Julie Blackmon: Day Tripping @Mann

JTF (just the facts): A total of 11 large scale color photographs, framed in white with no mats, and hung in the two room gallery space. All of the works are archival pigment prints made between 2010 and 2012. The images on view come in three sizes, with corresponding edition sizes. The smallest size ranges from 24x24 to 25x34 (or reverse) and is available in editions of 25. The medium size ranges 36x36 to 36x50 (or reverse) and is available in editions of 10. And the largest size ranges from 44x44 to 44x59 (or reverse) and is available in editions of 5; one image (Olive & Market Street) is also available in an extra large size of 60x80, also in an edition of 5. (Installation shots at right.)

 

Comments/Context: Julie Blackmon's newest photographs continue her exploration of the intersection of 21st century domestic life and the painterly nuances of the staged tableaux format. Mixing brightened, colorful, digitally-crisp hyper-reality and carefully choreographed scenes featuring families and children, her images have evolved an instantly recognizable signature look, placing the viewer in a stylized world that feels both obviously constructed and plausibly familiar. It's as if the action has been frozen for just a split second, offering us a heightened sense of all the competing activity that is swirling around.

 

A handful of earlier photographs by Blackmon played with references to the chaotic interiors of the Dutch Renaissance painter Jan Steen, but aside from a sharpie incident on the living room couch and a mother's book club (reading Fifty Shades of Grey), this group has generally moved outdoors. Most of the vignettes have multiple points of tension and compositions that draw the viewer's eye around to interrelated details. A pack of boys in a grassy meadow shoots a shotgun at overhead birds while babies howl in the abandoned stroller and a picnic is left unattended. Mom lounges on the patio reading a magazine and eating from a giant bag of potato chips, while the baby wanders around and the barbecue fire flares up, rubber balls strewn all over, including on the roof. Prim girls in dresses tend babies near a nighttime fire, while rampaging young boys turn a hot dog on a stick into a flaming torch. And The Sound of Music playing on a makeshift backyard screen is the setting for various groups of popcorn eating kids and distracted babies on rumpled blankets.

 

Two of the newest images on display pay homage to the busy street scenes of Balthus, with multiple characters moving independently of each other. In Homegrown Food, a girl plays tennis against the wall with a red ball, a man smokes, and another carries a wooden plank, both the girl and the plank man echoes of figures in Balthus' La Rue. In Olive & Market Street, a woman with a bag, a man walking away, a dog in the middle of the street, and even the closed in architecture of the surrounding buildings are all dead ringers for the setting in Balthus' Le Passage du Commerce Saint-Andre. In both images, a composed painterly scene is transformed by Blackmon's stylized photographic detail, melding manipulated "fact" and outright fiction with a nod to art history.

 

I think the best of Blackmon's work combines this multiple points of entry, all-over composition style with an underlayer of wry wit and knowing parental humor. When you're nodding your head in silent recognition at some exaggerated moment or arcane visual reference in her jarringly unreal world, you know she's got you.

 

Collector's POV: The works in the show are priced by size and place in the edition. The smallest works are priced at $3100 or $3500, the medium sized works are either $4500 or $5000, and the large works are either $7500 or $7900. The single extra large print is $12000, as are two medium sized AP prints from already sold out editions. Blackmon's work has recently begun to enter the secondary markets, but not enough lots have sold to chart much of a pricing pattern. As such, gallery retail is still likely the best option for those collectors interested in following up.

 

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

 

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Features/Reviews: New Yorker (here)

Julie Blackmon: Day Tripping
Through January 12th

Robert Mann Gallery
525 West 26th Street
New York, NY 10001

Richard Misrach, The Desert Cantos @Mann

JTF (just the facts): A total of 20 large scale black and white and color photographs, framed in white and variously matted/unmatted, and hung unframed against white walls in the main gallery space. 16 of the works are chromogenic dye coupler prints (1 has a laminate surface), made between 1984 and 1999. The other 4 works are vintage split-tone prints, made between 1975 and 1977. Physical dimensions generally range from 14x14 to 48x60; no edition information was available. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Spanning more than 15 years, made up of literally hundreds of photographs, and divided into 20 separate and distinct thematic subsections, Richard Misrach's Desert Cantos were a huge artistic undertaking. Such a broad body of work can't possibly be jammed into a single gallery show without trade-offs, omissions, and sacrifices, and so what we have here is really more of a jumbled appetizer plate of Desert Cantos ideas rather than anything comprehensive or in-depth. These core images have been bracketed by a few early and a few more recent photographs, spreading the focus of the exhibit even wider. For those unfamiliar with Misrach, the show provides a succinct overview-style introduction to his output over three decades.

A preliminary scan of the gallery provides a striking sense of tone and color; Misrach's palette is full of expansive pastels and soft yellow sands. The intensity of a fire, the stillness of a flood, the wispy gradient of a massive sky or a clearing storm, all of these natural events are exercises in luscious color. But a closer inspection of the pictures opens up multiple lines of thinking beyond pure aesthetics: an abandoned atomic bomb pit, a burned out bus, a dead animal, a buried rocket, a deflated oversized globe (a Burning Man leftover), a Playboy magazine shot full of holes, these are the evidence of an active, not necessarily benign human presence in the desert. Misrach's famous image of the orange dining sets in the middle of the blistering white salt flats caps this sense of puzzling intervention in the unforgiving landscape.

The show also includes several early flash lit night images (palms, monumental rocks), a vast, tumultuous Golden Gate Bridge vista, and even one of the Louisiana pipeline photographs from the recent Aperture show, albeit on a much smaller scale (review here). These pictures provide a skeleton framework for Misrach's artistic evolution, perhaps overly simplified but at least offering a few reference points to help generate a continuum.

Overall, this little of this, little of that gathering is a solid reminder of the enduring strength of the Desert Cantos project. These pictures are now forever part of the history of the American landscape, still fresh and relevant even decades later.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced as follows. The chromogenic dye coupler prints range in price from $12000 to $50000 (some are already sold), while the split-tone prints are either $22000 or $35000. Misrach's work is routinely available in the secondary markets, with prices ranging from roughly $2000 to $80000, with his newer, much larger prints at the top end of that scale. Misrach is represented in New York by Pace/MacGill Gallery (here) and in San Francisco by Fraenkel Gallery (here).

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

Transit Hub:

• Features/Reviews: Wall Street Journal (here), PDN Photo of the Day (here)

Richard Misrach, The Desert Cantos

Through October 27th

Robert Mann Gallery
525 West 26th Street (new location)
New York, NY 10001

O. Winston Link: The Last Steam Railroad in America @Mann

JTF (just the facts): A total of 22 black and white and 2 color photographs, framed in black and matted, and hung throughout the main gallery space. Nearly all of the works are later gelatin silver prints, most sized 16x20 or reverse, with 2 outliers (20x24, and 12x51). The two color images are chromogenic dye coupler prints, also sized 16x20. All of the images were taken in between 1955 and 1958. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: This show of the photography of O. Winston Link is exactly what you would expect it to be. It's a gathering of nearly every one of his most famous nocturnal steam train images, pictures that chronicle a simpler time before the arrival of the interstate highways. Without a doubt, it's a greatest hits exhibit, perfect for those who need a refresher on Link and his carefully controlled cinematic drama.

If we step beyond the obvious 1950s nostalgia and the train buff nerdiness and look at Link's work through the the eyes of today's contemporary art mindset, I think something surprising happens. I think a pretty compelling argument can be made for placing Link near the beginning of the "staging" timeline I mentioned earlier this week vis a vis the current Staging Action show at the MoMA. His use of artificial lighting and meticulous compositional construction is what makes these images so amazing; in many ways, he's a direct precursor to the sound stage elaborateness of Wall and Crewdson. The gas station, the swimming hole, the drive-in theater, the horse and buggy, the waterfall, the woman in her living room, the giant oak, yes, they all have a train in them, but the precise placement of that train within the overall scene was anything but accidental or documentary.

When dissected in this manner, I think Link's work becomes altogether more surreal. The shadows, the smoke, the bright highlights, the glare, nothing was left to chance. I started to notice the float of the steam, the placement of the figures, the areas of dark and light in each image; clearly, he was drawing our eyes to certain spots and hiding others in blackness. The pairing of images at the Rural Retreat depot shows how Link manipulated the light to get specific effects; in one image, a man holds a lantern and the depot is partially in darkness; in another, the man is without a lantern and the depot is fully lit.

I suppose this is what makes some of the masterworks of photography so great; they can constantly be reinterpreted and rediscovered by later generations, who will see in them something different than those that came before. Old can still be both good and relevant; for those of you who have steeped yourselves in the nuances of staged contemporary photography, swing by this show to reconsider just how fresh and important O. Winston Link might be.

Collector's POV: The works in this show are priced as follows. The black and white prints range from $10000 to $25000, with several intermediate prices ($12000, $16000, and $20000); the color images are $10000 each. Link's work is ubiquitous in the secondary markets, with dozens of prints up for sale in any given year. Prices have generally ranged between $2000 and $28000, with Hot Shot, Eastbound, Iager, West Virginia, 1956, always near the top of that range.

My favorite image in this exhibit was NW795 Winston Link, George Thom & Night Flash Equipment, New York City, March 19, 1956; it's on the far right in the third installation shot. It's a spectacular portrait of Link, his assistant, and all his cameras and lighting equipment. While the train pictures are of course iconic at this point, I liked the circular patterns of the light fixtures and the tangle of tripods in this image.

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

Transit Hub:

• O. Winston Link Museum (here)
• Feature: Photo Booth (here)

O. Winston Link: The Last Steam Railroad in America
Through March 26th
.
Robert Mann Gallery
210 Eleventh Avenue
New York, NY 10001

Wijnanda Deroo: Inside New York Eateries @Mann

JTF (just the facts): A total of 23 color photographs, framed in white and hung throughout the main gallery space. The chromogenic dye coupler prints come in three sizes: 16x29, 36x43, and 48x57, each in editions of 10. There are 16 in the small size (matted) and 7 in the medium size (unmatted) on display. All of the images were taken in 2009. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Wijnanda Deroo's images of New York restaurants are a short-hand catalog of the diversity of this great city: its traditions and routines, its ethnicities and neighborhoods, its celebrations and memories. Her quiet, unpeopled interiors capture the essence of the dining experience at each individual place, from table settings and surrounding decorations, to exuberant colors or muted light, running the gamut from down-and-dirty to over-the-top extravagant.

Deroo's pictures document these rooms on a human scale, at eye level, often looking straight at a geometrically balanced group of tables, or down a long bar or counter. Many seem to have been taken in the purity of the morning, when the light is bright and the tables are neatly set. Her photographs are like formal portraits of these spaces, rich in color and texture, some "personalities" crisp and starched, others worn and smooth. The Russian Tea Room and 21 Club are darkly opulent, while Milon and Papaya Dog have ebullient effervescence to spare.

When taken as a series, the works provide a historical (sometimes almost nostalgic) snapshot of the nature of dining in New York; as restaurants age and mature, or come and go, they reflect the aspirations, moods, and tastes of those they serve. Deroo's formal compositions etch these quintessential places in memory, removing the cacophony of the babbling customers, leaving behind silent, studied environments and surfaces, each patiently waiting for its next jolt of life.

Collector's POV: The works in this show are priced as follows. The small 16x20 prints are $3500 each; the medium 36x43 prints are $5000 each; and the large 48x57 prints are $8500 each. Very little of Deroo's work has appeared in the secondary markets, so gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point.

My favorite image in this exhibit was Jerry's, 90 Chambers Street, 2009; it's the coffee shop image on the left in the group of three at right. I like the breaking up of the picture plane and the way the light falls on the red leather of the booth.

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

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Review: Wall Street Journal (here)

Wijnanda Deroo: Inside New York Eateries

Through January 29th

Robert Mann Gallery

210 Eleventh Avenue

New York, NY 10001

Julie Blackmon: Line-Up @Mann

JTF (just the facts): A total of 13 color photographs, framed in white with no mats, and hung in the single room gallery space (with a small dividing wall). All of the works are archival pigment prints. The images on view come in three physical sizes with corresponding edition sizes: 22x29 in editions of 25, 32x42 in editions of 10, and 40x53 in editions of 5. There are 2 of the smallest size, 6 of the middle size, and 5 of the largest size in the show. All of the works were made between 2008 and 2010. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Since our home has a couple of young kids running wild inside, Julie Blackmon's stylized images of the loosely controlled chaos of childhood seem all too familiar. With a touch of humor and an eye for situations that border on the realistically absurd, her pictures are digitally staged vignettes that at once seem both wildly artificial and surprisingly and ironically plausible.

.

My favorite picture in the show is High Dive, where a gaggle of mismatched and unmonitored children fire straggly dolls off the second floor deck of a suburban house toward a blue plastic wading pool, while the parents sit outside on the lawn and drink wine in the twilight, generally oblivious to the action going on nearby. An appropriate assortment of abandoned clothing and shoes is strewn across the landscape. It captures both the imagination of summertime childhood play as well as the stress release of communal parenting. I can entirely imagine the scene devolving into tears (likely from a now remorseful or angry doll owner), or perhaps a back-handed shout of "No Injuries!" from one or another of the otherwise happily distracted parents.

Blackmon's pictures both pare down and exaggerate typical family-life scenes, making them almost perfect caricatures of the reality they portray. A girl practices her violin while her brother plugs his ears, a boy climbs the built-in shelving of the library, and kids scatter in the street as a parent loads the trunk of a car. Carefully placed props (a scooter, a half-eaten doughnut, a pile of confetti, a bunch of tinker toys, a Godzilla action figure) make the stories more enigmatically complex, referring to other related but unmentioned narratives that have already played out at some time in the recent past. Or maybe they're just the discarded remnants of everyday, messy life with kids.

While the overt staginess of these pictures can be a bit distracting, their mixing of obvious unreality with telling glimpses of underlying truth is what makes these pictures work. We've certainly experienced variations on this kind of surreal, random weirdness; perhaps lacking the candy-colors, shiny floors, and perfect lighting, but close enough to have resonance and create knowing chuckles. Blackmon references the Dutch Renaissance painter Jan Steen in her artist statement, and the images do have a constructed, painterly feel, drawn from memory and recreated using the powerful tools of digital photography.

.

Overall, I came away more impressed with these pictures than I expected to be. In the best of the works, Blackmon's imaginary craziness is a subtle mirror of our own lives, simultaneously mocking and sympathetic. The terrified baby launched into the air by his father is both oddly ridiculous and eerily reminiscent of things we have all done.
.

Collector's POV: The works in the show are priced by size and place in the edition. The 22x29 images are priced at $2800 or $3600; the 32x42 images are priced at $3800, $4200 or $5000, and the 40x53 images are $6900 or $8500. Blackmon's work has only recently started to trickle into the secondary markets, so no robust pricing history is really available. As such, gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point. Blackmon is also represented by Catherine Edelman in Chicago (here), Robert Klein in Boston (here), Fahey/Klein in Los Angeles (here), Photo-Eye in Santa Fe (here), and Gail Gibson in Seattle (here).
.

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

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Reviews: New Yorker (here), Photo Booth (here), Boston Globe (here)

Julie Blackmon: Line-Up

Through October 23rd

Robert Mann Gallery
210 Eleventh Avenue
New York, NY 10001

Joe Deal: West and West @Mann

JTF (just the facts): A total of 21 black and white images, framed in white and matted, and hung in the single room gallery space. All of the prints are square format carbon pigment prints, sized 24x24, in editions of 5. The images were taken between 2005 and 2007. A monograph of this body of work was published in 2009 by The Center for American Places at Columbia College Chicago (here). (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: With our cities made of towering skyscrapers and our natural world hemmed in by dense forests, it's easy for Northeasterners like ourselves to forget just how big the sky really is; whenever we look up, our view is constrained by something taller or more massive. Joe Deal's elegant pictures of the Midwestern prairies and grasslands are a jolting reminder of the immensity of the sky, the kind that can be seen for miles and miles in every direction, uninterrupted by the nuances of the flat landscape, the kind that reminds us of our paltry insignificance in relation to the endless emptiness that stretches to the horizon.

Like the grids of property lines laid down by surveyors more than a century ago (cutting up the empire using the rigidity of latitude and longitude rather than the natural breaks in the land itself), Deal has also imposed a geometry of his own on these broad views, a consistent square bisecting land and sky, like a Sugimoto seascape. With the eye of a geologist, he has documented sinkholes and glacial depressions, rolling hills and plateaus dotted by scrub and rock, and lonely buttes and cottonwood trees breaking up the perfect symmetry. Dust storms, smoke, stormy skies and wind across the grass are the only points of movement. The quiet compositions are spare and meditative, the light and shadow falling on the land in a thousand subtle variations from white to black.

Beyond the fact that these are perhaps the best black and white pigment prints I have seen lately, especially in terms of their richness of tonality and timbre (in other words their craft), what I like most about this body of work is that Deal has seemingly found a way out of the conceptual cul-de-sac of the New Topographics. Rather than repeat once again even more dire views of current suburban sprawl and environmental damage (only for them to fall on increasingly deaf ears), he has gone back to the land itself, and asked himself some more personal questions about his own memories of his Kansas roots and his evolving perceptions of the land he grew up on. While these pictures tie back to the 19th century images of the master wilderness photographers, in the end, I think they are about mature and sophisticated balance, about the relationship between earth and sky, and the relationship between man and earth.

Collector's POV: All of the prints in this exhibit are priced at $8000 each. Deal's work is rarely available in the secondary markets; only a very few prints have come up for sale in recent years. Prices for those prints ranged between $1000 and $4000.

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

Transit Hub:

• Exhibit: RISD Museum of Art 2009 (here); Providence Journal review (here); Brian Sholis review (here)

Joe Deal: West and West: Reimagining the Great Plains
Through May 8th

Robert Mann Gallery

210 Eleventh Avenue
New York, NY 10001

Robert Frank @Robert Mann

JTF (just the facts): A total of 24 black and white images, framed in black and matted, and hung in the single room gallery with a wall divider. The redesigned space has approximately the same wall area as before, but is much tighter and more intimate than the previous incarnation; the large bright window that looked out over Chelsea is now gone. The works in the show were made between 1948 and 1962, with a few vintage prints mixed in among a larger group of prints from the 1970s. All of the gelatin silver prints are 11x14 or reverse, and are not editioned. There are 8 prints from The Americans; a mix of other works span the time before and after the landmark book. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: It seems patently obvious that with all the attention surrounding the major Robert Frank exhibit at the Met (review here), it would be smart for someone to put on a well edited gallery show of Frank's work to coincide with the show. Unlike the Pace/MacGill show (review here) which tried to take a more scholarly approach and was largely available only to museums, this show executes the task at hand quite well: it gathers a solid group of images from The Americans as well as a selection of works/variants from other periods and ties them together into a neat package, a selling show to meet the demand of those whose interest in Frank has been piqued by the recent flurry of activity.

The show strikes a good balance between images from The Americans, for those who want to purchase a classic image from the book, and other works of interest from across Frank's career, for those who might be enticed to explore his artistic vision more deeply. There are early images from New York, London and Paris, and a series of artist portraits (De Kooning, Giacometti, Kerouac, and Kline) from the 1960s. I had forgotten about Frank's image Platte River, Tennessee, 1961, an image of a man standing with his back to the camera in a winter cropped field, complete with a cow in the background; it certainly belongs among the great images of backs in the history of photography (images by Lange, Wessel and Sidibe also come to mind).

Overall, this show is a well executed foil to the show at the Met, a practical complement for those who have been inspired by the exhibit and might now consider a Frank for their own collections.

Collector's POV: The works in the show are priced between $15000 and $120000. Frank's work is routinely available at auction, where prices have ranged between $5000 and $600000 in the past few years, with obscure images at the bottom of that range, and iconic vintage prints from The Americans at the top. With this price history in mind, the prices in this show are surprisingly well matched to the realities of the market. While Frank isn't a direct fit for our collection, I certainly enjoyed NYC on 33rd and 11th Ave, 1949, a view of cobble stoned streets and an abstract reflection in a car side mirror.

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

Transit Hub:

• Exhibit review: WSJ (here)

Robert Frank
Through January 9th

Robert Mann Gallery

210 Eleventh Avenue

New York, NY 10001

Robert Mann Staying in Chelsea

Earlier this spring, Robert Mann Gallery announced it was leaving Chelsea and moving to the Upper East Side, with a plan to open in a new space this fall (here). In recent discussions with the gallery, we've learned that they've decided to stay at 210 Eleventh Avenue after all (here).

Given the churn in Chelsea gallery space, I'm sure the landlord was keen to keep Mann in the building and looks to have made a last minute save. There are certainly lots of positives to staying in the same building: eliminating the relocation costs, no client confusion, connections with existing art tenants and the like.

The gallery is currently remodeling and will reopen in September in a slightly scaled down space. A good looking Robert Frank show is scheduled for the debut.

Book: Joe Deal, Southern California Photographs 1976-1986

JTF (just the facts): Published in 1992 by the University of New Mexico Press in association with the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. 150 pages, with 68 black and white images. Includes essays by J.B. Jackson, Mark Johnstone and Edward Leffingwell. (Cover shot at right.)

Comments/Context: Joe Deal has been on my hit list for quite a while now. He's one of those photographers that I felt like I needed to know more about, even though he wasn't exactly a household name. Deal was of course part of the now landmark New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape exhibit at the George Eastman House in 1975, along with other notable photographers Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and Stephen Shore. At least for us, of this group, Deal has always been the most elusive; there just seem to be less of his books and prints running around in the circles in which we travel, less discussion of his work in the press and among collectors we know.

I've actually been thwarted at least twice in trying to acquire this book; Internet booksellers who thought they had it on the shelf and had it listed in in their database somehow didn't actually have it when our order came in. Only recently have I successfully got my hands on a copy. I'm happy to report that it was thoroughly worth the wait, and I now feel like I have a much better understanding of why he was included in New Topographics in the first place, and how his perspective is distinct from the others who also took on the subject matter of suburbanization at that time.

In my view, Deal's images are mostly about the process of human settlement, about the underlying land and how we have built our lives upon it. They chronicle our occupation of the land, the tensions between the land and our chosen way of life, and the process of socialization and division that we impose upon our cities and communities as we create them. What I found most surprising in seeing a larger group of his work together in book form is that his viewpoint seems much less ominous and scolding than Baltz or Adams; his focus on the instabilities or ironies of our lives is subtler, perhaps bit less obviously judgmental.

The book is divided into three sections: The Natural Environment, The City, and The City's Edge, with work from several different projects getting rolled up under each of the headings. The images from The Natural Environment are primarily of the unique geography of Southern California: rocky hillsides, scrub brush, sand, wild scraggly trees and tangled bushes. In most of the pictures, an intrusion in the form of a dirt road or other human presence in the distance disturbs the otherwise pristine view of the untamed wilderness; we're clearly encroaching on the natural environment, and doing it in a way that detracts from its rugged beauty.

If there is any nature at all in the images in the section entitled The City, it was likely put there by someone. There are images of downtown construction projects, as well as of beach communities. There is a terrific sequence of images in this group that brings home the nature of our relationship to the natural world: a concrete patio overlooking the ocean, followed by synchronized swimmers in a suburban pool, followed by a lone man lying on the beach in the blinding sun, followed by families watching the twisting plastic forms of water slides, followed by trailers parked edge to edge along the coastline. The land has been domesticated for our entertainment and recreation (or so it seems).

The most powerful of the images in this book are the ones in The City's Edge. Here Deal has focused on single family suburban homes (and their occupants), built in planned communities and neighborhoods, backing up to the bone dry desert. Often the images peer into deserted back yards, where the formal perfection of the front yard is gone, where sun beaten lawn furniture, abandoned toys and trash cans take center stage. At one level, there is an amazing futility in these pictures, a ridiculousness found in watering a patch of lawn under the punishing sun, or sitting on a chaise amidst the dirt. And yet, the kids are flying a kite or playing happily in a plastic pool in the driveway, and there is some sense that these people have found a degree of happiness in having a place of their own, even if it is in this inhospitable and likely unsustainable environment.

This is what I mean about how Deal has approached his subjects. These suburban tract homes were an easy target; it would have been relatively straightforward to make them look ugly (and he does this to some extent). Deal has however found a way to make the point about the inherent problems with this kind of development, and the need to build communities that are in better balance with their natural environment, but he's done so without the overt harshness and lecturing that turns people away. He's left in some of the optimism that got us into trouble in the first place; the feeling that we can remake this world into a place that fulfills our dreams. He's just pulled back the curtain to remind us that this new life, on this stange land, is not turning out quite how we had envisioned.

This is a fine monograph of an often overlooked photographer, well worth adding to your library.

Collector’s POV: Joe Deal is represented by Robert Mann Gallery in New York (here). Very few prints by Deal have found there way into the secondary markets in recent years; those that have come up for sale have ranged in price between $1000 and $4000.

Transit Hub:

• RISD profile (here)
• West and West, Reimagining the Great Plains, 2009 (here)
• NY Times review, 2004 (here)
• LA Times review, 1992 (here)

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)

Book: Wijnanda Deroo, Huizen van Vereniging Hendrick de Keyser

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2003 by Uitgeverij De Verbeelding. In Dutch (with no English translation). 96 pages, including 67 color images. Includes an essay by P.B. de Bruijn.
.
Comments/Context: I think I first became aware of Dutch photographer Wijnanda Deroo's work in the pages of Blind Spot magazine (here), where her work has appeared on several occasions. I was recently poking around the ICP bookstore (one of the best places for photo books in New York by the way), and I came upon this book she did as a commission for Vereniging Hendrick de Keyser, an association dedicated to the preservation of historic homes in the Netherlands, named after the famous 17th century sculptor/builder. I have wanted to get to know her work better for a while now, so into the purchase pile it went.
.
Deroo has focused most of her art on interiors, both in historic places and in random, commonplace locations all over the world. An overly simplistic comparison can be drawn between Deroo's work and that of Candida Höfer, since they both photograph interiors void of people. But unlike the sterile grandeur that pervades Höfer's work, Deroo's rooms have a lived in feel, as though the people stepped out moments ago, leaving the space empty but warm.
.
The interior images in this book are perhaps a bit more formal than the rest of her work, as these buildings are preserved history, set pieces for visitors to enjoy (the exterior images are underwhelming, but necessary as background). Even so, Deroo finds powerful colors and sensual surfaces in these vacant rooms. I was particularly struck by her use of natural light in these pictures; if often pours into the spaces from bright windows, causing glossy reflections and glare off the polished floors and painted walls. While I fully realize the cliche in this statement, many of the images reminded me of Vermeer, particularly in the use of pure exterior light to bring clarity and emotion into a picture. These end up being much more than standard architectural photos; they tell us stories about the people that lived here, the functions and routines of their lives, and the wearing down of the spaces during the passing of time.

The artist's website can be found here.

The Vereniging Hendrick de Keyser website can be found here.

Collector's POV: Deroo is represented in New York by the Robert Mann Gallery (here). Not much of her work has appeared on the secondary market, so gallery retail is likely a collector's only option in the short term. I continue to be impressed with Deroo's images and I think many of these pictures would stand up well sharing walls with other strong color work.

Michel Szulc-Kryzanowski, The Early Sequences, 1977-1982 @Mann

JTF (just the facts): 20 works, each comprising between 2 and 7 images in a series, together mounted on a 20x28 sheet and framed. Negatives ranging from 1977-1982; the prints are vintage. In editions of 25. (see installation shot at right.)

Comments/Context: I have to admit right up front that prior to walking into the gallery, I had zero previous knowledge of the work of this photographer. My experience with conceptual photography is relatively limited, dominated by the work of Robert Cumming (whom I like quite a bit), with a smattering of early William Wegman, John Pfahl, Duane Michals, and a few others thrown in for good measure. So while I have admired this work from afar, keep in mind my general ignorance in these matters as we move forward here.
.
Like the artists mentioned above, Szulc-Kryzanowki's work uses visual tricks and sleights of hand to force us to consider the nature of the medium of photography and of time in particular. These works are playful and surprising, and even though they are staged to generate their desired effects, they seem much less self conscious and earnest than other conceptual work. Perhaps this is a result of their outdoor settings and use of natural materials (shadows, mountains, sand, sticks, surf etc.) as the subject matter of his experiments with angles, perspective, and time dilation. Perhaps the series form lends itself to a single, more simple theme (and variation) being explored. Regardless, there really isn't a weak series in this whole group, and together they provide a clear and novel point of view.

Collector's POV: The works are priced between $4500-7500. My particular favorites include the series of smaller and larger sand dollars held in a hand, the footprints in the sand, and the surf at different times in the same place.
.
I very much welcome the fact that we can have a diversity of viewpoints in the New York gallery scene, so that we are not bogged down with the same ideas rehashed again and again. This show isn't like anything you've seen recently, and even if it isn't what you collect, I am certain that you would find this show thought provoking and entertaining, and overall, well worth your time. It is a good reminder to get beyond comfortable images and expand your experience of all kinds of photography.
.
Rating: * (1 star) GOOD (rating system defined here)
.
Michel Szulc-Kryzanowski, The Early Sequences 1977-1982
Through October 18th

Robert Mann Gallery
210 Eleventh Avenue
New York, NY 10001

Of The Refrain @Robert Mann

JTF (just the facts): Total of 53 images, all black and white, none larger than 20x24, spanning a period from the mid 1920s to the mid 1960s, with most clustered in the 1930s and 40s. Hung in one large gallery space with plenty of natural light.

Here's a list of the photographers included, with the number of images in the show by that artist in parentheses:

Berenice Abbott (6)
Hazel Larsen Archer (6)

Ellen Auerbach (4)

Walter Auerbach (1)

Ilse Bing (6)

Carlotta Corpron (2)

Trude Fleischmann (1)

Horst P. Horst (1)

Lotte Jacobi (2)

Andre Kertesz (1)

Dora Maar (1)

Barbara Morgan (3)

Man Ray (3)

ringl + pit (11)

Josef Sudek (2)

Margaret Watkins (3)

Comments/Context: It's ironic that the summer group show is the one time of the year when gallery curators really get to flex their muscles, freed from the relentless parade of one person shows (where the work "speaks for itself"), and yet, these shows hang in quiet empty galleries, as the entire art world has decamped to greener pastures to escape the heat. These shows allow curators to reclaim the lost arts of storytelling and narrative, of juxtaposition, of education; they encourage us to see familiar work in new ways and to see unexpected connections with less known artists.

A well-executed example of the group show is now on view at Robert Mann (it's closing at the end of the week, so get over there soon). Of The Refrain is based (not surprisingly) on the simple premise of the musical refrain, where a common melody or theme is brought back again and again, to reinforce the dominant ideas of the piece, while also showing contrast and change over time. Transposed to the visual world of photography, we are shown a carefully sequenced series of images, where themes of dance/movement, portraiture, and commercial photography (eyeglasses, lace, hats, soap, bubbles and the like) are intermingled, repeated and harmonized. Camera angles and scale also keep changing to ensure the connections and variations aren't too staged or obvious.

Care the in crafting of this show was also clearly taken in the installation of the images themselves (see above and particularly to the right). Notice how the images drift up and down (like a musical score or a wave). While it's hard to see from these small digital images, the linear sequencing of the images introduces one subject matter theme for 2 or 3 pictures, moves to another idea, and then reintroduces the original theme 10 or 12 pictures down the line, again and again, around the room. The effect works and the whole exhibit "hangs together" well.

.

You'll notice I have yet to really highlight any singular images found in this show. And while I'll do that in a moment, the show isn't really about stand out, earth shattering images (in my opinion). It's more about the voice of the curator, and the journey taken walking through the gallery.

Collectors' POV: The prints in this exhibition range in price from $4000 on the low end to $25000 at the top. These prices seem to me to be at least 20% too high, but keep in mind, this is a well established gallery, selling at retail, in Chelsea, so perhaps the prices aren't that much out of line. I have always been a fan of the scientific photography Berenice Abbott did at MIT, and there are several nice prints of this work included in the show, in larger sizes (16x20) than I have seen them before ($6000 each). Another stand out was the work of Helen Larsen Archer (who was previously unknown to me). Her fragmented portraits of Merce Cunningham are fluid and simple, yet very evocative; they are sprinkled throughout the show and help to keep the pace up (prices range from $5000-7000).

.

All in all, well worth a trip down to deserted Chelsea in the dog days of summer.

.

Rating: ** (2 stars) VERY GOOD (rating system defined here)
.

Of The Refrain

Through August 22nd

Robert Mann Gallery

210 Eleventh Avenue

New York, NY 10001

PS. This will be the last post this week. Back on Monday.