June 2005 Archives

The latest show at ICP is a 19th century doozy, featuring the unmatched daguerreotype work of the 1850-60s Boston studio run by Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes. The duo specialized in commercial portraiture and I had the unique perspective of having my son’s portrait made at Sears the day before we visited this show. By all appearances, it seems little but talent and technology has changed in commercial portrait making over the course of 150 years. I highly recommend to anyone with the time to kill and the stomach for saccharine sentimentality that they predispose themselves to the show with a trip to a cheap, mass production portrait studio. You’ll be able to peer into the silver-toned plates and hear distinctly in your head the ghostly voices of Southworth and Hawes: “Here, lean on this. Now tilt your head that way. Good. No, a little bit more. Left. There. Hold.” Click.

The daguerreotype is a notoriously difficult print to see; one thing that makes this show so great is the dazzling presentation of the photos, each brightly illuminated by spot lighting. As they are more or less highly polished silver plates the daguerreotypes blaze to life in their gilt - gold frames. As I've mentioned before, there is no substitute for seeing photographs in person and this is particularly true with the daguerreotype. ICP’s lighting scheme makes this an even greater pleasure, highlighting the exquisite detail Southworth and Hawes were able to achieve with relatively crude technology.

Many of the conventions demonstrated in the portraits come straight from the practice of painted portraits, attempts to elevate what was seen by many as a purely mechanical process to the level of art. As the photography revolution gained steam and production costs dropped, the rash of daguerreotypists began driving the miniature portrait painters out of business. A good number of these painters switched over to photography and brought their posing methods with them. And we continue to suffer through sentimental, artificial backgrounds and an abundance of props every time we visit the commercial portrait studio.

Some show highlights include:

• A straight-on, nearly abstract shot of swirling frost patterns on a window
  
• Picture of Hawes taken late in life when afflicted by some sort of palsy, his head, bushy white beard and wild mane of hair rendered a blur by the time lapse daguerreotype exposure
  
• Photo of Hawes' wife sitting alongside her painted portrait. Shows the detailed reproductive qualities of the daguerreotype alongside paintings' ability to embellish reality (Ms. Hawes wasn’t a real looker.)
  
• A newspaper ad for the Southworth and Hawes studio showing a caricature of the sun painting the world’s portrait (cartoon metaphor for the mechanics of photography)
  

By the way, to anyone at ICP who might be reading this, images 147-151 are mislabeled.

The NY Times and New York have reviewed the show, but you should be sure to check Edward Winkleman's post last week about "Photography's Rise" for additional images.

Through Sept. 4 at the International Center of Photography
1133 6th Ave at 43rd St
(212) 857-0000

"When you are a child and you begin to notice art, what you most admire is accuracy and what is "lifelike". Then clever grown-ups tell you that this is simplistic, that painting is expressive, impressionist, conceptual, allegorical, etc, not just a way of showing what things look like which has now been superseded by the invention of photography."

Raiford by Christian Patterson

If you’re down Memphis way, check out Christian Patterson’s show Sound Affects at the “mini-Tate Modern” Power House gallery. Erik down at View from the Edge already picked up on this show while he was recently in Memphis. Christian has had the amazing opportunity to work with William Eggleston while developing his own style, one that features strikingly vivid color in even drab subjects.

In 2000, Patterson turned is back on New York (!) and the deflating dot-com bubble to work at the Eggleston Trust, a fortuitous turn of events that led to friendship with William Eggleton himself. Fortuitous, too, because otherwise Patterson might have ended up as just another photoblogger, albeit a particularly talented one. I say this because Eggleston and his contemporaries - Winogrand, Shore, Davidson et al - are really the spiritual fathers of the photoblogger aesthetic. So it is interesting that Patterson eschewed the digital trend and found himself on perhaps a richer path in Memphis, TN. (He hasn't however rejected NYC forever and plans to return to the city later his year.)

It’s surprising what amazing stuff you can find nestled in the small burghs of upstate New York. (Before anyone accuses me of being a big-city snob, you should know I’m originally from the middle of nowhere in Colorado.) For instance, last fall I stumbled across a finely done historical camera exhibit in the basement of the Glens Falls public library. And a week ago, I had the opportunity to visit a new photography show, The Material Image: Surface and Substance in Photography, at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz, about two-and-a-half hours’ drive north of NYC. It was absolutely worth the time to get up there.

Drawn from the museum’s own collection of over 1100 photographs plus the Center for Photography at Woodstock’s equally large collection, the show features 130 photographs spanning the entire history of photography and covering most, if not all, of the major and minor photographic processes. From a variety of different perspectives, curator Beth Wilson has created a unique opportunity to explore the concept of photograph as object, not just a surface for an image to play within or upon. Group shows are hard to pull off successfully. It is a rare photo that stands solidly on its own outside of a project or series, so finding enough such photos to fill out a whole exhibition is a real challenge for any curator. I'm glad to say there are many images here that stand solidly on their own.

The real question then becomes, do these images add up to a cogent commentary on "the material image"? It's hard not to be completely engulfed by the images' content itself - which is the very issue the show raises. Only those photos separated from our personal experience by the passage of time - and those that mimic them, such as the 1988 daguerreotype of Beaumont Newhall in this show - draw significant attention to their physical qualities as objects. The tangible nature of the photo was more clearly evident in the first decades of photography when pictures were encased in ornate little cases for safe keeping and denoting their value as mementos. Today, we are so bombarded with photographic imagery and creating photographs is second nature for so many people, we take their physical nature for granted. Every day we are exposed to literally hundreds of photographs, all of which encourage us to focus on the subject matter within the image. Perhaps only when digital display technology reaches a level of quality and pervasiveness that paper prints are no longer common will we recognize the last century's photographic output as objects along side the tintype or photogram.

The issue of photographs as art objects and the importance of seeing them in person rather than little Web graphics is one of the reasons I started this site. Looking at low resolution digital representations of photographs on a computer screen is no match for getting out and seeing the real thing in a gallery or a museum. For instance, in this show there is a technically amazing print by Kenro Izu, "Blue #1002B" that demonstrates the difficulty of representing photographs at reproductions (ironically). I don't fully understand the print process Izu used, but I do know the example above, from the same series, does no justice to the experience of seeing the physical print. Seems John Perrault's been thinking along the same lines lately.

Oddly enough, about the same time Beth Wilson contacted me about the SDMA show, I got a press release for a group show ('tis that time of year again) at Von Lintel gallery on this very same topic, the materiality of photographs, entitled "The Photograph in Question". Clever title.

Through Aug. 7 at Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art
SUNY New Paltz (you'll want a map)

Beehive Woodpile by John Coffer

Tin type photographer John Coffer is profiled in Wired. His dedication to 19th century photographic processes could be described as eccentric, but he's no poseur. He lives the 1860s lifestyle, catering to Civil War reenactors. Now he's caught the eye of New York collectors and is currently showing at Kerrigan and Campbell. The Wired article includes a link to "Razor", a short, looped movie made from 15 tintype prints. Just think what a pain that was to make.

I tend to dismiss alt process work because the novelty of the material is so strongly represented in the final work that it's often hard to discern whether the subject, technique and/or photographer's eye really is the draw. In this case, Coffer is adding something new in the same way as, say, Gursky. He's making really BIG tin types.

Through June 26 at Kerrigan + Campbell
317 E 9th St (btwn 1st & 2nd Ave)
(212) 505-7196

And people wonder why their camera-phone pictures are so cruddy.

If you can blearily read the light-gray text on a white background, check out the great interview with Jeff Wall over at Bridge magazine. I'm reading through Classic Essays on Photography and photographers rather than theorists write many of the essays from the first half of the collection. Wall seems to be in that vein, a photographer who thinks deeply and seriously about what he's doing. Still, in one instance he has to rein in his interviewer from heading off into inscrutable intellectual territory.

For those jet setters in the audience, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography is celebrating its 10th anniversary with a series of retrospectives collectively entitled "How Photography Changed People's Viewpoint." I'm sure it sounds more elegant in Japanese. The four shows, running back-to-back, each focus on a different stage in the development of photography, not only as an art form but also as a societal issue. The current show covers the period 1880-1940, a time of both significant technilogical advances of impassioned artistic innovation. As one would expect, there is a large showing of Japanese photography from this period presented alongside examples from Western masters. Check out the review in Daily Yomiuri for more info.

The third and fourth shows, "Reconstruction" and "Chaos", run from July 23 to Sept. 11 and Sept. 17 to Nov. 6 respectively. You'll have to know Japanese for more details, though. (Unfortunately I do not, and Google's Japanese translation definitely is still in beta.)

ArtNet has posted a review of the Photo-London photography fair held in late May. A quick scan of the site indicates it s was quite an action-packed event, much more "programmed" than the AIPAD show held here in NY each spring.

All aboard the podcasting bandwagon! I haven't completely figured out how this is supposed to work in an automated way, so you'll just have to download the link below and transfer it to your MP3 player by hand.

This first, test run podcast is a review/tour of the current Roger Fenton exhibit at the Met that I mentioned last week and went to see over the past weekend. It's about 20 minutes long and full of ums and uhs.

Roger Fenton podcast (14.4MB MP3)
Click the link to play in your browser, or to download:
Windows users: right click and select "save link as"
Mac users: Control-click and select "save link as"