Book: Elger Esser, Eigenzeit

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2009 by Schirmer/Mosel (here). 180 pages, with 73 color and black and white images. Includes essays by Simone Schimpf, Cees Nooteboom, Alexander Pühringer, Friedrich Wolfram Heubach, Peter Herzog, and Hubertus von Amelunxen, as well as a short biography, exhibition list, and bibliography. In English, German, and Dutch. (Cover shot at right, via Amazon.)

The works in the catalog have been divided into six groups, along with additional images by both Esser and other artists reproduced amongst the essays:

Landscapes, 1996-2009 (8 images)
Wrecks, 2006-2009 (9)
Views, 2004-2006 (6)
Vedutas, 1996-2009 (6)
Combray, 2007-2009 (7)
Palimpsests, 2007 (5)

Comments/Context: Having carefully reviewed this catatlog from the recent retrospective show of Elger Esser's work at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, I'd like to think that I have finally begun to understand a photographer who has puzzled me for years. Part of my problem as a viewer of Esser's work seems to have stemmed from some preconceived and now obviously incorrect notions about what the work of a Becher student from Düsseldorf was "supposed" to look like and how landscape photography could or should incorporate conceptual methodologies. When placed in the context to Gursky, Ruff, and Struth, I could never seem to see how Esser fit, or really even come to grips with what he was trying to accomplish.

This book gathers together a representative sample of his work from the past two decades, and so provides a mix of images from different projects, all placed together in the larger framework of his aesthetic approach. While I had always recognized the allusions to the conventions of Romantic painting and 19th century photography in his monumental washed out yellow seascapes and cityscapes, I had never really seen the connection between these works and his recent blown-up seaside postcards of shipwrecks and crashing waves or his seemingly unremarkable black and white village scenes executed in perfect heliogravure.

I can now see that Esser's works all revolve around an exploration of time and memory, always with a touch of melancholy for what has been lost along the way. Some of the works echo Proust, and look for contemplative moments of timelessness; others follow the thin thread of a forgotten narrative, only to be left with the essence of the moment, not its details. In all of Esser's works, he has rigorously recaptured approaches to picture-making (both compositional and technical) that look backward, and then updated, synthesized, and executed them using today's photographic tools. As such, their conceptualism is a bit more concealed, requiring some additional patience and quiet consideration to discern the patterns and relationships; this is one case where a bit of education about the artist's intent goes a long way toward enhancing the viewer's overall understanding of what hangs on the wall.

While I still enjoy Esser's yellow riverfront cityscapes and open seaside vistas most, this catalog has provided both a much needed roadmap of where Esser has gone since and a lucid explanation of how these newer works reflect on the foundational themes he has been wrestling with for years.

Collector’s POV: Elger Esser is represented in New York by Sonnabend Gallery (here) and in Paris/Salzburg by Galerie Thaddeus Ropac (here). Esser's work has generally been available at auction in recent years, typically ranging between $25000 and $75000 (with a few outliers).

Transit Hub:

• Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, 2009 (here)
  

Book: Robert Longo, Men in the Cities

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2009 by Schirmer/Mosel (here). The book is subtitled Photographs 1976-1982. 128 pages, with 93 color and black and white images. Includes a short essay by Cindy Sherman and an artist interview with Richard Price. In both English and German. (Cover shot at right, via Amazon.)

Comments/Context: Until I recently came across this excellent book, I had no idea that Robert Longo had used photographs as the source material for his famous drawings of lunging 1980s men in skinny ties; I had always assumed that the pictures were appropriated from somewhere or just imagined in his own mind. In fact, Longo set up his camera on the rooftop of his apartment and threw a variety of objects at his friends, capturing their violent reactions in these amazing photographs, that he then turned into his now iconic monochrome drawings.

What is altogether surprising about these pictures is that they rival the best dance photographs that have ever been made - Martha Graham never looked so good. The jerks and spasms of Longo's subjects have an elegance and grace that is entirely unexpected; protective reactions and exaggerated gestures have been turned into effortless and authentic choreography, a ballet of falls and stumbles, leaps and trips. While the business suits and skirts have a retro film noir look, the movements are fresh and vital, full of energy and life, even when they mockingly portray the agonizing arrival of a bullet to the chest or a fist to the jaw. Thirty years in the drawer have failed to dampen the impact of these "death dance" pictures - they document an essence of human motion, boiled down to pure expression.

Collector’s POV: Robert Longo is represented in New York by Metro Pictures (here). Digital prints of these photographs were produced in 2009, but they have yet to reach the secondary markets; as such, gallery retail is really the only option for interested collectors at this point.

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Video interview (here)

Candida Höfer, Florence and Naples @Sonnabend

JTF (just the facts): A total of 7 large scale works, framed in blond wood with no matting, and hung in the entry and the center room in the rear of the gallery. The c-prints range in size from roughly 75x61 to 80x102 and are made in editions of 7. All of the negatives are from 2008 and 2009, and were taken in Florence and Naples. A monograph of this body of work (entitled Napoli) has recently been published by Schirmer/Mosel (here). (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: After years of seeing shows of Candida Höfer's images of ornate public spaces and interiors and thinking they all looked generally the same, this exhibit of recent work from Florence and Naples made me think quite a bit more deeply about her artistic approach. For the first time, I got beyond the documentary novelty/awe of the over-the-top constructions and ornamentations themselves, and started to think about these pictures as a kind of nuanced portraiture, to see the artist's style more clearly layered over the subtleties of architectural personality.

In a certain way, these Italian pictures look like any number of other pictures she has taken previously: formal rooms, frescoed ceilings, checkerboard marble floors, classical sculpture, cherubs, flashy chandeliers, and rows of columns. There are impressive palaces, ballrooms, entry halls and libraries, all designed as overt signals of wealth, power, and status. Each is entirely empty of people, the polished floors reflecting the pure white light which pours quietly in through the windows.

I guess it was the simple thought exercise of comparing these images to how I would expect these same famous rooms to look on post cards in the nearby gift shops that started me down a more complicated reading of these photographs; when they're printed large and hung as individual objects, it's sometimes easy to just get lost in the grandeur of the prints and forget to think about the subtle differences in composition, framing, or lighting that Höfer has employed.

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If we looked at a series of Avedon or Penn portraits, all taken with monochrome backgrounds and frontal poses, we wouldn't say they all looked the same; we'd see the tiny gestures that have been captured that make the people individuals, and we'd see the overlay of the photographer's approach augmenting the exploration of these often hidden features. The same is true here: I suddenly became aware of how the square framing had been used to better capture the elongated decorated ceilings, or how the curves of a chandelier were carefully placed to interact with the balconies of a double height room. I also saw how Höfer had highlighted the cluster of modern plastic chairs that were set up in one of the ballrooms and realized how they formed a surprising juxtaposition to the ornate religious frescoes and gold leaf on the walls and ceilings. Even the David (perhaps the most cliched subject imaginable, often seen looking up at its magnificence) was photographed in an unexpected way that made the immense statue look more vulnerable, the grandeur of the domed glass atrium in which it stands dwarfing the iconic sculpture.

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All in, I was much less distracted by the grand locations themselves in this body of work, and as a result, saw much more of Höfer's aesthetic approach than I have noticed previously. I've come to the conclusion that Höfer's work cannot be appreciated via the normal "stand for 5 seconds and move on" approach to gallery hopping; it requires the patience to let the initial eye-catching drama dissipate and dissolve a little, so that the more subtle details of the photographic craft can come though.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced between 45000 and 50000€, based on size. Höfer's work is readily available in the secondary markets, in a variety of dimensions and edition sizes. Smaller pieces can be found well under $10000 (often in editions of up to 100), while the larger works (printed in much smaller editions, usually 6) range between $20000 and $50000, with a few outliers even higher.

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

Transit Hub:

• Architecture of Absence, ICA UPenn, 2006 (here)
• NY Times review, 2004 (here)

Candida Höfer, Florence and Naples

Through April 17th

Sonnabend Gallery (artnet page here)
536 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011

Book: The Düsseldorf School of Photography, Stefan Gronert (ed.)

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2010 by Aperture (here). 320 pages, with 162 color and black and white images by 11 different photographers. Includes a foreword by Lothar Schirmer, an essay by Stefan Gronert, and summary biographies, exhibition lists and bibliographies for each of the artists. The German version of the book is being published by Schirmer/Mosel (here). (Cover shot at right, via Amazon.)

The photographers included/discussed are:

Bernd & Hilla Becher
Laurenz Berges
Elger Esser
Andreas Gursky
Candida Höfer
Axel Hütte
Simone Nieweg
Thomas Ruff
Jörg Sasse
Thomas Struth
Petra Wunderlich

Comments/Context: The Düsseldorf school of photography is probably the largest topic in contemporary photography that has yet to receive the kind of in-depth scholarly treatment we would expect for such an important and influential artistic movement. While I'm sure there have been quite a few masters and Ph.D. theses that have been written about the Bechers and their students, until the publication of this book, there have been effectively no survey style volumes brought to market with the broader public in mind. Given the many monographs and exhibition catalogues that have been written about these photographers individually, the gathering of a representative sample of the various artists' work is the lesser of the challenges here; the real test falls to the essay and how coherently and insightfully it ties together what heretofore have been generally separate but parallel narratives. We have all been searching for someone to help connect the dots and fill in the gaps; I'm happy to report that this book is certainly a good start.

One important semantic definition is required before we get to the analysis: what is it we mean by the term the "school"? In general, I think there are two possible answers as applied to artistic movements: the narrow - the education derived from a specific set of teachings/learnings (i.e. the how/what of the curriculum at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie or the Yale School of Art and how it was absorbed by specific students), and the broad - the larger geographic and temporal phenomenon (i.e. Düsseldorf or Helsinki as the umbrella term for a common style of working).

This volume (and its keystone essay) has chosen to focus on the Düsseldorf school in the broad sense, looking for the larger commonalities seen in its most successful and best known adherents. It lays at the feet of the Bechers the "emancipation of photography": the critical artistic mindset that photography was fully equal to painting, the results of which are embodied in the downstream success of the students who wholeheartedly embraced this unorthodox-at-the-time concept. It also implies an amorphous teaching by osmosis approach, where the Bechers were effectively leading by example: off doing their own highly stringent and objective documentary work, using the series and typology as modes for working and comparison, all underneath a rigid conceptual framework, with the students watching and absorbing some or all of what they saw as they saw fit. The narrative is thus one of commonality rather than causation: the students all started from a generally similar location; as they grew and matured as artists and selectively incorporated the Bechers' teachings over time, they went off in different but often parallel directions.

While there are some anecdotal comparisons and back and forth between the artists, in general, the book follows each photographer down his or her own particular evolutionary path, often starting prior to their involvement with the Bechers, and running to the present, now decades after the teacher/student relationship has ended. Each photographer gets a short biographical analysis, often through the lens of the Düsseldorf similarities. We see some exploring the limits of conceptual ideas (Ruff, Hütte, Esser, Struth, Sasse), while others have consistently worked in subject matter based series (Höfer, Wunderlich, Nieweg, Struth); over time, many have experimented with the use of large formats and prints (Höfer, Hütte, Nieweg, Struth, Berges, Ruff, Esser, Gursky). The challenge here is that most of these artists have worked through a handful of different projects over their careers to date, moving back and forth between working styles and approaches - the Düsseldorf narrative is therefore circular and cyclical rather than strictly linear, the Bechers' influence waxing and waning as the artists continually evolve and reinvent themselves.

As such, the story of the Düsseldorf school is not nearly as neat and tidy as one might expect from the rigid Germans; the Bechers put down some foundation concepts, but their students have long since moved beyond those initial ideas. Perhaps it is the mark of great teachers that they imparted their wisdom and experience about successful methods for discovering one's artistic voice through photography, without imposing their own specific vision too strongly.

While this book provides the satisfying summary and overview I have outlined, I found myself still wishing for more specifics; perhaps the next scholarly book on the Düsseldorf school needs to limit its scope to the period when the photographers were actually studying with the Bechers, and needs to cover in more detail how the curriculum was embodied in the early pictures. I'd also like to see more work from a broader range of the students (not just the "winners") to see how the teachings got applied in different ways. Similarly, I think some commentary from the artists themselves on what they took away from the Becher experience would be enlightening. Clearly, all of these photographers have long since moved beyond their early education, but I for one would be interested to hear what if anything they still find of value.

Overall, this book fills a gaping hole in the history of photography. It provides a well-selected sampler of the work of the best known members of the Düsseldorf school and offers a readable explanation of how it all fits together. While I have an insatiable appetite for more on this group of photographers, this volume certainly delivers a solid and thoughtful introduction to one of the most important movements in contemporary photography.

Collector’s POV: In many ways, there isn't much "new" information to be found in this book on the best known photographers in the group. It was therefore the sections on Petra Wunderlich, Simone Nieweg, Jörg Sasse, and Laurenz Berges that were the eye openers for me, in terms of exposing me more fully to some of the other students who are a little further out of spotlight. I also think the essay was helpful in clarifying my rudimentary understanding of the evolution of both Axel Hütte and Elger Esser, neither of which I have felt particularly comfortable with in the past.

Transit Hub:

• Review: Conscientious (here)

Book: Michael Wesely, Stilleben 2001-2007

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2007 by Schirmer/Mosel (here). 96 pages, with 42 color images. Includes an essay by Franz-W. Kaiser. (Cover shot at right, via Schirmer/Mosel.)

Comments/Context: Contemporary German photographer Michael Wesely has made a name for himself by expanding the idea of the photographic exposure to the point where time itself seems to be what is being captured. Using a large format camera with exposures measured in days, weeks, months, and in some cases even years, Wesely has drawn out the decisive moment into something altogether more cinematic, albeit still delivered within the confines of a single, static frame. This recent book gathers together a group of floral still lifes Wesley did over the last few years, showing how this approach can breathe new life into a classic subject.

If you've ever bought a bunch of tulips at the market, jammed them into a vase and left them on a table for a week or so, you'll know that the straight stems quickly bend and bow over, and the flowers gradually open up and drop their petals. While other photographers have documented the end point decay of all kinds of flowers (often as withered, dried up, or dusty husks), Wesely is the first I have encountered to have effectively captured all of the intermediate steps; the photographs document the entire process of aging, not just the final result. (2.2-12.2.2007 (B2906) at right, via Fahnemann Projects.)

Given the simple construct of a week-long exposure combined with a nearly infinite variety of flower types and colors, Wesely has produced a surprisingly varied body of work. What sounds mundane is anything but; each bouquet performs a unique lyrical dance as the flowers slowly swoon and wilt. For pictures that claim to be "still", there is an amazing amount of ghostly movement in these images, creating an impressionistic layering of blurred light and color. What I like about these works is that they can be read on one level as conceptual exercises, and on another, simply as floral still lifes of unexpected elegance and beauty.

Collector’s POV: Michael Wesely is represented by Fahnemann Projects in Berlin (here). The artist's work has not appeared in the secondary markets with much frequency; the lots that have sold in the past few years have ranged in price between $4000 and $13000.

As admirers of floral photography, these images would fit right into one of our core collecting genres. Unfortunately, given their generally large size (the image above is printed approximately 50x50, but many are as large as 70x95), we likely would have a problem with finding a place to display these massive works.

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Open Shutter @MoMA, 2004 (here)

Book: Axel Hütte, After Midnight

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2006 by Schirmer/Mosel and Waddington Galleries. 56 pages, with 21 color images. Includes an essay by Martin Filler. (Cover shot at right.)

Comments/Context: Of the now famous group of Becher students, Axel Hütte has always been the least accessible for us, likely because he has focused much of his work on carefully composed people-less landscapes (jungles, caves, glaciers, fires etc. from exotic locales around the world), a subject matter genre that unfortunately doesn't match well with our particular collecting activities and interests. In recent years, Hütte has also begun to make wall sized nighttime images of sprawling cities and towering skyscrapers, and so this collection of nocturnal views of American cities seemed like a better entry point for us.

In this volume, Hütte has taken images in ten cities across America, often making long panoramic views of the carpet of lights from his upper floor hotel room. In other pictures, he uses an adjacent building as an anchor in the foreground of the shot or simply captures a cluster of nearby highrises. All of the images have an atmosphere of emptiness and distance, with exterior building lights and reflections often painting the town in garish color.

In general, these images left me cold, and upon further reflection, I think that's the point. Regardless of which city is depicted, there are virtually no unique identifiers; they all look generally the same (well lit tall boxes), empty of people and life. In our efforts to build cities that are "modern", we seem to have left out any indicators of our culture or personality. It is not so much that these works are overtly negative; they're not. But what I took away was that Hütte was holding up a mirror to how we are building our American urban environments and communities, and I didn't particularly like what I saw.

Collector's POV: Axel Hütte is represented in London by Waddington Galleries (here), but seems not to have any consistent New York representation. His works have become more available at auction in recent years, with mural sized prints in editions of 3, 4, or 5 selling in a range between $10000 and $35000, and smaller prints in larger editions (25, 30, 100) selling for under $1000.

Transit Hub:

• Fog and Fire at Galerie Wilma Tolksdorf, Berlin, 2008 (here)
• 2008 show at Patricia Low Contemporary, Gstaad (here)