Alejandro Chaskielberg, The High Tide @Milo

JTF (just the facts): A total of 12 large scale color photographs, framed in black with no matting, and hung in the single room gallery space in front. All of the works are digital c-prints, made between 2007 and 2010. The prints are displayed in three image sizes: 5 prints at roughly 32x40 (editions of 9+3AP or 12+3AP), 6 prints at roughly 44x56 (editions of 7+3AP or 9+3AP) and 1 print at 59x75 (edition of 5+2AP). A monograph of this body of work entitled La Creciente is forthcoming from Nazraeli Press (here). (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Alejandro Chaskielberg’s contemporary images of life along the Parana River Delta in Argentina begin with a context of documentary realism and then stylistically expand into the realm of impressionistic, cinematic staging. His works chronicle a river-centered life of logging and farming, using local inhabitants as actors in nighttime recreations of the everyday activities of the region. Farmers cut rushes along the river banks or transport timber in barges and smaller boats, while weathered elders and children perch on the banks watching the action.

Chaskielberg’s use of moonlight, lanterns, and other forms of illumination give his recreations a surreal sense of color, with washes of glow and haze enveloping his subjects in hollow shades of blue and orange. In combination with tilt shift flattening of the depth of field, the scenes mix a sense of hyper reality with unabashed romantic warmth and mystery; the focus often centers on the lonely toil of an individual (or ghost), with the rest of the scene stretched into a blurred, almost painterly backdrop.

I realize that I’ve been harping on the concept of photographic genre combination quite a bit in recent weeks, but here again, we have a contemporary photographer who is consciously mixing two worlds: taking an anthropological documentary tradition and placing it together with exaggerated staging and performance techniques. The effect is a set of pictures that go beyond reportage and cross into conscious control over our impression of the reality on the ground. Chaskielberg gives life on the river a mystical quality that transcends the mundane chopping and hauling that dominates its days, adding a sense of wonder to the hardships of the jungle existence.

Collector's POV: The works in this show are priced as follows. The 32x40 prints are $4500 each, the 44x56 prints are either $6500 or $9500 each, and the 59x75 print is marked “not available”. Chaskielberg’s work has not yet entered the secondary markets, so gallery retail is likely the best and only option for interested collectors at this point.

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

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Interview: Time LightBox (here)

Alejandro Chaskielberg, The High Tide
Through July 29th

Yossi Milo Gallery
525 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001

Book: Anthony Hernandez, Waiting for Los Angeles

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2002 by Nazraeli Press (here). 92 pages, with 46 color images. Includes an essay by Allan Sekula. The images were taken between 1996 and 1998, and are printed 40x40. (Cover shot at right.)

Comments/Context: Last week, I posted an opinion piece on the idea of "local" or regional photography, of photographers turning back to their own communities for inspiration, rather than repeating the same themes drawn from bland globalism. Los Angeles based photographer Anthony Hernandez is an excellent example of staying rooted in a single environment, and over time, uncovering its subtleties and nuances. He has, of course, made pictures in other cities and locales, but it is his Los Angeles works that have the most resonance for me.

Collectors will likely be most familiar with Hernandez' 1970s and 1980s black and white work depicting the gritty streets of LA, bus stops and body shops, vacant lots and urban waterways, later contrasted with the shoppers on the sidewalks of Beverly Hills. More recently, Hernandez has moved to a square format, using color and close up framing to create more abstract images with all over patterns.

The fragments Hernandez has selected all relate to the idea of waiting: welfare offices and other public spaces, thick with the air of bureaucratic indifference. There are tile walls and corrugated concrete, loudspeakers and barriers, official notices and torn telephone books. There are also the less obvious signs of human habitation: cigarette butts and orange peels, stains, scrapes and smeared hand prints.

These isolated fractions and remnants work on two levels: on the abstracted plane of line, form, and color, interacting to create striking geometric designs and motifs, and deeper down, at the personal level, depicting the often dispiriting touch points of a world we don't often see or have failed to notice.

Overall, the work is this book is consistently excellent, and I think this comes as a result of both keen attention to craft, as well as from the careful eye of an artist probing a subject he already knows well.

Collector's POV: Anthony Hernandez is represented by Christopher Grimes Gallery in Santa Monica (here) and Galerie Polaris in Paris (here). I couldn't find any New York representation for his work, so please add it in the comments if someone has further information. There have been very few Hernandez works sold at auction in the past few years, mostly prints from the Pictures of Rome series; in general, prices have varied between $1000 and $7000. For our collection, the images from this book would fit extremely well in our city/industrial genre, but at 40x40, they're unfortunately once again too big.

Transit Hub:

• Vancouver Art Gallery exhibition, 2009 (here)
• Getty Museum collection (here)
• American Suburb X review (here)

Book: David Maisel, Oblivion

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2006 by Nazraeli Press (here). 48 pages, with 15 black and white images. Includes a poem by Mark Strand and essays by William L. Fox and David Maisel. (Cover shot at right.)

Comments/Context: While we would like to think that collectors and photographers find each other through some efficient meritocracy of affinity, the reality is that nearly all collectors are scouring around looking for works that catch their eye, and a significant degree of random chance and accident often come into play. In this particular case, I think we saw this book when it first came out and flipped through it at the Strand or elsewhere, thinking it was pretty interesting, but not actually purchasing it at that point. We then visited an online exhibit of the work at the JGS Forward Thinking Museum (here, recently redesigned) a year or so later, and were again impressed by what we saw. It wasn't until a month or so ago that we actually bought the book, after sitting down and thinking about work we had seen over the past few years that we wanted to explore further and write about for this site. So here we are, with a review of a book most people reviewed in 2006, a slow progression of repeated positive encounters bringing us together now.

The seemingly endless sprawl of the city of Los Angeles and the unique human culture that has grown up in this environment have been rich material for many photographers. In particular, its vast miles of housing developments and freeways have been repeated subject matter for aerial photographers who have been fascinated by the patterns made in the landscape by the built structures and forms.

While David Maisel's images in this book are part of this larger history, they have a look and feel that is altogether different than Ed Ruscha's views of parking lots. The obvious difference is that Maisel's works are negative prints, with the black and white tonalities reversed, creating unsettling views that upend our conventional wisdom about what shots from the air are supposed to look like. What I think is more provocative is that using this ashen palette, Maisel has selected perspectives and compositions that heighten the sense of foreboding and anxiety embedded in the landscape (long shots where the individual buildings become a dense carpet, and closer up views where the white shadows fall in unexpected directions). Others have commented on how these images resemble military surveillance or night vision pictures, and indeed there is a bleak paranoia that pervades all of these works.

To my eyes, the formations and designs in the images most resemble the results of some biology experiment gone wild, where the self replicating mechanism has been unleashed, creating alternately rigid structures that mimic semiconductor circuit diagrams and more organic films that take after microscopic mold growing in a petri dish. As such, the images became thought-provoking vignettes of what indeed a massive human city like Los Angeles really is, engineered on a desert platform with borrowed water, and what it might mean to be a single individual eking out a life in this outrageous place.

Collector's POV: David Maisel is represented by Von Lintel Gallery (here) in New York, along with several others around the US. The works from Oblivion are 40x40 c-prints. These impressive images would fit extremely well into our collection (juxtaposed with other city scenes across the history of the medium), but as usual, the problem is that they are much too large for the constraints of our display space.

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Interview with Archinect, 2006 (here)
• Conversation with Jörg Colberg in Seesaw magazine, 2007 (here)
• Audio interview with Lens Culture, 2005 (here)