Community Notebook > Our Community, Our News
Shooting Stars
photos by Dion Ogust


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The Center for Photography at Woodstock is celebrating its 25th anniversary with two special exhibitions: “Constellation” is an impressive survey of work by over 30 photographers who have in various ways contributed to the Center’s history and success (by teaching or taking a workshop, exhibiting or volunteering at the Center, and so on), many of whom have gone on to stellar careers and international recognition in the art world; the smaller, more modest “Constellation Selects” features work by seven up-and-coming photographers, chosen by seven of those represented in the larger exhibition.

It’s a commonplace that “the artworld is a very tiny place.” If so, the art photography world is even tinier. Back in 1977 when the Center was founded, the market for art photography was even more limited, and photography in general was the Rodney Dangerfield of the artworld, receiving little respect as a “derivative” and inherently reproducible medium that trailed behind the “real” innovations of painting and sculpture.

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Over the past 25 years, a sea change of taste has taken place, and now many of the most influential artists of our times are photographers—Cindy Sherman, Andres Serrano, and James Welling, to name just a few—and it’s institutions like CPW that have helped foster this shift, providing a critical mass of emerging art photographers and giving them access to the knowledge base and equipment to properly harness the technology in service to their art.

Founded in 1977 by art dealer Howard Greenberg and a small group of fine art photography aficionados, its mission has been “to provide a place for art photographers to see contemporary work, and to see and discuss new ideas and develop new skills,” according to its executive director, Colleen Kenyon. She moved to Woodstock in 1979, with an MFA in photography and some college teaching experience under her belt. She recalls walking into the Center then, meeting Howard Greenberg for the first time—and never leaving. Named executive director in 1981, her daunting objective was to insure that the Center addressed artists and audiences on local, regional, national, and international levels, and based on the evidence provided by the “Constellation” exhibition, the Center has remarkably achieved that goal.
One of the oldest non-profit institutions supporting photography in the country, it is the only one not located in a major city. Given the difficult climate for non-profits in general (in fact, the San Francisco-based Friends of Photography was forced to close its doors last fall, after 30 years as the pre-eminent photographic society on the West Coast), it’s even more amazing to witness the Center’s prosperity. In 1999 CPW undertook a $300,000 renovation of its facilities, opening a new ground level gallery space on Tinker Street, which both literally and figuratively makes the Center more open and accessible to the community. With the assistance of a New York legislative grant, renovation of the building’s facade is now halfway done, and should be completed by this winter. The plan includes enclosing the front porch with French doors and augmenting the usable space on the first floor.

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The calendar for any given week at the Center reflects the beehive of activity that takes place there. From darkroom rentals to intensive workshops to public lectures to exhibitions to the artist’s residency program, daily life at CPW is nothing if not a moving target. Always a haven for photographers of all levels of ability, part of the Center’s mission is also to bridge the gap between the artistic innovation cultivated there and its potential audience. Towards this end, its public exhibition program is augmented by publication of Photography Quarterly magazine, which prides itself on covering “what the mainstream magazines leave out,” with a finger on the pulse of the contemporary photography community that rarely makes its way into the pages of ArtForum or Art in America.

The goal of all these activities is, in Kenyon’s words, “to support the creation and distribution of good work, from the darkroom to exhibition to publication to the [Center’s] collection.” From a business perspective, this approach is sometimes called vertical integration, and it seems to work well for the artists at the Center.

Perhaps the classic CPW success story is the career of Kenro Izu. He first learned to make his stunning platinum prints—which can record an almost infinite number of shades of gray to create an incomparably soft, sensuous image—at a workshop offered by the Center, and since then has made a name for himself as one of the most elegant photographers of our time. (He is the recipient of a Guggenheim award this year.) His artistic development was encouraged with the Center’s very first Photographer’s Fund Fellowship in 1980, his first solo exhibition at CPW was in 1985, and several of his haunting images of the ruins at Angkor Wat, Cambodia, are now in the Center’s permanent collection of over 1,500 prints on long term loan to the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz. His work has been featured in the Photography Quarterly, at one point he served on the Center’s board, and he continues to conduct workshops and contribute work to the annual fundraising auction.

At this point in its now venerable history, the Center for Photography at Woodstock has much to be proud of, as revealed in the Constellation of excellent photographers that have passed through its doors. The challenge now, as acknowledged by the subsidiary exhibition “Constellation Selects,” is to resist the temptation to rest on its (quite considerable) laurels, and to continue to press the medium’s limits in search of the photographic “stars” of tomorrow. At this point, it seems like a challenge that Kenyon and her colleagues are happy to take up.

—Beth E. Wilson