Jonathan Green (photographer)

Jonathan Green (born September 26, 1939) is an American writer, historian of photography, curator, teacher, museum administrator, photographer, filmmaker and the founding Project Director of the Wexner Center for the Arts.

[8] After taking a workshop with Minor White he began to write for Aperture Quarterly, publishing commentaries on the Daybooks of Edward Weston, 1967; Harry Callahan’s El Mochuelo and MOMA monographs, 1968; and Bruce Davidson’s East 100th Street, 1971.

His introductory essay and his lengthy notes, together with his painstaking indexes and other editorial apparatus, are a model of what a book of this sort should be—a prefect guide not only to a crucial publication but to a career and a period.

[26] In Malcolm’s essay “On Real and Fake Snapshots,” written as a memoir late in her life, Malcolm teases Green: “In his introduction, the editor, Jonathan Green, felt impelled to inform the reader that the photographers represented in the book were ‘not snapshooters but sophisticated photographers.’ The most sophisticated among them, perhaps, was Rexroth, who used a $1.50 toy camera called the Diana (thus my title) that also came in a model that squirted water when you pressed the shutter.”[27] Yet the reception to The Snapshot was not universally positive.

[30] In the process of giving workshops at his new facility MacNeil invited acclaimed MIT Press graphic designer Muriel Cooper to review student work.

When American Photography: A Critical History 1945–1980 was published in 1984 it was widely reviewed in periodicals including Newsweek, Los Angeles Times, Artweek, The New Criterion and the photographic journals Afterimage, Photo-Eye, and Exposure.

This history of American photography from 1945 to the present has not been dealt with substantially before this provocative and interesting survey by Jonathan Green....There is such a volume of material that even organizing it into chapter headings deserves a merit award.

Green’s democratic instinct sanctioned an open-ended experiment in distributed authority, offering the institutional apparatus to artists, curators, and cultural workers on the front lines of social struggle.

In 1983, the gallery launched what became a sequence of exhibitions channeling the politics of 1980s feminism, anti-imperialism, and queer activism, starting with All’s Fair: Love and War in New Feminist Art.

[56]Critic and artist Douglas Davis, who was also a member of the nine-person competition jury, writes in this Rizzoli book, “As a determined user of American museums devoted to ‘contemporary’ art—as well as a visitor and a commentator—I can attest that it is the first of its kind.

[57] In his essay “What is a Laboratory?” in To Begin Again on the precedents for the Wexner Center, historian and editor Julian Myers-Szupinska points out Green's relationship to the laboratory model: "Jonathan W. Green, the second director of Ohio State’s University Gallery of Fine Art and a driving force behind the Wexner Center’s statement of purpose, had published an anthology of Stieglitz’s journal, Camera Work, in 1973; he was intimately aware of 291’s laboratory model and was likely recalling it deliberately in the statement.”[58][59] Once Eisenman’s design was selected, Green worked closely with the architect during the design development phase including traveling to Germany with Eisenman to carefully evaluate several highly lauded new museums: Richard Meier’s Frankfurt Museum of Applied Arts (1985) and Abteiberg Museum in Mönchengladbach by Hans Hollein (1982).

[60] In 1987 Dean Brokema wrote, “For the past several years Jonathan has maintained a vital gallery program that has achieved recognition for its adventurous planning and for its imaginative combination of both arts and sociological commentary.

"[61] In recognition of his input, Green was invited to share the stage with Peter Eisenman and Richard Trott when the Wexner Center received the 32nd Annual Progressive Architecture Design Award in 1985.

[64][65][50] Here local dancers joined nationally known choreographers Ellen Cornfield, John Giffin, Elizabeth Streb, Stephan Koplowitz, and Susan Hadley with musical performances by accordionist Guy Klucevsek, William Larkin, and Thomas Wells.

With a team from the OSU Gallery, Green rediscovered, recovered and restored one of the remaining biplanes and other airfield paraphernalia which at Payne’s death in 1980 had been left to disintegrate in the sun, rain, and salt-water spray of Chesapeake Bay.

In defiance of anonymity and illiteracy and in resolute indifference to his distance from the centers of power, Payne used his prodigious visual imagination and mechanical talents to conscientiously become the architect, engineer, and pilot that society had disallowed.

[80] In The New York Times, dance critic Ann Daly wrote, “The show and catalogue, organized and edited by the museum’s director, Jonathan Green, comprise an extraordinary recovery project that fundamentally changes the way we understand ‘the other half’ of the Jones-Zane collaboration.

[84] One Ground: 4 Palestinian & 4 Israeli Filmmakers shifted focus from documentary footage that depicts the literal events of political conflict to the presentation of metaphorical works that address the more conceptual and universal issues of exile, loss, belonging, identity, and home.

Goldberg, Elia Suleiman, Emily Jacir, Michal Rovner, Mona Hatoum, Ori Gersht, and the American premiere of Rashid Masharawi’s film Waiting.

The team headed by Egyptian architect Mohamed Sharif and his Israeli partner Joel Blank were also finalists in a collaborative proposal for the Yitzak Rabin Peace Forum Memorial in Tel Aviv.

[86] Here the emails were reprinted as correlative and equal to excepts from Judith Butler’s Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative; Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others; and Vilem Flusser’s The Freedom of the Migrant.

[100] When the show appeared at ICP in New York, The Washington Post noted, “Cherry Guevara and other examples of what could be called Che abuse are now on display in an exhibition titled ¡Che!

The Rouse Department Store, which had been sitting vacant for many years, contained a period façade, freestanding display cases in the glass entry arcade and a magnificent two-story, skylit atrium.

[105] Green received a $500,000 grant from the federal Save America’s Treasures program for rehousing and seismically isolating the world-treasure Keystone-Mast Collection of over 350,000 glass stereoscopic plates, photographs and negatives in a new archive located in the Culver Center.

Additional essays by Lisette Model, Tod Papageorge, Steven Halpern, Walker Evans, John A. Kouwenhoven, Judith Wechsler, Paul Strand.

Portfolios by Bill Zulpo-Dane, Emmet Gowin, Garry Winogrand, Gus Kayafas, Henry Wessel, Jr, Joel Meyerowitz, Lee Friedlander, Nancy Rexroth, Richard Albertine, Robert Frank, Tod Papageorge, and Wendy Snyder MacNeil.

ISBN 0912334576 1974 Celebrations: An Exhibition of Original Photographs, Selection and texts by Minor White and Jonathan Green, preface by Gyorgy Kepes, Hayden Gallery, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge.

Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Harry Callahan, William Clift, Linda Connor, Bevan Davies, Roy DeCarava, William Eggleston, Elliott Erwin, Larry Fink, Frank Gohlke, John Gossage, Jonathan Green, Jan Groover, Mary Ellen Mark, Joel Meyerowitz, Richard Misrach, Nicholas Nixon, Tod Papageorge, Stephen Shore.

1993 Jonathan Green, "Las verdades y ficciones en la obra de Pedro Meyer," El National, Mexico City, November 22, 1993.

2009 Jonathan Green, "Michael Elderman’s Speculative Theater of Light and Color," in Riverside’s Fox Theater: An intimate Portrait, Photographs by Michael J. Elderman, 2009 ISBN 978-0615326801 2009 Jonathan Green, "The End of Film," in The End of Film: A Brief History of Digital Cameras, 1987–2009, Selections from the David Whitmire Hearst Jr. Foundation Collection, UCR ARTSblock, University of California Riverside, October 24, 2009 — January 30, 2010.