This is the first in a new series presenting the work of documentary and fine art photographers, beginning with Julia Dean, of the sad red earth, The Julia Dean Photo Workshops, and this writer’s affections. Julia has been shooting and teaching photography for over thirty years. At her workshops in Los Angeles, at Venice Beach, you can study with her and with some of the greatest names in contemporary photography, in all genres. Julia began her career as the last apprentice of then 80-year old Berenice Abbott, one of the greats of twentieth-century photography, famed for her images of Paris in the Twenties and New York in the Thirties, protege herself of Man Ray, and champion after his death of the then little-known Eugene Atget. In conjunction, with the fifth annual Berenice Abbott Prize for an Emerging Photographer, which Julia established in honor of her mentor, Julia is reproducing at her JDPW blog the daily journal entries that chronicle her year in Maine, at 23, living and learning with Berenice Abbott: The Last Apprentice.

Julia Dean: The Documented World

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“Every photograph is a certificate of presence.”

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

EARLY WORK

My grandfather Paul Dean, from a series on the vanishing general stores of America.

I received the call at the AP overnight desk with the report of the shooting.

APPALACHIA

MISSISSIPPI

NEBRASKA

The City Cafe, in my hometown of Broken Bow, Nebraska.

EUROPE

Prague, 5 a.m. He was walking toward me.

The road into Kaminets-Podolsk, Ukraine, the medieval fortress city about ten miles from the shtetl of Orinin, where Jay’s father, Meyer, was born.

MOROCCO

VIETNAM (Hanoi)

INDIA

I spent five months traveling in India. My major focus was on life in the village of Edneer.

LATIN AMERICA

from A Year on Monhegan Island, Houghton Mifflin