Recently in Photographers 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 NY Times has a good article on the recent acquisition of the Arbus archives by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Unlike the belongings of artists who fade gradually from view, which are sometimes scattered, pilfered or lost, Arbus's effects were in some ways frozen in time when she committed suicide at 48. Quickly her life began to acquire a cult status paralleling that of her photography.

Whenever these "archives" show up, I'm astonished at what packrats people must have been. I'm pretty loathe to throw much away, but every time I move apartments there's an opportunity to purge. When the archives of the luminaries of my generation start showing up I wager they will be mightly thin. Or in the Google cache.

From Guerrilla News Network, via Conscientious, an interview with Philip Jones Griffiths.

Alas, nomenclature is sadly lacking in the field of 'art'. Am I a news photographer? A press photographer? A photojournalist? An artist? I deplore the latter moniker because the word is so misused. For me, art is the melding of form and content, and as that is what I strive to do then perhaps 'artist' is correct. But I'm happy to be called a photojournalist!

I never realized this was a semi-regular feature on her blog, but Amy Stein has been making "Battle Photo" posts for a while now. Each post juxtaposes two photographs of similar subject/treatment by two different photographers. Something like a capsule-sized, visual Ongoing Moment. It's more obvious when you see them collected together.

The Chicago Tribune has reviewed Beate Gütschow's show at the Museum of Contemporary Photography.

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!)

The digital montage cavalcade continues. Photographer Maggie Taylor will be the featured speaker in the ICP lecture series on Wednesday evening October 10. Her talk will be centered upon Solutions Beginning with A, a new book that features 38 of her digital images. Her work is currently on exhibit in the group show Sun Pictures to Mega Pixels at the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center, Brooklyn.

The School of the ICP
1114 6th Ave (at 43rd St)
Weds, Oct 10 at 7pm
(212) 857-0001

Sun Pictures to Mega Pixels
Through Nov 4th at Williamsburg Art and Historical Center
135 Broadway
Williamsburg Brooklyn
(718) 486-7372 or (718) 486-6012

There's a long and comprehensive review of the Hiroshi Sugimoto retrospective currently on view at the De Young Museum.

It is difficult to explain why Sugimoto's work is different than most photographers. I think the difference is that he leaves more space for the viewer. One of the things that I struck me when I was walking through the show at the De Young was that when I look at Sugimoto's wide range of work, he is somehow always reaching for the eternal in an inherently temporal medium.

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.

From Cool Hunting, a visit to Lori Nix's studio.

Ashley Gilbertson has been photographing in Iraq since 2002. The latest issue of The Virginia Quarterly Review features a long, detailed article by Gilbertson and his wife called "Last Photographs" covering various experiences in Iraq, all centering on death and photography in some way. "Last Photographs" refers to the times Gilbertson has been the last person to photograph someone before they died, whether a US soldier or an Iraqi matriarch. In June, he was interviewed on NPR to promote his new book, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. The interview sheds some light on Gilbertson's motivations, including how his pro-intervention views have changed after years of covering the conflict. Photographs from the book will be on exhibit in October at Gallery Bar, 120 Orchard St.

Suaada’s dentures by Ashley Gilbertson

For comparison, listen to this interview with Time photographer Christopher Morris, from July 2003. At that time, according to Morris, photographing the wounded was allowable, but release of such photography was delayed to allow for notification of families.

Morris covered the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, and like a lot of the photojournalists that covered that war, was outraged that the US did not act faster to intervene and put a stop to the genocide. Asked whether the US intervention in Iraq represented a change for the better in this regard, Morris squirms and says "I don't know if my role in society is to give my opinion." That strikes me as an astonishing position for a photojournalist to take, but maybe not for a modern Western journalist who believes journalism truly can be, and is, wholly objective and the only opinions that appear in a paper are on the editorial page. Compare to the position of Philip Jones Griffiths from a generation before: "To me, there is no point in pressing the shutter unless you are making some caustic comment on the incongruities of life. That is what photography is all about. It is the only reason for doing it."

He goes on to say, "We have bit off more, ah, than we can handle in the sense that we are in a region, as part of the world where we are not liked. No matter what we do, what good we do, what our intentions are, it will be turned against us. And I think we have opened a very serious can of worms that we will have to deal with for a long time." That was in the summer of 2003.