Top 10 for 2005

Like last year, I have to note that this is a purely personal list, the volume of great work that passes through NYC each year is enormous and my free time for gallery visits is severely limited. That said, here's my top picks for the year.

10 Kim Keever at Feigen Contemporary
Keever’s smoky dioramas explore the visual language of the 19th century, a time when the chores traditionally serviced by painting began to be transferred to the camera.

9 Robbert Flick at Robert Mann and Gallery 339
Unknown to me until this year, Flick’s various projects got well deserved exposure on both coasts and served as a personal inspiration in my own work.

8 Thomas Allen at Foley Gallery
Allen’s macro photography using pulp novels and other printed material brings a sense of humor to the often dour-faced gallery scene.

7 Justine Cooper at Kashya Hildebrand
Showing the inner workings of the American Museum of Natural History, Cooper’s photographs of bottled specimens and stuffed animals mirror the suspended animation of a photograph – freezing life into a semblance of its former animation.

6 Thomas Struth at Marianne Goodman
Struth makes the audience his subject, leaving the artistic object off-frame. Any artist would be proud to elicit the wide mouthed gaping David draws, even after several hundred years.

5 David Maisel at Von Lintel
Maisel’s aerial study of the life and death of California’s desert lakes are so astonishingly colored you might suspect some dark room trickery. But the straight approach renders the abstraction all the more stunning.

4 Clifford Ross at Sonnabend
I didn't get a chance to write up this show, but Ross’s Mountain series is a technical tour de force. The largest of large-scale color prints, Ross demonstrates an amazing mastery of light, particularly in the two major triptychs in this show.

3 Stephen Shore at PS1
I must own up to having not actually seen this show, but Shore’s work was ever-present this year and his American Surfaces is an important contribution to American photographic arts. At the very least, every photoblogger is his spiritual child. (This opinion is based on the photos I saw at Edwynn Houk Gallery.)

2 Edward Burtynsky at Brooklyn Museum of Art
Burtynsky’s documentary work of China’s explosive expansion into a global economic superpower perfectly matches style and subject. The eco-theme of previous work is a subtext here, and Burtynsky has unconsciously transformed himself into a sort of Lewis Hine.

1 The Daguerreotypes of Southworth & Hawes at International Center of Photography and George Eastman House
The vivid, brilliant photographs in this show open a window on another time, one of the best goals of photography – illuminating the lives of others separated from you by time, distance or culture. ICP did a masterful job hanging the daguerreotypes which are notoriously difficult to view.

Compare this list with last year’s top 10. Feel free to list your picks/pans in the comments.