Josef Schulz, Form @Yossi Milo

JTF (just the facts): A total of 11 large scale digital C prints, displayed without frames throughout the main gallery. The images come in three sizes (39×51, 47×63 and 47×106) and the negatives range from 2003-2008 (part of two separate series: Formen and Sachliches). The prints are made in editions of 6. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: If there is a pattern to the work of students of Bernd and Hilla Becher (and more recently Thomas Ruff) from the Dusseldorf Art Academy, it seems to be a shared respect for large format photography, overlaid with an often strict intellectual/conceptual framework. Polish photographer Josef Schulz’ pictures, now on view at Yossi Milo, have all the hallmarks of this educational approach.

The subject matter of Schulz’ photographs is familiar ground: factories, warehouses, storage facilities and other industrial forms. We have seen plenty of these buildings over the past few decades, particularly from the German photographers. What is different and thought-provoking about these pictures is the theoretical inversion that Schulz is playing with. In his pictures, Schulz takes large format images of these industrial structures and then digitally strips away all the contextual information (signs, windows, aging, landscaping, location etc.), leaving behind clean, simple forms of corrugated steel and concrete. He takes the real buildings and breaks them back down into their elemental blocks, leaving them looking like simple architectural models.

These pictures have an eerie silence to them, as if the super perfect futuristic world is still being put together and the people have yet to arrive. (When they do, they’ll certainly all have matching jumpsuits and haircuts.) If you step back from the works as grounded in some kind of reality, they become almost abstract exercises in color, form, shape and volume – design concepts rendered in a CAD software program. Each work travels the same path: the viewer’s mind begins by trying to invent or add back some details of context to make the image “make sense”; when this fails, the viewer is forced into an examination of the building as a generic, and often surprisingly beautiful, form. If you like your photography cool and intellectual, this is a show for you.

The artist’s website can be found here.

Collector’s POV: The prints in this show are priced between $10000 and $16000 based on size, which seems a bit high for a first solo show in New York, even if the works are physically quite large. Given the string of stars that have been produced by the Bechers, perhaps this pricing is just a “provenance” effect.

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

Josef Schulz, Form
Through January 31st

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

UPDATE: More Schulz at Conscientious, here.

Course: History of Photography @MoMA

Starting in February, Diana Bush will be teaching an eight part evening series on the History of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art. This course is part of the larger series of adult academic programs offered by the museum. The class synopsis is below:

“Moving from its beginnings in the 1830s to the recent projects of contemporary artists, this course introduces participants to the history and historiography of the photographic image. A primary interest of the course is visual literacy, and, drawing on the exhibition The Printed Picture, class discussions take shape around the complex and diverse functions of graphic and photographic objects in specific historical contexts. At the same time, in the context of The Museum of Modern Art, we discuss the challenges of writing the history of photography, both within and outside of greater histories of modernism and modern art.”

Given the text above, the approach looks to be different from a traditional chronological slide lecture. The fee is $415 ($355 for members).

Further information on the course (and links to registration) can be found here.

Edward Burtynsky – China

JTF (just the facts): Published by Steidl in 2005. 148 pages, including 81 color plates and essays by Edward Burtynsky, Marc Mayer, Ted Fishman, and Mark Kingwell. (Cover shot at right.)

Comments/Context: Coming to grips with the prevailing view of industrialization, particularly in the developed West, has been an ever shifting and evolving topic for photographers of all kinds, for at least the past century. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries (right up through the 1930s or so), the exploits of man, in the form of skyscrapers, factories, railroads, dams, and steel mills, were bathed in a romantic glow, as we stood in awe and pride at our accomplishments, as the molten steel poured from the furnaces and the smokestacks rose into the sky. Many great American photographers, including Berenice Abbott, Margaret Bourke-White, Charles Sheeler, and even Edward Weston made inspiring images of our new industrial power. (EO Hoppe didn’t call his 1920’s book of photographs from across the country Romantic America by accident.)

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, this glow was beginning to fade, and the secondary and tertiary impacts of our industrialization (on our society and on our environment) began to become more apparent. Photographers like Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz were starting to ask hard questions about how our never ending consumption and growth were affecting the world around us, and the answers weren’t romantic or beautiful, they were harsh and dispiriting. At the same time in Germany, Bernd and Hilla Becher were taking a different approach to this industrialization, carefully and systematically capturing the seemingly endless variety of industrial structures that we as humans had built. And while there was beauty to be found lurking in these buildings, it was cool and disaffected, in a clinical and anthropological way. Recently, Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has continued this wave of more intense scrutiny of the realities of industrialization, making pictures that ask penetrating and complicated questions about the impact of our manipulation and destruction of the environment around us.

While Burtynsky has taken surprisingly beautiful photographs of industrial sites and wastelands all over the world, this group of pictures from China is particularly arresting, in that we are able to see the same movie we saw during our own industrialization over the past century, played again in fast forward and at a larger scale. Some have called what has gone on in China since 1949 “hypercapitalism“, but even this world fails to truly describe the staggering pace and scope of the industrial transformation that has gone on across China in the past few decades. To become the place where nearly everything the world needs is made, the very fabric of the nation has been (and continues to be) torn and rewoven.

The book itself is divided into separate sections based on the specific industrial activity being photographed (Three Gorges Dam, Steel and Coal, Old Industry, Shipyards, Recycling, Manufacturing, and Urban Renewal), and together, they create a compelling and interrelated portrait of just what is going on. Massive new industrial and manufacturing facilities are being built to meet world demand, causing new trickle down requirements, particularly for energy and labor. Literally millions of (anonymous) people have left the hinterlands and migrated to the coast to work in these factories, triggering a host of new pressures on the already overrun urban areas, including housing and waste disposal.

Burtynsky’s pictures are meticulously composed to highlight patterns of color and line that are found in these man-made environments. The images are taken with a large format camera, and as a result, are filled with exquisite detail. The result is an unsettling contrast between the singular beauty of the compositions and the underlying dysfunction that we all know is just beneath the surface. This tension between the technical quality and the ominous (and sometimes awe inspiring) undercurrent of the subject matter make the pictures work, especially when they are printed large (often 40×50). And even though the reproductions found in the book are relatively small, they are successful in giving the reader a sense for the craftsmanship of Burtynsky’s prints.

The artist’s website can be found here.

Collector’s POV: In the past few years, Burtynsky’s work has become more available in the secondary market, fetching between approximately $5000 and $35000, depending on the image and its size. Burtynsky is represented in New York by Charles Cowles (site here). While we can imagine adding a Burtynsky image to our collection, our challenge is that the work wants to be large and we generally prefer (and need) the prints to be small. We’ll just have to keep looking for just the right piece.

UPDATE: More Burtynsky at MAO, here.

Sebastiao Salgado, Workers

JTF (just the facts): Subtitled An Archaeology of the Industrial Age. Published by Aperture in 1993. 400 pages, with 350 duotone images, taken between 1986 and 1992. (Cover shot at right.)

Comments/Context: We have a relative who visits us perhaps once a year, and he is a photographer who has spent much of his life traveling the world making photographic portraits of indigenous peoples. Every time he comes to our home and sees the photography crowded on the walls, his first question is always, without fail, “Do you have any Salgados?” Since we don’t collect portraits or documentary photography, I am never ready with a very good answer. But his question has kept me thinking for many years, about why of all the photographers that one might fall in love with, he had been smitten with Salgado. So this year, when asked about which photo books I might be interested in for Christmas, I mentioned that it was about time we had a book on Salgado for our library. Lo and behold, one arrived under the tree on Christmas morning. Thus the reason for today’s review of a book published more than 15 years ago.
Of course, the reason our relative admires Salgado is that their work shares a similar passion and interest in the overlooked and forgotten peoples of our world. Workers is a kaleidoscopic portrait of the hardships and dignity of the manual labor that underlies our industrialized civilization, even in today’s technology-driven information age. Over a handful of years, Salgado made pictures in 26 countries, spanning the globe from India and Bangladesh to Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, and from Brazil to China. He investigated the production of sugar and cocoa, the mining of coal, oil and gold, and the building of automobiles and ships. He went on fishing boats and to slaughterhouses, and visited steel and iron ore plants and textile factories. He witnessed the massive construction of dams, tunnels, and canals. His images show a thorough and detailed understanding of how these various industries get their work done.
What he finds is that regardless of the specifics of any of these labors, the work is nearly always dangerous, dirty, and wearyingly difficult. The working conditions can be appallingly tough. There is brutality and exploitation. And yet within these hellish environments stand the workers themselves, time and again, getting the job done in the face of tremendous challenges. Salgado shows these workers in the worst of humanity’s jobs with honor and nobility, deserving of our respect and thanks for doing the ugly things that need to be done to make our world a place we can live in. These are not blandly objective documentary images, but a concerned and potent voice pointing out what we may have missed.
Nearly all the images in this book have a sense of motion, a visual feeling that the work continues all around us, even when one individual has been singled out for a moment of attention. These are not static shots; things are being done. And even in the shipyards, mines and oil rigs of the largest scale, most of the jobs look small (and often tedious), tiny cogs in the massive machine.
The images in the book have been carefully grouped and sequenced, and the total effect is powerful. One quibble I have is that all of the horizontally oriented pictures have been printed across two pages, burying the center of each image in the valley of the book’s spine. While the larger size of the images increases their impact, the images have a chopped up feel that makes them more difficult to fully appreciate. But overall, this body of work is consistently well crafted and tremendously effective in opening our eyes to the realities of the difficult labors that still go on all around us. It is still completely relevant, 15 years after its first publication.
Salgado has his own Paris-based press agency, Amazonas Images, site here.
Collector’s POV: Salgado’s images of the gold miners in Brazil and of the train station in Bombay, among many others, are often available in the secondary market, in various sizes. Prices range from a few thousand dollars (for later prints) up to the $15000 range for vintage prints of the most famous images. While it seems unlikely that we will add a Salgado to our particular collection in the near future, the book has a bold spine with large lettering that will stand out on our library shelves, perfect for grabbing the attention of our once-a-year Salgado fan. Having now spent time absorbing these images, we will now be ready for a much deeper conversation about his work.

Christie’s Plans Job Cuts

It shouldn’t be particularly surprising that Christie’s and the other auction houses will need to do some staff reductions to get their costs in line with the new economic environment. What these cuts will mean for our friends in the Photography department is still unknown.

New York Times article here.

Martin Parr, Parr-O-Rama @Janet Borden

JTF (just the facts): A total of 36 images (3 black and white and 33 chromogenic color prints), in various sizes, ranging from 7×10 to 50×60. In editions of 10, 25, 33, or open, depending on the specific image. The show contains a mix of vintage and later prints, with work from the early 1970s to the present, displayed in the main gallery. (Installation shot at right.)

Comments/Context: The photographs of Martin Parr take some getting used to. Many of the images seem indistinguishable from snapshots, the colors are often blindingly vibrant and flashy, and the point of view lives somewhere between sarcasm, mockery, and wry wit. At first glance, they’re a lot to take in, but given some patience, most reveal additional layers of thought-provoking ideas about our societies and cultures, consumerism, and modern existence.
The mini retrospective on view at Janet Borden spans nearly all of Parr’s career, including at least one work from a significant number of his picture projects (Think of England, The Last Resort, Common Sense, Small World, Luxury, Bad Weather, Signs of the Times, The Cost of Living, Food, Dubai, and Japanese Commuters Asleep are all represented). Seeing all of the images together, Parr’s consistent “eye” becomes more visible: close-ups of objects not usually paid much attention to, but which become striking when enlarged, and careful juxtapositions (accomplished with vantage point and framing) that highlight the ironic and ridiculous in the everyday that surrounds us and often passes unnoticed.
Not many photographers have tackled humor with as much success as Martin Parr. For the most part, his work has accomplished the tricky task of intelligently highlighting the subtle comedy of life’s situations, without falling into the trap of the jester or the jackass. His pictures aren’t necessarily guffaw-inducing, but more the type that cause you to smile with the knowledge that he has observed something quite surprising that you likely missed.
This show isn’t exactly a “greatest hits” exhibit, although some of his best images from Think of England are indeed included. It is more of a sampler, showing off a variety of approaches, although not always with the most striking of the images from any given series. As such, it has a bit of a “hit or miss” quality to it. Overall, however, it is a strong reminder of Parr’s place as an important chronicler of our modern existence.
The artist’s personal website can be found here. His page at Magnum Photos is here.
Collector’s POV: The prints in this show range from $1500 to $15000, based both on size and popularity. Given the fairly strict boundaries of our particular collection, we will need to do some more homework exploring all of his various projects to find one image that would fit just right (perhaps one from his Flowers book).
Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here)
Through January 31st
560 Broadway
New York, NY 10012

Victor Schrager, The White Room @Houk

JTF (just the facts): A total of 10 pigment prints, in either 30×23 or 45×35 inches, framed in white and arrayed in the main gallery only. All of the negatives are from 2008, in editions of 11. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: There seem to be very few contemporary photographers at work today who are focused on exploring the depths and intricacies of pure abstraction. Indeed, abstraction in black and white was thoroughly investigated several decades ago; in color, the recent expeditions have been less far reaching, mostly clinging to recognizable objects that have then been arranged and photographed in such ways as to highlight their abstract qualities.
In the past decade, Victor Schrager has been on his own abstraction trajectory. Several years ago, Schrager did a series of still life images of jacket-less books, whose forms and muted colors were arranged into planes, volumes, shadows, and intricate patterns. Indebted to the work of Italian painter Giorgio Morandi, the best of these images became elemental forms, blurred and indistinct.
Schrager’s new work, now on view at Edwynn Houk, continues along this path, exchanging the subtle yellows, greens and ochres of the slim volumes, for candy colored neon blocks of plastic and resin. Arranged on a mirrored black table and lit with pure white light, these objects are even less recognizable than the books, leading to a further focus on their attributes of color, form, and reflection. Echoes of the Color Field painters (particularly Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Morris Louis) are everywhere, as is the connection to Irving Penn’s frozen vegetable images.
Historical relationships aside, and while not every image in the show gets the objects placed just right, there are a handful of pictures that strongly resonate and shimmer off the wall, where the interactions of color and shape work to create both tension and harmony. As the objects have become simpler and less recognizable, the space for exploring the puzzles and complexity of abstraction have widened. As such, the images in this show seem less like the end of the road for Schrager, but just the beginning.
The artist’s website can be found here.
Collector’s POV: These images belong in a white cube of a home or apartment, whose owners are devotees of 20th century modern design/furniture. Their abstract forms and bright colors would mingle well with this aesthetic. They would unfortunately look wildly, even insanely, out of place in our old Colonial. The images are priced at $4500 and $5500, based on size.
Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
Through January 24th
745 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10151

Martin Klimas, Flowers @Foley

JTF (just the facts): 7 color pigment prints, each 32×24, six installed in the main gallery, and a single image shown down in the first floor entryway. We were told that the show normally had several more images on display, but that they had been taken down and shipped to Photo LA. Negatives from 2006 and 2007, in editions of 5. A slim book detailing this body of work is available from the gallery for $30. (Installation shot at right.)

Comments/Context: The floral images of German photographer Martin Klimas can most clearly be described as a mashup of Robert Mapplethorpe and Harold Edgerton. In each picture, an elegant floral bouquet in a striking vase is set against a saturated color background. The unexpected part of this conceit is that the vase is in the process of exploding, having been captured at the exact instant of disintegration by careful stop motion photography. The result is a surprisingly interesting contrast between the quiet beauty of the flowers and the violent destruction of the vase. Prior to visiting this show, we thought this concept sounded a bit contrived (was this just a stunt?), but we found the execution of the idea to be first rate, and the pictures are quite a bit better and more visually engaging than we had expected.
The artist’s website can be found here.
Collector’s POV: As collectors of flower and botanical photographs, we like to think we have seen pretty much everything that has ever been done in this genre, but these works by Klimas are indeed something new and different. The best of the images are to be found in the book, as the exhibit itself has been depleted by the demands of the fair circuit. At $3000 apiece, one of these would make an attractive (and relatively inexpensive) contrast to a color Mapplethorpe floral, if hung in tandem.
Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
Through January 17th
547 West 27th Street
New York, NY 10001

Eudora Welty in New York: Photographs of the Early 1930s @MCNY

JTF (just the facts): 40 black and white images (with a slight sepia toning/aging) of Mississippi in the main gallery (blue striped wall), with an additional 11 images of New York in an adjacent room (brown striped wall). All from the 1930s. (Blurry installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: The quick question “Who was Eudora Welty?” will in most cases elicit an answer (pulled from deep memories from high school) summarizing her success as a prize-winning writer of American novels and short stories set in and describing the rural South, primarily during the Depression. What is perhaps less well known is that Welty began her career as a photographer, as part of the WPA. Her first exhibit was held at the Lugene Opticians’ Photographic Galleries (a camera supply store) in 1936, and the images from this original show have been gathered together once again for this exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York. In addition to the works from Mississippi, a roomful of pictures that she took during her time in New York are also on view, and these images provide an interesting contrast to the Southern collection.
Even though Welty was a white woman in her twenties taking pictures of the predominantly black towns of Mississippi, her work has the authentic feel of an insider. These are not goopy, sentimental shots of rural workers, nor are they noble testaments to the dignity of labor. They are genuine images of day to day life, full of its dust, heat, humor and simple routine. There are scenes of both farm and city life, of people working in the fields and walking the streets in their Sunday best. While the images are too well composed to be called snapshots, there is an easy-going casualness to the work that is a testament to the comfort she instilled in her subjects.
When Welty got to the big city, she seems to have at once become a tourist, and was drawn to the eye-catching cliches that everyone is fascinated by when they first see New York (elevated trains, tall buildings, sidewalk life, stairways and stoops). Her work from this period, while still focused primarily on the effects of the Depression, lacks the intimacy of the Mississippi work, and degenerates into (to my eye at least) second rate Abbott knock-offs.
Collector’s POV: Unfortunately, Welty’s best work (that from Mississippi) doesn’t fit well with our particular collecting plan. 1980’s prints of Welty’s images from the South (seemingly in editions of 20 or more) have come up at auction from time to time in the past few years, but in small numbers. Prices have been generally reasonable.
.
Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
Through February 16th
1220 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10029

Broken Glass: Photographs of the South Bronx by Ray Mortenson @MCNY

JTF (just the facts): A total of 50 black and white gelatin silver prints, of varying sizes, mostly small 5×7 or reverse, with a handful of larger (20×24 or mural sized) prints as well, in a single hallway gallery. A large grid of images (77 total prints) and two glass cases containing artist books are also on display. All of the works are from 1982-1984. (Installation shot at right; image of grid below right.)

Comments/Context: With the growth and prosperity across the nation in recent years, it is often easy to forget what many urban areas went through in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Ray Mortenson’s photographs take us back to a time in the South Bronx when the streets and neighborhoods resembled an abandoned war zone, with tumble down houses, destruction, and utter collapse the prevailing landscape.

Mortenson made an in depth study of this environment, in an almost anthropological way, taking pictures of both interiors and exteriors, and placing buildings in the context of their surroundings and separating them apart. The images are entirely empty; not a single person is to be found anywhere. What remains are the architectural remnants of broken walls and windows, graffiti, and rotting furniture. It is a bleak world of peeling paint, massive holes, chaos and neglect. There are echoes of Gordon Matta-Clark’s work here, minus the conceptual overlay: walls and buildings are slashed and torn, with peep hole views through the decay.

Given the depressing subject matter, it is perhaps surprising to find that these works are consistently engaging and beautiful. Mortenson has used strong contrasts of black/white, light/shadow, and line/texture to bring vitality to these abandoned rooms and buildings. Each view has been carefully composed and crafted, and the small images draw the viewer into an intimate dialogue. The work is thought provoking, in the sense that Mortenson has taken spaces that were defined by negligence and dereliction, and paid respectful attention to them. In doing so, he has exposed some glimpses of simple beauty hidden underneath.

Collector’s POV: Prior to this show, we knew nothing about the work of Ray Mortenson. Given this body of work, we have come away impressed; one of these images would easily fit into our collection. Ray Mortenson is represented by Janet Borden (site here).

Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here)

Through March 3rd

1220 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10029

David Perkins, The Intelligent Eye

JTF (just the facts): Subtitled Learning to Think by Looking at Art. Published by the J. Paul Getty Trust in 1994. 95 pages.

Comments/Context: We received this book this Christmas from a friend who runs the education department at a museum we support. The author, David Perkins, has been working at the Harvard Graduate School of Education since the early 1970s, primarily in a group called Project Zero, where he has focused on teaching/learning, especially in the context of arts education and creativity. This slim volume is a quick read, but grounded in some compelling concepts.
The first key underlying idea is that neuroscience (study of the brain) has come along far enough in the past decades to understand some fundamental things about how our brains work. (Another excellent book on this topic is On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins, site here.) In a nutshell, our brains are hierarchical systems that use our memories to continuously pattern match and draw analogies. This activity creates a flow of predictions based on this data, trying to make sense of the stimuli that surround us and place it into a context that we can understand and make use of. In 90% of our daily activities, this “experiential intelligence” works extremely well and produces “right” answers and useful “solutions”.
Perkins argues that experiencing art falls into the other 10%, where our innate systems follow routines and well worn paths that don’t serve us particularly well. In these cases, the normal day-to-day approach is too hasty, often narrow, and sometimes fuzzy and sprawling (lacking discipline). Certainly, we have all had times when we blasted through a museum or gallery show, making 50,000 foot conclusions about what we had seen, without having really spent the time to take it all in.
His thesis is that a “reflective intelligence” is required in viewing art (and in other specific areas), almost as a check on the “experiental intelligence”, where an active, thoughtful and systematic approach is taken to ensure a deeper understanding. The second half of the book is a series of example artworks (several of which are photographs) and the stream of consciousness observations people made when consciously using his framework for thinking.
There are four anchor points to his “reflective intelligence” as applied to looking at art. The first is to slow your looking down, to resolve to spend several minutes with key works, and to allow your eyes to work and generate questions, and finally, when the flow stops, to look away, and then return again with a fresh perspective. This is really about giving your brain the time and space it needs to process what is before you. The second is to make your thinking “broad and adventurous”, to break away from the obvious conclusions that your brain has already provided and to look for open-ended solutions outside the normal boundaries. This involves looking for “surprises”, connections, and even technical specifics that can trigger a new pathway of thought. The third concept is to add a layer of more analytical thought on top of the expanded ideas that were generated by the second step. To summarize this idea perhaps simplistically, the concept is to dig in and investigate these ideas that have been surfaced with some rigor, “clearly and deeply”. Perkins’ final idea is that once you have gone through the first three steps, a summing up or orchestration of all the data is needed; organization is necessary to generate final conclusions. In this section, he refers to many well known strategies for looking at art, that include description, formal analysis, interpretation, and finally judgement, that are more oriented toward criticism. In his view, while these “art specific” strategies can be useful in providing frameworks for thinking, his view is that his “reflective” approach can be used for areas beyond the world of art. The final chapters of the book are about just this topic: how to apply and transfer this art-based thinking into other realms of thought.
Collector’s POV: This is a short book, but nevertheless, quite thought provoking in terms of challenging the established ways that most people (including ourselves) fly though art exhibits. I have always thought that people had an inherent “pace” to their viewing of art (slow, fast, or somewhere in the middle), and that it is important to find people with similar pacing to enjoy your art with, or you will be driven crazy (Have you ever gone to a large museum show with someone with meaningfully slower pacing than yourself? It’s maddening.) This book has led me to reevaluate this idea, and to consider slowing myself down a bit more, and to hopefully with a little more observant mindset, find some deeper and more interesting conclusions.

Lee Friedlander, New Mexico

JTF (just the facts): Lee Friedlander, New Mexico, 2008, published by Radius Books. 74 pages. Includes 51 black and white images, with a foreword by Andrew Smith and an essay by Emily Ballew Neff. Published in conjunction with an exhibit at the Andrew Smith Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico (site here).

Comments/Context: This exhibition catalogue collects together images that Friedlander took in New Mexico over the past two decades and were shown at the Andrew Smith Gallery this past fall. These images have been drawn from several different projects, and many of the pictures were previously published in Sticks and Stones, The Desert Seen or elsewhere, and as such, this group has a little bit of an “old wine in a new bottle” feel to it.
Friedlander’s recent work, regardless of its particular subject matter (harsh desert scrub brush, fences/yard landscapes, sidewalks/roadways/shadows etc.), has settled into a common framework: square format images, full of high density patterning and visual contrasts. Going back to his earlier work of the 1960s and 1970s, Friedlander has always been interested in how the camera “sees”, where the three dimensional world is flattened into a two dimensional plane of line and form. These more current works have taken this concept several evolutionary steps further, as the images get more crowded, brimming with contradictory and chaotic motifs and constructions.
Friedlander’s newest project uses the window (and oftentimes the side mirror) of a non-descript rental car as an additional framing mechanism for his world view. Given the setting of the car, one might think of these pictures as fly-by snapshots, but indeed, they have the same careful composition of all Friedlander’s work, and the frames and posts of the car just give him an additional set of dominant lines to unbalance and divide the picture plane.
An interesting thing to consider is whether the whole construct of this exhibit, namely the New Mexico setting, matters at all. Friedlander’s work isn’t “about” his environment per se; it’s about the compositional shapes and forms that are the outgrowth of the picture making process. So whether the pictures are “of” New Mexico (or any other place for that matter) seems irrelevant. It is his vision of these places that we came to see.
.
Collector’s POV: Oddly enough, we actually already own an image from this exhibit (here), which came from the Sticks and Stones series, and which we bought from Fraenkel Gallery (site here) a few years ago. Since that time, and likely as a result of the massive Friedlander touring retrospective, retail prices for Friedlander’s new work have continued to rise. We don’t have a price list from this show, but earlier last year, Friedlander’s new work was selling in the $7000 range at retail. One annoying thing about this book is that there is no listing of the images by title, date etc., so there is no way to reference the images, except by their page number. Overall, however, we continue to be amazed by Freidlander’s work, and even though this may not be his most ground breaking collection of images, we expect these pictures will likely stand the test of time quite well.

Sign up for our weekly email newsletter

This field is required.