Weekend Video

Thanks to the anonymous sender of the link to the above video. It gives a nice sense of the magic feeling of being in Tokyo. And thanks to the film-maker, Emily Nathan. (Please note: it may take a moment to load.)

Tokyo Photo ctd.

So you walk down Roppongi Street, take the little alley (above) next to the AM/PM store, and you’ll find the Belle Salle Roppongi where Tokyo Photo 2009 is taking place.

It’s beautifully organized by our hosts Tomo Harada and Toru Fukaya, the booths are immaculately built, and the crowds and response on opening night were overwhelming.

The Belle Salle Roppongi.

Here’s a glimpse of my booth. The fair is organized with “Photo America” upstairs. An exhibition anchored by the Museum of Photographic Arts and three American dealers – myself, Rose Shoshana, and Paul Kopeikin. Downstairs are 14 Japanese dealers from whom you’ll see my highlights, below. There’s a predominance of contemporary sized urban, industrial, and forest landscapes – but I guess you could say it’s an accurate representation of the country. There’s certainly not the same amount of personally introspective or constructed work you would see in America.

But going in order round the fair, here are some of the pieces that caught my eye:

Two pictures by Naoki Ishikawa at Gallery Terra.

Two urban landscape by Yurie Nagashima at Scai The Bathhouse Gallery.

Two photographs by Taiji Matsue at Taro Nasu Gallery that turned out to be of a model of Tokyo but were striking and vibrant nonetheless.

"Life's Little Worries" by Tatzu Nishi at Urano Aratani

Two views of Mount Fuji by Ken Kitano at MEM Gallery

Also at MEM, Yasumasa Morimura's "Hand Leonardo da Vinci" from 1996.

And two fairy tale looking forests by Yoshihiko Ueda at G/P Gallery.

And last but not least, a suite of gravures by Hiroshi Sugimoto, not readily available in the U.S., at Hiromiyoshi Gallery.

That's a quick Japanese floor report. More on the U.S. floor and Tokyo life tomorrow.

Tokyo Photo

Dear Readers,

I am in Tokyo for the next week participating in the first Tokyo Photo Fair. It's also my first trip to Japan. I arrived last night.

The 13 1/2 hour flight over was surprisingly comfortable and my first taste of Japan was being faced with the above drink machine outside the airport. A difficiult choice, but as you can see I settled on the Mets grapefruit soda (delicious) before going into town on the friendly (and efficient) limousine bus.

We install the show today so stay tuned for regular updates. But if anyone happens to be near the Roppongi district, do come by and say hi. Details are here.

Think Small

This lattice-shaped image is the first ever close-up view of a single molecule. Scientists from IBM used an atomic force microscope (AFM) to reveal the chemical bonds within a molecule. 'This is the first time that all the atoms in a molecule have been imaged,' lead researcher Leo Gross said.

The researchers focused on a single molecule of pentacene, which is commonly used in solar cells. The rectangular-shaped organic molecule is made up of 22 carbon atoms and 14 hydrogen atoms. In the image above the hexagonal shapes of the five carbon rings are clear and even the positions of the hydrogen atoms around the carbon rings can be seen. To give some perspective, the space between the carbon rings is only 0.14 nanometers across, which is roughly one million times smaller than the diameter of a grain of sand.

'If you think about how a doctor uses an X-ray to image bones and organs inside the human body, we are using the atomic force microscope to image the atomic structures that are the backbones of individual molecules,' said IBM researcher Gerhard Meyer.

The team from IBM Research Zurich said the results could have a huge impact of the field of nanotechnology, which seeks to understand and control some of the smallest objects known to mankind.

From my iPhone

I was walking along 10th Avenue when I saw this large poster outside the Equinox Gym. I love the picture and the good humored pun. I'm pretty sure this would have been an image that someone picked up from stock rather than commissioned, so it also shows the afterlife of a well executed image in today's fluid picture market. And lastly, in this summer of no summer, it's nice to be cheered up by a funny sunny photo!

Wonder

After a month of construction on my new space, I was itching to put something on the walls, and while things are pretty slow in Chelsea, I thought I might as well put together some kind of theme show. I had been thinking about how few pictures (as opposed to how many) could make a show and had been mulling over the title "Seven Wonders" which appealed to me because seven seemed the low number and wonder was a quality I particularly enjoy in photography. In the end though, seven relatively small pictures seemed too few and I ended up with ten and the title "Elements of Wonder". Not quite as catchy, I know.

Anyway, the show is up through August 21, Tuesday to Friday if you're around. And this is what I had to say about it in our press release:

Danziger Projects summer show - "Elements of Wonder" – takes as its central theme how the element of wonder so often manifests itself in photography.

Whether in Julia Margaret Cameron's constructed pictures, using her maid and friends' children as her subjects, or in Sze Tsung Leong's technical tour de force view of the Parisian skyline, the images in this show do more than just record a fact - they stop to marvel at what they see or create.

In a selection of ten images spanning over 130 years, the photographs in the show each demonstrate a different kind of wonder. There is Adam Fuss's re-invention of the photogram, Edward Curtis' prefiguring of Sugimoto's "Horizons", and Mario Giacomelli's frozen moment of kinetic energy.

Annie Leibovitz tackles wonder straight on with an image from her 2003 fashion shoot re-imagining Alice in Wonderland, while the wonder of Seydou Keita lies not only in his unconscious echo of August Sander's famous photograph of three farmers, but in the fact that such a marvelous photographer was unknown outside of his own country of Mali until near the end of his life.

In classic images such as Edward Weston's photograph of his wife, Charis, nude on the White Sands of California or the Bechers' picture of a New York water tower, we can appreciate the wonder of these photographic icons. And lastly, Abe Morell ties things up with his inventive connection of the wonder of the camera obscura to the wonder of photography.


And the ten pictures:

Julia Margaret Cameron

Edward Curtis

Edward Weston

Seydou Keita

Mario Giacomelli

The Bechers

Annie Leibovitz

Adam Fuss

Abelardo Morell

Sze Tsung Leong

Jackie (8) O

Jackie and Aristotle Onassis leave an Athens club at 7 a.m. after celebrating her 40th birthday, 1969. Photo: Nicholas Tsikourias/Getty Images


On what would have been her 80th birthday, I'm going to suggest a revisionist theory - that Jacqueline Kennedy's years as Mrs. Onassis (from 1968 - 1975) were not the emotional wasteland and loveless rebound of popular opinion but an interesting and refreshing period of her life. My evidence is the pictures from this period selected by Life Magazine for their website. Judge for yourselves.

To me, in these pictures she looks happy and svelte and stylish, while Aristotle looks surprisingly hip in a proto-90s/Tom Ford jet-set way. I may be obsessing on consumerist values these days, but I feel like the current economic situation and society's economic and cultural values are so tied up with celebrity consciousness that there's much to explore and analyze.

So here's a view of Jackie - not as the demure First Lady, not the grieving widow, but a harbinger of the social x-ray, shopper celebrity, paparazzi target that we see so much of today.

Jackie Kennedy Onassis shops with her niece and nephew in Capri, 1970. Photo: Ron Galella/WireImage

Jackie on Madison Avenue, October 1971. Photo: Ron Galella/WireImage

New York, April 1974. Photo: Tom Wargacki/WireImage

Jackie and Aristotle Onassis dress for a night out, 1970. Photo: Tom Wargacki/WireImage

(500) Pairs of Summer

I said I would post occasionally, and a recent visit to a shoe store in Southampton with my wife offered up this picture sent in by one of their loyal customers. You can read it as a celebration of summer or as evidence of excessive consumption, but either way it has the charm and vitality of much of vernacular photography - and gives quite a taste of summer in this rain-sodden time. (Taken on my iPhone, you'll need to click on the picture to get the full effect.)

One of the funniest photo albums I ever saw was a collection of snapshots put together by the staff of Sotheby's in London where people had sent in snaps of the object they wanted to sell. But like "Antiques Roadshow - Home Edition" these real-life snaps were things like a drunken family gathering and in the background was the intended consignment - a vase on the mantelpiece above Aunt Edna's head. This was years ago, but if I can ever track it down I'll be sure to post the highlights.

Summer Hiatus

I need a vacation! Or at least a break from blogging. So for the rest of the summer I'll be blogging occasionally rather than regularly and recharging the old batteries.

I'll leave you for now with this Leon Levinstein (above) from the Howard Greenberg Gallery's upcoming show, "Staff Picks". It didn't say who picked it on their e-mail announcement, an omission I hope they rectify in the show. But it's a fun pic and almost identical to the Yasuhiro Ishimoto (below) that I featured in a Summer Album last summer. I have no idea which came first but I'm pretty sure whoever came second was intentionally referencing the first. If anyone knows, do comment.

In the meantime, if you're missing this blog, can I suggest going back to some of the early posts? I'm always surprised by how quickly I've forgotten them, and if I can indulge myself, how well they hold up.

I ♥ Marilyn Minter

I get a big kick out of Marilyn Minter’s work, which I was mostly introduced to by Nadine McCarthy, the daring and creative Picture Editor of ALLURE. I say mostly because while I was vaguely aware of it before, it hadn’t snapped into focus until she commissioned Minter to do a beauty story for the magazine, and then we put one of Minter’s pieces in a benefit auction we both worked on. As often happens, I then saw how behind the curve I was!

Minter could perhaps best be described as a post-pop artist. Both a photographer and a painter, Minter goes back and forth between the two mediums with each informing and enriching the other. The work she’s making today, however, comes out of a long and winding career. Starting off as a photographer in the 1970s, Minter switched to painting in the 80s and 90s with a series of much noticed but also much criticized works referencing hard core pornography. Out of these images came the thought that the real glamour and the real porn was the glitter of luxury consumer culture.

Using both photography and painting Minter’s new millennial work consisted of hyperrealistic close-ups of makeup-laden lips, eyes, and toes, whose luscious colors and glossy surfaces were appealing and disturbing at the same time. Minter’s exaggerated images copied and subverted the visual seductiveness of advertising while providing a visceral pleasure-laden punch.

A 2005 solo show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and a star turn in the 2006 Whitney Biennial quickly put Minter on the contemporary art map. And the rest, as they say, is history.

And as an added bonus, a clip from Minter's newest video project - "Green Pink Caviar". As Minter explains,"I was shooting stills of models with long tongues swirling and sucking bakery products from under a pane of glass. I wanted to make enamel paintings along the idea of 'painting with my tongue'. My makeup artist shot some short videos during the shoot just to see how it would look. The low definition videos looked so good that we made a professional high definition video."

(If you want to buy the full 8 minute video from Minter's gallery, Salon 94, click here.) It's a bargain at $35 and an impressive way to start your video art collection!

A Debate

Muhammed Ali. Miami, 1970. Photograph by Danny Lyon. Copyright Magnum Photos.

Michael Jackson and Bubbles. 1988. Jeff Koons.

I was walking back to the gallery last night when I ran into Roy Lebenthal (the owner of the Pop Burger restaurants and a savvy collector) and Adam Cohen (a director at the Gagosian Gallery) having a drink outdoors at Cookshop. Being one of those beautiful summer evenings that makes you want to dilly dally, I stood around schmoozing with them for a while and eventually our talk came round to the question of whether Michael Jackson or Muhammed Ali was more important in the grand scheme of things. Adam was convinced it was indisputably Jackson. I felt equally strongly it was Ali. Roy seemed to be somewhat on the fence.

I know that photographically speaking, there's no question that from a visual art point of view, the wealth of great images of Ali blows Michael Jackson away.

Your feelings please.