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

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

Adams wins approximately £40,000 for his work spanning more than four decades. 'Adams is one of the most important and influential photographers of the last 40 years,' says the Foundation. 'During that time he has worked almost exclusively in the American West, and, as photography has altered and fragmented, he has refined and reaffirmed its inherent language, adapting the legacies of nineteenth century and modernist photography to his own very singular purpose.

'Precise and undramatic, Adams' accumulative vision of the West now stands as a formidable document, reflecting broader, global concerns about the environment, while consistently recognising signs of human aspiration and elements of hope across a particular changing landscape.'

His prize, along with a gold medal, will be presented at a ceremony at the Hasselblad Centre in Gothenburg in November, where an exhibition of his life's work will go on show.

NEW YORK — A very early photograph of New York City in the 1840s has sold for $62,500.

The photo depicting Manhattan's Upper West Side as open countryside was sold Monday at Sotheby's auction house.

The photo is a daguerreotype, an early form of photography that was used mainly for portraits. It is believed to date from 1848 and shows a white house with shutters, a grassy hillside and a horse-drawn carriage.

Sotheby's said the photo was recently discovered in New England. Neither the buyer nor the seller was identified.

The auction house estimated the pre-sale value of the daguerrotype at $50,000 to $70,000.

Helen Levitt, US photography legend has died.

From the British Journal of Photography website:
Levitt was considered one of the world's greatest street photographers, and the last living link with America's golden age of photography in the 1930s. Throughout her life, she worked in the streets of New York taking pictures of everyday things such as her most famous image, which depicts three children preparing to go trick-or-treating on Halloween in 1939.

Born in 1913 in New York City, Levitt left school to work for a commercial photographer and, by 1938, had started her seminal book, In the Street: chalk drawings and messages, New York City 1938-1948.

Levitt met Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1935 and even followed him when he photographed on the Brooklyn waterfront. She studied with Walker Evans, and in 1943, had Edward Steichen curate her first solo show at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1959 and 1960, she received two Guggenheim Foundation grants to take colour photographs in New York.

Levitt published her first major book, A Way of Seeing, in 1965, but in other respects photobooks were a later development for her. In the Street wasn't published until 1987, and her magnum opus, Crosstown, didn't hit the shelves until 2001. Slide Show, the Colour Photographs of Helen Levitt, which collected together her little-known colour work, was published in 2005.

Last year, Brooklyn-based Powerhouse Books published her last monograph, which saw Levitt handpick her eclectic mix of iconic and previously unpublished images, making this book her 'greatest hits' collection of personal bests.

Levitt died in her sleep in New York on Sunday.

Visit powerhousebooks.com for more details on her last monograph.

From the Nikon site:
Longest history among lens mounts for 35mm-format SLR interchangeable cameras

TOKYO – Nikon Corporation is pleased to announce the 50th anniversary of its legendary F-mount lens-mounting system, employed on the company’s lens-interchangeable SLR cameras and NIKKOR lenses. Apart from Nikon, no other maker has been able to sustain its original lens mount for such an extraordinary period.* (Revised on March 11, 2009)

*Among lens mounts for 35mm-format SLR interchangeable cameras

The Nikon F-mount was first employed on Nikon’s earliest lens-interchangeable SLR camera, the Nikon F, released in June 1959. Nikon has consistently utilized the same mount without changing its basic structure, even as other SLR camera manufacturers found it necessary to alter their lens mounts in response to changing technologies, such as autofocus compatibility and digitalization.

One of the biggest advantages of lens-interchangeable SLR cameras is that users are able to choose from a larger selection of lenses. Maintaining the same basic structure of lens mount for a longer period means a broader, constantly growing array of compatible lenses. For this reason, the lens mount is an extremely important and symbolic element for both photography enthusiasts and professionals, who are able to benefit from ongoing use of their carefully selected collection of lenses. The Nikon F-mount, employed for even the latest, most advanced digital SLRs, has received and continues to garner the highest evaluations as a reliable, long-serving lens mount.

Evolution of the Nikon F-mount

* Introduced on Nikon’s first lens-interchangeable SLR, the Nikon F (1959)
* Auto aperture indexing enables automatic setting of maximum aperture (1977)
* Program auto exposure mode compatibility (1981)
* Aperture information exchange with the camera body through CPU communication (1983)
* Autofocus compatibility (1983)
* Digital SLR cameras compatibility (1995)

6 March - 18 April 2009

Leica Gallery
670 Broadway
New York, NY 10012 USA

"As a true lover of photography, I always find it fascinating when looking at works such as those of Erich Lessing, the Austrian doyen of photography, to realize how the photographer’s eye can open up new perspectives and perceptions for the viewer. Photographs – a cross between what is transient and what can be captured and recorded – can tell their own stories, beyond any historical or geographical boundaries. Erich Lessing’s photographic oeuvre conveys in its own particular way this visualization of time, the portrayal of a subjective section of the world… Erich Lessing has always been especially fascinated by the world of art and the artist, by the challenge of demonstrating the creative process, of choosing a specific art of documentation as an approach to discovery. This ambition to realize the unreal – culture and concepts – is the underlying quality in his series of photographs taken from the artistic career of Herbert von Karajan. In dynamic, sometimes anecdotal pictures, the encounter between the young photojournalist Erich Lessing and the conductor on the threshold of world fame reflects the highest professional aspirations of both men. Erich Lessing’s oeuvre is closely linked with Leica and the Leica camera. Most of the photographs in this volume were taken with a 1950s M3 camera (still extant); its technical sophistication and lenses enabled him to capture the immediacy and intensity which still draw us under the spell of events and situations.”

- Dr. Andreas Kaufmann, Chairman of the Board of Management and Chief Executive Officer, Leica Camera AG, from his preface to Erich Lessing’s Herbert von Karajan (Metamorphosen, Vienna, 2008)

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

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

This is the first time that an official presidential portrait was taken with a digital camera. A new official portrait was released today of Barack Obama. It was taken by Pete Souza, the new official White House photographer.

View it, and if you like, download a copy here.

For the curious digerati, the EXIF data are:

Canon EOS 5D Mark II
January 13th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
no flash
105mm lens
f/10
1/125
ISO of 100

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.