pixnoir : : girlwiz

For Auction: The Oldest Camera In The World

Text from The British Journal of Photography website:

One of the first predecessors to modern cameras was invented in the 1800’s and were known as Daguerreotype’s, named after the inventor Jacques Mande Daguerre . One of first and most pristine examples of a Daguerreotype has surfaced in a private collection that was previously not known to exist. The camera is called the world’s oldest and most expensive.

The wooden sliding-box camera was made in Paris in September 1830 by Alphonse Giroux, the brother in law of the inventor of the camera. The camera is signed by Jacques Mande Daguerre to verify that the device is authentic.

The camera was found in Northern Germany and is in outstanding condition and even has the manual written in German that goes along with the camera. The whole works is up for auction at a starting price of 200,000 euro. The final sales price is expected to be 500,000 to 700,000 euro.

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Diane Arbus: In the Absence of Others
William Eggleston: 21st Century

January 7 - February
 13

Two concurrent photography exhibitions featuring, respectively, a selection of rarely shown photographs by Diane Arbus and new work by William Eggleston. The installation of Arbus's work, In the Absence of Others, brings together a group of photographs of empty interiors and artificial landscapes spanning the 1960s. The Eggleston exhibition is titled 21st Century.

Cheim & Read
547 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001

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Michael Hoppen Gallery
3 Jubilee Place,
London SW3 3TD

'Weegee-It's a crime to take photographs this good...'

11.25.09 - 01.09.10

From the Michael Hoppen Gallery website:

An exhibition of early photographs by Weegee the Famous and selected artists.

Always in the right place at the right time, Weegee’s lense was perpetually aimed the visceral and sometimes violent city of New York. In 1993, Wilma Fellig, Weegee’s widow, bequeathed his entire archive of original prints to the ICP in New York, and we are delighted to offer selected pieces of this unique photographers work which includes many images never previously seen in the UK.

Weegee photographed New York in the 1930s and 1940s in the same iconic and instantly recognisable way Woody Allen was to film the city in the 1970s. Weegee’s voyeuristic eye sought out theharsh realities of the urban experience, but also the joie de vivre and carefree attitude which typified the years between the wars.

Born in 1899 in the Austrian province of Galicia, which is today part of Ukraine, Weegee (real name Usher, then Arthur Fellig) was the second of seven children from Jewish parents. Weegee's family left Europe in 1910 for the Lower East Side ofManhattan, where Weegee grew up. He left home at 15 and in 1917 got a job in a photo studio and became assistant to a cameraman. In 1921, he got a part-time position at the New York Times and its legendary agency Wide World Photos, soon afterwards switching to Acme News pictures. Eventually, frustrated with the lack of recognition for his work, and not having his name on photographs, he became a freelance news photographer by late 1935.



Weegee’s images bridge the gap between art, evidence and photojournalism. His nickname was a phonetic rendering of ouija,as in ouija board, due to his sixth sense of being able to arrive at a scene minutes after the occurrence of a crime. In 1938, Fellig was the only New York newspaper reporter with a permit to have a portable police-band short wave radio. The trunk of his car was a carefully maintained darkroom, to enable himto deliver his freelance images tothe newspapers as speedily as possible. He worked predominantly at night listening closely to radio broadcasts, often beating the NYPD to the scene. It also meant he was on hand to document the raucous night life in the Bowery, Harlem and The Village, and he went on to document the society events and functions of the era.

Hisphotographs were taken with the very basic press photographer equipment, a Graflek and blue flashbulbs which gave his work such graphic qualities. He had no formal photographic training being entirely self taught, and was a relentless self-promoter.

As an adjunct to Weegee’s work, we will also be showing further images by Sergei Vasiliev, and Stan Healy.

Sergei Vasiliev's graphic and unflinching photographs show the grim reality of the Russian prison system and some of the characters that inhabit it. The tattoo motifs which Vasiliev was helping to document for the KGB represent the uncensored lives of the criminal classes, ranging from violence and pornography to politics. This was an underclass with its own caste and judicial system, and the history of each individual was instantly recognizable to the other.

Edward ‘Stan’ Healy was born in Missoula, Montana and as a local newspaper photojournalist documented crime scenes and local news stories. Healy has been praised for anability to capture a story in a single image and do so with an eye for composition. However, he also had a taste for the provocative and disturbing, and his images can be shocking. all the more so because of the parochial backdrop of mid 20th century Missoula- a small Midwest city whose boom years at the forefront of the logging industry were sadly over.

We strongly advise early viewing of this unique exhibition. Prepare to be shocked, amused and informed!

All pictures will be for sale.

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The Americans

At The Metropolitan Museum of Art

September 22, 2009–January 3, 2010

From the Met website:
This exhibition celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Americans, Robert Frank’s influential suite of black-and-white photographs made on a cross-country road trip in 1955–56. Although Frank’s depiction of American life was criticized when the book was released in the U.S. in 1959, it soon became recognized as a masterpiece of street photography. Born in Switzerland in 1924, Frank is considered one of the great living masters of photography. The exhibition will feature all 83 photographs published in The Americans and will be the first time that this body of work is presented to a New York audience. In addition, the exhibition includes contact sheets that Frank used to create the book; earlier photographs made in Europe, Peru, and New York; a short film by the artist on his life; and his later re-use of iconic images from the series

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street
New York City

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Keizo Kitajima

The Joy of Portraits

September 9 - November 7

In 1976 Keizo Kitajima made his impressive debut with photographs capturing Koza in Okinawa, a town near the US military base, in the period just after the end of the Vietnam War. Subsequently, he expanded his purview to include Tokyo, New York, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union, just as that nation was on the verge of collapse.

The Joy of Portraits, featuring portrait work from each of these series, presents the most complete picture to date of the extraordinary photographer Keizo Kitajima's work from 1975 - 1991, including many previously unseen images.

Amador Gallery
41 E. 57th Street
New York, NY 10022

212 759 6740

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Debbie Fleming Caffery

Until July 31, 2009

From the Gitterman Gallery website:

Gitterman Gallery is proud to present an exhibition of black and white photographs by Debbie Fleming Caffery. The exhibition will open with a book signing and reception for the artist on Thursday, May 21st from 6 to 8 p.m. and continue through Friday, July 31st.

Debbie Fleming Caffery has been photographing in Mexico since 1990. This exhibition focuses on the images Caffery made of women working as prostitutes. These photographs explore the complexities of their situation in life, showing their vulnerability and their strength. The exhibition is concurrent with the release of Caffery’s fourth major monograph, The Spirit & The Flesh (Radius Books, 2009), which spans her entire body of work in Mexico and includes an essay by Carrie Springer, Senior Curatorial Assistant at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Gitterman Gallery
170 East 75th Street
New York, NY 10021
T: 212.734.0868

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Bernd & Hilla Becher: A Survey: 1972 - 2006

7 May - 3 July 2009

From the Fraenkel Gallery website:
Through approximately twenty works in various formats, the exhibition will present a concise array of the subjects of primary importance to the Bechers over their ong career. At the same time, the works on view will highlight the artists' evolving modes of presentation, from their diptychs of the early 1970's, through ambitious multi-part typologies, and the large-format single images first introduced in 1990 in a renowned exhibition at the DIA Art Foundation in New York. The most recent works to be exhibited were made in 2006, the year of Bernd Becher's death.

Fraenkel Gallery
49 Geary Street
San Francisco, CA 94108

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a shimmer of possibility
Photographs by Paul Graham

The Robert and Joyce Menschel Photography Gallery, third floor

February 4–May 18, 2009

From the MoMA website:
In August of 2004 Paul Graham (British, b. 1956), who had moved from London to New York in 2002, set out on the first of many trips around the United States to see and photograph the country for himself. This exhibition has been selected from the resulting series of photographic works, which Graham published in twelve volumes as a shimmer of possibility (steidlMACK, 2007). Each simple but structurally inventive series includes varying numbers of pictures, from one to more than ten, and provides a vivid glimpse into unheralded moments in the lives of individuals Graham encountered on his travels. A series showing a woman eating a take-out meal or a man waiting at a bus stop transcends its nominal subjects and describes aspects of life that, while ordinary, are imbued by the photographer with affection and curiosity. a shimmer of possibility is a call for attention to the brief, indefinite intervals of life. As Graham has said, "Perhaps instead of standing at the river’s edge scooping out water, it’s better to be in the current itself, to watch how the river comes up to you, flows smoothly around your presence, and reforms on the other side like you were never there."

The Museum of Modern Art
(212) 708-9400
11 West 53 Street,
between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York, NY 10019-5497

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Walter Niedermayr
Robert Miller Gallery

February 12 - March 14, 2009

Text from the Robert Miller Gallery website:
Walter Niedermayr was born in 1952 in Bolzano, Italy, where he lives and works. He has gained world wide recognition for his large-scale photographs presented as multi-paneled works. Niedermayr's photographs have been widely exhibited internationally in both solo and group shows. Whether the subject is a mountain landscape or an architectural subject, Niedermayr's works present images of startling beauty and subtle complexity which invite contemplation of man's evolving relationship to his environment.

Robert Miller Gallery
524 West 26th Street
NYC

212 366 4774

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Gabriele Basilico: Intercity

Cohen Amador Gallery
41 East 57th Street, 6th floor
NYC

January 7 – March 6, 2009

Excerpt from the press release:

The Cohen Amador Gallery is pleased to announce “Intercity”, cityscapes by internationally renowned Italian photographer Gabriele Basilico. Pooled from his most recent bodies of work, the exhibition articulates Basilico’s lifelong fascination with the city as a densely collaged environment. The stunningly diverse and engaging range of Basilico’s city subjects are accentuated and emphasized by his technical mastery: an old school obsession with contrast and tonal richness which mixes with a post-industrial subject worthy of prolonged reflection.

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Willy Brandt Haus in Berlin

10.29.2008 - 01.17.2009

The New York Times
Published: January 7, 2009
Michael Kimmelman writes:

The photographer Gisèle Freund was born in Berlin in 1908, fled to France in 1933, then had some shows and books published in Germany during her later years that returned her to local attention. (She died in 2000.) Her portraits presently occupy the exhibition hall at the Willy Brandt Haus in Berlin. The Ephraim-Palais, also in Berlin, has some of the lesser-known pictures she shot when she returned briefly to visit postwar Berlin in 1957 and 1962.

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First Doubt: Optical Confusion in Modern Photography

Through – January 4, 2009

From the Yale University Art Gallery website:
Celebrating a major gift of over two hundred photographs from the collection of Allan Chasanoff, B.A. 1961, this exhibition will explore the seldom-discussed phenomenon of optical confusion in photography. Drawn from the Chasanoff Collection, as well as from the Gallery's permanent collection, First Doubt will feature approximately one hundred photographs by a diverse array of photographers across the twentieth century. Seen together, they reveal the interpretive nature of the lens and the interpolative nature of the photograph.

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Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans
January 19 - April 26, 2009

From the National Gallery Website:
First published in France in 1958 and in the United States in 1959, Robert Frank's The Americans is widely celebrated as the most important photography book published since World War II. Including 83 photographs made largely in 1955 and 1956 while Frank (b. 1924) traveled around the United States, the book looked beneath the surface of American life to reveal a profound sense of alienation, angst, and loneliness. With these prescient photographs, Frank redefined the icons of America, noting that cars, jukeboxes, gas stations, diners, and even the road itself were telling symbols of contemporary life. Frank's style—seemingly loose, casual compositions, with often rough, blurred, out-of-focus foregrounds and tilted horizons—was just as controversial and influential as his subject matter. The exhibition celebrates the 50th anniversary of the book's publication by presenting all 83 photographs from The Americans in the order established by the book, and by providing a detailed examination of the book's roots in Frank's earlier work, its construction, and its impact on his later art.

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Broken Glass: Photographs of the South Bronx by Ray Mortenson

Museum of the City of New York
1220 Fifth Avenue at 103rd St.
New York, NY 10029
212.534.1672

Through Mar 8

From the MCNY:
Made between 1982 and 1984, the photographs in Broken Glass: Photographs of the South Bronx by Ray Mortenson focus on the burned out, abandoned, and razed structures of entire city blocks in the South Bronx, documenting the aftermath of a widespread urban economic crisis that plagued the United States in the 1970s. Putting the political, economic and social causes for this collapse aside, Mortenson's photographs consider the land and loss in human terms. They project a haunting silence, reminding us that these neighborhood streets were cradles of the community, lined with the homes of individuals and families. Hints of a once prosperous district are revealed in Mortenson's work through a stark black-and-white portrayal of what remained.

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MOMA
11 West 53 Street,
between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York, NY 10019-5497

(212) 708-9400

Friday, November 14, 2008, 6:15 p.m., Theater 2, T2 (Introduced by Bruce Posner)
Saturday, November 15, 2008, 2:00 p.m., Theater 2, T2 (Introduced by Bruce Posner)

From the MOMA website:

NYC Restored: Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler's Manhatta and Other City Views

The centerpiece of this New York City-themed program is the premiere of a new restoration of Strand and Sheeler's groundbreaking Manhatta (1921), preserved by a consortium of archives, including MoMA, and supervised by independent curator Bruce Posner, who introduces the program and explains the digital restoration process, carried out by Lowry Digital (formerly DTS). NYC Restored also features views of New York shot by Lumière cameraman Alexandre Promio in 1896 and a newly preserved print of Francis Thompson's fantastical N.Y., N.Y. (1957), blown up from glorious 16mm Kodachrome to 35mm. All films (except N.Y., N.Y.) silent, with piano accompaniment by Donald Sosin. Program Approx. 80 min.

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Catherine Opie: American Photographer

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 5th Avenue (at 89th Street)

September 26, 2008–January 7, 2009

From the Guggenheim Museum website:
Since the early 1990s, Catherine Opie has produced a complex body of photographic work, adopting such diverse genres as studio portraiture, landscape photography, and urban street photography to explore notions of communal, sexual, and cultural identity. From her early portraits of transgender people and performance artists to her expansive urban landscapes of cities like Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and New York, Opie has offered profound insights into the conditions in which communities form and the terms in which they are defined. All the while she has maintained a strict formal rigor, working in stark and provocative color as well as richly toned black-and-white.

The exhibition gathers works from Opie’s most important series in a major mid-career survey, starting with the series Being and Having (1991) and Portraits (1993–97), which first brought the artist to prominence, that celebrate queer communities in San Francisco and Los Angeles. In Houses (1995–96) Opie explores her interest in domestic architecture through portraits of Beverly Hills and Bel Air mansions in which each facade retains as distinct a character. Domestic (1995–98) offers a flip side to these works, moving inside to document lesbian families engaged in everyday household activities. Freeways (1994–95), the first of her black-and-white series, offers a richly formal meditation on the Los Angeles highway system. Continuing to document structures as icons and relics of human, and especially Southern Californian, culture, she continued with Mini-malls (1997–98), which focuses on billboards, signs, and architectural elements identifying various ethnic and cultural groups in Los Angeles shopping centers. This series inaugurated the ongoing project American Cities (1997–present), an extended group of panoramic black-and-white series that so far has explored Chicago, Minneapolis, New York, and St. Louis. Opie then looked toward more natural settings and the communities that exist there. Icehouses (2001) focuses on the way architectural structures accumulate human history but are at the mercy of the natural landscape on which they depend. Finally in Surfers (2003) the subjects are virtually engulfed in the vast and gloomy shoreline of Malibu, forever suspended on a tranquil sea, primed to catch the perfect ride that may never come. And most recently, Opie has turned to her own domestic life in In and Around Home (2004–05), Opie’s family becomes a microcosm for political and social issues at play on a wider level, its status as a queer family becoming subtly apparent over the course of the series.

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INVASION 68 PRAGUE
Photographs by Josef Koudelka

Opening Reception—Pace/MacGill Gallery: Thursday, September 4, 4:00–6:00 p.m.
Opening Reception—Aperture Gallery: Thursday, September 4, 6:00–8:00 p.m.

Exhibition on View—Pace/MacGill Gallery: Thursday, September 4–Saturday, October 11
Exhibition on View—Aperture Gallery: Friday, September 5–Thursday, October 30

Excerpt from the Aperture website:
"On the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the invasion, Aperture Gallery and Pace/MacGill Gallery jointly present two exhibitions of Koudelka’s remarkable work made during that one week, which will celebrate the publication of Invasion 68: Prague. The exhibition at Aperture Gallery will be co-produced with Magnum Photos, featuring large-scale, ink-jet prints of a selection of work from the related publication, and will include some of the seminal texts featured in the book as well. The exhibition at Pace/MacGill Gallery will incorporate this sensibility, and will also feature vintage and recent prints of some of Koudelka’s most iconic images from this work.

This exhibition is presented in conjunction with the publication of a stunning monograph entitled Invasion 68: Prague, photographs by Josef Koudelka. This new volume features nearly 250 searing images—most of them published here for the first time—personally selected by Koudelka from his extensive archive. Compelling texts by three Czech historians, primary source material, and a detailed chronology together provide a multi-layered and unparalleled look at the events of that extraordinary week in Prague, as well as the implications for the Czech people."

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If you're in town, it's worth viewing: At the Zabriskie Gallery, an exhibit of Lissette Model's best-known images from the 1930's and '40's.

Zabriskie Gallery
41 East 57th Street, 4th Floor
New York, NY 10022

Through Aug. 29

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Through August 22

Of the Refrain

Robert Mann
210 11th Avenue, at 24th Street, Chelsea

From the New York Times Published August 14, 2008:

A beautiful conspiracy of rhyme and reason, “Of the Refrain” presents 53 black-and-white photographs by 16 Modernist masters in a way that seems as musical and poetic as it is visual. Organized by Phil Taylor, a young employee at the gallery, the exhibition focuses on standard genres of studio and commercial photography, viewing them as occasions for formal and technical innovation and experimentation. There is a particular emphasis on the extraordinarily lucid and stylish work of Ringl & Pit, two women who worked together in Berlin in the late 1920s and early ’30s.

Portraits, still lifes and fashion and dance photographs are distributed around the gallery at different levels like notes on a musical score. Certain motifs regularly repeat. Barbara Morgan’s pictures of Martha Graham in extravagantly expressive poses and Hazel Larsen Archer’s images of Merce Cunningham leaping with athletic abandon create a theme of exuberant buoyancy, while images of glassware by Berenice Abbott, Margaret Watkins, Carlotta Corpron and Ringl & Pit — some bordering on pure abstraction — repeat moments of crystalline luminosity.

Many amusing juxtapositions occur. Man Ray, in a self-portrait, and James Joyce, in a portrait by Abbott, appear sitting on couches and resting their heads on their hands. Ringl & Pit’s image of a woman in a sexy, lacy corset is followed by Ilse Bing’s picture of a white lacy baby’s dress. A Ringl & Pit portrait of Ringl wearing glasses with round black frames mirrors Andre Kertesz’s picture of a man’s hands holding similar glasses. Caught in a crossfire of echoes, reflections and affinities, these and other old photographs, including works by Josef Sudek, Dora Maar and Horst P. Horst, are vividly rejuvenated. KEN JOHNSON

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From the British Journal of Photography:

The Barbican Art Gallery in London will be the first venue to showcase never-before-seen images from Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David Seymour.

The recently discovered 'Mexican Suitcase' contains more than 3500 negatives from the two Magnum co-founders, Capa and 'Chim' Seymour, along with photographs shot by Capa's girlfriend, Gerda Taro - one of the first female war photographers, who was killed during the conflict they were covering.

The images were long-feared lost after the negatives were left in the photographer's Paris studio when he fled France during the Second World War.

Last January, the International Centre of Photography in New York announced that after years of secret negotiations with the descendants of a Mexican general who found the works, the rights to the negatives had been transferred to the Capa estate (BJP, 30 January).

The negatives were then handed over to the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, where they are still being assessed, catalogued and analysed. Speaking exclusively to BJP, ICP has announced that so far one fifth of the rolls have been scanned and their secrets revealed.

'The suitcase holds major stories from all three photographers,' says a spokesman. Researchers have found Seymour's images of the Basque clergy taken in January 1937, and of refugees in Barcelona in late 1936. Taro's images depict General Lukacs' funeral in June 1937. As for Capa, the ICP has found photos from March 1939 of French internment camps for Republican refugees.

However, historians are set for disappointment as the ICP confirmed that the suitcase 'does not include any additional images from the "Falling Soldier" series.' It was hoped that the work would shed light on the mysteries surrounding Capa's most famous photograph, which some people believe was staged.

The Barbican expects to receive some of these newly discovered images. 'We're hoping to get some of the works from the Mexican Suitcase,' a spokeswoman tells BJP. 'We don't know how many and what we will get yet. As they are still working on the suitcases, we will see what is available and ready to be used.'

The ICP has confirmed that the Barbican's show will be the first exhibition to include photos from the Mexican Suitcase - which, in fact, is made up of three colour-coded case, each storing rolled negatives and index annotations. The shows of Capa and Taro's work will then move to Barcelona, Milan and Rotterdam. The ICP also plans an 'appropriate exhibition' for the entire content of the suitcase once the scanning process is over.

What has been discovered so far?

- By David Seymour

The woman nursing a baby in Estremadura, May 1936; Images of the Basque clergy, January 1937; Refugees in Barcelona, late 1936.

- By Gerda Taro

The funeral of General Lukacs, June 1937; La Granjuela, June 1937; Valencia, March 1937; Brunete, July 1937

- By Robert Capa

Teruel, December 1937-January 1938; Rio Segre, November 1938; Barcelona, January 1939; French internment camps, March 1939

The Barbican show runs from 17 October until 25 January. For details, visit www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery .

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Pamela Hanson

Born in London and educated in Switzerland, Pamela Hanson went to college in the United States. It was in New York that she met photographer Arthur Elgort, her mentor. Elgort persuaded Hanson to go to Paris where she finally got her first big photographic commissions, working for magazines including Per Lui, Marie Claire, and Elle. Her photography has also been used as a part of an advertising campaign for the fashion designer Joseph.

July 24 - September 20, 2008

Bonni Benrubi Gallery
41 East 57th Street 13th Floor,
New York, NY 10022

212.888.6007 tel
212.751.0819 fax

Regular Hours:Tuesday - Saturday 10 - 6
Summer hours: Monday - Friday 10-5:30

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Framing a Century: Master Photographers, 1840–1940

June 3 - September 1, 2008

From the Met website:

The exhibition tells the story of photography’s first 100 years through the work of key figures who helped shape the aesthetic and expressive course of the medium: Gustave Le Gray, Roger Fenton, Carleton Watkins, William Henry Fox Talbot, Julia Margaret Cameron, Nadar, Édouard Baldus, Charles Marville, Eugène Atget, Walker Evans, Man Ray, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Brassaï. The exhibition presents 10 to 12 iconic works by each of these artists to convey a broad sense of their contributions to photography. Many of the works are drawn from the Museum’s 2005 acquisition of the Gilman Collection.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Howard Gilman Gallery, 2nd floor

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Bernd and Hilla Becher: Landscape/Typology

May 21 - August 25, 2008

From the MoMA Website:

The German artists Bernd and Hilla Becher, who began working together in 1959 and married in 1961, are best known for their "typologies"—grids of black-and-white photographs of variant examples of a single type of industrial structure. To create these works, the artists traveled to large mines and steel mills, and systematically photographed the major structures, such as the winding towers that haul coal and iron ore to the surface and the blast furnaces that transform the ore into metal. The rigorous frontality of the individual images gives them the simplicity of diagrams, while their density of detail offers encyclopedic richness. At each site the Bechers also created overall landscape views of the entire plant, which set the structures in their context and show how they relate to each other. The typologies emulate the clarity of an engineer's drawing, while the landscapes evoke the experience of a particular place. The exhibition presents these two formats together; because they lie at the polar extremes of photographic description, each underscores the creative potential of the other.

Organized by Peter Galassi, Chief Curator of Photography.

Museum of Moder Art
The Edward Steichen Photography Galleries, third floor

Upcoming related events:

Thursday, June 19, 2008

1:30 p.m.
Lectures & Gallery Talks | Gallery Talks
Bernd and Hilla Becher: Landscape/Typology
With Diana Bush

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NY Photo Festival

May 14 - May 18, 2008
Exhibition hours, 10am to 7pm

According to the NY Photo Festival press release:

“Photography, one of the most important visual media of our lives, has been surprisingly uncelebrated, particularly in the United States. New York City, home to the most influential commercial and fine art photography community, has lacked—until now—a large-scale event dedicated to photography.

PowerHouse Books and VII Photo Agency have joined forces to launch the new, annual New York Photo Festival, the first international-level festival of photography to be based in the U.S.

The inaugural New York Photo Festival (May 14–May 18,2008) promises to deliver a dynamic, high-quality event in what is arguably the photographic capital of the world. The festival will celebrate both contemporary photography and the creative, inspirational talents of the people who produce this work.”

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Out of the Shadow

Through May 18, 2008

Oklahoma City Museum of Art
Northeast of the Civic Center Music Hall

405.236.3100, ext. 237

Oklahoma City, OK – The Oklahoma City Museum of Art will be the first venue for Brett Weston: Out of the Shadow, March 20 through May 18, 2008. The exhibition is the first major retrospective of Brett Weston’s work in over 30 years. Although Brett Weston was a key player in the photography world during his lifetime, he was often overshadowed by his father, Edward. Brett Weston: Out of the Shadow will bring to light the younger Weston’s unique creative spirit by examining his long career. The exhibition presents 136 photographs taken in Mexico and California in the 1920s and 1930s, East Coast images from the 1940s, and landscape and nature photographs taken after he returned to the West Coast in 1948. Many of these images push toward pure abstraction, putting Weston at the forefront of non-objective, fine-art photography.

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Sketches on Glass: Clichés-Verre From The NY Public Library
Monumental France: The Photographs of Édouard Baldus

These two exhibitions at the New York Public Library focus on the experimental period after the birth of photography (the 1850s through the 1870s). Film had not yet been invented, but manipulation of glass-plate and paper negatives allowed for plenty of creative leeway and expression by the photographer.

March 7, 2008 - June 28, 2008

Humanities and Social Sciences Library
New York Public Library

Print Gallery (Third Floor)

212.592.7730

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In March, the Sundance Channel (PDF link download) salutes photography with a series called "Lives In Focus" which is a 5-night documentary series spotlighting well-known 20th century photography iconoclasts such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Helmut Newton, Tina Modotti and William Eggleston.

This series premieres Monday, March 3rd through Friday March 7th beginning at 7:00 pm e/p:

• Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Impassioned Eye, an illuminating look at the life and work of the legendary “photographer’s photographer.”

• Black, White + Gray: A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe, an acclaimed exploration of the complex and fertile relationship between a curator, patron and photography collector, and his protégé and lover.

• Tina Barney: Social Studies, a profile of one of America’s leading photographers, known for her revealing color photos of the East Coast elite.

• Peter Beard: Scrapbooks from Africa & Beyond, a visit with a true artistadventurer, whose passions range from Africa’s wonders to living the good life.

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Penn's "Small Trades" Photographs

The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles announced that it had acquired the entire series of "Small Trades" photographs which consists of 252 silver-gelatin and platinum prints of full-length portraits of workers — waiters, bakers, butchers, rag-and-bone men. It has been called Mr. Penn’s most extensive body of work.

He began taking them in Paris in the summer of 1950 on assignment for Vogue and he continued it for another year after the assignment, seeking out workers in London and then in New York, where he lived, asking them to come to his studio in their work clothes and carrying the tools of their trade.

August Sander took naturalistic, anthropological portraits of German tradespeople and professionals usually in the settings where they worked. Mr. Penn’s portraits on the other hand, are formal. He always tried to use natural northern light and posed each subject against a neutral background.

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Lee Friedlander: A Ramble in Olmsted Parks

Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Howard Gilman Gallery
1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street
New York, New York 10028-0198

January 22, 2008–May 11, 2008

In the early 1980's, Lee Friedlander began photographing parks designed by Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903), North America's premier landscape architect. Some of Olmsted's most notable designs are: Central Park in New York City, Prospect Park in Brooklyn; Cherokee Park in Louisville, Ky.; World’s End in Hingham, Mass.; Niagara Falls State Park. Approximately forty images of Olmsted's parks by Lee Friedlander will be on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This exhibit marks the 150th (1858) anniversary of the design for Olmsted’s masterpiece, New York’s Central Park.

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Beth Dow's "Fieldwork", platinum-palladium prints at Jen Bekman through December 8th deals with man's instrusion into the natural world. She uses rollfilm and a hand-held medium-format camera and then uses digital technology to make contact negatives for the final platinum-palladium print.

Jen Bekman
6 spring street
new york city 10012

tel: 212.219.0166

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Steichen: Lives in Photography

A retrospective of Steichen work will be shown at the Jeu de Paume through December 30th: Steichen: Lives in Photography. About 400 prints covering six decades of his work will be on display.

A smaller version of this show will travel to Switzerland, Italy and Spain through September 2008.

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A New Reality: Black-and-White Photography in Contemporary Art

Sep 01, 2007 - Nov 25, 2007

Text from the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum web site:

This exhibition of approximately 90 photographs explores two themes: the continued use of black-and-white photography as a medium of visual and historical consequence, and the growing tendency of some photographers to create imaginative narratives for their imagery, sometimes arranging figures and objects in environments or constructing tableaux for emotive effect. The photographers selected range from those whose careers began in the 1950s to the 1970s (burgeoning years of appreciation for photography as a significant aspect of modern art), to those whose work has emerged within the last decade. While numerically emphasizing American photographers, the exhibition also includes important international photographers. Among those represented in the exhibition are: Robert Adams, Vic Muniz, Cindy Sherman, Sherry Levine, Duane Michals, James Casabere, and Hiroshi Sugimoto. The exhibition is derived from a major private collection of photography amassed by Arthur and Anne Goldstein, New Jersey residents.

Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum
71 Hamilton Street
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1248
Phone 732.932.7237
Fax 732.932.8201

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Part of Magnum Festival '07: New York Genius

The exhibition will feature vintage and modern photographic portraits of some of Mr. Reed's favorite musicians, dancers, painters, actors, writers, and architects, including images of Miles Davis by Dennis Stock, Jack Kerouac by Burt Glinn, and Andy Warhol by Elliott Erwitt.

Steven Kasher Gallery
521 West 23 St. Second Floor
New York, NY 10011

212.966.3978

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Celebrating the Art of Documentary

Magnum Festival

Magnum are partnering with such notable NY institutions as the New York Public Library, International Center of Photography, the Museum of Modern Art, the Film Forum and the Film Society of Lincoln Center (Walter Reade Theater) in commemorating the 60th anniversary of Magnum Photos and the establishment of the Magnum Foundation, Magnum Festival '07 will explore documentary in its various forms – photography, film and journalism.

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Making the Scene: The Midtown Y Photography Gallery, 1972-1996

New York Public Library
Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street
NYC

Now - September 16, 2007

This exhibit tracks the fortunes of the Midtown Y Photography Gallery - its 25-year history, and the role it played as photography moved into the art world. The Gallery was founded in a corridor of the Emanu-El Midtown Y.M.-Y.W.H.A. by the photographer Larry Siegel.

Text from the New York Public Library website:

The gallery’s focus on emerging photographers was solidified in 1983 under the directorship of Michael Spano and a newly formed board of advisers made up of significant members of the photographic community, including Helen Gee, Aaron Siskind, Arthur Leipzig, Larry Fink, and Jeffrey Hoone. Although the gallery still occasionally presented new work by photographers with established careers, such as Sidney Kerner or Louis Stettner, the majority of the work presented was by up-and-coming photographers born in the late 1940s or 1950s. The gallery’s typical practice was to feature three photographers, each of whom showed between 25 and 30 photographs, in a single exhibition. The photographers paid a flat fee to the gallery (to cover the cost of printing invitations), and the gallery provided press, mailing, and an opening. Profits from exhibition sales went directly to the photographers, many of whom also donated one or two prints to the gallery’s permanent collection. In 1993, when the Educational Alliance took over the Midtown Y, the gallery moved to 197 East Broadway. Tighter administrative controls at the new location, the appearance of new venues for photography, and increased competition for dwindling state and national funding for arts programs resulted in the closing of the gallery in 1996.

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A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff + Robert Mapplethorpe

Tribecca Film Festival
May 1, 5, & 6

"I think Sam Wagstaff was an amazing tastemaker and he brought a really unique vision to collecting photographic objects, which is still playing itself out in the collector's market today."
- Director James Crump

Black White + Gray examines the symbiotic relationship between influential curator and collector Sam Wagstaff and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in New York during the heady years of the 1970s and 1980s. The film peers intensively into Mapplethorpe's love affair with Wagstaff, and his rapid ascendancy in the art world with Wagstaff's forceful patronage and guidance. At the time their romance began, Mapplethorpe was 26 years old--twenty five years younger than Wagstaff, 51--and leaving the loft apartment he shared with Patti Smith near the Chelsea Hotel on 23rd Street. Both men shared the exact same birthdate, November 4, an uncanny fact of this duo of near polar opposites. The film explores the strong bond of friendship both men shared with Smith in this period, also marked by Smith's first recording triumph, "Horses," her debut album from 1975.

Text from blackwhitegray.com

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Illumination, Lynn Davis
April 6–July 16, 2007

Lynn Davis (American, born 1944) has explored the world in search of the greatest universal sites, both man-made and natural. In this exhibition, the artist presents her photographs, deeply modern and imbued with a sense of abstraction, with her selection from RMA’s collection. This pairing reflects her intuitive response to the RMA collection as resonant with the spiritual nature of her work.

Davis’s photographs have been exhibited internationally and collected widely. Her work appears in many museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum, which held an exhibition of her works in 1999.

Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th Street
New York, NY 10011

212 620 5000

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Scaling the Lizard King
The Doors: Large format photographs
from the archives of Joel Brodsky

Snap Galleries
April 21 - July 3, 2007

Joel Brodsky, the photographer who captured one of the most iconic pictures of rock legend Jim Morrison, has died at the age of 67 on the eve of his first-ever exhibition in the UK.

His work has appeared on the covers of hundreds of albums — most memorably “The Best of the Doors,” with its provocative Christlike image of Jim Morrison in black and white.

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Spider's Strategy

April 11 - June 2, 2007

Cohen Amador Gallery
41 East 57th Street
New York, NY 10022

212 759 6740

Kanemura's work embraces the visual clutter of Tokyo; a spider is suggested through the massive amount of cables in the air along the streets.

OSAMU KANEMURA (b. 1964) supports his work in photography by delivering newspapers throughout Tokyo. While traveling his extensive route each day for the last three years, he made numerous black-and-white photographs of the crowded streets, the collage of old and new buildings and street signs, and the massive traffic in commercial goods. His dark, graphically dense, and tangled pictures capture the pace and material essence of a city that is more a product of unchecked growth than of design.

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For the past 30 years, Henry Wessel has been photographing run-of-the-mill subjects and making them look as though they have been photographed in the Twilight Zone.

Through April 22

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
151 Third Street
San Francisco, CA

(415) 357-4000

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January 19 - April 29, 2007

Louise Brooks and the "New Woman" in Weimar Cinema

From the ICP website:
The American silent-film actress Louise Brooks (1906-1985) is one of the great female icons in the history of the cinema. Although she starred in over thirty films, Brooks is best known for the role of Lulu in the classic German film Pandora's Box (1929), directed by G.W. Pabst. As played by Brooks, Lulu was a jazz-age beauty wearing high-fashion clothes and a severe black bob. She embodied the ideal of the Weimar-era "New Woman," a social role that connoted political equality, free-spiritedness, and gender ambiguity. Drawing on the vast Louise Brooks at the George Eastman House, this exhibition will celebrate the hundredth anniversary of her birth. It is organized by International Center of Photography Assistant Curator Vanessa Rocco, and is the eleventh in the "New Histories of Photography" series, a project of the ICP/GEH Alliance.

ICP Museum Gallery
1133 Avenue of the Americas at 43rd St.
New York, NY 10036
Phone: 212-857-0000

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Joseph Mills
Inner City

January 31 - March 17, 2007

This is the first New York exhibition of Joseph Mill's works, inspired by and taken during wanderings around the decaying urban streets of Washington D.C. in the 1980's.

Cohen Amador Gallery
41 East 57th Street
New York, NY 10022

212 759 6740

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International Center of Photography
January 19 through April 29, 2007

Photographic moderism at its peak between the world wars:
Henri Cartier-Bresson's Scrapbook: Photographs from 1932-46
Martin Munkacsi: think while you shoot

ICP Museum Gallery
1133 Avenue of the Americas at 43rd St.
New York, NY 10036
Phone: 212-857-0000

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“Elio Ciol: Visioni”

December 13 – January 27, 2007

Cohen Amador Gallery
Fuller Building
41 East 57th Street, 6th FL
New York, NY 10022

Elio Ciol (born 1929) is an Italian photographer and publisher who was born in Casarsa della Delizia in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, the region where he has principally lived and worked. His father was a photographer who kept a studio in their hometown and Elio was fascinated by the technical aspects and worked in the darkroom as a boy. A formative experience was when, during the Nazi occupation, a German doctor brought in films with photographs of the countryside rather than of people, "photographs that I myself should have been able to do and which I had not done or even imagined."[1] He began practising photography at fifteen, worked full time in the studio from nineteen, and spent an increasing amount of his free time taking photographs for his own interests. A trip to Assisi in 1951 made a great impression; Ciol subsequently spent much time there, taking many photographs.

Dissatisfied with the conventions demanded in Italian photographic contests, Ciol ambitiously entered contests abroad; in 1955 and 1956 he was encouraged by favorable mentions in the American magazine Popular Photography.

Ciol was greatly influenced by the ideas of Luigi Crocenzi, emphasizing sequence rather than single images when illustrating a book or other story (an example had been Crocenzi's Conversazione in Sicilia, with text by Elio Vittorini). Ciol moved to Milan in 1963 to work on projects for the firm of Altimani; this soon ran into financial difficulties and Ciol returned to Casarsa, but invigorated with new ideas for the illustration and layout of books. He has illustrated dozens of books since that time.

Ciol has concentrated on creating a photographic record and archive of Italian works of art, architecture, landscapes, and archaeological sites and artefacts, particularly in Friuli. His works are black and white, sometimes employing infrared-sensitive film. Some of his photographs show people so close as to be recognizable, but more often people appear as small figures within landscapes. More often still the landscapes are devoid of people.

1. Italia Black and White, pp. xxv–xxvi

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A sale devoted to the works of Brassaï (born Gyula Halasz, 1899 - 1984 in Transylvania) will be held at:

Drouot Montaigne
15 avenue Montaigne
75008 Paris

Monday & Tuesday, October 2 & 3

190 drawings, 12 never-seen sculptures, and 550 photographs will be offered. The photographs will be grouped by theme:

- Night
- Day
- The 1930's
- Les Bals

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Taiji Matsue : Landscapes

Cohen Amador Gallery
Fuller Building
41 East 57th Street, 6th FL.
New York, NY 10021

212 759 6740

Through August 25

"Matsue photographs landscapes from all over the world, flattening them by adopting a distant, non aerial view and eliminating the sky. He then introduces a further layer of homogeneity by printing them in a high-key tonality, so that the individual textures of such features as rock or foliage are ironed out. This produces a landscape devoid of much of its individuality, with no sense of scale or context, so that landscapes situated continents apart look remarkably similar. Only the captions reveal the location of sites so drained of life and atmosphere that we might be looking at a book of moon landscapes."

From The Photobook: A History volume I

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July 7 - September 23

Monroe Gallery
112 Don Gaspar
Santa Fe, NM 87501

505.992.0800

This is a major exhibition which celebrates the career and life of legendary photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt (1898-1995).

The exhibition of more than 60 photographs features numerous classic images, several little-known gems, and never-before-exhibited photographs that are sure to surprise and intrigue. Included are historic vintage photographs - the actual prints used for LIFE magazine stories, with important archive information inscribed and stamped on the back of each photograph.

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Dreaming in Black and White: Photography at the Julien Levy Gallery

Philadelphia Museum of Art
26th Street and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway
Philadelphia, PA 19130

June 17, 2006 - September 17, 2006

This exhibition celebrates the centenary of the birth of prominent art dealer Julien Levy (1906–1981), one of the most influential and colorful proponents of modern art and photography and an impassioned champion of Surrealism, with a survey of his collection of photographs. Levy's lifelong devotion to the art of photography is represented in more than 230 photographs, many of which are being exhibited for the first time in more than five decades. In conjunction with the exhibition, the Museum is presenting a series of films made by artists affiliated with the Julien Levy Gallery.

Works by more than sixty photographers exhibited by Levy are represented, including American masters Walker Evans, George Platt Lynes, Lee Miller, Man Ray, Charles Sheeler, and Ralph Steiner. Artists working in France and Germany are particularly well represented, including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dora Maar, Roger Parry, Maurice Tabard, László Moholy-Nagy, and Umbo. Mexican artists Manuel Álvarez Bravo and Emilio Amero round out the international roster. One of the pleasures of the exhibition is work by little-known artists Arthur Gerlach, Samuel Gottscho, William Rittase, Thurman Rotan, and Luke Swank.

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Works of Lucien Clergue will be on display at the Louis Stern Fine Arts Gallery through May 6.

The exhibit covers more than 50 years and demonstrates Clergue's development and use of photography as an iconoclastic endeavor.

Louis Stern Fine Arts Gallery
West Hollywood, CA
310 276 0147

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At the Matthew Marks Gallery, 522 West 22nd Street, Chelsea, (212) 243-0200, through Saturday.

Turning Back is a major new body of work, the scope of which is far greater than that of any survey the artist has previously undertaken. The photographs in this exhibition were inspired by the bicentennial of Lewis and Clark’s journey across the Northwest Territory to the Pacific Ocean. To make these pictures, Adams has taken an abbreviated version of the trip, but in reverse, beginning on the West Coast, traveling across the Cascade Mountain Range, and moving into the plains of eastern Oregon.

The black and white photographs of Robert Adams records what is scarred, flawed and humdrum. Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times has a great article about the exhibit entitled: Picturing the West: Scarred, Flawed, Beautiful

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The Hirshhorn Museum presents “Hiroshi Sugimoto,” the first career survey of one of Japan's most important contemporary artists. Sugimoto (b. 1948, Tokyo) is known for his starkly minimal images of seascapes, movie theaters and architecture as well as his richly detailed photographs of natural history dioramas, wax portraits and Buddhist sculptures. These celebrated series explore such essential concepts as time, space, culture and perception-even the nature of reality itself.

Beginning April 1, the Smithsonian's Arthur M. Sackler Gallery will feature Hiroshi Sugimoto: History of History (through July 30), an exhibition that includes ancient and medieval Japanese artworks from Sugimoto's personal collection. For more information, visit http://www.asia.si.edu/

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John Szarkowski: Photographs is the first retrospective of the esteemed photographer’s work. The exhibition features Szarkowski’s early photographs—beginning with pictures of his native Midwest dating from 1943 and continuing through his acceptance of a curatorial post at The Museum of Modern Art in 1962—as well as his later works, many of which were made around his farm in upstate New York. Though they vary in subject and date, viewed together the prints present a remarkable and consistent vision. Informed by a humanist sensibility, they depict the lived landscape, both urban and rural, and impart a sense of history, place, and the way Americans once regarded the land. Szarkowski is one of the most influential photography curators and critics of the twentieth century. Now the hidden half of his lifetime of artistic work is finally given the attention it deserves.

The Museum of Modern Art
(212) 708-9400
11 West 53 Street
New York, NY 10019-5497

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Selections from the Daniel Cowin Collection

December 9, 2005 - February 26, 2006

Little is known about the private lives of African Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their social transactions took place for the most part outside of public view and often away from the camera's lens. This exhibition offers a glimpse into the rarely seen everyday lives of African Americans through a variety of photographic genres and poses: formal studio portraits, casual snapshots, images of children, images of uniformed soldiers, wedding portraits, and "Southern-views" that were made for tourist consumption. While some of the sitters were celebrities of the day, the majority of subjects are unnamed Americans. The images attest to photography's ability to record personal histories for private uses and to create historical documents. This exhibition and its catalogue explore ICP's Daniel Cowin Collection of African American History, a trove of more than 2,000 postcards, stereographs, cartes-de-visite, tintypes, albumen prints, and gelatin silver prints. Taken together, these ephemeral images provide an important window into African American cultural life from 1860 to about 1930.

International Center of Photography
1133 Avenue of the Americas at 43rd Street, New York, NY 10036

212-857-0000

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