Snapshots
Sarah Charlesworth, detail from Arc of Total Eclipse, February 26, 1979 (1979/2010), courtesy University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
It’s easy to forget that pre-digital photography is essentially a two-dimensional register of the light in a particular place and moment in time. “Sun Works,” at the Berkeley Art Museum through May 6, reminds us of this fact through two monumental works from the museum’s collection: Sarah Charlesworth’s Arc of the Total Eclipse, February 26, 1979 (1979/2010) and Sunburned GSP #488 (Sunset/Sunrise, Galbraith Lake, Alaska) (2011) by Chris McCaw. Though divided along generational and tactical lines, both artists follow the sun’s movement over the course of a single day. The comparison is dramatized by the theatrical installation, two rooms deep, with the McCaw centered on the back wall of the far gallery, where it is visible as though through parted “curtains” of the flanking walls on which the Charlesworths are arrayed.
Charlesworth’s black-and-white series consists of full-size photographic prints of 29 front pages of newspapers from cities and towns corresponding with path of the 1979 eclipse from the Pacific Northwest to Alaska. But the pages are empty—whited out—except for the mastheads and images of the eclipse, such as the full eclipse as a dark orb with a surrounding glow or the succession of diminishing crescents. Scanning the installation, the eclipse reappears in different sizes and positions on the page. Cosmic grandeur contrasts with the local charm of the different typestyles, logos and names such as the Moose Jaw Times-Herald from Saskatchewan. The eclipse seems to offer respite from quotidian concerns such as the local weather and the Dow Jones detailed in the mastheads.
By contrast, McCaw takes photography back to its origins in works using view cameras he builds himself fitted with 40-by-30-inch sheets of vintage gelatin silver paper. McCaw had to reload the paper four times to capture the complete 24-hour cycle of the sun, which traces its own smile-shaped path across the four pictures, ending in a burnt tail at sunrise--its heat having actually burnt a hole in the paper. Dominated by an unmodulated gray sky, the landscape is crude and foggy, with little sense of depth or detail. In different ways, though, both artists focus on the simplicity of nature’s grand gestures.
By Melissa E. Feldman
Chris McCaw, Sunburned, GSP #488, courtesy Berkeley Art Museum
I remember the controversy stirred up when Ted Turner announced in the 1980s that he wanted to colorize classic black-and-white films. Cinephiles were understandably upset; they felt that adding color would change the content and meaning of the film and result in an experience not intended by the filmmaker. Colorization was tantamount to changing someone else’s artwork without their permission. A similar sort of discussion has been building around the Swedish artist Sanna Dullaway, who has added color to some of the most famous images in history—from Eddie Adams’s iconic photograph of a Viet Cong prisoner being shot in the head to Alfred Eisenstaedt’s enduring photo of a sailor kissing a nurse in the midst of VJ Day celebrations in Times Square.
Dullaway, who promotes her colorizing services at her Web site, proudly posted her versions of the historical images on Reddit, and they quickly went viral—and brought her unexpected criticism about copyright issues and whether she’d abused artistic license. At MSNBC’s photo blog, writer Jon Sweeney gave readers two narrow labels with which to characterize Dullaway’s colorizations: “improvement or blasphemy.” The U.K.’s Daily Mail, meanwhile, called the results of Dullaway’s efforts “truly stunning,” and gallerist James Danziger elegantly dismisses the colorization debate altogether at his blog, the Year in Pictures.
“While Dullaway’s main business is restoring old family photographs, she has taken to re-imagining iconic images with enough skill and verisimilitude that the issue it addresses is not colorization (of course it’s weird and disrespectful, but occasionally effective) but about the power of black and white photography” he writes. “In a world of color, it’s amazing what effect black and white has.”
Screenshot of the Daily Mail's article on Sanna Dullaway
Elsewhere, the lovely black & white shades of winter are the theme of a recent post by photographer Carrie Elizabeth Thompson at the Little Brown Mushroom Blog, the photo blog led by award-winning photographer Alec Soth. Thompson is a Minnesotan and is thus supremely qualified to contemplate this chilling season, which she does by way of her favorite winter images: a snowy, slushy New York City park photo from 1955 by Vivian Maier; a portrait from Elin Høyland’s photo essay “Brothers”; and more.
I might have included one of Thompson’s own wintery images—specifically, this untitled one, from her series “I Hope We Go Together.”
But then, that would mean mixing color with black & white…
By Kristina Feliciano
Elin Hoyland, Brothers
Carrie Elizabeth Thompson, I Hope We Go Together
Mattress Flip, courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art
Let’s start with Mattress Flip, maybe Zoe Strauss’s best-known photograph. It was first exhibited as a small color photocopy afixed to a cement column underneath I-95 in Philadelphia. Between 2001 and 2010, Strauss organized annual day-long exhibitions of photographs under the I-95 overpass, at the end of which she sold her pictures for $5 each. Those exhibitions grew to include some 200 photographs and plenty of critical attention. Today, Mattress Flip is a billboard-sized image, hanging at the west entrance of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where the exhibition Zoe Strauss: Ten Years is on view through April 22. In a dozen short years, Strauss has gone from her increasingly well-attended shows under the highway overpass to the Whitney Biennial (she was included in the 2006 show) to the Silverstein Gallery to this mid-career retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum.
Back to Mattress Flip, which exemplifies, in many ways, Strauss’s work. It shows a boy who seems to hang, mid-air, upside down, having just launched himself from a pile of ripped and dirty mattresses on a city street. Behind the mattresses stands another boy, fist in front of his mouth, hiding a grin, enjoying the show. The photograph is pure exuberance. It’s a moment of joy plucked from what we might imagine is a tough neighborhood and difficult life. In fact, the tragic back story to the photograph is that the boy in the background, Lawrence “Boo” Rose, was shot and killed not far from where the photograph was taken. That sad fact takes nothing away from the beauty of the picture.
Strauss’s photographs – portraits, architectural images, and signage – began in the South Philadelphia neighborhood where she lives and have expanded outward over the years to include other struggling cities and people trying to get by, from post-hurricane Biloxi to the Las Vegas streets well off the glittery strip to Camden, NJ, among other places. She trains her attention – and ours -- on people who have fallen through the gaping holes in our increasingly porous social safety net.
In addition to the exhibition in the museum, which includes photographs and two slide shows, Strauss’s images are embedded throughout the city, on some 54 billboards in and around Philadelphia. The billboards contain no words, no explanatory captions. Viewers will make of them what they will: the tough and sweet Women Kissing, Beatty, NV, at Cottman Avenue and Revere Street, for example, or the eerily beautiful Submerged Car in Swamp, Venice, LA, at Grays Ferry and 47th Street. With these billboards, Strauss has brought her work full circle, in some ways: from the streets onto the white walls of galleries and museums and then back out to the streets again.
By Jean Dykstra
Vanessa, Philadelphia, PA, courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art
Ilene Segalove, Pinky, 1979. Courtesy Jancar Gallery
When Pacific Standard Time -- the current region-wide, Getty-funded initiative to celebrate SoCal art history -- began, Susan Mogul noticed how male-centric and safe the Getty’s initial ad campaigns were. They paired big-deal artists Ed Ruscha and John Baldessari with immediately recognizable pop personalities (Ed with Red Hot Chili Pepper Anthony Kedis and Baldessari with Bored to Death’s Jason Schwartzman), suggesting only celebrity and icon-hood could compel people to see art. Mogul, featured in a number of Pacific Standard Time shows herself, decided to counter this message, creating a spontaneous “Susan Mogul Time” poster campaign and pasting images of herself in a vintage orange suit jacket around the city alongside posters of Schwartzman and Kedis.
This kind of feisty, DIY-initiative permeates Jancar Gallery’s exhibition (on view through February 4) of artwork by Mogul, Ilene Segalove, and Hildegarde Duane, all of whom work primarily in conceptual photo and video. Its title, “Vintage Work,” pokes fun at the fact that the 1970s and ‘80s art of these three is receiving an upsurge in retrospective attention (in 2009, all three had solo shows of their early work at Jancar). But better now than never. All three are cheeky and spot-on in their awareness of their femininity in relation to the history of pop and print culture. Hildegarde Duane’s series of photographs, Seven Snow White and a Dwarf, turns a fairy tale princess into a noir-ish femme fatale. For Pinky, an archival inkjet print from 1979, Ilene Segalove dressed her pinky in flowing white and a veil to resemble the docile, flush-cheeked heroine of an antique painting. In the collage Moses Mogul Receives the 11th Commandment, Mogul appears as a nerdier, scatter-brained iteration of the 50-foot woman stomping through L.A. and holding tablets that command: “Thou shalt not be denied equality on account of sex.”
by Catherine Wagley
Roebling's Folly, courtesy Robert Anderson Gallery
Barbara Mensch’s photographs of New York are like images from another era, rediscovered documents from the time of Stieglitz and Strand. The romantic pictures, on view at the Robert Anderson Gallery through March 3, are love notes to New York, and particularly to that much-photographed structure, the Brooklyn Bridge. Mensch’s Water Street loft, where she has lived for more than 30 years, looks out onto the bridge, and it is the sole subject of 12 of the prints on view. The geometric lines of its cables and the vaulting arc of its towers are captured in lovingly sepia-toned gelatin silver prints.
A second room is devoted to photographs from her series “New York on Foot,” images of industrial structures, back alleys, and down at the heel neighborhoods. The last days of The Thunderbolt, for example, a deteriorating roller coaster on Coney Island that was torn down in 2000, is memorialized by Mensch in a wistful selenium-toned print.
Mensch has done long-term projects devoted to other New York City landmarks, including the Fulton Fish Market, which was the subject of two books, The Last Waterfront (1985) and South Street (2007). There is a poignancy to her work, which has to do not only with the transformation of New York City, but with the transformation of photography itself. Her pictures are reminders of the richness and depth of traditional black and white film, printed by the photographer who shot it.
by Jean Dykstra
Laura Letinsky, Untitled #17. Courtesy Carroll and Sons
Now that New Year’s resolutions have been made (and possibly broken), it is a good time to examine the desire for change and its inevitable collision with the realities of everyday life. Resolutions tend to begin well, full of promise. Laura Letinsky’s still life photographs from 2006 through 2009, on view at Carroll and Sons through February 18, tenderly expose the fragility behind such hopeful resolve.
In 2006, her ethereal white palette dotted with colored objects conjured a determined spirit. In Untitled #5 from her series “To Say It Isn’t So,” a few simple leftovers are placed along the edge of a white cloth-covered table: a plastic cup with a single sip of orange juice, a nearly bare grape stem, and two small plastic toy rings. Behind the cup, a stale piece of baguette points toward a hot pink mesh bag set on the opposite end of the table. Suffused with soft natural light, the objects take on great potential.
By 2009 Letinsky’s palette darkens, suggesting our appetites can never be fully satiated. In Untitled #17 from “Dog and the Wolf,” glass shards from a broken vase co-mingle with bright orange orchid petals and a richly colored purple ribbon, strewn across a wrinkled gray tablecloth. Along the back edge of the table, stacks of empty candy wrappers surround a few half-eaten chocolates, while several intact bonbons remain untouched. The dark colors and shattered vase suggest the melancholy atmosphere familiar to anyone rationalizing a broken resolution. The desire and disappointment evident in Letinsky’s photographs call to mind the words of the poet T.S. Eliot: “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”
by Edie Bresler
David Hartt, Award Room, 2011, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
Chicago stakes much of its cultural identity on its infamous skyscrapers. In turn, the skyscrapers have identities all their own. The Chicago headquarters of the Johnson Publishing Company, whose glossies Ebony and Jet defined a generation of African-American taste and culture, is affectionately portrayed by David Hartt in a new series of photographs and video at the Museum of Contemporary Art. On the cusp of the company’s relocation to a downsized operation, Hartt focuses his lens on the office’s empty lounges, its tired cubicles, its psychedelic wallpaper, and other details of its once-chic interior designs, cast in the glow of fluorescent lighting and this empire’s setting sun. The wistful mood is heightened by Nicole Mitchell’s down-tempo, space-jazz flute soundtrack accompanying the video.
In Hartt’s photographs, one can imagine executives and models mingling among the pink ostrich-skin flatfiles or preening at the in-office cosmetics counter—all of it designed in 1971 by Arthur Elrod, but now hushed. It is seemingly unchanged over those 40 years, except by the addition of a few Mac computers. Hartt’s documentation of the office offers a time-capsule view of this company’s proud self-image, furnished in orange, brown, gold, and peacock feathers. It looks charmingly retro to contemporary eyes. More than that, though, Hartt reveals how the Johnson Publishing Company immersed its employees and clients in its brand during the golden age of a corporate cultural vanguard. When the new tenants occupy this prestigious South Michigan Avenue address, Elrod’s decadent decorative flourishes will surely be refurbished, but Hartt’s images are perfect memorials.
By Jason Foumberg
Jan Groover, Untitled. Courtesy Janet Borden, Inc.
“Formalism is everything,” was the motto of post-modernist still life photographer Jan Groover, who died on January 1st, 2012, in Montpon-Meneterol, France, where she had lived for more than 20 years. Although she started out as a painter, who admired European still lifes of artists like Giorgio Morandi and Cezanne, her own photographic still lifes were spare, and her subjects utilitarian, focusing on everyday kitchen utensils such as forks, knives, and cake pans.
In 1987, Groover was one of a handful of women to have a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art; the museum’s longtime curator, John Szarkowski, compared her to Edward Weston. The same year, photographer Tina Barney produced a documentary about her, Jan Groover: Tilting at Space. Groover graduated from the Pratt Institute in 1965, and she subsequently received a fellowship to study at Ohio State University in Columbus, where she received her MFA. In 1978, she won a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and used the money to buy her first large-format camera, which she used it to photograph complex tabletop still lifes. She taught at the State University of New York at Purchase for many years, until she and her husband, the artist Bruce Boice, moved to France.
Country Doctor, Life Magazine
It’s been years since long-form photo essays disappeared from mainstream magazines, but LIFE.com’s recent republishing of W. Eugene Smith’s landmark “Country Doctor” essay is a potent reminder of what’s been lost. As the captions in the story explain, Smith spent more than three weeks shadowing general practitioner Ernest Guy Ceriani in the rural town of Kremmling, Colorado. The legendary photographer was there for births, deaths, and everything in between. In its September 20, 1948, issue, LIFE magazine published 27 of Smith’s images—a number unimaginable today, given the slender size of the newsweeklies—and all of those photos are included in the “LIFE Classic” slideshow. There’s also a small gallery of previously unseen photos.
Sending a photographer out to spend weeks documenting a story, and then devoting multiple pages to the piece when it’s complete—that’s simply no longer viable. The money doesn’t exist, and I would venture to say the audience doesn’t either. Technology has taught us to consume media of all types at a breathtaking pace and on the fly. There’s no need to pay dedicated attention, and there’s hardly time to, in any case; there’s just too much to take in. No wonder some photographers (the blog IStillShootFilm is but one example) have re-embraced analog formats—they have realized that instant gratification isn’t always so satisfying. Now maybe it’s time for us, the audience, to catch up with them. There’s a slow-food movement. Why not a slow-photography one? Incidentally, you can see “Country Doctor” in its original format through Google Books, which houses LIFE’s archives.
New York Times Style Magazine, cover photo: Cass Bird
If you enjoy learning the personal stories behind the photographers whose work you admire, you might want to stop by Cass Bird’s blog. Bird is one of those rare photographers who are successful in both the fine-art and commercial worlds: Her work has been widely exhibited—in fact, it’s on view in the group exhibition HIDE/SEEK: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture through February 12 at the Brooklyn Museum, and she's shot major assignments for editorial and advertising clients like The New York Times Magazine and the Gap. Her style feels naturalistic, like she’s casually documenting what she sees around her. But the choices behind each of her images are unmistakably deliberate: Bird explores gender roles and challenges commonly held notions of femininity and masculinity, as well as of the definition of family. At her eponymous tumblr, she shares photos she’s taken around her home—of her kids, of her partner. Tousled hair, pajamas, lived-in spaces, naps, playtime. There are outtakes from shoots for her clients. Production stills. Fleetingly short videos that center on a single moment or feeling—larks, really. And almost no words. She lets the images tell her story—how she lives and how she works. For fans of her photography, it’s a chance to hang out with her, and proof that the images she makes—whether for art or for commerce—are in fact a part of her.
-- Kristina Feliciano
Eve Arnold at work, Magnum
Eve Arnold, the first American woman to be hired by Magnum Photos and a pioneering photojournalist and portraitist, died on Wednesday, January 5, 2012, at the age of 99.
Born Eve Cohen in Philadelphia in 1912, Arnold was the daughter of a rabbi and one of nine children in a family of Ukrainian immigrants. She moved to New York when she was 28, and took up photography when a boyfriend gave her a camera. The boyfriend didn’t last, but her love of photography did. She was mostly self-taught as a photographer, but she did take one, six-week photography course at the New School, and it was taught by the legendary Alexey Brodovitch, art director for Harper’s Bazaar, who noticed her talent and singled her out.
Arnold joined Magnum on an informal basis in 1951 and became a member in 1957. She traveled the world, taking photographs in China, India, Cuba and the United States, covering politics and making wide-ranging social documentary photographs. She was best known, though, for her celebrity portraits of such stars as Marilyn Monroe (to whom she devoted a book Marilyn Monroe: An Appreciation), Marlene Deitrich, and Joan Crawford. Arnold was the official photographer on more than 40 movie sets.
She married an industrial designer, improbably named Arnold Arnold, and they moved in 1961 to London, where she lived for the rest of her life. Her marriage ended in divorce, but Arnold is survived by her son, Frank, and three grandchildren. In her book Eve Arnold: Retrospective, published in 1995, she looked back and observed that the the motive force behind her successful career was curiosity. “The very unpredictability of photography enthralled me,” she wrote. “The possibilities were endless.” Only an artist, however, could select among those endless possibilities to make a great photograph, and do it time and time again.
by Jean Dykstra
Eve Arnold, Marilyn Monroe
