DLK COLLECTION

The Checklist: 2/23/12

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 14:07:00 +0000

Checklist 2/23/12
Current New York Photography Shows

New reviews added this week in red.
(Rating: Artist/Title: Venue: Closing Date: link to review)

Uptown

ONE STAR: Photographic Treasures from the Collection of Alfred Stieglitz: Met: February 26: review
THREE STARS: The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League: Jewish Museum: March 25: review
ONE STAR: Cecil Beaton: Museum of the City of New York: April 22: review
ONE STAR: Spies in the House of Art: Met: August 26: review

Midtown

TWO STARS: Reinstalled Permanent Collection: MoMA: March 28: review
TWO STARS: Eugène Atget: MoMA: April 9: review
TWO STARS: Magnum Contact Sheets: ICP: May 6: review
ONE STAR: Perspectives 2012: ICP: May 6: review
ONE STAR: Grey Villet: ICP: May 6: review
THREE STARS: Weegee: ICP: September 2: review

Chelsea

ONE STAR: Anne Collier: High Line: February 29: review
ONE STAR: Daifu Motoyuki: Lombard Freid: March 3: review
ONE STAR: Willie Doherty: Alexander and Bonin: March 10: review
TWO STARS: August Sander/Seydou Keita: Walther Collection: March 10: review
TWO STARS: Alec Soth: Sean Kelly: March 11: review

SoHo/Lower East Side/Downtown

ONE STAR: Kurt Tong: Jen Bekman: March 4: review
ONE STAR: Juergen Teller: Lehmann Maupin: March 17: review

Elsewhere Nearby

ONE STAR: Claire Beckett: Wadsworth Atheneum: March 4: review

Juergen Teller @Lehmann Maupin

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 14:28:00 +0000

JTF (just the facts): A total of 21 color works (19 single images, 1 triptych, and 1 four panel work), framed in white with no mat, and hung in the entry room, the main gallery space, and a small room on the second floor. All of the works are c-prints, in editions of 5, ranging in size from 10x8 (or reverse) to 24x20 (reverse), with intermediate sizes of 14x11, 16x12, and 20x16 (or reverse). The images were taken in 2010 and 2011. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Seeing the recent work of well-known fashion photographer Juergen Teller has got me mulling over what it means to be a contrarian in the context of contemporary photography. I think a pretty compelling case can be made that Teller's aesthetic style contradicts almost everything we associate with fashion/glamour/celebrity photography, which is why it stands out so joltingly in the countless pages of ads in a fashion monthly. His work is raw, rough, and consciously imperfect, blindlingly flash-lit and captured with a compositional style and snapshot look that is often exaggerated to its logical extreme. His images can be shocking and provocative, so much so that they border on being dismissed as off-hand stunts. And yet his best images are the ones that use this unconventional, sometimes harsh, approach to get at a fresh underlying layer of reality and truth, one that would have normally stayed hidden in the controlled perfection of twenty-first century glamour.

If, however, we take Teller out of his fashion sand box and ask his photographs to stand in comparison with the larger context of contemporary photography/art, which is already full of hell raisers and rule breakers by the way, I wonder about whether at least some of his pictures start to lose their juxtapositional punch. This show includes a number of forgettable dirt road landscapes and quiet views of pastoral scenes. These images have no verve, no edge, no rebellion, and the mix of beauty and ugliness in the landscape has been done better by many others before; taken off the walls of this show, even a photography expert would have little chance of identifying them as made by Teller.

But what does work here are those pictures and portraits that startle and puzzle: a soaking wet dog flanked by a riot of pink roses, the delicate neck of Roni Horn's stuffed swan seen from behind, a creepy nude of Kristen McMenamy wearing black eye makeup and a pointy shark jawbone. The star of this show is the triptych of Vivienne Westwood tucked away in the upstairs gallery (it's in the middle of the bottom installation shot): it's striking, unsettling, and surprisingly beautiful all at once. The nude Westwood is draped across an ornate chaise decorated with bright orange pillows, her fiery orange hair and her milky white skin competing for attention. She's like a contemporary (and clearly older) version of Manet's Olympia (an allusion I don't throw around lightly): frank, seductive, unnervingly explicit, and thoroughly unexpected. In these images, Teller's brash approach has clearly unlocked something both controversial and enduring.

I suppose my conclusion is that if an artist is going to take the path of the contrarian, then his/her job is to consistently push us out of our comfort zone and challenge us to broaden our ability to see. We may not ultimately like this much, but I think we can respect it. To my eye, this show mixes too much conventional material in with the subtle and not-so-subtle shockers, and so the overall confrontational power of the show is somewhat diluted. That said, when Teller does open the throttle, the handful of strong images here testify to his ability to create elegant comparative dissonance.

Collector's POV: The single images in the show are priced between £3800 and £6000, based on size (all prices quoted in £). The triptych is £35000 and the 4 panel work is £16000. While Teller's name recognition is high, his work still has very little secondary market history, so gallery retail is likely the only viable option for collectors at this point.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

Features/Reviews: Vogue (here), Flavorwire (here), Huffington Post (here)

Juergen Teller
Through March 17th

Lehmann Maupin
201 Chrystie Street
New York, NY 10002

Kurt Tong, In Case It Rains In Heaven @Bekman

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 14:10:00 +0000

JTF (just the facts): A total of 16 color photographs, mounted without frames, and hung in the single room gallery space. All of the works are undated digital c-prints. The prints come in two sizes: 16x20 (in editions of 10) and 24x30 (in editions of 5). There are 4 of the large prints and 12 of the small prints in the show. A monograph of this body of work was published in 2011 by Kehrer (here) and is available from the gallery for $45. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: While many photographers have tried to capture the complex nature of China's recent economic boom and its accompanying cultural transformations by pointing their cameras at towering skyscrapers, endless factories, and expansive construction projects, Kurt Tong has opted for a simpler, smaller scale example of how attitudes have been changing. His photographs document the Joss paper objects burnt as offerings for the dead, showing just how far Western consumerism and luxury lifestyles have permeated traditional Chinese society.

Tong's straightforward still life images, set against black backgrounds, have the look and feel of commerical or stock photography: bright, crisp, and colorful. But the objects themselves tell a more complicated, anthropological story. While mourners once burned paper decorated to look like silver and gold ingots to help provide for the afterlife existence of their loved ones, the variety of items now being burned has expanded to match modern Chinese life, covering both the drearily mundane and the wildly aspirational. For the luxury minded, a large house with a guard and maid is available, as is a Ferrari with a chauffeur, a pair of servants, and a Louis Vuitton handbag. More practical objects include umbrellas, an electric fan, dentures, and a wheelchair. And depending on your view of what comes after death, the machine gun, the swimming trunks and snorkel, or the iPod Nano might make an appropriate gift for the recently deceased. It is clear that the need for "stuff" now extends far beyond the grave.

These objects (and the resulting photographs) have a kitchy, cartoonish feel, but as still lifes they are successful in being both attention grabbing and representative of a larger and more nuanced idea. The story they tell mixes old and new, succinctly showing one facet of how Chinese culture is evolving to incorporate new trends, pressures and mindsets.

Collector's POV: The prints in the show are priced at $800 and $1600, depending on size. Tong has no secondary market history, so gallery retail is the only option for interested collectors at this point. Prints can also be found on Bekman's 20x200 website (here) in various sizes and editions, all the way down to $24 for an 8x10 print.
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Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
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Transit Hub:

Artist site (here)
Review: Hyperallergic (here)

Kurt Tong, In Case It Rains In Heaven
Through March 4th

Jen Bekman Gallery
6 Spring Street
New York, NY 10012

Eugène Atget: Documents Pour Artistes @MoMA

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 13:16:00 +0000

JTF (just the facts): A total of 107 photographs and 1 negative (in a lightbox), framed in brown wood and matted, and hung against light blue walls in a two room divided gallery on the 3rd floor. All of the works are gelatin silver printing out paper, matte albumen silver, or albumen silver prints, taken between 1898 and 1925. The works come from the Abbott-Levy Collection at MoMA. The exhibit was curated by Sarah Meister. (Installation shots at right.)

The show is divided into 6 sections, with the number of photographs on view in each in parentheses:

People of Paris (24)
Courtyards (14)
Jardin de Luxembourg (13)
Parc de Sceaux (24)
Surrogates and the Surreal (13)
Fifth Arrondissement (19)

Comments/Context: The encyclopedic 4 volume set, the single volume monograph with matching Szarkowski texts, countless exhibits over the years, it's hard to imagine a stronger champion for the work of Eugène Atget (beyond Berenice Abbott of course) than the photography department at MoMA. It might also be hard to fathom exactly what more there might be to say about Atget that hasn't already been said more eloquently elsewhere, and yet this new show does an admirable job of cutting a new cross section through the museum's Atget holdings and showing us a crisp mix of the known and unknown in equally thoughtful measure.
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The title of the exhibition Documents Pour Artistes references Atget's own sign outside his humble place of business, and in a retro-chic kind of way announces him as being in on the appropriation joke far before almost everyone else. Indeed, his whole approach was predicated on the idea that artists would want to borrow from his photographs and use them as guides. For those visitors with a more contemporary postmodern bent, this positioning is a subtle reminder that Atget is still very relevant to the artistic issues of the day.
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Several sections of the show will seem happily familiar: courtyards, doors, and entryways, surrounded by layers of interior and exterior space, the Luxembourg gardens, with statues, urns, roses, and reflecting pools, and the facades of buildings, complete with sculptural stonework and elaborate iron. These cobblestone Paris streets, angled buildings, and formal gardens are the Atget we know and love, and the power of these photographs has not dimmed with age or repeated viewing.
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The other three sections take a slightly less traveled path through the Atget archive. One gathers together Atget's images of people, relative rarities in his prolific career. His portraits center on vendors (lampshades, wire baskets, figurines, bread), rag pickers, and prostitutes, subjects who could be easily found on the streets and in the alleys. The are mostly full length shots, often capturing idiosyncratic Parisian nuances and personalities. A second grouping follows the theme of Atget's unintentional popularity among the Surrealists. These photographs are quirky and odd, many of storefronts and dusty window displays: headless mannequins, a seance clock, taxidermy, a skeleton, hairdressers' wigs, corsets, and spooky merry go rounds. A third group collects many of his late images of the Parc de Sceaux. In comparison with the formality of the Luxembourg garden images, these pictures are moody and wild, with overgrown ivy, bare trees, broken statues, and crumbling stairways. His lakeside reflections and shadowy and atmospheric, darker and more romantic. The whole series is full of lovely decaying grandeur.

Even for those who think they already know Atget, this show will be both satisfying and perspective broadening. It's also a refreshing reminder that small, well curated shows of vintage photography can still be new and exciting.
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Collector's POV: Given this is a museum show, there are of course no prices. Atget's works are consistently available in the secondary markets, with unknown images and later prints by Berenice Abbott selling at auction for as little as $2000, and iconic works finding buyers well into six figures; rare Atgets have recently pushed up towards $700000. In general, high quality vintage images of Paris street scenes are often priced in the low to mid five figure range.

Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here)
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Transit Hub:

Features/Reviews: Time LightBox (here), TimeOut New York (here), Capital New York (here)

Eugène Atget: Documents Pour Artistes
Through April 9th

Museum of Modern Art

11 West 53rd Street

New York, NY 10019

The Checklist: 2/16/12

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 14:22:00 +0000

Checklist 2/16/12
Current New York Photography Shows

New reviews added this week in red.
(Rating: Artist/Title: Venue: Closing Date: link to review)

Uptown

ONE STAR: Cecil Beaton: Museum of the City of New York: February 20: review
ONE STAR: Photographic Treasures from the Collection of Alfred Stieglitz: Met: February 26: review
THREE STARS: The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League: Jewish Museum: March 25: review
ONE STAR: Spies in the House of Art: Met: August 26: review

Midtown

ONE STAR: Robert Bourdeau: Edwynn Houk: February 18: review
ONE STAR: Massimo Vitali: Bonni Benrubi: February 18: review
TWO STARS: Reinstalled Permanent Collection: MoMA: March 28: review
TWO STARS: Magnum Contact Sheets: ICP: May 6: review
ONE STAR: Perspectives 2012: ICP: May 6: review
ONE STAR: Grey Villet: ICP: May 6: review
THREE STARS: Weegee: ICP: September 2: review

Chelsea

ONE STAR: Anne Collier: High Line: February 29: review
ONE STAR: Daifu Motoyuki: Lombard Freid: March 3: review
ONE STAR: Willie Doherty: Alexander and Bonin: March 10: review
TWO STARS: Alec Soth: Sean Kelly: March 11: review
TWO STARS: August Sander/Seydou Keita: Walther Collection: March 10: review

SoHo/Lower East Side/Downtown

No reviews at this time.

Elsewhere Nearby

ONE STAR: Patti Smith: Wadsworth Atheneum: February 19: review
ONE STAR: Claire Beckett: Wadsworth Atheneum: March 4: review

Alec Soth, Broken Manual @Kelly: A Review Conversation with Richard B. Woodward

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 12:49:00 +0000

Rather than following my normal format, today’s review of Alec Soth’s new show at Sean Kelly will once again take the form of a casual, but hopefully thoughtful, conversation. Regular readers might remember that I experimented with this collaborative approach in a recent review of the Jeff Wall show at Marian Goodman (here), where I went back and forth with longtime photo critic AD Coleman. As a reminder, this structure has no pre-sets – it’s an open ended discussion that leads wherever the ideas might take us.

I’m happy to say that Richard B. Woodward has decided to join me for today’s conversation. Woodward is an arts critic who contributes regularly to the Wall Street Journal, where he often covers major museum shows of photography from around the US, normally in longer format reviews containing a mix of historical background and artistic explication. His writing is also easily found in any number of photo books and exhibit catalogues from the past decade or two, where his essays provide lucid context and critical interpretation. I’m overjoyed to have lured him away from the tactile pleasures of the printed page and into the freewheeling online realm, at least for the moment.

DLK: I have to admit up front that I didn’t come into this show completely cold. Like many other collectors I’m sure, I had seen several prints from this series in the Weinstein Gallery booth at last year’s AIPAD and had also encountered a number of reproductions in the exhibition catalog from Soth’s retrospective at the Walker Art Center in 2010, so at some level, I knew what I was in for before I arrived. But with that caveat, I will say that I most certainly got a fuller experience of the work in this gallery show than I had previously felt.

My first reaction was at some level less about the photographs themselves as individual works (we’ll get to that in a moment I’m sure) and more about the overall mood that they create in tandem. To me, Broken Manual is an obvious progression from and intensification of the atmosphere of The Last Days of W (Soth’s previous project). We’ve clearly moved on from exhaustion (in many forms), political cynicism, tempered anger, and angst to something altogether more desperate and personal. While there is of course something action oriented about the desire to flee and disappear, I felt the heavy weight of powerlessness in this show. It’s as if these people (all men that I could see) have banged their heads against the metaphorical wall for so long (without anyone listening) that they have finally given up and retreated to the margins and wastelands of America. Whether they’re hermits, survivalists, hippies, government haters, conspiracy theorists or just plain crazy (by some definition), they’re living in a roughly similar emotional landscape, and Soth seems to have found a sense of deep empathy for parts of what made these men want to be alone. So my point is that the pictures are really capturing an abstract state of mind, and any particular authentic reality in the photographs is just a symbol of that frustrated psychological atmosphere.

RBW: I appreciate your asking me to trade fours with you on the bandstand in your club. I’m new and somewhat averse to on-line media (I don’t even have a Facebook page) but your blog is among the few that I regularly read, both to catch myself up on shows I’ve missed (you see everything) and to compare my reactions to your intelligent takes.

Like you, I had seen this body of Soth’s work before. I saw his retrospective last year at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, his home town, and Broken Manual was installed as part of that. The selection was, if I remember, somewhat larger but also presented in a subdued, grayish atmosphere. There were probably 10 pictures from the series in the catalog, From Here to There: Alec Soth’s America, that aren’t here.

I like this version better. It is, as you say, a deepening and a concentration of the glib and cynical tone in The Last Days of W and it’s also a logical progression from Sleeping by the Mississippi. The mood here is more crushingly sad than at the Walker. (I’ll see if I can explain why later.) We can talk in another exchange about his techniques for treating people who are not as economically advantaged or emotionally stable as he is, how he has earned their trust and whether or not you think he has betrayed it, and whether or not that’s inevitable.

But his choice to focus on men who choose to live apart from American society was smart and full of photographic possibilities. As types, they populate both our 19th century history (the Western prospector, the crazy hermit, persecuted religious sects such as the Mormons, various utopian communards) and our tabloid culture of paranoid loners and political lunatics. There was Eric Rudolph who blew up abortion clinics and attacked the Atlanta Olympic Games and went on to survive in the North Carolina woods for years. And, of course, there was “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski who is alluded to a couple of times in the show.

Soth is one of the most thoughtful photographers around, a guy who is always wrestling with the question of where to stand in relation to his subjects and how to keep the documentary tradition vital so that he can poke his nose where it doesn’t belong and still have a clear conscience. I wonder if you felt, as I did, that one of the strengths of the show is that one feels Soth is tempted by the idea of abandoning his life as a dutiful Magnum member and breadwinner in order to go off and live in a cave. He’s trying to empathize with these men, even a skinhead neo-Nazi, and, like Arbus, he keeps asking himself, “hmm, what would happen to me if?” He sees the appeal of getting away from home, and working. In fact, that’s what he’s doing here. How different is a photographer on the road from a guy holed up in the desert? Being both inside and outside is always a hard act to pull off. How do you think he succeeds at that?

DLK: Watching parts of the documentary running in the darkened side room made me conclude that Soth got the balance generally right, not too far in (thereby losing a sense of wider perspective), and not too far apart (with the danger of a smug mocking eye). The trust he built with his subjects seems to have been easy going and genuine. That said, the installation of ephemera in the first room wouldn’t look as manic and serial killer crazy as it does unless Soth had become somewhat fascinated by the whole culture he was exploring; I don’t want to speculate on exactly how far he was drawn in, but I think he imbibed enough of the kool aid to at least intellectually understand some of the motivations. I thought some of the best moments in the film are when nothing happens, and Soth is wandering frustrated in search of something or someone he can’t seem to find; the project takes a more obsessive tone at that point, which seems somehow appropriate for the subject matter. I do agree that Soth’s overall commitment to and engagement with “disappearing” makes these pictures more successful than they would have been at arm’s length.

The only image in the whole show that I think comes to close to the exploitation line is the portrait of the tanned, naked man standing in the water lily pond (the titles of these images are universally unhelpful for identification purposes). I actually think this is a very powerful image (especially printed as large as it is), juxtaposing the swastika tattoo and Garden of Eden setting, but I do wonder a bit about the coaxing that occurred to get this shot. Of course, I don’t know the back story to the photograph, but it seems pretty unlikely to me that the man came up with standing naked in the pond all by himself. That isn’t to say that he wasn’t a willing participant; on the contrary, I think he probably was, and the starved for attention quality that many of the men have is an important and unexpected discovery that Soth makes in these pictures. While the other portraits in the show are of course somewhat posed (he’s using a large format camera after all), this is the only one that seemed a bit unnatural to me. But maybe that risk taking (by both sides) is what makes it more memorable.

RBW: I think the project is rife with exploitation, as is any project with a gross imbalance of power between photographer and subject. And most projects are! That’s the nature of photography. The opening for the show at Sean Kelly was packed with friends of Soth and other photographers who were a world apart from the subjects in the pictures. I wonder if any of the lost souls featured here has seen the work and, if they have, I’d be curious what they thought of it. I doubt any of them would be too upset. Even the fellow standing naked in the water, with shaved head and swastika tattoo, seems proud of himself and would be probably be OK with seeing himself on the walls of a Chelsea gallery.

One of the many things I like about Broken Manual is that Soth has recognized this problem of the portrayer and the portrayed, and his photographs reflect that. There is a blurry portrait that suggests it was taken with a long lens, as though these are men of whom we are slightly afraid and who are slightly afraid of us. There’s a surveillance quality to the picture. Or it could indicate an early phase of his getting to know these guys: he could only see them from afar, stalking them in the woods as though they were Bigfoot. Other pictures, including the one you cite, and another of a bearded man sleeping, show a much greater degree of trust.

He has approached these men as if he were an anthropologist. He reveals not only their portraits but their abodes, reading matter, tools (including a sex toy) and their attempt to dress up or glamorize their surroundings. The saddest picture in the show to me was the mirrored globe hanging off a branch in the middle of nowhere. Soth has photographed it in the grayest, flattest light so that it barely reflects anything. Not many disco parties in that neck of the woods, I’m guessing.

DLK: I very much agree that the grainy, out of focus photo of the bearded man in the woods captures something important about this whole project. I think you’re right on as far as the feel of voyeuristic surveillance it employs, as well as the stalking, fleeting glimpse it offers. It’s indistinct, and marginal, and just out of reach, and yet the American flag bandanna around the man’s neck somehow opens up other narrative possibilities: is this a veteran, or perhaps someone fiercely patriotic, troubled by an America that seems to have lost its way, whose only logical response was to reject it and head for the hills?

The still life images are a bit of a departure for Soth I think. Not only are they in black and white, but they are set against blank backgrounds, just like Taryn Simon’s Contraband series. And in a sense, they have an affinity with that project, in that the objects are outside societal norms in one way or another: conspiracy videos, a makeshift knife, a welded iron helmet almost medieval in its roughness, a slug dragging a trail of slime, a sex toy. I absolutely see the resonance of these objects as part of the larger story, but I wonder if they would all be as powerful if taken out of context and forced to stand alone.

I also agree that both the disco ball and the light bulb in the lonely woods are achingly sad. Here I think the return to black and white is very effective; draining away the color makes the blanket on the forest floor or the rocky camp site seem even more dismal and gloomy. Here’s where the glamour and romance of disappearing really meet the harsh reality of being alone; time seems to stand still in these pictures, in a bone tired, dispiriting way.

I’m not sure if it’s just a quirk of this particular hanging, but with fewer portraits as a percentage of the whole, I think the places (the white cave with hangers, the house built into the rock wall, the dome in the desert, the house boat covered in lights, the single light bulb interior with graffiti) and objects start to act like stand-ins for invisible people. The eccentricities pile up, but they are harder to hold on to. The photographs are indirect portraits of their owners, which when taken together as a group, takes me back to the project as an exercise in abstraction, of using symbols to document a continuum of specific behavior that all converges on an underlying set of interlocking emotions.

RBW: I like your idea that the objects are stand-ins for people. The things these guys have taken with them into the woods are not only tools, they’re also totems. A single light bulb would be a fairly grim source of illumination in a room. Hanging from a tree it’s both a surreal symbol of civilization and an indication of one man’s extreme isolation.

But I don’t understand what you mean by “exercise in abstraction.” Soth is trying to evoke a sense of loneliness and rejection and self-exile strictly through traditional documentary means: portraits, forensic or evidentiary pictures of habitat and possessions. One of those techniques would only take us so far in setting a mood about a way of life. Portraits alone couldn’t transport us to that emotional place without a lot of obtrusive text telling us what to think about the economic plight of these guys. And the light bulb, mirror globe, sex toy, boat, coat hangers, slimy slug would be too allusive--too Taryn Simon--if seen alone. You’re right that what power these objects have derives from the context and conjunction with the portraits.

The published survivalist material stacked against one wall is another documentary technique, even if it’s not photographic. The array of pamphlets and books is a sign, as you say, that Soth has burrowed deeply into this culture. He also may want to show us how many kinds of crazy there are. As I wrote before, hermits have existed throughout our history and developed their own eccentric culture. In the 1950s and ‘60s men built fall-out shelters as they prepared for nuclear war. The survivalists in Soth’s photos don’t seem to conform to any single political philosophy. They’re not all neo-Nazis or Tea Party extremists or disappointed Left-wing radicals or hippies gone to seed. But many are clearly paranoid. I was interested to hear in the documentary from the old guy who expected Obama to be assassinated as a pretext by a cabal for a government take-over.

The books help to show that these men aren’t just camping and they’re not homeless. They’re serious and determined to live apart, and they have allies in the fringes of the business world. Preaching the apocalypse can be profitable. On various radio stations and on the Internet you can find advertisements now for a Food Insurance outlet selling “gourmet” meals guaranteed to last for 25 years. The company is endorsed by Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck. Economic or ecological collapse is not as unthinkable as it was 20 years ago, and some people have already begun to build their arks for the hard rain that’s gonna fall.

DLK: I like the way Soth has captured the broad diversity of these characters, but still retained their elusiveness. Most of the photographs are the opposite of traditional portraits: eyes closed, walking away into a thicket of brambles, camouflaged in a ghillie suit, dwarfed by towering trees or overgrown greenery. Soth has effectively matched his unconventional compositions to the marginal nature of his subjects.

By the way, I didn’t mean “abstraction” to represent anything more than the simple idea that all of the works here attempt to depict something which is underneath and invisible, and therefore a step away from the literalness of what they are and a leaning toward the metaphorical of what they might represent. The pictures themselves are of course not abstract in the visual sense, they are documentary (broadly defined) as you point out. All I was trying to get at was the representational aspect of trying to convey complex emotion, which to me ends up being somewhat “abstract”. I’m probably in the semantic weeds here, so let’s move on.

Overall, I came away from this show impressed with Soth’s dedication to an unruly project, and with his ability to consciously broaden his photographic toolkit to include more subject matter types and aesthetic approaches; I certainly got the impression he was pushing himself beyond his comfort zone. From my vantage point as a collector, I’m always trying to get my head around the difference between the durable and the forgettable, and I think there are at least half a dozen photographs on view here that will likely age very well indeed, that will retain their power to startle far into the future (even when taken out of context) and will be emblematic of the particular embittered times from which they came. Many of the others will likely fill the role of quirky supporters, especially in book form where they can be additive to the overall mood. I imagine a certain slice of collectors will find this work too far out there, a bit puzzling and hard to categorize. For the most part, I found Broken Manual compelling and original, and I was left wondering whether this body of work is the terminal end point to a line of thinking that began many years ago for Soth, or whether it is some kind of intermediate transitory stage, where he has been flexing his artistic muscles a bit with a tough problem, only to pivot and apply those new strategies and techniques to something altogether different in the future. As a show, I think it cements his reputation as a leader, and leaders don’t always take the obvious path.

RBW: Here are a few last thoughts.

I agree that Soth is working on the edge of where his core artistic beliefs and training have taken him. He and several other members of Magnum, including Susan Meiselas and Jim Goldberg, are rethinking what it means to document a culture. The danger is that in trying to encompass more by nibbling around the edges of a subject to get at “an overall mood,” you take a lot of lesser photographs instead of a few dazzling ones. I don’t see any great pictures in the show, although I see a number of good ones that mesh nicely and, as you say, “half a dozen photographs on view here will likely age very well.”

He’s also, as you say, “a leader.” From what I observe and hear, he’s very generous to other photographers. His drive to succeed to work hard has not blinkered him or turned him into an egomaniac. He has an expansive attitude about what documentary photography can be and he seems dissatisfied with the status quo. I expect lots more good work from him.

We haven’t talked much about the size of the prints and how unexpectedly large or small some of them are. My first reaction upon seeing the print of the ship was, ‘why so big?’ Then, on closer inspection, it won me over. If it were smaller, you wouldn’t see the detail of the jerry-rigged wiring on the masts and the quite unglamorous domesticity that life on the water affords. (Soth must be attracted to living on a boat or being near water, as the theme turns up repeatedly in his work.)

I wasn’t sure what he gained by mixing black-and-white and color. (The black-and-white prints here are actually, as I understand, just dialed down color negatives, not made from “true” black-and-white negatives.) Then, I decided this is another way for him to keep us on our toes and not let us think we could immerse ourselves in this alien world. If everything were color or everything were black-and-white it would be much easier to feel he was a reliable guide around these men. To revert for a moment to artspeak, he was revealing his camera and photography as a mediator, and not an inclusive or impartial one.

I was a little disappointed that he didn’t include here any of the videos he has made. Several were in the Walker retrospective and they revealed what a smart, goofball he can be. They might have disrupted the sobriety of this show and we can see those aspects of his personality in the film about him that’s playing in the first gallery. Still, I thought he could have mixed up his approach and complicated the mood even further with more irreverence.

The subject of men driven by a need to remove themselves from society has been taken up by writers (Jon Kracauer’s Into the Wild) and by movie makers (Jeff Nichols’s Take Shelter) but I don’t know that many photographers have attempted it. Joel Sternfeld’s Utopia project is much more sociable. Soth has to solve the problem of showing absence and emptiness and anomie and detachment and hostility, and that’s hard to do in a photograph. Too many others, when they decide to document, say, the homeless, will take portraits and maybe the makeshift shelters they construct, leave it at that.

Soth has tried to come up with a more nuanced solution and I applaud him for it. Like you, I see it as transitional in his development. I’ll be curious to see what his next project will be. The choice of subject often determines what you photograph and how, and it’s usually the hardest decision to make. I have a hunch we’re going to see more video.

Thanks again for inviting me for a chat in your digital man cave. Let’s do it again.

And now the usual supporting sections:

JTF (just the facts): A mixed group of 26 black and white and color photographs, framed in grey wood and unmatted, and hung against grey walls in the main gallery space, the entry, and a single side room. All of the works are archival pigment prints, mounted either to paper or 4 ply museum board, all in editions of 7+3AP. Sizes range from 10x8 to 70x56 (or reverse). There are 13 black and white and 13 color images in the show. The images were taken between 2006 and 2008. The exhibit also includes an installation of Broken Manual limited editions and other ephemera related to the project. In a darkened side room, a 57 minute documentary called Somewhere to Disappear (here) is on view. A trade edition of Broken Manual is apparently forthcoming from Steidl (here). (Installation shots at right.)

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced as follows. The smallest 10x8 images start at $5000, and generally increase in price according to size, reaching $28000 for the largest 70x56 prints. Intermediate prices include $6000, $9000, $15000, and $20000, with a couple of images NFS. Soth's work has begun to appear in the secondary markets more consistently in recent years (a handful of lots each year), with prices ranging from roughly $4000 to $22000.

Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

Interview: Interview (here)
Artist site (here)
Magnum Photos page (here)
Soth’s book publishing arm, Little Brown Mushroom (here)

Alec Soth, Broken Manual

Through March 11th
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Sean Kelly Gallery

528 West 29th Street
New York, NY 10001

Spies in the House of Art: Photography, Film and Video @Met

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 20:34:00 +0000

JTF (just the facts): A group show consisting of 14 photographic works (loosely defined) and 3 films/videos from 17 different photographers/artists. The works are variously framed and matted, and hung in a single room gallery space with a main dividing wall, with 1 video on display in a darkened curtained off area of the space and another shown in a nearby paintings gallery. The exhibit was curated by Douglas Eklund. (Installation shots at right.)

The following photographers/artists have been included in the exhibit, with the number of images on view and details in parentheses:

Diane Arbus (1 gelatin silver print, 1956)
Lutz Bacher (1 single channel video, 2002)
Lothar Baumgarten (1 chromogenic print, 1969/1985)
Sophie Calle ( 1 work comprised of 1 gelatin silver print, 2 chromogenic prints and text, 1986)
Joseph Cornell (1 box, 1950)
Tim Davis (1 chromogenic print, 2003)
Andrea Fraser (1 video, 1989)
Candida Höfer (1 chromogenic print, 1988)
Laura Larson (1 gelatin silver print, 1998)
Louise Lawler (1 silver dye bleach print, 1997)
Peter Nagy (1 laminated photocopy, 1985)
Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer (1 color film, 2006)
John Pilson (1 archival pigment print, 2007)
Cindy Sherman (1 chromogenic print, 1989)
Lorna Simpson (1 screen print on felt, with text, 1998)
Thomas Struth (1 chromogenic print, 1988)
Francesca Woodman (1 diazo collage, 1980)

Comments/Context: The latest thematic installation in the Met's contemporary photography gallery is narrower and more self-reflective than nearly all of the shows that have come before it in this same space. This particular gathering revolves around the relationship between artists and museums, running the gamut from inspiration and investigation to critique and deconstruction. It's a relatively small idea, but there are enough well-selected pictures here to examine the concept from plenty of competing angles.

I don't think it's at all surprising that Struth, Höfer, Sherman, and Lawler are part of this show; they seem like relatively obvious foundation inclusions. The real jaw dropper for me was the incredibly huge Francesca Woodman mural made of photographs on blueprint paper (in the top installation shot). In it, Woodman includes five versions of herself as caryatids, holding up the roof of a collaged together temple; it has much the same intimacy as her diminutive photographs, but on a grand, billowy scale. Nashashibi and Skaer's film Flash in the Metropolitan (found in the darkened portion of the room) is also a standout. Taken in the halls of the museum at night, a strobe light bathes the cases and statues in momentary flashes of brightness, an ancient head or obscure object emerging from the darkness to be recognizable for just a moment before disappearing once again. It's a spooky inversion of the museum going experience, ghostly and fleeting rather than timeless and enduring. And John Pilson's photograph of a stylish 1920s period room interrupted by an anachronistic camera and microphone is a lesser known but smart choice, quietly witty in its upending of the controlled environment of the museum exhibit.
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This is a tighter, less sprawling selection of works than previous thematic incarnations, and I think it holds together as a complete thought much better as a result. There are artworks and patrons as reusable subject matter (in a Sophie Calle multi-part work, a Rodin sculpture is thought to have "a terrific ass"), juxtapositions and relationships created by the museum setting (Laura Larson's unexpected alignment of wallpaper, settee, and carpet), and riffs on looking and seeing (one of Tim Davis' faces in paintings obscured by glare images). All in, this is a neat little package, perhaps not groundbreaking, but certainly thoughtful and well-edited.

Collector's POV: Given this is a museum show, there are obviously no posted prices for the works on display.
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Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
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Transit Hub:

Review: NY Times (here)

Spies in the House of Art: Photography, Film and Video

Through August 26th

Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10028

Willie Doherty, One Place Twice, Photo/text/85/92 @Alexander and Bonin

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:40:00 +0000

JTF (just the facts): In the first floor entry and gallery spaces, a total of 8 black and white photographic works with text overlays (6 single images and 2 diptychs), mounted on aluminum and unframed. In the second floor gallery, a total of 4 single image color photographs with text overlays, mounted on Plexiglas, and framed in white and unmatted. The black and white prints are each 48x72, in editions of 3 (the diptychs are made up of two panels of the same size). The c-prints are each 43x54, also in editions of 3. The black and white images were taken between 1985 and 1992, while the color images were taken in 2010. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Willie Doherty's late 1980s photographs from Northern Ireland have all the clever trappings of conceptual photography, but with an unexpectedly harsh political twist. Using bold text overlays reminiscent of those employed by Hamish Fulton, Doherty gives his deadpan images of Derry and its surroundings a sharp sense of tension and conflict.

Most of the pictures capture straight-on views of alleys, vacant lots, and dense side streets, hemmed in by concrete walls, iron fences, chain link barriers and barbed wire. Apartment blocks loom down with protective window grates and properties back up onto each other. The photographs have the abandoned silence of a police state, absent of people and simmering with claustrophobic paranoia. Overlaid texts like Remote Control, Shifting Ground, and God Has Not Failed Us give the images another layer of contextual meaning. This is a battle ground, blanketed with surveillance cameras, constantly under threat from multiple points. A diptych pairing Protecting and Invading highlights this push and pull: looking one direction toward what we want to safeguard and in the other to what we want to take from another. Last Bastion depicts a craggy castle wall amid the weed cracked pavement, both a dividing line and rallying cry.

Doherty's juxtaposition of text and imagery is altogether more serious and penetrating than the typical tricky irony of other conceptual photography. His photographs have an emotional tug that verges on propaganda, with the kind of succinct shock value that would work well on billboards. In a world of politically correct contemporary photography, these images have a raw, confrontational toughness that seems fresh and bracing.

Collector's POV: The works in this show are priced as follows: the single image black and white photographs are 20000€ each, and the black and white diptychs are 30000€ each. The single image color photographs are 12000€ each. Doherty's work has little or no auction history in the secondary markets for photography (perhaps there is more history for his videos in the contemporary art markets, I can't say), so for his vintage and more recent photographs, gallery retail is still likely the only option for interested collectors.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

Turner Prize finalist, 2003 (here)

Willie Doherty, One Place Twice, Photo/text/85/92
Through March 10th

Alexander and Bonin
132 Tenth Avenue
New York, NY 10011

The Checklist: 2/9/12

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 15:45:00 +0000

Checklist 2/9/12
Current New York Photography Shows

New reviews added this week in red.
(Rating: Artist/Title: Venue: Closing Date: link to review)

Uptown

ONE STAR: Cecil Beaton: Museum of the City of New York: February 20: review
ONE STAR: Photographic Treasures from the Collection of Alfred Stieglitz: Met: February 26: review
THREE STARS: The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League: Jewish Museum: March 25: review

Midtown

ONE STAR: Robert Bourdeau: Edwynn Houk: February 18: review
ONE STAR: Massimo Vitali: Bonni Benrubi: February 18: review
TWO STARS: Reinstalled Permanent Collection: MoMA: March 28: review
TWO STARS: Magnum Contact Sheets: ICP: May 6: review
ONE STAR: Perspectives 2012: ICP: May 6: review
ONE STAR: Grey Villet: ICP: May 6: review
THREE STARS: Weegee: ICP: September 2: review

Chelsea

ONE STAR: Gregory Halpern: Clamp Art: February 11: review
ONE STAR: Jitka Hanzlová: Yancey Richardson: February 11: review
TWO STARS: Shirin Neshat: Gladstone: February 11: review
ONE STAR: Bertien van Manen: Yancey Richardson: February 11: review
ONE STAR: Anne Collier: High Line: February 29: review
ONE STAR: Daifu Motoyuki: Lombard Freid: March 3: review
TWO STARS: August Sander/Seydou Keita: Walther Collection: March 10: review

SoHo/Lower East Side/Downtown

No reviews at this time.

Elsewhere Nearby

ONE STAR: Patti Smith: Wadsworth Atheneum: February 19: review
ONE STAR: Claire Beckett: Wadsworth Atheneum: March 4: review

Daifu Motoyuki, Lovesody @Lombard-Freid

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 15:55:00 +0000

JTF (just the facts): A total of 25 color works (22 single images and 3 diptychs), framed in white and unmatted, and hung in the main gallery space. All of the works are c-prints taken in 2011. The prints come in three sizes: 14x17, 20x24, and 30x40 (or reverse), all in editions of 10. The diptychs are made up of 11x14 or 20x24 photographs. There are 7 small images, 11 medium sized images, and 4 large images in the show, plus the 3 diptychs. A monograph of this body of work was published in 2011 by Little Big Man (here) and is available from the gallery for $75. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: The history of photography is filled with photographers and their muses: Stieglitz, Strand, Callahan, Gowin, the list goes on and on. Daifu Motoyuki follows in these weighty footsteps, making affectionate pictures of a young single mother during her pregnancy and the subsequent birth of her second child. He is undeniably smitten with his subject, and his playful images feel like snapshots from an intimate family album. While the infatuation only lasted six months, the warm energy of his crush lives on in the pictures.

These are casual images, unconstrained by typical Japanese formality and societal control. The young mother shows off her pregnant belly flanked by a pile of garbage bags, hangs up laundry and Hello Kitty baby blankets in the cramped bedroom, cooks a meal wearing only a towel (exposing her bare bottom), and takes a bath with her son in the tub. Half eaten toast, cigarette ashes in a plastic Winnie the Pooh bowl, leftover breakfast dishes, and a tornado of discarded toys decorate her small chaotic apartment. His images of her wander between the trials of motherhood (breastfeeding, exhaustion, crying children) and the reality of her attractiveness (clutching a microphone on the floor of a karaoke room or splayed suggestively on a mattress). Whatever she does, he finds it cute and endearing.

Even though many of these photographs seem quick and ephemeral, quite a few capture a surprising depth of emotion. He is enamored, charmed, and thoroughly fascinated by this woman, and his fondness has the ring of authenticity. We're voyeurs taking in the action second hand, but Motoyuki's charged atmosphere is a vivid reminder of the spellbound state of young love.
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Collector's POV: The photographs in this show are priced as follows. The unframed single images are priced based on size: the 14x17 prints are $1000, the 20x24 prints are $1600, and the 30x40 prints are $3000. The unframed prices of the diptychs are also based on component size: the works made up of 11x14 prints are $1800 and those made up of 20x24 prints are $3200. Motoyuki's photographs have not yet entered the secondary markets, so gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
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Transit Hub:

Artist site (here)
Features: PhotoBooth (here), W (here)

Daifu Motoyuki, Lovesody
Through March 3rd

Lombard-Freid Projects
518 West 19th Street
New York, NY 10001

High Line Billboard: Anne Collier

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 13:14:00 +0000

JTF (just the facts): A single billboard, 25x75 feet, displayed at the corner of 18th Street and 10th Avenue in Chelsea. The work is entitled Developing Tray #2 and is print on vinyl, from 2009.
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Comments/Context: The High Line Billboard series is turning out to be much more intriguing than I might have thought at the outset. The parameters of the billboard make for unexpected experimentation with monumental scale, and its location allows for contextual relationships that are wholly different from a gallery setting.

In this second iteration of the series, one of Anne Collier's recent developing tray images is blown up and left drifting in an expanse of wide, thick blackness. On the white walls of a gallery and at normal scale, this image (it's the artist's eye) would be much more intimate and personal, and the whole process centric theme of the emerging image floating in the tray would be more at the forefront of engaging with the work. But on this massive scale, and in the context of the bustling city around it, the work is transformed into a penetrating, disconcerting, Orwellian gaze. It's as though she's peering through the knothole of the tray out into our diorama world.
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Collector's POV: This commissioned work was not overtly for sale, nor are there many comparables in terms of scale in recent auction history. Collier is represented in New York by Anton Kern Gallery (here).
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Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
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Transit Hub:

Review: Societe Perrier (here)

Anne Collier
Through February 29th

High Line
Billboard at 18th Street and 10th Avenue

Gregory Halpern, A @Clamp Art

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:32:00 +0000

JTF (just the facts): A total of 24 color photographs, framed in white and unmatted, and hung in single room gallery space. The chromogenic prints come in two sizes: 10x8 (editions of 7) and 18x14 (editions of 5), with a few images also available in a 40x30 size (editions of 3). There are 8 images in the small size, 14 in the medium size, and 2 in the large size on display in the exhibit. The works were made between 2005 and 2011. A monograph of this body of work was published in 2011 by J&L Books (here). (Installation shots at right.).
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Comments/Context: In Gregory Halpern's photographic portrait of Rust Belt America, a sparkling piece of jewelry offered by a black gloved hand seems like an impossible treasure, a talisman of uncanny brilliance somehow blindingly inappropriate or just completely out of context in this dingy, downtrodden world. It refers to a better time, a time of luxury and wealth and optimism, but in these pictures, that time is long gone.
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What Halpern has documented in these cities (Baltimore, Cincinnati, Omaha, and Detroit) is the beginning of the end, where wildness is creeping back into the realms of civilization. Faces are quietly defiant or meekly averted, wearing a mix of haggard, bloodied, and exhausted glances. Houses smoulder with lingering fire, or crumble from decay and rot regardless of makeshift supports. Trees take on an almost sinister quality, triumphing over human pruning to win in the end. And feral cats and aggressive raccoons prowl the streets with an unabashed lack of fear; a peacock runs loose and blackbirds smother a tree in the eerie twilight. In these pictures, Halpern takes the broad economic challenges of these regions and turns them into smaller life and death struggles, a resilient battle between relentlessly persevering and giving in to the invading desolation. The inhabitants are reduced to scavengers, scratching out an existence against the raw tide of ruin.
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Halpern's photographs have a harsh lyricism that may make them hard for some collectors to warm up to. But they are soberly successful (especially in book form) in capturing the sense of helpless, slowly encroaching chaos that has overtaken some of our once great cities. In these worlds, when seen from the perspective of a lowly mouse, even a hissing kitty can seem ferociously predatory.
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Collector's POV: The works in this show are priced as follows: the 10x8 prints are $1200, the 18x14 prints are $2000, and the 40x30 prints are $3500. Halpern's work has little or no secondary market history, so gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point.
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Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
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Transit Hub:

Artist site (here)
Review: New Yorker (here)
Book Reviews: Photo-Eye (here), LPV (here)

Gregory Halpern, A

Through February 11th
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Clamp Art

521-531 West 25th Street

Ground Floor

New York, NY 10001

The Loving Story, Photographs by Grey Villet @ICP

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 14:08:00 +0000

JTF (just the facts): A total of 20 black and white photographs, framed in black and matted, and hung against light blue walls in a single room gallery space on the lower level of the museum. All of the works are vintage gelatin silver prints from 1965. No dimension or edition information was provided for any of the works on view. A glass case in the center of the room contains a copy of the LIFE magazine article The Crime of Being Married, which includes several of the photographs and ran in 1966. A single video screen runs a small tape loop giving news background on the story. The curator of this exhibit was Erin Barnett. Since photography is unfortunately not allowed in the ICP galleries, the images for this show come via the ICP website. (Photographs by Grey Villet, top to bottom, at right.)

Comments/Context: Grey Villet's photographs of Richard and Mildred Loving are a sensitive and surprisingly powerful example of the classic photo essay. Using a handful of interconnected photographs to tell the human back story of their unassuming but controversial interracial marriage, Villet documents the quietly personal aspects of the miscegenation laws of 1960s Virginia and of the Loving's history making Supreme Court battle. This isn't a story about shouting and marching, but about unlikely heroes going about their lives, defying the authorities and the prevailing attitudes of the day in the name of love and family.

Villet's photographs center on the intimacy and tenderness expressed between the couple, and while we have seen these kinds of softly romantic images before, these pictures have an undercurrent of intensity; the Loving's role in the civil rights struggle makes their ordinariness seem extraordinary. Hands touch, arms drape casually over shoulders, Richard lies in Mildred's lap on the couch, and knowing looks and kisses are exchanged. Their lives seem utterly normal and natural: Mildred wears curlers, sweeps the living room, and bandages a child's arm, the kids play with dandelions and joyfully climb trees in the backyard, the couple socializes with friends at the local diner or the drag racing track. The only clues to their larger struggle are their often tired faces (brave and dedicated in a supremely understated way), the disapproving glances of Richard's mother, and the smug portrait of the judge in his library.

This is a small exhibit, but I think it provides clear proof of the lasting value of the photo essay as a journalistic form. Photographs are used to illustrate a story ripped from the headlines, and in doing so, give it a much richer and more nuanced reading than could ever have been accomplished with text alone. No amount of saying so can replace the sight of this couple acting like all couples do. Given the context of the times, their behavior was inconceivable to many, and yet, when really observed, it was seen to be genuinely loving. It's a story that needed to be told with photographs, and Villet did an admirable job of avoiding a harsher and more obvious political angle and instead let the everyday actions of the people speak for themselves.
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Collector's POV: Since this is a museum show, there are, of course, no posted prices. Villet's photographs have little or no consistent secondary market history, so gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point. Many of Villet's prints are available from the Monroe Gallery in Santa Fe (here).
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Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

Estate site (here)
The Loving Story film site (here)
Features/Reviews: NY Times (here), Lens (here), La Lettre de la Photographie (here)

The Loving Story, Photographs by Grey Villet
Through May 6th

International Center of Photography

1133 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10036

The Checklist: 2/2/12

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 14:12:00 +0000

Checklist 2/2/12
Current New York Photography Shows

New reviews added this week in red.
(Rating: Artist/Title: Venue: Closing Date: link to review)

Uptown

ONE STAR: Cecil Beaton: Museum of the City of New York: February 20: review
ONE STAR: Photographic Treasures from the Collection of Alfred Stieglitz: Met: February 26: review
THREE STARS: The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League: Jewish Museum: March 25: review

Midtown

ONE STAR: Massimo Vitali: Bonni Benrubi: February 4: review
ONE STAR: Robert Bourdeau: Edwynn Houk: February 18: review
TWO STARS: Reinstalled Permanent Collection: MoMA: March 28: review
TWO STARS: Magnum Contact Sheets: ICP: May 6: review
ONE STAR: Perspectives 2012: ICP: May 6: review
THREE STARS: Weegee: ICP: September 2: review

Chelsea

ONE STAR: Pierre Gonnord: Hasted Kraeutler: February 4: review
TWO STARS: Joel Sternfeld: Luhring Augustine: Februay 4: review
ONE STAR: The Wedding: Andrea Rosen: February 4: review
ONE STAR: Jitka Hanzlová: Yancey Richardson: February 11: review
TWO STARS: Shirin Neshat: Gladstone: February 11: review
ONE STAR: Bertien van Manen: Yancey Richardson: February 11: review
TWO STARS: August Sander/Seydou Keita: Walther Collection: March 10: review

SoHo/Lower East Side/Downtown

No reviews at this time.

Elsewhere Nearby

ONE STAR: Patti Smith: Wadsworth Atheneum: February 19: review
ONE STAR: Claire Beckett: Wadsworth Atheneum: March 4: review

Weegee: Murder Is My Business @ICP

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:05:00 +0000

JTF (just the facts): A total of 116 photographs by Weegee (along with 6 additional photographs by other photographers and a handful of wall sized enlargements), framed in black and matted, and hung against light brown walls in a series of 4 connecting rooms on the lower level of the museum. All of the Weegee works on view are gelatin silver prints, taken between 1935-1946. No dimension or edition information was provided for any of the prints. The exhibit was curated by Brian Wallis. Since photography is unfortunately not allowed in the ICP galleries, the images for this show come via the ICP website. (Photographs by Weegee, top to bottom at right.)
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The exhibit is divided into four sections. The details of each section are as follows:

Photo Detective: Weegee and the Art of Self Invention
15 photographs
1 glass case (camera/bulbs, press card, hat, 2 magazine spreads)
Bedroom recreation
1 interactive screen

Read All About It! Weegee and the Tabloid Press
43 photographs
1 glass case (5 images in newspapers, 3 in magazine spreads)
1 case (crime scene log book)
1 interactive screen

Documentary Truth: Weegee and the Photo League
21 photographs
6 photographs by other photographers (1936-1948, Aaron Siskind, Vivian Cherry, Sandra Weiner, Helen Levitt, Lee Sievan, Arnold Eagle)
1 glass case (exhibition comment book)
Photo League exhibit recreation
1 interactive screen

Naked City: Weegee and Urban Disorder
37 photographs
1 video (Weegee's New York: New York Fantasy, 1948)
1 glass case (13 spreads from PM, 1940-1944)
1 glass case (6 copies of Naked City open to spreads matching prints above)
1 video (Coney Island, 1948)
1 interactive screen

Comments/Context: As you come down the stairs toward the first gallery of the new Weegee show at the ICP, you are greeted by a massive papier-mache revolver (recreating one his famous self portraits looming down over a gun shop) and foot high letters shouting the show's lurid title Murder Is My Business. These details announce that this exhibit is going to be full of high drama production values mixed with a film noir sense of hard-boiled roughness, and it certainly does deliver on that score. But as I circled the rooms of this excellent exhibit, I started to read the title with a slightly different cadence and emphasis. Say those same words in a deadpan monotone, as a statement of fact (like I Am An Accountant), with a sense that Weegee took his subject matter (murder) seriously and practiced his craft with relentlessness and care, and suddenly some of the over-the-top huckster bravado falls away, leaving behind a photographer who was undeniably very, very good at his chosen vocation.

While the meticulous recreation of Weegee's bedroom (police scanner on the bedside table etc.) and his exhibits at the Photo League (complete with red nail polish applied to the photographs to enhance their bloodiness) are visually exciting and break up the normal monotony of a normal photography exhibit, the real core of this exhibit comes in the second room, where Weegee's early flash-lit images for the tabloid press are shown with scholarly clarity. Instead of a parade of individual greatest hits, a smaller number of rightly famous images are selected and then surrounded by Weegee's other photographs of that same scene, often creating a cluster of 3 or 4 pictures of the same accident or perp walk. These groups prove that Weegee wasn't a fly-by paparazzi, snapping haphazardly. While any particular incident might be anchored by a bloody corpse or sheet covered body, Weegee took the time to orient his compositions looking for contextual stories. His pictures are never just the gangster or the criminal; they are always broader, rounder compositions including bystanders, gawkers, police officers, anguished relatives, other photographers, and other random passersby and local architecture, sometimes in multiple overlapping layers of foreground and background. He had an eye for witty irony, and black humor, and gritty, unexpected truth, and his pictures are almost always the story of a reaction, a gesture, a juxtaposition, or a movement that accompanies the central action. A movie marquee, an overturned white hat, a thick rooftop edge, onlookers craning out of upstairs windows, the bold sign for a bar and grill, they all provide context for the dingy repeated drama of death and disfigurement. It is clear from this series of pictures that Weegee understood that it wasn't enough to simply document the facts, but that every picture needed a visual hook to get run, and his approach to any given event was to search for that hook.

The other rooms in the exhibit surround this central "murder" core, providing evidence of Weegee's tireless self-promotion and of his work to expand his photographic subject matter to include many more facets of New York life. The first room is all self-portraits (with a bomb, with a pile of loot, out of a paddy wagon) and we get a refrain of self-portraits later in the exhibit (with his typewriter in the back of a car), as if we hadn't had enough of Weegee's fascination with his own persona. After the seemingly endless parade of corpses (and there is a particularly good one of a sheet covered body still holding a shorn off steering wheel), we see Weegee turn his camera to ice covered firemen, a trampling incident, tenement living, top hats covering faces, cars submerged in the river, Bowery entertainers, and even Santa being inflated for the Macy's parade and the endless crowds of the Coney Island beaches in summertime. In just a few short years, he went from the murder beat to covering the entire city, and his back to back shows at the Photo League were further proof that he was beginning to be recognized by his peers in the fine art world as something much more than a cigar chomping, nocturnal parasite.

My walk-away conclusion from this show is that Weegee really does get better and better the more you look at his work. This show brims with electric violence and nervous anxiety, and does an exemplary job of making a museum show interactive and fun, but what really got my attention (and what will stay with me long into the future) was the consistent cleverness of Weegee's compositional vision.

Collector's POV: This is a museum show, so of course, there are no posted prices. Since Weegee was so prolific, dozens of his photographs are routinely available at auction in any given year. Recent secondary market prices have ranged between roughly $1000 and $48000, with the vast majority available for under $5000.
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Rating: *** (three stars) EXCELLENT (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

Features/Reviews: NY Times (here), Lens (here), Hyperallergic (here), ARTINFO (here), Artdaily (here), Photo Booth (here), Capital New York (here), NPR Picture Show (here)

Weegee: Murder Is My Business
Through September 2nd

International Center of Photography

1133 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10036

Perspectives 2012 @ICP

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 14:16:00 +0000

JTF (just the facts): A group show consisting of the work of 3 photographers, variously framed and matted, and hung against white walls in a series of three connected rooms on the entire upper level of the museum. Starting at the entry to the exhibit, there are a total of 13 photographs by Chien-Chi Chang from his series China Town. 6 are gelatin silver prints and the other 7 are chromogenic prints. They are all framed in silver with no mat and hung edge to edge as diptychs and triptychs based on the relationships of the families depicted. The works were taken between 1998 and 2008. In the side room, there are a total of 11 photographs by Greg Girard from his series Half the Surface of the World. All of the prints are chromogenic prints, framed in silver with no mat. The works were taken between 2008 and 2009. And in the main space, there are a total of 12 images by Anna Shteynshleyger from her series City of Destiny. All of the prints are archival inkjet prints, framed in brown wood with no mat. The works were taken between 2002 and 2011. No dimension or edition information was provided for any of the works on view. Since photography is unfortunately not allowed in the ICP galleries, the images for this show come via the ICP website. (Photographs by Chien-Chi Chang, Greg Girard, and Anna Shteynshleyger, top to bottom, respectively.)

Comments/Context: This year's version of the ICP's annual Perspectives show gathers together three bodies of recent work that revolve around the idea of transplanted communities and the process of creating a feeling of home in a new environment. It's a loose theme that allows for divergent photographic approaches and cultural contexts.

Chien-Chi Chang's contrasting images of fathers working in New York and families back in China are the most successful. The men are photographed in black and white, sitting in cramped dormitories after a day of hard work, drinking beer, eating noodles, and calling home. The women and children are photographed in color, wives caring for babies, girls watching TV and lounging around. The contrast of these two worlds documents the dislocations that are occurring, where distance impedes communication and sacrifices are being made on both sides in the hopes of something better for the family. I liked the down time simplicity of these pictures, where the quiet loneliness of the subjects comes through.

Greg Girard's photographs follow in a long line of military base photography, but center not so much on the juxtaposition of opposing cultures but on the attempt to create a slice of the United States in far away lands. At bases in Kora and Japan, he finds big box stores, sculpted suburbs with manicured lawns, regulation US Postal Service mail boxes, ATMs and Pepsi trucks. Kids play on residential sidewalks, and American style news comes from military TV anchors and the Stars and Stripes newspaper. His images have the atmosphere of a surreal stage set, where small details of the underlying local world poke through at odd moments.

Anna Shteynshleyger's images of her life in an Orthodox Jewish community in Des Plaines, Illinois, are the most understated and subtle, to the point of being less durably memorable. The photographs are opaque and closed, the meanings less identifiable: a bare lightbulb in a room, carnations on a windowsill, a bird's nest on the hood of a car, an uncle standing in the greenery, a still life of backyard leftovers and pink Crocs. From these images, I was less able to connect with the narrative being told, or to resonate with the particular nuances of this cultural world and its challenges. I needed a few more clues to understand why these moments mattered.

All three of these projects likely function best in book form, where an aggregation of images can tell a broader and more robust story. That said, Chang's photographs will resonate most with me going forward, as I think he was most able to document the complexities of the underlying emotional state of an uprooted, transplanted life.

Collector's POV: This is a museum show, so of course, there are no posted prices. In general, these three photographers have little or no consistent secondary market history; as such, gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point. Chien-Chi Chang is part of Magnum; his vintage and modern prints are available directly from the Magnum Print Room (here) or via the Chi-Wen Gallery in Taipei (here). Greg Girard is represented by Monte Clark Gallery in Vancouver and Toronto (here). Anna Shteynshleyger is represented by Dvir Gallery in Tel Aviv (here).
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Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
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Transit Hub:

Chien-Chi Chang Magnum Photos page (here)
Greg Girard artist site (here)
Anna Shteynshleyger artist site (here)

Perspectives 2012
Through May 6th

International Center of Photography

1133 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10036

Magnum Contact Sheets @ICP

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 16:28:00 +0000

JTF (just the facts): A group show consisting of the work of 22 photographers, framed in black or enlarged and pinned directly to the wall, and hung against dark grey walls in a single room on the lower level of the museum. Many of the vintage contact sheets are shown in a large glass case in the center of the room, and copies of the recent book are arrayed on a bench along one wall. The show was curated by Kristen Lubben. A monograph of the larger collection was published in 2011 by Thames & Hudson (here); a special version with a limited edition print is also available (here). Since photography is unfortunately not allowed in the ICP galleries, the images for this show come via the ICP website. (Contact sheets from Rene Burri, Jonas Bendicksen and Philippe Halsman, top to bottom, respectively.)

The following photographers are included in the show, with the date of images in the contact sheet(s) in parentheses. Each photographer is represented by one sheet (some vintage, some modern) unless otherwise noted:

Eve Arnold (1959)
Jonas Bendicksen (2000)
Rene Burri (1963, plus 2 smaller contact sheets)
Cornell Capa (1961)
Robert Capa (1944, plus 1 individual print)
Chien-Chi Chang (2008)
Elliott Erwitt (1953)
Martine Franck (1976)
Leonard Freed (1978)
Bruce Gilden (1984)
Burt Glinn (1957)
Jim Goldberg (1989)
Philippe Halsman (1948)
Thomas Hoepker (1966)
Josef Koudelka (1968)
Susan Meiselas (1975, plus 1 smaller contact sheet)
Inge Morath (1957)
Trent Parke (2000)
Martin Parr (1985)
Marc Riboud (1953)
George Rodger (1940)
Alex Webb (1978)

Comments/Context: Right up front, I should confess that I am a lover of contact sheets. Seeing an entire roll of film displayed frame by frame is for me the ultimate expression of the photographic process, and I never seem to tire of poring over misfires and accidents on the way to the triumphant finish. The unaltered contact sheet represents (in a convenient short hand) the way the photographer's brain works, how he or she solves visual problems, and how chance and experimentation play a part in the picture making.
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At a detailed level, this show offers the ability to trail along behind the creation of some of photography's most iconic images: Robert Capa comes ashore at Normandy, Marc Riboud watches a painter high atop the Eiffel Tower, Rene Burri circles seemingly unnoticed around Che Guevara, and Josef Koudelka stands in the streets of revolutionary Prague. I was fascinated by the handful of images Martin Parr made of his famous New Brighton sunbather under the crusty treads of an excavator. He discovered the scene, moved around cautiously looking for the right compositional angle, and then was rewarded with the arrival of a small girl and the exact timing of a passerby in the background. It all happens in a handful of pictures, but it's a tight example of the calculating, iterative, construction of a terrific photograph.

For working photographers, this show should be on the required syllabus, since it proves that there is no one right way to work; below the specifics of the well-known images, the exhibit works on a more abstract level, exploring the nature of seeing, in-camera editing,and the passing of time. Some masters shoot only a frame or two when presented with a visual idea, and then move on rather quickly. Others snap frame after frame of variants on the same image, fine tuning angles and relationships until the magic happens. Still others set up a picture's underlying architecture and then wait for something unexpected to happen. I was just as interested in how these individual photographers worked, as in the eventual alchemy that produced a particular winner. I thoroughly enjoyed watching Susan Meiselas playing with adjacent/secondary cropped nude bodies in the contact sheet from her Carnival Strippers project, working to get just the right balance in the overall frame.

The accompanying catalogue is a wrist-breaking doorstop, but seems to offer hours of tracking and vicarious stalking of your most admired photographers. In our futuristic digital age, these contact sheets are now relics from a bygone era, but they still provide both an unmatched record of pathways of the artist's mind and a valuable teaching tool. In the end, it's just as interesting to see the ones that didn't work, on the way to finding the one that eventually did.
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Collector's POV: Contact sheets like these are rarely if ever found in the secondary markets, since they tend to be archived with the artist's negatives and papers rather than released as finished works. As such, there is no straightforward way to determine a current market value for these kinds of prints, either vintage or modern. Perhaps the safest answer here is "priceless"?

Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here)
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Transit Hub:

Magnum Photos page (here)
Book Reviews: NY Times (here), Guardian (here)

Magnum Contact Sheets
Through May 6th

International Center of Photography
1133 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10036

Claire Beckett, Simulating Iraq @Wadsworth Atheneum

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 13:16:00 +0000

JTF (just the facts): A total of 18 large scale color photographs, framed in white and unmatted, and hung in a single room gallery space on the first floor of the museum. All of the prints are archival inkjet prints, sized 40x30 or reverse. The images were taken in 2008 and 2009. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Claire Beckett's recent photographs turn on the idea of upending our expectations. Taken at specialized military training sites around the US, her smart, sometimes dissonant images document artificial, stage set versions of Iraq and Afghanistan, staffed with "soldiers" and "civilians" and used for simulations and training exercises. Nearly every picture is an inversion or a breakdown of reality as we know it, each one undermining our ability to impose our now ingrained stereotypes.

Her images of these fabricated towns look plausibly real from far away, but up close, the makeshift mosques are made of rough plywood and the warrens of interlocking alleys and buildings are cinderblocks painted the color of sand. Simplistic forms and fake brickwork provide an illusory backdrop for small narratives and role playing exercises played out by the soldiers: Al-Qaeda terrorist cells making IEDs, Taliban fighters hoarding machine guns, nurses and injured marines, and unsuspecting locals and civilians drinking tea in the village square. Beckett's portraits of these "actors" have an even more surreal quality. Marines and locals from nearby American towns dress up in tunics, robes and headscarves and are given Iraqi or Afghani names and elaborate backstories, but their blue eyes, fair skin, and work boots provide incongruous cultural mixtures and contrasts. Fresh makeup and perfect nails adorn a young "Iraqi nurse" and fake carcasses hang from a "butcher shop". Everything is a visual approximation, a window-dressed stand-in for the real.
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I like the fact that these pictures are free from a specific point of view; they aren't slanted or pushing a particular agenda. Their matter-of-fact conceptual oddity is part of what makes them so successful - they are open for any number of complex interpretations or conclusions. Beckett's photographs capture a different side of these conflicts than we have seen previously, broadening the ultimate story of our approach to these long running wars.

Collector's POV: Since this is a museum exhibition, there are, of course, no posted prices. Beckett's photography has no secondary market history, so gallery retail is likely the only viable option for interested collectors at this point. She is represented in Boston by Carroll and Sons (here).

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

Artist site (here)
Interview: Big, Red & Shiny (here)

Claire Beckett, Simulating Iraq
Matrix 163
Through March 4th
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Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art
600 Main Street
Hartford, CT 06103

The Checklist: 01/26/12

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 14:20:00 +0000

Checklist 1/26/12

New reviews added this week in red.

Uptown

ONE STAR: Cecil Beaton: Museum of the City of New York: February 20: review
ONE STAR: Photographic Treasures from the Collection of Alfred Stieglitz: Met: February 26: review
THREE STARS: The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League: Jewish Museum: March 25: review

Midtown

TWO STARS: Vivian Maier: Howard Greenberg: January 28: review
ONE STAR: Massimo Vitali: Bonni Benrubi: February 4: review
ONE STAR: Robert Bourdeau: Edwynn Houk: February 18: review
TWO STARS: Reinstalled Permanent Collection: MoMA: March 28: review

Chelsea

ONE STAR: Pierre Gonnord: Hasted Kraeutler: February 4: review
TWO STARS: Joel Sternfeld: Luhring Augustine: Februay 4: review
ONE STAR: The Wedding: Andrea Rosen: February 4: review
ONE STAR: Jitka Hanzlová: Yancey Richardson: February 11: review
TWO STARS: Shirin Neshat: Gladstone: February 11: review
ONE STAR: Bertien van Manen: Yancey Richardson: February 11: review
TWO STARS: August Sander/Seydou Keita: Walther Collection: March 10: review

SoHo/Lower East Side/Downtown

ONE STAR: Mel Bochner: Peter Freeman: January 28: review

Elsewhere Nearby

TWO STARS: Walker Evans: Florence Griswold Museum: January 29: review
ONE STAR: Patti Smith: Wadsworth Atheneum: February 19: review

Robert Bourdeau @Houk

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:09:00 +0000

JTF (just the facts): A total of 24 black and white photographs, framed in black and matted, and hung in the main gallery space. All of the works are vintage (or printed with a year or two) gelatin silver prints, many toned with gold, alternately available in editions of 15 or 30. Physical dimensions range between 8x12 and 11x14 (or reverse). The images were originally taken between 1981 and 2005. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Robert Bourdeau's recent photographs of decaying industrial architecture are in many ways a throwback to a time when superlative black and white craftsmanship was regarded as the pinnacle of photographic achievement. His images celebrate the tactile quality of surface texture with an almost fetish-like reverence, making stained steel and flaking concrete glow with burnished gold-toned glory.

Bourdeau's compositions crop out the sky, centering down on fragments of piping and industrial cement, where boilers, engines, furnaces, ladders, and railings criss-cross in layered abstract geometries. Residues drip down the sides of steel tubs, walls erode and crumble, swirls and imperfections decorating every inch of disused, dusty equipment. These are formal pictures, where shapes, angles and patterns have been arranged with care, their subtle tonalities enhanced by exacting printing. They have the echo of Bourdeau's friend and teacher, Minor White, the rotting hulks infused with an almost spiritual grace.

While we have all certainly seen these kinds of industrial subjects over and over again across the history of the medium, that doesn't take away from the fact that these are undeniably well made photographs. They're almost like old cabaret songs or jazz standards being sung once again; they're entirely familiar but still noteworthy when executed with such obvious technical expertise.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced at $8500 each.

Bourdeau's work has not yet reached the secondary markets with any regularity, so gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point.
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Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
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Transit Hub:

Artist site (here)

Robert Bourdeau
Through February 18th

Edwynn Houk Gallery
745 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10151

Shirin Neshat, The Book of Kings @Gladstone

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:45:00 +0000

JTF (just the facts): A total of 56 black and white photographs, framed in black and unmatted, and hung in the main gallery space, the reception hallway, and a smaller side room. The show also includes a new three-channel video installation entitled OverRuled, on view in a separate darkened room. 45 of the photographs come from the series Masses and are ink on LE gelatin silver prints, each sized 40x30, in editions of 5+2AP. 6 of the photographs come from the series Patriots and are also ink on LE gelatin silver prints, each sized, 60x45, also in editions of 5+2AP. And 3 of the photographs come from the series Villains and are also ink on LE gelatin silver prints, each sized 99x50, also in editions of 5+2AP. The other two works in the reception hallway are 47x60 and 62x49, with similar details in terms of process and edition size. All of the works were made in 2012. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Shirin Neshat's newest photographs are a direct response to recent political events in the Middle East, encompassing both the Green Movement in Iran in 2009 and the broader protests and revolutions of the Arab Spring. Her images take her back to her mid 1990s aesthetic style (spare black and white portraits with faces covered in painstakingly detailed calligraphy) and apply this haunting look to contrasting groups of participants (Masses, Patriots and Villains) in the struggle for power and freedom.

The Masses portraits are hung in a overpowering 3x15 grid that covers an entire wall with serious, staring head shots. Her subjects run the gamut from the older generation to younger people, and each everyday face provides tiny nuances of group emotion: anxiety, uncertainty, resignation, hope, aspiration. The Patriots images step back to show torso level portraits, with the universally young subjects placing their right hands over their hearts. These activist faces have even more intense expressions: defiance, fervor, pride, devotion, even potentially hatred(the image of Nida is particularly striking, second from the right, at right). The calligraphic text written on their skin is larger and bolder than on the people from Masses, as if shouting rather than whispering, even though the poses are equally sober and quiet. The Villains are full length portraits of older men, where the calligraphic text has been replaced with elaborate illustrations across their bare chests like tattoos. These drawings of ancient war (complete with spurting decapitations in blood red) reinforce the feeling of implicit violence (religious or political) that hangs in the air. Taken together, these three sets of participants are made into metaphors, or symbols of simplified emotions.

I have to admit that I think it is hard to completely understand these works given my inability to read the text superimposed on the bodies and faces. For Western audiences, the calligraphy is transformed from a storytelling layer into a purely decorative motif, and I'm guessing that I'm missing quite a bit of the desired effect. Imagine trying to understand Barbara Kruger's work if you couldn't read the text; sure, there is a graphic quality we as viewers can all connect to, but the irony and juxtaposition of the images and text would be completely lost. I have the same sense of being in the dark with these images. What is being said by the text blaring from the foreheads of the Patriots? And how might it change my experience of their ultra serious faces?

With this caveat of likely misunderstanding, I do think that many of these portraits are quite beautiful, even if they are sometimes harsh and heavy handed. The whole body of work is a personal reminder of the powerful emotions that surround the abstraction of political revolution, where individuals (not types) take part in the action on the front lines.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced as follows. The works from Masses are $35000 each, Patriots are $65000 each, and Villains are $85000 each. The other two photographs are $65000 and $75000 respectively. Neshat's images are regularly available in the secondary markets, particularly I Am Its Secret, which was printed in an edition of 250. Recent prices at auction have ranged from roughly $3000 to $70000.

Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

Interview: Modern Art Notes podcast (here)
Review: Huffington Post (here)

Shirin Neshat, The Book of Kings
Through February 11th

Gladstone Gallery
515 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011

Vivian Maier: Photographs from the Maloof Collection @Greenberg

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 16:33:00 +0000

JTF (just the facts): A total of 56 black and white photographs, framed in black and matted, and hung in the main gallery space and the book alcove. 31 of the prints (shown in the main space) are posthumous/modern gelatin silver prints, each sized 12x12, in editions of 15. The other 25 prints (shown in the book alcove) are lifetime gelatin silver prints, ranging in size from 4x3 to 11x14. All of the images were taken in the 1950s and 1960s. A monograph of this body of work was published by powerHouse Books in 2011 (here). (Installation shots at right.)
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Comments/Context: Whatever we might think about the rediscovery of the 1950s street photographs of Vivian Maier, it's impossible to conclude that the press coverage has been anything but breathless and ubiquitous; if you have even the slightest interest in photography, you can't have missed this story in the past year or two. Since every feature article follows the same exact path (the nanny, the storage locker, the 100,000 negatives, the auction, etc.), I'm going to assume this thin background is by now pretty well common knowledge.

Photography is likely the only mainstream artistic medium where we continue to unearth potentially major talents who have been heretofore completely overlooked or lost, so Maier's emergence is by no means an isolated case. In recent years, similar stories have played out with the work of Charles Jones and Mike Disfarmer to name just two of many. I think the hard thing about such rediscoveries is that it is very difficult to place these photographers back into their original historical context, since no one of that era saw the work or was influenced by it, nor do we have any concrete information about what shows the artist saw, what people he/she met or admired, or what books were on his/her shelves; the whole artistic narrative is disconnected. Until this data is uncovered by diligent scholarship and historical study (if ever), all we can really do is look at the pictures and try to draw our own narrowly drawn hypothetical conclusions about what might have been.

The other challenge with such a project, especially when the work is found as an undifferentiated whole, is that we really have no sense of Maier as an editor of her own art. We don't know which pictures she thought were her best, which ones she thought were failures, and which ones she thought were interesting but not necessarily representative of what she was trying to accomplish. In this small show, there are photographs reminiscent of Friedlander, Frank, Model, Callahan, Winogrand, Levinstein, Weegee, and even Arbus. Seeing such a gathering, one might plausibly conclude that she was a photographer still searching for her own style, perhaps trying on other ways of working in the process of looking for her own, borrwing here and there and incorporating pieces she found useful. Absent verifiable connections or a complete chronology, it's impossible to say which came first, or which echo was purposeful, random, or otherwise uniquely original.

So it is fair to say that I came to this show with a fair amount of inherent skepticism, especially given the hype. What is evident however is that Vivian Maier was undeniably talented. Her street photographs have a sense of formal control that is too consistent to be a coincidence; there is very little motion or chance in these pictures. She had an eye for small urban gestures: the turn of head on the street, the resting of a sleeping head on the bus, the clasp of hands across a lunch table, or the matching hats and newspapers on the train. She also had a fondness for the eccentric details in people: a crop of bushy white hair under a hat, the scowling veiled faces of society women in furs, the elastic bands exploding out of a conductor's back pockets, the watch chain of a suited man sleeping in a car, or the blurry glamour of a puffy white dress in the night. There is a strong undercurrent of crisp storytelling here, even with her self-portraits, which capture her modest figure with deadpan rigor, often reflected in shop windows or store mirrors.
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This show felt to me like a broad introductory edit, a little of everything, and I look forward to tighter slices of her work as the overall view of her photography becomes clearer. It's too early to say definitively where Maier fits or to understand how reinserting her into the march of 1950s photography might alter the agreed-upon progression, but it's safe to declare that her photographs are truly exciting and well-crafted. Much more work is clearly needed to process her voluminous output and synthesize it down into those images that represent a unique, innovative contribution to the history of the medium. That work is ongoing, so I expect this will be just the first of many Vivian Maier shows to come, bit by bit (re)defining her legacy.
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Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced as follows. The posthumous prints start at $1800 and rise up through $2600 and $3500 to $5000. The lifetime prints range from $4750 to $8250, with a few NFS or already sold. Maier's work has not yet reached the secondary markets, so gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point.

Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here)
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Transit Hub:

Artist site/Maloof (here)
Artist site/Goldstein (here)
Reviews/Features: NY Times (here), Lens (here), New Yorker (here)

Vivian Maier: Photographs from the Maloof Collection

Through January 28th

Howard Greenberg Gallery

41 East 57th Street

New York, NY 10022

Jitka Hanzlová, HERE @Richardson

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 13:06:00 +0000

JTF (just the facts): A total of 10 color photographs, framed in blonde wood and matted, and hung in the back project space. All of the prints are chromogenic prints, each sized 12x8, in editions of 8. The images were taken between 1998 and 2010. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: This small show of the work of Czech photographer Jitka Hanzlová is a sampler from a decade long project to document her transplanted existence in the Ruhr region of Germany. Her vertical fragments of landscapes and three quarter environmental portraits are infused with the acute curiosity and questioning eyes of an outsider. What locals would walk by without another glance, Hanzlová investigates with crisp, almost antiseptic, precision.

Most of the images on view mix industrial infrastructure with the rural countryside: a cow meandering under an imposing concrete overpass, a man-made hillside reflected in a yellow reservoir, towering electric stanchions above a grassy soccer field, and a snow covered coal mining depression that looks like a miniature striated amphitheater. These landscapes are formal and quiet, sparse but rigid in their own way. I most enjoyed the two portraits in the show, which have a timeless quality to them. The young women pose in front of monochrome walls and yellow leaves with a kind of fresh grace and alert simplicity that is found in paintings from another age.

The whole installation left me with a lingering sense of unease. Hanzlová's photographs have a real feeling of puzzled foreignness, of noticing the subtleties of the everyday with a heightened awareness for difference.
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Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced at 4300€ each. Hanzlová's work has become somewhat more available in the secondary markets in recent years, particularly in the European auctions; prices have generally ranged between $1000 and $3000.
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Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
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Transit Hub:

BMW Paris Photo Prize, 2007 (here)
Feature: Frieze, 2003 (here)

Jitka Hanzlová, HERE
Through February 11th

Yancey Richardson Gallery

535 West 22nd Street

New York, NY 10011

The Checklist: 01/19/12

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 18:02:00 +0000

Checklist 1/19/12

New reviews added this week in red.

Uptown

ONE STAR: Cecil Beaton: Museum of the City of New York: February 20: review
ONE STAR: Photographic Treasures from the Collection of Alfred Stieglitz: Met: February 26: review
THREE STARS: The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League: Jewish Museum: March 25: review

Midtown

ONE STAR: Jeff Wall: Marian Goodman: January 21: review
ONE STAR: Massimo Vitali: Bonni Benrubi: February 4: review
TWO STARS: Reinstalled Permanent Collection: MoMA: March 28: review

Chelsea

ONE STAR: Alex Webb: Aperture: January 19: review
ONE STAR: Pierre Gonnord: Hasted Kraeutler: February 4: review
TWO STARS: Joel Sternfeld: Luhring Augustine: Februay 4: review
ONE STAR: The Wedding: Andrea Rosen: February 4: review
ONE STAR: Bertien van Manen: Yancey Richardson: February 11: review
TWO STARS: August Sander/Seydou Keita: Walther Collection: March 10: review
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SoHo/Lower East Side/Downtown

ONE STAR: Mel Bochner: Peter Freeman: January 28: review

Elsewhere Nearby

TWO STARS: Walker Evans: Florence Griswold Museum: January 29: review
ONE STAR: Patti Smith: Wadsworth Atheneum: February 19: review

Patti Smith: Camera Solo @Wadsworth Atheneum

noreply@blogger.com (dlkcollection) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 14:26:00 +0000

JTF (just the facts): A total of 70 black and white photographs, generally framed in black and matted, and hung in a series of four connected gallery spaces. All of the prints are gelatin silver prints taken with a Land 250 Polaroid camera, available in editions of 10; dimensions were not available. The images were taken between 1995 and 2011. The exhibit also includes 1 sculpture, 1 video (in a separate darkened room), and 4 glass cases containing poems, drawings, books, letters, Robert Mapplethorpe's slippers and marble cross, a prayer cloth, a stone, contact sheets, a camera, a portrait of Baudelaire, Pope Benedict's slippers, and her father's china teacup. A monograph of this body of work was published by Yale University Press in 2011 (here). (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Patti Smith's photography is full of ghosts. Not the scary spectral beings or spooky monsters of a horror movie, but the gentle, ephemeral imprints of lives now gone that have remained deeply resonant for her in one way or another. Her pictures are brimming with objects infused with personal significance, together a kind of artistic diary or the map of a life long journey, where ideas and influences pile up like loose memories and everyday objects become a source of spiritual inspiration.

The vast majority of the photographs on display are deceptively simple, sometimes dull, black and white still lifes or interior scenes, often taken in the available light and left grainy and shadowy, full of subtle beauty and immediacy. The show reads like a parade of heroes or a puzzle of aesthetic (I hesitate to use the word "poetic") connections: Rimbaud's fork and spoon, Keats' bed, Woolf's cane, Nureyev's slippers, Tolstoy's stuffed bear, Hesse's typewriter, Bolaño's chair. As if communing with the dead, she earnestly searches out countless graves and tombstones: Sontag, Whitman, Blake, Baudelaire, Shelley, Modigliani, Brancusi. Other pictures document her children, her guitars and workspace, religious icons and cherubs, landmarks from Paris and Vienna, with treasured items from her life with Robert Mapplethorpe never far from view. Every item is symbolic, every seemingly insignificant thing a talisman or relic.

In the hands of one less talented, these same pictures might have been cloying, pretentious and suffocatingly arty; instead, Smith's images are modest, sincere, and surprisingly lyrical. She seems altogether unaware of the danger of cliche, walking right up to the line and somehow coming away with pictures that are altogether genuine. There is a sense of deep respect and honor in these photographs, of mundane personal effects made special, and of an intense, meaningful pilgrimage made to linger in their presence and to be moved by their strength.

This is one of the more inward looking shows I have seen in quite a long time, and there were moments where I felt a little claustrophobic being allowed in so close. Together, these images are the visual journal of a solitary artistic life, each item a tiny fragment of her searching persona. I can almost image the collectors of this work placing the same kind of obsessive energy into these prints, capturing a piece of the essence of Patti Smith in the pictures, to be placed on a shelf like a beloved shrine.

Collector's POV: Since this is a museum exhibition, there are, of course, no posted prices. Smith's photography has virtually no secondary market history, so gallery retail is likely the only viable option for interested collectors at this point. She is represented in New York by Robert Miller Gallery (here).

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

Reviews/Features: Guardian (here), BOMBLOG (here), Neon Tommy (here), Style.com (here), Hartford Courant (here)
Interviews: Vogue (here), ARTINFO (here)
DLK COLLECTION review of Just Kids (here)

Patti Smith: Camera Solo
Through February 19th

Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art
600 Main Street
Hartford, CT 06103