W. Eugene Smith, The Jazz Loft Project @NYPL for the Performing Arts

JTF (just the facts): More than 200 images, mostly framed in black and variously matted, and hung against dark blue walls in a large ground floor gallery space. A few prints have been enlarged significantly and mounted without frames. Many of the images on display are proof prints, and are generally small in size (roughly 7×5 or 6×4); others are printed somewhat larger in a more “final” print style. At the back of the exhibit, there is a large video screen showing outtakes of Smith working, and 6 smaller screens playing episodes of the Jazz Loft Project series. There are 4 glass cases housing reel to reel tapes and Smith’s recording equipment, various equipment cases, Smith’s telephoto lens, and a selection of LIFE spreads, as well as 2 listening stations where visitors can select from a variety of recordings and conversations. 8 large banners hang from the ceiling, depicting tape boxes covered in notes. A well-researched monograph of the project, written by Sam Stephenson was published by Knopf in 2009 (here). (Unfortunately, no photography was allowed in the exhibit; therefore, there are no installation shots for this show.)

Comments/Context: When I think of great neighborhoods for photography in New York, the Upper West Side is not one that I think of at all; there are virtually no venues, either public or private, that show photography on a regular basis. As such, any show on the Upper West Side offers little in the way of “clusterability“, that important quality which allows visitors to string together a bunch walkable visits to closely located sites. I think this is the reason why it has taken me so long to get to see this exhibit; it ultimately required a special trip. The surprisingly good news is that this show, tucked back in the out of the way New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (at Lincoln Center), is undeniably one of the best photography shows of 2010.

You’ve probably heard the back story to this project somewhere else already, but here’s the synopsis. Famous photojournalist, war correspondent and LIFE photographer, W. Eugene Smith left his family and his job and took up residence in an abandoned “cold-water” apartment building in the Flower District (28th Street and 6th Avenue). For the next eight years (1957-1965), this building became a casual mecca for jazz musicians, composers, and hangers on, and Smith took nearly 40,000 images and 4,000 hours of audio tape of nearly everything that occurred inside and outside the building, at all hours of the day and night, as jam sessions and impromptu meetings took place. The result is a truly amazing visual and auditory record of the people, the music, and the time period.

Jazz obsessives will of course revel in all of the musical detail in this exhibition, from the countless recordings of some of the biggest names in the community (both playing and talking, heard as background to the exhibit and via several headphone stations), to the marked up boxes of now-ancient recording tape (close-up images, hung as large banners throughout the display). But it is Smith’s black and white photographs that really bring the story to life.

While the pictures are hung mixed together on the walls, there are really only two bodies of work in the show: jazz musicians inside the building, and life on the streets outside. The shots of the musicians, either playing or just hanging out, have no trace of posing or staging; Smith seems to have been routinely ignored by his subjects, allowing him to capture moments of intense expression and calm quiet. There are dark, moody portraits of Thelonious Monk (wearing a porkpie hat) playing the piano and smoking, Roland Kirk playing two horns at once, and countless others (Bill Evans, Albert Ayler, Zoot Sims, Charles Mingus etc.) often photographed as fragments of a cymbal, or a hand, or lips blowing. Many were taken in the thick of the action of playing, where eyes are closed and cheeks are blown out; others document the pause between sessions, where the excitement ebbs and a player sits lost in thought, often in silhouette. Given that most of the sessions took place at night, many of the works are drenched in shadows, flanked by darkened windows. There is even an unexpected self-portrait of the artist, reflected in the flare of the bell of a horn.

Smith also used an ungainly 300mm telephoto lens (seen in a glass case) to take shots out the window of the building, documenting the comings and goings in the street below. These bird’s eye photographs have been grouped into short series and vignettes: people carrying flowers, fire escapes, garbage trucks, curves of cars, pedestrians, delivery trucks, umbrellas, rainy streets, firemen, white chairs in a truck, white lines on the street, snow falling, footsteps in the snow. These scenes have an elegant simplicity, where a single gesture or angle makes the whole composition exciting. It is the consistency of these pictures that is most surprising; in image after image, Smith turns the motion of the street into a balanced and sophisticated ballet – a woman’s leg bends out of a car door, a man carries a bunch of flowers in the snow, a cat balances on a window frame, cart tracks make straight lines in the slush. Several are even taken through a ragged hole in a tar-paper covered window, creating a jagged black tunnel, with the action taking place in the middle.

This exhibit really transformed my perception of Smith and his photography. Rather than the concerned documentary photographer of WWII or Minamata, or the staff photographer for LIFE of the Country Doctor (and countless other well known photo essays), here Smith is taking pictures on his own terms, still very much performing a kind of embedded photojournalism, but in a much more eccentric and personal way. Smith got much, much deeper into this story (it was his life after all), and as a result, the pictures have an intimacy and authenticity that is hard to match.

All in, this is a fantastic show, deep in its scholarship and compelling in its imagery, and well worth a detour from the well worn artistic ruts of the usual New York neighborhoods.

Collector’s POV: I couldn’t determine if there is any one gallery that officially represents Smith’s estate in the private markets; many vintage dealers carry representative samples of his work. His archive can be found at the CCP in Arizona. At auction, Smith’s prints are generally reasonably priced, ranging from $1000 to $50000, with his famous image The Walk To Paradise Garden drawing all of the prices at the top end. After seeing this show, I have come to the conclusion that many city scene collectors who have previously overlooked Smith might find quite a bit of interest in this body of work; there are intriguing echoes of NY Kertesz and Frank’s bus images in particular. Of course, collectors of jazz portraits will also find much here to enjoy.

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

Transit Hub:

  • The Jazz Loft Project site (here)
  • Reviews: WSJ (here, scroll down), DART (here), NYT Photo Booth (here)
  • Book reviews: New York (here), Chicago Tribune (here)

The Jazz Loft Project
Through May 22nd

New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center
40 Lincoln Center Plaza
New York, NY 10023-7498

Auction Previews: Contemporary Art, May 12 and 13, 2010 @Sotheby’s

Sotheby’s is up second in the Spring Contemporary Art season in New York next week, with Evening and Day auctions Wednesday and Thursday. There are a total of 52 lots of photography available across the two sales, with a total High estimate for photography of $4099000. It’s interesting to see well known Mapplethorpe flowers (in black and white) now being placed into the major Contemporary Art sales rather than into the Photographs sales. (Catalog covers at right, via Sotheby’s.)

Here’s the statistical breakdown:
Total Low Lots (high estimate up to and including $10000): 1
Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): $10000
Total Mid Lots (high estimate between $10000 and $50000): 30
Total Mid Estimate: $849000
Total High Lots (high estimate above $50000): 21
Total High Estimate: $3240000
The top photography lot by High estimate is lot 49, Andreas Gursky, Rimini, 2003, at $500000-700000.
Here’s the list of photographers represented by more than one lot in the two sales (with the number of lots in parentheses):
Vik Muniz (5)
Florian Maier–Aichen (4)
Cindy Sherman (4)
Hiroshi Sugimoto (4)
John Baldessari (3)
Thomas Ruff (3)
Elger Esser (2)
Douglas Gordon (2)
Andreas Gursky (2)
Robert Mapplethorpe (2)
Paul McCarthy (2)
Marilyn Minter (2)The complete lot by lot catalogs can be found here (Evening) and here (Day).

May 12th
May 13th
1334 York Avenue
New York, NY 10021

Auction Previews: Post-War and Contemporary Art, Including Works from the Collection of Michael Crichton, May 11 and 12, 2010 @Christie’s

Christie’s begins the main Spring Contemporary Art season in New York next week with two days of single collection and various owner sales. There is plenty of top tier art on offer, including works from the collection of author Michael Crichton. In terms of photography, it’s a mixed bag, with a handful of high priced works (Prince, Wall, Gursky), some usual suspects, and some more random inclusions. There are a total of 44 lots of photography available in these sales, with a total High estimate for photography of $6684000.

Here’s the simple statistical breakdown:
Total Low Lots (high estimate up to and including $10000): 1
Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): $3000
Total Mid Lots (high estimate between $10000 and $50000): 22
Total Mid Estimate: $621000
Total High Lots (high estimate above $50000): 21
Total High Estimate: $6060000
There are two lots that are tied for the top photography lot by High estimate. They are: lot 69, Richard Prince, Untitled (Cowboy), 1999, (image at right, top) and lot 73, Jeff Wall, Adrian Walker, artist, drawing from a specimen in the Dept. of Anatomy at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 1992, (image at right) both at $800000-1200000. We’ve only had two photo lots cross the million dollar threshold this year, so if both of these perform well (and/or the Gursky outperforms), that total will rise.
Here’s the complete list of photographers represented by two or more lots in the sales (with the number of lots in parentheses):

Hiroshi Sugimoto (6)
Vik Muniz (5)
Cindy Sherman (5)
Mike Kelley (3)

Richard Prince (3)
Jeff Wall (3)
Gregory Crewdson (2)
Tom Friedman (2)
Thomas Ruff (2)
The complete lot by lot catalogs can be found here (Evening), here (Crichton), and here (Morning/Afternoon). The eCatalogues are here (Evening), here (Crichton), and here (Morning/Afternoon).
Post-War and Contemporary Art, Including Works from the Collection of Michael Crichton
May 11th and 12th
Christie’s
20 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, NY 10020

Ralston Crawford, Drawings & Photographs @Zabriskie

JTF (just the facts): A total of 24 works, alternately framed in brown and black wood and matted, and hung in the main gallery and the back viewing room. The 10 photographs are all vintage gelatin silver prints, made between 1940 and 1965. The 1940s prints range in size from 4×5 to 7×9; the 1960s prints are somewhat larger, ranging from 11×11 to 14×17. The 14 drawings are mostly ink on paper, and were made between 1940 and 1964. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Ralston Crawford’s drawings and photographs of American architecture and industry are elegant exercises in the simplicity of carfeully constructed found abstraction. We’ve written about Crawford before (here, from 2008), so we’ll dispense with the usual broad historical background and photographic context in this review, and head straight to a closer look at the works on view in this particular show.

Crawford’s photographs are rooted in realism, with fragments of bridges, grain elevators, buildings, ships and trains providing the raw material for his explorations into geometric patterning. New York Door, 1961, depicts the thick black and white panels of a high contrast painted wooden door, bisected by a slashing black shadow. Box Car, 1949, juxtaposes undulating corrugated steel with the strict lines of bubbly seams and the rungs of a ladder, creating a composition with layers of interrelated textures. Grain Elevators, 1949, starts with a cluster of tubular white silos, and adds long diagonals, horizontal braces, and vertical vents striped like shutters. All of these works begin with something familiar, and transform it into a pared down visual experiment with spare, building block forms.

Crawford’s drawings and sketches seem to explore many of these same ideas in a slightly looser, more expressive way. Given his choice of medium, these works are very line heavy, with intersections and cross hatching used to create darkness and light. The remnants of a girder or a door frame are still evident if you look closely, but the lines have been boiled down to such an extent that very little representation is left behind. Reality has been reduced to flat, elemental shapes and planes, which have then become the starting point for further (and more radical) explorations in abstraction.

I suppose what I most would most like to see is a deep, scholarly retrospective of Crawford’s photographic work. But until that mythical show happens, exhibits like this one, which intermittently bring out a handful of unseen images from the storage boxes in the back room, will likely have to be the substitute.

Collector’s POV: The photographs in this show are priced between $7500 and $16000, with the 1960s images all priced below $10000. The drawings range in price between $6500 and $16500. Crawford’s photographs are scarce at auction, so it’s quite difficult to develop any reliable price pattern from so few lots. Overall, his photographic work remains on the short list of artists we would like to add to the city/industrial genre of our collection.

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

Transit Hub:

  • Reviews: NY Times, 1985 (here), NY Times, 1991 (here)

Ralston Crawford, Drawings & Photographs
Through May 15th

Zabriskie Gallery

41 East 57th Street
New York, NY 10022

Olivo Barbieri, site specific_NEW YORK CITY 07 @Richardson

JTF (just the facts): A total of 7 large scale photographs, framed in white with no mat, and hung in the main gallery space. The archival pigment prints are sized 45×61 or reverse, and are available in editions of 6+2. All of the works were made in 2007. Signed monographs are available from the gallery for $75. (Installation shots at right.)
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Comments/Context: Given the long history of iconic New York photographs, deciding to take on the challenge of seeing famous New York landmarks in an original way takes a certain kind of artistic confidence. What more can really be said about Times Square, the Flatiron Building, or Coney Island?
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Italian photographer Olivo Barbieri has been making aerial photographs of famous world cities since 2004. Using a tilt-shift lens, his bird’s eye images of recognizable architecture have been transformed into real-life architectural scale models, or tabletop toy set-ups with ant-sized people. The lens provides a shallow depth of field, so much of the image is semi-blurred, leaving only a small area of sharper focus where the detail is crisp (“selective focus”); the effect is to render reality with more impressionistic flair.
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Barbieri’s images of New York city make many of our hackneyed subjects seem fresh once again. I particularly enjoyed the vibrant swath of green of Sheep’s Meadow, where the crowd of sunbathers on towels has become a blur of blinding polka dots. The amusement park rides of Coney Island are another highlight, the playful colors and shapes restyled into a swirling mass of interconnected lines. The roof garden of the Met is likely the least known scene on display, with its pyramidal striped roof and irregular geometric hedge.
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While the novelty factor is always high for me with tilt shift photography, I wonder a bit about what lies beneath the decorative fun. Perhaps the answer is that these images so radically alter our common perception of a place that we are forced to see it with new eyes, in the process discovering details and nuances that we had wholly overlooked.
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Collector’s POV: The works in this show are priced at either $19700 or $23700. Barbieri’s photographs have very little secondary market history, so gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point. Another contemporary photographer who has embraced the use of a tilt-shift lens is Naoki Honjo (here).
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Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

  • Artist site (here)
  • Feature: Metropolis Magazine, 2006 (here)
  • Review: NY Times, 2006 (here)

Olivo Barbieri, site specific_NEW YORK CITY 07
Through May 28th

Yancey Richardson Gallery
535 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011

In Praise of Shadows: Dirk Braeckman and Bill Henson @Robert Miller

JTF (just the facts): A total of 23 large scale works, 12 by Braeckman and 11 by Henson, hung in the front room, hallways, two side galleries, and the main gallery space in the back. The works by Braeckman are gelatin silver prints mounted to aluminum, with no frames. All of the prints are 71×47 or reverse, except one smaller print, which is 47×31. The images are variously printed in editions of 3 or 5, and were made between 1994 and 2007. The works by Henson are Type C color prints, framed in dark wood but not matted. Most of the prints are 50×70 or reverse, with a couple of prints sized at 50×50 square. All of these works were made between 1990 and 2006 and come in editions of 5. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: While there is no brand new work in this pairing of Belgian photographer Dirk Braeckman and Australian photographer Bill Henson, it does offer some worthwhile contrasts in the subtle use of darkness and ambiguity. And although both artists are heavy users of shadow (hence the title of the show), they each use its properties in unique aesthetic ways, creating easily recognizable and unmistakable photographic styles.

Musical theorists use the word timbre to distinguish the difference in sound between say a piano and a trumpet, even when they are playing the same exact notes; instruments and voices have a specific, recognizable sound that can be easily and obviously distinguished by listeners (and used for effect by composers). Even though both Braeckman and Henson are using shadows in their work, the aesthetic timbre of those shadows is remarkably dissimilar; their tonality and feeling is entirely opposite.

Braeckman’s pictures of anonymous rooms, abstract spaces, and faceless nudes have a tactile quality, the matte surface of the images soaking up the light, creating a silvery world of ephemeral moments. There is very little sharp contrast in use, no harsh blacks or stark whites; only a modulated spectrum of middle greys, optimized for blurred, elusive nuance. Nondescript beds, curtains, wallpaper, and bodies reflect splashes of soft reflected light – carefully composed interior details become mysterious, a rumpled bedspread is transformed into an elegant, impressionistic pattern.

Henson’s images of teenagers and in-between spaces are altogether more moody and emotional. His rich shadows are thick and enveloping, his figures emerging from the opaque darkness and then receding back into the background, surrounded by the city lights in the distance. Some have likened his use of light to the chiraoscuro of Caravaggio, and this comparison seems apt; the vulnerability of his listless semi-clad subjects is enhanced by the shadows that alternately isolate and drown them. His painterly faces move back and forth between awkward and confrontational.

When hung together, the contrasting shadow styles become even more apparent: Braeckman’s images seem diaphanous and delicate, while Henson’s seem earthy and intrusive. While there are hits and misses on both sides of this pairing, in the end, I found a few of Henson’s portraits to resonate with a challenging aura that seemed to overpower the intricacies of Braeckman’s largely empty interiors. Both are seductive in their own ways, but Henson’s works stuck with me longer.

Collector’s POV: The works by Braeckman in this show are priced at either $10500 or $17000, with 2 images POR. The works by Henson are priced at either $30000, $34500, or $37500. While Braeckman has little or no secondary market pricing history, Henson’s images have intermittently come up for sale in the past few years, pricing between $7000 and $26000. Dirk Braeckman is also represented by Zeno X Gallery in Antwerp (here); Bill Henson is also represented by Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney (here).

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
Transit Hub:
  • Review: Artforum (here)
  • Dirk Braeckman artist site (here)
  • Bill Henson, Lux et Nox, 2002 (here)
Robert Miller Gallery
524 West 26th Street
New York, NY 10001

In Sook Kim, Inside Out @Gana

JTF (just the facts): A total of 14 large scale color photographs, framed in grey metal and not matted, and hung in the main gallery space on the ground floor, and in the smaller gallery upstairs. All of the works are c-prints on Diasec, made between 2004 and 2010. The works range in size from 43×63 to a whopping 181×118, and are variously available in editions of 5 or 10. A monograph on the work Saturday Night was published by Hatje Cantz in 2009 (here); it is available from the gallery for $50. There is also a thin exhibition catalog (Inside Out) that is for sale for $20. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Korean photographer In Sook Kim’s first solo show in New York is a polished and sophisticated combination of meticulous architectural documentation, thoughtful staging and manipulation, and layers of rich conceptual ideas, all delivered in large scale, object quality works. It is the kind of photography that will easily cross over into the world of contemporary art, and will likely generate some buzz along the way.
All of the works in this exhibit dissect the process of seeing and looking, pulling the viewer (who is also looking remember) directly into the frame, to peer through the brightly lit glass walls and windows of modern apartment buildings, hotels, museums, and storefronts at night. The geometries of the structures provide self contained boxes and boundaries for the interior action, like carefully controlled dioramas or theaters stacked together in grids, where cool antiseptic voyeurism meets the luridness and obsessiveness of the peep show. The boundaries of public and private are mixed and unraveled; people inhabit the buildings and fill the spaces, transforming them along the way.
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Kim’s Saturday Night is the focal piece in this show, reaching floor to ceiling at roughly 10×15 feet. Each room in the hotel depicts a different nocturnal vignette, each drawn from actual newspaper stories and staged in candy-colored light. Boredom and loneliness compete with sexual perversion and violence; pleasure, pain, and emptiness are all on view, separated into isolated fragments. The viewer’s eye travels from story to story, frantically jumping from titillation to sadness and back again.

Other works in the show focus down on an individual scene, where the ideas of viewing, watching and display are examined more closely, from inside and out. In one image, a room full of dark suited men vie to bid on a naked woman on a pedestal; in another, a similar group of men “dine” on bloody women in bondage gear (viewed through a glass window). Her series Drug Store transforms this seeing in a more metaphorical manner: heroin and cocaine become staged scenes of a delusionally slimming/beautifying mirror and the fleeting pleasures of prostitutes on display in a streetside window.

Kim was a student of Thomas Ruff’s in Düsseldorf, and there is a pared down conceptual rigor that is refreshing here. Whether we see a glass box museum slowly filling with visitors or watch a sordid narrative unfold in pastel pink light, her ideas have clearly been reduced and refined to their maximum potency; the staging is tightly controlled and executed, with little in the way of superfluous distraction. The different bodies of work and projects on display explore her ideas in confident, interrelated ways, spanning the objectification of women, the meaning of our spaces, and nature of drug addiction. All in, this is one of the best debut shows I have seen in a while, combining 21st century photographic craftsmanship with strong and multi-faceted ideas.

Collector’s POV: Nearly all of the works in this show are priced between $18000 and $52000, roughly based on size. The exception is the massive print of Saturday Night in the entry, which is priced at $190000. In general, these prices seem quite high for a first solo show, but the work is accomplished, her pedigree is sound, and the large glossy prints will appeal to crossover contemporary art collectors. Kim’s work has not yet reached the secondary markets in any meaningful way, so it’s difficult to chart any real pricing pattern. A smaller print of Saturday Night did sell at Christie’s in London last year for roughly $50000. Kim is also represented by Richard Levy Gallery in New Mexico (here). While it doesn’t fit into our particular collection themes, I actually think Saturday Night is going to end up being considered an important/signature piece, rewarding those risk takers who get in early.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
Transit Hub:
  • Reviews: Daily Beast (here), New York (here)
Through May 8th
568 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001

Silverstein Photography Annual 2010 @Silverstein

JTF (just the facts): A group show of 10 emerging photographers, with a single photographer chosen by each of 10 local NY curators. The works are variously framed and matted, and hung in the entry gallery, the main gallery space, and the back gallery. (Installation shots at right.)
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The following photographers are included in the exhibit. Details of the works on view are below:
  • Bahar Behbahani: 1 triptych (3 chromogenic prints), each print 72×48, in an edition of 6, from 2007
  • Rob Carter: 2 digital c-prints, 48×35 or 40×51, in editions of 5, from 2009
  • Juliane Eirich: 3 chromogenic prints, each 39×39, in editions of 5, from 2007-2008
  • Ben Gest: 3 archival inkjet prints, 67×40, 59×40, or 532×40, in editions of 8, from 2005 or 2006
  • Charlotte Haslund-Christensen: 3 diptychs and 1 single archival inkjet print, each individual print 20×20, in editions of 5+2AP, from 2007
  • Dana Miller: 5 chromogenic prints, each 20×24, in editions of 8+2AP, from 2006 or 2007
  • Aude Pariset: 6 three dimensional works, made from inkjet or lightjet prints mounted to various materials (wood, aluminum, leather, etc.), various sizes, in editions of 3, from 2008 or 2009
  • Radcliffe Roye: 6 chromogenic prints, each 20×24 or reverse, in editions of 10, from 2009
  • Glenn Rudolph: 3 archival inkjet prints and 1 color carbon transfer print, each 30×30, in editions of 7, from 1976, 2002, 2004, or 2008
  • Nodeth Vang: 2 digital c-prints and 3 instant film diffusion transfers, 30×24 or 4×3, in editions of 5 or 1, from 2008 or 2009
The following 10 curators selected the photographers for inclusion in the show:
  • Patrick Amsellem, Brooklyn Museum
  • Sean Corcoran, Museum of the City of New York
  • David Harper, Brooklyn Academy of Music
  • Matthew Higgs, White Columns
  • Mara Hoberman, Hunter College Art Galleries
  • Mason Klein, The Jewish Museum
  • Beatrix Reinhardt, College of Staten Island, CUNY
  • Edwin Ramoran, Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art
  • Carrie Springer, Independent Curator
  • Deborah Willis, NYU Tisch School of the Arts

Comments/Context: Since we haven’t had a Silverstein Photography Annual since 2008, it would be easy to have forgotten its simple but elegant premise: choose 10 photography curators and let them each select one exciting photographer for inclusion in a group show of new/emerging work. This year’s collection is a more recession-respecting local affair than prior years, with curators chosen from smaller New York metro area institutions rather than from far flung museums across the globe. These are the kind of photo curators who are likely down in the messy trenches of new photography, doing endless portfolio reviews and sifting through piles of fresh submissions, looking for new and original voices to champion; in many respects, they therefore represent a good cross section of what many institutions might be looking for (or finding of interest) right now.

Radcliffe Roye’s sweaty images from Jamaican clubs were my favorites in the show, particularly the image Ballerinas, of three young women done up in short skirts and colorful makeup; the pictures have echoes of Malick Sidibe’s images of the youth clubs in 1960s Mali, but with a more modern feel. The colors are eye-popping and the dancehall poses are lively and outrageous.

Bahar Behbahani’s photographs really fall into the category of documents of performance art; the artist hangs upside down from an apple tree, with leaves strewn across the patio underneath, and the pictures capture the blurs of her struggle at various times during the day. While the premise is pretty straightforward, I found the work surprisingly unsettling and metaphorically memorable.

Dana Miller’s images are so quiet and understated that it is easy to underestimate them in a quick pass through the gallery. Tennis balls trapped in a park fence, a grocery cart partially submerged in the water, these are not subjects that shout out from the walls. But there is a clarity and authenticity to these images, without a trace of self-conscious artifice, that makes these mundane scenes softly refreshing.

While I also found things to enjoy in Ben Gest’s disaffected images of upper class boredom and Charlotte Haslund-Christensen’s conceptual front and back portraits of Danish families, overall, the show itself felt a bit flat, with plenty of less remarkable work to go along with the few standouts. Intellectually, I can understand the logic for why each of these artists/bodies of work was selected, but that doesn’t mean that they all pass the test of being thrilling or significant. As such, this is the kind of show that you can wander through without being jarred out of your comfort zone; all of it is good, but unfortunately not enough of it is striking or sensational.

Collector’s POV: The works in the show are priced as follows:
  • Bahar Behbahani: $12000
  • Rob Carter: $5500 or $6000
  • Juliane Eirich: $3500 or $3950
  • Ben Gest: $5800 or $8800
  • Charlotte Haslund-Christensen: $1650 or $3500
  • Dana Miller: $2000 each
  • Aude Pariset: $1750, $2000, or $2200
  • Radcliffe Roye: $1500, $1800 or $2300
  • Glenn Rudolph: $3500 or $5000
  • Nodeth Vang: $1000 or $2000
Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:
  • Bahar Behbahani artist site (here)
  • Rob Carter artist site (here)
  • Juliane Eirich artist site (here)
  • Ben Gest artist site (here)
  • Charlotte Haslund-Christensen artist site (here)
  • Dana Miller artist site (here)
  • Aude Pariset artist site (here)
  • Radcliffe Roye artist site (here)
  • Glenn Rudolph artist site (here)
  • Nodeth Vang artist site (unknown)
Through May 8th
535 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011

Auction Results: BRIC, April 23 and 24, 2010 @Phillips London

Phillips’ BRIC themed sale took place last week in London, and while the buy-in rate for photography was over 45% and the total sale proceeds from the photo lots missed the estimate range by a wide margin, there was a silver lining of sorts: this sale delivered the highest photo proceeds for Phillips of all of its themed sales so far this year.

The summary statistics are below (all results include the buyer’s premium):

Total Lots: 147
Pre Sale Low Total Estimate: £734600
Pre Sale High Total Estimate: £1067100
Total Lots Sold: 79
Total Lots Bought In: 68
Buy In %: 46.26%
Total Sale Proceeds: £504438

Here is the breakdown (using the Low, Mid, and High definitions from the preview post, here):

Low Total Lots: 95
Low Sold: 46
Low Bought In: 49
Buy In %: 51.58%
Total Low Estimate: £279100
Total Low Sold: £136563

Mid Total Lots: 44
Mid Sold: 31
Mid Bought In: 13
Buy In %: 29.55%
Total Mid Estimate: £478000
Total Mid Sold: £305625

High Total Lots: 8
High Sold: 2
High Bought In: 6
Buy In %: 75.00%
Total High Estimate: £310000
Total High Sold: £62250

The top lot by High estimate was lot 302, AES+F, The Bridge, 2007, at £40000-60000; it did not sell. The top outcome of the sale was lot 72, Wang Qingsong, Dormitory, 2005, at £37250. (Image at right, via Phillips.)

79.75% of the lots that sold had proceeds above or in the estimate range. There were a total of five surprises in this sale (defined as having proceeds of at least double the high estimate):

Lot 86, Alex Guofeng Cao, Marilyn as Brigitte Bardot, 2009, at £5000
Lot 303, Dmitri Baldermans, Yuri Gagarin with family, 1961, at £6875
Lot 310, Boris Mikhailov, Untitled, from Case History Series, 1997-1998, at £15000
Lot 342, Sebastiao Salgado, Gold mine, Serra Pelada, Brazil (figure eight), 1985/Later, at £9375
Lot 343, Sebastiao Salgado, Gold mine, Serra Pelada, Brazil, 1996/Later, at £7500

Complete lot by lot results can be found here.

Phillips De Pury & Company
Howick Place
London SW1P 1BB

Tokihiro Sato, Trees @Tonkonow

JTF (just the facts): A total of 15 black and white images, hung in the entry hallway, main gallery space, and office area. All of the works are gelatin silver prints, made between 2008 and 2009. The prints come in three sizes: 62×51 (in editions of 3), 47×38 (in editions of 12), and 24×20 (in editions of 12). 9 of the largest size prints are on display in the show, mounted but not framed, and clipped to the walls. Also on view are 6 of the smallest size, framed in white and matted. A thin catalog of the exhibit is available from the gallery for $10. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Tokihiro Sato’s images of the stately trunks of Japanese beech trees amid the undergrowth of the forest operate on several different levels, proof that there are still original ways to take on a subject as traditional as the grandeur of nature in the wild. Sato’s frontal tree portraits sparkle with unexpected pinpricks of light, clusters of bright dots mysteriously hovering around the base of each tree.
For the process minded, Sato’s works have plenty of technical complexity. Using an 8×10 view camera, he makes long exposures (measured in hours), intermittently moving into the frame with a mirror, aiming vectors of sunlight back at the camera lens; the result are various points of light, made by an invisible photographer.
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For those with a conceptual bent, these works seem to tie back to the Land Art movement of the 1970s, or to more ephemeral examples of similar ideas from artists like Andy Goldsworthy. Sato’s gestures with light are like those of a surveyor, using light to measure and define the natural space; he calls the process “photo-respiration”.
And for those with a sense of whimsy, Sato’s lights become fireflies and fairies, or ethereal ghosts from Latin American magical realism. The difference in luminescence between the textured grey of the trees and roots and the sharp light of the pinpricks is so strong that the lights seem to literally jump off the paper, drawing all the attention to the movement and excitement they capture.

Overall, I found these images be quietly elegant and serene without being boring or gimmicky, mixing the straight and the conceptual with a deft hand.

Collector’s POV: The works in this show are priced based on size. The largest prints (62×51) are $18000 each, the middle (47×38) are $14000 each, and the smallest (24×20) are $5000 each. Sato’s prints have not yet reached the mainstream secondary markets, so gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point.

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

Transit Hub:

  • Profile: Japan Exposures (here)
  • Review: NY Times, 1998 (here)

Tokihiro Sato
Through May 8th

Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects
535 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011

Pioneers of Color @Houk

JTF (just the facts): A group show of a total of 48 color works from three different photographers (William Eggleston, Joel Meyerowitz, and Stephen Shore), all framed in white and matted, and hung in the entry, the main gallery space, and the smaller back gallery. The exhibit coincides with the publication of Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970-1980 by Hatje Cantz (here) and a larger survey at the Cincinnati Art Museum. (Installation shots at right.)

Details on the included works are as follows, with the number of images on display in parentheses:

  • Stephen Shore (20): Most of the works on view are vintage chromogenic contact prints, made between 1973 and 1979. Nearly all of these prints are 8×10 or reverse (there is one that is 12×15). A few larger c-prints (20×24) have also been included, as well as a pigment print on rag paper of one of Shore’s journal pages (18×14).
  • Joel Meyerowitz (20): The vintage works on display are either 20×24 dye transfers or smaller 8×10 RC prints. Recent pigment prints from the older negatives have been made in three sizes 20×24, 30×40, and 48×60, in editions of 15 or 20, 10, and 5 respectively. All of the images were taken between 1963 and 1983.
  • William Eggleston (8): Most of the works on display are 16×20 dye transfers from the Dust Bells 2 portfolio (taken between 1970 and 1974, published in 2004). Others are similar in size or slightly smaller (12×18).

Comments/Context: Even though the main thread of the 1970s color story is now well known, this vein of photography continues to be an active area for exploration and (re)discovery. Likely due to the predominance of color in today’s contemporary work and the powerful influence of the early color photographers on those working today, there seems to be a consistent interest in going back to the roots of this narrative and revisiting the evolution of the major practitioners. This exhibit focuses on three of the main players (Eggleston, Shore, and Meyerowitz), while the related survey book covers a much broader selection of photographers (by the way, there was also a terrific exhibit at Julie Saul in 2008 here that collected some of these same artists).

While this show is directly making a case for Meyerowitz‘ rightful inclusion at the top echelon of the 1970s color establishment, I must admit that it was the Egglestons that really made me think. Placed in the side-by-side temporal context with Shore and Meyerowitz, Eggleston’s images display a marked difference in photographic style. I found his approach to be significantly more radical: the compositions are skewed and off-kilter and the colors are much stronger and more saturated – I concluded that these works were less about their depicted subjects and much more about color itself. A room becomes orange, a wall is green, a car is red – the colors are purer and the aesthetic is more wholly new, an entire rethinking of photography based on how color really operates.

For Shore and Meyerowitz, these artists seemed to be using more established modes of picture making (drawn from various black and white traditions) and modifying them for the successful inclusion of color, more evolution than revolution. In these cases, the use of color transforms topographical images or motion-filled street shots in new ways; there are new compositional nuances and relationships to explore. Hotel rooms, shop fronts, clusters of people on street corners, TVs and dated furniture, clothing and patterned fabrics, they all present newfound opportunities to build color-oriented pictures. I particularly enjoyed the angles of Shore’s striped rug and yellow bedspread at the Harbor View Motel, and Meyerowitz‘ colorful neon circles on the ceiling of a food stand at the Hartford county fair.

What I like best about this exhibit is that it has just enough depth to tease out the patterns and differences. Instead of just one or two pictures hung together sampler-style (which is often how early color is treated), this show allows for a more thoughtful and deeper comparison of contrasting approaches and experiments.
Collector’s POV: The prices for the works in this show are as follows:
  • Stephen Shore: The vintage chromogenic contact prints are either $18500 or $24000. The larger c-prints are $25000, and the pigment print of Shore’s journal page is $6000.
  • Joel Meyerowitz: The vintage dye transfers are either $32000 or $40000; the RC prints range between $14000 and $35000. The later prints are priced based on size, starting at $10000 for the 20x24s, moving to $16000 for the 30x40s, and ending at $24000 for the 48x60s.
  • William Eggleston: Most of the available images are priced at $20000. Several (including the red ceiling and the drink on the airplane tray table) have been marked SOLD or NFS.
These prices seem generally on the high side (this is gallery retail after all), especially when placed in the context of recent secondary market sales of roughly equivalent material.

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

Transit Hub:
  • Review: New Yorker (here)
  • Joel Meyerowitz artist site (here)
  • William Eggleston artist site (here)
Through April 24th
Edwynn Houk Gallery
745 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10151

Auction Preview: BRIC, April 23 and 24, 2010 @Phillips London

Phillips’ parade of themed sales continues in London later this week with an auction entitled BRIC, a group of initials representing the fast growing nations of Brazil, Russia, India, and China. The catalog itself is a brick as well; it weights in at exactly 6 pounds according to our bathroom scale, and includes an astonishing 141 pages of articles and background information before getting to the lots themselves. While all this stuff is interesting to read, my conclusion is that Phillips must think that collectors are unfamiliar with or uneducated about what’s on offer here, and that reading a supporting article or two will help folks get more comfortable with buying. Out of a total of 438 lots available in all mediums, 147 are photographs or photo-based art, and the Total High Estimate for the photography lots is £1067100. (Catalog cover at right, via Phillips.)

Here’s the breakdown:

Total Low Lots (high estimate up to and including £5000): 95
Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): £279100

Total Mid Lots (high estimate between £5000 and £25000): 44
Total Mid Estimate: £478000

Total High Lots (high estimate above £25000): 8
Total High Estimate: £310000

The top lot by High estimate is lot 302, AES+F, The Bridge, 2007, at £40000-60000. (Image at right, via Phillips.)

Here is the list of photographers who are represented by three or more lots in the sale (with the number of lots in parentheses):

Sebastiao Salgado (6)
Alexander Rodchenko (5)
Vik Muniz (4)
Raghu Rai (4)
Huang Yan (3)
Yevgeni Khaldei (3)
Steve McCurry (3)
Pushpamela N and Clare Arni (3)
Caio Reisewitz (3)
Miguel Rio Branco (3)
Vaclovas Straukas (3)
Vkhutemas Workshops (3)
Wang Qingsong (3)
Zhang Peng (3)

The complete lot by lot catalog can be found here.

BRIC
April 23rd and 24th

Phillips De Pury & Company
Howick Place
London SW1P 1BB

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