2013). "Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder". Slant Magazine. Retrieved 26 May 2015.
  14. ↑ "Chris Felver: In Celebration of Artists," Films, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., summer, 2000.
  15. ↑ MEDALIST BOOKSTORE, Independent Publisher Book Awards
  16. ↑ INDIES finalists, Foreword Reviews
  17. ↑ Breedlove, Mark. "Illustration Credits," page 778, Principles of Psychology, Oxford University Press, 2015.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.