Beate Gütschow @Sonnabend

JTF (just the facts): A total of 16 black and white light jet prints, framed in white with no mat, hung in the entry and three back galleries. The works are printed in various sizes, ranging from 36x31 up to 70x105, and are made in editions of 5 or 15. The images were created between 2004 and 2009. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: While deadpan images of decaying cities and towns have become a commonplace subject for many contemporary photographers, Beate Gütschow has taken this idea to an entirely different level in the works now on view at Sonnabend. Gütschow starts by taking hundreds of analog images of architecture in locations all over the world, and then combines fragments from these pictures digitally into seamless and entirely original views that walk the line between apparent reality and obvious falsehood.
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On first glance, these abandoned buildings and empty plazas look hauntingly plausible, perhaps a documentary record of desolation from a far off failed state or a Julius Shulman-type record of some unknown architect's massive constructions. And yet, something is just not quite right - the scale of the buildings is so immense, the wastelands that surround them are so expansive - where on earth could this be?

The word "post-apocalyptic" has become a science fiction cliché, but these images truly seem to depict a world after some kind of disaster, where nearly all the people are gone (leaving behind only a few disoriented survivors, seen wandering aimlessly between the overly huge buildings) and the open sky has become a cloudless monotone grey. The images portray a convincing alternate reality (the cobblestones and concrete are cracked and worn), one that is more than a bit unsettling and depressing.
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What I think is compelling here is that Gütschow is using significant digital manipulation not in an obvious, attention grabbing fashion (look at me!), but with a degree of subtlety and understatement that draws the viewer into the trap. Once the viewer catches on (and gets over the staggering amazement of how these pictures were actually constructed), a second level of meaning in the works is discovered and their implicit commentary on our world is delivered with much more force. Even if you are not an architectural photography fan, this show merits a visit to see how digital tools can be used in sophisticated new ways.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced between 8000 and 20000 Euros. To date, there have been few if any images available in the secondary markets. I very much enjoyed the works in this show, and if they weren't so large, I could absolutely imagine adding one to our collection. I have a strong sense that these images will age well, and would provide an interesting dialogue with traditional architectural works, in the same way that Joan Fontcuberta's fabricated flowers offer unique contrasts to normal floral still lifes.

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

Transit Hub:

• MOCP show, 2006 (here)
• LS/S Aperture monograph (here), Conscientious review of the book (here)
• Frieze magazine article (here)
• Danziger Projects Landscape show, 2005 (here)

Beate Gütschow

Through July

Sonnabend Gallery (artnet page here)

536 West 22nd Street

New York, NY 10011

Auction: Photographs, May 21, 2009 @Bloomsbury London

Bloomsbury's upcoming Photographs sale in London has a heavy dose of portraiture: musicians and rock stars, actors and actresses, celebrities and artists, political figures and wealthy patrons. For collectors interested in pictures of famous (and not so famous) people, this sale has plenty to explore. Overall, the auction has a total of 269 lots on offer, with a total high estimate of £443200. (Catalog cover at right.)

Here's the breakdown:

Total Low Lots (high estimate £5000 and below): 254

Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): £293200

Total Mid Lots (high estimate between £5000 and £25000): 14

Total Mid Estimate: £100000

Total High Lots (high estimate above £25000): 1

Total High Estimate: £50000

Given the overall focus of this sale, there aren't as many lots that fit our collection well. The elegant cover image, Lot 8 Erwin Blumenfeld, (Nude), 1943, would however match nicely with our other nudes.

The complete lot by lot catalog can be found here.

Photographs

May 21st

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Bloomsbury Auctions

24 Maddox Street

Mayfair

London WS1 1PP

Book: Naoki Honjo, Small Planet

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2006 by Little More (here). 144 pages, with 68 color images. Includes short texts by Masahiko Sato and Naoki Honjo. (Cover image at right.)

Comments/Context: We were first exposed to the work of Naoki Honjo in the Reality Check group show at the Met (review here) last winter, where a single image by the artist was on view. Seeing this picture made us want to know more, and so we recently purchased a copy of his book, Small Planet, which contains a broader sample of this body of work.

Honjo's images are created by taking an aerial view with a very shallow depth of field, distorting and blurring nearly the entire image except a small area/narrow plane of crisp focus. The effect is to make the images look miniaturized, like a toy diorama. This technique ("tilt shift") is used by Honjo in a variety of locations: dense cityscapes, seashores, warehouses and railyards, construction sites, swimming pools, roadways, sporting events and parks. The clever inversion is, of course, that these scenes which look entirely fake/constructed are indeed all too real.

A detractor might characterize this work a simple exercise in optical trickery, and certainly, there is an element of forcing the viewer to consider how his/her eyes actually work, how seeing and perception actually happen. But after looking at the dozens of images in this book, I remain intrigued by each successive image, the weird novelty of scenes that shift between real/unreal still somehow fresh. The compositions from higher up and farther away, where the figures and cars are the size of ants, seem to be the most successful in using the technique for dramatic effect. While the majority of these pictures were taken in Japan (and a more recent series was made in London), given the visual diversity of our world, I'm sure Honjo will have no shortage of subject matter to be reconsidered using this approach.

Collector's POV: Honjo is represented in North America by TAI Gallery in Santa Fe (here). Images are available in either 20x24 (edition of 15) or 40x50 (edition of 5) sizes.

Transit Hub:

• CNN Interview (here)
• Exhibit of London series at Paul Smith (here)
• Ihei Kimura Photography Award (here)
• Tilt shift miniaturization (here)

Book: Michael Schmidt, Irgendwo

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2005 by Snoeck. 140 pages, with 67 black and white images. Includes an interview with the artist by Dietmar Elger. (Cover image at right.)

Comments/Context: Given the dominance of the the Becher students (Gursky, Ruff, Struth, et al) in the art markets in recent years, it would be easy for collectors to come to the conclusion that everything interesting in German photography was and is emanating from Dusseldorf. The reality is far more complex than a monolithic movement would allow. This book by Michael Schmidt is an example of some of the excellent work coming from a group of photographers who have been working in and around Berlin/Essen for decades, with loose ties to Lewis Baltz and Paul Graham.

In contrast to a search for single individual image, Schmidt works in serial format, gathering together sequences of images that together provide a more nuanced view of a subject (just like the Robert Adams book we reviewed last week). It is not so much that these groups tell a deeper or more linear narrative or story, it is that the relationships between a group of fragments or moments can broaden our understanding of the overall realities and rhythms buried underneath the surface.

In this particular book (and Schmidt has made several), the photographer has spent time in small provincial towns, capturing a mix of intimate landscapes, views of both traditional and modern suburban buildings, portraits of the inhabitants (primarily young people), and miscellaneous fragments (windows, walls, shopping carts, and loading docks). The title of the book can be translated as "somewhere" or "anywhere", and the pictures together portray a dismal monotony of vague places lacking identifiable details. In the interview, Schmidt alludes to the "loss of home as a place with identity", and there is certainly a cheerless melancholy that pervades the whole series of pictures.

And yet, this chronicle of German non-places is somehow surprisingly powerful and evocative. The spectrum of greys in this book have a rich, tactile quality, with a less than perfect sharpness that makes them softer; these "colors" help create the overall mood of the book. It is however the sequencing that seems most important in the end. It is the juxtaposition of a blank concrete wall, next to a teenage woman's face, next to a less than beautiful modern house, next to an image of a supermarket parking lot, next to an ornate architectural detail, next to a closed window that bring together all the pieces of this life into a subtle and complex whole.

Collector's POV: Michael Schmidt's works can be found at Galerie Nordenhake in Berlin (here) and Mitchell-Innes & Nash in New York (here). Galerie Nordenhake has just opened a mini-retrospective of Schmidt's work, on view through June 20th (here). Mitchell-Innes & Nash had a show in the spring of 2008 (here). Only a handful of works by Schmidt have appeared at auction in the past five years, most selling for under $2000.

This book has been a real eye opener for me and has continued to keep me thinking; I now feel compelled to dig deeper on Schmidt and his contemporaries, as this work seems to have been somewhat overlooked (at least by collectors we know here in America) and well worth further review/education on our part. There are clearly images in this series, especially the more deadpan architectural fragments, that would fit perfectly into our collection.

Transit Hub:

• Other Berlin/Essen photographers to explore: Joachim Brohm, Gosbert Adler, Volker Heinze (please put others in the comments if you can add to the list)
• U-NI-TY at MoMA, 1996 (here)
• Waffenruhe (here)
  

Gallery Conflict/Confidentiality Follow-Ups

There is a terrific post called Keeping Private Collections Private at Edward Winkleman today which tackles the tricky issues of gallery conflict and private information flow. While the piece admirably works through most of the salient points, I’d like to add a few collector-focused nuances. (It probably makes sense to read his post first if you haven’t already, as these comments build on the context of his discussion.)

When we, as collectors, get interested in a certain artist’s work, we tend to do our homework. This means that while we may have been introduced to the work at one gallery, it is not at all unusual for us to contact half a dozen other galleries around the world who carry work by this artist, in search of that single piece that we find most appealing. We do this not to “go around” our local or preferred dealer, but because the reality is that work is unevenly distributed in the market, and our favorite piece may just as likely be in Los Angeles, Chicago, Berlin or London as in New York.

For photographers who are no longer living, this is particularly true: in searching out prints by Bill Brandt or Imogen Cunningham for example, we have talked with the galleries that represent their estates, but also with literally dozens of others who may have had a piece at one time or another. For living artists, the search area tends to be smaller (perhaps a handful of galleries), but even in this case, certain galleries resonate with certain bodies of work more than others or certain dealers only carry certain sizes, and so it isn’t unreasonable to check with all of them, even if there might be quite a bit of overlap. A byproduct of this search is often some surprising information about pricing, showing works from the same edition priced differently in different markets. Once we have all the data, we can then decide from whom we might want to make a purchase, armed with quite a bit more context about the reality of the overall situation (perhaps knowing that there are multiple options or perhaps knowing that there is only one print that we really want).

At this point, all else equal, we would certainly prefer to patronize our favorite dealers (most collectors feel the same way I imagine). But the reality is that more often than not, all else is not equal, and the piece we want most is somewhere else. I think the argument about supporting your “local” dealer goes along an entirely different plane. This line of thinking centers on supporting businesses that you like and want to succeed, keeping dollars in your local community, and making sure neighborhood storefronts have galleries in them rather than big box stores. And if as a collector, you can find a way to balance finding the work you want with supporting the local gallery, this is a great outcome. But being harassed by your local dealer for buying elsewhere seems shortsighted and/or naïve on his/her part (I entirely agree with the argument as put forth in the original post), as if you’re local, you’ll almost certainly be back in the future.

Over the years, we have seen that collectors seem to fall into one of two buckets. One group selects two or three primary dealers and funnels nearly all of their buying through these galleries, building up deep trust relationships over time. Often they ask them to search out certain works for their collections or use the dealers to bid for them at auction. These collectors work in partnership with these galleries to build their collections over a long time scale. In return for the focused attention by the dealer, there are expectations that a collector will buy if not frequently at least consistently.

The other group (to which we belong) feels comfortable interacting with a wide range of dealers from all over the world, and so we tend to do our own searching and comparing, rather than having a specific dealer present us with a prescreened set of choices. For us, the hunting and gathering process is actually the fun part, and we don’t mind investing the time to do the leg work and go down plenty of blind alleys. This makes us less “loyal” to any one dealer or gallery, but more likely to build up a broader group of galleries that we patronize from time to time. The danger of this approach is that the very best pieces may be offered to the key clients first, leaving us to pick up what is left over. So part of our challenge is to make sure we stay well connected to the galleries that have the kind of material we like, so that we stay “top of mind” when a new piece becomes available. Buying history undoubtedly influences access to new work.

The final topic covered in this post is keeping buying information private. I think the post does an excellent job of making clear that the art world is a small universe and gossip and information are important currencies flowing in all directions (back to the word-of-mouth effects I was discussing yesterday). There is no way to change this, so collectors must find ways to comfortably handle the natural information exchange that goes on. We certainly understand the desire to have confidentiality. But we have also found that being open and sharing our collection (via this site and our collection site) has created all sorts of unexpected opportunities and relationships, and that these positives have vastly outweighed any negatives associated with posting our collection on the Internet. Galleries and dealers now need only look at our site to know what we are interested or what we have bought recently. This enables much deeper and more relevant discussions to happen more quickly, with less time spent on preliminaries that aren’t a fit.

I do agree that if confidentiality is paramount to a collector, they need only to make this clear to the dealer and the information will with all likelihood stay secret (as no gallery owner is looking to overtly anger a client). But while there is something more than a little distasteful about prices being bandied about, in the end, the art world information machine can be turned to a collector’s advantage by learning how to leverage it. In our experience, the more people that have a clear understanding of what we’re interested in, the more likely it is that we will be exposed to work that lights up our eyes. If that comes from one dealer telling another we bought a certain piece for a certain price, then so be it.

Auction: Photographs, May 19, 2009 @Bonhams

The Photographs sales at the old San Francisco-based Butterfields (now part of Bonhams in New York) have always had a heavier dose of West coast material (Ansel Adams et al) and have often been a good place to look for bargains. The upcoming sale matches this description and includes mostly affordable works, with the standout lot (to our eyes) being a 1950s print of Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother, although from the online image, it looks like it might have a few condition problems in one corner. (No catalog cover image available.)

Here are the statistics for the auction:

Total Lots: 166
Total Low Estimate: $642800
Total High Estimate: $938300

Total Low Lots (high estimate $10000 and below ): 149
Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): $619300

Total Mid Lots (high estimate between $10000 and $50000): 17
Total Mid Estimate: $319000

Total High Lots (high estimate above $50000): 0
Total High Estimate: NA

A couple of lots that would fit into our specific collection include:

Lot 61, Harry Callahan, Eleanor, 1947/Later
Lot 62, Imogen Cunningham, Triangles, 1928/1960s

The complete lot by lot catalog can be found here.

Photographs
May 19th

Bonhams & Butterfields
580 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10022

A Few Additions to the Discussion of Artist Statements

Over the past few days, Conscientious has had a series of insightful posts about the positives and negatives of artist’s statements (here, here, here, and here). While most of the ground has been covered in a thoughtful way, I thought there might be a couple of nuances from a collector’s perspective that would be worth adding to the discussion.

For us, artist statements are like road maps: they give us clues to better understand the work we are seeing. Optimally, they should be as clear and to the point as possible, thereby making it more likely that any background information that is important is actually passed along and internalized. Statements that are lost in jargon and art speak miss the chance to educate us. Our attention span for this kind of stuff is short (press releases fall into the same category), so make it hard hitting or you’ll lose us quickly, and we’ll go back to looking at the pictures and deciding for ourselves.

The Silicon Valley style “elevator pitch” (a one to two sentence summary) is probably an oversimplified way of communicating for the art world, but the reason entrepreneurs use it is that it is the single easiest way to control the message to someone who doesn’t know much about you (and it's also the most likely way to ensure the message is passed on to another person without getting garbled). To my mind, the artist statement should have the same goal: convey the salient points quickly and cleanly, in the hopes that the reader/viewer will actually remember them.

In some ways, an artist’s career can be thought of as the ultimate exercise in word of mouth. Galleries are constantly trying to place important works with well known museums to validate their quality. Positive remarks by an influential critic are circulated to the mailing list. Select pieces are “placed” with important collectors, so that other collectors can see them and hear about them. It’s all about creating a positive feedback loop and feeding the beast, year after year, with each successive release of new work.

When you’re early in your career, there is no word of mouth yet, and very few opinions have been formed. This is the exact moment that the statement was designed for; it is the one opportunity to frame the discussion before it goes its own way. If you decide not to take it and leave the work open for interpretation, fair enough, but you missed the chance to anchor us somewhere.

Once you’re an established or mid-career artist, the word of mouth is in full swing, and many voices have added their opinions (valid or invalid) to the mix. The crowd has spoken and the collective wisdom drowns out much of the rest of the commentary. With each successive group of new work, the marginal utility/value of any single statement by the artist is decreased, because it has to compete with the larger and larger pile of consensus thought about the artist’s overall approach and history. Therefore, the statements at the beginning of the career are the ones that have the most power to direct the discussion; later on, the overall flow has a mind of its own that is nearly impossible to modify.

So our simple summary advice on statements would be the following: don't miss the chance to direct our thinking (especially early in your career) and make sure you do it concisely so it sticks.

The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984 @Met

JTF (just the facts): A total of 280 works by 30 different artists, beginning in the main Contemporary Photography gallery, and winding back through an additional 5 rooms, with 3 adjacent spaces containing installations or video. In addition to the photography, there are paintings, sculpture, installations, video/film, collage, drawings, posters, magazines and books. An audio guide is available for the show. No photography was allowed in the exhibition, so unfortunately there are no installation shots.

Comments/Context: Even though The Pictures Generation has only been open a few short weeks, there is already a mountain of commentary on this superlative show. Much of it centers on who was included, whether these artists in different locations were really a “movement”, how this work related to Minimalism, Pop Art, Conceptualism, Postmodernism and plenty of other theoretical constructions, how feminism impacted the development of this work, and how the baby boomer environment contributed to the varying but related approaches these artists took. All of these are fruitful and necessary lines of thought, given the breadth and depth of this exhibition.

One discussion that has been remarkably absent in all this criticism is that there is a compelling argument to be made that it is this moment in the history of art when photography jumps into the mainstream of contemporary art. While the avant-garde and surrealist photography of the 1920s may well have been out on the bleeding edge at the time, I think a case can be made that photography generally remained within its own separate realm until the early 1970s, when work by artists in this exhibit jumped the gap and became particularly relevant to the ongoing discussions about media and its influence on modern life.

From my point of view, this is the key reason to see this important exhibition. For the first time, we have a comprehensive look at much of the contemporary art action going on during these years, and we can trace the use of photography and photographic techniques, side by side with painting, collage, video, and installation art. It is in these years that media saturation first appears, and these artists thoroughly deconstruct this creeping influence in myriad ways, often taking a cool, cynical look at the images that had become inundating. Placed in this context, the diversity of Cindy Sherman’s film stills (Untitled Film Still #54, 1980, above right), Laurie Simmons’ dollhouses, appropriations by Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine and James Welling, James Casebere’s architectural constructions, Barbara Bloom’s travel posters, Barbara Kruger’s collages, and Louise Lawler’s arrangements all suddenly coalesce into a multi-faceted view of how photography could be used very effectively to unpack the prepackaged culture that surrounded them. By intermingling work in other mediums by David Salle (The Coffee Drinkers, 1973, below right), Robert Longo, Jack Goldstein, Dara Birnbaum, Alan McCollum and many, many others, the show explores how all kinds of artists were riffing on the same set of interrelated ideas, many grappling with the issues of photography and image making, even if they weren’t always using a camera to do so.

Even today, nearly all of the photographers represented here are routinely categorized as Contemporary Art, rather than Photography, evidence of their lasting influence on the larger artistic dialogue. With passage of nearly 30 years, while many traditional photography subjects have disappeared, the influence of images, media, and popular culture are still as relevant as ever, perhaps even more so, given the explosion of marketing and consumerism that now surrounds us. A large percentage of contemporary artists are still wrestling with these same exact issues, only now with the help of digital technologies instead of hand crafted approaches. Appropriation and stage setting are now commonplace, the boundaries and playing fields of these styles being extended further each day. Much of the reason the work of The Pictures Generation still seems fresh is that nearly all of the same concerns the artists raised are still bothering us today. Unbelievably, our overall skepticism may have actually increased over time, which is why many of these overlooked and under appreciated works now seem even more prescient.

Collector’s POV: This is a deep and diverse show, with recognizable images hung side by side with obscure and lesser known pictures, all contributing to an environment of experimentation with and criticism of media. Much of the resonance of the show comes via comparison and juxtaposition, seeing the images inside the context of the shared consciousness of the time, and comparing how each artist took the same general raw material and came up with a piece of the larger puzzle.

Don’t be fooled into thinking this is a show that fits in the usual Contemporary Photography space; I started in, looking at each piece with utmost care, assuming it was only the usual one-room affair; I got to the other end of the first room and saw that the exhibit continued on through a hole in the wall for many more rooms, and my pace was suddenly way off and I had to recalibrate.

Finally, in particular, I came away with a much deeper appreciation for the work of Laurie Simmons and Louise Lawler (Pollock and Tureen, 1984, above right), both of which seemed to resonate more for me when placed within this environment than they had previously. I had several “ah ha” moments with these two, the light bulb going on above my head as I started to understand better what they were really trying to do.

Rating: *** (three stars) EXCELLENT (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Reviews: NY Times (here), New Yorker (here), Bloomberg (here)
• Audio clips at WNYC (here)
• Art in America interview with Met curator Douglas Eklund (here)
• Show catalog (here)

The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984
Through August 2nd

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

Tough Choices for Museums

Last evening, we attended a party for an out of town friend at a cozy restaurant on the Lower East Side. It was one of those dinners where you are separated from your spouse and carefully placed by the host according to some grand plan for maximum social effectiveness. One of my dinner partners turned out to be a person who works in the development department of an art museum. Through the first several courses of the meal, we had a wide ranging insider discussion about museums, capital and annual campaigns, how big gifts are targeted and brought in, how boards and accession committees are filled out, and the hierarchical nature of different classes of donors.

The singular takeaway for me from this entertaining conversation was that given the current economic environment, museums are really struggling to uncover new, fresh, deep pocketed donors that aren’t already affiliated with another museum in some meaningful way or that they haven’t already talked with. The list of targets is pretty stale, and it’s arguably shrinking. This has led them to start searching farther afield (the net has to get wider), often outside the local geography, and most intriguingly, getting connected to many folks who haven’t as yet shown any interest whatsoever in art. The sales pitch to these targets is that even if art isn’t your thing, a large donation to such a museum brings with it an important mark of status and an entrée into a network of high powered people of all kinds.

None of this is of course news or should be wildly surprising; in fact it’s standard operating procedure - if you’ve got to raise a big pile of money (in whatever context), you focus on those who have such money to give, and come up with some factors that will appeal to them. But it got me to wondering more deeply, is there an impact on the spirit of your institution over time if the majority of your board members and major supporters are giving money not because they are passionate about the cause (in this case, art), but because they are doing it for the ancillary benefits of the gala invitations or business contacts? Does the soul of the place get hollowed out? How many mail-it-in directors and donors can an institution handle?

Having seen firsthand plenty of dysfunctional boards/companies in a business context, it is clear to me that a less than attentive board can do an enormous amount of damage, can waste precious time focusing on the wrong things, and can derail positive momentum quite quickly. But it’s also true, and we’re seeing it in spades these days with the daily news stories about museum layoffs, that without money, these institutions crumble under their own weight equally fast. Money is what pays for exhibitions, and salaries, and conservation, and new buildings, not passion and erudition.

Which brings me to the paradox: is it a fantasy that a major museum can be fully funded by wealthy donors who also happen to be passionate about art? Is it inevitable that a museum has to choose between more money from donors who may not have much interest in the activities of the institution, or less from those who care more deeply? Of course, many will now immediately protest that their specific institution is only funded by passionate art patrons, that their board is filled with only important collectors and art world professionals, etc. etc. But imagine you are a museum with a less than perfect financial picture right now (not hard to do). Do you take the much needed money from donors who aren’t obviously aligned with your going forward plan (and may potentially be a permanent pain in the ass), or go without, thereby reducing your options for producing good exhibitions and holding onto key staff, forcing you to scale back your program? While this might be an oversimplification of a complex situation, and perhaps the easy answer is always "take the money", either way, it is an undeniably tough choice. No wonder museum directors and development groups are so stressed these days.

Ray Mortenson, Manhattan @Borden

JTF (just the facts): A total of 30 black and white images, taken in 2008 and 2009, framed in white, with no mat, and hung chronologically in the main gallery space. The images are 9x9 (on paper 18x14.5) and are titled with their location and exact date. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Given all of the famous images of New York (the previous post as just one example of many), the challenge of making contemporary images of classic views and moments of the city without rehashing the recognized masters is a daunting one. And yet, the city has certainly changed dramatically over the years, so there must be new discoveries to be made, even in the context of these traditional subjects.

Ray Mortenson has stepped into this realm with his recent body of work and has found some surprisingly fresh perspectives on old favorites. A handful of images take vertiginous upward views of abstracted skyscrapers that echo the well known images of Abbott and Newhall (linked below), but highlight new sleek forms of glass and steel, rather than the stone carved facades of the 1920s. Others capture light poles, water towers, billboards, and street grates; fragments of the city that become geometric forms. Images taken at morning and night, complete with wispy smoke, use the available light to broaden the tonal ranges. And Mortenson has even found new ways to see many iconic New York moments: skating at Rockefeller Center, the ceiling at Grand Central, the Chrysler building, Times Square, and Bryant Park.

Of course, all of this has been done before, but a good many of these images still find a way to be unexpected. While I think this show would have benefited from a slightly heavier hand in the editing process (the show might have been tighter at 20 pictures instead of 30), it is refreshing to see that overworked subjects can still be new in the hands of a talented photographer.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show have been made in editions of 3, and are priced at either $3000 or $3500, depending on the location in the edition. I particularly enjoyed the image of a skewed angle light post against some tall buildings entitled Broadway & Columbus Circle, 15 April 2008.

Rating: * (1 star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Broken Glass, Photographs of the South Bronx @MCNY, DLK COLLECTION review (here)
• Berenice Abbott, Canyon: Broadway and Exchange Place (here)
• Beaumont Newhall, Chase National Bank (here)

Ray Mortenson, Manhattan
Through May 29th

Janet Borden, Inc.
560 Broadway
New York, NY 10012

Paul Himmel, 1914-2009, An Unerring Vision @De Lellis

JTF (just the facts): A total of 20 black and white photographs: 11 larger modern prints of New York scenes, 6 smaller vintage prints of New York, and 3 large nudes. The large city shots are between 40x54 and 60x40, with original negatives between 1947 and 1950. The vintage works are all approximately 10x14, from the same time period. The nudes are tall and thin, 22x70, from c1950. All of the works are framed in black (the larger images without mats), and are hung in the main gallery and back into the office area. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Paul Himmel's images of 1950's New York combine a nostalgic look at the city with a shadowy, gumshoe noir. Most of the contrasty pictures feature silhouettes of men in overcoats and hats: on the Brooklyn Bridge, near the Third Avenue El, and streaming through Grand Central on the way to catching a train. Other images capture iconic New York moments: the blurred lights at Rockefeller Center, the parachute jump at Coney Island, or snow falling near windows and fire escapes.

While the large modern prints in this show are clearly eye catching, some of the enlargements have a hackneyed feel to them, these classic New York moments and landmarks having become overly familiar and a bit clichéd. The exception to this are the three images of the blurred masses at Grand Central, where the large scale reinforces the chaos of the environment and the swirling shape of the movement of the crowd.

Collector's POV: The large modern New York prints in this show are priced between $10000 and $12000. The vintage city prints range between $6500 and $9500; the nudes are priced at $8000 each. Very few works by Himmel have come up for auction in the past five years, so there isn't a defined pricing pattern available for reference. For our collection, I can imagine looking for one of the smaller vintage prints, perhaps with a little less romance and a little more dark abstraction.

Rating: * (1 star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Paul Himmel monograph (here)
• Galerie fur Fotografie, Munich (here)

Paul Himmel, 1914-2009, An Unerring Vision

Through May 20th

Keith De Lellis Gallery

1045 Madison Avenue

New York, NY 10075

Auction: Photographs, May 16, 2009 @Phillips London

In the past few weeks, we've touched several times on the idea of the democratization of contemporary photography and the positive impact of allowing a wide diversity of work to be pursued and exhibited. The upcoming Photographs sale at Phillips in London is a perfect example of following this trend, of not doing it the same old way, and thereby injecting some fresh excitement into the process.

The sale Phillips has put together is the most international sale I have seen in quite a while. It is a veritable United Nations of photography: work from China and Japan, Germany and Holland, Iran and Scandinavia, Korea and India, Britain and America, and the list goes on and on. There is a small portion of traditional "vintage" work by the recognized masters available, but the sale is generally dominated by contemporary work, most of it in color, some of it from relatively unknown names. Whether this approach maximizes the total proceeds to the house, I'm not sure, but Phillips has certainly created some energy and separated itself with this type of focus. The sale has a total of 170 lots on offer, with a total high estimate of £1462600. (Catalog cover at right.)

Here's the breakdown:

Total Low Lots (high estimate £5000 and below): 77
Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): £262600

Total Mid Lots (high estimate between £5000 and £25000): 87
Total Mid Estimate: £880000

Total High Lots (high estimate above £25000): 6
Total High Estimate: £320000

Here are a few of the images that fit with our collection, and several more that caught our attention even though they don't match our particular framework:

Lot 5 Ola Kolehmainen, Red with Black and Bulbs, 2004
Lot 13 Stephen Shore, West 9th Avenue, Amarillo, Texas, October 2, 1974
Lot 49 Nobuyoshi Araki, From Close to Range, 1991/Later
Lot 67 Andy Warhol, Untitled (Hairdryer), 1976-1986
Lot 94 Lewis Baltz, Santa Fe, 1973
Lot 97 Susan Derges, River Taw, 1997
Lot 123 Vee Speers, Untitled #30, 2007
Lot 156 Alex Prager, Desiree, 2008

The complete lot by lot catalog can be found here.

Photographs
May 16th

Phillips De Pury & Company
Howick Place
London SW1P 1BB

Auction: Photobooks, May 19, 2009 @Christie's London

In the past several years, the photobook market has dramatically changed shape. A sleepy subculture that was once the domain of enthusiasts and bibliophiles has now been transformed into a worldwide market, with much more attention, more auction activity/liquidity, and generally higher prices. This is likely a result of a handful of reference books that made a strong case for the photobook as an art form distinct from photography itself, as well as the wider use of the Internet to match buyers and sellers of scare titles. Auction houses were quick to pick up on this emerging market, and Swann, Bloomsbury, and Christie's are now all battling for market share.

Evidence of this continuing evolution is the Christie's photobook sale coming up in mid May in London. It is a single subject sale of photobooks, not attached as an afterthought to the photography sale, run by the Printed Books & Manuscripts department, not the Photography department. In fact, this sale is scheduled at exactly the same time as the Sotheby's Photographs sale in London, further evidence I think that the Christie's specialists think the buyers of photography and the buyers of photobooks are not necessarily a completely overlapping group of people.

In general, this is a solid looking sale, with a wide variety of material. It has a total of 191 lots on offer, with a total high estimate of £558900. (Catalog cover, at right.)

Here's the breakdown:

Total Low Lots (high estimate £5000 and below): 172
Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): £298900

Total Mid Lots (high estimate between £5000 and £25000): 17
Total Mid Estimate: £165000

Total High Lots (high estimate above £25000): 2
Total High Estimate: £95000

One of the things I continue to wonder about is how the publication of certain photo book reference guides has influenced this market. So I went through this catalog and counted the number of books on offer that are mentioned in the handful of the best known guides. Here's what I found, with the title of the book, followed by the number of lots in this sale found there:

The Photobook, Vol. I: 63
The Photobook, Vol. II: 43
101 Books: 38
The Open Book: 58

Given that there is no overlap between volumes I and II of The Photobook series, more than 55% of the lots in this sale are referenced in those two books combined, many of the lots also mentioned in one or both of the other books. To me this is evidence that either this market is very concentrated, or that collectors are somewhat uncertain about how to approach this market and are taking guidance from these expert driven reference volumes.

As we have mentioned before, we are first and foremost photography collectors, with books providing a much needed reference library for our activities. As such, there are plenty of books in this sale that are missing from our shelves that would be welcome. Some of them would include:

Lot 8, Karl Blossfeldt, La Plante
Lot 14, Emile Otto Hoppe, Deutsche Arbeit
Lot 59, Yoshikazu Suzuki and Shohachi Kimura, Ginza Kaiwai
Lot 81, William Klein, Tokyo
Lot 87, Shomei Tomatsu, 11:02 Nagasaki
Lot 90, Ed Ruscha, Thirtyfour Parking Lots
Lot 111, Ed Ruscha, Dutch Details
Lot 125, Shoji Ueda, Sketch Album
Lot 150, Paul Graham, A1. The Great North Road
Lot 179, Ryuji Miyamoto, Kobe 1995. After the Earthquake

If you think these books cost an arm and a leg, a review of the sale at 5B4 (here) is worth a look.

One other final question for the audience: I have recently been asked several times what the total size of the photo book market is. I have no idea. If anyone can provide an answer with some decent logic or facts behind it, please put it in the comments.

The complete lot by lot "ecatalog" can be found here.

Photobooks
May 19th

Christie's
85 Old Brompton Road
London SW7 3LD

Book: Robert Adams, Questions for an Overcast Day

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2007 by Matthew Marks Gallery and Fraenkel Gallery. Approximately 10x8 in size, with 74 pages, including 33 black and white images. A thin title strip is held around the book by a transparent sticker. (Cover shot at right.)

Comments/Context: One of the things I admire most about the art of Robert Adams is that he has in his years as a photographer found a way to simultaneously pursue both challenging bodies of work that ask us hard questions about how we are interacting with the natural world around us, as well as smaller, more intimate projects that come at some of these same questions, but from a simpler, more lyrical and less overtly polemical bent. While The New West, Summer Nights and Los Angeles Spring all might be more well known, many of my favorite books by Adams are smaller volumes (some of them essays) that weren't necessarily designed with large audiences in mind, but seem to have sprung from a genuine desire to dig deeper into the subtle relationships between photography, humans and nature.

This small book is a series of pictures Adams took of the leaves of alder trees on the Oregon coast, some from far off, others from up close. These particular leaves are often broken and torn, with holes and cracks, and Adams uses the bright background light filtering through these openings as a contrast with the dark black of the leaves. One might wonder how can Adams make pictures of tree leaves that are somehow new and different, rather than simply well crafted images derivative of others we have seen before. And yet, this is exactly what he has accomplished, especially via the sequencing of the images in book form, allowing for a gradual closing in from multiple branches to a single leaf, creating a multi-image portrait of the essence of these trees.

The only text in the book is the following set of questions, found near the end:

What would account for the condition of the leaves - drought, insects, rocky ground, disease, herbicide, wind?

Are the leaves beautiful?

Is there something wry in the hieroglyphics? And something humorous about a person taking photographs, the camera hand-held, between gusts of wind?

These questions seem perfectly attuned to the emotional quality of these images: serene and calm, simple and authentic, curious and open minded. This is the kind of book that you can pull down from the shelf from time to time, flip through, and find some balance.

Collector's POV: Robert Adams is represented by Matthew Marks Gallery in New York (here) and Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco (here). Prints by Adams have become increasingly popular in recent years, and his images are now generally available at auction, ranging in price between $5000 and $50000 in the past few years. For our particular collection, Adams continues to be on our wish list; we are still looking for just the right Adams image for the city/industrial group. This excellent book reminded me that we should also consider Adams for our floral/plant genre, as the leaf silhouettes here would mix nicely with other botanicals we already own.

Transit Hub:

• 2009 Hasselblad Award winner (here)
• Art:21 biography (here)
• Landscapes of Harmony and Dissonance, Getty Museum, 2006 (here)
• Turning Back, SFMOMA, 2006 (here)

Book: Ryuji Miyamoto

JTF (just the facts): Published in 1999 by Steidl (here). Unpaginated, with 79 black and white images. There is a list of previous exhibitions, but no essays or text. The images were taken between 1983 and 1997. (Cover shot at right.)

Comments/Context: After reading our book review of Naoya Hatakeyama's Lime Works, Mark Feustel (of Studio Equis (here) and Eyecurious (here)) took a look through our collection site and sent us a note with further information on Hatakeyama and a recommendation to explore the work of Ryuji Miyamoto. While we weren't aware of Miyamoto's different projects, we liked what we saw in a quick search, and so we went out and purchased this book as background to educate ourselves more fully about his images.

Miyamoto's early works chronicle the destruction and disintegration of architecture, all over the world. The images are filled with broken windows, twisted cables, pipes and steel framing, piles of rubble, scaffolding, broken bricks and concrete, peeling paint, and abandoned rooms being invaded by weeds. Some of the buildings have been left to ruin, collapsing under their own weight, while others are being actively destroyed, likely making room for something fresh and new.

While Miyamoto has captured these decaying buildings in Berlin, Vienna, New York, Brussels, Penang, Hong Kong, and all over Japan, it is the images he made of the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake in 1995 that are the most haunting. In these pictures, the ground has clearly heaved up, toppling the buildings in on each other, narrow alleyways made even tighter by listing walls, piles of wreckage and tangled electrical wires. Miyamoto's pictures are generally devoid of people, and many of the Kobe images have a dense interaction of staggered lines and planes, creating complex quiet abstractions out of the chaos. What is perhaps most surprising is just how striking some of these scenes of destruction can be.

Collector's POV: Ryuji Miyamoto is represented by Taro Nasu Gallery in Tokyo/Osaka (here) Kicken Berlin (here) and Michael Hoppen Contemporary (here) in London. A few of Miyamoto's works have recently come into the secondary markets, but not enough to have any pricing pattern. Many of his photo books have also become quite valuable.

I think these images have particular resonance with many of the New Topographics photographers of the 1970s, with Gordon Matta-Clark's works, and with Ray Mortenson's images of the abandoned South Bronx in the 1980s. There is also a connection to Osamu Kanemura's thickly wired city scenes. Overall, these works would certainly fit well into our collection and merit some further exploration.

Transit Hub:

• Cardboard Houses (here)
• UBS Art Collection (here)

Marilyn Minter, Green Pink Caviar @Salon 94 Freemans

JTF (just the facts): A total of 8 works on view: 5 paintings, 2 photographs and 1 video. The photographs are c-prints, made in 2008 and 2009, 86x60, unframed and loosely binder clipped to the walls. The paintings are enamel on metal, in various sizes from 40x20 to 108x180, and unframed. All are hung in a single room gallery, with one painting hiding behind the corner of the partition. (Installation shot of the photographs, at right.)

Comments/Context: Marilyn Minter's show of new work at Salon 94 Freemans continues to explore a style that has made her images instantly recognizable from across a room: photographs and hyper real paintings that walk the fine line between over-the-top fabulous and more than a little disturbing, creating just enough tension to keep us looking. In this set of works, sensuous mouths, lips, tongues and fingers variously push and smear cake decorations (sparkly silver balls, pink flaked sugar, and unidentified goo tinted with food coloring) and bubble gum across glass plates, the pictures and videos taken from underneath, capturing watery swirls, squishes and distortions in gorgeous close-up. While the photographs are hauntingly crisp and clear, the paintings have a slightly more airbrushed, commercial feel, the subtle hint of cheesiness somehow matching the subject matter. The video Green Pink Caviar is currently being shown on the huge MTV billboard in Times Square; a smaller version runs in the gallery. It's a little like watching a car crash; unsettling but nevertheless oddly engrossing.

Collector's POV: Not surprisingly, I think Minter's photographs are far more successful than her paintings; the real life detail captured by the lens makes the images all the more mesmerizing. And while Minter's works don't fit into our collection at all, I continue to be impressed with the uniqueness of her voice as an artist; no one else's work looks like this, and my guess is that some of her images will likely age quite well (there always seems to be a place for decadence). The two photographs in this show are priced at $32000, in editions of 3 plus 2 APs. Two of the paintings are not for sale; the other three are priced at $55000, $70000, and $130000 respectively. A copy of the limited edition video is available on DVD for $40. A handful of Minter's photographs have started to appear at auction in past couple of years, ranging in price between $10000 and $55000, usually in editions of 3, 5 or 7.

Rating: * (1 star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Green Pink Caviar website, with trailer (here)
• SFMOMA solo show, 2005 (here)
• Reviews: ArtObserved (here), New York (here)

Marilyn Minter, Green Pink Caviar
Through June 13th

Salon 94 Freemans
1 Freeman Alley
New York, NY 10002

The Generational: Younger Than Jesus @New Museum

JTF (just the facts): A sprawling group exhibit of recent contemporary art from a total of 50 different artists (all under the age of 33), in a variety of mediums, spread across the three floors of the museum. Eleven artists using photography (very broadly defined) have been included (the number of images on view in parentheses):

Cory Arcangel (1)
Tauba Auerbach (2)
Mohamed Bourouissa (3)
Cao Fei (6)
Mariechen Danz (1)
Haris Epaminonda (8)
LaToya Ruby Frazier (5)
Shilpa Gupta (1)
Matt Keegan (grid of 23)
Elad Lassry (9)
Ahmet Öğüt (4)

Comments/Context: Whether due to its catchy title, its biennial-type organization, or its focus on the art of a younger generation, this survey show at the New Museum has gotten a lot of buzz, complete with the resulting coverage by all the major media outlets (many of which are linked below). Regular readers here will know that we are focused on photography, and so our aim in visiting this exhibit was to see what kind of photography being made by artists born around 1980 is getting all the attention. Below, we’ve highlighted some of the work we found most promising.

What comes through time and again in this show, regardless of the artist’s chosen medium, is that this generation is very comfortable with media and technology, having been saturated with imagery and consumer choice their entire lives via the Internet, pop culture, and the multi-ethnic world around them. It is within this ever shifting environment that this cohort has been forced to find meaning, to grapple with finding individual identities in the overwhelming sea of information. For many, this has meant a search inward; for others, a focus on the evolving connections of personal and social networks enabled by technology. As a result, this show of new art is busy with combinations and mashups: cacophonous sound and light, video and paint, both behind and in front of the camera. The mixing here seems altogether natural and authentic, not a fussy conceptual overlay designed to impress.

Mohamed Bourouissa’s powerful color pictures of life in the Paris banlieues are the stand out images for me in this show (installation shot below). They depict the real friction of the mixing cultures and the simmering underlying disaffection in a quasi-documentary (staged) framework, heightened for emotional effect.

The works of Tauba Auerbach (below, top) and Cory Arcangel (below, bottom) both dive deeper into computer and display technology, exploring the edges of how image making can happen armed with these new tools. Auerbach’s pictures are made up of the abstract rainbow hues of pixelated static. Arcangel’s image was made entirely inside Photoshop, with soft gradients of rich abstract color, complete with instructions for reproducing the image in the title. These works signal a splinter direction emerging in photography, where the bleeding edge effects of the technology drive the process, rather than traditional subject matter. We should expect to see more work along these lines in the coming years, as the full boundaries of image making get extended (maybe it isn’t even “photography” anymore), perhaps taking us back to the ideas of the color field painters or abstract expressionists, only in a wholly new format and texture.

Cao Fei’s images of teenagers engaged in cosplay (dressing up in elaborate costumes derived from Japanese manga or virtual immersive environments, below) at first seem overly obvious and careful; we’ve seen plenty of pictures of cleverly staged people in costumes across the history of photography. But after standing in front of them for a while, I started to see more of the misunderstood melancholy, the search for some kind of distinctiveness of spirit against a raging tide of uniformity/conformity. We’re already seeing transformations in our culture in how we develop and maintain “identities” out on the Internet; these pictures are evidence of how the impact of these identities is clashing with the mundane of the everyday.

Finally, LaToya Ruby Frazier’s black and white portraits (below, shown in a very dark room) show that the old techniques still have relevance for a new generation. Her works explore the relationships of her family, with all of its tensions and inter-generational dynamics. They show that new work can indeed be made that addresses the issues of the present, while still relating to the traditions of the past (rather than abandoning them).

The rest of the photography in this show was less inspiring from my point of view; perhaps I just wasn't moved by the issues it was grappling with. Overall, while there is plenty of visual and audio stimulation in these galleries, the photography is a mixed bag, with a handful of solid bodies of work hiding amidst all the flashing lights, video clips and sampled sounds.

Collector’s POV: While none of the works in this show fits our collection, I came away quite impressed by several of the photographers who are included in this exhibit, particularly Mohamed Bourouissa. More generally, it was good to get a view into new directions that photography may take in the coming years, driven by this younger generation. Nearly all of these artists here have artist websites and some have gallery representation. There is also a large phone book style resource guide for all of the artists, and many, many more who were not included, complete with thumbnail images and contact information, for those who want to follow up.

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

Transit Hub:

• Print reviews: NY Times (here), New Yorker (here), New York (here) Village Voice (here)
• Online reviews: Art Fag City (here), C-Monster (here), Bloomberg (here)
• Mohamed Bourouissa – Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire (here)
• Tauba Auerbach’s website (here) and at Deitch (here)
• Cory Arcangel’s website (here)
• Cao Fei’s website (here)
• LaToya Ruby Frazier’s website (here)

The Generational: Younger Than Jesus
Through June 14th

The New Museum
235 Bowery Street
New York, NY 10002

Auction: Photographs, May 19, 2009 @Sotheby's London

Lots of auction previews this week, we know; it's just the nature of the clustering of these sales. While there are still plenty more to come, we'll be back to a more balanced mix of posts next week.

Sotheby's upcoming London sale is an unusual mix of material, with a heavier dose than normal of 19th century imagery and a few somewhat random portfolios and multi-image lots. To our eye, there is a marked absence of real stand out works here, although there is a solid smaller vintage Cartier-Bresson (lot 75) included. The sale has a total of 154 lots on offer, with a total high estimate of £1349000. (For some reason, there is no image of the catalog cover on the website at the moment, so this picture of the catalog on my desk will have to do, at right.)

Here's the breakdown:

Total Low Lots (high estimate below £5000): 58
Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): £264000

Total Mid Lots (high estimate between £5000 and £25000): 91
Total Mid Estimate: £845000

Total High Lots (high estimate above £25000): 5
Total High Estimate: £240000

By far the most exciting lot for our collection in this sale is the set of 13 maquettes of typologies by Bernd and Hilla Becher, from the 1970s (lot 136 at right). Given both the limitations of our walls and our wallet, it seems unlikely that we would ever own a full size Becher typology, even though it would fit perfectly into our collection. One of these small maquettes would be an excellent substitute, but these too have risen in price in past years, and this large group is estimated at £50000-70000. I very much wish they were being sold individually so we could pick off a single sheet.

One other random note. The recent news about more layoffs at Sotheby's perhaps made me a bit more attuned to the first few pages of the catalog, where I noticed that London Department Head Francis Hodgson is curiously absent: no picture, no listing of his name, no inclusion of him as part of the larger photography department. Since this information is spread across a couple of pages, it would be quite a coincidence to have made the same mistake everywhere. I went back and looked at the November London catalog and he is listed in all of these places. I hope this is just a production error and not a subtle sign of a shrinking department.

The complete lot by lot catalog can be found here.

Photographs
May 19th

Sotheby's
34-35 New Bond Street
London W1A 2AA