This Spring, the Griffin Museum of Photography honored Rixon Reed of photo-eye with the 2012 Spotlight award at the annual Focus Awards for shinning a light on photography and creating a far reaching impact in the field .  I was lucky to be in attendance and was witness to a wonderful video created about Rixon and the amazing projects he has produced throughout the years. In 1979 Rixon started photo-eye as a mailorder photography book source in Austin, Texas. In 1991 he moved the business to Santa Fe, New Mexico where it resides today as the home of photo-eye and photo-eye Gallery. In 1997 photo-eye’s website was launched and became one of the first e-commerce independent bookstores online. photo-eye has since grown to become the world’s largest online resource for photography books and now includes many other divisions, all developed by Rixon.   

photo-eye is has also morphed into Galleries, Auctions, Visual Server, Magazine and Newsletter, and a new venture called the Art Photo Index. This is a fantastic resource for our community, providing exposure of thousands of photographers and their images. Years ago, when Rixon created the on-line “Photographer’s Showcase”, it set the standard for showing work on the Internet and brought our images to the world in a way that had never been done before. With The Art Photo Index, he is again on the forefront of exposure for photographers.

Art Photo Index makes it easy for a targeted audience of curators, gallerists, publishers, editors, collectors and educators to access and discover interesting work. Art Photo Index is highly vetted. Artists are invited to take part as a result of their accomplishments in the field. 

The Art Photo Index cloud-based system includes a powerful search engine, a world map showing artist locations, a collections module for keeping track of interesting work and an alert system so that viewers can follow artists they like and be notified when those artists upload new work. 

For example, you can search photographers:

or you can peruse websites (what a great resource when building a website!):

or you can search images:

Along with this launch, API are excited to announce our monthly exhibition series featuring Art Photo Index artists. The inaugural shows open in February and March 2013, with Fear and Loathing by Katherine Ware, Curator, New Mexico Museum of Art and Those are not MY family values by Rebecca Senf, Norton Family Curator at the Center for Creative Photography and Phoenix Art Museum.