civilized ku # 182-187 ~ a NYC recap
Tuesday, June 30, 2009 at 09:42AM 
Sunday breakfast ~ NYC • click to embiggen
Chelsea gallery window • click to embiggen
Stephen Shore panos • click to embiggen
A little something for the backyard • click to embiggenPhoto exhibit / gallery wise NYC was pretty much a bust. While I did not attempt to visit every nook and cranny in the Chelsea district, I did cover the normal high points and ... well ... it's accurate to say that real change seems to be in the air.
A few big-name non-photo art galleries had closed their doors. One prominent photo gallery, Robert Mann Gallery, seems to have done so although there was no definitive sign. The current show was over, the door was locked, and their website says "check back for more information" regarding upcoming exhibits - all of which are not good signs.
The Bruce Silverstein Gallery is open for business but the current show is an exhibit of pictures from their private collection - an obvious cost-cutting procedure. That said, it's well worth a look-see because their private collection is ripe with pictures from the medium's past and present masters / notables. And some of the examples are not what one might expect from those picture makers.
303 Gallery provided me with the biggest disappointment - the street-level gallery displayed "Stephen Shore" on its entrance wall and I hustled in expecting / hoping to see pictures from his Uncommon Places work but was greeted with an exhibition of some early 60's BW reportage-style pictures of Andy Warhol and his crowd at The Factory - his original New York City studio from 1962 to 1968. If you are into pictures of 60's hipsters, amphetamine users, and Warhol superstars the exhibit is right up your alley.
I am not so it was fortune that a small back-room gallery at 303 was displaying 2 very large (37×95 inches) BW panos of Shore's work from the year 2000 with which I was not familiar. The pictures where made in the street photography vernacular but with an 8×10 view camera instead of the de rigeur handheld Leica most commonly employed for this type of work. The picture format comes from the fact that Shore was using 1/2 half of a sheet of a horizontal sheet of 8×10 film for his exposures.
The pictures were not groundbreaking in any real way content-wise (vis-a-vis the street photography genre). However, the fact that he was using an 8×10 view camera on a tripod (which must have been placed on busy sidewalks) meant that, unlike his surreptitious Leica-toting brethren, Shore must have been anything but unobtrusive. For me, this lent a curious aspect to the pictures because, with the exception of a single person, no one acts as if a very large camera, tripod, and attendant photographer are anywhere in the vicinity. And, in case you're wondering, there is no indication -written or otherwise - that these pictures were "staged".
One other exhibit worth a mention, Vector Portraits, was at the Yossi Milo Gallery. From the exhibit press release:
Begun in 1989, Andrew Bush’s series Vector Portraits was taken while the artist drove the city streets and freeways of Los Angeles. Either stopped in traffic or traveling at speeds of 20 to 70 miles per hour, the artist took portraits of other drivers using a medium-format roll-film camera and flash attached to the passenger side door of his car. Extended titles note particulars of speed, location or time with scientific precision while leaving other details unclear, such as “Man traveling southbound at 67 mph on U.S. Route 101 near Montecito, California, at 6:31 p.m. on or around Sunday, August 28, 1994”.
The photographs capture subjects in the ambiguous combination of private and public space created by a “private room on wheels.” The drivers are either alone in their vehicles lost in thought, or with passengers, revealing the dynamic between families, couples or friends. An examination of people and their cars in a city famous for its car culture, the series addresses personal privacy and challenges our definition of public space.
I had seen a small bit of this work somewhere before. I wasn't particularly impressed but after spending some time in the gallery looking and pondering, I must say that these pictures grew on me. There were even a couple from which I could chose one, if I had a spare $6,000 in my pocket, to live with on my wall for an extended period of time. There was a book of the work available but I chose to purchase another book from a previous exhibit that I had viewed at the gallery instead.
In summary, I can state that this Summer doesn't look to be a high point for photo exhibits and without question there will be fewer photo galleries by Summer's end. Summer is never a good season for the galleries / art crowd in NYC. However, if the lack of people on the streets and in the galleries this past Saturday is any indication, this Summer is most likely to be really bad.
What this portends for photo-artists is anyone's guess. What I am hoping for is a photo art market that resembles the 20×200 model - one that capitalizes on the medium's reproducible-originals characteristic.
Reader Comments (2)
Great information--thanks. I'll have to swing over there to check them out.
You might be interested in the DLK Collection's post about the curse of the summer group show in NYC.