Lee Friedlander: Nudes @Pace

JTF (just the facts): A total of 74 black and white photographs, framed in white/black and matted, and hung against white and grey walls in the large two room gallery space. The 56 prints by Lee Friedlander are all modern gelatin silver prints, taken between 1977 and 1991. The works are sized either 11×14 or 16×20 and are uneditioned. The 9 works by Bill Brandt are vintage gelatin silver prints, each sized roughly 9×8, and taken between 1947 and 1959. The 9 works by Edward Weston are vintage gelatin silver prints, sized either 4×5 or 8×10, and taken between 1933 and 1936. (Installation shots at right. There is no photography allowed in the gallery, so the images are courtesy of the Pace/MacGill website.)
Comments/Context: For many years after first seeing Lee Friedlander’s nudes, I had a hard time enjoying them. As I look back now, I’m not sure I ever really even saw them in some sense. They were just too hairy, too confrontationally real in a way that I found unsettling, and as a result, I didn’t engage them enough. It wasn’t that they were excessively aggressive or explicit exactly, but more that they seemed to fly in the face of everything I thought I knew (and valued) about the elegant photographic nude. That joltingly contrarian book (Lee Friedlander Nudes) sitting on our shelves was somehow radioactive, bursting with an energy that was too far out of control for me. I would take it down and look at it from time to time with the trepidation of handling a ticking time bomb, quickly flipping through it and putting it back before it could explode.
This show brings together a selection of these challenging Friedlander nudes and places them on equal footing with works by the two most important and influential photographers of the nude from the 20th century, Edward Weston and Bill Brandt. A side room plays host to this brilliant juxtaposition, teasing out the visual ideas and motifs that tie Friedlander to his predecessors. Weston’s nudes turn on close in framing to create unexpected body abstractions and employ plenty of elongated lounging forms (on the famous sand) built on sinuous lines. Brandt’s early pictures use shadowy interiors to host mysterious models in chairs, while later images create their magic with the bold, fragmented distortion of curves and overexposed whites. With these two sets of images as a historical backdrop and artistic foil, it’s possible to carefully follow the aesthetic connections and pathways between the photographers and to pinpoint Friedlander’s new and original innovations.
While the often disorienting twisting and turning of bodies in Friedlander’s nudes certainly has parallels in both Weston and Brandt, Friedlander’s approach is neither sculpted perfection nor full force abstraction. His pictures are rooted in the mundane and the everyday, in real individuals rather than dreamy ideals. Young bodies sprawl on couches and chairs with effortless ease, spread across messy beds and bent over crumpled blankets, not far from cluttered coffee tables filled with cosmetics and ashtrays. The camera spins and looms, often lingering from above or cropping out the head. His flash creates brash highlights that bounce off up-close hips, breasts and flanks, with dark hairy armpits and crotches offset by the dated patterns of woven upholstery and fringed pillows. Just when you’ve been distracted by the intrusion of a clip-on lamp, the interruption of a protruding window frame, or the swirl of a floral patterned bedsheet, Friedlander delivers an unexpectedly graceful curve or arched arm that takes your breath away; his nudes move back and forth between direct, honest, small apartment realism and compositionally complex formal exercises. In every picture, the casual and ordinary have been transformed into something striking, a jumble of overlapping female limbs, crowded and serenely chaotic rather than merely pared down.
What’s most important about this exhibit is how it so successfully shows both Friedlander’s respect for the past and his own one-of-a-kind rule breaking vision. There are obvious echoes of Weston and Brandt here, but those influences have been thoroughly digested, incorporated by Friedlander and then evolved in his own direction for several more iterative generations. The result is a body of work that is at once familiar and foreign, reverent and shockingly irreverent. All in, this is a show worth making a detour for. It finally led me to get over my own preconceived notions and prejudices about what the photographic nude is supposed to be, and to embrace Friedlander’s nudes for the genius that they are.
Collector’s POV: The prints in this show are generally priced based on size, with the 11×14 prints at $6800 each and the 16×20 prints at $8500 each. Outliers from this overall price pattern include the 11×14 image from the cover of the original Lee Friedlander Nudes book (at $7400) and the 16×20 images of Madonna (at $9500). Friedlander’s work is routinely available in the secondary markets, with recent prices at auction ranging from roughly $2000 on the low end to as much as $80000 for his most iconic vintage prints. The Brandts (from David Dechman’s collection) and Westons (from MoMA) are not for sale.
Rating: *** (three stars) EXCELLENT (rating system described here)
Transit Hub:
  • Features/Reviews: Daily Beast (here), NY Photo Review (here)

Lee Friedlander: Nudes
Through December 22nd

Pace Gallery
32 East 57th Street
New York, NY 10022

Olafur Eliasson: Volcanoes and Shelters @Tanya Bonakdar

JTF (just the facts): A total of 3 large grids of color photographs and 5 single image color photographs, framed in black and unmatted, and hung in the main gallery space and the smaller back room on the main floor. A room sized installation of obsidian rocks and a group of 3 strobe lit water fountains are displayed in the upstairs galleries. The 3 photographic grids are made up of individually framed c-prints, each sized between 10×16 and 16×24. The grids include 48, 56, and 63 prints respectively, and each work is available in an edition of 6+1AP. The 5 single image photographs are unique c-prints, each sized 38×57. All of the photographic works were made in 2012. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Olafur Eliasson has been making photographs since the mid 1990s, but it’s always his perception-altering installations that seem to get all the attention. Happily, in this show of new work, the photographs take the main stage and the installations play a supporting role. Together, they deliver a thoughtful meditation on the relativity of visual scale.

Three large grids of Icelandic landscapes fill the main gallery space, and at first glance, it might be tempting to think they are Becher-like typologies, given their repetitive motifs of volcanoes, hot springs, and huts. But Eliasson’s arrangements are much less rigid and systematic; they impose a kind of conceptual order on nature, but the terrain resists such precision. The result are arrangements that are more like maps or inventories, sets of images that subtly play with the relationship between the viewer and the land. The hot springs come in a dizzying array of unspoiled natural colors: shockingly blue, salt encrusted, moss covered, rusty orange, sulfurous yellow, steaming black. But aside from their rough beauty, these holes and depressions are fascinatingly and puzzlingly unscaled: is this image of something two feet or two miles wide? Eliasson’s volcanic craters are equally photographically unstable: aerials of mountains and cones in seemingly all sizes, wrapped in snow and grass, filled with pools of liquid, and surrounded by moonscapes of rock and scree, all scaled to the same relative size for the grid. The series of hiking huts introduces a human element to the land, where tiny A-frame buildings are dwarfed by the expanse of the rolling hills, at once hopelessly tenuous and quietly optimistic. In each case, Eliasson’s method of presentation mixes the rugged, untamed formations of highlands with a complex, nuanced sense of spatial awareness.

The single image photographs in the back room are printed much larger, but still consider many of the same issues of perception. While a couple have a scale giveaway hidden amid the landscape (a rainbow, a cascading waterfall), nearly all of the photographs are at least superficially uncertain in size: a pool of water surrounded by eroded rock, decorated with a splash of unmelted snow (could be a lake or a puddle); sculpted hills and valleys painted in a palette of dull green and brown (could be an aerial or a tiny slice of ground). All of these landscapes test our ability to discern the “real” scale, forcing the viewer into a different level of heightened engagement with the images. The installations upstairs continue this conceptual discussion, with a room sized pile of broken obsidian that might be visually measured in feet or acres, and splashing fountains of pleasingly aural water that are intermittently stopped mid fall (like a fleeting photograph) by flashing strobe lights.

What I like best about Eliasson’s grids and landscapes is their dynamic energy. Even in a natural world as hauntingly beautiful as Iceland, landscape photographs can easily be tired and boring. To combat this, Eliasson has inserted a layer of rigorous, cerebral attention, making the images not so much about the land itself, but about the experience of the land. Of course, these are pictures about walking, and stopping, and looking, and seeing, but they have a vital sense of off-kilter wonder that keeps them fresh and unpredictable.

Collector’s POV: The works in this show are priced as follows.The large photographic grids are 135000€ (huts), 145000€ (hot springs), and 175000€ (volcanoes). The single image photographs are 22500€ each. Eliasson’s photographs have become increasingly available in the secondary markets for both the Photography and Contemporary Art in recent years. Prices at auction have ranged from as little as a few thousand dollars for one of the single images to upwards of $600000 for the most sought after grids.

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

Transit Hub:
  • Artist site (here)
  • Features/Reviews: NY Times (here)

Olafur Eliasson: Volcanoes and Shelters

Through December 22nd

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
521 West 21st Street
New York, NY 10011

Joel Meyerowitz, 50 Years of Photographs, Part I: 1962-1977 @Howard Greenberg

JTF (just the facts): A total of 47 black and white and color photographs, variously framed and matted, and hung against light brown walls in the main gallery space, the book alcove, and the back transition gallery. The works in the show were made between 1962 and 1976. The 17 black and white images are a mix of vintage gelatin silver prints and modern archival pigment prints, sized between 9×13 and 11×15. No edition information was available for the vintage prints; the pigment prints are available in editions of 25. The 30 color images are a mix of modern archival pigment prints, vintage chromogenic prints and vintage dye transfer prints, sized between 9×14 and 27×40 (or reverse). No edition information was available for the vintage prints; edition sizes for the modern prints are variously 10, 15, 20, or 25. (Installation shots at right.)Comments/Context: Joel Meyerowitz seems to having a bit of a resurgence these days. A new two volume retrospective book, a European museum show, a couple of lifetime achievement awards, and now, in conjunction with joining the stable at Howard Greenberg, a two part career survey at the gallery. It feels like a consolidating, summing up moment for the influential American photographer.
This show digs back into the archive and tells the story of Meyerowitz’ early career. It finds him moving back and forth between black and white and color, testing the affinities and limits of both approaches. During this time period, there is a slow evolution from a focus on street photography (particularly in New York) to a broader look at the effects of color, in locations all around the world. But this transition doesn’t happen like a turning on a light switch; it’s more like a faucet, starting with a trickle of ideas that eventually overwhelms the previous style. Many of Meyerowitz’ early street scenes center on a single event: a woman in a coffee shop, a Times Square ticket seller obscured by the window grill, the splash of a red dress and gauzy hat at Easter, a cluster of women in white pumps standing in a doorway, the kiss of a hand in Central Park. A few of the pictures then start to become more complex and cinematic: a woman being thrown into a convertible, a gathering of people on a front stoop all looking in different directions, the blown hair of couples in Dallas, a fallen man in Paris surrounded by a chaotic group of gawkers.One wall of the exhibit shows pairs of images in black and white and color, taken seconds apart. They are evidence of Meyerowitz’ changing mind set, and the creeping influence of color on his work. The astro turf swimsuit man standing under a blimp is far more puzzling in color than in black and white. Slowly, the images seem to turn on the play of color rather than the coalescing of a decisive moment: the blue brushes of a Bulgarian car wash, a shadowy green room with an American flag, a pile of grey police barriers, a pair of camel hair coats on the sidewalk. And once again, the compositions increase in complexity, this time balancing many color fields: a bikini clad body, a blue car, and the long white line of a curb, snug in a mess of Florida telephone poles, a shapely bus driver’s leg in white boots in warm yellow sun, a lion balanced by a photo-taker in a car, taken through the dark frame of another car window. The few vintage dye transfers on view tint these kinds of scenes with a more saturated, richer color, both darker and more tactile.I liked the sense of experimentation that is found in this selection of pictures – they’re not all greatest hits or best shots. Whether it was a woman behind a projection screen, the flowers in a window of a trailer, or a jumping poodle, Meyerowitz was honing his craft and internalizing the nature of photographic color. Overall, this show is a solid sampler of work from the artist’s formative years, and sets the stage for Part II of the exhibit coming in December.
Collector’s POV: The works in the show are priced between $5000 and $40000. Meyerowitz’ work is routinely available in the secondary markets, particularly prints of his 1970s images made in large editions (75 or even 100). Prices have typically ranged from $1000 to $14000, mostly on the lower end of that range.Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
Transit Hub:
  • Artist site (here)
  • Features/Reviews: NY Times (here), New Yorker (here)
  • Joel Meyerowitz: Taking My Time, published by Phaidon (here)
Through December 1st

Howard Greenberg Gallery
41 East 57th Street
New York, NY 10022

Doug Rickard, A New American Picture @Yossi Milo

JTF (just the facts): A total of 16 color photographs, framed in white and unmatted, and hung against white walls in the East and West gallery spaces. All of the works are archival pigment prints, made between 2009 and 2011. The prints come in three sizes: 26×42 (in editions of 5+3AP), 40×64 (in editions of 5+3AP), and 21×34 (in editions of 7+3AP, but not on view in this show). A monograph of this body of work was recently published by Aperture (here). (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Doug Rickard’s A New American Picture is one of the most polarizing bodies of contemporary photography to surface in the past few years. While it is deeply and thoughtfully rooted the history of the medium, it aggressively pushes previously established boundaries and fundamental definitions. This has led to a wide spectrum of opinions on its merits, from ringing praise to scathing dismissal. In my view, heated arguments are a very good sign of something worth paying attention to – it’s a sign that the establishment feels just a little bit threatened.
Part of what has caught the wider public’s attention about this work is its unconventional process. All of the images are appropriated from Google Street View (the car mounted effort to mechanically photograph every street in America), then digitally tuned, reframed and edited by Rickard, and finally rephotographed from his computer screen. Supporters see these methods as an innovative extension of old school image appropriation, smartly matched to a 21st century flood of available digital files. They understand the pixelation and optical blur in the final works to be deliberate remnants of (and references to) their original quasi-surveillance function, and consider his archive mining as the natural next step in the onward progression of digital art. Detractors openly scoff at his tools, mocking him as an editor rather than a photographer and ridiculing the low fidelity image quality. They remind us of other artists doing similar things, characterize his interventions as less than original, and generally walk away underwhelmed.
The other part of the conversation that surrounds these pictures is their bleak, sometimes boring, often poverty laced content. For the most part, Rickard has selected uneventful scenes on the outskirts of our cities, where vacant lots grow weedy, street corners are closed or boarded up, and young men (virtually all black) wander in packs. Look closely and it will become apparent that Rickard has a well trained eye for overlooked detail: the billowing clouds over a cemetery, the shadow of a telephone pole, a blindingly white dog, the intense pop of a red wall flanked by a person in lime green pants, an overturned toy truck in a muddy yard at sunrise. And if you’ve ever read Rickard’s excellent blog, American Suburb X, you will know that Rickard is undeniably informed by a sense of history. His body of work is not an accidental grouping of snapshots thrown together; he knows exactly which images he is referencing, from the FSA photography of Evans to the road trip images of Frank, and from the American color of Eggleston, Shore, and Sternfeld to the street photography of Winogrand. So I think it’s an oversimplification to just see these as a newfangled extension of iconic street photography, dumbed down for a digital age. Given his raw material, he has carefully selected images that have echoes of the old but depict a very different, more modern existence and aesthetic.
Having heard both sides of the Rickard debate and looked closely at the pictures, I have to say that I come down on the side of being excited by what he’s doing. Not every photograph on view here is wildly memorable or entirely pleasing, but I came away won over by the thoughtfulness with which he is breaking rules and extending limits. I hope that Rickard will not end up hopelessly branded as a “Google Street View” photographer, as his broader approach is applicable to more than just this one method. This body of work asks us to reconsider the definitional edges of image capture and artistic creation, and to think differently about how the avalanche of digital imagery we now create can be repurposed and recontextualized. This work is a sign post pointing toward the new. So even if we have the innate urge to pick it apart as something unlike what we’re used to, we would be foolish not to watch closely.
Collector’s POV: The prints in this show are priced as follows. The 26×42 prints are $6000 each, the 40×64 prints are $8000 each, and the smaller 21×34 prints (not on view) are $4500 each. Rickard’s work has not yet reached the secondary markets with any regularity, so gallery retail is likely the best option for those collectors interested in following up.
Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here)
Transit Hub:
  • Artist site (here)
  • American Suburb X (here)
  • Features/Reviews: Artforum (here), New Yorker PhotoBooth (here), Time LightBox (here), Believer (here), Daily Beast (here)
Through November 24th
245 Tenth Avenue
New York, NY 10001

Nadav Kander, Yangtze – The Long River @Flowers

JTF (just the facts): A total of 13 large scale color photographs, framed in brown wood and unmatted, and hung against white walls in a series of three connected gallery spaces. All of the prints are chromogenic color prints made between 2006 and 2009. The prints are available in three sizes: 38×48 (in editions of 5), 48×59 (in editions of 5), and 59×69 (in editions of 3). A monograph of this body of work was published in 2011 by Hatje Cantz (here). (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: China’s rapid economic and cultural transformations over the past few decades have provided a rich vein raw material that countless artists and photographers have continued to mine. The most common underlying narrative follows a nearly endless set of clashes and contradictions: West and East, modern and traditional, urban and rural, new and old, uneasy dichotomies and unlikely juxtapositions seemingly everywhere one might look. Nadav Kander’s three year exploration of life along the Yangtze River explores this same terrain, centering on the dizzying cycle of destruction and construction that has wholly remade both the physical landscape and the day to day existence of millions of people along the river. But this isn’t a Three Gorges Dam story exactly, nor is it a documentary study of displaced families or overlooked individuals; Kander has instead stepped back to take an outsider’s wider view, creating images that revel in extreme contrasts of scale and outlook.
Printed large and bathed in the glow of a soft, foggy palette, Kander’s photographs bring a contemporary sensibility to the grandeur of 19th Romantic painting. The rugged mountains, wide vistas, and turbulent storms of nature have been replaced by massive, often unfinished, man made structures. Soaring bridges, concrete spans, support pillars, and industrial smokestacks anchor many of the pictures, dwarfing everything around them in their sleek newness. Tiny figures are evidence of the immensity of the scale, their insignificance made obvious by the enormous physical size of these infrastructure projects. Paltry human activities like having a drink, washing a motorcycle, fishing with an old style net, or swimming in the river become almost wistfully comic when set against these manifestations of power, a few of these ominous scale mismatches bordering on something out of a science fiction novel.
Kander hits the underbelly of this forward looking, aspirational future with images that highlight both the disconnect between old and new and the messy, unfinished nature of the changes taking place. A Vegas-style hotel complete with a pirate lagoon stands like an oversized concrete hulk, while old school bamboo scaffolding holds up an immense flyover and rebar spikes are covered by incoming tidal sand. Rickety, rusted barges still do the work of the river, and entirely new cities explode in chaotic sprawls just across the river from now abandoned wastelands. Once again, tiny people look on, alternately forlorn and awestruck by the metamorphosis – it’s impossible not to gawk at the pace and the scale of the activity, even if it means the only world you have ever known is disappearing.
I think the success in these pictures is found in their calm balance. They pepper the formally majestic and the atmospherically sublime with undercurrents of intimidated, vulnerable respect. They astonish and amaze with their can-do achievements, while never straying too far from the gritty realities of everyday life. And the emotions of personal anxiety and apprehension are quietly matched by national wonder and pride. It’s an impressive photographic mix, smartly charting the complex character of China’s modern personality.
Collector’s POV: The prints in this show are priced in ratcheting editions, starting at $6500 (38×48), $10500 (48×59) or $16000 (59×69) based on size; prices range all the way up to $48000, and many of the images are NFS or sold out in certain sizes. Kander’s work has just begun to enter the secondary markets in the past few years. That said, not enough lots have changed hands to generate any kind of auction pricing pattern, so gallery retail likely remains the best option for those collectors interested in following up.
Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here)
Transit Hub:
  • Artist site (here)
  • Features/Reviews: NY Times Lens (here), Photograph (here), Conscientious (here), Guardian (here), New Yorker (here)
  • Interview: Le Journal de la Photographie (here)
  • Prix Pictet, 2009 (here)

Nadav Kander, Yangtze – The Long River

Through November 24th
529 West 20th Street
New York, NY 10011

Aperture Remix @Aperture

JTF (just the facts): A group show consisting of 8 individual photographers and 1 artistic pair who were asked to make new work inspired by an Aperture publication. The exhibit is divided into 9 sections, with each section containing the new works, a sample of the works which made up the original book/magazine, and a limited edition book combining the old and new. The exhibit was curated by Lesley Martin. (Installation shots at right.)
The following photographers have been included in the show, with their chosen influential publication as reference. The details on the works on view made by both the commissioned artists and the subjects are underneath.
Rinko Kawauchi: Sally Mann, Immediate Family, 1992
  • Mann: 5 gelatin silver prints, 1984-1989
  • Kawauchi: 6 c prints, 2012
  • Case with Kawauchi’s limited edition book
Vik Muniz: Edward Weston, Daybooks, Volume 1, Mexico, 1973
  • Weston: 3 gelatin silver prints, 1921-1924
  • Muniz: 1 digital gelatin silver print, 2012, 1 copy of Daybooks cut up

Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs, Aperture essay books, 1976-2011

  • Onorato/Krebs: 1 camera made from a dozen cut through books, 1 archival pigment print

Martin Parr: Aperture issue 103, 1986

  • Nan Goldin: 2 cibachrome prints, 1977-1980
  • Chris Killip: 2 gelatin silver prints, 1983-1984
  • Larry Sultan: 2 digital c prints, 1984
  • Parr: 3 digital c prints, 1990-2001
  • Case with Parr’s limited edition book
Doug Rickard: Stephen Shore, Uncommon Places, 1982
  • Shore: 1 set of postcards, 1971-2000, 5 chromogenic prints, 1973-1975
  • Rickard: 8 archival pigment pigment prints, 1971-1978/2012
  • Case with Rickard’s limited edition book

Viviane Sassen: Edward Weston, Nudes, 1977

  • Weston: 3 gelatin silver prints, 1 palladium print, 1927-1936
  • Sassen: 5 archival pigment prints, 2003
  • Case with Sassen’s limited edition book
Alec Soth: Robert Adams, Summer Nights, 1985
  • Adams: 4 gelatin silver prints, 1975-1980
  • Soth: 1 video
  • Case with letters and Soth’s limited edition book
Penelope Umbrico: Masters of Photography series, 1977-1999
  • Group of source images: 2 Henri Cartier-Bresson gelatin silver prints, 1948 and 1964, 1 Wynn Bullock gelatin silver print, 1958, 2 Manuel Alvarez Bravo gelatin silver prints, 1966 and 1967, 1 Edward Weston gelatin silver print, 1935, 1 Alfred Stieglitz gelatin silver print, Eikoh Hosoe gelatin silver print, 1996, 1 Paul Strand gelatin silver print, plus other reproductions
  • Umbrico: 87 iPhone images, manipulated by apps, hung as a single cluster
  • Case with Umbrico’s limited edition book and stack of original Masters of Photography series books

James Welling: Paul Strand, Time in New England, 1980

  • Strand: 6 gelatin silver prints, 1928-1946
  • Welling: 22 archival pigment prints, 1 diptych, and 3 texts, 2012
  • Case with Welling’s limited edition book

Comments/Context: In honor of its 60th anniversary this year, Aperture might have easily trotted out a luscious parade of past masters and iconic photobooks, in a deservedly congratulatory and self-referential manner given the publisher’s important position in the history of the medium. But the overly obvious greatest hits show has been smartly avoided and instead recast by asking ten contemporary photographers to make fresh works (and books) in reference/homage to any one of Aperture’s many publications. The idea of exploring how a contemporary artist borrows and incorporates ideas from other artists is not a new one, of course, but in our age of image explosion and remixed culture, one that seems ever more relevant. Where is the line between responding and appropriating, riffing and reworking, entirely reformulating and just being derivative? The works in this show examine this process, opening a dialogue between past and present, asking and answering thorny questions about the nature of influence and interpretation across the photographic generations.

Edward Weston provides the starting point for two of the photographers included. Viviane Sassen has made deceptive pink toned nudes in reference to Weston’s iconic almost abstract creations, starting with a similar interest in the lines of the human form, but extending it in her own way into multi-body nudes that have a mysterious selection of extra limbs. Her images are both seductive and sculptural like Weston, but startlingly disconcerting and unexpected. Vik Muniz has also channeled Weston, immersing himself in the Daybooks and building one of his signature constructions out of text fragments from the book and other Weston imagery. His rework of Weston’s elegant portrait of Tina Modotti holding a white iris is both reverential and also uniquely Muniz.
Alec Soth’s homage to Robert Adams’ Summer Nights is fascinating near failure. After backtracking from night photography to experimenting with his new camera’s video function, Soth opted for still video clips of trees and their shadows, strip malls at twilight, and houses with lights in the windows; my first reaction was that it was all a little too literal for me, and not quite enough of Soth’s own vision coming through. But then I stopped looking and started listening more actively: the rustling of the trees, the background noise of a town, the settling down for the night, all captured (perhaps inadvertently) by the video. It’s an amazingly perfect soundtrack of summer nights, achingly evocative of Adams’ own photographs.
Other pairings are equally clever  and thoughtful. Rinko Kawauchi reconsiders Sally Mann’s images of her children, with her own ephemeral, atmospheric shots of kids: boys swimming, a splash of water, a baby behind a curtain, the soft sunlight streaming down behind a young girl. Penelope Umbrico dives into images of mountains made masters of the medium, and then reworks them using her iPhone, creating a candy colored array of the very same mountains, somehow made less imposing by tints, tiling, and reorientations. And Doug Rickard parrots Stephen Shore’s own postcard idea back at him, discovering his own 1970s era postcards of motels, cars, and restaurants, and then further tuning them to accent the saturated yellow palette of the times; they’re a smart homage, using Rickard’s own affinity for found imagery.
What I like best about this show is its sense of honoring without fawning, of acknowledging influence while still staying true to original thinking. If all of our remixed, reshuffled, chopped, and appropriated digital art of the future is as shrewd as most of what is on view here, we need not ever fear that photography is somehow over.
Collector’s POV: One of the consistently puzzling things about this venue is that it is always a challenge to figure out what is actually for sale. For the most part, this is a non-selling environment more like a museum, so there is hardly ever an easily accessible checklist with ready price information and image details. What is perplexing about this approach is that often at least some of the works are really for sale or there are additional prints available in the print room, so it usually takes some initiative to get the answers. In the case of this particular show, it is not at all clear whether any of the photographs are available for purchase. My assumption is that at a minimum the limited edition collaborative books are for sale, but I didn’t surface any prices, so interested collectors will need to follow up directly with Aperture or potentially with the various galleries that represent the artists.
Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
Transit Hub:
  • Features/Reviews: CNN (here), Capital NewYork (here), New Yorker PhotoBooth (here), Time LightBox (here)
Through November 17th
547 West 27th Street
New York, NY 10001

Lee Friedlander: Mannequin @Pace/MacGill

JTF (just the facts): A total of 28 black and white photographs, framed in white and matted, and hung against purple and grey walls in the two room gallery space. All of the prints are gelatin silver prints made between 2009 and 2011. Each of the works is sized 18×12 and is uneditioned. A monograph of this body of work was recently published by Fraenkel Gallery (here). (Installation shots at right. There is no photography allowed in the gallery, so the images are courtesy of the Pace/MacGill website.)

Comments/Context: Few photographers can boast of having consistently subverted existing visual genres as often as Lee Friedlander has. Over the years, he has radically disassembled the self portrait, the urban scene, the architectural image, the landscape, the floral still life, and even the nude, making each uniquely and undeniably his own. In this show of recent work, Friedlander takes on a classic of street photography – the reflected storefront window – and tries to wholly reenvision a subject that Atget, Abbott, Modell and many others have justifiably made iconic.

Friedlander has long been a master of complex, overlapping, interrupted compositions, so it is not particularly surprising that he was drawn to the layered flatness offered by the alternately transparent and reflective glass of these displays. His mannequins pose with rigid style, draped in clashing reflections and repeated geometric patterns. Sleek torsos are offset by soaring modern skyscrapers and grids of stone windows, sometimes framing the body with bold lines and other times trampling all over the background figure. Areas of dark and light, brightness and shadow, invert compositions and add a double exposure effect. A few of the headless models look like they are actually dressed with buildings, city trees bursting from their heads and metal scaffolding cutting straight through their graceful figures. No one would ever mistake these shop windows for pictures made by anyone but Friedlander.

My one quibbling criticism of these otherwise well made photographs is that a few too many are a bit flat, lacking in the crackling wit that I enjoy so much about Friedlander’s work. The compositions are characteristically cluttered, but I just didn’t feel the same restless energy and vitality that I do with his other bodies of work. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that he hasn’t been able to break the rules quite as much with this subject matter as he has been able to do with others; the Surrealists had plenty of fun with reflections like these, so Friedlander’s images seem less transgressive and shocking than they normally might. He’s at his best when he thoroughly upends the viewer’s expectations, and these photographs only turn the chaos up a notch or two from scenes we are already familiar with. All that said, they’re still a singular new riff on an old visual motif, and evidence that Friedlander’s eye continues to be distinctive and exceptional.

Collector’s POV: The prints in this show are priced at $8500 each. Friedlander’s work is routinely available in the secondary markets, with prices at auction ranging from approximately $2000 to as much as $80000 in recent years.
Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here)
Transit Hub:
  • Features/Reviews: Artcritical (here), New Yorker PhotoBooth (here), Le Journal de la Photographie (here)
Through December 22nd

Pace/MacGill Gallery
32 East 57th Street
New York, NY 10022

Danny Lyon: Deep Sea Diver @Churner and Churner

JTF (just the facts): A total of 30 black and white photographs, framed in white and matted, and hung against white walls in the front and back gallery spaces. All of the works are gelatin silver prints, made between 2005 and 2009. Each of the prints is sized 8×10 and is available in an edition of 6. The exhibit also includes two glass cases containing notebooks and maquettes, and a pair of large darkroom bulletin boards covered edge to edge in ephemera. A monograph of this body of work was recently published by Phaidon (here). (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Danny Lyon’s newest project applies his particular brand of get-involved photojournalism to life in Shanxi province in northeast China. This is rural coal country, a throwback to a slower, more time-resistant existence rather than a shining example of the energetic hustle of the modern urban world. His pace is measured and deliberate, taking the time to immerse himself in the small details and repeated patterns of this overlooked region.

Many of Lyon’s images capture the rough, griminess of people-intensive industrial work: coal miners in a communal bath, railway workers swinging pickaxes and laying track, grubby mechanics fixing broken vehicles, and truck drivers lingering waiting for the next load. The rocky roads are bumpy and cracked, the leftover coal must be hand gleaned from the track side, and smokestacks loom in the distance. Circus performers and opera singers provide animated distractions from the exhaustion and tedium, but most folks seem to opt for simpler pleasures: playing cards, chatting and/or smoking in a tea house, flying a kite. The economic boom of the cities has obviously failed to reach this area; dusty antiques, magazines in plastic bags, and fireworks are all that is for sale.

In many ways, these pictures look like they could have been taken ten, twenty, or even fifty years ago; the tide of change in the rural Chinese provinces has obviously been extremely slow. What I like about Lyon’s photographs is that they are consistently evenhanded and dignified. They forgo overly easy judgment and criticism for supportive curiosity and genuine interest. Every picture has a quiet backstory, providing understated context and straightforward details, approaching the people of countryside with openness and honesty.

Collector’s POV: Each of the prints in this show is priced at $6000. Lyon’s work is consistently available in the secondary markets, with recent single image prices at auction ranging between $1000 and $15000.

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

Transit Hub:
  • Artist site/blog (here and here)
  • Exhibit: Menil Collection, 2012 (here)
Through December 8th
205 Tenth Avenue
New York, NY 10011

FSA Photography & Contemporary Social Realism @Robert Miller

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

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

  • Horace Bristol: 5 gelatin silver prints, framed in white/black and matted, sized between 9×7 and 14×11, from 1938
  • Jack Delano: 2 dye transfer prints and 2 gelatin silver prints, framed in white/black and matted, each 10×15 or 11×14, from 1940-1941
  • Walker Evans: 5 gelatin silver prints, framed in white/black and matted, sized from 5×8 to 7×11, from 1935-1945
  • Debbie Grossman: 5 inkjet prints, framed in black and matted, each 11×14, from 2010
  • Dorothea Lange: 3 gelatin silver prints, framed in white and matted, each roughly 8×9, from 1935-1936
  • Russell Lee: 3 dye transfer prints, framed in white and matted, each 10×13, from 1940
  • Arthur Rothstein: 2 gelatin silver prints, framed in black and matted, each 14×11, from 1936-1939
  • Zoe Strauss: 5 archival pigment prints, framed in white and unmatted, sized 13×27, 18×27, or 20×30, from 2001-2006
  • Emma Wilcox: 7 gelatin silver prints, framed in black and unmatted, each 20×24, in editions of 7, from 2002-2012
  • Marion Post Wolcott: 2 gelatin silver prints, framed in black and matted, sized between 10×6 and 7×10, from 1936

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

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

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

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

Collector’s POV: The works in this show are priced as follows:
  • Horace Bristol: $10000, $12500, $15000 or NFS
  • Jack Delano: $3500, $4000 or $6000
  • Walker Evans: between $9500 and $26000
  • Debbie Grossman: $2500 or $3500
  • Dorothea Lange: between $8000 and $12500
  • Russell Lee: $6000 or $7000
  • Arthur Rothstein: $2500 or $3500
  • Zoe Strauss: $2600, $3250, or $3600
  • Emma Wilcox: $1850 each
  • Marion Post Wolcott: $3000 or $5000

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

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

Transit Hub:

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

FSA Photography & Contemporary Social Realism

Through November 17th

Robert Miller Gallery

524 West 26th Street
New York, NY 10001

Abelardo Morell: Rock, Paper, Scissors @Bonni Benrubi

JTF (just the facts): A total of 15 large scale photographs, framed in black and unmatted, and hung in the entry area, the main gallery space, and a smaller side room painted blue. All of the works are archival pigment ink prints, made in 2011 and 2012. The images are available in three sizes, with varying edition sizes depending on whether the works are in color or in black and white: 24×30 (in editions of 10 for color and 8 for black and white), 30×40 (in editions of 8 and 6), and 50×60 (in editions of 6 and 4). There are 2 works in the smallest size, 9 in the middle size, and 4 in the largest size on display. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: This show brings us up to date with Abelardo Morell’s most recent work, bringing together images from three distinctly separate photographic projects. In the past two years, Morell has clearly been busy: out on the road with his ingenious tent camera, in the studio making meticulous cut paper collages, and in the darkroom playing with water drop photograms.

While Morell has been working with his periscope tent camera for a few years now, I think the these textural landscapes continue to get better and better. I like the combined experience of the picture postcard views and the rougher reality of the physical location of the viewer: the iconic silhouette of the Golden Gate Bridge is decorated with scrubby weeds, star-shaped dandelions and hard packed dirt, while the epic grandeur of the Grand Canyon is underlaid with a rock slab and loose scree. The two simultaneous views outward and downward are flattened together, with recognizable landmarks like Old Faithful and Yosemite Falls interrupted by rocky gravel, pine needles, and delicately strewn flower petals. It’s as though the images have been hand painted out of the ordinary, overlooked path around your feet; they’re “grounded” in more ways than one.

Back in the studio, Morell has been channeling Frederick Sommer and MC Escher, picking apart 18th century Piranesi etchings and creating complex collaged fantasies of buildings made of impossible colonnades and swirling vortices of prisons and architectural facades. His book plate constructions play with perspective and angle, twisting and clashing in crisp black and white. Morell’s photograms have a more Berenice Abbott scientific feel, with water droplets shaped into a perfect triangle and transformed into a starry landscape of tiny round bubble orbs. Human profiles make appearances in both projects, a negative space self portrait is pushed into a ream of white paper, while another face is gently arced in water bubbles.

What holds these three bodies of work together is an interest in both the edges of photographic texture and the underpinnings of process. Morell displays craftsmanlike control over his varied tools, seemingly at ease with any combination of image making methods. Overall, this show is strong evidence of an artist actively and successfully exploring multiple complementary approaches and thought patterns, rather than being satisfied with following just one.

Collector’s POV: The prints in this show are priced as follows. The color works are $11000 each (24×30), $17000 each (30×40) or $24000 each (50×60); the black and white works are $5000 each (24×30), $9000 each (30×40) or $16000 each (50×60). Morell’s work has become more consistently available in the secondary markets in recent years, with prices at auction ranging between $2000 and $17000.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
Transit Hub:
  • Artist site (here)
  • Features/Reviews: TimeOut New York (here), The Two Percent (here), NY Photo Review (here)

Through December 22nd

Bonni Benrubi Gallery
41 East 57th Street
New York, NY 10022

New Photography 2012 @MoMA

JTF (just the facts): A group show of the work of six contemporary photographers (4 individuals and 1 partnership), variously framed and matted, and hung in a divided two room gallery on the 3rd floor. The exhibit was curated by Eva Respini. (Installation shots at right.)

The following photographers have been included in the show, with the number of works on view and image details in parentheses:
  • Michele Abeles: (9 pigmented inkjet prints, framed in white and unmatted, from 2009-2012)
  • Birdhead (Ji Weiyu and Song Tao): (1 group of 71 gelatin silver prints, tacked directly to the wall in a grid, overlaid with 8 additional photographs set in mahogany frames, from 2012)
  • Anne Collier: (4 chromogenic color prints, framed in white and unmatted, from 2009-2012)
  • Zoe Crosher: (1 group of 11 chromogenic color prints (including 1 set of 15 images mounted together), mostly framed in white with no mat (two are mounted and unframed), from 2012)
  • Shirana Shahbazi: (4 chromogenic prints, 3 gelatin silver prints, and 1 wallpaper lithograph with applied pigment, framed in white/black and unmatted, from 2011-2012)
Comments/Context: This year’s annual roundup of new photography at the MoMA follows in the footsteps of its predecessor and opts for inclusive diversity as its overriding theme. Given the explosion of image making triggered by the digital revolution and coupled with the loosening definitions and boundaries of the medium, this would seem like a safe and prudent choice. But with today’s backdrop of tumultuous innovation and risk-taking experimentation, I have to say I was surprised at how dull and expected this show is. It covers bases and samples styles (especially those with a conceptual bent), but ultimately fails to get out to the edges and bring back something fresh and brilliant.
In my view, the overwhelming standout in this show is Michele Abeles. What’s exciting about her work is that it both collapses several discrete genres (nude, still life, studio staging) and throws the results into the digital mixer, flattening out the space and cutting it into misaligned strips and layers. Odd juxtapositions of male bodies, plywood, printed fabrics, potted plants, wine bottles, engineering drawings, and colored filters lead to puzzlingly complex groupings, which are then further upended by digital stitching and rework, creating woven plaids and jittering lines of image fragments. I like the clash of ideas in these pictures, as well as the smart integration of digital wizardry; the photographs feel like the beginnings of something truly original and invigorating.
The other four bodies of work are all accomplished, of course, but don’t really offer wildly compelling or particularly new paths forward. Anne Collier sharply recontextualizes printed ephemera (album covers, magazine ads, a MoMA event calendar with a Weston nude), forcing the viewer to reconsider embedded stereotypes and biases. Zoe Crosher immerses herself in the appropriated archive of a 1970s woman, rephotographing and altering her subject’s Mae West poses and fantasy lives in a Cindy Sherman-esque study of identity. Birdhead furiously snaps offhand black and white images of the vitality of everyday Shanghai, finding the energy of self-centered youth in a city of bridges, TV towers, and palm trees. And Shirana Shahbazi pairs commercial-style abstractions in bold color with the parallel visual motifs of a jagged mountain or a diver in flight.
So while this show certainly covers many of the key themes in today’s photographic dialogue (it’s all appropriately “on trend”), the overall feeling of the exhibit is more like a checklist of the topics we’re supposed to be discussing rather than a discovery or championing of groundbreaking ideas. As we might expect, there’s China, and appropriation, and archives, and digital manipulation, and image proliferation, and commercial approaches, and crossing medium boundaries, but aside from the impressive chaos of Michele Abeles, much of the output is less than memorable.
Collector’s POV: Given this is a museum show, there are of course no posted prices. The photographers in the exhibit are represented by the following galleries:
  • Michele Abeles: 47 Canal (here)
  • Birdhead: ShanghART Gallery (here)
  • Anne Collier: Anton Kern Gallery (here)
  • Zoe Crosher: Perry Rubenstein (here)
  • Shirana Shahbazi: Galerie Bob Van Orsouw (here)
None of these artists has any meaningful history in the secondary markets, so gallery retail will likely be the best option for those collectors interested in following up.
Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
Transit Hub:
  • Exhibition site (here)
  • Features/Reviews: New Yorker (here), Time LightBox (here), New Yorker PhotoBooth (here), Capital New York (here)
  • Michele Abeles artist site (here)
  • Zoe Crosher artist site (here)
Through February 4th
11 West 53rd Street
New York, NY 10019

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