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.

Top Ten #1 – Brandi Carlile

A singer songwriter from Seattle, Brandi Carlile takes the number one spot with her fusion of country, folk, and rock. Her first album, Brandi Carlile, released in 2005 seemed to mark her as the next Lucinda Williams, a promise that was more than met with the 2007 release of her even better follow-up The Story. Yet in spite of a big push on Grey’s Anatomy, Carlile has not yet become the big name I anticipated (which makes listening to her even cooler). Here’s a video of a very relaxed performance that gives a better sense of her style than some of her more polished videos.

Top Ten #2 – The i-phone

Just as the Walkman and the first MP3 players ushered in a new era in how we listen to music, the iPhone presages the era of the all-in-one machine in a way that I'm still not sure has been fully recognized. It is a device out of science-fiction and it's been interesting to note not only the incredible press, but also the level of skepticism and hostility. So I think it's only begun to tap its market potential. (Let's see where Apple stock is next year.)

Trying not to be caught up in the initial hype, I resisted as long as possible (about three months) but after spending long hours at the Apple Store after both my children broke their computers, I gave in. (It was fortunately just after the price drop.) But, boy, do I love my iPhone! And don’t believe the scare stories. Everything about it works flawlessly and it’s really simple to master. In order of frequency the applications I use most often are: phone, iPod, notes, photo album, camera, weather, and the link to You Tube, but my newest pleasure is using it to listen to podcasts of Studio 360 as I walk my dog. Now that’s cultural enrichment!

Top Ten #3 – What Remains

Steven Cantor’s second film about Sally Mann (his first was a 1994 Oscar nominated short) was shot over five years and largely eschews the controversy about nudity and children to focus on the creation and aftermath of Mann’s photographic studies of death. An intimate and beautifully shot feature-length documentary, the film takes you deeply but unintrusively into Mann’s personal life and ends up as a study of the life of one of our most serious and talented photographers and the challenges even a renowned artist faces. Look out for: the story and pictures of Sally and husband Larry when they first met; and the unfolding drama of Mann's Pace/MacGill exhibition.

Top Ten #4 – Blogs

As previously noted, Jorg Colberg’s Conscientious, The Sartorialist, and Alec Soth’s late blog, were not just a pleasure but an inspiration. However, to state the obvious: the entire blogosphere is simply teeming with original voices, opinions, and content. In writing this blog I often find the answer to my research on one blog which leads me to another blog, etc...

If not for blogs, how would I have known who made the bra Nicole Kidman wore on the cover of Vanity Fair? (Thank you Mr. frankufotos.) Or seen the daily photographic postings of Swedish photographer Sannah Kvist on “She Broke My Heart So I Broke Her Face”. Or even known there was a blog “For White Men Who Prefer Black Women”. (I was trying to find out who took this great period expression of pride in black beauty (below) after I saw it on another blog that was referencing Jacob Holdt’s website for “American Photographs”.) I'm still trying to find out the photographer, so blog readers, please help!

Top Ten #5 - The Sound of No Hands Clapping. By Toby Young

The second book I loved was so funny I couldn't stop laughing out loud even as I ruefully noted the diminishing number of unread pages. Toby Young was the archetypical Brit in New York whose first book, “How to Lose Friends and Alienate People”, chronicled his hapless time at Vanity Fair where among other things he invited a stripper to the office on what he was unaware was Take Your Daughter To Work Day.

The follow-up finds him improbably successful after his first book is turned into a one man play in London. He is hired by a big time Hollywood producer to write the screenplay for an un-named movie about a mysterious 70s record producer. As he learns the ways of Hollywood and screws up with regularity, Young warily gets married, has a child, and in some of the books funniest moments attends various friends’ weddings where his inappropriate toasts end up losing even more friends and alienating even more people. A heroic failure in true Brit fashion, the book provides the vicarious pleasure of seeing the Emperor, himself, reveal he has no clothes, while skewering the media, the film business, and other cultural obsessions of our time.

Top Ten #6 - When the Light Goes: A Novel. By Larry McMurtry

While the cover misleadingly uses photography to reference "Brokeback Mountain" (for which McMurtry co-wrote the Oscar winning screenplay) "When the Light Goes" is in fact the latest and fourth installment in his Thalia series. Set in Texas oil country, the series began with the 1966 “The Last Picture Show”, followed by "Texasville", and the wonderfully alliterative “Duane’s Depressed”.

“When The Light Goes” picks up Duane Moore (the Jeff Bridges character in "The Last Picture Show") at 64 - now widowed, semi-retired, and crisied in just about every way. When I told my friend the über literary agent Mark Reiter I was reading it, his comment was “Oh, the sex book!” and it’s certainly….. frank. If that’s not enough to recommend it, McMurtry's writing is so sharp and breezy it’s one of those books you race through and then makes you want to go back and read all the others in the series.

Top Ten #7 – I’m Not There – the soundtrack

Merry Christmas to all!

I’ve never defined myself as a Dylan fan and I thought the movie was a mixed success, but the soundtrack was out of this world - an eclectic mix of recording artists covering 36 Dylan songs with a bonus 37th song of Dylan himself singing the title track. Many of the artists are pretty obscure. I still don’t know who John Doe is who sings my favorite song “Pressing On”, but I’ve at least heard of some of the other contributors - Karen O, Jeff Tweedy, Sufjan Stevens, etc.. Nevertheless in combination with the film, the soundtrack re-awakened my interest in Dylan so that my Christmas viewing will now include Scorcese’s Dylan documentary.

Top Ten #8 – Project Runway

If I had to pick one television show it would have to be Project Runway. What's so fascinating about P.R. is that as the contestants grapple with the weekly challenge you really do see the creative process at work from beginning to end. Idea, struggle, solution, execution. Surprisingly, the contestants seem largely friendly and supportive of each other, although there's always some super-narcissist to stir things up, and host Tim Gunn is avuncular, helpful, and charming – all at the same time. The judges are honest and incisive and so all the tension comes organically from the simple format – who is going to make the best outfit of the week and who is going to make the worst and get voted off. It’s thrilling to watch.