David Goldblatt in Conversation April 29th / Howard Greenberg Gallery

Errata Editions and Howard Greenberg Gallery are pleased to invite you to an evening with the South African photographer David Goldblatt in conversation with writer Joanna Lehan on Thursday April 29th. The opening of David's exhibition of the work from his landmark book Particulars will happen that same evening starting at 6pm at 41 East 57th Street Suite 1406. The conversation on both Particulars and In Boksburg will start promptly at 7pm. Pre-signed copies of the Errata Editions study of In Boksburg will be available for sale.

Pete,

In response to your idea that perhaps you were giving Maspeth a bad rep in your photographs...

Robert Coles writes the introduction in Thomas Roma's Found in Brooklyn book, and at the end of this introduction, he says something in relation to Roma's book, which I think really applies to your photographs of Maspeth.

He says that the photographer "...walks, stalks his hometown, keeps us resolutely outside those homes, garages, stores, schools; and yet, so doing, brings us up close indeed: we are given what he 'found,' the soul of a place as it is, and as it gets lived daily."

So in this way, I think you're allowing your audience to explore the neighborhood, stripped of its glamour, in its natural state. When a person walks around his neighborhood, he notices all of the so-called "behind the scenes" details, rather than the facade that it may be trying to put up, and becomes almost immune to all of the "impressive" aspects of the area because it's old to his eyes. So your photos make me feel like it's a neighborhood I live in and am a part of, and am definitely not visiting, which I think is part of the point.

I hope you understand what I'm saying. In my opinion, you're photographically representing Maspeth in a good way.

-Lisa

Book Review: Stanley Greenberg

On the photos he showed us in class:

In his book Architecture Under Construction, Stanley Greenberg photographs that which is scarcely photographed: skyscrapers and other buildings during the skeletal work of their construction phase. The book is composed of 71 large format images, all arranged either alone or with a complement on the opposing page. The book acts as a form of art that is itself captivated by another form of art: architecture. Furthermore, the book focuses on what is commonly believed to be the ugliest part of architecture’s creation, its construction. Whereas a painting or drawing may look beautiful at any phase through completion, structures being built are often associated with danger, dust, and loud, piercing noises. Greenberg points out the beauty he can find within this phase of art in the making.

Greenberg seems to be fascinated with the skeletal aspect of these structures. He never photographs barren, empty foundations, nor does he photograph the project as it nears completion. He instead focuses on the harmonious (but often sometimes extremely chaotic) intertwining of steel beams, the molding of concrete to encase the floors or “skin” of these buildings, and the scaffolding, which seems to fill up all empty space within.

Greenberg’s subject matter was well staked out ahead of time. Due to the nature of his medium, hundreds of snapshots of the sites were not practical. Timing was key, and this is where light comes in. The light in each of his photographs is well thought out. Greenberg estimated the optimal time for the sunlight he desired, and came back later on in the day. The extensive use and play of shadow is rare in his photographs, and the light from the sun is often straight on. His

photographs hint at this patiently planned out method of taking pictures.

The absence of people in his work hints at the fact that Greenberg was more interested in the aesthetics of these structures rather than the workers’ interactions with the architecture, the construction process as a whole, etc. This book is not a documentary, but rather an organized collection of aesthetic amazement.

Greenberg’s photographs are usually taken of a field of crisscrossing ironworks, or organized perpendicular lines. He loves to toggle between the two, between this organized sense of structural math and order, and chaos that contains great depth. None of his shots are taken at short-range distances, and are often taken of several components together from a large-scale point of view.

As a final note, I found Greenberg’s afterword very interesting and fitting for his book. It is structured exactly how I imagined his day would be like -- frantic, interrupted, and misunderstood. I found it to be a very appropriate ending.

Although this wasn’t an exhibit I’d normally be interested in, I wanted to write about it because it’s something I’ve never really explored or fully appreciated. Nonetheless, I thought the goals and experiments of the exhibition was very interesting and thought provoking (most often, after I had read the placard, I must admit). Anyway, the work I saw was the Surface Tension modern photography exhibit at the Met. It was a rather small exhibit of about 25-30 pieces. There were a few I jotted down that caught my interest.

The piece I was most interested in was Chris McCaw’s Sunburned. McCaw builds custom large and medium format cameras, loading standard size photo paper in lieu of film. For almost the entire day, the four prints scorched a path in the paper, and beyond this you can thinly make out the landscape of the mountains in the desert. He exposed the paper on the winter solstice, the day in which the sun follows the shortest path in the sky. I thought this was a really interesting piece. At first glance it looked like complete garbage. I throw away messed up photo paper in the darkroom that looks cooler than this. But after I understood the goal, and recognized that the discoloration in the background was in fact mountains, I really appreciated the piece a lot. I love how in an increasingly digital world, some artists still create their own film cameras and use them to interpret and record light in their own unique ways.

To the left of McCaw’s piece was a photograph by Daido Moriyama. Although I didn’t think it was one if his best works, I thought it was cool to see Moriyama’s work in an exhibit like this, especially since I’ve been looking him up a lot over the past month or two. I have to admit though, I don’t know how well his piece fits into the exhibit...

In the corner of the space was an enormous twenty-by-six foot photo mural of a concrete slab of freeway surface. The artist, Miles Coolidge, photographed a portion of the Santa Monica Freeway designated as an Accident Investigation Site, hence the title of his piece. The photograph was taken at a 1:1 scale, pointing out literally every imperfection, cigarette butt, crack and detail of the road surface. This is truly a great example of the photographer’s primary role, to point. And that’s literally all this piece does. As simple (and almost unoriginal) as it was, I really loved the way it was put together, and the concept behind it. Think about how many hundreds of thousands of motorists pass over this site each day, none of which take any notice to what Coolidge is pointing out. Of the entire freeway, this definitely had to be the most interesting portion of highway in terms of defect and detail hidden within.

One piece that got me thinking was Marco Beuer’s Spin. The concept was pretty straight forward: Breuer placed a sheet of exposed photo paper on a turntable, and allowed the record player to scratch through the layers of the paper. The placard noted that Breuer uses no cameras, lenses, film or enlargers in his “photography.” I found this interesting. Is this photography? Breuer’s not really playing with light in this piece; he’s playing with chemicals. I’m unfamiliar with any of his other works, but the mention of his work as photography got me thinking as to what exact point the word “photography” can no longer be used. In my opinion, this is one of those cases, although I’d be interested in hearing an argument otherwise.

Robert Adams Book Review: The New West

A pretty popular book included on the list we all received in January. I felt a really strong attachment to it, mostly because I have similar interests in Adams' views of development, deforestation, and man's (often forced) harmony with nature.

Robert Adams’ book The New West: Landscapes Along the Colorado Front Range caught my interest from the first few photographs. By the time I had finished his work, it was clear to me what Adams was expressing: his viewpoint in regards to the turmoil we have put the once “wild west” through. Adams divides his book, which contains fifty or so black and white photographs, into five sections labeled Prairie, Tracts and Mobile Homes, The City, Foothills, and Mountains. Each section guides his journey through the Pikes Peak region of the Colorado Wilderness. Each photograph occupies the right page, while a complementing word or two about the photo and its respective location lie on the left. It was obvious to me that these simple, at first innocuous captions were something more. They very, very subtly contrasted man’s creations with the natural landscape they are effectively destroying.

Prairie seemed at first as a romantic tribute to rural transportation. Here, man is not seen. His creations seem to compliment the landscape, or at minimum, seem unobtrusive. Some roads are unpaved, others are rolling landscapes with telephone wires running conspicuously through the sky. Then suddenly, more telephone poles -- a For Sale sign. The next image is a dead rabbit on hot asphalt, its innards graphically spilling from its sides. It is noticeable that the greenery is growing sparse -- a lone shrub grows painfully out of a rocky roadbed. Man has clearly claimed the land by the end of this chapter. The descriptions at left seem to mock this “description-of-my-vacation-pictures” type set up.

Man moves in. The opening image of Tracts and Mobile Homes makes this clear. Barren, level plains are for their exploit. They begin to create these homes. Even as they near completion, as Adams suggests in his captions, the restoration of wildlife and shrubbery is vacant. The dirt remains instead. One image contains a STOP sign, at the center of the composition -- deliberately chosen by Adams. Adams uses words sparsely yet powerfully in his photographs, so that they convey a powerful message without becoming convoluted. Interesting in this section is Adams’ use of two images from almost identical locations of a “subdivision in Arvada.” The latter of the photographs is ridden with dark, ominous clouds overhead. The chapter ends with Adams’ caption, “dusk,” with the image of what appears to be a real estate sign alongside the road.

The City is where it all grows cold and dead, as far as wildlife is concerned. Adams remarks at the opening of the title how nothing is forbidden. One image even shows people shopping within a drugstore, a sign ironically hung over them that reads, “CAMPING NEEDS.” Camping needs. In order to flee the poured concrete and destruction that their fellow man has laid, yes, maybe one needs camping. Miles and miles of concrete, parking lots, and gas stations flood Adams’ most important chapter.

Foothills finds the reader retreating from the inner city, back into the city limits. Here, man is still at work, but in a different setting. It appears that the reader is seeing man interact from a bit further back. He builds long fences to keep his few cattle from roaming (which, as the title suggests, are for sale), his highways are guided and formed by the natural terrain. A house sits in a field of plains, his homes, gas stations and motels all contrasted by the ominous landscape -- giant, silhouetted mountains behind them. His creations are small when viewed from this perspective. Perhaps the most interesting image in this chapter is one of a darkening sky, a lit gas station with the bold words FRONTIER on top of it, and a barely noticeable mountain silhouetted behind it. The caption only reads, “Pikes Peak.” It is clear at this image that Adams is using his labeling scheme to somehow mock man’s creations and his relationship with nature.

Mountains is brief, and closes the narrative through the Colorado landscape. The first image shows a curve in a highway, and signs for the purpose of guiding automobiles and creating a sense of order. Next comes “vacation homes,” scattered arbitrarily amongst heavy boulders that heave seemingly toppled down the mountainside. How have they not crushed flat these homes? Nature is starting to reclaim its domain -- a small billboard and telephone wires are found consumed by heavy foliage along a creek. The final image in this short, four-image chapter is that of a mountaintop on a clear day, with a cemetery in the foreground covered by a dark shadow. This image can be inferred as man’s inevitable decline; nature will always reclaim the land man takes, as man will inevitably die, leaving his land and possessions for the immortal landscape to consume.

Daido Moriyama

Hi everyone, sorry it took me so long to post on here . . .

Anyway, in late February, I went to the Luhring Augustine Gallery on 24th Street in Chelsea to see the Daido Moriyama exhibit. Moriyama is a post-World War II Japanese photographer that photographed and developed with extremely high contrast, popping grain tremendously to often create a lifeless, ominous feeling. The shadows his subjects create are often true black, and coalesce with the subject to morph it into a unique, unidentifiable figure.

The exhibit was divided into two parts. The front and larger of the two rooms displayed Moriyama’s photos from a trip to Hawaii. The second room displayed smaller-scale versions of his past work. At first I thought the front “vacation” portion was a bit strange -- strange that he would display vacation pictures that contained images of typical Hawaiian tourist photos of volcanoes, airplanes, palm trees, pig roasts and the like. However when I came back to this part of the show, I viewed the photographs more objectively, and really started to appreciate them for what they were and how they were presented. The reasons why I initially disliked them was most likely why Moriyama had taken them. He wanted to take trite, typical vacation pictures and present them through his unique lens. Hawaii is obviously a popular relaxation spot, but after Moriyama processes his images, they seem to take place on some eerie, lifeless planet. The refreshing surf becomes thick oil. The sand becomes a featureless concrete floor. Palm trees look like nothing you’ve ever seen before. (Of course, this is to exclude one piece I think kind of ruined the set . . . a dog with sunglasses on and money hanging out of his mouth . . . just didn’t do it for me...)

My favorite pieces were in the back room. Purely out of interest and not really attributing to technical ability, I really loved his transportation shots (including one or two in the front as well). I think Moriyama has a love for graphic design, as his photographs of signs and text suggest. The image of the streetlight against the texture of the ocean is, I believe, a great example of his style. Moriyama loves taking the typical, and morphing it towards the realm of unrecognizable. He isolates the common object, occurrence, landscape, etc., and alters it in a way that we see it from a completely new perspective. Grains pop where smoothness belongs, sense of day and night is completely removed, and small features that give character to the subject are blown out by the contrast to create a sense of shape, as opposed to unique object.

I definitely liked his photographs that he shot in Japan the most. It is obvious to me that he feels most comfortable here, and has a strong sense of unity with his subject matter. He appears to focus on culture and personal interactions, and present them from an almost post-apocolyptic point of view.

Something from the gallery's website:

http://www.luhringaugustine.com/index.php?mode=past&object_id=227

Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibition at MoMA

Hey! I'm going to see this on Friday, but just thought I'd let you all know about it now, and I'll write a little something later.

Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century, at MoMA (now through June 28th)

Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century

http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/968