Catherine Opie: High School Football @Mitchell-Innes & Nash

JTF (just the facts): A total of 23 color photographs, framed in white with no mat, and hung in the entry and the large main gallery space. The works are c-prints, made between 2007 and 2009. The portraits are sized 40x30 or 30x22, and the wider game scenes are sized 48x64. No edition information was provided on the checklist. (Installation shots at right.)

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Comments/Context: Catherine Opie's recent photographs of American high school football are cunningly understated and subtle. At first glance, they reminded me of the individual posed portraits taken on picture day and of the countless action shots taken by parents standing on the sidelines. They have all the trappings of the familiar, the look of pictures we have seen before, and yet upon closer inspection, there is something anthropological about her gaze, an investigation of this ritualistic behavior from a fresh vantage point.

Her posed portraits (either 3/4 or full body) capture the boys in their shoulder pads and uniforms, with sweaty faces and matted helmet hair. The players run the gamut from the swaggering and confident to the timid and gentle, a whole spectrum of male attitudes (both real and fabricated) on display. There is strength and vulnerability, toughness and defensiveness, grown up man and young boy, all mixed together in the stew of adolescence. While the settings are completely different, I saw some parallels between this work and Rineke Dijkstra's beach portraits.

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Opie's images of the games in progress are equally compelling and unexpected. All of the photographs are taken at ground level, with the painted lines of the green fields radiating outwards and large expanses of open air above the turf. In each case, the field is shown in the context of the surrounding land, alternately hemmed in by mountains, palm trees, towering evergreens, big sky deserts, and leafy suburban streets. Many were taken at night, when the lights were on and the skies opened up with downpours of rain. While there is of course action on the field (often small and seemingly insignificant), the pictures document the surrounding community, and the role of these games in that larger society. There is a strong sense of theater, of being out on the field in front of the whole town, of striving to prove worth or strength for all to see.

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These photographs really grew on me as I spent more time with them. As the wary parent of a middle school aged football player myself, it was as if Opie had shown me a side of my own sideline haunting that I had never really understood or internalized before. They show why the boys play, how they create and try on masculine personas for themselves, and how the community is stitched together by the support of the team. Perhaps what is most impressive here is that Opie has found so much rich and nuanced material right where most of us have routinely overlooked it, out on the playing fields of every town in America.
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Collector's POV: The works in this show are priced as follows. The 40x30 portraits are $20000 each and the 30x22 portraits are $15000 each; the 48x64 scenes are $40000 each. Opie's work has started to show up in the secondary markets with more regularity in recent years. Prices have ranged between $1000 and $17000, although not many of her larger prints have come up for sale.
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Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here)

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Transit Hub:

• Reviews/Features: New Yorker (here), PhotoBooth (here), Lenscratch (here)
• Exhibit: LACMA, 2010 (here)

Catherine Opie: High School Football

Through April 14th

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Mitchell-Innes & Nash

534 West 26th Street

New York, NY 10001

Justine Kurland, This Train is Bound for Glory @Mitchell-Innes & Nash

JTF (just the facts): A total of 22 color images, framed in white with no mat, and hung in the entry and the large main gallery space. The works are c-prints, in editions of 6, made between 2007 and 2009. The prints range in size from 11x14 to 40x50, with a few intermediate sizes in between. A monograph of this body of work is being published by Ecstatic Peace Library. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Unlike most of the contemporary photography shows on view this Fall, Justine Kurland's recent body of work doesn't follow the usual theme and variation project formula, but instead brings together a group of pictures that seem to illustrate a single all-encompassing atmospheric narrative; it's as if these pictures were taken from an illustrated novel, each one depicting a particular moment in the adventure story.

The recent tough economic times have brought a nearly endless set of comparisons to the Great Depression of the 1930s, and Kurland's subject matter is a portrait of the "neo-hobo" lifestyle, a 21st century version of the Great Depression wanderer: down on his luck, homeless, off in the wilderness, riding the rails to get from place to place. This old time, folk song narrative is infused with a more contemporary "off the grid" environmental sentiment; perhaps these people are living this life because of economic hardships or maybe they have simply chosen to get away from society and try to find some meaning out in the woods.

The sequencing of the images in the show brings several motifs back again and again:

• boxcars, hopper cars, tracks through the mountains, bridges, tunnels, the long S-shaped lines of distant freight trains off in the distance
• scratched out campgrounds, lean-tos, temporary structures of sticks and plastic tarps, shelters made of cardboard and plastic milk crates
• old men (vagrants, ramblers, travelers, mountain men) with scruffy beards and grubby clothing, naked children, sleeping in the back of a van or roaming in the weeds, bohemian backpackers communing with nature

Many of Kurland's images have the carefully composed quality of 19th century genre paintings, where the characters have been placed in the environment (along a riverside, perched on a fallen log, etc.) in such a way as to enhance the mood or to be representative of a larger allegorical idea/lifestyle. Unlike the documentary reality of the FSA pictures of the 1930s, Kurland's works have a romantic, utopian feel to them, a nostalgic back-to-the-land wildness and freedom, out on the frontier. And while there are fringe elements in all cultures, these pictures seem especially American to me, with a Huck Finn sensibility of self reliance and exploration, even if the times are hard.

This is a body of work that I think will be most successful in book form. While there are a few images that can easily stand on their own, the entire set of pictures is an evocative mood piece, where smaller pictures and train landscapes help fill in the gaps and details of the broader and larger narrative line; the best pictures benefit from being surrounded by the others. Overall, the images grew on me as I wandered through the gallery, and I left with the feeling of having been spun a yarn by an accomplished story teller.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show range in price between $2500 and $12000, based on size, with the middle range sizes priced at $6500, $7500 or $8500. Kurland's work has a very limited track record at auction - a handful of prints, in a range between $3000 and $6000, but not really enough sales to definitively chart a price trend. While these pictures don't fit into our collecting scheme in any way, I think they would be a solid fit for collectors interested in tableau-style work (the Crewdson/Yale school). As an aside, these works also reminded me of Alec Soth's recent body of work from the South (here); check them both out for a comparison of approaches to similar subject matter.

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

Transit Hub:

• NY Times feature, 2007 (here)
• Reviews: NY Times, 2004 (here), Art in America, 2004 (here), ArtForum, 2002 (here)

Justine Kurland, This Train is Bound for Glory
Through November 14th

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Mitchell-Innes & Nash
534 West 26th Street

New York, NY 10001