2.28.2015

DOUG KEYES: Portrait at KLOMPCHING

Martin Schoeller (2014)
by Doug Keyes courtesy KLOMPCHING Gallery

Chuck Close B&W (2014)
by Doug Keyes courtesy KLOMPCHING Gallery

Portrait
"There are many reasons artists have used the portrait as a means of expression throughout history but Keyes is most interested in the cognitive impression left after seeing the work. What is the image in our mind before we consider the idea behind the work? Is it a copy of what our eyes perceive in the world? What does the brain actually “see”? Keyes work proposes that the brain creates collections of layered images over time, not individual snapshots of moments like a camera. When we think of a person it’s not a static, flat impression. We live in time and space, always moving, always inputting new data. And this data is never objective, it’s not a collection of precisely copied information; it’s as imperfect as our memory."

"The genesis of this project was the Chuck Close catalog Keyes photographed in 1998 for his Collective Memory series. What emerged in that multiple exposure image were two portraits representing Close’ body of work. In creating the Portrait work, Keyes chose artists because of their potential to influence his thinking about art and portraiture. He sourced the images from books and the Internet, often after experiencing these artists work in person. Using these same original source materials, Keyes chose images he thought would create an overall portrait reflecting each artist’s portrait work. The resulting digitally layered images condense those many individual works in an effort to portray what the mind actually sees over time." –  DougKeyes.net


March 5–April 11, 2015
Artist Reception March 5, 6pm–9pm

111 Front Street, Suite 206 | Brooklyn, NY 11201
 

JAIME PERMUTH: Yonkeros

from Yonkeros, published by La Fábric
Photograph © Jaime Permuth

In his first monograph, Yonkeros, Guatemalan photographer Jaime Permuth documents “The Iron Triangle”: Willets Point, a small and often overlooked enclave of New York City that is home to junkyards and scrap metal businesses. Permuth’s beautiful black-and-white and color photographs highlight local workers, and their tools and materials.

Francisco Goldman writes, "Soon, maybe by the time you read this, Willets Point might be under the ocean, providing the architecture for one of those artificial reefs that draw fish, coral, crustaceans, a rusted skeleton from which sprouts a renascent marine ecosystem. Junkyard Reefs, these are sometimes called.  Maybe that’s why, as I turned the pages of Jaime Permuth’s beautiful Yonkeros, I thought of Atlantis, of a lost city fathoms deep."


photo: MoMA Store :: YONKEROS

2.26.2015

ASMP-NY PORTFOLIO REVIEW: Round-Up

 Photograph © Yoav Friedlander

 Turkana Wedding
Photograph © Marco Castro

 series "Tides"
 Photograph © Erica Price

ASMP-NY REVIEWERS!

Top left across: James Estrin, Co-Editor, NY Times Lens Blog; Jonas Cuenin, Editor-in-Chief, Camera Magazine; Susan May Tell, ASMPNY Fine Art Chair; Jaime Permuth, Photographer Author; John A. Bennette, Collector, Lecturer, Editor, Curator. 2nd row, left across: Photographer Amy Arbus, Jaime Permuth, James Estrin, Ruben Natal-San Miguel and Gabrielle Greenberg; Gabrielle Greenberg, Associate, Howard Greenberg Gallery; Frank Rocco, ASMP-NY President; Pamela Jean Tinnen, Curator, NYU Kimmel Galleries; Salem Krieger, ASMP-NY Sponsorship Chair. 3rd row, left across: Photographer author Jaime Permuth; Photographer Curator Rusben natal-San Migue; Corinne Tapia, Gallery Director, Sous Les Etoiles Gallery; Rafael Fuchs, Photographer Gallery Owner; Ruben Natal-San Miguel. Bottom row, left across: A.D. Coleman, Critic, Historian, Curator; Alice Zimet, Collector; Photographer Thomas Donley, Photographer and ASMP-NY Membership Chair; and Liam Alexander, ASMP-NY Board Member; Milton J. Ellenbogen, Collector Dealer. Complete list of Reviewers here: L'Oeil de la Photographie

 Photograph © Eileen Lerner

Walking on Air
Photograph © Linn Sage

Mannequin 5
Photograph © Margaret McCarthy

Photograph © Danielle Kelly

Photograph © Eric A. Wessman

Strolling Fifth Avenue After Midnight
Photograph © Teresa Kruszewski

Photograph © Kristy Chatelain
www.brooklynchanging.com

Above are the 10 photographers I reviewed for the ASMPNY 10th Annual Portfolio Review. Check out their websites and blogs for more images!

2.16.2015

THE PICTURE REVIEW: Kate Breakey In Conversation With Sean Perry


Sean Perry In Conversation With Kate Breakey
on the Process, Craft and Life of Working in the Visual Arts

Thursday, February 19, 2015 
6:30 PM to 9:00 PM (CST)
 Austin Community College
 
“I begin with a silver photographic image, a kind of evidence. Then I paint on this in many transparent layers of oil paint and pencil. If I am lucky, the media combine and become enmeshed, a curious union of what was real with my own exaggerations and embellishments, so I can show how beautiful it all is—the light, the form, the texture, and color—because I am a sensualist, and this is my deepest pleasure, my lovely addiction.” —Kate Breakey

Austin, Texas: For our ongoing In Conversation series, The Picture Review team is thrilled to host the singular and exceptional Kate Breakey, for what is sure to be a most inspired evening. We will be discussing the committed work of being an artist, and the remarkable career she has built doing so. Ms. Breakey is internationally recognized for her large-scale, richly hand-colored photographs, including her acclaimed series of luminous portraits of birds, flowers, animals, and insects. Since 1980, her work has appeared in more than ninety, one-person exhibitions and more than fifty group exhibitions in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, China, New Zealand, and France.

A native of South Australia who has also lived and worked in Texas, Ms. Breakey now resides and photographs in the desert outside Tucson. Her work has been beautifully represented in five books, including Birds/Flowers published in 2002 by Eastland Books and Slowlight published by Etherton Gallery in 2012. She has produced three substantial monographs in collaboration with The Wittliff Collections and the University of Texas Press, beginning with Small Deaths (2001), followed by Painted Light (2010) a career retrospective that encompasses a quarter century of prolific image making, and Las Sombras/The Shadows (2012) which is comprised of many hundreds of images, from a bald eagle to tiny moths and flies. This series is a continuation of her lifetime investigation of the natural world which in her own words is "brimming with fantastic mysterious beautiful things."

Her latest landscape work – Out of Darkness was showcased in a recent exhibition with photographer Keith Carter entitled Without and Within, these deeply felt landscapes becoming a metaphor for dramatic personal events that have recently changed her life. Ms. Breakey's work is held in many public institutions including the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University in San Marcos, the Austin Museum of Art, the Australian National Gallery in Canberra and the Osaka Museum in Osaka, Japan. This summer she will return to the prominent Santa Fe Workshops to lead a special course in The Hand-Colored Photographic Print, July 12th – July 17, 2015. – Sean Perry

Thursday, February 19, 2015 
6:30 PM to 9:00 PM (CST)
 Austin Community College
11928 Stonehollow Drive Austin
Photography Dept. Building 3000 | RM3112
Austin, TX 78758


In Conversation: A series of Talks on the Process, Craft and Life of Working in the Visual Arts with Sean Perry


2.13.2015

SYLVIA PLACHY: Mai Manó Haz, Budapest

  In The Shadow of the ElephantPhotograph © Sylvia Plachy

“Not since Robert Frank's 'The Americans' have I experienced a body of work of such range and power. She makes me laugh and she breaks my heart. She is moral. She is everything a photographer should be.”–Richard Avedon 


Photograph © Sylvia Plachy

Jean Michel Basquiat.  Photograph © Sylvia Plachy
 
Adrien Brody as Richie Rude in Spike Lee's Summer of Sam
Photograph © Sylvia Plachy

“I couldn't take my eyes off him. Here was this vibrant little being; his emotions mirrored in his face.”–Sylvia Plachy 

Her son – the Oscar-winner Adrien Brody – was born in 1973 and became her constant model. The photographs of her son are integral part of her oeuvre and, to this day, she wishes her friends and acquaintances happy holidays each year with a picture taken of Adrien in that given year.
Night Mare.  Photograph © Sylvia Plachy

 Recoleta Argentina.  Photograph © Sylvia Plachy

Sylvia often visited Kertész; they talked a lot about life and photography, and gradually a deep friendship developed between them. “I have never seen the moment sensed and caught on film with more intimacy and humanity." – Kertész said of Sylvia and her work.


 Dora and Marika.  Photograph © Sylvia Plachy
"The 110 images from Sylvia Plachy's exhibition, When Will It Be Tomorrow, opening at the Hungarian Photographer’s House in Budapest, are selected from her entire oeuvre with neither the places they were taken at, nor their theme playing a role in their inclusion, but they are chosen if they are attracted by the title’s question." Gabriella Csizek, the curator of the exhibition writes, "The installation adheres to a logic of poetry. The individual walls are verses, bringing the halls and the exhibition as whole together into a poem, a series of poems. The sequences of images created through associations, emotions, and meanings are sometimes painful and eternally lonely. Still at times, they put a smile on our faces."

"Sylvia Plachy's humanism and commitment to truth," continues Ms. Csizek in her introduction to the show, “are not in the harmonious presentation of the world or in search of its beauty; instead, she makes us see the back story with an almost imperceptible subtlety. She sees the fallibility of human existence and reveals cracks and layers of fragility in the faces or course of events. She senses the moment and converts this feeling into an image mapped onto light-sensitive paper. She often conceals her portraits, almost displaying them as quasi-still lifes. Her subjects are never beautiful or ugly; they are people who are just who they have become and who they could be. Sylvia holds a soul-mirror in the form of a camera in her hand. All of her images are a piece of fiction, yet genuinely real at the same time. She never finishes a story but shows it, thus giving life to the image."
SYLVIA PLACHY
When Will It Be Tomorrow
February 15 – April 19, 2015
Hungarian Photographer’s House / Mai Manó Haz
1065 Budapest-Terézváros, Nagymezõ utca 20

Sylvia Plachy, 2014.  Photograph ©Elizabeth Paul Avedon


In 1956, after the revolution, the world-famous Budapest-born photographer, Sylvia Plachy, crossed the Austrian border with her parents. Part of the way they were hidden by corn in a horse-drawn farm cart. Two years later the family settled in the New York area, where she has been living with her family since then. She took her first photographs in the Austrian Alps at the age of 15 during a school trip with an Agfa Box camera a gift from her father. The picture was  of a black goat in the snow-covered white landscape.

She began taking photographs during her studies at Pratt Institute in 1964, learning the basics of the craft during a photography course she took in her junior year; she then realized that she had found her calling. Sice 1974, for thirty years, Plachy was an influential staff photographer of the Village Voice, a cultural weekly newspaper in New York. For eight of those years, she had a column, UNGUIDED TOUR and on the contents page in one image per week and without words she was the city’s peculiar chronicler. Her first book, Unguided Tour came with a record by Tom Waits and featured selected images from the column and from her other Voice assignments. It won ICP’s Infinity award for best publication in 1990. Her next book Red Light (1996) was followed by Signs + Relics (1999), then Self Portrait with Cows Going Home, which received a Golden Light Award in 2004. She subsequently published Going on About Town (2007) and Out of the Corner of My Eye (2008).

Her photography work has been accompanied by continuous success and recognition. In 1977, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2004, the WIPI (Women in Photography International) gave her a Lucie Award. In 2009, she was given the Dr. Erich Salomon award by the German Society for Photography (DGPh) for her lifetime achievement in photojournalism.

Her photographs have appeared in Vogue, Camera Arts, Artforum, The New York Times, Granta, Grand Street, Newsweek, Conde Nast Traveler, Metropolis Magazine, and New Yorker. She has had multiple solo shows around the globe from Tokyo to Los Angeles. Her works are in private and museum collections including, amongst others, Guggenheim Museum (NYC), Museum of Modern Art (NYC), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Paris).

In her life and images, Sylvia Plachy sustains what Central European roots mean for her. She looks back at her first thirteen years in Hungary as a decisive period of her life, cherishing childhood friendships and using the values of her parents as her inner compass to guide her to this day. Starting in 1965, she returned frequently, like a pilgrim.  She visited her grandmother, her friends and the smells and scenes of her childhood.  Her newfound language, photography was the bridge that connected past and present.

The title of the exhibition, When Will It Be Tomorrow, is a sentence from her childhood she used to ask before going to bed. She intends to give this title to her next book as well.
or thirty years, Sylvia Plachy was an influential staff photographer of the Village Voice, a cultural weekly newspaper in New York. For eight of those years, she had a column, the title most of the time was UNGUIDED TOUR and on the contents page in one image per week and without words she was the city’s peculiar chronicler. Her first book, the legendary Unguided Tour came with a record by Tom Waits i and featured selected images from the column and from her other Voice assignments. it won ICP’s Infinity award for best publication in 1990. (text provided by sylviaplachy.com)

2.08.2015

ALINE SMITHSON: And the Magenta Foundation Kickstarter Campaign!



Award winning photographer Aline Smithson generously promotes and supports the work of other photographers and photo professionals daily on her award winning journal, LENSCRATCH; as well as giving workshops at the Los Angeles Center of Photography and jurying exhibitions and portfolio reviews around the country. Now Smithson's first monograph, a twenty-year retrospective of her portrait work, Self and Others: Portrait as Autobiography, will be published by The Magenta Foundation this Fall.


"I have always felt that the act of creating a portrait is equally a reflection of the artist and the sitter. I tend to work with people I know--family, friends, and neighbors, so that the process is in fact, autobiographical.  I am not only telling their story, but also telling my own. I still shoot film and work for the most part, with a mid century Rolleiflex. I like the slowed down nature of shooting film and the sense of history and methodology it brings to my art making." – Aline Smithson



I am thrilled to announce the Kickstarter campaign created to raise funds for the publication of award-winning photographer Aline Smithson's first monograph, Self and Others: Portrait as Autobiography, by the Magenta Foundation in the Fall of 2015.

"This will be the first published monograph of Aline Smithson's portrait photographs spanning over twenty years. Self and Others: Portrait as Autobiography is an almost 20 year culmination of portrait photographs captured by award-winning photographer Aline Smithson. Beginning with her early forays into black and white work, produced as darkroom silver gelatin prints, she photographed the world around her considering the poignancy of childhood and the pathos of aging and relationships. The book continues with her hand painted photographs featuring her defining series, Arrangement in Green and Black: Portrait of the Photographer's Mother, where she combines humor and family to create a universal expression of motherhood. The book is completed by her color projects that revisit beauty, the essence of childhood, and an examination of created realities. Aline brings a background in painting and fashion to her images, but at the heart of her work is her ability to recognize the inner self of her subjects. The photographer considers all her portraits a reflection of herself and the stories she wants to tell, and in that way, she has created a visual language that is her own unique autobiography." –The Magenta Foundation



"Hello friends! I am so excited to announce my first monograph, Self and Others: Portrait as Autobiography, and share my Kickstarter campaign created to raise funds for publication. The book will be published by the Magenta Foundation in Fall of 2015. I could really use your support to make this book a reality." Watch the Kickstarter video here



Read about Aline Smithson's series, Arrangement in Green and Black: Portrait of the Photographer's Mother, here on L'Oeil de la Photography.