State of the Art

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)

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

Where to Go and What to See

This week's exhibition with the most recognizable name is no doubt the Ken Heyman retrospective opening at Sundaram Tagore Gallery on Thursday. A prolific photographer (150 assignments for LIFE magazine) and author (of 54 books), Heyman is perhaps best known for his collaboration with the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead. But with lots of images with celebrities like Pablo Picasso, Marilyn Monroe, and Ernest Hemmingway, there should be a little something for everyone...especially considering this is Heyman's first major gallery show in a decade and promises "never before seen" photographs.

On a slightly more contemporary note, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago presents This Land Is Your Land on Thursday, a survey of the American landscape through the eyes of young international photographers. Complimented with a talk on Friday from Simon Roberts (whose book Motherland on Russia I adore) and Bryan Zanisnik, the show illustrates how these artists "use current events, personal observations, and often humor to comment on the political, religious, and cultural climate of this country."

~Miki Johnson

(Photo: "Hemingway," © Ken Heyman)

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

Ted Kawalerski: Shooting the Hudson

New York's Hudson River, for all its checkered history and boundless utility, has always inspired artists. The 19th century's Hudson River School of painters depicted the river and its shores in a more pristine state, but even now it's magnetic to photographers. Conservation photographer Robert Glenn Ketchum did his first color monograph about it (The Hudson River and the Highlands), and when American Photo once asked William Clift to name his favorite place to take pictures, the Santa Fe-based landscape photographer chose the Hudson's Constitution Marsh, which is right near the river town of Cold Spring.

No photographer I can think of, though, has photographed the Hudson with such devotion as Ted Kawalerski. Himself a resident of the Westchester river town of Sleepy Hollow -- yes, that Sleepy Hollow, the home and literary province of Washington Irving -- Kawalerski has spent his commercial career on corporate work for Xerox, Bausch and Lomb, MasterCard and their like. For the last twenty years, though, he has made it his personal project to shoot the mighty Hudson up and down, all the way to its upstate source, Lake Tear of the Clouds. Click on the picture here to see a gallery from Kawalerski's unique photographic endeavor.

Where to Go and What to See

This is a big week for big exhibitions of big names in contemporary photography. Probably the biggest is a collection of image made by Lee Friedlander in parks created by Frederick Law Olmsted, particularly Central Park (which is celebrating its 150th birthday this year). The first solo show by Friedlander at the Met, A Ramble in Olmsted Parks includes many never-before-seen images.

At Howard Greenberg Gallery, the master photojournalist Marc Riboud is exhibiting On the Road: An Intrepid Photographer. Riboud is probably best known for his image of a Vietnam War protester brandishing a daisy in the face of a line of National Guard troops, but his true gift is for creating such beautiful, iconic images throughout his long career. The Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Virginia, is honoring another master of documentary photography, Gordon Parks. As a fellow for the Farm Security Administration, Parks was in the company of photographers such as Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, and he later won acclaim for his extensive essays for Life magazine.

~Miki Johnson

(Photo: © Marc Riboud, China, 2001)

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

Music City Views

A case could be made that no other American city has encompassed more musical talent during the past four decades than Nashville, Tennessee. During most of that period, one of Nashville's most prolific music photographers was Jim McGuire, who made countless portraits of the Music City's performers and songwriters and also shot artwork for more than 500 recordings. (McGuire's shot of unlikely pals Johnny Cash and Billy Graham is above.) Now a well-deserved retrospective of McGuire's images is on display in a new exhibition and a new book, both entitled Nashville Portraits. 

The traveling exhibition opens today and runs through March 23 at the Art Museum of Western Virginia in Roanoke. It features 60 photographs of Nashville stars, ranging from past masters like Bill Monroe and Minnie Pearl to more contemporary artists such as Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, and Marty Stuart.

Where to Go and What to See

This is definitely one of those weeks I wish I had a teleportation device so I could go from uptown to Chelsea in a matter of seconds. If instantaneous transportation were possible, I'd start my photo tour off at The Morgan LIbrary & Museum for their first ever exhibition of modern photography, 67 portraits of artists by Irving Penn. Then over to Archive Fever at ICP, for what sounds like a pretty conceptual show for them, including "works by leading contemporary artists who use archival documents to rethink the meaning of identity, history, memory, and loss." Then down to Redux for Erika Larsen's fascinating Young Blood project, an unusually fair portrait of children who hunt. At Point of View Gallery I'd catch João Pina's portrait series recording the stories of surviving prisoners from Portugal's half-century of fascist rule and at the Nailya Alexander Gallery, a new series on the human price of the Iraq war from the accomplished "war portraitist" Lori Grinker. And because my teleportation machine would of course work outside Manhattan, I'd also pop by The Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego for The Photographer's Eye: A Way of Seeing, their take from the museum's archives on John Szarkowski's groundbreaking book The Photographer's Eye. (Note: These openings take place on different nights, so my transportation  device would also allow time travel.)

~Miki Johnson

(Photo: © Erika Larsen/Redux, from Young Blood)

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

Where to Go and What to See

I don't know about everyone else, but I am pretty happy that this holiday season is finally behind us. All the traveling, and eating, and relaxing -- I couldn't take any more. So I'm thankful to the galleries that are helping us kick the year off right with a flood of openings on this week. Actually, there are so many I have almost no chance of being fair or comprehensive in my recommendations, so I'm not going to attempt either. The three shows I plan to attend, for purely personal reasons and restrained by my residence in New York, are as follows:

Martin Schoeller at Hasted Hunt, because his images are always powerful and because he is a fascinating character, as I learned when we got a chance to talk at the Images of the Year party, where he took home the portrait prize.
Ron Diorio at Peter Hay Halpert Fine Art, because sometimes you want to look at photos that look like paintings.
Peter Kayafas at Sasha Wolf Gallery, because these "Recent Photographs of America" look like they were taken half a century ago.

~Miki Johnson
(Photo: © Ron Diorio, "Scorcese")

Click the link below for details on these and many (many) more events and openings.

Where to Go and What to See

The best of this week's photography offerings are three portrait series...well, one portrait series and two series that include strong documentary portraiture. Katy Grannan is well known for her first monograph, Model American, and The Westerns, her new body of work, promises to be similarly well received. Debbie Fleming Caffery's Aftermath, Louisiana and Bertien van Manen's A Hundred Summers, A Hundred Winters, on the other hand, are not traditional portraiture but create compelling portraits of places: Louisiana and Russia respectively. Caffery's work is particularly compelling in my eyes, not least because she seems to have found a ghostly dream side of the state's recent tragedies that lends her images a freshness that is difficult to achieve with such an overexposed topic.

~Miki Johnson

(Photo: © 2008 Debbie Fleming Caffery)

Hair There and Everywhere

If there was ever any doubt that big hair is alive and well, it will be dispelled by a new photo book and accompanying runway show. Just in time for the holidays, a consciousness-raising volume called Hair Wars has been released by powerHouse Books  (which can always be counted on for idiosyncratic photo collections). The book features such wild creations as this little do at left. For those who want to see this stuff in the flesh, a grand celebration is planned for January 20, 2008, at the Northfield Hilton in Troy, Michigan, outside Detroit — touted as the "Hair Capital of the World."

Where to Go and What to See

This week's big art happenings are all in Miami because...well, wouldn't you rather be in Miami this time of year? This will mark Art Basel's sixth year and Pulse Miami's third year in the tropical Florida town. And this year AIPAD, the huge international art dealer's group that runs its flagship art fair in New York every year, has also jumped on board. Plus, with several other smaller exhibits and fairs feeding off of these three major players -- it might just be time to get the sunglasses and Bermuda shorts out of storage.

For those of us staying in the chilly northern climes, I recommend the photographer talks at the School of Visual Arts (especially Jonathan Torgovnik, who I, like pretty much every else, love), and the holiday party for Magnum Magnum, this year's huge commemorative book on, you guessed it, Magnum, with each photographer seen through the eyes of another member of the collective.

~Miki Johnson

(Photo: Portrait of a Bollywood actor, © Jonathan Torgovnik)