Lisa Kereszi, Fantasies @Yancey Richardson

JTF (just the facts): A total of 6 color images, all mounted to board and not framed, hung in the smaller project gallery in the back. All of the images are 20×24, in editions of 5. The negatives are from the period 2000-2003. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: First published in 1976, Susan Meiselas‘ Carnival Strippers pulled back the curtain on the lives of the women who worked at strip shows, and the men who came to watch them. It was a compelling portrait of vulnerable lives in a tired, alienated existence, and it became a classic in the history of photography. Part of what was unusual about this project was that it had several viewpoints: the men watching the women, the women performing and watching the men, and Meiselas watching them both.
Several decades later, Lisa Kereszi has taken a walk down the same road, and found that not much has changed in the intervening decades. Her work is split between off stage views of strippers and burlesque performers and empty views of worn clubs and theaters. While Meiselas often focused on the interaction between performer and voyeur, Kereszi has chosen quieter shadowy moments, where the racy peep show fantasy has been exposed as a fraud – a dancer mundanely changing her shoes, or a tawdry stage with plywood walls and a cheap mirrored disco ball. While the pictures are well made, when the lights are on, 1980s chic is pretty dreary and uninspiring.Collector’s POV: The prints in the show are priced between $2100 and $2600. Since this show is so small (6 pictures), it’s hard to draw a conclusion about the overall nature of the work, since some of the images are fragmented interior shots, while others are more emotionally charged documentary portraits. Perhaps the book is a better vehicle for a more deep and nuanced narrative.
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Rating: * (1 star) GOOD (rating system described here)
Transit Hub:
  • The artist’s website (here)
  • Video of Kereszi on Governor’s Island (here)
  • Review of Fantasies at 5B4 (here)
  • 50 States Project (here)
  • Dikeou Collection (here)
Lisa Kereszi, Fantasies
Through May 9th
535 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011

Masato Seto, Binran @Yancey Richardson

JTF (just the facts): A total of 9 color images, framed in black with no mat, hung in the main gallery space. The prints come in two sizes, 30×40 or 40×50, in editions of 8 and 6 respectively. The negatives are from 2006 and 2007. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Masato Seto’s images of Taiwanese betel nut kiosks are dazzling and exotic, falling into a more general category of anthropological studies of remarkable foreign subcultures. In these pictures, Seto has made flash-lit night images of outlandish roadside binran shops. In each work, a scantily clad but bored female attendant (often sitting on a stool) stares out from a surreal glass cage reminiscent of a window display or an aquarium. Each pod is glowing with bright colors and harsh glare, literally “framed” by neon or fluorescent lines and swirls of light around the edges of the enclosure.

An initial reaction to these pictures might be that they are exposing overt exploitation, and perhaps in some way they are. But when many of these images are shown together (as they are here), any trace of specific personality or story seems to melt away, and the pictures become an exercise in theme and variation (almost like a set of Becher water towers), where the outrageous architectural details (including the doll-like women who are part of the scene) become the focal points.

Collector’s POV: The smaller prints in this show are priced at $4000; the larger ones are $6250. A signed monograph of the Binran work, published by Little More, is available from the gallery for $30; this book is well worth flipping through or buying, as seeing another 20 or 30 of these images (beyond those in the show) makes the breadth of the project and the diversity of shop styles more apparent.

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

Transit Hub:
  • The artist’s website (here)
  • 2008 Interview: The Sweet Allure of Betel Nut Beauties (here)
  • Concurrent show at Jackson Fine Art, Atlanta (here)
  • Silent Mode (here)
Masato Seto, Binran
Through May 9th

Yancey Richardson Gallery
535 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011

Andreas Gursky, Werke Works 80-08

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2008 by Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Moderna Museet Stockholm, Vancouver Art Gallery, and Hatje Cantz. 272 pages, with 155 color images. Includes an essay by Martin Hentschel. (Cover image at right.)

Comments/Context: We already own two Gursky monographs: one from the 1998 Kunsthalle Dusseldorf show and another from the 2001 MoMA show. So why do we need another, you might ask? The reason is that this smaller volume is trying to do something different. Instead of being a large format, coffee table sized book with big, beautiful pictures, this monograph is the size of a hardback novel, and the pictures are printed much smaller; what’s interesting is that there are many more of them, nearly twice as many as in either of the other books. While this isn’t a catalog raissoné, and many of the thumbnail images fail to evoke the grandeur of their mural sized cousins, the deeper dive into Gursky’s archives helps to tell a much fuller and more varied story about his evolution as an artist.

For quite a while now I have been wondering about the early work of the Becher students and how it shows the influence of their teaching style. An oversimplified definition of the Becher formula is as follows: 1.) choose a large subject, with lots of different potential examples, 2.) choose a consistent approach to picture making, 3.) take lots of pictures in this manner, and 4.) display some of them together (the “typology”) to get at the underlying essence of the subject. How Gursky internalized this teaching (and how he eventually evolved it into his own personal vision) is clearly shown in this book. His first subjects were interiors of restaurants, and he soon moved on to desk attendants (pairs). If you’ve never seen these images, they have all the Becher hallmarks: cool detached, frontal viewpoint, uniform and meticulous view camera picture making. It’s in Gursky’s next series, the Sunday Walkers, where the rigidity of the formula starts to break down; the pictures are more fluid, still using a common theme, but allowing for more flexibility of vision.

In the next few years, Gursky started to make his first bird’s eye view images, with tiny ant-like people dwarfed by the immense scale of their surroundings, the images still rigorous in their style, but now much less cookie cutter. By the time you get to the early 1990s, the Gursky that took the art world by storm is now in top form: extra large sized prints of far flung locales, where hotels, office buildings, industrial warehouses, raves and stock exchanges become metaphors for the spectacle of our anonymous contemporary lifestyle, minimalism and conceptualism merging (with the help of some digital manipulation) into something altogether new.

The reason I like this book is that many more patterns emerge when you see a larger sample of Gursky’s images. Since most of his recent works are printed mural sized and have become so expensive, one hardly gets a chance to see more than one or two at any one time these days; it’s hard to plot much of a line with only a couple of points. If you’re interested in the broader trajectory of Gursky’s career and want to place the themes and approaches he has come back to again and again in a larger context, this is a good book for your library. The exhibition should also be well worth a visit.

Collector’s POV: Andreas Gursky is represented by Matthew Marks Gallery in New York (here). Gursky’s large prints tend to be made in editions of 4, 5, or 6, and are routinely sold above $100000, ranging all the way up into the low millions of dollars. Smaller prints are often made in editions of 12, 25, 30 or even 60, which generally drives the prices down to a zone between $5000 and $50000.

Transit Hub:

  • The complete list of Gursky’s contemporaries while studying with the Bechers: Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte, Tata Ronkholz, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth, and Petra Wunderlich
  • 2001 MoMA exhibition (here)
  • Jerry Saltz: It’s Boring at the Top, New York magazine, 2007 (here)
  • Video of Gursky exhibit at Kunstmuseum Basel (here)
  • 2008 Matthew Marks show (DLK COLLECTION review here)
  • Upcoming 2009 Vancouver Art Gallery exhibit, in conjunction with this book (here)

Slide Show, The Color Photographs of Helen Levitt

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2005 by powerHouse Books (here). 120 pages, with 110 color images. Includes a foreword by John Szarkowski.

Comments/Context: I don’t think it was until we moved back to New York that I really started to resonate with Helen Levitt’s work. Her 1930s and 1940s black and white images of children in the streets, while undoubtedly well crafted, somehow didn’t grab my attention; I was more drawn to the architectural transformations documented by Berenice Abbott from the same period.

But it is her color work from the 1960s and 1970s that has made me change my mind a bit on Levitt’s rightful place in the history books. How’s this for a statement: of the great black and white photographers working prior to the 1950s, Levitt was the most successful at embracing color photography and making a superlative body of color work in her later career. The only other “old school” photographers I can come up with who made the transition to decent color work are Harry Callahan (his later dye transfers), Andre Kertesz (Polaroids) and Walker Evans (Polaroids). If I’ve missed some glaring great example, leave it in the comments, but I think the statement stands – Levitt did something that almost no one else did.

The images in this book perfectly capture the feeling of New York in the summer (no wonder her work is often labeled “social realism”). Virtually all the pictures are of people, not straight on portraits, but people in the context of their lives: on street corners, with pets, near parked cars, sitting on stoops, smoking, waiting, taking a break. Her compositions often capture the world slightly off-kilter, with spontaneous secondary stories playing out on the periphery, just like they do in real life. On first glance, these images look like snapshots; upon further review, they turn out to be tiny vignettes of everyday life, somehow optimistic amidst generally poor living conditions and plenty of old age. Her use of color isn’t self-conscious; she doesn’t use super-saturated attention grabbing color. Instead, color is used as just one of many tools that can make a picture resolve into something interesting, the hood or a car, or a dress, or a door frame suddenly providing a visual contrast. And even though there are a few dated fashions and hairstyles, these pictures have a timeless quality to them, as though you could step into the street in parts of New York in August and see these exact same stories playing out all over again.
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Collector’s POV: Levitt’s vintage silver prints from the 1930s and 1940s come up at auction from time to time, ranging in price from $10000 to $60000. Later prints from these same negatives are typically priced between $2000 and $6000. Her dye transfer prints have been much more scarce: only a handful of prints (some vintage, some printed in the 1990s) at auction in the past five years, selling for between $2000 and $12000. Levitt is represented by Laurence Miller Gallery (here) in New York, Fraenkel Gallery (here) in San Francisco, and Robert Klein Gallery (here) in Boston. While these images don’t neatly fit into our city/industrial genre (too many people), they are growing on me over time, so perhaps there will be a place in our collection for one or more of these prints at some point in the future.

Transit Hub:

  • NY Times obituary (here)
  • Interviews: NPR 2002 (here) and WNYC 2001 (here)
  • James Agee’s forward to A Way of Seeing (here)
  • Crosstown (here)
  • Helen Levitt – In the street @FOAM, Oct 2008-Jan 2009 (here, in Dutch)

Connectors, Grazing and Transit Hubs

In recent weeks, I’ve been thinking a bit more about exactly what it is that we as photography collectors are actually doing, and how this site might be reconsidered so that it has more relevance to those activities, both for ourselves and for our readers.

After mulling this over for some time, I’ve come to the simple conclusion that for most people, collecting is a search for meaning, a process of finding items that have some underlying significance or importance for them, or that somehow make a real connection to their lives. For some, it is the ongoing pleasure derived from owning the objects; for others, it is the action and education in support the search that is the source of repeated interest.

When we go to a gallery or museum show, read a photography book, or flip through an auction catalog, what we are doing is looking for connections: those pieces that seem to have a bright light shining on them – objects that stand out from the crowd, that resonate with our own personal world view (and we all know them immediately when we see them, like a lightning strike, even if they are wildly different from person to person). Education generally increases the likelihood of understanding and appreciating a work, so artists, dealers, museum curators and auction house specialists can all be sources of information that lead to a deeper appreciation of a photograph.

In the process of our often manic “hunting and gathering”, each collector has his or her own calculus going on behind the scenes that determines which pictures are worth paying attention to: perhaps it is those that have some sense of beauty in our eyes, or those that are challenging and knock us out of our numbness. Some of us see patterns and relationships between pictures and artists, others respond to overt or subtle emotional qualities. While collectors come in all shapes and sizes, from intuitive to structured, in the end, we are all doing the same thing: connecting with images. So maybe we should start calling ourselves “connectors”, focusing on those elusive qualities in a photograph that make our eyes (and brain) light up, rather than the acquisitions that are the end result of the larger process.

If we follow this train of thought, where collecting is really just a euphemism for connecting, then what is a site like this good for? What does the form itself provide, and what should we be trying to accomplish within the confines of its structure, if we are trying to optimize “connecting”?

From our own experience on this site, it is clear that the blog (as a form) is not well suited to long, reasoned arguments, complex reporting, or deeply historical/analytical essays. Print publications like weekly and monthly magazines (ArtForum or The New Yorker) and daily newspapers (The New York Times) are still a better venue for this kind of writing, regardless of whether it is scholarly in tone or more conversational. Ideas that require a complicated exposition don’t seem to fare as well when scrolling down endless pages; while we might have visions of writing these kinds of more in depth articles, reading them at significant length on any kind of screen can be tedious.

Blogs seem to be best suited to the 500 word summary (5 or 6 paragraphs at most): long enough to provide a handful of meaningful thoughts and ideas, short enough to be easily digestible in a few minutes. (This post is an example of a post that is too long; I expect many will give up before getting to the end.) Given the real time nature of our connected world, blog posts are also excellent for up-to-the-minute, time-based factual reporting (something that printed media does not do particularly well, and has largely migrated to online bretheren). A third important structural feature of blogs is their informal connectivity: the ease with which large amounts of external information (especially background material like long articles, images, and video) can be linked into the body of the text to enhance the reader’s experience (again, something that print media does poorly). So instead of trying to replicate the successes of other media in this new form, we should be focused on trying to exploit these strengths to create new experiences.

When we are jumping around from blog to blog and site to site, mixing our RSS reader feeds with Google searches, looking for “connections”, we are grazing. While this type of reading has its parallels in reading a newspaper and jumping from one article to another, Internet grazing is a bit more like following a trail of breadcrumbs. I think a good portion of our readers come to our site in search of something specific: a review of the recent Walker Evans show, details on an upcoming auction, or more information on Osamu Kanemura. Many come directly from a search engine (where they have searched for this specific item), or perhaps they already know about us, and come to the site knowing that what they are looking for might be here. However they arrive, they are generally looking for a succinct dose of precise information and we need to tailor our site to meet those demands.

What I have come to conclude is that once a reader/collector is here, we have an opportunity to use the strengths of this format to not only deliver our own appropriate content, but to help make a timely, relevant and useful connection to something else (the next breadcrumb). Often this will be another recent post or perhaps one from the archive. But it could just as easily be something outside this destination, that we as collectors already know has some relevance to the subject at hand. This neatly leads to the idea of the site as both a destination and a transit hub.

While some folks are interested in a continuing conversation with us (reading our reporting or hearing our voice/opinions in particular), most are just grazing, and need to make a new connection, to follow a new link, once they have finished with the ideas found here. I’ve come to realize that the single collector/critic, omniscient view of photography (or the art world for that matter) is no longer valid; it’s just an old, inward-looking and outdated way of thinking. I now think that our job (and challenge) is to embrace the polyvalent mixture of interdisciplinary ideas and information swirling around out there in the void and use our experience and judgment as collectors to make sense of the inputs, with the ultimate goal of making connections that increase our readers’ (and our own) sense of meaning in the art around us. If we can help you get connected to something that really catches your attention, we’ve been successful.

Our intention then is to evolve our approach and make this site more of a place of transit, or terminal of sorts, where our role is to provide both our own viewpoint/reporting as well as a synthesized subset of easily and rapidly transferable ideas for further exploration. We must force ourselves to learn to leverage others who provide complementary (and contradictory) perspectives, including those that are beyond the obvious mainstream, out on the edges a bit. So from now on, all of our exhibit/show and book reviews will have a new section at the end (called Transit Hub), which will provide some additional, potentially serendipitous roads to travel down.

This whole endeavor to open up the process of photography collecting continues to be a work in progress, and many of you have provided feedback that was helpful in tuning our direction along the way. A final strength of this blog format is its facility for direct interaction with readers. As such, your comments on this and other topics are always welcome.

Auction Results: Vintage & Contemporary Photography, April 18, 2009 @Heritage

The Photography sale at Heritage last week in Dallas was brutal evidence of just how soft the lower end of the market can be in this environment, especially when mid range collectors fail to show up for the more expensive lots. In general, the buying was soft all the way down to the $2000 minimum bid level, below which things seemed to sell more readily. More specifically, this is the first time since we have been covering auctions in detail that we have witnessed a complete washout: all 18 of the Mid range lots failed to sell (and there were no High end lots in the sale). 0 for 18 is a drubbing that isn’t easily forgotten.

The summary statistics are below:

Total Lots: 293
Pre Sale Total Minimum Price: $648500

Total Lots Sold: 125
Total Lots Bought In: 168
Buy In %: 57.34%
Total Sale Proceeds: $203304

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

Low Total Lots: 275
Low Sold: 125
Low Bought In: 150
Buy In %: 54.55%
Total Low Minimum Price: $476500
Total Low Sold: $203304

Mid Total Lots: 18
Mid Sold: 0
Mid Bought In: 18
Buy In %: 100.00%
Total Mid Minimum Price: $181000
Total Mid Sold: $0

High Total Lots: 0
High Sold: NA
High Bought In: NA
Buy In %: NA
Total High Estimate: NA
Total High Sold: NA

Since we didn’t have estimates to tally (given the way Heritage presented the information), we don’t have any statistical data on percentages above, in and below the estimate range or on surprise lots. That said, the best outcome of the sale was lot 75028 Pierre Dubreuil, Black Cat Cigarettes, 1930, which sold for $15525 against a minimum bid of $6000.

Complete lot by lot results can be found here. Lots available for post auction purchase can be found here.

Heritage Auction Galleries
3500 Maple Avenue
17th Floor
Dallas, TX 75219

Edward Steichen, 1915-1923 @Greenberg

JTF (just the facts): A total of 46 prints: 31 vintage images in the main gallery space, 8 fashion images in the small side gallery, and 7 later prints (city/bridges and fashion) in one of the viewing rooms. All of the images in the main room are from the period 1915 to 1923. Various printing processes were used by Steichen during this period: gum over platinum, toned/regular palladium, palladium and ferroprussiate, and toned/regular gelatin silver. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Concurrent with the big show now on at the ICP chronicling Steichen’s Condé Nast years (here), Howard Greenberg is showing a group of images from Steichen’s transitional period (1915-1923) just prior to joining the world of fashion and publishing. In these prints, Steichen was moving away from soft focus Pictorialism and experimenting with the sharper style of Modernism, borrowing portions from both in a satisfying combination.

This exhibit includes some truly astounding prints, several shown as pairs (the same negative using alternate printing processes, producing markedly different results). Most of the prints combine a simple, spare composition (often a still life) with a lovely warm toned patina (a holdover from Pictorialism).
Nearly all of the works in this show have strong formal qualities: round pears artfully composed on a plate, ribs and seeds of a sunflower, windows and fire escapes of a brick building, arched petals of white flowers against dark backgrounds, head shot portraits, hands and arms among long grasses. Up close, the prints have a tactile, object quality. For those interested in fine gradations of print tonality, these are prints not to be missed.
Collector’s POV: There were no prices on the information sheet for the main show (a pet peeve of mine, discussed here). This reality was not however particularly surprising, given the rarity of these prints and their undeniably sky high prices. That said, we have not seen a gathering of such beautiful prints of flowers in a very long time (there are seven staggering images, hung together in a group, at right); congratulations to the folks at Greenberg for scouring up such a strong group. The White Clymitis, 1921, and Lotus, 1915, were our two favorites, fitting snugly into our flower genre. As an aside, the later prints in the viewing room are priced at $3000 each.
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While I think this show missed an opportunity to tie the entire Steichen narrative together more crisply and with a bit more scholarship, there are some sublime prints here, well worth savoring.
Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system defined here)

Edward Steichen, 1915-1923
Through May 16th
Howard Greenberg Gallery
41 East 57th Street
Suite 1406
New York, NY 10022

Martin Munkacsi, Vitality @Greenberg

JTF (just the facts): A total of 25 prints, 17 vintage prints from the 1920s and 1930s in the book alcove, and another 8 later prints (mostly fashion) in one of the side viewing rooms. The images are framed in white and matted. (Installation shot at right.)

Comments/Context: Hungarian photographer Martin Munkacsi’s images were, and still are, all about action. In this small show at Howard Greenberg (concurrent with the other Munkacsi exhibit now on view at the ICP here), models and subjects are running, swimming, skiing, dancing, and walking this way and that, constantly in motion. Two small wall texts with quotes by Richard Avedon and Henri Cartier-Bresson are reminders of Munkacsi’s influence on a generation of photographers who came after him. Whether we categorize these images as fashion, portraiture, or sport, they all combine speed with glamour to create dynamic tension and moments of authentic joy.

Collector’s POV: The vintage prints in this show are priced between $10000 and $40000; the later prints are either $1200 or $1500. Prices at auction have been very similar to these ranges, with later prints in large editions (40 or 50) consistently selling for under $2000, and vintage prints ranging from $10000 to nearly $50000. For our particular collection, the more recognizable Munkacsi fashion and motion images aren’t a great fit; we’d like to find a simple Munkacsi nude (not the parasol nude), but so far, we haven’t found just the right one.

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

Martin Munkacsi, Vitality
Through May 16th

41 East 57th Street
Suite 1406
New York, NY 10022

Barbara Kruger, Pre-Digital, 1980-1992 @Skarstedt

JTF (just the facts): A total of 44 collages and 1 silkscreen painting, shown in the first floor and two second floor galleries (North and South). The collages are made of photographs and cut out type, mounted to paper. They are framed in black and matted, and are generally 10×8 or smaller, with a handful of works approximately 10×14. All of the works were made between 1980 and 1992. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Even after twenty years of time to age gracefully, Barbara Kruger’s collages from the 1980s still seem aggressively confrontational and bitterly ironic. While her work in recent years has been predominantly enlarged to billboard and wall sized murals that seem to shout their penetrating slogans, these smaller early pieces have a more hand crafted personal feel and expose more of her working process.

Most of her collages started with a symbolic photographic image, often dripping in Cold War noir. Kruger then cut and pasted words and phrases in a clean typeface (both white on black and black on white) straight onto the images, sometimes adding other graphic elements, like lines or borders. The result was an attention grabbing montage of words and pictures, steeped in the styles of product advertising and political propaganda.

While collage and photomontage went through periods of great activity during the first part of the 20th century (think Hannah Höch and her feminist/Dada collages and the Russian Constructivist posters and collages of Klustis, Lissitzky, and Rodchenko), the form seems to have been consumed by the graphic designers and advertising creatives of the 1940s, going somewhat dormant as an artistic mode until Kruger came along decades later and co-opted the clichés for her own purposes.

While it is a relatively simple idea to take a single image and make it more potent via the use of a clever caption, it is the consistent quality of Kruger’s execution that is clear from this show. In work after work, the juxtaposition/contrast of a strong visual with tightly edited, sparse prose leads to incisive commentary and spontaneous combustion. Here are a few of the most memorable phrases:

We are the objects of your suave entrapments
Admit nothing. Blame everyone. Be bitter.
It’s our pleasure to disgust you
You are not yourself
Who will write the history of tears
Your moments of joy have the precision of military strategy
We are astonishingly lifelike
Your body is a battlefield

Even in our oversauturated world of media, Kruger’s 1980s collages still have enormous energy. While some of the topical questions may have changed, the works themselves have aged extremely well.

Collector’s POV: The works in this show are priced between $35000 and $45000; the large silkscreen is not for sale. I think these early Kruger collages will end up being considered iconic, ground breaking works from the 1980s, especially since they show the hand of the artist. While they don’t fit into our collection, this is a tremendously thought provoking and challenging show, well worth a visit before it closes.

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

20 East 79th Street
New York, NY 10075

Mark Woods, After Analysis @Newman Popiashvili

JTF (just the facts): A total of 10 color images, framed in white with no mat, and hung in the one room basement gallery (down the stairs from the street level). The prints are either 37×30 or 24×20 in size, and all of the images were taken in 2009. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: I’m generally a fan of fragmented city scenes, and so I decided to take a chance on a show by Mark Woods (a photographer previously unknown to me) now on view at Newman Popiashvili. It seems these pictures were taken in the hours after Woods visited with his therapist, but this background information didn’t add any important context for my understanding of the work. Generally, these are formalist pictures of grates, stairs, steel covers, windows, and store fronts (without people) with well conceived color and texture contrasts. Line, form, and curve drive the crafting of the compositions.

As an aside, the press release text for this show is memorably obtuse. Catch phrases include “these pictures are allegories of their own viewing” and “this exhibition studies the tension between tensions”.

Collector’s POV: The images in the show are priced between $2000 and $4500. If deadpan city and architectural details are your thing, then this show is worth a quick flyby. I particularly enjoyed the image of the tape encrusted car hood.

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

Through April 25th

Newman Popiashvili Gallery
504 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011

Small Museum Profile: Kresge Art Museum @Michigan State

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

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

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

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

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

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

Liu Zheng, The Chinese

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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