Booked.

* Photo Americas 2001

* Month of Photography, October 2-27, 2001

* Review Americas, October 3-6, 2001 Portland, Oregon

* KATHLEEN POWERS is an independent fine-art painter and photographer living in Portland, Oregon.

This year's Photo Americas was packed full or career-building events and opportunities for any level of photographer. The photographic festival ran through the month of October, and was created specifically to celebrate and promote photographic arts in Portland, Oregon. The city's public and private art galleries, suppliers and educators, collectively and collaboratively participated to augment all facets of photographic-based art. Most of the reviews, lectures and workshops offered took place at the Governor Hotel located in the heart of downtown Portland. The photographic celebration began on the evening of October 2 at Portland State University's Newberger Hall with an informal and uniquely candid keynote address by Nathan Lyons. He is the founder of the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York, as well as a groundbreaking curator, educator and author in the field of photography. His recently published book, Riding 1st Class on the Titanic, includes over 20 years of photographic work, and it has earn ed Lyons an International Center for Photography Infinity Award for Lifetime Achievement.

During the Review Americas portion of events, an impressive total of 2500 reviews were given within the short span of 4 days. Each participant was able to receive up to ten different 20-minute critique sessions per day. The critiques were one-on-one reviews given by a choice of 49 international curators, critics, instructors, gallery owners, collectors and publishers. This incredible opportunity created an enormous potential for photographers to walk away with new exhibitions, publication opportunities and print sales. Experiences like Review Americas are paramount for any successful artist or educator. Such events keep us in touch with the ever-evolving art world, and at the same time, help us maintain personal growth, artistic relevance and a keen understanding of our connected place within it. This year's Review Americas experience provided just that, a valuable source for work and career feedback, critiques and dialogue with peers and mentors, as well as the gathering of viable media connections.

In total, there were 19 lectures, panel discussions and workshops given throughout the span of Photo Americas. For example, Portland-based photography professor and artist Phil Harris joined New York-based photographer Andrea Modica to give a refreshingly open and informative symposium on book publication. It was a great privilege and treat to be able to cruise through and discuss the pros and cons, realities and pitfalls of fine art publishing. They discussed what makes a good publisher (and even breached the potential headache of how to find one), estimated out-of-pocket costs, funding challenges, and design issues like choosing good papers, effective compositions and appropriate fonts.

On Wednesday October 3, a Portfolio Walk was held at Pacific Northwest College of Art's large exhibition hall cum gallery space. This informal and highly successful exhibition gave all the participating photographers a chance to meet, show their work and engage in discussions of techniques, styles and personal artistic visions. It was a wonderful luxury to be able to casually view nearly 80 portfolios in one evening, along with the unusual opportunity to discuss the work, education backgrounds, influences and career goals directly with the artists. There was a multitude of cutting-edge work presented, displaying a full range of photographic processes from basic black and white to digitally manipulated work.

A highly successful Fine Print Auction was held on October 5 with a total of 162 photographs up for bidding. All proceeds from the fundraiser auction went to support the Photo Americas exhibitions, lectures, publications and Portfolio Walk activities. In addition, an impressive total of 30 Portland art galleries opened First Thursday photography exhibitions on the evening of October 4. Some of the participating galleries were Froelick Gallery, Powell's Books, S.K. Josefsberg, Atelier Z and the Photographic Image Gallery, with the oldest and most renowned being Blue Sky Gallery and Nine Gallery.

In conjunction with Photo Americas, the impressive and beautifully crafted work of Ron van Dongen was exhibited in the Pearl room gallery of Powell's Bookstore through the month of October. This work was on generous loan from Portland's S.K. Josefsberg Gallery. In this show, we were presented with exquisitely printed close-ups of flowers and plants, all with an extremely shallow depth of field. The subjects were highly magnified yet maintained a beautifully composed taxonomy of botanical portraits. There was a luscious surface quality about them, revealing often unnoticeable subtleties and variations.

On Saturday October 6, the aforementioned reviewers chose Doug Keyes as the Review Americas Photographer of the Year. He was awarded with an exhibition at the Nine Gallery, which ran through Saturday, October 27. He presented dye-coupler prints of books, which he photographed, one page at a time, in a unique style using multiple exposures. All of the books, including titles like The Original Watercolor Paintings by James Audubon for the Birds of America, The Holy Bible and The Voyager Flights to Jupiter and Saturn, were alive with motion despite their inanimate content. In each print, the books were centered compositionally, and then laid out flat on a black background. Keyes photographed his condensed library straight down, giving the prints a distinct and grounded feel that was almost documentary due to the rigidity of his composition. While the procedural creation of the work remained constant, a wonderful spontaneous and fleeting motion also prevailed. The books resembled living creatures, with their deli cately tender and seemingly mutable parts. Keyes's multiple-exposure technique served to blend and obscure the actual illustrations and texts in the books to such a degree that they began to take on a soft, x-ray-like, skeletal or structural appearance. But at the same time, the work was able to sustain a peculiar dichotomy of supple life coupled with withering death--a most wonderful combination of a sobering duality. The works were beautifully intuitive, light and eerie, and challenged the viewer to cognitively assimilate this seemingly simple physical vs. ethereal combination. There is no doubt that I will be roaming the venues of Portland for the next Photo Americas.