State of the Art

Ode to the Oasis

Sometimes it seems like a lowly editor can't do too much to change the world. After all, it's politicians, builders, activists, teachers, criminals...or sometimes entertainers who usually make things happen, right? But once there was a not-so-humble newspaper editor, William Cullen Bryant of the New York Evening Post, who wrote that the burgeoning city of New York should create a big public park as a place to escape urban life. This was in 1844, when such a concept was novel in America.

The idea caught on, land was purchased, a design was selected, and now the park is celebrating the 150th anniversary of that design — Greensward, the Plan for Central Park. To mark the occasion a host of public events continue through the summer, and the Central Park Conservancy has set up a fascinating photo-driven Website detailing the park's long and winding history.

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.

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.
 

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.

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.

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)

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."

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.

New York Love Story Continues

Anyone have any great first-hand stories about John and Yoko? Now would be a great time to hear them...

That's because I could use the material. Not to tout my own horn, but I will be taking part in a panel discussion on the famous couple, and I've been asked to spread the word. The event will be held at 3 pm Saturday, April 5, at the Museum of the City of New York, 1220 Fifth Avenue at 104th Street.

The main speaker will be photographer Allan Tannenbaum, who published John & Yoko: A New York Love Story (Insight Editions, $45), a remarkable collection of his pictures of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. American Photo chose this book among last year's best in our Jan/Feb roundup, and we also ran a Web-exclusive interview between Tannenbaum and myself.

A veteran NYC photojournalist, Allan knew John & Yoko for several years but became especially close to them during the latter half of 1980, as they emerged from five years of seclusion to publicize their Double Fantasy album. Tannenbaum got rare access to their lives and made exceptionally intimate photos, among the last ones of Lennon before he was killed. He'll be showing and discussing these images in an illustrated lecture at the museum.

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.

Catcher of the Eye

For image-makers who want to learn to cut through the clutter of today's information glut and quickly grab people's attention, here's a chance to learn from one of the true masters. The Museum of Modern Art in New York just announced a forthcoming exhibition, George Lois: The Esquire Covers from the 1960s and early '70s. Along with large-scale prints of many of the final covers, the show will also show Lois's original artwork for several of the designs, including the renowned picture of Andy Warhol drowning in a soup can (above), which illustrated a May 1969 story about the decline of the American avant-garde.

This shot is particularly clever because, in the days before Photoshop, Lois and photographer Carl Fischer created it out of two images — one with the can of soup (Fischer says they dropped marbles in it; Lois says it was a stone) and the other a posed portrait of Warhol (he said, "Oh greaaaaat," Lois recalls). These were combined in a "C-print that was printed together and retouched," Lois told Kurt Andersen in an interesting interview recently broadcast on NPR's Studio 360. It will be fascinating to see the "images behind the icons" at the MoMA show — it runs from April 25 through March of 2009 (for a preview sampler of the Esquire covers you can go here).

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

Film, Stills, and Albert Maysles

As Dave Schonauer writes in his recent blog, Nubar Alexanian has photographed on the sets of many of Errol Morris's documentaries, work collected in a new book called Nonfiction. If you've never seen Morris's 1980 Gates of Heaven, do: I remember it as a brilliant series of talking still photographs. Another great documentary filmmaker, Albert Maysles, actually took his own pictures as he created such classics as Gimme Shelter and Grey Gardens. (Those earlier films were produced with Albert's brother and sound man David, who died in 1987.) Albert was in fact a photographer first, and you can catch his vintage black-and-white prints from the 1950s and 1960s, color stills from the filming of Grey Gardens, and his recent "cinemagraphs" at New York City's Steven Kasher Gallery, where they're on display through March 15. The cinemagraphs (below) are printed directly from frames of actual Maysles films.

The Soul of the Photo Collector

I hope everyone saw this article about photography when it appeared last week, but you might have missed it since it was  in the House & Home section of the New York Times. I was happy that American Photo got a mention in the lead—and happier to read the full profile of Jen Bekman, whose Manhattan gallery and online marketing savvy made her one of our Innovators of the Year in 2006. Nominally, the Times story is about living with art. In reality, it’s a fascinating journey into the soul of a collector.The photo of Bekman is by Gabriele Stabile. —David Schonauer

Giant Leap for Mankind (or, Why is This Man Jumping)?

Since it's Leap Day — that once-every-four-years phenomenon that lets people jokingly claim to age more slowly and stay newlyweds longer — we've been looking for the perfect photo event tied to this Gregorian intercalary anomaly. (We threw in that last $15 term in honor of the late Wlliam F. Buckley Jr.)

One cool contender is an homage to Philippe Halsman's Jump Book — including the classic shot of Richard Nixon at left — staged by Rich Janzaruk, photo editor of the Times-Mail in Bedford, Indiana, called "Leaping for Leap Day." Unfortunately, most of Janzaruk's shots of leaping local celebs are not posted online yet, but the story links to a great Owen Edwards piece recounting Halsman's original series published in 1959 (one of the most inspired leaps of imagination in modern portraiture, IOHO).

Then there is this Leap Day how-to article on adorama.com that tells you all about how to catch people in action (start with a cute and fearless model, as below).

Where to Go and What to See

I'm leaving for a two-week trip to Argentina on Wednesday, then going straight into the SPE conference in Denver, so I sadly won't be trouncing around the openings for quite a while. I apologize in advance for all the event invites I'll surely get while I'm out of the office -- and hope that the juicy tidbits I already have in my files will hold you over until I return.

In New York, it's fairly easy to tick off major art events of the next three weeks, although there are tons of great smaller shows going up to that I hope you'll look into (especially JeongMee Yoon, whose Pink and Blue book was one of our picks for the best of 2007).
Week 1: artexpo
Week 2: Whitney Biennial
Week 3: Open Society Institutes' Moving Walls

In other cities, the Ed Ruscha photography at The Art Institute of Chicago should be a much-talked about exhibition, since Ruscha is known for his paintings and his photos were long thought only study material, not art in and of themselves. I'd also like to highlight the work of Fiona Aboud at Benham Gallery in Seattle. The "Queens of Carnival" photos she's showing came from an on-parade portrait series the native Brazilian did in Rio, and their story is told in the upcoming travel issue of American Photo.

Sorry to be brief...I have packing to do! Lots of details after the jump.

~Miki Johnson

(Photo: © Fiona Aboud)

Watson's Walk on the Wild Side

Photographer Albert Watson has always been hard to pigeonhole, but his newest project is a surprise departure even for him — an unabashed romp into kitsch and kink in Vegas.

The Scottish-born Watson has put together a one-man show called Miss Beehayving, running at Hamiltons Gallery London through March 15. Culled from Watson's forthcoming big book project Shot in Vegas, this exhibition focuses on a single model, a dominatrix and burlesque performer called Breaunna (her online moniker is the show's title). "She lives in an exotic, erotic world, and that 's what fascinated me," says the photographer.

I once had the pleasure of visiting Watson's 13,000-square-foot studio in Manhattan's meat-packing district, which covers several floors and is humongous by New York standards. Throughout the space, prints of Watson's work were on display and stacked in organized piles, thousands of photographs running the gamut from fashion to celebrities to fine art to journalistic moments. "In 99 percent of art, recognizability is a comfortable factor," he said at the time. "My recognizability is going to have to be in the diversity."

Where to Go and What to See

In our Jan/Feb photography collecting version of Who's Hot and Who's Not, expert appraiser Stephen Perloff noted that although Muzi Quawson is not yet 30, she's been included in the most recent Tate Triennial and her prints are already a hot commodity. At Yossi Milo (who I've mentioned has a deserved reputation for bringing international rising stars to our shores) I'm looking forward to getting a closer look at Quawson's work  on Thursday, at her first solo U.S. show. The Duratran prints, from a documentary project about a young mother called Pull Back the Shade, will be displayed in lightboxes to emphasize their cinematic feel.

Speaking of the cinema, I'm also interested to see the About Face show going up at Keith de Lellis on Thursday. The vintage portraits of stage and screen stars recall an earlier incarnation of glamor and the deep ties between photography and movies, which is explored in depth in our March/April issue, due to hit newsstands any day.

(Photo: "Hot tub, Shandaken, New York," © Muzi Quawson/Courtesy Yossi Milo )

Follow the link below for details on these an many more photography events around the world.

Where to Go and What to See

This week's (and month's) big New York event is the release of a new retrospective scrapbook from Albert Maysles, who, along with his brother David, created the beloved documentaries Grey Gardens, Gimme Shelter, and Salesman--and therefore lauded by many as the father of modern documentary film. An accompanying exhibition opening  February 15 at Steven Kasher Gallery includes 50 of Albert's vintage black and white photographs plus large cinemagraphs from his movies. More events are to follow, including a brunch screening of The Gates and booksigning at the Film Forum on February 24.

In San Francisco Lee Friedlander seems to be the photographer on everyone's lips. His America by Car series opens at Fraenkel Gallery on February 14, and next week the SFMoMA launches a huge retrospective of his work, including more than 400 images. Plus, through May 11, Friedlander's images from parks created by Frederick Law Olmsted are on view at the Met back here in NYC.

~Miki Johnson

(Photo: © Albert Maysles, "Best Costume For The Day"/Courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery)

Follow the link before for details about these and many more photo openings and events.

Where to Go and What to See

Ok, there are just too many cool events this week for me to break it down too far. Here's a couple I'm excited about.

1. Judy Linn speaking at the Camera Club of New York. I wasn't familiar with her work, and while I'm always down to see pictures of Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe (which she's known for), her abstract documentary stuff is the real gem (as usual, Alec Soth agrees with me, and makes the point better than I could have).

2. Tyler Hicks at the Umbrage Gallery. Hicks is one of the best known newspaper shooters out there; he won the POYi Newspaper Photographer of the Year 2007 and his name is almost always below the New York Times pictures that stop me in my tracks. So it's nice to see he's getting a little gallery action, and I'm interested to see how his images will play on walls instead of computer screens (or paper, I guess, if people still read the news on paper...)

3. Juergen Teller at Lehmann Maupin. One of today's best known fashion photographer, Teller also likes to expand into more conceptual realms, like his Go-See book that included photographs of girls ringing his doorbell looking for modeling work. He never fails to see the world from an unexpected perspective.

4. Deborah Oropallo's Feign work at Stephen Wirtz Gallery in San Francisco digitally superimposes classic painted portraits of male leaders and war heroes with contemporary photographs of women in period costumes. It's simply fascinating.

5. Beloved Magnum photographer Larry Towell is presenting his The World From My Front Porch photographs at Stephen Bulger in Toronto. This exhibition includes some of the photographer's most intimate portraits, made almost entirely of his family in rural Ontario.

~Miki Johnson

(Photo: "Queen of Hearts," © Deborah Oropallo)

Follow the link below for details on these and many other openings and events.