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Archive for the ‘Article’ Category

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Preview: Harry Calahan and Jackson Pollock, Photographs and Drawings, Pace MacGill, NYC

In Article, Black and White Photography, Exhibits, Gallery, Photo Print Collector, Photographer on April 4, 2011 at 9:35 am

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An intriguing “small show” of small works … by two giants.

The New York Times reports:

During this decade they were exploring their chosen mediums’ potentials for abstraction, all-over composition and randomness. In drawing, which admittedly was not his main mode of expression, Pollock pursued these elements in small notational images. Those here alternate between impatient riffs on Picasso and schematic renderings of natural forms, including grass, all the while flirting with Surrealist automatism.

Calahan’s 1943 photographs of light rippling across dark water – in circling lines that resulted from extended exposures – are as classically “all-over” as the drip paintings that Pollock began making several years later. Callahan went on to produce strikingly calligraphic white-on-black works by photographing the beam of a flashlight in the dark while moving his camera, as well as delicate linear tangles achieved by taking multiple exposures of bare tree branches overhead.

Through April 16.

For more information: Pace MacGill

The New York Times article: NYT

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Notable: Ansel , We Hardly Knew Ye – The Lost Negatives Update

In Article, Black and White Photography, Photo Print Collector, Photographer on March 16, 2011 at 2:52 pm

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“The Lost Negatives” of Ansel Adams will remain lost under an out of court settlement just released. As described in the New York Times today:

The parties released a statement late on Monday that called the settlement terms “confidential.” But it said the parties to the suit, filed in California, had agreed that the man, Rick Norsigian, cannot use Adams’s name in selling prints from the negatives. He can continue to sell such items “subject to a disclaimer approved by the Trust.”

“Both parties have agreed not to make any defamatory statements about the other,” the statement said.

No mention was made of what the disclaimer might say or, more important, whether any agreement was reached on how to determine if the glass negatives found at a garage sale by Mr. Norsigian 10 years ago are actually Adams’s work.

To view the negatives and the press release: Lost Negatives

To read the NY Times article: NYT

Read our prior coverage: BWGallerist

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Preview: London Street Photography, Museum of London, UK

In Art Museum, Article, Black and White Photography, Exhibits, Photographer on March 13, 2011 at 4:21 pm

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Liebling’s ‘Outside Claridge’s Hotel, Mayfair’

In an article today, in the Financial Times, Claire Holland gives not only a nice review of a new “street photography” exhibit in London but also gives some nice historical context to the genre:

As if to assert street photography’s worth, a flurry of exhibitions exploring the genre is opening in the UK this year: Daniel Meadows will present Fieldwork: Photographs of Britain 1971-1988 at the National Media Museum in Bradford in September; at London Whitechapel Gallery, This is Whitechapel opens today and includes works by Ian Berry, followed by an exhibition of work by Paul Graham next month; and street photography is currently the theme at Format Photography Festival in Derby.

“It is very human to watch one another, and to photograph one another,” says Polly Braden, whose work is featured in London Street Photography at the Museum of London. Part of Braden’s ongoing project, London Square Mile, playful vignettes of life in the City of London, hang in the contemporary section of this generous show, which has been drawn from the museum’s archives.

For more on this subject: Financial Times

Related Articles

Notable: Sex Sells – Fine Art or Pornography? And Who Collects It?

In Article, Photographer on February 27, 2011 at 11:52 pm

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Peter Reed (1980) by Robert Mapplethorpe

From time to time the age old question of “what is art” gets jumbled into “what is pornography”.  Judging by a Financial Times article by Georgina Adam on the current state of affairs … some things never change:

So where is the line between pornography and art? Alison Jacques says: "When Mapplethorpe makes an image he is finding classical beauty in the everyday – this could be flowers, sculpture or something more graphic."
"The intention is the difference," says Simon Lee, arguing that the relation between the creator and the viewer makes all the difference.
"Every age has its ‘Olympia’," continues Szanto, referring to Manet’s 1863 portrait of a naked courtesan being offered flowers by a black servant, which provoked uproar in 1865. "Today the threshold for making outrageous sexual statements is higher. Art is a mirror of society." Catherine Wood concurs "The boundaries of acceptability in mainstream culture are continuously expanding," she says.

Who buys this art? There are some collectors – such as the Californian couple Norah and Norman Stone – whose holdings include a considerable number of explicit works. According to dealers, however, "Inevitably the pool of possible buyers is smaller", says Lee, particularly in a family context. Such art is generally kept in the private areas of the collector’s house, but when an artist becomes generally accepted, the work may move into public areas – whatever the content. "It depends on the consensus of what constitutes good taste," says Daniella Luxembourg, noting that when she started selling Egon Schiele works – which can be extremely graphic – they were usually kept in the bedroom, but with the growth of his reputation were displayed more openly.

For more sex, er, thoughts on this

ancient argument: Financial Times

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Notable: Need Funding For That Photography Project? Try Crowdsourcing the Money

In Article, Black and White Photography, Gallery, Photographer on February 17, 2011 at 4:32 pm

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Stanley Greenberg from “Time Machines”

We were visiting the Gitterman Gallery in New York last year and Tom Gitterman introduced us to one of his artists, Stanley Greenberg. On the table were an array of images for the future ”Time Machines” book … striking Black and White shots of particle accelerators Stanley had been photographing over several years.

Now the back story on the project and its funding is documented in an article found in the current issue of PDN.

Stanley used “Kickstarter”, a web based funding mechanism to obtain the needed funds for his project:

When Stanley Greenberg decided to use Kickstarter to raise the $13,000 he needed to pay for the printing of his new book, Time Machines, he had a finished project to show potential donors.

Greenberg has spent the last three years photographing supercolliders, particle accelerators and other physics labs with help from grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the National Science Foundation Artists and Writers in Antarctica program. He had even gotten a New York State Arts grants to pay for the design of the book. With everything done except the printing, Greenberg was able to say to funders: “All I need is a fraction of the whole budget and it’ll be done and you’ll get a book.”

To read the entire story see: PDN

For information on Kickstarter: Kickstarter

And of course: The Gitterman Gallery

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Notable: Top Ten New York Photography Shows in 2010, Vince Aletti

In Art Museum, Article, Black and White Photography, Exhibits, Gallery on January 24, 2011 at 5:46 am

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Constantin Brancusi, “L’Oiseau” (“Golden Bird”)

One of the great “eyes” out there viewing fine art photography is Vince Aletti:

Vince Aletti reviews photography exhibitions for Goings On About Town. In addition to his work for The New Yorker, he reviews photography books for Photograph. His work has also appeared in Aperture, Art + Auction, and photoworks. Aletti was the art editor of the Village Voice from 1994 to 2005 and the paper’s photo critic for twenty years. In 2005, he won the International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award for writing. He is currently an adjunct curator at I.C.P., where he is working on a series of exhibitions about fashion photography.

Check out his top ten list at : New Yorker Magazine

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Notable: Edward Burtynsky: Pentimento/Gulf Oil Spill, Flowers Central, London

In Article, Black and White Photography, Exhibits, Photographer on January 23, 2011 at 9:47 am

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Edward Burtynsky, ‘Shipbreaking #4 Field Proof’, Chittagong, Bangladesh

Interesting article in the Financial Times today by Francis Hodgson on Edward Burtynsky’s two approaches to oil spill photo shoots over the last decade.

At Flowers Central, in London’s Cork Street, there is a radical departure for Burtynsky, albeit of a retrograde kind. Pentimento (which means the action of a draughtsman revisiting his own work) is a series of large black and white reprints from the Type 55 Polaroids that Burtynsky made originally to check lighting and composition when he was producing his sequence on the Chittagong shipbreakers in Bangladesh. Type 55 produced both a print and a very fine-grained negative, and the new series takes delight in every blemish and crease from the original, including gashes of missing emulsion, stress marks and other scars of the passage of time, all seen in that enduringly suggestive and recognisable “frame” of the detritus of the Polaroid chemistry around the image.

Upstairs, Burtynsky is showing a series of aerial views of last year’s disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The weakness is that these are aerial views, blown up large, and even Burtynsky doesn’t always have all the control he needs from the unstable platform of a small plane.Still, Burtynsky has managed here and there to produce a sea surface as it has rarely been photographed before.

For the show review: Financial Times

For a slide show of the Polaroids: Edward Burtynsky: Pentimento

For the Gulf Oil Images: Flowers Gallery

Related Articles

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Notable: Up Against The Wall, Cindy Sherman! New Photographic Murals By The Artist

In Article, Black and White Photography, Exhibits, Gallery, Photographer on January 16, 2011 at 8:17 am

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Cindy Sherman, ‘Untitled’

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Cindy Sherman, Miro Kuzmanovic

Cindy Sherman has been role playing for decades and recording the results for viewers, posterity and not a few collectors.

Now you have the privilege of Cindy by the roomful:

Cindy Sherman’s new pictures are so huge that they are made on wallpaper. It’s very fancy wallpaper, admittedly, but there is no other word for patterned images as big as the room stuck directly to the panels of the wall.

This is a very daring way to make pictures. It represents a serious challenge to the market: the orthodoxy among rich buyers is that they like to know that they are getting measurably the same stuff as their peers. For anybody less established than Sherman, it would be a very odd gamble. It is not even clear that the practical mechanics of bringing such image-making to market are wholly thought-out. But Sherman has already explained (to Emily Stokes in these pages last weekend) that these images are to form the final room of her forthcoming retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Against these backgrounds Sherman places herself, in costume and character, as usual. But she has departed from her usual practice in many respects. The figures are at a scale to dwarf the background; they are seen against a pastoral, not in one.

Cindy Sherman, Sprüth Magers, London, January 12-February 19

To view the entire article: Financial Times 

To read a great interview about the murals: Financial Times II

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Notable: Svjetlana Tepavcevic, Of Atlanta Celebrates Photography Juried Show Has Two Page Spread in PDN Magazine

In Article, Black and White Photography, Exhibits, Photographer on January 12, 2011 at 4:45 pm

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Svjetlana Tepavcevic

At the Atlanta Celebrates Photography portfolio review, we highlighted Svjetlana Tepavcevic’s work along side some other very talented emerging artists.

Our friend Anthony Bannon, Director of George Eastman House, as juror at the show selected her portfolio as well.

Now the latest issue of PDN has an impressive spread spotlighting her striking seascapes.

Pick up the latest issue of PDN and checkout the “Exposures” coverage of Svjetlana’s work.

For more of her work: Svjetlana Tepavcevic

 For our original coverage: Atlanta Celebrates Photography

To make a donation to the important work of the George Eastman House: Donation George Eastman House

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Notable: End of a Year, End of An Era “Kodachrome 1935 – 2010

In Article, Black and White Photography on December 30, 2010 at 9:29 pm

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Steve Hebert for NY Times

The obituary for a technology of light, color and memory was written and presented today by the New York Times:

That celebrated 75-year run from mainstream to niche photography is scheduled to come to an end on Thursday when the last processing machine is shut down here to be sold for scrap.

The status of lone survivor is a point of pride for Dwayne Steinle, who remembers being warned more than once by a Kodak representative after he opened the business more than a half-century ago that the area was too sparsely populated for the studio to succeed. It has survived in part because Mr. Steinle and his son Grant focused on lower-volume specialties – like black-and-white and print-to-print developing, and, in the early ’90s, the processing of Kodachrome.

In the end, it was determined that a roll belonging to Dwayne Steinle, the owner, would be last. It took three tries to find a camera that worked. And over the course of the week he fired off shots of his house, his family and downtown Parsons. The last frame is already planned for Thursday, a picture of all the employees standing in front of Dwayne’s wearing shirts with the epitaph: "The best slide and movie film in history is now officially retired. Kodachrome: 1935-2010."

For more: NY Times

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