Street: Honorable Mention 2019 (professional)
ENTRY DESCRIPTION
While visiting Turkey in 1964, I photographed subjects in the streets, from a young money-changer outside of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul working with many foreign currencies out of a shoe box, to a mother with a child on her back herding camels. On my way to Ankara, the nation's capital, I happened upon this scene of horsemen along the road. Trained as a visual anthropologist, I've learned to recognize that the longer one remains in a strange land, the more prone are their visual senses to become dulled. Without this photograph I could never have recalled, half a century later, just how unusual this encounter on the road to Ankara had been – the flag-carrying horsemen, each wearing a white keffiyeh either on his head or around his neck, the familiar Pepsi sign with the unfamiliar foreign script, and the fanciful utility pole with its ornate resistors. Throughout my travels, I had learned that early impressions must deal with a flood of uniquely new visual stimuli. Photography is a wonderful tool to preserve these initial vivid impressions.
AUTHOR
Trained as a Cultural Anthropologist at the University of California at Berkeley and Los Angeles during the tumultuous 60s, author and award-winning commercial and fine art photographer Frank Barnett has had a rich, multi-faceted career. From heading marketing and public relations for the University of California Press to founding a carriage-trade bookstore and three fine art galleries, he also owned an advertising and public relations firm for 25 years. His specialty, photojournalism, has taken him from the center of the arena at the famous Pendleton Round-up to the infamous Louisiana State Penitentiary, home of the Angola Prison Rodeo.
For the past 50 years, he has sought access to edgy, outsider subjects from the Berlin Wall to the bedside of his terminally-ill wife, aging nursing home residents, and prison inmates for whom life beyond confinement would never be realized.
His fine art photography includes masterfully executed photomontages. In 1988 Frank co-authored Working Together: Entrepreneurial Couples, published by Ten Speed Press and cemented his reputation as a thought leader in the family entrepreneurial arena. At 80, he is still active as a fine art and commercial photographer. He resides in Salem, Oregon, with his wife and creative collaborator, Martha Solomon. Together, the couple serves museums, corporations, and individuals with award-winning photography, publications, and curated installations. Their next exhibit, "The All American Toy Company – An Oregon Original," is scheduled to open at the Oregon Historical Society Museum in Portland, Oregon, in September, 2019.
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