Each year, artists, galleries and collectors from around the world donate fine photographic works to be auctioned to benefit the Houston Center for Photography. The selection – representing more than 80 established and mid-career photographic artists with work collected in museum and private sectors – is an impressive catalog of both vintage and contemporary fine art prints.
The collection includes celebrated photographers and those far lesser known, such as Lou Vest, a ship pilot in Houston, whose work is his art.
Lou Vest, Big Wake, Little Wake, 2011.
In his words: “I´ve always been interested in photography, but I put my film cameras aside when my children were young. Several years ago there was a request for old photos of the ship channel and the pilot´s association was unable to help. I resolved to begin carrying a camera around at work so that in the future people could look back and see what the ship channel was like at the beginning of the 21st century. This evolved into requests for photos to show at school presentations, at port meetings and requests to donate photos for some of the fund raising benefits for the maritime industry here. After the first event and some positive feedback I decided to get some good equipment.
Beyond that, if I have to put a label on my photography, I would call it a lyrical documentary of the Houston Ship Channel. That classification will surprise people who are accustomed to thinking of the ship channel as a nuisance and industry as ugly, but I think it fits. The ship channel is a huge part of Houston and is what has allowed the city to prosper. Houston is the largest port in the United States yet most Houstonians are only vaguely aware that we have one and are surprised to hear how big it really is. Unlike San Francisco whose maritime nature is part of the landscape or Venice where the port is interwoven into the city; in Houston the harbor is hidden away, invisible except from a few places. The port is just not a part of our culture. It seldom appears in our newspaper nor, that I know of, in our local art or literature. I hope, in a small way, to help change that.” – Lou Vest
Adrian Fernandez (Havana, Cuba), Untitled No. 24, 2008-11.
Cuban visual artist Adrian Fernandez, in his To Be or to Pretend series, examines how “table decorations with fruit or flowers has become an exceptional protagonist of the Cuban interior . . . the aesthetic pretensions and sign of the home identity. It is a discursive axis that summarizes the values repeated with less clarity in other decorative elements,” according to the artist.
Beth Moon’s Heart of the Dragon was shot on the remote island of Socotra off the horn of Africa in the Arabian Sea. “There are few places left on earth so remote and untouched by time. Socotra is one of the world’s last truly wild places with a uniquely diverse and enchanting landscape of surreal beauty. Rich in mythical history, Herodotus wrote of the immortal phoenix that came to this island to be reborn in a nest of cinnabar and incense every 1,000 years. Frankincense that burned in the temples of ancient Greece and Egypt was harvested from this island. Glimpsing the dragon’s blood trees that mantle the Haghier Mountains, one imagines this is what the world must have looked like millions of years ago.
Beth Moon, Heart of the Dragon, 2011.
I believe it is through the unique vegetation that the spirit of Socotra is defined, with mythical trees like the dragon’s blood tree or the fabled frankincense trees and the island’s culture so closely linked to nature which sets this island apart from the rest of the world.” – Beth Moon.
The 2012 Print Auction Exhibition runs through Feb. 20 at the Houston Center for Photography. The auction, held at the conclusion of the exhibition on Feb. 22, raises money to help support the center’s mission which includes educational, outreach and publication work for the local community and the international photography community. Its goal is to increase society’s understanding and appreciation of photography and its evolving role in contemporary culture.
www.hcponline.org.
Keith Carter, Masked Couple, from the portfolio, Imagining Paradise, 2011.