Air McElroy

Lilly McElroy likes to throw herself around. At men, onto her bed, through the air. A performative photographer and video artist, McElroy seems to have a lot of fun making refreshingly spontaneous pictures. I asked her to explain the procedure behind her photographs and this is what she sent me:

"I started the project by placing an ad on Craig's list looking for men who would meet me at bars blind date style and let me literally throw myself at them. This worked fairly well, but limited the # of photos I could take. Now , I go to bars with a friend/photographer and approach men who are physically larger than I am. I ask them if I can literally throw myself at them. If they say yes, I have myself photographed doing it and buy them a drink afterwards. If it seems like they want to hang out, I'll have a drink as well. Sometimes we talk about the project and sometimes we just chat. I don't have a specific set up for the photos. I just want them to look as much like snap shots or party pics as possible."

Of course there are layers of meaning behind the physical comedy, but McElroy knows how to capture our interest and keep our attention. There are lots of other good series on her website which I'd recommend checking out.

Weekend Video - The Grammys

With so many award shows being cancelled I thought I'd pull out some highlights from last year's Grammy Awards for anyone feeling award deprived. The first - Gnarls Barkley's live version of "Crazy" - made my hair stand on end with it's strangely slowed down tempo, and I realized for the first time why the song was such a hit. (I'm still not sure what the airline pilot outfits mean.) But this version of "Crazy" made it seem like the signal song of the year.

The Corinne Bailey Rae/John Legend/John Mayer medley is nothing more than a look at three original and ascendant performers. As in photography, no matter how well traveled the road may be, fresh talent always finds a way.

Surfing the Web

I first met Tom Adler 12 years ago when he came into my gallery carrying the dummy of his first picture book "1936 - 1942. San Onofre to Point Dune. Photographs by Don James". We agreed to do a show and have become fast friends and collaborators ever since. The picture below is a Don James from the show. (Don James was 16 years old in 1936 when he borrowed his father's camera to record what were the very beginnings of surf culture in California.)


Tom has continued to produce important and revelatory photo books on surfing and been hired by companies from Polo to Roxy to brighten up their visuals. Last summer we did a follow-up show "Rediscovered Archives and Graphic Works" based on Tom's remarkable eye for combining and contrasting different images. See two examples below and more on the link above.



His latest books, "Surf Contest" and "Ron Church: California to Hawaii 1960 to 1965" bring the work of Ron Church back into the limelight after a long period of neglect.




Most recently, Tom was brought in to revise the look of swell.com - an online store and catalog selling surfing style clothes and accessories, and the results are just amazing. The catalogs are (deceptively) simple but visually refreshing, and almost every click on swell.com brings you to a picture that transcends the gee-whiz poster type of big wave photograph because of the subtly artful aspect of each image. Examples of some of the images and layouts below. Good web design is hard to find, but Adler shows both the importance of photography and the endless wave of possibilities. (Excuse the pun.)





Finally, the limited edition poster, below, which Tom created for our first exhibition now sells for up to $500! (swell.com has an authorized reprint for $29.95.)

Stormy Weather

Extreme weather is not a category of photography we think much about in the fine art world of New York City, but it has its fans, publishers, and practitioners just like any other genre. Top amongst these is probably Jim Reed, a 56 year old former writer and film-maker who moved from Los Angeles to Wichita, Kansas, 16 years ago in order to be near the biggest hurricanes and tornadoes in the country.

Abrams have recently published a book of his best images titled "Storm Chaser" and for an avowed lover of sky pictures these are quite something! Sublime and luminescent, the photographs have an almost religious quality. They're Ansel Adams on acid! So it's not altogether surprising to find a Christian theme running through Reed's writing as well as an endorsement from evangelist leader Pat Robertson. To balance things out politically though, there's an unabashed warning about global warming from Reed that would make Al Gore proud.

The Lost Sitting

I was intrigued by the picture above, although I've never been a huge fan of Alison Jackson's work. I find her faux paparazzi shots more one-liners than art. To see what I mean you can go to the M+B gallery website for images from her current Los Angeles show.

Unfortunately, the JFK and Marilyn images that I thought presaged some subtler new work turned out to be some of Jackson's earliest work, but with their echo of Mary Alpern's "Dirty Windows" series and their convincing recreation of a likely event, it's an instructive look at the road not taken.


Whatever quality these pictures have, however, pales next to the
capture of real life. As I was getting ready to post the above, I
came across the picture of JFK and Jackie (below) from Elliott
Erwitt's continually surprising new book, "Unseen".

Weekend Video - Once

If you haven't seen "Once", the incredible low-budget indie film about an Irish busker trying to get his life and career back on track, you are probably sick of people telling you to see it. But it's even better than its proselytizers can convey, with great music, great performances, and a subtle story that over and over again seems both true to life and dramatically satisfying. It's now been released on DVD so there are
NO EXCUSES!

Letter from L.A.

A brief trip to Los Angeles for meetings at The Getty, LACMA, and to discuss the Diana Vreeland film project with Sony Pictures. My visit also coincided with Photo LA now in it's 17th year.

First stop was the Getty where they currently have three photography shows up - Graciela Iturbide, Andre Kertesz, and The Nude. The first two didn't do much for me, but the nudes were lively and there was one terrific Manuel Alvarez Bravo picture from 1938 with an interesting caption about how the artist had hired one model to pose for him for an entire year. Talk about a year in pictures! I will try to get a j-peg, but as I was stopped from taking pictures by a vigilant guard, the picture below is the best I could do.


Meanwhile at The Getty I ran into none other than Sally Mann, who had just opened a show of her extreme close-up portraits of her children at Gagosian in Beverly Hills. It might not be the best space to show work, but the pictures have lost none of their power since they were first shown in New York a year ago. (Surprisingly for Gagosian, the gallery assistant behind the front desk was exceptionally friendly in a most un-New York way.)



I particularly liked this picture of Virginia, who we don't see much of these days.

Then it was on to Photo LA from which I've included just a few highlights. While these look like imitation Adam Fuss, they were actually quite beautiful photographs (not photograms) of colored water by the Vietnamese photographer Han Nguyen. At Joseph Bellows.

Julius Schulman's architectural pictures of Los Angeles were much in evidence. This unusual color shot courtesy CraIg Krull.


With Richard Prince ascendant, several dealers had rare Richard Prince books and portfolios. The conceptual gag here is that Prince signs all the photos to himself and then re-photographs the "finished" work. From Harper's Books

At Charles Hartman Fine Art, a striking new Scott Peterman taken in Cairo.

A Gary Winogrand taken at the Beverly Hilton in 1964. From Katrina Doerner

Ed Ruscha in 1970 by Jerry McMillan

And finally, from the Magnum booth, an unusual Alec Soth featuring Brigitte Bardot taken in Paris last year.

The Westerns

It looks like it’s going to be Katy Grannan month - with simultaneous shows at Fraenkel, Greenberg Van Doren, and Salon 94. The accolades I presume will come her way will be well deserved for these are some of the strangest and most powerful pictures to come along for a while.

One of the four original Yale girls in the famous 1999 "Another Girl, Another Planet" show, Grannan’s work has revolved around soliciting willing subjects for her psychologically intense constructed portraits. Aside from the technical expertise and tactile sense of the body Grannan brings to each picture, her work has always played with the tension between her own theatricality and the depth of revelation of her subjects.

Grannan has now moved her operation west where referrals led her to Gail and Dale (two middle-aged transsexuals and best friends) and Nicole, a woman clearly on the verge of something very disturbing. It’s Diane Arbus meets Sweeney Todd - a forceful and disturbing vision of a world where the roles people play cover up layers of once-repressed but now exploding emotion.

HIM

The British seem to have a thing about tweaking the establishment with a combination of art and humor. There's Banksy, Damien Hirst (who certainly seems like a prankster to me), and now HIM - a life sized waxwork of art collector Charles Saatchi by Robert McHarg III.

Saatchi's influence on the art world is legendary due to his reputation for making and breaking artists' careers through his buying and selling habits. In response McHarg created a life-size sculpture which he dressed up in 101 different outfits and photographed for a book just published by Trolley. As you can see it's a droll run across the visual iconography of contemporary art and photography executed in deadpan style. As McHarg points out, "It’s the biggest action figure I’ll ever own, it's all about the artist collecting the collector, a David and Goliath battle over power and punch lines."

Weekend Video - Jazz On A Summer Day

Bert Stern has been caught in Marilyn Monroe "Last Sitting" mode for so long it's easy to forget what a talented photographer and film-maker he was and is. His film "Jazz on a Summer's Day" covers the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival in startling Kodachrome color and with amazing photo-cinematographic compositions. The audience shots are a master class in how cutaways can invigorate rather than distract, and the multiple cameras and sharp edits never make the wrong move. In this clip Dinah Washington gives a swinging performance of "All of Me", but marvel at how Stern introduces Washington with just a close-up of the bopping jeweled bow of her dress!

The Year in Pictures

Given my obvious interest in other people's choices for "The Year in Pictures", I scoured the web from major news sites to obscure blogs to see other selections of the year's "best" photographs, but by and large it was a fairly predictable assortment. One picture kept cropping up, however, and I was surprised I hadn't seen it before. It was this picture by John Moore of a woman at Arlington National Cemetery mourning her fiance who was killed in Iraq.

With the web's instant access to information it was possible to go from pure visceral reaction to the image to knowing quite a lot about the photographer, the subject, the history of its publication, and the inevitable controversy about how "true" or manipulated the image was. (A less effective shot taken by Moore from a different angle shows a more crowded cemetery.) But to cut a long story short, it's a great and totally valid image - and rare in its neutrality. I guess if so inclined you could read it as a tribute to courageous sacrifice as opposed to an indictment of the folly of war. However what makes it so powerful and unusual is the sensuality of the mourning figure (something we don't usually associate with pictures of grief today although this has certainly been part of the language of paintings) intersecting the relentless geometry of receding headstones.

Moore, it turns out, is a Getty photographer based in Pakistan of all places, who returned briefly to the States so his wife could give birth to their child in the U.S. He gives an interesting account of how he came to take the picture on Getty's own blog.

Another striking picture that looks like a still from a Coppola or Scorcese film was taken by Denver photographer Ahmad Terry after police shot and killed a gunman in the State Capitol. Before shooting on his regular camera, Terry shot the scene on his cellphone so that his paper, The Rocky Mountain News, could post it on their website.

Lastly, this picture by Stephanie Sinclair which appeared in The New York Times Magazine in a story on Afghani child brides, some like the one pictured here as young as 11 years old. Like all the photographs above, it's the subject, combined with the many formal aspects of the picture, and the originality of the image that make each one so memorable.