Weekend Guide

With the opening of the fall art season upon us, I figured I might as well show what's going on right here in the heart of New York gallery land instead of the usual Weekend Video.

And as you'll see, there's a decidedly mixed bunch of shows. So if I sound a little cranky, well - you be the judge of whether it's warranted or not.

My first stop - literally across the road - was Mitchell-Innes & Nash and a show of new work by Martha Rosler. Rosler has been an important figure in art since the 1960's, working in video, photography, installation, and photomontage. Her series "Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful" (1967-72), which combined scenes of war with images of domestic comfort and style is probably her best known work. Now, in the wake of the U.S. involvement in Iraq, Rosler has revisited the photomontage format, updating it to reflect the new technologies of war and today's consumer culture.

Dare I say it was a little obvious for my taste, but for those interested in the better giveaways - the large poster (below) is being handed out free.

Whether by design or coincidence, Galerie Lelong which is next door to Mitchell-Innes & Nash, also has a photomontage show by a significant artist - in this case new work by Jane Hammond. Of particular interest are several large "snapshot" works in which Hammond has collected vernacular portraits and inserted herself into each one, presenting the viewer with a panoramic album containing an array of identities. Some of the other single collages also make for a interesting reconsideration of a genre not widely seen these days.

A block away, Bruce Silverstein presents his now annual offering where 10 well-known curators select 10 young photographers. The problem with organizing this kind of show is that you're stuck with whatever the curator chooses, and not unexpectedly the offerings are a very mixed bag, but the idea is a good one and if I had to pick my favorite it would be the Dutch photographer Rob Hornstra and his portraits from post-communist Russia.

Installation shot (below) followed by Hornstra:

At Sikkema Jenkins & Co., the normally interesting Vik Muniz takes a real misstep with a show titled "Verso" which consists of painstakingly crafted 3-dimensional recreations of the backs of famous paintings and their frames, labels, etc.. Laid out on the floor on wooden blocks they look boring and give off nothing. But don't worry - it gets better ... and worse!

Case in point for better: a show at Carolina Nitsch Project Room of a collection of seminal Japanese postwar photography books. While it seems that everyone has been all over Japanese photography, the show is done with great care and even includes a video projection of every page of every one of the many books that make up the collection.

Installation shot followed by a close-up of a rare Sugimoto accordion fold book:

At Sonnabend, Jean-Baptiste Huynh fails to get away with a shameless rip-off of Richard Misrach's seminal sky pictures, the only difference being a slightly more square format, a larger edition, and double the price. The pictures are 40,000 euros - sacre bleu!

At 535 West 22nd Street, Julie Saul shows Jeff Whetstone's large scale photographs of caves in Tennessee and Alabama that were mined for the saltpeter that was used to produce gunpowder in the civil war. These caves have since become hideaways for both explorers and teenagers as well as a waiting canvas for anything from love notes to graffiti. So much of the point of the pictures is the relationship between early cave drawings and the markings left today.

In the same building, an unusually restrained but typically elegant show of work by Masao Yamamoto - he of the pinned up distressed little silver prints. However, as you'll see, a few more works might have been in order here!

For some reason, meteorites are the thing this month. Jean-Baptiste Huynh has photographs of them at Sonnabend, and at D'Amelio Terras Gallery, Demetrius Oliver comes up with this boring combo. As the press release so helpfully explains:

Through large-scale photography, sculpture, slide-projection, and video, Observatory articulates a visual form for the cycles of thought, investigation, and experimentation endemic to artistic practice and self-discovery. Relying on materials encountered in daily routine and capturing their reflections off of curved surfaces, Oliver redeploys prosaic objects to unveil new contexts and sites of meaning ....

One day soon I promise to publish the best meaningless sentences from gallery press releases.

There's always a hip show of the moment and right now it's Roe Etheridge at Andrew Krepps. Etheridge is one of those photographers who works both the art and commerce side of photography and he seems to be quite influenced by the innovative color photographer of the 1930s, Paul Outerbridge. Again I could do without the conceptual layering with which the show is presented (something about Far Rockaway) but I particularly liked the photo of Etheridge's wife, Nancy.

And there's another good giveaway if you like poster size prints. (See bottom image.)

Alessandra Sanguinetti (at Yossi Milo) continues her series begun in 1999 following two young Argentinian cousins -Guillermina and Belinda. Having cultivated an intimate and collaborative relationship with the pair, Sanguinetti's images seem both fantastical and surreal as the girls transition from childhood to adulthood.

And the promised low point ... well, what can one really say about Andre Serrano's new show at Yvon Lambert (other than that it's a load of crap)? Or in this case different animal feces. Serrano who came to prominence as a result of his controversial image of a plastic crucifix submerged in urine (a surprisingly complex and interesting work) seems to have gone the route of the immature art school provocateur. And yet if my take on the contemporary art world is correct, he'll do O.K. with this show. Nevertheless, the thing I'd like to to see is the process by which a contemporary art collector comes in, selects, and purchases the work. That would help answer the pressing question - who buys this shit?

While Joel Sternfeld tries his best to deliberately avoid the picturesque in his photographs of a field in central Massachusetts, I was most drawn to the more picturesque of his un-picturesque pictures. Sternfeld was being televised as I walked into the gallery (Luhring Augustine) which I figured was as interesting as anything else going on and took a shot.

And finally ... phew! ... my last stop at Michael Mazzeo Gallery (formerly PEER) where they were still hanging the group show "How I Spent My Summer Vacation". What particularly caught my eye was the bottom picture by Cara Phillips - on one hand a head shot taken with ultra-violet light to reveal the damage sun can inflict to the skin, but on the other hand a visceral, luminous, interesting, original, and beautifully printed piece! And for those interested in the latest technology, it's apparently an example of the very latest digital black and white printing process.

The Circle of Life

Photos by Ina Fassbender. REUTERS

I've always tried to make this blog about positive things, but Brent Stirton's pictures of the slain gorillas were so powerfully and sensitively done (as well as conveying the respect for life and courage of the villagers carrying the bier) that I felt no qualms about posting them. However, as something of an antidote to the cruelty pictured yesterday, here are some much more cuddly and life-affirming animal pictures of the siberian tiger Shakyra and one of her five two-day old cubs at their enclosure at the Hamm Zoo in Germany. The birth of five tiger babies last Wednesday was completely unexpected, as the zoo had not even known that Shakyra was pregnant! But clearly mother and child are doing well, and the circle of life goes on.

Brent Stirton

Congratulations to photographer Brent Stirton of Getty Images. On Friday, Stirton won the 2008 Visa d'Or Award for feature photography at the prestigious yearly Festival pour L’Image in Perpignan, France, for his acclaimed project on the slaughter of gorillas in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Coming on the heels of Stirton’s being revealed as the photographer who took the Brangelina twins pictures that raised close to $20 milion for the Jolie-Pitt Foundation – it’s been quite a year. (In response to questions about the difference between the two shoots, Stirton had a smart response. “Photojournalism is education for change, Jolie-Pitt is about finance for change. Once you’ve seen the hospitals and clinics that money has built there’s no problem.”)

A brief history of the Virunga gorilla pictures: Last July, Stirton photographed the bodies of seven endangered mountain gorillas who had been murdered, execution-style, in the Virunga National Park. After discovering the bodies, many of which had been hacked and burned, park rangers and villagers covered the mutilated parts of the bodies with leaves and carried them on biers out of the jungle.

Virunga National Park is in the same region where researcher Diane Fossey studied the gorillas — and battled poachers four decades ago, before being killed herself. But the 2007 killings bore none of the hallmarks of poachers, who usually take the adult animals' heads and hands as trophies, and carry off the gorillas' young for sale on the black market. These victims were simply slaughtered — most likely as a warning message that Stirton has come to believe is part of an ongoing struggle over illegal charcoal production in the park's ancient hardwood forests — a struggle that involves corrupt wildlife park officials, Congolese army factions and the Hutu militia. A leading wildlife official is currently charged with the crime but has yet to be
found guilty.

The story is on one hand a microcosm of the war in the Congo and the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. But it is also a story of horrendous cruelty and inhumanity and of a moving human response.

In a recent NPR interview, Stirton described how the procession taking the gorillas' bodies from Virunga was unlike anything he'd seen in more than a decade of covering some of the planet's worst atrocities.

"I've never seen that degree of stoicism, or sobriety, or somberness," Stirton says. "There was no talking. ... For many moments at a time the only thing you could hear was the sound of people walking. ... I've never seen that before, even when people were collecting the bodies of humans, when I've seen massacre sites."

Is anyone else reminded of the scenes of Aslan's death from "The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe" (or other pictorial analogies) in these desperately sad pictures?

Meanwhile, mountain gorillas are among the world's most endangered species; only an estimated 720 of the primates remain alive today.

Veruschka

One of Veruschka's most famous shoots. Veruschka, photographer Franco Rubartelli, and then stylist Giorgio di Sant'Angelo were sent into the Arizona desert by Diana Vreeland with nothing but bolts of fabric and fur, and Dynel wigs. The resulting pictures published in July 1968 have become a legendary example in creating something out of nothing.

On Friday night I went to a book opening for the $500 book Assouline have just published celebrating the fabulousness that is Veruschka. Now a remarkable 69 years old, Countess Vera von Lehndorff-Steinort (her real name) was one of the great models of the sixties. A leaping whirlwind of energy, Veruschka brought what was for the time a rarely seen strength of personality to the job and soon became one of Diana Vreeland favorite models. The book, lovingly put together by David Wills in collaboration with Veruschka, is one of the few books that justifies its size and expense. (FYI - you can get it for about $150 less on Amazon.)

Veruschka’s background was dramatic and sad. Her father was a German army reserve officer and her mother a Countess. Her childhood was spent living in great wealth on an enormous estate, however, when she was five years old, her father, a member of the German Resistance, was executed for attempting to assassinate Adolf Hitler. After his death, the remaining family members spent their time in labor camps until the end of World War II, when her family was left penniless.

After studying art in Hamburg, she moved to Florence, where she was discovered at age 20 by the photographer Ulo Mulas. At over 6 feet tall, it was hard for Vera (as she was then known) to find work, but in 1961 she was spotted by Eileen Ford and in 1961 she moved to New York city to join the prestigious Ford Agency.

Work was still hard to come by for someone as distinctive looking as Vera so she returned to Europe with the self-imposed mission of reinventing herself. She changed her name to Veruschka, embraced her height and strength, and was soon brought to the attention of director Michelangelo Antonioni who immediately cast her in his 1966 film “Blow Up”. Her powerful five minute performance as a model in a rough and tumble with the photographer played by David Hemmings turned out to be all she needed to jump start her career. Bookings soon followed and she started earning up to $10,000 a day working with the best photographers in the world – an unheard of sum in those days.

Around this time, itching to create her own artistic work, she started posing nude wearing only body paint covering her entire body. Directing the entire process, she would paint herself as different animals or imaginary creatures, or create a painstaking trompe l’oeil that would allow her to completely disappear into the background. While the work was often published and exhibited, it failed to gain a serious hold in the art world most likely because of the difficulty of getting a model’s own artwork taken seriously.

In 1975, Veruschka turned her back on the fashion industry (reputedly due to disagreements with Grace Mirabella, the newly appointed editor-in-chief of Vogue, who wanted to change her image to make her more relatable to the average women). She moved to Berlin where she has continued to make her own work, and where she is regularly amused by the many requests she gets to return to modeling – now as a celebrated muse.

From "Blow Up"

Leaping for (and with) Avedon

Early body work - in collaboration with photographer Franco Rubartelli

A LIFE cover from 1968

Franco Rubartelli for Yves Saint Laurent

Veruschka by Nan Goldin. 2008.

Some snaps of the book from the book party:

Weekend Video - Dylan Interview

For those who have seen the Todd Haynes film "I'm Not There" this clip of an interview with the real Dylan is a startling confirmation of how amazingly Cate Blanchett inhabited the role. For those who haven't yet seen the film - a reminder to see it now that it's out on DVD.

Garry Winogrand - Part 2

Reading John Szarkowski's quote about Garry Winogrand - that his ambition was "through photography to know life" - was a felicitous find as I just uncovered a disc of images that had been offered to me years ago. They were a large group of early pictures the photographer had taken of his first wife, Adrienne, and their children - Laura and Ethan. What struck me then and perhaps even more now is the way they combine Winogrand's distinctive off-kilter vision with the kind of snaps many parents take. Not all the pictures in the group were good, yet each of the ones I'm illustrating here seem to me remarkable. Loving but probing, gentle yet removed.

Garry Winogrand - Part 1

One of the most interesting shows of the forthcoming season looks to be “Garry Winogrand – The Sixties” at the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco. The invitation, like all their invitations, is compelling and original, and beautifully done, so I have reproduced all four pages - above and below.

I also came across this uncredited biography of Winogrand on the Temple University website. I thought it was worth copying whole, but if you have to skim, don’t miss out on John Szarkowki’s final quote. As always, he said it better than anyone.

Garry Winogrand's too short career defined street photography for future generations of photographers. He made photos of New York City and it's inhabitants. He traveled the country is search of America. He captured the banalities, the excitement and the complex social realities of a modern city. Winogrand shot incessantly, at the time of his death he had over 2500 rolls of undeveloped film, over 6500 rolls of film that had not been contact printed and 300 contact sheets that showed no signs of being edited. This was a total of over 300,000 photographs that he had taken but not bothered to look at.


His subjects were drawn from life around him and frozen in time by his distinctive style of using a wide angle lens, a close approach to his subject and tilting the frame. He didn't like to use a long lens to isolate his subject against a background; rather he made the background part of the image to give the subject context. His photographs caught the critical moment when unrelated activities coincided against a background. Many of photographs imply, but don't show action. They exist before an event, anticipating the event about to occur.

Winogrand was born in 1928 in a predominantly working class Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx borough of New York City. Winogrand developed his habit of wandering city streets early on in his life because of his family’s crowded apartment. He would keep this habit all through his life.

He spent two years, 1946-47, as a US Army weather forecaster stationed in Georgia. He returned to New York City after his discharge and decided to become an artist. He enrolled in a painting course at Columbia University. His classmate George Zimbel introduced Winogrand to, as he put it, “the magic of photography.” Winogrand was hooked as he watched one of Zimbel’s prints magically appear in the developer tray. He immediately dropped the painting class to pursue photography. Winogrand was usually broke so he continued to “borrow” the darkroom at Columbia as long as he could. He went on to “borrow” paper and chemicals from his friends in order to keep working.

He received a scholarship to study with Alexey Brodovitch at the New School for Social Research. Brodovitch, an influential editor at Harper’s Bazaar, taught many of the great photographers to emerge from New York City in the 40’s and 50’s. Brodovitch enjoined his students to reject the old clichés of photography. He told them, if they recognized the picture they saw through the viewfinder, do not press the shutter. Winogrand learned this lesson well and based his whole life on searching for new ways to photograph his subjects.

Winogrand eventually got a job as a stringer for the Pix agency. He gained access to a darkroom and an office where he could talk with other photographers. One of the other photographers, Ed Feingersh introduced Winogrand to the agent Henrietta Brackman, probably because he was tired of Winogrand “borrowing” materials all the time. She got Winogrand commissions shooting various general interest stories for Colliers and Argosy. The work he did for the magazines was typically generic. Winogrand was later dismissive of his photojournalistic work because it was so generic and didn’t have the stamp of his individual style. Some of his work during this period did stand out including his photos of the beach at Coney Island and the 1955 feature on the ‘El Morocco’ nightclub.

Winogrand decided to take a trip across America in 1955. He was introduced to Walker Evan’s book, ‘American Photographs’ by his friend Dan Weiner. It had such a profound effect on Winogrand that his trip was far less photographically successful than Robert Frank’s trip the same year. According to the article by Peter Marshall, “he produced few pictures (because he was) – probably overawed by the work of Evans.” Frank’s’ trip would result, a few years later, in his book The Americans. This book would also be another strong influence on Winogrand.

The Cuban missile crisis in 1962 was an important turning point in Winogrand’s life. He was caught up, like many others at the time, in feelings of desperation that nuclear war could bring about the end of civilization. In typical fashion he took to the streets to walk off his worries. He came to the realization that, according to Szarkowski that “he was nothing … powerless, insignificant, helpless … and so was free to lead his own life.” This powerful liberation allowed him to escape from his political affiliations and the strict ethical structures of his Jewish family life. From then on he dropped all his political activities and began the process of divorcing his first wife. Marriage was never a success for Winogrand because he was too self-centered to make it work. After his divorce he single-mindedly devoted himself to pushing the boundaries of photography.

During the 60s magazine work dried up and he turned to advertising photography to support himself. His work in this field was competent but not outstanding because he refused to take the work seriously. He married a second time to a copywriter at one of the agencies he worked for but it was short-lived.

Winogrand had his first gallery show in New York in 1959. He took part in two prestigious shows in the 60s at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. The first was Five Unrelated Photographers with Ken Heyman, George Krause, Jerome Lieblin and Minor White in 1963. In 1967 he participated in the New Documents show that featured him with Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander. Winogrand didn’t make a big impression until the 1967 show curated by John Szarkowski, who later became an editor and reviewer of his work. The books The Animals (1969) and Public Relations (1977) would later confirm his as a master photographer.

The public recognition gained from the shows lead to invitations to lecture and lead workshops along with increased print sales. He received a second Guggenheim grant to take pictures showing events arranged for the media. This work was later shown and published as Public Relations. This book was considered his most polished work because of the editing work of photographer Tod Papageorge.

In 1972 he married for a third time and took his first permanent teaching post the following year at the University of Texas at Austin. He stayed in Texas for five years but produced very little work because of teaching and preparing his two books Women are Beautiful and Public Relations. He was commissioned to photograph the Fort Worth Dallas Fat Stock Show and later produced the book Stock Photographs from those pictures. Almost all of his work from this period was a series of airport photographs made while traveling.

Winogrand had a very bad year in 1975, both personally and professionally. His book, Women are Beautiful, was badly received by critics and the public. John Szarkowski discusses the pain of public indifference in his book Winogrand, Figments of the Real World: "A collection of Winogrand's pictures of women in public places, mostly made during the decade of he sixties, was published in 1975 as ‘Women Are Beautiful.’ Winogrand's own appreciation of women was enthusiastic and undemanding, and he naively assumed that the rest of the world, at least the rest of the male world, would be eager to buy a book of photographs of anonymous, fully-dressed women walking down the street. His expectations of commercial success were disappointed."

When he quit smoking because of a thyroid condition that required urgent surgery he gained 50 pounds. He was out of the hospital only a few months when he was injured in an accident at a football game. He ended up under a pile of players on the sideline with a broken leg and a smashed knee. His recuperation was slow and it was some months before he was back to work.

In 1978 he moved to California when he received his third Guggenheim grant to photograph that state. He continued his California project although it was interrupted by various trips abroad but he seemed to lose interest in seeing the results of his work. In February of 1984 Winogrand rushed to see a doctor because of abdominal pain. He died six weeks later from inoperable gall bladder cancer.

According to John Szarkowski, Director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art since 1962 and a longtime friend and supporter of Winogrand, "The technical decline of the last work was perhaps accelerated by Winogrand's acquisition, in 1982, of a motor-driven film advance for his Leicas, which enabled him to make more exposures with less thought. On the same day he acquired an eight-by-ten-inch view camera, an instrument that proposes a diametrically different approach to photography. The new camera was perhaps an acknowledgment that his old line of thought was nearing the breaking point. He did not use the eight-by-ten, but he talked about using it..."

Szarkowski's final words won't be applied to many, however.

"When we consider the heedless daring of his successes and his failures we become impatient with tidy answers to easy questions, and with the neat competence of much of what now passes for ambitious photography. Winogrand has given us a body of work that provides a new clue to what photography might become, a body of work that remains dense, troubling, unfinished, and profoundly challenging. The significance of that work will be thought by some to reside in matters of style or technique or philosophical posture. There is no original harm in this misunderstanding, and useful work may come of it, but it will have little to do with the work of Garry Winogrand, whose ambition was not to make good pictures, but through photography to know life."

That's LIFE!

Just announced today, the news that Time Inc. and Getty Images will jointly launch LIFE.com in early 2009.

The official announcement is couched in the corporate “we don’t quite know what we’re doing, but let’s hope it drives up our stock price” language, but the vision seems to be of millions of web users happily playing the “popular” LIFE picture puzzle, purchasing albums of their favorite photographs, and decorating their homes with digital reprints of the atom bomb and Marilyn Monroe. (Do I see a bombshell theme here?) All this, I presume, to be surrounded by ads.

Here’s the text of the official release:

New York, NY, September 23, 2008 – Time Inc. and Getty Images will jointly launch LIFE.com, the companies announced today at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s MIXX Conference in New York City. LIFE.com will be jointly owned and operated by Time Inc. and Getty Images, and will provide access to the most comprehensive iconic and professional photography collections available anywhere online. Andy Blau, president of LIFE and SVP of Time Inc. Interactive, and Catherine Gluckstein, vice president of iStockphoto and Consumer Markets at Getty Images, will serve as CEO and CFO, respectively.



“LIFE.com brings together the two most-recognized brands in photography, making the defining images of our times even more accessible to people everywhere,” said Jonathan Klein, co-founder and CEO of Getty Images. “We are thrilled to partner with Time Inc. on the launch of this exciting new venture.”

LIFE.com will offer access to thousands of new photographs from Getty Images’ award-winning photographers, including today’s news, entertainment, sports, celebrities, travel, animals and many others.

Consumers will also have access to millions of images from LIFE magazine, many of which have never been seen by the public. The collection contains the historic photos that LIFE published through the decades, in addition to many never-before-seen pictures of Hollywood stars, sports heroes, important people and events from the ‘30’s though the ‘90’s. Getty Images will be providing the majority of images at launch from its comprehensive archival and current collections. More than 3,000 new images will be uploaded daily from Getty Images.



“Image search is the fastest-growing type of online search, and LIFE.com will satisfy the public’s desire for quality and relevant imagery through a visually pleasing and easy-to-browse website,” says Blau. “Only three percent of the LIFE archive has been seen by the public,” says LIFE.com editor Bill Shapiro. “This site will put everything on display. You’ll be able to look at the biggest events of yesterday and the stories making news today with just a couple of clicks.

”

The new site, which was designed with Getty Images’ industry-leading search technology, will be easy-to-use and navigate. When the site launches in early 2009, consumers will be able to interact intimately with imagery, including printing select photos, sharing photos with friends and family, playing the popular LIFE Picture Puzzle, creating collections of photos around special interests and purchasing photo albums of user-made collections. Through the site, consumers can view the photos the world is talking about by searching for recently added photos or viewing photos by topic. Searching for and viewing images on the site will be absolutely free.



Given the literally hundreds of millions of dollars the two companies respectively lost on art.com and the recent re-launch of LIFE, this can only be seen as the triumph of hope over experience.

Summer's End

Stefano & Janet

With summer almost over, as is our tradition a small group of friends gathered on the beach in Bellport, Long Island, on Sunday to celebrate with a sunset potluck dinner.

This year, with the experience of having worked closely with The Sartorialist under my belt (as well as my sandproof and waterproof Pentax Optio W60) I paid homage to Sart with a series of full length shots. The results were so good, I thought I would share my foolproof summer portrait tips:

1. Find a beach.

2. Wait until the sun is about 10 minutes from setting.

3. Position the sun over one shoulder.

4. Stand around 15 feet away from your subject.

5. Zoom the lens so that it's the equivalent of somewhere around an 80 - 100 millimeter lens.

6. Crouch down so that the camera is at about the chest level of your subjects.

7. Compose the shot so that there's a little space below the subjects feet and about double that space above the head.

8. Shoot fast.

Phil & family

Zack

Katia & Howard

Josie & Teddy

Steve, Chapel, Suzanne, & Sophie