Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao, BQMB @Saul

JTF (just the facts): A total of 13 large scale color images, generally framed in black with no mat and hung in the entry and main gallery spaces. All of the works are pigment ink prints, most mounted on sintra (two are face mounted to plexi and luster laminate respectively). Physical dimensions range from 20x48 to 60x96, with several images printed in the 30x72 size. Edition sizes vary from 4 to 12. The works on display come from a number of different photographic projects and commissions, and were made between 2005 and 2010. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: If you walk into Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao's show at Julie Saul Gallery and do a five second visual scan of the photographs on the walls, your first reaction might very well be "panoramas of New York, seen this kind of thing before, time to move on". Times Square, the Cyclone at Coney Island, you know the drill. But if you resist the temptation to walk right back out and instead stand up close to these images and look at them for several minutes, the works will reveal a depth of detail that is entirely unexpected and therefore initially quite puzzling.

What you'll then begin to realize is that these images are not standard, boring panoramas but actually meticulous digital composites of dozens of large format images, seamlessly integrated into wide views that capture far more than human vision can normally handle. They reminded me of the work of Clifford Ross, where a viewer can dive deeper and deeper into nearly any section of an image and the details remain crisp and sharp, even though normal photographs often become blurred or distorted on the periphery.

Liao has applied this technique to two basic types of compositions: bird's eye views that capture the broader context of the local urban fabric, and street level views that chronicle the chaotic melting pot of crowded humanity in New York's neighborhoods and public spaces. I particularly enjoyed the elevated views of the city's changing baseball stadiums and the surrounding landscape of Queens and the Bronx. The works capture the expansive density of city planning, of roadways and rail lines slashing through endless low rise developments, warehouses and non-descript blocks, with old and new juxtaposed and continually evolving over time. They successfully document the vibrant scope of the boroughs - the landmarks and gathering places as well as the warren of everyday streets and commercial districts.

I think the challenge for Liao lies in using his obvious technical skills to make durable and memorable images about the changing nature of these New York neighborhoods without falling into the trap of overly-easy eye-catching gimmicks. His technical approach offers the ability to construct complicated, multi-layered stories and to show us the conflicts, contrasts and personalities that we take for granted in this complex city; his tools offer him the potential to expose facets of our lives we haven't seen before. As a result, this show seems most like a promise, a gathering of current evidence (with a few early highlights) that makes me anticipate what will come next as he digs even deeper.

Collector's POV: The prints on display in this show range in price from $5000 to $14500, with many intermediate prices ($5800, $7000, $8500, $10000, and $11000) apparently based on relative size or place in the edition. Liao's work has only recently begun to enter into the secondary markets, so no real pricing pattern can be discerned from the few lots that have come up for sale. As such, gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point.

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

Transit Hub:

• Reviews: New Yorker (here), DART (here), NYTimes, 2009 (here)
• Urban Panoramas @Getty, 2010 (here)
• Book: Habitat 7 (here)

Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao, BQMB
Through October 28th

Julie Saul Gallery
535 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011

Auction: First Open, September 22, 2010 @Christie's

Christie's begins the Fall Contemporary Art season in New York next week with its warm up First Open sale. Photography-wise, it's a generally solid mix of usual suspects; there are a total of 35 lots of photography on offer, with a total High estimate for photography of $775000.

Here's the simple statistical breakdown:

Total Low Lots (high estimate up to and including $10000): 10
Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): $69000

Total Mid Lots (high estimate between $10000 and $50000): 22
Total Mid Estimate: $436000

Total High Lots (high estimate above $50000): 3
Total High Estimate: $270000

The top photography lot by High estimate is lot 134, Thomas Struth, Kunsthistorisches Museum III, Vienna, 1989, at $100000-150000(image at right, top). The next highest lot by High estimate is lot 13, Vik Muniz, Marlene Dietrich (Pictures of Diamonds), 2004, at $40000-60000 (image at right).

Here's the complete list of photographers represented by two or more lots in the sale (with the number of lots in parentheses):

Thomas Struth (4)
Wallace Berman (2)
Richard Prince (2)
Hiroshi Sugimoto (2)
James Welling (2)

The complete lot by lot catalog can be found here. The eCatalogue is located here.

First Open
September 22nd

Christie's
20 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, NY 10020

Izima Kaoru, One Sun @Von Lintel

JTF (just the facts): A total of 6 large scale color images, displayed in artist-designed white frames with no mat in the single room gallery space. All of the works are c-prints with acrylic diasec from 2006 and 2007. The circular prints are each 47 inches in diameter, in editions of 5. A thin monograph of this body of work was published by Akio Nagasawa Publishing in 2009. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Japanese photographer Izima Kaoru is perhaps best known for his series of cinematic images where models imagine their own ideal deaths, complete with dramatic locations, fabulous couture fashions, and elegant pools of blood. After more than a decade of staged death, his new body of work, entitled One Sun, is a radical departure from this morbid fascination, a life-affirming look skyward.

Using a fish-eye lens and day-long exposures, Kaoru's images trace the path of the sun across the sky, resulting in images of sparkling bright lines against light blue orbs of hazy color. Depending on his location (near the Equator, in the northern Norway, or at various other locations around the globe) and the time of year/season, the sun creates a variety of concave and convex arcs, straight lines and even perfect circles, with cloudy weather periodically adding a dashed effect. These beams of light parade across a spectrum of soft blue, light purple and fuzzy pink pastel backgrounds, with only a few silhouetted palm tress, buildings, or other minuscule points of landscape around the edges to provide local context. They are like big blue marbles, or vibrating discs, or portholes.

In the past few years, we have seen quite a few photographers point their cameras up, following stars, satellites, and the sun and moon, mixing science and abstraction to generate unexpected landscapes or simulated line drawings. Kaoru's images bear some resemblance to the recent Sunburn pictures by Chris McCaw, but their glossy object quality, large size and strict conceptual geometries create an altogether different feeling than McCaw's intimate chance-driven solarized burns. The works feel much wider, capturing the incandescent radiance of the sun and the immense 360 degree breadth of the sky. I think the layers of roundness (the fish-eye distortion, the underlying shape of the earth and sun, the shape of the physical prints themselves) all contribute to making the conceptual construct effective.

Overall, while we have seen variations on these ideas before, Kaoru has added some new twists to the tracking of the sun, creating contemporary photographs that pulsate with collective optimism. He reminds us that wherever we might be on this diverse planet, the sun puts on a spectacular show if we would only take the time to look up and notice.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced in rising editions, starting at $16000 and moving up to $19500 and eventually to $23000. Kaoru's work has only recently come into the secondary markets, with a few of his large scale images from the Landscapes with a Corpse series coming up for sale in the past few years. Prices for these works have ranged between $9000 and $30000.

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

Transit Hub:

• Reviews: DLK COLLECTION, 2009 (here), NY Times, 2004 (here)

Izima Kaoru, One Sun
Through October 9th

Von Lintel Gallery
520 West 23rd Street
New York, NY 10011

Auction: Post-War and Contemporary Art, September 16, 2010 @Christie's South Kensington

The upcoming Post-War and Contemporary Art sale at Christie's South Kensington office in London marks the opening of the second half of the auction year for photography, and can be thought of as a warm-up for the heavier action which will take place later in October and November. Mixed in with works from a variety of other mediums, there are a total of 46 lots of photography on offer in this auction, with a Total High Estimate of £337700.

Here's the statistical breakdown:
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Total Low Lots (high estimate up to and including £5000): 27
Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): £83700
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Total Mid Lots (high estimate between £5000 and £25000): 16
Total Mid Estimate: £144000
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Total High Lots (high estimate above £25000): 3
Total High Estimate: £110000
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The top lot by High estimate is lot 160, David LaChapelle, Deluge: Museum, 2007, at £35000-45000. (Image at right, top, via Christie's.) The next highest lot by High estimate is lot 14, Thomas Ruff, m. d. p. n. 28, 2003, at £25000-35000. (Image at right, via Christie's.)

Here is the list of the photographers who are represented by two or more lots in the sale (with the number of lots in parentheses):

Nobuyoshi Araki (6)

Garry Fabian Miller (3)
Cindy Sherman (3)

Richard Artschwager (2)
Zarina Bhimji (2)

John Coplans (2)

Elger Esser (2)
Robert Mapplethorpe (2)

Thomas Ruff (2)

Andy Warhol (2)

The complete lot by lot catalog can be found here. The eCatalogue is located here.

Post-War and Contemporary Art
September 16th

Christie's
85 Old Brompton Road
London SW7 3LD

David LaChapelle, American Jesus @Kasmin

JTF (just the facts): A total of 5 large scale color photographs and 5 preliminary studies hung in two adjoining gallery spaces. The 5 photographs are all chromogenic prints, framed in white with no mats, made in editions of 3 from 2009. 3 of the works are 96x72, the other two are 84x72 and 52x120 respectively. The studies are a mixture of watercolor, collage, and graphite drawings on paper, and are framed in white and matted; they show initial ideas/iterations/versions of the image The Rape of Africa.

Comments/Context: Given the intensity of our celebrity-obsessed, pop culture soaked culture, it is not surprising that artists have sprung up who have been drawn to a heavy dose of slick commercialism and aggressive public relations. In recent years, David LaChapelle has made a steady stream of outrageous magazine covers, music videos, and elaborately staged celebrity portraits that walk the knife edge of fabulous and trashy, mixing vibrant garish colors, kitchy scene setting and a myriad of art historical symbols and references. Whether or not they fit our traditional definitions of great art, they hold up a mirror to our society and capture one view of the over-the-top spirit of the times.

In his newest photographs, LaChapelle has posed the ultimate pop icon, Michael Jackson, in a variety of quasi-biblical poses: held Pieta style by a bearded Jesus lookalike in the woods (complete with fallen sequined glove), standing on top of a devil with hands in prayer wearing white angel wings, and hand in hand with a saint on his day of beatification. His carefully constructed images depict Jackson as a prophet or martyr, reenvisioning the suffering and persecution brought on by his unmatched celebrity. The works have surreal, dramatic freakiness that verges on religious folk art, albeit on a massive scale with glossy production values, almost like album covers.
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The other two images in the show take on religious corruption and African exploitation, the latter seen as an updating of Botticelli's Venus and Mars, complete with Naomi Campbell, cherubs holding rocket launchers, goats, golden treasure, and backhoes. While the rework itself is a bit awkward and overly symbolic, I enjoyed seeing LaChapelle's preliminary drawings and collages hung nearby. These show a photographer who is undeniably building up his imagery in a painterly way, constructing and reconstructing ideas and motifs to achieve his desired results.

On one hand, I must admit that these pictures didn't do much for me, and I can see how many will dismiss them as ridiculous, disposable camp (coming soon to a t-shirt near you). But having said that, the outlandish weirdness of the Michael Jackson images is such that I can actually imagine them finding their way into some museums and contemporary collections, where they will successfully hold down large walls and make people gawk, point and fight, some in visceral dislike, others in star-worshipping positive awe. While they are not exactly shocking, given Jackson's astounding fame, it would be hard to walk by one of these photographs without some kind of reaction. And so while I can't exactly recommend these works, they are undeniably polarizing and memorable, and therefore worth seeing, if only to choose for yourself on which side to stand.

Collector's POV: The large photographs in this show are priced between $95000 and $125000. LaChapelle's work has jumped in value in recent years, with prices now routinely running between $10000 and $140000.

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

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Reviews: New Yorker (here), Independent (here), Stylelist (here)
• Interview: Nowness (here)

David LaChapelle, American Jesus

Through September 18th

Paul Kasmin Gallery
293 Tenth Avenue
New York, NY 10001

Arnold Odermatt @Koenig Projekte

JTF (just the facts): A total of 30 black and white photographs, pinned directly to the wall under glass, and hung in the simple single room gallery space. All of the works are vintage gelatin silver prints, made in editions of 8 between 1953 and 1983. Most of the prints are sized at 12x16 or reverse, with a few at 12x12, and one at 7x16. A monograph of this body of work, entitled Karambolage, was published by Steidl in 2003 (here).

Comments/Context: The unlikely back story to the work of Swiss photographer Arnold Odermatt makes his black and white sculptural images of car crashes all the more unusual. During his long career, Odermatt was the official police photographer in the canton of Nidwalden, where he documented everyday auto accidents for police and insurance files. When he finished with his work, he often took another set of images of the crash site for himself, and it is these images that have resurfaced in the last decade, eventually finding their way to the Venice Biennale and a solo show at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Unlike the gritty urban voyeurism of Weegee's crime scenes, Odermatt's car crashes are pensive and wistful, where crumpled hoods, broken barriers, and snowy skid marks are captured with crisp, pared down elegance. His photographs document the moment after the ambulance has gone and the glass has been swept up, leaving just the quiet aftermath of the car abandoned in the roadway, flipped over down a hill side, or filled with water in the river. While people are generally absent from these pictures, their lush tonalities somehow prevent the images from becoming too clinical or antiseptic. Chalk lines on the road are swirling and gestural, a knocked down light pole creates compositional chaos, and a boat in the roadway or a police officer doing a handstand offer a few moments of subtle and unexpected comic relief. Evidence has been turned into quiet art, the personal tragedy moved into the background, allowing the formal beauty of muddy roads, spin outs, and crushed cars to come forward.

Collector's POV: The vintage prints available in this show are priced between $3200 and $4500. Odermatt's work has not been widely available in the secondary markets, although a handful of prints have come up for auction in the past few years; prices for these lots have ranged between $2000 and $4000.

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

Transit Hub:

• Reviews: Artforum (here, scroll down), New Yorker (here), NY Times (here), Flavorwire (here)

Arnold Odermatt
Through September 10th

Leo Koenig Inc. Projekte

541 West 23rd Street

New York, NY 10011

Summer Hiatus

At this point, we're going to drop off the grid for a while and enjoy a summer hiatus. Think of this as the equivalent of a public radio membership drive, where they withhold the content you so desperately want while they deliver an earnest message about becoming a member, but in this case, we'll be using a silent message. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, right?

Consider becoming a subscriber to the feed, so you don't miss us when we return. We'll see you again after Labor Day, when the photographic art world reawakens.

Greater New York 2010 @MoMA PS1

JTF (just the facts): A large group show of recent contemporary work made by New York-based artists, displayed across all four floors of the PS1 building. A total of 68 artists have been included in the exhibit, 19 of which (roughly 28%) can be called photographers (using a broad definition of that term). The show was curated by Klaus Biesenbach, Connie Butler, and Neville Wakefield. Unfortunately, PS1 has both prohibited photography in the galleries and failed to provide images of the included works on its public website, so annoyingly, this review has neither installation shots or image highlights.

The following photographers are included in the exhibit, with the number of images on view in parentheses:

Michele Abeles (7)
Deville Cohen (3, 1 video)
LaToya Ruby Frazier (12, 1 video)
Zipora Fried (3)
Daniel Gordon (5)
K8 Hardy (18)
Alisha Kerlin (8)
Deana Lawson (6, 1 large installation)
Leigh Ledare (22, 1 stack of images, 3 videos)
Alice O'Malley (12)
Lucy Raven (1 photo animation, 1 video, 1 case of ephemera)
Mariah Robertson (8)
David Benjamin Sherry (19)
Erin Shirref (28)
Xaviera Simmons (1 grid of 42, 2 others)
A.L. Steiner (1 three wall installation)
Elisabeth Subrin (4)
Hank Willis Thomas (1 set of 82)
Pinar Yolacan (8)

Comments/Context: Given our passionate interest in photography, sprawling group shows like Greater New York always feel like a bit like a treasure hunt; we wander through the galleries in search of the photography, never knowing what might be beyond the next white wall. With this show's thematic focus on brand new work from emerging contemporary artists from the New York area, we expected to be surprised and challenged by some work and to be bored by much of the rest, and hoped to be introduced to some new names worth keeping an eye on. I think our expectations were realistically low, and I think the show delivers the ungainly mixed bag that we expected.

Trying to discern themes or patterns in such a diverse body of photography is a tricky prospect, but given the high highs and the low lows we have experienced in the past five tumultuous years, the fact that so much of the photographic work on display is inward looking and self reflective, with a heavy dose of performance, was a surprise. Perhaps this is a result of early career artists still looking to refine their voices and seeking that clarity by peering inward, but I came away a bit troubled by the tin ear the New York artists seem to be showing toward the important issues of the day. I'm a sucker for big meaty new ideas that make my eyes bug out, but most of the photography I found here was both preoccupied with personal nuances and lacking in radical innovation.

That isn't to say that there wasn't plenty of work to enjoy on display. I've detailed a handful of favorites and special attractions below:

• I stood in front of Xaviera Simmons' large array of appropriated images of boat people and refugees hung in the entry of the show for quite a long time, feeling the combination of isolation, desperation and wild hope of being packed in like sardines on a makeshift raft or rusting barge, heading for the unknown. This was one of the only pieces in the exhibit that I thought tried to get at the uncertain spirit of the times, that sense of unease and lack of control that has been so common of late.
• Deville Cohen's sparse constructed scenes, made up of ladders, step stools and shredded paper, and pictures of ladders and step stools, have intriguing layers in their simple conceptual inversions. The video of the fake car wash (once again made from these primary materials) mixes humor and creative inventiveness to successfully evoke an everyday object. These works seem like a promising set of ideas worth further exploration.
• Pinar Yolacan's Mother Goddess series also uses a relatively simple construct to generate something more powerful. In these works, Yolacan completely covers her models from head to toe, wrapping them like mummies in skin tight cocoons of denim, black latex, or patterned fabric. They are then posed against monochrome colored backgrounds, lounging like odalisques. The resulting images are weirdly mute, like ancient fertility figurines or fetish objects.
• LaToya Ruby Frazier is clearly another emerging photographer with some momentum behind her. Her formally crisp and sinuously elegant black and white studies of falling down houses, piles of trees, bedside tables and a burger on a countertop are entirely evocative of a certain set of personal life circumstances. In this case, a look inward has produced something that isn't overly self-conscious, but is rather abstracted just enough to be universal, both unflinching and quietly beautiful at the same time.
• The work of Mariah Robertson, Hank Willis Thomas, and Daniel Gordon on view is generally a repeat or a refinement of work we have seen recently at other NY venues. Robertson's 88 is different than her single, ragged edged works in that it is a long ribbon of overlapping imagery, billowing across the ceiling and piling up on the floor, mixing checkerboards, piles of books, petrified wood, and chemical drips in her signature darkroom style; her aesthetic is growing on me over time. It was also terrific to see Thomas' full Unbranded series (82 images), where appropriated advertisements have been stripped of their logos, leaving behind a distorted history of black culture since 1968; while the pictures stand on their own as individual artworks, seeing the series together adds a layer of elapsed time and a view into the evolution of cultural stereotypes.
• K8 Hardy's self portraits have a playfulness that is infectious. Across the wall, she shape shifts, alternately posing with purple hair, puckered lips, orange sunglasses, wearing a wrestling belt, or standing with lawn mowers, often adding in a seemingly random photogram for effect. It sounds overly staged I know, but somehow it all works, successfully mixing eccentric personal style and play acting.
• I can't really say that I liked Leigh Ledare's erotic images of his mother's sex life, but they certainly push on cultural taboos and get your attention. They combine a sense of tragedy with creepy repulsiveness; they're explicit, confrontational, disturbing, and sad all at the same time. My guess is most people will truly hate these pictures, but like them or not, they're challenging and weirdly memorable.

Overall, I think there are a few nuggets of photographic promise to be found amidst the slurry here if you are willing to invest the time in exploring the endless jumble of rooms filled with art. While I was pleased to see how much photography has become intertwined with the general practice of contemporary art making, particularly in the NY scene, I have to say I was a bit disappointed that so few in this emerging bunch seem to have found a singular voice of durable originality.

Collector's POV: Since most of these artists are early in their careers and the work is generally fresh out of the studio, none of it has yet migrated to the secondary markets. So the only real option for interested collectors is to follow up with gallery representatives or directly with the artists themselves. Below is a first pass list of easily identifiable gallery relationships and artist websites; if I've missed (or misidentified) important relationships or sites, please add them in the comments for the benefit of all:
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Michele Abeles: artist site (here)
Deville Cohen: Nowhere Gallery (here)
LaToya Ruby Frazier: Higher Pictures (here), artist site (here)
Zipora Fried: On Stellar Rays (here)
Daniel Gordon: Zach Feuer Gallery (here), artist site (here)
K8 Hardy: Reena Spaulings Fine Art (here)
Alisha Kerlin: artist site (here)
Deana Lawson: artist site (here)
Leigh Ledare: was Rivington Arms (here); not sure now
Alice O'Malley: Isis Gallery (here), artist site (here)
Lucy Raven: artist site (here)
Mariah Robertson: Marvelli Gallery (here), artist site (here)
David Benjamin Sherry: artist site (here)
Erin Shirref: Lisa Cooley Fine Art (here), artist site (here)
Xaviera Simmons: unknown
A.L. Steiner: unknown
Elisabeth Subrin: Sue Scott Gallery (here)
Hank Willis Thomas: Charles Guice Contemporary (here), artist site (here)
Pinar Yolacan: was Rivington Arms (here), not sure now; artist site (here)

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

Transit Hub:

• Reviews: NY Times (here), Village Voice (here), WNYC Gallerina (here), L Magazine (here), Huffington Post (here)

Greater New York 2010
Through October 18th

MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Avenue
Long Island City, NY 11101

The Dawn of Modernism: Early Twentieth-Century Mexican Photography @Throckmorton

JTF (just the facts): A group show containing a total of 34 black and white photographs, framed in thick black and matted, and hung in the elevator lobby and main gallery space (divided by several linen interior walls). The prints are a mix of vintage and later prints, in both gelatin silver and platinum. The majority were made between the 1920s and the 1940s. (Installation shots at right.)

The following photographers are included in the exhibit, with the number of images on view in parentheses:

Lola Alvarez Bravo (2)
Manuel Alvarez Bravo (8)
Hugo Brehme (1)
Anton Bruehl (4)
Hector Garcia (2)
Fritz Henle (2)
Leo Matiz (4)
Tina Modotti (6)
Edward Weston (4)

Mariana Yampolsky (1)

Comments/Context: Mexican modernism from the first half of the 20th century really has a special flavor all its own, meaningfully different from the photographic "modernisms" of Europe or America from the same time period. It combines the political fervor of the post-revolutionary period, a renewed attention to the symbols of traditional Mexican life, the historical mind set of the Mexican muralist painters, and the radical ideas of a number of influential artistic transplants into a potent stew of ideas, tinged with a bit of romance and bathed in the harsh, pure light of Mexico's geography.

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This show gathers together a sample of work from the main figures of the period, along with work from a group of somewhat lesser known contributors to the movement. While the aesthetic is modernist, with clean lines, pared down compositions, and found abstractions, the subject matter is uniquely Mexican: men in sombreros, women with water jugs, street markets, cacti, agave, and portraits of famous artists like Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. There are plenty of excellent Modottis, Westons, and Alvarez Bravos on display that will be familiar to collectors, as well as some secondary images that are worth a look. I particularly enjoyed Manuel Alvarez Bravo's wood pile and peeled jicamas, spare still lifes with geometric clarity. While this exhibit isn't a definitive or exhaustive scholarly study of Mexican modernism, it does successfully provide a taste of what makes the pictures from this period so distinctly intriguing.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show range in price from $2500 (Brehme) to $35000 (Modotti and Weston), with most under $10000.

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

Transit Hub:

• Reviews: New Yorker (here), Village Voice (here)

The Dawn of Modernism: Early Twentieth-Century Mexican Photography
Through September 11th

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Throckmorton Fine Art

145 East 57th Street
New York, NY 10022

Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970-1980 @Princeton

JTF (just the facts): A large group show, containing a total of 581 images/works by 36 photographers, variously framed and matted, and hung in an open lobby area and a series of densely packed, winding rooms. All of the works (except those in the prologue and legacy addendum sections) were made by American photographers between 1970 and 1980. The exhibit was curated by Kevin Moore and was shown first at the Cincinnati Art Museum earlier this year (here). A detailed catalogue, containing 304 images, with essays by Kevin Moore, James Crump, and Leo Rubinfien, has been published by Hatje Cantz (here) and is available in the museum shop. Unfortunately, no photography was allowed in the galleries, so there are no installation shots of the show; the images at right come from the exhibition website. (Stephen Shore, Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, August 13, 1974, at right.)

The following photographers are included in the main exhibit, with the number of photographs or other works on view in parentheses:

Harry Callahan (12)
William Christenberry (15)
John Divola (10)
William Eggleston (17)
Mitch Epstein (10)
Jan Groover (8)
Robert Heinecken (18 lithographs on magazine pages, 1 video, 1 case containing 5 reconfigured magazine spreads)
Barbara Kasten (8, 2 cyanotypes)
Les Krims (9)
Helen Levitt (40 color slides, projected onto gallery wall)
Joel Meyerowitz (14 photographs from two different projects)
Richard Misrach (12)
John Pfahl (9)
Leo Rubinfien (12)
Stephen Shore (312 images from American Surfaces in lobby, 10 commercial post cards, 10 photographs)
Neal Slavin (6)
Eve Sonneman (6 diptychs)
Joel Sternfeld (16 photographs from two different projects)
plus a glass case containing press releases, invitation cards, news articles and related ephemera

Two additional sections bracket the main body of the exhibit, and are not included in the catalogue; most if not all of the images seem to be drawn from the permanent collection of the PUAM. The photographers with work on view in these sections are listed below (John Divola, Zuma #21, 1977, at right):

Prologue

Diane Arbus (1)
Harry Callahan (1)
Harold Edgerton (1)
Robert Frank (1)
Ernst Haas (1)
Dorothea Lange (1)
Eliot Porter (1)
Aaron Siskind (1)
Edward Weston (1)
Minor White (1)
Garry Winogrand (1)

Legacy

Tina Barney (1)
Uta Barth (1)
Philip-Lorca DiCorcia (1)
Rineke Dijkstra (1)
Nan Goldin (1)
Candida Höfer (1)
Thomas Ruff (1)
Cindy Sherman (1)

Comments/Context: The well-known story of American color photography is often spun as a simplified tale of three misunderstood protagonists (Eggleston, Shore, and Sternfeld), fighting the black and white establishment and paving the way for an entire generation of colorists. Simple is easy to remember, so many of us mindlessly spit out these three names whenever the color conversation comes around. The fact is, while these three were undeniably important and massively influential, the actual history is much more complicated, with many more meaningful figures participating in the 1970s melting pot of photographic ideas. (Jan Groover, Untitled, 1978, at right.)

This excellent show does several smart things. First, it limits the playing field to a manageable size: we're only discussing Americans (no one else), color photography (not anything concurrently happening in the world of black and white), and the fixed decade of 1970-1980 (nothing before or after). These boundaries force us to focus on those artists who were really part of the active dialogue around the growth of color photography, without getting distracted and sidetracked by tangentially related themes and activities. Second, it grounds the imagery in the social and political history of the time and the current events of the 1970s, including Vietnam, Nixon, economic crisis, and the general mood of confusion and indifference. And third, it broadens the discussion far beyond the best known names to consider the contributions of many who didn't achieve a permanently meteoric rise.

The result of this set of curatorial framing decisions is an exhibit that isn't a linear, "this came first" kind of argument about the mainstream emergence of color in American photography, but more a snapshot of the diversity of color approaches that were being explored during those specific years, with plenty of opportunities to see connections and exchanges between different modes of experimentation. The story is much less straight and obvious than we have been led to believe - while Eggleston's show at MoMA in 1976 was clearly a watershed, his work didn't just arrive from an alien spacecraft to enlighten the world; many related ideas were percolating around in the artistic community (and in society at large), manifesting themselves in differing forms.

The exciting opportunity this exhibit provides is the ability to compare the work of a variety of contemporaneous artists and to stand in front of each display and ask two critical questions: how did this particular photographer use the newness of color, and most importantly, why?

The answers to these two questions are tremendously varied and utterly fascinating:

• Callahan and Levitt add color like a top layer over an existing black and white aesthetic. Callahan's approach created planes of color from the volumes and voids of Providence houses. Levitt's color allowed her to explore pattern and contrast (in fabrics, clothing, and street architecture), giving her another tool around which to coalesce a composition. Both of their color work can be seen as an extension of their earlier imagery, with color creating new opportunities within the existing framework.
• Christenberry matches his use of color with the sense of Southern vernacular history he is trying to document. His color is derived from a specific, drugstore print patina, layering a sense of everyday faded memory across the locations he has visited repeatedly over time.
• Epstein, Shore, Meyerowitz, Sternfeld, and Rubinfein all use color as a way to get at new kinds of relevant subject matter. Whether employing a snapshot aesthetic or a more formal view camera sense of control, these photographers were closely looking at the world of the 1970s, with its mass culture, its suburbia, its new ironies and unexpected vibrant garishness. Epstein uncovers a riot of patterned dresses, a woman with a snake, and a man sleeping on a cot near the West Side Highway. Shore documents hotel rooms, weird roadside interiors, and a parade of top down still life meals, and later turns his camera toward parking lots, piles of oranges, and empty streets. Meyerowitz grabs shots from passing cars, and captures the colored lights of gas stations, fast food joints, and Cape Cod cottages. Sternfeld finds blurred heads flashing by, and more formal views of beached whales, aquatic theme parks, and a basketball hoop in the desert. And Rubinfein sees the beginnings of empty globalization found in airports, taxicabs, ferries, and trains. In each case, color is an enabler, a method for making a new kind of picture that touched on the realities of 1970s life, without seeming stuck in the purity of black and white.
• Heinecken and Slavin are particularly interested in the colors of rampant commercialism. Heinecken boldly juxtaposes a Vietnamese soldier holding two severed heads with women's fashion ads, and collages provocative nudes into otherwise normal magazine spreads. Slavin uses the vocabulary of commercial portraiture to get at the wackiness of our subculutres, from Star Trek fans to rod and gun club members. Both are leveraging the ideas of advertising, of serial imagery, and of biting cultural commentary.
• Kasten, Groover, Krims, Pfahl, Divola and Sonneman are all using color in much more conceptual ways, getting beyond the found documentary moment to constructions, performances, and new ways of seeing. Kasten builds intricate sculptures made to be photographed, where color combines with geometric lines and forms to create complex abstractions. Groover makes elegant still lifes of fragmented kitchen utensils, carefully arranging forks, egg slicers and pie tins into controlled, formal compositions. Krims experiments with colorful staged sexuality, adorned with goldfish, pickles and balloons. Pfahl disrupts landscapes with tin foil, colored string, and oranges, playing with our sense of visual perception. Divola combines staged destruction with natural perfection, juxtaposing a destroyed beach house interior (complete with broken windows and spray painted decorations) and the the lilting colors of pink sunsets. And Sonneman plays with the idea of cinematic vision, making diptychs of action taken seconds apart, using color to highlight the changes from moment to moment. In all these cases, color is a subtext to a larger set of ideas, a tool for enhancing the conceptual pay-off. (Barbara Kasten, Construct II-B, 1979, at right.)
• I think Eggleston and Misrach are the most radical in their use of color, and this may explain both the initial negative reaction to Eggleston's work and its ultimate rise to stardom. Misrach tries something entirely unexpected - he creates blasting, glare-filled pictures of lush green Hawaiian jungles. The images take the normal landscape and turn it on its head, entirely via a change in the approach to color. Eggleston goes one step further - he takes ordinary fragments of life and pares them down to studies of color. While we've seen many of the images on display here before, the context of the other color photographers exposes just how extreme and unconventional Eggleston was. The stove interior, the red ceiling, the peaches sign are experiments in making the known unknown, in seeing the colors of the world as something wholly divorced from subject matter, even when there is an undercurrent of narrative. This was what upset people the most, and what liberated so many later on.

The exhibit itself suffers from some unfortunate quirks of architecture, where the huge array of Shore prints is divorced from the flow of the show (out in the lobby), and the one-way rabbit warren of narrow galleries makes it hard to double back and explore non-adjacent connections and echoes. Also, the "prologue" and "legacy" groups of pictures that bookend the show are entirely forgettable, and therefore fail to deliver the historical context they were attempting to provide. But these are only minor faults with an otherwise terrific and thought-provoking show.

In the end, the reason to get in your car and make a special drive down to Princeton is that this show doesn't offer any easy answers or a pat summary for cocktail parties. The story of 1970s American color is a mixed bag of experimentation, with artists and photographers going in all kinds of different directions, looking for new doors to open based on their own ideas of what was important in photography. So it isn't just Eggleston, although the show certainly helps clarify why he was ultimately so influential. And it wasn't a "school" so much as a group of artists loosely linked by a confluence of ideas, some inextricably tied to existing approaches to photography and others off on new tangents. The show reminds us that the common thread in this confused insider narrative is the richness of seeing the world in vibrant, chaotic, living color, and in adapting our collective art making to capture the broad diversity of that magnificence.

Collector's POV: Given the popularity of many of the photographers included in this show, collectors can easily find representative samples of their work in the secondary markets. In the event a more specific search is required, I've listed the gallery representatives and artist sites below (Richard Misrach, Hawaii V, 1978, at right):

• Harry Callahan: Pace/MacGill Gallery (here), Stephen Daiter Gallery (here), Fraenkel Gallery (here)
• William Christenberry: Pace/MacGill Gallery (here)
• John Divola: Gallery Luisotti (here), artist site (here)
• William Eggleston: Cheim & Read (here), artist site (here)
• Mitch Epstein: Sikkema Jenkins & Co. (here), artist site (here)
• Jan Groover: Janet Borden Inc. (here)
• Robert Heinecken: Pace/MacGill Gallery (here)
• Barbara Kasten: Yancey Richardson Gallery (here), Stephen Daiter Gallery (here), artist site (here)
• Les Krims: artist site (here)
• Helen Levitt: Laurence Miller Gallery (here)
• Joel Meyerowitz: Edwynn Houk Gallery (here)
• Richard Misrach: Pace/MacGill Gallery (here), Fraenkel Gallery (here)
• John Pfahl: Janet Borden Inc. (here), artist site (here)
• Leo Rubinfien: Robert Mann Gallery (here)
• Stephen Shore: 303 Gallery (here)
• Neal Slavin: artist site (here)
• Eve Sonneman: Nohra Haime Gallery (here), artist site (here)
• Joel Sternfeld: Luhring Augustine (here)

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

Transit Hub:

• Reviews: Wall Street Journal (here), NY Times (here), Daily Beast (here), CityBeat Cincinnati (here)

Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970-1980
Through September 26th

Princeton University Art Museum
Princeton, NJ 08544

The Magnum Mark: Selections from the Magnum Photos Archive @FLAG Art Foundation

JTF (just the facts): A group show containing final prints, press prints, contact sheets, print maps, story notes, books, and other ephemera from the Magnum Photos Archive. The exhibition is loosely divided into sections, all displayed in the upper gallery space (on the 10th floor, installation shots at right). These include:

• a group of "Magnum Classics" displayed over a series of walls near the stairs; all the prints are framed in silver and matted
• a section of African images by George Rodger, including 7 prints, 3 type-written story texts, and 3 glass cases holding binders of contact sheets, notes, and magazine spreads
• a group of print maps, each series showing a "before" print, prints with markings, and an "after" print, pinned directly to the wall under glass
• a set of images framed so that both sides of the print are visible, to enable the viewer to see the many stamps and markings on the back
• a series of 10 video screens along one wall, showing photographic stills in rotation
• a projection showing a montage of images, alternating with profiles on specific photographers
• an assortment of Magnum books/monographs on the reading desks

The following photographers are included in the various sections below, with the number of images on view in parentheses:

Magnum Classics

Abbas (1)
Eve Arnold (1)
Rene Burri (1)
Bruce Davidson (1)
Elliott Erwitt (2)
Stuart Franklin (1)
Philippe Halsman (2)
Josef Koudelka (1)
Steve McCurry (1)
Inge Morath (1)
Marc Riboud (2)

Print Maps

Burt Glinn (4)
Susan Meiselas (3)
Inge Morath (3)
David Seymour (4)
Dennis Stock (3)

Double Sided Images (framed to see both front and back)

Eve Arnold (2)
Burt Glinn (1)
Hiroshi Kubota (1)
Guy Le Querrec (1)
Constantine Manos (1)

Comments/Context: Earlier this year, Michael Dell's MSD Capital purchased a massive archive of press prints from Magnum Photos (those prints used up through 2003) and announced that the collection would ultimately be housed at the Harry Ransom Center at U Texas Austin. The FLAG Art Foundation (founded several years ago in Chelsea by collector Glenn Fuhrman, one of the managing partners of MSD Capital) is now showing a small sampler of these prints, giving us a taste for the many educational and art historical opportunities that lie within the archive.

While there are plenty of well-known, "classic" Magnum images on display, the real interest in this show lies beyond the obvious greatest hits. One large wall contains sets of images printed by Pablo Inirio, Magnum's in-house printer. They show his working process, from the initial prints from the negative, to detailed maps of dodging and burning regions and elapsed time periods, to the final images; it's a fascinating study of the intricacies of great old-school analog printing, as applied to James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Loren, and Susan Meiselas' carnival strippers.

Along an adjacent wall, a series of press prints have been sandwiched between glass, allowing the viewer to see both sides. The back of each print is a cluttered mass of credit stamps, consignment numbers, barcodes, archive stamps, and terms of use; a large wall diagram helps decode all the different markings. Armed with this information, each print is transformed into an historical object, a physical thing which has traveled a long and winding road from photographer to viewer. Unraveling the mysteries and connections of all these stamps and notations will clearly be a rich area for further scholarly exploration.

A bank of video screens and a changing overhead projection offer a stark contrast to the details of the physical prints; the images swim by endlessly, creating a sense of visual overload, where it becomes nearly impossible to single out just one image for patient looking. Digital display technologies are clearly offering new ways to see photographs, and these media pose complicated questions about how a physical archive like Magnum's should be managed most successfully in a 21st century world.

Overall, this show has a solid mix of old favorites and arcane details and will appeal most to those who want to dig a bit deeper into the minutiae of Magnum's long success.

Collector's POV: While this is not a selling show, most of the images in the Magnum Classics section of the exhibit, along with a few other images from other sections, are available from time to time in the secondary markets, and many of the best known Magnum photographers have gallery representation outside the photo agency, so interested collectors have plenty of options for following up. UPDATE: the folks in Magnum's print sales department have reminded me that prints of most of the images on view in the exhibit are available directly from Magnum, and that there are Magnum fine art advisors available to work with collectors in New York, London, Paris, and Tokyo.

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

Transit Hub:

• Magnum Photos website (here)

The Magnum Mark: Selections from the Magnum Photos Archive
Through September 10th

FLAG Art Foundation

545 West 25th Street

9th Floor
New York, NY 10001

Book: Matthias Hoch, Fotografien/Photographs

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2005 by Hatje Cantz (here). 136 pages, with 61 color and 12 black and white images. Includes essays in German and English by Jutta Penndorf, Harald Kunde, Thomas Seelig, and Sabine Maria Schmidt. The catalog was published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Lindenau-Museum Altenburg in 2005. (Cover shot at right, via Amazon.)

Comments/Context: German photographer Matthias Hoch takes a meticulous and disciplined approach to building facades and patterned interior details, finding sculptural qualities in the rhythms of structural functionality.

Rows of windows, layers of ceiling lights, angles of empty concrete fountains, and repetitions of balconies become exercises in shape and form, where ordered design and simple symmetry are transformed into abstractions of motif and systems of mathematics. His locations are everywhere and nowhere (parking garages, apartment buildings, roadways), anonymous mundane places found in any modern city, stripped of human inhabitants and filled with futuristic absence. His pictures are austere and logical, cool and controlled, taken in neutral light with an emphasis on clarity.

Thematically and stylistically, I think this work could easily be tied to that of Ola Kolehmainen or Julian Faulhaber. If you like your architectural photography to be formally precise and rigorously geometric, then Matthias Hoch will be a photographer worth discovering.

Collector’s POV: Matthias Hoch is represented by Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco (here). Hoch's work has begun to become available in the secondary markets in recent years. Prices have ranged between $4000 and $7000, with most works printed in editions of 5.

Transit Hub:

• Exhibition: Ludwig Forum, 2006 (here, in German)