Todd: October 2006 Archives
Put most bluntly, for the past century most photography critics haven’t really liked photographs, or the experience of looking at them, at all. They approach photography—not specific photographs, or specific practitioners, or specific genres, but photography itself—with suspicion, mistrust, anger, and fear. Rather than enter into what Kazin called a “community of interest” with their subject, these critics come armed to the teeth against it. For them, photography is a powerful, duplicitous force to be defanged rather than an experience to embrace.
from The Treacherous Medium, by Susie Linfield
Also, a related post on Alec Soth's blog
Apparently there a florescent light meme going around. This is last week to see Vicki Dasilva's "Flourescense", a series of time-lapse night photographs using gel-colored lights pulled across a circuitous track over the course of an hour.
UnionTerrace #8, by Vicki Dasilva
Through Oct 28th at Art Gotham
547 W 27th St (btwn 10th & 11th), 5th Flr
(212) 714-1100
(open Weds-Sat)
Closing reception on Saturday, 4-6pm
Love these photos by William Greiner, part of the series "UK is OK".
Sotheby's has posted the results from today's auction session. Two key highlights:
Ansel Adams, 1940s era print of "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico"
$609,000; 2.5X high estimate of $250,000
William Abbott Pratt, quarter-plate daguerreotype of Edgar Allen Poe
$150,000; 3X high estimate of $50,000
August Sander didn't fare so well, selling below the low estimate. Other spot checks show prices within estimate. Had thought Eliot Porter was in growing demand, but not extraordinarily so.
Fall photo auctions start today and continue all week.
Oct 17th
Sotheby's
10am & 2pm
Christie's
5pm
Oct 18th
Christie's
10am & 2pm
Oct 19th
Philips de Pury & Co
10 am
Swann Galleries
2:30 pm
Even if you don't give a rip about all this auction hullaballu, I hope you're check out this amazing photograph by Harry Callahan. I had the pleasure of seeing a print of this at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz last summer and the crisp, refined detail was just unbelievable. The online representation just can't do the print justice.
I always amazed at how many duplicate prints are being sold simultaneously at the different auction houses. Interesting to compare prices.
Alec Soth has assembled his shopping list.
Walter Robinson has posted a round-up of the recent Photo New York art fair on Art Net. Interestingly he mentioned Jill Greenberg's monkey portraits without a comment about this summer's controversy over her "End Times".
I wonder if he would have mentioned her at all a year ago.
Collecting vernacular photography is not so far from hoarding family photographs, particularly from two or three generations removed. I have a handful pf photographs of my father as a two or three-year old that I find visually interesting, taken by an unknown relative. Had I not been told the little boy in the picture was my dad, they'd have a whole different meaning.
When it comes to vernacular photography, the place in question is conceptual, not necessarily physical or geographic. Here, “vernacular” refers to a locus of expression in the medium of photographic image-making that is, simultaneously, everywhere and nowhere; traditionally, that familiar “place” has been and is anywhere where anyone who has ever handled a camera, shooting a conventional kind of photo (like the family snapshots or other generic images listed above), has pointed his or her lens.
From Everybody’s Photography by Edward M. Gomez
