Win a David Maisel print for $20 and help a friend

Photographer David Maisel’s friend Meg Patterson was diagnosed with cancer in 2008. Meg’s friends are putting out the word to help her get the advanced integrative cancer treatment that her health insurance does not cover.

David is raffling off one of his amazing prints, “The Lake Project 38” (above), for $20 per entry. You can read more on David’s facebook announcement, but basically, for a chance at this original, signed 15″ x 15″ photograph, please send a $20 check made out to the “Meg Patterson Cancer Treatment Fund” to David Maisel Studio, 100 Ebbtide Avenue, suite 320, Sausalito, CA 94965. The deadline is April 15.

David says,

I will draw one of the checks randomly on April 15th, when the raffle will conclude. The winner will be announced on Facebook. Checks must be received by that date in order to be eligible for the raffle drawing. Checks received after that date will be returned. The selected person will receive the print from me by May 15. After the April 15th raffle drawing has concluded, checks will be deposited to the “Meg Patterson Cancer Treatment Fund” based in Astoria, OR 97103.

If you would like to increase your chances at owning this photograph, please send as many $20 checks as you please. (This is, after all, a fundraiser for someone who needs our help). And of course, in the spirit of offering your help to Meg, if you would like to make your check for an amount greater than $20, that would be deeply appreciated. (Please note that these are not tax deductible donations).

To read more about Meg Patterson, visit her site. To donate directly, without participating in the raffle, visit her Give Forward page.

Please permit the spirit of goodwill to commingle with your desire for an original Maisel print and send an entry/donation. Thank you in advance!

Modern Ruins, Urban Archaeology, and the Post-Industrial Sublime

That would make a great title for a panel event and discussion, don’t you think?

….et voilà!

From Stages of Decay by Julia Solis

Joanna Ebenstein, who runs the amazing Morbid Anatomy library, is launching a panel series at the Observatory event space (Morbid Anatomy and Observatory are part of the Proteus Gowanus collective at 543 Union Street, Brooklyn). I am honored to be part of the first event on Thursday, March 25, featuring people who explore the aesthetics and phenomenology of contemporary ruin, spaces that still evoke powerful responses in the beholder. From the panel description:

. . . the ruins that captivate us today are of the relatively recent past—not just the industrial era that established Western hegemony, but now an even more recent service/retail age that dominated American culture until the crash of the late 00s.

A few dedicated individuals are committed to investigating and documenting this ruinous legacy. These intrepid photographer-researchers infiltrate a variety of hidden and abandoned sites, often risking physical danger or arrest, to capture and share stirringly uncanny photographs expressing the grandeur and pathos of these majestically crumbling spaces.

I will moderate the event, which features presentations by three people with fascinating qualifications and specialties: Ian Ference, who is “particularly fascinated by insane asylums and quarantine hospitals, both for their uniquely purposed architecture and for the particular threads of history they embody;” Tarikh Korula, cofounder of Uncommon Projects, who will be discussing photographer Brian Ulrich’s topical and attention-getting Dark Stores project; and Julia Solis, a veteran urban archaeologist/photographer whose explorations of subterranean New York have inspired many (and whose book New York Underground: The Anatomy of a City is a classic).

From Stages of Decay by Julia Solis

Each panelist offers opportunities for robust discussion, but I also hope to address the issues that bind them—including the history of depiction of ruins, the search for truth and derangement in the built environment, and whether the contemporary interest in ruins has something to say about the anxiety over the state and fate of our own empire. These topics are all central to the research I conducted for my recently submitted thesis, and along the way I found a lot of other people interested in these subjects. If you are one of them and are in Brooklyn next Thursday, I hope to see you there! Admission is $5.