JTF (just the facts): A total of 23 black and white and color photographs, variously framed and matted, and hung against white walls in a series of three connected rooms on the second floor of the museum. All of the works come from the collection of Emily Fisher Landau, and were made between 1980 and 2004. The exhibit also includes a camera obscura room. A catalog of the collection was published by Yale University Press in 2011 (here). There is no photography allowed in the galleries, so the installation shots at right are courtesy of the museum’s Flickr page.

The following artists/photographers have been included in the exhibit, with the number of works and print details as background:

Richard Artschwager: 1 sculpture/photographs mounted on wood, 2002
Matthew Barney: 1 chromogenic print in self-lubricating frame, 2002
Keith Cottingham: 1 digital chromogenic print, 2004
Lynn Davis: 1 gold-toned gelatin silver print, 2000/2002
Philip-Lorca diCorcia: 1 chromogenic print mounted on Plexiglas, 2000
John Dugdale: 1 hand-coated cyanotype, 1994
Nan Goldin: 1 silver dye bleach print, 1994
Rodney Graham: 1 chromogenic print, 1990
Robert Longo: 1 silver dye bleach print, 1980/1998
Vera Lutter: 1 gelatin silver print, 1996
Robert Mapplethorpe: 1 gelatin silver print, 1988
Abelardo Morell: 1 gelatin silver print, 2003
Shirin Neshat: 3 silver dye bleach prints, 2002
Victoria Sambunaris: 1 chromogenic print mounted on aluminum, 2002
Lorna Simpson: 2 gelatin silver prints in framed with plaque, 1991
Kiki Smith, 4 chromogenic prints, 2000-2001
Hiroshi Sugimoto: 1 gelatin silver print, 1994

Comments/Context: Back in 2010, long-time trustee Emily Fisher Landau made a major donation of 367 artworks to the Whitney Museum. Selections from that massive gift have toured around to many smaller museums in the United States in the past few years, and this particular show pulls out a very small subset, focusing on some of the photography to be found in the collection. If this group of works can be taken as any guide, Fisher Landau’s approach to contemporary photography has been to employ the “solid example from key figures” method, gathering an impressive list of important names and singular works. While the show is loosely organized into rooms of images with people, those without, and a handful of works related to the camera obscura room that has been installed as part of the exhibit, in essence, it’s really more of a parade of exemplary photographs from the 1990s and early 2000s.

If a collection is built without a rigid thematic or conceptual structure/system to connect the various artworks together (as most collections are), the only way to look at it critically is to ask, for each individual artist selection, “did the collector pick a superlative example of the artist’s work”? In general, I think there are some terrific choices on view here, many which would be considered among the best work done by that artist. There as an enormous, wall dominating, upside down tree by Rodney Graham, smartly flanked by a large Vera Lutter of the Fulton ferry landing with the Twin Towers in the distance. Other standout choices include the late Mapplethorpe self portrait (with skull head cane), the Sugimoto wax museum royal family, the Longo jerking suited man from Men in the Cities, and the Morell camera obscura image taken in the Whitney itself.

There are also a few less obvious selections which point to some inspired risk taking. Nan Goldin’s swarm of cherry blossoms in Tokyo isn’t exactly representative of her work, but is still quietly enchanting. Matthew Barney’s array of Chryslers from the Cremaster series lacks the bold originality of many of the scenes from that project, but is nonetheless subtly surreal. And Richard Artschwager’s child in a high chair sculpture wouldn’t necessarily be considered photography, except that its blocky form is constructed by straight on photographs from every angle, creating a smart multi-perspective portrait.

So while it’s hard to draw a line that connects all of the works on view here into a coherent whole, this small show certainly delivers a respectable mix of recent photography. I’m sure the larger Fisher Landau collection did plenty of welcome hole filling in the Whitney’s permanent collection (in photography and other mediums), and with the new building opening soon, I’m hoping we’ll slowly get a chance to see even more of its photographic treasures.

Collector’s POV: Since this is a museum show, there are, of course, no posted prices, and given the wide diversity of works on view, we will forego the usual discussion of secondary markets and price histories.

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

Transit Hub:

Fisher Landau Center for Art site (here)
Feature: New York Times, 2010 (here)

Legacy: Photographs from the Emily Fisher Landau Collection

Through September 2nd

Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

258 Main Street

Ridgefield, CT 06877

Dayanita Singh, File Room

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2013 by Steidl (here). Hardback/clothbound, 88 pages, with 70 black and white images. The book includes a series of texts by Aveek Sen and an artist interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist. (Spread shots below.)

Comments/Context: It is altogether fitting that Dayanita Singh’s visual meditation on the nature of paper in our digital age should smell so good. It’s the kind of book that rewards a nose pressed into the gutters and a deep lungful of breath, the sweet perfume of inks and rough tactile paper creating a real physical experience of what paper can mean. This simple sensual moment quickly pulls us down the rabbit hole and we are transported to Singh’s surreal and magical world of Indian file rooms, each its own peculiar mountain of sagging, tilted, toppled papers. Fluorescent bulbs buzz overhead as we silently wander the narrow hallways of shelving in state archives and municipal offices, overwhelmed by the endless paperwork of bureaucracy.

At first glance, the groaning file rooms offer a nearly hopeless pessimism, a head shaking feeling of astonished helplessness in the face of such suffocating, ancient chaos. But then a glimmer of order starts to reveal itself; the ledgers, books, files and loose papers have been stacked, bound, and piled using a dizzying array of methods. They are tied together with twine, bundled with cloth like laundry, padlocked in cupboards, and stored in flat files. Small rooms and warehouses are stacked to the ceiling with metal shelves and wooden cabinets, with cubby holes, lockers, trunks and boxes providing additional organization. Papers are heaped on every available surface, but their fluttering, jagged edges become regular horizontal lines and flat angles. Every room is its own unbelievable system, the labyrinthine domain of a human archivist who knows where things are.

Sometimes this person is a head peeking out from a sea of files, but mostly the archivist is absent, represented by a clean table and chair where work is done. While the papers encroach from all sides, the table is a tiny oasis of free space, a place where the battle for order is won. When an archivist is present, he or she seems to radiate quiet confidence and competent pride, certain that the arcane symbols and unknowable numerical markings on the shelving will lead to the right answers with swift efficiency. Singh’s photographs document both the physical manifestation of complex systems of coding and classification and the human element that makes the systems work, organizing principles that are at once hidden and entirely visible.

In our age of digital bits, these images tell the age old story of bureaucratic paper with rich, dusty sympathy. There is a unruly beauty to these dark, magical rooms, where history and memory are slowly fading to nothingness. Once important papers are now neglected or forgotten, fused together by moisture and decay. The photographs are a reminder of the precariousness of memory, of how history is so easily lost. In a certain way, Singh’s Indian file room project is like an archive of archives, an attempt to capture something important before it disappears, and not unlike the efforts of the Bechers to document various vanishing industrial forms. Her photographs tell the story of how we used to do things, with a sense of wonder and nostalgia that makes the pictures engrossing.

To my eye, there is something grandly mysterious about Singh’s anachronistic file rooms, full of secrets and intrigues, buried under an avalanche of paper. Order and disorder shift back and forth like two sides of a coin, and shadowy figures wait to unlock the past for those with the right questions. These places seem like sets out of fantastical literature, but are clearly rooted in the punishingly mundane realities of decades of government work. File Room is the kind of book to get lost in, a glimpse of a world that seems too odd to be true.

Collector’s POV: Dayanita Singh is represented by Frith Street Gallery in London (here); she doesn’t appear to have New York representation. Her 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.

Transit Hub:

Artist site (here)
Deutscher Pavillon at Venice Biennale, 2013 (here)
Feature: Financial Times (here)

Wolfgang Tillmans @MoMA

Snap Noir: Snapshot Stories from the Collection of Robert E. Jackson @Pace/MacGill

JTF (just the facts): A total of 61 black and white photographs, framed in white/black and matted, and hung against grey and white walls in the main rooms of the gallery. All of the photographs are vintage gelatin silver prints, made by unknown photographers from generally undated negatives. The prints are arranged into groups ranging in size from 4 to 21 prints. All of the prints come from the collection of Robert E. Jackson. There is no photography allowed in the gallery, so the installation shots at right are via the Pace/MacGill website.

Comments/Context: The dividing line between art photography and vernacular photography has always been a bit murkier than we might like to admit. Definitionally, we might say that it all comes down to original intent: in an art photograph, the person clicking the shutter was consciously making an artwork, while in a vernacular photograph, that same person might have been making a snapshot, documenting something of note, or acting for an infinite number of other reasons, except for making an artwork. Where things get a little bit more troublesome is that down the line, years later, it is altogether possible to see vernacular photographs with new eyes, where their original purpose or context is entirely removed, and their underlying artistic merit comes forth. Across the history of the medium, this has happened time and again, where images made for scientific, evidentiary, or documentary purposes (by photographers known and unknown) have been placed in the white walled context of a museum or gallery and have been instantly transformed into “art”, not by some decree from on high, but by the intrinsic artistic merits of the images themselves.

This show gathers together a small sampler from the vast collection of found/vernacular photographs assembled by Robert E. Jackson and directly confronts this recontextualization issue. The images are grouped into sets, with common subjects and themes tying the photographs together, some apparently taken by a single photographer, others likely made by many different shooters. The first two groups track personal eccentricity: a grown woman posing with her stuffed animal bunny and a man in sunglasses showing off a seemingly endless wardrobe of tight swimsuits/briefs. Other sets find a more voyeuristic tone: cocktail-drinking deck chair inhabitants seen from behind, multiple images of a topless woman through an open doorway, and a selection of views through chain link fences. The largest group is a parade of the ominous and slightly odd: a pair of women in gasmasks, a man holding a deer carcass, a surreal stare near a waffle, a boy with a gun, a woman with a snake, with incidents with choking, whipping, and Halloween masks mixed in for good measure. Taken out of their original context and resequenced here, the images effectively take on the slightly creepy, noir mood intended.

I think this editing and selection of found photographs raises an intriguing question about artistic and/or curatorial intent. What if the press release had not told us about a selection of vernacular images from the vast collection of Robert E. Jackson, but it had instead introduced the artworks of Robert E. Jackson, made up of found appropriated and recontextualized found photographs? Would we react to them differently? What we are being shown here is partially Jackson’s vision, his decisions about the creation of typologies and sets and his imposition of implied relationship or connection; the individual photographs (however wonderful or unexpected) are merely the (appropriated) raw material used to implement a particular edited point of view. A choice was clearly made to show (and sell) the photographs in series form rather than as a selection of singular images, and yet, in the end, we are asked to step back from that idea and return to the broader concept of vernacular photographs offering a multitude of potential interpretations; these groupings are just one, arguably temporary, approach to the vast image database of a huge collection like Jackson’s.

The result is a show that is infused with a kind of inescapable mystery. The questions we have about the actual details of these images are unknowable, and so we are left with their formal qualities and the flights of our collective imagination to make sense of what we see. But that ambiguity is surprisingly powerful, forcing us to get away from reading wall labels and sizing up artistic reputations and back to just looking at the photographs themselves and seeing what surprises they have to offer.

Collector’s POV: The groups of photographs in this show are priced based on the number of prints in the set, ranging from $2000 to $9500. Since the photographers are anonymous, there is no secondary market history available for any of the artists.

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

Transit Hub:

Exhibit: The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888-1978 @NGA, 2007 (here)
Interview: Design Observer (here)
Features/Reviews: New Yorker (here)

Snap Noir: Snapshot Stories from the Collection of Robert E. Jackson

Through August 21st

Pace/MacGill Gallery

32 East 57th Street

New York, NY 10022

Ed Kashi @Anastasia Photo

Alec Soth and Brad Zellar, LBM Dispatch #5: Colorado

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2013 by Little Brown Mushroom (here). Newsprint, 48 pages, with 42 black and white images taken by Alec Soth. Most of the photographs are accompanied by texts by Brad Zellar, and/or by quotes from James Galvin, EE Cummings, Willa Cather, and others. (Spread shots below.)

Comments/Context: While photocopied and small run artists’ zines have long been part of an amorphous underground publishing community, there is no doubt that the explosion of economically viable self publishing options that have emerged in the past few years has dramatically reshaped the photo book industry. While major titles with superlative printing and design may still follow more traditional production paths and release schedules, the do-it-yourself disruption has led to a flourishing of book making creativity and innovation, and a fast moving landslide of publications that don’t look and feel like we expect them to. The five crammed shelves of revolutionary photobooks included in this year’s ICP Triennial are a testament to just how important this phenomenon has become to the way we are experiencing contemporary photography.

The LBM Dispatch series from Alec Soth and Brad Zellar is a fantastic example of how newfound publishing freedoms have allowed artists to follow their own interests more precisely. Their “books” are nearly the opposite of what we’ve been taught to appreciate: they’re big (tabloid sized), they’re printed on cheap disposable paper (newsprint), they’re relatively inexpensive, and they reject the normal “parade of solitary imagery” approach by liberally mixing photographs and text. But by breaking all the rules, what Soth and Zellar have really done is simply matched form to function, molding the in-your-hands physical display to fit the kind of serial storytelling they want to do, which by the way, is a kind of storytelling that they’ve had to reinvent because it’s been overlooked for so long.

At the simplest level, the LBM Dispatch project falls into the long American tradition of expedition and road trip photography. Walking in the footsteps of everyone from Timothy O’Sullivan to Robert Frank, Soth and Zellar have headed out on rambling open ended trips and documented what they’ve found. But unlike their predecessors, Soth and Zellar have brought prose much more fully into the artistic end product; the texts here are not addendums or afterthoughts, but integrated parts of the collaborative storytelling experience. While the James Agee/Walker Evans team is certainly once precedent, I think there is stronger kinship here with the work of Wright Morris, where text and pictures were used with nearly equal brilliance to capture the nuances of specific American places and times.

In this particular issue, Soth and Zellar have driven the roads of Colorado, taking in healthy gulps of mountain vistas and frontier spirit. While their trips clearly have a dose of serendipity, these are not really random moments; they’ve done their homework, read their history, and are looking for certain kinds of encounters that will touch on larger themes. This method of building up a narrative is well suited to Soth’s approach to photography; he has never been one to be pigeon holed into just portraits, landscapes, still lifes, or any other type or subject matter, so this kind of vignette-driven storytelling fits well with his natural working style. While rugged snowy mountains and huge storm clouds are an inescapable part of any portrait of Colorado, Soth and Zellar have dug deeper than the stunning landscape, probing the edges of local communities, common folklore, and the undercurrent of violence seemingly inherent to life in this wide open country.

Many of Soth’s photographs in this book are portraits of people and objects, seen with an open, unassuming honesty that allows a sliver of the surreal to slip in nearly undetected: a bearded man stands in front of an enormous pile of antlers, while another sports a plastic mask of Doc Holliday, and a woman in formal riding gear waits for her horse perched on a set of stairs, while another beams in her colonial frontier dress amid a row of parked cars. Often, the still life objects and places are secondary evidence, physical remains with some additional resonance: a tombstone of a famous cannibal, the path leading to the Columbine High School memorial, a bullet hole in the wall at Focus on the Family, a rusted out, pock-marked car in the dust near the home of the Dragon Man, a plastic bear torso at a local archery club. Each image tells its own self contained mini-story, and contributes to the weaving of a larger non-linear tapestry of collective impressions.

Zellar’s words are equally important to the overall rhythm of this collaboration. Some of his contributions are casual, quirky interviews with the portrait sitters, often laced with nuggets of personal history or pithy wisdom. Others are background explanations, reflections, or poetry selections, incomplete hints of something more, but just enough to give us some context or a narrative handhold to grasp. The cadence of his voice is quiet and conversational, generally pared back to essentials and lacking in showy verbal flourishes, with a soft, poetic irony that is at once true to the facts and open to interpretation. His texts are easy going and approachable, authentically curious in their search for meaning, but appropriately ambiguous and open ended. Perhaps most amazingly, Zellar and Soth have got the artistic balance just right, where the mood of the photographs and the content and style of the prose never compete or trample on one another.

What I like best about this collaboration is that it has produced a truly personal riff on visual storytelling. They have blatantly disregarded the notion that words and photographs have no business mixing together, and instead have embraced the combination of forms as a more flexible method of communicating their own kind of mysterious narrative. They have resolutely camped out in no man’s land, bring prose that is more than a caption but less than an essay into direct conversation with individual images, allowing each photograph to open up further. And they have rejected the notion that such a product need thump down on your coffee table, and have instead offered us a physical form that can be enjoyed with unassuming pleasure. All in, Soth and Zellar have taken a bunch of obvious risks and delivered something of unpretentious grace and genius, a product that elegantly fits both who they are and the way they see the world.

Collector’s POV: Alec Soth is represented by Sean Kelly Gallery in New York (here). Soth’s photographs have begun to appear in the secondary markets more regularity in recent years, with prices ranging from roughly $4000 to $22000.

Transit Hub: