Greetings!

Welcome to Steve and Karen's April 2010 newsletter. Our trip to FotoFest in Houston was extraordinarily stimulating and productive. Our meetings with gallerists, museum curators and publishers yielded both helpful critical insights, as well as some promising connections. We also enjoyed meeting and catching up with two colleagues with whom we took studio courses at the U of A back in the 1980's, spent time with several photographers we met in China, and saw an amazing variety of first rate work.

On the drive back we visited Karen's brother in Oklahoma and then headed to one of Charles' favorite places: the Antelope Hills in Western Oklahoma. From there we proceeded to Santa Fe where we stopped in to see the new exhibit at the Verve Gallery of Photography where Karen is featured as the Emerging Artist during this show.

After overnighting in Socorro, NM, we drove west past the VLA and turned south at Datil to drive through the gorgeous landscape of western New Mexico. The landscape was compelling, but the wind was so strong that we could hardly open the car door. Nevertheless, we braved the gales and spent a good deal of the trip photographing. After crossing over Mule Creek Pass into Arizona, we were greeted first by an enormous cloud of mine tailings that had been lifted up by the wind from the mines at Clifton, and then by hillsides covered by hundreds of thousands of golden poppies. We are now home for almost three weeks before our trip to the east coast in mid-April.

As a reminder, both of our websites have been completely redesigned recently. You can see Steve's newly configured site at http://www.stephenstrom.com/. Karen's site can be viewed at http://www.karenstrom.com.

Steve and Karen each have two images in the Beyond the Lens exhibit at the Tubac Center for the Arts. The opening reception will be held on Thursday evening, April 1, from 5 - 7 pm at 9 Plaza Road in Tubac.

One of Karen's images, Warehouse, Marfa, TX, remains on display through April 25 in the Photospiva 2010 exhibit in the main gallery at the George A. Spiva Center for the Arts in Joplin, MO. The Portfolio ShowCase Volume 4 containing a portfolio of Steve's landscape images is available online from the Center for Fine Art Photography. The virtual exhibit can be viewed online, and a book containing the portfolios should become available for order through the website sometime during May.

We note again that Karen is the Emerging Artist at Verve Gallery of Photography in Santa Fe during the exhibit featuring Mark Citret, Douglas Ethridge and Dominic Rouse which opened on March 19 and runs through May 8.

Later in April we will travel to the East coast to visit museums and galleries. Steve will present two talks, "What kind of planets form in what kinds of disks?", at the Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge and at UMass in Amherst. He will also be giving a talk summarizing the evolution of his photographic vision and signing copies of Earth Forms at The Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley, Massachusetts. A new review of Earth Forms has just been published at Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments.

We travel to the Portland area in May for photography on the Oregon coast and in the eastern Oregon desert and for Steve's show at the Camerawork Gallery. We will also visit galleries in the Bay area on our way to Oregon.

In July Steve and Karen will have a joint show at the Open Shutter Gallery in Durango, CO.

Steve's photographs recently received unexpected and entirely unwanted attention in the national press. On our way back to Sonoita, we awakened one morning and picked up the newspaper outside our hotel room and were more than a bit surprised to find a photograph containing his images on the second page of the USA Today. Next, we opened the NY Times online and found a color image of the three photographs. That evening we saw the same image serve as the backdrop for a long story in the Rachel Maddow Show. But the epitiome, at least to this point, was on the Jon Stewart's The Daily Show on March 29 when the same image was shown again, zoomed in on Steve's photographs (well, really on the point of impact of the thrown object). Steve had given these images to Rep. Gabrielle Giffords after her election to CD8 in Arizona. Sadly, her office was vandalized during the outbreak of inchoate rage following the passage of the heathcare bill. His 3 images lie just to the left of the flag. Steve hopes that the next time his images appear 'in press' it will be under happier circumstances.