KEN ROSENTHAL: Photographs 2001-2009 at KLOMPCHING in DUMBO

Seen and Not Seen #1311-3 (2001)
Photograph ©Ken Rosenthal
Image: Courtesy Klompching Gallery

Seen and Not Seen #001-A-1 (2001)
Photograph ©Ken Rosenthal
Image: Courtesy Klompching Gallery

Ken Rosenthal (b. 1964) is an American artist living and workingin Tucson, Arizona. Since 2001, his subject has been an over-arching study of time, collective memory, fiction and cultural iconography; as seen through a somewhat brooding re-interpretation of historic negatives and photographs—specifically imagery from his own family album. He presents exceptionally crafted photographs—bleached, split-toned and blurred—that bring together a range of associations that seem at once shared yet highly personal, unknowable yet familiar. Like memory, his photographs are ethereal and ambiguous.–Klompching Gallery

March 9 – April 20, 2012
Artist Reception March 8 6–8PM
KLOMPCHING GALLERY
111 Front Street | Brooklyn NY 11201

GEORGE PLATT LYNES | The Jack B. Woody Collection: Steven Kasher Gallery to April 7

James Leslie Daniels, ca. 1937
(Jimmie Daniels, Singer at Le Ruban Bleu...read more)
Photograph by George Platt Lynes
Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Self-Portrait, ca. 1945
Photograph by George Platt Lynes
Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Robert McVoy, ca. 1941
(Robert McVoy was a dancer in Lincoln Kirstein’s company,
Kirstein co-founded the New York City Ballet...read more)
Photograph by George Platt Lynes
Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

George Tichenor, 1939
(Lynes fell in love with his studio assistant George Tichenor,
who was killed during the War...read more)
Photograph by George Platt Lynes
Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Gloria Swanson, ca. 1939
(One of the most prominent stars of silent films)
Photograph by George Platt Lynes
Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Marsden Hartley, 1943
(American Modernist painter, poet, and essayist)
Photograph by George Platt Lynes
Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Bill Miller, 1944
Photograph by George Platt Lynes
Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Jack B. Woody | George Platt Lynes Collection at Steven Kasher Gallery

Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

JACK B. WOODY, editor and publisher of Twelvetrees Press and Twin Palms Publishers, has produced some of the finest photography and art books for over thirty years. Woody’s first published photography book, George Platt Lynes: Photographs 1931-1955 (Twelvetrees Press, 1981), was immediately recognized as a classic monograph. Platt Lynes had been a highly successful fashion and portrait photographer in the 1930s and 1940s, rediscovered by Woody in the late 1970's. His George Platt Lynes Collection can now be viewed at the Steven Kasher Gallery through April 7.

From An Interview with Jack Woody: "While working as Director of Photography for the Nicholas Wilder Gallery in L.A. in the late '70's, Duane Michals told me, “There’s someone really out of fashion, a photographer named George Platt Lynes, you might be interested in.” About six months later someone called the gallery and said, “There’s a man in Berkley that wants to sell an album of approximately fifty photographs. Most of them are male nudes.” I went to San Francisco to meet Samuel Steward. George Platt Lyons’s had given him all of these photographs in the ‘50’s. There were fifty photographs. I had gone with a dealer from San Francisco, so I put up half the money and he put up the other half and we bought the album. That became the basis for my first photography book."

"I decided I wanted to do the George Platt Lynes book. I had the collection of fifty images, but I wanted about a hundred for the book. I spent two years tracking down all the living models and accumulating their photographs for this book – I borrowed some and some I bought.. Back then they weren’t worth anything. No one even knew who this George Platt Lynes was. I applied to the National Endowment for the Arts for a grant for the book and I got $12,500. from one of the non-profit arts organizations in LA."

"I sold the books by hand to the Strand and took them to Rizzoli on 57th Street in New York; they bought like fifty of them and put them in the window on Fifth Avenue. I went home and got a call from Andy Grundberg of the New York Times. He said, “I saw your George Platt Lynes book at Rizzoli. Could you send me a review copy?” I had no idea what a review copy was, all I knew is it was free. I said, “What is it for?” He said, “I’d like to write a review”. He gave me The New York Times Fed Ex number, so I sent it to him. He wrote this amazing review, and it just exploded from there."–Jack B. Woody (read more here)

George Platt Lynes
March 1st to April 7th
Steven Kasher Gallery

521 west 23 street new york

An Interview with Jack Woody
La Lettre de la Photographie

VOJTECH V. SLAMA: Wolf's Honey

TV Show (2004)
Photograph ©Vojtěch V. Sláma
Image: Courtesy Klompching Gallery

Bodies (2002)

Photograph ©Vojtěch V. Sláma
Image: Courtesy Klompching Gallery

Vojtech V. Sláma (b. 1974) lives and works in the Czech Republic. His photographs have been exhibited in numerous venues across the United States, Europe and Asia. In Wolf’s Honey, Vojtech V. Sláma offers a wonderful glimpse of his world—days spent with friends, observations of his artist peers, visits to places and events, glances of strangers, still life and figurative studies—all personal vignettes inherently connected to the tradition of Czech photography. Together they reveal Sláma’s fascination with the beauty of ordinary life and moments that he snatches without fanfare and yet with such poetic force. Stunningly rendered by the artist into Silver Bromide prints, the photographs are quiet, melancholic and at times—timeless.–Klompching Gallery

March 9 – April 20, 2012
Artist Reception March 8 6–8PM

KLOMPCHING GALLERY
111 Front Street, Suite 206 | Brooklyn, NY 11201

MAX SNOW: 100 Headless Women

An Interview: Max Snow Talks to Elizabeth Avedon

click on La Lettre de la Photographie

Kathleen Cullen Fine Arts, New York
March 2 to March 27

View Images Here
(I can't post Nudes)

ADAM BARTOS: Travel Work

Teotihuacan, Mexico (agave plants), 1981
Courtesy of Adam Bartos/Gitterman Gallery

Mombasa, Kenya (park), 1980
Courtesy of Adam Bartos/Gitterman Gallery

County Road 80, Southampton, NY, 2010

Courtesy of Adam Bartos/Gitterman Gallery

Martin's Marine, Bay Shore, NY, 2010

Courtesy of Adam Bartos/Gitterman Gallery

"Adam Bartos’ interest in the 19th century travel work of Samuel Bourne, Robert MacPherson, and others, led him to Egypt, Kenya, and Mexico with a large format camera and color film. His images are thoroughly modern, yet their energy is inspired by the lucid depiction of form and light that the earlier photographers achieved. His attention to the picture plane creates a tension that resonates between the photograph as both his expression of a place and an object in and of itself. None of the photographs are constructed wholly from incident or narrative."–Gitterman Gallery

Adam Bartos | March 1–May 5
Gitterman Gallery
New York, NY

MONA KUHN: Bordeaux Series | Flowers Gallery, New York

Mona Kuhn | Bordeaux Series
February 23 - March 24

Artist Talk • Saturday February 25th • 4 PM

Flowers Gallery
529 West 20th Street
New York City

Paysage 7, Bordeaux Series, Photograph © Mona Kuhn

Mona Kuhn spends her summers in the beautiful countryside near Bordeaux, France, in a house nestled in the pine forest, lit only by oil lamps and candles.

Stone 1, Bordeaux Series, Photograph © Mona Kuhn

EA: How did the idea of including landscapes fit into this series?

MK: They are landscapes I took of the region in-between the portraits, to inform a little bit about the area. When I had the beautiful light, I was photographing my friends. When it was raining, and there are a lot of summer thunderstorms that go though there, I would go out and photograph the thunderstorms. A couple of them are dramatic thunderstorms images and large clouds and high contrast, and some are of pathways that create this idea where this room is where all the people have gathered. So you have a little bit of a maze like feeling with the landscapes that lead somewhere, but you don’t know where.

Paysage 9, Bordeaux Series, Photograph © Mona Kuhn

"It started with a group of friends in France that go truffle hunting. I realized that I would love to photograph this path, kind of bringing them to my work. It’s not that I want truffle hunting in my work, but I transferred that into the idea of almost a tale, a little like Hansel and Gretel. You’re going somewhere, there’s this house in the photograph, but no one knows where you are going. In a more philosophical way, I was looking at those pathways also as the passages of entering and leaving life. Not that’s what you see in the images, just what was in the back of my mind...To celebrate black and white, I made prints that are 38” x 72,” very large black and white silver gelatin prints on fiber paper. They are like the most traditional black and whites you can possibly have. They are perfect. I am so excited about those black and whites."–Mona Kuhn

Read my Interview With Mona Kuhn here

CRUEL AND UNUSUAL: Prison Photography Noorderlicht Gallery

PREVIEW NEWSPRINT CATALOG HERE
Buy It Here

Cruel and Unusual is a curatorial collaboration between guest curators Pete Brook and Hester Keijser. The exhibition showcases the work of Araminta de Clermont, Amy Elkins, Alyse Emdur, Christiane Feser, Jane Lindsay, Deborah Luster, Nathalie Mohadjer, Yana Payusova, Lizzie Sadin, Lori Waselchuk, and others.

Cruel and Unusual
18 February - 1 April, 2012
Noorderlicht Gallery
9711 JB Groningen, Netherlands

Photograph © ARAMINTA DE CLERMONT
Series: Life After. Title: Passport (Achmed), 2008

CRUEL AND UNUSUAL:
Prison Photography Exhibition
Part I + Part II

Prison Photography's Pete Brook
Talks Blogs, Prisons, Road Trips and Photography
February 18th 4:00 - 6:00 pm

MICHAEL AVEDON: VMAN and the Artists

Portrait of Artist Chuck Close
Photograph (c) Michael Avedon

In ART RUBY, photographer Michael Avedon states, "Photography is largely in part a mystery to me. I am drawn to faces, and when I received my first camera as a gift from my grandmother that is where I began. Friends’ faces, strangers’ faces, my own face. As of recently I have found a particular interest in photographing artists at work in their studios. Each space ends up being a reflection or extension of the artist within it, and it therefore seems to be the ideal natural environment to capture some sort of truth about that person." Read "Meet Michael Avedon: Art Ruby's Newest Contributor"

25th Issue of VMAN | Guest Edited by Carine Roitfeld, includes
The Artists Are Present: Photographs by Michael Avedon

The Artists Are Present...these 6 rising artists are just starting to make a name for themselves, as is the young man who shot them, Michael Avedon, 21-year-old grandson of iconic photographer Richard Avedon.–VMAN

As guest editor of VMAN's 25th issue, Carine Roitfeld, former editor-in-chief of Vogue Paris, featured photographs by Michael Avedon of emerging artists shot with his preferred black & white 35mm film. Also check out "Michael Avedon: A Portrait of the Artist" which includes one of my favorite self-portrait's ever!

RICHARD GERE: 2012 George Eastman Award

Portrait of Richard Gere © Michael Weschler Photography

Richard Gere Receives the George Eastman Award
By Elizabeth Avedon for Le Journal de la Photographie

“It's a great honor to receive this prestigious award. In light of past recipients and the valuable work the Eastman House has done in film preservation, photography and the captured image, I'm very grateful to have been recognized by such a distinguished group.” –Richard Gere

February 16th, Richard Gere received the the George Eastman Award for Distinguished Contribution in the Art of Film, as well as for his International Humanitarian Leadership, from George Eastman House in Rochester, NY.

Gere is known as much for his leading rolls in films such as American Gigolo, An Officer and a Gentleman, Cotton Club, Pretty Woman, Primal Fear, Unfaithful, The Hunting Party, and Chicago, as for his ongoing commitment as advocate and supporter of numerous humanitarian causes through his Gere Foundation.

Dr. Anthony Bannon, Director of George Eastman House, said about Gere's nomination, “We have a special interest in inviting Mr. Gere to receive this honor, as he embodies the spirit of all four of the major awards this institution bestows, including the George Eastman Award, the George Eastman Honors (which is presented to those who excel in both motion picture and photography) and the Eastman Medal of Honor (which is awarded for exemplary public service). We admire Mr. Gere’s own considerable photographic skills. I am also well aware of Mr. Gere’s work on behalf of the people of Tibet and his relationship with H.H. The Dalai Lama, and I have followed both his career and his advocacy for many years. I read with interest his recent statements before Congress, and must tell you they very much echoed a conversation I had with the late Manute Bol when he visited Eastman House to speak about the crisis in Darfur.”

George Eastman House, the world’s oldest museum dedicated to the art, history and science of photography and motion pictures, was the first museum to create a school of film preservation, the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation. Established in 1947, their motion picture archive contains the leading silent film collection in the world. With nearly 30,000 titles, the collection includes significant holdings from Metro Goldwyn Mayer, various independent studios, personal film collections of Cecil B. DeMille and Martin Scorsese, the Merchant Ivory Archives, the Technicolor Archives, as well as lesser known documentaries, shorts, newsreels, and avant-garde works. In addition, Eastman House is home to more than 400,000 photographs representing the history of photography, making Eastman House the world’s most consequential non-government, independent collection of still and moving images.

The George Eastman Award was first presented in 1955, and past recipients include Charlie Chaplin, Gary Cooper, Cecil B. DeMille, John Ford, Greta Garbo, Harold Lloyd, Louise Brooks, James Stewart, Gregory Peck, Lauren Bacall, Lillian Gish, Audrey Hepburn, Mary Pickford, Isabella Rossellini, Martin Scorsese, Meryl Streep, Gloria Swanson, Jessica Lange, and Graham Nash.

Also Read
An Interview With Richard Gere
by Elizabeth Avedon

Le Journal de la Photographie: 2•16•2012

NEW DELTA RISING: Magdalena Solé

New Delta Rising | Photographs by Magdalena Solé

University Press of Mississippi,
Dreyfus Health Foundation, Rogosin Institute, 2012

Photograph (c) Magdalena Solé

Photograph (c) Magdalena Solé

Young Ladies SlowExposures 2011 Exhibition
Photograph (c) Magdalena Solé

Photograph (c) Magdalena Solé

I have returned to the Delta a dozen times.
Always for the same reason: the people.

New Delta Rising | Photographs by Magdalena Solé
An exploration of life in the Mississippi Delta

The Mississippi Delta has been called "the most southern place on earth. Award-winning photographer Magdalena Solé spent a year interviewing and photographing hundreds of residents in the Mississippi Delta. The deep connection she felt comes through in the compelling images in this book. Solé captures their personal dignity, resilience, and resourcefulness, along with the closeness of family and community she found among them. (publisher)

"People in the Delta have stories, music, love and deep care for their community, irrespective of the hardship they endure. I was drawn to the people I encountered. They were unlike most I had known. They allowed me to slip into their midst as if they had known me for a long time, and we could share stories, laughter, sorrow and silence. This didn’t happen one time, it happened every day in every town." – Magdalena Solé read more here

The Wall Street Journal

Photo-Op: Delta Hues "Ms. Solé's lushly colorful and formally striking images are restless. The people of Clarksdale are lively and in motion, contrasting sharply with their crumbling surroundings."

New Delta Rising
Photographs by Magdalena Solé

Text by Barry H. Smith and Tom Lassiter

CRUEL AND UNUSUAL: Prison Photography Exhibition Part II

Photograph © Stephen Tourlentes

Series: Of Lengths and Measures. Year: Ongoing (1996-present)

Title: Comstock, NY State Prison.Year: 2009

Photograph © Joseph Rodriguez
Series: Juvenile. Title: Juvenile Hall Intake

Photograph © Lizzie Sadin

Series: Mineurs en Peines. Year: 1999-2007. Title: Surveillance camera, Black Canyon School, Arizona. Video surveillance of solitary confinement cells where young inmates can be held for a week. They are placed there if they display aggressive behavior to either staff or inmates or attempt suicide.

Photograph © Lloyd Degrane

Stateville in a basement storage area- Electric Chairs (no longer in use) one from the State the other from Cook County- during an electrocution a prisoner's hair would catch fire and sometimes their eyeballs would melt, so a helmet, on each chair, was placed onto their heads so that witnesses wouldn't be subjected to such visual horror –1993.

Photograph © Scott Houston

Series: Chain Gang. Year: 2003. Brian Gawlik looks out the window of his cell at Estrella Jail after performing chain gang duty. Brian was convicted for possession of a " dime bag of weed" and sentenced to four months. During lock down, inmates stay in 8x12 foot cells for 23 hours a day unless they are out on assigned chain gang duty.

Photograph © Richard Ross

Series: Juvenile-In-Justice. Year: 2006-2011

"Time-out room” in the education wing, South Bend
Juvenile Correctional Facility, South Bend, Indiana

"Prisons are "home" for over 9 million people on this planet, and their numbers are likely to increase in the coming decades. As Curators, we hope this show will act as a moment to ask ourselves what our different societies should hope to achieve by (mass) incarcerating those who transgress." – Curators Pete Brook and Hester Keijser

+ + +

Cruel and Unusual is a curatorial collaboration between guest curators Pete Brook and Hester Keijser. The exhibition showcases the work of Araminta de Clermont, Amy Elkins, Alyse Emdur, Christiane Feser, Jane Lindsay, Deborah Luster, Nathalie Mohadjer, Yana Payusova, Lizzie Sadin, Lori Waselchuk, and others.

Noorderlicht Gallery is producing a 'must-have' catalog for Cruel and Unusual, designed as a newspaper by Pierre Derks in an edition of 4,000. Along with visuals from the main exhibition, the catalog contains articles, interviews, ephemera and material from photographers Pete Brook encountered during his crowd-funded road-trip through the U.S (here), capturing the chaos, interactions and visual excitement he saw in photographers’ studios, contact-sheets and home-towns while on the road.

Newspaper Catalog Available Here

Cruel and Unusual
18 February - 1 April, 2012
Noorderlicht Gallery
9711 JB Groningen, Netherlands

Prison Photography's Pete Brook

Talks Blogs, Prisons, Road Trips and Photography

February 18th 4:00 - 6:00 pm

CRUEL AND UNUSUAL: Prison Photography Part I here

LISE SARFATI: She

Christine #21 San Francisco, CA 2005. Photograph © Lise Sarfati
Courtesy Rose Gallery, L.A. and Brancolini Grimaldi, London

Sloane #15 San Francisco, CA 2007. Photograph © Lise Sarfati
Courtesy Rose Gallery, L.A. and Brancolini Grimaldi, London

Christine #10 Hollywood, CA 2006. Photograph © Lise Sarfati
Courtesy Rose Gallery, L.A. and Brancolini Grimaldi, London

Sloane #66 Oakland, CA 2009. Photograph © Lise Sarfati
Courtesy Rose Gallery, L.A. and Brancolini Grimaldi, London

La Lettre de la Photographie

Excerpts from my Interview with Lise Sarfati:

French-born Lise Sarfati has lived and worked in the United States since 2003. She produced six important series of photographs in America, each followed by major exhibitions. Two upcoming shows of her third series, She, will open shortly in London and in L.A., with a Twin Palms monograph to follow in the Spring, 2012.

Publisher Jack Woody (Twin Palms) confided about Sarfati’s work, "When I look at the women in her photographs I suspect in some way they are all self-portraits. Lise sees in these women an incredible endurance, confronting their circumstances across the surfaces of the indifferent western landscape they have come to occupy."

Q: What was your intention behind your series, She?

The ordinary and the singular. Universality. Anti-heroines. Projections and situations....My intention was to show a bit of the futility of our daily life, the simplicity of situations and our movements in our environment and to oppose this simplicity to another field: that of interiority, emotion, psychological relationships. It is to receive the emotion (of the 4 women) and to mix them with mine. I also had autobiographical elements that allowed me to situate myself emotionally: I have 3 sisters.

My point of view was not generic but I wanted to be immersed in a particular story between four women from the same family. This story had to have a generational dimension...In She and Gina are older, about 40 years of age, while Sloane and Sasha are younger, around 20. They are all sisters...The classic image of the mother is that of a woman drowned by the love for her little one. In She however, the mother, the daughter, the sister and the other sister can be rivals or enemies, competitors or indifferent.

Christine, the mother is the axis of this construction, the only woman who tries to satisfy her dreams. At first married to a Jehovah’s Witness in Arizona, she leaves her husband and her two daughters to live a fully liberated sexual life and becomes a dominatrix on the west coast. Then, she projects herself into a new dream: to become a rock star.

Gina cultivates a masculine/feminine sexual ambiguity and wears a black wig to look like her sister Christine. Sloane, Christine’s daughter, changes her appearance constantly going from a blond wig to discolored hair. She has been a nanny for two years. Sasha, Sloane’s sister, is perpetually depressed, enclosed in her cocoon and inclined to melancholia.

The environment is an important element. Christine is photographed in Oakland in the ghetto in a house she shares with a roommate. We meet Sloane in the ghetto in Oakland in the house of a friend of her mother’s. All these houses look alike with their wooden windows and their chimneys. They are the interiors of Hopper paintings. We see Gina coming out of a grocery store, these are environments linked to the 1970s. The only images of projection that are out of the ordinary are those of Christine in the desert...read the entire Interview with Lise Sarfati, La Lettre de la Photographie

She: Photographs by Lise Sarfati
Brancolini Grimaldi, London February 3 - March 17
Rose Gallery, L.A. March 31 - May 2012

She: Lise Sarfati, Text Quentin Bajac
Twin Palms Publisher, Spring 2012

SYLVIA PLACHY: New York City Panoramas

Hanging out in the Bronx, 1989
Photograph © Sylvia Plachy/Edges

Mannequin Under a Crashed Car, Midtown
Photograph © Sylvia Plachy

Love In the Afternoon, Central Park
Photograph © Sylvia Plachy

Anonymous in the Subway
Photograph © Sylvia Plachy

Theater of the Street the Bronx, 1989
Photograph © Sylvia Plachy

Newlyweds on top of the Empire State Building
Photograph © Sylvia Plachy

New York City Panoramas | Photographs by Sylvia Plachy

Sylvia Plachy's New York City Panoramas can be seen at the recently reopened South Street Seaport Museum. After being closed for nearly a year, two of their sixteen new galleries are dedicated to photography exhibitions curated by Elisabeth Biondi.

"Sylvia Plachy seeks and finds her images wherever she goes. She captures fleeting moments in time with her roaming eye. She says the panoramic frame intensifies her perceptions. It allows her to get close to her subjects, to be inside their space, and to be surrounded by it — unorthodox, whimsical, and close. One senses that she does not simply compose her photographs so much as she inhabits them. They read like private pictographs — lyrical memories of what, and how, she saw." Read all of Elisabeth Biondi's piece about the exhibition on La Lettre de la Photographie, including work by Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao.

Sylvia Plachy Photographs

New York City Panoramas | Curated by Elisabeth Biondi
South Street Seaport Museum
12 Fulton Street, NYC
until Spring 2012