Lise Sarfati, On Hollywood @Milo

 

JTF (just the facts): A total of 19 color photographs, framed in white and unmatted, and hung against white walls in the East and West gallery spaces. All of the works are digital c-prints, made in 2009 or 2010. The prints in the East gallery are sized 22x30, in editions of 5+2AP; the prints in the West gallery are somewhat larger (32x44), also in editions of 5+2AP. (Installation shots at right.)

 

Comments/Context: Lise Sarfati's images of Hollywood women are a far cry from anything that might be called glamorous. These aren't pictures of the already famous or the soon to be celebrities, they're spare photographs of the countless forgotten women who have set out to chase a dream and have found the path to stardom to be much harder and grittier than they ever imagined. Aspiration mixes with vulnerability, hope with despondency, frustration with weariness: these are some of the casualties in the heartless struggle for fame.

 

Sarfati has been making solitary images of men and women for years, often composed with indirect glances, empty settings, and an.adept eye for muted color. These new works certainly fall into this larger pattern, albeit with an even grimmer mood and a dirtier palette. The back gallery is filled with head shots taken from underneath, seen with city buildings and tired, rundown storefronts (drug stores, strip clubs) in the background. There is an echo of Callahan here, but with a more cinematic West coast mystery. The women alternate between quiet confidence and fragile despair, the sense of struggle apparent in everything from their body language to their blank expressions. A dreary cigarette is never far from view, taking the edge off on a random street corner or a washed out sidewalk.

 

The photographs in the front gallery step back a few paces, making the images into wider, more narrative scenes. A blond girl smokes a bored, languorous cigarette in a cheap poolside chaise, another lingers outside a convenience store next to a fluorescent-lit green wall, and a goth girl in black coolly poses outside a closed movie theater. Women stare into storefront windows, idle near chain link fences, and sit on seedy concrete stoops, always smoking, down on their luck and waiting for something that probably isn't going to arrive; a few might be credibly be mistaken for hookers, which makes the subtle desperation in the images even more discouraging.

 

Both sets of pictures have a quiet, downtrodden grace in the face of this unforgiving environment. In Sarfati's Hollywood, life on the fringes doesn't look too appealing, but there is a sense of moody perseverance in nearly every image, of making the best of it even if the self-delusions are wearing thin.

 

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced as follows. The 22x30 prints range from $6600 to $10600, while the 32x44 prints range from $9300 to $13200. Sarfati's work has only been sporadically available at auction in recent years, with secondary market prices ranging from roughly $3000 to $14000. This body of work was also on view at Rose Gallery in Santa Monica, CA (here) earlier this year.

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

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Magnum Photos page (here)
• Features: Time LightBox (here), Le Journal de la Photographie (here)

Lise Sarfati, On Hollywood

Through October 13th

 

Yossi Milo Gallery

245 Tenth Avenue

New York, NY 10001

Bruce Davidson: Subway @Aperture

JTF (just the facts): A total of 47 color photographs, framed in brown wood and matted, and hung in a single line around the large gallery space. The show is extremely light on detailed information, with no wall labels or other identifiers apart from a mention that the prints came from the collection of Susan Steinhauser and David Greenberg. A bit of detective work upon coming back from the gallery led me to the conclusion that these prints are not vintage, but from a portfolio published in 2006 by Howard Greenberg Gallery (here) and Rose Gallery (here). This portfolio contains 47 dye transfer prints, each 15x23 or reverse, in an edition of 6. The exhibit also includes a single glass case, with copies of Subway from 1986, 2003 and 2011; the show coincides with the reissue of the monograph from Aperture (here). (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Even though Bruce Davidson's Subway has already cemented its revered place in the march of photographic history, I tried to force myself to see this "victory lap" show with fresh eyes, and to consider carefully how this body of work has aged over the thirty years since its making. Is it merely a masterful visual document of a certain place and time, namely New York City in the more violent and dodgy early 1980s? Or does it transcend its period and continue to deliver messages that are more broad and universal?

Circling the gallery, I saw these photographs in a much more technical light than I ever had before, particularly in Davidson's observation of color and in his framing and composition. While the overall palette is often dark and shadowy (with moments of intense flash-lit brightness), bold, saturated color jumps out from these pictures: an orange door echoed by orange pants, the red outfit of a gun-to-the-head robber, a stripe of yellow light across a platform, drips of black graffiti near a red hat, a pink headscarf. Davidson then pairs these interior blocks of color and texture with a spectrum of light (and season) coming through the subway car windows: soft snowy whiteness, springtime flowers, crackled broken glass, honeyed evening light on a platform, the Twin Towers at sunset, the Wonder Wheel lit up in blue twilight. While there are of course plenty of personal stories here, I was most struck by the juxtapositions and angles that Davidson used to create the compositional interactions between the passengers, the subway car, and their larger surroundings: some make an up-close declaration, while others play layers of space against each other, creating unexpected combinations and ironies.

While it is impossible to avoid a sense of datedness in pictures from so many years ago, this doesn't come across as a nostalgic patina; in fact, the images remain brilliantly vibrant and energetic, colors bursting from the darkness. I certainly came away from this show with a better sense of how this work fits into the narrative of late 1970s color photography, in addition to its well deserved place in the history of New York photography. So while we have all seen this work before, it was surprisingly refreshing and thought provoking to see it unearthed once again.

Collector's POV: Since this is a not-for-sale show, there are, of course, no prices. As a proxy for the secondary market for these images, a complete copy of this Subway portfolio sold at the Berman sale at Christie's a year or two ago, fetching $146500.

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

Transit Hub:

• Magnum Photos page (here)
• Reviews: New Yorker (here), Art in America (here)

Bruce Davidson: Subway
Through October 29th

Aperture Gallery
547 West 27th Street
New York, NY 10001

Seung-Woo Back, Revised Ideals @Gana Art

JTF (just the facts): A total of 17 works, from two different series, displayed on separate floors of the dimly lit gallery. On the first floor, 7 images from the Utopia series are displayed, framed in grey with no mat; 5 of these works are diptychs hung edge to edge, while the other 2 are single images. All of the works are digital c-prints, printed in editions of 5, and made in 2008. Sizes range between 50x60 and 71x114. On the second floor, 10 works from the Blow Up series on shown; 9 of these are single images; the last is a grid of 40 images hung together as one unit. Again, the works are digital c-prints, in editions of 5 for the larger prints and 10 for the smaller ones, the larger prints ranging in size from 32x24 to 75x63; the grid is 105x200. The works upstairs were made between 2006 and 2008. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Contemporary Korean photography is clearly on the rise, according to our non-scientific hype-o-meter, and Seung-Woo Back is nearly always included when prominent names are thrown around amid the buzz. This show dives a bit deeper into two of his most recent projects, providing a larger sample of his works than is generally available in the current crop of broad survey shows.

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The Utopia series is drawn from 1970s era propaganda images from North Korea, complete with shiny science labs, chemical plants, bombers, and soul deadening cinder block architecture. These dated institutional scenes have been digitally manipulated to add in washes of pastel color in the sky and background, much like the "colorization" of old black and white movies. The addition of green, or pink, or orange to these otherwise carefully controlled black and white still images adds an unexpected touch of beauty, which of course makes them all the more unsettling and ironic.

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The Blow Up series was constructed via grainy snapshots Back took while in North Korea. Given the strict media censorship there, all of his images were checked before he left the country; this project was therefore built upon the small details of life that he could document with a tourist camera, many of which were otherwise unnoticed portions of mundane shots, later "blown up" to focus on something altogether different than what was in the foreground. The resulting collection offers a surreal glimpse of life in the North: serious police and traffic officers, empty streets with people rushing, school children posing, massive statues in vast open squares, orderly clean up crews, a patriotic pin attached to a shirt. Together, the images have the oppressive feeling of constantly being watched; the resulting mood is both creepy and depressing.

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While this show isn't exactly a sunny pick-me-up, it does offer plenty of complicated ideas to consider, particularly about the nature of controlled imagery and how it can be successfully undermined.

Collector's POV: The images from the Utopia series are priced between $13000 and $16000 for the single prints, $18000 to $23000 for the diptychs. The single larger prints from the Blow Up series range in price from $6000 to $18000, seemingly based on size; the grid of 40 images is $160000. For West coast collectors, Seung-Woo Back is also represented by Rose Gallery in Santa Monica (here).

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

• Photography Now @SFMOMA (here)
• Chaotic Harmony: Contemporary Korean Photography @MFA Houston (here)
• Portfolio 41 (here)

Seung-Woo Back, Revised Ideals
Through October 10th
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Gana Art Gallery
568 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001

Harlem: Photographs of Camilo José Vergara, 1970-2009 @NYHS

JTF (just the facts): A total of 100 color photographs, hung in a single gallery with multiple pillars/dividers, in blond wood frames with white mats, against butter yellow walls. The images were taken in the period between 1970 and 2009. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: I first became aware of the work of Camilo José Vergara when I saw a few of his images included in a group show at the Getty some years ago (linked below). On the way out, I purchased his book American Ruins in the bookshop and dove a bit deeper into his project to document urban life and architecture in some of America's most troubled cities. It's a terrific volume, full of not only imagery, but ideas and text, well worth inclusion in your library.

I recently visited the current show on at the NYHS which gathers together his street pictures of Harlem, spanning nearly 40 years. The exhibit is divided into a handful of sections, by subject matter:

• Introduction (images from 1970)
• Storefronts
• Transformations
• Religion
• Landmarks & Benchmarks
• Graphics (wall murals, street paintings etc.)
• Obama
• Sculpture
• Heart of Harlem (portraits and images of people)

When we talk about the changes in a place over time, we often use the word evolution. But this word implies a linear narrative, all moving in one direction, onward and upward. Vergara's images of Harlem portray the city as an ebb and flow of ocean tides or the swinging of a pendulum, constantly moving back and forth, exchanging optimism and pessimism as the dominant mood across the years. In a similar manner to William Christenberry's images of the same buildings taken over decades in the rural South, Vergara has revisited similar storefronts and vacant lots from time to time, finding that what was once a smoke shop is now a record store or a hair salon. At one level, his documentation of the transformations going on is anthropological, a categorization of life in the micro neighborhoods of single city blocks. At another deeper level, I think these pictures capture the spirit of the inhabitants, a natural sense of reuse and recycling, of building on top of the old to discover and enable something new.
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Indeed, this whole exhibit seems to center on the idea of constant replacement, of new graffiti painted over the old, of decaying buildings being torn down to make room for new ones, of spaces that were once used for one purpose now being used for another. In some ways, Vergara's pictures document the deep roots of the community, the history of these places, the memories of what came before. Seeing a group of images of a single location over the years allows us to excavate the site, to see its changes, and step back in time over and over to get a feel for what life was like back then, so we can compare it to what has come since.

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Vergara's pictures of the people of Harlem (with a nod to Helen Levitt) portray a remarkably durable and resilient bunch, people who have seen it all (the good and the bad) in the past decades, who have celebrated small triumphs and experienced hard times, but are still around to laugh and cry about it. While many of Vergara's pictures of other decaying cities have a despondent, bombed out, no solution mood, his Harlem images are full of life and activity, a sense that this place will always renew itself, drawing on its history from within, to make a path somewhere new.

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Collector's POV: Camilo José Vergara is represented by Rose Gallery in Santa Monica, CA, (here), but I couldn't find any New York gallery representation for his work. (If he is represented in NY, please leave it in the comments.) There have been very few, if any, images by Vergara available in the secondary markets in the past few years, so interested collectors will need to follow up at retail.

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To my eye, the time-lapse grids of changing storefronts are the most successful of the images in the show and the ones that would work best separated out from the larger narrative flow; there are quite a few pictures that really only work in the context of the exhibit and would be less successful if forced to stand alone. That said, I think the best format for this work would be the book form, where many more images could easily be sequenced to tell the more complex story of the neighborhood and its people that Vergara has so effectively captured.

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

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Transit Hub:

• Invisible Cities (here)
• Reviews: NY Times (here), Smithsonian magazine (here)
• Storefront Churches exhibit at National Building Museum, 2009 (here)
• Where We Live: Photographs of America from the Berman Collection, Getty, 2007 (here)
• American Ruins (here)

Harlem: Photographs of Camilo José Vergara, 1970-2009

Through July 12th

New York Historical Society

170 Central Park West

New York, NY 10024