2010 AIPAD Review, Part 2 of 4

Part 1 of this multi-part AIPAD post can be found here.

Robert Mann Gallery (here): Holly Andres (3), Michael Kenna (4), Robbert Flick (2), Joe Deal (5), Gail Albert Halaban (2), Mary Mattingly (1), Jeff Brouws (1), Wijnanda Deroo (1), Susan Rankatis (2), Aaron Siskind (2), Henry Wessel (1), Robert Frank (4), Ansel Adams (1), Alfred Stieglitz (2), Paul Strand (1), Paul Haviland (1), Elijah Gowin (1 set of 8). USC professor Robbert Flick was another discovery for me at the show. All of the individual images in the grid below were taken in the same concrete parking structure, with a mix of natural and fluorescent light slashing across the dark floors and walls. (Robbert Flick, SV# 034/81 – Inglewood Parking Structure #2, 1981, at $10000.)

Scheinbaum & Russek (here): Luis Gonzalez Palma (5), Manuel Alvarez Bravo (5), Beaumont Newhall (1), Henri Cartier-Bresson (2), Andre Kertesz (2), Flor Ganduno (1), Manuel Carillo (1), Brett Weston (1), Paul Caponigro (2), Walter Chappell (1), Edward Weston (1), Harry Callahan (3), Minor White (3), Aaron Siskind (2), Lynn Geesaman (2), Eliot Porter (6), plus 2 bins. I thoroughly enjoyed seeing the Walter Chappell nude below, not only because it is a spectaular image that would fit well into our collection, but also because we took it out of the frame to see the notes on the back, which explain that the print was reversed for the cover of Aperture #79, at the request of Minor White. (Walter Chappell, Nude Armpit, Wingdale, NY, 1962/1969, ay $8500.)

Yossi Milo Gallery (here): Myoung Ho Lee (1), Loretta Lux (5), Youssef Nabil (4), Kohei Yoshiyuki (9), Sze Tsung Leong (11), Robert Bergman (2).

Robert Koch Gallery (here): Larry Schwarm (2), Ilse Bing (2), Eadward Muybridge (1), Francis Frith (1), Michael Wolf (3), Brian Ulrich (1), Amy Stein (1), Jeff Brouws (4), Josef Koudelka (2), Bill Owens (1), plus 1 bin. The Koudelka image below was not at all what I envision when I think of his work, but I very much liked the simplicity of the forms in this wide print. (Josef Koudelka, Dunkerque-Port, 1986/1991, at $18000.)

Joseph Bellows Gallery (here): Bevan Davies (4), Terry Wild (2), Steven Salmieri (2), Randall Levenson (3), Wayne Lazorik (2), Enrico Natali (4), Nacio Jan Brown (2), Joanne Leonard (2), Jack Teemer (2), Joni Sternbach (6), Bill Arnold (1), Jay Boersma (4), Michael Light (4 large format books), plus 4 bins. This booth had plenty of unexpected and tempting work in it. I enjoyed both Joni Sternbach’s atmospheric tintype surfers, as well as Michael Light’s massive aerial scenes of Los Angeles highways and refineries. My favorite image in the booth was this small Terry Wild image below; I liked the stark contrast of adjacent black and white walls. (Terry Wild, Los Angeles, CA, 1969, at $5000.)

Project 5 (here): Jill Greenberg (6), Thomas Allen (8), Guido Castagnoli (7), Stuart O’Sullivan (1), Olaf Otto Becker (1). Project 5 brings together the work from five different New York galleries: ClampArt, Foley Gallery, Sasha Wolf Gallery, Daniel Cooney Fine Art, and Amador Gallery. The first portfolio from the group contains five prints: one each from a single artist from each gallery stable. I liked the contagious energy in this small booth, driven by three of the gallery directors collaborating to answer questions.

Catherine Edelman Gallery (here): Julie Blackmon (5), Gregory Scott (3), Lauren Simonutti (21), Joel-Peter Witkin (2), Keith Carter (1), Holly Roberts (2). I have recently been exploring some of the undefined edges of contemporary photography, where cameras are no longer used and traditional definitions of photography are hopelessly quaint. Gregory Scott’s lightbox works in this booth have HD video embedded inside; stand and watch one for a while and a small portion of it will change and then stop again, turning the idea of a still frame on its head. It’s not video art, nor is it exactly photography; it’s something else, a 21st century mashup, with a hint of where we may see the medium go in the future. (Gregory Scott, Color Grid, 2009, at $22000.)

Gitterman Gallery (here): Alfred Stieglitz (2), Louis Faurer (1), Josef Breitenbach (1), Eugene Smith (1), Minor White (1), Edward Weston (1), Ferenc Berko (5), Kenneth Josephson (7), Roger Mayne (1), Allen Frame (4), Lewis Baltz (2), plus 2 bins. As always, there were good things to see in Tom Gitterman’s booth. I enjoyed the two Baltz images, as well as the selection of Josephson prints (we’ll visit the larger show on view at the gallery soon). Below is a Ferenc Berko from the late 1940s, a spare composition of thin lines and simple abstracted black shapes, almost like a Calder. (Ferenc Berko, Store Display, Chicago, 1947-48, at $5500.)

Bonni Benrubi Gallery (here): Massimo Vitali (1), Georges Dambier (2), Matthew Pillsbury (4), Andreas Feininger (3), Gillian Laub (3), Abelardo Morell (4), Josef Hoflehner (1), Laura McPhee (1 diptych), Jehad Nga (2).

Halsted Gallery (here): Irving Penn (1), Emmet Gowin (1), Harry Callahan (2), Walker Evans (4), Andre Kertesz (5), Ruth Orkin (3), George Tice (1), Larry Glazer (1), Berenice Abbott (2), Frederick Evans (2), Michael Kenna (2), Ansel Adams (2), Arnold Newman (1), O. Winston Link (1), Edward Weston (4), Imogen Cunningham (1), Bill Brandt (1), Morris Engel (1), William Christenberry (1), plus 3 bins. The Halsteds have been running their photo gallery for 40 years now, and there was a fun book on the table in the booth showing old pictures of various family members paired with famous photographers, interspersed with letters and other correspondence. In the booth, I liked the vintage Max Yavo from San Francisco best, with its overlapping layers of houses. (Max Yavno, Army Street, 1940s, at $4500.)

Higher Pictures (here): Barbara Crane (9), Issei Suda (3), LaToya Ruby Frazier (4), Alfred Gescheidt (10), Scott Peterman (3), Sam Falls (4), Jill Freedman (7). While I have written about Barbara Crane’s repeats previously, I continue to find them original and exciting. (Barbara Crane, Dan Ryan Expressway, Chicago, 1975, at $7000.)

Beijing Jade Jar Fine Art (no website that I could find): Zhou Ning (3), Hu Wugong (3), Wang Shilong (3), Wang Yishu (2), Fu Yu (2), Yiming Jiang (9), Lu Houmin (6), Yu Deshui (6), Liu Tiesheng (1), Jin Hongwei (13). It was great to see a mix of vintage and contemporary Chinese photography in this booth; we need to see much more of this kind of work here in the United States to begin to make sense of the evolution of Chinese photography.
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Continue to Part 3 here.

2010 AIPAD Review, Part 1 of 4

The 2010 AIPAD Photography Show in New York last week was once again the dominant event on the annual American photography calendar, at least for collectors like us. With 76 exhibitors (mostly galleries and private dealers, but with a few booksellers thrown in for good measure), AIPAD remains the single best place to see the entire breadth of photography, from 19th century to contemporary, on display in one place at one time in the United States; collectors, curators, and photographers from all over the world come to New York specifically for this show just to see what is on view and available.

I made three separate trips to the show this year: a visit to the Wenesday night opening, as well as more focused sessions on Thursday and Friday afternoons. In between an active review of the booths, I met with all kinds of people: collectors large and small, working photographers, musuem curators, and particularly gallery owners/dealers. For the first time ever, I think I spent more time talking (and listening and learning) than I did looking. This is not to say that I didn’t end each day with a glassy eyed stare, earned through an overload of visual stimulation; I just interleaved meetings into spurts of booth scouring for a completely full calendar.

This 2010 AIPAD Review will be divided into 4 parts. The first three posts will be the customary booth reports, with lists of the photographers on view (the number of pictures by each in parentheses) and some additional commentary or a specific image (and its details) as further illustration. Given the scope of this fair, I have not attempted to create a complete count of everything on display – there was just too much; there will only be reports on about half of the booths, mainly chosen by pictures that really grabbed my attention or that I subjectively thought deserved some additional discussion; those that have been ommitted were not any less good necessarily, they just didn’t stop me in my tracks enough to keep me from relentlessly moving on. As an aside, I seem to have developed a kind of strange x-ray vision (perhaps a byproduct of too much fair-going) – I scan the contents of a booth and often a single image stands out as though lit by an invisible spotlight, while the rest of the images fall back into the blurry and less interesting periphery. It’s a kind of “aha” moment, when something unexpected, unusual, or exciting is discovered amidst the normal smorgasbord of work we’ve generally seen before. The final post in the series will try to step up a level or two and consider some of the ideas, patterns, and conclusions I’ve drawn from this year’s fair; seeing such a plethora of photography isn’t just about checklists and prices – there are larger themes present that cut across easy divisions/summaries and are worth a little bit deeper discussion.

For those of you who can never get enough and like to compare alternate viewpoints, a few additional AIPAD reviews worth checking out are those by collector/blogger Evan Mirapaul (here), gallery owner/blogger James Danziger (here and here), and Ken Johnson of the NY Times (here).

So let’s get started. The galleries presented are in no particular order, although I’ve tried to spread some favorites out across the three posts. Apologies for the marginal images, as they are often marred by reflections or glare:

Paul Hertzmann (here): Lisette Model (1), Harry Callahan (1), Ilse Bing (1), Lucia Moholy (1), Eugène Atget (1), Brassaï (1), Imogen Cunningham (2), Francis Bruguière (2), Leo Dohmen (1), Consuelo Kanaga (1), Edward Weston (2), Margaret Bourke-White (1), Ansel Adams (1), Osamu Shiihara (3), Gertrude Käsebier (1), Dorothea Lange (1), Gerard Petrus Fieret (1), plus 4 bins. We have quite a few Cunninghams in our collection and I can say unequivocally that the Cunningham nude of Portia Hume (1930) below was the best picture I saw at AIPAD this year. We have seen this image illustrated in several books over the years, but we have never seen an actual print of this work (vintage or otherwise) anywhere; it was already sold by the time I got to the booth at the opening night party.

Michael Shapiro Photographs (here): Ansel Adams (2), Frederick Sommer (1), Minor White (2), Edward Weston (2), Dorothea Lange (1), Brett Weston (1), Florence Henri (1), Margaret Bourke-White (2), Eugene Smith (1), Kurt Baasch (1), Martin Munkacsi (1), Robert Frank (2), Manuel Alvarez Bravo (2), Edward Steichen (1), Helen Levitt (1), Berenice Abbott (2), Irving Penn (1), Danny Lyon (1), Henri Cartier-Bresson (1), Hannes Beckmann (1), and a group of vernacular images on the outside wall (UPDATE: I misidentified these images, see the comments). While many of the visitors were crowded around a vintage Frank in this booth, I most enjoyed the simplicity of the Minor White image below, with its contrasts of pattern and texture. (Minor White, Abstraction: The Bird with the Misplaced Heart, 1948, at $12500)

Howard Greenberg Gallery (here): Frank Gohlke (3), Robert Frank (2), Saul Leiter (4), William Klein (1), Louis Faurer (4), Ted Croner (4), Miroslav Tichý (5), Bruce Davidson (1), and a wall of Photo League work (13).

Lee Gallery (here): Paul Outerbridge (1), Pierre Dubreuil (1), Alfred Stieglitz (1), Heinrich Kühn (1), Robert Frank (1), László Moholy-Nagy (1), Walker Evans (1), Ilse Bing (2), Dorothea Lange (1), Carleton Watkins (3), Henry Bosse (2), plus 2 bins. The thing I like most about visiting the Lees is that I always feel like I depart smarter than when I arrived; they are friendly and welcoming, while also being deeply knowledgeable about the works they have available. Over several conversations during the fair, we had a debate about the 1929 Kühn rubber plant bromoil and its place in the context of 1920s German floral photography, considered the supply of top material in the market, covered some of the intricacies of Outerbridge’s carbo process, and admired the intersecting lines and geometries (as well as what is presumably the photographer’s shadow) in the Moholy image below (Untitled (Woman on Ship Deck, Finland), 1930, at $30000).

Edwynn Houk Gallery (here): Robert Polidori (3), Joel Meyerowitz (1), Stephen Shore (4), Sebastiaan Bremer (1), Vera Lutter (1), Man Ray (1), Brassaï (3), André Kertész (1), Bill Brandt (1), Manuel Alvarez Bravo (1), Imogen Cunningham (1). The Houk booth was an even mix of contemporary and vintage material. I had not seen the terrific Vera Lutter below before; it was large and eye catching in the center of the booth – a new look at a very overworked subject (Times Square VII, 2007, at $75000).

Amador Gallery (here): Robert Voit (7), Olaf Otto Becker (2), Taiji Matsue (2). In contrast to most of the overstuffed booths in this fair, the Amador booth was clean and fresh, with just a handful of large color images filling the walls. Anecdotally, I heard that there was significant interest (from museums and collectors alike) in the Voit cell tower trees.

Richard Moore Photographs (here): Ralph Steiner (3), Russell Lee (1), Jack Delano (1), Arthur Rothstein (1), Morris Engel (1), Weegee (2), Irving Penn (1), Ansel Adams (1), Helen Levitt (1), Bill Owens (1), Garry Winogrand (1), Lewis Hine (1), Margrethe Mather (1), Frederick Evans (1), Clarence White (1), Karl Struss (1), Frank Eugene (1), Arnold Genthe (1), Frances Johnston (1), plus 3 bins. The 1950s Ralph Steiner below was an image that I hadn’t seen before; I liked the mixture of tonalities and layers of geometries, and it reminded me of a similar composition by Jeff Wall. (Ralph Steiner, Bissell Factory, Employee Washroom, 1959, at $5500)

Weston Gallery (here): Eugene Cuvelier (1), Edouard Baldus (1), Linnaeus Tripe (1), J.B. Greene (1), Frederick Evans (1), Anonymous (1 cyanotype pair), Roger Fenton (2), Antoine Claudet (1), Eugène Atget (1), Rod Dresser (1), Roman Loranc (2), André Kertész (8), Edward Weston (3), Henri Cartier-Bresson (1), Paul Strand (3), Johan Hagemeyer (2), Brett Weston (2), Edward Steichen (2), Wynn Bullock (2), Ansel Adams (2), Harry Callahan (1), and a few more in the back room. The best flower image at AIPAD this year was this delicate Hagemeyer. (Johan Hagemeyer, Talisman Rose, 1938, at $20000.)

Hemphill Fine Arts (here): Godfrey Frankel (3), William Christenberry (8), Don Donaghy (5), Franz Jantzen (1), Kendall Messick (1).

Yancey Richardson Gallery (here): Esko Männikkö (3), Alex Prager (3), Sharon Core (2), Andrew Moore (2), Mitch Epstein (2), Hellen Van Meene (4), Hiroh Kikai (3), August Sander (3), Rudy Burckhardt (2), Laura Letinsky (1), Lisa Kereszi (1). This booth was quite similar in concept to the gallery’s Armory booth. The bold Epstein on the outside wall was the perfect antidote for those overwhelmed by the sea of black and white vintage photography at the fair. (Mitch Epstein, Liquidation Sale V, 2000, at $11000)

Eric Franck Fine Art (here): Norman Parkinson (5), Enzo Sellerio (3), Henri Cartier-Bresson (5), Paul Hart (2), Chris Killip (4), Graham Smith (4), Al Vandenberg (6), Antanas Sutkus (4), Rimaldas Viksraitis (4), Marketa Luskacova (2), Jindrich Streit (4), Josef Koudelka (3), Lottie Davies (3). Graham Smith was a new discovery for me. The image below has echoes of Brassaï’s bar scenes, but with an English sensibility and a wonderful undertone of humor. (Graham Smith, I Thought I Saw Liz Taylor and Bob Mitchum in the Back Room of the Commercial, UK, 1984 at $5000.)

Photology (here): Helmut Newton (5), Carlo Mollino (8), Maura Banfo (4), Yasumasa Morimura (8), Andy Warhol (1), Robert Mapplethorpe (8), Gian Paolo Barbieri (5), Mario Schifano (4), Nobuyoshi Araki (4), Luigi Ghirri (4), Christopher Makos (11). A booth full of Polaroids by various artists.

Continue to Part 2 here.

Bill Hunt on Collecting

While today will bring another full throttle afternoon of looking and talking at AIPAD (the review posts will start on Monday), here’s a terrific conversation with gallery owner Bill Hunt on collecting to keep you busy. Find it at Conscientious Extended here.

Auction Preview: Fine Photographs, March 23, 2010 @Swann

Swann has scheduled a various owner photography auction to follow the single owner White collection sale planned for earlier the same day. For the most part, this sale is representative of Swann’s usual mix of material. There are 137 lots on offer, with a total High estimate of $1052200. (Catalog cover at right, via Swann.)

Here’s the statistical breakdown:

Total Low Lots (high estimate up to and including $10000): 115

Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): $559200

Total Mid Lots (high estimate between $10000 and $50000): 22

Total Mid Estimate: $493000

Total High Lots (high estimate above $50000): 0

Total High Estimate: NA

The top lot by High estimate is shared between two lots: lot 180, Ansel Adams, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941/1960s, and lot 223, Helmut Newton, Woman Observing Man, Saint-Tropez, 1975/1980s, (image at right, via Swann) both at $30000-40000.

Below is the list of photographers with 3 or more lots in the sale (with the number of lots in parentheses):

Ansel Adams (9)

Edward Curtis (9)

Lewis Hine (6)

Josef Sudek (6)

Berenice Abbott (5)

Brett Weston (5)

Horst P. Horst (4)

Robert Doisneau (3)

Andre Kertesz (3)

William Mortensen (3)

Helmut Newton (3)

Aaron Siskind (3)
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The complete lot by lot catalog can be found here. The 3D version is located here.

Fine Photographs

March 23rd

Swann Galleries

104 East 25th Street

New York, NY 10010

Auction Preview: The Stephen L. White Photograph Collection, March 23, 2010 @Swann

Swann’s first photography sale of 2010 is a single owner collection of American photography owned by Stephen L. White. The collection mixes historical and fine art images from the 19th and 20th centuries, and was featured at an exhibit at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in 2001 (here). This catalogue divides the lots according to three categories that characterize the American Dream: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. There are 102 lots on offer in this sale, with a total High estimate of $786050. (Catalog cover at right, via Swann.)

Here’s the statistical breakdown:

Total Low Lots (high estimate up to and including $10000): 81
Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): $277050

Total Mid Lots (high estimate between $10000 and $50000): 20
Total Mid Estimate: $434000

Total High Lots (high estimate above $50000): 1
Total High Estimate: $75000

The top lot by High estimate is lot 73 Alfred Stieglitz, Going Home by Ferry, New York City, 1902/1920s, at $50000-75000. (Cover lot, at right.)

This collection is quite widely dispersed in terms of the artists represented. As a result, below is the rather short list of photographers (not including unidentified or anonymous photographers) with more than 1 lot in the sale (with the number of lots in parentheses):

Lewis Hine (5)
Eadward Muybridge (4)
Edward Steichen (2)
Alfred Stieglitz (2)
Benjamin Strauss (2)
Dr. Dain Tasker (2)

For our particular collection, we were most drawn to lot 62, Dr. Dain L. Tasker, Daffodils (in box), 1933, at $15000-25000. (Image at right, via Swann.)

The complete lot by lot catalog can be found here. The 3D version is located here.

The Stephen L. White Photograph Collection
March 23rd

Swann Galleries
104 East 25th Street
New York, NY 10010

Say Hello at AIPAD

As most of you certainly know, the rest of this week/weekend is the once a year AIPAD Photography Show here in New York. We’re planning the same in-depth booth by booth coverage you’ve come to expect.

Whether you are a collector (large or small), curator, auction house specialist, photographer, book publisher, critic, fellow blogger, or whoever, if you are a regular reader here, I’d enjoy meeting you at the fair, if only for a few moments to look you in the eye, shake your hand, and get your feedback on how we can improve this site. I plan to be at the fair a good portion of Thursday afternoon, likely part of Friday afternoon as well, and at the opening tonight. Shoot me an email at info@dlkcollection.com and hopefully we can find a time to say hello.

Baron Adolph de Meyer @Robert Miller

JTF (just the facts): A total of 91 works, variously framed and matted (some in elaborate period frames with linen mats), and hung throughout the entire gallery (a series of 5 rooms and hallways). Virtually all of the images are portraits. The prints are mostly vintage, taken throughout De Meyer’s career, beginning in 1897 and ending in 1940. The print sizes are all intimate, ranging between 4×3 and 14×11. While most of the prints are gelatin silver prints, there are other processes represented in the exhibit as well: albumen, pigment, platinum, and platinum palladium. There is also one glass case containing portraits of the artist. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Given the ubiquitous nature of fashion and celebrity culture today, the main reason to see this show is to step back in time and understand where it all got started. Baron Adolph De Meyer was the first staff photographer for both Vogue and Vanity Fair and his luxurious images of society ladies and film stars of the early 1900s paved the way for the explosion that has come since.

De Meyer’s images were made in the soft-focus Pictorialist style of the times, with a heavy dose of Edwardian aristocratic glamour. His subjects outfitted themselves in a wide spectrum of old world finery, oriental exotica, and risque new Art Deco frocks; there are mountains of feathers, flowers, and lace, billowing formal ball gowns, furs, jewels, and over-the-top fabulous hats. Virtually all of the women are lit from behind (with the light in their hair), artfully posing in windows and doorways or in seen in profile in staged interior scenes, hands extended or folded just so. Vanderbilts, Havemeyers, and Isabella Stewart Gardner are mixed in with Josephine Baker, Nijinsky and a parade of now-forgotten actresses, the wealthy and the famous placed on equal footing, for the adoration of the masses.

An exhibit like this cannot avoid having a bit of a dated, period piece feel to it, but there are plenty of echoes and connections to the pages of our current fashion magazines that make this show more than just an interesting time capsule. When De Meyer gets it just right, his portraits have a timeless grace and elegance (with a touch of surprising modernism) that rivals the best of what has been produced since.

Collector’s POV: The prints in this show are priced quite differently based on the process in use. The gelatin silver prints range between $5000 and $63500. The platinum and platinum palladium prints start at $16000 and continue up to $160000. The albumen prints are either $19000 or $19500, and the one pigment print is $260000. There are 11 prints that are marked “not for sale”.

De Meyer’s work has been only intermittently available at auction in the past few years, with a wide range in prices based on the rarity of the lots on offer. Lesser known works have recently gone for as little as $2000, while just last Fall, a platinum print of Water Lilies went for $170000 at Christie’s.

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

Transit Hub:

NY Times T magazine (here), Style.com (here)
Book: A Singular Elegance, 1994 (here)

Baron Adolph de Meyer
Through April 3rd

Robert Miller Gallery
524 West 26th Street
New York, NY 10001

Pieter Hugo, Nollywood @Yossi Milo

JTF (just the facts): A total of 10 large scale color photographs, framed in white with no matting, and hung in the single room gallery space. All of the works are digital c-prints, taken in Nigeria in 2008 and 2009. The prints come in two sizes: 68×68, in editions of 5, and 44×44, in editions of 9; there are 2 large prints and 8 smaller prints in this show. A monograph of this body of work was published by Prestel in 2009. (Installation shots at right.)
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Comments/Context: It seems that almost immediately after Pieter Hugo’s Nollywood series was published in book form last year, strong opinions started to form on both sides of the work. After following some of the online debate and controversy last Fall (some of it linked below), I was eager to see the images in person and come to my own conclusions based on first hand experience of the prints themselves.
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The series is drawn from the busy Nigerian film industry, and depicts a variety of actors and actresses in macabre scenes: a nude man poses in a Darth Vader mask, a man in a suit stands over the bloody carcass of a water buffalo, a nude woman has a machete stuck in the middle of her chest, a man in a top hat and tails with white circles around his eyes sits in a junkyard, a man with a white mask and fake ears stands in an overcoat wielding an ax.
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The reactions to these images have been polarized primarily based on questions of documentary truth and intent. For those who see these works as valid depictions of Nigerian culture (or of African culture more generally), charges of exploitation, racism, caricature, and the ignorance of the white man’s gaze have all been leveled against Hugo. For those who see the works as merely yet another example of complex staged fictions, many have found these portraits extremely powerful, with a strange and disturbing intensity.
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To my eye, these works most resemble film stills from slasher movies, amplified and composed for maximum effect. They have an otherness that mixes horror with an underlying dose of grotesque comedy; strange (and perhaps unknowable) things are clearly going on, depicted with equal parts fear, black humor, and bloody gore. I am in no position to judge with a sense of anthropological correctness whether these images capture Nigerian myths, symbols, or spiritual stories with any fidelity, but I certainly didn’t read this as an even handed documentary study. These portraits are weird, wild, and melodramatic fictions that take us to shocking and surreal fantasy worlds, and I’m not offended if the artist took some liberties in exaggerating their details to generate more emotional impact.
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As I left the gallery, I was thinking about the inversion of this story and how it might play out. What if well-crafted stylized portraits and scenes of Hollywood horror actors were made and shown in African art galleries; how would the audience respond, given a different cultural context? Would they find them strange and powerful, revolting and disgusting, or just plain puzzling? In the end, I think we see fictions like Hugo’s through our own particular cultural lens and history. As such, I saw these works as over-the-top and strangely different versions of universal stories and tales, making them jarring and thought-provoking in new and unexpected ways.

Collector’s POV: The prints in this show are priced based on size. The 68×68 prints are $14000 each, while the 44×44 prints are $9500 each. Hugo’s work has not really reached the secondary markets in any consistent way to date, so gallery retail is likely the only real option for interested collectors at this point.

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

Transit Hub:

Artist site (here)
Politics, Theory & Photography (here), Amy Stein (here), Heading East (here)
Book review: Foto8 (here)

Pieter Hugo, Nollywood
Through April 10th

Yossi Milo Gallery
525 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001

Auction Preview: SEX, March 19, 2010 @Phillips London

Phillips continues its themed sales in London later this week with an auction bluntly entitled SEX. Running the gamut from artful nudes to explicit close-ups, photography is a cornerstone of this sale: out of a total of 221 lots on offer from all mediums, 137 are photographs (more than 60%). Overall, the Total High Estimate for the photography lots is £672500. (Catalog cover at right, via Phillips.)

Here’s the breakdown:

Total Low Lots (high estimate up to and including £5000): 110
Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): £264500

Total Mid Lots (high estimate between £5000 and £25000): 21
Total Mid Estimate: £183000

Total High Lots (high estimate above £25000): 6
Total High Estimate: £225000

The top lot by High estimate is lot 124, Pierre et Gilles, Tiger, 2007, at £40000-60000.

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

Helmut Newton (8)
Pierre Moliner (7)
Nobuyoshi Araki (6)
Noritoshi Hirakawa (6)
Bob Carlos Clarke (4)
Robert Mapplethorpe (4)
Hugo Markl (4)
Daido Moriyama (4)
Terry Richardson (4)
Merry Alpern (3)
Sante D’Orazio (3)
Nan Goldin (3)
Pamela Hanson (3)
Les Krims (3)
Rankin (3)
Miroslav Tichy (3)

The complete lot by lot catalog can be found here.

SEX
March 19th

Phillips De Pury & Company
Howick Place
London SW1P 1BB

Robert Adams, Summer Nights, Walking @Marks

JTF (just the facts): A total of 45 black and white photographs, framed in white and matted, and hung in the large second floor gallery space, separated by a dividing wall. Nearly all of the prints are vintage gelatin silver prints, sized between 5×5 and 15×15. No edition information was available. The images were taken primarily in the suburbs of Denver and Boulder (Colorado) in the period between 1976 and 1983. A monograph of this body of work was originally published by Aperture in 1985 and entitled Summer Nights; this exhibition has been organized to coincide with the rerelease of the book, in an expanded and resequenced edition entitled Summer Nights, Walking (here). (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: We’ve had a copy of Summer Nights in our photobook library since the very beginning of our lives as photography collectors; it sits among a shelf full of Adams’ books and essays, likely wedged in somewhere near The New West and Denver. In the past, I thought of the Summer Nights work as a direct extension of Adams’ daytime images of environmental mismanagement and the encroachment of poorly planned suburban development. Without really looking (or with a preconceived conclusion in mind), I assumed the harshness of his tract houses, construction sites, and scrub lands would be applied with the same unflinching commentary to his nighttime scenes. As a result, I only saw what I thought I was supposed to see: the ugliness of the wincing glare of the street lights, the sidewalks bordered by unruly weeds, the empty parking lots, and the depressing ranch houses engulfed in shadows.

It is with a great deal of surprise that I must now admit that I had it all wrong. In visiting this fine exhibit, my overwhelming reaction to seeing the pictures in person was how gentle they consistently are. While Adams’ compositions are not beautiful in any traditional sense, I found plenty of moments of grace, especially in the way that leaves and wildflowers catch the light or the way silhouettes are framed against the moonlit sky. The dramatic shadows that leak across the sidewalk or cover the sides of houses and garages with dappled patterns are no longer particularly ominous or hostile; I saw them more as moments of goose bump inducing shivers, even though the warmth of the night air surrounds you.

What I thought of most in seeing these works is that Adams has captured the American suburban equivalent of the Italian passegiata. What is perhaps sad is that this nighttime walk in an America boom town is such a lonely and desolate one: there are no people on the streets to stop and greet, no places to go to relax and leisurely enjoy the warm night air – we’ve built a world designed around car transportation, so walking in these places has become a kind of oddity. And yet Adams has found plenty of subtle joys in these solitary neighborhood walks: the playful lights of a carnival ride, the texture of a tree trunk, the reflections of windows or puddles, the pinpricks of lights in the distance, or an expanse of pavement against an enveloping blackness.

As I looked more closely, I started to notice just how masterful Adams’ use of the available light really is: moonlight and ambient light from the surrounding city is mixed with up-close glare of the streetlights to create depth and distance without resorting to night photography cliches; the range of tonalities is both quietly meditative and breathtakingly exquisite. These pictures are soft and still, and some effort is required to unlock their pleasures; a quick gallery fly by certainly will result in a wash of small, unmemorable dark pictures, while a deeper exploration will uncover a body of work that is remarkably varied and consistently well crafted.

I don’t want to give the impression that Adams’ commitment to the issues/problems of land use and suburban development isn’t to be found in these pictures; it’s certainly there if you want to go looking for it. But the revelation for me in this exhibit was that those complex issues could recede into the background a bit (the volume could be turned down), and that an unexpected loveliness and simplicity could be found underneath. There is a nostalgic warmth in his style here that is an excellent reminder that there is much more tender nuance to the art of Robert Adams than the New Topographics categorization might lead us to believe.

Collector’s POV: The prints in this show are priced between $8500 and $38000. Adams’ work has become increasingly available in the secondary markets in the past decade, with prices creeping upward over time, typically ranging between $5000 and $50000.
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Rating: *** (three stars) EXCELLENT (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

Reviews: New Yorker (here), John Haber (here), New York Photo Review (here)

Robert Adams, Summer Nights, Walking

Through April 17th

Matthew Marks Gallery

523 West 24th Street

New York, NY 10011

Auction Results: First Open Post-War and Contemporary Art, March 11, 2010 @Christie’s New York

In contrast to the lackluster performance at Sotheby’s a few days earlier, the results for the photography lots at Christie’s First Open Post-War and Contemporary Art sale were stellar. With a buy-in rate less than 10% and some help from Barbara Kruger, the total sale proceeds for photography soared well above the estimate range.

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

Total Lots: 22
Pre Sale Low Total Estimate: $558000
Pre Sale High Total Estimate: $792000
Total Lots Sold: 20
Total Lots Bought In: 2
Buy In %: 9.09%
Total Sale Proceeds: $895375

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

Low Total Lots: 4
Low Sold: 4
Low Bought In: 0
Buy In %: 0.00%
Total Low Estimate: $35000
Total Low Sold: $92500

Mid Total Lots: 15
Mid Sold: 13
Mid Bought In: 2
Buy In %: 13.33%
Total Mid Estimate: $397000
Total Mid Sold: $339375

High Total Lots: 3
High Sold: 3
High Bought In: 0
Buy In %: 0.00%
Total High Estimate: $360000
Total High Sold: $463500

There were three lots tied for the top photography lot by High estimate: lot 13, Cindy Sherman, Untitled #194, 1980, at $90000-120000, which sold for $98500; lot 17, Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Your every wish is our command), 1982, at $80000-120000, which was the top outcome of the sale and sold for $278500 (image at right, via Christie’s); and lot 105, Chuck Close, Nat (Five color studies), 1971, at $80000-120000, which sold for $86500.

90.00% of the lots that sold had proceeds in or above the estimate range. There were a total of four surprises in this sale (defined as having proceeds of at least double the high estimate):

Lot 2, Gerhard Richter, Guildenstern, 1998, at $25000
Lot 17, Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Your every wish is our command), 1982, at $278500
Lot 50, Lucas Samaras, Photo-Transformations, 1973-1976, at $32500
Lot 110, Thomas Struth, Grab von Lu Xun, Shanghai, 1997, at $25000

Complete lot by lot results can be found here.

Christie’s
20 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, NY 10020

Candida Höfer, Florence and Naples @Sonnabend

JTF (just the facts): A total of 7 large scale works, framed in blond wood with no matting, and hung in the entry and the center room in the rear of the gallery. The c-prints range in size from roughly 75×61 to 80×102 and are made in editions of 7. All of the negatives are from 2008 and 2009, and were taken in Florence and Naples. A monograph of this body of work (entitled Napoli) has recently been published by Schirmer/Mosel (here). (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: After years of seeing shows of Candida Höfer’s images of ornate public spaces and interiors and thinking they all looked generally the same, this exhibit of recent work from Florence and Naples made me think quite a bit more deeply about her artistic approach. For the first time, I got beyond the documentary novelty/awe of the over-the-top constructions and ornamentations themselves, and started to think about these pictures as a kind of nuanced portraiture, to see the artist’s style more clearly layered over the subtleties of architectural personality.

In a certain way, these Italian pictures look like any number of other pictures she has taken previously: formal rooms, frescoed ceilings, checkerboard marble floors, classical sculpture, cherubs, flashy chandeliers, and rows of columns. There are impressive palaces, ballrooms, entry halls and libraries, all designed as overt signals of wealth, power, and status. Each is entirely empty of people, the polished floors reflecting the pure white light which pours quietly in through the windows.

I guess it was the simple thought exercise of comparing these images to how I would expect these same famous rooms to look on post cards in the nearby gift shops that started me down a more complicated reading of these photographs; when they’re printed large and hung as individual objects, it’s sometimes easy to just get lost in the grandeur of the prints and forget to think about the subtle differences in composition, framing, or lighting that Höfer has employed.

If we looked at a series of Avedon or Penn portraits, all taken with monochrome backgrounds and frontal poses, we wouldn’t say they all looked the same; we’d see the tiny gestures that have been captured that make the people individuals, and we’d see the overlay of the photographer’s approach augmenting the exploration of these often hidden features. The same is true here: I suddenly became aware of how the square framing had been used to better capture the elongated decorated ceilings, or how the curves of a chandelier were carefully placed to interact with the balconies of a double height room. I also saw how Höfer had highlighted the cluster of modern plastic chairs that were set up in one of the ballrooms and realized how they formed a surprising juxtaposition to the ornate religious frescoes and gold leaf on the walls and ceilings. Even the David (perhaps the most cliched subject imaginable, often seen looking up at its magnificence) was photographed in an unexpected way that made the immense statue look more vulnerable, the grandeur of the domed glass atrium in which it stands dwarfing the iconic sculpture.

All in, I was much less distracted by the grand locations themselves in this body of work, and as a result, saw much more of Höfer’s aesthetic approach than I have noticed previously. I’ve come to the conclusion that Höfer’s work cannot be appreciated via the normal “stand for 5 seconds and move on” approach to gallery hopping; it requires the patience to let the initial eye-catching drama dissipate and dissolve a little, so that the more subtle details of the photographic craft can come though.

Collector’s POV: The prints in this show are priced between 45000 and 50000€, based on size. Höfer’s work is readily available in the secondary markets, in a variety of dimensions and edition sizes. Smaller pieces can be found well under $10000 (often in editions of up to 100), while the larger works (printed in much smaller editions, usually 6) range between $20000 and $50000, with a few outliers even higher.

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

Transit Hub:

Architecture of Absence, ICA UPenn, 2006 (here)
NY Times review, 2004 (here)

Candida Höfer, Florence and Naples

Through April 17th

Sonnabend Gallery (artnet page here)
536 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011

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