Here's a wrap up of what's going on this busy week in New York.

MONDAY APRIL 12
The wait is over, Adobe officially launches Creative Suite 5 today. Join the online fun. And while you're at it, read my thoughts about CS5 on Stockland Martel's blog.

TUESDAY APRIL 13
SalaamGarage Happy Hour NYC is having a benefit at The Globe, 158 east 23rd Street (Btw Lexington and 3rd Ave.) from 6:30pm - 8:30pm.
SalaamGarage is a storytelling, citizen journalism organization that partners with International NGOs and local non-profits to create and share independent media projects that raise awareness and cause positive change in their online and offline social communities.

WEDNESDAY APRIL 14


ASMP ProSpeaker Series Presents Jonathan Torgovnik from 7pm-9pm
At SOHO PHOTO 15 White Street (between Church Street and West Broadway. Doors open at 6:30pm.

Jonathan Torgovnik will present work form his recently completed long-term project "Intended Consequences: Rwandan Children Born of Rape" from Rwanda, which will include his Emmy nominated short multimedia film. He will also show images from a recent assignment covering the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti. His presentation will be followed by a Q&A.

Jonathan Torgovnik is an award winning photographer whose work from various projects and assignments has been published in Newsweek, Aperture, GEO, The Sunday Times Magazine, Stern, Paris Match, and Mother Jones among others. Torgovnik has been a contract photographer for Newsweek since 2005 and is on the faculty of International Center of Photography. He is the author of two books: Bollywood Dreams (Phaidon, 2003) and Intended Consequences: Rwanda Children Born of Rape (Aperture, 2009).

The event is free, but donations are requested, as all proceeds from this event will be donated to Foundation Rwanda, Torgovnik's non-profit that supports secondary school education for children born of rape during the Rwandan genocide.


Peter Hay Halpert Fine Art at The Chelsea Hotel Presents
Mikael Kennedy · Shoot The Moon · 500 Polaroids from 6pm-8pm at The Chelsea 222 West 23rd Street, Suite 524.
Shoot the Moon consists of 500 Polaroids taken between 1999 and 2009. As he moved about - living and traveling in New England, driving from Massachusetts to Washington, hanging around Portland, Oregon, even flying off to Serbia, and then coming to New York - Kennedy photographed with an obsessive intensity.


THURSDAY APRIL 16
PDN's 30 2010: Our Choice of New and Emerging Photographers to Watch
SVA Theatre, 333 West 23 Street
Free and open to the public
Seminar: 6:30 - 8pm
Reception: 8 - 9pm

In a panel moderated by Holly Hughes, editor of Photo District News (PDN), photographers chosen for the 2010 “PDN's 30” list will offer their perspectives on getting started in the photo industry. They will discuss how they go their first jobs and paid for their first promotional efforts, as well as what they learned in school and what they wish they had been taught. Panelists include three photographers selected to be part of PDN's 30--Adrian Mueller, Elizabeth Weinberg and Wayne Lawrence--along with Jeanne Graves, deputy photo director, Men’s Health; and Brian Smith, artisan of imagery for Sony.

Eirik Johnson: Sawdust Mountain

Four years photographing throughout Oregon, Washington and Northern California, this book and exhibition focuses of the tenuous relationship between industries reliant upon natural resources and the communities they support.
Aperture Gallery
547 W 27th Street, 4th Floor
6pm-8pm

Moments from Israel: Rina Castelnuovo

Andrea Meislin Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of Rina Castelnuovo. Although Castelnuovo considers her work photojournalism, her moving images have captured the daily life of Israeli people in a way that few other photographers – fine art or otherwise – have.

Castelnuovo was recently awarded First Place, International News Picture Story in the Best of Photojournalism 2010. She has been photographing for The New York Times in Israel since the mid-nineties, as well as for Time Magazine, Stern Magazine, and the Associated Press since the eighties. Her work presents a look into the complex forces that drive the ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. The award-winning series focuses on the West Bank settlements and outposts, which Israel has promised to dismantle as part of its commitment to a two-state solution.
Andrea Meislin Gallery
526 West 26th Street, Suite 214
6pm-8pm

CHRISTOPHER GRIFFITH - "States"

Christopher Griffith had nothing less than a radical reinterpretation
of American iconography in mind when he assembled a crew to travel the sideways and byways of a forgotten America to shoot everyday, utilitarian things found dotting our contemporary landscape. Searching out abandoned gas stations, remote industrial plants, budget motels, strip mall car lots, utility fields, roadside ditches, and
even graveyards, Griffith and his team constructed huge backdrops around each painstakingly selected specimen,creating stark, decontexturalized and utterly magnificent renderings of the myriad of things we see and forget without noticing.
Randall Scott Gallery
111 Front Street #204
Brooklyn
6:00pm-8:30pm

ASYLUM: PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHRISTOPHER PAYNE

Massive state-funded mental hospitals, many of them among the largest and most elaborate structures ever erected in America, were a prominent feature of the American landscape for more than a century. Once sources of civic pride before becoming warehouses of neglect, the asylums were emptied towards the end of last century, and now sit crumbling, keeping their secrets. Many of them are already gone. Architectural photographer Christopher Payne was granted unprecedented access to document the abandoned buildings and interiors over a period of six years, and the resulting book, ASYLUM: INSIDE THE CLOSED WORLD OF MENTAL HOSPITALS (MIT Press, 2009), has become something of a phenomenon, touching people in unexpected ways. Remarkable both as photojournalism and as art, the images of ASYLUM are elegiac, emotionally gripping, and possessed of a cinematic sensibility.
Clic Gallery
255 Centre Street
6:00pm - 9:00pm

SATURDAY APRIL 17

FAMILY WORK SERIES: photographs by Groana Melendez

Please join us for an Artist Talk and Meet the Artist Reception as part of En Foco's Touring Gallery exhibition, featuring New York based photographer Groana Melendez.

Melendez's portraits of her family are a powerful and poignant reminder of the importance of family; a collective experience that is common to us all, whether members of our family live down the street or in another country.

She states, " I photograph my family because I have a need to immortalize them from my point of view. I act as both a participant and observer. There are different class dimensions in my family; family that could afford certain luxuries versus those that live day by day. Judgments and prejudices are made from one part of the family to the other, and I have attempted to move between the two."
En Foco at Aguilar Library/NYPL
174 East 110th Street (between Lexington & Third Ave)
Arist Talk: 1 - 2pm
Artist Reception: 2 - 4pm