Recently in Color photography Category
Nicolai Howalt and Trine Søndergaard: How to Hunt
Thru Jan 12
Silverstein Photography
535 West 24th Street
(212) 627-3930
Michael Kenna: New York / New Work
Thru Jan 26
Robert Mann Gallery
210 11th Ave
(212) 989-2947
Christopher Rauschenberg: Daily Life
Thru Jan 19
Peer Gallery
West Chelsea Arts Building
526 West 26th Street
(212) 675-9082
Luis Gisbert: El Mundo Es Tuyo (The World Is Yours)
Jan 12 - Feb 16
Zach Feuer Gallery
530 W 24th St
(212) 989-7700
Tamir Sher: After Mars
Thru Jan 5
Point of View Gallery
638 West 28th Street
(212) 967-3936
O. Winston Link: Constructed Images
Thru Jan 12
Danziger Projects
521 West 26th Street
(212) 629-6778
Bart Michiels: The Course of History: The Mediterranean Theater
Jan 10 - Feb 16
Foley Gallery
547 W 27th St, 5th floor
(212) 244-9081
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The results are virtually seamless color and black-and-white images that in "LS" resemble Romantic paintings and in "S" severe architectural studies. Both impress viewers on the elementary level of how the artist did them, and that is supposed to get us to forget how when this sort of thing was done before it was ridiculed and eventually swept away by the masters of modern photography.It's good to see someone else has noticed that all this digital montage work is just a quicker, easier, more seamless version of something that's gone on from nearly day one of photography.
Beate Gütschow: LS/S
Through Jan 10 at the Museum of Contemporary Photography
600 S. Michigan Ave.
Chicago, IL
(312) 663-5554
(Hey, admission is free!)
Italian photographer Paolo Ventura is interviewed in the latest update (issue?) to FStop online magazine. Ventura does a lot of commercial magazine editorial work, but this interview focuses on his tableaux work. Ventura is becoming well known for his photographs of action figures reenacting World War II-era scenes - but notably, not combat.
In contrast to the Lori Nix interview from a few days ago, Ventura works in a looser style than Nix, working out the camera angles as the diorama comes together and using common household table lamps for lighting. He also builds the miniatures himself, whereas Nix uses a "fabricator".
Doing a little research on Paolo, I found he'd also done the project "Dress for Eternity", a documentary project about the catacombs of in Palermo, Sicily. Strangely, that work is difficult to find online and isn't even on Ventura's own site. The two subjects and styles are so different, I never would have made the connection otherwise.
Part 1 of an exploration of "the deadpan style", contrasting the work or Stephen Shore and Andreas Gursky. Uses a slide-show essay format, which I don't find completely satisfying and seems to be only used to drive additional ad impressions. Slate does the same thing.
Today's NY Times contains an article about a couple of newly discovered autochromes created by Edward Steichen. Always a little bizarre to see what was previously a black and white mental image revealed in color.
Christian Patterson has been doing a great series on the history of color photography, including the evolution of the autochrome.
Michael Kimmelman (I thought he was leaving?) has reviewed the new Stephen Shore show, Biographical Landscapes, being held at ICP.
The show is wonderful. Mr. Shore, who now teaches at Bard College, reprinted the photographs digitally, with rejuvenated colors as fresh and subtle as the day the pictures were shot. The work’s laconic eloquence speaks of an era and a nation. Its wit and affection add buoyancy to scenes of threadbare America from a moment when the country was depressed by war and years of civil unrest. Its formal rigor makes an uncanny order out of images that, at first glance, look like no place or nothing.
Interesting that the prints are new, not vintage, for the reason of "rejuvenating" the original color. How can anyone know what that means? My understanding is that color degrades relatively quickly, so it's up to memory to tell what the original color looked like. And haven't we replaced our memory with the photograph? Start chasing your tail...
Jerry Saltz's review of the new Andreas Gursky show at Matthew Marks is in this week's New York Magazine.
Gursky is still trying to render purring pre-9/11 space, where commerce ticked along without an undercurrent of fear. But his rigor and criticality have been replaced by grandiosity and theatricality; figures feel frozen; compositions are stagy; structure devolves into carpetlike pattern. Gursky’s new pictures are filled with visual amphetamine, but now they’re laced with psychic chloroform.
I have not yet seen the show. I probably won't. Saltz's review was almost, in my opinion, inevitable. It's hard to keep topping yourself, particularly when you basically defined the current epoch of photography. Reinvention is no picnic. Nor particularly lucrative.
But the increasing prevalence of digital manipulation in photography, beyond digital darkroom techniques (a blurry line, of course), brings photography closer and closer to painting and, consequentially, loses the distinctive qualities that separate photography from other media.
I have been driving my wife crazy with the photography-oriented movies I've littered across our Netflix queue. I reviewed the first, War Photographer, a few weeks ago. I was looking forward to William Eggleston in the Real World but it sat unwatched on the TV cabinet for two months. We popped it in the other night and after watching the first 20 minutes or so, I fell asleep on the couch.
First, I had to get past the technical problems of the film. The video quality and audio recording are pretty poor, the audio so bad it occasionally requires subtitles for normal conversation. About five minutes in you can start to ignore that and focus on what's happening, a silent recording of Eggleston at work. This reminded me of War Photographer in a way, where you see from the outside what the photographer is doing, but that is nothing at all like seeing through the viewfinder or understanding how he frames the pictures or quickly makes technical adjustments to bring the image into a semblance of what's in his mind's eye for the shot.
After the first 15 minutes or so, the film leaves this mode and follows Eggleston into some stupefied interactions with his local friends and that's where my mind wandered away. One amazing insight from this initial interaction is that Eggleston is completely assured of his own excellence. He is satisfied with his work. He describes a recent project as the best work he's ever done. I found that astonishing.
Long, long interview with landscape photographer and sometimes photojournalist Simon Norfolk. over at the architecture blog BLDGBLOG. Rambling interview covers current political ramifications of war coverage, efficacy of photojournalism, the impact of military activities on our daily lives even in the most innocuous ways. The guy's a bit sour, as you can detect from this quote:
I got fed up with the clichés of photojournalism, with its inability to talk about anything complicated. Photojournalism is a great tool for telling very simple stories: Here's a good guy. Here's a bad guy. It's awful. But the stuff I was dealing with was getting more and more complicated – it felt like I was trying to play Rachmaninoff in boxing gloves.
Take a look at Norfolk's work. I like it, but it certainly isn't "more and more complicated" in terms of explaining the effects or contributing factors to a war than traditional photojournalism. Mostly it's an after action report, beautiful, but far from impacting the causes or closures of war. Result of burnout? Maybe. I imagine it's tough to be constantly engaged as a caring observer in some of the most hopeless situations the world sees and the urge to find something beautiful in all that mess is probably a powerful one.
Over at his blog, Alec Soth has been talking a lot about underrated photographers lately. In his post about Denis Cameron, he quotes Cameron: "Our work is to record our world and history will judge us from what we leave behind. Pictures will be our epitaph.”
Last week's New Yorker featured a profile of Jerry Shore, a photographer unknown to me and a great many other people apparently. Few friends or acquaintances knew of his photography and he sold only one image in his life. Now, 12 years after his death, his prodigious, but unknown, output truly serves as his epitaph.
