Recently in Portrait Category

From the Guardian:

It is significant that the photographers Kozloff includes are often a good deal more famous than their sitters. There are taxi drivers and barmaids here, sailors and majorettes, hustlers, sharecroppers and vagrants. Teenagers and prostitutes outnumber statesmen. Kozloff favours anonymous faces and everyday locations: he makes room for discarded strips of photo booth portraits, but not for the celebrated sitters of Karsh, Bailey, Leibovitz or Testino.

I have many and assorted thoughts on portraiture which I have been feverishly typing up, but not feverishly fast enough. I can't wait any longer to post the long screed, but will get to it eventually.

There are two closing shows that you should go see that have been feeding my thoughts on this, one by Suzanne Option and the other by Helen Van Meene. Also, Benjamin Donaldson is opening a new show of portraits at jen bekman gallery, so go check that out as well. (Congratulations to Ms. Bekman on the gallery's fourth anniversary!)

Suzanne Opton
Feature on NPR
Also on Studio 360
Vince Aletti in the New Yorker

Birkholz, 353 Days in Iraq, 205 Days in Afghanistan by Suzanne Opton

The Soldier Photographs
Through March 24th at Peter Hay Halpert Fine Art NY
511 West 25th St, 3rd Flr
(212) 827-9890

Helen van Meene
Through March 17th at Yancey Richardson Gallery
535 W 22nd St 3rd Flr
(646) 230-9610

Benjamin Donaldson
Summerland
Through April 21 at jen bekman gallery
6 Spring St
(212) 219-0166

One of these days I will probably give this blog up and just set a redirect to Alec Soth's blog. Nearly every post he makes is deeply thoughtful about both the practice of photography and our daily encounters with the medium. Envy! Today he's posted an excellent bit on author's photos, which are a unique blend of art and commerce.

More or less in the order I wrote them down, my notes:

childhood, adolesence, innocense, sensuality, suburbia, nature vs artifice, staged, unnatural light, purity, temptation, Crewdson, parents, children, blondes, punishment, fathers, daughters, joy, alienation, Lolita, fourth wall, staring girls, carefree, stalking, nocturnal, cars, cruising, high school, boys, predators, vigilence, Venus, allusion, posession, freedom, independence, trapped, stasis, tender, threat, fear, anxiousness, emotional discomfort, nakedness, getting away with it, perverse attentions

Those thoughts probably are a bigger window on my own mind than Strassheim's perhaps, but the woman does seem to have some disturbing thoughts on the brain, sometimes couched in the most innocent of images.

Untitled (Hoola Hoop), 2006, Angela Strassheim

Angela Strassheim, Pause
Through Dec 2 at Marvelli Gallery
526 W 26th St, 2nd Flr
(212) 627-3363

UPDATE: Artnet weighs in with a more considered (longer) review.