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The Ojai Valley Museum invites you to celebrate an American experience through the lens of internationally known Ojai photographer, Joseph Sohm on Saturday, December 5, 2009. This multi media mosaic, Visions of America, answers the question: How do you photograph democracy?

This benefit event for the Ojai Museum begins at 4:30 pm at the Ojai Theatre, 145 E. Ojai Ave. A celebration party and book signing will follow at 6:00 pm, at the nearby Ojai Center for the Arts, 113 S. Montgomery, featuring catered American fare by The Event Caddy and musical entertainment by Los Angeles musician, Maurice Weiss. Tickets are $55 before November 25 and $65 per person after November 25. Prepaid reservations are required. Seating is limited. Contact the museum at (805) 640-1390 for full information and reservations.

Additional website information available at: http://www.ojaivalleymuseum.org/ and http://www.visionsofamerica.com/index.html

An American Dream on the Big Screen

If you read magazines, books, advertisements, newspapers, calendars, surf the web, watch television, or buy CD’s or post cards, you've probably seen images photographed by Sohm. His images appear in National Geographic, Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, CNN, ABC, the History Channel, on best-sellers including John Grisham’s King of Torts, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, Bill Clinton’s My Life, in American embassies around the world, in the National Archives of the U.S., and in advertisements for most of the Fortune 1000 corporations. His images are published more than 10,000 times a year worldwide.

He and his work have been profiled in Esquire magazine, USA Today, the LA Times, The New York Times, The San Francisco Examiner and at the NEWSEUM Museum in Washington, D.C. Sohm produced the 1993 Presidential Inaugural music-video for MTV, which aired worldwide. As a speaker he has appeared at more than one hundred colleges, universities and trade associations. C-SPAN’s BOOK TV aired Sohm’s speech from the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

Sohm began as a classroom teacher of U.S. history and soon turned his photography hobby into a career and vehicle for telling the history of America to a wider audience. Thirty years ago he asked, “How do you photograph democracy?” Since then he has been traveling and taking tens of thousands of photos, 1,300 of which are compiled in his new tabletop book, Visions of America - Photographing Democracy. It is a fifty-state portrait of America, examining multifarious facets of the US - its promise, challenges and accomplishments. Included, incidentally, are several shots taken in our own back yard. Paul Theroux, the legendary travel writer, wrote the foreword. Already the book has been honored with a Gold Medal in the 13th annual Independent Publishing Awards competition as “Best CoffeeTable Book

Taking the book into a concert hall format and fulfilling a dream to create his own “portrait of American democracy in image, word and sound,” Sohm collaborated with his friend and Ojai neighbor jazz pianist and Grammy Award-winning and Oscar-nominated composer Roger Kellaway, on a Visions of America concert, which played to a sold-out audience in Philadephia shortly after President Obama’s inauguration. For the concert Clint Eastwood voiced some of Sohm’s commentary from the new book.

Now we in Ventura County have a chance to view Sohm’s images on the big screen. Music videos incorporating his photos will be projected onto the screen of the Ojai Theater while Sohm describes his experiences of three decades photographing America. The theatre event, a benefit for the Ojai Valley Museum, begins at 4:30pm on Saturday, December 5, 2009 at the Ojai Theatre, 145 E. Ojai Avenue.

Immediately following will be a celebration and book signing at the nearby Ojai Art Center, 113 S. Montgomery St., featuring American fare catered by The Event Caddy and musical entertainment by Los Angeles musician Maurice Weiss. And there will be door prizes! Tickets are $55 before November 25 and $65 thereafter. Prepaid reservations are required and are available by calling the museum at 640-1390 before December 1.

Additional website information is available at: http://www.ojaivalleymuseum.org/ and http://www.visionsofamerica.com.