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Richard Gordon (photographer)
Encyclopedia
Richard Gordon is an American
photographer who has photographed all over America for more than 40 years. He is married and has a son.
Richard Gordon is a part-time instructor at City College of San Francisco
, Stanford University
Continuing Studies and other San Francisco bay area colleges.
Gordon is the author of Meta Photographs 1978 ,One More for the Road 1996 (on which A. D. Coleman
wrote "Still photography has its own versions of road movies and buddy pictures, but few of the latter have made it into book form"), and a number of limited edition, hand made artist's books. His works are in the permanent collections of SFMOMA, J. Paul Getty Museum
, Corcoran Gallery of American Art, Rosenwald Rare Book Collection, Library of Congress
., Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and others.
After more than ten years, in 2009 Gordon published American Surveillance, a book that takes a visually intricate, and often witty look at the role and surveillance and the difference between observation and electronic scrutiny.
Gordon has used a Leica camera, following in the traditions and craft of many others, for example Robert Frank
, Robert Capa
, Paul Strand
, Lee Friedlander
et al. all of which were street photographers photographing unstaged, real-world scenes in black and white using traditional processes throughout the American continent.
Richard Gordon wrote the first review (A.D. Coleman wrote the second) of Danny Lyon's seminal book, The Bikeriders (1968) in The Chicago Literary Review. In 1973 his review of Elaine Mayes
' exhibit at Gallery 115 appeared in Art Week. In 1999 Gordon saw the Winogrand exhibit at the Fraenkel Gallery of The Man In The Crowd: The Uneasy Streets of Garry Winogrand
and picked up pen to review the book for Photo Metro. This was followed by a review of Joel Leivick's Carrara in the same publication. Gordon wrote a review of John Cohen's There Is No Eye for Photo Metro, but it folded and the review finally saw the light of computer screens as the first book review on the photo-eye website. In the past ten years, Gordon's reviews have regularly appeared on the photo-eye website and with the relaunch of their magazine online, Gordon wrote a 6,000 word piece in two parts on the 50th Anniversary edition of Robert Frank
's The Americans
. He also wrote the introduction to Toby Old's Times Squared (Chameleon Press, 2002) and the essay on Lewis Hine
for the 2004-05 Routledge Encyclopedia of Photography. Aside from the traditional exposition of the Hine entry, what has distinguished Gordon's essays and reviews is the rare combination of a passionate insider's view—the photographer's view—of photography and the photo book. Gordon writes as a photographer engaging and appreciating the work of his colleagues. He has written on the obvious choices—in addition to Robert Frank
-- of Lee Friedlander
, Kertesz
, Helen Levitt
, Mary Ellen Mark
(whose work he recused himself from commenting upon—pointlessly—as he printed her classic book, Ward 81), and Danny Lyon. More importantly he has sought out and commented upon the work of Mike Smith, Thom Roma, Sylvia Plachy
, Rosalind Solomon
, Barbara Crane, Wayne Miller, and a forthcoming essay on Tom Arendt's new book, Home. Richard Gordon is currently rewriting some of these essays, and writing new essays with an introduction for future publication.
Richard Gordon conceived and then executed The Firestorm Family Portrait Project. Together with Chris Johnson, other local professional photographers, California College of the Arts
, local photo labs and Kodak, the project was about replacing, or a new beginning of, a family photo archive for those who lost their possessions in the Oakland Firestorm of 1991. In keeping with Gordon's iconoclastic views, he resisted all attempts to commercialize this project, insisting that it not be about exhibitions or books.
Judith Hoffberg
, the founder and editor of Umbrella said in her review of Gordon's One More For the Road,
David Elliot (long time film critic) in the Chicago Sun-Times
on Gordon's Meta Photographs: The book opens with a remark from the visionary writer Bruno Schulz
:
David Levi-Strauss on Gordon's political pictures from a review of exhibit at SF Camerawork, 1984.
In a Vicki Goldberg
review in The New York Times
Sunday July 21, 1991 of an exhibit at Staley-Wise in NY of Women Are Beautiful from Esquire she wrote,
A biography of Richard Gordon is included in Dictionnaire des photographes, by Carole Naggar, edition Seuil, 1982
Counting The House is one of the books illustrated in photo photo photo books, 802 photo books from the M.+M. Auer Collection, 2007 Editions M+M (Switzerland).
Educated at University of Chicago (1963-1967) and in 1982, Gordon received a N.E.A. Fellowship. Richard Gordon currently resides in Berkeley, California
.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
photographer who has photographed all over America for more than 40 years. He is married and has a son.
Richard Gordon is a part-time instructor at City College of San Francisco
City College of San Francisco
City College of San Francisco, or CCSF, is a two-year community college in San Francisco, California. The Ocean Avenue campus, in the Ingleside neighborhood, is the college's primary location...
, Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
Continuing Studies and other San Francisco bay area colleges.
Gordon is the author of Meta Photographs 1978 ,One More for the Road 1996 (on which A. D. Coleman
A. D. Coleman
-Career and recognition:Coleman was the first photo critic for the New York Times, authoring 120 articles during his tenure. He started writing in 1967 and has contributed to the Village Voice, New York Observer and numerous magazines, artist monographs and other publications worldwide...
wrote "Still photography has its own versions of road movies and buddy pictures, but few of the latter have made it into book form"), and a number of limited edition, hand made artist's books. His works are in the permanent collections of SFMOMA, J. Paul Getty Museum
J. Paul Getty Museum
The J. Paul Getty Museum, a program of the J. Paul Getty Trust, is an art museum. It has two locations, one at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, California, and one at the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, California...
, Corcoran Gallery of American Art, Rosenwald Rare Book Collection, Library of Congress
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...
., Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and others.
After more than ten years, in 2009 Gordon published American Surveillance, a book that takes a visually intricate, and often witty look at the role and surveillance and the difference between observation and electronic scrutiny.
Gordon has used a Leica camera, following in the traditions and craft of many others, for example Robert Frank
Robert Frank
Robert Frank , born in Zürich, Switzerland, is an important figure in American photography and film. His most notable work, the 1958 photobook titled The Americans, was influential, and earned Frank comparisons to a modern-day de Tocqueville for his fresh and skeptical outsider's view of American...
, Robert Capa
Robert Capa
Robert Capa was a Hungarian combat photographer and photojournalist who covered five different wars: the Spanish Civil War, the Second Sino-Japanese War, World War II across Europe, the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and the First Indochina War...
, Paul Strand
Paul Strand
Paul Strand was an American photographer and filmmaker who, along with fellow modernist photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, helped establish photography as an art form in the 20th century...
, Lee Friedlander
Lee Friedlander
Lee Friedlander is an American photographer and artist. In the 1960s and 70s, working primarily with 35mm cameras and black and white film, Friedlander evolved an influential and often imitated visual language of urban "social landscape," with many of the photographs including fragments of...
et al. all of which were street photographers photographing unstaged, real-world scenes in black and white using traditional processes throughout the American continent.
Richard Gordon wrote the first review (A.D. Coleman wrote the second) of Danny Lyon's seminal book, The Bikeriders (1968) in The Chicago Literary Review. In 1973 his review of Elaine Mayes
Elaine Mayes
Elaine Mayes is an American photographer.Known for her portraits of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury residents in 1967-8 and for her iconic images of rock and roll performers in the late 1960s, Mayes' subject matter has also included landscapes and conceptual projects including her series,...
' exhibit at Gallery 115 appeared in Art Week. In 1999 Gordon saw the Winogrand exhibit at the Fraenkel Gallery of The Man In The Crowd: The Uneasy Streets of Garry Winogrand
Garry Winogrand
Garry Winogrand was a street photographer known for his portrayal of America in the mid-20th century. John Szarkowski called him the central photographer of his generation....
and picked up pen to review the book for Photo Metro. This was followed by a review of Joel Leivick's Carrara in the same publication. Gordon wrote a review of John Cohen's There Is No Eye for Photo Metro, but it folded and the review finally saw the light of computer screens as the first book review on the photo-eye website. In the past ten years, Gordon's reviews have regularly appeared on the photo-eye website and with the relaunch of their magazine online, Gordon wrote a 6,000 word piece in two parts on the 50th Anniversary edition of Robert Frank
Robert Frank
Robert Frank , born in Zürich, Switzerland, is an important figure in American photography and film. His most notable work, the 1958 photobook titled The Americans, was influential, and earned Frank comparisons to a modern-day de Tocqueville for his fresh and skeptical outsider's view of American...
's The Americans
The Americans (photography)
The Americans, by Robert Frank, was a highly influential book in post-war American photography. It was first published in France in 1958, and the following year in the United States. The photographs were notable for their distanced view of both high and low strata of American society...
. He also wrote the introduction to Toby Old's Times Squared (Chameleon Press, 2002) and the essay on Lewis Hine
Lewis Hine
Lewis Wickes Hine was an American sociologist and photographer. Hine used his camera as a tool for social reform. His photographs were instrumental in changing the child labor laws in the United States.-Early life:...
for the 2004-05 Routledge Encyclopedia of Photography. Aside from the traditional exposition of the Hine entry, what has distinguished Gordon's essays and reviews is the rare combination of a passionate insider's view—the photographer's view—of photography and the photo book. Gordon writes as a photographer engaging and appreciating the work of his colleagues. He has written on the obvious choices—in addition to Robert Frank
Robert Frank
Robert Frank , born in Zürich, Switzerland, is an important figure in American photography and film. His most notable work, the 1958 photobook titled The Americans, was influential, and earned Frank comparisons to a modern-day de Tocqueville for his fresh and skeptical outsider's view of American...
-- of Lee Friedlander
Lee Friedlander
Lee Friedlander is an American photographer and artist. In the 1960s and 70s, working primarily with 35mm cameras and black and white film, Friedlander evolved an influential and often imitated visual language of urban "social landscape," with many of the photographs including fragments of...
, Kertesz
Kertesz
Kertész is a common Hungarian surname meaning gardener. The first to have this last name was in 1765, in a town called Budapest, Hungary. It may refer to:*Alice Kertész, Hungarian-born Olympic gymnastics medalist* André Kertész, Hungarian-born photographer...
, Helen Levitt
Helen Levitt
Helen Levitt was an American photographer. She was particularly noted for "street photography" around New York City, and has been called "the most celebrated and least known photographer of her time."- Biography :...
, Mary Ellen Mark
Mary Ellen Mark
Mary Ellen Mark is an American photographer known for her photojournalism, portraiture, and advertising photography. She has had 16 collections of her work published and has been exhibited at galleries and museums worldwide. She has received numerous accolades, including three Robert F...
(whose work he recused himself from commenting upon—pointlessly—as he printed her classic book, Ward 81), and Danny Lyon. More importantly he has sought out and commented upon the work of Mike Smith, Thom Roma, Sylvia Plachy
Sylvia Plachy
Sylvia Plachy is a Hungarian/American photographer.Plachy was born in Budapest, Hungary. Her Czech Jewish mother was in hiding in fear of Nazi persecution during World War II. Her father was a Hungarian Roman Catholic aristocrat and she was raised in his faith.Plachy's family moved to New York...
, Rosalind Solomon
Rosalind Solomon
Rosalind Solomon is an American artist and photographer, born April 2, 1930 in Highland Park, Illinois. Solomon's work has been shown in various solo and group exhibitions...
, Barbara Crane, Wayne Miller, and a forthcoming essay on Tom Arendt's new book, Home. Richard Gordon is currently rewriting some of these essays, and writing new essays with an introduction for future publication.
Richard Gordon conceived and then executed The Firestorm Family Portrait Project. Together with Chris Johnson, other local professional photographers, California College of the Arts
California College of the Arts
California College of the Arts , founded in 1907, is known for its broad, interdisciplinary programs in art, design, architecture, and writing. It has two campuses, one in Oakland and one in San Francisco, California, USA...
, local photo labs and Kodak, the project was about replacing, or a new beginning of, a family photo archive for those who lost their possessions in the Oakland Firestorm of 1991. In keeping with Gordon's iconoclastic views, he resisted all attempts to commercialize this project, insisting that it not be about exhibitions or books.
Judith Hoffberg
Judith Hoffberg
Judith Hoffberg was a librarian, archivist, lecturer, a curator and art writer, and editor and publisher of Umbrella, a newsletter on artists' books, mail art, and Fluxus art. She received a B.A. in Political Science from UCLA in 1956. She went on to get an M.A. in Italian Language and Literature...
, the founder and editor of Umbrella said in her review of Gordon's One More For the Road,
Yet this is more than photographic interest, this is a book of a friendship, personal, yet universal,....that is clear to all us human beings.
David Elliot (long time film critic) in the Chicago Sun-Times
Chicago Sun-Times
The Chicago Sun-Times is an American daily newspaper published in Chicago, Illinois. It is the flagship paper of the Sun-Times Media Group.-History:The Chicago Sun-Times is the oldest continuously published daily newspaper in the city...
on Gordon's Meta Photographs: The book opens with a remark from the visionary writer Bruno Schulz
Bruno Schulz
Bruno Schulz was a Polish writer, fine artist, literary critic and art teacher born to Jewish parents, and regarded as one of the great Polish-language prose stylists of the 20th century. Schulz was born in Drohobycz, in the province of Galicia then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and spent...
:
Reality is as thin as paper and betrays with all its cracks its imitative character." Gordon has taken that rather gnomic attitude and amended it into a series of conscious contemplations, his pictures dealing with all the ways in which people use pictures, see themselves as pictures, become part of the pictorial processes. And in his best work, he slices through that thin paper of reality to reveal things that are not so much imitative as indicative.
David Levi-Strauss on Gordon's political pictures from a review of exhibit at SF Camerawork, 1984.
Gordon's images subvert the hidden ideological agenda of mainstream photojournalism.....The hidden agenda is not a tightly controlled conspiracy but, in effect, is the result of all our public assumptions and perceptions. Gordon's images are often saved from the easy characterization and pat solution by his attention and sensitivity to faces, as in the image of front line supporters at a Jane ByrneJane ByrneJane Margaret Byrne was the first and to date only female Mayor of Chicago. She served from April 16, 1979 to April 29, 1983. Chicago is the largest city in the United States to have had a female mayor as of 2011.-Early political career:...
rally in Feb 1983. Gordon's faces ae seldom generalizations. Gordon is at his best when the ambiguities are active and the frames are filled to the corners with questions rather than answers, causing the viewer to think, rather than to accept or reject.
In a Vicki Goldberg
Vicki Goldberg
Vicki Goldberg is an American photography critic, author, and art historian.-Life:Vicki Goldberg is a photography critic and author based in New York City. She was born in St. Louis, Missouri and earned an MFA from New York University. Goldberg has authored several books and articles on the...
review in The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
Sunday July 21, 1991 of an exhibit at Staley-Wise in NY of Women Are Beautiful from Esquire she wrote,
The youth and glamour predominant in this show are gently spoofed in Richard Gordon's 32 Marilyns: Miss Artichoke Festival, San Francisco.....These and 15 more like them, not one of whom resembles the original in the least, were hired to pass out pieces of artichoke at the festival to commemorate that great moment in 1947 when Marilyn, still largely unknown, became the first Miss Artichoke in history.
A biography of Richard Gordon is included in Dictionnaire des photographes, by Carole Naggar, edition Seuil, 1982
Counting The House is one of the books illustrated in photo photo photo books, 802 photo books from the M.+M. Auer Collection, 2007 Editions M+M (Switzerland).
Educated at University of Chicago (1963-1967) and in 1982, Gordon received a N.E.A. Fellowship. Richard Gordon currently resides in Berkeley, California
Berkeley, California
Berkeley is a city on the east shore of the San Francisco Bay in Northern California, United States. Its neighbors to the south are the cities of Oakland and Emeryville. To the north is the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington...
.