The Checklist: 9/6/12

Current New York Photography Shows
New reviews added this week in red.
(Rating: Artist/Title: Venue: Closing Date: link to review)

Uptown

ONE STAR: Naked before the Camera: Met: September 9: review
THREE STARS: Rineke Dijkstra: Guggenheim: October 8: review

Midtown

TWO STARS: The Shaping of New Visions: MoMA: April 29: review

Chelsea

No reviews at this time.

SoHo/Lower East Side/Downtown

No reviews at this time.

Elsewhere Nearby

TWO STARS: Hank Willis Thomas: Aldrich: September 30: review
THREE STARS: Robert Adams: Yale: October 28: review

Forward Auction Calendar
New auctions added this week in red.
(Sale Date: Sale Title: Auction House: link to catalog)

September 12: Post-War and Contemporary Art (London): Christie's: catalog
September 19: First Open (New York): Christie's: catalog
September 20: Under The Influence (New York): Phillips de Pury: catalog
September 21: Contemporary Art (New York): Sotheby's: catalog

The summer is over and the decks are cleared and ready for the new shows, beginning with the rush of openings all over town this week and next. Regular reviews will return starting next Monday.

The Checklist: 8/16/12

Current New York Photography Shows
New reviews added this week in red.
(Rating: Artist/Title: Venue: Closing Date: link to review)

Uptown

ONE STAR: Spies in the House of Art: Met: August 26: review
TWO STARS: Heinrich Kuehn: Neue Galerie: August 27: review
ONE STAR: Naked before the Camera: Met: September 9: review
THREE STARS: Rineke Dijkstra: Guggenheim: October 8: review

Midtown

ONE STAR: A Short History of Photography: ICP: September 2: review
ONE STAR: Christer Strömholm: ICP: September 2: review
THREE STARS: Weegee: ICP: September 2: review
ONE STAR: Taryn Simon: MoMA: September 3: review
TWO STARS: The Shaping of New Visions: MoMA: April 29: review

Chelsea

ONE STAR: Simryn Gill: Tracy Williams: August 17: review

SoHo/Lower East Side/Downtown

ONE STAR: Scott B. Davis: Hous Projects: September 1: review

Elsewhere Nearby

TWO STARS: Rising Dragon: Katonah Museum of Art: September 2: review
TWO STARS: Hank Willis Thomas: Aldrich: September 30: review
THREE STARS: Robert Adams: Yale: October 28: review

Forward Auction Calendar
New auctions added this week in red.
(Sale Date: Sale Title: Auction House: link to catalog)

No sales at this time.

The full heat of the summer is now upon us and the New York art world is on its way into hibernation. Posting between now and early September will be spotty and intermittent, as very few (if any) new photography shows will be opening until the fall season begins. In general, I will be slowly picking off a few stragglers and outliers, and singling out a few random highlights from various group shows on Twitter (@DLKCOLLECTION), but mostly, I'll be on vacation as well.

Robert Adams, The Place We Live @Yale

JTF (just the facts): A total of 256 black and white photographs, framed in white and matted, and hung against grey (light, medium, and dark) and green walls in a series of interconnected spaces on the first and fourth floors of the museum (a handful of works are also on view in the lobby). All of the works are gelatin silver prints made between 1965 and 2009. No dimension or edition information was available on the wall labels. Glass cases in the various exhibit rooms contain a total of 67 photobooks, and a small number of sculptures and other ephemera are also distributed throughout the show. A catalog of the the exhibition, entitled The Place We Live, A Retrospective Selection of Photographs, 1964-2009 was recently published Yale University Press (here). The exhibit was curated by Joshua Chuang and Jock Reynolds. The exhibition has already made stops in Vancouver, Denver, and Los Angeles, and has four more European venues scheduled through the summer of 2014. (Installation shots at right.)

The show is divided into titled sections, each accompanied by wall text drawn from one of the artist's books. For each section or case, I have detailed the number of prints/books on view and their dates:

Lobby gallery

• 6 gelatin silver prints, 1999

First Floor galleries

• The Plains: 8 gelatin silver prints, 1965-1973
• Eden: 8 gelatin silver prints, 1968
• The New West: 22 gelatin silver prints, 1968-1971
• Case: White Churches of the Plains (1), The Architecture and Art of Early Hispanic Colorado (1), Prairie (2), 2 gelatin silver prints, 1968, 1974
• Summer Nights: 13 gelatin silver prints, 1976-1982
• Ludlow: 5 gelatin silver prints, 1978
• Case: Eden (2), The New West (3), Commercial Residential (2), Summer Nights (2), Summer Nights: Walking (2)
• Book display: 3 volumes, The Place We Live, 1 gelatin silver print, 1978
• What We Bought: 31 gelatin silver prints, 1973-1974
• Cottonwoods: 11 gelatin silver prints, 1973-1995, 1 cottonwood bark fragment, 1982
• The Pawnee National Grassland: 6 gelatin silver prints, 1984
• The Missouri West: 10 gelatin silver prints: 1975-1983
• Our Parents, Our Children: 15 gelatin silver prints, 1981
• Case: Our Lives and Our Children (1), No Small Journeys (2), From The Missouri West (2), Beauty In Photography (3)
• Screenprint: Beautiful Small Town Names

Fourth Floor galleries

• Los Angeles Spring: 21 gelatin silver prints, 1978-1983
• Case: Los Angeles Spring (2), Listening To The River (2), California (2), Gone? (2), Notes From Friends (1), Why People Photograph (1)
• Along Some Rivers: 28 gelatin silver prints, 1984-1987
• The Pacific: 17 gelatin silver prints, 1991, 2003, 1 wooden sculpture
• Turning Back: 22 gelatin silver prints, 1976, 1999, 2003
• Case: To Make It Home (1), West From The Columbia (2), Time Passes (1), Turning Back (2), Tree Line (2)
• Small reading room: 4 prints paired with poems by A.R. Aamons, Emily Dickinson, William Blake, and Zbigniew Herbert
• Case: Pine Valley (2), A Portrait In Landscapes (2), Still Lies The Manzanita (2), I Hear The Leaves And Love The Light (2), Along Some Rivers (2), 2 eroded rocks
• Pine Valley: 6 gelatin silver prints, 2001-2003
• Bodhisattva: 5 gelatin silver prints, 1999
• Alder Leaves: 5 gelatin silver prints, 2004
• The War In Iraq: 6 gelatin silver prints: 2004-2007
• Sea Stories, This Day: 8 gelatin silver prints, 1999-2009, 1 carved sculpture, 2001, 1 notebook
• Case: Alders (2), Questions For An Overcast Day (2), Bodhisattva (2), Sea Stories (1), This Day (2), Close At Hand (2), Skogen (2), What Can We Believe (1), 1 wood sculpture

Comments/Context: A year or two ago, I wrote a review of a Paul Graham show where I argued that Graham was an insider's photographer, an artist who was well known and highly esteemed inside the photographic community but largely unknown outside it. I was immediately shouted down by the masses of the converted, who were all too happy to point out my daft ignorance. Today, I am going to make a similar assertion about Robert Adams, and I assume that my inbox will fill once again with a flood of vehement protestations.

On one hand, I think a very compelling case can be made that Adams is a truly radical innovator who has fundamentally and permanently redefined the nature (no pun intended) of American landscape photography. Adams' long term influence is undeniable: I have met plenty of photographers who count him as one of their photographic heroes, and his books, writings, and teachings continue to have countless ardent, cult-like followers. On the other hand, I think there is a largely silent body of viewers who react to Adams' work with much less enthusiasm, finding it often ugly, underwhelming, and a bit boring. Its dissimilarity to what they have come to expect from the landscape genre (the dramatic grandeur of Ansel Adams) makes some of the work very hard to connect to; it doesn't reveal itself so quickly or boldly. In our first years of collecting, I will admit to having been in this second camp; I found his images to be like parsnips or kale - things I was supposed to like, that were obviously good for me, but which in all honesty, I found somewhat less than entirely tasty. Over the years, and with a growing shelf full of Adams' eloquent books in our library, I have gradually moved closer to the supporters point of view, slowly being won over by the consistent craftsmanship, elegance, thoughtfulness, and quiet beauty in even the most distressing and damaged of his photographs. So it was with some excitement that I traveled to Yale to see this grand, traveling retrospective, in the hopes of clarifying and deepening my understanding of his work once and for all. I'm afraid my findings are likely to offend both sides, as ample evidence of both the truly great and the truly forgettable is on view.

Covering roughly 45 years of time, the exhibition is gathered into thematic groups (both large and small), roughly mirroring bodies of work as they were originally presented in book form. In many ways, this helps to recreate some of the intimate sequencing and storytelling that is the hallmark of Adams' books, but strictly speaking, this retrospective is not rigidly chronological, as some subjects span decades and others overlap or jump around in time. To help clarify the overall "which came first" ordering (at least in my own mind), I have taken the dates of the images on view (by grouping) and laid them out on the timeline below:

Adams' early square format pictures from the late 1960s feel rooted in vernacular American modernism and a reverence for traditional American landscape photography. They echo the spare purity of a Paul Strand or a Walker Evans: an angular white church, the towering form of white grain elevator, broad grassland views with massive 19th century clouds. But his Eden pictures which follow signal the beginning of a new approach: this Eden isn't the leafy garden of snakes and apple trees we all know, it's a dusty flat expanse of interstate highway and dry desert, decorated with truck stops and gas stations. Seeing these pictures is like watching a light go on - it suddenly becomes obvious that there is another way to see the geography of the land, that the word landscape can be applied not only to classically beautiful mountains and rivers, but to the evidence of the human relationship to the natural world. There is a sense of discovery here, a philosophical opening of a door.

In the first half of the 1970s, Adams took these initial insights and expanded them, making some of the most unflinchingly critical photographs that had ever been made of the American West. With a deep respect for the unspoiled land and a frustrated eye for the environmental destruction puzzlingly taking place out in the open, Adams documented the boom town expansion of various Colorado towns (particularly Denver and its suburbs) and watched with ironic candor as whole cities were raised out of the water-less dust. His now-iconic book The New West chronicled the inhumanity of these newly built environments: subdivisons were laid out, messy construction ensued, and the result was an endless sea of flat one story houses, clustered trailers and arrow straight roads. Adams' pictures are an inversion - they're not a rah-rah celebration of our ingenuity, our hard work or our can-do spirit; instead, they show us our own self-inflicted, unvarnished stupidity and our stunning disrespect for the grandeur of the land and sky.

What I find fascinating about these pictures is that they were actually surprisingly well aligned with earlier American landscape photographs that openly celebrated the majesty of the land. But instead of searching out the most beautiful vistas to make his point (like his predecessors), Adams made his argument for the critical importance of the land by capturing our destruction of it. In New Topographics-speak, we were now in the realm of the "man-altered" landscape, and Adams' view of these modifications was alternately acerbic, distrustful, grief stricken, and downright angry. Other pictures from this same time (the What We Bought series) dive deeper into the grim lives of the inhabitants and their drab offices, liquor stores, fast food joints, and dreary strip mall convenience stores. There is a sense of being both offended and deeply saddened by the tradeoffs we have made in our development of the West, a pervasive pessimism to be found in the imperfections of these communities. These pictures present a depressing reality, but I think Adams' lasting contribution to photography is to be found in these early 1970s images and their precise examination of our separation from and disregard for the bounty of nature.

The second half of the decade found Adams channeling these core conceptual ideas in several different but adjacent directions. He followed the Missouri River out to the western edge of the nation, taking long elevated views of tire tracked prairies, rocky mesas near nuclear weapons test grounds, and smoggy mountains. He walked the lyrical nighttime streets of suburban neighborhoods, finding both shadowy menace and silent warm nostalgia: weedy sidewalks, bright carnival rides, empty chairs sitting under a porch light. And he explored the scrublands of sprawling Los Angeles, with its aging eucalyptus windbreaks, its dry washes filled with garbage, its defoliated development roads, and its ever encroaching highways. Environmental damage (and the related emotional distress) was never far from view, but hope began to creep in now and again as a balance against the constant urgent critique.

His projects in the early 1980s continued this pattern of gradual softening, as if Adams himself was becoming worn down and was in need of a few moments of optimism. Against the backdrop of soul draining suburban parking lots, he found multi-generational caring as expressed in embraces, carried babies, and hand held children. In the Pawnee National Grassland, he enjoyed huge, tumbling skies, vast open grass, and unspoiled sunflowers against a barbed wire fence. And along unnamed rivers, he exchanged an airplane for a hawk, reveled in the whiteness of fresh snow cover, and examined the delicate textures of dirt roads. Adams seemed to be saying that there was indeed beauty to be found in these landscapes if we were patient enough to look for it.
.

Given the timeline above and the span of photographic projects that Adams has generated since 1985, I think it is fair to say that his work has slipped a bit in recent years. The one exception to this is the sheer horror of the clearcut hillsides of Turning Back. The delimbing machines, the enduring stumps, the violence and devastation of the whole process, the photographs have all the fury and tragedy of Adams' earlier work. His question (found on a wall text and in the book) about who brings a child to see the wastelands of these close cropped hills is particularly poignant and troubling I think, and the sense of futility and failure in the pictures is heavy. And while I have a soft spot for the sublime cracked silhouettes of the alder leaves, I can't really hold these up as new or groundbreaking; they're just quietly meditative and beautiful. Beyond these two projects, very little will be durable I fear. Nearly all of Adams' images of the sea lack the emotional punch of his landscapes, even when they incorporate piles of flotsam and dirty sand. And his still lifes and Iraq war boots miss the mark entirely in my view. Perhaps there is some inverse relationship between the power of his images and the power of his words, as his recent books have been full of engaging, eloquent, and memorable ideas.

Retrospectives are designed to help us trace connection points and the evolution of artistic ideas, and I think this exhibition is highly successful in showing the gestation of Adams' original conceptual view point, its development and expansion over time, and its ultimate waning and subtle transformation. I think it cements Adams' rightful place in the pantheon of American landscape photographers, and highlights his consistently genuine and thoughtful concern for the way we have treated the land. That his flashes of brilliance have become less frequent since the 1970s hardly matters; his imprint on our ability to see the impact of our environmental choices is permanent. If there is one recurring visual motif in Adams' work, it is the open empty dirt road, cutting across the vastness of the landscape, vanishing into the horizon; there are likely a dozen of these pictures scattered throughout the show. At first, the road is discouraging in its slash across the unspoiled natural world. Later, it is perhaps assimilated and accommodated, shaded by an overhanging cottonwood tree, becoming part of the landscape itself, telling us something of our history. And going forward, it points the way to the future. What Robert Adams brought to landscape photography was an alternately caustic and graceful eye for these changes, an ability to show us what we didn't want to acknowledge or had somehow overlooked, with the hope that it would knock some sense into us, so that our journey down that long road would be smarter and more aware.

Collector's POV: This is a museum show, so there are of course no posted prices. Adams' photographs have become increasingly available in the secondary markets in the past decade, with prices ranging between $5000 and $87000. Adams is represented in New York by Matthew Marks Gallery (here) and in San Francisco by Fraenkel Gallery (here).

Rating: *** (three stars) EXCELLENT (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Review: Hartford Courant (here)

Robert Adams, The Place We Live
Through October 28th

Yale University Art Gallery
1111 Chapel Street
New Haven, CT 06510

The Checklist: 8/9/12

Current New York Photography Shows
New reviews added this week in red.
(Rating: Artist/Title: Venue: Closing Date: link to review)

Uptown

ONE STAR: Spies in the House of Art: Met: August 26: review
TWO STARS: Heinrich Kuehn: Neue Galerie: August 27: review
ONE STAR: Naked before the Camera: Met: September 9: review
THREE STARS: Rineke Dijkstra: Guggenheim: October 8: review

Midtown

ONE STAR: A Short History of Photography: ICP: September 2: review
ONE STAR: Christer Strömholm: ICP: September 2: review
THREE STARS: Weegee: ICP: September 2: review
ONE STAR: Taryn Simon: MoMA: September 3: review
TWO STARS: The Shaping of New Visions: MoMA: April 29: review

Chelsea

ONE STAR: Joni Sternbach: Rick Wester: August 10: review
ONE STAR: Simryn Gill: Tracy Williams: August 17: review

SoHo/Lower East Side/Downtown

ONE STAR: Scott B. Davis: Hous Projects: September 1: review

Elsewhere Nearby

TWO STARS: Rising Dragon: Katonah Museum of Art: September 2: review
TWO STARS: Hank Willis Thomas: Aldrich: September 30: review

Forward Auction Calendar
New auctions added this week in red.
(Sale Date: Sale Title: Auction House: link to catalog)

No sales at this time.

The full heat of the summer is now upon us and the New York art world is on its way into hibernation. Posting between now and early September will be spotty and intermittent, as very few (if any) new photography shows will be opening until the fall season begins. In general, I will be slowly picking off a few stragglers and outliers, and singling out a few random highlights from various group shows on Twitter (@DLKCOLLECTION), but mostly, I'll be on vacation as well.

Simryn Gill, My Own Private Angkor @Williams

JTF (just the facts): A total of 90 black and white photographs, framed in black and matted, and double hung in the main gallery space. All of the works are gelatin silver prints prints made between 2007 and 2009. The roughly square format prints are each sized approximately 16x15 and are available in editions of 1+1AP. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Simryn Gill's images of a decaying Malaysian housing development combine two artistic approaches that normally don't go together: the shadowy romance of ruined interiors and the formalism of hard edged abstraction. The result is a elusive series of photographs that shift uneasily between these two styles, moving back and forth between ragged beauty and conceptual rigor, never quite eliminating the unexpected dissonance but somehow mixing the elements with quiet grace.

The pictures start with the abandoned, vine covered rooms we've seen before countless times: dingy floors, rubble piles, black mold, invasive greenery climbing in through open windows and cracking walls. Tile, brick, and stucco elegantly crumble in shades of grey, stripped clean of valuable wiring and fixtures, leaving behind ragged holes and scarred openings that flood the rooms with light. Dark rubber window insulation often winds across the floors like a wiggling pile of sinister black snakes.

In their haste to mine out the metal window frames, the scavengers have left behind dozens of long rectangular pieces of glass, which have been haphazardly leaned against available walls. Smoky and partially transparent, the glass panes have been set together in pairs, overlapped in layers, or mixed together vertically and horizontally. Combined with the varying effects of light and shadow, the endless patterns of crisp geometric forms would have kept Josef Albers happily busy. Seen together, the series is a rigid monochrome theme and variation exercise, set against a backdrop of rotting decomposition.

What is surprising about these photographs is the way in which the spooky spirituality of the empty rooms (think Woodman, Meatyard etc.) has become a venue for abstraction. There is a lush, silent softness to these installations that makes the abstraction seem muted and natural, even when it is at its most cerebral. Gill has successfully merged opposing impulses in each frame, creating visual balance between chaos and order.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced at $7000 each. Gill's work has not yet reached the secondary markets for photography, so gallery retail is likely the best option for those collectors interested in following up.

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

Transit Hub:

• Reviews: New Yorker (here), TimeOut New York (here)
• dOCUMENTA13 (here)
• Australian representative to the 2013 Venice Biennale (here)

Simryn Gill, My Own Private Angkor
Through August 17th

Tracy Williams Ltd.
521 West 23rd Street
New York, NY 10011

The Checklist: 8/2/12

Current New York Photography Shows
New reviews added this week in red.
(Rating: Artist/Title: Venue: Closing Date: link to review)

Uptown

ONE STAR: Spies in the House of Art: Met: August 26: review
TWO STARS: Heinrich Kuehn: Neue Galerie: August 27: review
ONE STAR: Naked before the Camera: Met: September 9: review
THREE STARS: Rineke Dijkstra: Guggenheim: October 8: review

Midtown

ONE STAR: A Short History of Photography: ICP: September 2: review
ONE STAR: Christer Strömholm: ICP: September 2: review
THREE STARS: Weegee: ICP: September 2: review
ONE STAR: Taryn Simon: MoMA: September 3: review
TWO STARS: The Shaping of New Visions: MoMA: April 29: review

Chelsea

ONE STAR: Barbara Kasten/Justin Beal: Bortolami: August 3: review
ONE STAR: Zoe Strauss: Bruce Silverstein: August 3: review
ONE STAR: Holly Zausner: Postmasters: August 3: review
ONE STAR: Joni Sternbach: Rick Wester: August 10: review

SoHo/Lower East Side/Downtown

ONE STAR: John Houck: KANSAS: August 4: review
ONE STAR: Scott B. Davis: Hous Projects: September 1: review

Elsewhere Nearby

TWO STARS: Rising Dragon: Katonah Museum of Art: September 2: review
TWO STARS: Hank Willis Thomas: Aldrich: September 30: review

Forward Auction Calendar
New auctions added this week in red.
(Sale Date: Sale Title: Auction House: link to catalog)

No sales at this time.

The full heat of the summer is now upon us and the New York art world is on its way into hibernation. Posting between now and early September will be spotty and intermittent, as very few (if any) new photography shows will be opening until the fall season begins. In general, I will be slowly picking off a few stragglers and outliers, and singling out a few random highlights from various group shows on Twitter (@DLKCOLLECTION), but mostly, I'll be on vacation as well.

Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective @Guggenheim

JTF (just the facts): A total of 69 color photographs and 5 videos, variously framed and matted, and hung in a winding series of rooms on the four floors of the annex galleries. All of the photographs are chromogenic prints, made between 1991 and 2009. Physical dimensions and edition information were not available on the wall labels. The show was curated by Sandra Phillips of SFMOMA and Jennifer Blessing of the Guggenheim. A hardback exhibition catalogue is available the museum shop for $55 (here). (Installation views of Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, June 29–October 8, 2012 at right, courtesy of David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.)

Dijkstra's works can be easily categorized by subject matter. For each series, the title of the series is followed by the number of photographs/videos on view and their details:

Annex 2nd Floor
Beach Portraits: 13 photographs, framed in dark brown and unmatted, 1992-1998
Bullfighters: 4 photographs, framed in dark brown and matted, 1994, 2000
Tia: 2 photographs, framed in light brown and matted, 1994
New Mothers: 3 photographs, framed in light brown and matted, 1994

Annex 4th Floor
Olivier: 7 photographs, framed in dark brown and matted, 2000-2003
Almerisa: 11 photographs, framed in brown and unmatted, 1994-2008
The Buzz Club: 3 photographs framed in brown and unmatted, 1995, 1 2-channel video (26 minutes 40 seconds), 1996-1997
Chen and Efrat: 5 photographs, framed in white and matted, 1999-2005
High School: 1 photograph, framed in white and unmatted, 1994
Self Portrait: 1 photograph, framed in brown and matted, 1991
Annemiek: 1 video (4 minutes), mounted into gallery wall, 1997

Annex 5th Floor
Parks: 8 photographs, alternately framed in brown and matted/unmatted, 1998-2000, 2005-2006
Ruth Drawing Picasso: 1 single-channel HD video (6 minutes 33 seconds), shown in darkened room, 2009
I See a Woman Crying: 1 3-channel HD video (12 minutes), shown in darkened room, 2009

Annex 7th Floor
The Krazyhouse: 4 photographs, framed in white and unmatted, 2008-2009, 1 4-channel HD video (32 minutes), shown in darkened room, 2009
Israeli Soldiers: 7 photographs, framed in brown and matted/unmatted, 1999-2003

Comments/Context: Rineke Dijsktra's brilliant mid-career retrospective at the Guggenheim is proof positive of just how consistently smart her twenty year investigation of photographic portraiture has been. In series after series, she has rigorously probed the edges and boundaries of the genre, producing a body of work that shows a continuing progression of increasingly original conceptual innovations. For the first time, I was able to trace the evolution of her underlying ideas, and to see how she has refined and evolved those constructs over time. It's nothing short of a bravura performance, and I came away deeply impressed with the precision of both her observation and her thinking.

Unfortunately, the wacky configuration of the annex rooms at the Guggenheim makes following in her footsteps nearly impossible; the flow of the show is frustratingly broken up by the space again and again. While the exhibit might be characterized as roughly chronological, the limitations of the rooms lead to a few time jumps and misorderings that are distracting. To try to clarify the action, I've created a simple timeline that lists each project/series on view and the years in which Dijkstra made the pictures (small type, I know):

Dijkstra's small self portrait, taken poolside in 1991 after a grueling rehab training session, is the "aha" moment that kicks off her career as an artist and holds the flash of insight that has informed her work ever since. In it, she stands exhausted and unadorned, with an almost feral intensity, unable to pose for the camera or compose herself. For the first time, Dijkstra had found a way to make a portrait of someone with their guard truly down; like Halsman's jump portraits, this is not a fake smile or a pretend posture - it is the real person, open and honest, and it is mesmerizing.

Dijkstra's now iconic Beach Portraits were the first photographs she made building on this newly discovered approach to photographic authenticity. She placed her subjects on the sand at the shoreline, standing in nothing but their bathing suits against the minimal backdrop of the sea and sky. Dijkstra consciously chose adolescent boys and girls for these images, avoiding older people who were already adept at concealing and protecting themselves in front of the camera. The result is a series of pictures that are intimate and personal, mixing timidity with gawky confidence, awkwardness with self-conscious striving. American kids try a little too hard, imitating the curvy pose of a fashion model or the male swagger of long hair and cut off shorts, while the Eastern European kids seem less spoiled, standing unapologetically in their underwear or a dated speedo, fidgeting and looking for a place for their hands. At nearly life size and with a strict attention to detail, the prints offer nowhere to hide; all the imperfections come through. The differences in how these teens present themselves are fascinating sociology, but each one tells the same uncomfortable story of a child trying to figure out who he or she is going to be.

1994 turned out to be an important year in Dijsktra's early career. While working on the Beach Portraits, she was also simultaneously pursuing several other conceptual approaches to getting her sitters to reveal themselves more fully. One was an extension of the idea found in her self portrait: the exhaustion and conflicted emotion of an extreme physical experience. In her series of Bullfighters, she made pictures of the forcados just as they left the ring, their faces bloodied and their brocade jackets sweaty and torn. And in her series of New Mothers, she captured women naked with their newborns, just after they had given birth. In both cases, the portraits are alive with a kind of wide eyed shock, where pain and pride mix together with euphoric intensity. Another approach from this same year involved using an expanded idea of the element of time to uncover changes in a sitter's personality. On a small scale, Dijkstra's portraits of Tia (another new mother) taken five months apart show the minute, barely observable changes taking place, from her hairstyle to the freshness in her eyes. On a larger scale, Dijkstra's multi-year (and ongoing) portrait of Almerisa tracks more complex adaptations. It chronicles both the growth from young girl through teenager to young mother, and the more subtle changes in clothing, appearance, and attitude coming in her transformation from lost refugee to assimilated Dutch citizen.

In this same year, she also began a preliminary investigation of uniforms, via portraits of high school kids in Liverpool, and soon afterward, she expanded and evolved this concept in her first video piece, The Buzz Club. In many ways, this video is the combination of several of Dijkstra's existing conceptual threads, with a few new ideas thrown in for good measure. Club kids stand against a stark white background, dancing, smoking, drinking beers, chewing gum, and making out, while the soundtrack of the techno music thumps overhead. The girls and boys follow obvious patterns in outfitting themselves (thus the connection to "uniforms"): the girls have long hair and wear skimpy, come hither dresses (mostly black), while the boys have shaved heads and sport zipped up tracksuits. Instead of using still frames across time as she had done with Almerisa, Dijkstra has transitioned to video, creating a "moving" portrait that waits to uncover moments when authenticity intermittently shines through the role playing. Music is used as device to both relax the sitter and as something to focus on and get lost in; dancing becomes a way to break down the formality of the session. The overall effect is a swirling mix: shyness, boredom, swaying and hip shaking, bobbing heads and punching arm moves, staring down the camera and looking away in a trance. It's an exercise in controlled appearances (slinky females, tough guy males) and the split second breaking down of inhibitions.

Through the end of the decade, Dijkstra continued to refine many of her original ideas: Annemiek was another video piece, where a lip synching girl in braces timidly alternates between being painfully self-conscious and being absorbed by the music, and the Parks series used calm groups of young people in leafy natural settings to look for glimpses of honest connection. Three new projects dominated the first years of the next decade and further evolved the time-based concepts from the Almerisa-series, but with a tighter focus on people undergoing a specific life-changing process or rite of passage. Twin sisters (Chen and Efrat) are followed year to year through puberty (with an echo of Nixon's The Brown Sisters), young enlisted recruits in the Israeli army are seen side by side in their army uniforms and later in civilian clothes, and a young man in the French Foreign Legion (Olivier) is followed from his first day (and his subsequent military haircut) through to his emergence as a hardened, serious soldier three years later. In each series, nuanced shifts in maturity can be seen only by comparing the adjacent portraits; we see their emotions and personalities shining through in the cracks.

Dijkstra's most recent works have once again returned to video, pushing further toward moments of intense concentration to look for unguarded personal revelations. In both Ruth Drawing Picasso and I See a Woman Crying, Dijkstra follows school children as they participate in art exhibitions. In their grey sweaters and red ties (uniforms as a motif once again), they engage the art through drawing and group discussion, and in both cases, the action starts out slow and tentative and builds to a crescendo of intense fixation and inventive, exuberant brainstorming, where hidden individual personalities start to take shape. The Krazyhouse reprises many of the the themes from The Buzz Club, but narrows down to explore the intensity of dancing more deeply. As I said in my original review of 2010 show at Marian Goodman (here), this is one of the most exciting pieces of contemporary art made so far in this century. Each of the longer length portraits of the five club goers has something to slowly reveal, and there is contagious joy to be found in the thrashing hair, the ecstatic air guitar, the sultry swing of arms, the frenetic chopping of hands, and the biggest smile you've seen in ages (not that any of the dumbfounded deadpan drones watching the video in the museum while I was there seemed to notice). Each dancer finally gives in to the music, lets go, and the flimsy walls of controlled self-presentation come down in triumphant warmth; it's hard not to be amazed and inspired by such an intimate spectacle.

What I found most impressive about this consistently superlative body of work is how Dijkstra's underlying ideas about the nature of portraiture have been evolving. While much has been made of her historic ties to Sander and Arbus, I think Dijkstra's portraits start with these influences and then quickly move somewhere new. There is an enormous amount of experimentation and innovation visible here, all of it closely clustered around the challenge of getting people to show their true selves. Look closely and there are half a dozen important and original ideas: the aftermath of an intense experience, elapsed time and personal adaptation, the use of video as a patient way to let hidden nuances reveal themselves, uniforms and how personalities are influenced by them, the trance inducing power of music and how to incorporate it into portraiture, etc. etc. Don't be fooled by the seemingly endless stream of classic-looking portraits - there are as many pyrotechnics to be seen here as in any photographic show in recent memory. For me, this retrospective helped me to see the entire spread of Dijkstra's genius (not just her greatest hits) and to more fully appreciate just how much she has successfully challenged and expanded the traditions of photographic portraiture.

Collector's POV: Given this is a museum retrospective, there are, of course, no posted prices. Dijkstra's photographs have become generally available in the secondary markets in the past few years, with prices ranging from roughly $4000 to $180000, with a sweet spot between $10000 and $50000. Dijkstra is represented by Marian Goodman Gallery in New York (here), Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin (here) and Galerie Jan Mot in Brussels (here).

Rating: *** (three stars) EXCELLENT (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Reviews: NY Times (here), Village Voice (here), Wall Street Journal (here), New Yorker (here), American Photo (here), TimeOut New York (here), Capital New York (here)
• Interview: ARTINFO (here)
• Exhibit: SFMOMA, 2012 (here)

Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective

Through October 8th

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

1071 Fifth Avenue 

New York, NY 10128

The Checklist: 7/26/12

Current New York Photography Shows
New reviews added this week in red.
(Rating: Artist/Title: Venue: Closing Date: link to review)

Uptown

ONE STAR: Spies in the House of Art: Met: August 26: review
TWO STARS: Heinrich Kuehn: Neue Galerie: August 27: review
ONE STAR: Naked before the Camera: Met: September 9: review

Midtown

ONE STAR: A Short History of Photography: ICP: September 2: review
ONE STAR: Christer Strömholm: ICP: September 2: review
THREE STARS: Weegee: ICP: September 2: review
ONE STAR: Taryn Simon: MoMA: September 3: review
TWO STARS: The Shaping of New Visions: MoMA: April 29: review

Chelsea

THREE STARS: Richard Avedon: Gagosian: July 27: review
ONE STAR: Adi Nes: Jack Shainman: July 28: review
ONE STAR: Barbara Kasten/Justin Beal: Bortolami: August 3: review
ONE STAR: Zoe Strauss: Bruce Silverstein: August 3: review
ONE STAR: Holly Zausner: Postmasters: August 3: review
ONE STAR: Joni Sternbach: Rick Wester: August 10: review

SoHo/Lower East Side/Downtown

ONE STAR: Alfred Leslie: Janet Borden: July 27: review
ONE STAR: The Permanent Way: Apexart: July 28: review
ONE STAR: John Houck: KANSAS: August 4: review
ONE STAR: Scott B. Davis: Hous Projects: September 1: review

Elsewhere Nearby

TWO STARS: Rising Dragon: Katonah Museum of Art: September 2: review
TWO STARS: Hank Willis Thomas: Aldrich: September 30: review

Forward Auction Calendar
New auctions added this week in red.
(Sale Date: Sale Title: Auction House: link to catalog)

No sales at this time.

A Short History of Photography @ICP

JTF (just the facts): A total of 110 black and white and color photographs, variously framed and matted, and hung against greenish grey walls in a series of three rooms on the upper level of the museum (a few additional images can be found in the cafe on the lower level). A glass case in the second room contains a variety of photographic albums, contacts sheets, magazine covers and other ephemera. All of the works on view come from the museum's permanent collection and were made between 1865 and 2009. The show was curated by Brian Wallis. (Installation shots at right © International Center of Photography, 2012. Photographs by John Berens.)

The following photographers have been included in the exhibit, with the number of prints on view, process details and image dates as background information:

First Room
Adam Schreiber: 1 inkjet print, 2009
Unidentified: 4 tintype prints, 1865, 1870, 1880, 1890, 1 albumen print, 1865, 1 gelatin silver print diptych, 1880
Eugene Atget: 2 albumen prints, 1913, 1922
Ilse Bing: 1 gelatin silver print, 1936
Walker Evans: 1 gelatin silver print, 1936
Andre Kertesz: 1 gelatin silver print, 1919
Baron Adolph de Meyer: 1 photogravure, 1909
Edward Steichen: 1 gelatin silver print, 1930
Roman Vishniac: 1 gelatin silver print, 1935-1938
Ralph Eugene Meatyard: 1 gelatin silver print, 1963
Edward Weston: 1 gelatin silver print, 1941
Yasumasa Morimura: 1 silver dye bleach print, 1998

Second Room
Miroslav Tichy: 1 gelatin silver print, n.d.
Andre Kertesz: 1 gelatin silver print, 1927
Francesca Woodman: 1 gelatin silver print, 1976
Alessandra Sanguinetti: 1 silver dye bleach print, 1998-2002
Henri Cartier-Bresson: 1 gelatin silver print, 1933
Carl Van Vechten: 1 gelatin silver print, 1954
Irving Penn: 1 gelatin silver print, 1948
Danny Lyon: 1 gelatin silver print, 1964/2006
Christer Strömholm: 1 gelatin silver print, 1959/1965-1966
Philippe Halsman: 1 gelatin silver print, 1966
Cindy Sherman: 1 gelatin silver print, 1999
Chim (David Seymour): 1 gelatin silver print, 1948
John Paul Filo: 1 gelatin silver print, 1970
Vik Muniz: 1 gelatin silver print, 1995
Charles Moore: 1 gelatin silver print, 1963
Ernest Withers: 1 gelatin silver print, 1968/2006
Susan Meiselas: 1 chromogenic print, 1978
Gilles Peress: 1 gelatin silver print, 1972
Cornell Capa: 1 gelatin silver print, 1955
Shirin Neshat: 1 silver dye bleach print, 2002
John Gutmann: 1 gelatin silver print, 1941
Unidentified: 1 gelatin silver print, 1936, 1 gelatin silver print/offset lithograph collage, 1950s
William Hartshorn: 1 gelatin silver print, 1972
Maurice Tabard: 1 gelatin silver print, 1932
Suzanne Opton: 1 chromogenic print, 2004
An-My Lê: 1 gelatin silver print, 2003-2004
Eugene Smith: 2 gelatin silver prints, 1944, 1948
Josef Koudelka: 1 gelatin silver print, 1964
Gordon Parks: 1 gelatin silver print, 1952
Harry Callahan: 1 gelatin silver print, 1948
Brett Weston: 1 gelatin silver print, 1937
Josef Sudek: 1 gelatin silver print, 1948-1964

Glass Case (in Second Room)
Unidentified: 1 album of gelatin silver prints, 1910, 3 gelatin silver prints, 1929, 1960, 1 magazine cover, 1929
Mary B. Huslig: 1 album of gelatin silver prints, 1927-1933
Elliott Erwitt: 1 album of gelatin silver prints, 1950-1955
Robert Capa: 1 gelatin silver contact sheets, 1938
Andy Warhol: 2 gelatin silver photobooth strips, 1964/1965
El Lissitizky: 1 book cover, 1933
John Heartfield: 1 photo montage magazine cover, 1934
James Abbe: 1 magazine cover, 1931

Third Room
Larry Burroughs: 1 gelatin silver print, 1965
Margaret Bourke-White: 1 gelatin silver print, 1945
Robert Capa: 2 gelatin silver prints, 1935, 1944
Unidentified: 1 inkjet print, 2003
Thomas James Howard: 1 gelatin silver print, 1928
Samuel Shere: 1 gelatin silver print, 1937
Mitch Epstein: 1 chromogenic print, 2004
William Christenberry: 1 pigment print, 1978/2009
Marco Breuer: 1 chromogenic print, 2009
Richard Prince: 1 chromogenic print, 1983
Stephen Shore: 1 chromogenic print, 1974/2000
William Eggleston: 1 inkjet print, 1999-2000
Helen Levitt: 1 chromogenic print, 1980
Louise Lawler: 1 silver dye bleach print, 1993
Robert Adams: 1 gelatin silver print, 1976
Robert Smithson: 1 gelatin silver print, 1970
Roman Vishniac: 1 gelatin silver print, 1935-1938
Samuel Fosso: 1 gelatin silver print, 1977
Carrie Mae Weems: 1 gelatin silver print, 1987
Martha Rosler: 24 gelatin silver prints, 1974-1975
David Seidner: 1 gelatin silver print, 1980
Larry Clark: 1 gelatin silver print, 1971
Gerda Taro: 1 gelatin silver print, 1937
Bruce Davidson: 1 gelatin silver print, 1959
Robert Frank: 1 gelatin silver print, 1955/1975

In Downstairs Cafe
Charles Stacy: 1 gelatin silver print, 1913
Aaron Siskind: 1 gelatin silver print, 1939
Fazal Sheikh: 1 gelatin silver print, 1997
Sheng Qi: 1 chromogenic print, 2000
Hank Willis Thomas: 1 chromogenic print, 2004
Simon Norfolk: 1 chromogenic print, 2003

Comments/Context: The ICP's tribute show for outgoing director William "Buzz" Hartshorn gathers together a diverse mix of its institutional roots in documentary photography and photojournalism, a highlight reel of its recent exhibitions, and a parade of permanent collection acquisitions, telling an indirect story of the museum's evolution during the past two decades. As a history of photography (even a "short" one), it falls short of being comprehensive or particularly robust, but as a history of how the ICP has seen photography, I think it's a pretty useful exercise in hindsight.

It goes without saying that any such exhibit at the ICP would contain a heavy dose of classic photojournalism, and of course, this show delivers on that score. Robert Capa, Cornell Capa, Chim, Taro, Cartier-Bresson, Bourke-White, Eugene Smith, Peress, Meiselas, they all make their expected appearances. But from this core point of view, there is a sense of looking outward and finding contemporary connections to this material: John Paul Filo's Kent State shooting flanked by a Vik Muniz conceptual reworking of the same scene, iconic Eugene Smith WWII images matched with recent soldering pictures by An-My Lê and Suzanne Opton, Bourke-White concentration camp victims and Robert Capa D-Day shots put together with prisoner images from Abu Ghraib. The museum is clearly interested in how photographic approaches are changing, and how these new viewpoints relate to its historic classics.

In the period falling before the museum's core holdings (and encompassing nearly the entire 19th century), the approach seems to have been primarily historical, with an emphasis on vernacular imagery, found photographs, and other examples of documentary evidence. In more recent times, the strategy seems more diffuse, with a little of this and a little of that: some large color, some conceptual work, some abstraction, some international breadth. The show tries to tie these together on the walls via a few visual and thematic echoes, but the overall effect for the contemporary work is less coherent. This isn't to discount the quality of the work in any way; I certainly enjoyed the Martha Rosler grid of 1970s Bowery storefronts littered with liquor bottles mixed together with an exhaustive taxonomy of synonyms for "drunk" as well as other gems from Eggleston, Levitt, Weems, Shore, Christenberry and Frank. Mostly, I think the contemporary "mixed bag" feel is evidence of a museum with a limited acquisitions budget trying its best to be everywhere at once.

In a summertime season full of group shows, I think this exhibit will be best enjoyed by those with appropriate expectations. This show doesn't deliver a scholarly reasoned argument or an elaborate historical lesson. Instead it is a thoughtfully selected, well edited, eclectic jumble, with enough classics and unexpected choices to keep things lively.

Collector's POV: Since this is a museum show, there are, of course, no posted prices, and given the wide range of artists and work on view, I'm going to forgo my usual collector-driven price analysis.

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

Transit Hub:

• Features/Reviews: Le Journal de la Photographie (here), ARTINFO (here), Prison Photography (here)

A Short History of Photography

Through September 2nd

International Center of Photography

1133 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10036

Hank Willis Thomas: Strange Fruit @Aldrich

JTF (just the facts): A total of 4 color photographs and 1 video, alternately framed in black and white and unmatted, and hung in small single room space in the ground floor of the museum. The photographs are all digital c-prints, ranging in size from 60x29 (in editions of 5+1AP) to 35x96 and 65x96 (in editions of 3+1AP). The video runs for 5 minutes, and is available in an edition of 3+1AP. All of the works were made in 2011. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Hank Willis Thomas' newest works pack a wallop in terms of emotional intensity. Mixing the visual language and loaded symbols of slavery with those of modern day professional sports, his stylized images of football and basketball force a dialogue about what kind of options are really available for many contemporary African-American males. They draw uncomfortable, stark parallels, and imply an overlooked, discouraging interchangeability between history and the present.

In both the video and in two of the single photographs, Thomas replaces a traditional basketball hoop with the hanging rope of a noose. Classically beautiful and muscular bodies jostle in one on one and two on two matchups, with layups, jump shots and thundering dunks aimed at the circular rope. A haunting crescendo of musical chants, hums and work songs simmers in the background. Many plays end with one player soaring and dunking through the noose, only to be left hanging alone against the empty blackness, dangling from the rope instead of the rim. The triumphant sporting spectacle has been turned into a lynching (thus the reference to the Billie Holiday song in the exhibition title), where elegant, powerful athleticism has been overcome by prejudice and horror, turning the the whole event into an ugly form of entertainment.

Thomas uses the trappings of football with equal ironic harshness. A man picking cotton squares off with a lineman in football pads, one crouching in the dirt to gather the crop, the other crouching in the perfect green grass ready to play. In another image, a player flies through the air diving for the goal line like a wide receiver, only to be held up short by a rusty chain around his ankle that shackles him to the first down marker. The implication is clear: are these highly paid professional athletes much different than the field workers of old? Aren't they equally slaves to larger cultural forces? How much has really changed?

The pared down simplicity that Thomas employs in these set pieces turns them into vivid allegories. I like the strong masculinity of the images, and the clear replacement of one form of indentured service for another; his contrasts and comparisons are up front and easily legible, making them much harder to ignore. While this is a small show, it is filled with unforgettable images, ones that ask hard questions and force unflinching examination. This isn't opaque, incomprehensible art about art - it's in your face art that smartly uses the lens of our history, challenging the viewer to see the realities of our contemporary world in the sometimes grim and dissonant context of what has come before.

Collector's POV: Since this is a museum show, there are, of course, no posted prices. Thomas' work is not yet consistently available in the secondary markets, so gallery retail likely remains the best option for interested collectors. Thomas is represented in New York by Jack Shainman Gallery (here).

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

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Exhibit: Corcoran, 2011 (here)
• Interview: Art Nouveau (here)

Hank Willis Thomas: Strange Fruit
Through September 30th

Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum
258 Main Street
Ridgefield, CT 06877

Scott B. Davis, Black Sun @Hous Projects

JTF (just the facts): A total of 13 black and white photographs, framed in black and unmatted, and hung in the entry and the space to the right as you exit the elevator. All of the works are platinum palladium prints made between 2008 and 2012. The prints are each sized 21x26, and are available in editions of 5. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Black is the overwhelmingly dominant color in Scott B. Davis' night photographs of Southern California suburban darkness. It's a rich, tactile black (enabled by the platinum palladium process he uses) that engulfs the neighborhoods and desert scrublands, swallowing them up in a deep, textural sable that is broken only by lonely shafts and pools of dimly penetrating light. It's a world not unlike Robert Adams' Summer Nights, but even darker and more obscure.
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In many of Davis' pictures, a ghostly subject emerges from the thick blackness, reluctantly called out by the encroaching light: the pock marked, rusted out trunk of a car, a dock covered in crusted salty residue, the white painted rocks that edge a driveway, a cluster of small white bush flowers that float like pinpricks or fireflies. In others, nocturnal suburban neighborhoods and transitional spaces echo in silence: the bright reflected light on the side of weedy alleyway shed, a water tower looming in the darkness (with a nod to George Tice), a VW bus parked in the street, an empty intersection bathed in the cone of light of a single streetlamp.

While we've seen pictures like these before, Davis' technical control of the dark end of the spectrum is certainly impressive. His blacks are lustrous and detailed, dense and mysterious, bringing forth the adventure and insecurity lurking in the shadows.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced at $4500 each. Davis' work has not yet reached the secondary markets, so gallery retail is likely the best option for those collectors interested in following up.

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

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Interview: LENSCRATCH (here)

Scott B. Davis, Black Sun
Through September 1st

Hous Projects
31 Howard Street
New York, NY 10013

The Checklist: 7/19/12

Current New York Photography Shows
New reviews added this week in red.
(Rating: Artist/Title: Venue: Closing Date: link to review)

Uptown

ONE STAR: Roger Mayne: Gitterman: July 21: review
ONE STAR: Spies in the House of Art: Met: August 26: review
TWO STARS: Heinrich Kuehn: Neue Galerie: August 27: review
ONE STAR: Naked before the Camera: Met: September 9: review

Midtown

ONE STAR: Christer Strömholm: ICP: September 2: review
THREE STARS: Weegee: ICP: September 2: review
ONE STAR: Taryn Simon: MoMA: September 3: review
TWO STARS: The Shaping of New Visions: MoMA: April 29: review

Chelsea

ONE STAR: Matthew Brandt: Yossi Milo: July 20: review
ONE STAR: Image Object: Foxy Production: July 20: review
THREE STARS: Richard Avedon: Gagosian: July 27: review
ONE STAR: Adi Nes: Jack Shainman: July 28: review
ONE STAR: Barbara Kasten/Justin Beal: Bortolami: August 3: review
ONE STAR: Zoe Strauss: Bruce Silverstein: August 3: review
ONE STAR: Holly Zausner: Postmasters: August 3: review
ONE STAR: Joni Sternbach: Rick Wester: August 10: review

SoHo/Lower East Side/Downtown

ONE STAR: Ralph Eugene Meatyard: Peter Freeman: July 20: review
ONE STAR: Alfred Leslie: Janet Borden: July 27: review
ONE STAR: The Permanent Way: Apexart: July 28: review
ONE STAR: John Houck: KANSAS: August 4: review

Elsewhere Nearby

TWO STARS: Rising Dragon: Katonah Museum of Art: September 2: review

Forward Auction Calendar
New auctions added this week in red.
(Sale Date: Sale Title: Auction House: link to catalog)

No sales at this time.

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.

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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