MONA KUHN: Curates Nudes in Contemporary Photography at Flowers Gallery NY

Alec Soth, Las Vegas (2011). Courtesy of Sean Kelly, New York

Excerpts from An Interview With Mona Kuhn

by Elizabeth Avedon

via Le Journal de la Photographie

Elizabeth Avedon: What brings you to New York?
Mona Kuhn: I have been invited to curate an exhibition titled “Under My Skin” at Flowers Gallery in New York City. It is a selection of nudes in contemporary photography, with works created mostly in the last five years. The exhibition reflects how we are currently representing the nude through the photo medium.

Aside from photography, I have been an independent scholar at Getty Research Institute since 2000. In the last 13 years, I have been curious about how we humans represent ourselves in works of art, and specifically in nudes, throughout art history - in all mediums.

It is a fascinating subject to me. Trends in art come and go, but the Nude remains a canon of high art, like a shadow we cannot jump away from. My two favorite ways of escaping is to photograph and being a bookworm. The invitation to curate brought both desires together.

EA: Did you alter your point of view when shifting from artist to curator?  

MK: Lets face it, curating is a competitive career. Most curators compete with each other to establish themselves intellectually in their field. There has been a huge gap in the US for museum level exhibitions related to the Nude. I am very comfortable with the theme, it is my second skin. And because it is not my profession and I am not tied in with an institution, I have the freedom to bring together works of high and low art that reflect our current culture. The choices were more emotional and guttural, than academic. I am thankful for that freedom...(Mona Kuhn is one of the most interesting women in Photography today. Read the entire Interview here)

 EXHIBITION
Curated by Mona Kuhn 

 “Under My Skin: Nudes in Contemporary Photography” 
June 20 – August 24, 2013
FLOWERS GALLERY
529 West 20th Street, New York

PANEL DISCUSSION
Moderated by George Pitts with Mona Kuhn, Vince Aletti, 
Mariah Robertson and Shen Wei
“The Role of the Nude in Contemporary Photography”
June 18, 2013, 6:30PM
Parsons The New School for Design
Theresa Lang Auditorium
55 West 13th Street, New York

Mona Kuhn Interviews

from the Archives of Le Journal de la Photographie 
Interview with Mona Kuhn 2011   
Interview with Mona Kuhn 2012
 

2012 HOLIDAY BOOKS: A Few New Favorites I

 Saul Leiter
With Vince Aletti and Margit Erb, and others

Kehrer Verlag; First Edition (2012)
 

"Painter and Photographer Saul Leiter (b. 1923) exhibited alongside abstract expressionists like Willem de Kooning before beginning in the late 1940s to take photographs. Like Robert Frank or Helen Levitt, he found his motifs on the streets of New York, but at the same time was visibly interested in abstraction. Edward Steichen was one of the first to discover Leiter's photography, showing it in the 1950s in two important exhibitions at New York's Museum of Modern Art. This book, published to mark the first major retrospective of Leiter's work anywhere in the world, features his early black and white and color images, his fashion photography, the over painted nudes, as well as his paintings and sketchbooks."

 

 Joel-Peter Witkin

Delpire; First Edition (2012)

"In addition to the 89 photographs published, there are 68 details, 24 pages of sketch and preparatory drawings and a text, Crazy About Christ by Eugenia Parry, who aims to give clues, if not guidelines to his work." Read the books review by Bernard Perrine here + Interview with Joel Peter-Witkin here

 Howard Greenberg: An American Gallery,  

Twenty-Five Years of Photography

"...my 25th Anniversary show and book, “An American Gallery, Twenty-Five Years of Photography” (although published by Lumiere Press in 2007, this Collection is timeless). I labored for a couple of years about the 25th anniversary, I want to do a publication, I want to  do a show, I didn’t know what to do. Part of the problem was I’ve worked with so many photographers and estates and I have so many friends out there that I didn’t feel I could be politically correct. So I just took twenty-five pictures from my own collection and spoke about them and about my involvement in photography." –Read the Interview with Howard Greenberg here

 

 Jonathan Becker: 30 Years at Vanity Fair

Assouline, 2012

 "It’s a document of documents spanning 30 years of time – actually fairly important times with important people in important places – all touched by Vanity Fair." –Jonathan Becker

As one of the great visual storytellers of our time, Becker has worked in an exclusive world of aristocrats, artists, and heads of state most would never observe except through the lens of his Rollei. He’s documented for Vanity Fair HRH The Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker-Bowles at their first public appearance together in Buckingham Palace, "Dr. Death" Jack Kevorkian, China’s outspoken human rights activist Ai Weiwei, the mother of modern dance Martha Graham, as well as countless other fascinating characters from the rarefied worlds of art, literature, politics, pop culture, and society. Read more in my Interview with Jonathan Becker...

Interview with Jonathan Becker here

John Schabel : Passengers

forthcoming from Twin Palms

"John Schabel’s series of photographs depicting anonymous airline passengers effectively captures the curious blend of impersonal efficiency and poignant humanity that pervades the experience of contemporary commercial air travel. Like products on an assembly line, the planes carrying Schabel’s subjects churn down the runway; and with the same regularity the individual passengers emerge, identically framed, from his camera and onto the gallery wall. Interestingly, it is precisely this mechanized process that lays bare the active, but often overlooked, emotional and intellectual relationship between human beings and flight.” — Laura M. Andre

 

Gary Briechle Twin Palms, 2012

The rocky coast of Maine is where Briechle found himself driven to make pictures, using the wet-plate collodion process, of the individuals who constitute his stand-in family. “I've been in Maine close to eight years now and there are some people I've photographed for the entire time. A few have died and I've shot their likenesses tattooed on the chests of those they've left behind.”

 Sailboats and Swans

Michal Chelbin, text by novelist A.M. Homes Twin Palms, 2012

There is nothing easy about it. It is a constructed moment, a scene within a scene, the real within the unreal. They are moments, lunga fermata, suspensions of time in the midst of what might otherwise be unbearable.

The images are about a kind of discomfort—theirs, hers, mine and ours. It is like an old fashioned staring contest—one guy looks at the other and the first one who blinks is the loser, except Michal Chelbin never blinks. Instead she captures with the click of a shutter. Chelbin is always looking, drawing what is hidden to the surface. She captures—we shudder. — A.M. Homes

+

My Interview with Twin Palms Publisher Jack Woody

+
2012 BOOKS: A Few Favorites II