Weekend Video - Emily Haines

Emily Haines is a big name in the Canadian indie music scene, known for her dark but infectious piano-driven songs. Her debut release, “Knives Don't Have Your Back” was critically lauded as one of the best albums of 2006, and the video for the single “Our Hell”, directed by Jaron Albertin, is one of the most original visuals I’ve seen recently. I believe the eerie effect comes from the use of heat sensitive film, but correct me if I’m wrong.

Alejandra Laviada

I’m in the process of laying out our next show for an opening this Saturday to which you’re all invited. The artist is Alejandra Laviada, a 28 year old Mexican photographer whose work consists of going into old buildings in Mexico City that are about to be demolished, creating sculptures out of the detritus she finds, and then making a photograph of what she’s created. Her pictures burst with inventiveness, and her prints are large, colorful, and luminous. They remind me of a cross between the work of Tara Donovan (who was just awarded a MacArthur “Genius” grant) and the still lives of Irving Penn. (While of course remaining totally original.)

People are always interested in how someone gets a show so here’s
how it happened. I first saw Alejandra’s work in 2007 as part of PEEK – the follow up to Art & Commerce’s first Festival of Emerging Photo-
graphers. It stood out for me there and I made a mental note of the work. This past February Jorg Colberg gave her the briefest mention but it reminded me of her name. Then this spring Laviada’s new work was not only included in Kathy Ryan’s standout exhibition, “Chisel” at the first New York Photo Festival, but was a complete knockout for me. It had not only gone where I hoped her work would go, but had surpassed it. So I tracked her down and held my breath hoping that I would be able to convince her to do a show at Danziger Projects. Fortunately she was game and the only unusual thing was that we were able to schedule something so quickly.

Here’s what I wrote for our press release:

For Alejandra Laviada, Mexico City is more than her birthplace and home. The abandoned buildings and transitional aura of the sprawling capital city also serve as the inspiration and starting point of her original and inventive constructed still life photographs.

These photographs – exquisitely crafted large color prints - consist of elegant sculptural installations created on site from the everyday objects that Laviada finds in old and dilapidated buildings in Mexico City. The objects are mundane – dried out paint cans, old wheels, brooms, broken chairs, letters from old signage – but in Laviada's hands each construction is both an elegant exercise in creating a three dimensional work and a two dimensional record of pieces of history that are about to vanish while a new history is created. In Laviada's own words her work "explores the shifting relationship between photography and sculpture, whereby ordinary objects are stripped of their traditional function and perceived differently". On numerous levels, the works are about a reconciliation of past and future, classicism and modernism.

Alejandra Laviada was born in Mexico City in 1980. She began her artistic career as a painter, graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2003. Soon after, however, she turned her attention to photography, completing an MFA in photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Upon graduating, she was selected as one of 11 artists to featured in PEEK – the 2007 installment of The Art + Commerce Festival of Emerging Photographers.

Since her work first appeared in PEEK, Laviada has been commissioned and published in magazines including the New York Times Magazine, American Photo, and VOGUE. She was awarded honorable mention at the XII Photography Biennial in Mexico, and her work was singled out by critics when it was most recently shown as part of the exhibit "Chisel" at the first New York Photo Festival.

This will be Alejandra Laviada's first solo American show.

Anyway, please check it out for yourself. The opening is from 6 to 8 p.m. on Saturday, October 11. 521 West 26th Street between 10th and 11th.

Michael Phelps Revisited

I've always considered sports photography to be an under-appreciated genre of photography. Photojournalism, dance photography, jazz photography, fashion photography, are all seen on a higher level, so perhaps it's an accessibility thing. I prefer to make quality and originality the criteria.

As an example of this, I just came across this remarkable sequence of pictures showing unequivocally how Michael Phelps won the 100 meter butterfly by 1/100 of a second. The photographs were "taken" by Heinz Kleutmeier and Jeff Kavanaugh - Kleutmeier being one of the top Sports Illustrated photographers and Jeff Kavanaugh his assistant. As Vincent Laforet points out on his blog it's a rare event for photographers to share credit, but in this case the pictures were the result of so much collaborative planning, remote shuttering, computer synching etc., that the credit was both generous and appropriate.

The first picture (above) is a reminder of the trouble Phelps was in in this particular race. After 50 meters he was 7th of 8.

Phelps made a critical decision in the final meters to attempt another half-stroke while Serbia's Milorad Cavic (right) tried to glide to the finish.

With less than a meter to go, Phelps still trailed Cavic and his only hope was to somehow out-touch the Serbian.

Cavic was inches from stopping Phelps' quest for eight gold medals as the American reached over the water for his final half-stroke.

Phelps brought his hands down through the water and touched the wall .01 seconds before Cavic finished his glide to the wall, swiping the gold medal and tying Mark Spitz's record of seven golds at one Olympics.

As seen in this blowup from the previous frame, Cavic hadn't touched the wall yet.

The Serbian delegation filed a protest, but conceded that Phelps won after reviewing the tape provided by FINA, swimming's governing body.

Seven frames from one of the greatest seconds in sport and in sports photography.

Covered and Uncovered

Catalog time is always fun. Having been in the business a long time and knowing all the players, it’s interesting to see what each house puts on the cover and what the subtext is. I'll get to the above cover shortly.

Christies have recently tended to go with sexy, fashion-y images and now own that sector, but they have taken a serious turn this season with a Vik Muniz (estimated at $30,000 - $50,000) on their Contemporary Photographs sale cover, and a Harry Callahan experimental Chicago image on the cover of the general photographs sale. (Estimate $25,000 - $35,000.) Having won the fashionista battle but lost out on some heavyweight collections it’s a signal that they’re back to fight on the classics.

Phillips, still a relative newcomer, weigh in with a silver-toned reproduction (bearing no relation to the original) of Helmut Newton’s table-top portrait of Charlotte Rampling. The message - “Look at us! We’re edgy, we’re glossy, we’re sexy (but also expensive)." (Estimate - $120,000 - $180,000.)

Bloomsbury, a genuine newcomer holding their first sale in New York, have to my mind the best cover with this striking central detail from a larger picture by Ruud Van Empel. (Estimate $35,000 - $45,000.)

Now back to the top photograph. Sotheby’s go from staid to sensationalistic with the Edward Weston of Tina Modotti (estimated at $250,000 - $300,000). I’m pretty sure it’s the first time anyone has put a full frontal nude on the cover of their catalog so it’s a bold message signifying that they can do it all!

Investment wise, however, if I had to put my money on a single artist, Edward Weston would be my guy. At sub million dollar prices – which his very best works are still available for – I firmly predict this would be one of the safest places to park your money while waiting for the banking crisis or indeed the U.S. economy to recover. You betcha!

“Tina on the Azotea” was made in 1924 on the terrace of the house Weston and Tina Modotti shared just outside of Mexico City. Sotheby’s catalog information helpfully fills in the story behind the photograph:

Weston may have encountered the charismatic, talented, and politically outspoken Tina Modotti as early as 1919 or 1920 in California. Both were married at the time of their meeting: Weston to the former Flora Chandler, the mother of his four sons, and Modotti to the poet Robaix de L'Abrie Richey. Weston and Modotti's affair was already established by July 1923 when the couple sailed, along with Weston's eldest son Chandler, to Mexico. They settled into a small house on the outskirts of Mexico City, and it was there that Modotti took up her complex role as Weston's lover, muse, apprentice, and guide to the vibrant ancient and modern cultures of Mexico.

Mexico stimulated a change in Weston's work. Whether it was the clarity of the Mexican light, or his contacts with a new and exciting group of Mexican and expatriate artists, Weston's photographs soon became characterized by a greater amount of detail and an almost obsessive attention to the object in front of his camera. This change in vision necessitated a change in his technical approach to photographing, and in June of 1924 he purchased a lens that could stop down to a narrow aperture, allowing him to capture his subjects in sharper detail. In his Daybook he wrote, 'For 25 pesos I purchased a Rapid-Rectilinear lens in a cheaply made shutter. Now I start a new phase of my photographic career with practically the same objective that I began with some twenty years ago. My expensive anastigmatic and my several diffused lenses [standard tools for the Pictorialist photographer] seem destined to contemptuous neglect, though it may be that I shall dust them off for an occasional portrait head. The shutter stops down to 256; this should satisfy my craving for more depth of focus.'

Thus equipped, Weston attempted to take studies of clouds the following month from the roof of his house. When the rapid movement of the clouds through the sky made it difficult to capture them photographically, Weston found new subject matter close by, producing the group of photographs from which Tina on the Azotea almost certainly comes. He wrote, 'My eyes and thoughts were heavenward indeed—until, glancing down, I saw Tina lying naked on the azotea taking a sun-bath. My cloud "sitting" was ended, my camera turned down to a more earthly theme, and a series of interesting negatives was obtained. Having just examined them again I am enthusiastic and feel that this is the best series of nudes I have done of Tina.'

In Modotti, Weston found someone who broadened his horizons, as Margrethe Mather had done for him in the previous decade. Through Modotti, Weston was introduced to a world of people and ideas he would not otherwise have known. Modotti—whose own mastery of the photographic medium is unequivocal —posed for Weston throughout the duration of their relationship. Weston's early portraits and nude studies of Modotti were done in his individualistic early 1920s style, a style which had progressed past the standard vocabulary of Pictorialism but had not yet entered fully into Modernism. 'Head of an Italian Girl' and 'The White Iris', to name just two pictures from early in Weston's and Modotti's relationship, possess a lush, sensual, and romantic beauty. The study offered here, no less beautiful and made only a few years later, incorporates a radically different photographic approach. Taken outside the controlled confines of the photographer's studio, and incorporating the disarray of the blanket on which Modotti rests and the roughness of the terrace, the photograph places Modotti's beauty firmly within the corporeal world.

A series of nude studies that Weston would begin a year later—of Anita Brenner and Miriam Lerner—would take the photographer further into the realm of objective Modernism. Now icons, these studies would lead, in turn, to his tour-de-force studies of shells and peppers. But the frank sensuality embodied in Tina on the Azotea would never be as fully realized in Weston's later work as it is in this photograph.

An interesting sidebar to the above. I was recently looking at Kim Weston’s website (Edward’s grandson) where in addition to his own photographs you can find his father Cole Weston’s posthumous prints of Edward’s photographs. Observant readers of this blog may remember that I’ve always been a particular fan of Edward’s “nude in the dune” series from 1936 and there was an image (below) I had never seen before. Does it remind you of anything?

Weekend Video - Janis Joplin

YouTube never ceases to amaze me. One of my favorite Janis Joplin songs is her relatively obscure version of Rodgers and Hart’s “Little Girl Blue”. Joplin recorded the song in 1969 after the success of the track “Summertime” on the album Cheap Thrills, so the idea was to mix another re-worked show tune into her follow-up album Pearl. However, Joplin died in 1970 and the song was added to the album posthumously as a live version.

I never thought I would actually get to see film of Joplin singing the song, but a YouTube search offered up this 1969 clip taken from the singer Tom Jones’s variety show – “This is Tom Jones”. Amazing....

Sheila Metzner

Sheila Metzner installation at The Visual Arts Museum

Three more days to catch the retrospective of Sheila Metzner’s work at the Visual Arts Museum at The School of Visual Arts.

Metzner, who began photographing in the mid-1970s, has always been resolutely her own person whether her work was in fashion or not, and thirty years on her work seems even more distinctive and personal than ever. Working not so much in the Victorian style of photography but in the Victorian, Japonais inflections of Whistler and Sargent, Metzner has mastered most every genre of photography – portraits, floral abstraction, travel, the nude, fashion, urban landscapes, still life, and family pictures – to name a few.

The show contains approximately 100 prints hung salon style and all made by the Fresson printing process - a rare method of color printing that renders characteristically diffused images with remarkable tonal range and color saturation. The process uses layered oil pigments in gelatin and requires between four to seven separate negatives, yielding luminous, glowing colors and a softened, painterly effect. With its chemistry a tightly held secret and production highly limited, Metzner is one of the few photographers in the world who has consistently used the process throughout her career.

Of particular note are the photographs from one of Metzner’s latest series “36 Views of Brooklyn Bridge”, a response to the famous woodblock prints “36 Views of Mount Fuji” by the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai. Shot in both black and white and color and from numerous vantage points, the bridge dissolves and coalesces before our eyes – as Metzner explores the infinite photographic possibilities.

The one sad note in the show is that it quietly incorporates the photographer’s own memorial to her late husband, Jeffrey, a talented artist, teacher, and art director who died unexpectedly earlier this year. Metzner’s many portraits of her husband taken throughout her photographic career comprise their own loving “Views of a Modern Man” as Jeffrey – always the prototypical New Yorker – subjects himself to his wife’s inspection. His good nature and Sheila Metzner’s complete lack of cynicism are the twin spirits of this unusual and wonderful show.

More installation shots:

And some individual images:

William Eggleston

Following yesterday’s reference to William Eggleston, a short report on the forthcoming sale of Eggleston works at Christies, New York. The back story is a true Hollywood tale – a notable film company executive and his wife start collecting photographs in a big way, they hire a young woman to help catalog their rapidly acquired collection, the husband starts an extra-curatorial relationship with the cataloger, and before you know it the marriage is over and the collection is on the auction block. It’s not the way an artist likes to see his work come on the market, but that's life in the fast lane.

The photographs coming up for sale present a wide cross section of Eggleston’s work – some of his best pieces and some less so. The sale lacks his most famous single work, the seminal “Red Ceiling”, but it has images from most of Eggleston’s important series and includes a full set of the Los Alamos portfolios – 75 dye transfer prints taken from 1965 to 1974 encompassing all of the artists major concerns and themes. (The set is estimated at a lowball figure of $350,000 - $550,000 but is probably worth more in the $1 million range.)

Eggleston’s story is equally colorful (no pun intended). Born in Memphis, Tennessee, and raised in Sumner, Mississippi, Eggleston was an introverted and artistic child who took up photography when a friend gave him a Leica camera. Originally influenced by the work of Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, Eggleston began experimenting with color as early as 1965 and seems to have developed his trademark aesthetic pretty much on his own. A renowned boozer, womanizer, and charmer, his earliest patrons were MoMA’s John Szarkowski and the Corcoran’s Walter Hopps and their patronage led to a teaching job at Harvard in the mid 70s.

It was at this time that he discovered dye-transfer printing. As legend has it, he was examining the price list of a photographic lab and as he later recalled: "It advertised 'from the cheapest to the ultimate print.' The ultimate print was a dye-transfer. I went straight up there to look and everything I saw was commercial work like pictures of cigarette packs or perfume bottles but the color saturation and the quality of the ink was overwhelming. I couldn't wait to see what a picture would look like with the same process. Every photograph I subsequently printed with the process seemed fantastic and each one seemed better than the previous one."

At Harvard, Eggleston prepared his first portfolio, entitled 14 Pictures (1974), which consisted of fourteen dye-transfer prints. Two years later Eggleston's became the first color photographer to have a one-person show at MOMA – an exhibition now regarded as a watershed moment in the history of photography, but which at the time sharply divided critics and photography fans alike. (Szarkowski referred to Eggleston's pictures as "perfect," to which the highly offended New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer responded, "Perfect? Perfectly banal, perhaps. Perfectly boring, certainly.")

From then on, however, Eggleston’s radically modern vision, his embrace of everyday Americana, his exploration of color, and his belief in the profundity of the ordinary, along with his cool and louche Southern lifestyle and introspective personality combined to make him an icon of cool and the dominant influence on contemporary American photography.

In November, The Whitney will mount their own major retrospective of Eggleston’s work and we will get a chance to see a more considered view of his career. In the meantime, here are a few of my favorite images from a collection whose story would surely have given the artist a good laugh in his best bar-hopping moments.

From "Los Alamos"

From "Los Alamos"

From "Graceland"

From "Southern Suite"

Memphis, Tennessee, 1973

From "Graceland"

Untitled, 1972, from "10.D.70.V2"

Untitled, 1973, from "Dust Bells, Volume II"

Untitled, 1965 1968, from "Dust Bells, Volume II"