The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League, 1936-1951 @Jewish Museum

JTF (just the facts): A total of 150 black and white photographs from 73 different photographers, framed in black and matted, and chronologically/thematically displayed against grey, green, yellow, and dark blue walls through a winding series of adjoining gallery spaces. The prints cover the period from roughly 1910 to 1959, with a concentration between 1936 and 1951. An exhibition catalog has been published by Yale University Press (here) and is available in the bookshop for $50. The installation shots at right are courtesy of The Jewish Museum/Christine McMonagle.

The show is divided into titled sections. These sections and the photographers included are detailed below, with numbers of works and dates in parentheses.
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Precursors

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Lewis Hine (3, 1910, 1912, 1920)

Paul Strand (2, 1915, 1920)

1 video newsreel (1931)

The Great Depression/Harlem Document

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Berenice Abbott (2, 1937)

Alexander Alland (3, 1938)

Lucy Ashjian (4, 1938, 1939)

Harold Corsini (1, 1939)

Jack Delano (1, 1940)

Robert Disraeli (1, 1934)

Arnold Eagle (1, 1935)

Eliot Elisofon (3, 1937, 1940)

Morris Engel (3, 1937, 1938)

Sid Grossman (2, 1936, 1940)

Rosalie Gwathmey (1, 1940)

Consuelo Kanaga (1, 1937)

Sidney Kerner (1, 1938)

Rebecca Lepkoff (1, 1939)

Richard Lyon (1, 1937)

Jack Manning (2, 1939)

Lisette Model (1, 1940)

Arnold Newman (1, 1940)

Sol Prom (1, 1938)

Walter Rosenblum (3, 1938)

Arthur Rothstein (1, 1935)

Joe Schwartz (2, 1936, 1939)

Lee Sievan (1, 1940)

Aaron Siskind (5, 1937, 1938, 1940)

Rolf Tietgens (1, 1938)

John Vachon (1, 1938)

Dan Weiner (1, 1939)

Max Yavno (1, 1940)

2 glass cases (syllabus, notes, membership cards, newspaper articles, magazine spreads, books)
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The War Years

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Lou Bernstein (2, 1943, 1947)

Bernard Cole (1, 1944)

Harold Feinstein (1, 1945)

Godfrey Frankel (1, 1945)

George Gilbert (1, 1942)

Sid Grossman (2, 1945)

Rosalie Gwathmey (1, 1945)

Morris Huberland (2, 1941, 1942)

Arthur Leipzig (1, 1946)

Rebecca Lepkoff (1, 1947)

Helen Levitt (1, 1940)

Sol Libsohn (1, 1945)

Sonia Handelman Meyer (1, 1946)

Lisette Model (3, 1940, 1942, 1945)

David Robbins (2, 1941, 1944)

Walter Rosenblum (2, 1944)

Edwin Roskam (1, 1944)

Arthur Rothstein (1, 1946)

Fred Stein (1, 1945)

Louis Stettner (3, 1940, 1951)

Lou Stoumen (1, 1940)

Paul Strand (1, 1938)

Elizabeth Timberman (1, 1944)

Weegee (5, 1938, 1940, 1941, 1943, 1945)

Ida Wyman (1, 1945)

4 glass cases (book, installation/judging photos, magazines, brochures, flyers, party photos)
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The Red Scare

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Vivian Cherry (2, 1947)

Robert Disraeli (1, 1950)

Morris Engel (1, 1947)

Rosalie Gwathmey (1, 1948)

N. Jay Jaffee (1, 1948)

Arthur Leipzig (2, 1949, 1950)

Rebecca Lepkoff (1, 1947)

Sol Libsohn (1, 1949)

Jerome Liebling (2, 1948, 1949)

Tosh Matsumoto (1, 1950)

Sonia Handelman Meyer (2, 1945, 1946)

Ruth Orkin (1, 1948)

Marion Palfi (2, 1948, 1949)

Rae Russel (1, 1947)

Edward Schwartz (1, 1952)

Erika Stone (1, 1947)

David Vestal (1, 1949)

Sandra Weiner (1, 1948)

Ida Wyman (1, 1947)

2 glass cases (newspapers, books, meeting notes, letters, photograph)
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A Center for American Photography

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Nancy Bulkeley (1, 1946)

Ann Cooper (1, 1950)

Arnold Eagle (1, 1950)

Morris Engel (1, 1938)

Leo Goldstein (1, 1950)

Sid Grossman (2, 1947, 1948)

N. Jay Jaffee (1, 1950)

Sy Kattelson (3, 1948, 1949, 1950)

Rebecca Lepkoff (1, 1948)

Jack Lessinger (1, 1950)

Leon Levinstein (2, undated)

Jerome Liebling (1, 1953)

Sam Mahl (1, 1949)

Phyllis Dearborn Masser (1, 1948)

Marvin Newman (2, 1949, 1951)

Ruth Orkin (1, 1950)

Ann Zane Shanks (1, 1955)

Larry Silver (1, 1951)

W. Eugene Smith (2, 1951)

Louis Stettner (1, 1951)

Dan Weiner (4, 1948, 1949, 1950)

Bill Witt (1, 1948)

Ida Wyman (1, 1950)

Max Yavno (1, 1949)

George Zimbel (1, 1951)

2 glass cases (magazine spreads, Photo Notes, exhibit catalogues, installation/remodeling photos)

1 video film (1953)

1 interactive map
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Coda

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Sid Grossman (1, 1959)

1 glass case (book, teaching photo)

1 documentary film (2011)

Comments/Context: The short hand story of the New York Photo League has always been a bit too overly easy for my liking: a few notable artistic names, some left leaning politics, and a muddy and inconclusive interpretation of its lasting influence on photography and the history of the city. I think that's why I found this more comprehensive and inclusive retelling to be so much more exciting and useful; it's not just a hackneyed, one-sided narrative about communists, but a broad, interwoven confluence of politics, history, geography, and photography, with a strong undercurrent of healthy artistic debate.
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Walking through the twisting galleries, I found myself thinking about the Photo League in the context of a diagram. From one corner comes the march of history: the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, each with its own very real impacts on daily life in New York. From another corner comes the melting pot of the urban city itself: the people, the individual neighborhoods, the street life of mixed classes, races, religions, and ethnicities. And from a third corner comes the evolution of photography as a medium: the remnants of the between the wars Modernism, the arrival of the flexible hand held camera and the weekly magazines filled with photojournalism, and the beginnings of a more personal and subjective kind of image making. At the center of this diagram sits the New York Photo League, documenting the truths found on the streets of this great city, under the changing pressures of history, tugged in different artistic directions, trying to balance and synthesize these competing forces. Seen in this way, I suddenly started to understand where the Photo League really fits, and why the work on the walls looks the way it does.

This show is roughly chronological, and this design allows the viewer to see the evolving stylistic approaches being employed by League members over the years of the club's existence. Simplistically, one can imagine a continuum, at one end, documentary photography informed by activism, engagement and advocacy, a witness with an ideological purpose and a particular kind of social commentary to put forth. At the other end lies documentary photography informed by more subjective concerns, including individual emotions/reactions, aesthetics, formalism, and more personal questioning. As the years passed from 1936 to 1951 (the beginning and end of the League's operation), it is possible to watch this internal debate raging on, where a new sensibility gradually starts to take hold. This evolving definition of documentary/street photography didn't of course end here; these same issues remain intensely relevant and hotly argued on both sides even today.

With Hine and Strand as artistic precursors and with Abbott as a teacher, it isn't surprising that the Great Depression pictures start with a formal clarity and slowly evolve toward more progressive messages, likely as a result of the crushing economic times. Bridges and storefronts, vacant lots and crumbling tenement buildings, these kinds of subjects slowly give way to more human stories, particularly the Harlem Document pictures, which take a heavier handed look at poverty and unemployment in the black community. While these images are seen today with an eye for their overly negative stereotypes, they still represent a style of activist, engaged street photography that held favor with many of the members at the time.

With the arrival of World War II, the subject matter changed again: soldiers, white hatted sailors, mothers, political rallies, crowded protests, blurred motion coming into the frame with more regularity. In these pictures, the aesthetic schism starts to appear more clearly, with some members moving down a more atmospheric path, telling smaller and more marginal stories with empathy, humor, and even dark irony. These are more individual scenes, often environmental portraits, with an increasing level of compositional freedom and experimentation. As the Cold War deepened and the Photo League was blacklisted (and ultimately disbanded a few years later), the stylistic changes became more widespread. Using aerial views, mirrors, reverse angles, silhouettes, complex graphical overlaps, and a host of other approaches, the Photo League's brand of street photography became much more diverse, and by the early 1950s, it bore very little resemblance to the work from the late 1930s. The mood was harsher, the compositions more personal and less purely documentary.

What I like best about this show is its rag tag, unwieldy inclusiveness; there are dozens of names included here that have been largely forgotten, and yet their images fit together into a logical progression that seems fluid with the benefit of time. For me, I finally started to visually understand the small steps that made up the aesthetic and conceptual changes that took place between the 1930s and the 1950s, those missing evolutionary links between Abbott and Frank; The Americans now seems to me less like a thunder strike of genius out of nowhere and more like an innovative, original extrapolation from visual ideas that were already beginning to percolate around. This excellent show tells a uniquely New York story, and is worth a visit simply for the rich historical details of life in the city that it provides. But the reason I found this to be one of the best photography shows of the year is that it also successfully fills in an important (and largely missing) gap in the recounting of the American photographic narrative. Not only do I now have an increased appreciation for the talents of the many members of the New York Photo League (many of whom have been unjustly overlooked), I now understand much more clearly how the larger artistic puzzle fits together.
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Collector's POV: Given this is a museum show, there are, of course, no posted prices. Given the wide number of included artists, it seems fitting to forego the specific secondary market discussion that usually fills this section.
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Rating: *** (three stars) EXCELLENT (rating system described here)
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Transit Hub:

• Features/Reviews: Wall Street Journal (here), Lens (here), NY Times (here), New Yorker (here), Artnet (here), Photograph (here)

The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League, 1936-1951
Through March 25th

The Jewish Museum
1109 5th Ave at 92nd St
New York, NY 10128

Administrative Note: This will be the last post of the year. I'll return again in the New Year, beginning with the end of year roundups of the best shows and top photography venues of 2011. Happy Holidays!

South African Photographs: David Goldblatt @Jewish Museum

JTF (just the facts): A total of 150 black and white photographs, framed in blond wood and matted, and chronologically/thematically displayed through a winding series of adjoining gallery spaces. The prints cover the period from roughly 1948 to the present. The Jewish Museum does not allow photography in the galleries, so unfortunately, there are no installation shots for this exhibit; the images that accompany this post were taken from the museum website.

The exhibit is divided into seven thematic groups, along with a separate room devoted to a film about Goldblatt, a South African historical timeline, and 7 photography books that were influential for Goldblatt. These sections are listed below, with the number of photographs and other ephemera in parentheses:

Early Work (12)
On the Mines (17, 2 books)
Afrikaners (25, 8 books, 1 magazine)
Bantustans (18)
Boksburg (28, 2 books)
Structures (17, 2 books)
Johannesburg (33)

Comments/Context: In the past couple of years, New Yorkers have had an amazing opportunity to learn about the superlative work of South African photographer David Goldblatt. There was a large exhibition at the New Museum last summer (here) that paired some of his older work with more recent large color images, a tightly edited gallery show of vintage 1970s work at Howard Greenberg earlier this year (here), and now this retrospective-style exhibition covering a handful of his most successful projects and books. Given how little overlap there is between these three shows, we've really been exposed to the sweep of Goldblatt's varied artistic output, over a career that spans more than 50 years.

The show is organized into discrete groups of photographs categorized by subject matter, often echoing or sampling from photo essays or books that Goldblatt produced. A selection of works from his 1973 book On the Mines (in collaboration with author Nadine Gordimer) chronicles life in the South African gold mining regions, juxtaposing men in hard hats at the bottom of mine shafts with concession store clerks, abandoned mill foundations, and shadowy bunks in dormitories. His pictures capture the not-so-subtle racial divisions (black workers, white owners) that were commonplace in these regions, embedded in the fabric of the business. (Boss Boy at the Battery Reef, Randfontein Estates Gold Mine, Randfontein, 1966, at right, top.)

Goldblatt's images of Afrikaners are filled with contrast and subtle contradiction. Some are filled with quiet sympathy, chronicling the hardships of farm life, the fierce commitment to the church, and the general ordinariness of the people, with a dignity reminiscent of Walker Evans. And yet underneath, the undercurrents of racism, nationalism, and extremism give the pictures a heightened sense of anticipation and anxiety, of emotions simmering beneath the surface. Farmers with craggy faces make pine coffins, wear their Sunday best, and sit blankly at kitchen tables. I particularly liked the image of an older woman playing a fancy organ in a dark dining room, with the riot of flowers on the table; it seems so perfectly emblematic of the traditions of the Afrikaner life. (On an ostrich farm nead Oudtshoorn, 1967, at right, middle.)

The Bantustans section of the show collects images of everyday life in the black puppet states, where houses of sticks, mud, rock and wood provide traditional shelter for families. (Landscape with 1500 lavatories, Frankfort, Ciskei, 12 July 1983, at right, bottom.) The most powerful pictures in this group are those of commuting workers waiting for the bus, clustered in crowds at stops in the middle of the night, strafed by the glare of headlights. Images from the white suburban community of Boksburg are a direct contrast, with well dressed, middle class ladies meeting at home for bible study, walking by shop fronts, ballroom dancing or attending military ceremonies, living in a kind of fantasy world where the apartheid system lies out of sight.

The pictures of Structures provide yet another set of back and forth contrasts: heroic Afrikaner monuments and churches followed by destroyed houses and shacks under construction, perfect gardens next to nomadic sheep shearers. In one image, a black family lives in a house with no walls, where the bed and table are jumbled together, surrounded by rubble. The final section of images from Johannesburg finds these same themes embedded in the everyday life of the city. A menacing dog guards a parade at a soccer match (with the classic Life is Great slogan on the side of a car), children play on the top of a junked car frame, a white baby lies on a blanket tended by three black nannies, and a shoemaker plies his trade behind a jungle of razorwire.

All of these projects and photo essays have a commonality of feel, a sense of understated delivery, where similarities and differences are given equal weight, where subtleties of injustice and ironies of experience are highlighted without the hectoring of a heavy hand. Goldblatt's compositions are crisp and often sparse, picking out a single facet from the sea of contradictions around him. Perhaps the best way to describe the works is that they are implicit rather than explicit; they force the viewer to discover the back story, rather than shouting the obvious.

All in, this show applies a more traditional retrospective framework to Goldblatt's long career, and as such, provides a more coherent sense of chronological background and progression than the other shows of his work we've seen in New York recently. Even if you caught those other two exhibits, this one is worth a visit to provide a more thoroughly constructed historical foundation for his ideas and to fill in some photographic gaps with excellent projects you may have overlooked.

Collector's POV: David Goldblatt is represented by Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York (here) and Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg (here). Even with the activity surrounding his recent New York museum shows, his prints have not yet become widely available in the secondary markets, so gallery retail is likely the best option for interested collectors at this point.

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

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Transit Hub:

• Reviews: NY Times (here), New Yorker (here), Village Voice (here), New York Review of Books (here)

South African Photographs: David Goldblatt

Through September 19th

The Jewish Museum

1109 5th Ave at 92nd St

New York, NY 10128

Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention @Jewish Museum

JTF (just the facts): A total of over 200 works, including photographs, paintings, sculpture, ink and pen drawings, watercolors, mixed media works, films, books, and newspapers, all variously framed and matted, and chronologically/thematically displayed through a winding series of adjoining gallery spaces. The artworks cover the period from approximately 1915 to the early 1970s, with a few early family photographs from the turn of the century as background. There are 83 photographs on view, spread throughout the exhibition; virtually all of them are gelatin silver prints. A catalogue of the show has been published by the Jewish Museum and the Yale University Press (here) and is available in the bookshop for $50. (The Jewish Museum does not allow photography in the galleries, so unfortunately, there are no installation shots for this exhibit.)

Comments/Context: The Man Ray retrospective now on view at the Jewish Museum is a show with a point of view. Rather than delivering a dispassionate survey of the artist's work over a lifetime and allowing the viewer to draw his or her own conclusions about its significance, this exhibit opens with a hypothesis and then proceeds to use the works as supporting evidence. Given the venue, it is not at all surprising that the line of thinking here revolves around Man Ray's Jewish heritage, and the central pivot for the show is his evasion/assimilation of this background throughout his life (including the changing of his famous name). And while this analysis likely has its points of validity, both tangible and psychological, I didn't find the Jewish narrative compelling enough to be a definitive guide for all of the twists and turns of his life and art. Luckily, the breadth and depth of the work on view is such that an excellent portrait of Man Ray's evolution over time comes through, regardless of the religious back story.

In his early years, Man Ray was a relentless filterer. The paintings and watercolors from the 1910s are forgettable Cubist variants, with figures transformed into colorful geometric planes and positive and negative space often interchanged. After meeting Marcel Duchamp, readymade objects started to find their way into his work; soon the Cubism was gone, and witty Dada puns (L'Homme as a hand mixer) and more spontaneous found sculptures came forth. In my view, the sculpture made of wooden coat hangers (Obstruction, 1920) is an important and transformative piece. The interconnected hangers (which foretell the work of Calder) go beyond being pared down objects and find a lyrical quality, especially the patterns of shadows that fall on the wall behind the sculpture when light is shown through it. This was an "aha!" moment for me, as I now saw the thread between his early Dada work and the Rayographs - he was starting to truly experiment with light and shadow.

Man Ray's time in Paris between 1921 and 1940 was clearly the most productive of his career. While I might have vaguely understood this previously, the show really drives this point home. Although he continued to experiment with a variety of mediums, the weaker paintings fell away for the most part and Man Ray spent more time with photography, bridging (and reinventing) his Dada ideas and influences into Surrealism and the avant-garde. Out of this came iconic images like Le Violon D'Ingres, 1924, and Noir et Blacnhe, 1926, the entire series of stunning Rayographs, a large body of superlative nudes (including studies of Lee Miller), a group of solid still lifes, and a surprisingly inventive and original set of portraits and self-portraits. In these works, he's diving into the process of photography, pushing the edges, using cropping, multiple exposure, solarization, positive and negative cameraless images, and other manipulations and techniques to achieve his desired results.

The level of quality across this period is astounding. I had forgotten about his wild portrait of Berenice Abbott (Harlequin Composition, 1922), the penetrating gaze of Lee Miller's eye (1932), the intimacy of Retour a la Raison (a nude from 1923) and Anatomics (a neck, 1929), and the simple solarized Calla Lilies (1930). There are also a few early Rayographs on view that I hadn't seen before, along with better known images of light bulbs, wires, combs, tops, film strips and other objects. The portraits of Joyce, Breton, Hemingway, Duchamp, and Cocteau (among many others) are all much stronger than I remembered; Man Ray's portraits are perhaps under appreciated amidst this embarrassment of riches.

The end of this period however sees Man Ray start to spin his wheels; the mathematical models of the late 1930s are pretty mundane in comparison to what had come before. After he leaves Paris, and really throughout the rest of his career, he seems to have lost his touch. He goes back to painting, tries new things, goes against the grain, but is out of step with the prevailing trends (and seems to miss Abstract Expressionism entirely); his sculptures look like tired reworks of forgotten ideas. From my perspective, the last two periods (exile in Hollywood and Paris again) have very little of merit to recommend them; my reaction to the work in these final rooms was that it was all pretty sad, or perhaps just trying too hard to be relevant.

The comprehensive nature of this exhibit helps to tease out these overarching themes across his career. By seeing his work in all the mediums across all the decades hung together, the successes and failures stand out more, and the connection points and interrelationships become clearer. As an educational vehicle, this exhibit helped me to gain a larger perspective on Man Ray's whole career and to put some of his most important works in a deeper context. While I'm not sure the Jewish heritage motif deserves such prominent placement in the overall narrative of his life, the idea that Man Ray was a restless experimenter and assimilater generally rings true I think. In his prime, his fluidity of ideas generated more top quality bodies of photography than most photographers could hope for in an entire lifetime. As such, this exhibit is one worth making a detour for, both for the highlights, and for the missteps along the way that help to tell Man Ray's complicated story.

Collector's POV: Man Ray's photographs are routinely available at auction, with plenty of works on offer at nearly all price points. Vintage Rayographs and iconic works consistently fetch between $100000 and $450000, while lesser known works and later prints can be as inexpensive as $3000-5000; a majority of his middle of the road photographs range between $10000 and $40000.

For our particular collection, many of Man Ray's nudes and florals would fit nicely into our existing groups. We actually already own one Man Ray flower (here), but could certainly imagine adding more standout works from either genre.

Rating: *** (three stars) EXCELLENT (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Reviews and Features: NY Times (here), Huffington Post (here), Daily Beast (here), TimeOut (here), Vogue (here), FT (here), New York Social Diary (here)

Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention
Through March 14th

The Jewish Museum
1109 5th Ave at 92nd St
New York NY 10128