Outerland

Some projects take their time. Allison Davies’ “Outerland” is a body of work begun in 1998 when Davies was an MFA photo grad at Yale and which she has continued to work on ever since. It sees the world through the eyes of a solo planetary explorer in what appears to be a lonely but still sublime post-apocalyptic future. Part narrative, part landscape, it’s “The Little Prince” for the 21st century – a wordless visual inquiry into the mysteries of life.

Photographed all over the world, from Iceland to Argentina, the genesis of the series came from Davies’ fascination with movie locations and sci-fi films like “Planet of the Apes” and “Logan’s Run”. (An interesting sidebar to the work was that it inspired the title of Gregory Crewdson’s seminal show “Another Girl, Another Planet” – an exhibition that thrust many of the '90s women constructed narrative photographers into the limelight, but somehow omitted Davies.)

12 years in the gestating, Davies' photographs have finally been published by Charles Lane Press in a book that’s as spare and luminous as its subject. With a first edition of only 700, “Outerland” is not only likely to be an instant collector’s item, but as volcanic ash filters its way through the atmosphere - a prescient look at the fragility of the planet.

A Jetsonesque self-portrait of the artist.

Weekend Video

Showing what you can do with stop-motion film-making, this short by PENStory was made after shooting 60.000 pictures, making 9.600 prints and re-shooting over 1.800 pictures.

Opening Tonight!

Don't forget we have an opening tonight.. And the Schaller show looks extraordinary, so don't miss it! 534 West 24th Street. 6 to 8 p.m.

More Waves and Weather!

Photo by Debra Slifkin.

Longtime followers of this blog with good memories might remember two year ago when my wife and I went to Miami for the first Nautica South Beach Triathlon. Just as the race was about to begin a water spout appeared on the horizon - a remarkable sight. (Click here to see that post.)

This year, another great shot of the start was caught by Debra Slifkin. The weather was race perfect, the event was immaculately organized, and I finished 10th in my age group!

The rest of the weekend looked more like this:

Weekend Video

From my friend Tom Adler - a brief note: "Your Paul Octavious post last week reminded me of this video clip" and a link to the above video.

The film-maker, Dunny, described it like this :"I photographed and videoed this random soccer game in the fog as I was walking through the park. The soccer team I later learned was the Ghana World Cup Soccer Team.. who would have thought?"

Save the Date - April 15, 6 to 8 p.m..

You’re all invited to the opening of our next show – an exhibition by the renowned German photographer Matthias Schaller. What these pictures are all about, and how the show came to be is an interesting story. (I hope.)

This past December I was having dinner in Miami with two curators from the Victoria and Albert Museum who were in town to work on their forthcoming Horst show. One of the curators, Susannah Brown, mentioned that Gert Elfering – the owner of the Horst archive – had an interesting group of pictures hanging in his house. The pictures, she explained, were photographs of some of the masterpieces of fashion and editorial photography shot in the viewing rooms of Christies in 2005 prior to being sold in what was to become the first of three enormously successful sales of works from The Elfering Collection. These installation shots (so to speak) were commissioned by Elfering to have as both a high-class souvenir and as works of art in their own right, as Schaller's work is all to do with creating a person-less portrait.

This description immediately intrigued me and I was dying to see the pictures, but getting to Elfering is not easy. He doesn’t take phone calls or respond to e-mails! However, with the help of Philippe Garner of Christie’s and Andy Cowan, the former owner of London’s Hamilton’s Gallery who now lives in Bogota but flies in and out of Miami to help Elfering with various projects, a meeting was finally set up.

Patronage and commissions can be a tricky thing, but these pictures were a home run, and the minute I saw them on Elfering’s wall I knew I wanted to show them. Elfering liked the idea and passed it on to Andy Cowan. Cowan said Elfering had to work it out with Schaller. Elfering said Cowan would arrange it. And so it went for several months. With about three weeks left to the proposed opening date on what was literally the last day before I would have had to go with a different show, I finally got the go-ahead! Fortunately there was a complete extra set of the pictures in Miami so all I had to do was fly down to select the works I needed for the show and work out the shipping.

This is all a long way of saying that if all goes according to plan you can see these photographs in person at our opening on April 15. 6 to 8 p.m. And bring friends. There’s nothing we love more than a crowded opening.

If not here are a small selection of the pictures - and below those, a more formal press release. But trust me - it was all worth it.

Press Release:

Matthias Schaller
“Elfering – 1642”
April 16 – May 22

Matthias Schaller was born in Dillingen, Germany, in 1965. Over the last decade he has been widely exhibited and published in Europe but “Elfering -1642” will be his first U.S. gallery show.

Beginning in 2000 with his photographic study of Andreas Gursky’s studio, Schaller has focused almost exclusively on people-less interiors. Whether photographing photographers’ and architects’ studios (series Werkbildnis I and II), Cardinals’ desks of the Roman Curia in the Vatican (Purple Desk), Venetian interiors on the Grand Canal (Controfacciata), 150 Italian opera houses (Fratelli d’Italia), artists’ palettes (Das Meisterstück), original astronaut suits (Disportraits), or the architecture of Oscar Niemeyer (As Curvas), Schaller’s series or sequences engage with the spirit of objects and place and convey the notion that the marks we leave, the objects used, or the environment inhabited says as much about the selected individual as their physical presence. All his different works follow this strategy of indirect portraiture.

The title “Elfering – 1642” refers to the famous German collector, Gert Elfering, and the number allocated by Christie’s to Elfering’s single owner sale in October of 2005. The auction comprised 135 works that Elfering had defined as the distillation of his interests, and featured the most famous pictures by the masters of fashion and editorial photography – Irving Penn, Helmut Newton, Richard Avedon - as well as works by Man Ray, Thomas Struth, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Robert Mapplethorpe. The sale fetched over $7 million and its success signaled the ascension of the editorial/fashion genre to the highest levels of price and desirability in photography.

A longtime admirer of Schaller’s work, it occurred to Elfering that before parting with the masterpieces in his collection he should commission Schaller to photograph the work in Christie’s New York showrooms. In this way he would have an original new body of work as well as a unique souvenir. The idea resonated with Schaller who observing the work laid out on the floor prior to hanging saw this rather than the actual wall hanging as the singular metaphor for the event.

In this way and as a completed series, Schaller’s photographs encompass the many complexities and ironies of the concept while at the same time incorporating the power of the objects about to be sold into their own luminous interiors. The finished works – beautiful, compelling, and intriguing pictures in their own right - stand as a remarkable example of enlightened patronage while remaining resolutely true to Schaller’s own vision of creating a portrait of both a collection and a collector.

Clark Little

My thanks to Edward Mapplethorpe for introducing me to the work of Clark Little, a surfer from Oahu who started photographing just three years ago and in that short time has pretty much become to waves what Atget was to Paris! That's Little below, showing how he does it. (If you click on the picture you will see a hand holding a camera.)

Little's photographic career began when his wife asked him for a picture of the ocean to decorate a bedroom wall, and with the confidence of an experienced surfer, Clark jumped in the ocean, and started snapping away. (He has since upgraded to more advanced equipment.) His photographs are almost too beautiful, but they record the power of Hawaiian waves from the inside out. It's a view few people could ever get, and yes - it is as dangerous as appears.

Signs of Spring (as seen in Chelsea this past weekend)

Weekend Video

Ricky Gervais on David Letterman this past Tuesday. I love his energy, his sense of enjoyment, and what seems to be his totally spontaneous and unscripted delivery. Here he is riffing on fat people. For the full interview click here.

Richard Renaldi

An interesting and culturally timely show coming up - Richard Renaldi will be exhibiting photographs from his new series "Touching Strangers" at The Gallery at Hermès, 691 Madison Avenue, New York, starting April 9.

In Renaldi's words:

Touching Strangers is an ongoing photographic project stemming from my interest in the dynamics of group portraiture. The premise of this work is simple. I meet two or more people on the street who are strangers to each other and to me. I ask them if they will pose for a photograph together with the stipulation that they must touch each other in some manner...

My objective was to introduce an unpredictable variable in a very traditional photographic formula: to create a spontaneous and fleeting relationship between complete strangers in front of my 8 x 10 view camera.

Though these situations involve orchestrated collaborations between subject and photographer, the emotions captured are both genuine and honest. Touching Strangers encourages viewers to think about how we relate physically to one another, and to entertain the possibility that there is unlimited potential for new relationships with almost everybody passing by.

Renaldi has been exhibiting since he was a senior at NYU in 1990 and his website is the most complete website I have ever seen. He is also one of the most consistent and prolific photographers I know of producing, new bodies of work, books, exhibitions, a blog, and various other projects at a pace that would exhaust even the most energetic person.

Clearly a person who loves to share, one of my favorite parts of Renaldi's site is his library of self-published PDF books ranging in subject from "Our Trip to Burning Man. 2007" to "Hot Italian Guys". But make sure you have at least half an hour to spare before delving into Renaldi's website.

Anyway, back to "Touching Strangers" - here's a selection of more images from the project below. I'll leave you to explore the rest of the site on your own.

Line and Form

So often when people are observing the change of seasons we get the same sky/horizon/ground composition with the straight line of the horizon dissecting the picture plane. Paul Octavious, however, had the originality to see that the curve of a hill had a novel and dynamic effect, and so in his series "Same Hill, Different Day" we are treated to a refreshing sight. As Octavious explains on his website:

For the past 2 years I have visited a beautiful mound of earth that I have come to call "the hill." Each time I have come to the hill a new story is told to me as if the hill is my stage and the locals are the actors in this daily play.

Nice job!

Likewise - James Reeve, who is one of the exhibitors in the forthcoming Hyeres Photo Festival, has refreshed the night landscape genre by covering so many different locales. I haven't seen the prints yet, but the j-pegs look beautiful. More by Reeve can be seen here and below.

La Rouviere, Marseille

Las Vegas

Beirut

Gulf of Thailand

Albert Bridge, London

Greetings from Punta de Mita

Turns out this is the only place outside of the Galapagos where you can find the blue-footed boobie. Who knew?!

And on that Darwinian note, I'm taking a break for the rest of the week. But thank you for all your responses to the wheelie story. Always good to know someone's reading.

A Travel Advisory and a Travel Tale

The Four Seasons in Punta De Mita.

The day after AIPAD, I headed south to Punta De Mita, Mexico, to join my family on spring break. (And now I sit blogging by the pool.) But getting here was no fun. Because of the current runway work going on at JFK, the delays have backed up all the way to LaGuardia and my wait in the security line at the Delta terminal at LaG was one hour and five minutes! So New York travelers beware. (See below.)

On a very different travel-related tack, a friend recently told me a true story about a passionate romance that recently took place between two Americans abroad. She was an artist and he was a banker, sparks flew, days and nights were spent in the rapture of new love. They agreed to meet several weeks later at some romantic island and the woman got there first. Would the man make it as promised? Would the sparks still fly? Waiting inside the lobby of the hotel she finally saw him come through the doors pulling a wheelie bag. And in that instant the dream shattered. She knew she could never love a man with a wheelie bag.

People seem to take different sides on this story. Either she was right and he was an un-macho fuddy duddy not suitable for our passionate life-embracing artist. Or she was a fickle neurotic clearly not capable of a relationship of any depth. What do you think?

I’m simply here to sing the praises of this wheelie backpack that was once my son’s that I’ve started to take on planes with me stuffed with computer, magazines, etc., and remark on how effortless it was to stand in line for the hour and five minutes pushing this along rather than to be carrying or picking up and putting down whatever wheel-less carry-on I might have had before. Viva el wheelie!

AIPAD - Aisles 1,2, & 3.

Tod Papageorge. Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus at MoMA. 1974. At Deborah Bell.

Unfortunately now a retrospective look, but as promised, here is my finished round-up of some of the many highlights of last week's AIPAD Art Fair.

Up for a second year at Joel Sorroka but still just as good - Robert Frank's 1955 shot of salesmen at a Cadillac showroom.

Also previously remarked on in this blog - Helen Levitt's 1988 New York image. At Robert Klein.

Two pictures at Bonni Benrubi - the humorously titled "Mount Fujii" by Massimo Vitale.

And Matthew Pillsbury's shot from London's Victoria and Albert Museum.

Robert Kennedy on the campaign trail by Bill Eppridge at Monroe Gallery.

Also at Monroe, this impressive composite of Washington Square, going from day into night by Stephen Wilkes.

Above and below, two prints made from autochromes from the National Geographic archives at Steven Kasher.

And truly one of the highlights of the fair for me, three variants of Frederick Sommer's iconic "Livia". The two cropped prints came from the sitter herself.

And quite a curiosity - two photographs of silhouettes of none other than Stieglitz and Steichen. Photos by John Barrett Kerfoot, but prints signed by the sitters.

Twiggy, 1966 by Barry Lategan. At Peter Fetterman.

Also at Fetterman, Lillian Bassman's "Fantasy on the Dance Floor. Barbara Mullen, Paris, 1949.

Another picture I never tire of. Flor Garduno at Throckmorton Fine Art.

I liked these two so much I bought them myself! A rare vintage D-Day landing not by Capa, and a vintage NASA "Moonwalk". At Joseph Tartt.

At this point I'm afraid I was losing track of where I saw things, but I liked this picture of Ansel Adams at The California School of Fine Arts. The photographer, William Heick later got Adams to sign the mount.

Another great Winogrand - "Circle Line Ferry, 1971."

At Julie Saul, two handcut c-prints by Soo Kim make a novel collage.

"Guatemala, 1967." by Brett Weston at Scott Nichols.

The always sprightly Lartigue at Hyperion Press.

Carleton Watkins at Andrew Smith.

And last but certainly not least, Frederick Sommer's mysterious "Circumnavigation of the Blood" at Stephen Daiter Gallery.