The Lost Sitting

I was intrigued by the picture above, although I've never been a huge fan of Alison Jackson's work. I find her faux paparazzi shots more one-liners than art. To see what I mean you can go to the M+B gallery website for images from her current Los Angeles show.

Unfortunately, the JFK and Marilyn images that I thought presaged some subtler new work turned out to be some of Jackson's earliest work, but with their echo of Mary Alpern's "Dirty Windows" series and their convincing recreation of a likely event, it's an instructive look at the road not taken.


Whatever quality these pictures have, however, pales next to the
capture of real life. As I was getting ready to post the above, I
came across the picture of JFK and Jackie (below) from Elliott
Erwitt's continually surprising new book, "Unseen".

Weekend Video - Once

If you haven't seen "Once", the incredible low-budget indie film about an Irish busker trying to get his life and career back on track, you are probably sick of people telling you to see it. But it's even better than its proselytizers can convey, with great music, great performances, and a subtle story that over and over again seems both true to life and dramatically satisfying. It's now been released on DVD so there are
NO EXCUSES!

Letter from L.A.

A brief trip to Los Angeles for meetings at The Getty, LACMA, and to discuss the Diana Vreeland film project with Sony Pictures. My visit also coincided with Photo LA now in it's 17th year.

First stop was the Getty where they currently have three photography shows up - Graciela Iturbide, Andre Kertesz, and The Nude. The first two didn't do much for me, but the nudes were lively and there was one terrific Manuel Alvarez Bravo picture from 1938 with an interesting caption about how the artist had hired one model to pose for him for an entire year. Talk about a year in pictures! I will try to get a j-peg, but as I was stopped from taking pictures by a vigilant guard, the picture below is the best I could do.


Meanwhile at The Getty I ran into none other than Sally Mann, who had just opened a show of her extreme close-up portraits of her children at Gagosian in Beverly Hills. It might not be the best space to show work, but the pictures have lost none of their power since they were first shown in New York a year ago. (Surprisingly for Gagosian, the gallery assistant behind the front desk was exceptionally friendly in a most un-New York way.)



I particularly liked this picture of Virginia, who we don't see much of these days.

Then it was on to Photo LA from which I've included just a few highlights. While these look like imitation Adam Fuss, they were actually quite beautiful photographs (not photograms) of colored water by the Vietnamese photographer Han Nguyen. At Joseph Bellows.

Julius Schulman's architectural pictures of Los Angeles were much in evidence. This unusual color shot courtesy CraIg Krull.


With Richard Prince ascendant, several dealers had rare Richard Prince books and portfolios. The conceptual gag here is that Prince signs all the photos to himself and then re-photographs the "finished" work. From Harper's Books

At Charles Hartman Fine Art, a striking new Scott Peterman taken in Cairo.

A Gary Winogrand taken at the Beverly Hilton in 1964. From Katrina Doerner

Ed Ruscha in 1970 by Jerry McMillan

And finally, from the Magnum booth, an unusual Alec Soth featuring Brigitte Bardot taken in Paris last year.

The Westerns

It looks like it’s going to be Katy Grannan month - with simultaneous shows at Fraenkel, Greenberg Van Doren, and Salon 94. The accolades I presume will come her way will be well deserved for these are some of the strangest and most powerful pictures to come along for a while.

One of the four original Yale girls in the famous 1999 "Another Girl, Another Planet" show, Grannan’s work has revolved around soliciting willing subjects for her psychologically intense constructed portraits. Aside from the technical expertise and tactile sense of the body Grannan brings to each picture, her work has always played with the tension between her own theatricality and the depth of revelation of her subjects.

Grannan has now moved her operation west where referrals led her to Gail and Dale (two middle-aged transsexuals and best friends) and Nicole, a woman clearly on the verge of something very disturbing. It’s Diane Arbus meets Sweeney Todd - a forceful and disturbing vision of a world where the roles people play cover up layers of once-repressed but now exploding emotion.

HIM

The British seem to have a thing about tweaking the establishment with a combination of art and humor. There's Banksy, Damien Hirst (who certainly seems like a prankster to me), and now HIM - a life sized waxwork of art collector Charles Saatchi by Robert McHarg III.

Saatchi's influence on the art world is legendary due to his reputation for making and breaking artists' careers through his buying and selling habits. In response McHarg created a life-size sculpture which he dressed up in 101 different outfits and photographed for a book just published by Trolley. As you can see it's a droll run across the visual iconography of contemporary art and photography executed in deadpan style. As McHarg points out, "It’s the biggest action figure I’ll ever own, it's all about the artist collecting the collector, a David and Goliath battle over power and punch lines."

Weekend Video - Jazz On A Summer Day

Bert Stern has been caught in Marilyn Monroe "Last Sitting" mode for so long it's easy to forget what a talented photographer and film-maker he was and is. His film "Jazz on a Summer's Day" covers the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival in startling Kodachrome color and with amazing photo-cinematographic compositions. The audience shots are a master class in how cutaways can invigorate rather than distract, and the multiple cameras and sharp edits never make the wrong move. In this clip Dinah Washington gives a swinging performance of "All of Me", but marvel at how Stern introduces Washington with just a close-up of the bopping jeweled bow of her dress!

The Year in Pictures

Given my obvious interest in other people's choices for "The Year in Pictures", I scoured the web from major news sites to obscure blogs to see other selections of the year's "best" photographs, but by and large it was a fairly predictable assortment. One picture kept cropping up, however, and I was surprised I hadn't seen it before. It was this picture by John Moore of a woman at Arlington National Cemetery mourning her fiance who was killed in Iraq.

With the web's instant access to information it was possible to go from pure visceral reaction to the image to knowing quite a lot about the photographer, the subject, the history of its publication, and the inevitable controversy about how "true" or manipulated the image was. (A less effective shot taken by Moore from a different angle shows a more crowded cemetery.) But to cut a long story short, it's a great and totally valid image - and rare in its neutrality. I guess if so inclined you could read it as a tribute to courageous sacrifice as opposed to an indictment of the folly of war. However what makes it so powerful and unusual is the sensuality of the mourning figure (something we don't usually associate with pictures of grief today although this has certainly been part of the language of paintings) intersecting the relentless geometry of receding headstones.

Moore, it turns out, is a Getty photographer based in Pakistan of all places, who returned briefly to the States so his wife could give birth to their child in the U.S. He gives an interesting account of how he came to take the picture on Getty's own blog.

Another striking picture that looks like a still from a Coppola or Scorcese film was taken by Denver photographer Ahmad Terry after police shot and killed a gunman in the State Capitol. Before shooting on his regular camera, Terry shot the scene on his cellphone so that his paper, The Rocky Mountain News, could post it on their website.

Lastly, this picture by Stephanie Sinclair which appeared in The New York Times Magazine in a story on Afghani child brides, some like the one pictured here as young as 11 years old. Like all the photographs above, it's the subject, combined with the many formal aspects of the picture, and the originality of the image that make each one so memorable.