I received the recent issue of Contact Sheet, the publication produced by Light Work that documents its programs, resident artists, and exhibitions. This particular issue, Number 147, takes note of the organization's extraordinary thirty-five year history. For those of you not familiar with the organization, Light Work is the Syracuse, NY based organization that has diligently served the photographic community for three and a half decades. It is, quite simply, the oldest continuously operating organization and institution of its kind.

Looking through this issue of Contact Sheet was a deeply poignant and moving experience for me, since it served as a reminder of just how I and so many other photographic artists were supported at a pivotal and early stage of our careers. Through the residency/exhibition/publication support that so many of us had at Light Work, we became forever members of a community of support that endures to this day. Looking through the list of names of those who've been supported by Light Work over these many years I encounter the names of so many photographers that I have come to know over the thirty some years that I have been in the field, and the names of others I remember feeling honored to finally be in the company of, as well as several former students of mine who have recently become Light Work alums. And most tellingly, the organization is still helmed by the remarkable and modest man that I met when I first went there twenty-three years ago, Jeffrey Hoone. As unassuming (and brilliant) a person as you're ever likely to meet, I came to admire and respect Jeff from the very beginning. I only half jokingly refer to him as "brother Jeffrey" whenever I see him. He's had my back--and a whole lot of other people's backs--for very long time. I've always known I could count on his support and counsel.

I had been introduced to Jeff and Light Work by my friend, the late Sy Rubin. Rubin had completed a residency there in 1983, as had another friend Michael Spano in 1980. Rubin came back singing praises of the program, and suggested I apply. Rubin, who regularly photographed the New York State Fair each year in Syracuse, invited me to join him on his trip there in 1984, where I met Jeff for the first time. Not incidentally, both Rubin and later Spano were directors of the Midtown Y Photography Gallery, an important alternative exhibition space for photography in New York City that had been founded by Larry Seigel, a former teacher of mine at the School of Visual Arts. When I did my residency at Light Work the following year after that trip with Rubin, I came back home, and immediately contacted Carrie Mae Weems, my close friend and former student, telling her of the extraordinarily productive time I had there, and about the wonderful man I had met who was the director. When I had an exhibition there of the work I had made during the residency a year later, James Welling was beginning his own residency; he became a fast friend as well. Carrie Mae then did a residency there in 1988, and she and Jeff have been married for over a decade now. I think you get a sense from this just how important a role Light Work has played as a professional and personal touchstone in my own little corner of the universe.

The story of Light Work's beginnings is consistent with the time in which it came into being; a time when the various movements for social equity in the 1960s had given way to newly formed independent institutions designed to serve previously marginalized communities and constituencies. Funding agencies such as the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts were created as the funding entities that fueled the creation and growth of these organizations and institutions. An IRS 501 (c) (3) non-profit organization status, a nominal physical base of operation, and someone (or two) willing to launch and head an organization, along with enough willing like minded friends who could be corralled into a board of directors, was all that was required to be in the running for funding. In those heady days a lot of idealists formed a spate of organizations, all well intentioned. Few were able to weather the changing economic and political climates, and fewer still were able to grow and thrive in those ever shifting circumstances. Of the many organizations formed at that time to serve the community of photographic artists, Light Work has been the only one in the country to not merely survive (a few others have), but has certainly been the only one to thrive and grow in the extraordinary manner in which it has.

Founded by former Syracuse University students Phil Block (seen here in Jeff's photograph of him from 1981) and Tom Bryan in 1973 while they were running Community Darkrooms, a public access photography facility they had created by petitioning the University, Light Work has had only one other director for the past twenty-five years, Jeff Hoone. Hoone became director in 1982 when Block left to become the head of education at the International Center of Photography (and yet another story could be written about how Block turned ICP's fledgling education program into both a fully accredited degree granting institution and a continuing series of greatly expanded individual classes and workshops). Tom Bryan had departed the previous year to become a full-time sheep farmer. By then Hoone had been assistant director for two years. Hoone must have gotten a seriously deep immersion crash course in arts and organizational administration over those two years before taking the helm, because he has been a steady navigator of the institution ever since. I would imagine that his genius has been in determining what Light Work is not as much as what it is, since the organization as it currently exists provides the same services and platforms that it has since its inception, only in a much more sophisticated and expanded form and physical plant. Their first grant was from the New York Satet Council on the Arts in the amount of $5,000 in 1973 for a season of lectures, exhibitions, and workshops. This was followed by an NEA grant the following year in the grand amount of $1,500 that was to be used for a series of lectures. Exhibitions were held in a hallway gallery, and when I did my residency in 1985 the stipend for the month was $1,000; artists shared an apartment in campus housing. My apartment mate was John Dziadecki, a Western landscape photographer who arrived from a cross country drive in a station wagon crammed to the gills with equipment, paper, negatives, and other belongings.

Contact Sheet was originally introduced as a black and white 11X17 inch newsletter, folded in half to make four 8 1/2 X 11 inch pages. It became a four color book format twenty years ago. Even as a black and white newsletter, it was enough to get the attention of the Fogg Art Museum's then curator of photography Davis Pratt, who then included me in my first mainstream museum exhibition, "New American Photography." Jeff had deftly put Pratt in touch with me when he contacted him after seeing my picture ("Five Children," Syracuse, NY 1985, shown above) reproduced there. And one wouldn't recognize the new facility as being in the same physical plant if you didn't know better. As part of a $3.2 million renovation, completed in 2001, a state of the art digital lab was added, along with other impressive facilites, with the institutional space doubled. An impressive exhibition space, named after the organization's long time benefactor (and Syracuse University alumnus) Robert Menschel, has been in place since 1985 complementing the newly expanded Light Work Gallery. And the artist's stipend is now $4,000 for the month. The organization is consistently the largest grantee in its NYSCA funding category in the state of New York. These, and numerous other changes, are indicative of the skill and vision with which Hoone has grown and managed this institution.

While Hoone has clearly been the steady hand at the helm, he has had the assist of an able and growing staff throughout. The current staff is shown in the photograph above. With the added responsibility of a growing institution Hoone has hired Hannah Frieser as the Director, and he has now become Executive Director, along with a University based position that has him overseeing six arts institutions in the region and New York City. The organization's mission and vision, though, remain--as they have been from the beginning--artists centered, and there is a real lesson in its disciplined adherence to its core mission. Hoone, of course, is the man imposing that discipline. And as a result, Light Work and Jeff Hoone continue to stand as an enduring testament to solid institution and community building. Become a member of Light Work and read Jeff's reflective essay "Routine Maintenance is Our Only Weapon Against Entropy" in Contact Sheet #147 if you want to know what that means. (www.lightwork.org)