Katherine Wolkoff: Deer Beds @Wolf

JTF (just the facts): A total of 6 large scale color photographs, framed in white and unmatted, and hung against white walls in the long single room gallery space. All of the works are chromogenic prints, made in 2007. The prints are sized either 20x24 or 40x50, both in editions of 7. (Installation shots at right.)

 

Comments/Context: While the grassy meadows and scraggly weeds in Katherine Wolkoff's new photographs could conceivably have come from any number of places in America, somehow they have a uniquely Northeastern feel to them. Around here, the kinds of open areas she has documented on Block Island in Rhode Island typically border on wetlands or new growth forests, acting as sunny transitional zones from one micro-ecosystem to another. These in-between areas have become part of the fabric of this crowded land, so much so that we humans have gotten used to local animals moving back and forth between the areas of wildness and civilization. In our neighborhood, the deer that inhabit these meadows come right up to the houses in the twilight, stopping by to nibble on the tulips and the rhododendrons before bolting back into the undergrowth.

At night, these same deer make temporary beds in the tall grass, nestling down out of the wind. When they rise in the morning and move off, they leave behind faint swirled depressions and hollows, and it is these ghostly tramplings that Wolkoff has documented in her recent landscapes. In many ways, the works are like figure/ground exercises, the pushed down silhouettes becoming ephemeral evidence of recent presence. The grasses and weeds are matted and flattened in barely recognizable bowls and nests, the frame cropping out everything but the quietly noticeable absence of the deer. Given the natural course of wind, rain, and sun, these beds will soon return to their normal form, so there is something especially fleeting about what Wolkoff has captured. The resulting images are calm and gentle, pictures of both nothing and something, both representational and gesturally abstract.

I think these photographs rightfully belong in the Northeastern landscape photography tradition that includes everything from Ray Mortenson's weeds to Joel Sternfeld's Oxbow Archive. What all of these bodies of work share is sense of the understated, of the beauty to be found in the overlooked corners of our land. Wolkoff's deer beds require some patience to get into, but they reward the attentive viewer with a sense of closeness to the rhythms of nature and a feeling of unpretentious Yankee simplicity.

Collector's POV: The works on view are priced based on size, with the 20x24 prints at $2600 and the 40x50 prints at $6000. Wolkoff's work has very little secondary market history, so gallery retail is likely the best/only option for those collectors interested in following up.

 

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

 

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Features/Reviews: Artforum (here)

 

Katherine Wolkoff: Deer Beds

Through June 30th

 

Sasha Wolf Gallery

70 Orchard Street

New York, NY 10002

Paul McDonough: Sight Seeing @Wolf

JTF (just the facts): A total of 18 black and white photographs, framed in black and matted, and hung in the long single room gallery space. All of the prints are modern gelatin silver prints, made from negatives taken between 1971 and 1982. The prints are sized 16x20 and come in editions of 15. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: When we think of 1970s West coast photography, Paul McDonough isn't a name that we might normally come up with right away. But the New York photographer spent time in California and Oregon during that fertile period, making outsider pictures that combine his street-savvy awareness for the serendipity of converging people with the easy going, laid back warmth of life out West. They're street photographs, only in this case, the street is a beach, a sun-baked parking lot, or a paved boardwalk.

McDonough's image of the swirling mass of bodies around a Santa Monica beach camper is the kind of complex composition that has its roots in New York city chaos. Swimsuited men and women perch on top of the RV, stand in the doorway, climb on the back, catch rays nearby, and generally wander around, a half dozen mini-vignettes and tiny gestures captured in one single all-over frame. Other photographs zero in on knots and tangles of young people, hanging around cars and checking each other out, the indirect interactions of guys and girls falling into time worn patterns of looking and not looking. But the crisply observed local details are what creates the atmosphere: short shorts, plaid bell bottoms, beater convertibles, rusty El Caminos, bikinis, old school roller skates, wavy, sun-bleached Farrah Fawcett hair, and warm afternoon light. Again and again, McDonough's timing is quietly and casually perfect: a blown chewing gum bubble underneath a spraying fountain, a escalating line up of children on the ladder of a playground slide, and the separation of skateboarders on a gas station blacktop all coalesce at exactly the right moment. He has captured a relaxed world where pulling your car right up on the beach isn't out of the ordinary and where sunbathing on a grocery store curb amid the abandoned shopping carts seems entirely natural, and he makes it look so effortless that we might think taking these kind of pictures is somehow easy, which of course, it's not.

All in, this show broadens our view of McDonough, exposing a side of his work that we hadn't seen before. Step by step, exhibit by exhibit, we're working our way forward in time, his archive proving richer and more varied with every successive discovery.

Collector's POV: The works on view are priced at $3000 each. McDonough's work has very little secondary market history, so gallery retail is likely the best/only option for those collectors interested in following up.

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

Transit Hub:

• Features/Reviews: New Yorker (here), Hyperallergic (here)

Paul McDonough: Sight Seeing
Through May 5th

Sasha Wolf Gallery
70 Orchard Street
New York, NY 10002

David Nadel: Burns II @Wolf

JTF (just the facts): A total of 14 color photographs, framed in white and unmatted, and hung in the elongated single room gallery space. All of the works are archival pigment prints. The images come in two sizes: 16x20, in editions of 8, and 40x50, in editions of 6. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: David Nadel's second installment of wildfire charred, snow covered Montana landscapes introduces a series of small refinements to his already successful visual formula. Like the works from his previous show (in 2011), his newest images begin with arduous hikes to remote areas of unpeopled wilderness and end with miles of forested space compressed into flattened planes of nearly abstract lines. What's different this time is a subtle sense of increased sharpness, where the soft haziness of the early works has been traded in for a slightly tighter and crisper aesthetic.

Nadel's trees run the gamut from thin and spindly to dense and furry, depending on his distance from them and their natural clustering. Long views turn the trees into hairy bands and layers of medium grey that settle into the mounded hollows and angled valleys of the mountainous terrain. Closer in compositions are made of striking, all-over verticals, the trees striped into high contrast minimalist lines or feathered like bottle brushes. Against the blank whiteness of the snow, the endless repetition of the textural trees becomes meditative, the enveloping monochrome environment broken only by the isolated splashes of color of a lone, defiant regrown evergreen or the thin red stems of dormant undergrowth.

The best of Nadel's new landscapes have an almost mathematical rigor and precision, where the trees are dead-on straight and the lines run up like zips, creating a humming screen of verticals. It's these back and forth battles between organic and abstract that are fresh and exciting here, giving the works an added layer of formal interest beyond their obvious natural grandeur.

Collector's POV: The works on view are priced as follows: the 16x20 prints are $1500 each and the 40x50 prints are $4000 each, a small increase from his last show. Nadel's work has not yet entered the secondary markets, so gallery retail is likely the best/only option for those collectors interested in following up.

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

Transit Hub:

• Review: New Yorker (here)

David Nadel: Burns II
Through March 10th

Sasha Wolf Gallery
70 Orchard Street
New York, NY 10002

Andrew Borowiec: Along the Ohio @Wolf

JTF (just the facts): A total of 28 black and white photographs, framed in grey and matted, and double hung in the single room gallery space. All of the prints are gelatin silver prints, taken between 1984 and 1998. The modern prints on display are each 16x20, in editions of 10. A monograph of this body of work was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2000 (here). (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Andrew Borowiec's photographs of the industrial Midwest are deceptively understated; with just a quick, cursory glance over them, one could easily miss their complexity. Hovering in tones of middle grey, they document working class neighborhoods hemmed in by sprawling factories and power plants, the presence of the Ohio River never far from view. Their sober deadpan formality silences the landscape, leaving behind clusters of crowded houses and slowly decaying communities.

What makes these pictures exciting is the density and structural complexity of Borowiec's compositions; they're almost Friedlander-esque in their layers and details, albeit with a much more earnest severity. Nearly every image has something to discover: toys strewn across a front yard, fake raccoons decorating electric meters, a meandering street leading to a trestle bridge, a pair of ceramic poodles, a nest of overhead electric wires. White picket fences, abandoned cars, ATV tracks, overgrown greenery, and satellite dishes come together to tell a story of a worn down Midwestern existence, where flood waters overrun downtown streets and basketball courts, and smokestacks and cooling towers loom in the hazy distance.

Nearly every image in this show has robust front to back design, where foreground, middleground, and background are carefully modulated to create intricate juxtapositions and spatial overlaps. A kind of controlled chaos consistently emerges, where shapes and patterns interact under the guise of struggling lives. In the end, Borowiec's pictures capture a sense of quiet, muddling through perseverance, with an eye for the subtle photographic arrangement that transforms the mundane into something new.

Collector's POV: The prints on view are priced based on their place in the edition, starting at $2400 and rising to $3000. Borowiec's work has very little secondary market history, so gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point.

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

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Exhibit: Akron Art Museum, 2010 (here)

Andrew Borowiec: Along the Ohio
Through January 7th

Sasha Wolf Gallery
528 West 28th Street
New York, NY 10001

Elinor Carucci: Born @Wolf

JTF (just the facts): A total of 21 color photographs, framed in white and unmatted or unframed and pinned directly to the wall, and hung in the single room gallery space. All of the prints are archival pigment prints, made between 2004 and 2008. The prints are either 17x22 or 30x44/36x44 (or reverse), both in editions of 8. There are 14 prints in the small size and 7 prints in the large size on display. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Elinor Carucci's images of her life as a young mother have an unadorned bluntness that is alternately tender and disconcerting. The harsh realities of her pregnancy, birth, breast feeding, and early motherhood have an honest intensity that is often uncomfortable to watch, her private struggles splashed across the gallery with startling vulnerability. The pictures often center on physical skin to skin touches between herself and her children, getting up close and personal in capturing small moments of intimacy.

Given a few emotion-heavy pictures of her twins with runny noses, bruised lips and crying eyes, I can see how some have drawn a superficial parallel between this work and that of Sally Mann. But I think that's a significant misreading of what's going on. These pictures are almost entirely about the mother; even the images which only show the kids are really indirect portraits of Carucci and how she is feeling and reacting, examining her perspective of being stretched to the breaking point. We travel the entire road from her bulging belly and hospital gown to the c-section scars and the breast feeding harness, and her acute closeness and protectiveness as a mother is reflected in every gesture and touch, even when the sense of being exhausted and overwhelmed takes over.

These photographs have a potency and extremity that will be too much for some; Carucci's directness certainly has the ability to stun and agitate. But this high-strung reality is what makes the pictures so successful; she's crossed into territory where the truth is laid bare, where its tough combination of boundless love and draining weariness is exposed. You may decide that an image of her belly after giving birth isn't something you want to hang on your wall, but the authenticity of her experience is joltingly memorable.
.

Collector's POV: The prints on view are priced based on size, with the smaller 17x22 prints at $3000 each and the larger 30x44/36x44 prints at $5500 each. Carucci's work has very little secondary market history, so gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point.

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

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Reviews: New Yorker (here), Time LightBox (here), WSJ (here), Guardian (here)

Elinor Carucci: Born

Through November 5th
.

Sasha Wolf Gallery

528 West 28th Street

New York, NY 10001

Peter Kayafas, Totems @Wolf

JTF (just the facts): A total of 17 black and white photographs, framed in white and matted, and hung in the single room gallery space. All of the prints are gelatin silver prints, made between 2008 and 2010. The prints are 16x20, in editions of 15. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Taking pictures of abandoned American barns is a dangerous game for a contemporary photographer who wants to be taken seriously. Walk down to any local bookstore and dig around the selection of wall calendars and post cards, and sure enough, "Vermont Barns" or something like it will surface, complete with cloyingly nostalgic shots of dilapidated structures in warm afternoon light, with rusty antique trucks placed just so. Or perhaps you'll uncover the "most photographed barn in America", the famous one framed by the Tetons. In any event, taking on such a subject and not falling into the hackneyed trap of wince-inducing sentimentality is a real challenge.

Thankfully, Peter Kayafas' images of falling down barns and empty houses bring crisp formality and renewed reverence to these forgotten icons of vernacular architecture. His buildings have good bones, and Kayafas has let them stand alone amidst spare skies and broad expanses of grass. Compositionally, his pictures are plainspoken and straightforward, mixing the traditions of Walker Evans and the Bechers, but leaving behind strict rigor and conceptual dryness for a hint of warmth and frontier personality. The prints are bright and sunblasted, filled with the same kind of turned up whiteness seen in the work of Henry Wessel; in conjunction with the grain of the small format negatives, the geometries are at once brightly enhanced and subtly softened, often punctuated by the blackness of a dark window.

Kayafas' approach has stripped these buildings down to elemental forms, highlighting timeless lines and enduring simplicity. His works successfully avoid the obvious pitfalls of the subject matter and instead find a quiet honor in these frugal structures.

Collector's POV: The prints on view are priced at a reasonable $1600 each. Kayafas' work has not yet entered the secondary markets, so gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point.

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

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Review: New Yorker (here)

Peter Kayafas, Totems

Through July 16th
.

Sasha Wolf Gallery
528 West 28th Street
New York, NY 10001

David Nadel, Burns @Wolf

JTF (just the facts): A total of 11 color photographs, framed in white and unmatted, and hung in the single room gallery space. All of the prints are archival pigment prints. The images come in two sizes: 15x12 in editions of 8, and 35x44 in editions of 6. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: David Nadel's photographs of snow bound Montana forests reduce the landscape to a set of minimalist gestures, where charred tree trunks become dark vertical lines against the vast expanse of white. His pictures are like abstract exercises in linear geometry, executed with the delicacy of a dry point etching.

My first reaction when I entered the gallery was that these pictures were the direct descendants of Frank Gohlke's Mount St. Helens images from the early 1980s, and they certainly share a common aesthetic of fallen trees and dense textural surfaces. What's different here is that Nadel's pictures are even flatter; significant depths of distance have been aligned into one skyless plane, removing the sense of scale and abstracting the mountains and valleys into white backdrops. As such, there is also some intellectual kinship to Frederick Sommer's desert works, or some of Taiji Matsue's elevated landscapes. Depending on Nadel's position, the blackened trunks can look like up-close shoots of bamboo, or can be transformed into a calligraphic mix of spindly lines when seen from afar. The contrasts of thick and thin become the elements of his monochrome compositions.

At one level, there is something simple and decorative about this work; the effects of powerful burning have been softened, turned into muted line drawings. What I like better is to consider the concept of using the land as a basis for radical abstraction, and to see how different photographers have stripped away context in landscape to highlight its nuances of pattern and form.

Collector's POV: The works on view are priced as follows: the 15x12 prints are $1200 each and the 35x44 prints are $3000 each. Nadel's work has not yet entered the secondary markets, so gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point.

My favorite image in the show is Burn #2; it's on the right in the in the middle installation shot. I liked the busy right angle intersection of perpendicular lines formed by the vertical trunks and the fallen logs.

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

Transit Hub:

• Review: Wall Street Journal (here, scroll down)

David Nadel, Burns

Through March 26th

Sasha Wolf Gallery
528 West 28th Street
New York, NY 10001

Paul McDonough, New York City, 1973-1978 @Wolf

JTF (just the facts): A total of 21 black and white photographs, framed in silver and matted, and hung in the single room gallery space. All of the prints are modern gelatin silver prints, made from negatives taken between 1973 and 1978. 20 of the prints on view are 16x20, available in editions of 15; there is a single larger print over the reception desk (30x40), in an edition of 7. A monograph of this body of work has recently been published by Umbrage Books (here) and is available from the gallery for $45. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Paul McDonough's 1970's New York street photography fits neatly into the broad category so famously defined by Winogrand, Friedlander, Levitt, Meyerowitz and many others. While we've seen a mountain of this kind of work before (going back to Cartier-Bresson) and can pick out plenty of visual echoes and influences in this show, it doesn't diminish the fact that McDonough was consistently able to select and compose surprising moments of memorable warmth from the barrage of foot traffic on the city's sidewalks.
.

This genre of photography lives and dies on the whims of synchronicity - that ability to see a composition resolving itself as it happens, and the subsequent skill in framing and capturing that fleeting moment to highlight its transient juxtapositions, relationships and details. McDonough does it again and again in this selection of pictures: a passing handful of women all in fur coats, two men watching a parade perched on standpipes, a young couple with matching midair forks, three kids climbing on the same bent tree branch, a collection of people playing flutes and drinking from straws. His ironies are subtly amusing rather than aggressively harsh or biting, where short-lived gestures and glances tie a picture together without being too obvious. There is a terrific image of a disheveled artist with a bushy beard (a dead ringer for Hagrid of Harry Potter fame) earnestly measuring the chin of an ancient bust at the Met while wrestling with a large sketchpad; the visual back and forth of the similar faces is endearingly clear without being overly jokey.
.

I'll admit that when I walked in, I was thinking I would bored by this show. And at first glance, McDonough's street photographs don't have a vivid or immediately recognizable signature style like those of Winogrand or Friedlander; instead, they have a cleverness that grows on you, as you investigate and unpack their everyday instants of wonder. In the end, although his work is not as well known as many of his contemporaries, there are too many well constructed pictures here to discount his talent as repeated accident. So instead, chalk this show up to yet another rediscovery of hidden excellence, buried in forgotten flat files for far too many decades, now ready to reemerge and fill in the gaps of an important period in recent photographic history.

Collector's POV: The works on view are priced as follows. The 16x20 prints are $2500 each, while the 30x40 print is $4500. McDonough's prints (vintage or modern) have little auction history in recent years, so gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point.

My favorite image in the show is Three Car Salesman, 1973; it's second from the left in the top installation picture. The three men in suits stand together, each with one shoe poised on the window sill, underneath a sales sign shouting "450 cars to choose from"; beyond the visual echo of their three bodies, it's like a scene out of Glengarry Glen Ross.

.

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

Transit Hub:

• Reviews: New Yorker (here), Wall Street Journal (here)
• Features: Lens (here), Paris Review (here)

Paul McDonough, New York City, 1973-1978

Extended through January 29th

.

Sasha Wolf Gallery

528 West 28th Street

New York, NY 10001

Tribble & Mancenido, Hurry Up & Wait @Wolf

JTF (just the facts): A total of 11 color photographs, framed in white with no matting and hung in the main gallery space and behind the reception desk. All of the works are archival pigment prints, sized 30x40 and printed in editions of 5. The images were made between 2008 and 2010. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Before seeing this show, if you had asked me to guess what I thought the lives of long-haul truck drivers were actually like, I suppose the adjectives I might have come up with would have been boring (mile after mile of endless highway), stressful (gotta get there on time!), dreary, lonely, and maybe even sad, all in an abstract way. To get at the real answer, the husband and wife team of James Tribble and Tracey Mancenido packed up their cameras, got their commercial licenses, and spent the better part of a year on a permanent road trip, documenting the American trucking subculture from the inside, almost like embedded journalists.

.

What emerges from their travels isn't a series of surprising localities, dramatic adventures or iconic moments, but a sense of constant, mind-numbing motion, a journey without destination, a life of interchangeable truck stops, gas stations, parking lots, and eighteen-wheel tractor trailers. Their photographic approach mixes staged portraits with still lifes, wider shots of truck stop architecture with close-up near abstractions. Quiet, overlooked details are used to animate the story: a glowing dash board, a rainbow oil slick on the pavement, a set of orange warning triangles, a swirling salt residue, a group of parked trailers at night, a repairman sitting on an expanse of gravel, a brightly lit gas station empty in the pitch blackness. The result is an atmospheric portrait that echoes some of the stereotypes I alluded to, but with a deeper sense of personality; the grim reality of rolling up the miles each and every day weighs heavily on these otherwise crisp photographic fragments.

.

With some deft editing and sequencing, I think this body of work would make a solid artist's book. I think the danger lies in having too many pristine, almost bloodless images; it is the sympathetic connections and overlays to the larger story that give the pictures their emotional punch and context. Perhaps the success of the project actually turns on the relative strength of the portraits, even though some of the fragments may be the strongest images in the series. It's clear that trucking is a hard and gritty life, and the weariness that is etched on the faces of the drivers delivers the memorable pathos. While the elegant, stylized details tell an important part of the tale, in the end, it is the forgotten struggles of the people that make it real.

Collector's POV: The prints in the show are priced at $3000 each. Since this is the first solo show in New York for the artist couple, it follows that their work has not yet reached the secondary markets in any way. As such, gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point.

.

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

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here) and blog (here)
• Features/Reviews: Cool Hunting (here), The Black Snapper (here), Canteen (here)

Tribble & Mancenido, Hurry Up & Wait
Through October 23rd

Sasha Wolf Gallery
528 West 28th Street
New York, NY 10001

Book: Steven B. Smith, The Weather and a Place to Live

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2005 by Duke University Press (here) in conjunction with the Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography (here). 122 pages, with 80 black and white images. Includes an introduction by Maria Morris Hambourg. (Cover shot at right, via Amazon.)

Comments/Context: One afternoon back in late December, I selected a handful of photo shows to see and headed off into the very brisk (some might say arctic) weather to gather some information for a group of reviews. One of the shows on my list that day was a selection of Steven Smith's photographs of the suburban West, which were on view at Sasha Wolf. After making my way down to TriBeCa, I came to the door of the gallery, only to find the lights out and a paper sign taped to the window: "Gallery Closed: No Heat!". While I was thwarted that day, and didn't get a chance to get back to the gallery before the show closed, I am happy to say that I prevailed in the end, by getting my hands on a copy of this excellent monograph.

Purely from the point of view of a collector, I think the cult of the New Topographics is a fascinating study in the slow but relentless growth of an artistic movement. While it is certainly getting harder and harder each year, it is still possible to gather a representative sample of images from this landmark phase of photography: a few images by Robert Adams from The New West or Denver, a selection of works by Lewis Baltz from NIP and Park City, plus grain elevators by Frank Gohlke, suburban backyards by Joe Deal, and maybe even some color work from Stephen Shore. What I find particularly interesting in all of this is that in a span of two decades (the 1970s and 1980s), these photographers (and a few others) actively grappled with the suburbanization in the western US, effectively wrestling many if not most of the thorny conceptual issues of the times to the ground, leaving the topic effectively "done" for the many artists that were to follow along later. While in recent years, we have seen Japanese, Chinese and European photographers take up some of these same issues and threads from their own national perspectives, the suburbanization (and commercialization) story is of course far from complete here in the United States (especially in a world of renewed interest in the environment and climate change), and yet, few American photographers have revisited and reconsidered these issues in an updated and contemporary way in the past decade or two, without seeming too derivative or stuck in the 1970s. Most of the original photographers moved on to other related or tangential subjects, and very few new artists have stepped into the void to successfully carry the flag onward.

It is the synthesis of the old and new, and most importantly, the bringing in of updated perspectives and vantage points from our current world that make Steven Smith's topographic works so compelling. While the setting of the subdivision, the prefabbed tract house, and the gated development community will certainly feel familiar, the underlying issues have clearly continued to evolve and change. With most of the prime real estate in the West long ago carpeted with houses, builders are now encroaching further onto marginal desert lands, especially those that need an abundance of alterations: bulldozing, flattening, grading, retaining, and terracing, with special attention being paid to the increasingly scarce resource of water, via elaborate culverts, spillways, runoffs, and drainage ditches. Smith's images of these wide open construction sites find eye catching patterns and geometries in the altered landscape, while also asking pointed questions about the real sustainability of such approaches and about the scale of the arrogance and hubris that makes us think we can so readily transform an indifferent land in our own image.

Smith then moves in for a closer look at the unfinished houses themselves, mostly captured in the midst of construction, with piles of raw boulders, plastic drainage tubing and sprinkler systems, driveway heating coils, and cement lawn edging still in the process of installation, with new sod freshly laid out in perfect rows near thick cinder block privacy walls. Plenty of new homes sit precariously under massive rock formations or at the bottom of obvious desert washes and hillsides, mudslide disasters waiting to happen. The scenes have a puzzling sense of absurdity and head scratching, laughable idiocy. The only trees that are found in the blinding sun of these developments are the spindly, newly planted kind (sure to die almost immediately without constant watering); otherwise, garden decoration is dominated by large desert rocks settled in curved beds of dusty gravel, oddly spotlit by nighttime lighting.

As I flipped through these images, I was astonished to find that we haven't gotten much smarter about how we build our suburban communities; in recent decades, the whole enterprise has apparently been super-sized and we've been extending into more and more challenging terrain to meet the ever increasing demands of a growing population. This body of work will I think be looked back on as an important bridge piece to recent projects that have chronicled the violent bursting of the American housing bubble; it effectively shows the mood of the run up and the boom times, before the bottom began to fall out. As such, Smith's images now have an unexpected sense of impending doom; since we already know the ending of the story, the pictures are surprisingly similar to the morbid fascination of watching a car crash in slow motion.

Collector’s POV: As I mentioned above, an exhibit of Smith's work was recently held at Sasha Wolf Gallery in New York (here); Smith also has prints with Gallery Luisotti in Santa Monica (here). All of the images in the book were shot on film and have been printed in digital inkjet on baryta based paper. Each image comes in three sizes (12x15, 20x24, and 30x40), with a total of 20 images in the entire edition, spread across the three sizes (9 small, 7 medium, and 4 large). Prices for the prints are $1200, $2000, and $4000 respectively.

For those collectors who have immersed themselves in the conceptual framework of the New Topographics or for those who simply have an affinity for the built structure as subject matter (like ourselves), Smith's work will be an excellent extension into the contemporary domain. The images are also a terrific example of how black and white can still be relevant, even in the color dominated digital age.

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Reviews: Robert Pinsky at Slate (here, scroll down), Eyecurious (here)