Top 10 for 2004
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.
