Small Museum Profile: Kresge Art Museum @Michigan State

If we play a word association game with “Michigan State”, you might first think of college basketball, given the Spartans’ exciting success at the NCAA men’s basketball tournament this year. But equally exciting is all the activity going on at the Kresge Art Museum housed at Michigan State University (home page here). The museum was founded in the late 1950s and contains a large and diverse collection of 7000 items (including photography) appropriate to a teaching museum.

Anchored by a large gift from MSU alumnus and well known contemporary collector Eli Broad and his wife, the university will be breaking ground on a new Zaha Hadid designed building (The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum) in 2010 with 18,000 square feet of new gallery space, scheduled to open in 2012. On a going forward basis, post-1945 art will be the focus of collection growth and new acquisitions, so the visibility of the photography collection will certainly increase in the future. Images of the new museum and other related information can be found here.

Currently, the Kresge Museum holds approximately 1070 photographs, with 20th and 21st century imagery making up more than 90% of the holdings, so it’s a small but actively growing photography collection. The entire collection is up on the website and can be easily searched (here). Highlights include a group of Warhol photographs (similar to the ones recently exhibited at the Neuberger Museum, here), stock photographs by Ewing Galloway, many important portfolios, and significant direct donations by the artists/estates of Ruth Bernhard, Yousuf Karsh and Ralston Crawford. Collectors can access the collection in person by making an appointment in the print viewing space with the Registrar, Rachael Vargas.

Portions of the permanent collection of photography are always on view at the Kresge, and the exhibitions calendar has had a solid share of photography, given the museum’s broad mandate. Recent photography exhibitions have included:
  • Yousuf Karsh, Photographs, 2007
  • Ewing Galloway, Photographs, 1920-1950, 2007
  • Marion Post Wolcott, Photographs, 2007
  • Luke Swank: Modernist Photographer, 2005 (a monograph was also published on this show)
Photographs were also a significant part of the Kresge’s recent 50th anniversary exhibition (installation shots of the gallery spaces at right, provided by the museum). This show included works by Essaydi, Burtynsky, Meyerowitz, Winogrand, Weston, Weegee, Levinstein, Levitt, and others. Later this fall, Dawoud Bey’s Class Pictures will be on view.

The museum does not have a full time photography curator, but Dr. Howard Bossen, Professor of Journalism, is devoting part of his time to the photography department as an adjunct curator. Bossen is now in the process of putting together a major exhibition entitled World of Steel: 160 Years of Photographs, encompassing approximately 225 works. In addition to the exhibition, two books will be produced: an exhibition catalog with extended essays, and Voices of Steel, a compilation of oral histories, first person narratives and photographs. The project is in partnership with the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, and is slated to open in 2012 at the Carnegie, followed by the Kresge and two additional venues.

For a small program, the acquisitions activity at the Kresge has been fast paced in recent times, with approximately 200 pictures entering the collection in the past few years, via both a dedicated acquisitions budget for photography and by donations from patrons and artists. On a going forward basis, the short term collections focus is on broad-based hole filling: ensuring the collection has at least one representative work from historically significant photographers, with diminishing focus on the 19th century. Given the increased budget coming from the Broad gifts (for acquisitions and operating costs as well, not just the new building), this is a collection that will clearly continue to grow in the coming years, particularly in its contemporary holdings.
This museum is an example of an art institution on the rise (even in tough times), with a new building and new acquisitions just over the horizon. It’s one for photography collectors to keep an eye on.

Liu Zheng, The Chinese

JTF (just the facts): Jointly published in 2004 by Steidl and ICP. 142 pages, with 130 black and white images. Includes an introduction by Christopher Phillips, essays by Gu Zheng and Liu Zheng, and an artist interview conducted by Meg Maggio.

Comments/Context: In the past few months, we have been doing some further background work on Chinese photography, in the hopes of developing a more nuanced and educated view of the contemporary photography being produced there. A few weeks ago, Ren Yue, a lecturer at Renmin University in Beijing who is spending a year here in New York, was nice enough to answer some of my simplistic questions. (In her spare time, she writes an influential photography blog (in Chinese, here), which is how we got connected.) We had a wide ranging discussion of artists and styles, and about the impact of the Western art market on Chinese photographers.

One topic we covered was the preponderance of Chinese clichés (Chairman Mao, rapid economic expansion etc.) in recent contemporary art from China. Given a smaller base of well established local photography collectors in China, it seems plausible that much of this newer photography is being conceived (to some degree) with Western audiences in mind, and thus the heavier use of forms and symbols that are easily recognizable by Western viewers. Clearly, such a sweeping generalization cannot encompass all of the new photography being made, but this concept resonated for me as a decent hypothesis to explain a proportion of the new work now finding its way to galleries and auctions here in New York.

Which brings us to Liu Zheng and his project, The Chinese, which is a potent example of the exception to this trend. We have owned this book for some time now, but I was reminded again of its importance during this recent discussion. Unlike the airbrushed and cleaned up perfection of the Olympic games, or of the larger body of more propaganda style imagery falling under the Socialist Realism umbrella, Liu set out on a seven year journey to make a more complicated and robust picture of the unofficial realities of the Chinese people and culture. What emerges is a darker alternate history of the past few decades, grittier and more subversive, with its fair share of outcasts and fringe elements, aging, disease, and death. With echoes of August Sander, Robert Frank and Diane Arbus, the body of work has the highly personal and individual feel of a long and arduous journey, a far cry from art produced to meet the fickle demands of the commercial market.

All of the images in the book are square format black and white, nearly all of them straight forward portraits, many taken with a flash, further heightening the contrasts and emotional resonance. Liu’s subjects include rural coal miners, priests and monks, traditional opera performers and actors, beggars and drug dealers, hospital patients and waxworks dioramas (think Sugimoto), transvestites and corpses.

So while there are obvious references to the history of photography buried in these pictures, the images seem to me to be aimed mostly at Chinese viewers, rather than at Western audiences. Each image has a strong sense of narrative, of uncovering a hidden (and often far less than perfect) story worth hearing. While one might conclude that these images are overly judgmental or negative, perhaps they are better considered as a more even handed documentary cross section of the stories (many out on the margins) that have gone underreported for so many decades.

Collector’s POV: Liu Zheng is represented in New York by Yossi Milo (here), and a show of prints from The Chinese was held there in 2005. The entire set of 120 images from the book is currently on display at the Williams College Museum of Art (here) in Williamstown, MA. Meg Maggio’s gallery/consultancy, Pekin Fine Arts, in Beijing (here), has a broader array of Liu’s work on view on her website, including many more recent projects. A small number of Liu’s prints have begun to find their way into the secondary markets here in the US, but the numbers have been so small, it is hard to extrapolate any pricing pattern. While we aren’t portrait collectors, Liu’s excellent work would certainly provide a compelling contrast to works by Diane Arbus, August Sander, Malick Sidibé, Pieter Hugo (the Hyena Men) and Hiroh Kikai, not to mention broader parallels to photographers as diverse as Weegee, Lewis Hine and Nan Goldin.

Saul Leiter, Early Color

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2006 by Steidl. Small format volume, unpaginated, with 79 color images. Includes an essay by Martin Harrison. (Cover image at right.)

Comments/Context: When the story of color photography is told, William Eggleston is often given credit for being the artist who broke the black and white mold and first used color on its own terms. And while this might indeed be the case, especially considering Eggleston’s downstream influence on other photographers, I think this small book of Saul Leiter’s early color images makes a compelling case for a rewriting of the agreed upon narrative.
The images in this book were taken in New York in the period between 1948 and 1960 (a full decade or more before Eggleston), at a time when abstraction in general and Abstract Expressionism more specifically were ascendant modes of artistic expression in the United States. During these years, color photography was almost exclusively used in commercial endeavors (magazine advertising etc.), mostly due to its complexity and high cost. And yet Leiter somehow found ways to make a surprisingly deep body of non-commercial color work during these years.
Leiter started out as an abstract painter, and his photographs follow along a similar line of thinking, while incorporating the two dimensional flatness of the camera’s eye. Using the chaos of the city as his subject matter, his images are fragmented into layers, often using reflections from windows and mirrors to create additional visual density. Spaces are divided into elegant geometrical forms, many split by vertical stripes and bands of color reminiscent of Barnett Newman’s zips.
Ladders, umbrellas, lamp posts, staircases, and hats all become lyrical shapes. People (in profile, from behind or as shadows) become abstract forms. Snow (drifts and piles in the streets) and rain (fogged windows, streaming with rivulets of water, or shining, reflective streets) both play repeated roles as image enhancers. The use of color is careful and controlled, playing a quiet and effective supporting role, rather than dominating the viewer’s attention. Leiter’s compositions coalesce all of these competing forces into a nuanced and consistent way of seeing.
Collector’s POV: Saul Leiter is represented in New York by Howard Greenberg Gallery (here). His work has not to date been widely available at auction. I think these pictures would fit extremely well with early (1940s/1950s) black and white work from Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan, to be followed by later abstract city color by Luigi Ghirri, Stephen Shore, Helen Levitt and even recent Louis Stettner. Densely packed 1960s and 1970s Lee Friedlander would also make good companions for this work. And of course, it would also resonate well with the more geometric works of the Abstract Expressionist painters of the same time period. I have thoroughly enjoyed this book and have come back to it again and again; we will certainly consider these works carefully for addition to our collection.

Thoughts on the Photo Book Market from 5B4

There is an extremely well reasoned analysis of the challenges facing the photo book world at 5B4 today. Among many topics, it describes very accurately the price herding that goes on at Abebooks and elsewhere, highlights the impact “check off” collectors (those that are trying to get every book from Roth or Parr/Badger) have had on the market, and exposes the book signing racket. The link is here. Well worth your time.

Auction Preview: Post-War and Contemporary Art, April 30, 2009 @Christie’s South Kensington

Later in the month, Christie’s will offer a small group of generally lower end works in its Post-War and Contemporary Art sale at its South Kensington location. While the sale has 114 lots available, only 12 are photographs, with a total high estimate for those lots of just £84800. (Catalogue cover at right.)

Here’s the price breakdown for the photography:

Total Low Lots (high estimate below £5000): 5
Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): £15800

Total Mid Lots (high estimate between £5000 and £25000): 7
Total Mid Estimate: £69000

Total High Lots (high estimate above £25000): 0
Total High Estimate: NA

The photographers represented are:

Willie Doherty
Candida Hofer
Pierre Huyghe
Shirin Neshat
Damian Ortega
Andres Serrano (2)
Hannah Starkey
Erwin Wurm
Zhang Huan (3)

While none of the images in this sale fits with our collecting themes, I did enjoy seeing the three images by Zhang Huan.

The complete lot by lot details can be found here.

Post-War and Contemporary Art
April 30th

Christie’s
85 Old Brompton Road
London SW7 3LD

The No Photography Allowed Club

If you are a regular reader, you will no doubt realize that we go to a large number of gallery and museum shows in any given year (we have reviewed 43 photography shows year to date). When we go, we always try to take pictures of the installation, to give readers a feeling for the setting of the show, for the how the works are presented and staged. We almost never take pictures of single works, but do our best to give proper credit (artist, title, date etc.) when we do. And we always, without fail, ask before taking any pictures, and generally respect the law of land when photography is not allowed, even though we are often tempted to make a surreptitious snap when a guard isn’t looking. If no flash is allowed, we abide by the rules.

Luckily, photography is both allowed and welcomed at more than 95% of places we go. We are therefore consistently annoyed in the few hold out places where photography is still prohibited. Here is our very short list of places where your camera is not welcome:

303 Gallery
Gagosian Gallery
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
International Center of Photography
Pace/MacGill Gallery
Whitney Museum of American Art
Yale University Art Gallery

The most egregious one on this list is the ICP. If there was anywhere on earth where photography should be welcomed and supported, it is at this venue. If the Met and the MoMA allow pictures, why not the ICP? (UPDATE: I have to qualify the MoMA’s position here; of the shows on view now, the Printed Picture and Paul Graham’s show allow photography; Into the Sunset does not, so MoMA does not deserve full credit for freedom.) (UPDATE2: The Met too has a dual identity at the moment: the Walker Evans show allows photography; the Pictures Generation does not.)

The logic for outlawing image making seems thin at best. One argument has to do with copyrights, and the potential infringement on artist’s rights by visitors who take pictures. While I am not a lawyer, in the event a viewer did make an image and then publish it without proper crediting, it would seem to be a case between the artist and viewer, not the place in which the work was housed at the time. I suppose there is also the potential that the installation itself is copyrighted by the gallery or museum (unlikely), but again, this is only a problem if there is improper crediting/permission. (Copyright lawyers out there, please correct me if this is wrong.)

A second and more likely explanation for photography prohibition is somehow thinking that if pictures are circulated of an exhibit that less visitors will come (if they can see the pictures for free, why would they pay to visit in person). I think the age of the Internet, this thinking is short sighted, unless the exhibit is truly bad. Publicity of good exhibits should markedly increase visitors (even if the publicity is camera phone shots shared with friends), not decrease them. On the other hand, if the show is really weak, then having it exposed for what it is will clearly decrease turnout. I can’t however believe that any gallery or museum thinks their shows are poor.

A final and more nuanced reason for no pictures has to do with control. I believe that some institutions don’t want substandard (i.e. amateur) images of their spaces or shows floating around. So they make professional images of their installations (pefectly lit and composed) and put them on their websites (often these images are made uncopyable however, so we must resort to screen captures to make use of them). While I understand this impulse, I think that encouraging the audience to engage with the art is part of the job of these venues. Over controlling any and all interaction mutes this connection. I am consistently amazed when I am told I cannot take a picture in a gallery, when my reason for taking it is to show my wife so we can discuss it further as a potential part of our collection (the gallery would rather send me a perfect scan).

Of course, these “no photography” policies are a minor issue in the grand scheme of what’s important in our world. But that said, I’d like to see more freedom for viewers to make pictures where ever and when ever they want, and perhaps this post will put some small amount of attention on the issue at the highlighted venues. And if there are other institutions that belong on this list, please put them in the comments and I’ll update the post accordingly. And if your insitutiton changes its policy in favor of photography freedom, I’ll happily take it off the list.

Auction Preview: Saturday @Phillips, New York, April 25, 2009

Phillips has another of its entry level Saturday @Phillips sales in New York in two weeks, and once again, there is a wide variety of decent photography buried among the furniture, contemporary prints, and Japanese toys. Out of 420 lots on offer, 86 are photographs, with a total high estimate of $310300. (Catalogue cover at right.)

Here’s the breakdown:
Total Low lots (high estimate $10000 or lower): 81
Total Low estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): $235300
Total Mid lots (high estimate between $10000 and $50000): 5
Total Mid estimate: $75000
Total High lots (high estimate over $50000): 0
Total High estimate: NA
It has become somewhat of a tradition in these posts to provide a complete list of photographers in the Saturday sales, as they seem to provide a snapshot of the current tastes of the contemporary market, with both established artists and newcomers mixed together. So here’s the list:
Doug Aitken
Nobuyoshi Araki
Matthew Barney
Vanessa Beecroft
Hisham Akira Bharoocha
Nick Brandt
Keith Carter
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Sarah Charlesworth
Chuck Close
Andre De Dienes
Walter De Maria
Cheryl Dunn
William Eggleston
Elliot Erwitt
Fischli & Weiss
Lee Friedlander
Nan Goldin
Antony Gormley
Kim Hiorthoy
Matthias Hoch
Candida Hofer
Frank Horvat
Isaac Julien
Richard Kern
Kim-Joon
Elke Krystufek
Barney Kulok
Nikki S. Lee
Annie Leibovitz
Zoe Leonard
Vera Lutter
Gered Mankowitz
Malerie Marder
Steve McCurry
Marilyn Minter
Richard Misrach
Daido Moriyama
Vik Muniz
Helmut Newton
Catherine Opie
Man Ray
Herb Ritts
Thomas Ruff
Roy Schatt
Lawrence Schiller
David Seidner
Mark Seliger
Cindy Sherman
Stephen Shore
Julius Shulman
Alec Soth
Doug & Mike Starn
Bert Stern
Joel Sternfeld
Jock Sturges
Hiroshi Sugimoto
Larry Sultan
Wolfgang Tillmans
Rosemarie Trockel
Ruud Van Empel
Various
Massimo Vitali
Albert Watson
Edward Weston
Bob Willoughby
Garry Winogrand
Thomas Wrede
Erwin Wurm

The lot by lot catalogue can be found here.

While there isn’t much in this sale that fits our specific collection, I did enjoy Lot 220 Daido Moriyama, Another City, New York, 2007 and Lot 280 Vera Lutter, Engine, Frankfurt Airport, April 19, 2001. (Lutter image at right.)

Saturday @Phillips
April 25, 2009
Phillips De Pury & Company
450 West 15th Street
New York, NY 10011

Sanne Sannes, Erotica @Laurence Miller

JTF (just the facts): A total of 18 black and white images, framed in black/white and matted, and hung in a small anteroom gallery. The prints are mostly 10×8, and all are vintage, from the period 1962-1965. (Installation shot at right.)

Comments/Context: Dutch photographer Sanne Sannes’ first US show, coming over 40 years after his death, has a youthful 1960s confidence. The images are the opposite of the cool, detatched nudes of Edward Weston – active, vibrant, dark and grainy, exploring the emotions of his subjects, rather than the forms of their bodies. Many are head shots, with blurs of flowing hair and broad smiles, full of life.
The loose, shadowy style of these images is certainly reminiscent of the 1960s work of Gerard Petrus Fieret and Ed van der Elsken. All three captured freedom, exhilaration and sheer joy in ways that were (at the time) completely and radically new.

Collector’s POV: The images in the show are priced between $6500 and $16000. The look and feel of these images is so different from the nudes we have in our collection that I’m not sure they would work sharing a wall together. That said, a couple of the images caught my eye just enough to make me wonder whether they might fit.

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

Through May 2nd

20 West 57th Street
New York, NY 10019

Ray K. Metzker, Wanderings @Laurence Miller

JTF (just the facts): A total of 31 images, mostly framed in white and matted, and hung in the entry and one large room in the gallery. The pictures range from 1969 to 2008, though most were taken in the 1980s. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: If a musician has had a long enough career, along the way at some point, all the songs that didn’t make it onto one of the albums are gathered up and released on their own as a group. By definition, none of these songs was so great that it merited singular attention in the past, but at this point, they are good enough to help fill in a broader and deeper view of the artist’s entire output, and are especially of interest to committed fans.

The current Metzker show on view at Laurence Miller is the photographic equivalent of this out takes and b-sides album. It is a collection of odds and ends that fell outside Metzker’s more famous projects, images that don’t exactly fit into a neat and tidy narrative of his work. What is common to the pictures is Metzker’s keen eye for abstraction and pattern. There are fences, reflections in car windshields, dark shadows, dense wood construction, and even nature (trees/bushes), all seen with a fragmented two dimensional flatness that concentrates the attention on the lines and forms rather than the subject matter. Another group of images use a blurred tree as an interrupting device, throwing the images out of kilter, echoing his Pictus Interruptus series of the late 1970s. While none of these qualify as Metzker’s best, his unique approach to picture making is very much in evidence, and there are many excellent pictures to be found among these wanderings.

Collector’s POV: For the most part, the images in the show are $5000, with one at $6000 and another at $10000. There is a small group of vintage 1960’s images from Metzker’s more famous work tucked away on one wall, priced between $7500 and $40000. We still don’t have a Metzker in our collection at this point, although we continue to actively look for just the right one. In this show, I enjoyed the four fence images pictured above best.

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

Laurence Miller Gallery
20 West 57th Street
New York, NY 10019

André Kertész: In the Depths of Winter @Silverstein

JTF (just the facts): A total of 15 vintage gelatin silver prints, framed in black and matted, and hung in the back gallery. The images were taken in the period between 1940 and 1977. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Given the repeated heavy snows this winter in the New York area, this exhibit is perfectly timely, even now that the daffodils and tulips starting to bloom. André Kertész made many wonderful images of his Washington Square neighborhood, from his apartment window and out on the streets, and this show gathers together a solid group of pictures with snowy days and bare trees as their subject. What makes these images particularly resonant are the tiny human moments that are often hidden among the strong lines and forms: a child swinging, people trudging through the snow, or a small black dog on a snow covered rooftop.

While most of these images are less well known than his greatest hits, this exhibit demonstrates that even in his later life, Kertész was still making well crafted works in his signature style.

Collector’s POV: The images in this exhibit mostly range in price between $7500 and $12000, the exceptions being the iconic vintage Washington Square Day, 1954 at $55000, and a tighter cropped variant of this image, at $24000. We actually already own a Kertész winter scene (here, not in the show), but could easily imagine adding another, especially one filled with rooftops, water towers, and shadows.

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

André Kertész: In the Depths of Winter

Through April 25th

535 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011

E.O. Hoppé, Early London Photographs, 1910-1939 @Silverstein

JTF (just the facts): A total of 31 vintage gelatin silver prints, framed in brown wood and matted, and hung in one large room. The prints are generally small, mostly 4×5, some as large as 9×7. The images were taken between 1910 and 1939. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Perhaps the best way to characterize the work of E.O. Hoppé is to call it proto-modernist. His images chronicle the early part of the 20th century, just at the cusp of time when modernism began to take hold. As a result, his images are a kind of bridge between straightforward vernacular city scenes and the new modernist aesthetic (Strand, Stieglitz et al.)
While Hoppé made portraits as well as images in America and other places, this show chronicles his work in London, his adopted hometown. There are city and street scenes, top hats, dockyards and gardens, as well as plenty of architectural images of bridges, churches, and other London landmarks. The small size of the prints encourages intimate viewing. Given Hoppé’s transitional aesthetic, the show is a mixed bag of more routine historical shots, with a handful of stand out compositions here and there.

The estate website can be found here.

Collector’s POV: Hoppé is still in the process of being rediscovered and absorbed into the broader narrative of the history of photography, so his relative place in the hierarchy of early modernist work is still a bit fluid. The images in this show are priced between $7500 and $20000. His work has slowly begun to find its way into the auction markets, but very few prints have come up for sale in the past few years, so it is hard to draw any pricing pattern. In general, Hoppé’s images would fit into our city genre; I enjoyed Cannon Street Station, London, 1916, the most, with its dark black square sign.
Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
Through April 25th
Silverstein Photography
535 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011

Cloud 9: Imogen Cunningham, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston @Silverstein

JTF (just the facts): A total of 9 vintage gelatin silver prints (thus the clever show title): 2 by Imogen Cunningham, 4 by Alfred Stieglitz, and 3 by Edward Weston, all small prints, variously framed and hung on one blue wall in the front gallery. All of the images are from the 1920s and 1930s. (Installation shot at right.)

Comments/Context: Virtually every human being has at some point in their lives looked up into the sky and seen meaning in the clouds, even if it was simply a cluster of wisps that looked momentarily (to us) like a rabbit or a dog. Master photographers are no different, and this small amuse-bouche of a show gathers together a handful of examples of what three of them found when they pointed their cameras skywards.
The most recognizable images in the show are the four Stieglitz Equivalents, images of diaphanous clouds, designed to evoke emotional states. Stieglitz made many of these images over his career; most are printed in the same small size, requiring intimate attention. The Weston clouds have more form to them; in one, the thin clouds are transformed into energetic fingers of fire. The Cunningham clouds were a surprise to me, as we had never seen cloud images made by her before. Her choice of puffy, cotton ball clouds gave her more freedom to play with negative and positive space.

Collector’s POV: The Stieglitz images are priced between $55000 and $65000 (though not all are for sale), the Weston prints are between $25000 and $75000, and the Cunninghams are $20000 each. While clouds are not a part of our particular collection, I like the idea of having a small appetizer show in the front of the gallery that can explore a smaller theme in thoughtful detail, as a warm up for larger exhibit(s) in the back.

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

Through April 25th

535 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011

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