Christer Strömholm, Les Amies de Place Blanche @ICP

JTF (just the facts): A total of 26 black and white photographs, framed in black and matted, and hung against grey walls in a single room gallery space on the lower level of the museum. All of the works are lifetime gelatin silver prints lent by the estate, taken between 1955 and 1968. No dimension or edition information was provided for any of the works on view. A glass case in the center of the room contains 4 gelatin silver prints, 3 contact sheets, 4 books, 1 catalogue, and 1 address book. A catalog of the exhibition is available from the museum for $55 (here). (Installation shots at right © International Center of Photography, 2012. Photographs by John Berens.)

Comments/Context: Swedish photographer Christer Strömholm has long been well known in European photography circles, but his exposure here in the United States has generally been limited to the circulation of his sought after photobooks. The ICP has taken a first step toward ameliorating this situation by giving Strömholm his first US museum show, a one room summary of his best known body of work – the transgendered and cross dressing men of Place Blanche in Paris from the late 1950s and early 1960s. It’s a classic example of a well executed photo essay or tightly self contained project.

The reason that these images have been so well received over the years is that they are built on the combination of trust and empathy that is the hallmark of nearly all superlative portraiture. Strömholm captures his subjects in bars and on nighttime street corners, lounging in hotel rooms or vamping for the camera, consistently finding moments that waver between aspiration and vulnerability. There are confident blonde bombshells, beehive wigs, sultry looks with an excess of mascara, and plenty of fur coats. For the most part, he sees his “women” as they want to be seen, and does so with a sense of respect for their complicated lives (physically and psychologically) rather than with a leering voyeurism. He moves through their environment with the acceptance of an insider, tenderly documenting supportive friendship, best efforts, and haunting insecurity. The desire for a different future, regardless of its costs, can be found in nearly every picture, but the path to this self-determination has clearly been anything but easy.

Admirers of Arbus and Goldin (who both came later) will find much to connect with in this group of photographs. There is a similar unvarnished consideration for the uniqueness to be found in those outside the mainstream and an authentic, up-close attentiveness to their struggles and overlooked triumphs. In the dark, gritty streets of the Paris red light district, Strömholm has reaffirmed the basic human freedom to define one’s own identity, and his pictures remain a solid example of how a carefully constructed photo essay can capture the spirit of people quietly striving for a different way of life.

Collector’s POV: Since this is a museum show, there are, of course, no posted prices. Strömholm’s work has only been intermittently available at auction in the past decade, with prices ranging from $1000 and $5000. The artist/estate is represented in New York by Marvelli Gallery (here).Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

  • Estate site (here)
  • Features/Reviews: NY Times (here), Wall Street Journal (here), New Yorker Photo Booth (here), Le Journal de la Photographie (here)

1133 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10036

Barbara Kasten and Justin Beal: Constructs, Abrasions, Melons and Cucumbers @Bortolami

JTF (just the facts): A paired show of works by Barbara Kasten and Justin Beal; since Beal’s works (cast aluminum sculptures and wall objects) are not photographs, they have been omitted from the discussion. Kasten’s works can be divided into three chronologically based groups (installation shots at right):

  • 3 cyanotypes, framed in white and unmatted, each 30×40, from 1975
  • 11 Polaroids, framed in white and matted, either 10×8 (in editions of 7 or 10) or 24×20 (in editions of 8, 9, or 10), from 1980 and 1981
  • 3 archival pigment prints, framed in white and unmatted, 50×40 (in editions of 5), from 2009 and 2011

Comments/Context: Given that she has been thoughtfully exploring the realms of photographic abstraction for the better part of four decades now, Barbara Kasten is one of those photographers that still somehow seems underrepresented in our contemporary dialogue. So it was with some excitement that I came across this pairing at Bortolami, which brings together a mini sampler of works from across her career, including some brand new pieces.

Kasten’s early cyanotypes from the 1970s combine a Bauhaus mindset with a deeper investigation of the diaphanous nature of light. Using a thin woven sheet reminiscent of airy gauze or screen door, her compositions capture highlights as they glance across the folds and ripples of the drapery, making patterns like waves of sand dunes or refractions of light on water. They are crisp and delicate, eschewing blurring to create softness and instead letting the gossamer texture of the cloth take center stage.

Her 1980’s constructions have a decidedly Duran Duran vibe, with a bright New Wave palette and lots of jutting angles. But perhaps a more serious and appropriate context for these works would be a dialogue with the Light and Space artists (Turrell, Irwin, Wheeler, et al). Kasten’s sculptural images from this period are full of mirrors and lines, recalibrations of space, experiments with light coming from different angles, and illusionistic reflections where light and color are carefully managed. Certain compositions also recall Constructivism, with interlocked steel bars, slashing lines, primary shapes broken into component parts, and hard edged geometries flattened from three dimensions into two. Even though some of these abstractions feel dated, their sophistication as structural exercises is undeniable.

Kasten’s recent works have become darker and more minimal, moving to a monochrome palette and employing more transparent plates of glass, plexi, or resin. Light is still the principal actor in the works, but the number of variables has been reduced; simple lines and edges have come to the forefront. For the first time, there is also a sense of imperfection, of scuffs and scratches that abrade the surface or jagged broken edges that saw across the picture plane. Layers of transparency amplify these flaws, creating distorted shadows and hazed rubbings. In the end, these works are much less showy and eye catching than those from the 1980s, but more refined and clear when examined with patience.

Given the current vogue for photography of sculptural constructions made solely to be photographed, Kasten is due for a critical reappraisal. Not only are her compositions (old and new) more complex than most of this new crop of work, her evolution as an artist may provide an important set of connections between today’s trend and various historical precedents we have previously overlooked.

Collector’s POV: While I never actually saw a detailed price list for this exhibit, I was told that the Kasten works were priced between $6500 and $25000; I didn’t inquire about the Beal works. Kasten’s photographs have only been sporadically available in the secondary markets in the past decade, with only a few lots coming up for sale in any given year. Prices for those sales (which may not be entirely representative of market for her best work) ranged between $1000 and $4000.

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

Transit Hub:

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

Barbara Kasten and Justin Beal: Constructs, Abrasions, Melons and Cucumbers
Through August 3rd

Bortolami Gallery
520 West 20th Street
New York, NY 10011

Holly Zausner, A Small Criminal Enterprise @Postmasters

JTF (just the facts): A total of 20 photographic works and 1 film, generally framed in white and unmatted, and hung in the entry area, the front and back gallery spaces, and the studio area. The super 16mm film, entitled Unseen, has a running time roughly 17 minutes and is available in an edition of 5+2AP; it was made in 2007. The other works are unique photo collages constructed from images/stills from the film, each collage made between 2009 and 2012. Physical dimensions range from 15×20 to 60×90 (or reverse). There are 18 single work collages and 1 diptych on view. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: The large photographic image made up of thousands of tiny images as stand ins for pixels has now become a digital era cliche. While countless artists have explored this approach (Rashid Rana and Alex Guofeng Cao are just two of many), the juxtaposed ironies of this method have now become too obvious and predictable; the novelty has worn off and I’m sure it will only be a matter of time before a software filter will exist to turn family snapshots into my own personal digital mosaics. With the inevitable dumbing down of this trend running as backdrop, Holly Zausner’s shrewd new photo collages come as even more of a surprise.

The best way to comprehend this show is to start with the short film running on a video screen in the back room. In it, Zausner drags oversized elongated alien-looking bodies (alternately in blue and yellow) through the wide streets of Berlin, her heels clicking rhythmically as she wanders through empty sidewalks and seemingly abandoned train stations, carefully cradling the heads of her soft passengers. Her ceaseless travels take her to a decaying amusement park (toppled dinosaurs, rusty roller coasters), factories churning out newspapers and loaves of bread, and the sculpture garden of the Neue Nationalgalerie, where a menacing tiger inexplicably prowls among the reflecting pools and the hedges. Her ultimate destination is a quiet room filled with Baroque statues at the Bode Museum, where she is finally able to deposit her cargo, the blue form splayed on the floor in well deserved rest.

Starting with film stills and images from this stylized performance (in both positive and negative, black and white and color), she proceeds to do just the opposite of all the other digital stitchers: she doesn’t collage them into some larger recognizable image which we will find clever, but instead arranges them into increasingly abstract compositions that swirl and stutter like static. In fact, she actually meticulously pastes them together image by image, foregoing the simplicity of scans for the hand craftedness of highly organized grids. The most logical antecedent here is really Ray Metzker’s masterful composites, although Zausner seems more interested in allowing the underlying images to devolve into something illegible. In some cases, her large abstractions are found to be made of photographic blurs and smears of color, frustrating our ability to connect the intention back to the original film.

What we’re left with is an open-ended, metaphorical story that then becomes even more obscure as it is translated into skittering, all-over collages. The works don’t converge toward an overly simple reading, but instead diverge into something diffuse and fractal. It’s as if the farther we delve into Zausner’s symbolic narrative, the more it reveals itself as unknowable.
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Collector’s POV: The collages in this show are priced based on size, as follows.

  • 15×20: $3500 each
  • 20×30: $5000
  • 20×30 diptych: $6000
  • 40×60 (or reverse): $15000 each
  • 60×90 (or reverse): $25000 each

The film is priced at $15000. Zausner’s work has very little secondary market history, so gallery retail likely remains the best option for those collectors interested in following up.

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

Transit Hub:

  • Artist site (here)
  • Interview: Brooklyn Rail (here)
  • Feature: BOMB (here)

Holly Zausner, A Small Criminal Enterprise
Through August 3rd

Postmasters
459 West 19th Street
New York, NY 10011

The Permanent Way @Apexart

JTF (just the facts): A total of 30 black and white and color photographs, variously framed and matted, and hung in the two room divided gallery space. The show combines work from 5 contemporary photographers with railroad maps, hand colored wood engravings, vintage photo postcards (from the collection of Luc Sante) and other ephemera. The exhibit was curated by Brian Sholis. (Installation shots at right.)

The following photographers have been included, with information on the number of works on view and image details for reference:

  • Jeff Brouws: 3 archival pigment prints, each 37×44, from 2010 and 2011
  • Justine Kurland: 3 c-prints, each 15×30 or 40×50 (or reverse), from 2007, 2008 and 2012
  • Mark Ruwedel: 19 gelatin silver prints, each 8×10, from 1995-2005
  • Victoria Sambunaris: 2 chromogenic print, each 39×55, from 2007 and 2010
  • James Welling: 3 toned gelatin silver prints, each 18×22 (or reverse, from 1990 and 1991

Comments/Context: When we think about history in an academic, tell us the truth about the past sense, the one genre of photography that tends not to be considered particularly relevant is fine art photography. Without a second thought, we rely upon photojournalism and documentary photographs of various kinds to provide evidence for our backward looking interpretation of historical events, but we normally don’t include photographs with art as a first purpose in this analysis. Perhaps we assume they are too subjective or slanted to be instructive. This collective bias is what makes The Permanent Way such an unexpected show – it’s unabashedly a history lesson, and yet, the reasoned argument put forth is supported by fine art photographs as primary source material.

With the passage of the Pacific Railway Act 150 years ago this year, the US government unleashed what would become one of the most ambitious transformations of the American landscape ever undertaken. Land grants and rights of way enabled massive, industrial scale earthworks – bridge building, canyon cutting, rock blasting, path clearing, and track laying with a unprecedented scope. It was a fifty year whirlwind of engineered nation building, with commercial friendly rail lines spreading like blood vessels to every corner of the uninhabited West. Fast forward a century, and these railways are now permanently embedded in our landscapes, reshaping the way our towns and cities evolved, how our economy grew and developed, and how we see the land and its natural marvels. Along the way, the entire genre of American landscape photography was similarly remade.

Curator Brian Sholis has smartly mixed 19th century maps, photo post cards, and other vernacular material from the period with recent photographs made by five contemporary artists, each photographer employing a different approach to documenting the trains and railway infrastructure. None of these artists is a “train photographer” in the way that we might label O. Winston Link as such an artist; instead, the assembled group takes a broader view of the impact the trains have had (and continue to have) on the land and the communities that have grown up near the tracks. Victoria Sambunaris uses elevated views of bending arcs of freight cars and straight arrow tracks to tell complex, layered stories about the borderlands between the US and Mexico and the landscape of the Utah desert. Justine Kurland is perhaps more interested in the hobo subculture that has developed around the train system, and her images of the slow S curve of tracks that follow a river through the California mountain wilderness or the broad flat plains dominated by sky are quiet and lonely, measured by the contrast in scale between the rootless riders and the immensity of the land. Both Mark Ruwedel and Jeff Brouws examine the train system as a pattern of ruins; Ruwedel sees the formal Becher-style repetition in sharp V shaped cuts through rock and the dark holes of abandoned tunnels, while Brouws follows the empty railbeds as the thin paths vanish into the encroaching forest. And James Welling makes low angle black and white “portraits” of engines, evoking feelings that are alternately heroic and grimy.

Together, these photographs provide a varied, surprisingly unsentimental picture of the impact of the railroads on the American landscape. It’s an effective proof that the downstream effects of the decisions made some 150 years ago still reverberate in increasingly complicated and nuanced ways, even when the trains have long since ceased to run in many cases. Most importantly, I think this show is a fabulous reminder that fine art photography can be a vital resource in helping to interpret the complexities of our collective past; we ought to thoughtfully mix history and art more often.

Collector’s POV: The prints in this show are not for sale. The contemporary photographers included in the exhibit are represented by the following New York galleries:

  • Jeff Brouws: Robert Mann Gallery (here)
  • Justine Kurland: Mitchell-Innes & Nash (here)
  • Mark Ruwedel: Yossi Milo Gallery (here)
  • Victoria Sambunaris: Yancey Richardson Gallery (here)
  • James Welling: David Zwirner (here)

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

Transit Hub:

  • Reviews/Features: Modern Art Notes podcast (here), Artforum (here), Daily Beast (here)
  • Interview: Design Observer (here)

The Permanent Way
Through July 28th
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Apexart
291 Church Street
New York, NY 10013

Adi Nes, The Village @Jack Shainman

JTF (just the facts): A total of 13 large scale color photographs, framed in brown and unmatted, and hung in the entry area and the large back divided gallery. All of the works are chromogenic prints, made between 2008 and 2012. Each image is generally available in a small and large size; the small size is generally 39×49 (or reverse), in editions of 10, while the large size ranges from 55×70 to 69×88 (or reverse), in editions of 5. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Israeli photographer Adi Nes’ newest images
are filled with a heightened sense of symbolic and allegorical tension. Taking a busy mix of allusions to Greek tragedy, stories from the Bible, and references to art history, and then filtering them through a contemporary kibbutz setting, he has created large scale staged photographic tableaux that teeter on the edge of formal melodrama.

Nearly all of Nes’ photographs are built on anxious contrasts and simmering conflicts: closed versus open spaces, inside versus outside, old versus young. Villagers fire guns from the verdant green of the pasture into the nearby woods, keeping invisible invaders away. Young men argue with an old farmer (sons and a father?) over the fate of a sharply horned goat. A teenage boy is surrounded by naked young women in a dark, underground grotto dripping with cool water. And chickens and bats with outstretched wings hang at the mercy of boys itching for confrontation. Each scene is like a pregnant pause before the action begins. Even the images that mimic recognizable works from art history have this sense of impending struggle; there is something more stoically defiant about the shovel holding Grant Wood lookalike and and more lonely about the Picasso Boy Leading a Horse doppelganger than the originals they echo. And Nes’ Greek tragedy references make the entire setting seem even more ominous; the serious choir singers belting out the words of the Greek chorus and the blind man telling his oracular news to the assembled crowd of men both reinforce a mood of enduring weariness.

All of these works feel carefully stage managed, the characters placed just so to maximize the thematic effect. It’s photography as dramatic theater, executed with formulaic precision and charged with strong emotions. But in wandering through these galleries, I had the distinct sense of viewing “Israeli Art” and wondering whether I was missing certain references and metaphors that would be obvious, or at least more powerful, to insiders. Perhaps Nes is like an age old storyteller or traveling raconteur, weaving snippets of other epic tales and familiar myths into the fabric of his contemporary parables, hoping to expose his audience to the universal nature of events that have occurred far away.

Collector’s POV: The prints in this show are priced as follows. The smaller 39×49 prints range in price from $20000 to $42000. The larger 55×70 prints range between $28000 and $50000, while the 69×88 prints range between $40000 and $70000. Nes’ work has only been sporadically available in the secondary markets for photography in the past decade, with prices generally ranging between $6000 and $35000. But his works must have been more available in the contemporary art markets during that time, as I have seen sale results as high as $264000 mentioned in various articles. Companion shows to this one are running concurrently at Sommer Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv (here) and Galerie Praz-Delavallade in Paris (here).

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

Transit Hub:

  • Artist site (here)
  • Reviews/Features: Jerusalem Post (here), Haaretz (here)
  • Interview: Huffington Post (here)

Adi Nes, The Village
Through July 28th

Jack Shainman Gallery
513 West 20th Street
New York, NY 10011

John Houck: To Understand Photography, You Must First Understand Photography @KANSAS

JTF (just the facts): A total of 17 works, variously framed and matted, and hung in the entry, front main gallery space, hallway, and back gallery space. (Installation shots at right.)

The works in the show come from several recent series/projects. For each series, the number of works on view is listed, followed by  detailed print information:

  • Aggregates: 7 creased archival pigment prints, framed in white and unmatted, sized 60×40 or 30×24, each unique, from 2012; 1 set of 6 double sided spreads installed on a table, dimensions variable, each unique, from 2012
  • Echelon: 8 cyanotypes on watercolor paper, framed in brown and unmatted, each sized 16×20, in editions of 3, from 2012
  • Rounding Error: 1 video loop, 0:57 seconds, in an edition of 3+1AP, from 2012
Comments/Context: The primordial soup that is the intersection of photography and digital/computer-based tools has been simmering with increasing heat for the better part of a decade now. When these technologies first arrived, we saw a few existing old-school species painfully try to adapt, only to be quickly out competed by a torrential flood of new species better suited to the new environment (Photoshop effects, Internet compositing and appropriation, Instagram filters etc.). These simple, single celled organisms have come to dominate the new digital ecosystem. But along the way, some more complicated variants of spliced photography/computer genetics have also been evolving in the background, and we are just now starting to see the evidence of their maturation.

John Houck is one example of this new breed of hybrid artist, a visual explorer who comes at photography from the perspective of a software programmer. While an actual camera is used as part of his process in some works, his vocabulary is filled with languages and indexes, encoding and rendering, glitches and error correction rather than depths of field, exposure times, and tonal zones; software is the primary input and photography is the secondary (sometimes oppositional) output. This kind of mindset is nothing short of revolutionary, as it parses visual imagery (whether abstract or figurative) into discrete systems that can be modified and manipulated at the root level. Thomas Ruff’s zycles, Tauba Auerbach’s images of static, Cory Arcangel’s code-based gradations and hacked video games, they all put algorithms at the center of the process. This opens the door to an entirely different kind of artistic logic, one that relies on symbols and mathematical relationships to ultimately define and represent images.

Houck’s Aggregates start with purpose built software designed to output every combination of certain color selections, using variations in grid size (2×2, 3×3, or 4×4) and number of color inputs to create systematic catalogs of every possible outcome. When printed on a single sheet, the tiny indexed grids act like pixels, creating lines and striations that wave across the surface of the sheet with machined precision. Houck takes these prints and folds them, adding angled lines and subtle shadows that slash across the paper with three dimensional physicality. He does this again and again, rephotographing the results at each step, the end product being a unique image of the catalog, where the folds are both images and “real” things. The works deftly mix the exacting rigor of the underlying code with the gentle gradations of shifting abstract color and the optical illusions of tactile folds. Each one is both rigidly systematic and obviously handcrafted, the opposing forces of this combination giving them vivid cerebral energy.

Houck’s Echelon series also pairs the computer-generated and the photographic. These works begin with exacting 3D renderings of cathedrals and churches (appropriated from the Internet), like those now routinely used by architecture firms around the globe. Houck takes two software models for each structure (one with perspective and one without) and layers them together into one composite image. The result is a jittering, God’s eye view of turrets and towers, arches and vaults, with extreme linear detail that offers more than one right answer. These drawings are then printed using the cyanotpye process, giving them the feel of 19th century blueprints that have far too much perfect detail. Reminiscent of the taxonomies of ferns and algae done by Anna Atkins in the 1850s, this group of works is also an index of sorts, albeit smartly merging 21st century software rendering with antique production values to upend the viewer’s expectations.

Seeing Houck’s show and subsequently investigating a number of other emerging photographers working in similar ways has convinced me that this “thinking like a software engineer” is a big white space that stands open for artistic exploration. As an approach, it applies a wholly original conceptual framework to the medium of photography, while still allowing for connections to traditional ways of seeing. I was intellectually and visually impressed by Houck’s projects; while I think the Aggregates are the meaningfully stronger of the two, I can’t remember seeing a set of underlying first show ideas that felt so promising.

Collector’s POV: The prints in this show are priced as follows, based on the series/project (I did not inquire about prices for the spinning cursor video loop or sculptural installation)
  • Aggregates: $9000 or $4200 each, based on size
  • Echelon: $2200 each
Since this is Houck’s NY solo debut, it is obvious that his work has not yet reached the secondary markets. As such, gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point. A companion show of Houck’s work is on view at Bill Brady/KC (here).
Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
Transit Hub:
  • Artist site (here)
  • Interviews: Lay Flat (here), Triple Canopy (here)
Through August 4th
59 Franklin Street
New York, NY 10013

Roger Mayne @Gitterman

JTF (just the facts): A total of 34 black and white photographs, framed in black and matted, and hung in the main gallery space and the smaller front room on the ground floor. All of the prints are vintage gelatin silver prints made between 1951 and 1961. Physical dimensions range from roughly 7×6 to 18×23 or reverse, and the prints were not editioned. (Installation shots at right.)
Comments/Context: Roger Mayne’s photographs of children playing in the streets of working-class slums in 1950s postwar England are remarkably pared down and structured for what we call street photography. Using the linear geometries of the row houses and tenements as a controlling framework, his urban portraits and childhood vignettes play out with sparse, gritty clarity. Kids in proper school uniforms scramble around and improvise games, all with the dingy reality of the city as an ever present backdrop.
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While we Americans might see a certain commonality between Mayne’s images and those of Helen Levitt’s New York, I think this parallel is mostly superficial. Mayne’s pictures capture a time and place far different than our own, even though kids everywhere want to climb on window sills, create makeshift sculpture out of cardboard boxes, and play soccer in the street. Of course there is joy in these pictures (wrestling, giggling, fighting with swords, blowing bubbles), but shadows, broken bricks, and decaying architecture loom in the background, exhaustion and empty poverty never very far from view. Many of Mayne’s photographs capture this emotional back and forth: an optimistic billboard with a huge sparkling cruise ship flanked by a dirty weed strewn vacant lot, girls happily scrambling over a pock marked, bombed out wall, and Teddy boys posing in fancy suits and pompadour haircuts, trying to find some way to rebel against the whole stifling situation.
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Beyond the subject matter of these photographs, I was also struck by Mayne’s use of scale in some of these prints. Very few photographers working in the 1950s were experimenting with print sizes nearing 20×24, and as a result, there is something strikingly unusual about the surprising bigness of a handful of these works. (Apparently, Mayne was interested in ensuring that his photographs would sit on equal footing with paintings from the St. Ives School.) Mayne was also often employing extremely high contrast (almost crossing into abstraction), with over bright windows set next to the deep black slash of a bridge girder, or patterns of smoke stacks and brick buildings placed against a featureless white sky. The combination of these two gives the images a heightened sense of darkness, often offset by the lightness of a game of hopscotch or sidewalk cricket.

Overall, I came away impressed with Mayne’s ability to unobtrusively capture the fleeting moments of urban childhood, while at the same time infusing them with a heightened sense of heavy reserve. His pictures aren’t just simple fun, but something more balanced and atmospheric.

Collector’s POV: The prints in this show are priced between $3500 and $9000, with most under $5000. Mayne’s work has been intermittently available in the secondary markets in the past decade, with prices generally ranging between $1000 and $4000.

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

Transit Hub:

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

Roger Mayne
Through July 21st

Gitterman Gallery
170 East 75th Street
New York, NY 10021

Matthew Brandt @Yossi Milo

JTF (just the facts): A total of 61 photographic works, variously framed and matted, and hung in the front and back galleries, the side viewing room, and the connecting hallway. (Installation shots at right.)

The works in the show come from four separate projects. The projects are listed below, followed by the number of works on view and the image details:

  • Honeybees: 6 gum bichromate with honeybees prints on paper, framed in white with no mat, sized either 59×100 or 59×40, unique, from 2012
  • Trees: 50 charcoal silkscreen prints with wood from George Bush Park, Texas, on handmade paper, framed in blond wood with no mat, each sized 19×13, in editions of 3, from 2009-2011
  • Lakes and Reservoirs: 4 chromogenic prints soaked in lake water, framed in white with no mat, each sized 72×105, unique, from 2008-2011
  • Taste Tests in Color: 1 silkscreen with blue, red, yellow, and purple Gummy Bears on paper, framed in white with no mat, sized 40×30, unique, from 2012
Comments/Context: At a time when many in photography have looked back to antique processes in search of hand made, artisanal authenticity, Matthew Brandt has used process experimentation to look forward, mixing newfangled alchemical innovations with conceptual thinking in unexpected ways. He is at once a throw back to the photographers of the 19th century who were constantly tinkering with their chemistries and a contemporary artist who is comfortable with a new breed of photography that is more tactile and physical. The works in this show break down the barrier between the image and the process by both capturing a subject in the traditional manner and embedding the physical matter of that subject in the development process, making it a picture and a version of the thing itself at the same time. Depending on the series, this approach alternately feels truly inspired and transformative or too literal and overly conspicuous.
Brandt’s landscapes of lakes are the most successful and visually gripping of the works in this show. Starting with fairly standard color views of lakeside scenes, he dips the prints in water scooped from the lake itself, allowing the layers of color in the chromogenic print to dissolve and swirl around. The photographs begin to wash away, leaving behind fragments of the original view covered in expressionistic splashes of watery brightness. The colors run, and spot, and look like manic sponge prints, whirling and eddying in churning pools and gullies. Given the chance effects at work here, some images are naturally more striking than others, but they all use fluid forms to explore a delicate balance between sharp reality and indistinct abstraction.

Brandt’s images of swarms of bees made with real crushed up bee bodies mixed into the gum bichromate emulsion create gee whiz, open eyed astonishment when you really get up close. The bulbous forms of the insect body parts sit on top of the paper like they were meticulously glued in place one by one, giving the print a kind of bumpy topography. The problem is that from afar, it’s hard to see much more than tiny black dots against a huge sheet of white. Brandt’s images of trees also suffer from some compositional weakness; the paper made from wood and the ink made from charcoal provide the unusual physical connection to the trees, but I found the repeated deadpan images in shades of dirty brown to fade into a dull typological blur after the first dozen or so. The one work made out of Gummy Bears just felt too much like a gimmick to take very seriously.

All in, while this show is a bit uneven, there is plenty of evidence that Brandt has a surplus of original ideas. If he can match his novel process innovations with increasingly sophisticated and refined image making as he goes forward, he certainly has the potential to show us something durably new.

Collector’s POV: The prints in this show are priced based as follows, based on the project/series.
  • Honeybees: $16000 or $22000 based on size
  • Trees: $5000 each
  • Lakes and Reservoirs: all sold
  • Taste Tests in Color: $5800
Brandt’s work has very little secondary market history, so gallery retail is likely the best option for interested collectors at this point.
Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
Transit Hub:
  • Artist site (here)
  • Reviews/Features: New Yorker (here), Time LightBox (here), New Yorker PhotoBooth (here), DART (here), Daily Beast (here)
Through July 20th
245 Tenth Avenue
New York, NY 10001

Ralph Eugene Meatyard @Peter Freeman

JTF (just the facts): A total of 40 black and white photographs, framed in black and and matted, and hung in the two room divided gallery space. All of the works are vintage gelatin silver prints, made between 1955 and 1972. Physical dimensions range from roughly 6×6 to 14×11, most in square format. No edition information was available. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: This show is best described as a selling companion to the touring exhibit of Ralph Eugene Meatyard’s work now on view in Philadelphia (linked below). It doesn’t provide any critical reappraisal or new perspectives on the photographer’s output, but simply offers a well-edited sampler of photographs from his various bodies of work.
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Meatyard was an optometrist from Lexington, Kentucky, with an interest in more philosophical and introspective approaches to photography. His experimental works using multiple exposures and deliberate jiggling of the camera follow a path from Harry Callahan, his compositions organized around abstract echoes of trees and squiggling light on water. His many images of his children show the strong influence of Minor White, where melancholy portraits and dreamy, ghostlike scenes have been staged in empty corners of interior rooms or against decaying walls. His kids hide in the arms of tree limbs, are engulfed by overgrown grasses or leaf piles, and rush by in blurs near abandoned rowboats and rusty water pumps. The intimacy and psychological exploration in these pictures has obvious parallels with Francesca Woodman’s moody personal investigations of just a few years later.

Meatyard’s images of his family and friends wearing grotesque Halloween masks are perhaps his most widely recognized works, and this show gathers together a number of terrific examples. What remains interesting about these pictures is how seemingly boring snapshots of people standing in their backyards or in front of their houses can be transformed into something much more unsettling and inconclusive by the addition of the rubber drugstore masks. Specific people holding beers or standing with roses become unknowns, their faces erased or replaced by something both horrific and quietly comic. White shoes, modest dresses, and plain brick patios take on an edge of weird gothic drama.

While I certainly understand the logic behind a sampler show like this one given the timing of the museum exhibits, I’d like to see Meatyard reconsidered more rigorously in the context of contemporary work. Then a show like this one wouldn’t have such a stuck in the 1970s feel and would connect the dots between Meatyard’s photography and newer strains of both abstraction and scene setting. Perhaps we’d find that Meatyard is much more relevant and timely than a stately vintage retrospective might imply.

Collector’s POV: The prints in this show are priced between $8500 and $25000, with many intermediate prices. Meatyard’s work is consistently available in the secondary markets, with a handful of lots coming up for sale every year. Prices for his vintage works have generally ranged between $2000 and $34000, with most under $10000; a few posthumous prints/portfolios were also made, and  these prints have typically been sold for under $2000.
Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)Transit Hub:

  • Exhibit: Ralph Eugene Meatyard: Dolls and Masks @Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2012 (here), previously at the Art Institute of Chicago and the De Young Museum
  • Reviews/Features: New Yorker (here), Gallerist NY (here), TimeOut New York (here), Huffington Post (here)
Through July 20th
560 Broadway
New York, NY 10012

George Dureau, Black 1973-1986 @Higher Pictures

JTF (just the facts): A total of 15 black and white photographs, framed in white and matted, and hung in the main gallery space. All of the works are vintage gelatin silver prints, taken between 1973 and 1986. The prints are square format on 20×16 paper, and were not reliably editioned. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: George Dureau’s 1970s era portraits of muscular black men from New Orleans offer plenty of entry points for discussion, so many that I think the recent dialogue around the work has gotten somewhat misplaced. His photographs are both classical in structure and intimate in nature, capturing both the sculptural forms of the male body and the individual personalities of his sitters. His authentic connection to his models is undeniably visible in these portraits, and this trust is what makes the images durably engaging.

The bodies in Dureau’s photographs range from tight and gangly to thick and burly, with a wide range of bushy afros and dreadlocks as decoration. Perfect athletic muscles flank the deformed bodies of dwarves and amputees, and humanistic beauty is evident in all of them. With an echo of Avedon, his subjects are quietly posed against flat white backgrounds or simple interior walls, focusing the viewer’s attention on the shapes and forms of torsos and full length figures. There is a deliberate use of contrast in nearly all of the images, placing bright white clothing and featureless environments in contrast with the dark skin of the sitters, almost like silhouettes.

There are three lines of critical analysis around this work that I find to be distracting, if not downright misleading. There is the “white man taking photographs of black men” racial angle, the “male nude must mean homoerotic” angle, and the “Mapplethorpe was influenced by Dureau, so that’s why these pictures are important” angle. All three unnecessarily pigeon hole the work into “black photography”, “gay photography” and “Mapplethorpe knock-off photography”, none of which is particulalrly accurate or representative of what the portraits really show us. I think this overly easy tagging of the work also inverts the causality –  we should first determine the merits of the photography on its own before we attempt to place it into larger contextual frameworks, not the other way around. As a collector, I can’t really imagine buying one of these portraits and then telling visitors to my home “it’s a George Dureau; he influenced Mapplethorpe” as if that was some kind of logical explanation for why I purchased it. The Mapplethorpe connection is of course interesting in tracing the evolution of visual motifs between the artists, but it wouldn’t matter if the Dureau photographs themselves weren’t accomplished in their own right.

So bypass the critical red herrings that fly around this show and see these images for what they are: well-executed, empathetic, classically-influenced male portraits, distilled down to an essential mix of truth, strength, and vulnerability.

Collector’s POV: The prints in this show are priced between $8000 and $12000. Dureau’s work does not have much history in the secondary markets for photography, so gallery retail is likely the best option for interested collectors at this point. Dureau is represented in New Orleans by Arthur Roger Gallery (here).
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Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
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Transit Hub:
  • Reviews/Features: NY Times (here), New Yorker (here), Gallerist NY (here), Photograph (here)
Through July 13th
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980 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10075

Milcho Manchevski, Five Drops of Dream @Miyako Yoshinaga

JTF (just the facts): A total of 16 color works, mounted and unframed, and hung against white walls in the main gallery space and the smaller project room in the back. Each work is made up of 5 photographs arranged and printed together as one single unit. All of the works are archival pigment prints, made in 2012 from negatives taken between 1999 and 2010. Each of the prints is sized 10×43 and is available in an edition of 5. (Installation shots at right.)Comments/Context: When a recognized filmmaker exhibits still photographs, I think we all come with the expectation that these images will be “cinematic” in some identifiable way, perhaps in their use of motion, their exploitation of camera angles or their building of narrative arcs. But Macedonian filmmaker Milcho Manchevski’s globe trotting street photographs consistently turn on formal and structural elements, abstracting scenes and compositions from everyday life into two dimensional lines, geometries, and blocks of color. His sense for the cinematic comes through in their presentation, where the individual photographs are grouped into sets of 5 and then sequenced into what he calls “strings”, resulting in finished works that combine abstraction with narrative progression, visual echo, repetition, and formal interplay.
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One series begins with an image of a dog seen in profile, looking to the right. This is followed by an outstretched arm pointing to the left, and then a triangular shadow pointing back to the right. The next image finds another angular storefront shadow pointing to the left, and the last image caputres a stone filled excavation site, once again shaped into a triangular form pointing to the left. The sequence of found shapes moves us back and forth, almost like the turning of heads at a tennis match. A second series begins with an American flag, followed by an orange metal railing flanking patterns of cement being poured and flattened. The third image shows a shadowy reflected silhouette with edge of an American flag stuck on the window, next to a nude dappled in shadow. The last image brings back more crowd control railings, this time in silver. The series seems to fold back on itself, with multiple refrains of visual tunes heard earlier. A third series plays with linear directions: the horizontal stripe on a bus, followed by the vertical stripes of fish, followed by the vertical frames of windows, followed by the diagonals of the sidewalk, followed by the repeated verticals of architecture in a reflected window. Once again, Manchevski’s groupings add an additional layer of connection between seemingly unrelated images.Each of these works is almost like a puzzle to be unraveled or a rebus to be decoded, and slower, more deliberate looking uncovers more progressive harmonies and repetitions, especially using shadows and window reflections. Or maybe each is some form of photographic sonata, taking primary and secondary themes through introduction, exposition, development, recapitulation, and coda. Whatever the underlying structure, Manchevski’s strings being movement to his formal street photographs, adding a sense of playful, symbiotic interconnection to his found abstractions.
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Collector’s POV: The works in this show are priced at $1800 each. Manchevski’s work has not yet found its way to the secondary markets, so gallery retail is likely the only option for those collectors interested in following up.Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)Transit Hub:
  • Artist site (here)

Milcho Manchevski, Five Drops of Dream
Through July 14th

Miyako Yoshinaga Art Prospects
547 West 27th Street
2md Floor
New York, NY 10001

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