Out of town: January 2006 Archives
Tyler Green is posting a series on architectural photographer Julius Schulman over the course of the coming days. The first bit is up on Modern Art Notes now. The Getty's Schulman retrospective closes on Sunday.
I initially had a muted response to Sarah Pickering's US debut show. At first glance there is little to recommend the series of mock explosions in terms of framing, printing, technique, etc. (I say "mock" because though the explosions are very real, they are practice pyrotechnics used in military and police training.) Upon further reflection, the choice of subject is weightier than I'd first considered.
Large Maroon by Sarah Pickering
Blake Gopnik's review in The Washington Post is mostly about explosions and little about the photographs themselves. What immediately came to my mind upon seeing the images were Dr. Harold Edgerton's strobe-lit abstracts of milk droplets and rifle bullets. A little investigation shows Edgerton also did some work on explosions, though his subjects were a bit bigger than Pickering's.
In the case of Edgerton's best known work, the value of the images lean heavily on making what is unseen seen - a milk drop frozen in time faster than the eye can understand or a playing card shredded by a speeding bullet. Likewise, Pickering's photographs freeze the destructive force of an explosion into a blooming sculpture of fire and smoke. In the larger images such as the one above, the explosions feel small and manageable in the expanse of the proving ground. These images do not, however, bring us closer to an understanding of war. On a different level, Pickering's photos harken back to some of the earliest photographs - still life of reproductions of classical masterpieces. They are a representation of a representation, distancing us a further generation from the original subject - the explosion of landmine or a napalm blast.
Through Feb 25 at Daniel Cooney Fine Art
511 W 25th St, #506
(212) 255-8158
Hot on the heels of last week's Times article about gifting private collections comes the news that Hallmark's corporate photography collection numbering some 6500 prints by 900 American photographers has landed at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, the location of Hallmark's headquarters office. The acquisition is a combination gift & purchase from Hallmark. I'm still trying to figure out why it wasn't a full-on gift and required some portion to be purchased, but the Byzantine strictures of corporate giving are frequently beyond fathom. The collection will be featured in new galleries specifically designed and designated to the exhibition of photography scheduled to be opened in 2007. Hallmark's collection is nearly as large as the Gilman Paper Collection that the Met acquired last May, though Hallmark's collection covers the full history of photography while the Gilman collection focuses mainly on the first century.
The collection was published in book form in 1999.
