First Doubt: Optical Confusion in Modern Photography @Yale

JTF (just the facts): 114 images (mostly black & white), exhibited throughout the 4th floor galleries, all from the collection of Allan Chasanoff, either from the Yale collection or on loan from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Curated by Joshua Chuang. (Unfortunately, no photography was allowed in the galleries and there are no thumbnails available on the website; image of exhibit monograph at right.)

Comments/Context: If you have been reading this blog for any length of time, you will know that as collectors ourselves, we are extremely interested in the process of photography collecting and how other collectors have taken on the task of building their own collections. It was therefore with some excitement that we made our way up to New Haven to see this show of the collection of Allan Chasanoff.

Let’s start with a simple summary: this is the most intriguing collection show we have seen in quite a long time. Chasanoff’s collection is made up of a wide variety of images and subject matter, all with a common theme: that somewhere in the image a visual dislocation is taking place. As a thematic construct, it’s endlessly quirky and interesting. There are puzzles and juxtapositions, reflections and odd camera angles, distortions and paradoxes. With each and every striking picture, effort is required to figure out “what is going on”.

We very much like the structural concept of this collection. It’s not a “greatest hits” collection, nor a deep study of one master. There are plenty of unknown artists here. In fact, it is a carefully constructed group of images that highlight the optical trickery that can happen in photography. It is the image that matters, not who made it, or whether anyone else thought it was important. The show is consistently surprising and visually stimulating as you move from image to image.

On top of this tremendous collection is layered an unusual curatorial device: rehang the show a handful of times during the exhibition, and let various groups of people from the community do the choosing. Two “image stables” have been created at each end of the gallery, holding 20 or so pictures each. Images can be easily taken from the image stable and moved into the main gallery areas to interchange with something else. What happens is that the groups see different connections between specific works, and that the whole show gets thrown up into the air every few weeks. Given the nature of the work in this collection, this is an amazingly innovative and egalitarian idea, and one that matches the idea of risk taking that flows through all the pictures.

Collector’s POV: There were plenty of great images in this show that would add some spice to our collection, while still fitting into our general thematic plan. Here are a few:

  • Eliot Elisofon, Untitled, 1940s
  • Claude Cahun, Je donnerais ma vie, Jersey, 1936
  • Gordon Matta-Clark, Conical Intersect, 1975
  • Grant Mudford, The Pike, Long Beach, California, 1979
  • Kim Steele, Hoover I (Dam), 1979
  • Ralston Crawford, Cologne Ruins, 1951
  • Clarence John Laughlin, The Spell of the Shadow, No. 1, 1953
  • Robert Frank, Edge of Doom, 1950
  • Aaron Siskind, Acolman 2, 1955

Overall, we came away highly impressed with the strength of this eclectic collection, and of the thoughtful process required to build it over the years. You will be rewarded if you make the effort to go see this show.

Rating: ** (2 stars) VERY GOOD (rating system defined here)

First Doubt: Optical Confusion in Modern Photography
Through January 4th

Yale University Art Gallery
1111 Chapel Street
New Haven, CT 06520

A Ratings System For Exhibits and Shows

We’ve happy to report that we’ve survived the first three full months of writing this blog and along the way, we’ve learned many lessons about how to make the content crisper and more useful. One of the things we’ve spent some time thinking about is how to make the gallery show and museum exhibit reviews more helpful. The fact that we seem to end each review by saying the show is worth seeing has been bothering us; this doesn’t seem to give the reader enough information to make an intelligent decision about whether it is worth his/her time.

It is our view that the most precious resource any of us has is our time. And there are few things worse than blocking out some time to go to see a show, only to travel there and find that it was a complete waste of this limited resource. So we have devised a simple ratings system for shows and exhibits with time as its central focus. Depending on how much time you normally spend on seeing shows in a given year, the system should be able to give you a decent guide as to which ones are likely to merit your attention.

Here’s the framework:

3 stars: EXCELLENT. If you only go to one show a month, or approximately 10-12 shows a year, you should limit yourself to this category, as you can’t afford any missteps. These are, in our opinion, the best photography shows of the year, based on the quality of the work, the level of scholarship that accompanies the exhibit, and its overall “thought provokingness“.

2 stars: VERY GOOD. If you go to one exhibit a week, or approximately 50 shows a year, then this is the category for you. It has a broader mix of large and small, broad and narrow shows, all of very good quality.

1 star: GOOD. This could be called “the best of the rest”, a sort of top half of all the potential shows one could see in and around New York. If going to lots of shows is a hobby and you are interested in all kinds of photography, then this is our list of things worth seeing. There is a nugget of interest buried in each and every one, even if many of the shows are somewhat flawed or may be one dimensional. But since you love going to shows, you can handle some unevenness in quality.

While we could “grade the shows on a curve” and thereby ensure that there were the right number in each category, the reality is that the exhibits are spread out in time over an entire year, so we have to make judgements without knowing what great and terrible shows will come along in the future. So we’ll try to apply the criteria fairly and consistently, and if we end up with more or less in any one group, so be it.

In the next few days, we’ll be going back and retroactively rating the shows of the previous three months, not because you are likely to care about the rating of a show that is now closed, but more for consistency’s sake and to try and set some patterns of how we plan to approach the ratings going forward.

Finally, while this new system has the trappings of objectivity, it is of course a subjective exercise in the end, and there will be shows we fail to go see, even if they are of high quality, just because their subject matter isn’t of interest to us or the artist isn’t on our radar. There will also be shows we don’t like that you might find amazing, given the differences in peoples tastes and collections. So take it all with a grain of salt. Our hope is that the number of people who are pleased with this system will far outweigh the number who are somehow angry because we didn’t rate their show or exhibit highly enough.

As always, comments are always welcome, so we can continue to refine the reviews and make them more relevant and useful.

Auction Preview: Photographs, November 26, 2008 @Christie’s South Kensington

A haphazard mix of photographs has been gathered together for this mop-up sale at Christie’s South Kensington location. When you’ve become the high volume leader (as Christie’s has), it is inevitable that a decent portion of what is consigned falls into the bottom end of the range; by sequestering these lots off into a sale of their own, they can be focused at collectors who are looking for lower end or secondary images, without distracting from the top end VIPs (very important pictures). 32 lots in the sale come from gallerist James Danziger (who writes an excellent blog on photography, found here), with another 23 coming from the Springfield Collection (mostly 1930s German works).

In total, the sale has 168 lots available, with a total high estimate of 535000 Pounds. Approximately 87% of the lots are in the Low price range (see below), with just over 46% of the works being later prints.
Here’s the price breakdown:
Total Low Lots (high estimate below 5000 Pounds): 146
Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): 393000 Pounds
Total Mid Lots (high estimate between 5000 and 25000 Pounds): 22
Total Mid Estimate: 142000 Pounds
Total High Lots (high estimate above 25000 Pounds): 0
Total High Estimate: 0 Pounds


Unfortunately, there just isn’t much to tempt us in this sale. The only lot that catches our eye is Lot 154 Daido Moriyama, How to Create a Beautiful Picture: Fin (City), 1988 (image at right). We still don’t have a Moriyama in the collection, but we’ll certainly acquire one at some point.

Given the material arrayed here, we can’t really imagine this sale blowing the doors off in this economic environment, so perhaps this will be a good hunting ground for bargains.

November 26th
85 Old Brompton Road
London SW7 3LD

Rinko Kawauchi, Aila

JTF (just the facts): Rinko Kawauchi, Aila, published in 2005 by FOIL. (Cover image at right.) This book is a revised edition of the book originally published by Little More in 2004. 165 color images (one image per page), with no text (also no pagination or image titles).

Comments/Context: It is always interesting to watch to see which new emerging photographers somehow find a way to break through the noise and separate themselves from all the others trying to get attention. Rinko Kawauchi is a Japanese photographer in her mid 30s who has published a handful of books, won a few international prizes, and generated a surprising amount of buzz. When the press releases use phrases like “one of most celebrated photographers of her generation” for someone you have barely heard of, you know the spin is on. So when we recently came across her book, Aila, we felt compelled to get a better handle on her work.

Aila is a carefully sequenced group of primarily square format color images of what might be called “the essence of life”. There are images of baby animals, insects, flower and plant seedlings, and births of various kinds (human and animal), mixed with a few pictures of waves, sand and forests. If you haven’t seen these works (one of the series is shown at left), you are probably thinking to yourself about now that this sounds like the ultimate in tired, self important, camera club cliche.

And yet, there is an unexpected sensitivity to many of these images. Most are lit with a fresh, almost unreal, white light that gives them a fleeting, dreamy quality. While there are a few darker moods interspersed in this body of work, most of the pictures have an authentic, youthful innocence and optimism to them that has been missing from the vast majority of contemporary photography in recent times. Aila means “big family” in Turkish, and taken together, the collective group of pictures does have an inclusive, real sense of family and natural interconnectedness.
There is clearly some unevenness in quality from page to page in this book; more than a few of these pictures descend into the world of snapshots. But this criticism notwithstanding, there is a clear, consistent and new point of view here. Could it be that we’re all tired of fear and skepticism and that hope is back in style?
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Collector’s POV: While Kawauchi’s work doesn’t fit well into our particular collection, I can see why others might find a group of her best images, hung together in a grid, to be quite striking. Kawauchi has had shows at Galerie Priska Pasquer in Cologne (site here) in 2006 and Cohan and Leslie in New York (site here) in 2007, but her work has not appeared on the secondary market until recently. A set of 9 images from the Aila series are up for sale at Sotheby’s London (preview here), with an estimate of 12000-18000 Pounds (the images are each approximately 10 inches square and are individually from editions of 6). Regardless of these market facts, the book itself is a winner and well worth having in your library.
UPDATE: The set of 9 images up for sale at Sotheby’s London (referenced above) was bought in.

Auction Preview: Photographs of London and Contemporary, 20th Century & 19th Century Photographs, November 20, 2008 @Bloomsbury London

Bloomsbury’s upcoming photography auction in London has two distinct parts: a thematic grouping of pictures loosely centered on the city of London, and then a more straightforward mixed group of photography from across the history of the medium.

The London group has a wide variety of images, from all time periods (19th century through to contemporary), displayed in roughly chronological order. There are city landscapes and architectural views, street scenes and people, wartime shots, portraits of politicians, London fashion images, and even a few pictures of the Beatles, the Clash, and Johnny Rotten. I’m not sure the “London” theme gives resonance to everything that’s included here, but I understand the idea of using a theme to put a framework around a group of pictures like these.

The rest of the sale (displayed in reverse chronological order, just to keep you guessing) follows well worn paths. In total, the sale has a total of 302 lots on offer, with a total high estimate of 632300 Pounds. Here’s the price breakdown:

Total Low Lots (high estimate below 5000 Pounds): 287
Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): 506300 Pounds

Total Mid Lots (high estimate between 5000 and 25000 Pounds): 15
Total Mid Estimate: 126000 Pounds

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

With 95% of the lots in this sale below 5000 Pounds, and many below 1000 Pounds, this is the definition of a Low end sale, with a broad range of material available at reasonable prices.

For our collection, in the London section of the sale, we liked:

  • Lot 26 Wolfgang Suschitzky, St. Paul’s Cathedral, 1942
  • Lot 70 Roger Mayne, Southam Street, 1958 (image at right)

In the more general area of the sale, we found the following lots of interest:

  • Lot 166 Elliott Erwitt, New York City (Tony’s of Worth Street), 1969/Later
  • Lot 184 Bill Brandt, Nude, 1954
  • Lot 185 Bill Brandt, East Sussex Coast, 1959
  • Lot 245 Walker Evans, Barn Window Detail, 1930/Later
  • Lot 247 Berenice Abbott, Financial District Rooftops, 1938
  • Lot 263 Charles Jones, Gazania Splendorous, c1900
  • Lot 265 Charles Jones, Narcissus, Madame De Graaf, c1900 (image at right)
  • Lot 300 William Henry Fox Talbot, Fern, 1863

While there are few real stand out images in this sale, there are plenty of attractively priced secondary images that are worth a look.

Photographs of London and Contemporary, 20th Century & 19th Century Photographs
November 20th

Bloomsbury Auctions
Bloomsbury House
24 Maddox Street
Mayfair
London W1S 1PP

Taiji Matsue, Nest @Cohen Amador

JTF (just the facts): 5 large color C prints (50×60) from the “Nest” series and 12 smaller color C prints (19×19) from the “Cell” series, all from 2008 and in editions of 5, shown throughout the gallery (installation shot of the “Cell” series at right).

Comments/Context: Taiji Matsue is a technologist. I say this not because he uses digital capture and Photoshop, because even the Luddites among us are doing these things in today’s world. No, Matsue’s work and underlying approach seem to stem from a comfort with and genuine interest in technology: in computer programming, display electronics, and cartography, and how these technologies are related to the process of image making.

We first became aware of Matsue’s work a year or so ago when Paul Amador showed us several of his black and white city scenes and landscapes. In both sets of work, the surfaces are flattened out, the horizon is cropped out, the camera angle is from above or aerial, and the textures are brought into sharp focus. The traditional landscapes (if you can call them that) are very reminiscent of Frederick Sommer’s shimmering shots of the desert. The urban landscapes are low contrast, topographical studies, with windows and buildings used to highlight the interlocking patterns and repetitions. These have some echoes of Lewis Baltz, or perhaps 1970s Harry Callahan.

The work in this new show builds on these earlier themes and introduces the elements of color and larger/smaller scale. The “Nest” project is derived from an idea from computer programming: the concept of nesting subroutines, allowing a programmer to build a hierarchy of detail that is called only when necessary. The “Nest” images are large images with a huge amount of detail, “hyper real” you might call them. These are works that can be taken in on one level from 10 feet, and then can be engaged intimately at the same level of sharpness right up close (think Clifford Ross). This “feature” of the pictures creates a feeling of drifting in and out, as you move up and down the scale of magnification. They’re a little like playing with Google Earth, zooming in and out. The subject matter and general approach is the same as the earlier work: landscapes and urban studies, with the same cropping and camera angles, once again focused on patterns that are enhanced by this staggering level of detail.

The “Cell” series evolve these same concepts in another direction (perhaps derived from microprocessor or display architectures, or simply from spreadsheets or maps). In these images, Matsue has taken one of his standard size images and “discovered” one single “cell” 1/200th of the size of the overall negative, and then blown this small area up into a larger work. Up close, the effect is that the images are pixelated, with almost Pointillist dots of grainy color making up the magnified images. The subjects seem like ants shot from the moon (what are these tiny little people doing?).

While all of this is interesting at a technical level, the question is whether it is durable art. I found a few of the “Nest” images, particularly Leon, Mexico, to work quite well, the hive of small buildings and colors creating an all over pattern that was mesmerizing. Others in the series were less effective, and while I got the point he was making, the images weren’t as compelling, or perhaps seemed too reminiscent of the work of other artists. Of the “Cell” series, overall, I found the texture and graininess of the images intriguing, as the subject matter was broken down into points of color. Again, I think there were a few winners, and a decent number of more average examples.

There is a two part interview with Taiji Matsue in conjunction with this exhibit to be found at Modern Art Obsession, here and here. Matsue’s new book, Cell, is also available.

Collector’s POV: Matsue’s “Nest” images are being sold between $7500 and $11500 and the smaller “Cell” works are between $2000 and $4500. Since we have virtually no color in our personal collection, one of Matsue’s earlier works (likely an urban landscape) would fit better for us. That said, I think there are a handful of memorable pieces here that would be worth adding to your collection, especially in the context of considering how technology (as a mindset rather than as a tool) is influencing the photography of the 21st century.

Rating: * (1 star) GOOD (rating scale described here)

Taiji Matsue, Nest
Through December 31

Cohen Amador Gallery
41 East 57th Street
New York, NY 10022

Out of Town Gallery Shows (Volume 2)

Earlier in the fall, we offered a list of out of town gallery shows that we would have enjoyed seeing, had we been in the right city at the right time. With this post, we’re updating that list to include a number of new shows open through the rest of this season and into the New Year.

Frank Breuer @Richard Levy Gallery, Albuquerque, NM
Through November 26th

Vik Muniz, Paper Trails @ Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco
Through November 29th

Wolfgang Tillmans, Half Page @Regen Projects, Los Angeles
Through December 6th

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Portraits & Drive-In Theaters @Hemphill Fine Arts, Washington, D.C.
Through December 20th

Great Women of Photography: Berenice Abbott & Imogen Cunningham @Lumiere Gallery, Atlanta
Through December 23rd

Horace Bristol, Capturing LIFE, Celebrating a Century @Scott Nichols Gallery, San Francisco
Through January 3rd

Michael Wolf, Transparent City @Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco
Through January 3rd

Plus Ca Change: Daido Moriyama, Toshio Shibata, Shomei Tomatsu @Tepper Takayama Fine Arts, Boston
Through January 6th

Lee Friedlander, New Mexico @Andrew Smith Gallery, Santa Fe, NM
Through January 15th

Ruth Bernhard, The Small Pictures @Robert Tat Gallery, San Francisco
Through January 17th

As always, if you’re a collector and have seen any of these shows, give us your thoughts in the Comments section.

Auction Preview: Photographs, November 22, 2008 @Phillips London

Given the nature of the auction business, it is often the case that collections and groups of work are sold all at once, the result of death, divorce, or some other life changing event that requires the liquidation of one’s assets. Parsing through the catalog’s fine print, it is sometimes possible to reconstruct where the lots came from en masse, or where the original groupings were. The current London sale from Phillips has a very structured feel as a result of this kind of group selling, with distinct sections of work that are nearly unrelated, intermingled with various lots from other consignors. Let’s take a look at the underlying framework of this sale:

Lots 1-5 Oxfam benefit lots
Lots 6-23 Mixed/random (mostly pre 1975)
Lots 24-31 Mapplethorpe lots from Lisa Lyon
Lots 32-101 Mixed contemporary lots (Phillips’ bread and butter)
Lots 102-120 Arab/Iranian lots (new area of exploration, perhaps another area to separate themselves from the rest of the auction pack)
Lots 121-130 Contemporary Chinese/Korean lots (area of Phillips’ leadership, due to being the first to bring this type of work to the auction market)
Lots 131-175 Japanese lots from the Jacobsen/Ishimoto collection (mostly 1930s)
Lots 176-188 Other Japanese lots (mostly contemporary)

So depending on your interests, you can likely focus on certain parts of this catalog and browse through the others as background or general education. The sale has a total of 188 lots up for sale, with a total high estimate of 1623500 Pounds. Here’s the price breakdown:

Total Low Lots (high estimate below 5000 Pounds): 98
Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): 296500 Pounds

Total Mid Lots (high estimate between 5000 and 25000 Pounds): 81
Total Mid Estimate: 807000 Pounds

Total High Lots (high estimate above 25000 Pounds): 9
Total High Estimate: 520000 Pounds

The heaviness at the Low end of this sale is due to the large number of low priced lots in the vintage Japanese collection. Otherwise, this is a generally strong Mid range sale.

For our collection, there are some interesting pieces among the Jacobsen/Ishimoto collection, many of which aren’t often readily available here in the US:

  • Lot 134 Ori Umesaka, Flower I, II, III, IV, c1930
  • Lot 156 Iwao Yamawaki, Bicycle rack, 1930-1932 (image at right)
  • Lot 173 Iwao Yamawaki, Abstraction (scissors and cardboard with shadow), 1932

Beyond these, we also like the following contemporary lots, even though they don’t fit into our collection as directly:

  • Lot 66 Desiree Dolron, Librario Escuela Julio Mela, 2002-2003
  • Lot 70 Ruud van Empel, Moon #1, 2005
  • Lot 82 Edward Burtynsky, Shipyard #22, Qili Port, Zheliang Province, China, 2005

While these Japanese lots may be of interest to those attending Paris Photo (where this year’s focus is on Japanese photography), we wonder about how broad an audience this work actually has. It will also be interesting to see how the Arab/Iranian work does, given that it is new to most collectors. All in all, a bit of a strange mix, but at least it isn’t a boring rehashing of the usual suspects.

Photographs
November 22nd

Phillips De Pury & Company
Howick Place
London SW1P 1BB

Short Note on Auction Results

One quick clarification on our Auction Results posts. We tend to get our summary statistics on auctions out rather quickly, often just a day or two after the sale has ended. It is always the case that there are lots that are picked up by buyers after the sale is over, usually at or below the reserve, and these sales are fed back into the auction house’s results page sporadically for a week or two. These sales raise the total proceeds and lower the buy-in rate incrementally, even though they didn’t actually sell in the live auction. So if you see summary results from an auction house (or other source) two or three weeks after the sale, and they look “better” that what we reported, it is likely a result not of our mistakes (we like to think we are pretty diligent with the numbers) but of these after sales getting added in.

New York, N. Why?: Photographs by Rudy Burckhardt, 1937-1940 @Met

JTF (just the facts): 24 framed diptychs, consisting of 67 black and white images, 6 poems, and an excerpt from the New Yorker, mounted to unbound album pages (almost like a scrapbook). Displayed in three small back rooms, behind the current British prints show. All of the images are from 1937-1940. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: The 1930s were an exciting time for photography in New York city. Berenice Abbott was doing her Changing New York series. Walker Evans had his seminal American Photographs show at the MoMA. Margaret Bourke-White, Helen Levitt, Weegee, and Andre Kertesz, among many others, were all working around town. The combined output of these great photographers has given us a memorable portrait of the city and its inhabitants at that time.
Rudy Burckhardt emigrated to the US from Switzerland in 1935 and found himself taking photographs in New York at this same time. Burckhardt selected a group of his images, paired them with poems by his then roommate, Edwin Denby, and put together a self published portfolio of work, called New York, N. Why?, which has been unbound and shown in full in this exhibit. The slim volume is divided into three sections: Part 1 which is focused on architectural fragments, walls, and stand pipes, Part 2 which depicts storefronts, advertising and commercial signs, and Part 3 which shows pedestrians from various angles. It is clear that these images were selected and sequenced very carefully, as the structure of the work as a whole is very crisp and defined.
An easy conclusion from scanning these images is that there are plenty of echoes of Abbott and particularly Evans, and that Burckhardt was a talented, but basically second tier practictioner. And even if that is the ultimate verdict on this work, I found a surprising number of excellent images in this show, and a strong, but subtle point of view in these seemingly plain photos that is indeed different from those who were working with the same material at the same time. The walls and stand pipes of the first section are much more pared down, abstracted and austere (the influence of Mondrian discussed in the essay seems right on), and the best images of signs, storefronts and bodegas of Part 2 are direct, bold and graphic, without being heavy. In Part 3, I liked very much the low angle shots of feet and sidewalks, especially those with manhole covers or the embedded patterns of circles as part of the composition. While not every image is a winner on its own, together they show intriguing patterns quite successfully.
Collector’s POV: While we are city scene collectors, we haven’t spent much time on Burckhardt to date. There doesn’t seem to be much of his best vintage work moving around in the secondary market, and I certainly haven’t seen many of the images in this show anywhere for sale in the past few years. But I will say that I came away from this show with renewed respect for Burckhardt’s work and its verifiable difference from others of the same period. I can now absolutely imagine adding a Burckhardt to our collection, should we come across one of the best from this series out in the open market. As a small, tight show, it’s well worth a visit.
There is also an amazingly faithful page-by-page reproduction of the album (containing all the images and poems) available from Nazraeli Press, with an essay from Met curator Doug Eklund. Reading the fine print, you’ll discover our friends at JGS once again supporting a high quality photography show/book.

Rating: ** (2 stars) VERY GOOD (rating scale defined here)
Through January 4th
1000 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10028

Ralston Crawford @Zabriskie

JTF (just the facts): A total of 25 works of art: 4 paintings, 4 drawings/watercolors, and 17 photographs, shown through the main gallery and back room. Crawford died in 1978 and most of the work in this show is from his later life (i.e the 1960s and 1970s) although there are a handful of earlier pieces mixed in as well. (Installation image at right.)

Comments/Context: Ralston Crawford is best known as a 1930s/1940s painter of pared down and often abstracted views of American vernacular architecture: industrial buildings, docks, factories and the like. He is often lumped in with Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth as a Precisionist, or more loosely associated with artists like Stuart Davis or movements with titles like Geometric Abstraction or Synthetic Cubism. He made crisp, flat, simplified images of recognizable objects, where detail was eliminated and the relationships between form, line, color, and space were carefully selected and balanced. With the arrival of the wild, emotional excesses of Abstract Expressionism in the early 1950s, he was largely marginalized and forgotten.
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What is less known about Crawford is that he was also a photographer. Starting in the late 1930s, he used a 35mm camera as a kind of sketch pad, where he would capture images he found out in the world, to later be reworked and synthesized down for his paintings. As the years passed, he began to see the some of the photographs not as intermediate steps but as works of art in and of themselves, and in his later life, his activity as a photographer was much more pronounced.
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One of the neat things about this show is that Crawford’s photographs, drawings and oils of the same subject have been hung together, so you can really see how his mind was working through the problems of picture making. The installation shot above (not easy to see I realize) shows 4 different iterations of the same anchor, and how he carefully chose his elements and then amplified and distorted them to get the effects he wanted.

I think Crawford is under appreciated in terms of his place in the history of photography. Prior to the late-1930s, abstraction in photography was still in its infant stages. Many artists both in America and Europe were experimenting with pared down industrial forms and Modernist simplification, but most of the objects are still clearly recognizable. Crawford’s early photographs provide an interesting bridge to Callahan and particularly Siskind, who both came along in the late 1940s and 1950s and really started to break things down further. Crawford’s later photographs continue along the same path, exploring forms and shapes, light and dark, while still adhering to his consistent and original point of view.

Collector’s POV: In the past five years, there have been a total of two (2) Ralston Crawford photographs available in the auction market (one sold for just under $5000 and the other was bought in), so his work is scarce. (There is also one nice, albeit small Crawford available in the upcoming sale at Rago, preview here.) The photographs in this show are priced between $7500 and $15000, and are generally 8×10, 11×14 or slightly larger. The oil paintings are priced between $140000 and $200000, although a few are NFS (not for sale). As collectors of city and industrial imagery, we are absolutely on the look out for a Crawford photograph to add to our collection. Even if you’re not in the market for a Crawford, the show is worth seeing, especially to consider the interplay of photography and painting in the history of American Art.
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By the way, there was a nice retrospective catalog on Crawford put out by the Whitney in 1986, if you are looking for some background on Crawford for your library.

Rating: * (1 star) GOOD (rating system defined here)

Ralston Crawford
Through November 29th

Zabriskie Gallery
41 East 57th Street
New York, NY 10022

Paris Photo, November 13-16, 2008

Paris Photo opens next week, but unfortunately, we won’t be going this year. According to the show website (here), there will be 86 galleries/dealers and 21 book publishers exhibiting (38% of the exhibitors are new this year), and 66 magazines and other press covering the event. It seems from a quick glance at the list that there are fewer US-based galleries represented than in prior years (the usual suspects are present, but the next tier down seems thinner.) They’re expecting 40000 visitors, but that sure seems high, given the tough economic times.

The theme this year is Japanese photography, with over 130 Japanese photographers showing work (the largest such grouping in Europe ever, according to the site). There are special sections of the show devoted to Japanese galleries, book publishers, and artist videos.

Since we won’t be attending the show this year, we are hoping to get some insightful comments from other collectors who are going. We’re interested in the general feel of the show, how crowded it is, and which galleries were showing something unexpected or exciting. Feel free to call yourself a “special assignment correspondent” for DLK COLLECTION!

And don’t forget, no trip to Paris would be complete without at least one visit to Laduree (site here) for their best-in-the-world macarons (image at right). We usually go to the shop on Rue Bonaparte in Saint-Germain, but there are a couple of others around town as well.

UPDATE: There are videos of the show here.

Paris Photo
November 13-16
Carrousel du Louvre
99 Rue de Rivoli
75001 Paris
France

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