Of Grace Longoria, Dolphins, and Unicorns

Our Tanyth Berkeley show opened on Friday to big crowds and a wildly positive response. How do I know this? We served 350 glasses of wine and sold several pictures – the latter being a rarity at openings where usually only the former takes place. The star of the night, however, had to be Grace herself who dazzled and mesmerized all who came into contact with her. To give a sense of her in motion, here’s a picture of her taken from her Facebook page. A star has many points!

Tanyth once said to me that Grace was like a unicorn. And then lo and behold, a friend of Grace’s posted a story on her wall about an albino pink dolphin spotted near the Gulf of Mexico. “Like finding a unicorn” was the comment. I looked up the story and somehow it all seems to fit together.

Weekend Video - Don't Bring Me Down

I was running on the treadmill plugged into my i-pod shuffle when this song came on. It's the version of the Beatles' "Don't Let Me Down" from the film "Across the Universe" which I know I've raved about at least once before. But connected to the music in the way you are when you run with headphones I was struck again by how the interpretations of the songs not only revitalized them but in many cases actually improved them. Let me know what you think.

Camera Review - Panasonic DMC TZ5

A completely unsolicited review. Last night was my daughter's class performance of "The Pirates of Penzance" so I grabbed a camera I bought about a year ago, the Panasonic DMC-TZ5, and shot a bunch of pictures with the flash off. I didn't think much about it, until I downloaded the pictures, and then I was completely amazed by the quality of these totally automated snaps.

I'll let the pictures speak for themselves (you can click on the images to see them at full size) but technically speaking, I was zoomed about halfway in, shooting at the full picture size of 9MB, in regular automated shooting mode. I have not done anything to the files and bear in mind that posting a picture somehow always seems to slightly flatten out and diminish the image.

The camera is just slightly bigger than a deck of cards and when closed, the lens protrudes about 3/8 of an inch from the body, making it just out of true pocket size. That quibble is of course more than compensated for by the quality of the pictures. And it takes pretty good video too!

Animal Planet

Alexander Safonov.
 Common dolphins charging a 'ball' of bait during the sardine run off the east coast of South Africa.

Here at The Year in Pictures, we always enjoy a good animal picture (and we've been incredibly busy setting up the new gallery) so to keep things fresh and for a change of pace are a selection of some of the shortlisted wildlife images from the Sony World Photography Awards.

Ken Conger. A gathering of bald eagles in South Alaska.

Alejandro Jose De Oliveira Sanchez. Jellyfish.

Federico Veronesi. African elephants in Amboseli National Park, Kenya.

Lisa Maree Williams. 
A joey koala clutches a fake substitute mother at the Australian Wildlife hospital, the largest wildlife hospital in the world, Queensland, Australia.

Tanyth & Grace

Grace, 2008.

I first met Tanyth Berkeley in 1997 when she was working as an intern to Sheila Metzner who I represented at the time. The Metzner Studio was always a fun place to visit – imbued with Sheila’s zen spirit and good humor – but I never really knew Tanyth in any way other than as Sheila’s assistant.

Fast forward to 2005 and I was passing by Bellwether Gallery on 10th Avenue and saw that Tanyth Berkeley was about to have her first solo show opening that night. I went in to get a sneak preview and was literally stunned by how good the work was. The show was called “Love Parade” and consisted of a room lined with portraits of unusual looking young women Berkeley had met and persuaded to pose for her outdoors in city parks. She called her subjects "Orchidaceae" and the photo-
graphs looked at these women as rare blooms - inviting the viewer to ponder their own response while questioning traditional notions of beauty.

Berkeley's unique style combined both painterly effect and photographic clarity in new and distinctive ways. Influenced by artists from Toulouse-Lautrec and Egon Schiele to Diane Arbus - the work signaled the arrival of an original and wholly contemporary new vision, and was recognized as such when the Museum of Modern Art selected Berkeley for their "New Photography" show in 2007.

While Berkeley moved on to various other subjects – she continued to regularly photograph one of her original "orchids", Grace Longoria, a striking albino of Mexican descent who Berkeley once described as "a combination of Marilyn Monroe and the moon". Their initial chance encounter set the stage for an ongoing relationship which has now lasted seven years. It occurred to me a while ago that this might make for a strong and original show.

I put the idea to Tanyth and Bellwether’s owner, Becky Smith, and everyone was eager to do it. By a happy coincidence, it is also the inaugural exhibition of my new space at 534 West 24th Street. So, again, please try to see the show and if you’re anywhere near please come to the opening on Friday, March 13, 6 – 8 p.m. where you’ll get to meet Tanyth and Grace and see the new gallery.

For people not used to working with the photographers, their articulateness can sometimes be surprising, so I’ll end with what I thought was a lovely thing Tanyth had to say about Grace – that she saw her “as a symbol of the infinite and unique possibilities of the natural world”.

From Berkeley's first shoot with Grace in 2004.

One of the photographs exhibited at MoMA.

One of the most recent photographs taken less than a month ago.

Weekend Video - Nouvelle Vague, Part 2

A while back I posted the band Nouvelle Vague's video cut to the dance scene from Godard's "Bande a Part". It was a big hit and now either the band (or perhaps Matthias Heuermann who posted the above) have set another Nouvelle Vague song to Godard - in this case putting N.V's version of "Dancing with Myself" to the dance scene in "Vivre sa Vie".

Yo can see the original scene from the film below, and at the very bottom for any who missed it, the Nouvelle Vague/"Bande a Part" video that started it all off.

A Masterpiece by Helen Levitt

New York, 1988. Helen Levitt

While my inbox is flooded with images every day, it never bothers me as a picture takes so little time to look at. The only problem is that most of the images rarely stand out or move me. Yesterday, however, this Helen Levitt popped up advertising a new show at the Kahmann Gallery in Amsterdam and it just struck a chord with me.

Levitt, now 95, has been photographing for 70 years and is best known for her black and white street photographs of children at play. Cartier-Bresson was her friend and mentor and like him, she bought a small Leica camera in 1936, which enabled her to move quickly and freely through the streets of New York. Her color work only came to light recently, but like her fellow New York School photographer, Saul Leiter, the color work is a revelation, bringing a wonderful painterly quality to what is otherwise highly photographic work.

There's so much going on in this picture - the children's dilemma, the fabric of the woman's dress, the incidental action outside of the rectangle of the phone booth and the strange way it breaks up the picture, the intersecting lines of color, the abstract texture of the sidewalk, and of course above all the humor of the situation. Now that's a picture!

Oh Baby!

People often ask me for recommendations for a wedding photographer - which is way too much of a responsibility for me to take on – and so I always pass. When it comes to baby pictures, however, I have no hesitation in recommending Edward Mapplethorpe (yes, he is Robert’s younger brother) who has always been a talented photographer in his own right as well as having made largely unsung contributions to his brother’s work. Edward has tackled just about every subject – nudes, abstracts, conceptual work – but he’s been photographing children for close to 20 years. He insists on taking the pictures on or about the child’s first birthday. (He likes them sitting up.) And while he only shows the parents one or two frames from the shoot, as far as I know, he’s never had to show more.

What I like about his children is that they’re neither cutesy or little adults, but somewhere in-between. And if you get a crying picture, there’s always a smiling one to go with it.

You can contact Edward at edward@edwardmapplethorpe.com.

Goodbye to all that...

About six months ago, the photographer Joseph Holmes e-mailed me to see if I would let him photograph my workspace for his ongoing series of that name. As I like both my workspace and Joe's work, I was happy to co-operate and now his picture (above) is about to be all that remains as a visual record of where I've sat for the last five years, often writing this blog!

I'm indulging in a reflective moment because today is my last day sitting here before I move the gallery two blocks south to a new street front space on West 24th Street. (I'm following Rahm's advice and going counter economic trend!) The collage of pinned up images, notes, etc., are the accumulation of that period of time - a combination of to-do's, invitations, and memorable cards and images. I guess it's what is generally called an "inspiration board" and I've always thought a book of different people's inspiration boards would be a worthwhile project to put together. (Any publishers who like the idea should feel free to contact me!)

It's been a swell five years at 521 West 26th Street, but I like change (and hope). So I'm looking forward to another five years at 534 West 24th Street and you can be sure I'll be keeping you posted on my own shows as well as the other stuff that grabs me. (Nevertheless, I was pleased to see that on The Photo Blog Triangle recently posted by Jorg Colberg I was halfway between "Comment" and "Curate" and far from "Promote".)

But mark this Friday, March 13th, in your books and if you're anywhere near please come by our opening of our Tanyth Berkeley show - which will open Danziger Projects' program on West 24th Street.

Weekend Video

The art of the raconteur is not much in evidence these days, but every once in a while you stumble across a great story teller. I was watching David Letterman last month when his guest was Zach Braff and I thought he was so charming and funny and self-deprecatory that without knowing much about him or having seen his movie or t.v. show, I became a fan based solely on this.

Postcard from L.A.

A quick trip to Los Angeles began by meeting up with my friend Tom Adler. Our plan was to meet for lunch at The Getty - I was coming from Long Beach airport, he was driving down from Santa Barbara - and amazingly we both pulled up to the Getty front gate at exactly the same time! So the premonition was for a good day and the Getty did not disappoint with a delicious lunch in the cafeteria (I highly recommend their fresh taco plate) and two excellent photography shows.

The first - a small show titled "In Focus: The Portrait" - covers a wide range of photographic portraits from the 19th Century to the end of the 20th including formal portraits, "intimate" pictures, and documentary photographs. It was an excellent and provocative selection, but annoyingly The Getty does not allow you to take pictures (and have very few on their website) so most of the pictures you see here were snapped surreptitiously before different guards asked me to stop. Nevertheless it added a touch of excitement to the experience!

The Getty (like the Met) also has wonderfully lucid wall texts and one in particular seemed worth sharing - a quote from Richard Avedon which accompanied his diptych portrait of Francis Bacon: "A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he's being photographed and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he's wearing or how he looks. He's implicated in what's happening and he has a certain real power over the result." Very Avedonian!

I've purposefully left the top picture without a caption because it may surprise some of you. You'll find the answer at the bottom of this post.*

A Young Girl in Ennis, Ireland, Dorothea Lange, 1954

Marlene Dietrich. Cecil Beaton. 1930s.

The second and larger show at The Getty was "Dialogue among Giants: Carleton Watkins and the Rise of Photography in California". Weston Naef's final show as the museum's director of photography, it's a thorough and exhilarating survey that includes Watkins' mammoth plate camera (about the size of a car) and many if not all of my favorite Watkins photographs. Unfortunately it's only up through March 1.

Yosemite Valley from the "Best General View, 1866" No. 2

Cypress Tree at Point Lobos, Monterey County, 1883 - 1885

An atypical, but one of my favorite Watkins pictures - "Late George Cling Peaches, Kern County, 1889".

*And the answer to the top picture: Georgia O'Keeffe by Alfred Stieglitz!

Get Back!

Sometimes themes just present themselves. A bevy of backs began with an e-mail from the photographer David Schoerner informing me he had recently started working on a series of photographs inspired by the 1988 painting "Betty" by Gerhard Richter. (That's Schoerner above and Richter below.) Then the next thing you know back views are popping up everywhere!

This from Stuart O'Sullivan:

A trio of fashionable backs from The Sartorialist:

A pair of images showing what it takes to work at French Vogue from Tommy Ton of Jak and Jil:

These from Casia Bromberg, an interesting photographer from Sweden:

And lastly, if just the back of a head can count, this old favorite "Lloyd's Head", 1944, by Barbara Morgan:

Ruud van Empel

Sometimes when I don’t write about gallery shows it’s because nothing seems especially inspiring. However, the hope is always to find something that stands out, and I’m happy to say such a show is now up and running through mid-March at Stux Gallery on West 25th Street. The show is of recent work by Ruud van Empel – the 51 year old Dutch photographer who has been working in the collage/photoshop medium since the late 1990s.

For those familiar with the fine art photography world, there’s a strong similarity between van Empel and Loretta Lux’s work (digitally manipulated, slightly eerie looking pictures of children) but I believe van Empel’s work pre-dates Lux’s. In any case it’s definitely a step up in terms of scale, ambition, and execution.

Van Empel’s trademark pieces are Rousseau-like creations picturing (mostly) black children in the middle of vibrant jungle or verdant landscapes. Created and collaged and using photoshop, they are made up of hundreds of individual photographs so that every detail shimmers with life. The photographs of the children are slightly manipulated in a way that makes them appear fictional. Van Empel’s work imagines a world somewhere between children’s books, paintings, and science fiction.
Most importantly and appealingly to me - these pictures pack a powerhouse punch - visceral, catchy, fresh, large in size, and just beautiful as objects.

I understand that many people may feel a little queasy about the political correctness of such imagery, but looking at Van Empel’s pictures of both black and white children, there’s so much more visual oomph to the black subjects it’s easy to understand that the explanation is simply pictorial. Also the children are not so much pictured as unschooled natives but as sophisticated and elegant visitors to their edenic but strange environments.

Lastly Van Empel sees the children not as the other but as himself. Asked about the picture above, his explanation was as follows:

It is inspired on one of my own childhood photographs. When I was a kid I had to wear a suit with a tie and short trousers. I was supposed to look like a young gentleman but of course I only wanted to play wildly in the gardens and fields around our house. So it is funny to see a young boy all dressed up in a suit, and I translated this to dark children in tropical forest. In detail you can see a marking on his left knee, there is a little wound from playing to wildly but for the rest he is looking as a perfect example of a nice and good child.

Weekend Video - Frozen Moments

The latest viral video to be making the rounds is this British T-Mobile commercial which hops on the trend of creating guerilla style theatrical "interruptions" in public places. Like much advertising, it borrows from the street and popularizes it for mass consumption. In this case the folks from Saatchi & Saatchi took their inspiration from Improv Everywhere who created the "Frozen Grand Central" piece (below).

As they say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

The Results Are In

The results are in and it appears to be a landslide for Gabriela Herman, with honorable mention to Alicia Ackerman and Daniel Schmeichler. It was spirited and fun and we'll have to do more!

The above from Matt Parke came in too late, but gets a nod for accuracy with regard to the original. Thanks to all who submitted and voted.