DLK COLLECTION

Claire Beckett, Simulating Iraq @Wadsworth Atheneum

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 13:16:00 +0000

JTF (just the facts): A total of 18 large scale color photographs, framed in white and unmatted, and hung in a single room gallery space on the first floor of the museum. All of the prints are archival inkjet prints, sized 40x30 or reverse. The images were taken in 2008 and 2009. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Claire Beckett's recent photographs turn on the idea of upending our expectations. Taken at specialized military training sites around the US, her smart, sometimes dissonant images document artificial, stage set versions of Iraq and Afghanistan, staffed with "soldiers" and "civilians" and used for simulations and training exercises. Nearly every picture is an inversion or a breakdown of reality as we know it, each one undermining our ability to impose our now ingrained stereotypes.

Her images of these fabricated towns look plausibly real from far away, but up close, the makeshift mosques are made of rough plywood and the warrens of interlocking alleys and buildings are cinderblocks painted the color of sand. Simplistic forms and fake brickwork provide an illusory backdrop for small narratives and role playing exercises played out by the soldiers: Al-Qaeda terrorist cells making IEDs, Taliban fighters hoarding machine guns, nurses and injured marines, and unsuspecting locals and civilians drinking tea in the village square. Beckett's portraits of these "actors" have an even more surreal quality. Marines and locals from nearby American towns dress up in tunics, robes and headscarves and are given Iraqi or Afghani names and elaborate backstories, but their blue eyes, fair skin, and work boots provide incongruous cultural mixtures and contrasts. Fresh makeup and perfect nails adorn a young "Iraqi nurse" and fake carcasses hang from a "butcher shop". Everything is a visual approximation, a window-dressed stand-in for the real.
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I like the fact that these pictures are free from a specific point of view; they aren't slanted or pushing a particular agenda. Their matter-of-fact conceptual oddity is part of what makes them so successful - they are open for any number of complex interpretations or conclusions. Beckett's photographs capture a different side of these conflicts than we have seen previously, broadening the ultimate story of our approach to these long running wars.

Collector's POV: Since this is a museum exhibition, there are, of course, no posted prices. Beckett's photography has no secondary market history, so gallery retail is likely the only viable option for interested collectors at this point. She is represented in Boston by Carroll and Sons (here).

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

Artist site (here)
Interview: Big, Red & Shiny (here)

Claire Beckett, Simulating Iraq
Matrix 163
Through March 4th
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Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art
600 Main Street
Hartford, CT 06103

The Checklist: 01/26/12

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 14:20:00 +0000

Checklist 1/26/12

New reviews added this week in red.

Uptown

ONE STAR: Cecil Beaton: Museum of the City of New York: February 20: review
ONE STAR: Photographic Treasures from the Collection of Alfred Stieglitz: Met: February 26: review
THREE STARS: The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League: Jewish Museum: March 25: review

Midtown

TWO STARS: Vivian Maier: Howard Greenberg: January 28: review
ONE STAR: Massimo Vitali: Bonni Benrubi: February 4: review
ONE STAR: Robert Bourdeau: Edwynn Houk: February 18: review
TWO STARS: Reinstalled Permanent Collection: MoMA: March 28: review

Chelsea

ONE STAR: Pierre Gonnord: Hasted Kraeutler: February 4: review
TWO STARS: Joel Sternfeld: Luhring Augustine: Februay 4: review
ONE STAR: The Wedding: Andrea Rosen: February 4: review
ONE STAR: Jitka Hanzlová: Yancey Richardson: February 11: review
TWO STARS: Shirin Neshat: Gladstone: February 11: review
ONE STAR: Bertien van Manen: Yancey Richardson: February 11: review
TWO STARS: August Sander/Seydou Keita: Walther Collection: March 10: review

SoHo/Lower East Side/Downtown

ONE STAR: Mel Bochner: Peter Freeman: January 28: review

Elsewhere Nearby

TWO STARS: Walker Evans: Florence Griswold Museum: January 29: review
ONE STAR: Patti Smith: Wadsworth Atheneum: February 19: review

Robert Bourdeau @Houk

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:09:00 +0000

JTF (just the facts): A total of 24 black and white photographs, framed in black and matted, and hung in the main gallery space. All of the works are vintage (or printed with a year or two) gelatin silver prints, many toned with gold, alternately available in editions of 15 or 30. Physical dimensions range between 8x12 and 11x14 (or reverse). The images were originally taken between 1981 and 2005. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Robert Bourdeau's recent photographs of decaying industrial architecture are in many ways a throwback to a time when superlative black and white craftsmanship was regarded as the pinnacle of photographic achievement. His images celebrate the tactile quality of surface texture with an almost fetish-like reverence, making stained steel and flaking concrete glow with burnished gold-toned glory.

Bourdeau's compositions crop out the sky, centering down on fragments of piping and industrial cement, where boilers, engines, furnaces, ladders, and railings criss-cross in layered abstract geometries. Residues drip down the sides of steel tubs, walls erode and crumble, swirls and imperfections decorating every inch of disused, dusty equipment. These are formal pictures, where shapes, angles and patterns have been arranged with care, their subtle tonalities enhanced by exacting printing. They have the echo of Bourdeau's friend and teacher, Minor White, the rotting hulks infused with an almost spiritual grace.

While we have all certainly seen these kinds of industrial subjects over and over again across the history of the medium, that doesn't take away from the fact that these are undeniably well made photographs. They're almost like old cabaret songs or jazz standards being sung once again; they're entirely familiar but still noteworthy when executed with such obvious technical expertise.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced at $8500 each.

Bourdeau's work has not yet reached the secondary markets with any regularity, so gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point.
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Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
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Transit Hub:

Artist site (here)

Robert Bourdeau
Through February 18th

Edwynn Houk Gallery
745 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10151

Shirin Neshat, The Book of Kings @Gladstone

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:45:00 +0000

JTF (just the facts): A total of 56 black and white photographs, framed in black and unmatted, and hung in the main gallery space, the reception hallway, and a smaller side room. The show also includes a new three-channel video installation entitled OverRuled, on view in a separate darkened room. 45 of the photographs come from the series Masses and are ink on LE gelatin silver prints, each sized 40x30, in editions of 5+2AP. 6 of the photographs come from the series Patriots and are also ink on LE gelatin silver prints, each sized, 60x45, also in editions of 5+2AP. And 3 of the photographs come from the series Villains and are also ink on LE gelatin silver prints, each sized 99x50, also in editions of 5+2AP. The other two works in the reception hallway are 47x60 and 62x49, with similar details in terms of process and edition size. All of the works were made in 2012. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Shirin Neshat's newest photographs are a direct response to recent political events in the Middle East, encompassing both the Green Movement in Iran in 2009 and the broader protests and revolutions of the Arab Spring. Her images take her back to her mid 1990s aesthetic style (spare black and white portraits with faces covered in painstakingly detailed calligraphy) and apply this haunting look to contrasting groups of participants (Masses, Patriots and Villains) in the struggle for power and freedom.

The Masses portraits are hung in a overpowering 3x15 grid that covers an entire wall with serious, staring head shots. Her subjects run the gamut from the older generation to younger people, and each everyday face provides tiny nuances of group emotion: anxiety, uncertainty, resignation, hope, aspiration. The Patriots images step back to show torso level portraits, with the universally young subjects placing their right hands over their hearts. These activist faces have even more intense expressions: defiance, fervor, pride, devotion, even potentially hatred(the image of Nida is particularly striking, second from the right, at right). The calligraphic text written on their skin is larger and bolder than on the people from Masses, as if shouting rather than whispering, even though the poses are equally sober and quiet. The Villains are full length portraits of older men, where the calligraphic text has been replaced with elaborate illustrations across their bare chests like tattoos. These drawings of ancient war (complete with spurting decapitations in blood red) reinforce the feeling of implicit violence (religious or political) that hangs in the air. Taken together, these three sets of participants are made into metaphors, or symbols of simplified emotions.

I have to admit that I think it is hard to completely understand these works given my inability to read the text superimposed on the bodies and faces. For Western audiences, the calligraphy is transformed from a storytelling layer into a purely decorative motif, and I'm guessing that I'm missing quite a bit of the desired effect. Imagine trying to understand Barbara Kruger's work if you couldn't read the text; sure, there is a graphic quality we as viewers can all connect to, but the irony and juxtaposition of the images and text would be completely lost. I have the same sense of being in the dark with these images. What is being said by the text blaring from the foreheads of the Patriots? And how might it change my experience of their ultra serious faces?

With this caveat of likely misunderstanding, I do think that many of these portraits are quite beautiful, even if they are sometimes harsh and heavy handed. The whole body of work is a personal reminder of the powerful emotions that surround the abstraction of political revolution, where individuals (not types) take part in the action on the front lines.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced as follows. The works from Masses are $35000 each, Patriots are $65000 each, and Villains are $85000 each. The other two photographs are $65000 and $75000 respectively. Neshat's images are regularly available in the secondary markets, particularly I Am Its Secret, which was printed in an edition of 250. Recent prices at auction have ranged from roughly $3000 to $70000.

Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

Interview: Modern Art Notes podcast (here)
Review: Huffington Post (here)

Shirin Neshat, The Book of Kings
Through February 11th

Gladstone Gallery
515 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011

Vivian Maier: Photographs from the Maloof Collection @Greenberg

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 16:33:00 +0000

JTF (just the facts): A total of 56 black and white photographs, framed in black and matted, and hung in the main gallery space and the book alcove. 31 of the prints (shown in the main space) are posthumous/modern gelatin silver prints, each sized 12x12, in editions of 15. The other 25 prints (shown in the book alcove) are lifetime gelatin silver prints, ranging in size from 4x3 to 11x14. All of the images were taken in the 1950s and 1960s. A monograph of this body of work was published by powerHouse Books in 2011 (here). (Installation shots at right.)
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Comments/Context: Whatever we might think about the rediscovery of the 1950s street photographs of Vivian Maier, it's impossible to conclude that the press coverage has been anything but breathless and ubiquitous; if you have even the slightest interest in photography, you can't have missed this story in the past year or two. Since every feature article follows the same exact path (the nanny, the storage locker, the 100,000 negatives, the auction, etc.), I'm going to assume this thin background is by now pretty well common knowledge.

Photography is likely the only mainstream artistic medium where we continue to unearth potentially major talents who have been heretofore completely overlooked or lost, so Maier's emergence is by no means an isolated case. In recent years, similar stories have played out with the work of Charles Jones and Mike Disfarmer to name just two of many. I think the hard thing about such rediscoveries is that it is very difficult to place these photographers back into their original historical context, since no one of that era saw the work or was influenced by it, nor do we have any concrete information about what shows the artist saw, what people he/she met or admired, or what books were on his/her shelves; the whole artistic narrative is disconnected. Until this data is uncovered by diligent scholarship and historical study (if ever), all we can really do is look at the pictures and try to draw our own narrowly drawn hypothetical conclusions about what might have been.

The other challenge with such a project, especially when the work is found as an undifferentiated whole, is that we really have no sense of Maier as an editor of her own art. We don't know which pictures she thought were her best, which ones she thought were failures, and which ones she thought were interesting but not necessarily representative of what she was trying to accomplish. In this small show, there are photographs reminiscent of Friedlander, Frank, Model, Callahan, Winogrand, Levinstein, Weegee, and even Arbus. Seeing such a gathering, one might plausibly conclude that she was a photographer still searching for her own style, perhaps trying on other ways of working in the process of looking for her own, borrwing here and there and incorporating pieces she found useful. Absent verifiable connections or a complete chronology, it's impossible to say which came first, or which echo was purposeful, random, or otherwise uniquely original.

So it is fair to say that I came to this show with a fair amount of inherent skepticism, especially given the hype. What is evident however is that Vivian Maier was undeniably talented. Her street photographs have a sense of formal control that is too consistent to be a coincidence; there is very little motion or chance in these pictures. She had an eye for small urban gestures: the turn of head on the street, the resting of a sleeping head on the bus, the clasp of hands across a lunch table, or the matching hats and newspapers on the train. She also had a fondness for the eccentric details in people: a crop of bushy white hair under a hat, the scowling veiled faces of society women in furs, the elastic bands exploding out of a conductor's back pockets, the watch chain of a suited man sleeping in a car, or the blurry glamour of a puffy white dress in the night. There is a strong undercurrent of crisp storytelling here, even with her self-portraits, which capture her modest figure with deadpan rigor, often reflected in shop windows or store mirrors.
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This show felt to me like a broad introductory edit, a little of everything, and I look forward to tighter slices of her work as the overall view of her photography becomes clearer. It's too early to say definitively where Maier fits or to understand how reinserting her into the march of 1950s photography might alter the agreed-upon progression, but it's safe to declare that her photographs are truly exciting and well-crafted. Much more work is clearly needed to process her voluminous output and synthesize it down into those images that represent a unique, innovative contribution to the history of the medium. That work is ongoing, so I expect this will be just the first of many Vivian Maier shows to come, bit by bit (re)defining her legacy.
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Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced as follows. The posthumous prints start at $1800 and rise up through $2600 and $3500 to $5000. The lifetime prints range from $4750 to $8250, with a few NFS or already sold. Maier's work has not yet reached the secondary markets, so gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point.

Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here)
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Transit Hub:

Artist site/Maloof (here)
Artist site/Goldstein (here)
Reviews/Features: NY Times (here), Lens (here), New Yorker (here)

Vivian Maier: Photographs from the Maloof Collection

Through January 28th

Howard Greenberg Gallery

41 East 57th Street

New York, NY 10022

Jitka Hanzlová, HERE @Richardson

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 13:06:00 +0000

JTF (just the facts): A total of 10 color photographs, framed in blonde wood and matted, and hung in the back project space. All of the prints are chromogenic prints, each sized 12x8, in editions of 8. The images were taken between 1998 and 2010. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: This small show of the work of Czech photographer Jitka Hanzlová is a sampler from a decade long project to document her transplanted existence in the Ruhr region of Germany. Her vertical fragments of landscapes and three quarter environmental portraits are infused with the acute curiosity and questioning eyes of an outsider. What locals would walk by without another glance, Hanzlová investigates with crisp, almost antiseptic, precision.

Most of the images on view mix industrial infrastructure with the rural countryside: a cow meandering under an imposing concrete overpass, a man-made hillside reflected in a yellow reservoir, towering electric stanchions above a grassy soccer field, and a snow covered coal mining depression that looks like a miniature striated amphitheater. These landscapes are formal and quiet, sparse but rigid in their own way. I most enjoyed the two portraits in the show, which have a timeless quality to them. The young women pose in front of monochrome walls and yellow leaves with a kind of fresh grace and alert simplicity that is found in paintings from another age.

The whole installation left me with a lingering sense of unease. Hanzlová's photographs have a real feeling of puzzled foreignness, of noticing the subtleties of the everyday with a heightened awareness for difference.
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Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced at 4300€ each. Hanzlová's work has become somewhat more available in the secondary markets in recent years, particularly in the European auctions; prices have generally ranged between $1000 and $3000.
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Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
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Transit Hub:

BMW Paris Photo Prize, 2007 (here)
Feature: Frieze, 2003 (here)

Jitka Hanzlová, HERE
Through February 11th

Yancey Richardson Gallery

535 West 22nd Street

New York, NY 10011

The Checklist: 01/19/12

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 18:02:00 +0000

Checklist 1/19/12

New reviews added this week in red.

Uptown

ONE STAR: Cecil Beaton: Museum of the City of New York: February 20: review
ONE STAR: Photographic Treasures from the Collection of Alfred Stieglitz: Met: February 26: review
THREE STARS: The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League: Jewish Museum: March 25: review

Midtown

ONE STAR: Jeff Wall: Marian Goodman: January 21: review
ONE STAR: Massimo Vitali: Bonni Benrubi: February 4: review
TWO STARS: Reinstalled Permanent Collection: MoMA: March 28: review

Chelsea

ONE STAR: Alex Webb: Aperture: January 19: review
ONE STAR: Pierre Gonnord: Hasted Kraeutler: February 4: review
TWO STARS: Joel Sternfeld: Luhring Augustine: Februay 4: review
ONE STAR: The Wedding: Andrea Rosen: February 4: review
ONE STAR: Bertien van Manen: Yancey Richardson: February 11: review
TWO STARS: August Sander/Seydou Keita: Walther Collection: March 10: review
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SoHo/Lower East Side/Downtown

ONE STAR: Mel Bochner: Peter Freeman: January 28: review

Elsewhere Nearby

TWO STARS: Walker Evans: Florence Griswold Museum: January 29: review
ONE STAR: Patti Smith: Wadsworth Atheneum: February 19: review

Patti Smith: Camera Solo @Wadsworth Atheneum

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 14:26:00 +0000

JTF (just the facts): A total of 70 black and white photographs, generally framed in black and matted, and hung in a series of four connected gallery spaces. All of the prints are gelatin silver prints taken with a Land 250 Polaroid camera, available in editions of 10; dimensions were not available. The images were taken between 1995 and 2011. The exhibit also includes 1 sculpture, 1 video (in a separate darkened room), and 4 glass cases containing poems, drawings, books, letters, Robert Mapplethorpe's slippers and marble cross, a prayer cloth, a stone, contact sheets, a camera, a portrait of Baudelaire, Pope Benedict's slippers, and her father's china teacup. A monograph of this body of work was published by Yale University Press in 2011 (here). (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Patti Smith's photography is full of ghosts. Not the scary spectral beings or spooky monsters of a horror movie, but the gentle, ephemeral imprints of lives now gone that have remained deeply resonant for her in one way or another. Her pictures are brimming with objects infused with personal significance, together a kind of artistic diary or the map of a life long journey, where ideas and influences pile up like loose memories and everyday objects become a source of spiritual inspiration.

The vast majority of the photographs on display are deceptively simple, sometimes dull, black and white still lifes or interior scenes, often taken in the available light and left grainy and shadowy, full of subtle beauty and immediacy. The show reads like a parade of heroes or a puzzle of aesthetic (I hesitate to use the word "poetic") connections: Rimbaud's fork and spoon, Keats' bed, Woolf's cane, Nureyev's slippers, Tolstoy's stuffed bear, Hesse's typewriter, Bolaño's chair. As if communing with the dead, she earnestly searches out countless graves and tombstones: Sontag, Whitman, Blake, Baudelaire, Shelley, Modigliani, Brancusi. Other pictures document her children, her guitars and workspace, religious icons and cherubs, landmarks from Paris and Vienna, with treasured items from her life with Robert Mapplethorpe never far from view. Every item is symbolic, every seemingly insignificant thing a talisman or relic.

In the hands of one less talented, these same pictures might have been cloying, pretentious and suffocatingly arty; instead, Smith's images are modest, sincere, and surprisingly lyrical. She seems altogether unaware of the danger of cliche, walking right up to the line and somehow coming away with pictures that are altogether genuine. There is a sense of deep respect and honor in these photographs, of mundane personal effects made special, and of an intense, meaningful pilgrimage made to linger in their presence and to be moved by their strength.

This is one of the more inward looking shows I have seen in quite a long time, and there were moments where I felt a little claustrophobic being allowed in so close. Together, these images are the visual journal of a solitary artistic life, each item a tiny fragment of her searching persona. I can almost image the collectors of this work placing the same kind of obsessive energy into these prints, capturing a piece of the essence of Patti Smith in the pictures, to be placed on a shelf like a beloved shrine.

Collector's POV: Since this is a museum exhibition, there are, of course, no posted prices. Smith's photography has virtually no secondary market history, so gallery retail is likely the only viable option for interested collectors at this point. She is represented in New York by Robert Miller Gallery (here).

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

Reviews/Features: Guardian (here), BOMBLOG (here), Neon Tommy (here), Style.com (here), Hartford Courant (here)
Interviews: Vogue (here), ARTINFO (here)
DLK COLLECTION review of Just Kids (here)

Patti Smith: Camera Solo
Through February 19th

Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art
600 Main Street
Hartford, CT 06103

Jeff Wall @Goodman: A Review Conversation with A.D. Coleman

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 21:43:00 +0000

One of the challenges of trying to consistently write gallery show reviews, day in and day out, is that there is a tendency over a long period of time for the form to take over and for the structure of the essay to start to stifle the content. This is especially true in the kind of reviews I write, since I have a fairly rigid formula that I use to provide comparability between reviews. This scaffolding helps readers to easily find what they are looking for, but it creates the danger of a one-size-fits-all approach to looking at photography. It also lures me into a kind of auto-pilot state where I am filling in blanks rather than really thinking critically.

This year, I’ve decided to try some new approaches which will hopefully break some of these routines and open up some alternate avenues for discussion. Instead of the usual format, today’s review of the new Jeff Wall show at Marian Goodman is going to take the form of a back and forth conversation, the kind you might have with a friend, beginning with the normal question “What did you think of the new Jeff Wall show?” and continuing on from there, wherever the discussion might lead. Perhaps my companion and I will together pick this show clean, cut it to shreds, agree to disagree, or join hands in triumphant wonder; there is no pre-conceived path or self-fulfilling conclusion. The format will allow both of us to wander wherever the work and its underlying ideas may take us.
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My co-conspirator today is the esteemed photography critic A.D. Coleman. I’ve read all of Coleman’s books of essays and I’ve found his writing to be among the most approachable and lucid in the world of photography criticism. This isn’t to say he treads lightly, in fact, just the opposite; his analysis and arguments are clear and penetrating, leaving little room for waffling around. In recent years, Coleman has moved away from the gallery show review as a means of contributing to the photographic conversation, and instead leaned toward more critical reporting on the medium, from the Polaroid sale and the Adams negative scandal, to more recent posts on the pepper spray meme. But I’ve convinced him to join me today to examine the Wall gallery show, and I’m hoping I’ll be up to the challenge.
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DLK: My first reaction to this show was very similar to my reaction to Wall’s show from the fall of 2009: it feels sharply uneven. Even more so this time, I think this is a result of Wall going in many artistic directions at once. This isn’t a tight body of work, representative of a particular moment in time, self-contained and complete in its artistic statement. Instead, it is a gathering of pictures that are all traveling down different intellectual paths at different speeds. There are several large-scale color staged tableaux (perhaps what he is best known for), a large black and white portrait, a pair of landscapes (one in color and one in black and white), a still life (if we can call the grave image a still life), and a group of images that functions as a single unit (surprising for an artist who has so forcefully been a proponent of the individual, stand-alone picture). To my eye, there is a decently wide disparity in these works between those that are successful and those that are less so. Each genre or format seems to present Wall with unique visual challenges which he is dutifully exploring, but the whole doesn’t converge for me toward something I can easily make sense of.

ADC: There is indeed a sense here of someone cleaning out the fridge. The show contains 12 images all told: a four-image sequence and 8 autonomous pieces, two of them in b&w, the others in color. Four of the stand-alone works are typical Wall tableaux vivants: a rock-club scene, a boy falling out of a tree, a lecturer at a museum costume display, two boys boxing in a living room. Then there's a b&w full-length portrait of a "young man wet with rain," the four-image sequence, and three images made in Sicily in 2007 and, according to the gallery, shown here for the first time. The gallery has segregated the latter (presumably at Wall's request), presenting them separately in an immediately adjacent space: two landscapes -- one in color, one b&w -- and a study of a grave and tombstone. Impressive scale aside, these Sicilian pieces are utterly nondescript variants of images made many times before by many others. The gallery's spin control on this assortment hails Wall's "hybrid integration of the documentary and the cinematographic, the 'street' and the monumental, two directions he has pursued simultaneously, while being partial to neither." Yet I'm reminded of the Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock's impetuous young nobleman who "rode madly off in all directions."
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DLK: That side room was a head scratcher for me as well. While it might be possible to connect these new pictures to some of Wall’s earlier straight landscapes under the umbrella of man’s impact on the land (slightly New Topographics-ish), I agree that the execution here didn’t show much that we haven’t seen before: rocky hillsides and flat sky, punctuated by electric wires. By hanging them together as a Sicilian suite, there is an implication of a larger narrative, which seems counter to most everything I assume about Wall and his artistic process. The moss-covered tombstone, with its loose brick paving and wires draped over the wall (on the left, at right), has more potential for a richer individual reading, perhaps connecting it to his earlier The Flooded Grave, but if the tombstone is to be part of this interconnected threesome, then its meaning as a single picture is given a different, presumably more Sicilian or historical, context. For me, it all arrived with a mystifying thud.

The other work which I thought missed the mark was the large black and white full length portrait (on the right, in the third installation shot). Wall’s previous works in black and white have seemed to aim for the margins of life, capturing mundane transitional moments with an inexplicable, understated, almost Hitchcockian drama. This image, while certainly detailed, didn’t offer enough of a gesture to allow me a way into some kind of narrative. The young man is standing still, dripping. Fair enough, but it certainly didn’t grab me or make me wonder what was going on. Or perhaps that’s the point: a strange kind of edge-of-life nothing is going on?

ADC: Not nearly strange enough, if so. With one exception, which I'll get to, the dramaturgy fails to persuade me. Everything's stilted, frozen, like those scenarios I remember from childhood visits to the American Museum of Natural History: mannequin Native Americans and stuffed dogs around a teepee. Even in the most ostensibly dramatic of these scenes, a boy falling from a tree, just a few feet away from a potentially injurious crash, I didn't get caught up in the potential tragedy for a second. Instead, I found myself wondering only how Wall had engineered the effect. Not because I'm jaded; I'm not immune to convincing theater. But Wall's theater doesn't persuade me to suspend my disbelief. Nor, from a Brechtian standpoint, does it in any provocative way breach the fourth wall. (Pun unintended but unavoidable).

And I'm perplexed by the claim to cinematographic concern on Wall's part, because I don't know of any cinematographer who uses, or would approve the use of by others, a visual strategy that invariably places the subject front and center in the frame, with no significant use of the edge of the frame, no selective depth of field, no activation of the foreground, no foreground-background relationships . . . it's a banal and tedious POV, one of the first habits they get you to break in film school. Even the purists at Dogme 95 gave themselves more latitude.

DLK: I agree that I didn’t exactly believe that the boy falling from the tree (on the left, in left, in the top installation shot) would imminently crash into the grass or bounce off the upturned wheelbarrow. But the best of Wall’s staged events do make me wonder about the nature of the reality that he is depicting or that I am seeing secondhand; I know it is an artificial world (at least partially) and yet the fidelity to reality makes me question this intellectual conclusion, at least for a moment. This leaves me trying to unpack what is going on, separating likely fact from likely fiction. I did find the falling boy a little reminiscent of a stop-motion Muybridge, where a physical gesture is captured photographically that we have never really seen or looked at carefully before. As with Milk, I’d say I had a sense of astonished amazement with the technical aspects of the picture, rather than a true engagement with the proposed story.

I thought both Boxing and Band & Crowd were successful tableaux in a manner we have generally come to expect from Wall. The boxing image (on the left, in the bottom installation shot) juxtaposes the quiet control of the brightly lit modern interior with the physicality of the boys’ lunging movement, while the band image (on the left, at right) has the feeling of multiple, independent vignettes compressed into one frame. I found the first very rigid and composition driven but still lyrical in its own way, while the second drew me more deeply into the small lives of the bored crowd and the earnest band members. I think the framing of the band image unbalances the natural tendency to focus on the performers, instead giving equal weight to front and back, forcing the viewer to take it all in at one glance and then move across the frame from left to right. I can easily imagine wandering around in the shifting empty space with a beer in my hand, paying only passing attention to the odd gyrations on stage, so Wall got me play along just enough to identify with his version of stitched together reality.

ADC: The only piece in the show that engaged me was what I sense is among your unfavorites -- the sequence of four comparatively small images (on the right, in the top installation shot), revolving around a battered old suitcase covered with 1930s travel stickers and the period catalogue for the Berlin-based custom tailor N. Israel, titled Authentication: Claus Jahnke, costume historian, examining a document relating to an item in his collection, 2010. Conceivably this is a fiction, the props all invented, but that would involve more elaborate forgery than anything Wall has produced before. These objects seem authentic, and I take them as such, which adds to the power of the piece.

In the first image, Wall's camera looks down on the exterior of the suitcase, whose frayed ID sticker indicates that its owner, one Hermann Rosenthal, traveled with it cabin class in a stateroom on the Holland-America line to Vancouver in 1932, presumably from Rotterdam, that company's home port. On top of the suitcase lies the catalogue, its cover showing N. Israel's line of winter clothing, in the upper right-hand corner an autographed image of Leni Riefenstahl endorsing his product line and presumably wearing one of his ski outfits. In the second, a man in his forties sits in an armchair with a box of memorabilia on his lap, studying the same catalogue; the open suitcase and several other costumes appear in the background. In the third, we see the catalogue open to a two-page spread of shirts; and in the fourth we see a real-life example of one of those shirts on a hanger, bearing the N. Israel label.

On one level, then, we have a humdrum scene, an archivist verifying an item against its available documentation. But you don't need to know a lot of history to recall that Riefenstahl was then the sexy outdoorsy star of a series of German mountaineering movies, with Adolf Hitler already among her fans; that in 1932 she'd direct her first movie, while also reading Mein Kampf and hearing Hitler speak live at a rally for the first time, becoming entranced with him; that Hitler would become chancellor of Germany in January 1933; and that all hell would then break loose. Riefenstahl certainly wouldn't be buying any more clothing from high-end German-Jewish tailors, much less serving as cover girl for their brochures. Hermann Rosenthal didn't need a weatherman. He had enough money to buy custom-tailored clothes, so he got out early, making his way to the Netherlands and thence to Canada. N. Israel most probably wasn't so savvy, or so lucky.

Thus there's a multilayered narrative within this quiet piece, one that unfolds gradually. Unlike most of Wall's work, which asks the viewer to read things into the images (preferably intentionalist readings based on the photographer's statements of purpose), this piece requires the viewer to read things out of the images, to decipher the embedded content by bringing to it not what the photographer says it means but what 20th-century history imposes on it as meaning. As that's my preferred relationship to photographs, this piece satisfies me as none of the others do.

DLK: You are right that the four-image group isn’t among my favorites, but this opinion has less to do with the content of the supposed narrative and more with the conceptual approach he is employing. For the first time, Wall has gone beyond the single image narrative and is tying multiple individual pictures together via the kind of competing, simultaneous perspectives that Barbara Probst has explored. But instead of the technical rigor and investigation into the nature of seeing that makes Probst’s works intriguing, Wall’s use of this method seems altogether quaint. We move in and around the room, zooming in and out, catching repeat glimpses or close-ups of certain details. I realize that this is all in the name of advancing a certain non-linear narrative style, but I couldn’t get past the thought that I had seen this idea done better elsewhere, and that Wall’s interpretation of the process didn’t push the concept in any new directions. It just felt derivative, not transformative, and so I didn’t engage with the story being told with the same excitement that you did.

My favorite image in the show was the extra-longly titled Ivan Sayers, Costume Designer, Lectures at the University Women’s Club, Vancouver, 7 December 2009. Virginia Newton-Moss Wears a British Ensemble c.1910 from Sayers’ Collection (on the right, at right). What I found captivating in this picture was the complexity of the glances and angles on display underneath the ordinariness of the fashion setting. Sayers is looking in one direction (apparently at the seated audience), and the model is staged a bit in front of him and looking at a slight angle to his glance, almost across the audience and to her right. The viewer looks on these two subjects from a sideways nearly tangential view, and the audience (two different sets, alternately reflected in the mirrored doors) sits to our effective left, opposite Sayers. I stood in front of this picture for several minutes trying to work it all out. To me, this kind of multiple viewpoint control is much more effective than what Wall was trying to accomplish in the multi-image set. Packing all those angles into one frame creates some durable tension (I can imagine admiring this image in a decade and still finding it entertaining), whereas separating them out and cutting our food for us takes all the fizz out, at least for me.

ADC: I don't find the Authentication series as busy as you suggest; where you see the camera "zooming in and out," I see it dwelling calmly on the minimal but telling details. Nor is it narrative in the traditional sense; it's three simple still lifes and a profile study of a man in a chair. In fact, I consider the progression as presented in the gallery arbitrary, making it a suite rather than a sequence; its content wouldn't shift radically if you reshuffled the order. But that content, and the story I sketched based on it, is inherent in the material, inescapable -- at least to anyone who recognizes the sociopolitical context of these relics. So the title becomes richly ironic, the costume historian's process of "authentication" presumably completed by locating the clothing items within the catalogue, whereas a less narrowcast historical method, such as that of Fernand Braudel, would deepen our grasp of the past century by locating all of it -- catalogue, clothing, suitcase, travel labels, even the costume historian as a type of cultural artifact -- within their respective times and places.

In fact, I could argue that this suite is the linchpin of the show (the front room's images, anyhow), with the others -- the young boxers, the boy falling from the tree, the rock club, and the small-group fashion lecture you admire most, even the b&w portrait of the wet young man -- as present-day events linked to that specific past, the boys and the costume historians conceivably descendants of Rosenthal's, living safely (or facing their own vicissitudes) in Vancouver today. But that would be a stretch.

In any case, I'm not suggesting that this little suite breaks new ground either stylistically or conceptually. Indeed, it's possible to read it as retrograde in relation to Wall's practice. Be that as it may, it's the one I've carried away with me and will think further about.

DLK: The fact that you and I have both identified at least one image (if not more than one) that we think merits some further consideration is probably the best possible place to wrap up our discussion. Wall has clearly been experimenting with a variety of storytelling elements in these pictures, some old and some new, and with varying degrees of success. But if he can come up with a small number of enduringly intriguing images on a time scale of every two years (the general span of his recent gallery shows), I am left asking myself: what more can we reasonably expect? Perhaps this particular batch wasn’t as broadly innovative as others before (maybe the problems and solutions have evolved more slowly and incrementally), and perhaps the secondary images on view here will ultimately be left in the margins, but aren’t a couple of solid outcomes every few years a standard to which many contemporary photographers would happily aspire? In the end, this show was decidedly a mixed bag, but there were just enough subtle, unexpected gestures on display here to keep me off balance, leaving me to wonder where Wall’s exacting exploration of photographic narrative might take him next.

ADC: As a critic, I try to approach each project (a book, a show) as an entity in itself, to gauge whatever satisfactions it affords and dissatisfactions it provokes, and only then to add it to the larger oeuvre in order to weigh it in relation to the whole. The question of expectations re quantity of output depends so much on the mode within which the photographer works and the processes of production within that mode that I hesitate to answer this last question. Had Robert Frank returned from the two-year period during which he generated The Americans with "a couple of solid outcomes" -- say, a dozen of the very best images in that sequence -- he surely wouldn't have had a transformative impact on his medium. On the other hand, Frederick Sommer's total redacted photographic body of work (leaving aside the late collages, the quasi-musical "scores," etc.) probably comes to less than 150 images, made over half a century -- perhaps 3 images a year on average.

And now to the usual supporting sections:

JTF (just the facts): A total of 12 large scale black and white and color works, framed in silver or brown and unmatted, and hung in the North gallery and an adjacent viewing room. 8 of the works are single images; the other is a group of four images hung together as a unit. The color works are described as either “color photographs” or inkjet prints, while the black and white works are gelatin silver prints. The prints range in size from relatively small (between 18x18 and 42x27 for the sub-parts of the four image group) to mural sized (93x169).The edition sizes include 3+1AP, 4+1AP, and 5+2AP, generally based on the physical dimensions of the work (smaller editions for larger works). All of the images were taken between 2007 and 2011. (Installation shots at right.)

Collector's POV: The works in this show are priced as follows. The single images range in price from $300000 to $700000; the four image group is $350000. Wall’s prints have only been intermittently available in the secondary markets in the past few years, with none of his best known works coming up for public sale. Recent prices have ranged between roughly $50000 and $425000, but this is more a reflection of the specific lots that have been sold at auction than a representative data set of the entire breadth of Wall’s best work.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
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Transit Hub:

Reviews: NY Times (here), Artforum (here), New Yorker (here), ARTINFO (here), ArtObserved (here), Economist (here), Photograph (here), Capital New York (here)
A.D. Coleman’s blog, Photocritic International (here)

Jeff Wall

Through January 21st
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Marian Goodman Gallery

24 West 57th Street

New York, NY 10019

Bertien van Manen: Let's sit down before we go @Richardson

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 12:31:00 +0000

JTF (just the facts): A total of 19 color photographs, framed in white and matted, and hung in the main gallery space. All of the prints are chromogenic prints, sized 16x20, in editions of 5. The images were taken between 1991 and 1994. A monograph of this body of work (edited by Stephen Gill) was published by Mack Books in 2011 (here), and is available from the gallery for $45. (Installation shots at right.)
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Comments/Context: Bertien van Manen's images from the former Soviet republics have the intimate feel of family snapshots. They get inside the lives of the subjects, capturing them in quiet, unguarded moments, where the routines of ordinary life give way to small, personal joys. Unassuming and understated, the photographs are deceptively mundane.
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And yet, in a handful of these images, there is a glorious and enveloping warmth, made stronger by careful composition. At a summer campsite, young men wander between cloth tents, picnic tables covered with the remnants of meals passed and empty vodka bottles hanging from the trees. In winter, a nighttime snowball fight catches sparkling flash-lit flakes in mid-air. Inside a house, pink leggings hang from the ceiling, flanked by a pair of boots, a green table, and a child wearing a pacifier hung by a string. And in the soft summer evening, a woman gives a man a haircut, bathed in the yellow light across the green pasture. All of these are fleeting moments that might have gone unnoticed, but to van Manen's eye, they become something altogether more powerful and memorable.
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Other images in the show give supporting glimpses of everyday life in this particular time and place: a posed family surrounded by snowbanks, the bright red lipstick favored by the young women, skiing in bikinis and bathing suits, or groups casually hanging out on park benches. They are pictures that capture misjudged details, forgotten gestures, and small interactions, and together, they tell a nuanced story of life in 1990s Russia and its neighbors. All in, these are photographs full of subtleties, telling the other side of a better known story.
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Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced at $3800 each. Van Manen's work has little or no secondary market history, so gallery retail is likely the only viable option for interested collectors at this point.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
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Transit Hub:

Artist site (here)
Feature: Time LightBox (here)
Interview: Bint PhotoBooks (here)

Bertien van Manen: Let's sit down before we go

Through February 11th
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Yancey Richardson Gallery

535 West 22nd Street

New York, NY 10011

Checklist: 1/12/12

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 14:28:00 +0000

Checklist 1/12/12

New reviews added this week in red.

Uptown

ONE STAR: Cecil Beaton: Museum of the City of New York: February 20: review
ONE STAR: Photographic Treasures from the Collection of Alfred Stieglitz: Met: February 26: review
THREE STARS: The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League: Jewish Museum: March 25: review

Midtown

ONE STAR: New Photography 2011: MoMA: January 16: review
ONE STAR: Massimo Vitali: Bonni Benrubi: February 4: review
TWO STARS: Reinstalled Permanent Collection: MoMA: March 28: review

Chelsea

ONE STAR: Alex Webb: Aperture: January 19: review
ONE STAR: The Wedding: Andrea Rosen: January 21: review
ONE STAR: Pierre Gonnord: Hasted Kraeutler: February 4: review
TWO STARS: Joel Sternfeld: Luhring Augustine: Februay 4: review
TWO STARS: August Sander/Seydou Keita: Walther Collection: March 10: review

SoHo/Lower East Side/Downtown

ONE STAR: Mel Bochner: Peter Freeman: January 14: review

Elsewhere Nearby

TWO STARS: Walker Evans: Florence Griswold Museum: January 29: review

Joel Sternfeld, First Pictures @Luhring Augustine

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 14:18:00 +0000

JTF (just the facts): A total of 72 color photographs, framed in white and unmatted, and displayed in the entry, the main gallery space and the smaller back room. All of the works are modern pigment prints, sized roughly 9x13, in editions of 5+2AP. The images were taken between 1971 and 1980. The show is divided into four separate projects:

Nags Head, 1975
At the Mall, New Jersey, 1980
Rush Hour
Happy Anniversary Sweetie Face!

A monograph of this body of work has been published by Steidl (here). (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Looking at the early pictures of any artist offers the chance to go back to the beginning and see the experiments and false starts that ultimately evolved into a mature style. Inherent in this kind of analysis is a form of selection bias, where we already know what we are looking for, and so select those images that fit our knowledge of what came later. The opportunity to examine four of Joel Sternfeld's early photographic projects provides just this type of historical pattern matching, where we search the past for signs of the future, discovering visual ideas that were still rough and incompletely formed, but harbingers of later paths and explorations.

My initial impression of these first pictures is that they are looser and more fluid than Sternfeld's later work. His use of a hand held 35mm camera instead of the view camera he adopted later gives these images much more freedom. Some border on a snapshot aesthetic (especially the ones taken on the streets of New York and Chicago), and even the most formal of the compositions are not as strict and rigid as what would come later. In the context of this more forgiving approach, it's absolutely possible to see Sternfeld testing the limits of color, refining the idea of a carefully composed self contained narrative, and playing with subtle visual irony and cynicism, sewing the seeds of the stylistic hallmarks of his successful mature work.

There are many color exercises on these walls, both tighter still lifes and broader scenes that use color as a defining element. Chunky red high heels compete with blue woven polyester pants, a green dress balances a yellow cab, a striped bathing suit sets off deep tan lines, and a flash of blond hair piled up in a beehive has a honey glow. More complex color compositions find a boy with green shoes posed outside a suburban home of the same color (set off by bright pink flowers), a woman riding in a sky blue convertible with matching blue sunglasses, and a neon juke box flanked by lingering men and Playboy centerfolds. Sternfeld was clearly examining the play of different colors, and considering how those weights impacted the underlying structure of his pictures.

There are also plenty of stories and narratives here, many with a nuanced undercurrent of skepticism or humor. Boys with Farrah Fawcett t-shirts pop wheelies on their bikes in the driveway, a baby is carried in a laundry basket mixed in with the dirty clothes, a cop questions a ramshackle beach house resident, and an old man in sunglasses peers with trepidation at an ominously dark sky. Many of the images from Sternfeld's series of mall shots take this further, with lots of men with center-parted feathered hair, moustaches, chest hair, and gold chains posed in odd interior settings, one with an array of wigs and a fluffy dog as props. The beginnings of formality are in evidence in many of these pictures, where compositions are being pared down to their essentials. An emerging political or social edge is also apparent: smoke stacks outside the parking lot of the Tropicana, an oil tank in the window of an empty diner, or a Christina's World echo facing the Sears Auto Service building.

These early images grew more striking as I gave them more looking time. At first they seemed appropriately uneven, with a good number of misses. But even these weaker outcomes show Sternfeld pushing and trying, and the best of the lot absolutely foreshadow the Sternfeld pictures we all know. I came away extremely impressed with the rigor of Sternfeld's trial and error in his early years, his inquiries and questions given visual form, his preliminary steps thoughtful and appropriately risky.

Collector's POV: The prints in the show are priced at $7500 each. Sternfeld's work is widely available in the secondary markets, particularly his most famous images, which have been printed in editions of 50 or even 100. Recent prices have ranged between $2000 and $100000, with his most famous pictures generally in a zone between $10000 and $30000.

Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here)
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Transit Hub:

Reviews/Features: PhotoBooth (here), Capital New York (here), Guardian (here), Time LightBox (here), Wayne Ford (here), TimeOut New York (here)
Exhibition: FOAM, 2012 (here)

Joel Sternfeld, First Pictures

Through February 4th
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Luhring Augustine

531 West 24th Street

New York, NY 10011

Pierre Gonnord, Relatos @Hasted Kraeutler

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 13:15:00 +0000

JTF (just the facts): A total of 16 large scale color photographs, framed in black or silver and unmatted, and displayed in the entry and three connected gallery spaces. The portraits are digital chromogenic prints, sized 65x49 or 58x49, in editions of 5+1AP. The landscapes are lightjet prints, each sized 71x98, also in editions of 5+1AP. There are 12 portraits and 4 landscapes on view. The images were taken between 2004 and 2009. (Installation shots at right.)
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Comments/Context: French photographer Pierre Gonnord's gargantuan photographic portraits vacillate between the openly traditional and freshly contemporary. Their massive scale comes with a nod to Chuck Close and their extreme detail is reminiscent of any number of contemporary photographers pushing the edges of technology. But their head and shoulders poses look back centuries, drifting out of a dark gloomy blackness, reminiscent of Old Masters paintings and their singular power to capture the essence of an individual. The pictures therefore represent an uneasy visual compromise, at once both imposing and intimate, confrontational and humble.

Gonnord's subjects come not from the privileged classes, but from the realm of the ordinary and forgotten. Luis and Miroslaw are covered in inky, end-of-the-day coal dust, while Magdalena and Basilisa wear the rugged, weathered skin of old age. Krystov's penetrating glare and bushy beard make him a likely figure out of Dostoyevsky, while Konstantina's scarred but elegant nose opens up the unanswered questions of her past. Ali's big eyes, surrounded by a gaunt, muscular face, lock on and don't let go, engaging the viewer in an unencumbered and direct stare down. In each case, there is the sense of timelessness, of a figure drawn both from the distant past and the recent present, one side capturing an archetype and another documenting a real life individual.

Interspersed with the portraits are a handful of massive landscapes depicting wildfires and volcanic explosions, with spewing ash and choking smoke engulfing the scenes. At one point, I thought the soot stained faces nearby were those of firefighters of some kind, but I was told that the two bodies of work on display were unrelated. As such, I had a hard time making the connection or understanding the interrelationship between the two sets of images, and the landscapes left me a bit puzzled.

All in, I think the best of these Gonnord portraits hold the wall with authority, and will likely appeal most to the same slice of contemporary photo collectors who have gravitated toward the images of Bergman, Mikhailov, Grannan, Kerstens, Learoyd and others who have explored the intersection of the quietly marginal and the up close face.

Collector's POV: The works in the show are priced as follows. The monumental portraits are either $21750, $23750, $26700, or $29750, based on size and place in the edition. The large scale color fires/explosions are either $29700, $32700, or $34200, based on place in the edition. Gonnord's work has very little secondary market history, so gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
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Transit Hub:

Artist site (here)
Feature: Time LightBox (here)

Pierre Gonnord, Relatos
Through February 4th

Hasted Kraeutler Gallery
537 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011

Alex Webb: The Suffering of Light @Aperture

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 17:09:00 +0000

JTF (just the facts): A total of 52 color photographs, framed in blond wood and matted, and hung in the main gallery space. The digital c-prints come in two sizes: 20x30 (in editions of 20) and 30x40 (in editions of 12); there are 34 of the smaller size and 18 of the larger size on view. All of the images were taken between 1978 and 2010. The display also includes one long glass case containing seven of Webb's monographs (both covers and spreads of each). A new monograph of this entire body of work was recently published by Aperture (here). (Installation shots at right.)
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Comments/Context: Alex Webb's thirty year survey at Aperture isn't so much a greatest hits or personal best kind of show, but instead more of a once-over sifting of a long and successful career with an eye for artistry in color and composition. Bringing together elements of social documentary and street photography, his images go beyond the color we think of as uniquely American (think Shore, Eggleston, and Sternfeld) and instead capture the brash vibrant hues of the warm weather tropics. From Haiti to Mexico and Grenada to Cuba, Webb finds moments where people and color come together in layered, complex ways, echoing and reverberating across carefully structured frames. His work has reminders of Cartier-Bresson for me, but with a conscious use of color (especially toasted and softened by late afternoon and early evening light) as a distinct and handy tool.
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Political issues and social realities are never far from Webb's glance, but even images with a clear narrative line are thrown off balance by saturated color. A Mexican border patrol raid takes place in a field of bright yellow flowers, shiny black coffins punctuate a Haitian rally, creamy almond colored water floods a town in Brazil, and school kids in orange gingham shirts stand against a glowing golden wall. Even more ephemeral and unknowable moments turn on seeing color as something quietly but undeniably spectacular: a circus lion in a saturated red cage, pink blobs of fluffy cotton candy against a pastel green truck, a gently purple Istanbul sky, or the jarring combination of a red headscarf and a blue dress on the drab streets of Haiti. Additional patterns and juxtaposed motifs add structure to his visual mix: seeing eye posters in a Bombay market, a welcoming red and yellow popcorn cart against the twilit night of seaside Greece, layers of geometric jungle gym bars in Cuba, and posters of Santa and Jesus with a crown of thorns put together with shapely legs in short shorts. Webb's photographic style isn't out front and obvious and has a surprisingly consistent lack of irony; instead, it sits behind the content with subtle but confident craftsmanship.

For me, the real excitement here was to get outside the intellectual ruts that surround American photographic color, and instead start to gather a sense for a broader, more inclusive international color. Sure, Webb is American, but his images connected me to photographers from Raghubir Singh to Martin Parr, and made me start to consider more fully how all these photographers fit together stylistically and in chronological time. My conclusion is that Webb is particularly adept at undermining the natural tendency to take a specific documentary point of view or opinion; his images shimmer with intense and complex photographic color, but they don't necessarily force the viewer toward a defined end point or showy artistic flourish. Instead, they offer a more indeterminate experience of somewhere far away, alternately raw and unexpectedly visually refined.
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Collector's POV: While this venue is usually a non-selling environment, for this show, prices were actually available on the checklist. The 20x30 prints are $3500 and the 30x40 prints are $5000. Webb's work has very little secondary market history, so gallery retail or purchase via Magnum are probably the best options for interested collectors.
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Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

Artist site (here)
Magnum Photos page (here)
Reviews/Features: New Yorker (here), NY Times Lens (here), Time LightBox (here)

Alex Webb: The Suffering of Light

Through January 19th
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Aperture Gallery

547 West 27th Street

New York, NY 10001

August Sander and Seydou Keïta, Portraiture and Social Identity @Walther Collection

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 15:37:00 +0000

JTF (just the facts): A total of 55 black and white works by Seydou Keïta and August Sander, generally framed in black and matted, and hung in the main gallery space (with a dividing wall) and the side book alcove. There are 19 images by Keïta, taken between 1950 and 1959, most of which are modern or posthumous prints; there are 4 vintage prints (much smaller in size) and 1 self portrait on view in the side room. There are also 36 images by Sander, taken between 1910 and 1929; these prints were made by Gerd Sander in 1994, in an edition of 3. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: The second show at the Walther Collection Project Space matches the iconic portraiture of German photographer August Sander with 1950's portraits made by the Malian studio master Seydou Keïta. For most collectors, both of these bodies of work will likely be well known, and one might think that as a result, this show would be somewhat tired; on the contrary, their familiarity doesn't diminish the resonance between them in the slightest, and in fact, when seen together, I saw facets of each that I hadn't noticed before.

The pairing highlights the idea that both photographers were capturing societies in flux. In the past, I had tended to look at Sander's portraits individually, seeing the greatness of isolated single portraits of various types of people, all captured with Sander's signature deadpan, unembelleished, frontal style. When seen together as a group, I started to see the societal movement in between the portraits that Sander was actually documenting. In the beginning, there are stern farmers and country families, matched with coal miners, priests, and rural schoolteachers. But as the society began to change and more people moved to the cities, suddenly there were new occupations to document: bohemians and revolutionaries, writers and painters, politicians and more middle class families. In this period of time (1910s and 1920s), German society was being transformed from rural to more industrial/urban, and Sander's project captured much more of this wholesale national change than I ever really understood.

Keïta's photographs come at this same idea, but with a much different stylistic approach. 1950s Bamako was a place where traditional African society was mixing with post-colonial Westernism, creating a melting pot of visual and cultural influences. Keïta's portraits capture the aspirational aspects of his clients, their desire to create an identity, to be modern. Juxtaposing vibrant African fabrics with bold patterns (as backgrounds) with Western props like cars, radios, handbags, and sunglasses, he made posed portraits that found the essence of the mood of the times, with one foot in the past and one in the future. I particularly enjoyed seeing the intimate vintage prints in the side room (yellowed and wrinkled from age), as they seem to be a more authentic representation of Keïta's process than the larger, more contrasty modern prints.

Both sets of images consistently document formal dignity and grace, an almost regal quality that has nothing to do with wealth or station in life. Steely eyes peer out and tell stories of hopes and dreams and of the constraints of life in a changing world. Even though you've likely seen these images before, the quality of portraiture on view in this small show is nothing short of superlative, and the pairing makes both richer from the comparison.
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Collector's POV: Since this is a non-commercial space, no prices were available for the works on view. Keïta's prints come up at auction from time to time, but very few are vintage; prices have ranged from roughly $2000 to $15000 in recent years. Sander's prints are much more available in the secondary markets; there are portraits, landscapes, and later prints/portfolios made by both Gunther and Gerd Sander. As a result, prices vary widely, from as little as $1000 for lesser known images to more than $100000 for iconic vintage portraits.
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Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here)
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Transit Hub:

Seydou Keïta artist site (here)
Keïta background: NY Times, 2006 (here)

August Sander and Seydou Keïta, Portraiture and Social Identity
Extended through March 10th
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The Walther Collection

526 West 26th Street

Suite 718

New York, NY 10001

The Checklist: 1/5/12

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 14:15:00 +0000

Checklist 1/5/12

New reviews added this week in red.

Uptown

ONE STAR: Cecil Beaton: Museum of the City of New York: February 20: review
ONE STAR: Photographic Treasures from the Collection of Alfred Stieglitz: Met: February 26: review
THREE STARS: The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League: Jewish Museum: March 25: review

Midtown

ONE STAR: Erwin Blumenfeld: Edwynn Houk: January 7: review
ONE STAR: New Photography 2011: MoMA: January 16: review
ONE STAR: Massimo Vitali: Bonni Benrubi: February 4: review
TWO STARS: Reinstalled Permanent Collection: MoMA: March 28: review

Chelsea

ONE STAR: Andrew Borowiec: Sasha Wolf: January 7: review
ONE STAR: The Wedding: Andrea Rosen: January 21: review

SoHo/Lower East Side/Downtown

ONE STAR: Mel Bochner: Peter Freeman: January 14: review

Elsewhere Nearby

TWO STARS: Walker Evans: Florence Griswold Museum: January 29: review

Massimo Vitali: Arcadian Remains @Benrubi

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 14:13:00 +0000

JTF (just the facts): A total of 5 large scale color works, mounted to Diasec and not framed, and hung in the main gallery space. The chromogenic prints range in size from 71x89 to 76x100; 4 are single images and 1 is a diptych. The images were taken in Greece, Italy, and Spain in 2011, and are available in editions of 6. A companion exhibit of Vitali's works is on display at agnès b. Galerie Boutique (here). (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Massimo Vitali's newest pictures find him parked in a familiar location: looking down from above on the vast seashore, where sparkling blue water meets sand and eroded rock, and where tiny people in colorful swimsuits cover the available land mass like packs of insignificant ants. As usual, the light is squint inducing, so bright and white that it is almost a physical presence, draping the scenes with washes of blinding glare.

The gallery press release calls Vitali's works "socio-landscapes", and my experience of these new pictures is that they have a bit more landscape in them than his previous photographs. The scale seems broader, the white cliffs and rock formations more like harsh moonscapes, the crashing waves more dramatic. The tiny figures seem almost like the minuscule people found in the foreground of a romantic landscape painting, only multiplied into crowds, with each individual sun bather or pair of lazy swimmers identifiable and unique. The caustic irony I have felt in his earlier photographs seems more muted here, the folly of humanity (when compared to the grandeur of nature) made even smaller and more unimportant.

All in all, Vitali hasn't strayed too far from the formula that brought him success in these new images, but he does seem to be bridging closer to traditional landscape forms than ever before. There are less miles of matching umbrellas and acres of human flesh in these pictures, and instead a more subtle tilt toward the timelessness of the land and sea.

Collector's POV: The single images in this show are priced at 30000€ or 40000€ based on the place in the edition; the diptych is 50000€. These prices are a decent step up from his last show at Benrubi. Vitali's work has become more routinely available at auction in recent years, with prices ranging from roughly $5000 to $80000.
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Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
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Transit Hub:

Artist site (here)

Massimo Vitali: Arcadian Remains
Through February 4th

Bonni Benrubi Gallery
41 East 57th Street
New York, NY 10022

Top Photography Venues in New York in 2011

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 13:42:00 +0000

I reviewed photography shows at 83 different venues in and around New York in 2011. When you step back and think about the scale of that number, it certainly says something about the tremendous diversity of galleries and museums committed to photography in one form or another that we have at our disposal in this great city. We are blessed with specialist photography galleries of all shapes and sizes, contemporary art galleries with strong photography programs, and museums of all kinds that regularly show photography.

In past years, I have tried to get granular with my statistical analysis of these various places, taking averages and tallying totals, in the attempt to discover unseen patterns and trends. This year, I have returned to a more straightforward approach: simply adding up the total number of stars I awarded to photography shows at a venue over the course of the year. The fact is that this method rewards both extremes in quality and show to show consistency fairly equally, without resorting to trying to build in zeros for those shows I didn't review. I'm happy to report that the results below seem to realistically separate the wheat from the chaff.

The clear winner this year for overall strength of programming was Pace/MacGill Gallery. Of the total of 7 shows the gallery put on this past year, I reviewed 4 and issued a grand total of 8 stars. While there was a cluster of other strong galleries at 6 stars apiece (7 different venues at this score), no other venue in New York delivered as much. I think we would all expect to see names like Janet Borden, Yossi Milo, Bruce Silverstein, and Yancey Richardson among the leaders, given their recent historical strength, but I'd also like to single out newer galleries like Higher Pictures and Sasha Wolf Gallery, who have emerged from the pack with thoughtful and consistently intelligent programming.

With the exception of MoMA at 6 stars (padded a bit by 2 stars for a rehanging of the permanent collection), our museums were particularly weak this year. In general, not only was there a notable absence of blockbusters and scholarly retrospectives, these venues didn't deliver the depth of photographic programming we have generally come to expect. Many galleries roundly bested these institutional players with their offerings. Notable absences from the lists below include both the Whitney and the Guggenheim, and contemporary stalwarts Marian Goodman, Gagosian, Pace, Gladstone, Paula Cooper, Sean Kelly, Robert Miller, and 303. None of these usual suspects had more than a single 1 STAR photography show in 2011, and several had none at all. Perhaps this is just a quirk of longer term scheduling, so here's hoping to see them again in 2012, with the kind of quality photography we know they can deliver.

The complete data set is below, with gallery name, followed by total number of review stars earned over the course of the year (including only those venues with a total of 2 stars and above):

Specialist Photography Galleries

Pace/MacGill Gallery (here): 8
Janet Borden, Inc. (here): 6
Higher Pictures (here): 6
Yossi Milo Gallery (here): 6
Yancey Richardson Gallery (here): 6
Bruce Silverstein Gallery (here): 6
Sasha Wolf Gallery (here): 6
Hasted Kraeutler (here): 5
Danziger Gallery (here): 4
Amador Gallery (here): 3
ClampArt (here): 3
Edwynn Houk Gallery (here): 3
Deborah Bell Photographs (now closed): 2
Bonni Benrubi Gallery (here): 2
Howard Greenberg Gallery (here): 2
Steven Kasher Gallery (here): 2
Hans P. Kraus Jr. Fine Photographs (here): 2
Robert Mann Gallery (here): 2

Contemporary Art Galleries

Jack Shainman Gallery (here): 6
Salon 94 Freemans/Bowery (here): 5
Wallspace (here): 4
David Zwirner (here): 4
Matthew Marks Gallery (here): 3
Metro Pictures (here): 3
Sikkema Jenkins & Co. (here): 3
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery (here): 2
Cheim & Read (here): 2
Gallery at Hermes (here): 2
McKee Gallery (here): 2
Murray Guy (here): 2
Friedrich Petzel Gallery (here): 2
Andrea Rosen Gallery (here): 2
Sonnabend Gallery (here): 2
Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery (here): 2

Museums

Museum of Modern Art (here): 6
International Center of Photography (here): 4
Brooklyn Museum (here): 3
Jewish Museum (here): 3
Metropolitan Museum of Art (here): 3
Artists Space (here): 2
Bruce Museum (here): 2
Museum of the City of New York (here): 2
Florence Griswold Museum (here): 2

Top Photography Shows of 2011

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 16:55:00 +0000

While end of year "top 10" and "best" lists tend to be all effusive enthusiasm and back slapping congratulations, I'd like to go against the grain and state from the outset that I think 2011 was an underwhelming year for photography in New York. There were no game changing blockbusters, a surprisingly thin and forgettable program at our major museum venues, and not enough risk taking at our galleries. While I think we can reasonably chalk this outcome up to the challenges of real economic hardship across the board, I can't really say with a straight face that we generated a massive amount of vibrancy or heat this year.

While I had a short hiatus during the summer which slowed me down a bit, I still reviewed a total of 138 photography shows this year, and likely saw (at least fleetingly) a roughly equivalent number that I didn't review. Of all those shows in galleries and museums all over the region, only 7 merited 3 STARS (down from 10 last year that received that same rating and 12 in 2009). So my top ten isn't really a top ten, it's a top seven. 34 shows got a 2 STARS rating, and when tallied with the 3 STARS shows, there were actually 41 shows that should normally have been a top 50. Across the board, I think we were hunkered down, and it showed.

Having said that, the shows and exhibits listed below cut through that fog of uncertainty and provided some shining light and optimism we can build on going forward. In every case, the ideas were robust, the craftsmanship was meticulous, and the overall effect (from editing and sequencing to lighting and hanging) was superlative. These were the shows that hooked me immediately, dragged me in for close inspection and brain engagement, and left me in a head-nodding, smiling, state of wonder. A few additional words on each are below, now given the benefit of some small bit of hindsight, along with links to the original reviews.

Top Photography Shows of 2011 (all 3 STARS, alphabetically by last name/exhibit title)

Harry Callahan and Jackson Pollock: Early Photographs and Drawings @Pace/MacGill Gallery (original review here)

This show connected the visual dots that MoMA's sprawling AbEX show failed to connect. The pairings and interplay here were simply astonishing.

Philip-Lorca diCorcia: ELEVEN @David Zwirner (original review here)

A rethinking of the staged tableau in the context of fashion. Proof that with the right support, commissioned work can still be very exciting art.

Jill Freedman, Street Cops, 1978-1981 @Higher Pictures (original review here)

This show was the discovery of the year for me. Freedman's work captures New York's finest with an amazingly consistent warmth and grace, with an eye for photographic storytelling.

Nan Goldin: Scopophilia @Matthew Marks (original review here)

This was undoubtedly the most polarizing photography show in New York this year. Some, like me, found the video lyrical and transcendent, while others found the whole endeavor arrogant, tired, or even desperate. I know that I walked away with a new respect for and understanding of Goldin's work, seeing it with fresh eyes after all these years.

Self Reflections: The Expressionist Origins of Lisette Model @Bruce Silverstein Gallery (here)

This show entirely transformed my understanding of Lisette Model. Placed in the context of German/Austrian Expressionism, her whole body of work suddenly made visual sense to me. A testament to the power of getting outside the photography bubble and looking for historical connections in the other arts.

The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League 1936-1951 @Jewish Museum (original review here)

This exhibit is the educational winner of the year. It tells a complex story with inclusiveness and detail without becoming dry and overwhelming. For me, it filled in some important historical gaps, both introducing forgotten talents and placing the entire group in clearer photographic context.

Laurie Simmons, The Love Doll: Days 1 through 30 @Salon 94 Bowery (original review here)

This show of new work was amazingly assured and accomplished, taking themes she has explored throughout her career and extending them in a new and provocative way. Here was a bit of the risk taking I was talking about above; what could easily have been a throw away gimmick in the wrong hands was made thoughtful and shockingly real by Simmons.

In thinking more about what ties these seven shows together, I began to see a divergence in my mindset when evaluating contemporary and vintage shows. While in both cases, I was searching for some measure of innovation, originality, and inherent quality (however defined), for contemporary shows, I was more focused on likely long term durability and freshness of vision, while for vintage shows, I was more interested in new ways of thinking/seeing work I was already familiar with. As such, I decided to create two top 10 lists, one for each type of show, promoting the most worthy shows from the ranks of the 2 STARS brigade; these two lists are below. In some cases, when retrospectives bled into the present or when "new" work actually came from more than a decade ago, I had to make some determinations of just which bucket was most appropriate. In general, I think this separation has some meaningful and useful logic behind it, allowing for more apples to apples comparisons.

Top 10 Contemporary Photography Shows of 2011 (alphabetically by last name/exhibit title)

Philip-Lorca diCorcia: ELEVEN @David Zwirner (original review here)
Nan Goldin: Scopophilia @Matthew Marks (original review here)
Pieter Hugo, Permanent Error @Yossi Milo Gallery (original review here)
Rinko Kawauchi: Illuminance @The Gallery at Hermes (original review here)
Louise Lawler: Fitting @Metro Pictures (original review here)
Boris Mikhailov: Case History @MoMA (original review here)
Ray Mortenson: Full Scale/Meadowland Still Lifes @Janet Borden (original review here)
Laurie Simmons, The Love Doll: Days 1 through 30 @Salon 94 Bowery (original review here)
Lorna Simpson: Gathered @Brooklyn Museum (original review here)
Wang Qingsong: When Worlds Collide @International Center of Photography (original review here)

Top 10 Vintage Photography Shows of 2011 (alphabetically by last name/exhibit tile)

Harry Callahan and Jackson Pollock: Early Photographs and Drawings @Pace/MacGill Gallery (original review here)
Julia Margaret Cameron @Hans Kraus Jr. Fine Photographs (original review here)
John Divola, Trees for the Forest @Wallspace (original review here)
Elliott Erwitt: Personal Best @International Center of Photography (original review here)
Jill Freedman, Street Cops, 1978-1981 @Higher Pictures (original review here)
Robert Heinecken: Copywork @Friedrich Petzel Gallery (original review here)
Self Reflections: The Expressionist Origins of Lisette Model @Bruce Silverstein Gallery (here)
Mark Morrisroe: From This Moment On @Artists Space (original review here)
The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League 1936-1951 @Jewish Museum (original review here)
Henry Wessel, Vintage Photographs @Pace/MacGill Gallery (original review here)

As I look to 2012, I remain as energized as ever to troll through the dreck in search of the revolutionary. I wholeheartedly believe in the real power of the simple gallery show review and its rightful place at the center of the critical discourse that surrounds this medium, and I expect to redouble my efforts in the coming year to see as much as I can and report on it as thoughtfully as possible. In my view, everything starts with looking at and responding to the pictures, and everything else, all the discussions of business models and art markets, social media and artistic memes, it's all secondary (perhaps even an out right distraction) to the work itself. What we all need to do, whether we are collectors, or working artists, or just lovers of photography, is to see more shows. Resolve to double the number of shows you saw last year. If you can make that profound commitment, you'll increase your odds of having the artistic moment that really matters: the one when a photograph interrupts your daily muddle and leaves you astounded, dumbfounded, and thoroughly amazed and befuddled. We're making memories here folks, so here's to a 2012 filled with mind-blowing contradictions, jaw-dropping shocks, and staggering, uncompromising photographic beauty.

The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League, 1936-1951 @Jewish Museum

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 15:39:00 +0000

JTF (just the facts): A total of 150 black and white photographs from 73 different photographers, framed in black and matted, and chronologically/thematically displayed against grey, green, yellow, and dark blue walls through a winding series of adjoining gallery spaces. The prints cover the period from roughly 1910 to 1959, with a concentration between 1936 and 1951. An exhibition catalog has been published by Yale University Press (here) and is available in the bookshop for $50. The installation shots at right are courtesy of The Jewish Museum/Christine McMonagle.

The show is divided into titled sections. These sections and the photographers included are detailed below, with numbers of works and dates in parentheses.
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Precursors

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Lewis Hine (3, 1910, 1912, 1920)

Paul Strand (2, 1915, 1920)

1 video newsreel (1931)

The Great Depression/Harlem Document

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Berenice Abbott (2, 1937)

Alexander Alland (3, 1938)

Lucy Ashjian (4, 1938, 1939)

Harold Corsini (1, 1939)

Jack Delano (1, 1940)

Robert Disraeli (1, 1934)

Arnold Eagle (1, 1935)

Eliot Elisofon (3, 1937, 1940)

Morris Engel (3, 1937, 1938)

Sid Grossman (2, 1936, 1940)

Rosalie Gwathmey (1, 1940)

Consuelo Kanaga (1, 1937)

Sidney Kerner (1, 1938)

Rebecca Lepkoff (1, 1939)

Richard Lyon (1, 1937)

Jack Manning (2, 1939)

Lisette Model (1, 1940)

Arnold Newman (1, 1940)

Sol Prom (1, 1938)

Walter Rosenblum (3, 1938)

Arthur Rothstein (1, 1935)

Joe Schwartz (2, 1936, 1939)

Lee Sievan (1, 1940)

Aaron Siskind (5, 1937, 1938, 1940)

Rolf Tietgens (1, 1938)

John Vachon (1, 1938)

Dan Weiner (1, 1939)

Max Yavno (1, 1940)

2 glass cases (syllabus, notes, membership cards, newspaper articles, magazine spreads, books)
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The War Years

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Lou Bernstein (2, 1943, 1947)

Bernard Cole (1, 1944)

Harold Feinstein (1, 1945)

Godfrey Frankel (1, 1945)

George Gilbert (1, 1942)

Sid Grossman (2, 1945)

Rosalie Gwathmey (1, 1945)

Morris Huberland (2, 1941, 1942)

Arthur Leipzig (1, 1946)

Rebecca Lepkoff (1, 1947)

Helen Levitt (1, 1940)

Sol Libsohn (1, 1945)

Sonia Handelman Meyer (1, 1946)

Lisette Model (3, 1940, 1942, 1945)

David Robbins (2, 1941, 1944)

Walter Rosenblum (2, 1944)

Edwin Roskam (1, 1944)

Arthur Rothstein (1, 1946)

Fred Stein (1, 1945)

Louis Stettner (3, 1940, 1951)

Lou Stoumen (1, 1940)

Paul Strand (1, 1938)

Elizabeth Timberman (1, 1944)

Weegee (5, 1938, 1940, 1941, 1943, 1945)

Ida Wyman (1, 1945)

4 glass cases (book, installation/judging photos, magazines, brochures, flyers, party photos)
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The Red Scare

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Vivian Cherry (2, 1947)

Robert Disraeli (1, 1950)

Morris Engel (1, 1947)

Rosalie Gwathmey (1, 1948)

N. Jay Jaffee (1, 1948)

Arthur Leipzig (2, 1949, 1950)

Rebecca Lepkoff (1, 1947)

Sol Libsohn (1, 1949)

Jerome Liebling (2, 1948, 1949)

Tosh Matsumoto (1, 1950)

Sonia Handelman Meyer (2, 1945, 1946)

Ruth Orkin (1, 1948)

Marion Palfi (2, 1948, 1949)

Rae Russel (1, 1947)

Edward Schwartz (1, 1952)

Erika Stone (1, 1947)

David Vestal (1, 1949)

Sandra Weiner (1, 1948)

Ida Wyman (1, 1947)

2 glass cases (newspapers, books, meeting notes, letters, photograph)
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A Center for American Photography

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Nancy Bulkeley (1, 1946)

Ann Cooper (1, 1950)

Arnold Eagle (1, 1950)

Morris Engel (1, 1938)

Leo Goldstein (1, 1950)

Sid Grossman (2, 1947, 1948)

N. Jay Jaffee (1, 1950)

Sy Kattelson (3, 1948, 1949, 1950)

Rebecca Lepkoff (1, 1948)

Jack Lessinger (1, 1950)

Leon Levinstein (2, undated)

Jerome Liebling (1, 1953)

Sam Mahl (1, 1949)

Phyllis Dearborn Masser (1, 1948)

Marvin Newman (2, 1949, 1951)

Ruth Orkin (1, 1950)

Ann Zane Shanks (1, 1955)

Larry Silver (1, 1951)

W. Eugene Smith (2, 1951)

Louis Stettner (1, 1951)

Dan Weiner (4, 1948, 1949, 1950)

Bill Witt (1, 1948)

Ida Wyman (1, 1950)

Max Yavno (1, 1949)

George Zimbel (1, 1951)

2 glass cases (magazine spreads, Photo Notes, exhibit catalogues, installation/remodeling photos)

1 video film (1953)

1 interactive map
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Coda

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Sid Grossman (1, 1959)

1 glass case (book, teaching photo)

1 documentary film (2011)

Comments/Context: The short hand story of the New York Photo League has always been a bit too overly easy for my liking: a few notable artistic names, some left leaning politics, and a muddy and inconclusive interpretation of its lasting influence on photography and the history of the city. I think that's why I found this more comprehensive and inclusive retelling to be so much more exciting and useful; it's not just a hackneyed, one-sided narrative about communists, but a broad, interwoven confluence of politics, history, geography, and photography, with a strong undercurrent of healthy artistic debate.
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Walking through the twisting galleries, I found myself thinking about the Photo League in the context of a diagram. From one corner comes the march of history: the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, each with its own very real impacts on daily life in New York. From another corner comes the melting pot of the urban city itself: the people, the individual neighborhoods, the street life of mixed classes, races, religions, and ethnicities. And from a third corner comes the evolution of photography as a medium: the remnants of the between the wars Modernism, the arrival of the flexible hand held camera and the weekly magazines filled with photojournalism, and the beginnings of a more personal and subjective kind of image making. At the center of this diagram sits the New York Photo League, documenting the truths found on the streets of this great city, under the changing pressures of history, tugged in different artistic directions, trying to balance and synthesize these competing forces. Seen in this way, I suddenly started to understand where the Photo League really fits, and why the work on the walls looks the way it does.

This show is roughly chronological, and this design allows the viewer to see the evolving stylistic approaches being employed by League members over the years of the club's existence. Simplistically, one can imagine a continuum, at one end, documentary photography informed by activism, engagement and advocacy, a witness with an ideological purpose and a particular kind of social commentary to put forth. At the other end lies documentary photography informed by more subjective concerns, including individual emotions/reactions, aesthetics, formalism, and more personal questioning. As the years passed from 1936 to 1951 (the beginning and end of the League's operation), it is possible to watch this internal debate raging on, where a new sensibility gradually starts to take hold. This evolving definition of documentary/street photography didn't of course end here; these same issues remain intensely relevant and hotly argued on both sides even today.

With Hine and Strand as artistic precursors and with Abbott as a teacher, it isn't surprising that the Great Depression pictures start with a formal clarity and slowly evolve toward more progressive messages, likely as a result of the crushing economic times. Bridges and storefronts, vacant lots and crumbling tenement buildings, these kinds of subjects slowly give way to more human stories, particularly the Harlem Document pictures, which take a heavier handed look at poverty and unemployment in the black community. While these images are seen today with an eye for their overly negative stereotypes, they still represent a style of activist, engaged street photography that held favor with many of the members at the time.

With the arrival of World War II, the subject matter changed again: soldiers, white hatted sailors, mothers, political rallies, crowded protests, blurred motion coming into the frame with more regularity. In these pictures, the aesthetic schism starts to appear more clearly, with some members moving down a more atmospheric path, telling smaller and more marginal stories with empathy, humor, and even dark irony. These are more individual scenes, often environmental portraits, with an increasing level of compositional freedom and experimentation. As the Cold War deepened and the Photo League was blacklisted (and ultimately disbanded a few years later), the stylistic changes became more widespread. Using aerial views, mirrors, reverse angles, silhouettes, complex graphical overlaps, and a host of other approaches, the Photo League's brand of street photography became much more diverse, and by the early 1950s, it bore very little resemblance to the work from the late 1930s. The mood was harsher, the compositions more personal and less purely documentary.

What I like best about this show is its rag tag, unwieldy inclusiveness; there are dozens of names included here that have been largely forgotten, and yet their images fit together into a logical progression that seems fluid with the benefit of time. For me, I finally started to visually understand the small steps that made up the aesthetic and conceptual changes that took place between the 1930s and the 1950s, those missing evolutionary links between Abbott and Frank; The Americans now seems to me less like a thunder strike of genius out of nowhere and more like an innovative, original extrapolation from visual ideas that were already beginning to percolate around. This excellent show tells a uniquely New York story, and is worth a visit simply for the rich historical details of life in the city that it provides. But the reason I found this to be one of the best photography shows of the year is that it also successfully fills in an important (and largely missing) gap in the recounting of the American photographic narrative. Not only do I now have an increased appreciation for the talents of the many members of the New York Photo League (many of whom have been unjustly overlooked), I now understand much more clearly how the larger artistic puzzle fits together.
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Collector's POV: Given this is a museum show, there are, of course, no posted prices. Given the wide number of included artists, it seems fitting to forego the specific secondary market discussion that usually fills this section.
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Rating: *** (three stars) EXCELLENT (rating system described here)
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Transit Hub:

Features/Reviews: Wall Street Journal (here), Lens (here), NY Times (here), New Yorker (here), Artnet (here), Photograph (here)

The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League, 1936-1951
Through March 25th

The Jewish Museum
1109 5th Ave at 92nd St
New York, NY 10128

Administrative Note: This will be the last post of the year. I'll return again in the New Year, beginning with the end of year roundups of the best shows and top photography venues of 2011. Happy Holidays!

The Checklist: 12/22/11

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 14:18:00 +0000

Checklist 12/22/11

New reviews added this week in red.

Uptown

ONE STAR: After the Gold Rush: Met: January 2: review
ONE STAR: Cecil Beaton: Museum of the City of New York: February 20: review
ONE STAR: Photographic Treasures from the Collection of Alfred Stieglitz: Met: February 26: review

Midtown

ONE STAR: Erwin Blumenfeld: Edwynn Houk: January 7: review
ONE STAR: New Photography 2011: MoMA: January 16: review
TWO STARS: Reinstalled Permanent Collection: MoMA: March 2012: review

Chelsea

ONE STAR: Uta Barth: Tanya Bonakdar: December 22: review
TWO STARS: Robert Heinecken: Friedrich Petzel: December 22: review
ONE STAR: Sharon Core: Yancey Richardson: December 23: review
THREE STARS: Nan Goldin: Matthew Marks: December 23: review
TWO STARS: Richard Mosse: Jack Shainman: December 23: review
ONE STAR: John Baldessari: High Line: December 30: review
ONE STAR: Andrew Borowiec: Sasha Wolf: January 7: review
ONE STAR: The Wedding: Andrea Rosen: January 21: review

SoHo/Lower East Side/Downtown

TWO STARS: Lee Friedlander: Janet Borden: December 31: review
ONE STAR: Mel Bochner: Peter Freeman: January 14: review

Elsewhere Nearby

ONE STAR: Type A: Aldrich Museum: December 31: review
TWO STARS: Walker Evans: Florence Griswold Museum: January 29: review

The Wedding (The Walker Evans Polaroid Project) @Rosen

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 13:13:00 +0000

JTF (just the facts): A total of 83 color photographs by Walker Evans, framed in white and matted, and hung in the large single room main gallery. All of the works are SX-70 Polaroids made in 1973 or 1974, sized roughly 4x3. The exhibit also includes 4 photographic diptychs by Roni Horn. These works are iris-printed photographs on Somerset Satin paper, each panel sized 22x22. The images were made in 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2007, and are available in editions of 15+3AP. Additional supporting photographs include an 1887 Eadweard Muybridge collotype from Animal Locomotion (sized 19x24), and a Eugene Atget albumen storefront from 1900 (sized 9x7); these two photographs are displayed in the entrance area. The installation also includes a selection of oak furniture by Gustav Stickley, an 19th century architectural model of a cooper's workshop, and a 19th century English birdhouse. This exhibit was curated by Ydessa Hendeles; a spiral bound catalog of the show is available for free at the reception desk (and is worth taking). (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: One of the unforeseen consequences of a proliferation of art on the Internet is that we have inadvertently (and permanently) diluted the meaning of the word "curator". We're all choosers, selectors, organizers, editors and like-ers now, whether we are celebrities, gallery owners, scholars/academics, collectors, or idle watchers. At one level, this is mighty freeing and empowering, breaking down old restrictive barriers and letting in some much needed fresh air. But at another, we seem to be losing sight of the nuances of old school curating craftsmanship and excellence that go miles beyond just gathering a bunch of pictures under a clever theme for a group show.

While this show takes place at the Andrea Rosen Gallery and selling is ostensibly going on, a retail experience seems wholly beyond the point of this exhibition. The art objects on view transcend being works by Walker Evans or Roni Horn or whoever, and become elements of an elaborate theatrical set piece. Taken together, the individual items have been meticulously arranged and sequenced to highlight internal relationships and connections that have very little to do with their inherent Walker Evans-ness or Roni Horn-ness. The hand of the curator is so evident here that it trumps the underlying works themselves; we've entered the carefully controlled world of Ydessa Hendeles, and it is the sum of the parts that matters.

This kind of mixed media, open ended, metaphorical curation is rarely seen in Chelsea these days; it's such an unusual animal that we've almost forgotten how to react to such a complex presentation. My first reaction upon entering the main gallery space was to notice its clean geometries and the manipulation of scale going on: tiny Polaroids interrupted by larger prints, surrounding small church pews leading to a grand central object, in this case, an ornate, domed birdcage made of intricate polished wood. As I circled the gallery, the Evans Polaroids drew me into an intimate dialogue, vicariously wandering and circling the vernacular architecture just like Evans himself, moving in and out, around and across, seeing silhouettes and then details in succession. The Horn images of birds forced me to physically move back, to take them in as objects related to the central bird cage, and then to move back in to see their delicate layers of feathers in an architectural manner. The overall result is a sense of fluidity and motion that isn't linear but more swirling and rhythmic, the movement through space not strict and rigid, but more loose and serendipitous than it appears on the surface.

While there are a number of individual standouts mixed in among the works on display, many of the Evans Polaroids aren't hugely memorable, and are of more interest as a process flow, like contact sheets where we can see the photographer moving from frame to frame with deliberate action. There is a palpable sense of Evans testing the limits of the camera, figuring out how his eye could control the output of the device in ways that he wanted. Some work and some don't, but seen together, there is the real feeling of being along for the ride with a master.

What I like best about this installation is that there is some curatorial risk taking going on here. Hendeles didn't just give us a static ring of Evans Polaroids, but an immersive environment that draws from those Polaroids, one that offers additional less obvious pathways to explore; there are multiple "ways in" to this exhibit, leading to different contextual conclusions. I also appreciate the clear move to take photography out of its own separate artistic silo and to mix it together with other decorative arts that can provide alternate resonances. Her setting provides a richer experience of Evans' late work, offering us ways to look and see that are beyond the simple or straightforward.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced as follows. The Walker Evans Polaroids are priced at $7000 each, and the Roni Horn diptychs are either $85000, $120000, or NFS (she is represented by Hauser & Wirth here). Evans' late Polaroids do come up for sale at auction from time to time; prices in recent years have ranged between $1000 and $5000.
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Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
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Transit Hub:

Features/Reviews: Vogue (here), Opening Ceremony (here)

The Wedding (The Walker Evans Polaroid Project)

Through February 4th
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Andrea Rosen Gallery
525 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011

High Line Billboard: John Baldessari

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 13:11:00 +0000

JTF (just the facts): A single billboard, 25x75 feet, displayed at the corner of 18th Street and 10th Avenue in Chelsea. The work is entitled The First $100,000 I Ever Made and is print on vinyl, from 2011.

Comments/Context: Plunked down in the middle of a Chelsea parking lot, John Baldessari's monumental photograph of a real $100,000 bill is a disconcerting symbol for a neighborhood full of retail art galleries. By replacing the normal fare of forgettable movie ads and holiday sale announcements with a not-so-subtle swipe at the dollar driven world in the streets below, Baldessari successfully jolted me out of my huddled winter stupor and made me look again.

What I like best is that Baldessari's work is more than just a snappy one-liner; it mixes photographic appropriation and Pop art, with a surprisingly current-events relevant Conceptual zinger. I'm pretty sure Woodrow Wilson was never particularly brash, but in this setting, his serious Big Brother visage seems both judgmental and confrontational, and depending on your point of view, the steely-eyed critique can point in many different directions. Baldessari's wild transformation of scale is simultaneously absurd, cautionary, and perspective-changing, and it's absolutely worth a detour down the High Line, even if the winter winds are blowing.

Collector's POV: This work was not overtly for sale, nor are there many comparables in terms of scale in recent auction history. Baldessari is represented in New York by Marian Goodman Gallery (here).

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

Reviews: Daily Beast (here), Gawker (here), Arts Observer (here)

John Baldessari

Through December 30th
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High Line

Billboard at 18th Street and 10th Avenue

Andrew Borowiec: Along the Ohio @Wolf

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 16:17:00 +0000

JTF (just the facts): A total of 28 black and white photographs, framed in grey and matted, and double hung in the single room gallery space. All of the prints are gelatin silver prints, taken between 1984 and 1998. The modern prints on display are each 16x20, in editions of 10. A monograph of this body of work was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2000 (here). (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Andrew Borowiec's photographs of the industrial Midwest are deceptively understated; with just a quick, cursory glance over them, one could easily miss their complexity. Hovering in tones of middle grey, they document working class neighborhoods hemmed in by sprawling factories and power plants, the presence of the Ohio River never far from view. Their sober deadpan formality silences the landscape, leaving behind clusters of crowded houses and slowly decaying communities.

What makes these pictures exciting is the density and structural complexity of Borowiec's compositions; they're almost Friedlander-esque in their layers and details, albeit with a much more earnest severity. Nearly every image has something to discover: toys strewn across a front yard, fake raccoons decorating electric meters, a meandering street leading to a trestle bridge, a pair of ceramic poodles, a nest of overhead electric wires. White picket fences, abandoned cars, ATV tracks, overgrown greenery, and satellite dishes come together to tell a story of a worn down Midwestern existence, where flood waters overrun downtown streets and basketball courts, and smokestacks and cooling towers loom in the hazy distance.

Nearly every image in this show has robust front to back design, where foreground, middleground, and background are carefully modulated to create intricate juxtapositions and spatial overlaps. A kind of controlled chaos consistently emerges, where shapes and patterns interact under the guise of struggling lives. In the end, Borowiec's pictures capture a sense of quiet, muddling through perseverance, with an eye for the subtle photographic arrangement that transforms the mundane into something new.

Collector's POV: The prints on view are priced based on their place in the edition, starting at $2400 and rising to $3000. Borowiec's work has very little secondary market history, so gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

Artist site (here)
Exhibit: Akron Art Museum, 2010 (here)

Andrew Borowiec: Along the Ohio
Through January 7th

Sasha Wolf Gallery
528 West 28th Street
New York, NY 10001

The Checklist: 12/15/11

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 16:06:00 +0000

Checklist 12/15/11

New reviews added this week in red.

Uptown

ONE STAR: After the Gold Rush: Met: January 2: review
ONE STAR: Cecil Beaton: Museum of the City of New York: February 20: review
ONE STAR: Photographic Treasures from the Collection of Alfred Stieglitz: Met: February 26: review

Midtown

ONE STAR: Jessica Eaton: Higher Pictures: December 17: review
ONE STAR: Erwin Blumenfeld: Edwynn Houk: January 7: review
ONE STAR: New Photography 2011: MoMA: January 16: review
TWO STARS: Reinstalled Permanent Collection: MoMA: March 2012: review

Chelsea

TWO STARS: Daniel Gordon: Wallspace: December 17: review
ONE STAR: Andreas Gursky: Gagosian: December 17: review
ONE STAR: Uta Barth: Tanya Bonakdar: December 22: review
TWO STARS: Robert Heinecken: Friedrich Petzel: December 22: review
ONE STAR: Sharon Core: Yancey Richardson: December 23: review
THREE STARS: Nan Goldin: Matthew Marks: December 23: review
TWO STARS: Richard Mosse: Jack Shainman: December 23: review

SoHo/Lower East Side/Downtown

TWO STARS: Lee Friedlander: Janet Borden: December 31: review
ONE STAR: Mel Bochner: Peter Freeman: January 14: review

Elsewhere Nearby

ONE STAR: Type A: Aldrich Museum: December 31: review
TWO STARS: Walker Evans: Florence Griswold Museum: January 29: review