December 2004 Archives

The "found photograph" genre seems to be getting renewed interest these days, with two recent exhibits of Hans-Peter Feldmann's work here in NYC as good examples. The whole "flickr" phenomenon of photographs uploaded by different individuals and then browsed by tagged categories is perhaps the most modern expression, even if it's not deliberately a collection of "found" photographs.

Additionally, the beauty of found photography often comes from the age of the photos and the forced distance between ourselves, the anonymous photographers and the photos' subjects. Minor White is quoted as saying, "By photographs that found themselves do I mean the 'lucky or happy accident'? That is one name for it. 'Happy accident' is a name that I ought not to mention because many an extraordinary snapshot is passed off lightly with this appellation instead of being explained. I do mention it because it is a term of helplessness in the face of a photograph that is a freak, a sport in a man's work-unexplainable, so unsought for, so unaccountable that it is almost embarrassing."

Mirrors. Photographs from the Arkansas State Prison 1915-1937.

I was flipping through the channels the other day and landed on C-SPAN. They were showing a repeat of an "in-depth" interview with Susan Sontag from early 2003. I thought that was weird, but stopped and watched it for a while. I've just finished Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others which is an excellent and timely book, prescient in so many respects as we are now saturated with painful photography. Turns out they were running that show in relation to her death. She discussed her two previous bouts with cancer during the interview.

I've been on vacation, so this post is late to the table. Best list of links to Sontag obits is on Arts & Letters Daily.

Ah, it's that time of the year again, the time for making arbitrary lists of the best of what have you. Despite having only sampled but a smidgen of the photo work showing in New York this year, here's my personal list of the year's best. (Note, just because a work was originally shown elsewhere prior to 2004, I still count it as 2004 if it was shown in NYC this year. So, my 2005 list will likely include the Roger Fenton show that's currently at the National Galleries in DC, since it'll show at the Met this coming spring.) In reverse order:

10) Loretta Lux at Yossi Milo
Most high profile practitioner of new merger of digital technologies and photography. Not seamless, but an emotional, sensory, unsettling tug nonetheless.

9) Beate Gütschow at Danziger Projects
More examples of the effect of digital tools on the photographer, working in the tradition of multiple exposure, dark room manipulation and collage. Seamlessness nearly achieved. The rejoining merger of photography and painting is on the horizon.

8) Lisa Kereszi and Andrew Moore - Governor's Island: Lost and Found at Municipal Art Society
Fine addition to the abandoned environmental landscape niche genre, plumbed by the likes of Robert Polidori, Stanley Greenberg, and a multitude of Ellis Island infirmary trespassers.

7) August Sander - People of the 20th Century at Metropolitan Museum of Art
Long awaited display of the seminal German typologies and the a significant influence on the idea that a photographic work is more than a single photograph. The single photograph without the larger context is nearly meaningless.

6) Richard Misrach - On the Beach at PaceWildenstein
Puts to rest the value of the large scale color print. The isolation, loneliness, solitude and pattern repetition represented in these photographs could not be achieved in a 8x10 print. Should the format fall completely out of favor in the coming years, this could be the last hurrah.

5) Edward Burtynsky - Before the Flood at Charles Cowles
This Canadian photographer continues to make striking landscapes across a range of thematically connected locations while impressing on each his personal style. Although I saw it in Ottawa last year, I'm looking forward to his retrospective arriving at the Brooklyn Museum of Art next Sept., expanded to include his new aerial work.

4) Michael Wesely - Open Shutter at Museum of Modern Art
For the first 50-70 years of photography, it was absolutely essential for a photographer embrace both the art and technology of the camera. Wesely's extreme long exposure photographs once again make the same embrace.

3) Dawn of Photography: French Daguerreotypes, 1839-1855 at Metropolitan Museum of Art
I attended this show shortly after completing the early chapters of Seizing the Light, a photo history textbook by Robert Hirsch. Viewing today's photography without an understanding of how we arrived at this point and what had been explored before is a dead endeavor. Almost all the themes, styles, genres we have today were explored by the early French pioneers (of course many were simply translated from painting.)

2) Alec Soth - Sleeping by the Mississippi at Yossi Milo
Soth's wonderful work has achieved breakthrough status, appearing virtually everywhere you turn.

1) Larry Sultan - The Valley at Janet Borden
While NYC seemed awash in porn-themed shows this year, Sultan's work documenting on location film shoots in the San Fernando Valley was the only one worth seeing for anything beyond simply prurient interest. "The Valley" generated the most interesting discussion between my wife and I of anything we saw this year as it touches on a range of issues from economics, domesticity, sexual roles, to the nature and definition of pornography. However, I can't imagine anyone putting this stuff up on the wall.

The Washington Post has selected its best photography for 2004. The choices repudiate claims by some that American media portray a one-sided, cheery view of the world and don't report what war really means. The photos focus primarily on Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan and the Israel-Palestine conflicts. Based on these photos one would gather that 2004 was a year of painful suffering, which for too many people, it was.

Grace Glueck has written a review of the Ralph Eugene Meatyard show at ICP in today's NY Times.

It struck me that Meatyard had such masterful teachers, really high profile guys who are now revered at photography gods. I think guys on that level were forced to do a lot of teaching because it was so much harder to make a living as a art photographer until only just recently. You don't see today's luminaries teaching as much.

Meatyards' variety of styles and subject matter was unusual compared to today, when an artist often finds a unique trope early in their career and then is encouraged to drive it into the ground. Meatyards mask-centric images are perhaps the most media-genic, and thus widely reproduced in articles about the show. Unfortunately, they point to easy, but wrongheaded, comparisons to Diane Arbus.

Todd Gibson has posted a great review of the Bechers' retrospective being shown at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Check it out at From the Floor.

The show closes Jan. 3rd, so book those tickets quick!

After seeing Robert's recommendation on Coincidences, I just subscribed to SHOTS, a quarterly photography magazine. Based on the sample images on their Web site, I think it'll be a good $20 investment, certainly a better value than Aperture (which has undergone a nice site redesign and is unexpectedly persistent about calling me to resubscribe. Change your politics and I'll be back.) And SHOTS takes PayPal, which is even better.

A few galleries are hauling out inventory to put on holiday group shows and Bonni Benrubi has used the occasion to publicize its new location with "57 on 57th street", a mix of old-time heavy hitters (Steiglitz, Abbott, Winogrand, Weegee) with contemporary artists the gallery represents. These shows can sometimes be a grab bag, but put together right, they're a great way to get a sense of the flow of themes, treatments, ideas, etc.

Through Jan. 15th at Bonni Benrubi Gallery
Fuller Building
41 East 57th St, 13th Floor (!!)
(212) 888-6007

Just got notice that the latest issue of AK47.tv is out. Five great contributions, nothing bad at all. Alec Soth's "Sleeping by the Mississippi" is included, and it's some great stuff, but I have to encourage you to go see the photos in person. Viewing his large scale prints on the Web is just not the same. Brian Ulrich's "COPIA" and Christian Patterson's "Kicks" are also well done somewhat documentary stuff. (There are more of Ulrich's COPIA photos on his Web site.) Kate Greenslade's "Fervour and Longing" has a narrative feel while Julian Thomas's "The Reconstructed Gaze" consists of a series of diptych landscapes.

Ralph Eugene Meatyard
Starts today
Through Feb. 27,2005 at International Center of Photography
1133 6th Ave.
(212) 857-0000

Joel Meyerowitz, "Work from the Sixties"
Through Jan. 8 at Ariel Meyerowitz Gallery
120 11th Ave., 2nd Floor
(212) 414-2770

Macduff Everton, "New work"
Through Jan. 8 at Janet Borden
560 Broadway
(212) 431-0166

Paul Pfeiffer, "Pirate Jenny"
Final week
Through Dec. 18 at Gagosian Gallery - Chelsea
555 West 24th Street, NY 10011 New York
(212) 741-1111

Lately I've been thinking if I could do this blog if I didn't live in New York, or even if I could maintain an avid interest in art and art photography in another city. To those of you who live elsewhere, that must sound completely retarded. But I've got a short attention span, so if something isn't in my face constantly, I lose focus.

Some confirmation of my thinking came from an unexpected source. Artnet's interview with LA-based artist John Baldessari has been linked on a couple of other blogs for his comments on the unwitting kitsch artist Thomas Kinkade. It's a loooong interview, and he also makes some comments about his decision not to move to New York:

ND: Did you feel like you wanted to be in New York because that was where more action was, and where more artists were?

JB: Probably, yeah. Probably, of course. You know it was the art center. I don't know if it is now. In one way you could say yes. In one way no. I think it still has the best museums. I think also art is more in your face there. You can't avoid it. Here you can, which is good because one gets a lot of work done that way.

If you read all the way through the interview, you'll come across a hint of why Sonnabend Gallery doesn't have or want to have a Web site. (Don't tell me they have an Artnet site. As we all know, that doesn't count.)

The hyper-exaggerated facial makeup, stylized posing and overemphasized but ambiguous sexuality in Morton Nilsson's photographs of professional ballroom dancers strikes me as a kind of European cousin to American pro wrestling. (Despite the two similar pics I grabbed above, Nilsson has not done a typology. The show's poses are a bit more varied.)

Through Dec. 18th at ClampArt
531 W. 25th St.
(646) 230-0020

Well, it appears that the NetJets ads in the NY Times paid off. The luxury jet rental co. made 10 times the trips to Miami it normally makes this time of year, assumedly for Art Basel Miami Beach. The Times has gone gossip...

"Some seasoned fairgoers grumbled at the shortage of top-quality works and the large number of photographs." The rubes.

I'm a little confused by the upper echelon, old school, private dealers who show "by appointment only." Why curate a show, let alone publicize it, if you have no intention of opening it up to the broader gallery-going public? I suppose there's a value in such exclusivity, but it doesn't serve me - which is the point perhaps. So, I guess I'm less 'confused' than 'put out'.

Nonetheless, if you're inclined, make an appointment to see Gerard Pertrus Fieret's work at Deborah Bell Photographs. Ms. Bell's got no proper Web site, but the collection is likely to be on par with what I found on the Gitterman site. Fieret, an 80-year-old Dutchman, is known for his montage-influenced printing processes and habit of handstamping the frontsides of his photographs with his studio contact info and then scrawling his signature - the horror! You might be able to discern an influence on Ellen von Unwerth, in the treatment of color and the mixing of sharp and fuzzy focus. A catalog is available, according to this iPhoto Central write-up (scroll down.)

Through Feb. 26th, '05 at Deborah Bell Photographs
511 West 25th Street, Room 703
(212) 691-3883

Perhaps a souvenir for all the Art Basel Miami attendees?

Two professors from my alma mater, NYU Stern, are mentioned in an article from today's NY Times about economic analysis of the art market. They and others studying art's economic aspects have come up with some rather interesting findings, including purchases of masterpieces tend to be poor investments. Since economics is basically the study of human choices, it might offer some insights into how we pick what we like.

"A persistently high demand for artistic innovation has produced a regime in which conceptual approaches have predominated," Mr. Galenson wrote in a paper. "The art world has consequently been flooded by a series of new ideas, usually embodied in individual works, generally made by young artists who have failed to make more than one significant contribution in their careers."

We can only hope for such a fate for some of the current superstars.

Via greg.org, on Dec. 3rd, the Tate Modern will hosting a (seven hour!!) live Webcast of their Robert Frank Symposia discussing the impact of his seminal work, The Americans. If you can't dedicate such a chunk of time, it'll be available later as a canned replay you can view at your leisure.