State of the Art

Fab Four Reunion, Of Sorts

The photograph above is what I call "The One That Got Away." It's a rarely-seen picture of Beatle George Harrison with his first wife, Pattie Boyd, shot by Henry Grossman on the occasion of the couple's 1966 wedding. They both look young and fab. I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Pattie Boyd — photographer, former model, and rock-and-roll muse — for an article that will run in the July/August issue of American Photo. We just sent the piece to the printer. Alas, this picture didn't make the final mix — so I'm posting it here. (More about Pattie Boyd below.)

What's more remarkable is that in the photo world, nearly four decades after they disbanded, the Fabs — as Harrison sardonically called them — are still going strong. Never mind what John Lennon sang in 1970: For those of us who can't get enough of it, the dream still ain't over.

Recent reports  reveal that Christie's is to offer Lennon’s lyrics for "Give Peace a Chance" — plus never-published photos from the 1969 Montreal Bed-In staged by Lennon and wife Yoko Ono — for auction this summer, with early estimates between £200,000 and £300,000. The pictures, by UK-based comedy writer Gail Renard, had a unlikely beginning: Renard and a companion befriended John and Yoko after requesting an interview for their university magazine. This led to series of rare bed-in shots including the one at right. Lennon also signed and presented Renard the hand-written lyrics to his peace anthem, saying, "One day they will be worth something."

Meanwhile, the two surviving ex-Beatles, Paul and Ringo, recently showed up for the opening of an exhibit of platinum prints of Linda McCartney photographs at the James Hyman Gallery in London, on view until June 7. (Presumably McCartney is more pleased these days about revisiting memories with his first wife than with his second one.)

Where to Go and What to See

The headlining act at this week's photo shows is undoubtedly the New York Photo Festival going on in Brooklyn from May 14 to 18. NYPH is the offspring of powerHouse Books and VII Photo Agency, and consists of all the usual festival fare: special exhibitions, portfolio reviews, an awards ceremony, and, of course, lots of after-parties. What sets it apart may be its location in the up-and-coming, big spaces still available DUMBO area of Brooklyn...and which should nicely compliment the hip, underground flavor powerHouse is known for. Check out the full schedule here.

I'd also like to give a shout out to a couple of worthy photographers who have graced American Photo's pages in the last year. Timothy Fadek was one of our Heroes of Photography for his dogged work in Juarez Mexico so we're happy to see his City of Missing Women is on display at The Half King in NYC. Stop by tonight to hear from the photographer in person.

Camille Seaman, who was one of our 2007 Emerging Photographers, has a show at Candace Dwan in NYC for her Where There Should Be Ice series, a few images of which appeared in the magazine.

~Miki Johnson

(Photo: © Camille Seaman)

Follow the link below for details on these and many more photo events around the country.

Artist Robert Rauschenberg Dies at 82

The great American artist Robert Rauschenberg died yesterday at 82. You can read the New York Times obit here. As critic Michael Kimmelman puts it, Rauschenberg obscured and blurred the boundaries between almost every artistic medium: "Building on the legacies of Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell, and others, he thereby helped to obscure the lines between painting and sculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking, sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture and technology, technology and performance art — not to mention between art and life."--David Schonauer

This Day In Photographyy, 1937: The Hindenburg

On May 6, 1937, the German zeppelin Hindenberg exploded while attempting to moor in Lakehurst, New Jersey, killing 36 people. The disaster resulted in the death of the commercial trans-Atlantic zeppelin service and the rise of the mass news media. On this date, still photographers, filmmakers, and radio broadcasters put together a perfect storm of coverage that set the stage for the future of communications.
     At least it seems that way to me, but I’m no historian. Yet I can’t think of any event before the Hindenburg explosion that equaled it’s multi-media coverage.
     There are a couple of angles here that are interesting for photographers today.
     (And lots of interesting trivia: According to this article, the Hindenburg was to have been filled with non-flammable helium; however, the United States owned all the world’s helium and had placed an embargo against selling it to Nazi Germany. The Graf Zeppelin Company, which built the Hindenburg, turned to hydrogen as an lifting agent. Kapow!)

Where to Go and What to See

There are lots of good shows going up this week (Bruce Davidson at Jackson Fine Art, Saul Leiter at Howard Greenberg, Jerry Schatzberg at the Rizzoli Bookstore...). But it was a no-brainer to decide which I was most interested in, since my photo is part of the show (what? we editors are allowed to be self-interested occasionally).

Jose Picayo found out about the demise of Polaroid a little ahead of the curve and immediately began buying up every box of 8x10 Polaroid film left on the market. Then, with about 900 exposures compiled, he began making mug shots of New Yorkers. The brown-toned, split images will be displayed unframed and "edge-to-edge" at the Robin Rice Gallery starting May 7.

American Photo's editor, David Schonauer, and I both sat for mug shots (see above) -- but my interest in the show is not solely personal. First off, I'm fascinated by portrait photography and was excited to be part of a portrait shoot. But I quickly realized that in many ways this mug shot project creates anti-portraits. Picayo gives his subjects no direction, changes nothing about their appearance, and does absolutely no post-production manipulation. As the show's press release states, "Picayo seeks to revive the concept of  pure and unadulterated beauty, spontaneously captured."

I also love the idea of capturing a moment in time -- both the end of Polaroid film as it has been known and the few months in the history of New York City during which the images were made. Aside from the 8x10 mug shots, Picayo also made smaller Polaroids of each subject and pasted them in books where the sitter was asked to record their thoughts, especially about their ethnic and cultural background and what brought them to New York. I love the idea of recording a slice of New York through the faces of its inhabitants; and the use of a disappearing medium to do that underscores the constant mutability of those faces, and the city, and thus the ultimate impossibility of recording either.

~Miki Johnson

(Photo: © Jose Picayo)

Follow the link below for details about these and many more photography events around the country.
 

ICP Infinity Award Winners Announced

Award season continues apace, and the next big show will occur one week from tonight when the International Center of Photography presents its coveted Infinity Awards for 2008. But the word is already out about who’ll be receiving prizes this year.
     I’m happy to report that the Young Photographer award will go to Mikhael Subotzky, whose documentary work depicting life in South African prisons (below) also earned him an American Photo Emerging Photographer award in 2007. A portfolio of the work that appeared last year in Aperture was nominated for a National Magazine Award as well….so this has been a big year for Subotsky.
     The award for Art this year goes to Edward Burtynsky, whose large-format work explores the connections between landscape and industry. His pictures from China (above) have achieved a kind of cult status at this point.
     The photojournalism award will go to Anthony Suau, who has covered a number of important stories over the past 20 years, including the war in Chechnya. He has recently worked on a project documenting the US during the Iraq war. Suau won the Infinity Award for Young Photographer in 1986.
     The Applied Photography award this year will go to fashion photographer Craig McDean. Photographer Taryn Simon wins the Publication award for her book “An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar.” (Read an interview we did with Simon here.) The Writing award will go to Bill Jay for his 2007 book “Bill Jay’s Album.” The Trustees Award is going to actress Diane Keaton, who is also a longtime photography enthusiast. And the Lifetime Achievement Award will go to Malick Sidibe, the renowned Malian photographer.
     I’ll be at the awards show and post on all the goings-on from there.—David Schonauer

Galleries Galore

Last night I braved the chilly rain that is currently plaguing New York's beautiful spring and went to see the opening of William Greiner's Fallen Paradise show at Klompching Gallery in DUMBO. Greiner and I have been emailing for at least a year, so I was happy to see him (and his beautiful prints) in person. But I was even more pleased to have finally made it out to the DUMBO gallery scene -- especially on what was a particularly opportune evening.

Last night happened to be the first Thursday of May, and it turns out that a bunch of the DUMBO galleries stay open until 8:30 on the first Thursday of every month. To make things even more convenient, the vast majority of those galleries are located in one building, 111 Front St. A funny aside: When I first went to DUMBO a couple years ago to see the construction of powerHouse's now-bustling Arena, I made a picture of the huge orange marquis at 111 Front St. (see above), without knowing what lay inside.

So it was pleasant serendipity to realize last night that that building holds many of the galleries I've been including in my weekly exhibition listings ... and that they all happened to be open late for my perusing pleasure. After Klompching, I stopped in at Safe-T-Gallery, showing Larry Racioppo's Brooklyn Interiors. These large, stunning images of the extreme decay hiding inside many of Brooklyn's transitional buildings are startling and enthralling -- one of an abandoned schoolroom reminds me so much of Robert Polidori's images of empty classrooms near Chernobyl.

Then I stopped in at Umbrage Gallery to see the Sylvia Plachy show. I love Plachy and her always light-handed wit ... although, I have to admit, after seeing her massive retrospective at PHotoEspaña last year, this small show was a little underwhelming. An exhibition combining work by Andrew Miksys and Jonathan Gitelson at the nearby Nelson Hancock Gallery had a similar air of insightful levity, especially Gitelson's funny little "Artist's Books," my favorite of which includes a found To-Do list that Gitelson "completes" with a sort of Polaroid scavenger hunt.

Finally, I wandered through Hire Education, the Pratt Senior Thesis Photography Exhibition. There were the usual highs and lows, but I was especially struck by Anita Ng's four studies of friend's bedrooms. Her artist's statement says that she never had her own bedroom, and thus is exploring both how people use personal space and what that personal space represents. Above all that, they are just fascinating spaces to look at -- and to imagine from them what their inhabitants must be like.

So if you haven't gotten the gist of this article yet, let me break it down for you: See these shows, check out 111 Front St., try to hit it on the first Thursday of the month. Especially if it's raining ... you won't even have to leave the building to see tons of good photography (and other art, fyi, if you're into that kind of thing).

~Miki Johnson

Where to Go and What to See

I'm happy this week to be able to highlight a few photographers that American Photo has worked with in the past and that I know personally. We featured Michal Chelbin in our March/April 2007 portraitists issue and are delighted to see she now has her first monograph, with Aperture. Titled Strangely Familiar: Acrobats, Athletes, and Other Traveling Troupes, it explores the liminality between childhood and adulthood, performance and play...the strange and the familiar, if you will.

William Greiner is a New Orleans native and keeps attention on the problems that have persisted there since the Katrina disaster with his photoblog. Now his saturated, structural images of the city are on view at Klompching Gallery in Brooklyn.

Finally, Zoe Strauss, the quintessential Philadelphia photographer (and herself a big photoblogger), is taking full advantage of the city she calls home and putting up her annual outdoor exhibition under an I-95 overpass  there.

~Miki Johnson

(Photo: © William Geiner, "Apartment near levee, New Orleans, 2005")

Click on the link below for details on these and many more photography events around the country.

Seven Photographers Win Guggenheim Awards

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announced the recipients of it Fellowship grants for 2008. Among the 190 awards, seven went to photographers. Go here for the complete list of winners. These are the photographer recipients:
     1. Michael Berman, artist and photographer, San Lorenzo, New Mexico.
     2. Elijah Gowin, photographer and Assistant Professor of Art and Art Histroy, University of Missouri, Kansas City, Missouri.
     3. Builder Levy, photographer, New York City.
     4. Fredrik Marsh, photographer and Senior Lecturer in Art, Otterbein College, Columbus, Ohio. (The image above is by Marsh.)
     5. Greg Miller, photographer, Coventry, Connecticut.
     6. Ardine Nelson, photographer and Associate Professor, Department of Art, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio.
     7. David J. Taylor, photographer and Associate Professor of Photography, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico.
     If you noticed that Columbus, Ohio was well reprsented among the winners, you're right, but it gets better: Ardine Nelson and Fredrik Marsh have been life partners for 27 years.
     According to the Guggenheim Foundation, the 190 winners were chosen from a group of 2,600 applicants.--David Schonauer

Flickr Superstar Profiled in Times Magazine

I’ve been keeping a secret for a while now, and it’s time I just let it out, so here goes: I totally don’t follow the whole Flickr thing. I check out images there from time to time, but I don’t know who the big stars and major personalities are. By now I should be an upstanding member of the Flickr community, since I write about photography, but instead I spend all my spare time working.
    So I was really interested in a piece in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine by Vigrinia Heffernan about Rebekka Guoleifsdottir, describes as “one of Flickr’s most popular photographers.
    The point of the story was that some savvy photographers have learned how to perfect a “Flickr style”—images that look good in thumbnail form, with fulsome digital manipulation—and how to work the social networking aspect of the site to make herself more popular.
     As the piece points out, Guoleifsdottir, who lives in Iceland, isn’t shy about posting images of herself (above, for example). She eventually became so popular on Flickr that she was hired to do a Toyota ad campaign.
      I’d be interested in hearing from Flickr members if they believe there is particular style of photography that defines a new aesthetic. Do film images really get shouted down because they seem out of focus? Is it wrong to game the Flickr system in order to become popular? (Analog artists have been doing that forever.)–David Schonauer

Where to Go and What to See

If you haven't picked up on this before, I'm a photojournalism girl at heart, so I'm happy to see there are several shows this week that have a distinctly documentary bent while preserving the beauty and grace of what we call "fine-art photography" (although the distinction between the two is getting blurrier every day).

Shifting Landscapes at the powerHouse Arena in Brooklyn looks at changes humans have wrought on our environment through images by Edward Burtynsky, Olaf Otto Becker, David Maisel, and Simon Norfolk. It also includes work from Christopher LaMarca, whose individual Forest Defenders show opens contiguously today.

I wasn't familiar with Stella Johnson's work before, but I'm glad to have been introduced to it through her show on Saturday at the Hallmark Museum of Contemporary Photography in Turner Fall, Massachusetts. She spent her Fulbright year photographing women in rural Mexican communities, and her new book, Al Sol, demonstrates the best of her dense, poetic black-and-whites from there as well as Nicaragua and Cameroon.

Finally, it's a bit of a hike (to Amsterdam actually), but I highly recommend a show with Lana Slezic and Robert Knoth at the LUX Photo Gallery on Thursday. If you can't make the trip (and most of us can't), it will be worth your while to get familiar with these two artists through the internet at least. Slezic's book Forsaken was on American Photo's top ten list last year, and her new series of portraits made with an old field camera of unveiled Afghanistan women is mesmerizing (see above). Robert Knoth has systematically documented the effects of long-term nuclear testing on parts of the former USSR, and his portraits especially are haunting without being voyeuristic.

~Miki Johnson

(Photo: © Lana Slezic)

Follow the link below for details on these and many more photo events around the world.

The Photo Book As Art and Insulation

Here’s some good news for people who love photo books—and all books for that matter.
    If you are one of those people, you may sometimes feel guilty about trees being cut down for paper. But the editor’s of the Bookseller magazine in the UK now assure all of us that books are environmentally good. Their thinking is that books lining the walls of homes actually provide a type of insultation, reducing energy usage for heating.
     The science behind the claim—spelled out in an article in the Telegraph newspaper—isn’t really spelled out, as far as I can tell. But it’s an intriguing idea, and very welcome, I can tell you. I’m tired of carrying around a paper-lover’s guilt. I believe in photo books as collections of history, as art objects in their own right. My office (above), which contains stacks and mountains of photo books, lined against walls and piled high on tables, must be the most energy efficient office in New York.
      I know I'm not alone in this. A couple of weeks  ago I was interview photographer/book packager Rick Smolan, who confessed that a lot of his friends try to make him feelbad about making books. (Rick is one of the people behind the popular "Day in the Life of..." series, so he's go a lot of trees to answer for.) But, as he told me, there is nothing like books in terms of reproducing images with great power and authority. The Telegraph article says that a survey of people in the UK found that many more would rather have a home library than a home theater system. I wonder if the same would be true in the U.S. Let's start our own informal pole: What would you rather have, a home photo library or a home theater?
—David Schonauer

Tintype Buckaroos

Having grown up in the Texas Panhandle with a healthy dose of cowboy artifacts and imagery all around, I'm always tickled when I come across said folklore here in New York City. So I was pleased as a pig in mud to see the arts-section feature story called "You Bet Your Tintype, Buckaroo" in yesterday's New York Times.

The subject is the photography of National Geographic veteran Robb Kendrick — a native of tiny Hereford, Texas (home to world-class stinky feed lots, and sports rival to my nearby hometown of Canyon) — who often shoots modern cowboy life using the outdated but aesthetically apt medium of the tintype.

"The latest result of Mr. Kendrick’s twin obsessions — with tintypes and the bow-legged anachronisms who continue to make their living on horseback — is Still: Cowboys at the Start of the Twenty-First Century, a new collection of 148 tintype portraits published by the University of Texas Press," writes Randy Kennedy in the Times.

The story's online slide show includes evocative portraits such as those of Raithe and Merline Rupe (above left) and Kendrick himself at work (right). The project is a fascinating rediscovery of rural North America, historic photo techniques, and enduring relics. Happy trails to viewers. — Jack Crager

Dr. Larry Schaaf Opens Up About "The Leaf"

There's been lots of fallout since our first post on "The Leaf," above. The image was to have been auctioned last week at Sotheby's in New York, but was withdrawn because of the controversy caused by an essay in the Sotheby's catalog. The essay, by Dr. Larry Schaaf, speculated that the image was not made by William Henry Fox Talbot in 1839, as commonly thought, but by Thomas Wedgwood nearly 30 years earlier. Today the New York Times has an interesting interview with Schaaf, in which he very firmly says the image was not by Talbot:
    “Someone could obviously come along and say that these images are all in fact Talbots, but they would be wrong," says Schaaf.
    This is only the beginning. Lots more will come out as further research is done. The veil is lifting on the murky history of photography prior to 1839. Couldn't be happier about that.--David Schonauer

Where to Go and What to See

To be honest, I'm pretty happy this week is light on openings. Everyone must be worn out after AIPAD last week — I know just how they feel. It's been a long week ... and it's only Wednesday. Luckily there are still some great openings to choose from. My picks are Humankind at Hasted Hunt in New York City (notice that although this show opens this week, the reception will be in May; I'll post again when it's approaching). The VII answer to Edward Steichen's legendary 1955 The Family of Man show at the MoMA, this show will explore  the place of the "humanistic" viewpoint in modern life through the lenses of the agency's photographers. And at M+B in Los Angeles, consummate Muhammed Ali chronicler Howard Bigham's Rumble In the Jungle documents the boxer's historic 1974 trip to Zaire.

~Miki Johnson

(Photo: "Zaire, 1974," © Howard L. Bingham)

Science as Art: Stereo View of Mars Moon

That super-camera on the Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter has done it again. This time in 3-D, almost. What you see here is a stereo view of the Martian moon Phobos. The Orbiter is equipped with a camera what scientists call the HiRISE camera (it stands for High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) which is a ridiculously long name for a camera, no matter how good it is. But we’ll forgive them, because some scientist at the control has the soul of an artist.
   The HiRISE made two different snaps (scientists call them “observations”) of the Martian moon on March 23. The two images were made ten minutes apart and show roughly the same features, but from slightly different angles. They were then combined to made a stereo view.
    As my colleague Russell Hart points out, that’s essentially how stereo aerial images used to be made. But in this case we’re talking about vastly greater distances. Go here for more information, and to see a short video clip of both HiRISE observations.—David Schonauer

Auctions Begin, and New York Is Art Town

New York will see a battle of very different cultures this week. It will be Hockey Town, as the New York Rangers face off against the New Jersey Devils in the NHL playoffs. And it will be Art Town, as the big auction houses hold their spring photography sales, followed on Thursday by the annual AIPAD Photography Show, where the world’s top dealers put on an art fair at the New York Armory. I love hockey, but my job is art, so that’s what we’ll focus here throughout the week.
     The auctions got off to a rousing start last night at Sotheby’s, with the sale of the  Quillan Collection. The excitement actually started last week, when Denise Bethel, head of the photo department at Sotheby’s in New York, announced that one lot was being withdrawn from the sale until further historical research could be done about the image—research that could prove it to be the oldest photo image ever made.
     There was also some nervousness going into the spring sales over whether the lagging economy would put a break on what has been a dynamic art market. The results of the Quillan sale show that great quality—and this material is really some of the highest quality ever offered at auction—still commands high prices.
      Edward Weston has been the star of recent auctions, and he came through again on Monday night. His “Nude,” dated 1925 (above), sold for $1,609,000, a new record for the photographer. Another highlight of the auction was Paul Strand’s 1923 image titled “Rebecca,” which sold for $645,800. A more modern piece, Richard Avedon’s “Marilyn Monroe, May 6, 1957, New York City” (below) was estimated at $70,000 to $100,000 but fetched a notable $457,000. All together the sale brought in a very, very healthy $8,901.350.

Where to Go and What to See

First off, I have to note that the AIPAD show is going on in New York this Thursday through Sunday. Most of the art community will be tied up there, but if you can drag yourself away, there are a couple of interesting shows going on, especially at the big museums.

Today in New York, The Met is putting up its second show in its new contemporary photography gallery, showcasing pieces from the permanent collection that represent moments when photographers turned their cameras on the art of photography itself. In Washington, D.C., the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery will show the first major exhibition of turn-of-the-century New York portrait photographer Zaida Ben-Yusuf.

There are also two collaborative shows that mirror each other interestingly. First is the Mentors show at SVA's Visual Arts Gallery, which exhibits work by photography BFAs that has been inspired by their mentorships with prominent members of the arts community. Second, the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, Massachusetts, is displaying work from its Photosynthesis project, where the museum connects high school photographers with important photographers and curators and then displays their final work.

~Miki Johnson

(Photo: "Mike, President of American Ocean Corp.," by Michael Dalton, from Mentors at SVA)

Crewdson's Weird World

Given the unsettling eerieness of Gregory Crewdson's photographs and their suburban settings, it's surprising that photographer grew up in Brooklyn with a self-described "normal" childhood. "Suburbia is like a foreign country to me," Crewdson told me a couple of years ago. "I approach it as a literary place, an aesthetic setting rather than one of personal experience."

Nonetheless, Crewdson has made that setting his own in elaborate images that manage to tell little stories yet often beg the question, "What's going on here?" An influential photo professor at Yale, he creates large-scale photographs at a meticulous pace but keeps cranking them out: His most recent collection, Beneath the Roses, goes on view at New York's Luring Augustine Gallery April 5 through May 3, as well as London's White Cube April 23 to May 24 and LA's Gagosian Gallery May 3 to June 4. Crewdson himself will be signing books at Luring Augustine from 2 to 5 pm April 12.

Accompanying the show is Crewdson's newest book, Beneath the Roses (Harry N. Abrams, $60), in which the photographer adds some slushy winter elements to his subjects' psychological coldness. As always, the detailed pictures show familiar scenes in which something is askance, the mood seems foreboding, the characters caught in an internal drama. "I like to take sort of ordinary iconography and defamilarlze it, make it mysterious," Crewdson explains, "so there's a tension between a sort of dream and reality, between the ordinary and the fantastical. But it's always grounded in something real."

Sotheby's Withdraws Potentially Historic Image from Auction--For Now

It looks like it will take a little bit longer to rewrite the photo history books. I just got off the phone with Denise Bethel, director of photographer at Sotheby’s in New York, and she told me that a controversial image that was to have been included in a sale next Monday has been withdrawn from the auction. According to at least one historian, the image could prove that photography was invented not in 1939 1839, the date commonly given for the birth of the medium, but nearly 30 years prior to that.
    In the past few days the photo world has been buzzing about the image, a “photogenic drawing” (above) that until now has been attributed to the Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot and dated 1839. However, the Sotheby’s catalog attributed the image to “Photographer Unknown” and included an essay by photo history Larry J. Schaaf speculating that the image was in fact may by Thomas Wedgewood “in 1805 or earlier.” Wedgewood was a member of the family famed for making fine china and was known for experimenting with photographic processes.
     When the essay appeared, it stirred up a hornet’s nest of commentary from other historians. “We knew this was going to happen,” said Bethel. “We knew that if we put it out there we would get this discussion going.” With more speculation dribbling in, Sotheby’s decided to postpone the sale of the image until further clarification of its origins could be made. This doesn’t mean that Schaaf was wrong in his assertions. It does mean, however, that in the next weeks and months we are going to be learning a lot more about the birth of photography.

Where to Go and What to See

You know how there are two kinds of "big weeks" for openings? There are the big openings, like, say, an Avedon retrospective at ICP or Jeff Wall at the MoMA. And then there are the weeks packed with openings for artists you're pretty sure you know about but can't quite put your finger on. And then you look them up and are like, oh yeah, that guy, he's great! Well, guess which week this is...

That's right, I had no fewer than four of those "oh yeah" moments while going through this week's listings. First up, Matthew Pillsbury, whose Elapsed show goes up at Bonni Benrubi on Thursday. You'd think I would remember him, since I've written about his work at least two other times (once when I he won an award and was shown at PHotoEspaña) and I always have glowing things to say about it. This show appears to be a mix of several of his projects, which all involve dark, b&w, time-lapse photography where stationary objects--buildings, electronic screens, stuffed wildlife--take on the appearance of monuments, while the people around them become transitory ghosts.

Then we have Chris Kitze's The Electric Image up today at powerHouse Arena's Windows on Main (appropriately). I've glanced at postcards of his glass window--neon sign--innocent bystander juxtapositions before but finally took the time to peruse his series this time. Although this kind of thing has been done before, it's still hard to do well, and that's how Kitze does it. Plus I'm into how he alternates between Tokyo, Shanghai, New York, Las Vegas, and Paris.

I also finally took a close look at Jessica Todd Harper, whose Interior Exposures series is going up at Cohen Amador on Wednesday. Harper's intimate, old-money family portraits also remind me of other things (i.e. Tina Barney), but they are still fresh and genuine and haunting in the best way.

Finally, at the Lisa Sette Gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona, a new project from Kahn/Selesnick. If you don't know about these guys, you should. They've worked together for 20 years creating "narrative photo-novellas," as they like to call them. Basically  they develop elaborate stories with fantastical locations and characters and then photograph them in long panoramas and turn them into books with fairy-tale caption-titles...oh, it's easier if you just go look at them.

~Miki Johnson

(Photo: "Emilie and Stephano, 2005" © Jessica Todd Harper)

Follow the link below for details on these and many more photography events around the country.

Where to Go and What to See

One of my readers complained last week that I had only included three shows outside NYC. It's inevitable that I know more about what's going on in my own cities than others, but I'd also like to point out that the art calendar ebbs and flows constantly...this week is a case in point. Because there are three big art shows in NYC this week, everyone seems to have been holding their breath until now. This week constitutes a deluge—yes, including some big shows in OTHER cities, too.

An annotated list:

• Bond Street Gallery (NYC): A brand new gallery with an opening show extravaganza including James White and Harold Feinstein.
• Slideluck Potshow XI at the Chelsea Art Museum (NYC): Food and photography (and booze, of course). If you haven't made it to one of these slideshows yet, you really ought to do yourself the favor.
• Sundaram Tagore Gallery (NYC): My "thanks for introducing me to this artist I obviously should have known about" award this week is for this Subhankar Banerjee exhibition. It's hard to make  landscapes transcendent, but I think you'll agree that's what these are.
• J. Paul Getty Museum (LA): Ten Years in Focus: The Artist and the Camera. I think the name says it all.
• Hallmark Museum (MA): Lili Almog, Linda Butler, and Stella Johnson: Three blow-you-away-good women photographers in one place.
• Corcoran Gallery of Art (D.C.): Photos from the renowned collection of Norman Carr and Carolyn Kinder Carr.

~Miki Johnson

(Photo: © Subhankar Banerjee)

Follow the link below for details on these and many more photo events around the country.

National Magazine Award Nominees Announced

The nominations for the National Magazine Awards have been announced, and there are some interesting photography angles. I was a judge in the Photojournalism category, so I’m going to focus on that category in this post. For a complete list of all the NMA nominations, go here.
       In general, nominations in the three photo categories went to the same magazines that have been honored in the past. Aperture magazine received nominations not only in the Photojournalism category but also in the General Excellence category for magazines with circulations under 100,000. National Geographic was nominated in the Photography category and the Photojournalism category. New York magazine was nominated in both the Photography and Photo Portfolio categories (among many others).  But as I said, the interesting news, from my perspective, was in Photojournalism. I saw a glimpse of the future.

Where to Go and What to See

The New York art world seems to have conspired to ease me back into my weekly column with a pre-arranged theme: Asia Week! I don't know if all these shows are specifically part of the festivities, but at least a few are...and as for the rest, I'm just glad to see all the non-Western (or non-unconsciously-Western) photographs being honored.

Howard Greenberg takes the retrospective approach with Photographers of Japanese Descent, including Araki, Hosoe, Izu, and Matsumoto. The Point of View Gllery brings us the fusion sensibilities of Drew Tal; ICP the work of Yi-Ting Chung; and Sous Let Etoiles, a fascinating portrait study of immigrants and their restrictive spaces from Fumio Tanai.

~Miki Johnson

(Photo: "Artist" by Fumio Tanai)

Follow the link below for details about these and many more photography events.

Exhibitions Watch: The Boudoir as Affordable Art

There’s a new photo show opening soon in New York that you might want to know about. I got a preview yesterday. The show is great, but what’s really interesting is the gallery that’s putting it up.
   On March 27, the Lumas Gallery in New York will debut “Boudoir: A Hint of Sensuality,” featuring photograpahy by Michel Comte, Lylia Cornell, GABO (photo above), Jacques Olivar, Howard Schatz, and other photographers. As the gallery notes, “The title of this exhibition refers to the boudoir as “the classical place of transformation through costume and to the joyous sensuality reigning there.”
    It’s a beautiful show, to be sure, but I’m really fascinated by the Lumas Gallery. The New York location, which is at 77 Wooster Street in SoHO, is the first of several planned U.S. branches of this art operation. Founded in Germany by Stefanie Harig and Marc Ullrich, the gallery now has branches throughout Europe. The director of the U.S. gallery, Stephanie Yovi, told me there are plans to open more branches in New York and the United States as well.
     The idea behind the gallery is intriguing: Essentially, it sells very big digital prints of work by a wide range of photographer. The Lambda prints are gorgeous, and prices for the prints start at about $600 and go up into the several thousands. The prices are kept low because the gallery sells in large editions--up to 100 in some cases—while other prints are sold in open editions. The gallery negotiates deals directly with the more than 100 photographers it represents. The list includes names like Steichen, as well as a wonderful new generation of photographers.
     Do I sound impressed? I am. The idea is to open up the notion of collecting to a new, young generation of buyers. The gallery caters to the taste of modern consumers by offering very large prints and by selling them via storefront galleries as well as online. There’s nothing wrong with that: It’s nice to see quality photography being made available to lots of people. It’s one more vision of photography’s future.—David Schonauer