Toshio Shibata and Toeko Tatsuno: Given @Miller

JTF (just the facts): A two artist show containing a total of 13 black and white and color photographs by Toshio Shibata and 12 paintings by Toeko Tatsuno. Shibata's photographs are a mix of c-prints and gelatin silver prints, framed in white and matted/unmatted, and made between 1989 and 2008. His prints come in three sizes: 20x24 (in editions of 25), 32x40 (in editions of 10), and 40x50 (in editions of 10). There are 9 color works and 4 black and white works on view, split between the main gallery space, the entry area, and the smaller print room. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Toshio Shibata doesn't come from the cherry blossom in springtime school of Japanese landscape photography. His interest lies the intersection of the man-made and the natural, not so much the harsh contrasts of the American New Topographics photographers but something more tightly integrated and humanized. Paired with the geometric abstractions of Toeko Tatsuno in this back and forth show, his eye for linear pattern and sculptural form comes through even more clearly.

Stone retaining walls, concrete spillways, landslide nets, and reservoir dams are the main characters in Shibata's natural drama. Patchwork combinations of bricks, squares, and herringbone patterns dot the hillsides, intermixed with scrubby greenery and erosion mediating trees. His waterscapes turn man-made waterfalls into flat curtains of flowing white, adding an element of passing time to his images; concrete blocks and other debris bob in swirling eddy pools and at the bottom of still runoff areas. Whether using the girders of a bridge or the edge of a waterfall, Shibata manages his lines and angles with precision, seeing landscape as rigid structure, even when it is a line of trees or the rusty residue falling from a drainpipe.

Toeko Tatsuno's blocky stacks and ladder-like bookcase forms provide an insightful foil for Shibata's focus on man-made abstraction. In this context, his compositions resolve even further into systems of line, a rope of buoys becoming a graceful arc and a tethered net turning into an obtuse triangle. Shibata's landscapes depict this strict human-imposed order not as ugliness or interference, but as something graceful and well-integrated, finding harmony where others have found dissonance.

Collector's POV: The Shibata photographs in this show are priced between $3500 and $25000, based on size and place in the edition. His prints have not developed a consistent presence in the Western secondary markets; only a handful of lots have come up for recent public sale, fetching prices between $1500 and $7500, but these prices may not be entirely representative of the broader market for his work. As such, gallery retail may be the best/only option for those collectors interested in following up.

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

Transit Hub:

• Shibata exhibit: @Peabody Essex Museum, 2013 (here)
• Shibata interview: Eyecurious (here)

 

Toshio Shibata and Toeko Tatsuno: Given

Through May 25th

 

Laurence Miller Gallery

20 West 57th Street

New York, NY 10019

Ray K. Metzker and Ruth Thorne-Thomsen, Two of a Mind @Laurence Miller

JTF (just the facts): A two artist show containing a total of 40 black and white photographs by the husband and wife pairing of Ray K. Metzker and Ruth Thorne-Thomsen. The works are framed in white or blond wood and matted, and hung against white walls in the entry space and main gallery area. All of the photographs by Metzker (there are 23) are from the series Pictus Interruptus and are displayed in the main gallery space. They are vintage gelatin silver prints made between 1976 and 1981, sized either 11x14 or 16x20, and available in editions of 5, 15, 20, 25, or 30. The works by Thorne-Thomsen (there are 17) are from four different series: Expeditions, Door, Prima Materia, and Songs of the Sea and are on view in the entry area. They are toned vintage gelatin silver prints, sized 4x5, and available in editions of 25. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: While the premise of this show is that there are connections and relationships between the photographs of Ray K. Metzker and Ruth Thorne-Thomsen, the reality is that these are two very different bodies of work and aesthetic sensibilities. Yes, the two artists are married to each other, and yes, both have placed objects in front of the camera in these particular images, but that's where the superficial similarities end I think.

Metzker's Pictus Interruptus series is a masterful study of flat, two dimensional abstraction. Starting with something vaguely identifiable (a street sign, a gutter, a parking lot, a city view, a set of stairs, a marble faced wall), he has then quickly waved a piece of paper, a face in a magazine ad, a folded edge, or some other perforated object through the image area, creating blurred frenetic forms that interrupt the compositions. When juxtaposed with the original views, lines and angles slash through the frame, bright white trapezoids and dark fields of dots cutting in front of the found shapes. The result is images that mix crispness and softness, hard edged geometry with the passing glance of a model's eyes. They're restlessly inventive, unexpected, and routinely engrossing.

Thorne-Thomsen's intimate pinhole photographs are dark and dreamlike, full of oversized surreal heads, floating airships, silhouetted figures, and broad sweeps of land. Female statues perch on columns engulfed in fog, a man made of dots stands on a rocky seashore, and a hot-air balloon hovers near the Leaning Tower of Pisa. While these fabrications are indeed fanciful and unreal, their mystery seems a little too obvious and self-conscious to me. They successfully conjure up a mythical world, but from my perspective, it was almost like the artist was trying a little too hard to be magical.

Overall, this show is a quirky pairing, held together by a simple bonds but largely non-competitive. I think the Metzker abstractions continue to be visually challenging and exciting (even three decades later), largely due to their smart understanding and manipulation of the way a camera sees.

Collector's POV: The works in this show are priced as follows. The Metzker prints range in price from $7500 to $25000, based on the place in the edition. The Thorne-Thomsen prints are $4000 each. Metzker's work has only been intermittently available in the secondary markets over the years; recent prices have ranged between $1000 and $23000. Thorne-Thomsen's prints have not yet reached the second markets, so gallery retail is likely the best option for those collectors interested in following up on her work.

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

Transit Hub:

• Review: New Yorker (here)

Ray K. Metzker and Ruth Thorne-Thomsen, Two of a Mind
Through November 17th

Laurence Miller Gallery
20 West 57th Street
New York, NY 10019

Ray K. Metzker: Intimations @Laurence Miller

JTF (just the facts): A total of 45 black and white works, variously framed in black and white and matted, and hung in the entry space and main gallery area. 22 of the images are sized 8x10 and were taken between 1956 and 1981; these prints are a mix of primarily vintage and a few later prints, in varying edition sizes (unique, 2, 3, 5, 6, 10, 25). Another 8 of the images are printed slightly larger at 11x14, spanning the years 1964-1983; these are printed in editions of 3, 5, 20, 25, or 30. There are 6 composite works in the show, each with a date when the images were taken and another when they were assembled; the works on display come from 1964/1964, 1965/2002, 1964/2006 (2), 1963/2006, and 1965/2006. Most are unique, although one was made in an edition of 3; outside dimensions for these works range from 15x18 to 31x22. Finally, there are a group of 9 images each 16x20 from 1981-2004; they are printed in editions of 6, 10 or 25. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Congratulations for staying power and long term commitment are probably in order for Ray Metzker and Laurence Miller, who are partnering for an astounding 20th solo show at the gallery. This particular exhibit includes a dense sampler of images from Metzker's recent European retrospective Light Lines, which originated at the Musée de l'Elysée, Lausanne, in 2007, and traveled to a few additional locations.

.

I've previously written plenty of times (see the links below) about Metzker's mastery of light and dark, the power of his blacks, his expert use of contrast, and the craftsmanship of his prints, so I won't rehash many of those same arguments and celebrations again here. What we have in this show is really "a little of this, a little of that": a few early urban images from Chicago, a couple of pictures from 1960s Europe, a few more from 1960s Philadelphia, a handful of composites and double frames, a few beach scenes, some 1970s New Mexico images, a Pictus Interruptus or two, some 1980s city scenes, and a handful of more recent landscapes and Philadelphia shots. As such, the exhibit steps back away from any particular project, and gives a more 50,000 foot view of the evolution of Metzker's photographic approach, highlighting both recurring themes (city sidewalks, solitary figures, shadows, multiple images) and new directions in appetizer-sized bites.

.

Apart from a few newly composed composites of repeated figures against deep black backgrounds, I'm not sure there is much here that will be haltingly new for experienced Metzker supporters; there are just wasn't enough space in this small gallery to give each of these separate bodies of work room to breathe. But this in no way diminishes the consistent quality of the work on view or the richness and variety of Metzker's meticulous graphic control. There is roughly 50 years of innovative monochrome experimentation on these walls, a succinct summary of the development of a striking and underappreciated photographic vocabulary.

.

Collector's POV: The prices for the works in this show are as follows. The 8x10s range in price from $6000 all the way to $55000, with many intermediate prices along the way. The 11x14s fall between $7500 and $35000, and the 16x20s range from $5000 to $12000. The composites are available between $35000 and $50000.

.

Metzker's work was much more available in the secondary markets in 2010 than in most recent years. Prices ranged between $1000 and $10000. The most recent composite to be found at auction sold for $22500 in 2009.

.

My favorite image in this show was the multiple exposure building abstraction, Chicago Loop, 1957; it's the image on the far right in the second installation shot. While we would certainly enjoy having a composite in our collection, the slashing lines of this early city scene would fit well with other images we already own.

.

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

Transit Hub:

• Review: New Yorker (here)
• Exhibit: The Photographs of Ray K. Metzker @Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2011 (here)
• Past Gallery Shows: AutoMagic (review here), Wanderings (review here)
• Book: Light Lines (review here)

Ray K. Metzker: Intimations

Through February 26th

Laurence Miller Gallery

20 West 57th Street

New York, NY 10019

Jessica Backhaus, I Wanted to See the World @Laurence Miller

JTF (just the facts): A total of 51 color photographs, framed in white and matted, and densely hung in the entry and main gallery spaces. All of the works are c-prints, in one of three sizes: 40x30 (in editions of 8), 24x20 or reverse (in editions of 8 or 15), and 14x11 or reverse (in editions of 15). The show contains 4 prints in the largest size, 22 in the middle size, and 25 in the smallest size. The various works are drawn from four different book projects. There are 11 images from Jesus and the Cherries (2001-2004), 17 images from One Day in November (2002-2008), 11 images from What Still Remains (2004-2008), and 12 images from I Wanted to See the World (2010). (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: It was likely William Eggleston who first popularized color photographs of simple everyday objects made special through the sheer force of his focused attention. This concept of grabbing a seemingly random fragment of life and infusing it with significance has now morphed into an entire genre of contemporary photography, with practitioners with styles as different as Wolfgang Tillmans, Rinko Kawauchi and Paola Ferrario. In the past decade, German photographer Jessica Backhaus has also been exploring the nature of the incidental via a series of book projects, sampled here in a kind of mini-retrospective first New York solo show.
.
Backhaus' approaches her overlooked objects with a sense of crisp, formal purity, and an eye for radiant color: red cherries in jars, orange carrots on the edge of a sink, a blue tennis ball in the gutter, a pink blanket on a clothesline. She explores the found geometries in the zigzag of carpeted stairs, the curvature of glasses of water, and the decay of a partially eaten apple or peeling sky blue paint. Water makes a repeated appearance, often infused with reflected, smeared color; her images capture drips, rivulets, wet pavement, and a variety of fogged, damp or sprinkled surfaces.

Backhaus takes this investigation of wetness to an entirely new level in her most recent body of work. These pictures document the reflections of colored buildings in the canals of Venice, her camera pointed down at the dappled, moving surface of the water. The bright colors become swirled, rippled and distorted, at turns broken and abstract. The color effects are both impressionistic and painterly, exercises in the marbling of pink and green, purple and yellow, or red and brown. They are images you can get lost in, endlessly following the intersecting waves and transitions.
.
Together, this is a satisfying introduction to Backhaus' work, spanning both the power of pared down simplicity and the lyricism of visual complexity.
.
Collector's POV: The works in this show are priced as follows: the 40x30 prints are $5800 each, the 24x20 prints are $3600 each, and the 14x11 prints are $2500 each. Backhaus' work has not yet reached the secondary markets in any meaningful way, 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)
• Reviews: New Yorker (here), Photograph (here, scroll down), Photo Booth (here)
• Book review: 5B4 (here)

Jessica Backhaus, I Wanted to See the World
Through October 30th

Laurence Miller Gallery
20 West 57th Street
New York, NY 10019

Denis Darzacq, HYPER @Laurence Miller

JTF (just the facts): A total of 15 color images, framed in white with no mat, and hung in the entry/reception and main gallery spaces. All of the c-prints are 38x52 or reverse, made in editions of 8, and taken in 2007/2008. A monograph of this work has been published by Filigranes Editions (here). A supporting exhibition entitled "Body Language" hangs salon style on one wall in the entry. It contains a grouping of 16 vintage works depicting bodies in motion taken by a wide variety of photographers. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: A trip down the aisles of a large supermarket or big box store can often feel like an assault on the senses: walls of bright colors and eye catching graphics jostle for attention, offering a dizzying array of life changing features and suspect benefits. The choices attack from all sides, pummeling consumers with a nearly infinite number of ways to buy.

.

French photographer Denis Darzacq has extended this simple metaphor to its logical conclusion by making startling images of young people drifting through the air amidst the consumer excess of French hypermarkets. Dancers dressed in everyday clothes alternately hang listless in the refrigerated section, dive face first near the shampoo, and lunge near the toilet paper. Every picture features a different flavor of mid-air balletic grace: falling, flying, floating, twirling and soaring, with some of the moves looking more like the unexpected reaction to an explosion or a fight, with bodies blown back, hanging face down like corpses or twisted like rag dolls. Since these works are not digital Photoshop constructions but actual stop-motion photographs, some of these moments of quiet, angelic hovering likely ended in punishing falls. The message is elegantly and exuberantly clear: there's an invisible battle going on in aisle three, and relentless consumerism is delivering a potent barrage of body blows. While we've seen this theme explored in plenty of contemporary photography, these works have a freshness and vitality that separates them from the depressing and hectoring hordes.
.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced in an escalating edition, starting at $7500, moving to $11500, and finishing at $15000, depending on the location in the edition. Darzacq's work has very little secondary market history, so gallery retail is likely the best option for interested collectors at this point. The various vintage prints hung in support of the main exhibit are priced between $2000 and $38000.

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

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Agence VU page (here)
• Features/Reviews: Lens culture (here), The Daily Beast (here), Photograph (here), The Independent (here)

Denis Darzacq, HYPER

Through March 27th

Laurence Miller Gallery

20 West 57th Street

New York, NY 10019

Ray K. Metzker, AutoMagic @Laurence Miller

JTF (just the facts): A total of 52 black and white works, alternately framed in black and white and matted, and hung in the entry space and main gallery area. 32 of the images are 8x10s and were taken between 1958 and 1965; these prints are a mix of primarily vintage and a few later prints, in varying edition sizes (5, 20, 25). A small group of images (5) are printed slightly larger at 11x14, spanning a wider number of years (1960-1989); these are also printed in editions of 5 and 20. There are 3 composite works in the show: one from 1965, another from 1964/1984, and a third from 1965/2002; they are 32x24, 30x22, and 18x24 respectively. Finally, there are a group of 12 recent images printed 16x20 from 2004-2009; they are printed in editions of 10. A new limited edition book of this body of work (also entitled AutoMagic) has been published by Only Photography (here) and is available from the gallery for $200. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Ray Metzker is clearly one the masters of photographic contrast. His careful control of the interplay of dark and light, and his understanding of the power of deep shadow and blackness to create drama in an image have made his work distinctive and original for more than 50 years. This terrific show brings together Metzker's images of automobiles from across his long career. With this subject, Metzker uses the curves and lines of the cars to create exciting compositions and finds unexpected abstractions in the reflective surfaces of paint, glass and chrome.

The show is loosely divided into groups of common details: car fragments, snow covered cars, parking lots, cars on the street, people in cars, cars from the side, multiples of cars, architecture reflected in cars, etc. The early works from Chicago and Philadelphia are extremely dark (the night views are often noir-ish), punctuated by a few small lines of white, a simple silhouette, or small patches of glare from a street light. The thick blacks are velvety and enveloping, with only the highlights coming forth to define the pictures.

The more recent images (nicknamed Autowackies) stay in the middle grey tones a bit more, but explode with complex reflections and refractions; adjacent buildings become intersecting wallpapers of grids and windows, densely applied to windshields, hoods, and expanses of curved metal. The pared down simplicity of his earlier work has given way to more exuberant clashes and cacophony.
.

Metzker's composites continue to be my favorite of his various projects. In two of the works on display in this show, the repetition of hundreds of tiny images (arrayed in strips) creates a fascinating all over patterning of black and white; only up close can the actual content of the variant images be grasped. The third composite uses multiple exposures to create layers of upside down geometries, ghostlike in their see-through overlaps.

.

Overall, the quality of the work in this show is consistently high. The installation effectively sets up sub themes and allows the work to show wide ranges of variation and experimentation within these constructs. They're all cars, but as fodder for Metzker, this routine subject seems limitless.
.

Collector's POV: The prices for the works in this show are as follows. Most of the vintage 8x10s are priced at $6000, although there are a few in this size that range higher: $9500, $10000, $15000, $18000, and even $45000; the later prints are $4000. The 11x14s are priced between $4000 and $10000. The three composites are $75000, $48000, and $50000. The recent 16x20s are $5000 each.

Metzker's work is not consistently available in the secondary markets, and as such, the price history is spotty. While a range for the past few years does exist (approximately $1000 to $8000), I don't think it is particularly representative of the real market for his under appreciated work. This past fall, a Metzker composite was sold at Christie's for $22500; this was the first quality Metzker I had seen at auction in quite a long time. We continue to consider Metzker a photographer that belongs in our collection, and there are plenty of works in this exhibit that could be made to fit into our collecting genres, given their level of abstraction.

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

Transit Hub:

• Light Lines: DLK COLLECTION review (here), 5B4 review (here)

Ray K. Metzker, AutoMagic
Through January 9th

Laurence Miller Gallery
20 West 57th Street
New York, NY 10019

The Abstracted Landscape @Laurence Miller

JTF (just the facts): A total of 19 black and white and color works, variously framed and matted, hung in the entry and main gallery space. This a group show of four gallery artists: Peter Bialobrzeski, Stephane Couturier, DoDo Jin Ming, and Toshio Shibata. (Installation shots at right.) The details for each artist's works are below:

• Peter Bialobrzeski: 2 c-prints, 60x50 each, in editions of 10, from 2005; 6 c-prints, 11x14, in editions of 9, from 2008; and 1 c-print, 51x65, in an edition of 5, from 2003
• Stephane Couturier: 1 c-print, 26x48, AP, from 1991; 1 c-print, 52x44, in an edition of 8, from 2005; and 1 digital c-print, 50x88, in an edition of 5, from 2004
• DoDo Jin Ming: 12 gelatin silver prints, hung as a single work, 55x60, in editions of 10, from 1996; 1 gelatin silver print, 30x40, in an edition of 10, from 2002; 1 digital c-print, 51x41, in an edition of 10, from 2004; and 1 digital c-print in two parts, overall 63x49, in an edition of 10, from 2004
• Toshio Shibata: 1 gelatin silver print, 20x24, in an edition of 25, from 1990; 1 gelatin silver print, 50x40, AP, from 1996; and 1 c-print, 50x40, in an edition of 10, from 2005

Comments/Context: This exhibit is a thematic group show of gallery artists, where images have been selected based on a broadly common handling of landscape elements. And while the show is entitled The Abstracted Landscape, none of the works on view is completely abstract in the traditional sense (i.e. non-figurative); rather these images are all landscapes that turn on compositional fragments of form and line, pattern and shape.

Peter Bialobrzeski is represented by two twilight building scenes from his series Lost in Transition (book reviewed here), a typology of shacks, and a massive hillside view from Heimat that dwarfs the people down to ant-like dots. Stephane Couturier's prints take the abstraction a bit further, where a roadway flanked by spindly trees and sculpted land becomes an exercise in blocks of color and texture; another image shows a terraced ground in an unreal shade of green, using the contrasts of the land to create juxtapositions of wild and controlled areas.

Three waterfalls by Toshio Shibata transform rushing water into cottony white curves; the most abstract image in the show peers straight down the face of a waterfall, turning the perspective upside down. (A recent Shibata book review can be found here.) And DoDo Jin Ming's negative prints of a faded sunflower field become a post-apocalyptic nightmare, complete with dark shadowy figures; her typology of pyramids plays with size as well as color, all variations on the simple triangular form.

Overall, this is a solid group show that highlights relevant work by each of the photographers included; the thematic construct is a bit thin, but the work itself is consistently well crafted.

(As an aside, for those of you who are familiar with the gallery space, the overall size of the display space has recently been reduced. What was once the second gallery room is now a private viewing space, and a door on the far side of the entry has now been closed off.)

Collector's POV: The prices for each of the four photographers in the show are as follows:

• Peter Bialobrzeski: $1500 for the small prints, $7500 for the Lost in Transition prints, and $15000 for the Heimat print
• Stephane Couturier: the prices were $7500, $15000, and $35000, based on ascending size
• DoDo Jin Ming: the group of 12 prints is priced at $10000 total, the Free Element print is $16000, and the two images from Behind My Eyes are $15000 and $10000
• Toshio Shibata: the small black and white print is $6000, the larger black and white is $25000, and the color image is $10000

There has been very little secondary market activity for any of these artists, so gallery retail is likely the best option for collectors in the short term. While none of these works is a great fit for our collection, I particularly enjoyed Shibata's look down the steep face of a waterfall (black and white) and Couturier's view through a crumbling light blue building (reminiscent of Gordon Matta-Clark).

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

Transit Hub:

• Peter Bialobrzeski: artist site (here)
• Stephane Couturier: NYTimes review, 1999 (here)
• DoDo Jin Ming: NYTimes review, 2002 (here)
• Toshio Shibata: artist site (here)

The Abstracted Landscape
Through November 14th

Laurence Miller Gallery
20 West 57th Street
New York, NY 10019

Book: Landscape Shibata Toshio

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2008 by the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and Ryoko Yomiuri Publications, in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name. 84 pages, with 74 images. Includes essays by Iizawa Kotaro and Fujimura Satomi, selected exhibitions and bibliography, and a list of public collections. (Cover shot at right, via Japan Exposures.)

Comments/Context: Not to be confused with his two monographs with similar names published by Nazareli Press (linked below), this volume is an exhibition catalogue of Japanese photographer Toshio Shibata's 2008 show at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, collecting together a sample of his recent color work, as well as selections from several earlier black and white projects going back to the early 1980s. So while not quite a retrospective, it certainly is an excellent overview book for those who want to get a broad understanding of his photography.

Unlike the many Japanese artists who have celebrated the natural world and its spiritual qualities, Shibata has focused his attention on the man made structures that have been introduced into the landscape: roadside retaining walls and concrete barriers, webbing to catch falling rock, terraced dams and reinforced reservoir spillways. In many ways, he has adapted the ideas of the New Topographics photographers of the 1970s (Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, et al) for his own environment, challenging the established notions of what a Japanese landscape should look like in the process.

His works in black and white are full of vaguely organic but unidentifiable geometric forms, stripes and checkerboards, zig-zags and chevrons, draped over the undulating land like chain mail, often with tufts of greenery growing from between the cracks. Water also plays a large role in these pictures, either tumbling down the face of a dam in frothy waterfalls, or pooled in reservoirs and man made lakes. And yet these images look nothing like anything you've seen anywhere else; they seem to be unique civil engineering solutions devised for the problems of Japanese construction, now suddenly more visible, as opposed to being consciously overlooked. Shibata has cropped out both the sky and horizon, drawing our attention to the details of the concrete, posing questions about man's interaction with nature and about the traditional definitions of landscape beauty.

The recent large scale color images tackle this exact same terrain, almost as a rephotography project. Many of the same structures that we first saw as stark black and white contrasts are now softer, more real, in their neutral earth tones of tan, green and brown. The same underlying issues are of course at work here, but the integration of nature and the man altered landscape is more subtle, and arcs of color add an additional element of form to the compositions.

A final group of early night pictures from the 1980s round out the book. These too seem indebted to the New Topographics photographers, as Shibata has singled out roadside hotels and restaurants, toll booths and gas stations, centering on the flat horizontals of the architecture and road, lit by pinpricks of light in the enveloping darkness.

Overall, this volume is a solid introduction to the work of an important contemporary Japanese photographer.

Collector’s POV: Toshio Shibata is represented by Laurence Miller Gallery in New York (here), Gallery Luisotti in Santa Monica, CA, (here, on artnet) and Tepper Takayama Fine Arts in Boston (here). Shibata's work has very little auction history, so gallery retail is likely the best bet for collectors who wish to follow up. There are quite a few of Shibata's black and white concrete patterns that would fit well into our city/industrial genre; we just need to spend some time looking at a number of prints to find the one that matches our collection best.

Transit Hub:

• Artist website (here)
• Profile on Polaroid website (here)
• Reclamation, 2006 @Laurence Miller Gallery (here)
• Landscape and Landscape2 @Nazraeli Press website (here)

Helen Levitt, A Memorial Tribute @Laurence Miller

JTF (just the facts): A total of 80 photographs (both black and white and color) and 1 video, hung in the entry, and two gallery spaces. Amidst a handful of vintage prints, there are three enlarged images of graffiti (48x38), from 1939 and printed in 2000, and a poster from an earlier exhibit in the entry area. The 1944 silent black and white video In the Street, made by Levitt, James Loeb, and James Agee, runs in a continuous loop in this area as well.

Most of the vintage black and white prints are from the period of 1939 to 1942, though there are a few prints from the mid 1980s as well. These prints are generally 11x14 or 8x10 (or reverse), and are variously framed and matted, primarily shown in the main gallery space, with a few hung in the entry. The 5 color dye transfers are 18x22, and were made between 1971 and 1980, and are intermingled with the black and white work.

The 30 black and white contact prints in the "First Proofs" area are of varying sizes, and were made circa 1940; they are framed in brown wood and matted, and displayed against bright yellow walls in a separate room. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: When New York street photographer Helen Levitt passed away at the age of 95 earlier this March, I was surprised by the number of tributes and obituaries written by working photographers that were posted into the blogosphere. Given both the sheer number and the sincerity of these eulogies, Levitt's work has clearly made an impression on the generation of photographers active today, especially those based in New York.

This "memorial" exhibit does a fine job of covering the high points of Levitt's long career, as well as digging deeper into her process as an artist. Of course, the show is anchored by a variety of vintage prints of Levitt's signature subjects: children and old folks, playing in the streets and watching from stoops and staircases. In some ways, these images have become a reminder of authentic New York life, of running and laughing and blowing bubbles, of bringing a chair right out onto the sidewalk and sitting down to watch the show and visit with neighbors. The joy she found in the streets was genuine, without a trace of mocking, even when the scenes have their own warmth and irony.

When you visit the show, be sure to take a few minutes to sit down and watch the silent movie In the Streets. It is full of faces, grubby kids eating, dogs and cats, and Levitt's own poetry of everyday life, in full motion. There are two scenes worth looking out for: one where kids push a barrel over an open fire hydrant, creating a geyser of water spewing high into the sky, and another where a woman is seen from behind, walking along carrying a mop and swinging her hips in time. Both are classic Levitt.

The smaller prints entitled "First Proofs" are also worth a longer look, since they provide a glimpse into Levitt's process of refining her compositions and editing her images. The typical Levitt subject matter can be found in these works (people, store windows, etc.), but they are seen in variations and alternate views, as she experimented to capture just the right interaction of the figures.

What I like about this show is that it strikes a good balance between greatest hits and lesser known images, providing a sampler of a wide variety of her work, while at the same time offering new angles for understanding her artistic approach. It's a show worth catching before it closes.
.

Collector's POV: Many of the images in this show are courtesy of the estate, and as such, are not for sale. In general, the vintage works that are available are priced between $7500 and $15000, with a few of the more famous outliers at $25000, $60000, and $98000 respectively. The color dye transfers from the 1970s are priced at $15000, and the larger modern prints are $7500 each. The "First Proof" contact prints are priced between $2500 and $15000.

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

Transit Hub:

• Short reviews of this show: NY Times (here), Wall Street Journal (here)
• Slide Show, review by DLK COLLECTION (here)

Helen Levitt, A Memorial Tribute

Through June 26th

Laurence Miller Gallery

20 West 57th Street
New York, NY 10019

.

UPDATE: There is also a small tribute now on vew at the Met in the second floor hallway (which you walk past on the way to the Photography galleries). Though not exactly a full exhibit, it does contain 13 well selected vintage images by Levitt.

Book: Slide Show, The Color Photographs of Helen Levitt

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2005 by powerHouse Books (here). 120 pages, with 110 color images. Includes a foreword by John Szarkowski.

Comments/Context: I don't think it was until we moved back to New York that I really started to resonate with Helen Levitt's work. Her 1930s and 1940s black and white images of children in the streets, while undoubtedly well crafted, somehow didn't grab my attention; I was more drawn to the architectural transformations documented by Berenice Abbott from the same period.

But it is her color work from the 1960s and 1970s that has made me change my mind a bit on Levitt's rightful place in the history books. How's this for a statement: of the great black and white photographers working prior to the 1950s, Levitt was the most successful at embracing color photography and making a superlative body of color work in her later career. The only other "old school" photographers I can come up with who made the transition to decent color work are Harry Callahan (his later dye transfers), Andre Kertesz (Polaroids) and Walker Evans (Polaroids). If I've missed some glaring great example, leave it in the comments, but I think the statement stands - Levitt did something that almost no one else did.

The images in this book perfectly capture the feeling of New York in the summer (no wonder her work is often labeled "social realism"). Virtually all the pictures are of people, not straight on portraits, but people in the context of their lives: on street corners, with pets, near parked cars, sitting on stoops, smoking, waiting, taking a break. Her compositions often capture the world slightly off-kilter, with spontaneous secondary stories playing out on the periphery, just like they do in real life. On first glance, these images look like snapshots; upon further review, they turn out to be tiny vignettes of everyday life, somehow optimistic amidst generally poor living conditions and plenty of old age. Her use of color isn't self-conscious; she doesn't use super-saturated attention grabbing color. Instead, color is used as just one of many tools that can make a picture resolve into something interesting, the hood or a car, or a dress, or a door frame suddenly providing a visual contrast. And even though there are a few dated fashions and hairstyles, these pictures have a timeless quality to them, as though you could step into the street in parts of New York in August and see these exact same stories playing out all over again.
.
Collector's POV: Levitt's vintage silver prints from the 1930s and 1940s come up at auction from time to time, ranging in price from $10000 to $60000. Later prints from these same negatives are typically priced between $2000 and $6000. Her dye transfer prints have been much more scarce: only a handful of prints (some vintage, some printed in the 1990s) at auction in the past five years, selling for between $2000 and $12000. Levitt is represented by Laurence Miller Gallery (here) in New York, Fraenkel Gallery (here) in San Francisco, and Robert Klein Gallery (here) in Boston. While these images don't neatly fit into our city/industrial genre (too many people), they are growing on me over time, so perhaps there will be a place in our collection for one or more of these prints at some point in the future.

Transit Hub:

• NY Times obituary (here)
• Interviews: NPR 2002 (here) and WNYC 2001 (here)
• James Agee's forward to A Way of Seeing (here)
• Crosstown (here)
• Helen Levitt - In the street @FOAM, Oct 2008-Jan 2009 (here, in Dutch)

Sanne Sannes, Erotica @Laurence Miller

JTF (just the facts): A total of 18 black and white images, framed in black/white and matted, and hung in a small anteroom gallery. The prints are mostly 10x8, and all are vintage, from the period 1962-1965. (Installation shot at right.)

Comments/Context: Dutch photographer Sanne Sannes' first US show, coming over 40 years after his death, has a youthful 1960s confidence. The images are the opposite of the cool, detatched nudes of Edward Weston - active, vibrant, dark and grainy, exploring the emotions of his subjects, rather than the forms of their bodies. Many are head shots, with blurs of flowing hair and broad smiles, full of life.

.

The loose, shadowy style of these images is certainly reminiscent of the 1960s work of Gerard Petrus Fieret and Ed van der Elsken. All three captured freedom, exhilaration and sheer joy in ways that were (at the time) completely and radically new.

Collector's POV: The images in the show are priced between $6500 and $16000. The look and feel of these images is so different from the nudes we have in our collection that I'm not sure they would work sharing a wall together. That said, a couple of the images caught my eye just enough to make me wonder whether they might fit.

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

Sanne Sannes, Erotica

Through May 2nd

Laurence Miller Gallery

20 West 57th Street
New York, NY 10019

Ray K. Metzker, Wanderings @Laurence Miller

JTF (just the facts): A total of 31 images, mostly framed in white and matted, and hung in the entry and one large room in the gallery. The pictures range from 1969 to 2008, though most were taken in the 1980s. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: If a musician has had a long enough career, along the way at some point, all the songs that didn't make it onto one of the albums are gathered up and released on their own as a group. By definition, none of these songs was so great that it merited singular attention in the past, but at this point, they are good enough to help fill in a broader and deeper view of the artist's entire output, and are especially of interest to committed fans.

The current Metzker show on view at Laurence Miller is the photographic equivalent of this out takes and b-sides album. It is a collection of odds and ends that fell outside Metzker's more famous projects, images that don't exactly fit into a neat and tidy narrative of his work. What is common to the pictures is Metzker's keen eye for abstraction and pattern. There are fences, reflections in car windshields, dark shadows, dense wood construction, and even nature (trees/bushes), all seen with a fragmented two dimensional flatness that concentrates the attention on the lines and forms rather than the subject matter. Another group of images use a blurred tree as an interrupting device, throwing the images out of kilter, echoing his Pictus Interruptus series of the late 1970s. While none of these qualify as Metzker's best, his unique approach to picture making is very much in evidence, and there are many excellent pictures to be found among these wanderings.

Collector's POV: For the most part, the images in the show are $5000, with one at $6000 and another at $10000. There is a small group of vintage 1960's images from Metzker's more famous work tucked away on one wall, priced between $7500 and $40000. We still don't have a Metzker in our collection at this point, although we continue to actively look for just the right one. In this show, I enjoyed the four fence images pictured above best.

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

Ray K. Metzker, Wanderings
Through May 2nd

Laurence Miller Gallery
20 West 57th Street

New York, NY 10019

Book: Ray K. Metzker, Light Lines

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2008 by Steidl in conjunction with a retrospective exhibition of Metzker's work held at the Musée de l’Eysée, Lausanne. 288 pages, including 245 black and white images. With an essay by William Ewing, a transcript of Metzker in conversation with Nathalie Herschdorfer and a chronology.

Comments/Context: In the history of photography, there have been few artists who have photographed (and printed) black as well as Ray K. Metzker. This claim may sound ridiculous given the huge number of photographers who have worked in the medium of the gelatin silver print over the past century or so, but one look at this fine retrospective monograph of Metzker's 50 year career as a photographer should be enough to make a persuasive argument that he took black places others could only dream about.

Almost from the very beginning, Metzker's work has been defined by shadows and low light situations, where black becomes the dominant color, both the primary graphical element and the backdrop. His blacks have a richness and depth, a crisp inky darkness used to make powerful contrasts. They are not washed out, fuzzy, or grainy; they are executed with breathtaking perfection.

Metzker first pointed his camera at the urban surfaces of the Chicago Loop, taking formal pictures full of rhythm, repetition and pattern. Over the years that followed, in various locations from Europe and Philadelphia to Atlantic City and New Mexico, Metzker continued to deconstruct cities and their inhabitants. His images became increasingly complex, relying on meticulous darkroom manipulations (using multiple negatives) to create couplets, double frames, and dense composites. Fragments of pictures were seamlessly sewn together, juxtapositions creating surprising contrasts and interactions, all intensified by the ever present blacks. In the late 1970s, he added another layer of abstraction to these ideas, a fleeting glimpse of a blurred piece of white paper, in a series called Pictus Interruptus. Most recently, he has applied his aesthetic to more natural subjects, abstracted wispy trees and leaves, either unspoiled or placed in the context of the city.

This volume is a comprehensive, chronological look at an important photographer's entire output. It does an excellent job of telling the broader story of his approach, and includes a variety of work made since the Unknown Territory retrospective in 1984.

Collector's POV: Metzker is one of the artists we have wanted to add to our collection for a very long time. His work would fit perfectly into our city genre, and we are particularly fond of his multiple negative images and composites. While Callahan also did multiples, Metzker took this idea and transformed it into something altogether more complex and kinetic. In addition, Metzker's darkroom craftsmanship (and the amazing blacks and shadows) make his images ones that stand the test of repeated viewing quite well in our view.

Surprisingly, Metzker's work is not widely available in the secondary markets, and none of his best composites or double frames have come up for auction in several years, although we have seen a few in gallery group shows sprinkled here and there. So we're still looking for just the right one that we both fall in love with and can afford. Metzker is represented by Laurence Miller Gallery in New York (site here).

Read another review of this book at 5B4 (here)

Book: Peter Bialobrzeski, Lost in Transition

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2007 by Hatje Cantz. Includes 53 color images, taken in 28 cities around the world, with an essay by Michael Glasmeier. (Cover image at right.)

Comments/Context: There is an old song by the Band called Twilight that has a chorus that goes something like this:

.

Don't send me no distant salutations

Or silly souvenirs from far away

Don't leave me alone in the twilight,

Cause twilight is the loneliest time of day

.

German photographer Peter Bialobrzeski's newest pictures are all taken at this fleeting moment in the day, when dusk is falling, the lights have just come on, and the cooler breeze gives you a shiver. His subjects are the futuristic mega-constructions that are multiplying all over the world, rapidly gobbling up the old and remaking the world in their own distinct science fiction aesthetic. His pictures have no people, no identifiers of place, no signs or landmarks to give away their locations; whether we are in Abu Dhabi or Bremen, Jakarta or Zurich, it just doesn't seem to matter. When small towns are overrun by chain stores, we bemoan the "Starbucksification" of the neighborhood; Bialobrzeski's images remind us that this homogenization is happening on a much larger scale, as cities across the globe make the transition from old to new.

.

While most photographs of great buildings from the 1920s and 1930s had a romantic aura, these pictures seem to have a more complex set of emotions mixed together. Some of the darker images seem to be precursors to a Metropolis or Blade Runner style world, a neo-noir movie in the making. Others are more mundane, with grubby construction sites encroaching on older warehouses and worn out factories.

.

This is not to say that these are not beautiful images; indeed they are. One of my favorite pastimes with this book has been to flip through the images slowly, simply looking at the sublime palette of sky colors that Bialobrzeski has captured in this series: greys and soft blacks, mauves and deep purples, and a nuanced spectrum of blues, all carefully sequenced. Due to the stark fluorescent lights that inhabit nearly every locale, the images seem to radiate a silent and lonely brightness.

.

Overall, this is a book that provokes some complicated thinking: about architecture and cities, about the "modern world", and about how our collective society is evolving around us.

The artist's website can be found here.

Collector's POV: There was an exhibition of Bialobrzeski's images from this series (printed 40x50) at the Laurence Miller Gallery last fall (here), which we somehow missed. His previous books, particularly Neon Tigers, have been well received.

For more on Bialobrzeski, see an interview (here) and another review of the book (here) at Conscientious.