February 2005 Archives

eBay and American Photo magazine are holding an auction of photographs and photographic equipment donated by high profile phototographers such as Ron Haviv, James Natchwey, Rick Sammon, Patrick McMullen, Steve McCurry. Current high bid is for a Canon lens used by Robert Clark of National Geographic to capture the second plane hitting the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. That's followed by a 1971 George Kalinsky photo of Ali and Frazier, signed by all three.

Check out the full list of participants and items up for auction. Make it quick, though, the auctions end March 2nd.

If you're free Wednesday night, you may want to check out a panel on "great unknown photographers" at the New School. Off the top of my head Atget seems to be the greatest to fall into this category. ICP has an exhibit on E. J. Bellocq, who would also seem to be a great photographer made famous much after his film was first exposed. (Note, the show ends Feb. 27th) This is just my conjecture, however. It'll be interesting to see who the panel judges as great unknowns. It's a free event.

Falling Through the Cracks: Photography by Great Unknowns
Wednesday, Feb. 23 at 7PM
Parsons School of Design Tishman Auditorium
66 W. 12th St., between 5th & 6th Aves

It's about time I actually talked about some photography again.

If you're real quick, you can catch Kim Keever's show at Feigen Contemporary which ends this Saturday. Keever's phantasmagoric landscapes are completely manufactured in his studio, yet are remeniscent of both American landscape painting of the 19th century and 1950s science fiction films. His photography fits in a cluster of recent shows featuring staged miniatures, including Thomas Allen's pulp fiction project, Corinne May Botz's "The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death", and Sarah Anne Johnson's "Tree Planting" which was recently covered in the Village Voice. Lori Nix is another photographer mining this vein. Nix's latest project, "Lost", will open at Alona Kagan Gallery in June.

Check out Keever's studio set-up.

Through Saturday, Feb. 19, at Feigen Contemporary
535 West 20th St.
(212) 929-0500

Christie's is holding an auction of primarily vintage photography today. View highlights or browse the catalog.

The usual suspects are all there, plus a smattering of contemporary or late-20th C. photographers like Vik Muniz, Robert Adams, Jerry Uelsmann, and William Wegman. Estimates run from $100 for various show catalogs through $30k for an Alfred Eisenstadt. I'd considered making a run for a Robert Adams shot at the low end of that range but the image just didn't strike the Mrs. quite right. Would have been my first real purchase, but it's just not the right image.

Over at greg.org, there's an amusing and thought-provoking analysis of the much ballyhooed $20 million figure bandied about as the cost for "The Gates".

"Whatever the Christos' can convince their accountants--and the IRS--to accept, more power to'em. Given that they've set up their practice as a professional corporation whose core competency is persuading bureaucracies to allow them to do massive, nonsensical things, maybe their accounting practices are a conceptual--or absurdist--art work themselves."

Whoa, look out. Christo and Jean-Claude are rather adamant that their work is not conceptual art, which one would assume extends to their accounting practices. Plus I'm not sure that Greg has taken into account Christo's claim that he works 17-hour days, 7 days a week.

Erik's "A View From the Edge of the Universe," down Atlanta way, provides a summary of the going rates for various contemporary photographers recently featured in London auctions. (I think. There are no links to the price sources.) About 1/2 the photographers listed are of the German persuasion. I suspect Candida Hofer is getting increased attention because she's an inexpensive entry to work from the Dusseldorfer circle rather than stand alone interest in her work.

I try not to post too much, or think too much, about blogging itself. Art is too full of navel gazing exercises already, but it's human nature to be self-absorbed. ArtForum and its ilk are the usual targets of online derision of "old media." The same distraction afflicts the design community it seems. Check out this great comment thread over at the AIGA blog in response to the posting "Blogs vs. Mags" by Steven Heller, the art director of the The New York Times Book Review. Heller is defending print, but has this to say about blogging's growth:

"Despite a few insufferable rants, blog content is now often as sophisticated and informative as any design magazine, sometimes even more entertaining. Blogs have also proven that, unlike newsgroups, the writing is not entirely unedited and can be quite complex. For that matter, not all print periodicals, despite extended lead times and editing staff, are always well edited."

The post and discussion are specific to the reading and writing habits of the design community but the art world is not so different in terms of its left-leaning, bloated sense of self-importance.

The Association of International Photography Art Dealers' annual show starts tomorrow, Feb. 10. I attended the show last in 2003 and am considering another visit this weekend. As has been discussed elsewhere, shows like these are great opportunities to quickly introduce yourself to a ton of great work. Plus, you get a fat, 360-page exhibitor guide full of high-quality glossy reprints of a range of photographers' work being shown by the 70+ galleries in attendance, more than half of which are from outside New York. Three lectures/panels will be held over the weekend, one on the great photography collections in the mid-west (where a lot of great photography is coming from these days), and tributes to Henri Cartier-Bresson and Hellen Gee, both of whom died last year.

It's $30 for the whole shebang, $20 for one day only (probably all you'd need.)

AIPAD Photo Show
Hilton New York
53rd St and 6th Ave

Andrea Rosen Gallery is showing Richard Avedon's last project, 'Democracy', in conjunction with 'The Family', a project he completed in 1976. Avedon suffered a fatal brain hemorrhage while photographing 'Democracy' for The New Yorker, so it remains an unfinished project. The prints being shown are smaller than you might expect from him, perhaps 8x10s. This, from Avedon, is the size I prefer and the gallery has chosen to hang the series in two long chains, one stacked atop the other. This is simultaneously reminiscent of and divergent from the typological, “Becher-style” presentation of images from "The Family" in the Met's 2003 retrospective. Both projects appear on the surface, through straight-on poses and stark white backgrounds, to implicitly be documentary, but Avedon never really did documentary photography. His stated style was to capture in a subject that quality which he himself wanted to communicate through the image, not some objective reflection of the subject's essence. I assume this is a result of his early work for magazines (or even earlier experiences) and having to fulfill on a theme or the instruction of a creative director. Thus his work was always an act of creation rather than witness. (Oddly, nowhere on the Web was I able to find good examples from 'The Family".)

Through Feb. 18th at Andrea Rosen Gallery
525 West 24th Street
(212) 627-6000