Emerging Icon in Photography — Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao
Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao, 35, is widely known for his large-scale, panoramic photographs
that brilliantly document the dynamic social and urban landscapes of New York City.
Engulfed by the changes of a fast-paced metropolitan environment, his works represent
a personal journey through places both foreign and familiar. His first major debut
and highly regarded project is Habitat 7, which won the inaugural New York Times
Magazine “Capture the Times” photography contest in 2005. In this series, as in ones
that have followed, Liao’s process transcends the bounds of documentary photography
through a compelling layering of time.
Photographing high above the city streets where permits and special equipment are
customary, he takes hundreds of shots that later become superimposed and collaged
together, creating deeply layered images that speak to a city in flux. Liao worked with a
large-format camera and scanned the prints to create the panoramic, colored images in
Habitat 7. He now works digitally, although his objectives in capturing the phenomena
of the city remain the same. Liao, a native of Taiwan now living in New York City,
has traversed all of New York’s boroughs, documenting the vibrant atmospheres and
burgeoning socialscapes of Coney Island, Times Square, the Flatiron district, and
CitiField, as it transformed to the new home of the Mets.
In New York City, he has been exhibited at The Queens Museum of Art and the Bronx
Museum of the Arts, where he was commissioned for a major project titled Intersections:Grand Concourse, commemorating the 100th anniversary of the historic boulevard. He
has recently exhibited at the Getty Museum in the group exhibition Urban Panoramas,
as well as at the South Street Seaport Museum in Widely Different: Panoramas by Jeff
Chien-Hsing Liao and Sylvia Plachy.
His most recent solo exhibition, BQMB (Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, Bronx), was
at Julie Saul Gallery, where he is currently represented. Laio’s work is in numerous
collections, including The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, The J. Paul Getty Museum,
the Norton Museum of Art, and George Eastman House International Museum of
Photography and Film..
Emerging Icon in Film — Joshua and Ben Safdie
Josh Safdie, 26, and Benny Safdie, 28, were born and raised in New York City, under
the eye of their father's Video 8 camera He filmed them as they ate, fought, played,
performed, drew, and even slept — showing them the importance of small moments in
the height of chaos. All the while, their mother grounded them with stability. In high
school, the brothers met Alex Kalman and started the creative collective Red Bucket
Films. Now also including Sam Lisenco and Brett Jutkiewicz, the brothers say Red
Bucket “has become a playhouse of ideas.”
Josh and Benny studied film at Boston University and have collaborated on many shorts,
both intellectually and technically, pushing and pulling each other constantly, with a
fight here and there. Their work has played at many international festivals including
the Director's Fortnight in Cannes, where Benny's short film The Acquaintances of a
Lonely John premiered and Josh's first feature film, The Pleasure of Being Robbed
Internationally, premiered in 2008. That same year, Filmmaker Magazine named Josh
one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film.
The Safdie Brothers’ first feature film together, Daddy Longlegs, was released
theatrically in the United States and around the world and won the John Cassavetes
Award at the 2011 Independent Spirit Awards. Their most recent short films have
experienced great success — John's Gone had its world premiere at the 67th Venice Film
Festival and The Black Balloon won the Sundance Film Festival 2012 Jury prize for Best
U.S Short film and went on to win the Wolphin Award at South by Southwest (SXSW)
2012.
The Safdies live and work in New York City and say that will probably die there, too.
Lifetime Achievement in Photography — Howard Greenberg
Howard Greenberg is one of the world's foremost photography dealers, proclaimed one
of the 25 most important people in photography by American Photo in 2005. He holds
a collection of 30,000 photographs and is acknowledged as an authority on 19th and
20th century photography and a leader in establishing acknowledged value on the fine
art market, employing his keen eye for artistic value and a unique historical perspective, Greenberg represents and exhibits photographs by many of the acknowledged masters,
including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Bruce Davidson, Walker Evans, Arnold Newman,
Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Weston, as well as the vintage print
archive of Time/Life.
Greenberg began his career as a freelance photojournalist when he moved from Brooklyn
to Woodstock, N.Y., in 1972, with his work published in The New York Times and The
Washington Post, among others. His work also was featured in several solo exhibitions.
In 1977, Greenberg founded the still-active Center for Photography in Woodstock, a
non-profit gallery and educational institution for which he today serves as president of
the board. He entered the commercial side of photography in 1981 by establishing the
Photofind Gallery, which he moved from Woodstock to New York City and ultimately
became the Howard Greenberg Gallery.
Since the gallery’s inception, Greenberg has published more than 40 photographic
catalogues and books. He has curated many critically acclaimed exhibitions, including
Edward Steichen: 1915-1923 (2009); Bruce Davidson: East 100th St., The 1970 MoMA
Show (2009); Minor White: Eye Mind Spirit (2008), Czech Vision (2007), and Appeal
to This Age (1995), a pictorial overview of the civil rights movement that was exhibited
at George Eastman House. Greenberg served on the board of the directors of the
Association of International Photography Art Dealers from 1987 to 1994. The Howard
Greenberg Gallery received the “Photo Gallery of the Year” award from the Lucie
Foundation in 2004 and Greenberg was honored by the Aperture Foundation in 2009 for
his contribution to the field of fine art photography.
Lifetime Achievement in Film — Bruce Goldstein
For more than 30 years, Bruce Goldstein has devoted his career to the exhibition and
distribution of classic films and has been instrumental in getting more than 500 new
prints or restorations of classic films into re-release, both in his Rialto and Film Forum
capacities.
He began his career when he dropped out of Boston University to run his first repertory
cinema on Cape Cod, which he ran seasonally for five years. In the mid-1970s, he began
programming at the Bleecker Street and Carnegie Hall cinemas and in 1980 moved to
the Thalia, an eccentric movie house with equally eccentric programming that created
in 1983 the distribution subsidiary Manhattan Movietime, which Goldstein headed. In
1991, he wrote and co-produced the award-winning Nicholas Brothers: We Sing and We
Dance, a documentary on the famous dance team. As a filmmaker, he also has created
unique new trailers for The Graduate, The Third Man, and La Grande Illusion.
Karen Cooper, director of Film Forum, asked Goldstein in 1986 to run the theater’s
second screen, for which he created the now-familiar repertory format. Since that time,
he has produced four repertory calendars a year and has singlehandedly created more
than 300 film festivals, which are often emulated around the world. His programming has
been called “the Best of New York” by both New York magazine and New York Press
and Time Out NY named him one of the 100 essential people of New York in 1997, citing him “for keeping showmanship alive.”
Goldstein created Rialto Pictures in 1996 out of frustration of not being able to get prints
of certain films. Two years later he was joined by lawyer/cinephile Adrienne Halpern
and, since then, the two of them have fervently scoured the globe for rights to long-out-
of-release classics, with a particular emphasis on French films. Goldstein and Halpern
are also consulting producers on the Criterion Collection DVD releases of their films. In
2000, the National Society of Film Critics awarded Rialto a special “Heritage Award” for
its re-releases of The Third Man and Grand Illusion and the following year the New York
Film Critics Circle awarded Rialto a special award for its re-release of Rififi. (Photo by
Robin Holland)
photo: Robin Holland
The Light and Motion Award — Carole and Howard Tanenbaum
The Tanenbaums of Toronto, Canada, have established the Howard and Carole
Tanenbaum Family Charitable Foundation and contribute to many causes related to
health care, the Jewish community, education, and the arts, including George Eastman
House, for which Howard serves as a trustee and chairman of the museum’s Photography
Acquisitions Committee.
Together the Tanenbaums have acquired more than 500 masterworks from the 20th
century and have an extensive photography collection. In addition to Eastman House,
their support for photography institutions also includes the Daguerreian Society, which is
dedicated to the history, science, and art of the daguerreotype; a variety of photography-
related initiatives at Toronto’s Ryerson University; and the CONTACT Photography
Festival. The Tanenbaums also are active members of Yad Vashem, the world center for
documentation, research, education, and commemoration of the Holocaust.
Howard is a lawyer, financier, real estate developer, and art collector. He is involved in
domestic and international real estate development and was a director and officer of the
Warren Paving and Materials Group Ltd., until its merger with Lafarge Canada Ltd. He
currently is a director of Allstate Insurance Company of Canada and also serves on the
boards of several community and charitable organizations.
Carole, a New York City native, is renowned for The Carole Tanenbaum Vintage
Collection, which is one of North America's premier collections of vintage costume
jewelry. She has been collecting costume jewelry for more than 25 years, resulting in
an unparalleled collection of more than 15,000 pieces dating from the Victorian period
through the 1980s. The collection includes designer-stamped, limited-edition, and one-
of-a-kind pieces. Jewelry from the collection has been featured in high-profile film
and television productions and fashion publications. Celebrities who wear pieces from
Carole’s collection include Beyoncé, Tyra Banks, Samuel L. Jackson, Elton John, Jessica
Lange, and Michelle Obama.
