Galleries: February 2005 Archives

It's about time I actually talked about some photography again.

If you're real quick, you can catch Kim Keever's show at Feigen Contemporary which ends this Saturday. Keever's phantasmagoric landscapes are completely manufactured in his studio, yet are remeniscent of both American landscape painting of the 19th century and 1950s science fiction films. His photography fits in a cluster of recent shows featuring staged miniatures, including Thomas Allen's pulp fiction project, Corinne May Botz's "The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death", and Sarah Anne Johnson's "Tree Planting" which was recently covered in the Village Voice. Lori Nix is another photographer mining this vein. Nix's latest project, "Lost", will open at Alona Kagan Gallery in June.

Check out Keever's studio set-up.

Through Saturday, Feb. 19, at Feigen Contemporary
535 West 20th St.
(212) 929-0500

Andrea Rosen Gallery is showing Richard Avedon's last project, 'Democracy', in conjunction with 'The Family', a project he completed in 1976. Avedon suffered a fatal brain hemorrhage while photographing 'Democracy' for The New Yorker, so it remains an unfinished project. The prints being shown are smaller than you might expect from him, perhaps 8x10s. This, from Avedon, is the size I prefer and the gallery has chosen to hang the series in two long chains, one stacked atop the other. This is simultaneously reminiscent of and divergent from the typological, “Becher-style” presentation of images from "The Family" in the Met's 2003 retrospective. Both projects appear on the surface, through straight-on poses and stark white backgrounds, to implicitly be documentary, but Avedon never really did documentary photography. His stated style was to capture in a subject that quality which he himself wanted to communicate through the image, not some objective reflection of the subject's essence. I assume this is a result of his early work for magazines (or even earlier experiences) and having to fulfill on a theme or the instruction of a creative director. Thus his work was always an act of creation rather than witness. (Oddly, nowhere on the Web was I able to find good examples from 'The Family".)

Through Feb. 18th at Andrea Rosen Gallery
525 West 24th Street
(212) 627-6000