Luigi Ghirri, Kodachrome @Marks

 JTF (just the facts): A total of 25 color photographs, framed in silver and matted, and hung against white walls in the single room gallery space. All of the works are either vintage c-prints or vintage cibachrome prints, taken between 1971 and 1977. Physical dimensions range from roughly 4x6 to 18x12 (or reverse); no edition information was available. MACK Books published a second edition of Ghirri's 1978 monograph Kodachrome in 2012 (here). The show is sequenced to match the order in the book. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: In the years that have followed the recent rediscovery of the work of Luigi Ghirri, there has been a strong tendency to try to understand him in the context of Eggleston, Sternfeld, and Shore and 1970s American color. His work was made in color (check), his work was made in the 1970s (check), at first glance, his work has the appearance of a snapshot aesthetic (check), therefore, he's the "Italian Eggleston". But having spent time with this exhibit and the associated reissued monograph, I've come to the conclusion that such a categorization is both overly easy and ultimately misguided. As we see and digest more of his work, his vision seems increasingly innovative and original, with more logical ties to European Surrealism than to anything happening in American photography.

 

The works in this exhibit come from Ghirri's first self published book, and the photographs are full of visual dislocation and wry disorientation. Compositions are often interrupted, with a vertical board bisecting a beach view, a cross shaped window pane quartering the gardens at Versailles, and a dark shadow falling directly across a framed picture. Other works play with subtle optical illusions and the flattening of perspective, almost with conceptual glee: a perfectly straight contrail in the sky connecting the two sides of a mountain valley, the curve of a man's face echoed by the arc of a souvenir Eiffel Tower, and two men sitting on the corner of a gravel roof, its dark edges receding with mirrored precision. Many images have a constructed, collage-like aesthetic, combining painted murals and found cut outs with tourists walking by and bored couples, creating juxtapositions that are unexpected and often absurd or mysterious. While a few images are inherently about photographic color (the blown pink beach umbrella, the glow of foggy red traffic lights, the wall painted half yellow half blue), most of Ghirri's pictures seem less about color itself and more about a specific way of seeing. Time and again, he confounds your expectations (using his own understated brand of Dada), making photographs of the frames not the paintings, or the postcards not the sunset itself.

 

I thoroughly enjoyed Ghirri's sense of visual wit, his images carefully composed to make everyday Italian reality seem altogether more surreal and odd. He never crosses the line into heavy handed trickery, staying instead within the confines of the quietly poetic and the unassumingly puzzling. In the end, his pictures are consistently smart, comforting us with their familiar subject matter and then upending our sense of balance with their deft surprises.

 

Collector's POV: The works in this show are priced between $12000 and $20000, based on size. Ghirri's prints have only been sporadically available in the secondary markets in recent years, with prices ranging from roughly $1000 to $34000.

 

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

 

Transit Hub:

• Features/Reviews: American Suburb X (here), LPV Magazine (here), New Yorker (here), NY Times (here), Gallerist NY (here)

Luigi Ghirri, Kodachrome

Through April 20th

 

Matthew Marks Gallery

526 West 22nd Street

New York, NY 10011

Robert Adams, On Any Given Day in Spring and Light Balances @Marks

JTF (just the facts): A total of 75 black and white photographs, framed in white and matted, and hung against white walls in the main gallery space and a smaller second room in the back. All of the works are made up of gelatin silver prints, made between 2002 and 2012. There are single images, diptychs, triptychs, and groups of 4 prints. There are a total of 19 works (made up of 50 individual prints) in the main room from the series Light Balances, and a total of 13 works (made up of 25 individual prints) in the back room from the series On Any Given Day in Spring. Individual prints range in size from roughly 5x8 to 8x12 (or reverse). All of the works are unique. (Installation shots at right.)

 

Comments/Context: Robert Adams' newest photographs are works of slow motion patience. Drained of the simmering frustration that inhabits much of his earlier work, these recent pictures are among his most meditative and subdued. They settle in for a long attentive look, letting the distractions of the day melt away and a heightened sense of respectful engagement with nature come forward.

 

Adams wanders through the Oregon forest in the images from Light Balances. Grouped into small bunches, they have the pace and rhythm of an ambling hike, with new views of the woods around each turn of the trail. The dense leaves and evergreens provide a backdrop for a study in the endless variation of sunlight and shadow. Adams peers through the canopy at silhouettes, examines the mottled surface of the forest floor, follows dark pinpricks of light through the undergrowth, and watches as the light turns trunks into imposing vertical forms. The pictures move in and out, catching a burst of light in an otherwise shaded glen, or waiting in the cool cover while the sun illuminates a nearby grove. The photographs play with collapsed distance and layered, overlapping branching, often looking gently up into a mixture of dappled, crisscrossing blackness.

 

The On Any Given Day in Spring series finds Adams on the Washington coast, watching the shorebirds peck at the sand as the waves move in and out. Between the sea, the sky, and the ever changing clusters of birds, these pictures are full of cycles and repetitions, following the peaceful cadences of nature. The flocks fly through the air in dark masses, wheel and spread, and settle into black bands on the beach. They gather in clusters, thin into dots, and soar into slashes against the muted grey of the seashore, leaving tiny footprints and tracks in the sand.

 

While I can certainly appreciate the richness and craftsmanship of these photographs, I think their hushed deliberateness makes them somewhat forgettable as individual artworks. Together, they are extremely successful at setting a mood and conveying a reflective mindset, but that intense absorption led me to daydreaming rather than specific engagement. In the end, in my mind, they all washed together into a wistful memory. Perhaps the answer is that these photographs will function better in book form, where their intimacy and delicacy can be savored more introspectively.

 

Collector's POV: The works in this show are priced as follows. The single image works range from $14000 to $17500, the diptychs from $25000 to $35000, the triptychs from $35000 to $40000, and the groups of 4 prints are $50000 each. Adams' photographs have become increasingly available in the secondary markets in the past decade, with prices ranging between $5000 and $87000.

 

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

 

Transit Hub:

• Features/Reviews: NY Times (here), New Yorker (here), ARTINFO (here)
• Exhibit: The Place We Live, Yale University Art Gallery, 2012 (DLK COLLECTION review here)

Robert Adams, On Any Given Day in Spring and Light Balances

Through November 3rd

 

Matthew Marks Gallery

523 West 24th Street

New York, NY 10011

Robert Adams, The Place We Live @Yale

JTF (just the facts): A total of 256 black and white photographs, framed in white and matted, and hung against grey (light, medium, and dark) and green walls in a series of interconnected spaces on the first and fourth floors of the museum (a handful of works are also on view in the lobby). All of the works are gelatin silver prints made between 1965 and 2009. No dimension or edition information was available on the wall labels. Glass cases in the various exhibit rooms contain a total of 67 photobooks, and a small number of sculptures and other ephemera are also distributed throughout the show. A catalog of the the exhibition, entitled The Place We Live, A Retrospective Selection of Photographs, 1964-2009 was recently published Yale University Press (here). The exhibit was curated by Joshua Chuang and Jock Reynolds. The exhibition has already made stops in Vancouver, Denver, and Los Angeles, and has four more European venues scheduled through the summer of 2014. (Installation shots at right.)

The show is divided into titled sections, each accompanied by wall text drawn from one of the artist's books. For each section or case, I have detailed the number of prints/books on view and their dates:

Lobby gallery

• 6 gelatin silver prints, 1999

First Floor galleries

• The Plains: 8 gelatin silver prints, 1965-1973
• Eden: 8 gelatin silver prints, 1968
• The New West: 22 gelatin silver prints, 1968-1971
• Case: White Churches of the Plains (1), The Architecture and Art of Early Hispanic Colorado (1), Prairie (2), 2 gelatin silver prints, 1968, 1974
• Summer Nights: 13 gelatin silver prints, 1976-1982
• Ludlow: 5 gelatin silver prints, 1978
• Case: Eden (2), The New West (3), Commercial Residential (2), Summer Nights (2), Summer Nights: Walking (2)
• Book display: 3 volumes, The Place We Live, 1 gelatin silver print, 1978
• What We Bought: 31 gelatin silver prints, 1973-1974
• Cottonwoods: 11 gelatin silver prints, 1973-1995, 1 cottonwood bark fragment, 1982
• The Pawnee National Grassland: 6 gelatin silver prints, 1984
• The Missouri West: 10 gelatin silver prints: 1975-1983
• Our Parents, Our Children: 15 gelatin silver prints, 1981
• Case: Our Lives and Our Children (1), No Small Journeys (2), From The Missouri West (2), Beauty In Photography (3)
• Screenprint: Beautiful Small Town Names

Fourth Floor galleries

• Los Angeles Spring: 21 gelatin silver prints, 1978-1983
• Case: Los Angeles Spring (2), Listening To The River (2), California (2), Gone? (2), Notes From Friends (1), Why People Photograph (1)
• Along Some Rivers: 28 gelatin silver prints, 1984-1987
• The Pacific: 17 gelatin silver prints, 1991, 2003, 1 wooden sculpture
• Turning Back: 22 gelatin silver prints, 1976, 1999, 2003
• Case: To Make It Home (1), West From The Columbia (2), Time Passes (1), Turning Back (2), Tree Line (2)
• Small reading room: 4 prints paired with poems by A.R. Aamons, Emily Dickinson, William Blake, and Zbigniew Herbert
• Case: Pine Valley (2), A Portrait In Landscapes (2), Still Lies The Manzanita (2), I Hear The Leaves And Love The Light (2), Along Some Rivers (2), 2 eroded rocks
• Pine Valley: 6 gelatin silver prints, 2001-2003
• Bodhisattva: 5 gelatin silver prints, 1999
• Alder Leaves: 5 gelatin silver prints, 2004
• The War In Iraq: 6 gelatin silver prints: 2004-2007
• Sea Stories, This Day: 8 gelatin silver prints, 1999-2009, 1 carved sculpture, 2001, 1 notebook
• Case: Alders (2), Questions For An Overcast Day (2), Bodhisattva (2), Sea Stories (1), This Day (2), Close At Hand (2), Skogen (2), What Can We Believe (1), 1 wood sculpture

Comments/Context: A year or two ago, I wrote a review of a Paul Graham show where I argued that Graham was an insider's photographer, an artist who was well known and highly esteemed inside the photographic community but largely unknown outside it. I was immediately shouted down by the masses of the converted, who were all too happy to point out my daft ignorance. Today, I am going to make a similar assertion about Robert Adams, and I assume that my inbox will fill once again with a flood of vehement protestations.

On one hand, I think a very compelling case can be made that Adams is a truly radical innovator who has fundamentally and permanently redefined the nature (no pun intended) of American landscape photography. Adams' long term influence is undeniable: I have met plenty of photographers who count him as one of their photographic heroes, and his books, writings, and teachings continue to have countless ardent, cult-like followers. On the other hand, I think there is a largely silent body of viewers who react to Adams' work with much less enthusiasm, finding it often ugly, underwhelming, and a bit boring. Its dissimilarity to what they have come to expect from the landscape genre (the dramatic grandeur of Ansel Adams) makes some of the work very hard to connect to; it doesn't reveal itself so quickly or boldly. In our first years of collecting, I will admit to having been in this second camp; I found his images to be like parsnips or kale - things I was supposed to like, that were obviously good for me, but which in all honesty, I found somewhat less than entirely tasty. Over the years, and with a growing shelf full of Adams' eloquent books in our library, I have gradually moved closer to the supporters point of view, slowly being won over by the consistent craftsmanship, elegance, thoughtfulness, and quiet beauty in even the most distressing and damaged of his photographs. So it was with some excitement that I traveled to Yale to see this grand, traveling retrospective, in the hopes of clarifying and deepening my understanding of his work once and for all. I'm afraid my findings are likely to offend both sides, as ample evidence of both the truly great and the truly forgettable is on view.

Covering roughly 45 years of time, the exhibition is gathered into thematic groups (both large and small), roughly mirroring bodies of work as they were originally presented in book form. In many ways, this helps to recreate some of the intimate sequencing and storytelling that is the hallmark of Adams' books, but strictly speaking, this retrospective is not rigidly chronological, as some subjects span decades and others overlap or jump around in time. To help clarify the overall "which came first" ordering (at least in my own mind), I have taken the dates of the images on view (by grouping) and laid them out on the timeline below:

Adams' early square format pictures from the late 1960s feel rooted in vernacular American modernism and a reverence for traditional American landscape photography. They echo the spare purity of a Paul Strand or a Walker Evans: an angular white church, the towering form of white grain elevator, broad grassland views with massive 19th century clouds. But his Eden pictures which follow signal the beginning of a new approach: this Eden isn't the leafy garden of snakes and apple trees we all know, it's a dusty flat expanse of interstate highway and dry desert, decorated with truck stops and gas stations. Seeing these pictures is like watching a light go on - it suddenly becomes obvious that there is another way to see the geography of the land, that the word landscape can be applied not only to classically beautiful mountains and rivers, but to the evidence of the human relationship to the natural world. There is a sense of discovery here, a philosophical opening of a door.

In the first half of the 1970s, Adams took these initial insights and expanded them, making some of the most unflinchingly critical photographs that had ever been made of the American West. With a deep respect for the unspoiled land and a frustrated eye for the environmental destruction puzzlingly taking place out in the open, Adams documented the boom town expansion of various Colorado towns (particularly Denver and its suburbs) and watched with ironic candor as whole cities were raised out of the water-less dust. His now-iconic book The New West chronicled the inhumanity of these newly built environments: subdivisons were laid out, messy construction ensued, and the result was an endless sea of flat one story houses, clustered trailers and arrow straight roads. Adams' pictures are an inversion - they're not a rah-rah celebration of our ingenuity, our hard work or our can-do spirit; instead, they show us our own self-inflicted, unvarnished stupidity and our stunning disrespect for the grandeur of the land and sky.

What I find fascinating about these pictures is that they were actually surprisingly well aligned with earlier American landscape photographs that openly celebrated the majesty of the land. But instead of searching out the most beautiful vistas to make his point (like his predecessors), Adams made his argument for the critical importance of the land by capturing our destruction of it. In New Topographics-speak, we were now in the realm of the "man-altered" landscape, and Adams' view of these modifications was alternately acerbic, distrustful, grief stricken, and downright angry. Other pictures from this same time (the What We Bought series) dive deeper into the grim lives of the inhabitants and their drab offices, liquor stores, fast food joints, and dreary strip mall convenience stores. There is a sense of being both offended and deeply saddened by the tradeoffs we have made in our development of the West, a pervasive pessimism to be found in the imperfections of these communities. These pictures present a depressing reality, but I think Adams' lasting contribution to photography is to be found in these early 1970s images and their precise examination of our separation from and disregard for the bounty of nature.

The second half of the decade found Adams channeling these core conceptual ideas in several different but adjacent directions. He followed the Missouri River out to the western edge of the nation, taking long elevated views of tire tracked prairies, rocky mesas near nuclear weapons test grounds, and smoggy mountains. He walked the lyrical nighttime streets of suburban neighborhoods, finding both shadowy menace and silent warm nostalgia: weedy sidewalks, bright carnival rides, empty chairs sitting under a porch light. And he explored the scrublands of sprawling Los Angeles, with its aging eucalyptus windbreaks, its dry washes filled with garbage, its defoliated development roads, and its ever encroaching highways. Environmental damage (and the related emotional distress) was never far from view, but hope began to creep in now and again as a balance against the constant urgent critique.

His projects in the early 1980s continued this pattern of gradual softening, as if Adams himself was becoming worn down and was in need of a few moments of optimism. Against the backdrop of soul draining suburban parking lots, he found multi-generational caring as expressed in embraces, carried babies, and hand held children. In the Pawnee National Grassland, he enjoyed huge, tumbling skies, vast open grass, and unspoiled sunflowers against a barbed wire fence. And along unnamed rivers, he exchanged an airplane for a hawk, reveled in the whiteness of fresh snow cover, and examined the delicate textures of dirt roads. Adams seemed to be saying that there was indeed beauty to be found in these landscapes if we were patient enough to look for it.
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Given the timeline above and the span of photographic projects that Adams has generated since 1985, I think it is fair to say that his work has slipped a bit in recent years. The one exception to this is the sheer horror of the clearcut hillsides of Turning Back. The delimbing machines, the enduring stumps, the violence and devastation of the whole process, the photographs have all the fury and tragedy of Adams' earlier work. His question (found on a wall text and in the book) about who brings a child to see the wastelands of these close cropped hills is particularly poignant and troubling I think, and the sense of futility and failure in the pictures is heavy. And while I have a soft spot for the sublime cracked silhouettes of the alder leaves, I can't really hold these up as new or groundbreaking; they're just quietly meditative and beautiful. Beyond these two projects, very little will be durable I fear. Nearly all of Adams' images of the sea lack the emotional punch of his landscapes, even when they incorporate piles of flotsam and dirty sand. And his still lifes and Iraq war boots miss the mark entirely in my view. Perhaps there is some inverse relationship between the power of his images and the power of his words, as his recent books have been full of engaging, eloquent, and memorable ideas.

Retrospectives are designed to help us trace connection points and the evolution of artistic ideas, and I think this exhibition is highly successful in showing the gestation of Adams' original conceptual view point, its development and expansion over time, and its ultimate waning and subtle transformation. I think it cements Adams' rightful place in the pantheon of American landscape photographers, and highlights his consistently genuine and thoughtful concern for the way we have treated the land. That his flashes of brilliance have become less frequent since the 1970s hardly matters; his imprint on our ability to see the impact of our environmental choices is permanent. If there is one recurring visual motif in Adams' work, it is the open empty dirt road, cutting across the vastness of the landscape, vanishing into the horizon; there are likely a dozen of these pictures scattered throughout the show. At first, the road is discouraging in its slash across the unspoiled natural world. Later, it is perhaps assimilated and accommodated, shaded by an overhanging cottonwood tree, becoming part of the landscape itself, telling us something of our history. And going forward, it points the way to the future. What Robert Adams brought to landscape photography was an alternately caustic and graceful eye for these changes, an ability to show us what we didn't want to acknowledge or had somehow overlooked, with the hope that it would knock some sense into us, so that our journey down that long road would be smarter and more aware.

Collector's POV: This is a museum show, so there are of course no posted prices. Adams' photographs have become increasingly available in the secondary markets in the past decade, with prices ranging between $5000 and $87000. Adams is represented in New York by Matthew Marks Gallery (here) and in San Francisco by Fraenkel Gallery (here).

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

Transit Hub:

• Review: Hartford Courant (here)

Robert Adams, The Place We Live
Through October 28th

Yale University Art Gallery
1111 Chapel Street
New Haven, CT 06510

Thomas Demand @Marks

JTF (just the facts): A total of 3 large scale color photographs hung unframed against white walls in the front gallery space, with 1 video projection shown in an adjacent darkened viewing room. The photographs are c-prints mounted on plexiglas, ranging in size from 55x45 to 79x118. The film and sound installation has a projected size of 148x197. No edition information was provided on the checklist. All of the works were made in 2011 or 2012.(Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Thomas Demand is one of the reigning kings of the contemporary photographic installation. Starting with a source photograph, the artist creates an elaborate cut paper construction, reproducing the scene in exacting detail, but paring it down to a composition of geometric solids and shapes. He then photographs the resulting installation, making an image that is a recognizable representative of the original, but abstracted from its truth and reality. This generalization process drains away context and specificity, creating a simplified visual language that is both intellectual and reductivist. Demand is a kind of meta-matician, his works occupying an analytical space above the place where photographs normally operate.

His newest photographs continue his use of this meticulous methodology, documenting Whitney Houston's last meal at the Beverly Hilton, the shadowy vault at the Wildenstein Institute where dozens of long missing paintings were recently found, and the control room of the Fukushima Daichi nuclear power plant after the evacuation. When seen via Demand's cardboard short hand, the settings are neutered, our reactions and emotions muted by the subtle rigidity of the abstractions. There is still something sadly poignant about the disarray of sugar packets and leftover salad dressing on the room service cart and the jumbled white ceiling tiles which float like elegant weightless origami above the knobs, switches and computer readouts, but the feelings are detached and aloof rather than hot and immediate. His translation has sucked the juice out of these moments, leaving them dry and academic, like empty ghosts of themselves.

The short film on view amplifies the focus on Demand's astounding craftsmanship. Beginning with YouTube video taken by a security camera on a cruise ship during a heavy storm, Demand painstakingly recreated the ship's cafe, with its seating arrangements of chairs and tables and its bright orange counter with a cash register and bar supplies. Over the course of 2400 individual frames, the objects were then moved inch by inch (with apparent understanding of the laws of physics), the resulting full speed film depicting the crashing back and forth of the entire scene as the ship rocked and tumbled. There is something impressively precise and scientific about this work, where the furniture rumbles across the frame like a herd of buffaloes, the wind blows, the pendant lights sway, and the bucket of lemon slices topples over, all with increasing violence until the chaos subsides, straws, napkins and a lone pink shoe left strewn amidst the destruction. It's hard not to enjoy the whole raging spectacle, but there isn't much emotional payoff; I found myself feeling respect for Demand's prowess as a set builder (and wondering about how the sound was synched to the imagery), rather than paying much attention to the fate of the ship and its passengers.

Curators have long had a love affair with Demand, as his work is both conceptually rigorous and wholly original, and I do think there is something very intriguing about using increasing abstraction to push a photograph to the edge of its ability to communicate meaning. But there is a cerebral quality to this construction exercise that often times leaves me cold; my brain engages with systematic nature of his recreation process, but the pictures ultimately fail to grab me. Finding this tipping point of engagement and leaving the abstract physical objects to imply narrative is part of the interest of course, and I actually found these newest works by Demand more engaging than some of his prior efforts. His work seems to me more about questions than answers, the resulting images almost always unresolved.

Collector's POV: Unfortunately, even after two visits to the gallery and repeated emails to the directors and staff, I was unable to get anyone to respond to my simple questions about the prices and the edition sizes for the photographs on view. There was no printed checklist with prices on it, and the usual pass off to the sales director was never followed up, which is puzzling, since I would assume collector inquiries would merit at least cursory attention. I'm not sure if this was just inadvertent incompetence or deliberate indifference, since I have had nothing but perfectly friendly and cooperative encounters with the gallery in the past.

In any case, if I subsequently find out the price information, I will post it in the comments; other collectors who have had more success than I are encouraged to do so as well. On the auction front, Demand's work is becoming more routinely available in the secondary markets, with at least a handful of works up for sale every year. Recent prices have ranged between $15000 and $260000 for the works in small editions (3, 5, or 6), while works from larger editions (100) have typically found buyers between $1000 and $5000.

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

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Features/Reviews: NY Times (here), Wall Street Journal (here), New Yorker (here), ARTINFO (here), TimeOut New York (here)

Thomas Demand
Through June 23rd

Matthew Marks Gallery
522 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011

Nan Goldin: Scopophilia @Marks

JTF (just the facts): A total of 47 photographs, framed in black without mats, and hung against white, grey and yellow walls in four interconnected gallery spaces, with 1 video projection, shown in a darkened viewing room. All of the works are chromogenic prints, made between 1993 and 2011, displayed as single images, diptychs, or grids of up to 16 component images. Physical dimensions range from 20x15 to 45x67; the grids and diptychs are available in editions of 3, while the single images are available in editions of 15. The 25-minute video projection, which mimics the behavior of a slide show, is available in an edition of 5, and contains images from 1977-2010. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: It takes a certain amount of confidence to pair a life's worth of intimate photographs with the treasures of one of the world's great art museums; if the work can't hold its own, the entire enterprise has the potential to look like a shockingly self-centered and arrogant stunt. Nan Goldin's mixing of art history, life and "the love of looking" (using examples from the Louvre) walks this dangerous, thin line, but actually finds a way to tell us something unexpectedly new, not about the paintings and sculptures found in the Paris museum, but about the timeless gestures captured via Goldin's snapshot aesthetic; she uses the images from the museum to successfully reinterpret her own personal and artistic history.

The video installation is the real centerpiece of this show, with the still photographs on display in the rest of the gallery acting like a supporting apparatus, repeating themes that run through the video in a more rigid and fixed medium. The slide show format (one image projected after another in serial fashion), complete with sparse commentary by Goldin and soaring choral voices, lends itself to rhythmic timing, leading the viewer back and forth between Goldin's photographs and fragments of the museum's collection with a natural pace that allows for stylistic comparison and thoughtful echoes. While I have long admired the rough, vulnerable realism and lush color in her photographs, the video forced me to get beyond those more obvious merits and see the underlying structure of Goldin's compositions more clearly, something I had heretofore completely overlooked. Pairings of like poses wash away the blunt harshness of Goldin's life stories, leaving behind the tenderness and grace of her portraits and human forms. Translucent skin is followed by luscious white marble, kisses rebound between iconic paintings and stolen moments, long hair cascades over and over, and nudes (both female and male) jump from casual to formal and back again. Her choices from the Louvre are steeped in the "mythology of romance", making her own photographs of private desire and elemental longing seem more universal and timeless, even though they clearly come from a very specific time and place. The gritty destructiveness that lays within many of Goldin's photographs is trumped here by the honest truth of sensual bodies and eternal relationships.

After watching the video, the still photographs seem a little less engaging, although the simpler diptychs of paired naps and embraces are more successful than the larger grids of odalisques, backs, and water drenched bodies; I think when the gestures get multiplied out into typologies, the "see they match" message gets more heavy handed, almost too obvious. The rounded room in the back pairs frontal portraits, capturing commonalities of expression across the ages; penetrating stares and authentic looks haven't changed much over the centuries, even if roles and classes certainly have.

The reason this show merits my highest rating is that it forced me to reappraise Goldin's photography, to see beyond the edgy bedroom scenes and the candidly intense situations and to discover the classic lines of her work. It was a way of approaching her pictures that I had never tried (it had never even occurred to me), and I was astounded by the controlled power and refinement in her compositions once I went looking for it. After seeing these juxtapositions, my impression of her many talents has been permanently altered. One might argue this is an "old wine in a new bottle" show, but there are moments of sublime finesse and subtle poetry to be found here (particularly in the video) and the chance to fundamentally transform your opinion of one of the masters of the medium doesn't come along very often.

Collector's POV: The prices for the works in this show are as follows: the grids and diptychs are priced between $20000 and $60000, while the single images range between $6000 and $15000; I did not get a price for the video installation. Goldin's work is routinely available in the secondary markets, with dozens of images available at auction every year; recent prices have generally ranged between $2000 and $34000.

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

Transit Hub:

• Features/Reviews: Hyperallergic (here), Huffington Post (here),  NY Times Lens (here)

Nan Goldin: Scopophilia
Through December 23rd

Matthew Marks Gallery
522 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011

Nan Goldin, New Work @Marks

JTF (just the facts): This is a actually broad group show, including the work of Katharina Fritsch, Robert Gober, Nan Goldin, Andreas Gursky, Martin Honert, Charles Ray, and Terry Winters, displayed across the gallery's three Chelsea locations. While there is a single Andreas Gursky photograph (a Dortmund soccer stadium/crowd) on display in one of the 22nd Street galleries, there is a larger sample of Nan Goldin's new work on view in the 24th Street space. There are a total of 8 Goldin photographic works, framed in black without mats, taking up half the gallery area. All of the works are cibachrome prints, made between 2006 and 2010, and printed in editions of 18. Four of the images have physical dimensions of 30x40, the others are either 30x30, 42x60, or 59x66. The two largest works are grids of images, made up of 16 and 9 individual images respectively. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: While this is really a sprawling group show of gallery artists (most of them not photographers), I couldn't help myself from taking a quick look at Nan Goldin's new work. What's on view is a mini-sampler of ideas: still lifes of burned Parisian taxidermy (?), larger grids of images (small ephemeral nudes and layered, multiple exposure people snapshots, displayed in a sequential manner reminiscent her famous slide shows), and a group of strong single images that seem most related to her prior work and familiar aesthetic.
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Over the years, one of the things I have come to admire most in Goldin's work is her subtle understanding of color. While Joey as Marilyn mines emotional territory we have seen before from Goldin, the saturated orangey yellow that envelops the hotel room heightens the tension of the cinematic moment. Similarly, a single tree landscape might seem thoroughly boring, but this one, taken at twilight with a flash, creates an epic purple blue sky set off by white flowers in the foreground, the evening thick and lush with melancholy color. I think Ava twirling, NYC is perhaps the best image in this small bunch. In it, a young girl in a white dress spins in a bedroom, her dress and hair flowing out in a blurred arc of motion; deceptively simple, and yet, perfectly lovely.

While the overall body of photographic work here is a bit disconnected, if you find yourself in the neighborhood, take a moment to climb up the stairs and catch a few of the standouts.

Collector's POV: The Nan Goldin works in this show come in two prices: the two larger grid images at $40000 each, and the smaller images (in varying specific sizes) at $12000 each. Goldin's work is regularly available in the secondary markets, with dozens of images available at auction every year. Prices generally range between $2000 and $34000, with larger edition sizes (100+ in some cases) keeping prices down. Goldin is also represented by Yvon Lambert in Paris (here).

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

Transit Hub:

• Features: artnet (here), Frieze (here)
• Interview: Foto Tapeta (here)

New Work: Katharina Fritsch, Robert Gober, Nan Goldin, Andreas Gursky, Martin Honert, Charles Ray, Terry Winters
Through October 16th

Matthew Marks Gallery
523 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011

Robert Adams, Summer Nights, Walking @Marks

JTF (just the facts): A total of 45 black and white photographs, framed in white and matted, and hung in the large second floor gallery space, separated by a dividing wall. Nearly all of the prints are vintage gelatin silver prints, sized between 5x5 and 15x15. No edition information was available. The images were taken primarily in the suburbs of Denver and Boulder (Colorado) in the period between 1976 and 1983. A monograph of this body of work was originally published by Aperture in 1985 and entitled Summer Nights; this exhibition has been organized to coincide with the rerelease of the book, in an expanded and resequenced edition entitled Summer Nights, Walking (here). (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: We've had a copy of Summer Nights in our photobook library since the very beginning of our lives as photography collectors; it sits among a shelf full of Adams' books and essays, likely wedged in somewhere near The New West and Denver. In the past, I thought of the Summer Nights work as a direct extension of Adams' daytime images of environmental mismanagement and the encroachment of poorly planned suburban development. Without really looking (or with a preconceived conclusion in mind), I assumed the harshness of his tract houses, construction sites, and scrub lands would be applied with the same unflinching commentary to his nighttime scenes. As a result, I only saw what I thought I was supposed to see: the ugliness of the wincing glare of the street lights, the sidewalks bordered by unruly weeds, the empty parking lots, and the depressing ranch houses engulfed in shadows.

It is with a great deal of surprise that I must now admit that I had it all wrong. In visiting this fine exhibit, my overwhelming reaction to seeing the pictures in person was how gentle they consistently are. While Adams' compositions are not beautiful in any traditional sense, I found plenty of moments of grace, especially in the way that leaves and wildflowers catch the light or the way silhouettes are framed against the moonlit sky. The dramatic shadows that leak across the sidewalk or cover the sides of houses and garages with dappled patterns are no longer particularly ominous or hostile; I saw them more as moments of goose bump inducing shivers, even though the warmth of the night air surrounds you.

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What I thought of most in seeing these works is that Adams has captured the American suburban equivalent of the Italian passegiata. What is perhaps sad is that this nighttime walk in an America boom town is such a lonely and desolate one: there are no people on the streets to stop and greet, no places to go to relax and leisurely enjoy the warm night air - we've built a world designed around car transportation, so walking in these places has become a kind of oddity. And yet Adams has found plenty of subtle joys in these solitary neighborhood walks: the playful lights of a carnival ride, the texture of a tree trunk, the reflections of windows or puddles, the pinpricks of lights in the distance, or an expanse of pavement against an enveloping blackness.

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As I looked more closely, I started to notice just how masterful Adams' use of the available light really is: moonlight and ambient light from the surrounding city is mixed with up-close glare of the streetlights to create depth and distance without resorting to night photography cliches; the range of tonalities is both quietly meditative and breathtakingly exquisite. These pictures are soft and still, and some effort is required to unlock their pleasures; a quick gallery fly by certainly will result in a wash of small, unmemorable dark pictures, while a deeper exploration will uncover a body of work that is remarkably varied and consistently well crafted.

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I don't want to give the impression that Adams' commitment to the issues/problems of land use and suburban development isn't to be found in these pictures; it's certainly there if you want to go looking for it. But the revelation for me in this exhibit was that those complex issues could recede into the background a bit (the volume could be turned down), and that an unexpected loveliness and simplicity could be found underneath. There is a nostalgic warmth in his style here that is an excellent reminder that there is much more tender nuance to the art of Robert Adams than the New Topographics categorization might lead us to believe.

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Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced between $8500 and $38000. Adams' work has become increasingly available in the secondary markets in the past decade, with prices creeping upward over time, typically ranging between $5000 and $50000.
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Rating: *** (three stars) EXCELLENT (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Reviews: New Yorker (here), John Haber (here), New York Photo Review (here)

Robert Adams, Summer Nights, Walking

Through April 17th

Matthew Marks Gallery

523 West 24th Street

New York, NY 10011

Peter Hujar: Photographs 1956-1958 @Matthew Marks

JTF (just the facts): A total of 21 black and white gelatin silver prints, framed in black and matted, and hung in a single room gallery. The works were taken in Southbury, CT, and various locations in Italy between 1956 and 1958. Most of the prints are 10x10; a few are slightly larger at 13x13. (Installation shot at right.)

Comments/Context: Peter Hujar is probably best known for his sensitive portraits and street images chronicling the downtown scene in New York in the 1970s and 1980s and for his downstream influence on photographers like Robert Mapplethorpe and Nan Goldin. This small show takes us back to Hujar's beginnings and the unknown work he made in his early 20s, a kind of precursor to what would come later.

Nearly all of the images on view are of children, some from a home for the developmentally disabled in Connecticut, others from a convent in Florence and the streets of Rome. There are kids playing with a big ball, climbing on a jungle gym, scrambling in the water, and eating at a long dormitory table. These are simple empathetic pictures, gentle and uncritical, capturing small moments of emotion amidst the chaos of active play. They show the same genuine respect for the humanity and individuality of his subjects that would come to be the hallmark of his later work (and that of Diane Arbus).

While not every picture here is a standout, for those who want to get an expanded view of Hujar's work and his development as an artist over time, this small show is worth a quick visit.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show range in price between $12000 and $15000. Hujar's work is not consistently available at auction; the images that have sold in the past few years have ranged between $2000 and $23000; most prints are unique or in small editions, while a few have been printed in groups of 15 or even 50 (Candy Darling). Hujar is represented on the West coast by Fraenkel Gallery (here). While this work doesn't fit into our particular collecting parameters, my favorite image in the exhibit was Girl Sucking Her Thumb, Florence, 1958, where a child lies sideways on a white iron frame bed, peering out from the shadows.

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

Transit Hub:

• Times review of ICA show, 2007 (here)
• PS1 exhibit, 2005 (here)
• NYTimes review, 1990 (here)

Peter Hujar: Photographs 1956-1958
Through October 24th

Matthew Marks Gallery
526 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10001

Book: Andreas Gursky, Werke Works 80-08

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2008 by Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Moderna Museet Stockholm, Vancouver Art Gallery, and Hatje Cantz. 272 pages, with 155 color images. Includes an essay by Martin Hentschel. (Cover image at right.)

Comments/Context: We already own two Gursky monographs: one from the 1998 Kunsthalle Dusseldorf show and another from the 2001 MoMA show. So why do we need another, you might ask? The reason is that this smaller volume is trying to do something different. Instead of being a large format, coffee table sized book with big, beautiful pictures, this monograph is the size of a hardback novel, and the pictures are printed much smaller; what's interesting is that there are many more of them, nearly twice as many as in either of the other books. While this isn't a catalog raissoné, and many of the thumbnail images fail to evoke the grandeur of their mural sized cousins, the deeper dive into Gursky's archives helps to tell a much fuller and more varied story about his evolution as an artist.

For quite a while now I have been wondering about the early work of the Becher students and how it shows the influence of their teaching style. An oversimplified definition of the Becher formula is as follows: 1.) choose a large subject, with lots of different potential examples, 2.) choose a consistent approach to picture making, 3.) take lots of pictures in this manner, and 4.) display some of them together (the "typology") to get at the underlying essence of the subject. How Gursky internalized this teaching (and how he eventually evolved it into his own personal vision) is clearly shown in this book. His first subjects were interiors of restaurants, and he soon moved on to desk attendants (pairs). If you've never seen these images, they have all the Becher hallmarks: cool detached, frontal viewpoint, uniform and meticulous view camera picture making. It's in Gursky's next series, the Sunday Walkers, where the rigidity of the formula starts to break down; the pictures are more fluid, still using a common theme, but allowing for more flexibility of vision.

In the next few years, Gursky started to make his first bird's eye view images, with tiny ant-like people dwarfed by the immense scale of their surroundings, the images still rigorous in their style, but now much less cookie cutter. By the time you get to the early 1990s, the Gursky that took the art world by storm is now in top form: extra large sized prints of far flung locales, where hotels, office buildings, industrial warehouses, raves and stock exchanges become metaphors for the spectacle of our anonymous contemporary lifestyle, minimalism and conceptualism merging (with the help of some digital manipulation) into something altogether new.

The reason I like this book is that many more patterns emerge when you see a larger sample of Gursky's images. Since most of his recent works are printed mural sized and have become so expensive, one hardly gets a chance to see more than one or two at any one time these days; it's hard to plot much of a line with only a couple of points. If you're interested in the broader trajectory of Gursky's career and want to place the themes and approaches he has come back to again and again in a larger context, this is a good book for your library. The exhibition should also be well worth a visit.

Collector's POV: Andreas Gursky is represented by Matthew Marks Gallery in New York (here). Gursky's large prints tend to be made in editions of 4, 5, or 6, and are routinely sold above $100000, ranging all the way up into the low millions of dollars. Smaller prints are often made in editions of 12, 25, 30 or even 60, which generally drives the prices down to a zone between $5000 and $50000.

Transit Hub:

• The complete list of Gursky's contemporaries while studying with the Bechers: Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte, Tata Ronkholz, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth, and Petra Wunderlich
• 2001 MoMA exhibition (here)
• Jerry Saltz: It's Boring at the Top, New York magazine, 2007 (here)
• Video of Gursky exhibit at Kunstmuseum Basel (here)
• 2008 Matthew Marks show (DLK COLLECTION review here)
• Upcoming 2009 Vancouver Art Gallery exhibit, in conjunction with this book (here)

Andreas Gursky @Matthew Marks

JTF (just the facts): 4 large scale color photographs (on the order of 8 x 16 feet), displayed in the main, natural lit gallery. (Installation shot at right.) A fifth photograph is being shown (on its own) at the other gallery location.

Comments/Context: When we look back on photography from the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries, Andres Gursky will likely be one of the first artists who will be mentioned as having somehow captured the spirit of these times. His images are unlike anything else that had come before in terms of size, scale, and level of staggering detail. He has taken everything from buildings and architecture to trading floors, nightclubs, and 99 cent stores and imposed his sense of formal structure to create mesmerizing works that dominate walls. Along the way, he has unabashedly but artfully manipulated the images digitally to create his desired effects. The view point is always from on high and distanced, the people are always in extreme detail and yet anonymous in their environment, and there are nearly always compositional systems and patterns that move your eye around the picture.

The group of new works in this exhibit are all taken inside the Cocoon Club in Frankfurt, and these pictures travel the same road as other previous Gursky works inside techno nightclubs (seas of people, waves of movement, the interplay of individuals and crowds, theatrical lighting). As such, beyond one image that is a less than interesting self portrait of the artist and his son, there isn't anything new here and none of these pictures match the greatness of some his better know works. All the images are quite dark and muddy, and even the ones with large crowds and wild lights don't really jump off the wall; they actually draw you in to look more closely at the details. Heading into this exhibit, we were eagerly expecting to be wowed by the new Gursky show; and while his works are always visually interesting and carefully crafted, and we are overall fans of his art, unfortunately, these particular pitcures didn't move us and the show was ultimately a let down.

Collector's POV: Gursky's work is consistently priced at the very top end of the range for photography, routinely crossing the $1 million dollar mark for his best (and most popular) works. Priced at 600000 and 700000 Euros apiece (and notice that the prices were quoted to us in Euros in a New York gallery - an interesting development), these works are being marketed into that same price window, although we think these particular examples aren't of the same quality.

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

Andreas Gursky

Through December 24th

Matthew Marks Gallery

523 West 24th Street

New York, NY 10011