Paris Photo

Saw all the latest from the photo world this weekend at Paris Photo.

Paris Photo, you ask?

You know... "the most prestigious art fair dedicated  to historical and contemporary photography. This fair takes place annually at the Grand Palais in Paris mid-November and at the Paramount Pictures Studios in Los Angeles at the end of April."

That one.

Hiromi Oshima Signing a Bruce Hall Photo #photoLA

Hiromi Oshima signs a photograph by Bruce Hall during the Photo L.A. event in Santa Monica, Calif. on Thursday, January 12, 2012.

Pete Eckert #photoLA

Pete Eckert, a member of the Blind Photographer's Guild, stands near a booth with his work during the Photo L.A. event in Santa Monica, Calif. on Thursday, January 12, 2012.

NoHoShow (NoHo Gallery LA)

Saturday evening I'll be at NoHo Gallery LA.

Five of my photos are in the Occupy USA Photo Expose exhibition, showing with the gallery's "Art Noir" show.

The opening reception is free & open to the public on: Saturday December 3 from 7pm – 11 pm.

(The exhibition runs from December 3, 2011 to January 22, 2012. Gallery Hours are on Friday and Saturday from 5pm – 8pm; Sunday from 12 noon – 2pm. The gallery address is: NoHo Gallery LA 5126 Lankershim Blvd. North Hollywood, CA 91601.)

You can see a little more here.

Picture In Picture

A woman photographs her friend inside the installation of "The Great Picture" on the last day of the exhibition at UCR Sweeney Art Gallery in Riverside, Calif. on Saturday, October 8, 2011.

Report from the Met

We went to the Met on the holiday Monday, and saw three photography shows:

The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984

Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard

The Model as Muse: Embodying Fashion

All three seemed to me on the shallow side. It's my opinion that none of these shows know when to stop, really.

Model as Muse would have been fine with just the photos and the clothes. More than fine.

Instead, its credibility is destroyed by an overlay of crap culture. An ill-considered and immature "era" approach is taken in which fake graffiti, bad pop songs and off-base cultural references distract us from the content so that we won't discover there's no material here that actually addresses the basic conceit of the show.

You can't present fantastic taste -- which is what fashion photography is, in the end -- underneath a frame that seems like an underinformed 19-year-old trying to encapsulate past decades. Using the unsophisticated idea of "the 1950s was this, then the 1960s was this, then..." is bad enough, but trying to then flesh that out with the weakest and least cool cultural touchstones reduces the show to a touristy, bland blanket, smothering fantastic images and clothes.

This is not a case of the Emperor wearing nothing. Rather, the Emperor turns out to be wearing a poncho, and hoping we'll say it's very nice.

It was, however, fun to see a connection to William Klein's Qui êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo? integrated into the show in the one room that worked. I just wished they'd paid more attention to what Klein was satirizing.

I enjoyed Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective much, much more.

Above: an iPhone snapshot at the Met today.

Blind Photographers Update

My friend Doug McCulloh's exhibition is in Time Magazine today.

The Art and Heart of Blind Photographers

"The whole trajectory of modern art for the last 100 years has been toward the concept of mental construction, and blind photography comes from that place," says the show's "sighted" curator Douglas McCulloh, himself a photographer. "They're creating that image in their head first — really elaborate, fully realized visions — and then bringing some version of that vision into the world for the rest of us to see."

Mentioned in the article are the Seeing With Photography Collective, Mark Andres, and Sonia Soberats -- and you might remember they all appear in our short documentary Blind Faith: A Film About Seeing.

Sight Unseen

My pal Doug McCulloh's exhibition Sight Unseen is in Time Magazine.

Included in both the show and mag are works by Victorine Floyd Fludd and the Seeing with Photography Collective, who were featured in our short documentary Blind Faith: A Film About Seeing back in 2007.

Congrats to everyone -- I wish I could get out to the show.

And Then There's More Fashion

Sure, I know I didn't thoroughly enjoy the recent ICP fashion exhibitions. And, yes, sure, I did complain a little about the AIPAD panel on fashion of photography.

But that's all in the past. Upcoming in the museums:

Model As Muse

"Exploring the reciprocal relationship between high fashion and evolving ideals of beauty, The Model as Muse: Embodying Fashion focuses on iconic models of the twentieth century and their roles in projecting, and sometimes inspiring, the fashion of their respective eras."

Richard Avedon

"This exhibition will be the most comprehensive exploration to date of Avedon's fashion photography during his long career at Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, The New Yorker, and beyond. Working closely with The Richard Avedon Foundation, ICP curator Carol Squiers and guest curator Vince Aletti will present new scholarship on the evolution and extraordinary, ongoing impact of his work."

Both are going to be great. I just know it.

Local News

In local news, Mrs. New York Portraits and I went to the Metropolitan Opera Friday for the opening night of La Cenerentola, then on Saturday hit the fashion photography shows at ICP.

Weird Beauty seems to me to get the role of curator completely backwards: you are supposed to take material and amplify it, not diminish and confuse it.

The idea of showing contemporary fashion photographs as tearsheets is a good one -- but completely undermined because it's done in a half-assed way. That is, the text for the show explains that work from fashion magazines should be shown as tearsheets, but the exhibition puts the tearsheets on the wall and mixes in framed versions of some pieces, a meaningless roman numeral system of dividing sections, and places some of the work so high that you can't really see it properly.

The thing about work in fashion magazines is that the presentation is one of oversized glossy splendor -- you hold the magazine close, it's large and at a scale that fills your visual field. Presented as in this show, however, the scale of the work is ruined: the top row of images feels different than the middle row, since you can't get close to it; the unneeded framed works are sometimes just a little bigger than the tearsheet versions and only distract; and as presented all the work feels small.

That's not helpful for fashion photography, as the point is sensual fulfillment (since there's at best one or two new ideas in this room filled with 200 magazine snaps, you should at least let it be pretty rather than pretty vacant). A last flaw: if a show is going to be completely dependent on current fashion magazines -- which thrive on the idea of being cutting edge, now, and wild -- why make such a conservative selection? I like the NYT fashion shooters, but seeing several spreads from such a mainstream source made me realize that there are likely a lot of people dragging around the Lower East Side who have a better grasp of what's been cutting edge in the magazines lately than the curators of this show. This collection is too mainstream, and fails at the main goal of fashion photography: to possess stopping power. As presented, the strongest images in this show lose much of their ability to stop you from flipping past, on to the next image.

This Is Not a Fashion Photograph makes an even bigger faux pas: it takes fantastic images from the ICP collection, and asks us to consider them in the context of fashion photography. That does no favors to the images or fashion photography. The photos are merely crowded together, and after the disaster of a show one has just seen the effect is not the intended one but pure confusion: the feeling is that these images have been misunderstood, and half of them should quickly be put away so that those which make sense in this context could be properly understood. That is, a smaller show with more context could work here -- there are many photographs that are in fact interesting when re-thought in the context of fashion -- but this presentation reduces that theme to nothingness by simply accepting anything at all. It's diluted.

Edward Steichen: In High Fashion, on the other hand, is just fine. It presents 175 photographs without destroying the context of the work or making them hard to see and therefore beats out the previous exhibitions. The work is, of course, great.

My only complaint is that there's a lot here that could be informative in light of the contemporary fashion photo show upstairs -- and it isn't brought out. As one specific, note that Steichen is allowed to let clothing fall into complete shadow -- a contemporary no-no -- which shows he's holding a lot of the power in the creation of these images. Take a look at this image and imagine a contemporary fashion mag editor letting a shooter get away with that dark, textureless dress. A contemporary Vionnet would be at the shoot, previewing each shot on a laptop and yelling about featuring the dress -- then threatening to pull 14 pages of ads.

Well, That Clears it Up

Mikhail Baryshnikov and Merce Cunningham Talk Dance Photography

I never liked dance photography; it’s very flat, and dance photography in the studio looks very contrived. Very few photographers really know how to … it’s just a page in the book. It was not that I hated it, but I didn’t feel it was necessary compared with the real thing. But there were a few photographers — Brodovitch, Himmel, Ilse Bing, Irving Penn — who made me feel it was possible. I wanted the audience to see, to be able to imagine, the movement before and after, not just the frozen moment.

They even mention that the show is at Mark Seliger’s 401 Projects.

Unnatural Shadows Need Not Apply

I didn't much like Lee Friedlander: A Ramble in Olmsted Parks, though I like Friedlander's work.

I wrote one paragraph and it was straightforward. Clearly that's not the way to go. The Financial Times gives it 12 paragraphs, and I really have no idea what they think about it. Or if they have any understanding of photography at all. Are they faking it? Making it up?

Shot in the park

"His new exhibition reveals what happens when Friedlander turns his painterly, avant-garde lens on the landscapes of North American parks."

Painterly? Really?

"Friedlander's genius in capturing and cropping images permits him to transform natural shadows into spectacular forms. Here he is perfectly served by his technique of shooting in black and white on gelatin-silver print, a method that results in silky, metallic monochromes ideal for rendering contrasts of light and shade."

Yep. That's pretty painterly and avant-garde of him to use that unusual technique of shooting in black and white on gelatin-silver print. It seems much advanced over other photographers, who just shoot on black and white film and then make gelatin-silver prints.

Which is traditional black-and-white photography.

I'm going to have to look into that rendering contrasts of light and shade thing, too -- it sounds great, if one is dead set on capturing and cropping images.

Irving Penn

On Sunday, we went to Close Encounters: Irving Penn, Portraits of Artists and Writers. Excellent show, but an expensive admission ticket if you're just going for the exhibition. (So plan to take in the rest of the museum, especially the space redesigned by Renzo Piano.)

"Close Encounters showcases a group of sixty-seven portraits of notable subjects by Irving Penn (b. 1917), acquired by The Morgan Library & Museum in 2007. The exhibition demonstrates Penn's incredible achievement as a portraitist, and photography's vital role among the twentieth-century arts."

The show ends April 13th.

Rambling

One reason for Saturday night's visit to the Metropolitan was to see: Lee Friedlander: A Ramble in Olmsted Parks. I'm a big fan of Friedlander, but I left wondering if anyone would have any interest if these were by a relatively unknown photographer. I found little spark in them, and felt none of the usual Friedlander aura.

As I Was Saying

As you may have noticed, I've been away from the blog for a while. I'm not sure what to say about that just yet, so I'll just continue on as usual, for whatever that's worth. Since my last post, I traveled to California and back twice, but only made a few photographs. There is some news, however, of events in the upcoming weeks.

First: I'll be showing three photographs in a group show at the Sam and Alfreda Maloof Foundation for Arts and Crafts. The show is scheduled February 10 - March 23, 2008, in Alta Loma, California. More on that soon.

Also: It's official. My short documentary film Blind Faith: A Film About Seeing will be screening at Big Sky Documentary Film Festival. It's an "official selection." Excellent.

This Weekend in the Galleries

Spent the day in the photo galleries. Started off at the 57th Street galleries, went on to the Leica Gallery, and then -- of course -- veered back into Chelsea. The highlights:

A roomful of Garry Winogrand photographs at Deborah Bell Photographs features work from his books The Animals and Women Are Beautiful. Also, there's a snap of Winogrand at work that I had not seen before. (That's at 511 West 25th Street, Room 703 -- and they are only open Saturdays. And next Saturday is the last day of the show....)

A laugh-out-loud show of Richard Kalvar photographs at Leica Gallery. (That's at 670 Broadway, Suite 500.) The Web site doesn't show his work -- but there's a fantastic slideshow of 50 of his pictures at Magnum.

I also thought the "25 Years" show at Howard Greenberg was really a rich experience -- each image includes a very personal story of why Greenberg has collected that specific photograph and what it means to him. That's a lot of reading, but it's rewarding -- there are a number of great stories I doubt could be found anywhere else.

Above: my wife and I brought our friend Marc along on the tour.

Gerda Taro and Robert Capa at ICP

Yesterday I spent the day working from home -- editing video -- but in the evening we went to International Center of Photography for four shows:

Gerda Taro

This is War! Robert Capa at Work

Other Weapons: Photography and Print Culture During the Spanish Civil War

Dark is the Room Where We Sleep: A Project By Francesc Torres

I thought the Torres project was excellent, and was glad to see the history / story of Taro being brought into light.

The Capa show, however, left me with mixed feelings: it's the best and most detailed collection of his war work I've seen, but I much preferred the exhibition that toured (from the Philadelphia Museum of Art) around 1996-1997, as captured in this book: Robert Capa: Photographs. It just seems better to me to include all sides of his work -- both war and peace -- if we're really to understand the stakes of war.

Above: 43rd Street walking back from ICP.

Great Picture Exhibition Closes

If you are in the Los Angeles area, don't forget to visit The Great Picture before the exhibition closes. Saturday is the last day.

An exhibition of the largest photograph ever made. At three stories high and 11stories wide, "The Great Picture" is a gelatin silver print made using a shuttered F-18 aircraft hangar blacked out to form a giant camera obscura.

Inside, Looking Out, Part Three

So, as the fall season starts, I'm left to ask: where is photography at this very moment? The answer: it's very fragmented.

The classics roll on ... though it will be very interesting to see if the "blue chip" photographers continue selling in the auctions for record prices or not. The galleries roll on ... but there's no sense of any particular new movement, style or group arising. The museums roll on ... about the same as always.

Yet you can't help but notice, out of the corner of your eye, that more people are shooting more photographs than ever, and that cameras have become omnipresent. There must be change in the works ... but where is it?

Inside, Looking Out, Part Two

Lisette Model and Her Successors at Aperture Gallery (547 West 27th Street in Chelsea) was a good show. More exciting to me, however, was getting a look around the rest of the building.

Aperture is on the 4th floor, and it's a very beautiful space. Take the elevator to the 5th and 6th floors, however, and go see the "Alcove" -- a tiny hallway transformed into an installation space -- and the various studios and galleries throughout the building. On a quiet day, it's a very good experience. The floor creaks under your feet, but around each corner is a new and unexpected space.