A Sincere Plug for our 2010 Sponsors

I'd like to end this year with a sincere plug for the 2010 sponsors of DLK COLLECTION. Given that the vast majority of our readers subscribe to the feed (rather than arriving directly to the site), many of you may not even realize that we have sponsors. In fact we do, and their banners fly proudly along the sidebar.

As a friendly reminder, although we don't have non-profit status, being a photography critic/blogger is undeniably a money losing proposition. It's also a massive time sink, and if it wasn't such an amazingly gratifying and challenging labor of love, a rational person would give it up right away.

Our sponsors provide something extremely valuable that our mostly silent readers, followers, and intermittent anonymous visitors don't: they provide a public vote of confidence for what we are doing. With their dollars and their brands, they support the grand idea of a multitude of hopefully intelligent voices engaging in thoughtful discussion about photography of all kinds.

But let's not be confused however. While counting the number of click throughs or page views of a banner is mildly entertaining, the point of sponsoring this site is to get bodies in the door, to add subscribers (for the magazines), and to generate tangible sales. If we can reliably connect the dots between reading reviews on this site and buying photographs in the real world, then we're doing much more than just shouting into the void.

While each and every one of our 2010 sponsors is deserving of my heartfelt thanks and your disposable income, I would particularly like to highlight the support of Janet Borden Inc. (here). Janet's gallery has been an anchor sponsor of this site for the entire year, taking the top banner slot month after month. She has been tirelessly enthusiastic about the evolution of this blog, and has been quick to point out my delusions and misguided opinions with her biting wit. Her persistent encouragement, even when her show of the moment didn't get 3 STARS, has been invaluable. If you find enjoyment in what we are doing here, I urge you to reward Janet for giving her support when it wasn't even remotely obvious. Get down to Soho and buy that Lee Friedlander, Tina Barney, Martin Parr (or whoever) that you have been coveting, and tell Janet that one of the reasons you are there with your dollars out is that you read DLK COLLECTION. You can thank me by thanking her.

Our other monthly sponsors also deserve your attention and your patronage. They have chosen to stand and be counted as well, so open your wallets folks and show them you value their commitment to independent photography writing:

Amador Gallery (here)
ClampArt (here)
Robert Koch Gallery (here)
Lee Gallery (here)
Photograph magazine (here)
Von Lintel Gallery (here)

Finally, I'd like to send out an authentic thank you to the many sponsors (past, present and future) of other photography blogs. This is a vibrant and collegial community and the dollars that are spent in support of Joerg Colberg or AD Coleman, Marc Feustel or Andy Adams, or countless other important voices are critical to keeping them on the air. I know from experience: don't underestimate what a small amount of support will do for the confidence of a writer wondering if they can feed the beast with something intelligent for yet another day. And by the way, their daily traffic of targeted, photography-loving visitors is likely larger than the entire client database of most galleries.

This is the last post of 2010. We'll be back in January, starting with the posts that didn't get done this week: the 2010 Auction Summary, the Top 10 Photobooks of 2010, and hopefully some reviews of books that came out from under the tree. Happy Holidays!

Lynn Geesaman @Richardson

JTF (just the facts): A total of 11 large scale color works, framed in black and matted, and hung in the main gallery space. All of the works are square format chromogenic prints, made between 2007 and 2009. The prints come in two sizes: 28x28, in editions of 15, and 38x38, in editions of 6; there are 9 small prints and 2 large prints in the show. The images were taken in various gardens in France, England, and the US (Kentucky and Louisiana). (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: I've always thought that Lynn Geesaman's photographs were about the simple poetry of tranquil gardens. Her works have a dreamy, almost hallucinatory, feel to them, a shimmering painterly effect that softens the formality of long rows of trees, perfectly pruned hedges, or unusual botanical specimens. Her pictures capture a world of hazy beauty, a delicate mix of Atget and throw back Pictorialism.

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What I found surprising in this show is that for the first time I saw a conceptual edge in her pictures, a move beyond the decorative to something more challenging and subtly ironic. Shaped trees and carefully orchestrated vistas have been enhanced by brilliant exaggerated colors: bright orange, deep red, vibrant green and smashing pink. The dissonance isn't overpowering, but somehow the rules of landscape photography seem to have been broken; the gardens have become more stylized and fabricated, the human hand controlling the natural world seems more obvious, the blurry romance a little more sinister. The most unexpected picture in the show is one from the Hampton Court Gardens in England, where a cluster of perfect conical evergreens sits in front of a jumble of tall scaffolding covered in red cloth. This is the first image I have ever seen by Geesaman that so overtly contrasts the natural and the artificial; it still glistens with glimmery light, but we're a long way from artful reflections in still ponds. Seeing this image entirely changed my mindset, and when I circled back to see the other pictures once again, I was suddenly much more attuned to the ways in which the view was being manipulated, both by the garden designer and the photographer.

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I have always been intrigued by the unique diffusion process that creates Geesaman's signature hazy effect, but these new works forced me to look beyond the obvious beauty of the idealized gardens and to see how the artist was adding a nuance of commentary underneath that I had entirely missed before. I'm sure many viewers will still be enthralled by the easy loveliness of these pictures and will continue to enjoy them at face value. But I think the unlikely conceptual skepticism and the tiniest hint of absurdity give these pictures another richer level of meaning that takes them away from the conventional and toward something quite a bit more thought provoking.

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Collector's POV: The works in this show are priced as follows. The smaller 28x28 prints are $4250 (including the frame). The larger 38x38 prints are $6700 (including the frame). Geesaman's work does not have much auction history, so determining a secondary market price window is difficult. As such, gallery retail is likely the best option for interested collectors at this point.

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Luckily, Geesaman's work is represented by quite a few galleries around the US. In addition to Yancey Richardson in New York, her representatives include Robert Koch in San Francisco (here), Catherine Edelman in Chicago (here), Thomas Barry in Minneapolis (here), Scheinbaum & Russek in Santa Fe (here), and Jackson in Atlanta (here).
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Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
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Transit Hub:

• Book: Gardenscapes, 2003 (here)

Lynn Geesaman
Through July 9th

Yancey Richardson Gallery

535 West 22nd Street

New York, NY 10011

Michael Wolf: The Transparent City @Aperture

JTF (just the facts): A total of 43 color photographs, 1 video, and 1 sculpture, generally framed in black with no mat, and hung throughout the main gallery space (with two interior dividing walls), against white and dark blue walls. Since neither wall labels nor a handy exhibition checklist was readily available, the usual detailed information about sizes, dates, editions, formats, and even titles was not present; what follows are my assumptions or simply rough guesses. The chromogenic prints came in three general sizes: large (approximately 4x5 feet or reverse), medium (approximately 16x20 or reverse), and small (approximately 8x10 or reverse); the exhibit contains 13 large prints, 15 medium prints, and 13 small prints, intermixed on the walls. The first wall of the exhibit contains a prelude of sorts, two images and a wooden stool from Wolf's previous Hong Kong project, Architecture of Density. In the middle of the gallery, a video interview runs in a loop, across from a pedestal containing a selection of Wolf's books. A monograph of this work is available in the shop for $60. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Michael Wolf's new images of Chicago skyscrapers and the diversity of life that goes on inside them are fundamentally oriented around the idea of telescoping space, of seeing something from a multitude of distances, from far away to right up close, zooming in and out to to see different layers of meaning.

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From ten feet away, Wolf's large nighttime architectural studies look like any number of dense city scenes you've seen before; the sky is cropped out, flattening the picture plane into a gridded wallpaper of geometric lines and patterns, created by the formal repetition of the windows and vertical structure of the buildings. While the scale is larger here and the prints are in color, fundamentally, these are modernist visual ideas that go back all the way to the 1920s. The difference comes in the ability to walk right up to the frame and continue to delve into deeper layers of detail. Try that trick with a classic vintage image and you'll get an eye full of grain and blur; in this case, individual stories resolve themselves in each pane with startling Rear Window voyeurism.

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Certainly new technologies play a part in enabling this kind of storytelling, and in some cases, there are echoes of the grand gestures of Andreas Gursky in these pictures. But it is this ability to go from abstraction to documentation in the same frame that is exciting. Up close, the boxes and grids become a warren of lighted offices and apartments, each inhabited by workers and everyday people.

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This idea of changing and uncertain distance is amplified by the small, pixelated images of anonymous faces and bodies that are intermixed with the large architectural views. Each one was drawn from one of the big studies and blown up, the pixelation creating another layer of uncertainty; the pictures are indistinct and textured, forcing the viewer to move back and squint to resolve the details. Many of these works were made during the first weeks of the banking crisis, so there are plenty of anxious and worried looks, faces buried in hands, stressed thinking, and subtle gestures of fear. Others have a more pensive and lonely feel, as isolated apartment dwellers watch TV or putter around aimlessly. While I appreciate the impressionistic aspect of the pixels and understand their ability to leave the image more open for interpretation (rather than a strict viewing of truth), I'm not sure that most of the individual close up images can really stand that well on their own; that said, they do provide an important contrast to the larger city shots, and successfully highlight the back and forth changing of scale that is a vital part of Wolf's artistic approach.
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In many ways, these images connect me of the earlier city scenes of Kertesz, where the small details of a cat, or a boy swinging, or a boat on a windowsill suddenly come into view when viewed up close, ultimately changing the feel of the picture. I can imagine a collector having one of these large Wolf architectural views on a big wall, and continually bringing visitors right up to the frame to show them some captivating little detail buried in an office. But while Kertesz' vignettes have the light touch of humor and romance, Wolf's small stories seem more emblematic of the trials and tribulations of these depressing economic times. And so perhaps that will be the ultimate fate of these images: to rest as unexpected artistic documents of this particular point in 21st century history.
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Collector's POV: Since the images in this show are not for sale, no price information was offered. Michael Wolf is represented by Bruce Silverstein Gallery in New York (here) and Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco (here). Wolf's images have only recently begun to find their way into the secondary markets. As such, the pricing history is likely too small to be particularly representative; that said, the few works that have sold in the past few years have ranged between $20000 and $26000, all of the prints being of the largest size from Architecture of Density.

For our specific collection, one of the larger patterned architectural studies would likely be the best fit, even though we would struggle to find a place to hang it.

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

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• MoCP exhibit, 2008 (here)
• Video interview @Conscientious (here)
• Features/Reviews: Artforum (here), Lens (here), LensCulture (here)

Michael Wolf: The Transparent City

Through January 21st

Aperture Gallery

547 West 27th Street
New York, NY 10001

Amy Stein: Domesticated @Clamp Art

JTF (just the facts): A total of 18 color images, framed in white with no mat, hung in the main gallery space and the small side alcove. The works are digital c-prints, in two sizes: 24x30 (in editions of 10+2AP) and 30x40 (in editions of 3+2AP). The show includes 17 images in the small size and 1 in the large size; all of the works were made between 2005 and 2008. 12 of the images can be found in the book Domesticated, published by Photolucida (here), and available from the gallery for $24. There are 6 new images (not included in the book, but part of the same series) on view as well. (Marginal installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: The scenes depicted in Amy Stein’s Domesticated series chronicle the borderlands of the human and animal worlds, the places where two previously separate habitats now overlap and rub together, forced into precarious proximity by the encroachment of civilization on untamed nature: wolves are in the garbage, bobcats lounge on a construction site, bears are near the swimming pool, and deer are in the greenhouse and underneath the window. The images are full of confrontations and tests, separations and boundaries, anxiety and curiosity, both sides keeping a wary distance, and watching carefully.

It has already been well publicized that Stein uses stuffed animals (taxidermy) to create her diorama-like stories; these are not documentary photographs of real life events, but re-enactments of incidents and memories culled from conversations with residents of a small town in Northern Pennsylvania. This is I think a critical piece of information for understanding these works; documentary images of these same events would look different; they’d be messier, or too fleeting to have been captured at all, or most likely, the real thing happened in an altogether less interesting manner.

So what we actually have in these photographs is the recreation of memory and the embellishment of tales and legends told again and again. This kind of thinking on the part of the artist seems highly rooted in the history and practice of painting; much less so in the realm of photography (particularly “straight” photography). And so while it is relatively straightforward to see narrative and stylistic parallels with the work of Jeff Wall or Gregory Crewdson or even certain film makers here, I think the more interesting connections are to be made to painting, both in the process steps of formulating an image from memory and transferring it into a more easily digestible and compact form, and in the borrowings and echoes of art history, of allegorical works, and of fables, myths and fairy tales. Stein’s works are a synthesized reality, carefully composed for maximum narrative effect. The whole project shouts 19th century painting to me, even though the images have been executed by a contemporary photographer.

While not every image in the show packs a punch, the overall theme of human/animal interaction is deftly explored from a variety of vantage points in these pictures, coming to a complex and nuanced set of conclusions; perhaps this why the book form has been so successful for this body of work (it has won awards from Critical Mass in 2007 and the New York Photo Festival in 2008). All in, this is a convincing first New York solo show. What I like best is that she seems to have found practical ways to connect photography to painting, and to leverage the strengths of both to generate some unexpected and satisfying outcomes.
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Collector's POV: The images in the show are priced based on size and location in the edition. The smaller prints range between $2500 and $5000; the larger prints start at $4500 (I’m not sure of the end of the edition price for the larger pictures). Stein’s work has no history to date in the secondary markets, so collectors will need to work within the gallery system to access her prints. For those on the West coast, Stein is also represented by Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco (here).

While Stein’s work does not fit into our specific collecting program, I particularly enjoyed seeing the image Backyard, 2007 (here), which eerily reminded me of Goya’s The Third of May, 1808 (here, in the Prado).

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

Transit Hub:

• Artist website (here) and blog (here)
• Review of UPenn talk (here)
• Interview with The Rumpus (here)

Amy Stein: Domesticated
Through October 31st

Clamp Art
521-531 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001

Book: Readymades: American Roadside Artifacts, Photographs by Jeff Brouws

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2003 by Chronicle Books (here). 272 pages, with 274 black and white and color photographs (some duplicates). With essays by Diana Gaston, Jeff Brouws, D.J. Waldie, Luc Sante, M. Mark, Phil Patton, Joel Jensen, Mark Frauenfelder, Bruce Caron, Wendy Burton, and Alan Rapp. (Cover shot at right, via Chronicle Books website.)

The book is divided into 11 separate sections, each centered on a single subject matter type. These include:

Freshly Painted Houses
Language in the Landscape
Abandoned Drive-Ins
Farm Forms
Partially Painted Pickup Trucks
Twentysix Abandoned Gasoline Stations
Freight Cars
Signs
Trailers
Bowling
Storage Units

Comments/Context: If you took Walker Evans' love of the American vernacular and threw it into a mixer with the rigorous conceptual ideas of Bernd and Hilla Becher and added a splash of the spirit of the open road, what might emerge is the work of Jeff Brouws. In many ways, Brouws is a collector (just like some of us), cataloging fragments of increasingly obsolete American culture, making careful inventories of the worn, distressed and left behind.

This small, thick book gathers together nearly a dozen photographic projects, where Brouws has selected a single resonant American subject (beat-up partially painted pickup trucks, or railway freight cars, or bowling alleys) and then traveled the country finding multiple examples of this specific form. His images are generally straight-on "portraits" of these places or things, carefully laid out with clarity and order (although somewhat less meticulously rigid and repetitive than the Bechers). The prints are then displayed as typologies, thereby accenting the theme and variation effect found when a number of images of the same subject are brought together on one wall (or page). The result is a visual inventory of American small town culture, an anthropology of the quirks of our American personality which are slowly being lost to the homogenizing forces of global change.

The best of these groups are those that accent the individuality and eccentricities of the subjects: the garishly painted houses that seem overflowing with optimism, the lovingly dilapidated side panels of the work horse trucks, the simplicity of empty drive-ins, and the innovations in graphic design found in paint and neon across the land. I also enjoyed the systematic surveying of abandoned gas stations, as an homage to Ed Ruscha's Twentysix Gasoline Stations.

In paging through this book, I found myself wanting more of the projects I found most interesting, and would have willingly given up several of the less successful subjects (Farm Forms and Storage Units were my least favorite) to make room for more depth on a few. That said, the diversity of common subjects creates a broader picture of the peculiar landscape of the American back roads, thereby telling a more complex and whimsical story of vernacular America.

Collector's POV: Jeff Brouws is represented by Robert Mann Gallery in New York (here), Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco (here), and Robert Klein Gallery in Boston (here). Surprisingly, there have been very few examples of Brouws' work in the secondary markets, so interested collectors will need to follow up with the appropriate retail galleries. For our particular collection, a selection/grid of gasoline stations, sign elements or colorful houses would likely be the best fit.

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Interview: Conscientious, 2007 (here)
• Approaching Nowhere (here)
• NY Times review, 2003 (here)
• PBS Photo Essay, 2003 (here)