Every Booth at the 2013 AIPAD Photography Show, Part 4 of 6

Start here for Part 1 of this series. It provides some background and explanation for what's going on in these lists.

Weinstein Gallery (here): Vera Lutter, $12000. This image (and the others in the series on the wall nearby) has some visual kinship with Kertész' famous picture, but introduces Lutter's own signature reversed out aesthetic to the composition.

David Zwirner (here): James Welling, $20000. Welling was fortunate to receive a solo show in such a prominently placed booth, right in front of the fair entrance. A pair of these stark black and white abstractions (that look almost like industrial girders) hung on the outside wall.

Catherine Edelman Gallery (here): Keliy Anderson-Staley, $1000-4400 each. This installation of modern tintype portraits was striking and personal. Proof that the use of an antique process need not seem old timey or preciously retro.

Weston Gallery (here): Paul Strand, $65000. Down in the weeds Strand is always worth a deliberate inspection.

 

Charles Isaacs Photographs, Inc. (here): Julia Margaret Cameron, POR. An iconic portrait, one of the true greats in the history of the medium. Rich, haunting, and penetrating. I didn't need to ask the price.

Laurence Miller Gallery (here): Ray K. Metzker, $125000. While nearly all of Metzker's composites are astonishing, this car and lamp image layers light and shadow into a gentle rhythm.

Gallery 19/21 (here): Mario Giacomelli, $9000. This looking straight down image by Giacomelli recalls Moholy-Nagy, with buildings flattened into tiny squares.

Paul M. Hertzmann Inc. (here): Imogen Cunningham, $150000. This was the best Cunningham floral at the fair. Irises aren't always exciting, but this one has a richness and luminosity that is extraordinary.

Staley-Wise Gallery (here): Richard Avedon, $30000. How to add motion to an otherwise static composition - the lively poof of Jean Shrimpton's hair.

Contemporary Works/Vintage Works (here): Raoul Ubac, POR. I haven't seen many Ubac prints so it was a treat to see this clashing, overlapped, solarized nude, the bodies seemingly all cut up and smashed together in a chaotic muddle.

Stephen Bulger Gallery (here): André Kertész, $4800, $35000, and $4800. An important reminder to keep those artist greeting cards.

Brancolini Grimaldi (here): Heidi Specker, £10000. Rough rock walls, flattened into texture and edges, or a hint of Siskind in a modern form.

ClampArt (here): Mark Morrisroe, $27500. Morrisroe's sandwich negative tribute to Diane Arbus, a lonely bird in a murky fog.

Robert Mann Gallery (here): Mike Mandel, $4000 each. A fun series of car window portraits, full of goofy faces and genuine warmth.

Continue to Part 5 here.

Auction: Fine Photographs, February 26, 2013 @Swann

The first focused Photography sale of the year takes place at Swann next week, with the auction house's customary eclectic mix of material up for bid. As always, the tilt is toward lower priced 20th century black and white work, both vintage and modern prints. An Edward Curtis portfolio is the headliner. Overall, there are 138 lots available, with a total High estimate of $1360000.

Here's the statistical breakdown:

Total Low Lots (high estimate up to and including $10000): 104
Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): $650000

Total Mid Lots (high estimate between $10000 and $50000): 32
Total Mid Estimate: $535000

Total High Lots (high estimate above $50000): 2
Total High Estimate: $175000

The top lot by High estimate is lot 22, Edward Curtis, The North American Indian, Portfolio #1, 1907, at $70000-100000.

The following is the list of photographers with 3 or more lots in the sale (with the number of lots in parentheses):

Alfred Eisenstaedt (7)
Ansel Adams (6)
Berenice Abbott (5)
Edward Curtis (5)
Brassaï (4)
Henri Cartier-Bresson (3)
André Kertész (3)
Gordon Parks (3)
Aaron Siskind (3)
Edward Weston (3)
Minor White (3)

Other works of interest include lot 33, André Kertész, Distortion #128, 1931-1933, at $30000-45000 (image at right, top), lot 46, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Trafalgar Square on the day of the Coronation of King George VI, London, 1937/1950s, at $20000-30000 (image at right, middle), and lot 58, Minor White, Mendocino #3, 1948, at $4000-6000 (image at right, bottom). All images via Swann.

The complete lot by lot catalog can be found here. The 3D version is located here.

Fine Photographs
February 26th

Swann Auction Galleries
104 East 25th Street
New York, NY 10010

Michael Wolf: iseeyou @Silverstein

JTF (just the facts): A total of 31 color photographs, each framed in black with no mat, and hung in the reception area, front room, and main gallery spaces. The show is a mini-retrospective of sorts, with images culled from a variety of projects. The following projects are represented, with the number of prints on view and their details in parentheses:

• Architecture of Density (1, 48x58, edition of 9+2, 2006)
• Night (1, 48x60, edition of 9+2, 2008)
• Transparent City (5, 48x60 or 48x64 or reverse, in editions of 9+2, 2008)
• Transparent City Detail (2, 50x40 and 34x27, in editions of 9+2, 2008)
• Paris Street View (4, various sizes from 27x34 to 60x48 or reverse, in editions of 3+1, 5+2 or 9+2, 2009)
• Manhattan Street View (2, 40x50 or 48x60, in editions of 5+2 or 9+2 respectively, 2009/2010)
• A Series of Unfortunate Events (5, various sizes from 27x35 to 48x60 or reverse, in editions of 3+1, 5+2, or 9+2, 2010)
• Tokyo Compression (11, 42x34 or 10x8, in editions of 5+2, 2010)

All of the works are digital c-prints, except for those from the Tokyo Compression series which are archival inkjet prints. A selection of 13 black and white city views by André Kertész from 1954-1978 (curated by Wolf) is on view in the back room.

Comments/Context: Over the past five years or so, the work of German photographer Michael Wolf seems to be on a trajectory toward finer grained detail, moving inward from wide abstracted city scenes of anonymous hives of geometric apartment blocks to specific personal moments found on city streets around the world. Along the way, his images have opened up prickly questions about the pervasive nature of video surveillance and its impact on our evolving definition of privacy, encouraging and exposing our own implicit voyeurism.

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In his newest body of work, Wolf has given up the use of his own camera and instead mined the endless stream of digital images being captured by Google's automated car-mounted cameras for its Street View product. While these pictures were taken to document buildings in a relentless block by block manner, given the number of people in these big cities, they consistently, if inadvertently, capture pedestrians and passersby. Wolf has appropriated these robotic photographs and then interpreted them via cropping and enlargement, discovering stolen glimpses of urban life. I found the resulting images random and disconnected: a couple kissing, layered reflections in a bus window and mirror, a man giving the camera the finger, a woman collapsed in the gutter; their durable individual significance was generally lost on me. What I liked best was the fabric of pixelization that covers each blown-up image like a thin screen; the repeated red, green, and blue shards resolve into tiny veiled grids of blocked color, creating an almost Pictorialist textured feel.

My favorite images in this exhibit were from the new Tokyo Compression series, where Wolf has photographed commuters pressed up against subway windows. Faces are smashed against doors, creating fogs of condensation; fingers claw as though trying to break free; people close their eyes or adopt masks of indifference and weary disgust to compensate for the crush of humanity. These images make the breakdown of personal space and the invasion of privacy much more explicit than in the context-free Street View scenes. Here the voyeurism is harsh and physical, and the people protect themselves from the onslaught by closing up.

Taken together, the show sees our world from a variety of distances, forcing the viewer to move back and forth, from close-up to broad scale and back again, always voraciously looking and being watched. I think Wolf's work asks us to consider more fully whether we have entered a 21st century version of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon, where the knowledge of being under surveillance has started to influence our behavior. In many ways, these new images are evidence of exactly this outcome, and it is this unnerving line of thinking that makes this show worth seeing.

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Collector's POV: The works in this show are priced as follows. The larger prints from Architecture of Density, Night, and Transparent City range between $11750 and $15750. The images from Transparent City Details are either $5900 or $9000 based on size. The prints from Paris Street View, Manhattan Street View, and A Series of Unfortunate Events range between $5900 to $15750, also based on size. The large print from Tokyo Compression is $9000, while the 10 smaller prints from the same series are being sold as part of a set of 30 prints, together $20000. Wolf's prints have only recently entered the secondary markets, with a few large prints from Architecture of Density finding buyers between between $20000 and $26000.

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

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Reviews: New Yorker (here), New York (here)
• Interview: The Morning News (here)
• Aperture show, 2009/2010 (DLK COLLECTION review here)

Michael Wolf: iseeyou

Through December 24th

Bruce Silverstein Gallery

535 West 24th Street

New York, NY 10011

Photography at the 2010 Armory, Part 6 of 6

This is the final part of our exhausting multi-part Armory review post. Hopefully, all of the details will be of use to collectors who want to follow up with specific galleries, or who just need a summary of the photography that was being shown. Parts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 can be found here (part 1), here (part 2), here (part 3), here (part 4) and here (part 5). This post refers to the booths at Pier 92.

Galerie Daniel Templon (here): James Casebere (2)

Locks Gallery (here): Eileen Neff (2)

Alan Cristea Gallery (here): Jan Dibbets (9), Boo Ritson (1). Having recently seen the Dibbets show at Gladstone, I was happy to run across this grid of Dibbets' color studies; they are bigger and bolder than I had imagined. The set is priced at $18500.

Wetterling Gallery (here): Doug & Mike Starn (8), Nathalia Edenmont (5). The Starn works are various views of a dense thicket of bamboo poles.

Springer & Winckler Galerie (here): Arnold Odermatt (8), Andy Goldsworthy (3), Bernd and Hilla Becher (15 as one typology), Sigmar Polke (3), Gerhard Richter (6 overpainted photographs), Bernhard Johannes Blume (2 diptychs), John Baldessari (1)

Galerie Michael Schultz (here): Gilbert & George (1)

Bruce Silverstein Gallery (here): Shinichi Maruyama (1), Randy West (16), Yao Lu (1), Martin Denker (1), Michael Wolf (4), Todd Hido (3), Maria Antoinetta Mameli (1), Ryan Weideman (9), Diane Arbus (1), Leonard Freed (3), Nathan Lyons (3), Rosalind Solomon (1), André Kertész (4 black and white, 3 Polaroids), Aaron Siskind (4 broken windows, 4 paint studies), Barbara Morgan (3), E.O. Hoppé (5), Alfred Stieglitz (1), Marvin Newman (2 color, 12 black and white, including a grid of manhole covers), Frank Paulin (4), Larry Silver (4), Walker Evans (2), and others. The Silverstein booth was a tribute to 100 years of photography in New York (1910 to 2010), with time periods marked out in paint underneath each section. I was surprised to see the two large Kertész prints (at right), as they were larger than any prints of his from Washington Square that I had ever seen. They were priced at $25000 and $20000 respectively. Silverstein also had two early Walker Evans architectural/railroad studies (from the late 1920s) which would fit well into our collection.

Faría Fábregas Galería (here): Marta Minujin (1)

Winter Works on Paper (here): Lee Friedlander (2), Weegee (4), Josef Sudek (1), Arthur Tress (1), Ralph Eugene Meatyard (2), James Casebere (1), Andre Villers (1), among many, many others, hung salon style.

Contessa Gallery (here): David Drebin (4), Chuck Close (2), Robert Rauschenberg (1)

Sicardi Gallery (here): Geraldo de Barros (8). These conceptual prints by de Barros were a discovery for me. The negatives were made in the late 1940s/early 1950s, and are full of gridded geometries and overlapping patterns. The prints are recent posthumous prints, made in editions of 15, priced between $8000 and $12000.

Gana Art (here): Jang Taewon (1 lightbox), Cindy Sherman (1 film still)

Mixografia (here): John Baldessari (1 set of 6 prints)

HackelBury Fine Art (here): Garry Fabian Miller (7), Pascal Kern (6), Doug & Mike Starn (1 triptych and 1)

Barry Friedman, Ltd. (here): Michael Eastman (5 interiors, 2 abstractions), Man Ray (2), Sally Mann (1), Hans Bellmer (1), Arno Rafael Minkkinen (2)

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Alan Koppel Gallery (here): Constantin Brancusi (1), Harry Shunk (1), Robert Frank (2), Diane Arbus (1), Hiroshi Sugimoto (2 dioramas), Vik Muniz (1), Adam Fuss (1)

Yancey Richardson Gallery (here): Ed Ruscha (10 gas stations), Julius Shulman (1), Sebastião Salgado (1), Esko Mannikko (3), Sharon Core (2 still lifes), Andrew Moore (2), Hellen Van Meene (3), Barbara Kasten (5). The marginal picture at right doesn't do justice to the intricacies of Kasten's recent glass studies; light and shadow play across the layers of glass, creating a network of subtle lines. This particular image is priced at $10500, in an edition of 5.

JGM Galerie (here): Fred Wilson (5), Ion Grigorescu (3)

Marc Selwyn Fine Art (here): Richard Misrach (2)

David Klein Gallery (here): Liz Cohen (5)

Tomorrow: the last of our fair posts (until AIPAD), covering the 2010 ADAA Art Show.

André Kertész: In the Depths of Winter @Silverstein

JTF (just the facts): A total of 15 vintage gelatin silver prints, framed in black and matted, and hung in the back gallery. The images were taken in the period between 1940 and 1977. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Given the repeated heavy snows this winter in the New York area, this exhibit is perfectly timely, even now that the daffodils and tulips starting to bloom. André Kertész made many wonderful images of his Washington Square neighborhood, from his apartment window and out on the streets, and this show gathers together a solid group of pictures with snowy days and bare trees as their subject. What makes these images particularly resonant are the tiny human moments that are often hidden among the strong lines and forms: a child swinging, people trudging through the snow, or a small black dog on a snow covered rooftop.

While most of these images are less well known than his greatest hits, this exhibit demonstrates that even in his later life, Kertész was still making well crafted works in his signature style.

Collector's POV: The images in this exhibit mostly range in price between $7500 and $12000, the exceptions being the iconic vintage Washington Square Day, 1954 at $55000, and a tighter cropped variant of this image, at $24000. We actually already own a Kertész winter scene (here, not in the show), but could easily imagine adding another, especially one filled with rooftops, water towers, and shadows.

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

André Kertész: In the Depths of Winter

Through April 25th

Silverstein Photography

535 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011