FSA Photography & Contemporary Social Realism @Robert Miller

JTF (just the facts): A group show containing a total of 41 photographs by 10 different photographers, hung in the front room, the common area, and the two middle gallery spaces. (Installation shots at right.)

The following photographers are included in the main show, with the number of prints on view and image details as background:

• Horace Bristol: 5 gelatin silver prints, framed in white/black and matted, sized between 9x7 and 14x11, from 1938
• Jack Delano: 2 dye transfer prints and 2 gelatin silver prints, framed in white/black and matted, each 10x15 or 11x14, from 1940-1941
• Walker Evans: 5 gelatin silver prints, framed in white/black and matted, sized from 5x8 to 7x11, from 1935-1945
• Debbie Grossman: 5 inkjet prints, framed in black and matted, each 11x14, from 2010
• Dorothea Lange: 3 gelatin silver prints, framed in white and matted, each roughly 8x9, from 1935-1936
• Russell Lee: 3 dye transfer prints, framed in white and matted, each 10x13, from 1940
• Arthur Rothstein: 2 gelatin silver prints, framed in black and matted, each 14x11, from 1936-1939
• Zoe Strauss: 5 archival pigment prints, framed in white and unmatted, sized 13x27, 18x27, or 20x30, from 2001-2006
• Emma Wilcox: 7 gelatin silver prints, framed in black and unmatted, each 20x24, in editions of 7, from 2002-2012
• Marion Post Wolcott: 2 gelatin silver prints, framed in black and matted, sized between 10x6 and 7x10, from 1936

Large black and white photographic portraits by Josh Lehrer hang in the back gallery, but are designated separately on the checklist (Project Room) and have not been included in the discussion here.

Comments/Context: While an exhibit pairing photographs from the 1930s Farm Security Administration with contemporary social realism certainly sounds promising in general, this particular show doesn't quite fire on all cylinders. This isn't so much a reflection on the quality of the work (which is excellent from the FSA bunch and plenty strong from the more current artists) as it is a lack of interesting parallels and unexpected connections. The chasm between the two time periods is wide enough that even though there are some common issues (poverty first among them), there isn't a clear continuum of visual ideas connecting the past and the present in the selected pictures. As a result, the show feels a bit disjointed and awkward, instead of resonating with juxtaposed insight.

The only true pairing in this show is the side by side hanging of Russell Lee's 1940s small town farmers and Debbie Grossman's digital manipulations of those same images sixty years later, where she has carefully replaced all the men with women, creating a fictional all female world. It's a clever old/new mix, where the physical labor of homesteaders is done by women and stoic square dancing families have two female parents; traditional gender roles are smartly upended and reconsidered. Many of the other FSA works on view are penetrating vintage portraits: Rothstein's Montana rancher, Wolcott's coal miner, Bristol's bearded migrant, and Lange's disembodied weathered hands, wearing torn work clothes and holding a wooden hoe. On the contemporary side, Zoe Strauss offers shot appliances and and the texture of a yellow curtain, while Emma Wilcox plumbs the depths of darkness, via shadowy checkout aisles, stenciled skulls, and an aerial town shot with the residence of a thief indicated by large white letters and an arrow.

I think this show would have benefited from the inclusion of a few more contemporary photographers and a more conscious and repeated mixing of the two time periods; instead of bigger single artist groups, small side by side comparisons might have helped to tease out the similarities and differences. That said, there's plenty of solid work worth seeing here, even if the thematic construct isn't hugely effective.

 

Collector's POV: The works in this show are priced as follows:

• Horace Bristol: $10000, $12500, $15000 or NFS
• Jack Delano: $3500, $4000 or $6000
• Walker Evans: between $9500 and $26000
• Debbie Grossman: $2500 or $3500
• Dorothea Lange: between $8000 and $12500
• Russell Lee: $6000 or $7000
• Arthur Rothstein: $2500 or $3500
• Zoe Strauss: $2600, $3250, or $3600
• Emma Wilcox: $1850 each
• Marion Post Wolcott: $3000 or $5000

The work of the FSA photographers is generally available in the secondary markets, ranging from the iconic and expensive to the lesser known and very reasonably priced. The work of the contemporary photographers in this show (Grossman, Strauss, and Wilcox) is much less available at auction, so gallery retail will likely be the best option for following up on these three.

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

Transit Hub:

• Features/Reviews: New Yorker (here)
• Debbie Grossman artist site (here)
• Zoe Strauss artist site (here)
• Emma Wilcox artist site (here)

FSA Photography & Contemporary Social Realism

Through November 17th

Robert Miller Gallery

524 West 26th Street

New York, NY 10001

Zoe Strauss, 10 Years: A Slideshow @Silverstein

JTF (just the facts): A total of 229 color photographs, displayed as a continuous slideshow (roughly 30 minutes long) in the darkened main gallery space. These images were made between 2001 and 2010. The show also includes 25 color photographs (and a map) of Strauss' installation of the work under the I-95 interstate highway in Philadelphia; these prints are unframed and tacked to the wall in a cluster in the front gallery. A single finished print, framed in white and unmatted, is hung on the wall outside the slideshow; it is sized 18x27 and is uneditioned. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: In this age of increasingly short attention spans, few contemporary photographers commit themselves to sustaining a single artistic project for an entire decade. What is lost in this manic flitting from one thing to the next is the steady accumulation of ideas that only becomes evident when we slow down and take a long view. Change, in the broadest sense, nearly always happens in increments too small to notice at the time and patterns don't emerge until we can stop for a moment to look back and see the repetitions. The power of the long term project is in its ability to provide rich, layered persepctive and to get much further into the hidden details than a cursory examination normally allows.

Zoe Strauss' decade long study of her South Philadelphia neighborhood (as well as other locales across America) tells the story of everyday life in our 21st century urban communities. Mixing straightforward documentation of the people and events around her with more abstract pictorial exercises, the body of work moves back and forth between various thematic threads and compositional approaches. It charts the the decay and disuse in her particular section of town (but common to many of our older cities), follows the dynamics of repeated waves of new immigrants as they are absorbed into the social fabric, and finds emblems of the daily struggle we now associate with the Bush years. The slideshow on view represents the final edit of the entire integrated project, merging old and new photographs and carefully sequencing them to reinforce refrains and harmonies.

Strauss' portraits of friends, neighbors and strangers cover an emotional landscape from weariness to proud defiance and from anxiety to everyday joy. In many cases, her pictures are startlingly direct and quietly poignant: a girl's evil looking puffy black eye, a woman holding a dead bird, a man with a pistol, a boy exuberantly flipping upside down onto a pile of mattresses in the street. In others, tiny details anchor a face (a squiggling curl of hair, pierced ears that have been stripped, missing front teeth, a hairnet) while scars (suicide, c section, heart surgery), tattoos, severed digits and bloody injuries provide other forms of personal identification.

Like Walker Evans before her, Strauss also has a fondness for vernacular American signage, particularly the one liner which has been made unintentionally ironic by its surroundings or condition. There's Let's Roll! next door to the depression clinic, POWER in bright lights with the P burned out, Satisfaction Guaranteed reduced to a ghost of itself, and the crumpled arches of a McDonalds sign. If the pessimism of the emotional landscape of the times has somehow been forgotten, Keep the fuck out! and This is your warning help to bring back the simmering harshness with heavy immediacy. Other pictures delve into more formal architectural geometries and Eggleston-like studies of color. Ice covered stairs flank a blue wall, a house is split down the middle into pink and white halves, and red horizontal stripes cover adjacent buildings. Colors pop in images of an electric green ceiling, red carpeted stairs, and the competing dress patterns in a butcher shop. A pile of pillows and a wilted corsage become elegant still lifes. Part of what makes Strauss' work so strong is its familiar looseness; compared with other successful photography documenting the same period (Soth, Epstein, Ulrich etc.), her images are grittier and more immediate, even when they are highly structured.

For an otherwise excellent body of work, my one complaint is that the slideshow format of this exhibit severely undermines its ultimate impact. The images click by, making it impossible to return to them later to savor their details or to orient them in a chronological progression. While I liked the sense of thematic variation and repetition that was apparent, the overall effect of the darkened room experience was underwhelming and vaguely dissatisfying. This is a big gallery space with lots of nooks and crannies; it could have easily held a decent sample of the project, especially if the prints were double hung, gridded, or otherwise clustered. Or maybe the slideshow should have run in the smaller far back room as an adjunct to a more formal presentation. While I watched the show, most people came in, sat down for a dozen slides or so, and then gave up. If the gallery had been filled with prints (instead of feeling largely empty), the experience of the project would likely have been more fully representative of the high quality of the work.

All in, this is a remarkably strong and consistent photographic project, with plenty of subject matter and stylistic breadth. Across the years and along the way, Zoe Strauss has refined her talents and honed her craft, emerging what likely seems like a lifetime later with a sharp and original eye. Based on the merits of the work alone, this show easily deserves a higher rating. But given its suboptimal installation, I was left wishing for a different and more triumphant summation.

.

Collector's POV: The main slideshow on display here is not for sale. Strauss' prints apparently come in three sizes: roughly 8x12, 12x18, and 18x27, all uneditioned. The largest size (like the one framed print on view) is priced at $3600; I didn't get the details for the other smaller sizes. Strauss' work has not yet reached the secondary markets with any regularity, so gallery retail remains the best option for those collectors interested in following up.

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

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Exhibit/Catalog: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2012 (here and here)
• Reviews: NY Times (here), Bloomberg (here)

Zoe Strauss, 10 Years: A Slideshow

Through August 3rd

Bruce Silverstein Gallery

535 West 24th Street

New York, NY 10011