Christer Strömholm, Les Amies de Place Blanche @ICP

JTF (just the facts): A total of 26 black and white photographs, framed in black and matted, and hung against grey walls in a single room gallery space on the lower level of the museum. All of the works are lifetime gelatin silver prints lent by the estate, taken between 1955 and 1968. No dimension or edition information was provided for any of the works on view. A glass case in the center of the room contains 4 gelatin silver prints, 3 contact sheets, 4 books, 1 catalogue, and 1 address book. A catalog of the exhibition is available from the museum for $55 (here). (Installation shots at right © International Center of Photography, 2012. Photographs by John Berens.)

Comments/Context: Swedish photographer Christer Strömholm has long been well known in European photography circles, but his exposure here in the United States has generally been limited to the circulation of his sought after photobooks. The ICP has taken a first step toward ameliorating this situation by giving Strömholm his first US museum show, a one room summary of his best known body of work - the transgendered and cross dressing men of Place Blanche in Paris from the late 1950s and early 1960s. It's a classic example of a well executed photo essay or tightly self contained project.

The reason that these images have been so well received over the years is that they are built on the combination of trust and empathy that is the hallmark of nearly all superlative portraiture. Strömholm captures his subjects in bars and on nighttime street corners, lounging in hotel rooms or vamping for the camera, consistently finding moments that waver between aspiration and vulnerability. There are confident blonde bombshells, beehive wigs, sultry looks with an excess of mascara, and plenty of fur coats. For the most part, he sees his "women" as they want to be seen, and does so with a sense of respect for their complicated lives (physically and psychologically) rather than with a leering voyeurism. He moves through their environment with the acceptance of an insider, tenderly documenting supportive friendship, best efforts, and haunting insecurity. The desire for a different future, regardless of its costs, can be found in nearly every picture, but the path to this self-determination has clearly been anything but easy.

Admirers of Arbus and Goldin (who both came later) will find much to connect with in this group of photographs. There is a similar unvarnished consideration for the uniqueness to be found in those outside the mainstream and an authentic, up-close attentiveness to their struggles and overlooked triumphs. In the dark, gritty streets of the Paris red light district, Strömholm has reaffirmed the basic human freedom to define one's own identity, and his pictures remain a solid example of how a carefully constructed photo essay can capture the spirit of people quietly striving for a different way of life.

Collector's POV: Since this is a museum show, there are, of course, no posted prices. Strömholm's work has only been intermittently available at auction in the past decade, with prices ranging from $1000 and $5000. The artist/estate is represented in New York by Marvelli Gallery (here).

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

Transit Hub:

• Estate site (here)
• Features/Reviews: NY Times (here), Wall Street Journal (here), New Yorker Photo Booth (here), Le Journal de la Photographie (here)

Christier Strömholm, Les Amies de Place Blanche

Through September 2nd

International Center of Photography

1133 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10036

Christer Strömholm @Marvelli

JTF (just the facts): A total of 29 black and white photographs, framed in black and matted, and hung in the project room at the back of the gallery. The show contains a mix of gelatin silver prints, many vintage, others early or later prints, all without editions. The images were made between 1949 and 1966, and are generally small in size, measuring roughly 9x7 or 10x8. (Marginal installation shots at right.)
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Comments/Context: It's hard to believe that the well known Swedish photographer Christer Strömholm has, until now, had neither a gallery or museum show in the United States. Strömholm was part of Otto Steinert's subjective photography (Fotoform) group in Germany in the 1950s, and he went on to become an influential teacher in Europe (one of his pupils was Anders Petersen, whose work is on view in the main space of the gallery, review here).
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This small show gathers together an edited selection of Strömholm's vintage work, primarily from the 1950s and 1960s. What I found most compelling in these pictures is the photographer's consistent ability to capture single image vignettes, where emblematic moments and subjects seem to imply more complex and mysterious stories. Two small boys stand holding purses, a sailor has a glass of milk flanked by his bored girlfriend, a child covers her eyes in a soup of fog, and coquettish pairs of transvestites snuggle together. Still other images capture a boy holding snails, a woman's flash of white underwear as a man walks by, a snake tied up in rope, and a pair of iron dog collars minus the dogs. These are more than acute observations or decisive moments; each scene opens up a combination of the surreal and the metaphorical, with layers of meaning implied and available for exploration.

While Strömholm's work can undeniably stand on its own, I thought the pairing of teacher and student (with Petersen) added some additional smart resonances, as threads of artistic ideas can be seen to pass from one to the other, being modified, amplified and transformed along the way. For those of you who pay the bills via teaching, I think you will find this interchange quite intriguing.
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Collector's POV: The prices for the prints in this show range between $6150 and $10650. Strömholm's work has appeared at auction from time to time over the past few years, with small selections of lots finding buyers for prices between $1000 and $5000.
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Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Review: New Yorker (here)
• 1997 Hasselblad Award (here)

Christer Strömholm
Through December 30th

Marvelli Gallery
526 West 26th Street
New York, NY 10001

Anders Petersen, City Diary @Marvelli

JTF (just the facts): A total of 100 unframed black and white photographs, hung edge to edge in grids covering the walls in the main gallery space. All of the works are digital prints on matte paper, sized 38x26, and printed in editions of 10. The images were taken between 2000 and 2008, with most made in the second half of that period. A monograph of this body of work is forthcoming from Steidl (here). (Installation shots at right via Marvelli Gallery.)

Comments/Context: Swedish photographer Anders Petersen's new show crackles with raw, gritty energy, assaulting the viewer with an enveloping array of disconnected moments. The works jump from the unsettling and explicit to the more intimate and vulnerable, documenting the shadowy underbelly of life in nameless European cities.

Petersen's sooty aesthetic was immediately reminiscent for me of the work of Daido Moriyama and other Provoke-era Japanese photographers. His shadowy interiors are often harshly lit by a blast of light, capturing everyday scenes and objects with a mood of disturbing darkness. Muzzled, mangy dogs and bright eyed cats become sinister and threatening. Close-up faces are scarred and bloodied, weary and angry, the sitters unperturbed by the invasion of the camera. His nudes are casual and direct, bodies bluntly exposed. Even his images of brides, cupcakes, flowers and goldfish seem to have a rough edge, finding an undercurrent of something brusque and unpleasant in subjects that would normally be warm and inviting. Dead bugs cluster on a windowsill, a woman sticks out her black tongue, a left-over sausage is tangled on a plaid dinner plate, and a dog hobbles along with a broken leg near a dated van. Europe is seen as a collection of marginal subcultures, a veil of charcoal giving each moment a sense of struggle.

This body of work is successful as an overpowering installation, and will likely be equally potent in book form. Even with their unwavering directness, these pictures never seem voyeuristic, cheap or even particularly pessimistic; instead they have that memorable empathy and stylized realism that can be found in the work of Nan Goldin or Diane Arbus, albeit with a slightly darker point of view. This is a jolting show, one that is not always safe or easy, but one that forces the viewer to see a slice of our world that hides in the shadows.

Collector's POV: All of the works on display priced at 5000€ each. Petersen's work has not yet become reliably available in the secondary markets, 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)
• Review: New Yorker (here)
• Interview: Lens Culture (here)

Anders Petersen, City Diary
Through December 30th

Marvelli Gallery
526 West 26th Street
New York, NY 10001

Angela Strassheim, Evidence @Marvelli

JTF (just the facts): A total of 11 black and white works, framed in black with no mat, and hung in the main gallery space and the smaller second room. All of prints are archival pigment prints, made in 2009. The works come in one of three sizes: 28x35, 46x58 or 58x73; all are printed in editions of 8. There are 3 works in the smallest size, 7 in the middle size, and 1 in the largest size in this show. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Angela Strassheim's images of the hidden remnants of long ago crime scenes add a haunting sense of memory to otherwise ordinary interiors. Her crime scenes have none of the fresh gore of a flash lit Weegee photo or the puzzling conceptual randomness of Mandel and Sultan's landmark project. Instead they uncover the violent past lurking within the everyday, invisible to the naked eye, but very much still present.

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Strassheim uses a forensic chemical technique to highlight old blood stains that have been cleaned away, seen as a white powdery luminescence against the darkened rooms, vaguely similar to the effect in black light photographs. Her works depict kitchens, bathrooms, and bedrooms covered in glowing splotches, sprays, drips, and mists of blood, some bearing the marks of hands and fingers. The remains of these crimes are everywhere: on the back of a door, covering a dresser, sloshed over a wall molding, and in the corner of a tiled floor. Perhaps the creepiest of these images is of a living room, where two family portraits have been hung unknowingly on top of an entire wall of bloody smears.
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While these images have a dramatic, almost cinematic feel, I think they successfully get beyond the detective science gimmick to the more interesting questions of history embedded in a place. New tenants are now living right on top of the remains of any number of violent crimes, likely totally unaware of the horrors that lie beneath the surface. The walls have not forgotten however, and still bear the marks of those past events, for those who take the time to look. Strassheim's shadowy rooms filled with phosphorescence bring these untold stories to the surface, creating ironic juxtapositions and unsettling contrasts; in one image, a brightly lit TV, streaming light from the long exposure, sits directly adjacent to yet another bloody stain. Life has gone on, but there are ghosts of the past everywhere, hiding in plain view.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced at $11000, $15000 or $18000 based on size. Strassheim's work has not yet reached the secondary markets, so gallery retail is the only option for interested collectors at this point.

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

Transit Hub:

• Reviews: Vulture, 2009 (here), Artnet, 2006 (here)
• Exhibition: Monterey Museum of Art, 2008 (here)
• Whitney Biennial, 2006 (here)

Angela Strassheim, Evidence

Through December 31st

Marvelli Gallery

526 West 26th Street

New York, NY 10001

Mariah Robertson, I Am Passions @Marvelli

JTF (just the facts): A total of 17 works, framed in white with no mat, and hung in the single room main gallery space. There are 3 gelatin silver prints, 7 c-prints, and 7 photograms; all of the prints are unique (not editioned). Sizes range from approximately 14x11 to 56x48; many are 24x20. All of the works were made in 2009 and are untitled. (Installation shots at right.)
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Comments/Context: For the taxonomists and list makers out there, it is clear that one large wing of the world of contemporary photography can be labeled "process"; under this title would fall all of the photographers who have dug into any number of image making techniques and explored the edges of what the old school combination of light and chemicals can produce. Under "process", we might further divide the huge pile into those who are interested in photograms, or camera obscura images, or collaged found images, or multiple negatives, or chemical chance and manipulation in the darkroom (and on and on from there).
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Mariah Robertson is yet another young photographer who has looked deeper into process, but she is the first that I have come across who has really destroyed the physical boundaries of these individual technical disciplines and mashed them together in single, densely layered almost sculptural works. Working on long rolls of paper (that are later roughly cut apart), she alternates between contact printing, enlargements, and photograms, one on top of the other, with the chemicals that underpin each one mixing together in an unexpected stew.
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The works in the show offer a theme and variation experience; certain motifs arise again and again, in different combinations and colors: 3D cubes, boxes, grids and other 80s era computer graphics (some apparently drawn from quilt patterns), silhouetted palm trees and leaves, and rephotographed male nudes. These subject matter themes are then mixed with saturated colors and chemical drips to generate contrasts, irregularities, and filters. There are certainly parallels here to Robert Rauschenberg's use of silkscreening and additional over painting to get his collaged combines; the processes in this case are variously photographic, but the strata of juxtaposed symbols are related.
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For works like these, the question then becomes: did the string of chance elements and image snippets somehow come together into something visually striking and thought provoking? I think the answer is "sometimes"; for the best of the experiments, the overlapping layers of imagery create striking patterns from afar and still work as interconnected all-over collages up close. In others, the randomness is more chaotic and the relationships between objects is more obscure; the "artfulness" trumps the content. It will be interesting to see where these processes take Robertson in the future, as she seems to be standing amidst the rubble of the broken walls between long discrete approaches to photographic picture making.
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Collector's POV: The prints in the show are priced between $2400 and $7500 based on size, with many at $3000. This is Robertson's first show with Marvelli Gallery; she was previously represented by Guild & Greyshkul, which is now closed. Her work has not yet made it to the secondary markets in any real way, so gallery retail will be the only follow-up option for interested collectors.

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

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Reviews: Artforum (here, scroll down), NY Times (here, scroll down)

Mariah Robertson, I am Passions
Through November 14th
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Marvelli Gallery
526 West 26th Street
New York, NY 10001