Joel Sternfeld, First Pictures @Luhring Augustine

JTF (just the facts): A total of 72 color photographs, framed in white and unmatted, and displayed in the entry, the main gallery space and the smaller back room. All of the works are modern pigment prints, sized roughly 9x13, in editions of 5+2AP. The images were taken between 1971 and 1980. The show is divided into four separate projects:

Nags Head, 1975
At the Mall, New Jersey, 1980
Rush Hour
Happy Anniversary Sweetie Face!

A monograph of this body of work has been published by Steidl (here). (Installation shots at right.)

 

Comments/Context: Looking at the early pictures of any artist offers the chance to go back to the beginning and see the experiments and false starts that ultimately evolved into a mature style. Inherent in this kind of analysis is a form of selection bias, where we already know what we are looking for, and so select those images that fit our knowledge of what came later. The opportunity to examine four of Joel Sternfeld's early photographic projects provides just this type of historical pattern matching, where we search the past for signs of the future, discovering visual ideas that were still rough and incompletely formed, but harbingers of later paths and explorations.

My initial impression of these first pictures is that they are looser and more fluid than Sternfeld's later work. His use of a hand held 35mm camera instead of the view camera he adopted later gives these images much more freedom. Some border on a snapshot aesthetic (especially the ones taken on the streets of New York and Chicago), and even the most formal of the compositions are not as strict and rigid as what would come later. In the context of this more forgiving approach, it's absolutely possible to see Sternfeld testing the limits of color, refining the idea of a carefully composed self contained narrative, and playing with subtle visual irony and cynicism, sewing the seeds of the stylistic hallmarks of his successful mature work.

There are many color exercises on these walls, both tighter still lifes and broader scenes that use color as a defining element. Chunky red high heels compete with blue woven polyester pants, a green dress balances a yellow cab, a striped bathing suit sets off deep tan lines, and a flash of blond hair piled up in a beehive has a honey glow. More complex color compositions find a boy with green shoes posed outside a suburban home of the same color (set off by bright pink flowers), a woman riding in a sky blue convertible with matching blue sunglasses, and a neon juke box flanked by lingering men and Playboy centerfolds. Sternfeld was clearly examining the play of different colors, and considering how those weights impacted the underlying structure of his pictures.

There are also plenty of stories and narratives here, many with a nuanced undercurrent of skepticism or humor. Boys with Farrah Fawcett t-shirts pop wheelies on their bikes in the driveway, a baby is carried in a laundry basket mixed in with the dirty clothes, a cop questions a ramshackle beach house resident, and an old man in sunglasses peers with trepidation at an ominously dark sky. Many of the images from Sternfeld's series of mall shots take this further, with lots of men with center-parted feathered hair, moustaches, chest hair, and gold chains posed in odd interior settings, one with an array of wigs and a fluffy dog as props. The beginnings of formality are in evidence in many of these pictures, where compositions are being pared down to their essentials. An emerging political or social edge is also apparent: smoke stacks outside the parking lot of the Tropicana, an oil tank in the window of an empty diner, or a Christina's World echo facing the Sears Auto Service building.

These early images grew more striking as I gave them more looking time. At first they seemed appropriately uneven, with a good number of misses. But even these weaker outcomes show Sternfeld pushing and trying, and the best of the lot absolutely foreshadow the Sternfeld pictures we all know. I came away extremely impressed with the rigor of Sternfeld's trial and error in his early years, his inquiries and questions given visual form, his preliminary steps thoughtful and appropriately risky.

Collector's POV: The prints in the show are priced at $7500 each. Sternfeld's work is widely available in the secondary markets, particularly his most famous images, which have been printed in editions of 50 or even 100. Recent prices have ranged between $2000 and $100000, with his most famous pictures generally in a zone between $10000 and $30000.

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

• Reviews/Features: PhotoBooth (here), Capital New York (here), Guardian (here), Time LightBox (here), Wayne Ford (here), TimeOut New York (here)
• Exhibition: FOAM, 2012 (here)

Joel Sternfeld, First Pictures

Through February 4th
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Luhring Augustine

531 West 24th Street

New York, NY 10011

Luisa Lambri, Certain Variables @Luhring Augustine

I have a handful of shows in the backlog from the summer that I think merit a discussion, even though they are now closed. I'll be working my way through these before I dig into the new Fall offerings.
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JTF (just the facts): A total of 13 Laserchrome prints, framed in white with no matting, and hung in the entry, main gallery, and one back room. The images range in size from 29x24 to 43x35 and are available in editions of 5. All of the negatives are from 2007. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: With a cursory glance at Luisa Lambri's new photographs, it might be tempting to slap a label on them and think we can characterize what they're all about. Calling them Minimalism or lumping them in with other architectural photographs from across time would be the two easiest paths forward, since her works are, in fact, elemental geometric images taken through the skylights of famous Modernist buildings. But I think those conclusions would be evidence of laziness on the part of the viewer; I think there's quite a bit more to be discovered here beyond figuring out which bucket or category they might belong in.
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Most of the images in this show have the exact same framing: an upward view out a glass skylight at the Sheats-Goldstein House, where a leafy canopy of trees hangs overhead. Two parallel edges of the window running vertically through the frame act almost like a prism, subtly fracturing the natural scene. Changes in the light conditions generate images that range from hazy white Southern California brightness to dense dark green with moody shadows. Aside from a few fallen leaves trapped on the outside of the glass, the only variable is the light; everything else in the frame stays constant.

While this kind of rigorous set up may sound like the recipe for an academic exercise in photographic tonality, I think Lambri's approach is less about rigid rules and tedious variations and more about a personal response to a specific space across time. The images are full of soft contemplation and quiet meditation, an experience of nature via the context of the building and through the eyes of the architect who placed that skylight just so. They are gradual and intimate, where fleeting shadows dance rhythmically across the glass surface or an ephemeral beam of faint sunlight pokes through the leaves. There is the strong feeling of seeing the "outside" from the "inside" and of becoming intricately involved in the architecture, rather than just recognizing its surface features.

I think this is a case where simplicity is deceiving; these pictures have much more personality than a Minimalist nametag might imply. Instead of showing us obvious views of soaring rooflines or elegant siting, Lambri has brought us down to the experience of the individual, showing us both the wonder and the nearly infinite variation that can come from such a controlled setting.
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Collector's POV:The images in the show are priced at either $10500 or $12000 based on size. Lambri's work has very little secondary market history, so gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point
 
Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
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Transit Hub:

• Exhibition: Luisa Lambri, Being There @Hammer, 2010 (here)
• Venice Biennale, 2010 (here)

Luisa Lambri, Certain Variables
Through August 11

Luhring Augustine
531 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011

Book: Joel Sternfeld, iDubai

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2010 by Steidl (here). 96 pages, with 243 color images. Includes an essay by Jonathan Crary. All of the images were taken using an Apple iPhone camera. The book itself is small, thin, and rectangular, with the images printed in sets of three per page, each picture roughly the size of an iPhone display. The book is covered in gold sparkled cloth, with a huge gold bar code on the back. (Cover shot at right, via Amazon.)

Comments/Context: If you take a step back and look at Joel Sternfeld's photography over the past decade or so, human sustainability, in the form of how we live our lives, comes back again and again as an undercurrent of exploration. He has documented utopian communities, delegates at climate change conferences, and the subtle nuances of his local Massachusetts landscape (review here). His newest collection of work, found in the book iDubai, takes these ideas even further, via the ubiquity of his mobile phone camera. It is a sustained indictment of consumption as a way of life, a penetrating critique of the excesses and rootless materialism of modern living.

Virtually all the images in this book were taken inside one of Dubai's many over the top shopping malls, where marble floors and glass elevators connect an endless stream of affluent shops, food courts, and indoor entertainments. Basking in the glow of gaudy fluorescent lights, his subjects wander around in a trance, alternating between boredom and apathy, slumping listlessly in pre-arranged seating areas or emotionlessly pushing strollers and shopping carts from one artificial diversion to the next. His pictures document the apex (or ultimate limits) of globalization, where men in robes and headscarves can go bowling, shop at IKEA, get a sandwich from Subway, and take their kids to the Elmo show. After we get past the initial surprise of seeing Middle Eastern families juxtaposed with Western commerce, the pictures take us back to a relentless sameness, the stale, ordinary, mindless repetition of teen fashions, luxury jewelry, and high-end coffee that has blanketed the world.

When the first handheld cameras were introduced many decades ago, many ridiculed them as toys, but some artists found freedom in the movement they allowed and discovered new and exciting pictures that were enabled by the small form factor. We are now in the midst of a new revolution, where the mobile phone camera has empowered an entirely new generation of people to make pictures, and once again, the establishment has scoffed at what a "citizen journalist" might accomplish with such a dumbed down tool. Armed with his iPhone, Sternfeld has made his photographs with the ultimate consumer device, making himself part of the culture of aspirational consumption he is trying to document. He has clearly captured the feeling of his subject, leveling his criticism with sharp effectiveness. The question remains, however: are these great photographs?

In general, it would be hard not to characterize these images as snapshots, and given the sheer number of pictures included in the book, it seems the camera phone encourages a prolific approach to image making. More than any one particular image, iDubai is about the piling up of imagery into a larger whole, of catching hundreds of snippets of the story and weaving them together, of everything adding up to rich portrait of mall life. When Walker Evans made pictures with a Polaroid SX-70, even though the technology was wholly different than what he had used previously, the pictures he made still bore the hallmark of his eye. When Sternfeld uses an iPhone, the formal clarity that I associate with his view camera pictures is gone, replaced by a more fleeting attempt to resolve his compositions; his originality as a photographer seems to have been diluted by these "always on" tools - I can't discern a signature Sternfeld look, even though the narrative as a whole coalesces strongly.

Overall, I think this is the kind of project that is most successful in book form, or when displayed as a dense, atmospheric installation of many images, where the whole is far more interesting and memorable than any one picture on its own. What I take away is Sternfeld's view of how depressing, homogenized mall culture has permeated every corner of the globe, and how it creates a collective unreality where we lose sight of our connections to our communities. While this book is shiny and luxurious on the outside, it delivers a scathing censure of the global culture we are so actively building.

Collector’s POV: Joel Sternfeld is represented by Luhring Augustine in New York (here). At this point, Sternfeld's work is readily available in the secondary markets, especially his most famous images (which have been printed in editions of 50 or even 100). In recent years, prices have ranged between $2000 and $100000, with a sweet spot for the greatest hits between $10000 and $30000.

Transit Hub:

• Review: The National (here)
• Feature: New Yorker Photo Booth (here)

Daido Moriyama, Hawaii @Luhring Augustine

JTF (just the facts): A total of 52 black and white photographs, hung in the entry, main gallery, and one of the back rooms. 29 of the images are from the recent Hawaii series, taken/printed between 2007 and 2010. All of these works are 39x59 (or reverse) and are framed in blond wood without mats; the unique prints are hung edge to edge in the gallery. The back room contains a selection of vintage work of Japan from the 1970s and 1980s. These prints range in size from 7x10 to 14x17, and are framed in black and matted. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: One of the most interesting "what if" games that can be played with photographers from across the history of the medium is to perform the thought experiment of what would have happened if a photographer with a signature style had gone elsewhere to make pictures. What if Atget had visited the streets of New York or Cairo? What if Ansel Adams had made images of the Himalayas or the Andes? What if Sander had taken portraits in India or China? (Another recent example of this phenomenon would be Eggleston's images of Paris, here.) The effect is somewhat like musicians making covers, taking someone else's songs and making them their own; sometimes the mashup creates something wholly original and unexpected, and sometimes the combination doesn't quite work.

This exhibit extends this line of thinking, with the Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama making pictures of Hawaii, using a group of the artist's vintage images of Japan as a counterweight for comparison. The older works provide a reminder of Moriyama's powerful visual vocabulary: dark shadowy images, with skewed off-kilter angles, harsh contrasts, and a rawness that often mixes the gloomy and the menacing. His best images uncover the dark underbelly of the streets, capturing the cultural nuances of Japan in gritty, grainy blackness.

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The island life of Hawaii, with its shakas and mellow aloha spirit, presents a surprising challenge for Moriyama: where can a visitor find the brooding or sinister in this paradise? Moriyama does his best to apply his trademark darkness to palm trees and ferns, beaches and hotels, jungles and clouded hills, tourist shops and conch shells, but the overall effect lacks the malignant edginess that haunts his images of Tokyo; he has found some unexpected surface oddities, but the subjects feel a bit too obvious and superficial. Visually, the big prints (roughly 3 by 5 feet) and their shadowy palette make for a jarring view of the easy going, sunny destination, but the subject matter just doesn't lend itself all that well to deep psychological probing. The real culture of Hawaii is hidden somewhere else, far from the welcoming hula girls, tiki fabrics, and flowers offered to visitors.

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I actually think that this work will function best as a small stand alone book, as a document of Moriyama's eye as applied to Hawaii. But in the end, I think the sightseer content of the pictures defies a more obscure and difficult reading; we've traded the threatening growl of Moriyama's iconic 1971 stray dog for a dog in sunglasses lying on a pile of cash.

Collector's POV: The large black and white prints in the front room are priced at $9500 each. The smaller vintage prints in the back are either $7500, $10000, or $15000. Moriyama's work has not been widely available in the secondary markets in recent years; it almost seems like there are more of his vintage photobooks running around than his actual prints. Prices have generally ranged between $1000 and $20000, with his well known image Stray Dog, Misawa, Aomori, being a repeated best seller.
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Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Reviews: Artforum (scroll down, here), Artinfo.com (here), The Last Magazine (here)

Daido Moriyama, Hawaii

Through March 13th

Luhring Augustine

531 West 24th Street

New York, NY 10011

Luisa Lambri, Photographs @Luhring Augustine

JTF (just the facts): A total of 14 black and white Laserchrome prints, framed in white and minimally displayed in the entry, main gallery, and one back room. The images are of three different sizes (29x25, 30x36, and 48x37) and are available in editions of 5. All of the negatives are from 2008. (Marginal installation shot at right.)

Comments/Context: Italian photographer Luisa Lambri makes architectural images in the buildings constructed by the masters of modernity, and instead of documenting the triumphant vision and bold details that we have seen so many times before, she interprets the spaces in more personal ways and finds introspective moments of meditative quiet.

This is perhaps the subtlest show of photography I have seen in quite a while. On one wall, a grid of six images taken in the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea in Galicia, Spain (built by renowned Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza) are displayed, spread widely on a large blank wall. At first glance, these images appear identical, and are vaguely reminiscent of stairwells photographed by Tina Modotti and Charles Sheeler. As you contemplate these images, minute variations in the light in the images present themselves as slight tonal gradations and color shifts, so small as to be nearly imperceptible. The other images in the exhibit are also grouped to highlight these ethereal permutations.

These solemn and quiet abstractions grew on me over time and I started to appreciate a bit more their tender intimacy. I came around to seeing these images as sensory exercises in light, less about realism and more about minimalism. If however you are wound tight and moving quickly when you see this show, you will have little patience for these delicacies and will likely leave mystified.

Collector's POV: These images will, of course, appeal to the all white, open and airy, minimalist crowd. The images in the show are priced at $9000, $10000, and $12000 based on size. Lambri's work has been virtually absent from the secondary markets for photography, so retail is likely your only avenue for acquiring her work in the short term.

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

Luisa Lambri, Photographs
Through February 7

Luhring Augustine
531 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011

Joel Sternfeld, Oxbow Archive @Luhring Augustine

JTF (just the facts): 13 large scale color landscapes, approximately 5' x 7' each, shown in the entry, front, and two back rooms of the gallery. (see installation shot at right) In editions of 3, plus 2 APs. Negatives from 2005-2007, prints from 2008.

Comments/Context: It's been more than 20 years since Joel Sternfeld produced the work for which he is best known, the series of unexpected, paradoxical, and surprising work from American Prospects. The word most associated with these pictures is "ironic", as exemplified by the image of the firefighter picking out a pumpkin while a house burns in the background.

One of the interesting challenges for the mid-career artist is how to get beyond the work that made you famous; how do you continue to innovate, without repeating yourself or becoming bored. Often, this means heading deeper into more personal territory and taking some more risks with images that are less obviously appealing to the "market" that has developed around the early work. So if you go to this exhibit hoping to find a repeat of American Prospects, you will be left puzzled. But if you go without preconceptions, I think you will find this exhibit quite satisfying, in a low key, quiet way.

All of the images in the show were taken in Northampton, Massachusetts, through the seasons over a couple of years. These are landscapes, but not the majestic grand gestures of Ansel Adams. This is second growth scrub forest, river flats, and meadows of weeds, scenes perfectly reminiscent of the sometimes anonymous and deadening landscape of current day New England. The pictures are grouped into seasons, with rooms for summer and fall in the back, and winter/spring together in the main room.

But unlike the less than beautiful California landscapes of Robert Adams, there is a touching affection buried in these images. There is no irony here; in fact, there are no people at all and no clever juxtapositions. These are pictures of a local, who has taken the time to really see the landscape around him, even thought it might not fit the traditional definitions of beauty. This is a person who is noticing and enjoying the turning of the seasons, and selecting out those moments when the yarrow is high, or the river is frozen, or the warm spring light has finally come back after months of dismal grey. These pictures seem to me to be perfectly grounded in the thoughts and emotions of a 21st century world: what have development and global warming done to our traditional lands? how can we re-embrace the local world around us and reconnect to something more meaningful that consumerism? how can we get more in tune with the seasons and the local foods that grow in our communities? (A few Bill McKibben essays would be a nice pairing for this work.)

These pictures will not blow your hair back when you see them in the gallery. And whether they will stand up to the tests of time is still unknown. Perhaps they will be looked back on through the lens of heightened care for the world around us and seem emblematic of the thoughts of these times. Regardless, these pictures reflect the real sentiments of an artist who is watching the nuanced changes in the world around him. And for that, they should be praised.

Collector's POV: The images are priced at $50000 each, which given their size and the prevailing market for Sternfeld's work, seems about right for retail.

As an aside, as relatively anonymous collectors, we are used to receiving the frosty attitude of gallery staff, designed for the unwashed walk-ins. I was therefore pleasantly surprised to get not only a friendly greeting, but genuine enthusiasm for the work from the staff at Luhring Augustine. And when I inquired about the book published to coincide with the show and found they were already sold out, they went out of their way to offer me options for getting a copy later. Well done. Gallery folks out there, think of me as the mystery shopper at Burger King, checking to see if I get a hot meal and a clean bathroom. (For future reference, I am particularly annoyed by misdirection and sneakiness with the price list.) Luhring Augustine passed with flying colors, and made me eager for my next visit.

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

Joel Sternfeld, Oxbow Archive
Through October 4th

Luhring Augustine
531 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011