Friday, November 30, 2012

Lynne Cohen, Occupied Territory 1971-1988 @Higher Pictures

JTF (just the facts): A total of 14 black and white photographs, framed in original marbled frames and matted, and hung against white walls in the single room gallery space. All of the works are vintage/early gelatin silver prints made between 1975 and 1982. 12 of the prints are 8x10 contact prints; the other 2 are sized 30x40 and have titles printed directly on the mats. No edition information was available on the checklist. The 1987 monograph of this body of work was recently reissued by Aperture (here). (Installation shots at right.) 
 
Comments/Context: If Lynne Cohen's images of interiors were made today, we might easily mistake them for stage sets or ironic art installations. Their kitschy, dated unreality and odd, empty formality make them seem quietly preposterous, perfect for some arch conceptual twist or sideways social commentary. But the fact is these images were made more than three decades ago and depict actual found environments rather than mysterious constructed fictions. These offices, showrooms, and public spaces were indeed real places, making their blend of seriousness and unintentional absurdity all the more head-shakingly amusing.
 
As I circled the gallery, I found myself thinking that these pictures had a strong underlying kinship with Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan's Evidence series. There is something perplexing and unknowable about why a recording studio would be outfitted to look like an undersea world (complete with stuffed and mounted swordfish and tuna) or who would decorate an ordinary office with a dense flock of duck stencils, a tower of birdfeeders, and a few twisted tree branches on the floor. Cohen's interiors have an elaborateness to them, a controlled attention to detail that from a distance seems downright laughably puzzling. Why the taxidermied animal heads in the tiled stairwell? Or the woodland scene pinned up behind the badminton court? Or the floor-to-ceiling cloud wall in the drab office? I thoroughly enjoyed the orderly tile/brick/siding showroom, with its display of suitcase style arrays hung neatly on the peg board wall - it's just the kind of lonely weirdo salesroom I imagine to be inside one of Lewis Baltz' flat roofed industrial park office buildings.
 
Cohen brings a straightforward deadpan eye to these almost perfect simulations and oddball assemblages, bridging between late 1970s witty conceptualism and the New Topographics photographers' interest in the suburban built environment. Her pictures feel both steeped in the artistic issues of that particular moment and simultaneously remarkably fresh and smart. This is a body of work that has aged well, still as crisp, biting, and subtly hilarious as ever.
  
Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced as follows. The 8x10 prints range from $6000 to $8000 each, while the 30x40 prints are $15000 each. Cohen's work has very little secondary market history, with only a handful of lots coming up for sale in the past decade. Those prints found buyers at prices ranging between $2000 and $5000.
  
Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
 
Transit Hub:
  • Artist site (here)
  • Video interview (here)
  • Features/Reviews: New Yorker (here), Daily Beast (here)
Through December 8th
 
980 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10075

Thursday, November 29, 2012

Auction: A Show of Hands: Photographs from the Collection of Henry Buhl, December 12 and 13, 2012 @Sotheby's

While I haven’t posted many auction previews/results in recent months, I think the upcoming single owner Buhl sale at Sotheby’s is worth following. Henry Buhl’s extensive collection of photographic hands (over 1000 images I'm told) is somewhat legendary among collectors. Shown at the Guggenheim in 2004, it’s an obsessive, expansive, single subject matter private collection that spans the entire history of the medium, from Fox Talbot and early daguerreotypes to Wall, Baldessari and Sherman. It includes photograms, Surrealism, FSA imagery, a wide range of portraits, photojournalism, advertising, scientific photographs, basically any and every type of photograph ever made with a hand in it in some fashion. As subject matter driven collectors ourselves, I am fascinated by what he has unearthed and gathered together, and how compellingly it can tell the story of photography through a single narrow slice. Most every major photographic name is represented here, sometimes by an iconic show stopper (like the ones illustrated at right), but often by an image that is much less well known. I think this is the genius and joy of the collection - going off in a direction no one else is interested in and uncovering countless gems that have been overlooked and underappreciated. The sale itself includes a total of 432 lots across two days, with a total High estimate of $12157500. The preview will certainly be worth a visit, for collectors and casual gallery goers alike.

Here's the statistical breakdown:

Total Low Lots (high estimate up to and including $10000): 270
Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): $1560500

Total Mid Lots (high estimate between $10000 and $50000): 116
Total Mid Estimate: $2387000

Total High Lots (high estimate $50000 and above): 46
Total High Estimate: $8210000

The top lot by High estimate is lot 33, Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe - Hands and Thimble, 1919, at $800000-1200000. (Image at right, top, via Sotheby's.)

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

Man Ray (7)
Ruth Bernhard (4)
Imogen Cunningham (4)
Adam Fuss (4)
Ralph Gibson (4)
Robert Mapplethorpe (4)
Edward Weston (4)

(Lot 12, Herbert Bayer, Lonely Metropolitan, 1932, at $300000-500000, image at right, middle, and lot 20, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Fotogramm, 1925, at $300000-500000, image at right, bottom, both via Sotheby's.)

The complete lot by lot catalog can be found here.

A Show of Hands: Photographs from the Collection of Henry Buhl
December 12th and 13th

Sotheby's
1334 York Avenue
New York, NY 10021

The Checklist: 11/29/12

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

Uptown

No reviews at this time.

Midtown

ONE STAR: Joel Meyerowitz: Howard Greenberg: December 1: review
THREE STARS: Lee Friedlander: Pace: December 22: review
TWO STARS: Lee Friedlander: Pace/MacGill: December 22: review
ONE STAR: Abelardo Morell: Bonni Benrubi: December 22: review
ONE STAR: New Photography 2012: MoMA: February 4: review
TWO STARS: The Shaping of New Visions: MoMA: April 29: review

Chelsea

ONE STAR: Danny Lyon: Churner and Churner: December 15: review
ONE STAR: Olafur Eliasson: Tanya Bonakdar: December 22: review
ONE STAR: Jitka Hanzlová: Yancey Richardson: December 22: review

SoHo/Lower East Side/Downtown

No reviews at this time.

Elsewhere Nearby

No reviews at this time.

Forward Auction Calendar
New auctions added this week in red.
(Sale Date: Sale Title: Auction House: link to catalog)

November 29: Photographie (Cologne): Lempertz: catalog
December 5: 19th-21st Century Photography (Berlin): Bassenge: catalog
December 7: Photographs (Cologne): Van Ham: catalog
December 11: Fine Photographs & Photobooks (New York): Swann: catalog
December 12/13: Photographs from the Collection of Henry Buhl (New York): Sotheby's: catalog

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Jitka Hanzlová: There is something I don't know @Richardson

JTF (just the facts): A total of 13 color photographs, framed in brown wood and unmatted, and hung against white walls in the main gallery space. All of the works are archival pigment prints made between 2000 and 2011. The prints range in size from 14x11 to 25x18 and are available in editions of 8. A retrospective survey of the artist's work was recently published by Kehrer (here) and is available from the gallery for $67. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Jitka Hanzlová's portraits from the last decade look back to Renaissance painting for their compositional structure and style. While the images capture contemporary sitters of all ages, their poses are nothing if not traditional: full profile, three quarter, and torso only views, tightly framed in natural light with generally nondescript colored backgrounds. The works have the look and feel of the old, with a dash of crisp freshness provided by the new.

The best of the images on view here find a subject who seems caught between the two worlds, where a hairstyle, the curve of a nose, or a piece of clothing hearkens back to another age. Suddenly a silk wrap, a wide-necked dress, some black beads, or the direct stare of a dark haired woman seem to seamlessly connect the past and present. Other works feel slightly more dissonant, as if the modern sitter has been trapped in an uncomfortably formal pose or a frame that is too small. Each photograph plays with a changing sense of time, highlighting tiny similarities and differences between what we expect from art history and what we are now.

Hanzlová's casually intimate portraits are subtle and require close observation not to be quickly overlooked. A quick fly by of this exhibit might leave you underwhelmed, so opt for a slower pace to encourage the quiet nuances of the pictures to come forth.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced at between $7700 and $8500 each. Hanzlová's work has become more available in the secondary markets in recent years. This has been particularly true in Europe, where prices have generally ranged between $1000 and $3000.

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

Transit Hub:
  • Feature/Review: New Yorker (here)
  • Exhibit: Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 2012 (here)
Jitka Hanzlová: There is something I don't know
Through December 22nd

Yancey Richardson Gallery
535 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Lee Friedlander: Nudes @Pace

JTF (just the facts): A total of 74 black and white photographs, framed in white/black and matted, and hung against white and grey walls in the large two room gallery space. The 56 prints by Lee Friedlander are all modern gelatin silver prints, taken between 1977 and 1991. The works are sized either 11x14 or 16x20 and are uneditioned. The 9 works by Bill Brandt are vintage gelatin silver prints, each sized roughly 9x8, and taken between 1947 and 1959. The 9 works by Edward Weston are vintage gelatin silver prints, sized either 4x5 or 8x10, and taken between 1933 and 1936. (Installation shots at right. There is no photography allowed in the gallery, so the images are courtesy of the Pace/MacGill website.)
 
Comments/Context: For many years after first seeing Lee Friedlander's nudes, I had a hard time enjoying them. As I look back now, I'm not sure I ever really even saw them in some sense. They were just too hairy, too confrontationally real in a way that I found unsettling, and as a result, I didn't engage them enough. It wasn't that they were excessively aggressive or explicit exactly, but more that they seemed to fly in the face of everything I thought I knew (and valued) about the elegant photographic nude. That joltingly contrarian book (Lee Friedlander Nudes) sitting on our shelves was somehow radioactive, bursting with an energy that was too far out of control for me. I would take it down and look at it from time to time with the trepidation of handling a ticking time bomb, quickly flipping through it and putting it back before it could explode.
 
This show brings together a selection of these challenging Friedlander nudes and places them on equal footing with works by the two most important and influential photographers of the nude from the 20th century, Edward Weston and Bill Brandt. A side room plays host to this brilliant juxtaposition, teasing out the visual ideas and motifs that tie Friedlander to his predecessors. Weston's nudes turn on close in framing to create unexpected body abstractions and employ plenty of elongated lounging forms (on the famous sand) built on sinuous lines. Brandt's early pictures use shadowy interiors to host mysterious models in chairs, while later images create their magic with the bold, fragmented distortion of curves and overexposed whites. With these two sets of images as a historical backdrop and artistic foil, it's possible to carefully follow the aesthetic connections and pathways between the photographers and to pinpoint Friedlander's new and original innovations.
 
While the often disorienting twisting and turning of bodies in Friedlander's nudes certainly has parallels in both Weston and Brandt, Friedlander's approach is neither sculpted perfection nor full force abstraction. His pictures are rooted in the mundane and the everyday, in real individuals rather than dreamy ideals. Young bodies sprawl on couches and chairs with effortless ease, spread across messy beds and bent over crumpled blankets, not far from cluttered coffee tables filled with cosmetics and ashtrays. The camera spins and looms, often lingering from above or cropping out the head. His flash creates brash highlights that bounce off up-close hips, breasts and flanks, with dark hairy armpits and crotches offset by the dated patterns of woven upholstery and fringed pillows. Just when you've been distracted by the intrusion of a clip-on lamp, the interruption of a protruding window frame, or the swirl of a floral patterned bedsheet, Friedlander delivers an unexpectedly graceful curve or arched arm that takes your breath away; his nudes move back and forth between direct, honest, small apartment realism and compositionally complex formal exercises. In every picture, the casual and ordinary have been transformed into something striking, a jumble of overlapping female limbs, crowded and serenely chaotic rather than merely pared down.
 
What's most important about this exhibit is how it so successfully shows both Friedlander's respect for the past and his own one-of-a-kind rule breaking vision. There are obvious echoes of Weston and Brandt here, but those influences have been thoroughly digested, incorporated by Friedlander and then evolved in his own direction for several more iterative generations. The result is a body of work that is at once familiar and foreign, reverent and shockingly irreverent. All in, this is a show worth making a detour for. It finally led me to get over my own preconceived notions and prejudices about what the photographic nude is supposed to be, and to embrace Friedlander's nudes for the genius that they are.
 
Collector's POV: The prints in this show are generally priced based on size, with the 11x14 prints at $6800 each and the 16x20 prints at $8500 each. Outliers from this overall price pattern include the 11x14 image from the cover of the original Lee Friedlander Nudes book (at $7400) and the 16x20 images of Madonna (at $9500). Friedlander's work is routinely available in the secondary markets, with recent prices at auction ranging from roughly $2000 on the low end to as much as $80000 for his most iconic vintage prints. The Brandts (from David Dechman's collection) and Westons (from MoMA) are not for sale.
 
Rating: *** (three stars) EXCELLENT (rating system described here)
 
Transit Hub:
  • Features/Reviews: Daily Beast (here), NY Photo Review (here)
Lee Friedlander: Nudes
Through December 22nd

Pace Gallery
32 East 57th Street
New York, NY 10022

Monday, November 26, 2012

Olafur Eliasson: Volcanoes and Shelters @Bonakdar

JTF (just the facts): A total of 3 large grids of color photographs and 5 single image color photographs, framed in black and unmatted, and hung in the main gallery space and the smaller back room on the main floor. A room sized installation of obsidian rocks and a group of 3 strobe lit water fountains are displayed in the upstairs galleries. The 3 photographic grids are made up of individually framed c-prints, each sized between 10x16 and 16x24. The grids include 48, 56, and 63 prints respectively, and each work is available in an edition of 6+1AP. The 5 single image photographs are unique c-prints, each sized 38x57. All of the photographic works were made in 2012. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Olafur Eliasson has been making photographs since the mid 1990s, but it's always his perception-altering installations that seem to get all the attention. Happily, in this show of new work, the photographs take the main stage and the installations play a supporting role. Together, they deliver a thoughtful meditation on the relativity of visual scale.

Three large grids of Icelandic landscapes fill the main gallery space, and at first glance, it might be tempting to think they are Becher-like typologies, given their repetitive motifs of volcanoes, hot springs, and huts. But Eliasson's arrangements are much less rigid and systematic; they impose a kind of conceptual order on nature, but the terrain resists such precision. The result are arrangements that are more like maps or inventories, sets of images that subtly play with the relationship between the viewer and the land. The hot springs come in a dizzying array of unspoiled natural colors: shockingly blue, salt encrusted, moss covered, rusty orange, sulfurous yellow, steaming black. But aside from their rough beauty, these holes and depressions are fascinatingly and puzzlingly unscaled: is this image of something two feet or two miles wide? Eliasson's volcanic craters are equally photographically unstable: aerials of mountains and cones in seemingly all sizes, wrapped in snow and grass, filled with pools of liquid, and surrounded by moonscapes of rock and scree, all scaled to the same relative size for the grid. The series of hiking huts introduces a human element to the land, where tiny A-frame buildings are dwarfed by the expanse of the rolling hills, at once hopelessly tenuous and quietly optimistic. In each case, Eliasson's method of presentation mixes the rugged, untamed formations of highlands with a complex, nuanced sense of spatial awareness.

The single image photographs in the back room are printed much larger, but still consider many of the same issues of perception. While a couple have a scale giveaway hidden amid the landscape (a rainbow, a cascading waterfall), nearly all of the photographs are at least superficially uncertain in size: a pool of water surrounded by eroded rock, decorated with a splash of unmelted snow (could be a lake or a puddle); sculpted hills and valleys painted in a palette of dull green and brown (could be an aerial or a tiny slice of ground). All of these landscapes test our ability to discern the "real" scale, forcing the viewer into a different level of heightened engagement with the images. The installations upstairs continue this conceptual discussion, with a room sized pile of broken obsidian that might be visually measured in feet or acres, and splashing fountains of pleasingly aural water that are intermittently stopped mid fall (like a fleeting photograph) by flashing strobe lights.

What I like best about Eliasson's grids and landscapes is their dynamic energy. Even in a natural world as hauntingly beautiful as Iceland, landscape photographs can easily be tired and boring. To combat this, Eliasson has inserted a layer of rigorous, cerebral attention, making the images not so much about the land itself, but about the experience of the land. Of course, these are pictures about walking, and stopping, and looking, and seeing, but they have a vital sense of off-kilter wonder that keeps them fresh and unpredictable.

Collector's POV: The works in this show are priced as follows.The large photographic grids are 135000€ (huts), 145000€ (hot springs), and 175000€ (volcanoes). The single image photographs are 22500€ each. Eliasson's photographs have become increasingly available in the secondary markets for both the Photography and Contemporary Art in recent years. Prices at auction have ranged from as little as a few thousand dollars for one of the single images to upwards of $600000 for the most sought after grids.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
 
Transit Hub:
  • Artist site (here)
  • Features/Reviews: NY Times (here)
Olafur Eliasson: Volcanoes and Shelters
Through December 22nd

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
521 West 21st Street
New York, NY 10011

Thursday, November 22, 2012

The Checklist: 11/22/12

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

Uptown

No reviews at this time.

Midtown
ONE STAR: Joel Meyerowitz: Howard Greenberg: December 1: review
TWO STARS: Lee Friedlander: Pace/MacGill: December 22: review
ONE STAR: Abelardo Morell: Bonni Benrubi: December 22: review
ONE STAR: New Photography 2012: MoMA: February 4: review
TWO STARS: The Shaping of New Visions: MoMA: April 29: review

Chelsea

TWO STARS: Nadav Kander: Flowers: November 24: review
TWO STARS: Doug Rickard: Yossi Milo: November 24: review
ONE STAR: Danny Lyon: Churner and Churner: December 8: review

SoHo/Lower East Side/Downtown

No reviews at this time.

Elsewhere Nearby

No reviews at this time.

Forward Auction Calendar
New auctions added this week in red.
(Sale Date: Sale Title: Auction House: link to catalog)

November 23: Photographs (London): Bloomsbury: catalog
November 23: 7th Photo Auction (Vienna): WestLicht: catalog
November 28: Modern and Contemporary Photographs (Berlin): Villa Grisebach: catalog
November 29: Photographie (Cologne): Lempertz: catalog
December 5: 19th-21st Century Photography (Berlin): Bassenge: catalog
December 7: Photographs (Cologne): Van Ham: catalog
December 11: Fine Photographs & Photobooks (New York): Swann: catalog
December 12/13: Photographs from the Collection of Henry Buhl (New York): Sotheby's: catalog

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Joel Meyerowitz, 50 Years of Photographs, Part I: 1962-1977 @Greenberg

JTF (just the facts): A total of 47 black and white and color photographs, variously framed and matted, and hung against light brown walls in the main gallery space, the book alcove, and the back transition gallery. The works in the show were made between 1962 and 1976. The 17 black and white images are a mix of vintage gelatin silver prints and modern archival pigment prints, sized between 9x13 and 11x15. No edition information was available for the vintage prints; the pigment prints are available in editions of 25. The 30 color images are a mix of modern archival pigment prints, vintage chromogenic prints and vintage dye transfer prints, sized between 9x14 and 27x40 (or reverse). No edition information was available for the vintage prints; edition sizes for the modern prints are variously 10, 15, 20, or 25. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Joel Meyerowitz seems to having a bit of a resurgence these days. A new two volume retrospective book, a European museum show, a couple of lifetime achievement awards, and now, in conjunction with joining the stable at Howard Greenberg, a two part career survey at the gallery. It feels like a consolidating, summing up moment for the influential American photographer.
 
This show digs back into the archive and tells the story of Meyerowitz' early career. It finds him moving back and forth between black and white and color, testing the affinities and limits of both approaches. During this time period, there is a slow evolution from a focus on street photography (particularly in New York) to a broader look at the effects of color, in locations all around the world. But this transition doesn't happen like a turning on a light switch; it's more like a faucet, starting with a trickle of ideas that eventually overwhelms the previous style. Many of Meyerowitz' early street scenes center on a single event: a woman in a coffee shop, a Times Square ticket seller obscured by the window grill, the splash of a red dress and gauzy hat at Easter, a cluster of women in white pumps standing in a doorway, the kiss of a hand in Central Park. A few of the pictures then start to become more complex and cinematic: a woman being thrown into a convertible, a gathering of people on a front stoop all looking in different directions, the blown hair of couples in Dallas, a fallen man in Paris surrounded by a chaotic group of gawkers.

One wall of the exhibit shows pairs of images in black and white and color, taken seconds apart. They are evidence of Meyerowitz' changing mind set, and the creeping influence of color on his work. The astro turf swimsuit man standing under a blimp is far more puzzling in color than in black and white. Slowly, the images seem to turn on the play of color rather than the coalescing of a decisive moment: the blue brushes of a Bulgarian car wash, a shadowy green room with an American flag, a pile of grey police barriers, a pair of camel hair coats on the sidewalk. And once again, the compositions increase in complexity, this time balancing many color fields: a bikini clad body, a blue car, and the long white line of a curb, snug in a mess of Florida telephone poles, a shapely bus driver's leg in white boots in warm yellow sun, a lion balanced by a photo-taker in a car, taken through the dark frame of another car window. The few vintage dye transfers on view tint these kinds of scenes with a more saturated, richer color, both darker and more tactile.

I liked the sense of experimentation that is found in this selection of pictures - they're not all greatest hits or best shots. Whether it was a woman behind a projection screen, the flowers in a window of a trailer, or a jumping poodle, Meyerowitz was honing his craft and internalizing the nature of photographic color. Overall, this show is a solid sampler of work from the artist's formative years, and sets the stage for Part II of the exhibit coming in December.
 
Collector's POV: The works in the show are priced between $5000 and $40000. Meyerowitz' work is routinely available in the secondary markets, particularly prints of his 1970s images made in large editions (75 or even 100). Prices have typically ranged from $1000 to $14000, mostly on the lower end of that range.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
 
Transit Hub:
  • Artist site (here)
  • Features/Reviews: NY Times (here), New Yorker (here)
  • Joel Meyerowitz: Taking My Time, published by Phaidon (here)
Through December 1st

Howard Greenberg Gallery
41 East 57th Street
New York, NY 10022

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Doug Rickard, A New American Picture @Milo

JTF (just the facts): A total of 16 color photographs, framed in white and unmatted, and hung against white walls in the East and West gallery spaces. All of the works are archival pigment prints, made between 2009 and 2011. The prints come in three sizes: 26x42 (in editions of 5+3AP), 40x64 (in editions of 5+3AP), and 21x34 (in editions of 7+3AP, but not on view in this show). A monograph of this body of work was recently published by Aperture (here). (Installation shots at right.)
  
Comments/Context: Doug Rickard's A New American Picture is one of the most polarizing bodies of contemporary photography to surface in the past few years. While it is deeply and thoughtfully rooted the history of the medium, it aggressively pushes previously established boundaries and fundamental definitions. This has led to a wide spectrum of opinions on its merits, from ringing praise to scathing dismissal. In my view, heated arguments are a very good sign of something worth paying attention to - it's a sign that the establishment feels just a little bit threatened.
 
Part of what has caught the wider public's attention about this work is its unconventional process. All of the images are appropriated from Google Street View (the car mounted effort to mechanically photograph every street in America), then digitally tuned, reframed and edited by Rickard, and finally rephotographed from his computer screen. Supporters see these methods as an innovative extension of old school image appropriation, smartly matched to a 21st century flood of available digital files. They understand the pixelation and optical blur in the final works to be deliberate remnants of (and references to) their original quasi-surveillance function, and consider his archive mining as the natural next step in the onward progression of digital art. Detractors openly scoff at his tools, mocking him as an editor rather than a photographer and ridiculing the low fidelity image quality. They remind us of other artists doing similar things, characterize his interventions as less than original, and generally walk away underwhelmed.
 
The other part of the conversation that surrounds these pictures is their bleak, sometimes boring, often poverty laced content. For the most part, Rickard has selected uneventful scenes on the outskirts of our cities, where vacant lots grow weedy, street corners are closed or boarded up, and young men (virtually all black) wander in packs. Look closely and it will become apparent that Rickard has a well trained eye for overlooked detail: the billowing clouds over a cemetery, the shadow of a telephone pole, a blindingly white dog, the intense pop of a red wall flanked by a person in lime green pants, an overturned toy truck in a muddy yard at sunrise. And if you've ever read Rickard's excellent blog, American Suburb X, you will know that Rickard is undeniably informed by a sense of history. His body of work is not an accidental grouping of snapshots thrown together; he knows exactly which images he is referencing, from the FSA photography of Evans to the road trip images of Frank, and from the American color of Eggleston, Shore, and Sternfeld to the street photography of Winogrand. So I think it's an oversimplification to just see these as a newfangled extension of iconic street photography, dumbed down for a digital age. Given his raw material, he has carefully selected images that have echoes of the old but depict a very different, more modern existence and aesthetic.
 
Having heard both sides of the Rickard debate and looked closely at the pictures, I have to say that I come down on the side of being excited by what he's doing. Not every photograph on view here is wildly memorable or entirely pleasing, but I came away won over by the thoughtfulness with which he is breaking rules and extending limits. I hope that Rickard will not end up hopelessly branded as a "Google Street View" photographer, as his broader approach is applicable to more than just this one method. This body of work asks us to reconsider the definitional edges of image capture and artistic creation, and to think differently about how the avalanche of digital imagery we now create can be repurposed and recontextualized. This work is a sign post pointing toward the new. So even if we have the innate urge to pick it apart as something unlike what we're used to, we would be foolish not to watch closely.
 
Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced as follows. The 26x42 prints are $6000 each, the 40x64 prints are $8000 each, and the smaller 21x34 prints (not on view) are $4500 each. Rickard's work has not yet reached the secondary markets with any regularity, so gallery retail is likely the best option for those collectors interested in following up.
 
Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here)
 
Transit Hub:
  • Artist site (here)
  • American Suburb X (here)
  • Features/Reviews: Artforum (here), New Yorker PhotoBooth (here), Time LightBox (here), Believer (here), Daily Beast (here)
Through November 24th
 
245 Tenth Avenue
New York, NY 10001

Monday, November 19, 2012

Nadav Kander, Yangtze - The Long River @Flowers

JTF (just the facts): A total of 13 large scale color photographs, framed in brown wood and unmatted, and hung against white walls in a series of three connected gallery spaces. All of the prints are chromogenic color prints made between 2006 and 2009. The prints are available in three sizes: 38x48 (in editions of 5), 48x59 (in editions of 5), and 59x69 (in editions of 3). A monograph of this body of work was published in 2011 by Hatje Cantz (here). (Installation shots at right.)
 
Comments/Context: China's rapid economic and cultural transformations over the past few decades have provided a rich vein raw material that countless artists and photographers have continued to mine. The most common underlying narrative follows a nearly endless set of clashes and contradictions: West and East, modern and traditional, urban and rural, new and old, uneasy dichotomies and unlikely juxtapositions seemingly everywhere one might look. Nadav Kander's three year exploration of life along the Yangtze River explores this same terrain, centering on the dizzying cycle of destruction and construction that has wholly remade both the physical landscape and the day to day existence of millions of people along the river. But this isn't a Three Gorges Dam story exactly, nor is it a documentary study of displaced families or overlooked individuals; Kander has instead stepped back to take an outsider's wider view, creating images that revel in extreme contrasts of scale and outlook.
 
Printed large and bathed in the glow of a soft, foggy palette, Kander's photographs bring a contemporary sensibility to the grandeur of 19th Romantic painting. The rugged mountains, wide vistas, and turbulent storms of nature have been replaced by massive, often unfinished, man made structures. Soaring bridges, concrete spans, support pillars, and industrial smokestacks anchor many of the pictures, dwarfing everything around them in their sleek newness. Tiny figures are evidence of the immensity of the scale, their insignificance made obvious by the enormous physical size of these infrastructure projects. Paltry human activities like having a drink, washing a motorcycle, fishing with an old style net, or swimming in the river become almost wistfully comic when set against these manifestations of power, a few of these ominous scale mismatches bordering on something out of a science fiction novel.
 
Kander hits the underbelly of this forward looking, aspirational future with images that highlight both the disconnect between old and new and the messy, unfinished nature of the changes taking place. A Vegas-style hotel complete with a pirate lagoon stands like an oversized concrete hulk, while old school bamboo scaffolding holds up an immense flyover and rebar spikes are covered by incoming tidal sand. Rickety, rusted barges still do the work of the river, and entirely new cities explode in chaotic sprawls just across the river from now abandoned wastelands. Once again, tiny people look on, alternately forlorn and awestruck by the metamorphosis - it's impossible not to gawk at the pace and the scale of the activity, even if it means the only world you have ever known is disappearing.
 
I think the success in these pictures is found in their calm balance. They pepper the formally majestic and the atmospherically sublime with undercurrents of intimidated, vulnerable respect. They astonish and amaze with their can-do achievements, while never straying too far from the gritty realities of everyday life. And the emotions of personal anxiety and apprehension are quietly matched by national wonder and pride. It's an impressive photographic mix, smartly charting the complex character of China's modern personality.
 
Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced in ratcheting editions, starting at $6500 (38x48), $10500 (48x59) or $16000 (59x69) based on size; prices range all the way up to $48000, and many of the images are NFS or sold out in certain sizes. Kander's work has just begun to enter the secondary markets in the past few years. That said, not enough lots have changed hands to generate any kind of auction pricing pattern, so gallery retail likely remains the best option for those collectors interested in following up.
  
Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here)
  
Transit Hub:
  • Artist site (here)
  • Features/Reviews: NY Times Lens (here), Photograph (here), Conscientious (here), Guardian (here), New Yorker (here)
  • Interview: Le Journal de la Photographie (here)
  • Prix Pictet, 2009 (here)
Nadav Kander, Yangtze - The Long River
Through November 24th
 
529 West 20th Street
New York, NY 10011

Friday, November 16, 2012

Aperture Remix @Aperture

JTF (just the facts): A group show consisting of 8 individual photographers and 1 artistic pair who were asked to make new work inspired by an Aperture publication. The exhibit is divided into 9 sections, with each section containing the new works, a sample of the works which made up the original book/magazine, and a limited edition book combining the old and new. The exhibit was curated by Lesley Martin. (Installation shots at right.)
 
The following photographers have been included in the show, with their chosen influential publication as reference. The details on the works on view made by both the commissioned artists and the subjects are underneath.
 
Rinko Kawauchi: Sally Mann, Immediate Family, 1992
  • Mann: 5 gelatin silver prints, 1984-1989
  • Kawauchi: 6 c prints, 2012
  • Case with Kawauchi's limited edition book
Vik Muniz: Edward Weston, Daybooks, Volume 1, Mexico, 1973
  • Weston: 3 gelatin silver prints, 1921-1924
  • Muniz: 1 digital gelatin silver print, 2012, 1 copy of Daybooks cut up
Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs, Aperture essay books, 1976-2011
  • Onorato/Krebs: 1 camera made from a dozen cut through books, 1 archival pigment print
Martin Parr: Aperture issue 103, 1986
  • Nan Goldin: 2 cibachrome prints, 1977-1980
  • Chris Killip: 2 gelatin silver prints, 1983-1984
  • Larry Sultan: 2 digital c prints, 1984
  • Parr: 3 digital c prints, 1990-2001
  • Case with Parr's limited edition book
Doug Rickard: Stephen Shore, Uncommon Places, 1982
  • Shore: 1 set of postcards, 1971-2000, 5 chromogenic prints, 1973-1975
  • Rickard: 8 archival pigment pigment prints, 1971-1978/2012
  • Case with Rickard's limited edition book
Viviane Sassen: Edward Weston, Nudes, 1977
  • Weston: 3 gelatin silver prints, 1 palladium print, 1927-1936
  • Sassen: 5 archival pigment prints, 2003
  • Case with Sassen's limited edition book
Alec Soth: Robert Adams, Summer Nights, 1985
  • Adams: 4 gelatin silver prints, 1975-1980
  • Soth: 1 video
  • Case with letters and Soth's limited edition book
Penelope Umbrico: Masters of Photography series, 1977-1999
  • Group of source images: 2 Henri Cartier-Bresson gelatin silver prints, 1948 and 1964, 1 Wynn Bullock gelatin silver print, 1958, 2 Manuel Alvarez Bravo gelatin silver prints, 1966 and 1967, 1 Edward Weston gelatin silver print, 1935, 1 Alfred Stieglitz gelatin silver print, Eikoh Hosoe gelatin silver print, 1996, 1 Paul Strand gelatin silver print, plus other reproductions
  • Umbrico: 87 iPhone images, manipulated by apps, hung as a single cluster
  • Case with Umbrico's limited edition book and stack of original Masters of Photography series books
James Welling: Paul Strand, Time in New England, 1980
  • Strand: 6 gelatin silver prints, 1928-1946
  • Welling: 22 archival pigment prints, 1 diptych, and 3 texts, 2012
  • Case with Welling's limited edition book
Comments/Context: In honor of its 60th anniversary this year, Aperture might have easily trotted out a luscious parade of past masters and iconic photobooks, in a deservedly congratulatory and self-referential manner given the publisher's important position in the history of the medium. But the overly obvious greatest hits show has been smartly avoided and instead recast by asking ten contemporary photographers to make fresh works (and books) in reference/homage to any one of Aperture's many publications. The idea of exploring how a contemporary artist borrows and incorporates ideas from other artists is not a new one, of course, but in our age of image explosion and remixed culture, one that seems ever more relevant. Where is the line between responding and appropriating, riffing and reworking, entirely reformulating and just being derivative? The works in this show examine this process, opening a dialogue between past and present, asking and answering thorny questions about the nature of influence and interpretation across the photographic generations.
 
Edward Weston provides the starting point for two of the photographers included. Viviane Sassen has made deceptive pink toned nudes in reference to Weston's iconic almost abstract creations, starting with a similar interest in the lines of the human form, but extending it in her own way into multi-body nudes that have a mysterious selection of extra limbs. Her images are both seductive and sculptural like Weston, but startlingly disconcerting and unexpected. Vik Muniz has also channeled Weston, immersing himself in the Daybooks and building one of his signature constructions out of text fragments from the book and other Weston imagery. His rework of Weston's elegant portrait of Tina Modotti holding a white iris is both reverential and also uniquely Muniz.
 
Alec Soth's homage to Robert Adams' Summer Nights is fascinating near failure. After backtracking from night photography to experimenting with his new camera's video function, Soth opted for still video clips of trees and their shadows, strip malls at twilight, and houses with lights in the windows; my first reaction was that it was all a little too literal for me, and not quite enough of Soth's own vision coming through. But then I stopped looking and started listening more actively: the rustling of the trees, the background noise of a town, the settling down for the night, all captured (perhaps inadvertently) by the video. It's an amazingly perfect soundtrack of summer nights, achingly evocative of Adams' own photographs.
 
Other pairings are equally clever  and thoughtful. Rinko Kawauchi reconsiders Sally Mann's images of her children, with her own ephemeral, atmospheric shots of kids: boys swimming, a splash of water, a baby behind a curtain, the soft sunlight streaming down behind a young girl. Penelope Umbrico dives into images of mountains made masters of the medium, and then reworks them using her iPhone, creating a candy colored array of the very same mountains, somehow made less imposing by tints, tiling, and reorientations. And Doug Rickard parrots Stephen Shore's own postcard idea back at him, discovering his own 1970s era postcards of motels, cars, and restaurants, and then further tuning them to accent the saturated yellow palette of the times; they're a smart homage, using Rickard's own affinity for found imagery.
 
What I like best about this show is its sense of honoring without fawning, of acknowledging influence while still staying true to original thinking. If all of our remixed, reshuffled, chopped, and appropriated digital art of the future is as shrewd as most of what is on view here, we need not ever fear that photography is somehow over.
 
Collector's POV: One of the consistently puzzling things about this venue is that it is always a challenge to figure out what is actually for sale. For the most part, this is a non-selling environment more like a museum, so there is hardly ever an easily accessible checklist with ready price information and image details. What is perplexing about this approach is that often at least some of the works are really for sale or there are additional prints available in the print room, so it usually takes some initiative to get the answers. In the case of this particular show, it is not at all clear whether any of the photographs are available for purchase. My assumption is that at a minimum the limited edition collaborative books are for sale, but I didn't surface any prices, so interested collectors will need to follow up directly with Aperture or potentially with the various galleries that represent the artists.
 
Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
 
Transit Hub: 
  • Features/Reviews: CNN (here), Capital NewYork (here), New Yorker PhotoBooth (here), Time LightBox (here)
Through November 17th
 
547 West 27th Street
New York, NY 10001

Thursday, November 15, 2012

The Checklist: 11/15/12

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

Uptown

No reviews at this time.

Midtown

ONE STAR: Ray K. Metzker/Ruth Thorne-Thomsen: Laurence Miller: November 17: review
TWO STARS: Lee Friedlander: Pace/MacGill: December 22: review
ONE STAR: Abelardo Morell: Bonni Benrubi: December 22: review
ONE STAR: New Photography 2012: MoMA: February 4: review
TWO STARS: The Shaping of New Visions: MoMA: April 29: review

Chelsea

ONE STAR: FSA Photography/Contemporary Social Realism: Robert Miller: November 17: review
ONE STAR: Danny Lyon: Churner and Churner: December 8: review

SoHo/Lower East Side/Downtown

TWO STARS: Tina Barney: Janet Borden: November 21: review

Elsewhere Nearby

No reviews at this time.

Forward Auction Calendar
New auctions added this week in red.
(Sale Date: Sale Title: Auction House: link to catalog)

November 15: Post-War & Contemporary Art Morning (New York): Christie's: catalog
November 15: Post-War & Contemporary Art Afternoon (New York): Christie's: catalog
November 15: Contemporary Art Evening (New York): Phillips de Pury: catalog
November 16: Contemporary Art Day (New York): Phillips de Pury: catalog
November 16: Photographies (Paris): Sotheby's: catalog
November 16/17: Photographies (Paris): Christie's: catalog
November 17: Photographs Signature Auction (New York): Heritage: catalog
November 23: Photographs (London): Bloomsbury: catalog
November 23: 7th Photo Auction (Vienna): WestLicht: catalog
November 28: Modern and Contemporary Photographs (Berlin): Villa Grisebach: catalog
November 29: Photographie (Cologne): Lempertz: catalog

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Lee Friedlander: Mannequin @Pace/MacGill

JTF (just the facts): A total of 28 black and white photographs, framed in white and matted, and hung against purple and grey walls in the two room gallery space. All of the prints are gelatin silver prints made between 2009 and 2011. Each of the works is sized 18x12 and is uneditioned. A monograph of this body of work was recently published by Fraenkel Gallery (here). (Installation shots at right. There is no photography allowed in the gallery, so the images are courtesy of the Pace/MacGill website.)

Comments/Context: Few photographers can boast of having consistently subverted existing visual genres as often as Lee Friedlander has. Over the years, he has radically disassembled the self portrait, the urban scene, the architectural image, the landscape, the floral still life, and even the nude, making each uniquely and undeniably his own. In this show of recent work, Friedlander takes on a classic of street photography - the reflected storefront window - and tries to wholly reenvision a subject that Atget, Abbott, Modell and many others have justifiably made iconic.

Friedlander has long been a master of complex, overlapping, interrupted compositions, so it is not particularly surprising that he was drawn to the layered flatness offered by the alternately transparent and reflective glass of these displays. His mannequins pose with rigid style, draped in clashing reflections and repeated geometric patterns. Sleek torsos are offset by soaring modern skyscrapers and grids of stone windows, sometimes framing the body with bold lines and other times trampling all over the background figure. Areas of dark and light, brightness and shadow, invert compositions and add a double exposure effect. A few of the headless models look like they are actually dressed with buildings, city trees bursting from their heads and metal scaffolding cutting straight through their graceful figures. No one would ever mistake these shop windows for pictures made by anyone but Friedlander.

My one quibbling criticism of these otherwise well made photographs is that a few too many are a bit flat, lacking in the crackling wit that I enjoy so much about Friedlander's work. The compositions are characteristically cluttered, but I just didn't feel the same restless energy and vitality that I do with his other bodies of work. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that he hasn't been able to break the rules quite as much with this subject matter as he has been able to do with others; the Surrealists had plenty of fun with reflections like these, so Friedlander's images seem less transgressive and shocking than they normally might. He's at his best when he thoroughly upends the viewer's expectations, and these photographs only turn the chaos up a notch or two from scenes we are already familiar with. All that said, they're still a singular new riff on an old visual motif, and evidence that Friedlander's eye continues to be distinctive and exceptional.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced at $8500 each. Friedlander's work is routinely available in the secondary markets, with prices at auction ranging from approximately $2000 to as much as $80000 in recent years.
 
Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here)
 
Transit Hub:
  • Features/Reviews: Artcritical (here), New Yorker PhotoBooth (here), Le Journal de la Photographie (here)
Through December 22nd

Pace/MacGill Gallery
32 East 57th Street
New York, NY 10022

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Danny Lyon: Deep Sea Diver @Churner and Churner

JTF (just the facts): A total of 30 black and white photographs, framed in white and matted, and hung against white walls in the front and back gallery spaces. All of the works are gelatin silver prints, made between 2005 and 2009. Each of the prints is sized 8x10 and is available in an edition of 6. The exhibit also includes two glass cases containing notebooks and maquettes, and a pair of large darkroom bulletin boards covered edge to edge in ephemera. A monograph of this body of work was recently published by Phaidon (here). (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Danny Lyon's newest project applies his particular brand of get-involved photojournalism to life in Shanxi province in northeast China. This is rural coal country, a throwback to a slower, more time-resistant existence rather than a shining example of the energetic hustle of the modern urban world. His pace is measured and deliberate, taking the time to immerse himself in the small details and repeated patterns of this overlooked region.

Many of Lyon's images capture the rough, griminess of people-intensive industrial work: coal miners in a communal bath, railway workers swinging pickaxes and laying track, grubby mechanics fixing broken vehicles, and truck drivers lingering waiting for the next load. The rocky roads are bumpy and cracked, the leftover coal must be hand gleaned from the track side, and smokestacks loom in the distance. Circus performers and opera singers provide animated distractions from the exhaustion and tedium, but most folks seem to opt for simpler pleasures: playing cards, chatting and/or smoking in a tea house, flying a kite. The economic boom of the cities has obviously failed to reach this area; dusty antiques, magazines in plastic bags, and fireworks are all that is for sale.

In many ways, these pictures look like they could have been taken ten, twenty, or even fifty years ago; the tide of change in the rural Chinese provinces has obviously been extremely slow. What I like about Lyon's photographs is that they are consistently evenhanded and dignified. They forgo overly easy judgment and criticism for supportive curiosity and genuine interest. Every picture has a quiet backstory, providing understated context and straightforward details, approaching the people of countryside with openness and honesty.

Collector's POV: Each of the prints in this show is priced at $6000. Lyon's work is consistently available in the secondary markets, with recent single image prices at auction ranging between $1000 and $15000.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
 
Transit Hub:
  • Artist site/blog (here and here
  • Exhibit: Menil Collection, 2012 (here)
Through December 8th
 
205 Tenth Avenue
New York, NY 10011

Monday, November 12, 2012

FSA Photography & Contemporary Social Realism @Robert Miller

JTF (just the facts): A group show containing a total of 41 photographs by 10 different photographers, hung in the front room, the common area, and the two middle gallery spaces. (Installation shots at right.)

The following photographers are included in the main show, with the number of prints on view and image details as background:
  • Horace Bristol: 5 gelatin silver prints, framed in white/black and matted, sized between 9x7 and 14x11, from 1938
  • Jack Delano: 2 dye transfer prints and 2 gelatin silver prints, framed in white/black and matted, each 10x15 or 11x14, from 1940-1941
  • Walker Evans: 5 gelatin silver prints, framed in white/black and matted, sized from 5x8 to 7x11, from 1935-1945
  • Debbie Grossman: 5 inkjet prints, framed in black and matted, each 11x14, from 2010
  • Dorothea Lange: 3 gelatin silver prints, framed in white and matted, each roughly 8x9, from 1935-1936
  • Russell Lee: 3 dye transfer prints, framed in white and matted, each 10x13, from 1940
  • Arthur Rothstein: 2 gelatin silver prints, framed in black and matted, each 14x11, from 1936-1939
  • Zoe Strauss: 5 archival pigment prints, framed in white and unmatted, sized 13x27, 18x27, or 20x30, from 2001-2006
  • Emma Wilcox: 7 gelatin silver prints, framed in black and unmatted, each 20x24, in editions of 7, from 2002-2012
  • Marion Post Wolcott: 2 gelatin silver prints, framed in black and matted, sized between 10x6 and 7x10, from 1936
Large black and white photographic portraits by Josh Lehrer hang in the back gallery, but are designated separately on the checklist (Project Room) and have not been included in the discussion here.

Comments/Context: While an exhibit pairing photographs from the 1930s Farm Security Administration with contemporary social realism certainly sounds promising in general, this particular show doesn't quite fire on all cylinders. This isn't so much a reflection on the quality of the work (which is excellent from the FSA bunch and plenty strong from the more current artists) as it is a lack of interesting parallels and unexpected connections. The chasm between the two time periods is wide enough that even though there are some common issues (poverty first among them), there isn't a clear continuum of visual ideas connecting the past and the present in the selected pictures. As a result, the show feels a bit disjointed and awkward, instead of resonating with juxtaposed insight.

The only true pairing in this show is the side by side hanging of Russell Lee's 1940s small town farmers and Debbie Grossman's digital manipulations of those same images sixty years later, where she has carefully replaced all the men with women, creating a fictional all female world. It's a clever old/new mix, where the physical labor of homesteaders is done by women and stoic square dancing families have two female parents; traditional gender roles are smartly upended and reconsidered. Many of the other FSA works on view are penetrating vintage portraits: Rothstein's Montana rancher, Wolcott's coal miner, Bristol's bearded migrant, and Lange's disembodied weathered hands, wearing torn work clothes and holding a wooden hoe. On the contemporary side, Zoe Strauss offers shot appliances and and the texture of a yellow curtain, while Emma Wilcox plumbs the depths of darkness, via shadowy checkout aisles, stenciled skulls, and an aerial town shot with the residence of a thief indicated by large white letters and an arrow.

I think this show would have benefited from the inclusion of a few more contemporary photographers and a more conscious and repeated mixing of the two time periods; instead of bigger single artist groups, small side by side comparisons might have helped to tease out the similarities and differences. That said, there's plenty of solid work worth seeing here, even if the thematic construct isn't hugely effective.
 
Collector's POV: The works in this show are priced as follows:
  • Horace Bristol: $10000, $12500, $15000 or NFS
  • Jack Delano: $3500, $4000 or $6000
  • Walker Evans: between $9500 and $26000
  • Debbie Grossman: $2500 or $3500
  • Dorothea Lange: between $8000 and $12500
  • Russell Lee: $6000 or $7000
  • Arthur Rothstein: $2500 or $3500
  • Zoe Strauss: $2600, $3250, or $3600
  • Emma Wilcox: $1850 each
  • Marion Post Wolcott: $3000 or $5000
The work of the FSA photographers is generally available in the secondary markets, ranging from the iconic and expensive to the lesser known and very reasonably priced. The work of the contemporary photographers in this show (Grossman, Strauss, and Wilcox) is much less available at auction, so gallery retail will likely be the best option for following up on these three.

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

Transit Hub:
  • Features/Reviews: New Yorker (here)
  • Debbie Grossman artist site (here)
  • Zoe Strauss artist site (here)
  • Emma Wilcox artist site (here)
FSA Photography & Contemporary Social Realism
Through November 17th

Robert Miller Gallery
524 West 26th Street
New York, NY 10001