A Bug's Life

One more week to see Sally Gall's show "Crawl" at the Julie Saul Gallery in Chelsea.

Other than the unusual rhyming of the key words (Gall, crawl, Saul) it's an unusual view of nature taken from several inches above the ground. Gall, who has been unapologetic about her interest in beauty throughout her career, now brings a Pixar like scrutiny to a bug's eye view of the world and discovers a wondrous Eden.

She reflects, "Infants know this world for a time. Picnickers and soldiers glimpse it. There is no more dynamic stage of life and death on earth than the first few inches above its surface. This is where prairies and forests are born. Here is where the bulk of our food comes from and where all earthly creatures return when our lives are finished. Comforting, beautiful, frightening, and strange--this is the terrestrial world. And it can only be discovered and known intimately on hands and knees."

One marvels at the patience that must have been necessary to capture these images as well as the consistency and quality. It's a mid-summer treat!

Sent from my iPhone

Like the first bird of spring, the first street vendors selling Obama buttons and paraphernalia have just arrived on the streets of New York City. Of course not a penny of the proceeds will get anywhere near the Obama campaign, but what a shining example of the American way!

As further proof of democracy in action, the vendor next to the gentleman below had a smattering of McCain buttons but informed me they were selling very poorly.

Weekend Video - Beirut

I was recently introduced to the band Beirut and their two videos directed by Israeli film-maker Alma Har’el. Both the music and the visuals make a nice change of pace.

Forbidden

When someone tells me I'm not allowed to take a picture, I take it as an affront and a challenge. I haven't looked into the actual legality of the situation yet, but I'm pretty sure there's nothing wrong with photo-
graphing the former TWA Terminal at JFK (above), as I tried to do before I was stopped by security, or in the various stores, museums, and establishments who routinely tell you, "Photography is not allowed". With the advent of tiny digital and cell phone cameras it's pretty hard to enforce anyway, but here are some samples of my recent surreptitious iPhone camera work.

This from Juicy Couture in Beverly Hills, after they would not sell my daughter the bathing suit on the display dummy. (We wanted a visual reference.)

This from the revelatory August Sander show at The Getty (photography not allowed), about which I'll write more later. The title for this picture is "The Photographer after a Nap" so it's an unusual self-portrait!

This from Katsuya - a new-ish Philippe Starck designed restaurant in Brentwood. The tricky thing here was that Robert Downey Jr. was sitting at a table just to the left of the frame so I was trying to get the graphic on the wall while respecting his privacy as a diner. However, I'm sure he thought I was pretending to photograph the wall while really trying to snap him!

Greg Miller

I am in Los Angeles this week so I’ll do my best to keep posting. On
the plane over I was reading TIME Magazine when I was stopped by
the full page picture by Greg Miller (above). It’s from their current
cover story on childhood obesity.

I have known Greg since 1988 when he was photographing for the magazine 7 Days and have always been a big fan. Since then he has had a highly successful career mixing editorial and advertising work but he’s very much a picture person’s photographer. I e-mailed him when I landed to congratulate him on the TIME pic and find out what he was up to and he told me he just received a Guggenheim Grant to photograph around his hometown of Nashville. Patience and virtue have been rewarded!

For a further look at his work, his website is rich with good pictures.

From a recent series taken in Brazil.

From the series "Italy".

From the series "Band Camp".

Weekend Video - Adele

After posting "Chasing Pavements" by Adele as a Weekend Video two weeks ago, I was pleased to receive an e-mail from "Federico" pointing out that Adele had also covered the same Bob Dylan song I had featured a few weeks previously - "Make You Feel My Love". As both a completist and a great appreciater of this kind of serendipity, I'm happy to make it this weekend's video, and I hope you enjoy!

Cool Stuff!

A year ago, I stopped into Tusk - a terrific leather goods store a few blocks from the gallery - and ended up in conversation with Hiten Manseta, the owner. I was bemoaning the fact that I couldn't find a backpack that was both ergonomic and didn't look like a school bag. Anyway the result was that I ended up designing what we dubbed ”The Flatpack” for them – a thin nylon and leather backpack that rides close to your body and carries a laptop up to 15” in size. After Departures Magazine featured it, they quickly sold most of their stock, and I just found out there are only a few left in brown and black. It’s not cheap, but it’s been a lifesaver for me and my back.

The other Tusk product I can’t live without is a little leather case I use to carry my pocket digital camera. Because they keep introducing new product, this one is also nearly sold out, in fact it’s not even on their website. But if you call up and ask for it, they have a few left in their stockroom. It’s incredibly light and soft unlike most other camera cases which bulk up with unnecessary protection and defeat the notion of pocket-sized. (Squeezed flat it’s 3” x 5” so it’s only good for the smallest cameras that are around 2” x 4”.)

I've arranged a special offer for The Year in Pictures readers. If you call the store and give them the code "Danziger" you will receive a 10% discount on whatever you buy. 1.888.GET.TUSK. (438.8875.)

Paul Fusco Opening

Things don't always go smoothly. The frames for the Paul Fusco "RFK Funeral Train - Rediscovered" exhibition arrived on Thursday with the wrong plexiglass (They were supposed to have Atrium plexi - a u.v. protecting, non-reflecting plexi that costs about $300 per frame!) However, all was set right and now the show is up and ready for its grand opening tomorrow (Wednesday) night from 6-8 p.m..

By then the heat wave should have broken, we'll have the gallery nicely air-conditioned, and cold beer ready to be served. (One of my quirks - to serve little cans of beer instead of the nasty wine you usually get at openings.) So I look forward to seeing all local The Year in Pictures readers at 521 West 26th Street. There's no such thing as an opening that's too crowded!

Trouble in Paradise

Detail - see full image below text.

For almost 40 years Richard Misrach has been producing photographs of the American West focusing on man's relationship and impact on his environment. His extended series “Desert Cantos” explored many aspects of the American desert with subjects ranging from fires and floods to military-scarred terrain to luscious skyscapes.

More recently he has turned his attention to the water with a series he titled “On the Beach” photographing the ocean, sunbathers, and swimmers from a hotel balcony in Hawaii. Shot on his 8x10 inch view camera, the photographs yield exquisite detail and sense of light. But Misrach did not intend them to be just pretty pictures.

As he explained, "My thinking was influenced by the events of 9/11, as well as by Nevil Shute's 1950s Cold War novel "On the Beach". I was drawn to the fragility and grace of the human figure in the landscape. For me, the work is both a celebration of our survival and an elegy. Paradise has become an uneasy dwelling place; the sublime sea frames our vulnerability, the precarious nature of life itself."

While some of these photographs have been exhibited over the past few years, an exhibition of 19 of these photographs, some as large as 10 feet wide, has just opened at the National Gallery in Washington D.C. and is the first time that this many works from this series can be seen together. It’s a stunning and disquieting view of trouble in paradise.

Weekend Video

Given the popularity of my post on the various tribute versions of Mariah Carey’s “Touch My Body” found on YouTube, I thought I’d snoop around to see what versions of the current summer hits were popping up. To my surprise, so many of the tributes were good, I had
to resist any cheap shots and focus instead on three astoundingly strong performances.

Above – Colin Jennison backed by his brother taking a hack at Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida” two days after it's release.

Below – Salicia singing Rihanna’s “Take a Bow” and 12 year old Jessica Sanchez’s version of “Bleeding Love” by Leona Lewis.

Let Freedom Bling

I just came across Shirin Aliabadi’s work and her two series “Miss Hybrid” (above) and “Freedom Is Boring, Censorship Is Fun” (below). In Aliabadi’s pictures, the subjects are young Iranian women who in spite of the oppression of Islam seem to be defying our stereotypes and having a good time. It’s a welcome revision to our view of the Middle East.

“Freedom Is Boring, Censorship Is Fun” like Andrew Bush’s “Vector Portraits” focuses on the way we live in cars to find its insights into contemporary life. Clearly the idea is as valid in Tehran as on Interstate 405.

Aliabadi’s latest series, “Miss Hybrid”, pokes fun at the style and beauty trends among fashionista Iranians, where the current vogue is for blond hair, light-colored contact lenses, occasional facial piercing and most importantly, surgical nose tape. (It's like the current trend for faux glasses.)

“Miss Hybrid” Aliabadi suggests, should be seen as an alternative beauty manifesto positing that natural beauty is unfair, elitist, and irrelevant - while artificial beauty and the need to transform into someone else via cosmetic intervention can be regarded as a healthy exercise in cultural rebellion and global integration. Now that's an radical and original concept!

Another picture from the "Miss Hybrid" series.

A Conundrum

I’m a big fan of Patrick Smith’s work. (See images above and below.) He has a good eye, a nice sense of scale, a feeling for light, and a pleasing way of putting a picture together. But what do you do when you’re a photographer whose pictures are somewhat reminiscent of other photographers who have gotten more exposure than you? In Smith’s case, Massimo Vitali, Peter Bialobrzeski, and Walter Niedermayr in particular. These photographers all deal with large format landscape where the figure is minuscule, and where photography’s relationship to traditional landscape is explored along with man’s relationship to the environment.

It’s a problem that I’m sure affects many photographers and I guess the only advice is to keep taking pictures and looking for places to photograph that differentiate your work based on the originality and freshness of the subject/location. Skiers have pretty much been done, so have beaches. So is it off to the jungle? The desert? Liechtenstein? None of this is to say Patrick Smith is a copyist - he has a much more pictorial sensibility than the more cerebral three mentioned above - but it's an issue that can't be ignored.

In the face of so much photography, it is increasingly clear that we are in a post-post (and maybe even one more post) modern world where concept comes first followed by execution. After that it’s a race to the finish line. It doesn’t matter if you’re Hillary Clinton, the Zune, or “Infamous”. (If you’re scratching your head, “Infamous” was the second film on Truman Capote released in 2006 .)

Not Alexander Rodchenko (but almost)

How fitting that such a constructivist photograph be taken at the French Open after two of the best Russian players – Dinara Safina and Maria Sharapova – had battled it out in the fourth round. Safina (pictured above) won in three sets.

The photograph by Pierre Verdy is one of the best of its kind with its aerial perspective, strong diagonals, and wonderful strokes of footmarks breaking up the clay, not to mention Sarafina’s expression - a mix of exultation and relief.

Again, it’s a picture that appeared in black and white in The New York Sun newspaper and in color on their website, but I think it’s a no-brainer this time that the black and white version wins game, set, and match.

Pictures from a Train

I have been holding off on writing about the upcoming exhibition at my gallery - Paul Fusco’s RFK Funeral Train: Rediscovered – as the New York Times Magazine had an exclusive. But this Sunday they ran six pages on the work together with an excellent audio-visual piece on their website, so now I’m free to blog.

To put it simply and truly, these pictures are my favorite body of work in photography. They were taken on June 8, 1968, from inside the funeral train that carried Robert Kennedy’s body from New York to Washington so that he could be buried beside his brother at Arlington. The photo-
grapher Paul Fusco had been assigned the story by LOOK Magazine and on what turned out to be an unusually hot Saturday, close to a million people – black and white, rich and poor, young and old, singly and in groups - spontaneously came out to pay their respects to the man who had inspired so many Americans.

I first came across the pictures when I was Director of Magnum Photos in New York (Paul Fusco is a Magnum photographer) and was overwhelmed by their emotion, by the very American-ness of the pictures, the skill with which they were captured, the modernity of the color aesthetic, and the surprisingly uplifting response to such a tragic event. Fusco took over 2,000 pictures in the eight hours it took to make the usually four-hour journey and from this group I had the daunting but privileged task of selecting 20 images that we ultimately printed as a set of 27 inch wide cibachrome prints.

To compound the challenge and the pleasure, over the period of a year and a half that Paul and I worked on the project, we kept discovering new troves of the pictures including close to a thousand lost transparencies located by Lesley Martin of Aperture that had been sent to the Library of Congress when LOOK Magazine folded in 1971. (Aperture will be publishing a new book of the work in September.)

I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves, but I’ll also tell you the only area where Paul and I disagreed. For Paul, the event and the photographs represented the end of hope. To me they represent the indomitability of the American spirit.

One final note – the opening of this exhibition is Wednesday, June 11 from 6 to 8 p.m.. I would love to welcome all readers of this blog who can make it to attend the artist's reception of this extraordinary show.

Danziger Projects is at 521 West 26th Street. New York City. New York.

Weekend Video

The flow of talented young British female singers continues unabated with 20 year old newcomer Adele (born Adele Laurie Blue Adkins). A neo soul/jazz singer, Adele was the first recipient of the Brit Awards Critics' Choice, given to an artist who yet to release an album. A few months later, Adele released her debut album 19, which went straight to #1 in the UK charts and was certified platinum within a month of its release.

This weekend’s video shows Adele performing her hit single "Chasing Pavements" live on BBC 1's "Friday Night With Jonathan Ross"