Terry Evans: Inhabited Prairie @Richardson

JTF (just the facts): A total of 19 black and white photographs, framed in black and matted, and hung against white walls in the main gallery space. 18 of the works are vintage gelatin silver prints and the remaining work is a modern archival pigment print; all of the images were taken between 1990 and 1994. The gelatin silver prints are sized 15x15, while the pigment print is 30x30; no edition information was available for the vintage prints, while the pigment print is available in an edition of 10. A monograph of this body of work was published by the University Press of Kansas in 1998 (here). (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: By its very nature, aerial photography is about finding new perspectives, about putting some distance between the photographer and the subject. When seen from above, the land becomes a patchwork of patterns and abstractions, lines and forms that were unseen at ground level. American photography has a rich tradition in aerial picture making, from early surveys and elegant land forms (think William Garnett), to more recent documents of suburban sprawl, industrial waste lands, oil spills, and other environmental blights. Looking down from the sky allows us to see the broad expanse of the land, and to measure our visible impact upon it.

While the mood of much of contemporary aerial photography swings between despair and disgust, Terry Evans' pictures of the Kansas prairie are more neutral. They don't shout at us about the sweeping horrors of our industrial follies or ecological disasters, but instead take a more dispassionate look at a specific local setting, where the regional geography is seen with intimacy and insight. Made while striking out on flights in a 25 mile radius from her home, the photographs are filled with the rich tonalities of rolling hills, undulating swales and valleys, and the natural rhythms of floods and prairie fires. A small pond, the edge of a cultivated field, or the sweep of a tree line is often the basis of a tactile, middle grey composition.

But Evans' prairie is an inhabited one (hence the title of the show and accompanying book), and the hand of man interrupts the grand open spaces time and again. The interventions start small, with an abandoned farm house or a small cemetery amid the wavy furrows of the dusty fields, the ghostly remains of a Native American settlement mixed in with the striations of the plowed land, or the swirling worn paths of tiny cows in a cattle yard. A more organized presence is found in the march of electric towers or the arc of train tracks across the land, but Evans' view is restrained and matter of fact rather than outraged; the sweeping energetic curve of a white striped roadway is more a contrast of hard edged and natural forms than a nasty slash across the pristine prairie. Even the ugliest of man made alterations (a grubby asphalt mine, a weapons testing range) are made gracefully textural by her muted aesthetic approach; the violence of the targeting circle is heightened by the empty dark blackness of the grass, but somehow softened by the miniature white tires which mark the ring.

What I like best about these photographs is that Evans has found a way to make her aerial photographs sensitive and personal without being bombastic. They are neither overly scientific or overtly slanted in any particular direction; instead, they find a quietly understated balance that reflects genuine respect for and interest in the land and her local community. They ask questions about the changing relationship between man and nature on the American prairie, and let us draw our own conclusions about what is to be learned from these complex realities.

Collector's POV: The works in this show are priced as follows. The vintage gelatin silver prints range from $5000 to $6500, while the larger modern pigment print is $5600. Evans' work has very little secondary market history, so gallery retail remains the best option for those collectors interested in following up.

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

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Exhibit: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2012 (here)
• Features/Reviews: Wall Street Journal (here), Architizer (here)

Terry Evans: Inhabited Prairie
Through July 3rd

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

Olivo Barbieri: The Dolomites Project @Richardson

JTF (just the facts): A total of 7 large scale color photographs, framed in white with no mat, and hung in the main gallery space. All of the works are archival pigment prints, sized either 65x85 or 45x59, each available in editions of 6+3AP. All of the works were made in 2010. A monograph of this body of work was published by Damiani (here) and is available from the gallery for $40. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Olivo Barbieri's aerial images of the Dolomites follow in the hallowed tradition of Ansel Adams' photographs of Yosemite: pictures made to convince others of the grandeur of a place to ensure its protection for future generations. With the goal of helping to secure a World Heritage Site designation for the northern Italian region, Barbieri took to a helicopter and made crisp view camera images hovering over the towering rocky crags and crumbling rugged mountainsides.

These landscape photographs are out of the ordinary in several ways. Instead of using his usual tilt/shift approach of selective focusing and flattening, Barbieri has instead gone for selective coloration, playing with positive and negative values and tonalities to create dissonant landscape concoctions. These effects are not universally employed across all parts of an image, but in small areas and regions, often set off by the natural breaks and watersheds in the land. These manipulations mix together hyper-real and surreal, tweaked and inverted, stitching them together in unnatural, layered carpets of jagged cliffs and eroded surfaces. Tiny figures stand on outcroppings and resting points like figures from a romantic landscape painting, showing off the immense, imposing scale of the setting. And the prints themselves are monumental in size, enveloping the viewer in the expansive, all-encompassing detail of the dramatic scenes.

Given the off kilter coloration, the scale, and the looking down viewpoint, I had a few Niedermayr and Maier-Aichen moments in these photographs. In general, I very much like the idea of experimental manipulation, and of using new digital techniques to expand the boundaries of the landscape genre, but the overall impression I took away from these photographs was something more like a feeling of over reaching. What I mean is that the raw land in these images is already astonishing and breathtaking (especially from the air), but these pictures amplify this awestruck impressiveness to the point of subtle searching distraction; I found myself scanning for the visual trickery, rather than enjoying the whole experience. The land has clearly been interpreted by Barbieri in a clever new way here, but I found myself wondering whether his manipulations were diverting attention away from the authentic spectacle of the mountains themselves.

Collector's POV: The works in this show are priced as follows. The 65x85 prints are either $25000 or $40000, and the single 45x59 print is $20000. Barbieri's photographs have very little secondary market history to date, so gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point.

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

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Feature: NY Times The Sixth Floor (here)

Olivo Barbieri: The Dolomites Project
Through March 31st

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

Edward Burtynsky: Dryland Farming @Wolkowitz

JTF (just the facts): A total of 12 large scale color photographs, framed in black and not matted, and hung in the entry area and the main gallery space in the back. All of the works are chromogenic color prints, taken in 2010. The images are shown in three different sizes (with a fourth smaller size not on display): 39x52 (in editions of 9), 48x64 (in editions of 6), and 60x80 (in editions of 3). There are 2 images in the 39x52 size, 6 images in the 48x64 size, and 4 images in the 60x80 size on view. A concurrent show of Burtynsky's earlier work is on view at Howard Greenberg Gallery (here). (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Edward Burtynsky's photographs have routinely posed nuanced questions about how certain human actions have potentially far reaching and often unseen implications for the planet. At massive industrial sites criss-crossing the globe, he has documented both the rigid order and the decaying chaos of open pit mines, Chinese factories, ship salvage yards, and stone quarries, finding abstract beauty amid the expansive work environments. In his previous project on the end-to-end influence of oil, he took a broader look at the upstream causes and downstream effects of the entire industry, connecting the dots to consequences that weren't immediately obvious. His most recent pictures are part of a new project on water, presumably investigating how the increasing scarcity of yet another vital resource is changing the way we live.

All of the photographs in this show were taken in the dusty hills of northern Spain, where water has been in short supply for generations. Looking down from a helicopter, Burtynsky has captured the endless stripes and striations carved into the dirty foothills, flattening out the landscape into an abstract puzzle of fingered, terraced fields. The visual patterns are a shocking echo of the dense paintings of Jean Dubuffet (an example, here), where the land has become a patchwork of squiggly quilted parcels, cross hatched by irrigation, mowing and thin, intervening roads. The undulating topography has been condensed into subtle geometries and graphic forms, the hand of man writ large on the rocky terrain.

There is virtually no green in the palette of these images (save a few olive trees as dots); instead, the land is painted in beige and rust, grey and black, with a dusting of drifted white snow. These subdued colors highlight the desolation and desperation in farming this country, accenting the sense of scratching an existence out of land that is indifferent and uncooperative. The pictures ask tough questions about how our agricultural needs will evolve as water sources become more and more depleted, and to what lengths we will be required to remake the land to adapt to this new reality. While there is an uncanny, frenetic elegance to these muted landscapes, their message is surprisingly dark and ominous.

In general, I think these images have moved Burtynsky back towards a more painterly kind of photography, where landscapes are transformed into expressive gestures. At the same time, I think his vision of how photography can influence the direction of the collective conversation is getting broader; with each successive project, he is taking on larger and more complicated issues. The worldwide water situation will only become more tense and strategic in the coming years, so Burtynsky's artistic exploration of this subject may well be an important starting point for raising the awareness of what we're up against.
 
Collector's POV: The prices for the works in this show are as follows: the 39x52 prints are $16500, the 48x64 prints are $24000, and the 60x80 prints are $42000 (I didn't get the price for the smallest size not on view). Burtynsky's photographs have slowly become more available in the secondary markets over the past few years, with prices at auction ranging between roughly $5000 and $48000. 
 

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

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Article: NY Times (here)
• Reviews: Time LightBox (here)

Edward Burtynsky: Dryland Farming

Through December 10th

Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery
505 West 24th Street

New York, NY 10011

Julian Faulhaber, Tulips @Hasted Kraeutler

Still working my way through the summer backlog.
.
JTF (just the facts): A total of 8 large scale color works, framed in white and unmatted, and hung against white walls in the back room of the gallery. All of the works are Lambda prints, sized 32x47 or reverse. The images in the show were made in 2011, and are available in editions of 3. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Earlier this year, the New York Times commissioned the German photographer Julian Faulhaber to make images of the spring time ritual of blossoming tulips in Holland (the article can be found here). Countless tourists visit the farms and fields each year to witness the riots of color, and the endless rows of bright flowers have become a post card cliche.

Faulhaber's novel way into this subject was to take to the air and make abstract aerial shots of the fields themselves, cropping out the surroundings and sky to focus solely on the fragmented lines of color. The result is a set of images that are dramatically striped and linear, where variations of orientation and angle (horizontal, vertical, and diagonal) create rhythmic geometric patterns. It is a reductionist approach, turning the strict rigidity of agriculture into simple arrays of pigment, the texture of the tulips creating a mottled surface not unlike ribbons and bands of pastel.

Faulhaber is not the first to employ an aerial vantage point when looking at the flatness of the Dutch countryside; Gerco de Ruijter has made related images using a kite camera. The difference here is the emphasis on painterly color, and on how the rows of vibrant tulips can be transformed into delicate, perfectly straight lines when seen from afar. Instead of opting for the obvious and saccharine, Faulhaber has highlighted the intensity and exacting rigor of this surprisingly unnatural visual spectacle.
 

Collector's POV: Each of the works in this show is priced at either $6000 or $7000 (likely a ratcheting edition price). Since Faulhaber's prints have little secondary market history, gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point.

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

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)

Julian Faulhaber, Tulips
Through August 19th

Hasted Kraeutler Gallery
537 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011

New York: A Bird's Eye View @De Lellis

JTF (just the facts): A group show including a total of 48 black and white and color photographs, mostly framed in black and matted, and hung in the main gallery space. All of the images are vintage aerial photographs of New York city, and were taken between roughly 1875 and 1960. (Installation shots at right.)

The following photographers have been included in the show, with the details of the works on view in parentheses:

• Berenice Abbott (3 gelatin silver prints, 16x16, 14x10 or 16x5, 1932-1938, and 1 photogravure, 13x10, c1932/later)
• American Illustrated Stereograph (1 albumen print, 4x7, c1876)
• Anonymous (2 bromide prints, 6x8, 1884, 1 albumen print, 5x10, c1876, 1 albumen print, 9x16, c1900, and 1 group albumen prints, 6x8, c1876)
• Margaret Bourke-White (1 gelatin silver print, 9x13, c1930)
• Charlotte Brooks (1 gelatin silver print, 13x10, 1943)
• Harold Haliday Costain (3 gelatin silver prints, 9x20, c1930)
• John Paul Edwards (1 gelatin silver print, 9x20, c1925)
• Fairchild Aerial Surveys (1 gelatin silver print, 14x18, 1931)
• W. Gray (2 albumen prints, 6x8 or 7x9, c1890)
• Horsman's Cabinet Photographs (1 albumen print, 4x6, c1875)
• International News Photo (1 gelatin silver print, 10x8, 1930)
• J.S. Johnston (1 albumen print, 7x9, 1893 and 1 bromide print, 8x6, c1890)
• Keystone View Company (1 gelatin silver print, 5x7, 1937)
• Arthur Lavine (1 gelatin silver print, 13x9, 1965)
• Ben Judah Lubschez (1 gelatin silver print, 6x9, c1925)
• Nickolas Muray (1 gelatin silver print on gold paper, 4x4, 1927)
• Fritz Neugass (1 gelatin silver print, 10x8, 1947)
• Peyser & Patzig (1 gelatin silver print, 10x7, 1930)
• Press Photo (1 gelatin silver print, 7x10, 1945)
• George Rockwood (1 albumen print, 7x9, c1880)
• Charles Rotkin (2 gelatin silver prints, 10x13, c1950)
• Edward Scherck (1 gelatin silver print, 8x10, c1930)
• William Gordon Shields (4 gelatin silver prints, 14x11, 13x10 or 9x19, 1915-1917)
• Samuel Stebbins (1 gelatin silver print, 14x11, c1934)
• Fred Stein (2 gelatin silver prints, 14x11 or 9x7, 1940-1945)
• Howard Suchurek (1 chromogenic print, 19x9, c1960)
• Todd Webb (1 gelatin silver print, 8x9, 1947)
• Paul Woolf (5 gelatin silver prints, 8x6, 9x7, 8x7 or 8x10, 1935-1940)

Comments/Context: As collectors of city and industrial images, we're fascinated by the geometric patterns that are created by the interactions of architecture and by the density of built structures that make up all kinds of cities. This show brings together nearly a century of aerial views of New York city, providing both a rich historical record and an evolving survey of how landmarks and urban buildings were used as the raw material for photographic experimentation.

Chronologically, the show begins with 19th century views of the city, when the tallest structures were the church spires that poked up through the uniformity of squat warehouses and apartment blocks. With the advent of the skyscraper, the skyline took shape, and steep views downward into the concrete canyons below became more possible - instead of looking up into the sky at the outlines of famous buildings, artists were looking down into the chaos of the streets. Actual aerial surveys (shot from airplanes) were also taken from even higher vantage points, putting the tall buildings in wider panoramic context. As expected, the Empire State Building and Chrysler Building make repeated appearances in these photographs, providing a visual anchor against hazy clouds or the dark shadows of dusk.

My favorite images in the show are those that induce a bit of vertigo, where the angles get distorted and the walls of buildings bend in unexpected ways. They forgo the heroic romance of the broad vista and instead give us the frenetic, spine tingling energy of the city.

Collector's POV: For the most part, the prints in this show are reasonably priced, ranging from $150 to $8500, with a sweet spot between $2000 and $5000. The outliers are the vintage Berenice Abbott prints, which are priced between $18000 and $26000.

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

Transit Hub:

• Reviews: Gothamist (here), Wall Street Journal (here, scroll down)
• Feature: NY Times (here)

New York: A Bird's Eye View

Through November 20th

Keith De Lellis Gallery
1045 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10075

Book: Gerco De Ruijter

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2004 by Basalt Publishers. 76 pages, with 7 black and white and 46 color images. Includes an essay (in Dutch) by Petran Kockelkoren. All of the images included in the book were made between 1993 and 2003. Most of the prints are square format, in 6x6 or 32x32 dimensions; a few are wide panoramas at 33x79. (Cover shot at right, via Schaden.)

Comments/Context: In the past year or so, I've run across the aerial images of Dutch photographer Gerco De Ruijter in several group exhibitions and books, and so when I saw this slim monograph in the ICP bookshop recently, I was happy to bring it home for further study.

The primary difference between De Ruijter's work and that of classic aerial photographers like William Garnett (recent review here) is derived from a change in overall scale. Instead of taking images out of the window of an airplane (thousands of feet in the air), De Ruijter makes his pictures via a camera mounted to the bottom of a kite (hundreds of feet in the air), triggering the shutter via remote control mechanism. Using this unusual approach, the artist is able to create aerial images that are much more intimate, with a more obvious relationship to the ground (even though the horizon is cropped out), and with a much finer grain of detail. Trees, grasses, waves, sand, rocks, and farm crops all are rendered with minute texture; farm animals look like plastic toys rather than dark spots.

The other main difference is of course in the landscape itself, where the countryside has been carefully altered by the Dutch over the centuries, creating a latticework of ditches and canals that slash through the land. When seen from the air, a pattern of geometric color planes is seen, divided and separated by the straight lines of roads and waterways. Endless rows of greenhouses and tractor furrows further align the unruliness of nature into simple strict forms. Even the trees have often been planted in perfectly symmetical grids.

While it might be a cliche to say that many of De Ruijter's works hearken back to the precise geometries of Mondrian, it is fair to say that these works are highly structured, even though many depict an unkempt area of nature. While there is clearly an element of chance in the taking of these pictures, De Ruijter has clearly edited the work down to those images that have the strongest formal relationships, compositions that juxtapose fields of color to create contrast and pattern (especially when viewed from a distance).

In general, I like this work, and hope to get beyond seeing a single image in a Dutch themed group show and on to a deeper viewing of more of the work in person some point soon. In the meantime, this small monograph will have to suffice.

Collector's POV: Gerco De Ruijter is represented by MK Galerie in Rotterdam/Berlin (here). To my knowledge, he does not have New York representation at this point, nor has his work found its way to the secondary markets in any meaningful way, so European gallery retail is the only likely avenue for follow up at this point. De Ruijter's images would clearly make a nice contemporary addition to a series of aerial works (Garnett, Ruscha, Gowin, Burtynsky, Bridges, et al), to a collection centered on abstraction in found forms, or to an exploration of contemporary approaches to traditional landscape.

Transit Hub:

• Artist website (here)
• Borders @MK Galerie, 2008 (here)
• Nature as Artifice @George Eastman House (here)
• Dutch Dare (here)
• H+F Collection (here)

Book: William Garnett, Aerial Photographs

JTF (just the facts): Published in 1994 by the University of California Press. 159 pages, with 73 black and white images. Includes an introduction by Martha Sandweiss, a list of exhibitions and a bibliography. The images were made between the early 1950s and the mid 1980s. (Cover shot at right, via Amazon.)

Comments/Context: We had been searching for an inexpensive copy of this book for our library for quite a few years when recently I finally managed to unearth one on the Internet for an affordable sum. As I hold it in my hands now, it was certainly worth the wait.

While aerial photography began back with balloon flights and early airplane experiments decades earlier, William Garnett was the first flying photographer to move the images beyond their geographical/topographical/military beginnings and into the realm of art. In this volume, Garnett's subjects are primarily the hills and valleys of the Western United States: sand dunes, water eroded canyons, the twists and turns of rivers fingering out into deltas, salt flats, frothy ocean surf, and the farmland patterns made by plows, tractors and irrigation.

In spirit, these images have much in common with the Ansel Adams school of photography: meticulous attention to craft, resulting in crisp prints with broad tonal ranges, and an overall perspective that well made images of the glories of the West could be important in the larger movement toward environmental preservation/conservation. In actual look however, with the horizon lines cropped out, many of Garnett's images bear resemblance to the work of Minor White: amorphous, organic designs that aren't exactly identifiable as anything specific (given uncertainties of scale), but are somehow evocative of the artist's point of view. Light and shadow are the primary tools used to highlight the patterns and textures found in the landscape, where rivers become sinuous painterly curves and parched sand dunes and mesas become undulating sculptural forms. Only the intrusions of man bring hard edges and straight lines to these pictures: the broad stripes of strip cut grain and hay, the narrow lines of irrigation furrows, the back and forth swirls of tractor patterns, the flat edges of a sewage pond, or the perfect horizontal line of a railroad train.

Overall, this is a much deeper body of work than I had expected or known; this volume includes page after page of superlative imagery, deftly exploring astonishing facets of the abstract landscape from a bird's eye perspective. It is a book that successfully challenges the traditional boundaries of classic landscape photography, and is one that rewards close and repeated looking.
.
Collector's POV: It's not at all clear which galleries might officially represent the estate of William Garnett, but both Scott Nichols Gallery in San Francisco (here) and Joseph Bellows Gallery in La Jolla (here) hold some inventory of his work. Garnett's images have not come up at auction much in the past few years; those prints that have sold have ranged in price between $3000 and $8000. We continue to be on the lookout for a terrific Garnett print for our collection. In our particular case, one of his patterned images of suburban buildings (not included in this book, as the images here are all landscapes of one kind or another) would be the best match.

Transit Hub:

• Getty Museum profile/holdings (here)
• NYTimes obituary (here)