Two from The Times: Gerda Taro at ICP and Kohei Yoshiyuki at Yossi Milo
This weekend's NY Times includes two photography show reviews. The first covers the Greda Taro show at ICP. Taro was a contemporary (and lover) of Robert Capa and photographed along side him and others during the Spanish Civil War. (ICP, like a lot of photojournalists, has a Spanish Civil War fetish and is indulging itself now with another show on Capa and another by
Francesc Torres about Civil War atrocities.) Taro was killed during the fighting at the age of 26.
The second is Peter about Yossi Milo's exhibition of Kohei Yoshiyuki's infrared photos of the night denizens of a Japanese park from the 1970s where couples would meet to have clandestine hook-ups and lonely men would gather to secretly watch them. Interestingly, the review opens with what only now strikes me as an obvious reading of the work, that is our own voyeurism in looking at people looking at people having sex in the park. Not sure why that hadn't jumped out at me before. I suppose I was too busy pointing my finger at the Japanese and writing this off as typical pervish behavior from a culture that's notoriously repressed. I should have been looking at the log in my own eye. Then there is the issue of surveillance, which we face more and more each day.
Interestingly, when the photos was first displayed in Japan in the 80s, they were blown up to lifesize, the gallery lights were turned off and attendees were given flashlights to find the work.
Just what history will make of Ms. Taro's newly robust story is too early to tell, said Naomi Rosenblum, an art historian and the author of "A History of Women Photographers."
"She died so young and her career was so short, her significance wasn't so much in photography -- though it was significant -- but can be attributed to the fact that a woman did go and involve herself in battlefield photographs," Ms. Rosenblum said. "Taro and Capa represent a sort of romantic vision of the stateless person involving themselves in terrible battles: the social battles, the political battles of the time."
The second is Peter about Yossi Milo's exhibition of Kohei Yoshiyuki's infrared photos of the night denizens of a Japanese park from the 1970s where couples would meet to have clandestine hook-ups and lonely men would gather to secretly watch them. Interestingly, the review opens with what only now strikes me as an obvious reading of the work, that is our own voyeurism in looking at people looking at people having sex in the park. Not sure why that hadn't jumped out at me before. I suppose I was too busy pointing my finger at the Japanese and writing this off as typical pervish behavior from a culture that's notoriously repressed. I should have been looking at the log in my own eye. Then there is the issue of surveillance, which we face more and more each day.
The raw graininess in Mr. Yoshiyuki's pictures is similar to the look of surveillance images, but there is an immediacy suggesting something more personal: that here is a person making choices, not a stationary camera recording what passes before it.
Interestingly, when the photos was first displayed in Japan in the 80s, they were blown up to lifesize, the gallery lights were turned off and attendees were given flashlights to find the work.
