Judy Fiskin: The End of Photography and Selected Photographs @Greenberg Van Doren

 

JTF (just the facts): A total of 75 black and white photographs, custom framed in white wood with no mat, and hung against grey striped walls in the main gallery space. The show also includes 1 video, which is on display in the entry area. The gelatin silver prints are mostly vintage, made between 1973 and 1988, with a few modern prints made in 2006. Paper sizes are either 5x7 or 6x8 (or reverse), with images roughly 2x2 or 2x3 (or reverse). All of the prints come in editions of 6+2AP. The video is a Super 8 film on digital video with sound, running 2 minutes and 28 seconds; it is available in an edition of 10+2AP. Some Aesthetic Decisions: The Photographs of Judy Fiskin, a new catalog raisonne recently published by the Getty (here), is available at the reception desk. (Installation shots at right.)

 

The following projects are included in the show, with the number of relevant prints on view and their dates as background:

 

Stucco: 11 prints, 1973-1976

35 Views of San Bernardino: 4 prints, 1974

Military Architecture: 10 prints, 1975

Desert: 3 prints, 1976

Long Beach: 5 prints, 1980

Dingbat: 12 prints, 1982-1983

My Trip to New York: 19 prints, 1984-1986

Jersey Shore: 3 prints, 1986-1988

New Orleans: 5 prints, 1987

New Architecture: 3 prints, 1988

 

Comments/Context: Judy Fiskin's tiny, couple-of-inches-square black and white prints seem both anachronistic and unexpectedly modern in these days of the humongous and the over sized. From the center of the gallery, her prints from the 1970s and 1980s are completely illegible, minuscule dots circling the room. They require nose-to-the-frame engagement to even decipher their subjects, and when you get up close, their black bordered edges make it feel like you're looking through the viewfinder along with the artist; it's as if you're along for the ride.

 

This show is a mini-retrospective sampler, gathering prints from a variety of her projects across two decades. At first glance, the bleached out, high contrast deadpan of the photographs might recall the Bechers, Ed Ruscha, or the New Topographics photographers, but even though her visual formula is strict and methodical, the pictures seem more about quirks and outliers than vernacular patterns. I liked the edge of wit in her Southern California flat roofed stucco houses (often with mirrored geometries or palm trees) and her Dingbat apartment blocks, punctuated by quiet oddities of shrubbery and surface decoration. In the 1980s, Fiskin shifted her gaze East, documenting the elaborate roof lines of the Jersey shore and the mixed-up stand alone bungalows and duplexes of New York. She even took time to capture the over-the-top architecture of cemetery tombs in New Orleans. Across the various subjects, she consistently found overlooked details worth noting, small eccentricities that seem to stick out as obvious once she had highlighted them. Her photographs are evidence of conscious looking, of searching for the individuality and personality that had been easily passed by in the apparent monotony of these everyday structures.

 

The front room contains Fiskin's 2006 film, The End of Photography, where moving images of this same Southern California architectural aesthetic are cut together and overlaid with a spoken eulogy to the black-and-white, analog world. The voice-over is a repeated cadence of "no more" followed by a catalog of items once found in a darkroom: no more enlarger, no more tray, no more beaker, no more developer, no more radio, etc. ending with "no more photography". It points to the comfortable details of a now vanished world, and the uncertainty felt as these traditional technologies and processes have been washed away by the new. I have to admit that I had a mixed reaction to this message of this film, as it elicited both a real nostalgia for the old (and the subtleties of what has been lost) and a lack of patience for the underlying bitterness being expressed at being forced to change.

 

Overall, I think this Fiskin overview is smart and well-constructed, especially in its coverage of many of her early projects. In putting together the historical puzzle of 1970s/1980s American photography, I think her personal take on local vernacular architecture (particularly in California) merits inclusion among the better known names that define the period.

 

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced at $5000 each. The video is available for $10000. Fiskin's work has little or no secondary market history, so even though these photographs date back several decades, gallery retail is likely the only option for those collectors interested in following up. Fiskin is also represented by Angles Gallery in Los Angeles (here).

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

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Cal Arts page (here)

Judy Fiskin: The End of Photography and Selected Photographs

Through October 27th

 

Greenberg Van Doren Gallery

730 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10019

Tim Davis: The New Antiquity @Greenberg Van Doren

JTF (just the facts): A total of 17 color works (16 single images and 1 triptych), framed in brown with no mat and hung in the entry and main gallery spaces. The c-prints range widely in size (from 8x10 to 60x72), were taken in 2008 and 2009, and are all made in editions of 6+2AP. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Humor and photography don't seem to go together very often these days; while a few recent photographers have succeeded in blending satire with significance (Martin Parr and Lee Friedlander come to mind), most don't even try; they're too busy being serious. And while the works in Tim Davis' new show aren't exactly guffaw-inducing, they certainly inhabit the territory of clever juxtaposition and irreverent contradiction.

The images in the exhibit were taken during a Rome Prize Fellowship in Italy, and later mixed with other works from China, the US, and elsewhere. In a gallery world full of rigidly formulaic narrow-gauged projects, these pictures cover a variety of subjects, are loosely connected thematically, and are printed in a wide range of sizes; this creates a feeling of singular discovery with each image, even when the adjacent images don't seem particularly related.

The detritus of modern life provides the setting for most of the pictures, albeit twisted by wry combinations with ancient undertones: golfers flail underneath a Roman aqueduct, an array of digital cameras show tourist snaps of the Colosseum, a miniature Sphinx flanks some hi-rise apartments, and a beautiful fresco is covered by a spiderweb of carved graffiti. Other pairings of detailed findings seem even more odd: a fluorescent green soccer cleat abandoned in lush ground cover, some large breasted prostitutes inexplicably standing in the woods, or a bronze statue of upside-down pants in a Chinese parking lot. There is certainly an element of witty surprise in many of these pictures; in others, the ironic significance is much less readily apparent, and the images seem more random.

All in, while the gallery show is generally solid if a bit uneven, I'm guessing this work will perform even better in book form, where many more images can be sequenced together and the sly complexity of the project can be more fully fleshed out.

Collector's POV: The prints in the show are priced between $2000 and $12000, based on size. Davis has no meaningful record at auction to date, so gallery retail is likely the only viable option for accessing his work in the short term. I think we first saw Davis' work at the Armory earlier this year, and while it doesn't fit into our particular collecting genres, I came away from this show impressed with the handful of images that smartly balance the found juxtapositions to highlight the overlooked absurdities.

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

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Reviews: artnet (here), TimeOut (here)
• Interview: White Hot magazine (here)
• The New Antiquity, published by Damiani (here)

Tim Davis: The New Antiquity
Through October 24th

Greenberg Van Doren Gallery
730 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10019

Paul Graham, Photographs 1981-2006 @Greenberg Van Doren

JTF (just the facts): A total of 12 works, 10 single images, and 2 series, variously matted and framed, hung in the entry and main gallery spaces. The images are from the period 1988 to 2007, many from the 1990s. The prints range in size from approximately 16x20 for the small series images, all the way up to wall sized 70x90. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: After enjoying Graham's current show on view at the MoMA (review here) and having quite a few follow-up discussions with various folks who helped educate me a bit further on Graham's work, I was eager to see how Greenberg Van Doren would present a broader array of his images, mini-retrospective style. The gallery has opted for the "appetizer sampler" approach: two or three images from a handful of different projects, served together, with the assumption that after trying each of them, we'll know what to order next time.

The first room has a grab bag of images: one from Empty Heaven of a Japanese woman about to cover her mouth (1992), one from New Europe of a suited man's knees (1988), and one of an amputated tree painted white (2005), from a shimmer of possibility. Each has its merits, but it's hard to draw much of a pattern from these three as group.
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The main gallery has some of the same series from a shimmer of possibility that were presented at the MoMA clustered on opposite walls, and upon a second viewing, they're still excellent. Also in this room are a pair of large profile mug shot portraits of teenagers (1997) from End of An Age. These images are vaguely reminiscent of Thomas Ruff's deadpan frontal portraits from the 1980s, with a bit more adolescent angst thrown in for good measure. Three images from the Painting series (1999) share this wall; they are close up, color field like works of graffiti scratched walls, and they reminded me tangentially of Brassäi.

My favorites in the show were the two massive images from American Night (one 1998, one 2002). The first depicts a seemingly downtrodden man with an eye patch, standing in a darkened alley, near a graffiti covered corrugated steel security pull down and an array of gumball machines. The second shows a lone man standing in an empty parking lot in a pupil-dilating field of white brightness. Both of these works take what at first glance is a simple documentary image and make it something altogether more powerful. We'll certainly go in search of more images from this particular project to get a wider view of the whole effort.

Overall, this show is a bit uneven, but it certainly worth a visit as further background on the evolution of Graham's career.

Collector's POV: The series images from a shimmer of possibility are $35000 and $40000. The pictures from the Painting series are $17500 or $25000. The American Night images are priced at $40000, while the various images in the entry gallery are between $15000 and $20000. The two portraits from End of An Age are not for sale. All the prints are made in editions of 3, 5, or 6. Paul Graham's photographs have been virtually unavailable at auction, although the MoMA show will likely shake some loose in the coming seasons I would imagine. As a collector, I came away from this show with a deeper appreciation for both the American Night works, as well as those from a shimmer of possibility.

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

Transit Hub:

• Paul Graham Archive (here)
• 2009 Deutsche Borse Prize (here)
• 2009 Interview with PDN (here)
• American Night (here)

Paul Graham, Photographs 1981-2006
Through May 2nd

Greenberg Van Doren Gallery

730 5th Avenue

New York, NY 10019

Paul Graham, a shimmer of possibility @MoMA

JTF (just the facts): A total of 49 color images, displayed as 8 sequences of between 4 and 9 images each, and two single images. All of the images were taken between 2004 and 2006. The prints are made in varying sizes, framed in white, without mats and with very little wall text, and hung at varying heights in a two room gallery with a single dividing wall. The curator of the exhibition is Susan Kismaric. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: I'm going to go out on a limb here, but I think British photographer Paul Graham is a complete unknown for most collectors. Even though he has had a nearly 30 year career, published a dozen high quality books, and made some memorable pictures, I think he has been overlooked by many, mostly because he isn't easily categorized. While one might attach the labels "color" or "documentary" to his work, his isn't the first name that comes up when you think of these terms, and so I'm afraid many folks have missed out on some amazing photography (ourselves included for the most part, I must admit).

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The new show at the MoMA takes a sampling from his most recent work, a shimmer of possibility, a group of images he took during many trips across America from 2004 to 2006. What is surprising is that this work is not a group of standard, stand alone documentary pictures. Instead, the images are sequenced into spare narratives, with almost cinematic slices of time (reframing the subjects minute to minute) propelling the stories along, sometimes quite linearly but often in a more elliptical undirected flow.

In many ways, nothing much happens in these stories; they are tiny vignettes of ordinary life. Here are a few of the moments that are captured:

• A woman eats takeout at a bus stop, and then smokes
• A man camps out near a Jack-in-the-Box trash can
• A girl with her toys on the sidewalk
• A man mows the grass, as it begins to rain
• Kids play basketball as the sun sets
• A man sells flowers on a street corner
• A man on a break savors a cigarette

The overall mood of these short stories is the same exhausted melancholy that permeates Alec Soth's recent work. And yet, Graham's economical narratives are oddly engaging and satisfying; the details all seem to matter a bit more. The exact moments when the rain falls on the man mowing the grass (sparkling in the sunlight), or when the smoker exhales, or when the basketball is released all have a hyper reality, saturated with our attention. And then there is a sense that life goes on - the open ended stories will all continue. While this show is relatively small, take your time to savor each thread; they'll grow on you.

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The artist's website can be found here. The 12 volume set of books published by Steidl can be found here.

Collector's POV: Paul Graham's work has been virtually unavailable in the secondary markets in the past few years, except for a few copies of his first book A1, The Great North Road, which have started to show up in the newer photo book auctions. Graham is represented in New York by Greenberg Van Doren Gallery (site here), who will be having a retrospective show of his work starting later in March.

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

a shimmer of possibility: Photographs by Paul Graham

Through May 18

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Museum of Modern Art

11 West 53rd Street
New York, NY 10019

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5B4's review of the books can be found here.

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UPDATE: My email has been full of readers with links and ideas for educating us further about Paul Graham (a few politely pointing out just how out of touch and misinformed we are). There is currently a show of the 2009 Deutsche Borse finalists up at the Photographers' Gallery in London (site here). A second good resource is the Anthony Reynolds Gallery in London (site here), who has represented the artist for most of his career and has access to all of his work. Perhaps there is a real difference in knowledge of Graham's work between working photographers and other photo "insiders" (who all know Graham well) and many collectors (particularly in America) who only know him tangentially.