Bruce Haley @Anastasia

JTF (just the facts): A total of 12 panoramic black and white photographs, mounted unframed and unmatted, and hung against grey walls in the single room gallery space. All of the works are Epson archival pigment prints on Museo silver rag paper, made between 2007 and 2010. Each of the black bordered prints is sized 14x60 and is available in an edition of 5. The show also includes a short video on the artist which is displayed on a small monitor. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Bruce Haley is probably best known as an award-winning conflict photojournalist, taking pictures of wars, famine, and destruction in Burma, Somalia, Afghanistan and the former Soviet states. His newest work brings him back to the United States and to the dusty, desolate wastelands of Nevada, where marginal mining towns sprang up during boom times and now hold on with hardscrabble tenaciousness.

The twelve pictures in this show are arranged in a progression, almost like a time lapse recreation of the history of the region. The first few are geology and geography centric, like survey pictures from the 19th century, capturing the looming black cone of a small mountain and the vast, scrubby flatness of the empty valley below. Soon, the hand of man starts to appear: a lonely cinder block shed, mining walls, open pit holes, and the beginnings of a haphazard settlement of low rise buildings, temporary trailers, and pickups. Haley then moves in closer, making elegant, high contrast images of the geometric out buildings. Edges zig zag in and out, boxes and rectangles pile up on each other, scrap wood and winding towers create dense black angles, and tin siding adds vertical striping. The final photographs in the series move back to an elevated vantage point, taking in the sweep of the sprawling towns, with their dense clusters of houses, telephone poles, and decaying structures. The mining activity may have moved on to the next rich site, but these towns have endured with remarkable frontier stubbornness. So while there is clearly an echo of the ugly suburban menace of the New Topographics in a few of these images, I took away a bit more survivalist desperation, the unlikely scratching out of a life in the harshest of conditions.

I have to admit that I am a bit of skeptic when it comes to the panorama format; I think too many of these wide pictures seem gimmicky. My favorite panoramas are those made by Art Sisabaugh decades ago, where the strengths of the format were smartly matched with the superflat land of the Midwest. So I was somewhat surprised to like Haley's panoramas as much as did. Both the pure landscapes and the city vistas play off the bigness of the sky and the horizontals of the land, and the up-close buildings have been carefully composed to take advantage of an enveloping edge to edge movement. I think part of their success also lies in their narrowness, which keeps the images tightly hemmed in even when they depict something grand and effusive. All in, Haley deftly engages the history of American landscape photography in these images, while still bringing his own voice to the ongoing dialogue.

Collector's POV: All of the 14x60 prints in this show are priced in ratcheting editions, starting at $6500 and rising to $9000. The images are also available in a smaller 9x40 size (not on display, in a larger edition of 10); prices for these prints start at $4000 and rise to $8000. Haley's work has not yet reached the secondary markets, so gallery retail is likely the best option for those collectors interested in following up.

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

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here) 
• Interviews: Conscientious (here), Lenscratch (here)
• Exhibit: Fresno Art Museum, 2012 (here)

Bruce Haley
Through October 26th

Anastasia Photo
166 Orchard Street
New York, NY 10002

Paolo Woods @Anastasia Photo

JTF (just the facts): A total of 13 color photographs, framed in black and matted, and hung in the single room gallery and office alcove. The prints are square format archival inkjet prints, and come in two sizes: 36x36 (in editions of 5) and 16x16 (in editions of 10). There are 9 images in the large size and 4 images in the small size in the show, and all of the photographs were made between 2005 and 2009. Each image is accompanied by a text caption provided by the photographer. A monograph of this body of work, entitled Marche Sur Mes Yeaux, was published by Editions Grasset (here) in 2010. (Installation shots at right.).

Comments/Context: In recent years, the West's view of Iran has become increasingly polarized, largely driven by questions of extreme politics and the country's nuclear aspirations. Photojournalist Paolo Woods has spent the past five years making pictures inside Iran, and his images provide a much more nuanced and complex picture of Iranian society than the stereotypes to which we have become accustomed might otherwise imply.

Nearly every picture in this show tells a story, either of an individual or of a facet of current society embodied by the scene (or both), further embellished by detailed captions providing additional background information. Wood's photographs touch on women's rights/roles, youth culture, the influence of the West, Islamic religious traditions, the increasing wealth of the middle class, and the multiplicity of political activity. Along the way, he finds plenty of contradictions and changing behaviors: centerfold nudes woven into high quality Persian carpets, 20-somethings in a mix of fancy Western and Middle Eastern fashions standing in drained swimming pools, regular folks taking classes at the Tehran Laughing School, modern women on the ski slopes, a teenager in his room surrounded by rock posters and graffiti drawings.

Many of these portraits have a formality that implies the cooperation of the sitters, rather than simply snatched moments from passing life. As such, the pictures often seem careful and condensed, their contrasts sharpened through composition. Together, they provide a glimpse of today's Iran that isn't so easily summed up, a nation with plenty of conflicting ideas and strong traditions, struggling to merge the old and new into some kind of creative workable equilibrium.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced as follows. The 36x36 prints are $3300 and the 16x16 prints are $1600. Woods' work has little secondary market history, so gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point.

My favorite image in this show was the portrait of Maryam and her mother (no exact titles and dates were available); it's the image on the far left in the middle installation shot. I liked the pairing of mother and daughter in the kitchen, looking away from each other, their contrasting styles and attitudes each clearly apparent via clothing and posture.

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

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Feature: Lens (here)

Paolo Woods
Through March 5th

Anastasia Photo
166 Orchard Street
New York, NY 10002

Cédric Gerbehaye, Congo in Limbo @Anastasia

JTF (just the facts): A total of 13 black and white images, framed in black and matted, and hung in the single room gallery and office alcove. The prints are archival inkjet prints on Hahnemuhle paper, in three sizes: 16x16, 16x24 or reverse, and 14x32. There are 10 works in the 16x24 size, 1 in the 16x16 size, and 2 in the 14x32 size. All of the images were taken between 2007 and 2009. The works are all untitled and are not editioned. This is Gerbehaye's first solo show in the US. (Installation shots at right.)
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Comments/Context: Cédric Gerbehaye's documentary photographs of the recent conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo are dark and haunting. They chronicle the intertwined lives of the soldiers and the civilians, and the hardships being endured by those that have been displaced or injured by the civil war.
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Many of the images tell the story of life in the tent camps, where a warren of shelters made of mud, sticks and sackcloth house families and young children. Others capture the soldiers, alternately outfitted with grenade launchers and spears, in berets and bandoliers; images of child soldiers jammed into the back of a truck or praying before a day of fighting capture the depressing reality of the on-the-ground combatants. Hospitals and churches complete the portrait of the victims; bright white light streams in through cross-shaped windows in a simple church, while men cover their eyes in despair. The most memorable image in the show is a picture of a young general, outfitted in a cowboy hat, and flanked by two heavily armed bodyguards; his sunglasses and cellphones sit on the simple table in front of him, his expression one of confident power.

While we have all seen pictures of civil wars and felt sympathy for the innocent bystanders who get caught up in the crossfire of the conflicts, these images are consistently well crafted and moving. They are dark and shadowy, with alternating moments of gritty realism and quiet lyricism.
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Collector's POV: All of the prints in the show are priced at $1650. Gerbehaye has no secondary market history. While photojournalism isn't an exact match for our particular collection, this is an impressive and penetrating group of humanist pictures that tells an important, and generally overlooked, story.
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Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
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Transit Hub:

• Agence VU page (here)
• Medecins Sans Frontieres video (here)

Cédric Gerbehaye, Congo in Limbo
Through October 31st
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Anastasia Photo
166 Orchard Street
New York, NY 10002

Carlos Jiménez Cahua, Lima @Anastasia

JTF (just the facts): A total of 10 color images, framed in white with no mat, and hung against grey walls in a single room gallery space. All of the images were taken in 2007. The prints are ink jet on dibond, in sizes either 35x44 or 55x43. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: In his first solo show now on view at Anastasia Photo, Carlos Jiménez Cahua documents the sprawling towns on the edge of desert outside Lima, Peru. Low rise buildings made of brick and concrete, corrugated tin and plywood, with blue plastic sheeting for windows, cover the dusty land in suffocating edge to edge clusters. Rectangular boxes repeat for mile after mile, as though they were self-replicating, creating geometric patterns in the dun colored land. Misty orange street lights bathe the settlements in eerie light when the sun retreats.

Never completely out of sight are the encroaching mounds of dirt and sand, looming ominously in the background or swirled into a think foggy soup by the wind. The towns seem precipitously perched on the edge of the powerful desert, at the mercy of the natural forces that push the sand into every crack and crevice. The forecast each day seems to call for yet another dust storm.

Out of this gritty geography, Cahua has discovered a variety of memorable moments: the cinder block cemetery, full of small bricked up pods for the dead; the missing building amidst the density of the built environment, the solitary structure covered in neon paper posters. To my eye, these pictures are about the desperation of people who are forced to live in an inhospitable environment, fighting an uphill battle day after day to gain a toe hold against a land that is indifferent to their struggle.

Collector’s POV: The images in this show are priced at $2000 or $2500, depending on size. This show is another reminder of the power of well made documentary photography, and a solid first outing for a promising new photographer.

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

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)

Carlos Jiménez Cahua, Lima

Through August 15th

Anastasia Photo
166 Orchard Street

New York, NY 10002