Wang Qingsong

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2006 by Albion and Hatje Cantz, in conjunction with an exhibit at Albion in London. 136 pages, with an essay by Zoe Butt. Includes large plate images, as well as a comprehensive list of works as thumbnails (with sizes and editions). (Cover shot at right.)

Comments/Context: To Western eyes, the high points to the storyline of China’s transformation in the past few decades have become predictably well known: unprecedented and explosive economic growth, staggering new construction projects and radical urban change, an increased openness to and embracing of Western culture, and a much larger and more powerful position on the world stage. It is not surprising that amidst these changes, and in concert with a gradual relaxation of central censorship, artists have begun to examine the changes going on all around them and to ask hard questions about how China is being recast.
Wang Qingsong is a contemporary photographer who uses sarcasm, irony, satire and humor to expose some of the undesired consequences and unintended effects of the country’s modernization on the collective psyche of the population. Beginning in 1997, Wang has made theatrical images that have centered on the quiet war between traditional Chinese culture and the encroaching Western lifestyle. His early work was dubbed “Gaudy Art”, for its garish colors and not-so-subtle surrealistic kitsch. His 1998 work, Prisoner, shows Wang trapped inside prison bars made of Coke cans; Thinker, also from 1998, has him seated on a lotus leaf in Buddhist prayer, with a huge McDonald’s logo carved in his chest; Requesting Buddha no. 1, 1999, (at right) has the Buddha’s many arms filled with a variety of consumer products. These and other images all parody the materialism of the West and how it has invaded the minds of the Chinese people. Instead of worshiping self denial, fulfilling every desire via consumerism is the new norm.
Unlike the heroic and patriotic battle scenes from propaganda films, Wang’s series of images entitled Another Battle highlights the clash going on between the traditional and modern cultures, and shows Wang as a defeated and bloodied commander, lost among the razor wire decorated with soda cans. (Another Battle no.8, 2001 at right.) Other images show the battlefield complete with McDonald’s trash cans and road signs. These images have been elaborately staged, and have the feel of film stills.
Wang’s more recent output has evolved into elaborate and monumental tableaux, with large numbers of actors and painstaking stage sets, in the end becoming massive, scroll-like photographs, some more than 20 feet wide. While in approach there may be valid comparisons to Gregory Crewdson or Jeff Wall, Wang’s images are firmly rooted in typical and traditional Chinese artistic forms and metaphors and make no pretense of their careful manipulation. The image at right, Romantique, 2003, shows both a small detailed section on the top, with a thumbnail version of the entire work below (impossible to see I realize). Here the world is a confusing, fabricated mixture of Chinese and Western allusions and symbols, full of staged snippets from famous paintings by a wide range of recognized masters, from Botticelli and Raphael to Manet and Matisse.
Wang’s exaggerated work brings home many of the subtler challenges posed to China by such rapid modernization. As traditions are exchanged for Western consumerism, his work points to continuing social questions about what lies ahead for this giant nation. This monograph is almost like a catalog raisonne, as it has a complete set of all Wang’s images and other detailed print/negative information. As such, it is an excellent reference resource on this innovative Chinese photographer.
Wang Qingsong’s artist website can be found here.

Collector’s POV: Wang Qingsong’s work has become increasingly available in the secondary market in the past few years. Most of the images come in at least two sizes, and are in editions of 6, 10 or 20. Smaller single images have been priced starting at around $10000, moving upward toward $100000. Only a few of the large tableaux have come to market, and all have sold in the six figure range.

Zhang Huan, Altered States

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2007 by Edizioni Charta and the Asia Society, in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name at the Asia Society. 180 pages, with essays by Melissa Chiu, Kong Bu, Eleanor Heartney, and Zhang Huan. (Cover shot at right.)

Comments/Context: While Zhang Huan’s images can routinely be found in photography auctions around the world today, to call him a photographer would be to grossly misunderstand his art. His photographs are merely documents of his performance art – sometimes further labeled as “body art” or “endurance art”, as many of his performances involve testing the limits of his body and mind. This book provides a retrospective look at all of his performances and installations, going back to 1993. Each and every performance is an opportunity to watch from the sidelines as Zhang explores the depths of his own history and personality or reacts to his environment.

Not surprisingly, some of Zhang’s performances work better as photographs than others. He has sat covered in flies in a public toilet; he has suspended himself in midair and had some of his blood drained; he has lain naked on blocks of ice; he has worn suits of bone and meat. Two of his earlier projects To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain, 1995 (below ltop) and To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond, 1997 (below bottom) both lend themselves well to being captured as a single moments. Both works document Zhang measuring himself (with the help of others) against the natural world.


In Foam, 1998 (below left) and Family Tree, 2000 (below right), Zhang tackles the issues of his own personal identity. In one, he holds the photographs of family members in his mouth (is our history inside us, or can we swallow it?); in the other, he disappears under the layers of stories written on his face by Chinese calligraphers.

Most of Zhang’s works are subtly infused with traditional Chinese values and Buddhist teachings and these ideas provide the framework and backdrop for his autobiographical explorations. His performances seem to find the just the right balance: surprising without being gimmicky, earnest and stoic without being pompous, real and meaningful without being contrived. Overall, Zhang has generated a significant number of highly memorable and thought provoking moments in his short career; this book provides a valuable one-stop summary of his output.
Zhang Huan’s artist website can be found here.
Collector’s POV: Zhang Huan’s images have become mainstays of the auction circuit. Most are large chromogenic prints (often 40×60, but generally in various formats), in edition sizes ranging from perhaps a handful to as many as 25. Prices for single images have ranged from $10000 to over $100000, with larger groups of pictures (like Family Tree) selling for $150000 to $250000. Even though his work is often found in photography auctions, it has clearly crossed over to the “contemporary art” price schedule.
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(Aside: Blogger’s handling of embedded images is frustratingly quirky, so please excuse any unexpected odd formatting or white spaces you may encounter, especially likely if you are using a reader.)

The Mystery of Chinese Contemporary Photography

Our ignorance about Chinese contemporary photography is a deep, dark, massive abyss. Truth be told, we hardly know anything about the artists, their work, their influences or their ideas. We lack even the simplest framework for making sense of what is going on. Perhaps we are just dumb Americans, but we like to think we know a little about the world of photography.

If you look in the auction records over the past decade, you will find a startling pattern. There are a few 19th century Chinese photographers who made mostly panoramic shots of large Chinese cities, and then almost nothing for over 100 years, until the arrival of the new group of young artists a few years ago (nearly 50 new Chinese photographers at auction in the past three years). Very few of these artists have any New York gallery representation.

This poses many questions for us. Where did these artists come from? Where were they trained? From whom did they learn? Where did all the photographers from the previous 100 years go, if there were any? Were they all suppressed during the Cultural Revolution? What is the context of this new movement? Who are the important figures to be watching?

In tomorrow’s book reviews, we will try to wrestle with some of these questions (at the most basic level possible), with reviews of books on Wang Qingsong and Zhang Huan, two of the anointed stars of this Chinese invasion.

If you are a person out there listening who can add something to our education, whether it be in the form of broad background, a key book or article to read, or the narrow information of a single photographer who should be on our radar, please leave the information in the Comments or send us a direct email. Help us develop some perspective on a key trend in contemporary photography that has not, to our knowledge, been explained well to collectors at large.

Auction Preview: Constantiner Collection, Part II, February 12th @Christie’s

While the snow keeps coming down, there is no surer sign of Spring than the arrival of the first major photography auction catalogues. The 2009 Spring auction season begins with Part II of the Constantiner Collection, a lower-end sibling of the sale that set the record for a single owner photography sale at Christie’s (over $7.7M) last December (original posts for preview here and results here), despite coming to market in the worst of times. (Catalogue cover at right.)

As a reminder, the Constantiner Collection focuses on fashion and glamour images, with a heavy dose of Helmut Newton and Marilyn Monroe. This second part of the sale follows this same pattern, with 26 pictures by Newton (including an enlarged pair of contact prints from Sie Kommen which probably belonged in the first part of the sale) and 39 more lots of Monroe imagery. Here are the statistics for the auction:
Total Lots: 155
Total Low Estimate: $1143000
Total High Estimate: $1734500
Total Low Lots (high estimate below $10000): 113
Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): $523500
Total Mid Lots (high estimate between $10000 and $50000): 38
Total Mid Estimate: $771000
Total High Lots (high estimate above $50000): 4
Total High Estimate: $440000

While there isn’t much to tempt us in this particular bunch of pictures, I think this second selection helps to tell a more rounded story of this collection. While Part I was filled with iconic pictures, scarce portfolios and trophy lots, this sale shows the hallmarks of the passion of the collectors. There are plenty of lesser known photographers and outlier images. This is evidence that these collectors were consistently looking at the images themselves, and not just the names and the prices. They had a certain eye for what they found of interest, and were willing to pursue unheralded pictures (by unfamiliar artists) and add them to their collection over time, even if they weren’t recognized masterpieces. And they continued to add depth to the collection, long after they had achieved critical mass. This kind of amazing collection is only built with single minded, relentless pursuit over many years.

Since the economic climate is perhaps even gloomier than when the first sale occurred, it is extremely difficult to predict how this sale might fare. The first sale was proof that the demand for fashion and glamour imagery is broader and deeper than many had imagined. This sale will test the edges of that demand a bit, and might give us some clues as to the evolving nature of the overall market for photography this year.

February 12th
20 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, NY 10020

Aaron Siskind: Recurrence @Silverstein

JTF (just the facts): 101 black and white gelatin silver prints (mostly vintage), displayed in the back two rooms of the gallery. The main room has a dark wall, while the smaller room in the far rear is white. The images span much of Siskind’s career, from 1940s work in Gloucester to 1980s images of tar dripped roads. (Mediocre installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Taking on the estate of a recognized master who had previously been represented by one or more other galleries has its own special challenges. By and large, these kinds of estates have been “picked clean” by the preceding representatives, the best of the early and influential work skimmed off and sold years or decades earlier, often leaving behind a grab bag of later and less well known work that doesn’t seem to have an audience among collectors and museums, unless someone is looking to build a comprehensive sample of the artist’s career.

Bruce Silverstein seems to be willing to dig through these estates in search of diamonds in the rough. Starting with the Kertesz estate, and now with the Siskind estate, his job has been to sift through what remains and try to make sense of it all. Most importantly, he has brought a fresh pair of eyes to work that has been overlooked and under appreciated.
This show is built around the insight that Siskind’s work is best understood when seen the way Siskind took the pictures: in series. Long before the Bechers developed their typologies, the ID in Chicago was teaching students to shoot in multiples, to make projects of a single subject matter observed in detail. This exhibit is then groups of pictures rather than a gathering of single images. There is a cluster of reeds, some broken windows, a group of wall stones. There are pieces of driftwood and swirling strands of seaweed. There are building facades, close ups of paint on walls, and divers soaring through the air. All are displayed in groups of 4, 6, 9, 12 or even 16 pictures; there are few single pictures hung in isolation.

What is striking about this exhibit is that it shows, regardless of the subject matter, and over nearly 50 years of taking pictures, Siskind was ultimately interested in lines, patterns, color contrasts, and the beauty of simple forms. Over and over again, the groups of images show him meticulously exploring a subject, in search of interesting compositional relationships between the lines. Siskind seems to have been intrigued by both the sharp and geometric, as well as the rounded and swirling. While some of his work does have a formal rigidity to it (the building facades with grids of windows for example), most of the works have a more fluid, gestural quality, more in tune with the prevailing ideas in the world of Abstract Expressionism. As he got older, these gestures seemed to get looser, with the paint splatters and tar ribbons of the 1970s and 1980s becoming larger and more like calligraphy.
What I like best about this superb exhibit is that it puts all of these different projects into a larger context. Seen as single images, isolated from the rest of his work, some of these pictures don’t hold up particularly well. But seen in groups, riffing on the same ideas as their neighbors, the pictures have a much stronger resonance. I think the show does an excellent job of showing that Siskind continued to make thought provoking pictures in his own unique style his entire career, not just in his 1950’s heyday. Siskind’s artistic approach across his lifetime was remarkably consistent, and the later works merit more attention and praise than they have heretofore received. This show does a good job of forcing us as viewers to think about the quality of his entire output, rather than just his greatest hits. Every single group in the gallery is worth some patient looking. In our view, this is a show worth going out of your way to see.

The Aaron Siskind foundation website is here.

Collector’s POV: There are plenty of superlative prints in this show that would fit perfectly into our collection. Prices range from $3500 on the low end to $30000 on the high end for single images, with some prints sold only in groups with larger total prices. Siskind made a large number of later prints in his life, and as a result, the market for his work has gotten muddied and confused. Vintage prints of his most famous images are hard to come by, but vintage images of variants in any one series are often much more reasonable (and available). We already own several Siskinds (here), but we still found many things to tempt us.
Rating: *** (three stars) EXCELLENT (rating system described here)
Through February 21st
535 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10001

Dutch Photographer Gerard Petrus Fieret Dies

We picked up the news on the Internet that Dutch photographer Gerard Petrus Fieret (1924-2009) apparently died yesterday. We became aware of his work via a catalogue/show that gallerist Deborah Bell (site here) and private dealer Paul Hertzmann (artnet site here) collaborated on several years ago.

Fieret made a number of nudes in the 1960s that seem emblematic of those times. They are warm, grainy, and real, sometimes strange and chaotic, complete with his bold signature and address stamp prominetly placed, often right in the middle of the image. (See Untitled, ca 1960s at right.) The pictures are unlike any other nudes we have seen. Fieret’s vision was indeed unique: informal, shadowy, personal and full of life.

Christoph Gielen, Arcadia @Cooney

JTF (just the facts): A total of 10 large scale color Cibachrome images, framed in white and displayed throughout the small gallery. Prints come in two sizes (22×28 and 40×50), in editions of 7. Negatives are from 2004-2008. (Installation shot at right.)

Comments/Context: Over the history of the medium, aerial photography has evolved its own distinct subculture, buried inside the larger frameworks of various commercial and artistic endeavors. Starting with Nadar back in the 19th century, people have been fascinated with pictures from the air. We have used aerial pictures for cartography and topography, overhead surveillance, and a never ending array of glossy travel books named things like Above the Pyramids or Over Indianapolis. In the realm of aerial art, photographers like William Garnett and Ed Ruscha set out the playing field, to be followed by artists like Marilyn Bridges, Emmet Gowin, and more recently David Maisel and Gerco de Ruijter (among others).

Christoph Gielen has stepped into this tradition with the images in his first solo NY exhibition, Arcadia, now on view at Daniel Cooney. Gielen has focused his attention on the human built environment, from tangled freeways to dense suburban subdivisions and housing projects, in locations spanning Berlin, Shanghai, Kowloon and southern California. Most of the images have no horizon line, reducing the subject matter to geometric lines and patterns.

Gielen clearly shares a viewpoint with the New Topographic photographers of the 1970s (Robert Adams especially), who highlighted the downsides to suburban sprawl, both in terms of its damage to the environment and its life sapping monotony. While Gielen’s images have a simple decorative beauty, the not-so-subtle message is that these things we have built are more than a little scary. The show’s ironic title (Arcadia being the essence of a serene, classical place) is another reminder that while we may have designed these worlds with the best of intentions, they haven’t turned out to be the paradise we envisioned.

The artist’s website can be found here.

Collector’s POV: The prints in this show are retailing for $1800 and $3800 based on size. While Gielen’s images are well made and often striking, they haven’t moved the ball forward much in terms of aerial photography. While we have seen much of this kind of thing before, there are a few images in the show that point to a continued evolution toward a more abstract approach, further drawing out new and subtle societal impacts resulting from the aging of these built environments. I was particularly interested to note the changing details of the faceless developments, as the trees grew bigger and broader and the inhabitants had time to begin to personalize their plots. Perhaps the chaos of humanity and nature will one day drown out the perfect geometries of the designers.

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

Christoph Gielen, Arcadia
Through January 31st

Daniel Cooney Fine Art
511 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001

Lecture: Inside the Met: The Curatorial Departments – Photographs

The three Photography curators from the Met will be giving an overview of the department and its history on March 11th at 6:00PM. Here’s the synopsis from the website:

“Although an independent Department of Photographs was established only in 1992, the Metropolitan has collected photography as art since 1928, when Alfred Stieglitz donated twenty-two of his own works, including portraits of his wife Georgia O’Keeffe. During the intervening decades, and especially since the mid-1980s, the photography collection has grown to encompass the full history of the medium, from its invention in the 1830s to the present day. Malcolm Daniel traces major steps in that expansion, including landmark acquisitions from the Stieglitz Collection in 1933 and the Gilman Collection in 2005; Jeff L. Rosenheim discusses the extraordinary archives of American photographers Walker Evans and Diane Arbus, acquired in 1994 and 2007; and Doug Eklund presents the department’s recent activities in the field of contemporary photography.”

Tickets are $23 and can be purchased here.

Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10028

PICTORIALISM: Hidden Modernism. Photography 1896-1916

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2008 by Georg Kargl Fine Arts and Galerie Kicken Berlin, in advance of an exhibit on display now and running through March 14, 2009. 63 pages, including 43 images. Essays by Monika Faber, Wilfried Wiegand, and Elizabeth Pollock. (Poor cover shot at right.) Photographers represented include:

James Craig Annan
Robert Demachy
Hugo Erfurth
Frank Eugene
Hugo Henneberg
Theodor and Oskar Hofmeister
Gertrude Kasebier
Rudolf Koppitz
Heinrich Kuhn
Rupert Lovejoy
Elise Mahler
Karel Novak
Erwin Raupp
Edward Steichen
Alfred Stieglitz
Anton Josef Trcka
Hans Watzek
Clarence White

Comments/Context: As a collector, there is something truly wonderful about receiving an unexpected photo book in the mail. Gallery owners and dealers should be reminded that these small gestures really do build meaningful goodwill over time. Over the years, the folks at Kicken Berlin have sent us a few of their well produced catalogues, and we are always very thankful to be included. This slim volume arrived in time for the holidays and got us thinking about Pictorialism again in new ways.

To be perfectly honest, we haven’t spent much time exploring Pictorialist photography, as most of the images we have been exposed to previously were of the soupy, soft-focus variety that were a mismatch with our particular collecting plan. And while Pictorialism was summarily discredited and almost entirely abandoned just after World War I, this exhibition shows that underneath the self-conscious workmanship of these images, the beginnings of more modernist sensibilities were indeed percolating.

The show itself is a superb primer on the entire movement, as it has strong examples from all of the major photographers of the times, covering a broad array of subject matter (domestic scenes, nudes, landscape and nature scenes, portraits, still lifes, and architectural studies). It also provides some excellent specimens of a variety of nearly obsolete photographic processes, including gum bichromate (in various colors), bromoil transfer, carbon, and platinum prints.

While we haven’t seen the show in person, the reproductions in the catalogue are good enough for us to reconsider our previous view of Pictorialism a bit. There are some quite beautiful photographs here, where the interplay of special high quality papers and meticulous control of light sensitive materials have led to some exquisite objects. To our eye, among many terrific pictures, there is a fine nude by Heinrich Kuhn, and the zigzag of the reflected shadow in the cover image by Erwin Raupp is quietly wonderful.

Another takeaway concerns the relationship of Pictorialism to today’s contemporary photography. Surprisingly, both the rediscovery of some of these antique processes by photographers who want to control their image making more directly and the new found freedom to manipulate images enabled by digital technology bring us back to some of the art-making ideas of this movement. Whether overt manipulation as a vehicle for creating new kinds of work will be more readily accepted the second time around remains to be seen, but it is interesting to consider some types of contemporary work through this historical lens.

Galerie Kicken Berlin’s website can be found here.

Collector’s POV: We don’t currently have any images in our collection that would fall under the umbrella of Pictorialism, although we do have a handful of pictures from this time period which are a bit more modernist in their approach. Perhaps a perfect bridge picture in the Pictorialist mode will someday appear that will help fill our hole between the 19th and 20th centuries.

A.D. Coleman, Critical Focus

JTF (just the facts): Subtitled Photography in the International Image Community. Published in 1995 by Nazraeli Press. 179 pages. Includes 47 essays, created between March 1989 and November 1993. (Cover shot at right.)

Comments/Context: If there is one thing that writing this blog on a regular basis has done for us, it has made us far more attuned to the quality and quantity of photography reportage and criticism out there in our media sources. We notice with much more care what shows Vince Aletti is covering for the New Yorker and how he is writing about them; the same can be said for Jerry Saltz in New York magazine, or the team of folks covering the arts for the New York Times. From there, it’s a pretty sharp drop off to regional and international newspapers, to photography and art magazines of various kinds, and more recently, to the blogosphere. The unfortunate reality is that, save a few bright spots, the overall state of the world of photography criticism is pretty underwhelming on the whole (this is perhaps a myopic, New York centric view of the world I realize).
Given this situation, it is with significant pleasure that I have been going back and working my way through the photography criticism of A.D. Coleman. This volume covers a period in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and shows Coleman actively trying to expand his horizons beyond the traditional American photo scene. While his essays are primarily rooted in New York, he travels to Prague and Lausanne, Arles and Amsterdam, Jerusalem and Goteborg, as well as all over the United States, in search of interesting photography to write about. He visits fairs and expos, large museum shows and out of the way galleries.
While this particular period in history includes the various scandals surrounding the work of Mapplethorpe, Serrano, Sturges, and Mann (all of which he dissects masterfully), the book centers on the parade of exhibits and shows of those years, featuring Sherman, Sugimoto, Misrach, Witkin, Goldin, Winogrand, Boltanski and Wegman, among many others. There is also the palpable sense that photography had quickly become much more international, and that artists from all over the globe were now garnering well deserved attention. While at one level, Coleman’s essays paint a picture of a remarkably stable universe of photographers of merit (many of these are still the ones we’re talking about today, twenty years later), at another level, exposure to the broad base of the medium internationally was clearly widening. So while a few of the essays have a time capsule feel to them, the majority have a continued freshness and relevance, regardless of their age.

I have thought quite a bit about what it is that sets Coleman’s criticism apart from the rest of the field. It cannot be that he was the first to report anything, that he got the scoops or exclusives, or that his description of the facts was particularly more detailed or thorough. My conclusion is that he paired a high standard for the craft of his writing with a true and genuine commitment to the medium of photography. While all criticism is full of opinions, his were built on the twin foundations of thorough and meticulous analysis and deeply felt enjoyment of pictures of all kinds. What I particularly admire is that he is able to be honest and unmerciful, to take a stand without degenerating into name calling or overly clever potshots. This is a solid collection, well worth your time.

A.D. Coleman’s website, The Nearby Cafe, can be found here.
Collector’s POV: For many of the years we have been collecting, we didn’t read much photography criticism, likely because we were quickly tired of the pompous, art-speak that drags down a large percentage of monograph and exhibition essays. Coleman’s columns were like a breath of fresh air for us. If you have been wary of reading photo criticism (assuming it would be dry and boring) or haven’t picked up a book of essays for a decade or more, we highly recommend choosing one of Coleman’s collections. You’ll find you like critical writing more than you thought.

Louis Stettner, Tresor Des Rues @Benrubi

JTF (just the facts): A total of 19 images, in a mixture of formats and sizes, displayed in the entry and main gallery. Here is the breakdown of the show:

  • 9 8×10 or 11×14 black and white gelatin silver prints, some negatives/prints from the period 1949-1951, others more recent (1991-2001)
  • 3 larger 40×40 gelatin silver prints, again a mixture of early and later negatives
  • 3 wall sized (48×60) digital silver images from early negatives
  • 4 iris color prints of images from the late 1990s

All of the images are from Paris. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Louis Stettner has spent a lifetime capturing eloquent, real life moments in the streets of Paris and New York. The current show at Bonni Benrubi is a kind of sampler of his Paris work across the years.

The early works (from the late 1940s and early 1950s) are intimate contact prints that chronicle sidewalks, tree lined streets, cafes and shop windows, rain and shadows. There is a romantic familiarity to these images, capturing what some might call the essence of Paris, complete with its ordinary, working class routines. We have been across this same ground with Atget, Kertesz and Doisneau, but it’s still an evocative ride.

A second small group of color images from the 1990s are also on display, where Stettner explored abstraction more fully, within the confines of Parisian subject matter (cafe chairs and neon signs). There are echoes of Callahan’s dye transfers in this group. That said, these were a little hard to mix in with the other black and white material, and perhaps would benefit from of a show of their own where they could be explored in more depth.

Filling out the exhibit are a number of larger prints of mostly older negatives. These big, beautiful prints amplify the subtleties of the small negatives (they have a definite Wow! factor). This is a mixed blessing however, as romance on such a grand scale walks a thin line between nostalgia and kitsch. I think they fall just short of the “too much” line, and as such are successful, but I can also see how others might react differently.

All in all, this work is a fond, and somewhat sentimental, reminder of why Paris is like no place else.

The artist’s website can be found here.

Collector’s POV: The images in this show range from $2800 for the small contact prints to $15000 for the wall sized enlargements. While we don’t have any Louis Stettner images from Paris, we do have two more recent pictures from New York in our collection, which can be found here.

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

Louis Stettner, Tresor Des Rues
Through January 31st

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

Gabriele Basilico, Intercity @Cohen Amador

JTF (just the facts): 12 black and white pigment prints, hung in dark grey frames throughout the gallery. The works come in two sizes (approximately 29×37 and 53×42) and are printed in editions of 15. The images were taken in a variety of locations (Naples, Moscow, San Francisco, Monaco, Barcelona, and Bari) during the period 2004-2007. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Italian photographer Gabriele Basilico has been making careful studies of cities, urban environments and architecture in Europe and in other locations around the world for nearly three decades, and yet he remains a bit of a mystery to audiences in the United States. Except for the show at the SFMOMA last year and a relatively recent relationship with Cohen Amador, Basilico has been virtually absent from America.
Basilico’s images of densely built habitats are neither wholly abstracted exercises in lines and planes, nor are they wide documentary views of architecture in the context of its surroundings; they lie somewhere in the middle, giving the structures some larger situation, while playing with the relationships of space and pattern inherent in their design. At first glance, some of the images can seem a bit dull, but upon further inspection, the complexities start to reveal themselves and the pictures become more intriguing.
An example of this is a set of three images from Monaco, hung together in the back of the gallery (image at right). When I first saw these pictures, I wondered why three pictures which were so obviously similar had been chosen for the exhibit, when they were not designed as a triptych. And yet, as I stood and looked at these images more carefully, it became clear to me that each image had its own subtle variations in pattern as a result of the changes in camera angle. The sinuous street down in the valley of the buildings was entirely different in each image, and the relationships between the structures had been altered just enough to create varied compositions. Each picture could easily stand on its own, and the triptych effect created by their installation together simply highlighted their differences.
Basilico’s works merit this type of patient looking. These are silent, almost introspective pictures, that encourage standing and thinking awhile. His work asks questions about our built environments, but it does so without shouting or overt critique. The images are simply put forth, to be read in a multitude of ways. Focus can quickly shift from the interplay of the planes and tones of a dense warren of buildings, to harder questions about how or why they evolved to be that way in the first place.
In sum, this small show is certainly worth a visit, particularly if you aren’t familiar with this important photographer.
Collector’s POV: Basilico’s work makes an interesting contrast to a variety of city and industrial photographers throughout the history of the medium, from Abbott, Callahan, and the New Topographic photographers, to newer voices (Struth, Opie, Kanemura and others). His work is solely represented by Cohen Amador here in the US (I believe), and is virtually absent from the secondary market, so there aren’t many options for acquiring his prints locally. The images in this show are retailing for 8000 and 11000 Euros, based on size. Vintage works from the 1980s and 1990s are also available (although not part of this particular exhibit).
Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here)
Through March 6
41 East 57th Street
New York, NY 10022
UPDATE: We have been reminded by another collector that Basilico also had a solo exhibition at the MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2004.

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