Join us in celebrating the artists of Common Time on Saturday November 7th in this special artist panel with Margo Cooper, Bootsy Holler and Michael Weinstein.
Margo Cooper
Thursday Night at Po' Monkey's, Merigold, Mississippi, March 2000Abbey Lincoln, Regattabar, Cambridge, Massachusetts, February 1998T-Model Ford's wife Stella and her granddaughter Stella, Greenville, Mississippi, October 2003
Moved by a Buddy Guy and Junior Wells album she heard in high school, Margo started hanging out in the blues clubs around New England in the early nineties. Over the decades, she met and photographed many blues giants including Jimmy Rogers, Hubert Sumlin, Junior Wells, Pinetop Perkins, and other members of Muddy Waters bands, always wondering and exploring: what was life like for blues musicians and their families in Mississippi? What had it been like to grow up during the days of segregation and sharecropping?
Beginning in 1997, Margo began wandering the back roads of Mississippi, photographing and recording oral histories along the way. Margo is a contributing writer and photographer for Living Blues. Photographs from Margo's project, Deep Inside the Blues, have been exhibited at the University of Connecticut and the National Heritage Museum.
Since 1993, Margo has also been following the lives of two families in rural Maine. This documentary project received a Juror's Award from Debra Kao and was shown at the Photographic Resource Center Members Exhibition. Jonathan Blaustein recently featured the series on his blog, A Photo Editor Posts.
Margo was a Finalist for Artadia Awards and a two-time Finalist for the Ruttenberg Arts Foundation Award. Margo received a local arts council grant, and her project Photographic Exhibition including Music and Literature, was selected as an exemplary project by the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Margo's photographs have received numerous awards and been selected for shows juried by Maxwell Anderson, Catherine Edelman, Emmet Gowin, Karen Haas, Anne Havinga, Barbara Head Millstein, Phillip Prodger, and Kathy Ryan.
Margo studied at The Maine Photography Workshops. She took a workshop with Jerry Berndt in 1994 and was lucky enough to have his support and encouragement through the years. She also took a workshop with the beloved Sylvia Plachy in 2013. Sylvia helped Margo edit and sequence the series, Deep Inside the Blues.
In addition to her photography, Margo has served as a New Hampshire Public Defender. She has been practicing as a lawyer and guardian ad litem in juvenile court since the early nineties.
Bootsy Holler
© Bootsy Holler© Bootsy Holleran intimate documentary of the seattle indie, rock & punk scene 1992-2008
Bootsy Holler is a Los Angeles-based artist with deep roots in the Pacific Northwest, spending her 20s and 30s immersed in Seattle's vibrant music scene; she has crafted a raw, personal chronicle of a generation trying to make it. Most recently, she exhibited MAKiNG iT at the Leica Gallery London in October 2024, and in 2025 published MAKiNG iT: an intimate documentary of the seattle indie, rock & punk scene 1992-2008 (Damiani Books).
Michael Weinstein
© Michael Weinstein© Michael Weinstein© Michael Weinstein© Michael Weinstein© Michael Weinstein© Michael Weinstein
Michael Weinstein's career as a photographer began in 1978 after he graduated from the University of Michigan with an English degree. After moving back to Chicago, Michael worked as a printer at the Ross-Ehlert Photo Lab in the black and white film department.
Simultaneously, the music scene in Chicago was bursting at the seams. It was an extremely exciting time, and provided a rare opportunity to document Chicago's thriving music scene.
Weinstein spent his days printing at the lab, and on most nights he would photograph shows and venues all over the Chicago area. On weekends, Michael would develop his film at a place known as The Darkroom - a communal darkroom space dedicated to working with both amateurs and professionals. The Darkroom was an inspirational home base for Weinstein as a young photographer, and was a primary influence on his career. In the basement of The Darkroom was the office of Photo Reserve, an agency that specialized in Rock and Roll photography. Photo Reserve covered most of the music venues in and out of the city and provided Weinstein with access to almost every musical event in the area. As a result, Michael's Rock and Roll photos began to appear in local Chicago publications, as well as major national music magazines like Rolling Stone and Esquire.
Michael has been a full time photographer ever since. He has photographed people on assignment for almost every national magazine and has photographed in the fashion industry for numerous retailers. For the past 25 years, Weinstein has developed his namesake, MW Studio, into one of NYC's top boutique Real Estate and architectural photography studios.
After spending the past few years archiving all of his music photography from the special period of the late 70s and early 80s, Weinstein premieres this treasure trove of photos featuring Rock and Roll's biggest stars. After sitting in storage for over 40 years, this collection is a time capsule from an exciting and inspiring musical era of the past.