Pleasure

As regular readers will know, one of my great pleasures is seeing memorable pictures in the New York Times, and this week brought some excellent ones. Above - and gracing the front page of Thursday's Arts section was this photograph by Nan Goldin (left) paired with an 1855 painting by Ary Scheffer from Goldin's new show at Matthew Marks - the result of Goldin being given free rein to browse The Louvre on the days it was closed to the public. The show is up in New York for two months. Don't miss.

Next up, from today's Sports section, this joyful victory celebration in the women's 4 x 100 meter relay captured by Mark Ralston. It's so balletic it could be a dance photograph!

On a more serious note, Magnum newcomer Mark Zachmann photographed a boat carrying 158 Libyan refugees shortly before it was stopped by the Italian coastguard. (Italy has the closest European shore to Libya.) It has the gravitas and compositional power of a great history painting.

And lastly, this week's New York Times Magazine picks up on this very blog - highlighting the Kenneth O Halloran Irish Horse Festival photographs I ran last February. Just to let you know the appreciation runs both ways!

iSad

I'm not sure if there is any category of people who were more affected by Steve Jobs' innovations than photographers and the photography minded. Everything Jobs masterminded at Apple was elegant and visual. Everything Apple innovated made life easier and better for the viewing, management, and simple pleasure of working with and looking at photographs. To say he will be greatly missed is an understatement.

But in many ways, Jobs will not be gone from Apple. He consistently put the right people in to the right positions so that his creativity, insight, marketing genius, and his ability to “Think Different” can continue. Jobs put it best himself:

“My model for business is The Beatles: They were four guys that kept each other’s negative tendencies in check; they balanced each other. And the total was greater than the sum of the parts. Great things in business are not done by one person, they are done by a team of people.”

During his life, I always thought of Jobs as arrogant. Now and as we read more and more about his personal life and thoughts, and ponder his remarkable achievements, I think he was modest.

Tokyo ctd.

Hisaji Hara

For me there's nothing quite like Tokyo. I love the way that form follows function in both the design sense and also in the sense of the formality and functionality of the place. I love the Tokyo subway. The museums. The stores. The enthusiasm and politeness towards strangers, and most of all the people I had the pleasure of meeting or dealing with. In three trips I don't think I've ever had a bad or rude experience.

To me Tokyo is a city of innovation. Everything seems to work and there are always new ideas of how do things. Cabs are plentiful. The airport buses are a model of efficiency. We all know about the toilets. Recently Tokyo introduced "Women Only" carriages on the subway so that women going to work didn't have to be hassled. Now why don't more places do that?

But back to photography. For my third Tokyo Photo fair, I tried to bring things that I thought would interest my hosts. A wall of work by 11 different western photographers new to art fairs. A Kate Moss selection. Sartorialist prints. Warhol polaroids. And a new Susan Derges piece. I'll show these later but for this post I'll concentrate on some of the many Japanese photographs that struck me as particularly good.

Above and below - the work of Hisaji Hara. A graphic designer and film-maker by background, over the last few years Hura has obsessively translated the work of the already obsessive painter Balthus into extraordinarily original photographs. As a concept, nothing could interest me less than copying painting but Hura's work has such a unique sensibility and the photographs have such a timeless feel that they are completely successful.

Hisaji Hara

Hisaji Hara

Ken Kitano

Ken Kitano's work has consistently dealt with time and layering. Here one of his sunrise to sunset pictures wherein he literally stands by his camera for a day as it captures the passage of time and light. This one is of Ground Zero at Hiroshima.

Ikko Narahara

Also new to me was the work of Ikko Narahara. This surreal but un-manipulated shot was credited by the British photographer Chris Shaw, whose work was being shown at the fair by The Tate, with inspiring him to be a photographer. More on Chris and his work later.

Anon. by way of Fiona Tam.

These anonymous photographs of Japanese schoolgirls were found at a flea market by artist Fiona Tan and became the basis of a complex video piece. But as a refection of pure Japanese visuals and culture I think they're stunning - a study of uniformity, diversity, and seriality.

Taiji Matsue

I remember liking Taiji Matsue's work two years ago. Matsue photographs from a great distance and then blows up telling details of seemingly random incidence into little squares. This was a nice installation.

Tokihiro Sato

Tokihiro Sato creates his pictures by opening the lens and moving around with a flashlight to create mysterious and magical effects. One of the ideas I heard in Tokyo (from Yoshiko Suzuki at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography) was the idea of a post 9/11 - post 3/11 (the Japanese Tsunami) sensibility in art. This works for me in that way.

Yasuhiro Ishimoto

A Chicago picture by the great Japanese photographer Yasuhiro Ishimoto from when he was at The Art Institute. If you click into it you'll see it's a picture of cars in a parking garage. One of my favorite individual pictures in the show.

Rinko Kawauchi

Rinko Kawauchi

A section of the fair was given to photographs specifically of the after effects of 3/1. The always reliably mystical Rinko was photographing the devastation when a black and white pigeon appeared - flying away only to return again. To her they symbolized life and death, hope and despair, light and dark, Adam and Eve.

Mika Ninagawa at Tomio Koyama gallery

And last but certainly not least - a group of Mika Ninagawa photographs in a back room at Tomio Koyama gallery. I have been wanting to meet Ms. Ninagawa - one of (if not) Japan's most popular photographers - for quite a while. I love her super-saturated pop take on flowers and fish and whatever else crosses her lens. She's sort of Nan Goldin meets Andy Warhol but in a completely original form. This trip I finally got the chance to go to her studio and home and I am pleased to say that I will now be representing and showing her in the U.S..

Tokyo

After being diverted overnight to Hokkaido by Hurricane Roke, I arrived in Tokyo last night with 2 hours to hang 33 pictures in my booth at Tokyo Photo 2011! Thanks to some great help from my translator/assistants we made it, but there was not a second to check out the other booths, which I will make up for shortly.

In the meantime, I always enjoy my hotel views. This is clearly not so picturesque but looking out of my window in the Nagatacho district I feel like I'm already enveloped in a contemporary Japanese photograph.

Fashion Week

As Fashion Week in New York comes to a close - a great aerial shot of the backstage preparations from London's Daily Mail. Unfortunately the photograph is only credited to Getty Images so I can't give the resourceful photographer their due credit. Please write in if you know.

Save The Date - September 15

Gloria Swanson, 1924.

You're all invited to our opening show of the season. Thursday, 6 to 8 p.m..

The show features 80 iconic Edward Steichen 8x10 contact prints made by the renowned photographer George Tice who was Steichen's last printer. In addition to the Steichens we are showing 12 rarely seen George Tice photographs in our Print Room, and George - who is truly one of photography's living legends as well as an incredibly nice guy - will be there. More on George later.

Gary Cooper, 1928.

VOGUE Fashion. 1920s.

Gertrude Lawrence, 1928.

Charlie Chaplin, 1928.

9/12

I have mixed feelings about the proliferation of 9/11 images that have flooded the airwaves and print media these past few days. Nearly every story and image is powerful and moving but at a certain point you can begin to feel you're being used.

I was looking for a photograph that meant something more than re-visiting the past when Len Prince sent me this picture. It's an iPhone snap of a contact sheet that he had never tried to print or publish but ten years later the picture makes a lot of sense.

It was taken on 9/12/01 near Ground Zero and is of the back window of a smashed-up police car that had been blown on top of another car. Someone had scrawled the date in the dust of 9/11 as both a record and - I like to think - a hope. 9/11 as we know changed everything, but it's what we do with 9/12 that counts.

For a moment it seemed like 9/12 had brought about an amazing togetherness and spirit in this country, but it didn't take long to disintegrate and go awry. Let's try to make this 9/12 something better.

Irene

Of all the snaps I've taken, this one seems to provoke the most visceral response!

It was taken around noon on August 28th as Hurricane Irene hit the south shore of Long Island. It's the view from the living room of our house on The Great South Bay, and amazingly, the water stopped about 1/4 inch short of flooding the house. What you see in this picture is The Great South Bay, and then what little lawn we have between the house and the bay.

We were very lucky.

Weekend Video

I was listening to an interview on NPR with Greg Mottola, the director of "Superbad", when they played the scene where Fogell gets his fake i.d. - one of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite summer movies. Listening to it on the radio with just the sound, I was knocked out by how good the dialog was and how one sharp line follows another. So try listening to it first without watching.

I generally have pretty highbrow/artsy taste in movies, but if you haven't seen the film I can't recommend it highly enough. It may be a teen "gross-out" comedy, but it's a near perfect movie with a great narrative, a great script, and wonderful performances from a cast who if not famous at the time have nearly all gone on stardom.

What You See is Not Always What You Get...

Over the last few years, New York Magazine has established itself as one of the leading exponents of great photography. Mixing photo-journalism, pick-up, and the creative commissioning of fine art photographers, the magazine can regularly be counted on to deliver eye-catching images. Under Director of Photography Jody Quon (a longtime deputy to the New York Times Magazine's Kathy Ryan) and Editor Adam Moss the art of matching subject and photographer is both astute and surprising.

A great example is last week's memorable picture of gender-bending model Andrej Pejic by the renowned French photographer Valerie Belin. Belin does not usually do editorial work so the choice was as inspired as the result. On the surface, it's a photographic Gainsborough portrait. A beautiful person beautifully rendered in a distinctive style, but when you understand that the subject is in fact a man, you can't help but be drawn back to study the picture in greater detail to see what clues, if any, you missed. It's "The Crying Game" in a single frame. A picture worth at least the thousand words that you can read here.

Weekend Video - Senna

By now, those of you who are sick of the monkey picture will realize I'm on something of a summer hiatus. Officially I'm back after Labor Day.

But one last post and recommendation for the summer.

"Senna" is a documentary about about the Brazilian motor-racing champion, Ayrton Senna that is being released in the States tomorrow. It explores his arrival in Formula One in the mid 1980s, and follows his struggles both on track against his rival, French World Champion Alain Prost, and off it, against the internal politics of the sport. Directed by Asif Kapadia, it was a huge success in England and won the World Cinema Audience Award for documentaries at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.

The film is a gripping story on many levels. There is the charisma of its subject, matters of spirituality, and glimpses into Brazilian culture. Beacause I knew so little about Senna and motor racing, the story kept me on the edge of my seat while the insight in to Formula One racing was a fascinating glimpse into another world.

Just see it.

Ciao for now.

Monkey Business

If MoMA was really looking to break ground in their upcoming "New Photography" series, they couldn't do much better than this amazing self-portrait taken by an un-named Indonesian macaque. I'm pretty sure he hasn't exhibited before.

David J. Slater, a British wildlife photographer, was shooting in one of Indonesia's national parks when the black-crested macaque snatched his camera equipment and became enthralled with the reflection in the camera lens. Slater shoots wildlife with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II so his DSLR lens was large enough for a clear reflection.

The macaque shot a couple hundred pictures before Slater was able to recover the equipment. And while many of the shots were out of focus, the majority of the pictures showed the monkeys showing off their teeth as it’s likely the first time they had seen their reflections. Slater said that the group of monkeys was initially frightened by the clicking sounds of the camera, but they all eventually returned to check out the gear.

The image above is actually a cropped version of the full frame below, but I like the directness of this version, the tension between the caricature of a smile and the sadness of the eyes, and the blunt geometry of the composition. Inadvertent or not, I'd still rank it as one of the most powerful and moving photographic self-portraits I've seen.

Totally Gratuitous Weekend Video

While we're in the Hamptons doing the Art Hamptons art fair (this Thursday through Sunday), a little video showing that our Kate has lost neither her good looks or her sense of humor!

And if any one would like to visit the art fair (it's in Bridgehampton) here's a link to get you a free pass for two: click here.

July 4th.

We all take firework pictures but not many as successful as those by Pierre LeHors, a young American (in spite of the name) photographer I was introduced to by David Strettel of Dashwood Books.

I was looking for some unusual pictures for a client's summer house and Strettel pointed out LeHors' book "Firework Studies".

As LeHors says in his artist's statement, "By constraining nearly all tonal values to stark blacks and pure whites, the trails, explosions and clouds of debris are reduced to a series of simple repeated formal elements: arced lines, spherical bursts, and randomly dispersed particles. i made no effort to limit digital artifacts resulting from pushing the image files past their conventional range; the resulting noise becomes hard to distinguish from the texture of the fireworks themselves."

We ended up selecting a group of 8 to hang in a grid, but rather than print them photographically LeHors chose to make silkscreens of each image thereby pushing the tonal values and painterly qualities even further. Anyway, it worked out really well and if you're interested, the book can be purchased at Dashwood. Just click here.

And happy 4th!

Dog Days

Growing up, one of the sweetest dogs I knew was a Pit Bull named Oliver. So I was pleased to find via Yahoo a photographic reminder that the Pit Bull was not always the feared dog it is these days. Apparently in the late 19th and early 20th Century, the Pit Bull was even known as "The Nanny Dog" because of its steadfastness and reliability.

This is a case where photographic evidence presents the most convincing proof. And the further you dig, the more supporting data you find. So here just a few images in defense of the breed.

One Thousand Pictures

At 8pm tomorrow, HBO will premiere the documentary, "One Thousand Pictures" - a film by Jennifer Stoddart that tells the story of Robert Kennedy's funeral train through the stories of many of the people who waited to see it, and in particular, through the recollections and photographs of Paul Fusco who was on the train tirelessly taking pictures of the vast cross section of Americans who came to pay their respects to the assassinated Senator and hope of many.

As I never tire of saying, Fusco's pictures are to me the greatest series in American photography, so it's interesting that the film doesn't see things from a photographic perspective. But that's its strength. It simply tells a deeply moving, sometimes shocking, and improbably nostalgic story. It's a worthy companion to Fusco's masterwork and should not be missed.

The Variations

Two weeks left to see the latest development in the ongoing and fascinating career of Edward Mapplethorpe at the Michael Foley Gallery in New York.

In a career now entering its third decade, Mapplethorpe (the younger brother of Robert) has continually pushed the boundaries of what constitutes a photograph - moving from classical black and white portraits and still lives (which I have to remind people were as influential to his brother as his brother was to him) to photograms, to what is essentially painting with photographic material.

In his current work, titled "The Variations", Mapplethorpe has moved into Pollockian territory dripping and pouring photographic chemicals onto black and white photo paper with a mixture of spontaneous and controlled action. The densely layered abstractions were in part inspired by the artist's fascination with the classical pianist Glenn Gould and his iconoclastic re-interpretation of J. S. Bach’s "Goldberg Variations". When you enter the room you can feel the energy and dynamism that comes with breaking barriers.

The Dance Goes On

Some of you may remember this post I did a few months ago about the above Muybridge gravure. Well so did the folks at 20 x 200 - a great web business which specializes in high quality but low cost photographs and prints. Founder Jen Bekman (we're mutual admirers) read the post and asked me if they could do an edition and as: a) it's long been in the public domain, and b) I believe it's an image well worth sharing - I agreed, thus launching their first reproduction as opposed to original art edition.

20 x 200's formula is simple - they create an edition with large numbers of small prints at a super-reasonable cost, and as the print gets bigger the edition size decreases while the cost goes up. So you can get an 8 x 10" print for $20 and larger prints anywhere from $200 to above $2,000 depending on the work and size.

The Muybridge sold out immediately in the 8 x 10, is close to selling out in the 16 x 20 (at $200), but there are still a number available in the 11 x 14 size (at $50). If you're interested you can click here to view and/or buy. As I say in their text - it's now going to be my own go-to wedding present for friends embarking on married life!

Surf's up - (again) !

Hey - it's that time of year! Do you want to be looking at dreary black and white urban landscapes or pictures of sun, surf, and sport?

If you feel like the latter, there's a new book coming out covering a yet un-chronicled subsection of surf culture. In the 1980s while New York was witnessing the birth of the Hip Hop movement, Newport Beach was experiencing a counter culture of its own. At a small stretch of beach nicknamed “Echo Beach” a new look and style emerged in conjunction with the more bold and aggressive direction the sport was taking. Neon colors and pattern replaced the boho look of the 1970s. The Californification of the world was beginning.

Photographer Mike Moir was there recording the scene. And now in the publishing equivalent of a super-group Quiksilver and Chronicle Books will be releasing “The Eighties at Echo Beach,” written by Jamie Brisick, and designed by none other than frequent guest contributor to this blog, surf archivist, design superstar, and my good friend Tom Adler.

The book is not coming out until later this summer, but for those who can't wait, Partners & Spade are previewing the book and have a few advance copies at their Great Jones Street office/gallery. There's an opening tonight and the space is open to the public on weekends. There will also be a sneak peak at Adler and Danziger Projects' latest collaboration - a set of four new surf related graphic works about which more later.

P.S.

As so often happens, while Googling around on the subject I came across these pictures by surf photographer Chris Sardelis. Nice work.