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The Flying Carpet. By Cesare Fabbri. Mack, 2017.
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Reviewed by Karen Jenkins
The Flying Carpet.
Photographs by Cesare Fabbri.
Mack, London, England, 2017. 72 pp., color illustrations, 9½x11½".
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| Represented artist Zoë Zimmerman in her Taos, NM studio – image: Paul O'Connor |
Currently on display at photo-eye Gallery as part of the LOCAL EIGHT exhibition is a selection of new images from Zoe Zimmerman's ongoing series Her Dream. LOCAL EIGHT is a group exhibition of photographs featuring eight represented artists from Santa Fe and Northern New Mexico and will be on view through April 22nd. Zimmerman’s images from Her Dream are photographed using a large format camera in her studio in Taos, NM in collaboration with her daughter. In honor of the new images and the exhibition, I caught up with Zoe to discuss this fantastic ongoing series. – Anne Kelly
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| Cerro Gordo. By David Black. Hat & Beard Press, 2016. |
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Reviewed by Blake Andrews.
Take Me to the River.
Photographs of Atlantic Rivers.
Photographs by Michael Kolster. Text by Alison Nordström and Matthew Klingle.
George F Thompson Publishing, Staunton, USA, 2016. 240 pp., black-and-white illustrations.
"You can't step into the same river twice" the old saying goes. Photographer Michael Kolster might beg to differ. Supported by a 2013 Guggenheim, he's spent the past few years stepping into and around the same four rivers along America's Atlantic Coast. With each river — north to south they are the Androscoggin, Schuylkill, James, and Savannah Rivers — he applied roughly the same treatment. He began at the mountain headwaters and proceeded to the industrial mouth, making images from the shoreline along the way. One hundred of the resulting photographs are collected in the handsome new book Take Me To The River published by George F. Thompson.
Kolster employed the ambrotype process for his photographs, a technique that had its brief heyday more than 150 years ago. For those needing a quick refresher, an ambrotype's emulsion is made of liquid collodion poured over a large glass plate, which must be developed and fixed on-site quickly after exposure. This choice of medium injects more limitations than most — site accessibility, exposure duration, and material flaws must all be accounted for — and these factors become integral to the resulting images. Photographers accustomed to digital convenience might consider the entire thing a pain. But for an enthusiast like Kolster, ambrotypes represent "photography at its most physical and sensuous."
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In Kolster's experienced hands, the photographic process takes front and center. Blips, blurs, and specks litter the images. But these markings are well controlled and rarely detract from the subject matter. On the contrary, in several of the more successful images, Kolster masterfully references the time-lapsed streaks of flowing rivers with the collodion itself. "The visible residue of the chemical slurries I coaxed across their surfaces corresponded to the dynamic, shifting character of the rivers," he explains in the forward. Static shots of Worumbo Dam in Maine and a bridge in Philadelphia, in particular, exemplify a deft combination of effects. But all of the images exhibit the timeworn character of cherished heirlooms.
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The choice of ambrotype and its inherent retreat from objectivity raises photography's perennial dichotomy: the photograph as an external document vs. the photograph as internal expression. In John Szarkowski's well-known argument, the division is between "windows" and "mirrors." Don't expect the question to be settled any time soon, and not in this book. But it assumes a central role in Kolster's images. Kolster is well versed in the subject — it may well have motivated his choice of material — and wades quickly into the fray in his introduction, delving into Szarkowski's 1978 essay before finally straddling a philosophical middle gray: "The images… are quite literally both window and mirror."
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If Kolster's explanation leaves the issue unsettled, Alison Nordstrom’s essay, also in the book, provides a bit more guidance. By framing Kolster's river photos in historical context — with supporting examples by Daguerre, Fox Talbot, and O'Sullivan — she seems to favor their importance as scientific documents. The structure of the book also fosters this view. Each river's chapter is introduced with a diagram and statistical background, followed by a sequence of photographs progressing downstream to describe a loose geographic narrative. For those seeking pure information about these four rivers, the book is a reference manual of sorts.
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The meat of Take Me To The River is, of course, the photographs themselves. Presented dramatically with dreamy bright orthochromatic skies, they look quite beautiful in this large scale book. Kolster photographed from a variety of perspectives with varying amounts of human influence. Some images show Edenic natural settings. Some — generally downstream — are quite industrial. A few show actual humans, blurred toward indistinction by the slow exposure process. The range of expressions that a single river can take on is quite extraordinary. One of Kolster's favorite techniques is to combine several photographs of a site horizontally into a panoramic sequence. Sometimes these are contained in one spread. In a few dramatic cases they sweep beyond the page into an extra gatefold. When laid on the book's black satin pages, these multi-image panels give the effect of peering out a — Szarkowski's? — window.
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Kolster's photographs bear more than a whiff of environmentalism. With deadpan translations of industrial effects, they recall the social commentary of New Topographics; yet Kolster's are less wry and are given a romanticized twist. Whether that feeling is due to the chosen viewpoints or the use of an antiquated process is hard to untangle. In any case, Kolster's nostalgia for healthy rivers comes through both in the photos and in his introduction. When he writes "I am struck by how quickly and profoundly these rivers change day by day and over the course of decades," one can't help but wonder if he rues the human impact. But of course, rivers change on their own too.
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The environmentalist ethic expresses itself through the progression of photographs and is finally addressed at length in Matthew Klingle's closing essay which gives an informative history of river-based environmentalism. So, as well as being a photography monograph and reference manual, it could also be considered an environmental manifesto. — Blake Andrews
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BLAKE ANDREWS is a photographer based in Eugene, OR. He writes about photography at blakeandrews.blogspot.com.
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| White Terns, Midway Atoll, 1999 – © Hiroshi Watanabe |
Hiroshi Watanabe
Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant
photo-eye Gallery is proud to announce that represented artist Hiroshi Watanabe has been selected to receive a year-long grant from the esteemed Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Artists cannot apply for these grants and must be nominated and selected by committee.
The Pollock-Krasner foundation was established in 1985 for the sole purpose of providing financial assistance to individual artists of established ability through the generosity of the late Lee Krasner, one of the leading abstract impressionist painters and widow of Jackson Pollock. Our sincere congratulations to Hiroshi on being chosen to receive this prestigious award.
Jamey Stillings
International Photographer of the Year
First Place Winner -
Editorial: Environmental (Professional)
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| Work from Jamey Stillings' Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project |
International Photographer of the Year has awarded represented artist Jamey Stillings First Place in their Editorial: Environmental Professional category for his work on the Cresent Dunes Solar Project. Our congratulations to Jamey on receiving this honor!
The Cresent Dunes work, along with other images, are a part of Stillings' new project Changing Perspectives – an ongoing examination of renewable energy projects on a global scale. Work from Changing Perspectives is on view in LOCAL EIGHT currently installed at photo-eye Gallery through April 22nd.
View More Work by Jamey Stillings
Read More about the Award
See work included in LOCAL EIGHT
Richard Tuschman
Rangefinder Magazine Profile
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| The Potato Eaters, 2014 – © Richard Tuschman |
Richard Tuschman's work was recently featured in Rangefinder Magazine in an article titled How I Light. In this piece, Tuschman breaks down the process and practice of lighting three of different works The Potato Eaters, Green Bedroom (Morning), and Couple in the Street detailing both the gear he used and the challenges he overcame.
"I want the light to act almost as another character, illuminating the inner lives of the subjects as well as their physical forms." – Richard Tuschman
Nick Brandt
Michael Kenna
50 Contemporary Photographers You Should Know
Text by Brad Finger and Florian Heine.
Prestel, Lakewood, USA, 2016.
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| 50 Contemporary Photographers You Should Know Book Cover |
This winter Prestel released 50 Contemporary Photographers You Should Know and photo-eye Gallery is proud to have represented artists Nick Brandt and Michael Kenna listed among a stellar group that includes photographic greats like Steven Shore, Sally Mann, Sebastião Salgado, and William Eggleston.
Organized chronologically by year of birth, each photographer is introduced in double-page spreads that feature reproductions of their work and a perceptive and concise appreciation of their life and career.
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| Nick Brandt's entry from Prestel's 50 Contemporary Photographers You Should Know |
View Work by Nick Brandt
View Work by Michael Kenna
Purchase a Copy of the Book
Linda Connor: Gravity
Florida Museum of Photographic Arts
Gravity, an exhibition of large-format POP prints by represented artist Linda Connor is on view at the Florida Musem of Photographic Arts through the end of March. If you're in Florida or making the trip to Tampa for Spring Break, make sure to see this beautiful work before the show closes.
View More Work by Linda Connor
Read More about the Exhibition
Bear Kirkpatrick
The Billboard Creative
Photographer's Showcase artist Bear Kirkpatrick was selected to participate in The Billboard Creative's 2016 LA Billboard Art Project. Our congratulations to Bear for participating in this creative takeover in Downtown LA.
Under Creative Director and Creator Mona Kuhn, The Billboard Creative transforms remnant, or unsold, billboards into public art sites throughout greater Los Angeles. Their goal in this work is two-fold: to provide opportunities for emerging artists to share their work with a broad audience and to make art as accessible to Angelenos as the numerous billboards that we view every day.
See More Work By Bear Kirkpatrick
Read more about The Billboard Creative
Florida Museum of Photographic Arts
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Gravity, an exhibition of large-format POP prints by represented artist Linda Connor is on view at the Florida Musem of Photographic Arts through the end of March. If you're in Florida or making the trip to Tampa for Spring Break, make sure to see this beautiful work before the show closes.
"[Linda] is known for her luminous and iconic photographs and fascination with culturally sacred sites and landscapes. Her artwork reveals the essence of her subjects, yielding a sense of timelessness while visually evoking the intangible. She uses a distinctive technique: a large-format view camera allowing her to achieve remarkable clarity and rich detail. "– FMoPA
View More Work by Linda Connor
Read More about the Exhibition
Bear Kirkpatrick
The Billboard Creative
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| Ashely 3: The Triumph of Death, 2013 – © Bear Kirkpatrick On View in Los Angeles last January |
Under Creative Director and Creator Mona Kuhn, The Billboard Creative transforms remnant, or unsold, billboards into public art sites throughout greater Los Angeles. Their goal in this work is two-fold: to provide opportunities for emerging artists to share their work with a broad audience and to make art as accessible to Angelenos as the numerous billboards that we view every day.
See More Work By Bear Kirkpatrick
Read more about The Billboard Creative
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| Traffic/Sunset Park/Continental Divide. By Henry Wessel. Steidl, 2017. |
Henry Wessel (b. 1942, Teaneck, NJ) is a photographer based in California. He is the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships and three NEA grants, and his photographs are included in numerous private and public collections. In 1975 he was one of ten photographers included in New Topographics at George Eastman House. He is the author of several photographic monographs, including most recently Traffic / Sunset Park / Continental Divide, published in 2017 by Steidl.
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| Traffic/Sunset Park/Continental Divide. By Henry Wessel. Steidl, 2017. |
Blake Andrews: Congratulations on the new book. It comes on the heels of several books of your photographs made in the past few years. And this is after a long career with not many publications. Has something happened recently to spur your increased book production?
Henry Wessel: I started making books in 1968. It was not until meeting Gerhard Steidl in 2005 that a viable opportunity to publish presented itself.
BA: Do you feel that the sequencing of your books adds a layer of complexity to the work?
HW: Absolutely. Arranging a precise sequence of photographs is similar to arranging words in a specific order to create a poem. The meaning comes from what is being described and the shape of that description. The photographic sequence is a fiction, an analogy for the thing it represents. It is about a particular experience that would not exist without the sequence.
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| Traffic/Sunset Park/Continental Divide. By Henry Wessel. Steidl, 2017. |
BA: What is your understanding of chance as it relates to making photographs?
HW: Luck is impartial. A person has just as much bad luck as good luck. Some artists learn very early to ignore the bad luck and to embrace the good luck. Many photographers learn, experientially, how to anticipate good luck and then physically put themselves in a position to receive it.
BA: What do you think is the most common misconception about your photographs?
HW: If you approach any work openly, trying to ascertain from its appearance what the work is suggesting it is about, and then deciding if the work lived up to this suggestion, and finally asking yourself if it was worth suggesting, then you have taken the effort to inhabit the work, which would lead to very few misconceptions about the work.
BA: Can you describe how you found, conceptualized, and made this photograph?
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| Santa Barbara, 1977. Henry Wessel. |
HW:
- Found……This photograph describes a moment hidden in the flux of time. Before the photograph was taken, it did not exist. Therefore it could not be found.
- Conceptualized……This photograph is not the kind of picture that one could have imagined. Otherwise, someone would have painted it long ago. Therefore it could not be conceptualized.
- Made……(or “How were you able to take this picture?) If I am walking on the sidewalk in a populated area, I usually have the camera settings at a position that will describe the light, stop the action, and maximize the depth of focus. This allows me to simply point the camera and press the shutter, with very little time between recognition and response. Without a fluid, intuitive response, this picture would not have been made. Thinking would have been too slow. The event would have been over if I had taken the time to think.
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| Traffic/Sunset Park/Continental Divide. By Henry Wessel. Steidl, 2017. |
BA: How often do your photographs match what you see during the moment of exposure? Are you generally surprised or are they as you expected? How does your reaction affect your interpretation?
HW: Never. I shoot film. I use a rangefinder camera. When I am looking through the viewfinder I am looking through a clear piece of glass, a window. I am seeing the physical world when I press the shutter. Later, when I print the photograph, it is no longer the physical world in my viewfinder. It is a transformation of that world into a still photograph — a new form.
Purchase Traffic / Sunset Park / Continental Divide
View more publications from Henry Wessel
photo-eye Gallery is thrilled to share Stage Stills a fantastic new series by represented artist Jo Whaley. Created on location at the Scottish Rite temple in Santa Fe, NM, Whaley’s latest project is equal parts fine art and documentary. Granted Access by Scottish Rite Masons, Whaley returns to her roots in painting and theatre by photographing the 76 stage backdrops on site – some dating back to as early as 1911. Remarkably, the backdrops, props and rigging have remained unchanged. Whaley instantly recognized the rarity of this theatrical collection and as she puts it, "fallen down a rabbit hole into a theatrical fantasy world still intact". We look forward to the unveiling of more images from Stage Stills, as well as the 2018 release of The Museum of New Mexico Press's book in which Whaley's photographs will be featured to document the Scottish Rite Temple and it's jewel box-theater full of rare backdrops.
In the art portfolio of images entitled Stage Stills I am responding to theatrical backdrops that were intended for masonic degree performances, but I repurpose their original intent. In my eyes they are viewed out of context and are material for fiction. I arrange the props, stage the models and design the lighting in order to create an image, much as I have done in my studio for years. The difference is that the scale is much grander and I must interact to the arcane visual references inherent in the theatrical past of the backdrops. These Stage Stills also take the viewer back stage, deconstructing the illusion that theater hopes to create and revealing the stagecraft. Theatrical sets are always created with speed and efficiency, intending to look good only from the distance of the audience. Up close they tend to appear crude and in the case of the Scottish Rite temple collection, showing the signs of over a century of use. The camera captures these cracks in the illusion. This series is still in progress. I have fallen down a rabbit hole into a theatrical fantasy world still intact. There is more to explore.– Jo Whaley 2016
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| Stage Stills (6) 2016 © Jo Whaley | Archival Pigment Print, 23x34.25", Ed. of 10, $2,000 |
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| Stage Stills (1) 2016 © Jo Whaley | Archival Pigment Print, 34x23", Ed. of 10, $2,000 |
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| Stage Stills (3) 2016 © Jo Whaley | Archival Pigment Print, 30x23", Ed. of 10, $2,000 |
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For more information on Stage Stills or to purchase prints, please contact the Gallery Staff at 505.988.5152 x202 or gallery@photoeye.com
Additional images from Whaley's classic series Natura Morta are included in photo-eye Gallery's current group exhibition LOCAL EIGHT, and are on display until April 22nd, 2017.
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"Daido Moriyama is without a doubt one of the most prolific and influential Japanese photographers alive today. Now at seventy-eight years of age, Moriyama has created an exhaustingly massive catalog full of work created in over half a century of photographing. His work is so abundant that even the most avid collectors have difficulties amassing a complete library of his publications. To those who have not spent a lifetime following the artist’s work, it may seem daunting to figure out where to begin — but like all legendary artists, Moriyama’s career had to start somewhere.
Enter Pantomime, This publication is a collection of the first photographic series Moriyama ever made as a freelance photographer. After being inspired by a biology textbook illustration of human and animal embryos, Moriyama sought to photograph the inside of a gynecological institution near the Tanzawa Mountains. There he found a collection of embryos and fetuses at various stages of development preserved in formaldehyde. Over the next three days, Moriyama spent hours photographing these specimens both in their original glass containers and in a more controlled studio environment. The resulting images are dark, disturbing, intriguing, intimate, and compelling. As you flip through the thin pages of the volume you are torn between an instinctual aversion and a curious fascination. The images haunt you with their silence and are impossible to ignore. While a selection of these photographs were published in Moriyama’s very first photobook, many of the images are published here for the first time.
Despite the beautiful artwork found inside Pantomime, the images are not the primary reason why I recommend this book. In an afterword, Moriyama explains not only his memory of creating this series — but also what the work means to him now over fifty years later. This book not only documents the beginning of life — but also the beginning of one of the most accomplished photographic careers in modern history. If this wasn’t enough, he makes a powerful statement about memory, humanity, hopelessness, innocence and the passage of time. This book seamlessly combines the ingenuity and experimentation found in emerging photographers with the wisdom and knowledge gained from a lifetime of photographing. Pantomime serves as the perfect introduction to Daido Moriyama’s work, whether you have been following him for years, or if you have never seen his photographs before." — Forrest Soper
Purchase Book
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Forrest Soper is a photographer and artist based out of Santa Fe, New Mexico. A graduate of the Santa Fe University of Art and Design, he also has previously worked at Bostick & Sullivan. Forrest is the Editor of photo-eye Blog.
http://forrestsoper.com/
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Reviewed by George Slade
Ellsworth Kelly, Photographs.
Photographs by Ellsworth Kelly.
Aperture, New York, USA, 2016. 92 pp., 42 black-and-white illustrations, 9½x10½".
Funny, isn’t it, how infrequently we encounter publications addressing the paintings, sculptures, or print-work of well-known photographers? Whereas over time there’s been no shortage of books attending to the photographic efforts of painters, sculptors, and printers. Could this be one of those insidious, veiled comments about how “easy” and “democratic” this medium is?
Please don’t misunderstand; I do think it’s interesting to encounter a visual artist’s more simplified encounters with the material world. Some, like Robert Rauschenberg, demonstrate a very thorough, robust relationship with photography, and are more interesting than others. Let’s just be grateful that they all want to be part of our world; that’s some form of flattery, as I recall.
In most cases, my feeling is that not-primarily-photographic artists’ photographs either present themselves as random yet somehow relevant expressions of a signature vision, or they are used as sketches or raw material toward the completion of a more complex work.
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When it comes to Ellsworth Kelly’s photographs, arranged in a succinct chronological sweep in this new volume, I sense an entirely different engagement. Kelly’s art, as a refresher, addresses color and form in a very straightforward, geometric way. Rarely does he use more than three or four colors, and often relies on only one, uniting it with form, light, and scale as the principle elements of his work. One might imagine his work emerging entirely from a commingling of French curve templates, rulers, and Pantone swatches. But Kelly (1923–2015) made it clear, over time, that there have been real-life correlatives for his work. The dust jacket of his 1994 book Spencertown (featuring his photograph Curve Seen from a Highway, Austerlitz, 1970, which appears on page 39 of the new book) is explicit on this count; the slow rise of a snow-covered field draws a crisp curve across a swath of dark tree trunks, and the resultant shape—note how he calls it a “curve,” not a hill—is immediately recognizable as a “Kelly.”
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Photographic syntax helps him conceive the forms of his work. Something intrinsically photographic, the way photography and its optics compress the three-dimensional world into a planar space, suffuses Kelly’s creative process. One could say, then, that the works he is most known for can be fairly considered on the basis of how effectively they render the forms apparent in his photographs.
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The book reproduces photographs made over a 32-year period. He has drawn inspiration from both dimensional objects, like bricks, barns, branches, and a cabana on a beach in southwestern France. (Also in that part of the world in 1950 he recorded twisted rebar sprouting from the rubble of shelled bunkers, a recollection of what were then very fresh impressions.) Windows both open and shuttered are predictably good, rectilinear subjects. A broken pane of window glass, too, echoing Brett Weston’s 1937 image Broken Window, San Francisco but captured by an eye attracted to the clear form drawn by the sharp edges.
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Kelly embraced perspectival distortions. In fact, the trapezoids that appear in his photographs imply an increasingly sophisticated understanding of photographic vision. A square of refreshed sidewalk cement, photographed at a low angle, meets the picture plane as a skewed rhombus. A glowing drive-in movie screen, seen during the day, floats in an ambiguous relationship to the black background and the hint of horizon above the trees. A bent branch, seen from the proper angle and flattened in the image, casts a shadow on snow that makes a heart.
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It’s in his understanding of shadows that Kelly reveals his most photography-reliant inspiration. Knowing that he’s looking for shapes allows us to comprehend his attraction to spaces under eaves, inside doorways, and beneath boardwalks and fire escapes. He understands how shadows issue from the physical objects that cast them and fruitfully explores the tensions present in figure-ground relationships. In some of the images, the sought-after form pushes so assertively against the picture plane that the image starts to flip between one configuration of reality and another.
Kelly clearly grasped that photography’s dialectic encompasses both the dimensional and the flat; using black-and-white imagery this so-called abstract artist asserted that his work bore a very convincing resemblance to aspects of the real world. — George Slade
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GEORGE SLADE, a longtime contributor to photo-eye, is a photography writer, curator, historian and consultant. He can be found online at http://rephotographica-slade.blogspot.com/
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| Cloud No. 8716, © Laurie Tümer |
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| Cloud No. 3853, © Laurie Tümer |
I have a 180-degree view from my perch. If I walked up the hill that crests 60 feet from my front door, I would see 360 degrees. Down here is still close enough to heaven. I see the badlands to the south that obscure my view of Santa Fe, and a pristine mesa I dream of hiking that runs east and west from Española to Chimayo. Facing west from a reclining position is the Jemez Mountains where I can only see a hint of the horizon. When I moved across town here six years ago I began lazily photographing the clouds through this west facing window while waiting out pain flares. As I became absorbed in capturing this spectacle, the pain eclipsed just enough to rise and get carried away. Photographing clouds is now an impressive antidote in my arsenal. Before moving to this cloud amphitheater, I never had the luxury of watching clouds for hours—who does? So, I am grateful for the time, the view from this room of my own, and a generous subject.“ –Laurie Tümer
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| Cloud No. 3148, © Laurie Tümer |
"Laurie Tümer has found a way to deliver sunsets and clouds from their overused and exhausted banality…" – Siegfried Halus
"…We need them [clouds] – the alchemy, this mystery, these drifting masses we can’t beckon or cajole, fence or box or even put a finger on. Sometimes what has evaporated returns to quench a fireline or nourish a garden plot...” – Lisa Gill.
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| Cloud No. 8575, © Laurie Tümer |
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| Cloud No. 3655/3652, © Laurie Tümer |
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| Cloud No. 4889, © Laurie Tümer |
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| CLOUDS self-published by Laurie Tümer |
Purchase a copy of the CLOUDS monograph
View the LOCAL EIGHT exhibition
Read More about Laurie Tümer
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