Contact News

With the 2008 Beijing Olympics underway, Contact is engaged in it’s seventh coverage of the quadrennial summer event through August 24.

Since 1984 in Los Angeles the agency’s co-founder David Burnett has anchored the coverage establishing for himself the reputation of being one of the best “sports photographer” in the world. He is teamed up in China with expert veteran Olympic shooter, Ken Jarecke who is attending his fifth summer games. Belgian-based Italian photographer Paolo Pellizzari has joined the small Contact team in Beijing bringing his distinctive style of panoramic photography.

Contact in China, L to R: Robert Pledge, Tim Mapp, David Burnett, Kenneth Jarecke	© Li Shi

Contact has been invited to set up offices at the headquarters of China Daily, the largest English-language newspaper in the country, that was chosen to produce “The Olympian,” the official English-language publication for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Operating independently, the agency supplies the paper’s two-part special supplement everyday with unique photo stories and individual images.

To coordinate and edit the coverage in the Chinese capital is also Olympiad veteran Robert Pledge, the agency’s other co-founder and editorial director, who gathered a small and energetic staff which includes editor and digital director Tim Mapp from Contact’s Paris office, researcher and translator Li Shi, and logistics-assistant Eric Powell.

A selection of the work by the three photographers can be seen here as well as tear-sheets from China Daily carrying their published imagery.

All published photos by David Burnett & Kenneth Jarecke

This summer (July 2-August 6), in the Mott Haven section of New York City’s South Bronx, the Bruckner Gallery is presenting Departure, a group show by (from left to right in photograph below): Danny Ramon Peralta, Miguel Anaya, Mark Nevers, Bashira Webb, Lyric R. Cabral with images from their respective essays: “My Mexican-American Family, Texas”, “The Movement, Harlem”, “Elderly Addictions, a SRO hotel in Harlem”, “Ma (My Mother), Chelsea”, and “Afro-Punk, New York.” The gallery exhibition is curated by Chet Urban.*

© Robert Pledge

The five “concerned photographers” first met five years ago at The Point, a community arts organization in Hunts Point and coalesced as a group in 2005 when accepted into the Jocelyne Benzakin Fellowship. The program coordinated by Lacy Austin at the International Center of Photography gave them access to “mentors” — all respected members of the photojournalism community — including Frank Fournier, Alice Gabriner, James Nubile, Robert Pledge, Hillary Raskin, Fred Ritchin, and Joseph Rodriguez.

In 2007, they were the collective recipients of the Howard Chapnick Grant “for the advancement of photojournalism” for The Bridge — a project that replicates the model that they have formed together in order to serve young people in neighborhoods where photography is not generally practiced and photographic education is not available. The same year they also won a Lucie Award.

The group continues to work with “mentor” Fournier, in his South Bronx studio, as a loose collective of socially oriented photographers exploring their communities yet developing their own individual voices.

For more info, see Frank Fournier and JB Fellows, July 2007.

*Directions: 1 Bruckner Blvd (corner of 3rd Avenue.), Bronx , NY info@brucknerartgallery.com

To great acclaim, Rodrigo Salgado presented for the first time the drawings and paintings he has been producing over the last several years. The complex mosaics bursting with color and stimulated by strong musical interests, mirror the prolific inner world of the twenty-eight year-old artist. The show was organized in Paris, in June, by book editor/designer and exhibition curator Lelia Wanick-Salgado who is the mother of the artist — whose father is the Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado.

	Photographs © Ronald Pledge