Raghu Rai is India's most famous photojournalist. A retrospective of his work opened at Aicon Gallery, in New York City on February 18 and wraps up on March 19.

This is an invitation for you to join me and a small group of image makers interested or curious about India. Meet us on the 19th (this Saturday) at the gallery at 10.30 am, to take in the body of work Mr. Rai has created over the last 40 years. We will also meet up for a cup of chai or coffee afterwards. It's essentially a very loosely structured networking event that I want to start doing more often either in New York, Hartford (where I live) or in Boston. If you are interested in photojournalism or documentary photography, you might find kindred spirits among us to trade stories, referrals or more.

Shreeya Sinha, a multimedia journalist and producer, will also join us as well. Having lived and worked in India, for Undesired, I felt she might provide us the right perspective on Raghu Rai's own mostly domestic work.

Aicon Gallery is located at 35 Great Jones Street, New York, NY 10012. If you are lost, please call 212-725-6092. Take the #6 Subway line to Bleecker Street and walk North on Lafayette Street for two blocks, then a right onto Great Jones Street. Aicon Gallery should be on your right hand side.

Meanwhile, check out the recent podcast SAJA hosted with Mr. Rai. Also view his work on the Magnum website. If you are inclined to buy one of Raghu Rai's books, I recommend Raghu Rai's India: Reflections in Colour. [aff]

So, tell me … are you already a fan of Raghu Rai's work? What can you tell me/us about him? Although I am familiar with some of his work, I know little about the man so I am interested in seeing this exhibit in hopes that it will reveal something about him.

I hope to see many of you there. It would be great to know of a headcount before hand so that there are no surprises. Would you please comment below if you are able to make it? Thank you!

If anyone knows who photographed Mr. Rai in the above photograph, please let me know. I would like to credit the image, if it is still ok to display the image.

This is a guest post by Stuart Sipahigil. He is an amateur photographer in the traditional sense of the word; that is, he does it for the love of the craft. His photographs have won awards, appeared in publications, and have made their way into homes and businesses around the country. Stuart also teaches workshops to help other amateur photographers find great photographs close to home. Stuart’s work can be found at TheLightWithout.com.

So, you're “just” an amateur photographer… but you've discovered that you have a love for making photographs and you seem to be pretty good at it. Your friends and family are telling you they love your photographs and several have said you are “good enough to be a professional.” Maybe you've entered a local photography contest or two, and you've done pretty well. Or perhaps you've even sold a few prints of your photographs to the local coffee shop or restaurant.

Now you're thinking to yourself, “maybe I could be a professional photographer,” and then, “how would I do that?” So you check out a couple of books about being a pro photographer — David duChemin's VisionMongers: Making a Life and a Living in Photography or Dane Sanders' Fast Track Photographer, for example — and discover that it's actually quite a bit of hard work. You already have a career right now and well, it's paying the bills and you're doing okay, even in this economy. Shifting gears to becoming a pro is a big change and would disrupt your life quite a bit. It might be doable, but it would be painful, and you're just not sure it would be worth it.

So now what do you do?

Traditionally, there were the only two paths available to you: turn pro, with all of the responsibilities that entails and the costs associated with it. Or remain an enthusiastic amateur, occasionally selling a print or two at your local art fair, or maybe shooting your cousin's wedding for a few hundred bucks (and thus, pissing off an entire group of professionals—but that's another story). However, I think there are several other choices you can make; several other paths you can trod that don't involve becoming a traditional “pro” to find satisfaction as a talented amateur photographer.

The Internet has changed everything. You have many more outlets for your work now than ever before. Traditionally, if you wanted to get your photographic work out into the public eye you had only a few choices; magazines, gallery showings, or stock photography, for example. Today, you can sign up for a blogging service and start your own photography blog, publishing your work to a worldwide audience in about five minutes. If you're a little more ambitious, you can self-publish your own “coffee table” book of your photographs using services like Blurb or Inkubook. Or publish a photography ebook, either on your own or through a publisher like Craft & Vision. All of these things were prohibitively expensive and perhaps even impossible to do on your own only five years ago.

There used to be an old saying, “Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach.” That's simply not true these days (and it never really was). Many professional photographers like Joe McNally, David duChemin, and Zack Arias — all terrific photographers — offer workshops and seminars about the vision, the craft, and the business of photography. But not everyone is ready for (or can afford) workshops with these big names.This can create an opportunity for you to step up and use your skills to help others that are as passionate about this craft as you are. Is there a local arts center in your town? This can be a great place to start and to hone your teaching skills. If you don't have that opportunity, why not just try leading a few photo walks, either on your own or in concert with Scott Kelby's Worldwide Photo Walk in July? Signing up to be a walk leader is easy and can get you started on the path to becoming a photographic instructor.

Are you good at talking about photographic tips and techniques? Do you think you can interview other photographers? Maybe you should start a photography podcast. In a few minutes, you can set one up in Apple's iTunes and publish it to a worldwide audience on a regular basis. The folks at Faded & Blurred have done just that, combining it with their own regular photo walks and a lively online community to create a terrific resource for passionate photographers.

If you are currently a professional photographer, you too can benefit from “going amateur.” I don't mean that you should give up your business and find something else to do, but to try to carve out a little time in your life to do some work for yourself. Personal projects are your connection back to why you started in the field to begin with: your love of photography, the feel of the camera in your hands, and the joy of seeing something that moved you appear on film or in the LCD. There is enormous value in removing the pressures of running a successful photography business and just do it for yourself.

Maybe there are other opportunities that you could use to expand your business (and reputation) as well. Matt Brandon, a professional travel and humanitarian photographer, publishes regular interviews with other pros like Ami Vitale, Gary S. Chapman, and Chris Orwig on his Depth of Field podcast. David duChemin created the Craft & Vision eBook publishing business by starting with a few of his own ideas about photography. Chase Jarvis has added The Best Camera, a best-selling book and phone app, as well as the Creative Live educational video series to his successful endeavors. Many other pros are adding to their repertoire of services by taking advantage of these new avenues.

And if your photography business isn't very successful, why not step back and take a fresh look? Is it just a production job for you now: prepare, shoot, post-process, deliver? Have you lost that love for the art that you used to make? Perhaps it's time to re-think photography as a professional career. That may seem a bit harsh, but I'm simply saying your photographic life might be more rewarding without the pressures of trying to make a living at it. Or perhaps you just need to shift gears and, like some of these other pros, add some new roles to your career, such as broadcaster or teacher. There may be opportunities available to you that you just haven't considered.

There are great rewards to becoming a professional photographer if you're willing and able to put in the time and effort it requires, but there is no shame in trying to be a great amateur photographer. Making money with photography doesn't always equate to making exceptional photography. If you love photography and want to do more than just make slideshows for your friends and family, there are more opportunities now than ever before. Overcome your doubt and hesitation, step out and see what you can accomplish as “just” an amateur.

Please support this site and buy Stuart's awesome e-book, Close To Home, through the Craft & Vision website. [affiliate link]

Rishi Singhal's MFA Exhibition called Condition of Urbanity opens on April 10. The reception is from 3 to 5 pm. You will have to make it to Syracuse University to see the show. It will be held at the Joe & Emily Lowe Art Gallery in the Shaffer Art Building.

“All photographs, installations and conversations in the Chairs exhibition are a blend of understanding and wondering.”

New Delhi-based photographer Dayanita Singh defies labeling. While she got her start as a graduate of the ICP program in documentary photography and cut her teeth with Mary Ellen Mark as her assistant, Singh's own imprint on the photography landscape has been rather diverse.

About 10 years back she set upon a photography documentary as she was allowed to follow the life of Mona, a eunuch. That resulted in a book called, “Myself Mona Ahmed.” Exhausted documenting only social justice issues, she took a break of sorts to document the lives of people from a social class she knows best – the rich elite in India. That too resulted in a book called “Privacy.”

Dayanita Singh has a string of exhibits in the US; mostly in Boston and New York city. A group show she is in called PRESENCE is located at Sepia International and is on till April 16th. Another group exhibit she is a part of called EDGE OF DESIRE, at the Asia Society is on until June 1. The exhibit in Boston, at the Isabelle Stewart Gardner museum, is on until May 8th. The title of the show is simply – CHAIRS.

Gardner ‘Chairs' for seeing, not sitting
By Christine Temin, Globe Staff  |  February 18, 2005

“Empty” is not a word generally associated with the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Gardner was one of the great collector/pack rats of her era, as her faux Venetian palazzo on the Fenway attests. The place is stuffed.

But let an Indian photographer and an Italian furniture expert loose in the dense, eclectic collections, and the surprisingly minimalist result is ”Chairs,“ among the finest of the contemporary shows the Gardner has mounted to reinterpret its holdings.

Dayanita Singh is the photographer and Fausto Calderai is the expert who has refined our knowledge of the Gardner's furniture, a part of the collection that has gotten far less attention than its signature paintings. There are other players in the ”Chairs” project: the Italian/Indian artist Andrea Anastasio, designer of the overall exhibition; museum educator-in-residence Carla Hartman; and filmmaker Michael Sheridan, who documented the making of the exhibition. A six-minute excerpt from his longer behind-the-scenes film is playing outside the museum café. Watch Sheridan's contribution last, so the ”how“ doesn't overtake the ”what,” even though his film is a series of poetic snapshots rather than a dry blow-by-blow.

This is a surprising show, one of resonance and even poignancy, sparked by the Gardner's copious collections of chairs of various periods and provenances. The empty chairs in Singh's works also echo the empty frames in the Gardner gallery that was once home to works by Rembrandt and Vermeer, paintings stolen in a still unsolved 1990 heist.

Through rearranging furniture and adding temporary labels where none existed, lest they disturb the museum's residential style (and possibly violate Gardner's famous will that allows very little change), the team of artists draws our eyes and minds to objects most of us routinely walk by en route to a Botticelli or a Rembrandt.

This multifaceted show extends — without fanfare and somewhat surreptitiously — through the Gardner's three floors of exhibition space.

The prescribed route begins with Singh's elegant photos of chairs from various countries and eras, installed in the Gardner's small temporary exhibition space. It continues in a niche carved into a first-floor wall, moves to a jarring ensemble of seating in an ornate second-floor gallery, and finishes quietly, with a subtle intervention in the long gallery on the third.

Singh's chair photos come without the visual clutter of labels. (A free handout that identifies each chair is available in the gallery.) She has followed Gardner's lead in asking us to focus on the objects alone.

The range of seating in her images is even broader than Gardner's. She photographs an old theater from above, looking down on seats in rigid rows. In other images are chairs piled so high with books you can barely see them, or bookcases acting as backdrops for Asian-style cushions on the floor. Singh, like Gardner, is a bibliophile. And, like Gardner, she goes for weird juxtapositions, as in a photo of Buddha statues in the lotus position, seated on the floor, their dignity compromised by the sheets and clothes drying on the laundry line above.

Despite all the connections to Gardner, Singh is working in a completely contemporary mode, one related to the photographs of unoccupied theaters by Hiroshi Sugimoto (a sampling of which are across the way at the Museum of Fine Arts), the photographs of empty psychiatrists' couches by Shellburne Thurber, or Abelardo Morell's eerily unpopulated interiors, upside down, thanks to his use of the camera obscura. Absence becomes a potent presence in the works of all of them.

Each of Singh's chairs has a distinct personality and even a gender. An ethereal example with thin legs, straight back, and no arms suggests a delicate, flyweight female with exquisite posture, graceful enough to avoid tipping over a little table nearby that seems to have only two legs. A fluted pilaster on a wall accentuates the image's verticality. Singh calls this photo ”Ballerina Chair.“

The objects in the images suggest particular places and scenarios. We're left to guess at the particulars, if we want, but the deliberate lack of information isn't frustrating. We can easily identify the things in Singh's rooms, and that is satisfying in itself.

In ”Amnesia,” the niche-in-the-wall piece, most of the back of an ornate 18th-century Italian walnut chair has been excised, replaced by a flat white surface on which projections of Singh's photos appear, as if the chair-turned-screen were a memory bank. The sequence of projections ends with the image of the chair itself. It reads as a returning prodigal.

Wandering upstairs we take note of the huge variety of chairs in the museum's collections, from a sedan chair in which some 18th-century aristocrat was carried through the streets, to choir stalls. The sight of the chair that sits quietly in a corner, in front of the Raphael ”Pieta,“ will be familiar even to those who have never visited before. Singh's photo of the same vignette hangs downstairs. The ”Pieta” is beside a window that sheds filtered daylight on it. In the days before the museum had electricity, natural light was the only way to see it. Today's conservation-conscious curators would balk at placing a light-sensitive masterpiece by a window, even with protection from ultraviolet rays. But Gardner's will prevails.

There isn't going to be any electric lighting in the second-floor ”Little Salon“ for the run of the show, unless it's the darkest of days. Into this ornate room where nearly everything but the visitor is gilded, the artists have put a suite of sofas and chairs in a deliberately haphazard arrangement that suggests at least two separate conversations going on, with a couple of outcasts at a distance from the central groups. All the furniture is upholstered in the same blue silk, as if a reminder that this was a meeting of people of equal rank. One of Calderai's whimsical touches is the squashed cushions, suggesting that the party has broken up but the maid has yet to arrive to plump the pillows.

In a glass case in the Gardner's Long Gallery are two artists' books — with more chairs — that Singh made for Calderai and Anastasio. Roughly the size of prayer books, they unfold, accordion style, so your eye can quickly scan all the images without moving your head.

The show has its ironies. So many fragile, historic chairs in the museum, but almost no place for the public to sit. Sheridan's film has a hysterical shot of curator Pieranna Cavalchini and Calderai sitting on the floor as they talk.

And even when the Palazzo was private, those carved and gilded chairs didn't come in for heavy duty. In the film, Singh laments that they've never been lived in and loved, which, for her, diminishes their personalities.

Many people see them as objets d'art, not seating. In that group was Henry James, who remarked on Gardner's ”seven glorious chairs (the loveliest I ever saw); but they are not a symbol of her attitude — she never sits down.”

The New York Times section on travel of all places had a blurb about a massive annual photo exhibit in Hamburg, Germany.

“Ten museums and more than 70 galleries in and around the city will host the third Triennale of Photography from April 14 to June 19, featureing 107 exhibitions of photographers' work from around the world.”

If your feet are itching to travel, you can get more info by calling (49-40) 428314-297.