ELIZABETH AVEDON JOURNAL

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)

“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

Tickets Here

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 Elephant. Photograph © 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)

www.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

PLAY THE VIDEO

"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

ALINE SMITHSON

KICKSTARTER CAMPAIGN!

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

1.27.2015

SHEN WEI: Invisible Atlas at Flowers Gallery

Shen Wei, Tear, 2013
Ink on archival pigment print

Shen Wei, Sarangkot, 2014
Acrylic on archival pigment print

Shen Wei, Mask, 2013
Metallic ink on archival pigment print

Chinese artist Shen Wei series Invisible Atlas is inspired by the Chinese philosophy of Qi - an unseen life force and a method of healing. For Shen Wei, this mysterious vital energy is poetic and seductive. Using his own body and personality as a subject, he envisions the internal and external forces channeling through the body and its surroundings. Drawing from memories of his childhood, as well as religious, historical and mythological imagery, the narrative is interwoven with elements of fantasy. Photographic subjects of the figure, objects and landscape are combined with minimally rendered drawings, where luminous dots, circles, arcs, arrows and waves give tangible form to imagined flows and concentrations of Qi....read more here

To coincide with his solo exhibition, Shen Wei is also curating a group show Second Thought at Flowers Gallery, featuring work by Shiyuan Liu, Tingwei Li and Peter Glenn Oakley.

Shen Wei: Invisible Atlas to February 28, 2015

Flowers Gallery/NY

529 West 20th Street, NYC

Shen Wei discussing his work with me at Flowers Opening

All images Courtesy of the artist and Flowers Gallery, London / New York

1.21.2015

CLAY PATRICK McBRIDE: 3rd Rail at FOLEY

3rd Rail © Clay Patrick McBride

The 3rd Rail, a site-specific installation by photo giant Clay Patrick McBride, opened at Foley Gallery this week; part of the gallery’s ongoing storefront window curatorial series. McBride sculpts and pastes his black and white 35mm photographs of people riding the NYC subway to replicate a sense of anxiety and anonymity. The work, exhibited inside the long glass corridor windows on either side of the Gallery entrance-way, is meant to convey the subway rider’s dark and chaotic claustrophobia experience.

W.M. Hunt, Curator and author of The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the Unconscious told me, “His final project ... was a seemingly enormous 6-foot combination with wood, photographs and drawings that looked like the bowsprit on a ship. At the beginning of the evening reception, Duane Michals walked in, took a moment to consider what was in front of him, sized it up, and pronounced it “Primal!” It doesn’t get better than that.” read more here....

3rd Rail

Clay Patrick McBride

FOLEY Gallery

59 Orchard Street, NYC

January 21 – February 22, 2015

Read my Interview with Clay Patrick McBride

L'Oeil de la Photographie

1.20.2015

FINDING VIVIAN MAIER: OSCAR Nomination!

Photograph by Vivian Maier, Chicago, 1973

The OSCAR Nomination here

Congratulations to Finding Vivian Maier Directors John Maloof and Charlie Siskel on their OSCAR nomination for Best Documentary Feature!

Finding Vivian Maier is The Boston Globe's pick for Best Documentary Oscar! Check out "Sorting through OSCAR Documentary Nominees" in The Boston Globe.

Self-Portrait by Vivian Maier

Watch The Trailer
‪

Finding Vivian Maier

is playing on Showtime on Demand to March 5, 2015

View more Vivian Maier Self-Portraits on TIME LightBox

1.05.2015

KLOMPCHING GALLERY | DUMBO: ONE UNIQUE PHOTOGRAPHS

Photograph © Matthew-Robert Hughes

Photograph © Ken Rosenthal

Photograph © Diane Meyer

Photograph © Robert Calafiore

Photograph © Carole P. Kunstadt

Photograph © Max Kellenberger

Robert Calafiore • Matthew-Robert Hughes • Max Kellenberger
Carole P. Kunstadt • Diane Meyer • Ken Rosenthal

Opening Reception: January 8, 6pm–8pm

ONE | UNIQUE PHOTOGRAPHS

January 7-February 14, 2015

KLOMPCHING GALLERY

111 Front Street, Brooklyn

1.04.2015

FOLEY GALLERY: Select Cuts and Alterations

FOLEY GALLERY

Mia Pearlman Installation in Storefront
Paper, India ink, paperclips, tacks

Chris McCaw - Sunburned GSP #672 (Pacific Ocean), 2013
11 x 14 inches Unique gelatin silver print

Mia Pearlman - COEVA, 2014
Paper, India ink, paperclips, tacks

Select Cuts and Alterations brings together more than 20 artists who cut, crumple or crease their materials. Select Cuts was a great success receiving many excellent reviews including The New Yorker .

Foley Gallery invites you to a final celebration for the exhibition on Sunday, January 11, from 2-4pm, with many of the artists attending.

Select Cuts & Alterations

Foley Gallery, 59 Orchard St, NYC

through January 11, 2015

Wednesday - Sunday, 12 - 6

Final Celebration Open to All with the Artists

Sunday, January 11, from 2-4pm

Cal Lane - Untitled, 2008
17 x 13.5 inches. Plasma-Cut Steel Oil Can

SOHO PHOTO: Upcoming Exhibition

Photoville: Picturing The Built Environment

click to enlarge images

Portrait of the Family, Cuba: 2009-2011

In Sight

SohoPhoto Gallery

January 7, 1015 – January 31, 2015
Opening Reception: January 6, 2015, 6-8pm

Opening the New Year, the SohoPhoto Gallery presents three new artists to the gallery: Carol Julien, Stephen Rae and Steven Gilbert; the images the gallery exhibited at its first Photoville exhibit; a new show by the Professional Women Photographers organization; and the American debut of Cuban photographer Maria Cienfuegos’s haunting images of Cuban family life.

SohoPhoto Gallery, 15 White Street, NYC

is a 501(c)(3) non-profit arts organization.

1.02.2015

LUIS MALLO: Interruptions from Wm Hunt

A note to me from Photography Curator and Collector, William Hunt:

Luis Mallo’s exhibition “Interruptions” opens next Thursday at Praxis Gallery in Chelsea. Go see it and tell your friends to also.

I love Luis. When I became a dealer, he was one of the first photographers I championed. I debuted a classic looking body of work “Passengers”. These are black and white studies of subway riders' hands: wonderful typologies, printed gorgeously.

He went on to develop other substantial portfolios, including “Reliquarium”: moody, spectral images of enigmatic spaces, also in black and white. Then switching to color, he created “Laminas”: studies of stained glass windows from behind.

“In Camera”, and “Open Secrets” are also considerations of seemingly closed off spaces - the first ones are cityscapes that play with depth, looking at openings in wall and fences seeing what’s beyond. Then moving into storerooms in museums, similar considerations of what’s not seen.

It has been a steady career, and like most artists he made room for a full life with marriage, a son, a full time position as an art director. “Interruptions” is not intended as a description of the career but rather the way he photographs, stopping to see as he goes. “Interruptions” includes new work and some older work, all part of the same trajectory.

I hope to see you there,

W.M. Hunt,

Dancing Bear

wmhunt.com

LUIS MALLO: Interruptions

Praxis NY, 541 West 25th Street, NYC

January 8 – February 21, 2015

In this exhibition Luis Mallo presents a group of visually arresting images meant to stimulate us to question notions of familiarity. With this series Mallo wants us to understand that the manner in which we perceive our surroundings is contingent by nature. Most of what we see and experience is illusory and therefore, deceptive. His scenes reveal this illusory nature by offering partially concealed and most often perplexing representations of the surrounding landscape and its various props. For Mallo, Interruptions is not an outcome, but a vital process, a way of looking that may offer a fresh perspective. As previously done with other series, he invites us to look deeper and unearth that which lies latently waiting to be discovered under the veil of familiarity.

LUIS MALLO

SHEILA PINKEL: Folded Paper, Glass Rods

"I realized that if I sculpted photographic paper in the darkroom and then illuminated that sculpture with a one point light source, the planes of the paper would be exposed to differing amounts of light. When I developed that paper it flattened and the image became a two-dimensional representation of the paper when it was three dimensional, or a time-space paradox. As I continued to make paper sculptures in the darkroom the resulting images became less structural and began to reveal more intuitive dimensions of my imagination." – Sheila Pinkel

+ + +

Higher Pictures will present Folded Paper, Glass Rods, 1974 – 1982, two seminal bodies of cameraless photographic work by artist, writer, and professor emerita Sheila Pinkel. The prints on view evolved from experiments Pinkel began as an MFA student at UCLA. Fascinated by the possibilities of using light to make images without a camera or enlarger, Pinkel studied with a physicist and subsequently conducted rigorous visual experimentation with light phenomena including incandescent, X-Ray, ultraviolet, prismatic and digital sources.

To make Glass Rods and Folded Paper Pieces, Pinkel exposed her compositions—solid glass rods arranged directly onto photosensitive surfaces and sculptures made from sheets of photographic paper—to a brief flash of light from a single light source. From within this seemingly narrow set of parameters come rich and varied studies. In monochrome and candy-colored palettes, some of the glass rods are clearly identifiable, others begin to break down into vibrating woven patterns and further into geometric abstractions, and still others are stretched and warped into melting psychedelic planes. Pinkel found that layering the rods at increasingly perpendicular angles led to greater light refraction, bringing the final photograms closer to what she describes as visual music.

The Folded Paper Pieces are lushly textured trompe l’oeil, pictures that Pinkel calls “time-space paradoxes,” two dimensional representations of the paper as a three dimensional form. When the artist flashes the dimensionalized folded paper with light, planes of paper are exposed to varying degrees, giving the final image its dramatic shading and sense of volume. But developing the print itself requires flattening the sculpture back into a two-dimensional sheet that now holds an image of its own prior form. Distilling her process to the very essentials of photography allows Pinkel to work precisely at the intersection of the medium’s double nature. It reproduces vision and has an endless capacity to defamiliarize it.

Sheila Pinkel: Folded Paper, Glass Rods, 1974 - 1982

January 10 - February 14, 2015

Higher Pictures, 980 Madison Avenue, NYC

Opening: January 10, 2015, 6 - 8pm

SheilaPinkel.com

Sheila Pinkel was born in Virginia, lives and works in L.A. Over the course of her 40-year career, Pinkel has created a strikingly diverse body of work that encompasses experimental light studies, documentary photography, social and political critique, and public art. Pinkel’s work is held in the collections of numerous museums, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; The Santa Barbara Museum of Art; and the Musée National d’Art Moderne – Centre Pompidou, Paris.

1.01.2015

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2015: Things Won and Lost

To begin the New Year 2015, I've chosen from photographer and contributor Sean Perry, Things Won and Lost from his series Fairgrounds. Perry was selected as a finalist for the Hasselblad Masters award for this work, including his limited edition book, Fairgrounds (published by Cloverleaf Press).

Perry's imagery is hallmarked by wrapping diverse subjects in his particular quality of light, releasing a simple expression of a given object's unexpected nature and grace. That voice is further refined by his dedication to the darkroom and alchemy used to breathe life and light into his prints. "I work hard to be known for my printing," he says. "I take great pride in it, and hope when someone sees one of my images, they would instantly identify the craft and thumbprints of being mine. It's why I sign them that way, the inked thumbprint next to my name - a metaphor that my hands have made this." read more here

Watch Perry's SVA Masters in Digital Photography i3 Lecture Video on YouTube here. More about Perry's recent work posted here

SEAN PERRY PHOTOGRAPHS