October 2004 Archives

The new issue of Web-based photo mag AK47.tv has been posted. Lots of good stuff, particularly Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin's South African series, "Mr Mkhize`s Portrait". Also, nice work from Fin Manford and R. Jerome Ferraro. Ferraro's protraits make me wonder how you get the gumption to ask your friends of the opposite sex "Mind if I take a picture of you in your underwear?"

For me, "affordable art" would be well under a thousand bucks. My lone purchase, a Burtynsky print from his 2003 retrospective, cost less than $300. Apparently in the the art world (as opposed to the real world) the cut-off point is five grand. Starting yesterday, the Affordable Art Fair hits NYC with around 130 galleries showing art that sells for less than that magical number. I would assume there will be a great representation of photography, since it generally sells for much less than other media. Heck most even established photographers would be happy to sell a piece for $5000.

How to Buy Art (For $2,500 or Less)" is in the November issue of Esquire, which might come in handy for the Affordable Art Fair. Now, understand that it's Esquire we're talking about, so there's a fair amount of discussion of how collecting art, or pretending to, will impress the ladies. But the article has good tid bits on how to talk to gallery staff, bringing up the subject of money (especially if you don't have much to spend) and buying at an auction. Good stuff. What's not good is that Esquire has put most of their content behind some sort of premium subscriber wall, which you can climb over for 7 days if you are willing to cough up your email address to some company called KeepMedia.

With that article under your belt, you won't need to attend the Saturday panel discussion "For Love or Money: How to Build a Collection" with collectors Sue Stoffel and Richard M. Danziger; Jeremy Adams, Director of CUE Art Foundation and Suzanne Randolph, Art Advisor and Curator.

Exactitudes® is a project by the Dutch team of photographer Ari Versluis and stylist Ellie Uyttenbroek purporting to catalog archtypical "modern tribes". Each archetype is represented by nine identically posed examples.

Don't forget that registered trademark!

There's a new Web-based photomag out on the Web, this time from Portugal. BZKmag comes in English and Portugeuse flavors. If you haven't had the chance to see Alex Soth's "Sleeping by the Missippi", they've replicated many of the show images in large images. Via flux & mutability.

From Michael Kimmelman's (I reluctantly link) review of the Shomei Tomatsu retrospective at the Japan Society:

Japan's pre-eminent photographer of the postwar era, Mr. Tomatsu is a master of a kind of redolent ambiguity that speaks both to his subject, which is life in Japan, and also to the nature of photography, which always shows tantalizingly more than it can explain. As photographers like William Klein, Garry Winogrand and Robert Frank defined their era in America, Mr. Tomatsu has defined his in Japan, but the work does something more than that, too.

Through Jan. 2 at the Japan Society
333 East 47th Street
(212) 832-1155

I swung by the Robert Mann gallery last weekend to see the new show by Dutch photographer Wijnanda Deroo. Mann's tastes seem to frequently intersect with mine, so shows there are usually a sure bet. Deroo's focus in this show is the ubiquitous "empty room" theme that is so popular this fall. Initially I dismissed the work, but my wife pointed out there is a distinct contrast between the rooms shots in Latin America and the middle American suburban homes. The lower class rooms are inhabited for the long term, with several generations passing through a home, each building up additions to the decoration. The middle American suburban home appears to have been decorated in a single flurry of activitiy, probably by a professional decorator. And they leave you wondering, "someone wanted it to look that way?" Of course, there's an element of exoticism in the Latin American rooms, but still...

Through Nov. 13 at Robert Mann Gallery
210 11th Avenue
(212) 989-7600

Candida Höfer was one the last of the major contemporary German art photographers (Gursky, Struth, Hutte, etc.) I had not seen in person. Thomas Ruff is the other. Last year I'd seen a single photo at the Sonnabend gallery, one of a deep red themed theater and I was eager to see a larger selection of images. Unfortunately, my weekend gallery crawl included a trip to see Hofer's show at Sonnabend was mostly a disappointment. Most of the images are bland and undistinguished rooms in me-to European palaces. The photos lack sharpness I would expect as matter of course. In one photo, Höfer is seen reflected in a mirror shooting these large schale images with a medium format camera mounted on a very high tripod, which may have contributed to the shake. The one room devoted to her tried and true theme of libraries and book collections was the most interesting of the bunch.

Sonnabend is always an interesting place to visit because they've always got a grab bag collection of inventory lying around one room. I was introduced to a stunning photo by Elger Esser today (below). Amazing in person, much darker and, of course, printed in giant size.

The next time I complain that Sonnabend Gallery has no Web site, remind me they're using an artnet site instead of their own domain.

“Why can’t a corpse be beautiful?” asks Japanese fashion photographer Izima Kaoru. He explores the answer in a series of photographs entitled “Landscapes with a Corpse,” currently on display at Von Lintel Gallery. The photos are more striking than I’d expected from such a thin premise, but ultimately the effect Kaoru creates somes off as contrived and, ultimately, unnecessary. Based on the three folios available at the gallery, Kaoru has been mining this empty shaft for quite some time.

The show contains four semi-narratives, each showing a stylishly dress model lying in a position approaching that of mock death, though only successfully in one series. The first room is dominated by several large scale prints centered on the color yellow. The presence of the model seems superfluous. Without her inert presence, staring blankly into the ceiling, I might have thought this guy was an acolyte of Gursky or Burtynsky. The second room presents the other three series in smaller prints, each, again, using a simple, saturated color scheme and models playing dead. Perhaps what makes Kaoru’s work fall short is that his subjects, despite the word “corpse” in the title, aren’t actually dead at all. Of course, that hasn’t stopped others from attempting the same thing, perhaps to better effect. Take David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, for instance. The image of Laura Palmer wrapped in plastic, blue from blood loss and hair seductively wet, was an early 90s icon, particularly in Japan.

The mixture of beauty and death actually has a long history within photography and at least Western culture. Kaoru adds little to the pile. Waaaaay back in the day of daguerreotype and tintype photography, when children died at a much higher rate than today, it was not uncommon for grieving parents to have a portrait made of their dead child as a memento mori. Certainly, for them, there was a sense of beauty in those images of actual corpses, even if they only appeared to be sleeping. It's possible that this practice fell out of favor as families in America shrunk and dispersed, making personal experiences with death rare and more likely to be associated with a grim end. That's just conjecture. There's a whole weird subculture interested in this 19th C. and early 20th C. phenomenon, but also some serious scholarship.

Luc Delahaye's 2001 image "Taliban" poses the question “why can’t a corpse be beautiful” more strikingly. The large scale print was snapped up by major collectors and museums almost as soon as it became available. The image is a large-format picture of a dead Taliban militant lying in a ditch somewhere in Afghanistan. The composition and color are unmistakably meant to bring a refined aesthetic quality to the image, beyond a simple photojournalistic recording of one man’s death. In fact, following the ensuing controversy over this photo, Delahaye has redefined himself as an artist and not a photojournalist. So, why do we feel is okay to treat this person’s death as an object of collecting? What are the factors that turned a dusty corpse into something to hang on the walls of LACMA and generate $90,000 for the “artist.” For an attempt at an explanation, check out the Village Voice, though it strikes me as self-justifying gibberish.

Finally, despite having said all that, it was a thought provoking show, more because of ideas outside the images than inside them, though.

Through Nov. 13 at Von Lintel Gallery
555 West 25th St.
(212) 242-0599

The series is available as a $30, 88 page book, as well.

The Photo Review is holding a benefit auction on November 6, but online bidding is now open. The photos available run the range of photographic expression, in style, subject and media - landscapes, portraits, still life, vintage, contemporary, color, black and white, straight, heavily manipulated, you name it. Some highlights:

George Hurrell's photo of Jean Harlow that is hanging in college dorm rooms all over the country.

Michael Kenna: "Ratcliffe Power Station"

August Sander: "The Painter", one of the less interesting portraits, in my opinion.

An unusual Willliam Wegman dog shot, unfortunately already sold.

A sample of the auction photographs is on view from Oct. 12-14 at Sarah Morthland Gallery
511 West 25th Street, Suite 709
(212) 242-7767

Via DC Art News

Head down to Jen Bekman gallery for tonight's opening reception for Tema Stauffer's show "American Stills". I mentioned Tema Stauffer in a post earlier this year about Minnesota photographers. Stauffer's work makes vivid use of color, both highly saturated and concentrated, in both night and day scenes. The Bekman gallery is quite small, so the show extends into the nearby Public restaurant.

If you can't go tonight, call ahead. The Web site lists hours Tues-Sat, but the invite I got says Tues-Thurs.

The opening reception is tonight, Oct. 12th, in two parts:
At the gallery: 6-8pm
At Avro|KO/PUBLIC: 8-9:30pm

Through Nov. 13 at Jen Bekman gallery
6 Spring St. (between Elizabeth & Bowery)
(212) 219-0166

and

Avro|KO / Public restaurant
210 Elizabeth St. (between Spring & Prince)

Okay, the Art Blog Survey results are in. I haven't had time to analyze the results in detail, but I wanted to make a quick post relating some of high level findings. Nearly 200 people were kind enough to fill out the short survey, so thanks to all of you who did.

Of most personal interest, 12% of respondents said they visit Gallery Hopper daily or weekly. I'm hoping increased post frequency will boost that number since 34% said they were Very Interested in photography.

Probably the most striking result, for me at least, was that 54% of respondents identified themselves as a working art professional - museum, gallery, critic, working artist. I would have expected more students in the audience - only 5% of respondents.

While I didn't find it unusual to see that 89% of respondents had at least a 4-year degree, I was a little surprised to see the age range skewing higher, with 33% over 40. Not a single respondent was under 18, which is disappointing, but maybe not surprising.

As expected, there were several comments about the East Coast/American skew of the survey, which I expected. Yes, the publicization of the survey was made through primarily American blogs, most of which are based on the East Coast. That's a grain of salt to be taken with the results. 33% of respondents identified themselves as from the US Northeast and a whopping 77% are urban residents.

A few choice comments:

"I am disappointed with your inclusion of just "traditional fine art" blogs in this survey. Art includes contemporary craft and not just the monarchial NYC and LA art scenes." With this blog, at least, I'm trying to keep it local. That I live in NYC is an accident of history.

"Would love more info about emerging artists and smaller galleries."

"My biggest problem with most art blogs is that they don't post enough." I have been trying to pick up the pace around here, at least.

"Todd kicks ass." I wish I could believe you were talking about me, but I'm sure this comment was directed at Todd Gibson.

From the Floor has other, high-level results.

More to come...

I'm not sure what to make of this. The Stephen Cohen Gallery in Los Angeles (?!) has organized the First New York International Photographic Art Exhibition, or Photo New York for short, which starts on Thursday and extends through the weekend. How this will be better or different from the AIPAD show held each February, I'm not sure. I looked down the list of galleries showing and recognized only one or two. Certainly, my mental gallery catalog is limited, but I would expect to see one or more high profile galleries in the list.

Nonetheless, Larry Fink and Joel-Peter Witkin will be speaking and there will be what appears to be an interesting panel discussion about the development of the photography book. At first I thought this was a weak discussion topic until I realized that books are the medium through which the majority of us experience most art photography and always have been.

Witkin's photo on the Web site is ridiculously self-serious.

The First New York International Photographic Art Exposition
October 14 –17, 2004
Metropolitan Galleries
125 W. 18th Street (btwn 6th and 7th)

A special preview of photo new york 2004 will be held at the Lyons Wier Gallery at 511 W. 25th Street #205, through October 30

Don't forget, you've only got until Sunday to fill out the Art Blogs Reader Survey created by Todd Gibson over at From the Floor. If you're a left-leaning anti-establishmentarian and don't want to fork over your personal info, check out Franklin Einspruch's fiery rant about an art blogging revolution over at artblog.net. Otherwise, launch that survey and start clicking radio buttons.

If you already filled it out, then, thank you.

It's been a while since I've been able to venture out to the galleries. Aiming to sneak away this weekend and see something. Perhaps that's why I have been stuck on short little posts. Not the case elsewhere.

Robert over at Coincidences has been burning up the keyboard with a variety of great posts on a whole slew of up-and-coming photographers, as well as discussing the mix of commercial and fine art sensibilities. Also a good post on the death (and life) of Richard Avedon, including links to the major obituaries.

Stacy Oborn's blog, the space between, has a nice post on Masahisa Fukase and how personal experiences are expressed through photographic themes. I had the opportunity to see some of Fukase's "ravens" pictures at the Victoria & Albert Museum in late 2001, unfortunately before I knew what I was looking at.

If you 've got a spare $6 million lying around and a serious jones for high risk, there's a daguerreotype of a young Ulysses S. Grant for auction on eBay that's waiting just for you. Starting bid is $6 million, so who knows how high it could go? No bids, yet, probably for good reason. The highest comparable sale I could find on Google was a collection of 250 early American prints by the team of Southworth & Hawes that was auctioned by Sotheby's for $3.3 million in 1999. I don't feel confident that this is actually the record for photography sales, so if you know of anything higher, leave a comment.

I really should have posted this earlier this week, but today Mitch Epstein will be signing copies of "Family Business," the folio for his show currently at Yancey Richardson gallery through October 16th. Two years ago, Epstein received a Guggenheim Fellowship for this work, which combines photography with video and multimedia. Many of his images exude the same oddball squalid despair seen in Alec Soth's Sleeping by the Mississippi.

The Guggenheim Fellowship Web site is hilariously bad. I found it amusing that the stipends are open to applicants in all fields "except the performing arts." Why make that one exception? Not that I disagree with it - I'm no fan of plays, musicals or dance - but it seems peculiarly mean to make one kid go sit in the corner like that while everyone else eats cake.

Book signing at noon, Oct. 2
Yancey Richardson Gallery
535 W. 22nd St
(646) 230-9610

Andy Grundberg has been kept busy writing photographers' obituaries, unfortunately.

My wife and I went to see Avedon's retrospective at the Met in 2002. I can't remember technically how the work was created, but most of the images were large format, black and white, with the exception of a handful of really big mural-sized prints and two sets of 8x10s worked into a grid, much how the Bechers displayed their typographies. These grid presentations were the best parts of the show. The larger pieces had to be absorbed one at a time and one after another. By the time you reached the end of a wall, they began to feel gimmicky. But the smaller, grid format allowed you to survey a large array of mostly political portraits and make comparisons between the likes of Kissinger, Reagan, Tip O'Neal, etc.

I have frequently complained about the New Yorker's incessant publication of Avedon photos in each week's issue. I am unfamiliar with the magazine prior to, say, 1996, so, I was not aware of what a novelty photography in the magazine was, nor did I realize until just a few months ago that Avedon was the magazine's photo editor. Still, I think the magazine would've been better served to use the talents of other, less well-known (and less wealthy) photographers. Now, I suppose, they will have no choice.