Evidence, A New Book by Mona Kuhn – Essay by Gordon Baldwin, Story by Frederic Tuten. Published by Steidl, 2007. Collector’s slipcased book in a special edition of 100 with an original signed and numbered 10” x 10” Fuji Crystal Archive print, printed by the artist. Choice of Evidence, 2006 or Repose, 2006 on the facing page.

O. Winston Link:

O. Winston Link, Train No. 2 Heading North Beside the Gooseneck Dam, Maury River, Virginia, C. 1955, Gelatin silver print

THE EARLY CONTACT PRINTS

The Largest Inventory of classical Fine Art Photography

www.peterfetterman.com

Bergamot Station · 2525 Michigan Ave · Santa Monica, CA 90404

Telephone 310 453 6463 · FAX 310 453 6959 · Email [email protected]

O. Winston Link, Silent Night at Seven-Mile Ford Broken By Class J 611 over 322, Virginia, 1957, Gelatin silver print

JAMES GRITZ

© James Gritz, The Float, www.jamesgritz.com

© stuart o’sullivan, dionicia at cape cod, 2005

511 west 25th street, suite 506
nyc 10001 • tel 212 255 8158
www.danielcooneyfineart.com

David Spivak

President and Publisher

Stephen Perloff

Editor

John A. Bennette

Editor at Large

Anthony Bannon, John A. Bennette, Daniel Cooney

Contributing Editors

Taylor Dietrich

Copy Editor

Matt Damsker

Photography Book Editor

Jennifer Cobb

National Advertising Sales Director

Peter Remmers

Art Director

Exhibition Reviewers Victor M. Cassidy, Sal Glynn, Bill Kouwenhoven, Denise Molica, Douglas Singleton, Bill Troop, Steve Weinstein

Contributing Writers Kay Kenny, James Rhem, N. Elizabeth Schlatter

Book Submission Guidelines

Please e-mail [email protected] for more information on submitting books for review.

New Submission Guidelines

$25 per portfolio, black and white, color, digital, traditional. Please send CD of hi-resolution images (300 dpi) all images CMYK. See page 108 for more information.

Advertising

Please visit www.focusmag.info/advertising for more information and to download an advertising media kit. Online advertising now available on photoconnoisseur.net.

Circulation

All galleries distributing at least 25 copies or more of Focus magazine are entitled to a 25% discount on all advertising from the rate card. Focus magazine is distributed to all major book store chains in the United States and in dozens of countries worldwide. If you do not see Focus at your local bookstore or gallery, please ask the manager to special order Focus.

Focus Magazine

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© 2007 Focus Fine Art Photography Magazine, Inc. None of the material appearing herein can be reprinted without the permission of Focus magazine. Unsolicited material will not be returned unless sufficient postage is provided. The publishers and editors shall not be responsible for loss or injury of any submitted manuscripts and/or art. The acceptance of advertising in Focus does not imply endorsement by the publisher. Publisher reserves the right, without giving specific reason, to refuse advertising.

Dear readers:

These are exciting times for us here at Focus magazine. I could not have imagined ever having so much fun putting an issue together. Let me give you a bit of a history as to what has transpired between our last issue and this one. First and foremost, we are launching a new website to help grow the online community of collectors and connoisseurs of fine art photography. This new website, photoconnoisseur.net, is going to be the only website you will ever need to visit for anything related to collecting photography. In partnership with nearly two-hundred different photography galleries worldwide, photoconnoissuer.net will deliver to you the most current and up-to-date information on exhibitions in your area. Not only that, but our exhibition reviews that you regularly see inside of the magazine are also being published in the form of blogs in our Exhibition Blogs section. Starting in October, this section will publish blogs from select cities around the world that will not even be published in the magazine. With the ability to comment and leave feedback, you can help other connoisseurs learn what you think about the exhibition as well. We hope to grow a rather large feedback section, filled with your personal experiences at the exhibition under consideration. Exhibitions not your style? In our online gallery photoconnoissuer.net will offer you the ability to view more in-depth portfolios of photographers exhibited in Focus, plus photographers you’ve never seen before. Looking for a photographer to add to your collection, but not sure which gallery represents that photographer? Sign-up for an account and when you’ve registered, do a search by first and last name on our homepage. We’ll do our best to help you find every single gallery that represents that photographer. Want to find out more information about a photography book you’ve seen listed or reviewed in Focus? Check out our Book Focus section on the website — enhanced, more detailed listings that also give you a sneak preview to see what’s inside the book. Last, but certainly not least, the latest news and headlines in the world of fine art photography with breaking news updates will be listed on the homepage as well. To be honest, this is just the beginning. We’re teaming up with The Photograph Collector and The Photo Review to be able to sell back issues and subscriptions online. Of course single copies and subscriptions of Focus will be available, but by the time the Holiday Season rolls around, we hope to be able to team up with photography book publishers, galleries and other businesses offering photographic products that you’ll want to buy for your friends and loved ones this Holiday Season. What’s even better is if you buy a product from an advertiser inside of Focus magazine or on photoconnoisseur.net, you get a free lifetime subscription to both Focus magazine and photoconnoisseur.net. All you need to do is show us your receipt from your purchase and you’re set! photoconnoisseur.net is going to be the collector’s most important guide to every single aspect of the world of photography.

One other reason to be excited is that through the help of a new analysis, we have re-evaluated the numbers for the first three years of NYFocus, should the show be produced. These numbers are so encouraging we are now openly seeking investors to help us make this dream a reality for the Autumn of 2008. For those who don’t remember, in the past two issues, I have discussed a new photography art fair that I wanted to launch this October in coordination with the upcoming Lucie Awards and the photography auctions. The idea was to hold an exhibition of no more than 50 fine art photography galleries inside of Pier 94 in Manhattan with an estimated 7,500 people to attend the show. Unfortunately we did not have all of the information we needed to at the time. When we finally pulled the information together, none of the numbers we had presented were showing something profitable. Now, with more ideas on sponsorship opportunities, a more direct marketing plan and the addition of photoconnoissuer.net as a resource, we are ready to begin planning NYFocus 2008. First thing’s first: We need investors.

Our editor of two years, Steve Anchell, recently decided it was time to move on to other projects that demanded his attention. Steve gave a lot of time, commitment and devotion to helping Focus magazine grow from where we were in our second and third issues to where we are today. Our original partnership was supposed to be only for one issue, but thanks to Steve’s generosity with his time and knowledge, the partnership lasted two years and eleven issues. We wish Steve Anchell luck with whatever his next endeavor may be and I personally believe that whatever Steve touches turns to gold — I cite our last issue as the perfect example of that. With Mr. Anchell’s departure, I have taken a more hands-on role with the editorial content of the magazine and have hired Stephen Perloff to take over as Focus magazine’s new editor. This decision will enhance the editorial content of Focus magazine. With two successful publications, one centered around collecting photography, under his belt already, Perloff’s challenge is to take an already successful mass-distributed magazine and enhance the editorial content to cater towards collectors and connoisseurs of photography. It is not an easy task by any means and I wish Mr. Perloff luck. I personally can’t wait to see what ideas his experience and knowledge of collecting photography will do for the editorial content of Focus — something that Mr. Anchell and I both worked very hard at to achieve the highest standards possible. These are quite exciting times to be a reader of Focus magazine. If I were you, I’d take out a subscription today to I make sure that I didn’t miss a single issue.

There is one immediate result of my taking a more hands-on role with Focus magazine’s editorial content: I just got off of the phone with a new writer, Carole Naggar, who is planning a new column for us as I write this letter. Her column will add some needed culture to Focus magazine’s list of columns. It will discuss photographers on the margins from the early 20th century until now. The column will be called “Photographia Obscura,” either because the photographers discussed in the column come from lesser-known cultures or just because history is arbitrary and so far has privileged the US and Europe while these photographers remain largely undiscovered. By going to many exhibitions and auctions abroad, this writer has found, for instance, that some photographers who are highly valued in Europe are less known here in the US. The same goes with books that are published abroad about photographers who are little-known here. One example that comes to mind is how the magazine Noir in France had shown African photography since the early 1980s. Prints by photographers they had promoted by Seydou Keita and Malik Sidibé, for example, have become much sought after. So we are going to help you discover some undiscovered photographers from smaller, lesser-known cultures and civilizations whose works are rather remarkable. Not only that, but Carole will also analyze the work and explain to you what she feels makes this work unique and intriguing.

I have personally received more e-mails and compliments from readers praising the new reproduction in Focus magazine due to our switching of printers. I wish I could take credit for the brilliant move to switch to Brilliant Graphics, the current and hopefully permanent printer of Focus. One reader recently wrote that “This edition of Focus is probably one of the best printed pieces I have ever seen. The quality is luscious...a big step forward.”

While the praises are welcome, we did receive one e-mail questioning our new printing process. In the e-mail, the reader asked why we have discontinued the reproduction of grayscale images. There are many reasons for this, a couple of which I can discuss here. Number one, black-and-white photography — and those with true passions for it will agree with me — was never intended to be reproduced in grayscale. Unfortunately, as a result of the digital age, people often associate black-and-white photography with grayscale reproduction. Nothing could be further from the truth. Many papers used to print a black-and-white photograph are warm-toned papers, thus giving the photograph a subtle warm tone and adding depth to an otherwise neutral-toned photograph. In fact, many of you will agree that out of the numerous photographs that exist, a vast majority of them have some form of subtle warm or cold tone to them. Ansel Adams’s work usually had a very subtle cold tone to it. We reproduce a photograph the way it was intended to be seen. We do not at all and will never again assume that stripping a photograph of any and all color, whether subtle or vibrant, is the correct way to reproduce a photograph.

This doesn’t mean we won’t be reproducing black-and-white photography, in fact, just the opposite. We would hope that this decision allows us to reproduce even more black-and-white photography — because when you compare two images of the same photograph, one reproduced in four-color and the other reproduced in just black, we feel that the photograph with more depth, mid-tones, better highlights and shadows, a darker, more deep and rich black will be the one that you will choose over a dull, flat, boring grayscale image. From here on out, no image in Focus magazine will ever be reproduced in grayscale again.

On a final note, congratulations goes out to James Shull, a previous advertiser and photographer who decided to invest in the Photographer Marketing Package. I recently received an e-mail from him in which he wrote, “I have some great news! I have achieved museum representation with the Noyes Museum of Art, here in southern Jersey. Part of my accepted packet contained the Focus Gallery profile from three issues ago. The link is: www.noyesmuseum.org. Thank you for your help!” This is one of several e-mails I have received from various photographers who have taken part in any level of the Photographer Marketing Package. Other photographers have received representation from AIPAD and non-AIPAD member galleries. Still others have had other publications or even stationery companies contact them to discuss opportunities to reproduce their work in calendars, daily planner book covers and other forms of stationery. Most have received a good deal of traffic on their website and still others have made quite a few sales to collectors just like you who are in the market for something new and inexpensive. Our list of photographers who have taken part in the Photographer Marketing Package for this issue begins on page 110. I look forward to reading more responses regarding the Photographer Marketing Package from photographers and buyers as well. Remember, if you purchase something from any of our advertisers in this or any previous issue or from photoconnoissuer.net, you’ll have a lifetime subscription to Focus magazine. Doesn’t sound like such a bad deal, huh? Until then, thank you for taking the time to read Focus magazine.

David S. Spivak

Publisher and President

Focus Fine Art Photography Magazine

Domingo A. Rodriguez

The Chicana Homegirls Project

Charles Anselmo

Deconstructions: Havana/New Orleans

September 5 - October 31, 2007

Article by David Spivak

On Friday, March 2, 2007 John Szarkowski suffered a double stroke. Although there was believed to have been progress made in his recovery, on July 7, he passed away. It is not something I enjoy doing — reporting the death of a beloved icon in the photography world. Unfortunately, I had the honor of meeting Mr. Szarkowski only once. I didn’t know him very well, but I knew of him, I knew of what a powerful force he was and still is today in the world of photography. So, in thinking of some kind of a fitting tribute and remembrance to John Szarkowski, we contacted a few people who did know him and who might be able to share some thoughts and anecdotes on one of the most influential people in the world of fine art photography.

John Szarkowski was one of my mentors and just before John’s last illness we had a wonderful long visit in Houston. This was a gift, a treasured time that is all the more precious in its finality. The occasion was the opening of his SFMOMA retrospective in Houston. I was understandably nervous about sequencing his photographs for the exhibition and then waiting for his response. Typically, John didn’t give compliments, but you knew if he was pleased or displeased by the story that he happened to tell. His stories were fables. He would tell one and glance at you with this look that said, “Did you get it?” I got the message that he was pleased with the show, and especially with it being in Houston where his beloved sister lived and in whose house his nieces and nephews gathered for the occasion. Of course, we invited John to lecture. There are not many people who can pack an auditorium, especially almost 15 years after their retirement from a position of great power, but John could and did fill our hall with young and old, photographers and architects, and writers and musicians, as well as the general public.

He showed his work, charming everyone with his command of both the images on the screen and those formed by words. As his most recent pictures were of his apple farm, I wasn’t surprised when he began to talk about apples: grafting new varieties, watching them grow, hoping, and mostly being disappointed that all that labor and effort did not measure up to his expectations. Slowly, I got it. He wasn’t talking about apples. He was talking about photographers. There are thousands and thousands of photographers out there, but if your standards are really high, and your senses are really acute, there are only a few really good apples. Among other qualities, I am going to miss those stories, particularly his way of telling them, with many witty asides and diversions. While he was here, he had, I thought, finished a story. But he said, “Anne, I wasn’t through.” I apologized and said that it sounded like an ending. No, he said, “that was only a semicolon.” John and I often disagreed over what we thought were good pictures. I rarely changed my mind, but I was no match for him in an argument. It’s probably good that no one will ever again have the power that John wielded over photography, mostly with great grace and with exceptional intelligence. But I’ll miss that process of sharpening my thoughts against John’s rapier sharp and supple mind.

Anne Wilkes Tucker

Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

I remember one time when we met for drinks at the Century Club, a wonderful old NY artist’s club where the walls were hung by member artists, the good ones from the nineteenth century. I remember we were talking about some of the more current photographers, and he was becoming grumpy so I changed the subject. I had been reading Looking at Photographs because I wanted to see, among other things in that wonderful book, how far he had gotten, what the most recent pictures were that interested him. And I observed that most of the discussion of those pictures was about what was in the pictures, what was interesting to look at and why. And he said, well that was what photography was best at, wasn’t it? What it was most suited for was a kind of pointing. I said to myself, well, yes, that kind of respect for looking is important to remember — that the real world is important.

Sandra Phillips

Curator of Photography

MoMA SF

John Szarkowski was a giant. I can definitely say I owe my own life in photography to him. As a young man I picked up a copy of Looking at Photographs and it changed my life. I was not a photographer but a voyeur of images that were having a profound affect on me and slowly taking me over. But I was struggling to understand why. John’s writings and taste articulated the reasons in such a powerful way. The irony was our eventual meeting and friendship and the honor of presenting his own beautiful work in our gallery. His contribution to the field is as great as Stieglitz’s — which history will bear out. He was in life a Shakespearean character, part Hamlet, part Falstaff, part Lear. Wise, witty, and passionate. I owe him so much and will miss him greatly. But I am staring now at an image of one of his beloved apple trees and feel sad but inspired. I know he is holding court in the big darkroom in the sky at the head of the table, his rightful and most deserved place.

Peter Fetterman

Peter Fetterman Gallery

John Szarkowski

By Weston Naef

As published in the Los Angeles Times, July 13, 2007

When the news of John Szarkowski’s death at 81 reached me on July 8, my mind turned immediately to the first time we sat down together for a serious conversation, almost 40 years ago, and how his style of thinking and personal conduct still affect me. I was in my 20s, still in diapers as a museum curator. Szarkowski had invited me for lunch at the Century Club of New York, a venerable private social establishment on Fifth Avenue within walking distance of his office at the Museum of Modern Art and a fifteen minute bus ride from my desk at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I had lived in New York for only two or three years and was in awe that a private social club could hold on its walls paintings by some of the same artists on the walls of the Metropolitan Museum. I was nervous about what I would say to my legendary senior.

I found my way up the paneled stair to the Century Club dining room, where Szarkowski was seated with one of the famous Century gin martinis on the small round table. He welcomed me and invited me to join him in the same. He was wearing a uniform I saw him in many times — a navy blue blazer, paisley medium-width tie and gray trousers, and he was smoking a pipe. Seated around us were luminaries from the fields of publishing and advertising. I was impressed by Szarkowski’s skill at telling a story peppered with juicy anecdotes, and how he could manage to achieve diplomacy and candor in the same breath. At the time of our meeting the Diane Arbus exhibition was at MoMA, but not having anything original to say about Arbus, I told the story of the slender thread that had led me to Szarkowski, which also touched on how I had been bewitched by the art of photography as a doctoral student in the history of art at Brown University. I related how I was assigned to assist Professor William Jordy in teaching his popular undergraduate course on the history of American architecture. One of my jobs was to prepare informal exhibitions drawn from the art department collection of photographs of works of architecture and secure relevant books from the library.

When it came time to prepare materials about the buildings designed by the Chicago architect Louis Sullivan, whose work I admired greatly, it turned out the strongest images of Sullivan’s architecture had the name “John Szarkowski” attached to them. In 1966 his name meant nothing to me, but by 1971 I had matched Sullivan’s photographer with the man at MoMA. Sitting in the Century Club, I directed the conversation to the subject of how a curator learns the skills required to do our job. His advice: “look, look, look and don’t stop looking.” We communicated regularly over the decades, and Szarkowski’s compelling genius forced me to put up with his often cantankerous attitude.

There was much to admire, envy and regret. He could be courtly and generous one minute and the next be brutally opinionated about a trivial matter. I respected the methods he used to teach a whole generation of people how to look at photographs and to comprehend their cultural, historical and artistic importance. I respected how he followed in the well established tradition of the artist-savant/connoisseur, whose understanding of quality and importance in his subject stemmed from years of practicing it. I admired his commitment to mentoring newcomers about the art of photography. I admired the way he communicated personally with photographers, what he said to them about their work and how he took their advice about what was worth looking at. I will miss the chance to match with him on a point of disagreement and will especially miss his extraordinary sense of humor that inevitably brought a laugh at the most unexpected point in a story.

Compiled by Stephen Perloff

Editor of Focus Magazine,

The Photograph Collector

and The Photo Review

AUCTION HOUSE ROW

Following a wide-ranging strategic review, Christie’s will be closing its London collectibles departments, including its department dealing with Cameras and Photographic Equipment, at the end of July. The department began holding specialist auctions in 1973, and since 1986 Michael Pritchard has headed it, establishing its international profile as the world’s leading collectible and vintage photographic equipment auctioneer. The department set numerous record prices over the years. Sales of photographs in London are unaffected. Pritchard, who was also an auctioneer and director, will be leaving Christie’s on August 10 after 21 years. He has started a PhD looking at the development of the British photographic industry under the supervision of Roger Taylor at De Montfort University. He will be available for some limited freelance consultancy and may be contacted via his website www.mpritchard.com or by email: [email protected]

In the spirit of innovation and enterprise that has become a trademark of the contemporary art establishment, Phillips de Pury & Company has announced the launch of www.phillipsartexpert.com. This stand-alone site, completely separate from the core brand, capitalizes on the growing public interest in art and design and the desire to collect. Its aim is to engage and educate the user in the nomenclature of the auction process, enhance one’s knowledge of art and above all, allow the user to hone his or her taste and collecting passion. Phillipsartexpert.com is a totally interactive site driven by user-based content. The platform of the site is centered on a blog, with colorfully executed pop-up information on artworks entitled “In the Know” and “Games Gallery.” There is also a video glossary of basic auction terms featuring the international auctioneer/art specialist, Simon de Pury. At launch, blog content centers on threads that include an essential reading list of titles for the art expert’s library, a diary of the must-see exhibitions around the world, and the hottest living property of the art scene. The blog also features a free classifieds board where individuals and businesses can post announcements, offers, and contact information. If a hotel has spare rooms in the run-up to the Basel Art Fair or if you are looking for a receptionist with a PhD in Gallery Management (SIC!), you can tap into an unrivalled art network of user-posted classifieds on phillipsartexpert.com. “In the Know” allows users to gather knowledge about a particular piece that has been offered in the [email protected] sales. Images are posted of works of design, contemporary art, and photographs and the user is able to click on the piece at various points to reveal select facts and the ‘backstory’ relevant to the piece. A registered user can add his/her own pop-up information on provenance, process, historical facts and any other relevant data about the piece. “Games Gallery,” hosted by Simon de Pury, is in development and the first two games launched in early July are an “Art Quiz” and the “Auction Top Ten.” Two additional games, “Name That Brushstroke” and “Build Your Own Collection” are being constructed and will launch early in September. Registered users are able to play the games and earn points. Scores will be drawn on a monthly basis. And every six months a grand-prize winner will be drawn and awarded a Business Class ticket to New York or London (from anywhere in the world) plus accommodation, to attend a Phillips de Pury & Company evening sale. Phillipsartexpert.com intends to encourage the un-initiated as well as the seasoned art enthusiast to participate. Log onto www.phillipsartexpert and see if you have what it takes.

GALLERY ROW

Flazh!Alley Studio will show Horowitz by Arbus — The Lost Diane Arbus Portraits through October 13. The exhibit consists of fifteen digital color prints from the original transparencies taken by the Diane Arbus in conjunction with an ad campaign for Zeiss Lenses in 1969, two years before her death. These photographs have never been printed or exhibited before and are new to the public Arbus canon. The subject of these photos is then Broadway stage actor, Bob Horowitz, now known as Bob Barry, jazz photographer. These photographs reveal, as no one but Arbus could, a face of late sixties New York City. Because of the importance of this collection, Flazh!Alley Studio has extended the exhibition to twelve weeks. There will be a public reception on San Pedro’s 1st Thursdays Art Walk Night on October 4, 2007 from 7–11 p.m. Horowitz by Arbus can also be seen by appointment by contacting (310) 833-3633 or [email protected] Flazh!Alley is located at 1113 South Pacific Avenue, San Pedro, CA.

John Stevenson is closing his New York Chelsea gallery. An elegant and intimate space, the gallery was as far from the big white boxes that have come to dominate the Chelsea gallery scene as possible. Located on the edge of Chelsea, on 23rd Street near 8th Avenue, it was several blocks from the heart of the gallery district, but you could actually get there as the E train stopped right at that corner. While Stevenson had a year left on his lease, the constant construction around him, with subsequent damage to the building, was too much to bear. So he’s taking the summer off for a much-deserved vacation and coming back in the fall as a private dealer. We’ll let you know his new contact information when we get it.

MUSEUM AND NOT-FOR-PROFIT ROW

Opening on September 25, 2007, the Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography will be the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s first gallery designed specifically for and devoted exclusively to the display of photographs created between 1960 and the present day. Situated adjacent to the special exhibition galleries for drawings, prints, and photographs and the portion of the Robert Wood Johnson, Jr. Gallery where the earlier history of photography is displayed, the Menschel Hall will allow the Department of Photographs to show its contemporary holdings within the broader context of photographic traditions and in an exhibition space with appropriate scale and detail. Installations, which will change every six months, will be drawn from the Department’s growing permanent collection of major contemporary works by artists including Bernd and Hilla Becher, Adam Fuss, Rodney Graham, Sharon Lockhart, Richard Prince, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Jeff Wall.

SF Camerawork announces the unveiling of its 2007 Fine Print Membership Program, which offers a unique opportunity to collect contemporary work at prices substantially below market value. When you join at the Collector Level or above, you may choose from among limited edition, signed photographic works by such nationally recognized artists as Kota Ezawa, David Levinthal, Ruth Bernhard, Debra Bloomfield, Bill Dane, Debra Bloomfield, Monica Denevan, Tim Sullivan, Hank Willis Thomas, and Michael Rauner.

Pierre-Yves Mahé, founder of Spéos - Paris Photograhic Institute announced the discovery of the world’s oldest intact photographic lab — dating back to 1840. After in-depth research, the entire lab will be exhibited in the Maison Nicéphore Niépce — Bistrot de la Photographie, 2 rue Nicéphore Niépce, 71240 Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, France. For further information about the discovery, visit www.niepce.com/pagus/pagus-eve.html, which will be showing numerous photos and the results of the ongoing research. Contact Pierre-Yves Mahé or the Niépce house through Spéos: at 8 rue Jules Vallès, 75011 Paris, France. Telephone +33 (0) 40 09 18 58, or [email protected]

From july 21 through November 4, 2007, the Busch-Reisinger Museum of Harvard University Art Museums, will exhibit Light Display Machines: Two Works by László Moholy-Nagy. The show highlights the museum’s newly acquired replica of László Moholy-Nagy’s seminal kinetic sculpture, Light Prop for an Electric Stage (1930). Commonly known as the Light-Space Modulator, the original work has been in the Busch-Reisinger Museum’s collection since 1956, and is currently on view in its galleries. Extensive changes in the original Light Prop’s materials over the decades and continuing problems with its mechanical engineering mean that the original can no longer give an adequate impression of some of the artist’s intentions. The full-sized and fully-functioning 2006 replica will be installed in a darkened gallery with spotlighting that creates a dramatic play of shadows, translucencies, transparencies and reflections generated by the rotating machine’s multiple surfaces. Moholy-Nagy’s short experimental film Light Play: Black White Gray (1930) will be shown in the gallery. The artist used the Light Prop as the sole subject of this film’s carefully choreographed sequence of close-ups, double exposures, and special effects. For more information, contact the Busch-Reisinger Museum at (617) 495-9400 or www.artmuseums.harvard.edu/exhibitions/busch/lightDisplayMachines.html.

The Phillips Collection has acquired 151 Brett Weston photographs from the Brett Weston Archive, making it the largest gift to the museum’s collection of photography. The acquisition of such a significant body of work by Weston positions the Phillips as a study center for the artist’s work and offers an unparalleled opportunity to examine Weston’s photography in depth.

The 151 photographs include important examples of Weston’s work from the late 1920s through the 1980s, including portraits, landscapes, and images of abstracted forms and textures. Also among the images are views of New York City, landscape photographs of the West, a portfolio of portraits of his father Edward Weston, and botanical images from Hawaii.

In the summer of 2008, the Phillips will showcase selections from the acquisition during a major Weston retrospective exhibition, Brett Weston: Out of the Shadow, organized in partnership with The Oklahoma City Museum of Art. For further information on the Phillips Collection, contact (202) 387-2151, [email protected], or www.phillipscollection.org.

The Southeast Museum of Photography is currently closed in preparation for its move into a new facility at the Mori Hosseini Center. The website is also undergoing construction and certain pages may become periodically unavailable. Stay tuned as information becomes available about new fall exhibitions.The Southeast Museum of Photography is located at Building 100, Daytona Beach Community College, 1200 West International Speedway Boulevard, Daytona Beach, FL 32114 and can be contacted at (386) 506-4475 or through www.smponline.org.

George J. Rosa III, Founder and President of the Hallmark Museum of Contemporary Photography, has announced that the museum will expand its exhibition, archive, and exhibit preparation spaces in January 2008. The new facilities, in the historic Crocker Bank Building at the entrance to the renaissance district of downtown Turners Falls, Massachusetts, will provide three new galleries, an exhibit mounting and framing area, staff quarters, a photographic book shop and an archive room for study of the museum’s permanent collection. Rosa plans to devote the next six months to remodeling the lower floor of the 1860s building for museum uses, aiming for a post-New Year grand opening. Paul Turnbull, Executive Director, says, “This expansion will more than double our current exhibition capabilities, allowing us to show an even greater range of contemporary photography. We’ll also be able to feature vibrant and significant work by photographers young in their careers, students, and other underrepresented artists, as well as theme and group exhibitions.” The Hallmark Museum of Contemporary Photography is located at 85 Avenue A, downtown Turners Falls, Massachusetts. Regular museum hours are Thursday through Sunday, 1-5 p.m. All events are free and open to the public.

In elections held at the end of May 2007 by the Board of Trustees of The Museum of Modern Art, Jerry I. Speyer was elected as Chairman, succeeding Robert B. Menschel. Leon Black was elected a Vice Chairman, joining Sid R. Bass, Kathleen Fuld, and Mimi Haas in that capacity. Donald B. Marron becomes President Emeritus. Marie-Josée Kravis, elected President in June 2005, remains in office. The elections are effective July 1, 2007.

Jerry Speyer, President & CEO of Tishman Speyer Properties, has been a member of the MoMA Board of Trustees since 1982. He becomes Chairman after serving as Vice Chairman since 1996. He was integral to the new building project and instrumental in the Museum’s sale of the West End properties. In addition to acting as a member of the Executive Committee and chairing the Fund for the 21st Century and the Development Committee, Speyer has been a member of the Nominating Committee, Finance Committee, Ad Hoc Committee on Government Relations, Committee on Painting and Sculpture, New Building Committee, and Library Council. Since 2004, he has been listed in ARTnews’ Top 200 Collectors. He regularly displays world-class art in public spaces, including Rockefeller Center.

In addition to his affiliation with MoMA, Mr. Speyer serves on the boards of a number of other organizations, including Carnegie Hall, New York-Presbyterian Hospital, The Partnership for New York City, RAND Corporation, Urban Land Institute, Columbia University, The New York City Investment Fund, and Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.

AWARDS

On June 11th, after meetings at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris, the jury of the HCB Award 2007 nominated Jim Goldberg as the winner for his project “The New Europeans.” Goldberg, a member of Magnum Photos since 2006, was presented by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Presented by the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson every other year, the HCB Award is a prize of €30 000 intended to stimulate a photographer’s creativity by offering an opportunity to carry out a project that would otherwise be difficult to accomplish. Created in 1988 by Robert Delpire, it was relaunched in 2003 with the opening of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris. Chris Killip (1989), Josef Koudelka (1991), Larry Towell (2003) and Fazal Sheikh (2005) were the previous recipients of the Award. This Award has been given by an international jury composed of seven adjudicators: Robert Delpire (President of the jury), Martine Franck (Photographer and President of la Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson), Antoinette Seillière (Representative of Groupe Wendel), Giovanna Calvenzi (Artistic Director, Milan), Sandra Phillips (Senior Curator of Photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), François Hébel (Head of the Rencontres d’Arles) and Marloes Krijnen (Head of FOAM, Amsterdam). The jury underlined the originality, the sincerity and the creativity of Jim Goldberg’s work — a work that is well known in America and deserves to be widely shown in Europe. “The New Europeans” is a project that Jim Goldberg started four years ago on the occasion of the 2004 summer Greek Olympiad.

This project tells of the journeys of refugees and immigrants who travel from war-torn and economically devastated countries to make new homes in Europe. In the last four years, he has photographed immigrants, refugees and trafficked peoples in Greece and Ukraine. With the HCB Award, he will travel to these people’s countries of origin and tell the root stories of migration. While much of this project is specific to the socio-economic landscape of Greece and the plight of refugees who make Greece their new homeland, it speaks to larger issues and raises questions about racism and cultural persecution across the globe. This project will be exhibited at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in April 2009. For further information about the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation and the HCB Award, contact Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, 2, Impasse Lebouis, 75014 Paris, France, 33 1 56 80 27 00, or www.henricartierbresson.org.

Hossein Farmani (Founder of the Lucie Awards and Co-Founder of the Palm Springs Photo Festival) and Jeff Dunas (Creative Director and Co-Founder of PSPF), announced the Lucie Awards honorees to be celebrated October 15, 2007, at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall in New York City. A 55-member Advisory Board nominates these individuals each year. This year’s honorees are: Elliot Erwitt – Lifetime Achievement, Kenro Izu – Humanitarian Award, Ralph Gibson –  Achievement in Fine Art, Philip Jones Griffiths – Achievement in Photojournalism, Heinz Kluetmeier – Achievement in Sports, Eugene Richards – Achievement in Documentary, Lord Snowdon – Achievement in Portraiture, Deborah Turbeville – Achievement in Fashion, and Howard Zieff – Achievement in Advertising. The Lucie Awards will also celebrate the top winners from the International Photography Awards (IPA) competition — The International Photographer of the Year (Professional Category, $10,000 cash prize), the Discovery of the Year (Non-Professional, $5,000 cash prize), and the Deeper Perspective Photographer of the Year ($5,000 cash prize). Six additional awards are announced each year lauding 2007’s “Best” – Picture Editor, Fashion Layout, Curator/Exhibition, Advertising Campaign, Book Publisher, and Photography Magazine. For more information about the Lucies and the International Photography Awards, contact (310) 659-0122 or [email protected], or visit www.lucieawards.com.

Robert Frank has won the PHotoEspaña Award 2007 in recognition of his career and influence on contemporary photography. He received the award on June 25th at a ceremony held at the Teatro Español in Madrid. The festival’s top award — a special trophy designed by Eduardo Arroyo and €12,000 in the purchase of photographs — was granted to Frank “in recognition of his influence on aesthetics and contemporary photography. Frank’s images of life in the USA, published in the book The Americans, set a new trend in visual perception that has impacted deeply on subsequent generations. His beat aesthetics, together with his cinematographic and photographic projects, have helped to enhance the status of photography as a major art form amongst specialist critics, cultural institutions and collectors.”

The Bartolomé Ros Award for the best career in photography, worth €12,000, has been granted jointly to Marta Gili, director of the Jeu de Paume, and the photographer Javier Vallhonrat. The Galería Magda Belloti received the Festival Off Award for the exhibition by Columbian photographer Juan Fernando Herrando. The M2 / elmundo.es Public’s Award went to the BBVA for Sebastião Salgado’s show, “África.” In the national category, the Best Photography Book of the Year Award was given to Making Time by Thomas Struth, published by the Prado Museum and Turner. Sob Zeus estranhos. Uma história de exilio by Daniel Blaufuks, published by Tinta-da-china, won the Best Photography Book of the Year Award in the international category. Finally, for the first time ever an Editorial Project Award was granted to Steidl Publishers. Finnish photographer Harri Pälviranta, winner of Descubrimientos PHE, the portfolio viewing section of the festival, also attended the event.

PhotoEspaña: PHE07, the 10th edition of the International Festival of Photography and Visual Arts, continues through July 22. For further information, contact 00 34 91 360 13 20, [email protected], or www.phedigital.com.

FAIR AND FESTIVAL NEWS

Paris Photo 2007: 11th edition will focus on Italian contemporary photography. From November 15–18, 2007, the Paris photography festival will bring together 105 exhibitors (83 galleries selected from 300 applicants and 22 publishers) from 16 countries. Showcased at the fair will be the work of some 500 international photographers and artists from every continent. In addition to 18 French galleries, the largest contingent of foreign exhibitors comes from Italy (16), followed by the USA (15), Spain (7), Germany (6), the UK (5), Holland and Japan (3 each), Finland (2) and one representative each from Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Hungary, Luxemburg, Portugal and South Africa. With 31 new arrivals this year, contemporary work gains unprecedented exposure with the first-time participation of major international galleries such as Yvon Lambert (Paris/New-York) or Massimo Minini (Brescia) as well as the return of Kicken (Berlin) and Xippas (Paris/ Athens). In 2007, the guest of honour at Paris Photo is Italy. The exploration of this country’s photography scene will begin with the presentation of the UniCredit Collection in the Central Exhibition — a choice selection of work by leading Italian photographers from the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s in an exhibition whose thematic focus is the landscape. The Statement section, comprising eight invited galleries, will showcase artists emblematic of the emerging scene since 2000: Luca Andreoni, Bianco e Valente, Botto e Bruno, Alberto Peola, Lorenza Lucchi Basili, Raffaela Mariniello, Maurizio Montagna, Eugenio Tibaldi and Carlo Valsecchi. The Project Room will present a panorama of contemporary video with pieces from the collections of Italy’s major art institutions. Finally, group and thematic shows will be exhibited in the Main Section. Now in its fourth year, the BMW–Paris Photo Prize of €12,000 will be presented to a winner chosen from among the living artists represented by Paris Photo 2007 participating galleries. The contest theme for 2007 will be “Water, the Origin of Life”. The short-listed works will be on view during Paris Photo, and the award ceremony itself will take place on Thursday, November 15. For further information about Paris Photo, contact Reed Expositions France — Paris Photo, 52/54, quai de Dion-Bouton - CS 80001, 92 806 Puteaux Cedex, France, 33 (0)1 47 56 64 74, or visit www.parisphoto.fr.

Atlanta Celebrates Photography Festival has announced the programming for ACP 9. Featuring a multitude of photography-related events, ACP 9 will include more than 100 exhibitions and other events in the Metro Atlanta area. ACP Programs include Lecture Series, Collector’s Series, Film Series, Portfolio Review and Walk, Public Art Program, and My Atlanta, Spotlight Series, and ACP Collaborations. This year’s Lecture Series and Collector’s Series contain an emphasis on the development of new media in photography. The festival will kick off with an official opening reception on September 27 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Georgia (MOCA GA). For further information about Atlanta Celebrates Photography, contact (404) 634-8664, [email protected], or www.acpinfo.org.

ART LA returns to the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, January 25–27, 2008. The fair will again focus on Los Angeles’ growing number of important galleries ranging from established blue-chip galleries to young experimental art spaces, all operating at the forefront of contemporary art. The 2008 fair will also host a select number of top international commercial and alternative galleries. Galleries from all over the world are invited to apply. Applications are now being accepted and are available for download from the ART LA website at www.artfairsinc.com. Deadline for submission is August 7, 2007. For additional information on applying to ART LA 2008, contact (323) 937-4659 or [email protected]

Imogen Cunningham, Magnolia Blossom, 1925; Courtesy Sotheby’s

Averitable cornucopia of collectible photographs will be available for the collector of fine photographs during auctions on the East and West coasts.

There are two sales at Sotheby’s this fall that will surely delight collectors of important photographic works. On October 10, an exhibition of photographs from the collection of Nancy Richardson opens. This single-owner sale features a small but sophisticated offering of images by some of the most interesting photographers of the 20th century. Highlighting this collection is pioneer Modernist Herbert Bayer. Metamorphosis, a unique large-format photomontage made in 1936, is estimated to bring $250,000 – $300,000. Pierre Dubreuil’s Le Premier Round, ($150,000/$250,000), is one of only two prints of this image known to exist. Work by photographers associated with the Institute of Design in Chicago is also a part of the Richardson collection that will be exhibited and sold by Sotheby’s. Photographers including Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskin, Frederick Sommer and Arthur Siegel are represented. Especially exciting according to Sotheby’s representatives is Richardson’s group of early Siskind exhibition prints, including Ironwork, New York ($20,000/$30,000), shown at New York’s Egan Gallery in 1947. The early sequential triptych Highland Park, Michigan ($30,000/$50,000), by Harry Callahan is another up for bid. Additionally, Sommer’s complex and unsettling Negative #68, in which the photographer created a face from chicken parts and is one of only three known prints of this image, is estimated at ($50,000/$70,000). The October 15 sale also includes work by Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Edward Weston and an oversized unique Photogram by contemporary photographer Adam Fuss.  Sotheby’s various-owners-sale takes place October 16. An exhibition of works by American Photographers from the first half of the 20th century opens October 10. Included in this sale will be works by Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Ansel Adams and Paul Strand. A Sotheby’s spokesperson said works by Weston represent, “the most significant offering….to come to auction in many years.” Included in this grouping are a beautiful platinum nude of Anita Brenner made in Mexico in 1925 ($400,000/$600,000); several Oceano dune studies from 1936 ($120,000/$180,000 – $200,000/$300,000); and a rare group of four nude studies of Miriam Lerner from 1925, all but one previously unknown in Weston’s oeuvre. Imogen Cunningham’s 1925 Magnolia Blossom ($250,000/$350,000) is one of several works by this artist in the exhibition. Paul Strand is represented by his famous Family, Luzzara, Italy, from 1953 ($150,000/$250,000). Notable among the outstanding 19th-century items is a half-plate daguerreotype of Baltimore, one of the finest surviving examples ($50,000/$70,000); a group of 10 mammoth-plate photographs by Carleton Watkins of scenes in California and Utah; and a scarce album of Watkins photographs of Kern County, California, made in the late 1880s.

Christie’s New York has three photograph sales planned for October 17-18, which will showcase works of 19th century landscape. The museum quality exhibition features 400 works set to run five days. Works by Walker Evans and Robert Frank, two of the most important artists of the 20th-century, highlight the sale of Important Photographs from a Private American Collection. Both men had a broad influence on generations of photographers, artists, filmmakers and writers. Scheduled for October 17 at 5 p.m., the sale includes the most significant group of photographs by Robert Frank ever to come to auction. Fourteen images from Frank’s cross country travels during 1955-1956 that were published in his seminal book The Americans are on offer. The book was first published in France in 1958 and in the US in its definitive form the following year. Included in the group is a rare early print of Trolley - New Orleans that is featured on the cover of the first American edition of the book ($150,000/$250,000). Photographs by Walker Evans published in a 1966 book titled Many Are Called are also included in the sale. Seven of the eight prints were made discreetly in the New York City subway with a hidden camera around 1938. Two other subway portraits by Arthur Leipzig and Helen Levitt are included in the sale. The second sale at Christie’s New York features a 51-lot offering from the collection of Rex, Inc. These artist portraits provide a “comprehensive survey of 20th century photographic history.” Two major highlights are iconic selections by Alfred Stieglitz (of wife Georgia O’Keefe) and Chuck Close (of Keith Boyle). Also included in this sale are rare self-portraits by Man Ray, Constantin Brancusi and Claude Cahun.

There is an exceedingly rare portrait of Marcel Duchamp by Henri Cartier-Bresson. Irving Penn’s photograph of Picasso and Brassaï’s of Dora Maar provide other examples of 20th-century visionaries both in front of and behind the camera. Important female artists Cindy Sherman, Shirin Neshat, Francesca Woodman, Nan Goldin and Ann Hamilton are represented in the sale. The men are in the house too: Americans documentarians Harry Callahan, Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand and Richard Avedon are all represented with images of their contemporaries: Winogrand of Arbus, Friedlander of Winogrand and Avedon of Frank. The final Christie’s New York sale takes place October 18 at 10 a.m. & 2 p.m. and features a rare and important group of images by Carleton Watkins. There are 21 mammoth albumen prints and a group of 62 stereoscopic positives acquired by Trenor Park directly from Watkins. The images are from an 1861 journey to Yosemite by Watkins financed by Park.

Swann Galleries showcases a striking collection of seafaring photographs at its sale on October 18. Nearly 40 nautical images by prominent American and European photographers will be featured in this auction of important 19th & 20th Century Photographs. The collection was built over a quarter century by marine photography enthusiast Charles W. Sahlman of Tampa, Florida. The photographs was exhibited at the Tampa Museum of Art. “Great art should be made available to the marketplace,” the now 80 year old Sahlman said, “not hoarded, when it is time to simplify.” The sampling of 19th-century works in the auction includes a salted paper print from a calotype negative by one of the inventors of photography, William Henry Fox Talbot. Hungerford Suspension Bridge ($5,000/$25,000), is a early image of the bridge (circa 1842-45), with several docked boats in the foreground. Two other works from this period of note are Gustave LeGray’s stunning Brig on the Water, a large-format albumen print, 1856 ($25,000/$35,000), and Timothy H. O’Sullivan’s Black Canyon, Colorado River from Camp 8, Looking Above, albumen print, 1871, from the Wheeler Geological Survey of the Western U.S. ($9,000/$12,000). Civil War photographer George N. Barnard is also featured in the auction. Barnard’s Savannah, Georgia No. 2, gold-toned albumen print, 1866, from his photographic documentation of Sherman’s Campaign, is estimated to garner $2,500 – $3,500. Other notable representatives of 19th-century photographers are English photographer Peter Henry Emerson and renowned Antarctic photographer Herbert G. Ponting. Emerson’s Marshman Going to Cut Schoof-Stuff, platinum print, circa 1885, from his masterwork Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads, is estimated at $4,000 – $6,000. Ponting’s majestic view of the Terra Nova Icebound in the Pack, ($15,000/$25,000), is an oversize green-toned carbon print, 1914, taken during Admiral Scott’s ill-fated expedition. Representing the early 20th century are Karl F. Struss’ Sailboats, New England, platinum print, 1910 ($4,000/$6,000); Alfred Steiglitz’s classic image The Steerage that appeared in his publication Camera Work, photogravure on Japan tissue, 1911 ($5,000/$7,500); and Eugène Atget’s La Rochelle-Bateau, arrowroot print, circa 1920 ($7,000/$10,000). Representing the Modernist school are Edward Weston’s Abstraction Depicting the Bow of a Boat in San Francisco Bay, silver print, 1925, ($25,000/$35,000), German artist Ernst Scheel’s New Objectivity view of Schiffmaste from below, oversize silver print, circa 1930 ($10,000/$15,000); and Margaret Bourke-White’s powerful scene of a sailor Climbing the Mast, warm-toned silver print, 1934 ($9,000/$12,000). Two other groups of photographs offered by Swann Galleries are photographs by Berenice Abbott, Andrea Feininger and Edward S. Curtis. Abbott’s journalistic images include Tusitala, North River and 156th St., Manhattan, silver print, 1937 ($4,000/$6,000). New Yorkers should take note of Feininger’s Brooklyn Bridge and Fulton Fish Market, and New York, Fulton Fish Market, ferrotyped silver prints, 1940 ($3,000/$4,500). The North American Indian, Edward S. Curtis’s magnums opus, will also be offered for sale. There are 16 complete portfolios containing his large-format magisterial photogravures and 16 fully illustrated text volumes in handsome morocco bindings. The auction will begin at 2:30 p.m. on Thursday, October 18. The photographs will be on public exhibition at Swann Galleries on Saturday, October 13 from
10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Monday, October 15 to Wednesday, October 17, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; and Thursday, October 18 from 10 a.m. to noon. Illustrated catalogues are available for $35 from Swann Galleries, 104 East 25th Street, New York, NY 10010, and may be viewed online at www.swanngalleries.com.

The Phillips de Pury sale will take place October 17, 2007 at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. and feature Robert Frank and Several others. Frank’s Parade, Hoboken NJ 1955 ($70,000/$90,000) may be one of the best known. There’s also; F. Holland Day, Pilate, 1906 ($250,000/$350,000) and Pierre Dubreuil, Chantecler, 1929 ($80,000/$120,000). A few of the other highlights are; Tina Barney, Jill and Polly in the Bathroom, ($30,000/$50,000); Gregory Crewdson, Untitled from Twilight Series, 1999, ($40,000/$60,000) and Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 1994 ($100,000/$150,000).

While all of this activity is taking place in New York, Bonhams & Butterfields’s will be gearing up for their November 7th sale in Los Angeles. Included in this sale will be works acquired by a collector directly from Ansel Adams in 1961. A framed and signed gelatin silver print Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park, California, 1944, is expected to bring $30,000 – $40,000. The sale features more than 200 lots of 19th- and 20th-century photographs.

Adams is just one of many artists featured in the auction which includes works by Johan Hagemeyer, Anne Brigman, Michael Kenna, Diane Arbus, Edward Weston, Garry Winogrand, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Weegee, Ruth Bernhard, Robert Mapplethorpe and Abelardo Morell among others. In addition to the Adams photograph mentioned above the other notable work is Irving Penn’s Woman in Palace, Marrakech, Morocco (Lia Fonssagrives-Penn), 1951/printed 1953. Estimated at $225,000 – 300,000, the platinum print is signed and numbered 13/40. There will be two previews for the Bonhams & Butterfields sale. The first is October 26-28 in Los Angeles followed by a San Francisco preview on November 3-5. The illustrated auction catalog will be online in the weeks preceding the previews at www.bonhams.com/us. Quite a selection of work from a wide range of photographers will be available at some of America’s premier auction houses. Everything from portraits, landscapes, nautical themes, small town scenes, big cities and much more.

Marvin Montgomery, Jr. is a New York City based freelance writer who has worked for local and national broadcast organizations as an editor and producer.

Robert Frank, Trolley, New Orleans, 1955; Courtesy Christies Images LTD. 2007

Weegee, Easter Sunday in Harlem, circa 1940; courtesy Bonhams & Butterfields

I started writing for Focus with the idea that the person reading my words would be by my side and that it could be as relaxed as having coffee with a friend. That was about a year ago. I have tried to shy away from telling you what to buy or who is the next great artist. I really want you to look at photography. A new season filled with new excitement and new photographs to look at has started. It is by now October; the auctions will be in a few days. Please try to visit the previews this year.

Collecting is not about what you can buy but about what and why you choose to leave something out. Collecting is another art form. It could be why the larger collectors of today with money and power have started to build their own museums to keep their visions whole and undiluted. We are not there yet — maybe one day.

This column was inspired by what I did during my summer vacation. Collecting is a joy, but like anything else, you need a break, a different direction— maybe to realize that you have reached your goal. For the summer I decided to stop looking for images to acquire. For the summer I decided to put myself to the test that I usually give to my students, that is, to curate an imaginary exhibition of 16 images based on a theme using photographs from many sources, mostly from printed matter and, most importantly, not iconic photography. I use this as a way to help them see and understand what it is they are looking for. Usually we have a session where they all show their ideas and we talk. The process hopefully expands our thoughts about what it is that drives us to collect.

Finding a subject was easy because I love looking at people. More and more I find myself looking with the understanding that something lies within the borders of the image that the sitter is trying to tell me — something more than the conflict of revealing the private self, more than the blank gaze or defensive glare, more than the artist’s manipulation. I want to see it all. I want to be there in the second when no one is looking, knowing of course that it is all in my imagination, that a photograph does not provide me with the privilege of someone else’s life.

I gave my effort the title of “Degrees of Separation.” Previously in my class exercises I had used as a unifying theme people holding photographs of lost friends and family. I am moved and fascinated by the power of the photograph that comes to represent the missing. While I was working on finding photographs that fit with my conceit, a New York gallery approached me to do a summer show. My notebooks were filled with nearly 600 portrait images. The show gave me an opportunity to force myself to edit, to crystallize what was important about this group of photographs. The gallery has as its primary objectives the striving for quality, diversity and affordability. So all of a sudden I could no longer borrow big-name artists from high-profile galleries. I had to establish a sense of cohesiveness to communicate to others a simple idea about repetition in presentation, and I could not use all 600 photographs to do this.

The decision not to use a Diane Arbus or an Irving Penn had a profound effect on me and on the way the show looked. To frame the exhibition—maybe to give pause or a visual rest to what eventually became 95 photographs — I chose six large format photographs of interiors with family portraits and snapshots displayed. This is the way most of us live with portraits. The artists were Mary Presley Adams, Sheila Pree Bright, Annabel Clark, Wyatt Gallery (a person not a space), Joelle Jensen and Jessica Rowe. There were 61 artists from around the world including 17 women. Most are working artists, some with long and distinguished careers. A number I found when visiting galleries and online sites. It was also for me a pleasant chance to show work by artists that I have met over the past 15 years while I have collected and visited places like FotoFest and Photolucida and Rhubarb-Rhubarb.

I guess I should give a little overview at this point. There is a wonderful Shelby Lee Adams picture called Mother and Baby, 1999, a homage to Mike Disfarmer taken for the Sunday New York Times. It had never been seen before, but it recalls some of the great paintings on the subject. Placed near it was Heard by Rachael Dunville, a tender image of a family gently intertwined on a porch in an old glider swing. Taken in Missouri, it is beautifully colored, yet there remains something that is a little off. Most people who see Heard say that it reminds them of a Pieta.

“Degrees of Separation” is a portrait show with a number of issues under discussion. One is Identity. How much does a photograph tell us about a person? Marco Arbus’s photograph from Two Cultures in an Armchair — of a handsome black man sitting in an elaborate chair — could have been taken almost anywhere, but it is part of a series taken in Verona, Italy, of a Pentecostal group of West Africans living there. The man evokes George Rodgers’s famous photographs taken in Sudan in 1947.

To some viewers the image suggests the work of Seydou Keita. Against this lushly colored image where the subject injects his presence and connects with the viewer, you are asked to define a person by what is left behind. Vicki Topaz’s keen observation in #302 San Francisco, California gives only a single clue: a lovely piece of lingerie left in a well-appointed hotel bathroom.

We feel that we know this woman based on many images that have come out of advertising in the past. The portraits balance ideas about who is looking. Roger Eberhard’s Taxi Driver, Russia, 2006, taken on the streets, carefully frames a man parked smoking and waiting, a man who appears to be unaware of the camera, yet the viewer is led to where the driver is looking, his gaze focused on his rear view mirror. At what could he be looking so intently? Maybe he is a spy.

Another small silver gelatin photo by Radek Skrivanek of Two Teenagers with a Cassette Player, Wadi Hadhramawt, Yemen, 1995, leaves no doubt as to what engages their eyes. The response to the exhibition was close to what I wanted to create. People took the time to look, and some came back more than once. They looked at details and asked questions. They noticed that some artists posed their subjects very carefully while others seemed to let life happen.

I think Joelle Jensen’s Portrait Hall, 2006, best represents the essence of the show. The artists, their subjects and the viewers are like a large family. Maybe we don’t always talk to or see each other, but we know we are there. We like to stop in that hallway and remember and reflect; we like to look.

Collecting is about looking and then deciding what stays with you. What stays with me is a conceptual piece by Mauro Altamura consisting of 1000 14 x11-inch black and white photographs. Twelve were in the exhibition. The body of work is called Anonymous and they are re-photographs of people in the background of pictures published in the New York Times Friday Metro section.

So this summer I had a lot of time to look at people. I would suggest to future collectors that they try my little exercise. Maybe it will help them see too. The artist who made “Degrees of Separation” a reality are listed below. Most have websites.

Shelby Lee Adams, Mary Presley Adams, Mauro Altamura, Marco Ambrosi, Dave Anderson, Roswell Angier, Sheila
Pree Bright, David Wilson Burnham, Julie Dennis Brothers, Debbie Fleming Caffery, Peikwen Cheng, Albert Chong, Annabel Clark, Valdir Cruz, Rachael Dunville, Roger Eberhard, Amy Elkins, Martine Fougeron,  Allen Frame, Wyatt Gallery, Stan Gaz, Justin Guariglia, Charles Harbutt, Jefferson Hayman, Jason Horowitz, Joelle Jensen, Jimmy Katz, Rafaelo Kazakov, Mark Kessell, Yasutaka  Kojima, Milomir Kovacevic, Jason Langer, Li Jie Liu, O. Rufus Lovett, Joseph Maida, Gratiane de Moustier, Mladen Pikulic, Dan Nelken, France Scully Osterman, Mark Osterman, Sung Jin Park, Paolo Pellegrin, Matthew Pillsbury, Nicholas Prior, Chris Rauschenberg, Frank Rodick,
Jessica Rowe, Junsik Shin, Elizabeth Siegfried, Inbal Sivan, Radek Skrivanek, Will Steacy, Maura Sullivan, Joseph Szabo, Brad Temkin, Vicki Topaz, Charles Traub, Preston Wadley, Ann Weathersby, Frederic Weber, Marc Yankus.

John A. Bennette is a well-known New York photography critic and scholar whose passion is collecting and supporting emerging artists. His 1996 AIPAD address on “The Joy of Collecting” brought him to national attention within the photographic community. He is a frequent panelist and lecturer at photographic symposia nationwide. He is also participating in Focus Feedback. To contact John with comments or questions, please

e-mail him at [email protected]

Marco Ambrosi, Portraits in Black; Courtesy Peer Gallery

Rachel Dunville, Heard; Courtesy Peer Gallery

When considering the current trends in commercial photography galleries, there are the obvious and already well-stated. Digital manipulation has become the norm, as have large, bold color images. Many galleries known for their emphasis on photography have begun to integrate non-photographic mediums into their programs, and the search for the next “young art star” is more intense than ever.

Something I have begun to notice lately is the reemergence of black and white photography in contemporary art. While it might not yet be considered a “trend,” I am starting to see a trickle of black and white images by working artists. While conducting research for this article I contacted a few colleagues who said they were also beginning to notice this, but only in bits and pieces. Many said they did not see it at all.

I started to consider this idea when one of my artists, Sarah Pickering, explained to me that her new series of photographs include both color and black and white images. The idea made sense, considering the series and the varied formats of her previous work. The idea of mixing black and white and color was exciting to me. I brought up the idea to a collector whose opinion I value greatly. He pointed out the recent exhibition of Vera Lutter’s monumental black and white photographs at Gagosian Gallery and the wonderful exhibition at Postmasters by Anthony Goicolea. Later he followed up with an e-mail mentioning Gregory Crewdson’s Fireflies exhibition at Skarstedt Fine Art and the integration of black and white images in Sarah Anne Johnson’s work shown at Julie Saul’s recently.

I enjoy the thought that black and white is being “reintroduced” to the world of image making, considering photography was black and white for most of it’s history. It is inspiring to see the work of artists who never abandoned the practice. One of the reasons I love photography and feel compelled to devote my life to it is that there is no other artistic medium that is constantly challenged by technology. Photography was born of technological advances and has continued to evolve because of those continuous advances.

On this subject, Sarah Morthland of Archive Consulting and Management Services in New York had this to say, “In no other artistic arenas are processes so easily dismissed as obsolete, or identified so strongly as belonging only to certain eras. Large color works are now ubiquitous and have lost some of their initial impact. It would be a natural tendency for artists to turn to black and white as another option in terms of utilizing whatever process best complements and promotes what they desire to express, rather than suffering the constraints of technological developments in the medium to provide the only acceptable source of materials for the creation of contemporary works of art.”

The collector who I mentioned earlier added, “As a collector of photography for nearly 15 years, I’m not sure if I’m convinced that black and white is a trend, as much as simply another way for artists to express themselves. Today, there are some great examples of contemporary photographers stretching their craft into the black and white realm. It seems odd to think of black and white as a stretch, but after years of big color, it feels like a refreshing venture. There is simplicity to black and white images. When color is taken out, the image becomes the main focus.” Charlotte Cotton notes in her essay The New Color: The Return of Black and White, “I am sure I’m not alone in beginning to think that the more complex, messy, unfashionable and broad territory of black and white photography is where we are going to find some of the grist to the mill in photography’s substantive and longer term positioning within art.”

From the perspective of the artists, Anthony Goicolea commented on the use of black and white imagery in his recent work, “I was interested in playing with the idea of traditional black and white photography versus digital and I like the film noir references and that it undermines the technology behind the image.” Sarah Pickering added a similar voice, “I’m currently using black and white as it suits the subject matter, dark and monochromatic environments. My work appears to have digital manipulation and I have been asked about that in my previous work where there was none. Although photography has always had the potential for manipulation, authenticity is much more of a concern now that digital technology has permeated the medium. I enjoy this ambiguity and with my new work I’m returning to traditional silver gelatin printing, but using digital methods.”

Looking to the future it seems that traditional black and white printing may become less common as silver-based papers and established darkroom processes become obsolete. As Anthony and Sarah mention, they are using digital production as a means to produce their images. Perhaps traditionalists will begin making their own papers or maybe it will become a cottage industry for artists dedicated to preserving the gelatin silver image. No matter how they are made, it seems that we might be seeing more black and white photographs in the world of contemporary art. It’s only natural after many years of color work becoming increasingly more saturated, brighter and bigger that artists would start to engage with the subtleties that a black and white image reveals. It is a refreshing look at an approachthat some have forgotten. Perhaps with the combination of technology and creative minds the “new” black and white will be something totally unexpected and truly new.

Daniel Cooney has over fifteen years of experience as an instructor, gallerist, curator and auction specialist. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the State University of New York at New Paltz and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Illinois. He taught photography at the University of Illinois for three years and has lectured widely on contemporary and historical photography. Currently, Cooney is an adjunct faculty member in the Graduate Studies Department of the Fashion Institute of Technology. He began his gallery career at the James Danziger Gallery and continued as Associate Director of the Julie Saul Gallery. He was also the Director of Online Photographs at Sothebys.com. He has taken appraisal classes at NYU and is on the Board of Advisors of the

Center for Photography in Woodstock.

Anthony Goicolea, Low Tide; Courtesy Daniel Cooney Fine Art

Soulcatcher Studio at The Lofts

3600 Cerrillos Rd., Suite 729D, Santa Fe, NM 87507, Tel: 505-310-SOUL (7685) www.soulcatcherstudio.com

We are proud to announce the representation of Camille Seaman and her new portfolio, The Last Iceberg.

Camille Seaman, Grand Pinnacle Iceberg, East Greenland, 2006

De Clercq

Louis-Constantine-Henri-Francois Xavier De Clercq was born on Christmas Day in 1836 in Oignies, France. Doubly blessed with the support of a wealthy French family, De Clercq early on fell in love with archeology and ancient cultures.

But the beginnings were not auspicious for the young De Clercq. Even at 23, he had not yet been meaningfully employed. Through family influence he became a courier for Napoleon III during the Italian campaigns in early 1859.In their efforts to give the young man a more classical experience other friends of his family would influence him in what was to become his most important life work. The marquis Melchior de Vogue, noted archeologist and a friend of De Clercq’s brother-in-law, and Emmanuel-Guillaume Rey, an historian of Crusader Castles, were to play major roles in this life change. Melchior de Vogue suggested that Rey hire the young De Clercq as Rey’s assistant on an expedition to Syria and Asia Minor that was being commissioned by the French Ministry of Public Instruction. After interrupting a trip to Switzerland, De Clercq joined the expedition in August and remained with Rey until December 5, 1859. Part of the reason for Rey’s hiring of De Clercq apparently stemmed from the young man’s ability with a camera. According to Rey’s notes, “his experience and success as a photographer promised that I would have in him a useful assistant.”

Oddly enough, little is actually known about De Clercq’s early photographic training and experience. Through the recent discovery of De Clercq’s waxed paper negatives, we may now surmise that French photographer Gustave Le Gray’s teachings may have been influential on De Clercq, either before or during his journeys. There have also been other clues noted by other authors, including De Clercq’s own note about pursuing his work “with perseverance,” which was a phrase that Le Gray was very fond of repeating and which provided ironic fodder for his critics. As photo historian Eugenia Parry Janis noted in the very excellent Louis De Clercq: Voyage en Orient, “The fact that his work is brilliantly executed with a consistent vision of his subjects throughout the entire corpus of the pictures, makes it difficult not to see the force of Le Gray’s influence.” De Clercq’s use of waxed paper negatives was probably due to the influence or even direct suggestion of Le Gray, who had perfected and registered several waxed paper processes in France before he left for Syria and Egypt in the 1860s himself.

De Clercq’s images are stunning and give a greater sense of the overwhelming size of many of these archeological wonders and monuments than nearly any other of his contemporaries, despite the fact that he would rarely use people for purposes of scale in his images, as many of these other early photographers would do. As Janis noted in her introduction, De Clercq’s work also often gave one a sense of “precariousness amid monuments constructed to endure for millennia. There is something irregular, unusual, even absurd here, as if one were viewing a disoriented dinosaur. In the Hemicycle the broken entablature leans against the stone socles as if about to push them off their vertical axes.” Janis also cited his image Heliopolis (Baalbeck), Interior of the Temple of Jupiter, Syria, where she notes “De Clercq fixed upon the colossal keystone that has slipped out of place, and that suspended thusly, seems about to drop like the blade of a guillotine.” In 1861, De Clercq wound up publishing some 222 photographs in six volumes: I. Picturesque views of the cities and monuments of Syria; II. Castles in Syria at the time of the Crusades; III. Views of Jerusalem and of the Holy Places in Palestine; IV. The Stations of the Cross in Jerusalem; V. Monuments and picturesque sites in Egypt; VI. Voyage in Spain, views and picturesque monuments. He exhibited photographs from these sets almost immediately at the Fourth Exhibition of the SFP (Societé Française de Photographie) in Paris, even though he was apparently not a member at the time.

Although he self-published these volumes in a reported edition of 50, only about a dozen copies — both intact and broken — are known to have survived. Most of these copies are in public institutions — unlike his negatives. In January 2003, most of his paper negatives were auctioned off in Chartres, France. Oddly enough these had disappeared for over 140 years before coming to light. A French antique dealer had found them in a file folder that dated to about the 1920s. Many from the Egyptian series were missing from the group and remain unaccounted for. Perhaps further scientific study of these negatives can provide a more direct link to Le Gray’s own waxed paper processes.

De Clercq died in his hometown of Oignies on December 27, 1901, just two days after his 65th birthday. Prices on De Clercq’s prints in good condition usually range from about $2,500–$50,000. His paper negatives, which are, of course, unique, are difficult to find. Many have now disappeared into large private collections. They also have usually ranged, when available, from about $2,500–$50,000. Overall condition, tonality and specific image determine prices. The Tower of Gold from the Spanish album is perhaps the most expensive De Clercq positive print and will often sell at the top end of the range. A broken set of Louis De Clercq albums, minus the important Syrian forts album, sold to a phone bidder for over $410,000 in mid-2006 in a small French auction in suburban Paris. The condition was generally considered by most observers to be just “average” on this group, despite the high price tag.

The best single reference book on Louis De Clercq — in fact the only one focused on him to date — is Rolf Mayer’s Louis De Clercq: Voyage en Orient, which was published by Edition Cantz in 1989 in conjunction with an exhibit at the Mayer and Mayer gallery in Cologne at the end of that year. The text is in English, German and French. The Gilman Company’s fine set of De Clercq’s work, which is now a part of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection, was used for 222 of the reproductions. The Musée d’Orsay lent a 223rd image that was a part of an album in its collection. Besides Rolf Mayer’s work in compiling the images and information, Eugenia Parry Janis wrote the excellent introductory essay and notes. Unfortunately this book/catalogue is now quite scarce and usually sells for $500 to $600 or more when in its fragile slipcover. The book is not a complete compendium of De Clercq’s images, however, because a number of paper negatives surfaced in the Chartres auction that were not included in the albums.

Alex Novak is a private dealer that has over 30 years experience in the photography-collecting arena. His companies, Vintage Works and Contemporary Works, are a member of the Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD). These companies sell important 19th, 20th and 21st-century photography in every medium. There are over 3,500 images in inventory, which can be viewed on the following websites: www.iphotocentral.com, www.vintageworks.net, and www.contemporary.net. He can be contacted at 1-215-822-5662 or [email protected]

Louis De Clercq, Heliopolis (Baalbeck), Foundations of the Temple of the Sun, 1859

Louis De Clercq, Heliopolis (Baalbeck), Ruined Mosque, Originally Built with the Debris of Ancient Temples, Syria, 1859; All images courtesy Vintage Works

Aperture

Paris-New York-Shanghai

Hans Eijkelboom

Publication Date: November 2007

Hardcover; 1,256 four-color images; 240 pages

$49.95

Dutch conceptual artist Hans Eijkelboom’s work is very much in line with the deadpan, seemingly mechanistic note-taking of Ed Ruscha and Hans-Peter Feldman. In Paris-New York-Shanghai, Eijkelboom creates a witty comparative study of three major contemporary metropolises, each selected for having been the cultural capital of its time: Paris during the nineteenth century; New York, the twentieth; and Shanghai, the twenty-first. This uniquely bound three-volume accordion-folded set opens up to allow the reader not only to view each city individually, but also to compare simultaneously the three photographic studies of each metropolis and its citizens. The large-format cityscapes with the identifying quirks of each city and the snapshot-style grids of their inhabitants soon reveal how similar one city is to another today.

Chronicle Books

Elliott Smith

Autumn De Wilde

Publication Date: November 2007

8 x 10.5″ hardcover; 200 color and b/w; 224 pages

$29.95

Elliott Smith’s intensely intimate music and open-hearted, Beatlesque pop songs have left a deep mark on a generation of fans and musicians in the wake of his tragic death in 2003. In Autumn de Wilde’s remarkable photographs and conversations with close friends, family, and musicians he inspired, this is the first and only portrait of the beloved and troubled singer/songwriter by those who knew him well. Complementing de Wilde’s riveting, personal images are ephemera, handwritten lyrics and revealing talks with Smith’s inner circle, many speaking here for the first time. Also included are a foreword by Beck Hansen and Chris Walla, and a live CD of unreleased solo acoustic performances.

The Garden at Night: Private Views of Public Edens

Linda Rutenberg

Publication Date: November 2007

11 x 13″ hardcover; 160 4-color illustrations; 176 pages

$40.00

Linda Rutenberg’s images capture an astonishing world hidden in plain sight. By photographing public and botanical gardens at night, Rutenberg reveals a luminous landscape of plants, colors, shadows and light. Twenty-one gardens throughout North America are included, each with intimate portraits of their regional flowers and plants glowing in the blackness, revealing a secret nighttime world of subtle yet vibrant beauty. An essay by celebrated author Christopher Dewdney, illuminates the mystique of gardens and the nature of seeing. The Garden at Night will enchant art-lovers and garden-lovers alike.

Feral Press

The Ministry of Truth: Kim Jong-Il’s North Korea

Eva Munz, Christian Kracht and Lukas Nikol

Publication Date: October 2007

10.5 x 8″ trade paper; 88 color; 132 pages

$22.95

The few dozen tourists—and a few journalists—who come annually to the North Korean capital of Pyongyang are accompanied by guides and are only allowed to see what the regime blinders for their viewing. For the visitors, actors often stand in for pedestrians, and the consumer goods seen in stores are unavailable to the public at large. The statistics heaped upon the visitors are dubious at best. Kim Jong-Il’s People’s Republic of North Korea is a gigantic installation, a simulation, a play. Eva Munz, Christian Kracht and Lukas Nikol traveled to this land to take pictures of a country of which there are no pictures. What they show in The Ministry of Truth is a window view of the gigantic 3-D production of Kim Jong-Il, who writes the nation’s statistics and authors its film script. Because no accurate view is available of this total installation, the authors make the only one possible: They comment on their photos with quotations from a didactic book on the art of film written by the dictator, who not only collects wine and Mazda RX-7 sports cars, but also has an enormous film library.

The Last Photographic Heroes: American Photographers of the Sixties and Seventies

Gilles Mora

Publication Date: October 2007

9.5 x 12″ hardcover; tba illustrations; 200 pages

$50.00

The photography that Americans invented in the 1960s and ’70s was as fresh and vital as their music. Photographers of those years believed in their medium’s unlimited capacity for expression. Between the publication of Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958) and the coming of post-modernism, the photographers featured in this book embarked on their own personal quests. Whether they roamed the world, like Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand, or sought out its dark corners, like Larry Clark and Nan Goldin, they shared a fierce devotion to their medium and its unique qualities. The generation that created this work knew it was remarkable. Today, with Gilles Mora as a guide, we can look back on it with even greater appreciation, since we know that these were indeed the last photographic heroes. Also includes work by Joel Meyerowitz, William Eggleston, and many others.

Kodansha International

The Tokyo Look Book: Stylish to Spectacular, Goth to Gyaru, Sidewalk to Catwalk

Philomena Keet

Publication Date: November 2007

Paperback; 500 color; 224 pages

$29.95

Tokyo is home to the most creative and stylish fashion in the world. The Tokyo Look Book takes us on a dazzling journey through the streets, clubs and boutiques of this trendsetting city to introduce us to the people who wear the latest fashions and the people who make them. Crammed with color photographs of Tokyo’s trendy teens and twenty-somethings captured as they work and play, this is a comprehensive look at the richly varied fashion scenes that thrive in Japan’s capital city. Yuri Manabe’s distinctive photographic portraits are complemented by insightful text from British anthropologist and fashion expert Philomena Keetand a plethora of soundbites and quotes from the featured fashionistas.

The MIT Press

Food

Edited by John Knechtel

Publication Date: October 2007

4.75 x 6.75″ cloth; 100 color; 320 pages

$15.95

In Food, an artist photographs everything he ate in 2006 (and some things he didn’t eat, including “Food I Left in the Fridge Too Long”) and finds the results both “seductive and repulsive”; a writer describes the global agro-assembly line that produces an organic bento box for Japanese commuters containing rice and vegetables from California, pork from Mexico, and salmon from Alaska; a short story writer offers an eight-page graphic novel, Eating in Cafeterias; a landscape architect compares a commercial orange with an organic apple using visualized data. Other projects include a map of the free food from fruit trees on public land in a Los Angeles neighborhood, and a surprising report on food security. The essays, artwork and stories in Food offer readers a full menu of intellectual nourishment and aesthetic delight.

Steidl

Movement

Guido Mocafico

Publication Date: October 2007

14 x 14″ hardcover; 60 color; 96 pages

$85.00

Time is naturally divided by astronomical phenomena. The transition of the seasons or day and night repeats itself in cyclical fashion. To divide Time into finer fractions, artificial means such as sundials—which mark the movement of the shadows projected by the sun, or clepsydra based on water flow—were invented. Ever since 1657, when the first watch was created, we’ve used oscillatory movements of a mechanical system to measure time. The photographer Guido Mocafico has explored these movements. He chose more complex and rare mechanisms, a whole new world of know-how controlled by Master Watchmakers without any trace of electronics. Movement is a photographic plunge into this unknown world, comparable to the exploration of living beings.

Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin

Publication Date: November 2007

10 x 11″ clothbound hardcover; 120 pages

$45.00

Nan Goldin is one of the most significant photographers of our time. Adopting the direct esthetics of snapshot photography, she has been documenting her own life and that of her friends for more than 30 years. Her intimate and formally beautiful photographs focus on the urban scene in New York and Europe in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, a period dramatically marked by HIV and AIDS. Her use of photography as a memoir, as a means of protection against loss and as an act of preservation, and her use of the slide show as a means of presenting her work, resonates in the work of photographers of recent generations.

While Eastern European photographers—from Sudek, Kertész, Koudelka and others—established a dark modernism that lent spiritual intensity to our experience of their corners of the world, an insular world of fragile beauty, brute Stalinist reality and the long gray Soviet sky, their younger brethren are shining fresh light on the post-Soviet world. Prime among them, Stanko Abadzik is, at 54, a venerable presence, but the photos collected in this book extend back no farther than about 10 years, when the fall of the Berlin Wall was the energizing force in European realism.
Abadzik’s images of Berlin, Prague, Dubrovnik, Budapest, Zagreb and the towns of Eastern Europe are nothing if not celebratory, preferring to capture the sheer, simple power and magic of sun and shadow playing over a world that has rather beautifully survived itself. Thus, the shots of empty cobblestone streets viewed in long perspective, or the images of townsfolk idling by cafes or bicycling acrobatically, are not so much moody dispatches from the edge as they are character studies now hopefully lit, it seems, from within as well as from without. Indeed, the glass and steel of Berlin skyscrapers, with the fighting image of Muhammed Ali dominating one huge façade, or a rural billboard plastered with Andy Warhol’s portrait of Mao, become, through Abadzik’s lens, cheerful reminders of pop globality in the most specific of settings.
This warm pop sensibility may be new to Eastern European photography, but it certainly feels right. It is also charmingly palpable in Abadzik’s more traditional studies—of an alley in Dubrovnik, with laundry hung high above, or of a nun making her solitary way—in which bright sunlight winks at us through the heavy shadows. At the same time, the wonder of shadow, its way of abstracting the simplest image—of a gate, an archway, or the slats of a window treatment—is one of Abadzik’s abiding affections, and he makes richly patterned Op art from such found material. There is a lot of delight to be found in this excellent compendium of Abadzik’s art, and while Natasa Segota Lah’s accompanying essay makes rapturous descriptive and philosophical connections for us (“The artist knows very well that simplicity is the result of the most complex modes of intellectual and emotional abstraction.”), it suffers somewhat from an awkward English translation.
But Abadzik’s passionate and affectionate eye speaks volumes for itself, and truly needs no explication. Images of dogs making their way, ploddingly, against a wonderfully high, lamp-lit wall in Prague, or of a skateboarder suspended over his twisting shadow in a context of curved space, are unforced masterworks, while Abadzik’s portraits of people—accordionists and bench-sitters, leggy models and old women—are expressive and joyful in their embrace of humanity. There is really no rhetoric here, and no real darkness amidst the shadows — just the pure power of time, place, personality and photography.

As Vladimir Birgus notes in this rigorous study of Czech photographer Jaroslav Rössler, “the most important part of his work, the part for which he is ranked among the leading figures of avant-garde photography between the two world wars, comes from a period of roughly fifteen years.” Indeed, Rössler was devoted to the medium for nearly 70 years, but his most compelling and influential work—absorbing Futurism, Constructivism, and abstraction in bold yet harmonious images—was made between 1919 and 1935.
In fact, 1919’s Opus 1, which begins this generously annotated portfolio of his work, is Rössler’s first great photograph, an austere, shadowy study of a jar of film chemical placed in a kind of film-noir relation to two triangular shards of paper against a dark corner. The image has depth and quiet drama, evoking mystery and formal elegance. It’s a muted trumpet blast of modernism that sets the tone for Rössler’s evolution.
In the 1920s, his experimental energies took wing, of course, ranging from nude self-portraiture to images combining photos and his own charcoal drawings, with their echoes of Cezanne and the expressionism of Munch and even Fritz Lang. As the 20s roared on, Rössler delivered haunting black-and-white prints, exploring the geometry of everything from vacuum tubes to splintered views of towers in Prague. All along, Rössler loved collage, and under the influence of Kurt Schwitters and others, he brought his balanced, nuanced eye to drawing various industrial and commercial images.
His photo-collages are very much his own, though, as in a 1926 collaged assembly of Parisian street signs and awnings that has the look of a true Futurist machine (Paris, NORD – SUD). Simpler yet no less effective, his 1932 close up of locomotive wheels has all the gravitas of iron and night, its perspective of spoke and sphere receding gracefully toward the left of the frame. At his most avant-garde, in stark photograms of matches and smoke, paper clips and shadows, he suggests Man Ray yet maintains his signature irony-free touch.
In the 1930s, Rössler produced numerous advertising photographs for products as mundane as tooth powder, soap, aspirin, as well as perfume. He delivered unique photomontages in which the various products were presented in negative image, or in relation to ghostly double exposures, or in surreal juxtapositions. They impart a strange, totemic life to these commercial objects, though it’s hard to say how well Rössler’s artistry helped to sell them. Now, they have the look of Duchampian relics, presaging Warhol in their cool depiction of brands and logos.
The book closes with a selection of Rössler’s color work, such as a fine 1936-37 image of a beaded necklace, a ceramic ashtray, and some numbered wooden game tokens on a field of knit fabric and cotton. The formal, unfussy beauty of the piece seems utterly contemporary. Long past his avant-garde heyday, in the 1960s and ’70s, Rössler pushed further, with violently abstracted colored transparencies that connect him to Lucas Samaras, perhaps, but have little to do with the taut, groundbreaking accomplishments of his early modernism.

This book accompanies the exhibition of the same name held at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., from October 17, 2004, to January 2, 2005; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, from February 1 to April 24, 2005; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from May 24 to August 21, 2005; and Tate Britain, London, from September 21, 2005 to January 2, 2006. It is hard to grasp that Roger Fenton created a deathless and rather extensive body of photographic work in less than a single decade, from 1852 to 1860, only to retire from the medium and return to the practice of law—as if taking pictures had been something of a detour. Perhaps it had, since the medium was so new and novel, while Fenton’s academic grounding, in painting and law, was highly traditional.
Still, as the extensive biographical essays in this catalogue tell us, Fenton himself was a portrait of professional indecision, and it is a good thing for posterity that a checkered early career led him to the blank slate of photography at its first golden moment. Traveling to Russia in 1852, he was among the first to capture the Kremlin in photos, and within a few years he was commissioned to photograph the Crimean War, turning out landmark portraits of battle-worn soldiers and blasted battlefields.
These images alone would have been enough to cement his reputation, but this wonderful exhibition—touring halfway round the world, deservedly—tracks the Fenton who captured so much more, from the open spaces of Great Britain to posed Orientalist images that echo Delacroix and Ingres. Fenton’s shots of such European abbeys as Tintern or Rievaulx catch the spiritual richness of church architecture activated by casual passersby and contemplative sitters. We can feel the life in those moments, while the rigor of Fenton’s exposures, his strong tonalities, and painterly compositions seem to make the utmost of the sharp detailing and glossy surface of the albumen-print process he favored for much of his career.
In his Russian and the Crimean photos, though, he was working in the earlier salt-print process, which generated a softer texture and dreamier tone. Thus, the vistas of church domes in Moscow, or views of the Kremlin walls, have a misty quality evocative of Constable’s or Turner’s paintings. Meanwhile, the cannonball-strewn fields of the Crimean War are like moonscapes, harsh and hilly, with a near horizon. And Fenton’s images of grimy Hussars or Croat chieftains, under skies that seem thick with powder, are nothing less than archetypes of military fatigue.
After the exertions of Crimea, Fenton seemed to throw himself into the romanticism and lyricism of Scotland and Wales, documenting his abbeys, chapels and church ruins with a palpable affection. Craggy Scottish vistas, of falls and lush valleys, have a pantheistic intensity to rival anything by the Hudson River School of painters. Likewise, Fenton’s English landscapes and portraits of stately homes are marked by an inspired eye for perspective. In one lovely oval 1859 image of Harewood House in Yorkshire, the sumptuous residence is glimpsed from a great distance, through trees and across water, shimmering in the center of the photo like a dream of civilization, and with a miniaturist delicacy that seems almost Japanese.
Indeed, the Orientalist studies of 1858—costumed studio shots of near-east pashas, odalisques, water carriers—prove that Fenton was comfortable with the exotic, along with a languid female sexuality that boldly confronts the camera. These photos point to modernism, even though Fenton’s career-closing sequence of lush still lifes of fruits and decanters, flowers and foliage, baskets and fringed cloth, seem to be where his artistic heart lay, though now they seem fussy and mannered. Of course, Fenton always wanted to prove that photography could equal painting, if not surpass it, but, despite the expansiveness of his work, perhaps he saw too narrowly. The mighty world that called to Fenton can contain oceans of expression, none truly better than any other. If he hadn’t given up so soon, who knows what worlds he might have conquered?

It is almost a given that a great collection of anonymous, or “found,” photography will haunt us in a way that photos with a full-fledged provenance often fail to do. Ripped from factual or historical context, anonymous photos epitomize the mystery of real moments, suggesting far more than they can ever fully explain, leaving us with a poignant sense of reality’s ephemeral nature. And this collection, by Robert Flynn Johnson—curator of the Achenbach Foundation for the Graphic Arts at the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco—is certainly a great one, not only beautifully presented but superbly organized as well, giving thematic order to images that might otherwise swirl randomly through photographic history.
As a collector and scholar, of course, Johnson’s eye is keenly attuned to the qualities that make for a fine photograph—tonal, compositional, formal and temperamental. Many of the more than 200 images here are as remarkable as any number of classic photographs. Again and again they prove that photography remains the most democratic art form, endowing even the humblest snapshooter with the potential to capture a moment—even accidentally—that will live forever and may move us with the power of a great artwork.
Thus, Johnson’s sectional approach, beginning with “Land, Sea and Sky,” collects some wonderful ephemera, from the serenely picturesque—a rowboat glimpsed from afar across a lake at sunset, beautifully and subtly occupying the center of the frame—to startling images of the moon behind clouds, or geese in their chevron flight against the moon; of lightning electrifying the night; of lava sparking from a volcano’s crater; and, most powerfully, a panoramic image of a 19th-century crowd on a hill, witnessing the smoke and flame of a city on fire (Is this Chicago? San Francisco?). The sheer scale of this print is overwhelming; it is a masterpiece of documentary photography.
More intimate, of course, is everything else in this book. The section on “Beginnings” captures childhood in a plethora of ways, all compelling. A baby cradled against a mirror, twinned in the reflecting glass, with the image of the photographer and, presumably, the mother visible in the mirror, becomes something almost worthy of Velazquez’s Las Meninas, that painterly Bible of multiple visual referencing. Less ambitious but no less expressive are strange period images of children costumed as bride and groom, or smoking cigarettes, or of two white girls cradling blackfaced baby dolls. And the shot of Nazi storm troopers holding the hands of their two young children, identically dressed in miniature storm trooper outfits, is a dark wonder.
Just as fascinating: “Maturity,” shots of men and women that reflect a range of adult choices and tensions. A formally dressed woman in a platinum wig stares at us, arms folded across the back of a chair, an odd floral wallpaper behind her(paging Cindy Sherman!). And who are these women clustered so collegially together, wearing city clothes from the 1930s, their faces half-hidden by surgical masks? And what of this photo of a woman replacing the inner tube of a bicycle tire, a neatly crafted study in physical angularity and circular geometry?
In “Eros,” Johnson brings us anonymous erotic photography, from the comically titillating—two women baring their buttocks for us, and holding their garter belts high over their heads—to formal nude portraits and fetishistic studies of female genitalia. These images tend to reek of amateurism, but the sexually charged nature of the work assures some interest. And one shot, of a nude man and woman tangled in bed, while the shadows cast above the bed by Venetian blinds provide a noir-ish atmosphere, is a formal and tonal delight, despite the posed melodrama of the whole thing.
Johnson closes out his overview with “Endings and Infamy,” which collects a number of morbid images, from the formal baby-in-coffin portraits that were all the rage in the Victorian era to documentary photos of executions. One shot of a decapitation, presumably in a public square in Japan, is stunning. The head has just hit the ground, plopping chin-first with all the indelicacy of gravitational fact, while blood spurts ferociously from the headless torso and the Samurai executioner follows through with ritual dignity, his sword bloodstained. Whoever took this photo had a feel for the decisive moment to match the most darkly voyeuristic impulse—just as whoever took the wonderful, life-affirming photo of 19th-century pedestrians rushing across a Parisian street in the rain, their umbrellas tilting forward, their feet blurred in motion, was channeling the best of Lartigue or Cartier-Bresson. Enigmatic they may be, but in the end these images are all about the visual certainty and personal stamp that only the camera can bring to history. “This was here,” these photos seem to say, “and so was I.”

As exhibition curators and authors Birgus and Mlcoch remind us in their introduction, Czech Photography of the 20th Century was the “largest comprehensive presentation of the main trends, personalities and works of Czech photography from 1901 to 2000.” The result was a thorough overview that offered countless perspectives on everything from obscure photography to the familiar achievements of Josef Sudek, Josef Koudelka, Tono Stano, and others. This beautifully rendered guide, on heavy stock and with generous annotations, does justice to an ambitious exhibition on one hand, and offers a unique panorama on the other.
That’s because Czech photography in general is a portrait in cultural restlessness, a chronicle of a European landscape torn between huge forces, struggling to express identity amidst oceanic change. From the German occupation of the 30s, through the liberation and Soviet domination that followed, to the late-century blossoming of true freedom, Czechosolovakia has seen it all. Its photographic legacy is an unstable mosaic of vivid experience and sensation. What begins with the pastoral dreaminess of impressionist and art nouveau photography quickly yields to the documentarianism and reportage of urban and World War I images, and then the experimentalism of modern and abstract photography, with the likes of Sudek locating the textures and random beauty of Prague, while Jaroslav Rossler and Jaromir Funke play with cubist notions, expressionist geometries, and fractured form.
Indeed, there’s a certain organic logic to the perception that emerges: Czechoslovakia’s jagged history is abstractly reflected in the photographic distortions of the human body that seem to predominate. Nudes tend not to be merely nudes, bodies merely bodies, or faces merely faces, but canvases of anxiety, angst, struggle and strain—from the war-torn youth captured by Koudelka to the tense muscularity of various male nudes. And female beauty is typically conceptualized as shadowy and secretive, with identity cropped out of the frame for its own protection. The psychological weight of all this is built up layer by layer in this book, climaxing with the unique elegance of Tono Stano’s iconic 1992 fashion shot, “Sense,” in which a stunning nude woman is rendered as a vertical serpent, her head, torso and one leg emerging from the black halves of a gown. It apotheosizes Czech photography in a single image—an image of freedom stepping out of the darkness.

Jock Sturges’ beautiful nudes—young girls captured as they move from childhood toward maidenhood and beyond—may stand as metaphors for innocence and experience, though at best they are paragons of black-and-white artistry, their bodies at rest in a play of natural light. The work suggests rhetoric of nymphets in Eden, along with a certain Maxfield Parrish utopianism, but Sturges is a realist, looking for the power of character and personhood within his stunningly lean and healthy subjects.
The 25 plates in this catalogue are fine reproductions of the gelatin silver prints offered by Paul Cava Fine Art, and each photo casts an individual glow. Sturges’ subjects are part of his and his wife Maia’s extended family and friends, photographed in settings of rustic privilege in Northern California, France or Italy—often at the beach, in or on the water. The aura of a private world and languid summer days pervades, with nudity a casual extension of all that. Thus, the 1989 image of Marine, long-limbed and at ease with her adolescent perfection, is a study as much in unassuming intelligence as in beauty.
The older, wiser Minna, however, posed protectively above her sleeping dog in Point Reyes, CA, is an image of stunning beauty ready for the world, her flawless face and nubile body utterly self-possessed. Other images, such as a barely pubescent Misty Dawn hanging tough, her arms upraised to grab a line of rope, her head turned slightly, epitomize, in Sturges’ own accompanying text, “a newly arisen self-knowledge and wariness in the world.”
Indeed, the theme of awakening, to sexuality, the predatory world and mortality, is implicit yet unforced in these photos. Bettina, seen with her eyes closed and arms slightly outstretched, receptive to sensation in a field of sunlight, is a pure image of trust and vulnerability, while Cecile, seen in profile, her arms protectively crossed on her torso, is contemplative and demure. And the image of a 17-year-old Fanny, a dark, intense-eyed goddess grown into the curves of a woman, is remarkable; she poses stretched out on her right side, eyeing us tentatively, richly complicated in her gaze, while her little sisters laze in the background, as if to suggest the childhood world Fanny has left behind.
Sturges acknowledges that he prefers to crop his photos to avoid such narrative density, relying on the sitters’ force of personality and little else, but in a few of his shots the implicit stories are wonderful. An image of the Dutch sisters Lotte and Nikki on the beach with their beautiful mother, Vera, is a generational archetype, as the younger sister cleaves to the still-strong mother while the older sister stands tall and looks away, independently. At the center, Vera gazes at the camera with all the worldly-wise power and rue of mature womanhood.
If anything, Sturges’ photos—utterly contemporary as they are—may seem like relics of a less sensitive time, a time before the Internet age, when the disturbing realities of child pornography and celebrity pedophilia seemed less pervasive. In fact, Sturges was bought up on charges—then cleared of them—that he violated U.S. pornography laws in the early 1990s. By now, it is hard to look at Sturges’ shots of pubescent girls and not wonder about their propriety—but, as has been said, good taste and propriety are the enemies of art. Sturges is certainly an artist, and Beauty, nothing less, is his Truth.

Matt Damsker is an author and critic, who has written about photography and the arts for the Los Angeles Times, Hartford Courant, Philadelphia Bulletin, Rolling Stone magazine and other publications. His book, Rock Voices, was published in 1981 by St. Martin’s Press. His essay in the book, Marcus Doyle: Night Vision was published this past November.

Thames & Hudson Inc.

Anonymous: Enigmatic Images From Unknown Photographers
Foreword by William Boyd. 500 Fifth Ave., New York; 2004; $45 U.S., $68 Canada. 208 pages; 220 photographs.

www.thamesandhudson.com

Cemetery View, Queens, New York, 1969

Tress describes himself as “polymorphous perverse” in style and motivation, always looking for the edge of expression and pushing it, or transgressing at that edge just a bit. The last rooms of the Corcoran show contained what must have seemed to many viewers the end of the line in stylistic experimentation. There were “pop-ups,” three-dimensional photo constructions and a group of images called Faceted Fictions. The latter Tress created by photographing book illustrations through a faceted glass and then hand coloring the photographs. “With this elaborate series of very crafted images, I really pushed what photography is normally thought of,” Tress recalled in a recent conversation.

“So what do you do?” Tress continued. “You go two steps forward and one step back; so I took six steps backward. I began rereading, getting in touch with photographers that I admired in my youth like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, and others. I began looking at their books again. So in my own photography I went back to simple documentary, just walking around and taking pictures.”

For Tress, known as a pioneer of “staged” photography in his Dream Collector and Theater of Mind series in the 1970s, this move was both a departure and a return. His first major work was also documentary made while just “walking around” — Open Space in the Inner City: Ecology and the Urban Environment — a series undertaken for the Sierra Club that focused on finding remnants of nature in the built environment. Five thousand portfolios of that work were printed and distributed to public schools. It fulfilled its documentary mission, aided in many ways by Tress’s darker, surrealist sensibility. Before Tress could depart on his new walking adventure, what he describes as a “funny event” happened: a heavy box of prints he was getting down from a high shelf fell on his head and gave him a slight concussion. Perhaps it was more than slight; he awoke that night with the room spinning and was later taken by ambulance to the hospital. Most vertigo lasts a day or perhaps a week; Tress’s lasted a year and a half.

The falling box was the first of a small series of accidents that had significant impacts on Tress’s new creative work. When he started photographing again, he began a series he calls Spinners, created by rotating the camera lens around a central pivot during exposure. “I’d just twist my wrist,” he says. Spinners of children seem to catch them with a fresh visual energy not so much in a tableau from their dreams as in the visceral process of dreaming itself.

One day while making Spinners, Tress’s lens shade got cock-eyed. He thought, looking at the vignetting in the ground glass of his Hasselblad, “this is interesting” and went on to make a series of octagonal photos that led him to wonder what would happen if he turned the lens shade around backwards. He tried it, and looking at the fully circular vignette, he began to imagine images of strange new planets. Focusing on different textured and patterned surfaces, he created a whole portfolio of these, which Lodima has just published as a book. “I was just using what I found — a kind of ‘straight’ photography, not that that’s in anyway superior to manipulated photography. It’s just where my head has been the last few years,” Tress says. The vertigocreated instability in Tress’s creativity and forced him rely on intuition more than on a program of intention. Somehow it also got him into geometric shapes, especially spiral shapes.

While the actual vertigo was new to Tress, the appeal of disorientation and the quest for reorientation were old friends. After college, he traveled the world — Europe, Egypt, Mexico, India, Japan and Africa — photographing cultures and customs as a kind of folklorist and ethnographer. He ended his world tour in Sweden, working as photographer for the Stockholm Ethnographical Museum. When Tress returned to the States in 1968, his first assignment took him to Appalachia to document the people and customs there. Each of these “foreign” worlds presented him with a disorienting affect, a challenge to Tress’s understanding and experience that he would work out photographically by embracing the “otherness” of foreign places and peoples. He had, after all, long been in the process of embracing the otherness of his homosexuality, a process culminating in yet another body of published work, Arthur Tress: Facing Up (1980). “Growing up in the 1950s as a gay teenager, and not really knowing what that was, gave me sort of a sense of being an existential outsider,” he says.

The outsider hasn’t wanted to change, but he has thrived on transformations of the world around him. In the early 1980s Tress discovered ann entrance into an abandoned training hospital on New York’s Welfare Island, a 500-room facility full of outmoded equipment from the 1950s. For three years he entered the hospital through a second-story window with cans of colorful spray paint, his camera and color film. He transformed over 60 rooms from haunting tombs filled with the memory of diseases like polio into what he describes as “Kafkaesque kindergartens.” An iron lung becomes The Green Cow; an array of portable respirators becomes a rainbow fantasy of maternal nurturance in Mother Matrix. In some ways Tress has been almost as prolific, varied and creative in the six years since his retrospective as in the 40 years it showcased. He’s produced compelling work in at least ten new series in both black and white and color. In two of the most impressive, he’s played to his strengths as an “existential outsider”, making penetrating images of two very contemporary subcultures — the habitués of skateboard and paintball parks. Both these worlds contain the fears and excitements that have animated some of Tress’s best work for years. “It’s something reflective of my inner psyche or insecurities, I guess,” he says. “I always seem to focus on this edgy darkness, and that’s where the best Tress lies. I don’t know why: it’s my gift and my curse.”

In skateboard and paintball parks, the fear of death and injury is both real and imagined; dreams of flying and conquest enjoyed equally, though in miniature versions. But if thematic familiarity drew Tress to these worlds, it is perhaps his delight in engaging very different visual and technical problems that has helped make them newly vibrant. “Look, there’s a great joy in photography,” says Tress. “Most photographers, when they’re happy is when they’re trudging along with their camera photographing; it’s the brightest part of their day.”

Just as thematic streams in Tress’s creative life flow together in these two series in transformed ways, so, too, do formal visual qualities: the disorientation of the current Spinners series, is a harking back to the visual drama of shadows, which he once explored in a full-length narrative (Shadows, 1975). Yet nothing about the work seems old, rehashed Tress.

“An aspect of the skate parks and paintball series that I’m rather proud of,” says Tress, “is that I became a sort of sports photographer to do them, and that was something that I’d never really done. I really got good at anticipating action and shooting at 500th of a second. With the Hasselblad it’s not easy. By the time you focus and release the shutter the action may be over. The way I enjoyed learning these new skills was as a challenge, I think that’s part of me, the attraction to trying the new to see what that’s like. What can I do with that?”

Eventually the skateboard work became a kind of narrative of ritual self-initiation that will soon appear as a book — Wheels on Waves.

Serendipity has guided Tress’s artistic journey in the last several years, and while he’s opened himself to aleatoric practices at times, there’s been nothing careless about how he’s traveled these new pathways. Take Pointers, another post-vertigo series that followed Spinners and the octagonal photos.

Exposure to a lot of modernist, European-style architecture around Palm Springs caught Tress’s eye and led him back to reviewing Rodchenko and Bauhaus imagery. Faced with the challenge of photographing these stairways and facades in a fresh way, he turned the camera 45 degrees and stood his square image on its point. There was a touch of Mondrian influence hovering over the form as well, since Mondrian had done some diamond-shaped paintings with his usual geometric content. But Tress didn’t stop there: “It was a way of working that I’d never explored,” says Tress. “Over the last five or six years I’ve thought of myself as a kind of student, recharging my batteries for the next 25 years,” he says laughing. “When I was doing the Pointers, I even went to Europe to photograph some of the masterpieces of modernist architecture: Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and others. I just made a little pilgrimage.”

About Pointers Tress says, “I set out first to destroy the frame, the traditional frame of the photograph. I’ve made myself a little rule for the last few years that I’m not allowed to make the same photograph twice. I think a lot of photographers get one or two interesting photographs and then do that for the next five years. So I’ll do three or four of something, and then I’ll say to myself, ‘Have I done that already?’ In photography it’s very easy to get into visual formulas, and I think a lot of photographers fall prey to that. It’s the way you structure reality. You just get in the habit of organizing things again and again the same way.” Though the modernist subject matter in Pointers seems familiar, Tress’s images convey a fresh energy, one that not only satisfies in the here and now, but also one that renews one’s sense of what was fresh and vital in all that Bauhaus imagery and modernist design in the first place.

Influences abound in Tress’s work. He readily acknowledges them, knowing that to be influenced is not to be derivative. “A big influence on me in the last few years has been Paul Strand,” he says. “A couple of his books are laid out on my table right now.” Though Strand did all kinds of work, his portraits have impacted Tress perhaps most, and have led to yet another impressive series in the last few years called Grave Demeanors. A number of these picture gay men with their mothers. One astonishing portrait of Tress’s sister makes the idea of family connection literally palpable. All of Tress’s recent work has been formally well structured, something that he believes may be a professional disadvantage for an artist these days. Thinking especially of Pointers Tress muses: “One of the tenets of modernism is movement of forms within the picture and the tension of positive and negative shapes and the edges of the picture, but now with the adoration of the snapshot aesthetic that attention to form has been neglected a little bit — the ability within that instant to be able to construct a very complicated orchestration of shapes and forms. I think we’ve dumbed- down what we expect from photography. And sadly, I think a lot of curators have followed that lead.”

Though Tress has continually renewed himself creatively and produced an impressive body of varied work, he remains untroubled by the thought that clear, careful structure is passé. For him, a photograph could hardly aspire to the status of art without it, and, in that way, he remains unabashedly old-fashioned even as he goes forward never really repeating himself.

James Rhem is the author of Ralph Eugene Meatyard: The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater & Other Figurative Photographs and the Phaidon 55 Series on Aaron Siskind.

Flood Dream, Ocean City, New Jersey, 1971

Mother Matrix, 1984

Planets

The Green Cow

Skatepark Spinners

Flood Dream, Ocean City, NJ

Korean Mystery, 2007

To photography collectors and critics, Uelsmann’s journey is a widely known and celebrated pilgrim’s progress. It began on the edge of American modernism—under the influence of teachers such as Minor White and Henry Holmes Smith—and took Uelsmann far from his Detroit roots to an international renown that only grows. With a recent retrospective at the Beijing World Art Center and experiments in large-format reproductions of his work, Uelsmann is affirming the global relevance of his images, and bridging the worlds of traditional and digital photography technique.

Yet he remains true to his classic approach, which relies on a darkroom montage of images captured on film. Since 1960, when he began teaching at the University of Florida, Uelsmann has lived quietly and productively in Gainesville. His retirement from teaching has further freed himto travel more and to collaborate with his wife, the artist Maggie Taylor, whose digital images stake out their own imaginative terrain. Together, they continue to forge a fresh language for photography.

You retired from your teaching duties about 10 years ago after decades of teaching at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Was that a big change in terms of your artistic life—to not have the obligations of teaching and to be able to concentrate solely on your work?

Well, I started teaching here in the ’60s, right out of graduate school. It was one of those very fortunate situations. I began at a lower rank and things went well for me, and by the time I had people wanting to woo me to other schools, I was quite content with the friends and situation I had here, so I stayed here and retired after 37 or 38 years. I’d had a certain amount of outside success in my career—it was 40 years ago this year that I had a one-person show at MOMA, which opened all kinds of doors—and so midway through my academic career the university made me what’s called a “graduate research professor.” These appointments were usually given to people in the sciences, although there was an anthropologist and a writer—token people from the humanities—but basically with that appointment what the university wanted you to do was maintain a high profile. They used that appointment often to lure professors from the northern universities who basically wanted to come to a warmer climate and maybe retire. So you usually just taught a seminar, and maintained a high profile. Once I had that appointment, I basically had some responsibility for the graduate program in photography and I did have more time to do my work. And so for the past 20 years I have dealt primarily with graduate students.

There’s been a lot of mentoring involved in that, I suppose. Graduate students are accomplished and have been studying in the field, so you’re working with them on their ideas rather than imparting any fundamentals of image-making to them.

Right. I like to tell people jokingly that it was a lot of psychotherapy for which I wasn’t trained. But I was blessed with some very outstanding graduate students and I suppose the advantage of that is that being constantly around them made me keep much more current in terms of what was happening in the art world.

Did you find that you were a strong influence on the directions that they would move, the type of photography they were doing or wanted to do—and vice versa, in terms of them influencing you?

I think people assume that, but in general you try to evoke from them some of what their concerns are both intellectually and visually and humanistically, and then you try to help them clean their windows, so to speak, to help them open up possibilities within what areas they are most interested in.

The other thing that did indeed happen, even when I was teaching undergraduates, is that when someone did a piece that involved manipulation in the darkroom, the first response of someone would be, “Oh that’s a Uelsmann,” and the students would hear that as a pejorative kind of comment. But we did have a program, I will say, that was very progressive back in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Robert Heinieken’s at UCLA and our program I think were considered the most open-ended. We had good rapport with the other areas and departments; we had people exploring printmaking and photography combinations, for example. Todd Walker taught here, and Evon Streetman, who taught with me for many years, was trained as a painter and painted on photographs. And so there wasn’t sort of a precious attitude toward the Group f.64 or the straight tradition. However, we didn’t discourage that—we had some students who worked in those areas. But in general we had people who were more experimental-oriented.

So that aspect of experimentalism in photography, of which you have been a pioneer, do you think that has continued to be a strong direction for photography? Or do you think realism has come to dominate too much?

What is truly happening today, the span of aesthetics, or what can be considered art, has greatly increased. It’s constantly being challenged by new younger people coming along, and so we have art theory now when there weren’t even courses in theory when I studied art, and so you have a greater range. Now I do think the evolution of digital photography, which is certainly the future, and the fact that Photoshop exists mean that there is greater acceptance for manipulation in photography than there had ever been in the past.

At the same time, if you look at the current photographic heroes that are being praised by New York critics, there’s a lot of heavy influence by Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus; these are the prominent figures, and while they may be experimental in the way that they address the culture, they are certainly not inventing other realities.

Aesthetic influences fall in and out of favor over time. You’ve been consistent in what you’ve been doing, and it seems that one of the key things is that while you acknowledge digital photography as the future, you remain very much an artist who shoots on film and works in the darkroom.

Well, I know a writer who still writes on a yellow pad and another who does it all on a computer, yet the books they write are equal in terms of value. There is to this day a sense of alchemy to the darkroom. I’ve never lost the thrill of watching those prints jump up in the developer. It still is incredibly seductive to me, but I am very much aware of what’s happening digitally, and I think there a few people—mainly my wife, Maggie Taylor—who have both the technical skill and the vision to do something with it. Too frequently you have people who develop the technical skill, but they’re visually illiterate. It’s like someone writing with perfect grammar and spelling, but where’s the content?

You’re still creating new images, but do you build them largely from the vast archives that you’ve created over the years, or are you still photographing and adding new imagery?

I just shot a bunch of film in China—where I had a retrospective this past spring at the Beijing World Art museum—and so it just adds to the reservoir. The interesting thing for me that happens—you know, there’s a lot of mythology out there about being an artist…well, it’s not like lightning strikes, and you think, Whoa this is gonna be great! I spend a lot of time looking at contact sheets and I try to find things that might work together. Initially it’s your conscious mind wondering will this tone blend into that tone? And there’s another part of your consciousness that’s thinking content but it’s not really foreground for you at that point, and so the adventure starts in the darkroom. But on a good day what happens is the first thing I try doesn’t quite work, but while going through the process, sometimes I’ll remember a negative I shot ten years ago that had something on it that may work. So there’s a way in which I go back into those resources and find material and build an image.

But you’re still shooting as much as you always did, in terms of finding new images?
It happens more now in spurts. We go to Yosemite almost every year, and I come back with film, and a lot of the time I’m photographing the same thing again and again. And I do photograph around here, but here I usually photograph small objects on a light table or on a black background that allows for techniques in the darkroom.

Do you use a lot of different cameras at this point?

I have a Bronica, which they don’t make anymore—it’s kind of a poor man’s Hasselblad and has great lenses, and when I travel I shoot with a Mamiya 7; I want the largest format that I can use roll film with and it’s a 6-by-7 format rangefinder, so it’s less bulky to carry. But it’s interesting, where ideas come from: I had a show in Italy and I was contacted by a winemaker over there who asked if I would do a wine label. Well I don’t do commercial work, but I do like wine, so I photographed some grapes on the light table and spent a couple days coming up with something. The irony is that in the course of doing that I got some ideas that I can use in my own work that have nothing to do with grapes.

You’ve been in Gainesville since 1960, and grew up in Detroit, and since so much of your work is focused on landscape, has Florida’s landscape—that flat terrain as well as its light—been a factor or is it sort of marginal in the way it impacts your work?

That’s a good question. In my early years here, since I didn’t travel much, a lot of the material was indeed created in the surrounding areas in north Florida—for example, there’s an image of a figure embedded in the grass around the oak trees of the live oak forest we have here. The other thing is, whenever we’re at the beach—and we share a place with a person at Long Boat Key, on the west coast of Florida—I often see the clouds forming, and so almost all the skies you see in my images are from Florida. The interesting thing is I’d rather have the work function out of context; it doesn’t have to be a particular place, but the way it’s turned out as time went on is that most of my photography was done during the travels that we’ve had.

You’ve said that only about 10 percent of the work you do ends up as finished work. Has that always been the ratio, pretty much?

Right. It’s sort of a fact that you’d rather not know. It’d be like for every ten pages you write there’s one that you feel could be published. But you know, you can’t set yourself up and say today I’m gonna make great art. The important thing is to be functional. I have a sort of primitive attitude toward art—it’s like an occupation and I work at it, and a lot of times I work without major inspiration but I do know that I can create conditions for things to happen. So many times, things that seem like wonderful ideas, when you try to expand on them, they don’t go anywhere; on the other hand, sometimes things that seem rather simplistic, once you start building an image with that, it opens endless possibilities. I’ve heard writers talk about the point when the character sort of runs away with their own identity; it’s the same with me. I’m always mindboggled after I create an image, and people want to know about it and they want me to explain, and I can’t. You can provide clues, and answer the technical questions, but where do the initial ideas come from? Sometimes after the images have existed for a while, I do find a way of connecting with them and understanding the probable sources.

People are bound to seek some sort of personal revelation from your photography. And there are some recurring themes: the images of the house, the images of the trees with roots, the clouds and the water. These seem archetypal.

They’re definitely archetypal. In the past three days I got an email from a student in California, who had gotten an assignment in her college class to find a piece of art that poetry would work with, and she found an image of mine called Meditation Mystery, with water and a sort of hole in the water and clouds and birds flying off and the implication of the image for me is that if you can get into a meditative state—and I truly think that happens to me at times in the darkroom—that you do get to these other sorts of levels. And this student selected incredible poetry and writings to go with this, and I like the idea that people can associate with my images in that way.

I wonder if there are childhood issues being played out in your photos: the concept of security symbolized by an image of a house, or of family as symbolized by tree roots. Are some of these more personal than others?

The concept of home is very important to me, and in a lot of the recent work, the boat has sort of become a metaphor for a spiritual journey. That all began in 1982, up in Boston. Minor White had died a few years earlier, and I was up there lecturing and I showed a picture of waves breaking, and there was a boat in there, too, and I said I wish Minor’d been alive to see it. And afterward a guy came up to me and said he was at Minor’s bedside at the hospital when he spoke his final words, and they were, “There’s a small boat waiting for me.” And so when I came back from Boston, the first image I did was of a boat, and there’s sort of a cloud sphere behind it, and that was done as a kind of homage to Minor.

Looking at your wife’s work in the digital realm, she seems more narratively engaged, making connections between different realities, which is what you do, but also placing an emphasis on pre-modern imagery, which suggests more of a story, whereas yours are more outside of time and story. It’s an interesting partnership—you’ve been together 20 years. How are you influencing each other?

The interesting thing is, because we work at home and work together, we do give feedback to each other, and frequently she will need a particular background and so she can scan one of my contact sheets and add that background, so there’s a dialogue there. In terms of my work, she will comment on it, and what’s happening more and more is that she will make suggestions I can’t do in the darkroom, because with the computer, God knows, you can move a single hair and do all kinds of stuff. The thing I’m most jealous about, I have to say, is that Maggie can work for an hour and just save where she’s at and do other things—work in the yard or run some errands—and then come back and pick up where she left off on the computer; whereas with my work, once I’ve got all the chemistry out and the papers, I need something like a six-hour block of time to get things done. And though people imply that working on the computer is easier, she has the same problem I have: if at the end of the year she has ten images she truly likes, she’s happy. She works on these images for months.

Most of your work is displayed as developed, either 11 x 14 inches or 16 x 20 inches, the standard sizes, and I wonder about the possibilities for larger format prints of your images.

I must tell you something that’s happening right now for the first time. Epson was interested and contacted me six months ago, and wanted to show how they could replicate a black and white photograph, and so I sent them a print, and they sent me back these inkjet prints, and they were framed under glass next to my photograph, and you could not tell the difference, absolutely not. There was a slight gloss differential if you held the paper at an angle, but very minor. Anyway, Maggie and I had an exhibit at the Museum of Photography in Seoul, Korea, and the way the layout of the museum was, there were a couple of hallways you went down to get to the gallery spaces, and they asked us could there be some larger prints at the end of the hallways? Well, Maggie could do that with her digital files and she said she could scan some of mine and do it as well, and so she did these and we put them in and I just thought they looked magnificent. And now Maggie and I are having an exhibit together at the University of Florida at the university gallery on campus, and we said we could do some large prints. To me the shock is the scale—I could never do that scale in the darkroom.

Your work would easily lend itself to large scale, it seems, and I have to wonder if you would want to take the inkjet and digital approach with the sort of enveloping images that Gursky and Struth create. Is that meaningful for you?

You’re talking about something I’m actually thinking about on a daily basis. On one hand my concern is that I want people to know these images are created in the darkroom, but I don’t see digital and traditional photography as some competitive sport. And I’m amazed by the quality of these large prints, and the large prints in certain museum spaces work a hell of a lot better, though they have a different viewing distance, from 10 to 15 feet away, whereas when you look at an 11 x 14-inch print that’s a much more intimate experience. I’m just sort of thinking through this whole process.

If you moved toward a series of really large-format work, would it change the imagery you’re drawn to, the sort of art that has become your signature imagery?

I don’t think it would change, because my images are going to be built out of the storehouse of material that I’ve already collected with my camera for the last 50 years. So I’m not gonna grow another head. But there’s a way in which it might have another audience, being seen in the large context.

Going back to your early days at RIT [Rochester Institute of Technology, where Uelsmann studied photography in the 1950s], did you feel then what Harold Bloom describes as the anxiety of influence, developing your style in the shadow of modern photo masters, and then at a certain point turning toward the type of photography that defines you?

I was from inner-city Detroit and the only photography I knew at the time was portraiture and commercial photography, that was the model I saw in Detroit. I wanted to study and RIT had a two-year program, but they were basically training people to be tech reps for Kodak [based in Rochester, N.Y.], and have their own portrait studio back in Oshkosh or wherever they came from. I started that program, and it was there that I was introduced by Professor Ralph Hattersley to the concept that you could make photographs for personal reasons. Prior to that, the thought never occurred to me. And then RIT went from a two-year to a four-year program, and they were trying to get accreditation, and so they hired Beaumont Newhall, the leading American historian of photography, and they also hired Minor White, who had been working at the George Eastman House with him. So suddenly we have people who are introducing me to a kind of photography and to a history I had no sense of. And Minor was into Zen Buddhism and meditative stuff, and poetic narrative images that were sequenced together. I can remember Minor showing us some of his own work, and he was saying, “When I took this, I felt the spirit coming down….” And my hand would shoot up and I’d ask, “Can you tell me more about the spirit coming down?” And he was very tolerant in trying to share with me some of the meditative concepts, and now I totally understand, how sometimes in the darkroom things come upon you spiritually. So I feel I lived out the answer to a lot of the questions and seeds that were planted by Beaumont Newhall and Minor and my most important professor, Henry Holmes Smith at Indiana University, who pushed me into the deep water. He made images, for example, by pouring syrup on glass and refracting light through it—he was one of those guys who read everything and would make connections. He made us read I.A. Richards on practical criticism, and had us try to apply to the visual arts things like the attitude of the author toward the subject. At the time, I was working in audiovisual education, going for a degree on that, and thanks to Henry I realized I had to go in a different direction.

Matt Damsker is an author and critic who has written about photography and the arts for the Los Angeles Times, Hartford Courant, Philadelphia Bulletin, Rolling Stone magazine and other publications. His book, Rock Voices, was published in 1981 by St. Martin’s Press. His essay in the book, Marcus Doyle: Night Vision was published November, 2005.

Untitled (Hands in Water), 2003

Contrary to Reason, 2006

A World Within, 2006

Untitled, (Figs, Wrapped Bags), 2005

The Edge of Silence, 2007

The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College, Chicago, Illinois (MoCP), the only museum in the Midwest with an exclusive commitment to the medium of photography, has one of the most vital collections of twentieth- and early twenty-first-century art photography in the area. With a background as diverse as the museum’s contemporary collection, Photography Curator Karen Irvine has organized a wide range of provocative exhibitions including Audible Imagery: Sound and Photography; The Furtive Gaze, works by artists who use the camera as an instrument of surveillance; Camera/Action: Performance and Photography; and Anticipation, exploring strategies of slowness and suspense in time-based art. She is also a part- time instructor of photography at Columbia College, Chicago.

The Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP) is the successor to the Chicago Center for Contemporary Photography that began in 1976. In 1984 Columbia College Chicago recreated it as a museum. It is now part of a college with a degree program in photography. In addition to being the photography curator at MoCP you are also a part-time photography instructor at the college. Do you believe that a museum in a college changes the nature of a museum’s role within a community?

Yes, in that the museum very purposefully serves two communities — that of students and educators, as well as the general public. Being part of an art college challenges us to organize shows that are relevant and interesting to students who are studying art, art history and theory, and the artists and scholars who teach them, as well as a person who comes in to the museum off the street. We cultivate this academic audience not just from our own institution but also from many area colleges and high schools. In many ways it is a luxury to work at a college art museum in that we operate like a study center and do not have to be concerned with staging blockbuster exhibitions that will draw high attendance figures. In addition, because we are a relatively small operation we can remain flexible and “light on our feet” in terms of how we serve our constituents. Our collection is extremely accessible, for example, it is used extensively for print viewings that we tailor to the interests of each class or individual who comes in to see work. From a curatorial perspective, not having to plan three or four years out leaves us with the flexibility to show an artist’s work when we feel it is fresh and most relevant, something I think is critical in order to stage really strong contemporary art exhibitions, and which is especially important since a lot of contemporary art is political in nature and responds to global affairs.

MoCP has a well-established reputation for promoting emerging talent. It is now working with Aperture to publish a series of monographs on photographers selected as up-and-coming stars. The Midwest Photographer’s Publication Project recently spotlighted Kelli Connell, Justin Newhall, and Brian Ulrich with essays by Rod Slemmons, Natasha Egan and yourself. What are the criteria for selecting a rising star and are there other stars being readied for publication?

We are working on the next installment of MP3, to be released in 2008, but we haven’t yet settled on the final trio of artists. To be considered a rising star one’s work first has to be strong in idea, and then well-executed technically. That may sound simplistic, but we put a premium on ideas and pictures that have conceptual layers that make a viewer think. With younger/more emerging artists it is also critical that their work not be too derivative. Rod Slemmons, our director, likes to say that artists have to extend a tradition, not imitate it. This is a very good way to describe what often differentiates the strong emerging talent from the rest.

As a curator and also a teacher, you have been a reviewer at several important photography festivals such as Fotofest in Houston and Photolucida in Portland. What do you consider a successful portfolio review?

Well, successful in terms of it being a productive exchange and twenty minutes well spent I think would mean that either the photographer or myself, or ideally both of us, walk away having learned something. Of course the obvious answer from my side would be to say that success means finding an artist I would like to work with. But to be honest, it rarely happens. Not to be too vague or trite, but to discuss art in a limited, closed context is often a learning experience. There have been times when the art is something I am absolutely not interested in, but the artist is smart or insightful and we’ve had a good discussion.

You once remarked, “Even if I was working at another museum, I would consider the work of the students coming out of Columbia College’s M.F.A. in Photography program as some of the best I’ve seen.” Many of the graduates have their work included in the collection. This collection prides itself as having over 9,000 images of 20th century and contemporary photography and is a major resource to the photography students at Columbia. Recently a former Columbia student, Richard Hanson, donated a significant collection of photographs by the Hungarian artist André Kertész, an innovator in the early days of modern art photography, who lived in New York from 1936 until his death in 1985. In addition to the Kertész collection, considered to be one of the most important donations in the museum’s 25 year history, what more would you include as the highlights of the museum’s collection?

Obviously, having the museum at Columbia College provides us with great access to its students and their work. Many of them even work at the museum during their time at Columbia. And some of the Columbia graduates have made some of the most exciting work we’ve collected recently by emerging artists. Highlights from this group would include Jonathan Gitelson, Brian Ulrich, Ben Gest, and Greg Stimac. We also actively collect out of our Midwest Photographers Project, a rotating archive of work by regional artists from the nine Midwestern states. The archive is probably our most innovative program. Artists lend us up to fifteen images for a two year period that we keep in our print study room and use for print viewings and make available to interested parties such as curators or collectors. We put the artists’ work on our website, organize exhibitions out of the project, and have inaugurated a bi-annual series of three publications with Aperture, as we discussed earlier. This allows us to work with and support far greater numbers of artists than we could possibly collect or show. Recent purchases out of the MPP archive include Ed Panar, Todd Deutsch, and Anna Shteynshleyger. And finally, we’re also continually buying work by international artists and artists whose work we’ve shown or published. Some recent acquisition highlights stemming from exhibits I have organized include works by Barbara Probst, An-My Lê, and performance-based photographs by Vito Acconci, Ann Hamilton, Ma Liuming, and Marina Abramović.

You curated an exhibit entitled Warfare that included older established photographer/activists and younger emerging photographers. At the time, you indicated that there was a marked difference between generations in depicting anti-war concepts and political images. How would you describe those differences?

I actually included work by only one artist in Warfare who I would consider older and established — Martha Rosler. The rest of the artists were all younger and emerging. I showed both of Rosler’s Bringing the War Home series, from Vietnam and Iraq, where she collages horrific photojournalistic images of war and advertisements for consumer products that often appear next to each other in the media. These series actually point to the continued effectiveness of artistic strategy. I think that indicates that the issues are still the same when it comes to the problematic nature of regarding imagery as information about war. This work is important because it reminds us that as “decoders” of photographs, it is imperative that we take into account the many layers of context and content — political, ideological, and commercial — that shape their impact.

Are there any plans to curate another exhibit in the near future that is as politically charged as Warfare?

No, I do not have any overtly political shows on the schedule at the moment, although I am constantly interested in work that is politically charged because I feel that one important role of art is to pose questions and raise consciousness about some of the more pressing issues facing society, in a way that no other form of communication can. My colleagues Natasha Egan and Rod Slemmons have both been working on shows with politically charged content. Natasha just opened a show called Loaded Landscapes that presents artists who photograph places with significant histories that sometimes include evidence of past events, and sometimes not. And Rod Slemmons is working on a show that addresses immigration issues and the border between the United States and Mexico.

Your MFA is from FAMU Film and TV School, part of The Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, Czech Republic. That is an extraordinary place to study film with a rich history quite distinct from American Universities. What years where you in Prague and why did you choose to go there?

I actually went to Prague in January 1993 to teach English — I was the clichéd American-looking-for-adventure-in-Central Europe. A full load of teaching was only twenty hours a week, and I felt like I had a ton of free time: I started taking pictures. I bought an enlarger and some chemistry, and taught myself how to print pictures in my bathroom. When I learned that FAMU offered degrees in still photography to foreigners and the classes were taught in English, I applied. I ended up spending three years there, starting in 1995 and graduating with my MFA in 1998.

I had an excellent experience at FAMU. There is a very rich tradition of photography in the Czech Republic, and being a small country, some of the best photographers there teach at the academy — Viktor Kolář and Štěpán Grygar, for example. We got a very good grounding in the basics, especially in the tradition of black and white documentary photography. Furthermore, because the still photography program was relatively small, about 70 students total — 35 Czechs and 35 “European” students (of which I was the only exception, being American, and only native English speaker), it allowed for a very lively exchange of ideas since the students were from diverse cultural backgrounds and also in terms of their art training. It was a very exciting time to be there as in many ways the school was still catching up with international trends. My class, for example, was one of the first to graduate students working in color. When I returned to the States I discovered that my knowledge of photo history was very Central European-centric, and I had to brush up on my American photo history!

Now that you are an instructor and working for an American institution, how do you think the approach to imagemaking differs in a European community, especially one with as rich a history of photography and filmmaking as Prague’s?

The Czech Republic has very strong traditions of black and white documentary photography by people such as Josef Koudelka and Jindrich Streit and more experimental, surrealist imagery by artists such as Josef Sudek, Jan Saudek, Michal Macku, and Michaela Brachtlová. This second type of imagery often served as a way to subtly comment on the oppressive Soviet system that reigned there for a good portion of the 20th century. I can’t speak for other European traditions, because I think they vary widely, but in the Czech Republic photographic education is very much grounded in the history of image-making in that country. The quality of the image produced is still very much a primary concern, and generally speaking conceptual photography and what one might consider more “edgy” contemporary work is somewhat less appreciated than documentary, surreal, and purely formal experimental photography.

As a teacher, what is your special area?

I usually teach a class called Photography Seminar; it’s designed for students who are majoring in photography, so most of them are seniors when they take it. It’s a project-oriented class: the students spend 16 weeks working on one body of work and we do weekly critiques. Along the way I try to introduce them to the work of a wide variety of contemporary artists, and also to teach them a little bit about putting together a portfolio, writing an artist statement, and generally what they need to do to get their work out into the world. I am not the one who teaches them technique; by the time they get to me they should have those skills in place. I try to get them to focus on the idea behind their art, to be able to speak about it intelligently, and to understand how it relates to art history as well as why it’s relevant to society today.

You have written essays for several exhibit catalogues in various European countries, notably The Royal Museum of Photography, Copenhagen, 2002, and Galerie Kusseneers, Antwerp, 2005. Did you begin your career as a curator in Europe?

I haven’t done any curating at all in Europe. I was invited to contribute essays to the publications for those exhibitions. I was an art student in Europe and when I came back to Chicago after graduating in 1998 I tried to be an artist. But it didn’t exactly turn out that way.

You were an associate curator at MoCP before becoming curator in 2005. When did you return to the United States and when did you begin your curatorial duties at MoCP?

When I came back from Prague at the end of 1998 I needed to find a job. Ideally I wanted to do something related to photography, so I called the museum to see if I could get involved. I worked as a part-time volunteer in the education department for three months writing an educational packet and then left. A few weeks later the director called and offered me a temporary full-time paid position, to manage the press and a large fundraising gala for an exhibition by a very well-known local photographer. I jumped at the chance, and even though I was only supposed to be there for six months, there was a lot of work to do after the event and somehow I never left…. The museum was experiencing a lot of change at that time, and when a new director, Sarah McNear, was eventually hired. I told her about my interest in organizing exhibitions, and she made me associate curator in 2001. In 2005 our current director, Rod Slemmons, promoted me to curator and gave me the responsibility of managing our publications. Since Rod’s arrival in 2002 we have increased our publications dramatically, publishing three to five books a year in cooperation with major publishing houses and also writing extensive essays for all of our exhibition announcement cards, so all of our shows are accompanied by solid research and scholarship.

You are also enrolled in the Masters program in Art History at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Was your career as a curator something that evolved from your love of film and photography?

And also the fact that I never had any success as an artist! But truthfully, even in grad school, my written work was stronger than my practical work, and I think I suspected all along that I might not end up as an artist…. More than a few of my professors at FAMU had issues with my practical work as being too conceptual, i.e. not concerned enough with print and image quality, and told me that I should stick to the theory. The school was pretty traditional, to be honest, but their message must have rung true to me on some level. To answer your question, yes, I’ve always loved photography, and I am thrilled that I have found a way to turn that passion into a career. And when I figured out that I love being a curator, I went back to school for art history, and am just now finishing up a degree — so I guess I did things a bit backwards.

Backwards might be considered the historic norm in photographic curating, considering how late a History of Photography curriculum came into being! Your background as an undergraduate at Tufts with a double major in International Relations and French (BA 1989) and your time spent in Paris and in Prague give you insights that are valuable in contemporary photographic imagemaking. What do you see for future exhibits at MoCP?

In the past few years I’ve had a lot of fun organizing exhibitions about photography’s intersections with other mediums, for example, performance art or painting. I am currently working on a show about photography and architecture, which will explore the connections between the immersive natures of both disciplines and the networks of spatial relationships on which they depend. I am interested in how a photograph or video can correlate, or not, to the experience of real time and space. The exhibition will examine methods of spatial representation and hopefully raise questions about the relationships between the real and virtual worlds in each discipline.

I am also working on an exhibition that will somehow relate to On The Road by Jack Kerouac. Columbia College’s Center for Book and Paper Arts is bringing Kerouac’s original manuscript to the college, the famous “scroll” of continuous paper on which he typed and hand wrote edits for the book in less than three weeks.

I am working with our two other curators Rod Slemmons and Natasha Egan to come up with an exhibition concept that will play off of the legacy of the book and Beat culture in an interesting way. One thing we do know is that it won’t be a show of artists who take pictures on the road in the Western United States. But it might very well include artists who explore what we feel is a correlation between the surface nature of photography and travel. Another idea is to address the very human impulse to search for a deeper meaning in life and sometimes having to reinvent oneself in order to do so.

Kay Kenny is a photographer and writer and teaches photography at ICP and NYU. Examples of her work can be seen at www.kaykenny.com. You may contact her at [email protected]

Greg Stimac, Recoil; Courtesy the Museum of Contemporary Photography

Ed Panar, Walking to Santa Monica; Courtesy the Museum of Contemporary Photography

IDENTITY AND

Since much of your art poses questions about identity, can you talk a bit about your background and how you ended up living in Amsterdam?

I was born in London. My mother is South African and my father Austrian. I was adopted as a baby by British parents and brought up in the North of England, in the Merseyside area (near Liverpool). I always felt a little disconnected from my immediate environment when I was growing up. I always wondered about my birth parents, who they were and that sort of thing. I always felt restless and had a sense of not belonging. I moved to the Netherlands in my twenties. Amsterdam, where I live, is very small but has always been a melting pot of cultures. So I find it quite an appropriate place to live, in that sense.

The theme of identity has been prominent in contemporary art for the past few decades and is still fueling the work of many artists today. Do you feel like identity is a concept you’ll be considering throughout your life?

I think the notion of identity fascinates me for several reasons. Partly because of personal experience (a sense of disconnectedness, also on a larger scale in the sense of being unable easily to feel part of a heritage, either personally or in a broader context) and partly because I think it reflects many aspects in contemporary culture, at least in the West. At one level I see identity as a series of acquired behaviours and mimicry, which is fluid by definition and context-dependent. But I think that perhaps what I’m preoccupied with is actually non-identity or the loss of the self. We learn ways of being, ways of communicating, assume masks to function in the wider world, but how does this connect to the core of who we are? These ideas aren’t new but still hold currency; I’m fascinated in the individual becoming separated from him/herself, losing touch with what his/her drives really are, becoming a stranger to him/herself.

On a nuts and bolts level, I also see identity as a thing related to genetic material and manipulation. I’m intrigued by the world of sperm/egg donation and surrogate parenting. And other types of future-scenario human fertility. It’s a new way of creating family. What kind of issues does it raise about identity, roots, belonging, etc? Fertility treatment also introduces a commodity value to parenting — you can perhaps choose the sex of your child, or choose a particular ethnicity. And intelligence if possible, plus, of course, the ability to eliminate, in time, certain genetic defects. And, of course, it’s available to people who can pay for it. I think these are fascinating aspects too. I’ll be interested to see how these impact ways in which people see themselves and society.

You’ve said that Claude Cahun with her blend of surrealism and self portraiture and Urs Luthi’s work from the 1970s has been a major influence on your work. Your art has a shared theatrical quality with that of Cahun and Luthi. Is that something you are aware of, even if it may not seem particularly theatrical to create portions of your compositions on a computer?

There’s definitely a sense of theatre in my work. My work has always been performative. I also consider the work done in the computer as performative in the sense that I can only spend a certain amount of time or energy before the buzz, for want of a better word, is lost. I work quickly and intuitively in the computer — there’s always a sense of urgency, of trying to lock onto a feeling, something that is always elusive but which I sometimes feel close to capturing. I’m trying to get something of this into the work — a kind of pace, a glimpse of something just out of reach.

Does that performative element parlay into your use of the image of the geisha in some of your work?

I find the image of the geisha appealing for several reasons. It’s clearly a highly theatrical phenomenon. It’s an image of the exotic for the West, it’s an image that represents a certain aspect of identity — we’re looking at an artificial cultural expression of beauty, femininity, art, entertainment cultivated over centuries and highly respected.  I think there are actually six types of geisha. And I read that some think that geisha were originally men who entertained in a society called “the water world.”

There are so many misconceptions about the geisha — sexual connotations particularly — that the image of the geisha has become loaded with other meanings in the West. It’s become a kind of stock character, I think, a stereotype. Just put on white face makeup, redden your lips and wear a black wig, and you’re a geisha. It’s a kind of “identikit” identity, a uniform, a non-identity. I think that’s fascinating — you train from childhood for this profession, putting yourself outside of ‘normal’ life to acquire these skills. It’s very ritualistic, and has an element of the magical.

When did you start using yourself as an element of your artwork?  Do you think of your art that features yourself as self-portraiture?

I started using myself in my work about 10 years ago. First, I started by doing performances based on brief stream-of-consciousness type ‘monologues’ I delivered while sort of ritualistically splashing myself with pungent oils (vanilla and other stuff that is very sickly and sweet) and crudely applying makeup. There’d be music in the background — soul music often, because I liked the sugary girl meets boy lyrics. The texts were culled from notes of dreams, things jotted down from TV soaps and random thoughts. The performances were a little absurd, a little surreal, and had a rawness.

Why does Victorian painting and literature interest you as of late?

I started looking at the origins of photography. It was intriguing to see that, even though it was a new medium, people turned to classical painting as models for image making. I have a small collection of studio portraits dating from around the 1900s. I loved the painted backdrops and how the sitter sat or stood so stiffly among props meant to invoke classical antiquity. I found those images sometimes pretentious, sometimes vaguely comical and a little sad. Also, the old studio photos were attempts to show the sitters’ status and didn’t really tell us anything about them apart from that. And I found myself making up stories about the characters, looking for cracks in the posed expressions that might show a bit of the person behind.

I was brought up near Liverpool where the entire city really boomed in the Victorian era. There’s amazing architecture there still. It’s also a city that derived part of its wealth from the slave trade. It’s a fascinating place for looking at identity and a society in flux. It also had one of the first women who campaigned for the rights of women, including prostitutes and their illegitimate children (this became a big issue in Victorian times). So I grew up surrounded by the extremes of Victorian heritage — big burly architecture, larger than life-size statues of Queen Victoria, and a love of art. The new money wanted a different kind of art and the Pre-Raphaelites seemed to fit the bill. Highly saturated colours, sugary portrayals of women and romanticised medieval themes.

I began looking at the painter Rossetti, and noticed that, like geishas, all his women look the same: whitish pallor, large poppy-coloured lips, a dreamy if not vacant gaze. And, surprisingly enough, they look quite like portraits he drew of himself. So here again was an “identikit” way of looking at femininity, and a sort of projection of the artist onto his subjects. I found that identity-exchange/interchange quite interesting.

Another aspect to Victorian literature is the sense of the gothic. I have recently been reading Wilkie Collins, said to be the creator of the suspense novel/thriller. He often uses two characters in a plot who on some level are two sides of the same person, and interchangeable. His books often feature dual identities, confused identities. Also, Collins (like many middle class people of the time) used laudanum, the opiate derivative. In fact, he was addicted to it and claimed that he didn’t remember writing passages of some of his books because he’d written then under the influence of laudanum. Collins himself led a bit of double life. At one point, he lived with his secretary (mistress) by whom he had a child, and kept a household with another woman, who had three children by him.

It’s an era that really engages me. It’s also the time at which the novel really started to evolve — Wuthering Heights, for instance, which is non-linear, and uses flashbacks and two narrators. I like the complexity of the narrative and the ‘sensational’ atmosphere.

When you start with a — for lack of a better description — freestanding artwork (as opposed to a site-specific installation), do you have an idea in mind from the beginning as to where you want to end up? Do you have something like a core set of images in mind to start with?

I have a set of images in mind, but things don’t always work to plan. I try to work freely from the original idea so that it can develop naturally. I’m not someone who nails down everything before starting. It’s not the way I work. I like to create a bit of chaos and confusion, as that gives me the most freedom to come up with a strong image.

I often work on several series at the same time. Some images take months. Some even take several years. And I like to stay with a series for quite a long time. In some ways I think my process is a little like composing poetry. It needs time to ripen and is often a case of putting down the bare bones in a concentrated flurry of work, then spending months on editing. I’ve just realized that I didn’t embark on the body of work I currently produce until after I had actually met my birth parents. Not to make this all too autobiographical, but I have always regarded the camera as a transformative tool.

I think that part of what informs the images is the creation of a narrative and parallel narratives. I don’t necessarily need to be the subject, because I am the creator of the narrative. But somewhere, this is about scripting a reality, taking control (I think). In many ways, I consider my work more a form of writing than anything else. My birth parents — I’d obviously built up a fantasy image of them — didn’t live up to that fantasy by any means. My father is purely German speaking so we couldn’t actually communicate. And my mother seems to have a whole host of issues and a very personal way of looking at reality. I think the images were a way of creating a world or spaces I could inhabit on my own terms. The personal side of it seems to be involved, perhaps as a trigger to all of this.

It’s not unusual or even questioned when an artist combines pencil and paint on a canvas or even paint and sculpture. But if an artist combines photography with painting, and better yet with digital manipulation, the process sometimes supersedes discussion of the artwork itself. Why do you think there’s so much focus on process when photography and other media are mixed? Is there something specific to photography that creates this response? To be honest, in the visual arts — I trained in the visual arts in the broadest sense, in a program that encouraged you to do use any materials you felt necessary, in any combination — you just get on and make the work. In photography, often the paper the image is actually printed on, the glues used, the backing — the whole thing is considered super-sensitive and must comply with conservation standards. Which is absolutely essential. But I think you’re right — in an art context, throwing paint on a photograph, cutting it up and sticking it onto canvas, card or a wall, doesn’t raise any eyebrows. But in the context of photography, it’s quite adventurous, it seems. I began applying paints and varnishes to the finished image because I thought some of the pieces needed it. It was very spontaneous and something I just did because it seemed necessary. Personally, I don’t really mind how an image is made. It’s the final work that counts. But I am always asked how the piece is made, how the colors were achieved, how the piece is printed. Some people seem to need details about the process. Maybe it sets their minds at rest that, yes, there’s skill involved; it’s not just a question of pressing a button on the computer and — ping — out pops an image.

Lisa Holden’s artwork can be viewed on her website www.lisa-holden.com. In the U.S. she is represented by Contemporary Works, Chalfont, PA; phone: 1-215-822-5662; email: [email protected]; www.contemporaryworks.net.

N. Elizabeth Schlatter is Deputy Director and Curator of Exhibitions at the University of Richmond, Virginia, as well as a writer on the visual arts and the museum profession.

Claudia Kunin, Adam & Eve

Michael Smith, T.B., from the series, Inmates

Stanko Abadžic, A Circle

Marcus Doyle, Bus Shelter (Whitly Bay)

Arthur Tress, Popova’s Picnic

Vladimir Birgus, Berlin

Martin Munkácsi

san francisco museum of modern art

Photographers do not come out of the cradle with a Rolliflex in hand ready for action. They are like the rest of us, only more restless. Something waits for them around the next corner, a new idea, a new direction, or another abstract idea they are unable to articulate. To choose photography as a means of expression is not enough. Questions of what to photograph and why and how makes the wait interminable. No matter. Impatience has scheduled an afternoon meeting with the marvelous.

In 1932, a young Henri Cartier-Bresson shambles along unfocused. He travels and takes snapshots of his friends. His photography is a parlor trick to entertain, and the big faces and scenery from other countries are records without depth or meaning. A copy of the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung comes into his hands, maybe at a cafe while he sips his afternoon espresso. Cartier-Bresson flips through the issue until one image blasts his eye, Three Boys at Lake Tanganyika by Martin Munkácsi. Symmetry gives definition to the delightful chaos of life, celebrated on a Liberian beach in sharp focus. The cup, saucer and spoon are shoved aside, and the coffee is left to cool. “I suddenly realized that, by capturing the moment,” he writes, “photography was able to achieve eternity.” Cartier-Bresson leaves the cafe a photographer.

Hungarian Martin Munkácsi, born Marton Mermelstein in 1896, contributed gossip and articles to newspapers in Budapest before he picked up a camera. He thrived as a sports photographer and specialized in the moments before a goal was scored or lost. In his early thirties, Munkácsi moved to Berlin and filled the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung with his images from Egypt, Algeria, and Brazil. A well-known photograph by him in the 1930s of Leni Riefenstahl captures her schussing into the hearts of übermenschen everywhere. In these years, Munkácsi was the right man in the worst place. On March 21, 1933, he photographed President Paul von Hindenburg as he surrendered Germany to the failed painter Adolf Hitler. The participants missed the irony of having a Jew record the event. A year later, Munkácsi left Germany for New York and signed on with Harper’s Bazaar. He changed the static form of fashion photography when he took the models out of the studio to cavort on beaches in that season’s summer frocks. To catch the action Munkácsi hauled around his heavy box camera regardless of the location. Portraiture of Hollywood stars followed, and so did his decline. A contract with Ladies Home Journal trivialized his work, and the death of his daughter and two divorces broke his spirit and bank account. Munkácsi died cold, alone and broke in 1967.

The exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art shows over 125 vintage photographs from the 1920s to the mid-1940s, along with magazines and layouts from their first appearance. The gelatin silver prints of Munkácsi’s singular vivacity are a pleasure for the viewer and hold the possibility of inspiration for future photographers. A welcome 416-page exhibition catalogue is also available, with more than 300 tritone images of every aspect of Munkácsi’s influential work.

Michael Wolf

Robert Koch Gallery

Pierre Menard was not content to write a contemporary Don Quixote, he wanted to write the same book as Miguel de Cervantes. Why argue with success, asked the Symbolist from Nimes. The best way to write an immortal classic is to write an immortal classic. The years of fumbling through various drafts could be used instead with the actual final work. In the Jorge Luis Borges short story, “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote,” the writer leaves behind only a few fragments and a letter stating, “If I could just be immortal, I could do it.”

Copy artists in China are the heirs of Menand. They work with the assurance they will create an acknowledged masterpiece, and daub their brushes to reproducing paintings by Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and others. Hong Kong-based photographer Michael Wolf sought out these craftspeople and posed them outside in alleyways and on sidewalks with their best.

In Copy Art #01, Roy Lichtenstein, euro 22.50 (Cibachrome, 2006), the gray of the alley fades into the background with the full-size Lichtenstein The Melody Haunts My Reverie propped up by the painter. The only break in the background is a red plastic food dish left out for the cat. The painter, in more gray and black, stares at the camera in a disappearing act as Lichtenstein’s blond chanteuse warbles Mitchell Parish and Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust” in a flat comic panel.

The woman who holds the canvas of Copy Art #11, Ed Ruscha, euro 5 (Cibachrome, 2006) with the yellow slab-serifed word “NOISE” on blue background assumes the same position of letting the art speak for itself. Red-handled mops and a broad-leafed plant in a brown pot break up the monotonous salmon-colored concrete of the surrounding buildings.

Francis Bacon, Jasper Johns, and other contemporary painters make a showing, but not at the expense of the old masters. Copy Art #27, Mona Lisa, soft porn: both euro 22.50 (Cibachrome, 2006) shows the Da Vinci contrasted by a large-breasted nude taken from the pages of a magazine. The young man in striped tee shirt offers both as the same: just another way to make a living in the global economy.

Wolf opens his lens to the lives of people and lets the viewer see inside, especially in the disturbing series, 100 X 100 (Cibachrome, 2006).The Shek Kip Mei Estate in Hong Kong was constructed after the 1950s fire that destroyed much of the city’s public housing. The 100 windowless rooms of 100 square feet hold singles, couples, and families with their belongings stacked in shelves and hanging from the walls. Lifetimes and generations have lived here, workers who keep the city going to feed the constant need for economic growth.

Some of the rooms contain only what is necessary, a stove and refrigerator, bed and table, a chest of drawers. Others are piled high with the obsessive accumulation of books and magazines without space to sit or stand. Old men and old women sit on lone stools, husbands and wives crowd seating for one. They look at the camera without shame or pleading from the other side of the Pacific Ocean.

Kelli Connell

Stephen Wirtz Gallery

Kelli Connell uses digital technology to create an investigation into identity by skillfully combining multiple medium-format negatives in one image. The two models in her latest work, Double Life, are actually one woman, Kiba Jacobson, who Connell has photographed since beginning the series in 2002. The context of the two women’s relationship is left to the viewer. Double Life has generated two lectures, “Double Vision: Or Do We Really Care About the Olson Twins?” by Bill Hunt of the Hasted-Hunt Gallery in New York City, and “The Space Between: Kelli Connell and the Representation of Subjectivity in Photography” by Erina Duganne of the University of Texas at Austin. The German doppelgänger, or double walker, has been a fascination in Western arts. Percy Bysshe Shelley in his Prometheus Unbound tells of: “The Magus Zoroaster, my dear child, /Met his own image walking in the garden. /That apparition, sole of men, he saw. /For know there are two worlds of life and death: /One that which thou beholdest; but the other /Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit /The shadows of all forms that think and live /Till death unite them and they part no more.” Krzysztof Kieskowski embraces the doppelgänger in his 1991 film, The Double Life of Veronique. Two women portrayed by Irène Jacob, one Polish and the other French, almost meet in the beginning of the film before going to their separate fates.

The women in Double Lives interact. Brickhaus Cafe, 2006 (digital Lambda print) has them sitting at a coffee house table in deep conversation while American Spirit cigarettes smolder in their hands. The table is littered with the cup and ashtray remains of an easy afternoon. One wears a purple tee shirt and speaks as her other self in white tee shirt adjusts her eyeglasses and listens. Privacy is in every image. This is their strength. The top is up in Convertible Kiss, 2002 (digital Lambda print). One woman slumps in the seat and leans her head against the door. Her more aggressive double has her arm braced in the headrest and moves in for a kiss. She is frozen in study of the eyes, nose, cheeks, and mouth she desires. We are left to wonder whether the first woman will respond. Life, even for doubles, presents its difficulties. In The Conversation (digital Lambda print, 2006), the women have separated to become two sides of an argument. One wears a wool cap against autumnal chill and yellow sweater with sleeves pulled over her clenched knuckles, betrayed by her cruel, bare headed mirror image in dark blue pullover and rational expression cold as the air between them. Whether the women are in a same-sex relationship is unimportant. They are, like all of us, together alone. Connell begins teaching at Columbia University in Chicago this fall. She has a BFA in photography and visual arts from the University of North Texas, Denton, and an MFA in photography from Texas Woman’s University. Her work has been published by Aperture in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Photography as part of the three-volume set, MP3: Midwest Photographers Publication Project.

Sebastião Salgado, Iceberg Between Paulet Island & The Shetlands Islands, Antarctica, 2005; Courtesy the Peter Fetterman Gallery

Sebastião Salgado

Peter Fetterman Gallery

Sebastião Salgado makes transcendent beauty out of the ugliest atrocities and deprivations of the human species. A gaunt but gorgeous mother stares unfocused into the void of an Ethiopian refugee camp as her baby thirsts at her wizened bosom. The ethereal African light outside her tent sharply abuts the knotted drapery of her headscarf and shawl as if this malnourished woman and her oblivious heir emerged from this shimmering radiance and yet subsist solidly and heartrendingly apart. This Madonna and Child cannot be sustained by the perfect light of their world. Instead the infant sucks urgently at a woman anointed with an impregnable dignity but precious little life. Likely this beleaguered duo will die for the sin of being born in a land of famine, for our sins of indifference and neglect. No one will write best-selling Testaments recounting the illustrious moments of their lives. All they will leave is this photograph. To stand in an immaculate Santa Monica gallery perusing such exquisite images is unsettling. At first, the impeccable artistry of the composition, the dreamy dance of shadow and light, the arresting detail of tiny baby fingers clutching the shriveling breast of a woman who might have graced the cover of Vogue had she been born in Omaha or Milan, spark a quiet thrill. You yearn to look and linger — to savor the dazzling acumen of the artist, to speculate about which wall of your living room would best host this beautiful thing. And then something seems to break inside, and the elation of art mutates into shock, outrage, and tears. Salgado’s photographs — a haunting, microscopic chronicle of brutality and squalor on continent after continent — conjure an uncanny seduction, disarming with their luster just before whacking you in the gut with the apprehension that humans — millions, maybe billions of them — actually live in a similar state of dilapidation or bondage today.

Only you can’t call them them. This eminent Brazilian artist has defined his work as “militant photography,” which compels a considerable broadening of the definition of what it means to be human. Over the last 30 years, Salgado has created several epic projects that document some of the most ghastly chapters in recent history, including starvation in Ethiopia, leftover landmines in Angola and the Bosnian genocide. And his books, Workers (1986–1992) and Migrations (1993–1999), have indefatigably catalogued the subjugation and grief of those who sweat, toil and perish within the harrowing maw of the global economic revolution. Perhaps it’s the prevailing elegance of Salgado’s every picture that enables him to sidestep charges of exploiting the misery of others in the name of his art and reputation. Before his lens, the forlorn, the bereaved, the oppressed and the devastated all project an unassailable nobility no matter the dehumanizing horror of their plight. Salgado cultivates this compassion by thoroughly immersing himself in the landscape of his subjects. To procure his singular series of Brazilian gold miners, for example, Salgado spent a month deep inside the leviathan pit, living, sleeping and communing with some 50,000 men — all laboring in the muck with nothing but hand picks and shovels — until his camera became an intrinsic participant in the baleful community rather than an unfaithful interloper. His picture of scores of miners ascending a web of immense rickety ladders — their mud-blanketed bodies sardined head to backside and burdened by bags of the Earth’s bounty perched hazardously on their shoulders — appalls with its evocation of a horde of ants scrambling atop the laggards and injured. But his camera, nonchalantly embedded within the bedlam, swiftly obliges our acknowledgement of individual strength and teamwork: a fearsome thigh flexed to bursting, a leathery hand grasping for balance, a bulging calf snapping upward toward the sun. The result is a spectacle of transfixing theater, each faceless individual an impressive and irreducible cog in a crazy charismatic machine. The photograph confounds and agitates and might stir you to renounce jewelry forever, but it also triggers enduring twinges of awe at each man’s Herculean fortitude.

This exhibition also highlights a roomful of images from Salgado’s more optimistic enterprise, an ongoing eight-year project entitled Genesis, in which the photographer treks the globe to commemorate landscapes yet untouched by industry’s defiling clutches, pristine tracts of wilderness that remain as unsullied as they were on “the day of Genesis.” This departure from his exacting testimony of despoilment and despair coincides with Salgado’s own eco-endeavor called Instituto Terra, a nonprofit that aims to resurrect Brazil’s denuded Atlantic Rainforest, rehabilitating the very plot of land upon which he was born in 1944. (Salgado reports that to date his cooperative has planted more than a million trees in a region that had been eviscerated by economic exploitation.)

His Genesis photographs emerge equally luminous and dramatic as his pictures of human desolation, even if they lack the pathos that has enshrined him in the pantheon of photo greats. He captures the panorama of a steep ridge in Antarctica, which teems with an evidently infinite mob of Chinstrap Penguins that have convened for what appears to be their very own Woodstock. He bumps against the apparition of a bluish iceberg at the bottom of the world that sports a medieval keyhole as tall as a skyscraper and an implausible precision-sheared square castle of snow that looks like it must have been constructed with the bulldozers of a fairy-tale giant. He shoots twin volcanoes on the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia, their conical summits shrouded in a ghostly abstract swirl of speckled clouds that would be the envy of Harry Potter’s special effects wizards. And he returns to the jungles of his native Brazil to snap a portrait of a posse of nearly naked Kamayura shamans — their ears pierced with sticks, their necks wreathed in shells and feathers — as they smoke skinny pipes of the herbs that inform their mystical insights. In a way, these marvels of nature loom as forbidding as Salgado’s photo of a outlandishly crowded Bombay depot, the blurred surge of humanity streaming between the banks of two stalled trains like a lethal stretch of Class 5 rapids. But they seem orchestrated as a respite from his lifelong obsession with man’s relentless inhumanity to man. With these new images Salgado awards an alternate diagnostic for life on this planet circa 2007 — a revelation that prods and preserves our capacity for hope, recuperation and majesty.

Sebastião Salgado, Gold Mine, Figure Eight, Brazil; Courtesy the Peter Fetterman Gallery

Gao BROTHERS

Walsh Gallery

Since 1985, the Chinese brothers Gao Zhen and Gao Quiang have collaborated on painting, installation, performance, and photography, becoming pioneer avant-gardists in a highly controlled society. Miraculously they have survived and prospered, acquiring an international reputation for large-scale photographs and photomontages that recall propaganda and advertising.

From March through May, the Walsh Gallery exhibited 27 Gao Brothers photographs (dated from 2000 to 2006) that ranged from 47 to 106 inches high and 24 to 106 inches wide. Technically pedestrian, these works document performances by the brothers and a group of Chinese men in their thirties and forties. Nude or half-dressed, the men either embrace each other outdoors or curl up in wooden, cabinet-like enclosures. Nude and semi-nude women appear now and then, but men are the main event. The scroll-like forms of some photographs and the horizontal compositions of others echo traditional Chinese painting.

The Gaos are trying to come to terms with China’s cultural traditions and its recent past. They employ painting conventions, but instead of tranquil landscapes and sexual understatement, we see big-city concrete and naked men hugging. This must shock the Chinese more than Westerners, for we are drowning in sexual imagery.

Eleven photographs in the Walsh Gallery show come from a series titled The High Place, which responds to the way that statues of political leaders are often sited atop tall columns. One High Place photograph shows a statue of Chairman Mao on a column. In others, we see nude or half-clad women, a couple standing on a wall made from empty bottles, the Gao brothers, and more. These digitally manipulated images are shot dead-on and lit like ads.

It takes real courage to create such rebellious work in a place like China. Every day the Gaos risk jail, torture, or execution. But these admirable artists are doing nothing that was not done almost a century ago in Europe. China needs the Gaos more than we do. We’ve been there, done that.

Jin Lee

MN Gallery

“A pile can be a holding place, a methodical gathering, an arrangement, or a way to consolidate what is left over, unwanted, or discarded,” says Chicago’s MN Gallery about Tendency to Pile, its exhibition of paintings by Katy Fischer, collages by Melissa Oresky, and photographs by Jin Lee.

The works in this imaginative exhibition talk to each other, even though the artists were strangers until the day the show was hung. Oresky employs acrylic, ink and collage on paper to create lively semi-abstract images of junk heaps or “private landfills,” as she calls them. Fischer’s acrylic and gold leaf paintings are “inspired by burial mounds, compost heaps, and burning piles of leaves,” she states. Jin Lee shows three archival pigment color prints of salt that the City of Chicago stores in huge piles and spreads on its icy streets in winter.

After a visit to the Rocky Mountains, Lee says she looked for local equivalents, discovered the salt mounds, and applied her “poetic imagination” to them. “I’m interested in how these materials are shaped by human use,” she states, “as well as elements of weather and time.” Because she was photographing mountain-like subjects, Lee was able to explore ambiguity of scale. Salt Mountain 2 shows a pile that’s roughly 30 feet high and a city block wide, which weathers like a mountain, but at a dramatically accelerated pace. Wind, rain and snow erode its surface over the winter. City employees remove salt, creating the two holes at upper right that recall mountainside gold mines. As workers disturb the pile, loose salt slides down its side, encrusting debris at the bottom. Lee shoots on overcast days when the sky is white. She aims the camera straight ahead and wants the viewer to see the crest of the salt mountain against the sky. The “sublime subjects of landscape interest me,” she states. She likens the shallow pond at the base of Salt Mountain 2 to the proverbial lake in landscape paintings. Jin Lee is a thoughtful artist whose straightforward work rewards repeated viewing. The more you look, the more you see.

Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison

Catherine Edelman Gallery

In April and May, Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison exhibited nine large-scale images at the Catherine Edelman Gallery. Their work hovers between painting and photography — and makes us wonder just what we are looking at. “We choose to manipulate the viewer’s concept of the photograph as truth,” the artists said in a recent interview (ZOOM magazine, January 2007). “We want to make our own realities.” Reality, ParkeHarrison style, is a curious brew of performance art, surrealist painting (they admire Magritte), and photo collage. The images show “Everyman,” an anonymous balding male in a dark suit. When “Everyman” goes outdoors, he moves through huge, deep, empty landscapes beneath gloomy skies. When he’s indoors, “Everyman” sits listlessly in bleak rooms. Nature in these images is either distressed or damaged. We see awkwardly overgrown plants or butterflies that “Everyman” nails alive to a concrete wall in one image — or which swarm over him in another. The ParkeHarrisons use long, horizontal lines to create a formal center that holds their images together and sepia toning that makes them look old and very painterly. In The Scribe (2006), a man’s arm with an IV attached to it, moves across a snowy landscape to make a line of blood. “Everyman” is either marking the land or his life is draining into it.

According to the artists, their work “refers to the complex and ever-changing relationship” between humans and the world of nature, to “human fascination with technology” and human desire “to manufacture/manipulate our existence.” So be it, but these images are so preciously mournful that we wonder why “Everyman” doesn’t just end it all by throwing himself off a cliff. For all their formal brilliance, the ParkeHarrisons belong to the 19th century, not to ours.

aipad photography show 2007

In an exposition the size of AIPAD one spends a good deal of time searching for an overarching tenor traipsing through the nearly onehundred international galleries displaying the work of thousands of photographers — trends, movements, creative processes. To be quite honest, I expected a good deal of traditional and boring work short on ingenuity, but the work on display was far from that. Of course, there was much work from the usual suspects — Stieglitz, Abbott, Cartier-Bresson, Steichen, Frank, Alvarez Bravo, Weegee, Evans and Arbus. That is to be expected with collectors chasing dead heroes with the aplomb of the Fortune 500. Some of the work exhibited was at least safe. I stopped counting pop culture celebrities after a while for one can only take so much of the Lennon-Ali-Dylan-Monroe oeuvre. As striking as it may be, there should be a moratorium on their use. But by no means was AIPAD uninspired and good deal was contemporary and cutting-edge.

At the Keith de Lellis Gallery booth, standing in front of Benedetta Bonichi’s La collana di Perle, 2002, a work featuring a floating x-ray of a human skeleton wearing pearls with octopus legs and lower torso, I overheard an older woman say, “I don’t like that. I like regular pictures.” Other galleries with standout work included Manhattan’s Zabriskie Gallery, Chicago’s Catherine Edelman, showing Joel-Peter Witkin’s eerie and beguiling Interrupted Reading, Paris 1999 and Gerard Petrus Fieret’s works from the 1960s at Deborah Bell Photographs.

Very engaging sculptural collage works by Joseph Mills were shown by Washington D.C.’s Hemphill gallery, which included old photos framed in wood, worn boards and found objects painted over by the artist. Another great find was at Laurence Miller, Ray K. Metzker’s Car and Streetlamp, 1966, an incredible black and white composite photo, meticulously framed and mysterious, of a car sitting under a streetlight in a number of alternating spatial configurations.

Contemporary Works/Vintage Works from Chalfont, PA presented Lisa Holden, whose luscious digital imagery and hand painted works mesmerized me for a good deal of time. Picture Photo Space, Inc. from Osaka, Japan showed Kunihiko Katsumata’s inspiring, lightly colored panoramic vistas from across the globe. Jeff Thomas’ photographs at Stephen Bulger Gallery of tiny toy Native American soldiers and chiefs photographed in a multitude of settings, nearly defy description. The context is of captured performance. Perhaps “toy performance photography” might best characterize it, with photographers concerned more with experimental facets of life and manufactured narratives than with just capturing imagery. David Levinthal comes to mind, as does Vik Muniz. Performance, digital and process manipulation, collage, as well as the use of the self and abstraction — this is the type of work that stretches the nature of the medium and would most likely be of no use whatsoever tothose interested in “regular” pictures.

Andreas Gefeller’s sprawling, delicate Untitled (Tree Nursery) at Hasted Hunt was astounding with a humanist grid of cut leaf or drawn seedlings sprawled across a white background with a spacious warmth and microscopic mystery. Dennis O. Callwood’s multimedia works at Charles Isaacs, from his Gang Series, were an AIPAD highlight and another example of work I simply had not expected to find.The work was characterized by portraits of tattooed gang members, along with texts scrawled across the images, colorful graffiti and religious symbols built from the language of urban clans. The Ken & Jenny Jacobson Gallery, from Essex, England, embodied another trend — the exhibition of delicate 19th-century works. Jacobson’s Odalisques & Arabesques: Orientalist Photography 1839–1925 comprises wonderful works from both Africa and the Middle East in the manner of “orientalist” painting. TARTT/Washington had hidden away in their booth Images of African Americans, 1863–1980, selections from a collection of one thousand photographs stretching back to slavery. Baudoin Lebon Gallery, from Paris, was one of a half-dozen or so French galleries that blew me away. Samantha Everton’s cinematic blue works of children at Australia’s Josef Lebovic Gallery were beguiling, as were Desiree Dolron’s Xteriors series, stoically classical works printed on Endura Paper, rendered in dark shadows of black at Michael Hoppen. Despite my fears, AIPAD was indeed a refreshing showing of contemporary work.

BARNEY KULOK

NICOLE kLAGSBRuN GALLERY

Kulok’s work is simple, but deceptively so. At their most basic these images are stunning. I’m thinking of the showstopper, a black and white print Untitled (Stain) in which Kulok captures the subtle indenture in a leather headrest from a recently removed head. The elegance of the image, as well as the inherent drama, is palpable. The synapses connecting the various works betray their richness. Skillman Avenue, Queens NY, a lightbox transparency of a decaying billboard reads, “You Want It. You Can(’t) Have It. You’ll Never See It.” In a discussion with Kulok, the photographer was adamant that the context and juxtaposition of the photographs in relation to one another was tantamount, though it was equally important that the works stand up individually in and of themselves. There is an intense interplay and juxtaposition between the color and black and white works here, between the surface of images as well as their underlying spirituality. The effect works on an unconscious level rather than didactically. What is one to make of a stark, rich black and white work of a barn in the middle of a desert titled Green Barn? Or the tree on a lonely neighborhood block harshly lit as if it were a movie set?

Kulok shifts between C-prints and light box transparencies, making connections difficult to vocalize, musical in nature and often angry in tone. An abstract photo of a stone wall is titled Protest and on close inspection the word is faintly stenciled on the wall inside the photo. This temper comes to a head with Landscape of Landscapes, a masterwork of a landscape photograph of a car parked near a seashore with landscape photographs draped over and covering the car itself. The referential, rabbit-hole nature is jarring. As a disciple of multi-disciplinary “installation” photographer Vik Muniz, Kulok layers works with multiple thematic thrusts, utilizing the simple and mundane. In Untitled (Decomposition) the peeling paint of a poster board featuring an illustrated man pointing a gun (Warhol’s Elvis?) is cut off at the neck, is both threatening and silly and thoroughly engaging. Employing many subtle shifts in tone, perhaps Kulok is too smart for his own good. But the richness of his work lies in its pure, simple elegance, regardless of purported underlying depth. One could stare at the beauty of Queen Amazones, Avenue D and never grow tired. Without any intellectual connection, or context, it communicates a spirituality and wonder well worth the price of admission.

Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits

International Center of Photography

In 2006 the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC, announced the official site for its forthcoming National Museum of African American History and Culture. In collaboration with that institution and the National Portrait Gallery, New York’s International Center of Photography presented this arresting exhibition of African American portraits dating back to the photographic medium’s invention through contemporary times.

A portrait of the slave pianist “Blind Tom” Wiggins by George Kendall Warren in 1882, through more modern portraits like that of Alvin Ailey dancer Judith Jamison in 1976, by Max Waldman, retell American history through images of celebrated African Americans. Curator Deborah Willis states, “Photography is empowering for both those in front of and those behind the camera and the photographic image represents a transformative experience…. Portraits reflect individual and community concerns and serve as a metaphor for people’s ideals and desires.” A pensive, regal W.E.B. Dubois, photographed by Addison N. Scurlock in 1911, surely served to give a sense of dignity to a people most Americans at the time were more likely to see in demeaning imagery. A 1966 work with congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and black nationalist Stokely Carmichael, both laughing in a congressional office corridor, not only points to the shift in cultural power for African Americans at the time, but also begs a complex question: What exactly was the joke that had these two very dissimilar personalities, representatives of far removed generations, laughing so hard together? Photographs of individuals less well known today who played important cultural roles in their times are of much interest: civil rights activist Robert P. Moses in 1962 and musician Mary Lou Williams, in 1943. There is not much discussion in this exhibit, or its literature, of the fact that many of these portraits were taken by individuals who were not themselves black, an interesting power dynamic at play.

The quote from which the title of the show is taken is by abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet at an 1843 National Negro Convention. Calling out to slaves in America he said, “Let your motto be resistance! Resistance! RESISTANCE! No oppressed people have ever secured Liberty without resistance.” It is hard to find anything resembling that type of political anger and intensity in these photos. (For such power, view the National Gallery’s Foto exhibit, in which the photographers directly challenge the societal status quo as well as photographic practices of the day.) Willis’ makes a persuasive argument that the mere existence of some of the Resistance photos, as well as the lives some of the subjects lead, not to mention the courage of the photographers in deeming those lives culturally, historically and artistically relevant, was a type of resistance in itself. The portraits acquire power in their resistance to the limitations set upon these cultural icons by the society at large.

Sandro Fogli and Carlo Pettinelli

Galleria Luxardo

Mutation is permanent change in an organism’s hereditary material. It is transformation as well, which reminds us that life is multi-faceted. It is neither still nor permanent and that it’s capable of blossoming unexpectedly from where we believed it did not exist.

Mutazioni (Mutations) is a double exhibition of two artists in search of the complexities of life in transition. In the section Asfalti (Asphalt), by Sandro Fogli, mutations abound in our everyday life: on the asphalt where grass grows in the cracks and an unidentifiable spot of green emerges like an island from the ocean. Leaves and flowers are scattered among the sanpietrini, the typical square stones paving many Roman streets. Cigarette butts and confetti are signs of life that has passed.

The pictures — taken with a compact digital camera and computer, and manipulated to enhance contrast — are without a context. There is no spectacular light and no perspective, so all is entrusted to geometry, to specks of color and to the viewer’s imagination. Carlo Pettinelli focuses on how natural landscape and inanimate material undergos mutation because of human intervention. In Asfalti, scraps are photographed at the moment they are crashed and pressed, before being taken to the recycling plant.

The effect is a sort of frightening reality, a confused, expanded nightmare,and the scraps are a first step through the stages of mutation: new life emerging out of used material. Mutation is the possibility for a new future, which is never exempted from uncertainty.

Virtual landscapes suggest that there is a point where transformation can take different directions, either for life or for death. These landscapes are pictures of houses under construction.

The cross-processed, altered colors transform an idyllic countryside into a post-atomic backdrop. Point of View is probably the least congruent with its framed, encircled seaside views. They are marked by exquisite light and appalling colors, unfortunately lacking the substance of a unique vision.

Rodchenko

The Shenker Institute of English

The rich retrospective of one of photography’s masters, the Russian Alexander Rodchenko, organized and hosted by the Shenker Institute of English, is a good occasion to reflect upon art and its intersection with politics. Born in St. Petersburg in 1891 to a working-class family, Rodchenko originally dedicated himself to art as a painter. A member of the Productivist movement, which advocated art as a practical expression of everyday life, he later took up the camera as a better means of expression. His photographic career began in 1924 and ended only two decades later, at which point he took up painting again.

This exhibition presents rare photos from the Portfolio Classic Images, which was published in 1994, and the series Portraits, Rodchenko and his Circle, published in 1997. Each photograph from the two portfolios was developed from the original negative and printed by Rodchenko’s nephew in the original darkroom of Rodchenko’s Moscow studio. The works are printed on a paper identical in appearance to the paper the photographer used in the 1920s.

Rodchenko’s images are always astonishing and innovative: 80 years later they don’t look dated and still keep intact their strong visual power and revolutionary message. They are characterized by a totally modern aesthetic sense and by an experimental attitude. They are metaphysical visions that seek to astonish the observer, to give him new ideas to reflect upon. As Rodchenko wrote in his manifesto-like text Ways of Contemporary Photography: “In order to educate man to a new longing, everyday familiar objects must be shown to him with totally unexpected perspectives and in unexpected situations.” In other words, if we want to change things — and this was a priority of his historical period — let’s learn to see them from any possible angle.

The 1930s was as well one of the great eras of reportage, determined in both substance and style by Soviet Realism. The lucid Russian style, with its intact objects and scenes, was unambiguous. But in Rodchenko’s style the perspective is startling and the camera angles — from far below or overhead so that the figure seems flattened — are deliberately out of focus or oblique. Rodchenko was opposed to a painterly aesthetic but this way of photographing inevitably sometimes transfigures the image into a pure graphic. In Worker on a Ladder the point of view from below creates an effect of parting the frame in triangular cuts. In Pioneer with Trumpet the same point of view makes everything round: the hemisphere of the head, the trumpet’s hemicycle, the trumpet’s round key.

Tightly framed studio portraits of people from the artistic world he frequented — such as the striking image of poet Vladimir Mayakovsky — of relatives and ordinary people (the portrait of his mother is very well-known), are an important part of his work. Documentary images of Moscow’s architecture from the 1920s and photojournalism used to shore up the social politics of Stalinism are other recurrent themes displayed here. Rodchenko argued for an agitated, active, modernist format, as being analogous to the real state of things. He was criticized in the Soviet Union and by 1933 the state authorities allowed him to take pictures only of official State events. We can’t but wonder what would have been the evolution of his experimentalism if this hadn’t been bridled by the State’s will.

ARNO FISCHER

GALERIE ARGUS FOTOKUNST

In celebration of the 80th birthday of the great chronicler of East Germany, Galerie argus fotokunst, in Berlin’s art center, Mitte, presented a retrospective of the work of Arno Fischer. Born in 1927 in Berlin, Fischer trained after the Second World War as a sculptor but by the mid-1950s had begun to work as a photographer in East Berlin.

He helped install the famous exhibition The Family of Man in Berlin and also founded the influential East German photography collective, Direkt, in 1969. His early work about his home city, Situation Berlin, was not published because of the erection of the Wall in 1961. He worked for numerous magazines including the fashion journal Sibylle, Das Magazin and Sonntag, and taught at the now legendary College of Book and Graphic Design in Leipzig, and after the fall of the Wall in 1989 taught photojournalism in Dortmund. In 2000 he received the Dr. Erich Salomon Prize from the German Society of Photography.

Arno Fisher’s photography is marked by a classic form, is deeply humanist, and yet preserves true intimacy. Fischer is able to get to the heart of people and circumstances with quiet success. His images of the reconstruction era of pre-Wall Berlin testify to the growing disparity of living conditions in the Eastern and Western halves of the city. The ironic image of a sign, “Free West Berlin,” seen from behind and aimed at the Eastern zone, is augmented by the looming Mercedes and chauffer seen through the car door’s window.

Despite having some difficulties with the powers that be in the GDR of the day, Fischer retained commissions, was able to teach, and was able to travel to the West as well as throughout the Eastern block and “socialist brother lands.” His portraits of East Block luminaries and the Westerners on tour in the East are stunningly beautiful. Marlene Dietrich glows on the Moscow stage of 1964. The writer Peter Weiss sits elegantly composed in a chair. Others — elevator operators, soldiers, and mothers — retain their souls for all to see. His simple graphic style could also be seen in his fashion work for Sibylle, for which, he said, “we sold dreams.” His fashion work was not necessarily the most up to date owing to the political and socioeconomic circumstances in the GDR, but was greatly influenced by the French Vogue of the 1960s. Yet his work seems most touched by Robert Frank, although Fischer’s is more optimistic, and with his contact with The Family of Man Exhibition.

Since the re-unification of Germany, Fischer has been able to travel more widely, returning to New York where he photographed extensively in the 1980s. He continues to teach at the Ostkreuz School of Photography in Berlin.

This retrospective of portraiture follows that of his studies of New York and his collected works. It reveals another side of a great photographer more known for his (now) historical documents from mostly East Berlin up to the fall of the Wall. His portraits reflect the intense sincerity Fischer feels both for his craft and for the people he photographs.

Hannah Höch

Berlinsche Galerie

It is impossible to imagine 20th century art, especially Dada and Surrealism, without Hannah Höch’s contribution. Although less well known than her male contemporaries, John Heartfield, Raoul Hausmann and Kurt Schwitters, she contributed as much as they did to photography, photomontage and photo collage. With more than 160 works, the recently closed exhibition Hannah Höch: ALL BEGINNING IS DADA! took full advantage of the Berlinsche Galerie’s extensive holdings as well as work from international public and private collections.

Born in 1889 in Gotha, Germany, Höch studied graphic design and applied arts in Berlin and by 1915 had come across Raoul Hausmann, who had already made his name as an artist, and began a lasting affair with him. Höch quickly turned her talents towards collage and illustrating, and by the end of the First World War had become an active member of the newly found Dadaist art movement and participated throughout its twenty-year run in Germany. Dada declared itself devoted to the overthrow of everything that had gone on before it.

With its attacks on conformity and the machine-age politics of the Weimar era by such artists as Georg Grosz and Otto Dix, Dada was known for biting political satire. Höch, however, went a step beyond and launched into a far-reaching examination of gender roles and sexual politics. Her paintings and collages such as Die Braut [The Bride also known as Pandora’s Box] (1924–27) others from the 1920s composited bits of distorted heads and body parts in disquieting scenarios. Her collages of heads also made use of medical imagery from the facial reconstruction of wounded soldiers in a way similar to the photomontage Denkmal I [Memorial I] (1924). It was decidedly unsettling and fit beautifully into the shock-value aesthetic of the Dadaists. She made use of her own photography as well as found and appropriated media images that also formed a critique of the prevailing status quo. Her collected clippings, forming a collage called Album (1933) contained figure studies, nudes, ethnographic and architectural photographs, as well as snippets from texts and advertising. It functioned as a brilliant idea book and unique work of art as Gerhard Richter’s Atlas did fifty years later. Höch’s best-known photocollage, Cut With the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimarian Beer Belly Epoch of Germany (1919–20), is a vicious study of the early Weimar era with all of its speciousness, militancy, nascent Nazism, and revanchist capitalism. Her other works including anthropomorphic dolls and larger paint and photo collages prefigure the works of the likes of Robert Rauschenberg and Pop Art.

Hannah Höch managed to survive the Nazis and the Second World War, emerging unscathed but impoverished in Berlin. In the late 1940s and early 1950s she managed to make ends meet by teaching and by selling Dada artifacts. It wasn’t until the mid-1950s that she was awarded a pension, and began to have her own solo shows and make money from her art. She continued to produce work up into her final years. She died in 1978 at the age of 88. The first major treatment of her in the United States was Maud Lavin’s Cut with the Kitchen Knife, published in 1993 by Yale University Press. It is a fitting tribute to one of the most important and under-appreciated artists of the 20th century. The Berlin retrospective travels later to Basel, Switzerland’s Tinguely Museum.

THOMAS HOEPKER

C/O GALLERY BERLIN

Thomas Hoepker popped back into the American consciousness in 2006 when his image from September 11, 2001, View from Williamsburg at Lower Manhattan, was published for the first time. The image shows five young people at a scenic overlook chatting amiably among themselves as smoke billows from where the World Trade Center used to be. It is a somewhat surreal image depicting the spot where almost three thousand people died an hour or so before and young people seeming to be relaxing on a sunny September morning without a care about the disaster unfolding in the center of the frame. When it was finally published and featured in an article by Frank Rich in the New York Times five years after the disaster, all hell broke loose. First construed as an example of American apathy or ability to move along, “The young people in Mr. Hoepker’s photo aren’t necessarily callous. They’re just American,” wrote Frank Rich. Hoepker himself surmised, “They were totally relaxed like any normal afternoon. It’s possible they lost people and cared, but they were not stirred by it.” The photograph also became an indictment of modern photojournalism.

Like Spencer Platt, whose image of young Lebanese in a cabriole viewing downtown bombed out Beirut last year won the Picture of the Year from the World Press Photo organization, he didn’t ask what his subjects thought about what they were seeing. “Had Hoepker walked fifty feet over to introduce himself he would have discovered a bunch of New Yorkers in the middle of an animated discussion about what had just happened,” claimed Walter Sipser, one of the people in the photograph. “I also have a strict policy of never taking a photograph of a person without their permission or knowledge of my intent,” reported Chris Schaivo, the woman on the right in the picture and a practicing photojournalist. This is a legitimate concern, but it should not obscure the strength of Hoepker’s long career as “maker of images.” Thomas Hoepker, 50 Years of Photography, now on display in Berlin and headed later to New York, is a compelling retrospective. Born in Munich in 1936, Hoepker photographed extensively in America, notably embarking on a Robert Frank-like odyssey in the early 1960s, making an amazing body of work on Muhammed Ali in the middle 1960s and of the training of Marines at Paris Island in 1970–71. He became a member of Magnum Photos in 1964. He later was the first western photographer to have carte blanche to work in East Germany and photographed all aspects of society in the GDR. Since then he has traveled the world for Magnum and for countless magazines amassing an immense body of work. The two hundred or so images in the show and accompanying catalogue produced by Schirmer-Mosel are but a drop in the bucket of this photographer who has worked in the “humanist” vein of photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson and Eve Arnold. From 2003 to 2006 he was president of Magnum. A self-described “producer of images” and not “an artist,” Hoepker notes that the “glass eye of the camera works like a mask and filter. The view through the lens produces the distance that allows us photographers not to feel like voyeurs but rather chroniclers of time. I want to provoke with my images without sensation and without creating truth. But I want to bring something into motion in order to help.” Sometimes that is not so easy.

A Gallery for Fine Photography

241 Chartres Street

New Orleans, LA 70130

504.568.1313

www.agallery.com

[email protected]

Various artists: Art for Art’s Sake

October 6

Afterimage Gallery

2800 Routh Street, Quadrangle #141

Dallas, TX 75201

214.871.9140

www.afterimagegallery.com

[email protected]

Terry Falke: Observations in an Occupied Wilderness

September 8 to October 23

Alfredo’s Gallery, Fine Art Photography

116 Mountain Road

Mountain Road Market Place

Suffield, CT 06078

860.254.5400

www.alfredosphoto.com

[email protected]

Karen Dalrymple

Dr. Merrill C. Raikes

October 12 to December 7

Atlanta Photography Group

75 Bennett Street NW, Space B-1

Atlanta, GA 30309

404.605.0605

www.atlantaphotographygroup.org

[email protected]

Various photographers: Fay Gold Selects

October 19 to November 30

Andrea Meislin

526 West 26th Street, Suite 214

New York, New York 10001

212.627.2552

www.andreameislin.com

[email protected]

Ofri Cnaani: Two Dimensional Days

September 20 to November 3

Anton Kern Gallery

532 West 20th Street

New York, New York 10011

212.367.9663

www.antonkerngallery.com

[email protected]

Eberhard Havekost

Marcel Odenbach

September 8 to October 13

Dan McCarthy

October 18 to November 24

Barry Singer Gallery

7 Western Avenue

Petaluma, CA 94952

707.781.3200

www.singergallery.com

[email protected]

Douglas Gayeton: Slow Food: Slow Living in Tuscany

August 18 to November 3

Benham Gallery

1216 1st Avenue

Seattle, WA 98101

206.622.2480

www.benhamgallery.com

[email protected]

Peggy Washburn

Ann Pallesen

Shoshannah White

October 3 to November 10

Black & White Gallery Chelsea

636 West 28th Street, Ground Floor

New York, New York 10001

212.244.3007

www.blackandwhiteartgallery.com

[email protected]

Liset Castillo: Pain is Universal but so is Hope

September 7 to October 13

Black & White Gallery Williamsburg

483 Driggs Avenue

Brooklyn NY, 11211

718.599.8775

www.blackandwhiteartgallery.com

[email protected]

Various artists including Carol Boram-Hays, Lisa Cooperman, Phyllis Ewen and Meg Walker: Compass: New Directions

September 14 to November 18

Bonni Benrubi

41 East 57th Street

New York, NY 10022

212.888.6007

www.bonnibenrubi.com

[email protected]

Simon Norfolk

Judith McMillan: In the Red Room

September 20 to November 24

Brooklyn Museum of Art

200 Eastern Parkway

Brooklyn, New York 11238

718.638.5000

www.brooklynmuseum.org

[email protected]

Various artists including Ghada Amer, Pilar Albaracin, Pipilotti Rist, and Tracey Rose: Global Feminisms Remix

August 3 to February 3

Callanwolde Gallery

980 Briarcliff Road

Atlanta, GA 30306

404.872.5338

www.callanwolde.org

John Elliott: The Human Pulse

September 14 to October 26

Camera Obscura Gallery

1309 Bannock Street

Denver, CO 80204

303.623.4059

www.cameraobscuragallery.com

[email protected]

Phil Borges: Women Empowered

September 21 to November 4

Catherine Edelman Gallery

300 West Superior Street

Chicago, IL 60610

312.266.2350

www.edelmangallery.com

[email protected]

Terry Evans: Steel

September 7 to November 3

The Center for Fine Art Photography

201 South College Avenue

Fort Collins, CO 80524

970.224.1010

www.c4fap.org

[email protected]

Colorado Photo Exhibit

October 2 to October 6

2007 International Exhibition of Fine Art Photography (Online Exhibition)

October 12 to November 10

ClampArt

521-531 West 25th Street, Ground Floor

New York, NY 10001

646.230.0020

www.clampart.com

[email protected]

Mark Morrisroe: Mark Morrisroe (1959-1989)

September 6 to October 6

Cohen Amador Gallery

41 East 57 Street, 6th Floor

New York, NY 10022

212.759.6740

www.cohenamador.com

[email protected]

Lars Tunbjörk: Office

September 12 to October 27

Composition Gallery

1388 McLendon Avenue Northeast

Atlanta, GA 30307

678.982.9764

www.compositiongallery.com

[email protected]

Joeff Davis

October 13 to November 25

Cowboy Fine Art Photographs

1101 West 6th Street

Austin, TX 78703

512.477.0828

www.cowboyfineartphotographs.com

[email protected]

Bill Wittliff: Lonesome Dove

October 20 to December 6

Daiter Contemporary

311 West Superior Street #408

Chicago, IL 60610

312.787.3350

www.stephendaitergallery.com

[email protected]

Zana Briski: Brothel

September 7 to October 27

David Gallery

5759 Washington Boulevard

Culver City, CA 90232

323.939.9069

www.davidgallery.net

[email protected]

Michael Prince: PUSH

Brandon Herman: BrandonHermanLand

September 8 to October 13

Etherton Gallery

135 South Sixth Avenue

Tuscon, AZ 85701

520.624.7370

www.ethertongallery.com

[email protected]com

Frances Murray: Psychologue: Photographs 1977-2007

September 4 to November 3

Fahey/Klein Gallery

148 North La Brea Avenue

Los Angeles, CA 90036

323.934.2250

www.faheykleingallery.com

Rankin: Eye Candy

September 6 to October 20

Fay Gold Gallery

764 Miami Circle

Atlanta, GA 30324

404.233.3843

www.faygoldgallery.com

[email protected]

Herb Ritts: Celebrity Photographs 2007

Brian Oglesbee: Aquatique

October 12 to November 9

FLATFILEgalleries

217 North Carpenter Street

Chicago, IL 60607

312.491.1190

www.flatfilegalleries.com

[email protected]

John Himmelfarb: Multi-Dimensional

Nancy Racina Landin: Spinnin’

Claude Andreini, Euro Rotelli, Flyn Vibert, Marc Sirinsky, Carol Coates, Ryan Zoghlin, Gary Engle, and Fred Camper: Fotowerk 2007

September 7 to October 26

Florida Museum of Photographic Art

200 North Tampa Street

Tampa, FL 33602

813.221.2222

www.fmopa.org

Clyde Butcher and Maria Martinez Canas: Cuba: The Works of Clyde Butcher and Maria Martinez-Canas

September 18 to November 10

Fraenkel Gallery

49 Geary Street

San Francisco, CA 94108

415.981.2661

www.fraenkelgallery.com

[email protected]

Diane Arbus: Something Was There: Early Work by Diane Arbus

G. Gibson Gallery

300 S Washington Street

Seattle, WA 98104

206.587.4033

www.ggibsongallery.com

[email protected]

Keith Carter

September 6 to October 13

Galerie 1900-2000

8, rue Bonaparte

75006 Paris

33.01.43.25.84.20

www.galerie1900-2000com

[email protected]

Jose Pierre: Le Surréalisme Revendiqué

November 8 to December 15

Galerie Clairefontaine

7, Place de Clairefontaine

L-1341 Luxembourg

352.47.23.24

Various artists including Joann Hauser, Phillipp Schöpke, Franz Kamlander, August Walla, Rudolf Horacek, Fritz Koller, Josef Bachler, and Oswald Tschirtner

September 27 to November 3

Galerie Esther Woerdehoff

36, rue Falguière

Paris, France 75015

33.1.43.21.44.83

www.ewgaleriecom

[email protected]

René Burri: Clamor, Grito y Amor

Nikolas Tantsoukes: Collages

September 5 to October 20

60 various artists: Magnum Photos

October 24 to January 26

Galerie Johannes Faber

Brahmsplatz 7

Vienna, Austria A-1040

43.1.505.75.18

www.jmcfaber.at

[email protected]

Todd Webb: Photographs 1940-1980

Through December 1

Galerie Poller

547 West 27th Street, 2nd Floor

New York, New York 10001

www.galerie-poller.com

[email protected]

Julia Gröning: future.loves.me

September 6 to October 27

Galerie Priska Pasquer

Goebenstraade 3

5062 Koeln, Germany

46.221.952.6316

www.priskapasquer.de

[email protected]

Daido Moriyama: Kyoku/Erotica

September 5 to December 14

Gallery 339

339 South 21st. Street

Philadelphia, PA 19103

215.731.1530

www.gallery339.com

[email protected]

Tina Barney: World Stage

September 15 to October 27

Gallery Luisotti

2525 Michigan Avenue, Building A2

Santa Monica, CA 90404

310.453.0043

[email protected]

Simon Norfolk: Beirut: How Did You Come to Smell of Smoke And Fire?

September 15 to November 3

Gendell Gallery

1847 Larking Street

San Francisco, CA 94109

415.567.3523

www.gendellgallery.com

[email protected]

Diane Arbus, Amos Badertscher, Marsha Burns, Horace Bristol, Craig Cowan, Bruce Cratsley, Imogen Cunningham, Arnold Genthe, Horst, Dorothea Lange, Clarence J. Laughlin, George Platt Lynes, Will McBride, Duane Michals, Andrea Modica, Eadweard Muybridge, Luis Gonzales Palma, Laurence Salzmann, Jim Steinhardt, Edmund Teske, William Wegman, and James Van Der Zee: Group Exhibition

September 4 to December 1

Griffin Museum of Photography

67 Shore Road

Winchester, MA 01890

781.729.1158

www.griffinmuseum,org

[email protected]

Juried by Brian Paul Clamp: 13th Juried Exhibition

Amy Stein: Domesticated

David Wolf: Transform/Transcend

August 23 to October 28

Hamiltons

13 Carlos Place

London, England W1K 2

207.499.9494

www.hamiltonsgallery.com

[email protected]

Helmut Newton: Big Newton

September 26 to November 18

Harry Ranson Center

21st and Guadalupe

Austin, TX 78713

512.471.8944

www.hrc.utexas.edu

[email protected]

Various artists: Dress Up: Portrait and Performance in Victorian Photography

September 4 to December 30

Hasted Hunt

529 West 20th Street, 3rd Floor

New York, NY 10011

212.627.0006

www.hastedhunt.com

[email protected]

Lisette Model, Aaron Siskind,

Gerald Slota

September 6 to October 27

Hemphill

1515 14th Street Northwest

Washington, DC 20005

202.234.5601

www.hemphillfinearts.com

[email protected]

Renee Stout: Journal: Book One

September 15 to October 27

Howard Greenburg Gallery

41 East 57th Street, Suite 1406

New York, New York 10022

212.334.0010

www.howardgreenberg.com

[email protected]

Various artists including Bernice Abbot, Charles Jones, and Ruth Orkin: Howard Greenberg Gallery: 25 Years

September 21 to October 20

International Center of Photography

1133 Avenue of Americas at 43rd Street

New York, New York 10036

212.857.0000

www.icp.org

[email protected]

Various artists: Other Weapons: Photography and Print Culture During the Spanish Civil War

September 25 to January 6

Iris Gallery of Fine Photography

47 Railroad Street

Great Barrington, MA 01230

413.644.0045

www.irisgallery.net

[email protected]

Brian Kosoff & Barbara Cole

October 5 to January 3

Jackson Fine Arts

3115 East Shadowlawn Avenue

Atlanta, GA 30305

404.233.3739

www.jacksonfineart.com

[email protected]

Sam Taylor-Wood

David Hilliard

September 14 to October 27

Jenkins Johnson

521 West 26th Street, 5th Floor

New York, New York 10001

212.629.0707

www.jenkinsjohnsongallery.com

[email protected]

William Wylie

October 18 to November 24

Joseph Bellows Gallery

7661 Girard Avenue

La Jolla, CA 92037

858.456.5620

www.josephbellows.com

[email protected]

Kate Breakey

September 15 to October 20

Julie Saul Gallery

535 West 22nd Street, 6th Floor

New York, NY 10011

212.627.2410

www.saulgallery.com

[email protected]

David Stephenson: Vaults

September 6 to October 6

Maria Kalman: The Principles of Uncertainty

October 11 to November 24

Kathleen Ewing Gallery

1767 P Street Northwest

Washington, DC 20036

202.328.0955

www.kathleenewinggallery.com

[email protected]

John Grant: Flowers

August Sander: Portraits

September 14 to October 27

Laurence Miller Gallery

20 West 57th Street, 3rd Floor

New York, New York 10019

212.397.3930

www.laurencemillergallery.com

[email protected]

Burk Uzzle

September 6 to October

Lee Gallery

9 Mt. Vernon Street

Winchester, MA 01890

781.729.7445

www.leegallery.com

[email protected]

Edouard Baldus: 19th Century French Photographs

September 3 to October 31

Leica Gallery

670 Broadway, Suite 500

New York, NY 10012

212.777.3051

www.leicaphoto.com

[email protected]

Richard Kalvar: Photographs

September 19 to November 3

The Light Factory

345 North College Street, Suite 221

Charlotte, NC 28202

704.333.9755

www.lightfactory.org

[email protected]

Various Artists: Message in a Bottle: Reconstructing Lives

July 27 to October 11

M.Y. Art Prospects

547 West 27th Street, 2nd Floor

New York, New York 10001

212.268.7132

http://www.myartprospects.com

[email protected]

Go Sugimoto

September 6 to October 13

McNamara Gallery

190 Wicksteed Street

Wanganui 4500, New Zealand

06.348.7320

www.mcnamara.co.nz

[email protected]

Richard Barraud: For the Benefit of Mr. Kite: Photographs 1965-1975

October

Metropolitan Museum of Art

5th Avenue & 82nd Street

New York, New York 10028

212.535.7710

www.metmuseum.org

Various artists including Cindy Sherman, Rodney Graham, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth, and Wolfgang Tillmans: Depth of Field: Modern Photography from the Collection

September 25 to December 30

Michael Dawson Gallery

535 North Larchmont Boulevard

Los Angeles, CA 90004

323.469.2186

www.dawsonbooks.com

[email protected]

Various artists: True to Life: Color Photography, 1860-1960

Through October 31

Minnesota Center for Photography

165 13th Avenue Northeast

Minneapolis, MN 55413

612.824.5500

www.mncp.org

[email protected]

Kristine Heykants, Orin Rutchick, Mickey Smith and Angela Strassheim: New Photography: McKnight Fellows 06/07

Eric Carroll: Sunburn

August 4 to October 7

Various Artists: Photobravo 2007: A Celebration of Photographic Art

October 13 to November 10

Monique Meloche Gallery

118 North Peoria

Chicago, IL 60607

312.455.0299

www.moniquemeloche.com

[email protected]

Todd Pavlisko

September 7 to October 13

Christopher Patch

October 19 to November 24

Monroe Gallery of Photography

112 Don Gaspar

Santa Fe, NM 87501

505.992.0810

www.monroegallery.com

[email protected]

Steve Shapiro: American Edge

September 28 to November 18

The Museum of Modern Art

11 West 53rd Street

New York, New York 10019

212.708.9400

www.moma.org

[email protected]

Tanyth Berkeley, Scott McFarland and Berni Searle: New Photography 2007

September 30 to January 1

Museum of the City of New York

5th Avenue & 103rd Street

New York, New York 10029

212.534.1672

www.mcny.org

[email protected]

Various artists: The Jewish Daily Forward: Embracing an Immigrant Community

Through November 25

New Century Artists

530 West 25th Street, Suite 406

New York, New York 10001

212.367.7072

www.newcenturyartists.org

[email protected]

Janet Glazer

October 16 to November 11

Newspace Center for Photography

1632 SE 10th Avenue

Portland, OR 97214

503.963.1935

www.newspacephoto.org

[email protected]

Rishi Singhal, Paul Yurkovich, Todd Stewart: 2006 Juried Competition

October 5 to 28

O. Winston Link Museum

101 Shenandoah Avenue

Roanoke, VA 24016

540.982.5465

www.linkmuseum.org

[email protected]

Various artists: An Exhibit of Civil War Photographs From the David L. Hack Collection at the Chrystler Museum

October 1 to March 1

Open Shutter Gallery

755 East 2nd Avenue

Durango, CO 81301

970.382.8355

www.openshuttergallery.com

[email protected]

Chip Thomas, Jenny Gummersall, Tony Stromberg, Adam Jahiel: Spirit of the West

Oswald Gallery

P.O. Box 910

Jackson, WY 83001

307.734.8100

www.oswaldgallery.com

[email protected]

Herbert Tilley

August 29 to October 15

Pace/MacGill Gallery

32 East 57th Street, 9th Floor

New York, NY 10022

212.759.7999

www.pacemacgill.com

[email protected]

JoAnn Verburg

September 6 to October 13

The Photographers’ Gallery

5 & 8 Great Newport Street

London WC2H 7HY

44.0.20.7831.1772

www.photonet.org.uk

[email protected]

Shemelis Desta: From Emperor to Military Dictator: Shemelis Desta’s Ethiopian Archive 1963-1983

Photographs Do Not Bend

1202 Dragon Street, Suite 103

Dallas, TX 75207

214.969.1852

www.pdnbgallery.com

[email protected]

Frank Gohlke

September 8 to October 13

Photographic Resource Center

832 Commonwealth Avenue

Boston, MA 02215

www.prcboston.org

[email protected]

Over 200 artists, including John O’Reilly, Olivia Parker, Gordon Parks, Jock Sturges Lori Nix, Walker Evans, and Bradford Washburn: Live Auction Preview Exhibition

September 14 to October 21

Photography 414

414 Main Street

Fredricksburg, TX 76856

830.990.1330

www.photography414.com

Dan and Jill Burkholder: Two Views of Loss: New Orleans

October 1 to 31

Richter Gallery of Photography LLC

4003 Hillsboro Road

Nashville, TN 37215

www.richterphotogallery.com

[email protected]

Richard Sexton: Terra Incognita: Photographs of America’s Third Coast

Opens November 10

Robert Klein Gallery

38 Newbury Street, 4th Floor

Boston, MA 02116

617.267.7997

www.robertkleingallery.com

[email protected]

Didier Massard

September 7 to November 23

Robin Rice Gallery

325 West 11th Street

New York, New York 10014

212.366.6660

www.robinricegallery.com

[email protected]

Cig Harvey

September 20 to October 29

RoseGallery

Bergamont Station Arts Center

2525 Michigan Avenue G-5

Santa Monica, CA 90404

310.264.8440

www.rosegallery.net

[email protected]

Manuel Alvarez Bravo: The Eyes in His Eyes

September to November

Scheinbaum & Russek LTD

369 Montezuma, #345

Santa Fe, NM 87501

505.988.5116

www.photographydealers.com

srlt[email protected]

Alex Harris: The Idea of Cuba

August 31 to October 27

Schneider Gallery

230 West Superior Street

Chicago, IL 60610

312.988.4033

www.schneidergallerychicago.com

[email protected]

Howard Henry Chen

September 7 to October 13

Scott Nichols Gallery

49 Geary Street, 4th Floor

San Francisco, CA 94108

415.788.4641

www.scottnicholsgallery.com

[email protected]

Ron Partridge: Ron Partridge at Ninety: 75 Years in Photography

Imogen Cunningham, Dorothea Lange

September 5 to October 13

Silver Eye Center for Photography

1015 East Carson Street

Pittsburgh, PA 15203

412.431.1810

www.silvereye.org

Diana Shearwood: What’s for Dinner?

September 26 to November 24

Silverstein Photography

535 West 24th Street

New York, NY 10011

212.627.3930

www.silversteinphotography.com

[email protected]

Noelle Tan, Phillip Pisciotta, Barret Oliver, Zoe Sheehan Saldana, Sonja Thomsen, Lisa Robinson, Lola Flash, Michael Lundgren, Curtis Mann, and Will Michels: Silverstein Photography Annual

September 8 to October 13

Soho Photo

15 White Street

New York, New York 10013

212.226.8571

www.sohophoto.com

[email protected]

Paul Stetzer: Canyon Panoramas

October 2 to November 3

Staley-Wise Gallery

560 Broadway, 3rd Floor

New York, NY 10012

212.966.6223

www.staleywise.com

[email protected]

Bert Stern: Stern in Stern

September 28 to November 3

Stephen Bulger Gallery

1026 Queen Street West

Toronto, Ontario, Canada M6J1H6

416.504.0575

www.bulgergallery.com

[email protected]

Mark Ruwedel: Shelter

October 11 to November 10

Stephen Cohen Gallery

7358 Beverly Boulevard

Los Angeles, CA 90036

323.937.5525

www.stephencohengallery.com

[email protected]

David Levinthal: The Passion

September 8 to October 20

Michael Grecco: Blind Ambition

October 25 to November 24

Stephen Daiter Gallery

311 West Superior Street #404

Chicago, IL 60610

312.787.3350

www.stephendaitergallery.com

[email protected]

Various artists: A Selection of Exceptional Vintage Photographs

September 7 to October 27

Sun to Moon Gallery

3001 Keller Springs Road

Carrollton, TX 75006

972.418.1199

www.suntomoongallery.com

[email protected]

Dan Burkholder, Scot Miller, and Jill Skupin Burkholder: Europe: Three Visions

October 12 to 28

Tepper Takayama Fine Arts

20 Park Plaza Suite 600

Boston, MA 02116

617.542.0557

www.teppertakayamafinearts.com

[email protected]

Milton Montenegro, Shomei Tomatsu, and Robert Welsh: Overseas

September to October

Throckmorton Fine Art, Inc.

145 East 57th Street, 3rd Floor

New York, NY 10022

212.233.1059

www.throckmorton-nyc.com

[email protected]

Christian Cravo: Waters of Hope: Photographs by Christian Cravo

September 20 to November 10

Verve Gallery of Photography

219 East Marcy Street

Santa Fe, NM 87501

505.982.5009

www.santafephotogallery.com

[email protected]

Irving Greines

Elizabeth Opalenik

August 31 to October 27

Wall Space

600 1st Avenue, Suite 322

Seattle, WA 98104

206.330.9137

www.wallspaceseattle.com

[email protected]

Keith Johnson: Ground Cover

October 2 to November 3

Whitney Museum of American Art

945 Madison Avenue

New York, New York 10021

212.570.3676

www.whitney.org

Eileen Quinlan: Undone

September 18 to December 31

Yancy Richardson Gallery

535 West 22nd Street

New York, NY 10011

646.230.9610

www.yanceyrichardson.com

[email protected]

Laura Letinsky: Say it isn’t So

September 12 to October 27

Yossi Milo Gallery

525 West 25th Street

New York, NY 10001

212.414.0370

www.yossimilo.com

[email protected]

Kohei Yoshiyuki: The Park

September 6 to October 20

Oskar Korsár

October 25 to November 24

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New Photography Award

The REAL Photography Award is an exclusive, new photography award. Three themes have been selected: Nature, Development and Architecture. Prize money: EUR 50,000.

To apply visit: www.realphotographyaward.com

Patricia Lambert is shown and collected nationally and internationally. She is in major collections including NY MoMa and The Houston Museum of Fine Art. Archival warm toned gelatin-silver prints range in price from $800 to $2500, in sizes from 11 x 14” to 30 x 30”. Small editions are scheduled for next year.

[email protected]

708.453.9317

I have been photographing full time for 31 years. But I started developing my skills for traveling in the wilderness, and finding compositions there, nearly 50 years ago, while accompanying my father, Les, on his photographic expeditions. Dad often tilted his large-format cameras down from the big landscapes to focus on the more intimate, often overlooked, compositions of the forest floor. Throughout my career, I’ve carried on this tradition, setting the stage with a few larger landscapes, then providing multiple images of the details.

Since 1984 I’ve photographed almost exclusively on Lake Superior. Past books on the lake include: The Lake Superior Images; Horizons; and A Voice Within — The Lake Superior Nudes. The photographs shown here are from my most recent book, Minnesota’s North Shore. In A Voice Within — The Lake Superior Nudes, the black and white images often had an oriental aesthetic — where the rocks, water and ice all played an equal role with my wife, Honey, who was the only human model. In Minnesota’s North Shore, I have returned to working with color, but those same natural elements are just as important. The book is a blend of older, large-format film images, with newly produced digital images. The results are familiar, yet fresh. The high-resolution digital camera allowed me to make images technically impossible with my view camera — especially from my kayak. Because of the increased depth of field possible with the smaller camera, it also allowed me to create intimate images with more depth than I previously could.

This intimacy is also a major part of the three-hour movie that accompanies the book. With motion and sound I was able to share the waves and light patterns — the many repeating rhythms of the lake. While I will never give up making stills, I am totally hooked on using video to complement the still images.

Craig Blacklock’s photography is part of many private and corporate collections, including the Tweed Museum of Art, The Polaroid Collection, The George Eastman House, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Blacklock Photography Gallery is located in his hometown of Moose Lake, Minnesota. blacklockgallery.com 888-485-0478. All prices are $800 - 20 x 28.

Murphy Kuhn’s recent exhibit in the Faulkner Galleries of Santa Barbara is titled “An Alternative Perspective”. This title aptly summarizes Murphy’s work. He finds subjects and compositions in the visible world often overlooked by most photographers and never conceived of by most lay people. With subtle, tasteful digital manipulations, he transforms the images into his own view of the world.

Perhaps it is the result of years at sea as a commercial ship’s captain that helps him see land-based subjects differently. For whatever reason, the internal vision he captures with his photography is truly unique and distinctive. A self-taught photographer with 32 years experience, he has dedicated himself to full time professional photography for the past 5 years. His efforts have been rewarded with prestigious awards—including the IPA Lucie Awards competition—and placement in private collections. He is a regular exhibitor at the Corridan Gallery in Santa Barbara, www.corridan-gallery.com.

Murphy Kuhn’s website, www.murphykuhn.com shows his dramatic large format work, other worldly landscapes, unique botanicals and abstracts. Prices for his smaller unframed works are as follows: 11x16-$250, 13x19-$275, 16x21-$350 Contact artist for pricing large format pieces. Limited Editions vary by size.

I’d have to say that my shooting method would best be described as “Jazzing.” What do I mean by that? When I was studying Fine Arts at York University in Toronto, (Jazz performance, and piano) one of the things I did was to play sessions a few times a week with two other pianist in a room with three pianos. We would come to the session with no notation or preconceived notion of what it was we were going to play.

We just knew that we would do it together. One guy would start a unique theme and, based on that, one or more of the other players would join—or not. Add or not. Often we would play spontaneous musical interludes that would last twenty minutes or longer all based on “in the moment” ideas inspired by one another and the music. It is there that I realized there is no Jazz, just “Jazzing”. Jazz is a verb not a noun. So it is with the way I approach photography. I try to interact with the environment the same way I interacted with the musicians as I have described. I want to approach subjects with empathy and serendipity. I need to be open to surprise. I bring myself with all the experience I have to that moment, to the subjects, and they bring theirs to me. For me it’s the process of “photographing” that is the thrill. I consider myself a “documentarian”. The camera becomes the tool for recording the interactions between subjects and their environments, and myself. In that way the camera functions much like the tape recorder did in those “three piano” sessions. I am fascinated by the broad unconscious strokes of things. Whether it be nature etching life lines on someone’s cheek or a sandy shoreline, or a construction worker squirting glue on a piece of plywood. For more information, please visit my website www.picsfrompants.com or email me at [email protected]

Born in New York City, I have been a professional photographer for more than 30 years, although photography was not my original profession. I started in the computer industry in early 1960’s learning to program large UNIVAC computers, writing software for BURROUGHS computers and eventually opening my own firm in professional computer/software education for industry. I sold my company in the mid 1980’s and took what had been a photography hobby and turned it into another profession. I always had a camera with me for as long as I can remember. During the day if I saw something or someone that was interesting, I would take a photo. On weekends, I would walk through Central Park spending the day photographing people and children at play. It became somewhat of a joke with my colleagues that at any given time, you could have your picture taken by me.

After the sale of my company, I left for East Africa on a three-week trip to photograph animals. One of the two dreams that I had as a boy was to travel to Africa and Alaska to photograph animals. I find myself fortunate that I was not only able to do both but to do both several times and to see also a great part of the world during other travels (Israel, Egypt, China, East Africa, South Africa, most of Europe, Most of the United States, etc.). When I returned from Africa on what would be my first trip, I took off about two months to edit and send out slides to various agents. I worked as a free-lance photographer for the New York Daily News and The Associated Press in New York until 1994 when I moved to Florida. I still work as a freelance photographer for the New York Daily News, European press photo-agency (EPA), The New York Times, REUTERS News Service, and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). I cover breaking news events, sporting events, music award shows and feature stories. My work has been published in various publications such as The New York Times, New York Daily News, The New York Times Magazine, Time Magazine Annual, European press photo agency wire service, Associated Press Wire Service, Reuters News Service, ESPN Magazine, Sports Illustrated & Sports Illustrated for Kids Magazines, People Magazine and Who Weekly. My work has also appeared on the Covers of The Economist, The Blood-Horse, Dolphin Digest (The Miami Dolphin’s football team magazine) cereal boxes and newspapers through the world. I published my first book in 2003: ALASKA: A DIGITAL ODYSSEY ISBN# 1-4134-3006-6, my second book in 2006: VILLAGE PEOPLE NOURIVIER, SOUTH AFRICA ISBN# 1-59926-771-3, 3-2-1 IGNATION (at copyright office) and currently working on my fourth book “AFRICA UP CLOSE” .

I am currently seeking agency representation. For more information, please contact me at www.girphotos.com