Photography Collection

"Original Books," is a group exhibition at Cohen Amador Gallery, New York - a selection of black and white photographs from Morten Andersen, Jens Liebchen, Keizo Kitajima, Gabriele Basilico, and John Gossage, five prominent, contemporary photographers from five different countries. Culled from unique photo-book projects, the styles and subject matter of each series varies dramatically; however by using the format of the photo-book as an art tool each photographer has come to fully articulate their ideas visually.

Norwegian photographer Morten Andersen and German photographer Jens Liebchen have taken a conceptual approach in their projects. In photographs from Days of Night, Andersen assembles a furtive, noirish series, which constructs a tense and emotionally heightened, fictional cityscape. Though photos of ever yday life in Japan and New York, Andersen utilizes photographic conventions to create a universal sense of drama and tension. Even more critically and conceptually eng aged in photog raphy's visual histor y, Liebchen explicitly demonstrates the manipulative characteristic of photog raphy in his book DL 07 Stereotypes of War. Images of helicopters, men with guns, abandoned buildings and smoke-filled skylines illustrate what appears to be a besieg ed city. Yet all the photos were taken in Tirana, Albania during a time of peace, thereby inver ting assumptions about the themes of war and peace through the conventions of traditional, documentar y war photography and challenging the viewer's willingness to accept visual clichés as signifiers of identity.

The stunning street photography in A.D. 1991 by Japanese photographer Keizo Kitajima compliments the conceptual projects of Morten and Liebchen by focusing on the individual in urban society at the end of the 1980s. Renown for his energized technique in documenting the sub-culture of 1980s New York and Tok yo, Kitajima refashions his sexy, nonchalant style to the purpose of portraying the anguish of a globalizing society at the end of the Cold War. Exhibited are the portraits from this series, whose graininess underscores the strong visual characteristics of the photographed subjects. Whereas contrast served to amplify ambiguity in Morten's work, here it underscores the force of society upon the individual. Kitajima's unyielding, individualized documentation contrasts with Italian photog rapher Gabriele Basilico's broader and more purely documentary look at coastal towns and landscapes of northern France. Bord de Mer: T he DATAR Project is the book of Basilico's work for the Mission Photographique de la DATAR, a French regional planning authority whose mandate is to investigate the "geog raphic identity and regional chang e" of these coastal regions. Taking the opposite approach from Kitajima, Basilico uses distance as a way of highlighting the tranquil and sometimes melancholic identity of these areas, using masterful print techniques to encapsulate the visual character of these diminishing coastal communities. American photographer John Gossag e completes the exhibition. Like Basilico, the photographs from Gossag e's book, There and Gone, often focus on the sea. However, Gossage uses these settings as a means of blurring boundaries and borders rather than attempting to define them. His dark, grainy and often jarring close-ups limit the viewer's ability to read into the identity of the subjects por trayed and their locations. Gossage further complicates the photograph's legibility by adding words and intentional marks onto the photo matte thereby creating unique ar tworks and altering photography-lauded for its re producibility-into an object of strengthened individuality with a unique identity of its own.

Original Books, 07/16 - 09/06/2008
Cohen Amador Gallery, New York
Fuller Building
41 East 57th Street

Opening: 07/16/2008, 6 p.m.
Opening Hours: Tue-Sat 11-18

Although Brett Weston was considered a key player in the photography world during his lifetime, his achievements have been overshadowed by those of his renowned father, Edward. In the first major exhibition in 30 years to be exclusively dedicated to Brett’s prolific body of work, Brett Weston: Out of the Shadow concentrates on the photographer’s distinct creative spirit. On view from June 21 through Sept. 7, 2008, the exhibition features more than 100 photographs from the 1920s through the 1980s. It is the first retrospective of the artist’s work ever to be presented in Washington, D.C. Out of the Shadow focuses attention on Brett’s abstract black-and-white photographs of landscapes, shapes and textures, and architectural elements. A pioneer in his field, Brett captured the intricacies and rhythms of form, light, and shadow while avoiding photographic techniques such as contrived lighting, staging, or other manipulation. “The Brett Weston exhibition is a natural extension of our interest in and support of 20th-century photography,” said Dorothy Kosinski, director of The Phillips Collection. “The museum has presented two Edward Weston exhibitions, and we are eager to bring Brett’s work to wider public attention.”
Aside from two series taken in San Francisco in the 1930s and New York in the 1940s, and abstract images of painted walls, broken glass, and cars, Brett focused on aspects of the natural world, in both close-ups and big views. Although all of his photographs seem to have been taken outdoors, Brett did not consider himself a nature photographer. Many of his most beautiful and accomplished images are associated with water—ice, clouds, ocean, underwater nudes, wet kelp, wet stones, puddles, beads of moisture, bubbles. His sensual black-and-white images transformed quiet moments into powerful statements of bold abstractions. From the rocks of Pebble Beach (1980) that shimmer as if made from mercury, to the sand and horizon in White Sands New Mexico (1945) that appear so stark they seem joined as one, Brett built his oeuvre by pushing the limits of vivid black-and-white contrasts.
Born in Los Angeles, Brett left California at the age of 13 to live with his father Edward in Mexico, taking his first picture on the boat ride south. In Mexico Brett learned form and composition from his father while using his portrait camera. Edward commented in his daybook, “He is doing better work at 14 then I did at 30. To have someone close to me, working so excellently, with an assured future, is happiness hardly expected.” Brett received international recognition for his work at age 18, when 20 of his photographs appeared in the exhibition Film und Foto (1929), along with work by Edward Steichen, Berenice Abbott, Man Ray, and others. In
1947, Brett was awarded a Guggenheim grant to photograph East Coast landscapes. A year later, Brett returned to California to help care for Edward as his health declined and to print his father’s photographs, exercising the ultimate influence on Edward’s art. In the following decades, Brett continued to create images of landscape and nature, making several trips to photograph locations in Europe, Japan, and Central America. In the late 1970s, Brett built a house in Hawaii, where he worked and lived for most of the rest of his life. He guaranteed that he would be the only person to ever print his work by destroying all but a few negatives, which are permanently damaged. Brett died in 1993 in Kona, Hawaii.

A book with over 100 tritone illustrations accompanies the exhibition. Brett Weston: Out of the Shadow, edited by Stephen Bennett Phillips, features essays by Phillips, Brett Weston Archive Director Scott Hale, and Phillips Editor in Chief Johanna Halford-MacLeod. Published by the Oklahoma City Museum of Art and The Phillips Collection, it will be available in the Museum Shop.

Brett Weston: Out of the Shadow
The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.

The collection is located in the heart of Washington’s historic Dupont Circle neighborhood, at 1600 21st Street, NW, near the Dupont Circle Metro (Q Street exit). Museum hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursday Artful Evenings until 8:30 p.m.; Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Closed Mondays and New Year’s Day, Independence Day, Thanksgiving Day, and Christmas Day.

In the most comprehensive exhibition of its type ever undertaken, The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens will showcase a 150-year span of Los Angeles photography, featuring some 200 works from The Huntington’s collections and other institutions, collectors and, in some cases, the artists themselves. “This Side of Paradise: Body and Landscape in L.A. Photographs” is organized by Jennifer Watts, curator of photographs at The Huntington and independent curator Claudia Bohn-Spector. Unlike New York, Paris, or London—cities with rich photographic traditions that have been intensely studied in exhibitions and publications—the photography of Los Angeles rarely has been the subject of sustained scholarly investigation, says Watts. “And yet, its history dates back nearly to the advent of the art form itself,” she says. “What’s clear is that L.A. photography quickly began to define itself in terms of the region’s climate, landscape, diversity, and its sprawling urban and suburban areas.”
For well over a century photographic images and icons have shaped a unique sense of place for Los Angeles, she says. The exhibition is an unprecedented effort to view L.A. photography through the dual lenses of landscape and the human body, offering a provocative counterpoint to more traditional, chronological histories of the medium. Works from early photographers—among them William Henry Jackson, Carleton Watkins, Imogen Cunningham, and Edward Weston—will be displayed alongside photography by commercial and studio practitioners such as George Hurrell, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Philippe Halsmann, and works from Maynard L. Parker and the “Dick” Whittington Studio. Artists of more recent vintage such as Ansel Adams, Garry Winogrand, John Baldessari, Robbert Flick, and Catherine Opie will be on display as well. In all, more than 100 photographers and photographic studios are represented.

Divided into seven sections—Garden, Dwell, Move, Work, Play, Clash, and Dream—the exhibition demonstrates how photography has defined life in the city across time. Carleton Watkins’ 1877 picture of Santa Monica, shot from high on a bluff, is juxtaposed against Joe Deal’s 1979 stark landscape view of Inglewood; Catherine Opie’s 2004 print of Oliver in a Tutu echoes Ida Wyman’s 1949 street portrait of Girl with Curlers; G. Haven Bishop’s 1915 street scene at night foreshadows the bawdy allure of John Humble’s 1991 Selma Avenue at Vine Street, Hollywood, an iconic image of Los Angeles as self-promoting caricature, with a billboard emblazoned with pink block letters screaming “Angelyne” in the foreground.
“The show brings together imagery that encapsulates both the glories and the unfulfilled promises of the great American enterprise, and every stage in between,” says Watts. “From the region’s spatial configurations to its distinctive light, engineered environment, and its celebration of physical culture, health, and fitness, something truly emblematic emerges. It is variously ‘the city that brings it together’—the city’s official slogan—as well as the ‘nightmare at the terminus of American history’— a descriptor coined by L.A. historian Mike Davis.” The exhibition comprises some 200 historic and contemporary images drawn from The Huntington’s collections; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the J. Paul Getty Museum; the University of California, Los Angeles; L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art; the Japanese American National Museum; as well as from loans from collectors and photographers. The core of the show comes from The Huntington’s rarely displayed photographic archives. Henry E. Huntington, the founder of the Huntington Library and one of the original architects of the Los Angeles area, believed strongly that L.A. was the “city of the future.” His convictions resulted in a photographic collection unparalleled in its visual documentation of the explosive transition of
greater Los Angeles from pastoral hub to thriving metropolis. Included in the exhibition are works from the archive that range from the earliest extant landscape image of Los Angeles, taken in 1862 by William M. Godfrey, to the soft-focus Pictorialist imagery of the 1910s and 1920s sponsored by the Automobile Club of Southern California’s first magazine, Touring Topics. The curators also mined the Huntington’s Southern California Edison archive, the Maynard L. Parker archive, and the “Dick” Whittington Studio archive—among others—for visually compelling images representing the rise of Los Angeles through the remarkable demographic booms of the 1910s and 1920s on through the postwar era. An expansive display, the exhibition occupies two venues at The Huntington that sit several hundred yards apart. The Huntington has commissioned a site-specific photo-based installation by Los Angeles artist Allan Sekula that will appear in the gardens between the two gallery spaces. “Like the show itself, Sekula’s piece questions how photographs shape a region’s history and how the region, in turn, is shaped by the imagery it engenders,” says co-curator Bohn-Spector.


This Side of Paradise: Body and Landscape in LA Photographs
Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Library West Hall and Boone Gallery
San Marino, CA
1151 Oxford Road
Till Sept. 15

Stretched out on colored sheets, the women for this new series remind us of the Chambre Close models who posed against very different backgrounds of colorfully-painted paper; in the same manner, here, each sheet corresponds to one woman. Photographing her models from above for the first time, and in doing so, placing them closer to her, in a relationship of proximity and intimacy during the session, Bettina Rheims seems to capture these women upon awakening in the morning or in an in-between moment, one of “beautiful agony,” between ecstasy and suffering… Only the look in their eyes has the capacity to help us understand their innermost feelings in this ephemeral moment. These women pose nude or in lingerie, their cheeks are red from the suffering that dwells within them and their ruddy skin bears clear impressions, including those of their undergarments… As distinguished from the Héroïnes1, their eyes are not wild, and the marks on their bodies are not witnesses to the sorrows and stigmas of life. On the contrary, once arranged in these large-size photographs (155 x 125 cm), they suddenly express an outpouring, like recumbent statues that are raised up, an outpouring that here is linked to desire…

As the exposition shows (Bettina Rheims – Can You Find Happiness, currently at the C/O Berlin), portraits of women are the heart of the artist’s work. This new series fits in very logically, with its fresh look at what a woman is in our contemporary society. Just Like a Woman is a snapshot of those secret moments of complete ecstasy that today’s woman can freely experience. After the success of her grand European museum retrospective, from Helsinki in February 2004 to Lyon in July-August 2006, this new, colorful series shows us, once more, the quality of Bettina Rheims’ portraits and their ability to reveal the deepest human feelings through an eye that is always supremely sensitive.

The gallery Karl Pfefferle, Munich, Germany, presents new photographs by Larry Clark. He portrayed Jonathan Velasquez, a youngster and immigrant from latin america living in South Central, Los Angeles. He is a member of a skater gang performing punk-music. Here is what Larry Clark reports about how he got to know Jonathan Velasquez:

"The winter of 2002 in New York City was brutal and continued well into 2003. Tif andI were getting fat. Snappy was very needy, We all went to California to do somepublicity for KEN PARK. I was to photograph Tiffany for a french magazine, REBEL, because my film was opening in Paris. I photographed Tif with some young teenagers from the ghetto we met at the little skatepark in Venice beach. The next morning we went with the two french ladies from the magazine to South Central Los Angeles to pick them up and photograph them in the hood. We brought a long breakfast sandwiches. It was the 4th of July, 2003. We met the kids and were standing in the street when we saw him. We were stunned. „Who is that?“ „Our friend. Can he come?“ „Yes“ „Whats his name?“ „Jonathan“ It was like he dropped out of heaven. I started photographing the kids skateboarding and Tiffany with Jonathan. A few hours later the french ladies had Tiffany and Jonathan in French underwear. It was a natural. I’m thinking, is his legal? Jonathan Velasquez, a just 14 year old (5-5-89) latino living with his family in South Central Los Angeles. He is not a model. He was not an actor. Today is July 4, 2007. I have been photographing him for four years. Here are a lot from the first three. I just hung out with Jonathan and his friends as they grew up. Carlos and Porky and Kico and Louie and spermball (Milton) and Rob G and Churro and PJ and Armando and.....

Has Jessica Todd Harper been inspired by Elinor Carucci when she took the photos for her book Interior Exposure? Family portraits seem to be an important subject for both photographers but Elinor Carucci is focusing more on the naked body, on details of the persons she is taking photos of toenails, scars and the eyes. For both photographers the relationships between the members of their families are important as a subject of art. Elinor Carucci focuses more on intimacy and Jessica Todd Harper seems to be more inspired by the history of family portraits in art. In some pictures the persons of the motif appear like statues, it remembers of a painting by Renoir.
As Jessica Todd Harper was a child her mother took her and her sister to the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. And as a teenager Jessica spent rainy weekends copying impressionist paintings with charcoal and pastel. "I was obsessed with the Impressionists", she says. So painting seems to be one of her sources for the family portraits, an other is story telling. "My family is very interested in history and storytelling. I have been photographing them since I was 15 and I think at that point it just seemed natural (rather than premeditated) to tell stories with pictures. It was what I was used to anyway. And family stories were always of particular interest."

For some of the photographs the houses they were taken in are like stages and the persons seem to play a role in a drama of a middle-class family, some of the pictures express a strong intimacy like the self portraits with her husband Chistopher and some seem to be pictures of a dream. Jessica Todd Harper has studied art history at the Bryn Mayr College and photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Afterwards she has worked as the assistant and studio manager of Larry Fink. Nowadays she is an assistant professor at Swarthmore College and a well known photographer. Institutions like the George Eastman House, Rochester or the Houston Museum of Fine Arts are exhibiting her photographs.

It's official. The picture of the naked girl that sparked the Bill Henson fuss in Australia is not pornography. The sight of her on an invitation to the photographer's Sydney exhibition two weeks ago provoked shock and outrage, but the Classifications Board has now declared the picture "mild" and safe for many children. Yesterday Photography Collection also learned that the Director of Public Prosecutions was on the verge of advising NSW police that any prosecution of Henson was unlikely to succeed. In Canberra, Federal Police also announced that no charges would be laid over photographs in the Australian National Gallery.The Henson affair appears close to collapse. Police seized 32 of his photographs from the Roslyn Oxley9 gallery in Paddington on May 23 following uproar on talkback radio. The Premier, Morris Iemma, declared the pictures "offensive and disgusting" and the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, called them "absolutely revolting". Since then, Henson photographs have been removed from the walls of two regional NSW galleries and impounded at the National Gallery. Stacks of the invitation, along with copies of Art World, a new magazine containing Henson images, have also been seized by NSW police.
But the Classification Board, under its new chief, former ABC head Donald McDonald, is far less troubled by Henson's work. Earlier this week it cleared five images - four of them had been partly censored - and it has now given the young girl on the invitation a rating of PG. The board's guidelines state: "Material classified PG may contain material which some children find confusing or upsetting, and may require the guidance of parents or guardians. It is not recommended for viewing or playing by persons under 15 without guidance from parents or guardians." The picture came to the board for classification when it was found in a blog discussing pornography and the sexualisation of children. The classifiers found the "image of breast nudity … creates a viewing impact that is mild and justified by context … and is not sexualised to any degree". While a minority of the board thought the impact of the picture was "moderate", none of the classifiers called for any restriction on its display.

The Indianapolis Museum of Art announced today that it has received a gift of 210 photographs by acclaimed artist Weegee (Arthur Fellig, 1899-1968) as well as nearly 100 documents relating to his life. The collection, which is believed to have belonged at one time to Weegee's long-time companion Wilma Wilcox, contains photographs spanning Weegee's career and portraying all aspects of his idiosyncratic subject matter. Also included are numerous portraits of the artist, and various ephemera such as letters and postcards from Weegee to Wilma, newspaper clippings, press passes, and even Weegee's Social Security card. The collection is a partial gift of Steven H. Nowlin, and a partial purchase by the Caroline Marmon Fesler Fund and the Alliance of the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
The Weegee collection, considered second only to that from the artist’s estate at the International Center of Photography in New York, was discovered in a trunk at a farmhouse yard sale in southern Kentucky in 2003 and acquired by Indianapolis historic documents dealer Steve H. Nowlin the same year. It includes works ranging from crime photographs, Harlem in the 1940s, audiences at jazz concerts or in darkened movie theaters taken surreptitiously with infrared film, strippers, transvestites, Greenwich Village in the 1950s, and distortions of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, Bette Davis, Elizabeth Taylor, Picasso, Eisenhower, Jackie Kennedy, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
“Without an ounce of decorum, Weegee gave permission to us all to observe the dark corners and bright lights of modern urban America. The unscripted, unvarnished tone of Weegee’s photographs anticipates the free-wheeling character of today’s Internet-based candid photography,” said Maxwell L. Anderson, the Melvin & Bren Simon director and CEO of the IMA. “The incredible range and depth of this collection makes it an outstanding addition to our photography holdings and will enhance the IMA’s role as a community resource and encyclopedic art museum.”
Weegee was a photojournalist whose work was synonymous with New York City. From 1930 to the end of his life, he prowled the metropolis with his Speed Graphic camera—from Uptown to Downtown, from the upscale to the down-and-out. While Weegee's intent was simply to photograph "the soul of the city I knew and loved," his unflinching eye set the trend for young, edgy photographers in the 1960s, most notably Diane Arbus who was a great admirer. Ever the intrepid chronicler of the city, he began his career as a freelance photographer, providing gritty crime scene photos to the tabloids and he arrived on the scene so frequently in advance of the police that they told him that he must be using a Ouija board, which the photographer adopted as his moniker— "Weegee." In 1945, Weegee compiled a selection of his candid street photographs into a book, Naked City, which brought him fame and which inspired the film noir classic of the same title. This film drew Weegee to Hollywood in 1947 where he embarked on a second phase of his career. For five years, he photographed the glamorous at movie premiers and Oscar ceremonies and then, in the darkroom, distorted those portraits into wicked and perceptive caricatures of movie stars and personalities. These were published for the first time in Weegee's Naked Hollywood in 1953.
The Weegee works join the IMA's growing photography collection. In 1992, the Museum embarked on building a comprehensive photography collection. While still accounting for a small fraction of the IMA's collection of 28,000 works on paper, the photography holdings now number some 700 works and include vintage images by William Henry Fox Talbot, Julia Margaret Cameron, Carleton Watkins, Charles Sheeler, Andre Kertesz, Alexander Rodchenko, Brassai, Berenice Abbott, Margaret Bourke White, Dorothea Lange, Edward Weston, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Cindy Sherman, James Casebere, Gregory Crewdson among other masters of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.