Photography on Photography: Reflections on the Medium since 1960 @the Met

JTF (just the facts): 22 artists represented by one work each (although some contain multiple images or a series), displayed in the Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall, a large white box of a room with a high ceiling. Here’s a list of the artists in the show (alphabetically):

Vito Acconci
William Anastasi
Lutz Bacher
Sarah Charlesworth
Moyra Davey
Liz Deschenes
Roe Ethridge
Kota Ezawa
Janice Guy
Sherrie Levine
Robert Mapplethorpe
Allen McCollum
Richard Prince
Josephine Pryde
Thomas Ruff
Allen Ruppersberg
Karin Sander
Hiroshi Sugimoto
Andy Warhol
James Welling
Christopher Williams
Mark Wyse

Comments/Context: The new contemporary photography gallery is probably the only place (save the special exhibits areas) in the hallowed halls of the Met where some real risk taking in exhibit making can take place. The art in this room hasn’t necessarily weathered the trials of decades or centuries, and any one work may or may not have yet risen to the top as best of breed for a certain style or time period. It’s a place where fresh ideas can be shown, providing interesting contrasts to what’s on view elsewhere in museum.

This exhibit takes on the challenge of making sense of the entire sweep of photography since the 1960s. Some of the themes it touches on include:

  • Appropriation/rephotography
  • The idea of truth in photography
  • Conceptual photography
  • Photography as a ubiquitous mass medium
  • Photographic advertising
  • New and old photographic processes

This is a small gallery remember, and therefore a relatively limited place in which to tell the stories of all these individual movements/concepts coherently. As a result, I’m sorry to say that this exhibit had a random “dressed in the dark” feel for me. I felt I had to engage each work and play the guessing game of which theme this particular image was trying to represent – “why is this here” for each and every picture or series of images. With some effort, these puzzles can be deciphered and the audience can see the thought process behind the exhibit; it just takes some work, and I’m guessing that 80% of the fly-by viewers who stroll through these galleries on their way to someplace else will leave mystified. While the mix of established artists and unknowns is a good thing, there was just so much going on that the juxtapositions of different works didn’t seem to make much sense (I bet this will be the first and only time that a Sugimoto portrait and a Welling flower will hang next to each other; see the Welling image at right, 012 Flowers, 2006). Given the size of this space, any one of the themes mentioned above could fill this room with an interesting and representative array of work to tell its particular story more thoroughly. So while risks are good, perhaps some tighter focus is required.

As an aside, there are two entrances to this room, that are nearly equally likely for someone to come through. This exhibit was arranged generally chronologically, so if you came in through the far doors are worked back (as I did), it seems even more of a grab bag, until you get to the other end, where the historical context is more obvious. I think the lesson here is that this room does not lend itself well to a linear narrative, and shows need to be monolithic in this space.

Collector’s POV: For our particular collection, there were really only a couple of works that would fit well. The first is the flower image I referenced above by James Welling. This is a large image, hearkening back to various hand crafted processes of the past, but fully rooted in the present and with a strong point of view. If we had a wall big enough, I could imagine one of these in our collection.

A second is Mark Wyse’s Mark of Indifference #1 (Shelf) from 2006 (see image at right). This artist was previously unknown to me, but I liked the simplicity of the vision.

While not a fit for us, I think the Sugimoto wax figure portraits in general (there is one of Fidel Castro in this show) are both thought provoking and spectacular. My guess is that they will end up being truly signature pieces from this era.

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

Photography on Photography: Reflections on the Medium since 1960
Through October 19th

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

Upcoming Lectures and Courses

Here are three upcoming lectures and courses of interest to collectors:

1.) Collector’s Workshop: Introduction to Affordable Photography Panel Discussion @Aperture

Panelists:
Kellie McLaughlin (Aperture Limited Edition Photographs Program)
Amani Olu (Humble Arts Foundation)
Ruben Natal-San Miguel (collector/blogger ARTmostfierce)

Tuesday, September 16, 2008
6:30PM

Aperture Gallery
547 West 27th Street
4th floor
New York, NY

2.) Aspects of Photography @Christie’s Education

This is a short course, including 4 nights of lectures (one at the NY Public Library collection) and a sale walk through with one of the specialists. The course plans to “look at photography from different angles including a history of processes and photography’s place within contemporary art”.

September 12-October 12, 2008
$450

3.) The Photographers Lecture Series @ICP

This is a 10 week series of evening talks, given by photographers who show/discuss their work. Here’s the schedule:

October 1: Susan Meiselas, In History
October 15: Jeff Liao, From the 7 Train
October 22: Tierney Gearon, Family
October 29: Morten Andersen, Never is Forever
November 5: Arno Rafael Minkkinen, Saga
November 12: Thomas Holton, People
November 19: Ed Kashi, Black Gold
December 3: Andrew Bush, Stories
December 10: Lynn Saville, At Night
December 17: Burk Uzzle, Social Landscapes

$155/$130 for members

You can see some highlights of past lectures here. The talks by Joan Fontcuberta and Vik Muniz are worth checking out.

International Center of Photography (school)
1114 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10036

Four Summer @Benrubi

JTF (just the facts): This is a group show of four gallery artists: Pamela Hanson, Peter C. Jones, Jeffrey Milstein, and Lindy Smith, shown in the entrance area and main gallery space. Here’s a quick rundown on each:

  • Pamela Hanson: 14 images, 2 in color, the rest in black and white. Mostly of fashion/models. Ranging from 11×14 to 24×30.

  • Peter C. Jones: 8 images, all in color, 20×20. Window scenes/florals/summer landscapes.

  • Jeffrey Milstein: 7 images, all in color, varying sizes from 20×20 to 50×50. Images of airplanes from below and head-on, against white backgrounds.

  • Lindy Smith: 5 works, some single images, some diptychs or triptychs. Floral Kallitypes

Comments/Context: One of the big trends of the last decade has been, in the face of the relentless move to digital, the revival of many antique photographic processes, focusing on the hand crafted nature of image making. Artists have taken these old processes and applied them to new and different subject matter and come up with exciting new work that references the history of the medium.

Lindy Smith has taken an abandoned 19th process, the Kallitype, and resurrected it to make larger scale floral images. (see the installation photo at right.) The Kallitype is a cameraless process, where paper is coated with iron salts and silver nitrate and then exposed to the sun (much like the cyanotype, but with different chemistry). The interaction between the chemicals and the plants/flowers she lays down on the sheets creates some unpredictability in the final colors, generating a whole nuanced spectrum of browns, yellows and oranges. The resulting images are quiet, intricate, and lovely.

These pictures however raise for me a larger question about what happens when an artist heads down a path well worn by previous artists. Starting with William Henry Fox Talbot and Anna Atkins in the mid 19th century, and then moving forward to Bertha Jaques (see here) in the early 1900s (and many others since then), the concept of the simple silhouetted botanical image has been around for a long time, and these original artists set the standard and defined the playing field for everyone that has followed. How does an artist innovate and bring a new point of view to subject matter that has already be “done”?

In the world of music, we have seen the emergence of the “retro” and “neo” prefixes, attached to new work that either seeks to emulate the old sounds in full or to take those old sounds and recast them in a new light, while still staying recognizable as the old form. In Soul music, we might call Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings “Retro Soul” and someone like Amy Winehouse “Neo Soul”. Perhaps the artists themselves hate these kinds of characterizations, but these terms help audiences understand where the music is coming from and what it might be trying to accomplish.

So back to photography. Should we call Chuck Close’s recent portraits “Neo Daguerreoptyes“? No one would ever confuse what Close has done with portraits from the 19th century using the same medium; his artistic viewpoint is clear. Or what about these Lindy Smith florals? “Retro botanicals“? I wonder if her viewpoint comes through prominently enough; the works are clearly beautiful and well made, but are they a ground breaking new voice or a riff on the past? And if the artist’s perspective isn’t as strong or obvious, will “retro” style work stand the test of time? Will it be forgotten or enjoyed as something wonderfully familiar and comfortable?

In general, I like these Lindy Smith images for what they are and can imagine adding a small one to our collection. But go and check out the work yourself and make your own judgement.

Collector’s POV: The Lindy Smith works range in price from $3500 for the single images, up to $12000 for the triptychs, and of course, they are unique prints (edition of 1).

As an aside, my eight year old son would love the work of Jeffrey Milstein in this show. (see installation photo at right.) This is meant as a high compliment, not a slight. My son would love the large, colorful shots of airplanes and would beg to have one in his room if he saw them in person. Ranging from $2600-6000 depending on size, that isn’t going to happen any time soon, but the works are striking and would work well in large contemporary spaces.

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

Four Summer
Through September 20th

Bonni Benrubi Gallery
41 East 57th Street
13th Floor
New York, NY 10022

Selections from the Permanent Collection @MoMA

JTF (just the facts): Over 200 images, spread across 5 rooms. The prints are grouped together by artist/subject matter, exhibited in roughly chronological order. Here is a quick run down on each room, with the artists represented, the number of images displayed (in parentheses) and the subject matter of those images:

Room 1:
Bernard (8) Sherman’s campaign
Blancard (5) Eiffel Tower
Muybridge (10) Motion studies
Kasebier (3) Mother and child
Stieglitz/White (4) Nudes

Room 2:
Modotti (3) Abstractions
Stieglitz (3) Hands
Weston (8) Nudes
A. Adams (4) Geysers
Moholy-Nagy (2) Portraits
Rodchenko (3) Portraits
Sander (12) Portraits
Atget (6) Staircases
Albers (2) Portraits

Room 3:
Strand (3) Houses
Anonymous/Vernacular (Many)
Brassai (4) Bar scenes
Lange (5) People
Callahan (5) Heads
Callahan (4) Reeds

Room 4:
Winogrand (14) Animals
Arbus (6) People
Friedlander (6) Self-portraits
Koudelka (11) Gypsies
Gedney (8) SF Hippies
R. Adams (10) Colorado development
Eggleston (4) Color

Room 5:
Bechers (21) Industrial facades
Groover (3) House parts – color
Horn (5) Water
Spano (2) People
Struth (4) Buildings – b&w
Dane (postcards)
Shore (postcards)
Ruscha (Sunset Strip book)

Comments/Context: While collecting photography has become over the past decade or two a priority for museums of all sizes across the country, only a handful that I can think of (MoMA and SFMoMA are two of the best) treat photography on a somewhat even footing with paintings or sculpture by dedicating a relatively consistent space for displaying highlights from the permanent collection. Carving out this space allows (and forces) the curators to continually revisit the collections and rediscover ways to use the images on hand to tell stories about the nature of the medium.

As I walked through this exhibit, I was reminded of all the talk that surrounded the rehanging of the permanent collection of paintings and sculpture when the MoMA reopened after its recent renovations. Given the museum’s prominence, many considered the installation of the permanent collection to be a very important commentary on the history of art, and there was much learned debate and detailed review of very single work included (and omitted).

The primary structural device in this hanging of the photography collection is grouping via common subject matter, although not necessarily a particular photographer’s iconic work. I started to think to myself: what would the paintings galleries look like if they were hung with this same structure? A grouping of Cezanne fruit still lives, a bunch of Picasso cubist guitars, a few Matisse portraits of women near windows, and a group of Van Gogh agricultural landscapes, on separate walls, all in one room, as an example. What do we make of such an exhibit? Or a couple of Pollock drip paintings, a handful of small Newman zips, some De Kooning women, and a group of Kline black and white paintings, all in one room? My feeling is that for paintings, using subject matter (even if it is abstract) as the driving force behind the categorization misses much about differing artists’ stylistic approaches and ends up being overly reductive and potentially misleading about the broader sweep of art history.

And yet, I think this approach works quite well for the photography. And while this particular hanging of the collection has some uneven spots (the first and last galleries seem less tightly focused than the ones in the middle), in general, I think these groups of images deliver a coherent narrative about the evolution and forward progression of photography over time and show us that the great work of many photographers was not limited to a few masterpiece images. It also reminds us that by its very nature, photography has always lent itself to the “project”, “album” or group of related photographs that together tell a multi-faceted and more robust story than a single image would – a single Atget staircase might seem random; 6 hung together give us theme and variation and end up making a more interesting comment on Parisian life of that period. Sequences and recurring motifs are much easier to execute in photography than in any other medium.

So while the organizational concept of this exhibit does lead to some “jumpiness” and the feeling of some gaps here and there, it does a terrific job of showing off what is exciting and amazing about photography. An audio guide would be a welcome addition, to hear more detail/context about the various artists and their work (especially in the last gallery, which feels more like a grab bag).

Collector’s POV: As collectors who organize our collection using subject matter genres, this show had some perfect matches for us. There were several groups of pictures I would gladly take home lock, stock and barrel and which would fit snugly into our view of the world:

  • The 8 small Weston 4×5 nudes from 1933/34. (seen at right) We have one nude from this series in our collection (see here), and we would very much like to find others that we like and could afford, but there just aren’t that many floating around in the marketplace.

  • The 3 Stieglitz portraits of hands. These are spectacular, and would fit well with other nudes we own. Unfortunately, these are both not available and far removed from anything we could realistically add to our collection.

  • The 3 Strand images of houses (seen at right). Again, these are truly amazing images that would easily fit in our city/industrial genre. However, they too are far out of reach.

  • I also thought the Modotti abstractions, the Callahan heads, and the Friedlander self-portraits were all tremendous, even if they don’t quite fit what we collect today.

Overall, the folks at MoMA should be commended for continuing to so explicitly support all kinds of photography, and you should visit this show from time to time to see how they are recasting and reinventing the history of the medium.

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

Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street
New York, NY 10019

Out of Town Museum Shows (Volume 1)

From time to time, we plan to generate a list of some of the museum shows that are on view elsewhere that we find of interest and wish we could see in person. (We will cover a similar group of out of town gallery shows/exhibits in a separate post at some point soon.) There are plenty of places to get an exhaustive roll call of exhibits across the nation and the world; our goal is to provide an edited group that highlights our point of view (listed in order of closing date, starting with soonest). We plan only to list shows that are open now.

1.) The Hunter Gifts @Norton Museum of Art
Through September 7th
2.) Peter Henry Emerson and American Naturalistic Photography @Minneapolis Institute of Arts
Through September 7th
3.) Out of The Shadow: Brett Weston @Phillips Collection
Through September 7th
4.) Basic Forms: Bernd & Hilla Becher and People of the Twentieth Century: August Sander @Getty Center
Through September 14th
5.) Philip Lorca–diCorcia @LA County Museum of Art
Through September 14th

6.) Wildflowers of New England: Edwin Hale Lincoln @De Young Museum
Through September 21st
7.) Biographical Landscape: Stephen Shore @Haggerty Museum of Art
Through September 28th
8.) Beneath the Roses: Gregory Crewdson @Cincinnati Art Museum
Through October 5th
9.) Accommodating Nature: Frank Gohlke @Center for Creative Photography
Through October 26th
10.) Mexico: Edward Weston @Phoenix Art Museum

Through November 15th
11.) On Reading: Andre Kertesz @Portland Museum of Art
Through November 16th

If you are a collector and have seen or are planning to see any of these shows, please feel free to post a short review in the Comments section. We’d love to get a first hand view of how these show look and feel.

Auction Preview: Christie’s First Open Post-War and Contemporary Art, September 9, 2008

This post about Christie’s upcoming First Open Post-War and Contemporary Art sale can be considered a companion piece to last week’s post about Sotheby’s upcoming Contemporary Art sale, as they both contain the same type of slightly lower end work, and are scheduled to follow each other next week. More importantly, this sale also raises the same questions about the nature of “photography” in the context of Contemporary Art.

Of the 238 lots up for sale at Christie’s, I think 29 qualify as “photography” (broadly defined), as listed below:

Marina Abramovic, Rhythm 10, 1973/1994
John Baldessari, One and Three Fans (with Triadic Emotional Spread), 1993
Vanessa Beecroft, VBGDW, 2000
Sharon Core, Around the Cake, 2003
Lynn Davis, Jonas Salk Institute, 2000
Dan Graham, Ziggaurut, Skyscraper 1967 and Two Way Mirror, 1976
Dan Graham, Tract Housing, 1978 and New Housing Development, 1966
Roni Horn, Untitled (Fox), 2000
Alfredo Jaar, Guess Who Is Coming To Dinner, 1988
Anselm Kiefer, Snow, 1980
Louise Lawler, Objects, 1985
Vera Lutter, Pepsi Rooftop, Vent and Logo, August 8, 2000, 2000
Yasumasa Morimura, Self-Portrait (Actress) after Liza Minelli 1, 1996
Shirin Neshat, Rapture Series, 1999
Shirin Neshat, I am its Secret, 1993
Thomas Ruff, Substrat 7III, 2002
Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #13, 1978
Laurie Simmons, Lying Fountain, 1991
Laurie Simmons, The Music of Regret X, 1994
Lorna Simpson, Untitled (cabin in the sky), 2001
Mike and Doug Starn, X, 1989
Thomas Struth, Tokyo, Tokyo Fair, 1999
Ruud van Empel, World #9, 2005
John Waters, Three Sirk Mirrors, 1998
Wang Qingsong, Another Battle #7, 2001
Carrie Mae Weems, Sea Island Series, 1992
Weng Fen, Staring at the Lake 2, 2005
Zhang Huan, To Raise The Water Level In A Fish Pond (Waterchild), 1997
Zhang Huan, Foam, 1998

If we take this list of artists and merge it with the one from the Sotheby’s sale, I think we would have the beginnings of a solid list of the key crossover artists at work today.

To our eyes, the standout lot in this sale, by a very large margin, is the cover image, Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Still #13, 1978. This image is one of the best of the film stills and is a unique print; it could easily have gone in the high end VIP only evening sale given the interest in her work, which begs the question why it is here. For our collection, the Vera Lutter (one of our favorites) and the two diptychs by Dan Graham would be the best fits.

A few other random thoughts triggered by this catalog:

  • Contemporary Chinese photography has clearly established itself in the mainstream. And yet it doesn’t seem that from a scholarly point of view that this work has been assimilated into the entire narrative of the history of photography. I’d like to have this work placed in context a bit more to understand it better.
  • Even though the Photography sales coming in October will have some of the same artists (if not the same exact images), none of the pages in the back used for promoting future sales are used for photography. This was true as well in the Sotheby’s catalog. This is a puzzler to me.
  • The Christie’s Buyer’s Premium thresholds have been raised in tandem with those at Sotheby’s. This catalog has the step down thresholds at $50,000 and $1,000,000 versus $20,000 and $500,000 (where they were in the spring sales).

First Open Post-War and Contemporary Art
September 9, 2008

Christie’s
20 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, NY 10020

Auction Preview: Saturday @Phillips, London, September 6, 2008

JTF (just the facts): Out of a total of 454 lots in this sale, I counted 96 lots of photography, mostly contemporary works. Here’s the highly eclectic list of photographers represented in the sale (many completely unknown to us):

Nobuyoshi Araki
Eve Arnold
Miriam Backstrom
Vanessa Beecroft
Christian Boltanski
Frank Breuer
Danielle Buetti
Jeff Burton
Martino Coppes
Tim Davis
Carl De Keyzer
Thomas Demand
Gotz Diergarten
Tracey Emin
Jenny Gage
Claus Goedicke
Douglas Gordon
Rodney Graham
Tim Hailand
Jitka Hanzlova
Naoya Hatekeyama
Eberhard Havekost
Frances Kearney
Alberto Korda
Idris Khan
Daniel Kramer
Luisa Lambri
Louise Lawler
Ryuiji Miyamoto
Liliana Moro
Eadward Muybridge (what’s he doing in here?)
Helmut Newton
Seamos Nicolson
Walter Niedermayer
Michael James O’Brien
Tod Papageorge
Martin Parr
Richard Prince
Rankin
Gerhard Richter
Mick Rock
Daniela Rossell
Thomas Ruff
John Schabel
Roy Schatt
Wilhelm Schurmann
Mark Seliger
Andres Serrano
Yinka Shonibare
Alice Springs
Hannah Starkey
Beat Streuli
Jock Sturges
Hiroshi Sugimoto
Wolfgang Tillmans
Massimo Vitali
Celine Van Balen
Bernard Venet
Bettina Von Zweil
John Waters
James Welling
Weng Fen
Anita Witek
Shizuka Yokomizu
Zhu Ming

Comments/Context: Saturday @Phillips is an intentionally mixed bag sale designed for newer/entry level collectors (I think). This sale has everything from contemporary paintings and prints to Japanese action figures and toys, with furniture, watches, and jewelry thrown in for good measure. Nearly all of the lots are low priced, so these sales can be a place to pick up a bargain or take a chance on something without breaking the bank.

Collector’s POV: While there are plenty of interesting lots in this particular sale, only a very few would really fit into our collection in any way. Here are three that would potentially work in our city/industrial genre:
    • Frank Breuer, Untitled, 2002: Frank Breuer was a student of the Bechers I believe. We have seen some of his recent work (telephone poles) and I like this image of cargo containers.
  • Wilhelm Schurmann, Genk, Belgium, 1978: This work is reminiscent of other 1970’s industrial/topographic photography. We’re not familiar with the photographer, but the image is strong.

 

  • James Welling, Glessner House Service Entrance, Chicago, Illinois, 1885-87, 1988: This is earlier architectural work by Welling, reminiscent of Szarkowski’s Louis Sullivan pictures. He has done some recent florals that are also of interest to us.

 

Saturday @ Phillips
September 6, 2008

Phillips De Pury & Company
Howick Place
London, SW1P 1BB

When Color Was New @Saul

JTF (just the facts): 38 mostly vintage works, hung in both the small entrance way and the larger, light filled gallery. (Installation shot, at right.) Negative dates range from 1936 (Outerbridge) to 1985 (Eggleston), though most are clustered in the 1970s. Here’s a list of the photographers included in the exhibit, with the number of works in parentheses:

Harry Callahan (2)
William Christenberry (2)
William Eggleston (2)
Mitch Epstein (1)
Walker Evans (1)
Luigi Ghirri (3)
Nan Goldin (2)
Dan Graham (1)
Jan Groover (2)
David Hockney (1)
Helen Levitt (2)
Joel Meyerowitz (4)
Paul Outerbridge (1)
Martin Parr (2)
John Pfahl (2)
Stephen Shore (2)
Arthur Siegel (2)
Joel Sternfeld (2)
Boyd Webb (2)
Terry Wild (2)

Comments/Context: After spending some time with this exhibition, my conclusion is that the time “when color was new” was a mixed bag, a chaotic period of experimentation, with an appropriately uneven selection of work produced. It seems as though each artist had his or her own challenges with “digesting” the new ideas color brought to the table. A few were successful in getting over to the other side, many failed, and another group abandoned the old ways and embraced the new. While different photographers experimented with different processes over a decently long period of time (where, by the way, is the representative autochrome?), it is clear that things really changed after Eggleston was canonized; the MoMA exhibit encouraged a whole generation of photographers to continue down a new road. Thirty years later, we now take color for granted.

A recurring thought for me as I looked at these pictures was that while some were clearly better than others, on the whole, this early work as a genre is under appreciated by collectors. I don’t think I can name a single collector who has a large, deep collection of this kind of work, although they must be out there somewhere (there isn’t a single color picture in our collection at the moment, but I think this will change over time). A few thoughts on a handful of the artists represented:

  • Shore: I think Shore will be the first color photographer in our collection. His work from this time was very consistently strong and is getting stronger with age. Looking at the images, you can see that he actually completely rethought how color influenced the process of picture making.
  • Evans: His late Polaroids are fun. I’d like to have a group/grid of these matted/hung together.
  • Parr: These pictures are deceptively well made, and resonate long after you have stopped smirking at the joke.
  • Pfahl: Why is this work forgotten? As an aside, we had a Pfahl that my mother bought hanging in our house when I was growing up. It was the one with strips of lace spread over the scrub brush, echoing the foam from the waves at the seashore (I don’t know the exact title off hand.) I always thought it was a puzzling and amazing image. I think the same for his other work; really unlike anyone else.
  • Sternfeld: While his work won’t fit as neatly into one of our genres, I think his pictures continue to be thought provoking, partly because of their use of color, partly because of their careful setting of scenes.
  • Callahan: I think his dye transfers are under appreciated. When I was first exposed to them, I didn’t think much of them, but as time has passed, I think they are standing up better than I had originally thought.

Another reaction I had to this show was that I need to force myself to be more attentive to the different color processes (carbo, chromogenic, dye transfer, Cibachrome, Polaroid etc.) and the nuances of their color palettes – they really are aging at different rates. Some seem dated; others seem fresh.

Collector’s POV: Prices in this show range from $1500 (Pfahl) to $50000 (Sternfeld), with the ever mysterious NFS (not for sale) obscuring the value of a few of the pictures (the iconic Eggleston in particular). I think Evans ($6000), and Shore ($8000-10000) seem close to reasonable for Chelsea retail. Christenberry ($6000) and Callahan ($8500) are higher than recent auction ranges for equivalent work. Joel Meyerowitz‘ work seemed astonishingly high to me ($16000-$45000), but I’m not following it closely.

All in all, this a worthwhile exhibit that gets you thinking about some work that may have drifted off your radar.

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

When Color Was New
Through September 6th

Julie Saul Gallery
535 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011

Lisette Model @Zabriskie

JTF (just the facts): 18 total images, 2 of which are duplicates. 12 of the images are from a 1976 Lunn portfolio of Model’s work; the other 4 are portraits of jazz musicians, including Louis Armstrong. The images were taken between 1933 and 1949, and measure approximately 19×15 or the reverse. (Installation shot of the gallery, at right.)

Comments/Context: Given the explosion in the Arbus market in recent years, I am glad to see some of that light being reflected back on Model who (as her predecessor and teacher) is deserving of more attention and respect. I think it is hard for us today to understand just how revolutionary Model’s portraits were for her times. Back in the late 1930s/early 1940s, the dominant portraiture was cool, detached, even distant, and sometimes heroic (think of the FSA photographers of this time). Her images are of imperfect, ordinary, and sometimes extraordinary people, with whom she has connected in a way to reveal their humanity, their dignity, and their humor (without mocking). I think that it was this willingness to “get involved” with her subjects, to meet them on their own terms without looking down on them, which was her true innovation, one which she happily passed on to a generation of photographers after her (especially Arbus, nearly 30 years later).

This small show does a good job of giving a viewer a feel for her approach to portraiture. (It closes tomorrow, so make haste in getting to see it.) While there is really only one semi-vintage piece in the exhibit, there are still many great pictures to see and be reminded of. I particularly like the only non-portrait in the show, Window Reflections, Fifth Avenue, New York City.

By the way, Model’s work can also be seen at Arbus/Avedon/Model, currently on at the ICP (see here). There are only 5 of her portraits in this small show (all of which are in the Zabriskie show I believe), but they are placed in the context of the work of the other two, which helps to clarify her influence on the photographers who came after her.

Collector’s POV: For collectors, there is a big gap between Model’s vintage and non-vintage work. Due to the relatively large number of later portfolios made (edition of 75 plus 15 APs), many have been broken up and sold off as individual images, depressing the prices a bit I imagine. At auction, later prints have gone in a range of $1000-5000 in recent years. The vintage work is another story: there has been very little that has come to market and those that have appeared have sold in a range between $25000-60000. Zabriskie is selling the entire 12 print 1976 portfolio for $65000. Other pictures in the show range from $7000-8500 for the more unknown jazz musicians up to $38000 for the 1950s print of Singer at the Cafe Metropole. These are, of course, Fuller Building retail kinds of prices.

Some questions to ponder about portfolios: when does a collector get large enough in his/her activities to be interested in buying entire portfolios of work? What is the right edition size for a portfolio, so that it is large enough to serve the audience of museums and large collectors, without flooding the market? And how many collectors get so big that they begin to support/subsidize the creation of specific portfolios of new work by their favorite photographers?

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

Lisette Model
Through August 29th

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

Framing a Century: Master Photographers, 1840-1940 @the Met

JTF (just the facts): 154 pictures, displayed in 5 rooms on the 2nd floor of the museum, with a selection of teaser photos on the exterior hallway walls. 3 rooms of 19th century work and 2 rooms of 20th century work, with differing paint/lighting. Here’s a list of the photographers represented in this exhibit (alphabetically), with the number of works by the artist in parentheses:

Eugene Atget (12)
Edouard Baldus (9)
Brassai (16)
Julia Margaret Cameron (11)
Henri Cartier-Bresson (11)
Walker Evans (14)
Roger Fenton (11)
Gustave Le Gray (11)
Charles Marville (11)
Nadar (12)
Man Ray (12)
William Henry Fox Talbot (15)
Carleton Watkins (8)
Comments/Context: The curatorial task of using the permanent collection to tell the comprehensive story of an art form must be as old as the idea of a museum itself. No museum (not even the venerable Metropolitan Museum, my vote for the best museum in the world) has every great masterwork, and so curators must carefully pick and choose from among the holdings to bring together a representative sample that supports the narrative they have selected. The danger of such exhibits, especially in smaller museums, is that they have the tendency to devolve into a “greatest hits” exhibit that is often boring, or they expose the weaknesses of the collection in glaring ways. So while the concept of the historical summary exhibit isn’t a new one, it isn’t as easy as it looks.
In this exhibit, the folks at the Met have bitten off a meaty task: telling the story of the first 100 years of photography. With the addition of the Gilman Collection to an already staggering body of work, the Met has the depth in its collections to experiment with new ways to educate us about the history of the medium. Rather than go down the predictable road of the “parade of masterpieces”, they have chosen to focus on a dozen or so seminal photographers, and to show their work in more depth (plus or minus 10 pictures each).
The first three rooms are “19th century photography”, and seem to me to make a point about the evolution of the medium and the dominant subject matter themes of the times. There are three “landscape” photographers (Fenton, Le Gray and Watkins), two “portrait” photographers (Cameron and Nadar), three “city” photographers (Baldus, Marville, and Atget), and Talbot, who gets a category all his own, given his early and groundbreaking innovations. (The image at right is an installation shot of these galleries; I apologize for the blurriness, but the light is turned down so low in these galleries, it’s hard to get a crisp shot.)
I found these first three rooms to work extremely well in telling the story “economically”, getting the main points across without droning on too long. I also think that the concept of selecting a handful of pictures for each artist, a few of which were well known images, but others of which were equally stunning lesser known works, helped clarify the idea of the “point of view” of the artist – these are not just historical documents; an artist’s eye is at work. I did find myself wondering about Watkins as the only American, and the omission of the Grand Tour as a thematic concept, but these are quibbles, which probably deservedly ended up on the cutting room floor in the name of staying focused.
The exhibition then transitions into another set of rooms, which are less expansive than the first three, and are painted a lighter color and lit more brightly (see another sub par installation picture at right). In here we find Evans, Cartier-Bresson and Man Ray in the first room, and Brassai in the last, on his own. While there are plenty of amazing images in this section as well, I think the multiplicity of views and voices found in the first forty years of the 20th century (along with the transition to the gelatin silver print) isn’t particularly well represented by this grouping. It’s not that these four aren’t a key part of the story; they clearly are. From my view, there is just too much to tell (particularly in the 1920s and 30s); the motif of the representative photographer seems too restrictive. The last two rooms left me scratching my head and unsatisfied, given how splendid the first three rooms were.

Collector’s POV: As a collector, there were many images to covet in this exhibit, knowing full well that they would never be available in the open market, and even if they were, they would be too expensive for us. As flower collectors, two highlights were Talbot’s purplish Botanical Specimen, 1835, and Dandelion Seeds, 1858. I also came away with a more general appreciation for Marville and the consistency and quality of his city scenes. Finally, while not in our collecting sweet spot, Cameron’s Sappho, 1865, with her patterned textile dress, was exquisite.
In general, this is a thoughtful, well-executed survey exhibition, which starts out with a bang, and limps a little to the finish (in my opinion). Overall, however, these are nitpicks. You’re not going to find a more comprehensive and well-constructed historical show of truly spectacular work any time soon anywhere else, so get down and see it before it closes.
Rating: ** (2 stars) VERY GOOD (rating system defined here)

Through September 1st
1000 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10028

Documenting the Face of America: Roy Stryker and the FSA/OWI Photographers

A thought-provoking documentary on the FSA photographers recently aired on PBS, and I finally got around to watching it over the weekend (after saving it on the DVR when it originally ran on August 18th). I must admit that prior to seeing this film, my knowledge of the FSA was limited to a few high points: Walker Evans in Alabama, Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, and maybe Arthur Rothstein’s dust bowl pictures.

So let’s start with a bit of background that I learned from this documentary, which while obvious to experts in the field I’m sure, was generally new to me. Starting in the mid 1920s, rural America, and those engaged in agriculture more specifically, started a period of steady decline, as commodity prices around the globe came down after the end WWI. When the financial markets crashed in 1929, a broad and deep depression gripped virtually all parts of the country. As FDR worked to get his New Deal programs passed through Congress, it became clear to him that Washington and much of urban America was out of touch with the suffering going on in rural communities across the nation. People were not up in arms about rural poverty, or the plight of sharecroppers and tenant farmers, or the larger and larger numbers of displaced people and migrant workers. A sustained political effort was going to be needed to change people’s perceptions; he needed a way to “introduce America to Americans” and thus was born the idea of sending photographers out to document what was happening.

Roy Stryker was brought in to run this effort, and he gathered together the photographers, gave them assignments, defended his budget to Congress, and generally got things done. Over the period of 1935-1943, this effort was housed in a variety of places: the historical unit of the Resettlement Administration, the Farm Security Administration, and later, the Office of War Information. Throughout this time, all of the pictures were gathered together into one “big file” (which eventually ended up at the Library of Congress). Here’s a list of the photographers mentioned in the documentary who contributed to the effort:

Esther Bubley
John Collier Jr.
Jack Delano
Walker Evans
Dorothea Lange
Russell Lee
Edwin Locke
Carl Mydans
Gordon Parks
Edwin & Louise Rosskam
Arthur Rothstein
Ben Shahn
John Vachon
Marion Post Wolcott

The documentary follows a generally historical timeline, interspersed with vignettes and anecdotes about specific photographers. There are interviews with Louise Rosskam and Gordon Parks which are particularly interesting, and more gossipy tidbits are thrown in periodically for flair (Walker Evans was the first one fired from the FSA, since he wouldn’t follow the rules and manage his budget; Marian Post Wolcott was so beautiful that she often wasn’t taken seriously etc.). The iconic images from this period are also given a fuller treatment, with discussion of how and why the pictures came to be taken.

In general, this is a terrific documentary that is well worth an hour of your time. I think it also begs the question of how and where today’s documentary pictures are being stored and archived. While we think of the group above and others (like Margaret Bourke-White and Weegee) as “artists” today, in their time, they were photojournalists. So who is taking care of the flood of images being created by the photojournalists of today?

By the way, there is also a very fine website in support of the film, which can be found here.

Auction Preview: Sotheby’s Contemporary Art, September 10, 2008

You know auction season is just around the corner when the first of the wrist breaker catalogues thumps down on your doorstep. The first to arrive at our house was for Sotheby’s Contemporary Art sale on September 10th. This is generally lower end/lower priced sale, spreading out the lots that don’t get into the bigger Contemporary Art sales later in the fall. Out of a total of 418 lots for sale, there are 21 lots that could be described as “photography”. I’ve listed them below alphabetically:

Pierre Bismuth, Most Wanted Men/NYC, 2007
James Casebere, Toilets, 1995
Rineke Dijkstra, Almerisa Wormer, 1999
Sam Durant, Landscape Response (Pigs Heads), 2002
Steve Giovinco, Untitled (Night Landscapes, #1626), 2004
Richard Kern, No Dogs (Long Island), 2003
David LaChapelle, Pamela Anderson, Miracle Tan, 2004
Louise Lawler, Pleasure/More, 1998
Philip Lorca–diCorcia, Calcutta, 1998
Loretta Lux, The Dove, 2006
Paul McCarthy, Heidi Drinks, 2000
Ryan McGinley, Sam at Ground Zero, 2002
Ryan McGinley, Dan and Eric, 2002
Tracey Moffatt, Something More, No. 1, 1989
Yasumasa Morimura, Self Portrait (Actress)/White Marilyn, 1996
Jack Pierson, Flower No. 6, 1995
Thomas Ruff, Nudes Obe 06, 2001
Ed Ruscha, Five Views from the Panhandle, 1962/2007
Sandy Skoglund, Walking On Eggshells, 1997
Hiroshi Sugimoto, Mathematical Form 0004, 2004
Andy Warhol, Dolly Parton, 1985

The real thought behind this post is to consider the continued, blurry question of which pictures are “photographs”, and which ones are “photo-based art” or some other moniker used to place them more in the realm of Contemporary Art (with capitals). Just what is “photography” these days? In the list above, there are more than two thirds that would (in my opinion) do just as well or fit just as appropriately in a normal, run of the mill Photography auction. So it begs the question, why are they here? Are some of these inherently more Contemporary Art than Photography? How has the Photography market evolved in recent years?

It seems that these pictures/artists (and others like them, whatever that might mean) have been singled out from the larger world of Photography for their qualities that make them attractive to Contemporary Art collectors. Perhaps they are large, or colorful, or provocative, or touch on themes that are “beyond” photography. But the underlying thought must be that they will sell for more in a Contemporary Art sale than in a Photography sale, maybe because different people go to the different auctions, or maybe because there is more money flying around Contemporary Art than ever before. Does the data bear this concept out? I haven’t checked side by side, but it seems unlikely to me that savvy collectors will pay higher prices for a Sugimoto simply as a result of which sale it was placed in.

Perhaps the inevitable and ultimate outcome will be that the world of Photography (capitalized) will split, into a “classic/vintage photography” world, say pre 1985, and a “contemporary photography” world, for everything after. Phillips seems to believe this, and has headed aggressively in this direction. And for those artists on the bubble, which box are they put in? There must be an ultimate “list” somewhere that is the final arbiter (I’m sure the auction house specialists have a working list they use) of where an artist fits, although it has to be fluid, as artists’ reputations and collectors’ tastes evolve and change. Will Avedon, Penn, Arbus, or Mapplethorpe be “pulled forward”? Perhaps the sales in the next few seasons will see this become clearer. We’ll try to keep this question open as the rest of the sales this season come and go, and perhaps when all the data is in, a better pattern will emerge.

And by the way, is it just me, or did the Sotheby’s Buyer’s Premium thresholds go up, yet again? This catalog has the step down thresholds at $50,000 and $1,000,000 versus $20,000 and $500,000 (where they were in the spring sales). Maybe there was a press release with this in it, but I must have missed it. Collectors get squeezed again.

Sign up for our weekly email newsletter

This field is required.