Photographs Not Taken

There are the photographs not taken

An aged, elegant couple
sitting on a 5th Avenue park bench just north of the Met
matching blue-tinted eyeglasses
serenity in their long couple-hood
a “biopic” of quiet seated before the volta

A widow living in a tenement built by Mussolini
tending to a crude distillery housed in a Mussolini granted garage
the quiet drip drip drip of slivovica welcoming visitors to sit
in the deplaned seats of the now defunct Jugoslavenski Aerotransport
Wearing a stained, but clean apron
this simple, yet noble woman, is unknowingly part of an image
solely recorded by grey matter

A recently slaughtered calf hangs from a hook on the ceiling of a farmer’s work room
slowly dripping its blood in anticipation of the butchering
Tiny raised glasses of herb-infused liqueurs toast the beast
foreshadowing the soon to be prepared tripe, stews and soups

And the pic formed by a talented, but short-sighted gallerist in a town house gallery
standing before walls once rioted with iconoclastic works
most resting in storage now, unseen, unaccompanied, and increasingly
unremarkable with their exile
Clean white crew neck T-shirt over standard Levi blue jeans
a nod to basic good taste and handsomeness
minus the scarred belly clothes would later hide

Untaken photographs, but photographs nonetheless.

Gabriella Radujko

http://modernartswriting.wordpress.com/

All photographs courtesy Sam Matamoros

The Aipad Photography Show in New York, held March 29-April 1, 2012, continues to unite the past with the future of fine art photography under one glorious roof at the historic Park Avenue Armory. Here, the past’s usefulness is on display as prescribed and thoughtfully described by Israel Zangwell–namely, the past is for inspiration (not imitation) and continuation (not repetition).

Presumably, the English writer would have appreciated the close proximity of historical images to those belonging to our decidedly post-photographic era, which is what makes this the premier, annual show for fine art photography in the United States, in part, for its educational value.

Here, too, one visits old friends, as exemplified by familiar, vintage works and discovers new ones.  Berenice Abbott’s perennial Gunsmith, 6 Center Market Place, 1937 and Edward Weston’s first nude, Nude (IN) 1918 by Halsted Gallery, Franklin, Michigan were among two “old friends” whose exploration of signs and portraiture, respectively, presaged the ubiquity of such images which found their way into photography conscious, mid-century newspapers and magazines.

The Stieglitz Memorial Portfolio/ Jeff Hirsch Books

Photobook dealers Harper’s Books of East Hampton, New York and Jeff Hirsch Books of Evanston, Illinois, guest exhibitors for Aipad for the past four years, contribute to conversations about photography expressed in the book format. The Stieglitz Memorial Portfolio offered by Jeff Hirsch Books with 18 reproductions of photos by Alfred Stieglitz (edited by Dorothy Norman) was an excellent example. Several poignant, black and white plates, including Venetian Boy, The Steerage, and the Equivalents series validate the autonomous art form of photobooks while simultaneously giving a visual primer about the origins modern photography since the death of its “father”, Alfred Stieglitz.  In addition to photography for the wall, new photography collectors will want become acquainted with the photobook.

New friends include John Cyr, whose Developer Trays series, shown by the Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago, are among the most admirable images in the show.  Cyr photographs the residue left behind on the surfaces of stainless steel and plastic silver gelatin printing trays. His project simultaneously captures and conserves two facets of analog photography’s history—the technology and the history of the artists whose trays he photographed.  His first participant, Emmit Gowin, immediately appreciated the project idea and Cyr continues to receive a great deal of positive reinforcement about the importance of the series; some of his research has led to the realization that the estates of well known photographers like Avedon and Penn have dismantled and disposed of the dark room equipment.

Developer Trays by John Cyr

London-based, Hackelbury Fine Art, showed selections from Bill Armstrong’s most recent series, Film Noir, part of the “Infinity Series” started in 1997.  Armstrong’s photographic practice experiments with color science and extreme de-focusing.  The results are out-of-focus, other worldly photographic collages. In Film Noir #1405, the artist reaches a new level of refinement of the series by featuring a pedestrian moving through artist generated weather, the perfect contextual background for the figure’s challenged boundaries.

Aerotone #7 © Ryan Zoghlin; all photos courtesy Photo Review

The complete portfolio of competition winner images can be viewed at: http://www.photoreview.org/competition/portfolio.php/38/1

Ryan Zoghlin is the First Prize winner of the 27th annual Photo Review International Photography Competition juried by Robert Mann.

Gabriella Radujko: Thematically, your portfolios explore being “on an edge” or “on the edge” (as opposed being edgy). These include:

• Surf-o-glyphs: where surfers are on the edges of water
• NIMBY (Not in My Back Yard) where industrial power encroaches on the periphery of modest single family homes
• Aerotones and Airshow which capture airplanes performing aerobatic maneuvers at the Chicago Air and Water Show

Why does this theme appeal to you?

Ryan Zoghlin: I am glad you ran a thread through these works. Maybe it’s just that things are more interesting where worlds intersect. Whether this is where the water’s edge meets the land or when the circus rolls into a small town. On the edge is where relationships and juxtaposition can be complicated and hopefully more visually interesting.

Funny, though, I do tell myself when working technically that “I’m working on the edge.” For some reason, I like to come up with elaborate schemes to produce images. These seem like great ideas in my head, but often in practice don’t work out.

My equipment tends to be more on the edge, also. Cameras with multiple lenses and shutter, hand held 5×7 and 8×10 cameras, pinhole and fingerprint cameras.

GR: You received First Prize for Aerotone #7, an Orotone of two planes performing flying maneuvers punctuated by vapor trails. Talk about why this particular photographic process was used and why does it work aesthetically?

RZ: Originally, I had done the airshow as straight black and white to print. I probably shot the show ten years in a row. I was trying to move beyond the straight prints and I was thinking more about the real sculptural affect that the contrails make as the airplanes were flying. I was trying to make a more three-dimension effect for the images. I started shooting it with a 5 x 7 camera, knowing that I wanted to do some contact prints, originally thinking that they might be platinum, or something like that. I was at an antique image show in Chicago and ran by an Orotone print that someone was selling. Not knowing if I had ever seen one before, I was pretty blown away by it. I asked the seller, “What is this?” and he said, “An Orotone print”. And I asked him, “How do you make these”? And he looked at me and he said, “How would I know?”

The three-dimensional affected me but I also liked that it was an older process that gave a classic, vintage look to the image. It took me a couple of years to figure it out. I did a lot of research on Orotones and tried to find out how they are made and learned there is no written recipe. With experimentation, I made several Orotones and then took them from there. It has a kind of granular effect, playing with the gold powder, there’s a metallic feel to it. All these things work together to make the image really interesting.

GR: Minor White spoke of photographs as mirages and the camera as a metamorphosing machine. He said it was incumbent upon the photographer to free himself of the tyranny of the facts before him to get from the tangible to the intangible. What helps you capture the intangible?

RZ: Whenever I approach something, I try to make it my own. I once spoke to someone who was afraid of shooting an event because he said it was shot a million times. Like the air show, there are millions of spectators there and there are thousand of cameras photographing it. I’ve just been able to feel the kind of image I want to see on the wall. I say, okay, here’s my subject matter, how do I want this to look?

How do I make it intangible? I think I’ve been very fluid in photography. There are the kinds of things you can’t describe to someone who hasn’t practiced photography for a really long time.

Like the one I’m working on now. I knew what I wanted to do and to get there I knew I had to have a camera made. There wasn’t a camera that existed that did what I needed it to do. I contacted a friend of mine who was a woodworker and he did a great job building me a camera with the specifications I wanted. I have been able to create the tools I need to get to the specific goal that I want to reach.

I also understand how photography and cameras make the normal an abstraction automatically. That’s one thing I love about photography. It’s why I like to shoot in black and white–the abstraction.

I don’t mind working in color at all. In the case of NIMBY, it had to be color, because NIMBY is so real. What I always say about color film and color work, is that I don’t like color work because it’s too real. With more cerebral work. I tend to work more in color with that type of work. With more abstract work, like Aerotones, I work in black and white.

GR: Which photographic images and/or photographers inspire you? Which non-photographic influences inspire you?

RZ: There are so many and I would like to give people due credit. When I was in college, I spent hours looking through books. Harry Callahan was very important, and of course, I loved Minor White. I like photographers who explain a lot with a little. There was the influence of Giacometti sculpture for example. I was also influenced by early Christian, religious art. There were things they were trying to say, a certain flatness about their work.

GR: Some say we are in a post-photographic age. What are your thoughts about the photograph in an age of digital media?

RZ: Photographs are so ubiquitous. Cameras are in everyone’s pocket. I don’t’ know how we can be beyond the photograph, though, maybe we are beyond the print. I do see a lost generation of print, which I feel badly about.

On the other hand, when I don’t have a camera, and I want a photograph, it’s very convenient to have a phone and to be able to share it with other people. It cuts both ways. I feel terrible that quality has been usurped by convenience. When I shoot two and a quarter or 4 x 5 or 8 x 10 negative, I am always amazed at the great quality I get, even when I scan and manipulate it later. Also, film is still relatively inexpensive and it lasts forever.

I know in the end, digital will win. I just hope the quality comes back in photography. I am a little tired of post-production. I want to get it right the first time when I do the photography. I want to get it right in the camera. I never wanted a desk job. If I wanted a desk job I would have gotten a job that pays good money. Photography has become a desk job. I hope the character doesn’t disappear.

Origami Shark © Marc Fichou

Marc Fichou is the Second Prize winner of the 27th annual Photo Review International Photography Competition juried by Robert Mann.

Gabriella Radujko: Origami Shark is a photograph of a three-dimensional origami shark figure superimposed on the original, deconstructed kraft paper used to make it. What was the formative idea for this piece in particular and the series in general?

Marc Fichou: With the origami series, initially, we notice the image of a thing or animal. Then we become aware of an origami, a piece of paper. Finally, we realize that they are the same thing, just different facets which are revealed in different stages of time and space. It was my idea to first stimulate the mind, the imagination of the viewer, then to draw him inside the image, within the space where the origami is. Finally, through reasoning, he returns to reality and sees that what is actually before him is nothing but a sheet of paper.

I wanted to demonstrate how increasingly evolving technologies enable us to merge the real with its image. Subsequently, we record reality and revisit it in the form of images. But our memory can only retain the real time moment for a few seconds before becoming memories which furthermore evolve over time.

Memories reactivated by our minds involve a consciousness of who we once were as in “I am the child I once was.” In contrast, memories captured using technologies like the still camera or video are somewhat dead. These images, then, transport us to a time that has disappeared or no longer exists while simultaneously suggesting that we are experiencing that reality in real time. The images we capture are those of the past only; we cannot escape the material world.

GR: When discussing your work, you mention reuniting matter and its image, presence and absence, here and there, before and now. How are these concepts manifested in Origami Shark?

MF: In a classic photograph, the subject is captured in an image and then printed on paper. The image reunites us with the absence of the subject, i.e. “it or he was there at that time.” In contrast, Origami Shark is the material support, the sheet of paper on which it was printed. Indeed it was captured in different moments and shapes, but it is one and the same thing. With Origami Shark, the absence of the origami is connected to the presence of its double, the sheet of paper.

GR: Thirty years ago, in 1981, the exhibit “Cubism and American Photography 1910–30” was held at the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House. It rekindled a debate about cubism’s role in ushering in modern photography in the early 20th century. To what extent does cubism influence your photography?

MF: The appearance of photography in the 19th century and its ability to capture events and people robbed the painter of mnemotechnical work and challenged representation, changing the role of the artist in the process. The reaction was Impressionism, something that photography could not grasp. Since then and into a period of widespread use of photography through the 1990s, photography has tried to become recognized as a major art form, thus using ideas found in movements like cubism.

In my work, I have chosen to combine mediums and use a variety of technologies available to me to realize my ideas. With the origami series, I used photography because of its ability to freeze the moment as well as painting to color the sheet of paper with the blue color of the ocean. As for influences, I am not looking to transgress but rather remain open to ideas and movements. That would include cubism as it appears in my origamis, but it was not planned.

GR: What emerging trends in fine art photography interest you? How are you integrating those trends, if applicable, to your own practice?

MF: I am interested in plastician photography in general, but I especially like the works of artists like Lauren Marsolier who has been able to transgress her medium using the technological tools of our time. To some degree, the artist integrates the work of his peers within his own, but as far as I am concerned, it is never intentional. But once the work is completed, it is often apparent.

GR: Which photographic images and/or photographers inspire you? Which non-photographic influences inspire you?

MF: Joseph Kosuth’s conceptual photography interests me. He juxtaposes an object, its full-scale photographic reproduction and its dictionary definition. Also, the work of plastician photographer Sophie Calle, primarily her use of photography as narrative, but also her displays where the support is made prominent and takes on a sculptural form. We find similar experiences in Rene Magritte’s paintings. He combines words and images with their support, subsequently questioning the real and its representation. Video art pioneers like Nam June Paik and Peter Campus are also influences. At the other end of the spectrum is outsider art. I like it for its spontaneity and because it both conceals and reveals the psychology of its creator. But my most important influences come from philosophy and psychology, especially the ground-breaking theories developed by Henri Bergson and Jacques Lacan.

Odette England is the Third Prize winner of the 27th annual Photo Review International Photography Competition juried by Robert Mann.

Gabriella Radujko: While working on WPA assignments, the writer Eudora Welty took photographs of people she encountered while travelling through her home state of Mississippi. The results can be found in the book One Time, One Place, Mississippi in the Depression: A Snapshot Album, which she described as “a family album.” She wrote that while making the “snapshots,” she imagined herself into the lives of her subjects. Have you imagined yourself into your photographs in the Self Diagnosis series?

Odette England: I think to a degree, I have, and that was a relatively easy task because every single snapshot in the series features me in it. Nine of the ten snapshots in the series were made by my mom or my dad. I had a really long familiarity with these images in the family album as something that has been shown to me and that I have grown up with. My mom, like many moms, is the gatekeeper of our family album. So for me to even borrow from it, to undertake this project, was something unique in it’s own right.

The family album is something that has always been very closely guarded but shared socially with friends and family. It think that current technology has changed that because most people don’t necessarily make snapshots and put them in an album and then use the album as an opportunity for friends and family together. In a way, this project, for me, was realizing some of the still special quality that comes from the actual print of a snapshot and where it resides in the album and what role it has in sowing facts or storytelling about someone’s past and how I have been coming to manipulate that and knead it and mold it in some way to fit my own artistic purposes.

GR: Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach, in the preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity, wrote, “But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence…illusion only is sacred, truth profane.” Is Self-Diagnosis illusion or truth?

OE: It’s an excellent question, and I think it’s both, depending on how a viewer comes to it versus what my intent for the work was. I think of Self-Diagnosis as a strange relationship between hiding and showing, where I teeter on some sort of basic collapse of public showing of family snapshots alongside the exposure of who I might be, via and according to a very narrow and deliberate edit of a selection of snapshots from the family album. Showing the snapshots that aren’t revealing don’t necessarily reveal anything deep or mysterious about me but combining it with the results of an inkblot test doesn’t either. Ten snapshots from a collection of hundreds do not a “complete me” make. So I think of this as a little bit of playing hide and seek with the viewer, the nature of photography, and myself.

GR: Many photographers (Nicholas Nixon, Sally Mann) make their children their subjects. What challenges does intimacy present in photographing one’s family?

OE: I think one of the biggest challenges is how the imagery is ultimately going to be read. When I think of Sally Mann’s work and having read interviews with Sally Mann, her claim has always been that she never intended for her images to be read in some of the more detrimental, negative light in which they have been. I’ve been asked a similar question about Self-Diagnosis.

I thought this work is as much about this hiding and showing of me or this expression of failure where I don’t really show myself, nor do I completely show or clearly show the snapshot in which I am in, as double-exposed on the Rorschach card. But it’s also a relationship of boss and subordinate. This is what is particularly relevant about Sally’s work. For me, the subtext of Self-Diagnosis is one of the relationships of power, of mother/daughter or father/daughter. In the case of the Rorschach card — the clinician/patient; in the case of my artwork, of artist/viewer.

The editing, the collating and the showing parts of the family album is invested with personal bias. Albums are maintained in a certain way, just as the inkblot test is. So there’s a transfer or a transaction of imagery and story, and therefore it’s proof when one is shown an album, or a snapshot, or an inkblot or an artwork. Access to my own childhood through the album is heavily mediated and therefore predetermined by maternal preferences. They were mom’s wishes and tastes at how it would be presented and therefore in an aegis sense doomed to fail in providing a true picture. The inkblot test is an orderly two-page form, which once completed suggests this semi-standardized systemized idea in writing of who you might be. The dynamics that are inherent within snapshots are reflected in the structure of the collection, of the collection itself, and they don’t always necessarily show what the author intended it to be read because the viewer will come at it using their own bias. Whilst the content of my imagery is very intimate, it’s not necessarily giving a whole lot away, and for me, the failure in the work makes it a great success.

GR: You state, “I don’t take photographs. I make loss.” In her book, Necessary Losses, Judith Viorst writes about the universality of loss including the loss of childhood, the death of family members and friends, and finally our own deaths. Do you embrace loss as well as make it?

OE: I embrace it as much as I am willing to. I have a love/hate relationship with loss. I embrace the notion of it as something that I can use as a creative lever — I cannot make work unless it’s personal. One of the many foundations in being personal, is it has some sense of loss of the past and in particular what it means to love home and leave home. When I think of loss, I think of the fact that childhood is a reverie. It’s a place of longing, a place I wish to go back to, but cannot. The world is just one big “un.” It’s uncomplicated, unhurried, unpressured. At some point, the “un” leave home before we do. I need a remedy or proper treatment for my loss. Maybe photography is my rehabilitation or perhaps I need proper therapy, which is why I tend to use Rorschach tests in order to appropriate work. In embracing the loss and in taking very personal artifacts, which are soon “snapshots to be,” I am playing with the role of photography in this idealistic association between childhood and innocence by leveraging its very illusory nature. I think the fantastical qualities of childhood and its apparent innocence are part of this creative inquiry that I have and why I rely on snapshots so heavily in my work. Snapshots are always a part of loss.

The word I keep coming back to is mirage. It means to look at and to wonder at. I think of snapshots as mirages. They are these lovely things that you can wonder at and think about and contemplate the past, but they ultimately show a moment of loss, because the moment the shutter is pressed, the moment is gone. It’s only recording this moment of loss, which is terribly sad, but I tried to take a more happy, modernist approach by freezing aspects of everyday life which are often very natural and spontaneous and giving them this strangeness with the cold and diagnostically frank and the scientific, which in this case is the Rorschach test.

GR: Which photographic images and/or photographers inspire you? Which non-photographic influences inspire you?

OE: I am in the process of drafting my thesis, so I have had to think very carefully about whose work I particularly draw from and why. For many and varied reasons, I tend to go towards the work of those who pick very personal subjects, but illuminate them in a way that I haven’t seen before. There’s someone like Nancy Rexroth, for example, and her series Iowa, in which she took a dinky, little toy camera called an Diana, and from 1970 to 1976, she made images in Ohio that reminded her of Iowa and she made the series accordingly. So none of the images actually show Iowa except for Nancy’s interpretation. But from this dinky, little camera she makes these gorgeous platinum prints that are so beautifully rendered and capture all sorts of fleeing, transitory dream-like moments.

I also really like the work of Larry Sultan, in particular his pictures from Home Series which he made over a ten-year period and was inspired by when his father Irving was forced into semi-retirement from a job that he worked for 30 to 40 years. Larry started making the work in his early to mid-thirties and he was feeling restless about his home and his life and his idea of what it meant to be family and to have roots planted in a specific location. He invited his parents to narrate alongside the images he was making. So its this lovely, poignant subject of not just his relationship to home, but a relationship he has with his parents.

I am embarking on a similar style of project, which is why I have been doing a great deal of reading about those two, in particular. But there are other photographers whose work I admire. Tracy Moffat, the Australian photographer, her series Plantation, which she made in 2009 from pictures she took ten years earlier of these very strange, exotic landscapes, which she never actually gives away the location of where these were taken, which is part of the mystery behind the work — the fact that there’s no real narrative going on; there’s this strange, mysterious male character who continues to appear. All the projects that I speak of are deeply personal and they don’t really give a great deal away, so there’s a wonderful proximity for me as a viewer to enter the work and apply myself within the work.

It’s almost as though we can exchange places. I can see myself in the imaginery and I can see myself thinking about the imagery. Mostly, I veer toward literature that has a personal bias. Gaston Bachelard and the other French philosopher, Georges Perec and his Species of Space and Other Pieces. Susan Stewart’s On Longing. Tim Ingold has a book called Lines: A Brief History. Numerous authors who write about things about place. I am half-way through Ken Jennings’ book Maphead, which is deleriously funny if you love the study of maps and geography. Anyone who is writing about place and location and what that means to one’s current and past.

Additionally, she works as a freelance journalist and is a regular contributor to Artcards Review where she writes about contemporary art, focusing on fine art photography. Her poetry can be found in two anthologies, The Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow (2010) and Gape-Seed (2011).

Radujko received a Master of Library and Information Science from Rutgers Universityin 2005 and has worked in libraries as diverse as the Oradell Public Library, Oradell, NJ, Cipriani Club 55 Library, New York, NY and the Sri Narayani School Library, Tamil Nadu,India.

Website: http://modernartswriting.wordpress.com/

Photo:  Sam Matamoros, © 2012

Lately, the fine art photography community has been experiencing a tsunami of discoveries which include the resurfaced photographs of Robert Frank, negatives by Lillian Bassman, and more intriguingly, actual photographers themselves.  The new, posthumous content, while incredibly exciting, is no match for the discovery of the unknown (until 2007), self-possessed, prolific photographer named Vivian Maier.

Who better than John Bennette, who recently gave a talk at the Steven Kasher Gallery in Chelsea, New York, to illuminate the significance of her work.  “She has done every idiosyncratic image ever made”.  Bennette’s humanistic view of photography, punctuated by the large hands he uses to frame the photographs he handles, resonates with listeners, as it always does, whether they are crowded around him in close quarters, as was the case at Steven Kasher, who himself was part of the audience, or when speaking to larger audiences during any number of panel discussions in which he has participated.

Untitled (Girl with Clown Costume), ca. 1967/Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

For the uninitiated, when Mr.Bennette, photography collector, educator, and tastemaker puts a photograph into context historically, audience members need not know about the history of fine art photography to appreciate him.  He is, above all, an accomplished storyteller, and you will learn the history as a result of listening to him.  Moreover, you will learn about the criteria he values when identifying photographs he calls “collectable” or successful.  Photography, he tells us, should be personal.

One of his favorite images by Miss Maier—she took pictures in the fifties, sixties, and seventies and wore no-nonsense cotton house dresses paired with men’s shoes (for comfort) and would never have subscribed to “Ms.”—is Untitled (Girl with Clown Costume), ca. 1967.  It captures what Bennette appreciates most about her work.  He “knows” these people.

Vivian Maier’s work is going to be revealed in chapters as the 120,000 negatives she left behind make their way into the twenty-first century.  Undoubtedly, many will become iconic photographs.  Refreshingly, and best of all,  they will demonstrate what photographic work, unsullied by the media, professional contacts, or academia looks like. At Kasher’s, we learned she took pictures for herself; and she never shot the same image twice.

Self-Portrait (Shadow and Kite) ca. 1960s/Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Photo: Trois © Pat Beary

The Soho Photo Members’ second annual Small Works Exhibition, which opened on February 9th at the Soho Photo Gallery in Tribeca, captured the power of “small” as part of a creative competition showcasing photographic images no larger than six by six inches.  Baby boomers will remember how Volkswagen capitalized on the concept with their 1959 “Think Small” ad campaign, the highest ranked in the 20^th century. Small is as disarming, sexy, and fun in cars as it is in photographs as demonstrated in this beguiling show which provides a fashionable reprieve from the ubiquity of supersized images. Veteran Karen Marks, Exhibitions Director of the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York, acted as juror.

Papier, the series by first place winner Pat Beary, was prominently featured at the entrance of the non-profit cooperative gallery.  Un, Deux, Trois, Quatre, and Cinq form studies of hand-made paper found by the photographer in a Parisian boutique.  Exemplified by the topography shown in Trois, Beary captures paper’s organic, birch and coral-like properties, and most important, the imagination of anyone who writes or draws.

Sea Montauk #1 © Minney Lee

Second place winner Minny Lee offers black and white views of one stretch of the ocean at dawn and again at night fall with Sea Montauk #1 and Sea Montauk #3.  These timeless images of the where the sea meets the shore have a fairly wide depth of field, interpreted for the smaller photograph–seemingly from an aerial perspective. Third place winner Michael Callaghan entered five images which “serve as visual and linguistic tools to clear a zone for thinking”, according to the artist.  Three–Uber, Lofoyo, and Red Blue Blue Red– are “photographs of ‘material’ appearing in magazines, newspapers, billboards and other media to which [he has]added, subtracted or modified certain elements, most often text”.  

Red Blue Blue Red  © Mike Callaghan

Two honorable mention photographers include Helen Ellis whose two black and white Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade images from  2004 and 2010 capture unassuming, mindful subjects in  documentary style; and Charles Rutan’s images of effortlessly assembled collages–Summer’s Passing, Salvation and Saturday Times, which combine strategically torn newspaper with earth, leaves or blades of grass.   Noticed in the main gallery were works with influences by Edward Weston were John Atchley’s softly focused black and white Snowfield #2 and Snowfield #4, two of the most minimal, abstract works in the show.  Also, Passy Lynn’s playful Abandon whose silhouetted figure dances into rows of light of the venetian blind variety.

Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade 2010 © Helen Ellis

Snowfield #2 © John Atchley

While gallery members were ineligible to participate in the contest, 15 presented a variety of images in a corresponding esprit de corps.  Standouts include two archival inkjet prints by Mike Cullin whose relativism on “small” yielded images of trees cropped to the size of two, “forever” postage stamps with shadows front and center in works named Abstract Landscape #13 and Abstract Landscape #205.

Winners of the competition were rewarded when their images captured the felicity of expressing “small”, a challenge which seemed effortless in the hands of the most mindful of the participants.

Abandon © Passy Lynn

Abstract Landscape #205 © Mike Cullen

All images courtesy Soho Photo Gallery; Small Works 2012 catalog images can be found at:

http://www.sohophoto.com/downloads/smallworks_winners_gallery2012.pdf

Jean Arp used seashells and blood; Jean Dubuffet, butterfly wings and glue; Bruce Conner, nylon hosiery and nails.  Joseph Montgomery uses nonesuch provocative materials in his assemblages, part of the show Velveteen, now on view at Laurel Gitlen, the polished, new gallery on the Lower East Side.  Instead, he uses what one would find in the garage of the average do-it-yourselfer–canvas, clay, lacquer, oil, sheet metal, and plastic—weaving, painting and affixing them on panels averaging 12.5”x 10.5” x 3” deep. Less noteworthy than the use of found, masculine materials, is the skill with which the artist successfully unifies disparate textures using high value colors.  His work solicits a calm and restrained response uncharacteristic of a medium which has been disturbing audiences for a century since the advent of the first modern collage by Picasso in 1912 and “God”, the first modern assemblage by Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Morton Schamberg in 1918—a work which featured plumbing fittings.

Historically, assemblage has mixed substandard materials to yield a kind of anti-art which  pasted, pressed, glued, nailed, cut, stapled and painted “found”, previously intact, and everyday objects into new, expanded forms. Montgomery’s assemblages (called paintings by the gallery) have much in common with two-dimensional abstract paintings such as Robert Motherwell’s Western Air (1946) and Gertrude Greene’s Monumentality (1949), only re-imagined as three-dimensional relief sculptures.  The stronger precedent can be found in Jean Pougny’s (Ivan Puni) 1915 Suprematist Sculpture which might account for their “strange familiarity”.

Velveteen’s locus of inquiry in sculpture continues with minimalist sculptures made of shims, or tapered pieces of wood.  On one end of the continuum are Large Shim: 13 and Large Shim: 7,  two 10-foot tall wall-mounted, natural, red cedar shims in varying widths.  The strong wedge shapes, suggesting exclamation points minus the dots, share the enthusiasm of Hisayuki Mogami’s 1962 curvilinear pine sculpture Laugh, Laugh, Laugh.

The most muscular of the shim series is Image One Hundred Thirty, a protruding, black lacquer wall sculpture of cedar shims arranged as alternating wedges and suggesting charred wood.  Additionally, three similar wall sculptures use cedar or cardboard constructs mimicking shims with faux wood finishes or covered in white paint.

On the other end, two large marbles marked with the deep indentations of a marble saw rest on the floor.  The found objects pulled from a Vermont stream have much in common with the wall sculptures, although they predate them, temporarily filling in the gap where the “paintings” did not yet exist, the artist wondering if their “resemblance” to the paintings suggest that all images are “just waiting to be found”.

All images courtesy Laurel Gitlen

He delivers what one studio visitor described as a “luminous experience” by blending formalistic techniques which distort the subject “beyond recognition” and are indeterminable in advance with elements of a category of occult photography known as supernatural; the Oxford Companion to the Photograph describes supernatural images as those which “more or less show what an observer present during the exposure could have seen” and more important, do not show ‘the invisible’.

Subsequently, two of the images, Reading the email telling me Oscar had died and The sun setting on Riley’s birthday, with Hannah screaming in the background capture the emotionally charged moments selected, but they are not representational. The viewer must create the narrative, and in some ways, according to Farwell, the photograph. The image is beyond recognition even though the camera, minus lens, produced an “aide-mémoire”.

The installation ranks high in mischievousness, hiding what was once in plain sight and then coaxing the viewer to complete the final image.  With no two final results alike, Die Transfer Process will have succeeded in engaging audiences in a creative process using a space no larger than the one found on their cell phones.

Sisters© Nan Goldin, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

Single-handedly, Scopophilia, the 25-minute slideshow and centerpiece of Nan Goldin’s show at the Matthew Marks Gallery show generates empathy for Goldin’s subjects, those demi-monde friends appearing in alternating states of intimacy and quiet dysfunction. For about half an hour, the transgressive vulgarisms associated with her work are forgotten. Instead, viewers experience a pastiche accompanied by a liberating soundtrack and the juxtaposition of images typical of her aesthetic with ethereal masterpieces depicting eternal devotion, love and tenderness.

By pairing harmony with pathos and the impalpable with the palpable, we are given reasons to care about the fates of all of Goldin’s men and women, both past and present.   More significantly, the corporeality in Goldin’s work suggests a departure from a static, myopic world into one where connectedness is sought, relationships are healthy and touch is of a soft variety.   Goldin, the woman, seems to have embraced humanity, an uplifting prospect for those familiar with her work.

the Nap© Nan Goldin, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

Scopophilia continues across three galleries, as nearly fifty mounted thematic photographs, including  Hair, Water, Crazy Scary, Odalisque and Veiled, shown as “mosaics.”  It’s impossible not to ask what was awakened in the artist to have selected the works she paired with her autobiographical subjects beyond scopophilia, the pleasure of looking.  Curatorially, the show would have benefited from the introduction of a narrative–think e-readers with anecdotes illuminating the new perspective of the artist.

Diptychs like The Horse Races, Egypt; Sisters; The Nap; Swan-like Embrace; Pygmalion and Galatea were more studied, and validate her self-described desire to understand people as opposed to being a voyeur or narcissist.  Sisters is the finest among them with its asymmetrical composition and ethereal light highlighting the angelic qualities of the modern girls, their slight Roman noses mirroring those of their classical sisters.

Hair © Nan Goldin, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

A portrait in the round gallery paired Louvre paintings with Goldin subjects, one atop the others such as Diana the Huntress (1550/60) with Valerie, London (2003).   Indeed, the story about why these images are paired (one of the images is part of her personal mythology) meets the challenge posed by Patrice Chéreau.  Yet by accepting his invitation to participate in “Faces and Bodies” the cross-disciplinary program which ran through January 2011 at the Louvre, Scopophilia becomes evidence that Ms. Goldin achieved a detectable amount of transcendence from an earlier body of work.

Light moves slowly between the galaxies according to physicist Paul Davies. Scopophilia gives us the sense that Goldin has been exposed to a light more poetic than scientific,  and,  more important, more hopeful.

Installation View

At the heart of the interdisciplinary, experimental approach to art making documented in “Black Mountain College and Its Legacy” at the Loretta Howard Gallery, is a human ethology that emphasizes cooperation and interdependence.  What happened at Black Mountain College is as nostalgic as it is antithetical to western society’s preoccupation with the importance of the individual over the group, most recently highlighted with the passing of Apple’s visionary icon earlier this month.

Ray Johnson

In an early 20^th century America, the maverick North Carolina-based institution fostered a breadth of inter-media (multimedia) projects achieved through assemblage, a style of working Steve Jobs would never have subscribed to.  Therein is this show’s value and significance.  It is a celebration of creativity achieved through mutual dependence versus the aggression and competitiveness our society often celebrates in our (now post-Jobsian) world.

Picture a college campus populated by some of the greatest artists and thinkers of the 20^th century, including Buckminster Fuller, Ben Shahn, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Harry Callahan, Dorothea Rockburne, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Merce Cunningham, and John Cage, many of whom have their work on display here.  Yet, Black Mountain College was not an arts school, although there are over 100 works by 35 artists in the show.  It was a liberal arts college (it closed in 1957) that experimented with art.

. . it really became kind of recognized [at BMC] that art could be anything, and could be made out of anything, and that it didn’t necessarily cross boundaries — they thought – between theatre, the visual arts, dance, music, etc., that you could mix all this up and make a multi-media – or . . . environmental art.

Kenneth Noland, Student 1946-48, 1950 Summer Session

Robert S. Mattison, who co-curated the show with Ms. Howard and wrote the catalog, offers several insights about the visiting artists’ program which differentiated the college.   “BM stands out for freedom of inquiry.  Artists were invited without institutional restrictions, and the interactions with the students were determined almost wholly by the artists themselves…[it’s] heritage is defined by the linkages between individuals.”

“Black Mountain College and Its Legacy” challenges viewers to consider what resulted when the talents of so many innovative artists from such a variety of disciplines were harnessed in a remote valley setting just outside of Asheville between 1933-1947.  The show gets an aural jump-start with John Cage’s debut into electronic music, Williams Mix, 1952-53, which is analogous to techno-rock today. The sound piece is followed by a photograph of David Tudor’s performance of Cages’ “4’33”. To learn that Cage credits Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings as the inspiration for the piece is to begin to understand how the dots connect within the context of the expansive two-storey show.  Around the corner is Merce Cunningham’s film Antic Meet, four short filmed “studies” of the roots of modern dance, tedious because our awareness of the dance that would follow it is now mature.

Dates on many of the works place the artist’s career on a continuum between those influenced by the “legacy period” and those made more recently.  Willem de Kooning’s Standing Figure, c. 1948-50, for example is shown next to Two Women, 1963.  Kenneth Noland’s 1949 V. V. is next to the 1963 Soft Touch.   Ray Johnson’s hypnotic collages include Untitled (Dear Suzi) 1958 next to 3B (Back of Cupid Head with Snake) 1992 with Untitled (Merce Cunningham) 1982-88 wedged in between.  In the later work, Johnson sums up why Black Mountain matters; embedded in the piece is written:  after 40 years of avant-garde choreography, the grand old man of experimental dance is still treasured by the young and finally winning mainstream recognition.

Buckminster Fuller

Dorothea Rockburne, inspirational in making the show happen in Chelsea, contributed Gradient and Field, 1971. The piece further exemplifies an interdisciplinary approach and employs set theory, introduced to her by mathematician Max Dehn who spoke to her about “mathematics for artists”.

The story of Buckminster Fuller’s mobilization of the BC community to participate in building an unsuccessful prototype of what would later become the Geodesic Dome illustrates his  inspirational mantra, “everything is connected”. This is demonstrated in a photograph of students raising the failed Supine Dome above their heads, by Beaumont Newhall.  Newhall would later become curator of the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House from 1948-1958. A schematic print of Geodesic Dome accompanies the group shot, again, connecting the dots, or in this case, the venetian-blind material used to construct the Supine Dome.  Closest Packing of Spheres, 1980 proves to be a more concrete time capsule than the ephemera on the wall, but not less thought-provoking.

Where Jobs practiced control, Black Mountain eased it, erasing boundaries between who teaches and who is taught as well as the differences between dance, geometry, sound and the line—a legacy worth knowing about.

Andrew Moore, House on Walden Street, East Side, 2008, Digital chromogenic print scanned from film negative

Andrew Moore’s must see photographs in Detroit Disassembled at the Queens Museum of Art capture the ruinous state of Detroit after the collapse of the automotive industry.  The colors are lush, the light, ecclesiastical; and Moore captures the intensity prescribed by Frederick H. Evans who urged photographers to “wait till the building make you feel intensely”.

The demise of Detroit is so devastating as to remind one of Chernobyl’s aftermath vis-à- vis Michael Forster Rothbart’s photographs commemorating the 25^th anniversary.  In 1950 America, Detroit was the center of the universe in the production of 10 million motor vehicles, 70% of which were on the road in the U.S. at a time when the United States represented only 7% of the world’s population.  Now, the U.S. Census report (two years ahead of Moore’s three month visit to Detroit in 2008-9) shows it has lost 25% of its population in the last ten years.

Did Moore intend to educate the viewer about the demise of an industry that unleashed a social revolution of unprecedented personal freedom to travel unchecked and the lessons therein for voters and policymakers? It’s hard to say given his visual syntax, which is tainted with a commercialism most often associated with magazine assignments.  The tendency is increasingly apparent when reviewing his treatment of hotspots like Bosnia and Vietnam, and controversial projects like Robert Moses’ New York.

The days when photographers needed to be of two minds—working for the magazines “by day” and on their own projects “at night”—are long gone.  Yet the boundaries are blurred with Detroit Disassembled.  Whose story does Moore tell?