July 2005 Archives

Unknown Surfer, Pipeline, Oahu 1972 by Leroy Grannis

Of all the sports, surfing may have the strongest affinity to photography. Pick up any surfing magazine (or skateboarding, for that matter) and the thing is probably chock full of great photography and might even have a surf photo how-to article. The combination of waves' powerful scale juxtaposed with dinky, but skilled man lends itself to implicit commentary on both our insignificance and our deft control of nature. (It also lends itself to a lot of lazy work, but that's the hazard of dealing with overwhelming subjects.)

Just in time for these hazy-hot-humid days, Bonni Benrubi is showing Leroy Grannis' "Birth of a Culture: 60's and 70's Surf Photography". In his youth, Grannis dabbled in many of surfing's progenitor forms and started shooting in the 60s just as the sport picked up popular attention - well before camera technnology would make waterborne photography remotely easy.

Through Sept. 17 at Bonni Benrubi Gallery
Fuller Building
41 E. 57th St, 13th Flr
(212) 888-6007

Tyler Green alerted me to the fact that Forbes.com has included Gallery Hopper in its list of best art blogs, from its "Best of the Web" issue. Before my head gets too big, I have to point out that the list also includes Art Addict, which hasn't been updated in nearly a year. But honestly, Gallery Hopper is in great company...

Forbes' full review shows a detailed reading of this blog, commenting on posts that went up last week as well as last year.

There has been quite a bit of buzz over the public "beta" of the PhotoMuse site, a new online database expected to eventually offer the combined collections of the George Eastman House and the International Center of Photography, almost all of it glowing. Certainly the partnership holds a great deal of promise sitting on the foundation of these two institutions. I love the idea of exposing the collections publicly, but as long as the technical infrastructure is directed by ICP the project is likely to fall far short of its aims. I don't know for sure that ICP is guiding the technical work, but after spending a few minutes with the PhotoMuse site I detect the same fingerprints that have continually marred ICPs previously deeply flawed site. The GEH site is even worse. (While writing this entry I discovered that ICP has quietly launched a completely new Web site– vastly improved and solving almost every major flaw that had plagued the previous incarnation. Still, they fail to link to Gallery Hopper in their resources section, so there is room for improvement.) Granted the site is a prototype (and was crashed by the deluge of attention from the NY Times' coverage of the partnership on Wednesday) so hopefully there is time to get some simple but effective changes made:

1) Put the search function right on the homepage
There is no reason the search function should be buried three pages down at the end of a string of increasingly inscrutable and unnecessary links. This also would have alleviated the traffic problem by reducing the number of pages a user has to load to do a search (or would it? I suspect a fair number of visitors gave up looking for the collection before they stumbled upon it.)

2) Spend a day with other photo databases and steal their best features
Has anyone in this project used Getty or Flickr? Doesn't look like it. As it’s backed by non-profits, I suspect this project is hobbled by an overly academic approach that translates into snail’s-pace development and a design-by-committee ethos. (Also evident in monolithic corps like IBM.) Getty, as a for-profit, lives and dies by its visitor’s ability to find just the right image so its search and presentation capabilities are well refined. Flickr grew as a small grassroots site for public storage and display of photographs and has a wonderfully user-friendly interface - a perfect model for PhotoMuse.

3) Minimize the use of extraneous images and animation.
What is the need to spell out "PhotoMuse" with a series of large, individual graphics that reveal images from the collection on rollover? Nice idea, but the execution is botched and detracts from the point of the site – searching the database. One small logo would have done the trick. And that little accordion graphic that cryptically links to the search interface is the equivalent of a circa 1996 flaming logo. Lose it.

MAN has declared the St. Louis Arts Museum site to be the worst of major American museum Web sites. It might be ugly, but at least you can find what you’re looking for.

Many galleries use the summer lull while their high rollin' clients are in the Hamptons to show off a bit of the back catalog, but there are also thesis shows where you might be able catch a rising star before they're called up to the pro leagues. The MFA show at School of Visual Arts has some great work on display. A few of note:

Rachel Papo
Inspired by her own military experience, Papo documents the lives of Israel's female conscripts (seen above, but part of the ASMPNY Image 05 Competition show through 7/24). A nice bridge between Lauren Greenfield's continuing examination of American girls and Rineke Dijkstra's semi-longitudinal portraits of young soldiers (including Israelis.)

Chien-Hsing Jeff Liao
A portrait of Queens, NY, as defined by the route of the 7 train. Great wide-angle work, a bit of Bernice Abbott mixed with Stephen Shore.

Shuli Hallak
Soup to nuts on cargo container shipping. As a group, solid, with at least one mezmerising image (I'll leave it to you to guess which one.)

Through July 30th at Visual Arts Gallery
601 W 26th St, Suite 1502

Richard Misrach's At Sea series was highlighted in today's NY Times Magazine. Also known as "On the Beach", these images were taken from the 2004 show at Pace Wildenstein that made my 2004 top ten list. As I said then, the small scale of magazine reprint just doesn't do these large-scale prints justice.

Seems the paper-based photo magazine is making a comeback, following the explosion of online magazines last year. Print-on-demand capabilities seem to have become borderline affordable to do small-run issues.

JPG is probably the most high-profile amongst the photobloggers. Gomma has also gotten a lot of attention and 100% the proceeds go to charity. The sadly now defunct 28mm.org has posted a final issue, in print - for $39!. And though AK47.tv is proud to be "free and online. Saving paper." I wonder how long it will be until we see it in print, too.

Meant to comment on this a few days back. Seems Philip-Lorca diCorcia is being sued by one of the unwitting subjects of his photographic projects.

This reminds me a of a large scale Richard Misrach photo I saw last year, a photo of a European beach. There, front and center, was a topless woman lying face up in the foreground of the photo. I remember remarking to my wife "I wonder how that woman would feel if she walked into this gallery and found herself on the wall, spread out on the beach for every jackass to see?"

Summer shows are starting to crop up. Cheim & Read is showing "new" (not previously exhibited) work by William Eggleston from 1973, a series of large scale black and white portraits taken in Memphis nightclubs using a custom-built infrared camera. Very different from the color work that made Eggleston's name and builds upon last year's pre-color show, also at Cheim and Read. (I wish C&R would post actual photos on their site rather than pictures of the installation.)

UPDATE: Photos from the show. (Adobe PDF)

"Nightclub Portraits 1973"
Through Sept. 3rd at Cheim and Read
547 West 25 St (map)
(212) 242-7727

The travelling Burtynsky retrospective continues to snowball as it slowly makes its way to NYC. It's currently showing at the Stanford University's Cantor Arts Center. As befits the cradle of Silicon Valley, the Stanford site promoting the show is chock full of technology. The online pictures use a magnification gizmo that lets you zoom in and see exactly how crisp and detailed Burtyunsky's work really is. Not the same as seeing it up close, but kind of cool. The other thing is that each image online has an associated discussion thread. This actually is hard to replicate in a gallery space - an ongoing discussion of the work and its broader meaning in the world. Unless you have a really big circle of gallery-going friends.