Silverstein Photography is pleased to announce FRANK PAULIN: OUT OF THE LIMELIGHT, an exhibition featuring the artist’s vintage and non-vintage photographs spanning the last half of the twentieth century. It was during this immensely productive period that Paulin, having had the unique privilege of studying under the great Bauhaus and New Bauhaus masters Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Harry Callahan, as well as the pioneering art director, designer, and modernist Alexey Brodovitch, pushed traditional street photography into new and innovative directions.
Born in Pittsburgh in 1926, Frank Paulin grew up in New York and Chicago. The photographic education of Paulin began at the age of 16, when he began his studies of fashion illustration and photography while working as an art apprentice at Whittaker-Christiansen Studio in Chicago. Two years later in 1944, Paulin joined the Army and spent two years in the Signal Corps in Europe. It was during this period that Paulin began to develop his documentary style by photographing the wartime devastation of German cities.
After the war, Paulin returned to Chicago in 1946 and enrolled at the Institute of Design, arriving coincidentally the day that Harry Callahan began teaching there. The ID required photography for all students as part of a utopian curriculum that sought to teach students to think in new ways. Professors Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Harry Callahan turned the classroom into a laboratory for experimentation with paper and light. Additionally, by the end of the 50s, Paulin’s impressive educational resume included studies at the New School under the renowned art director Alexey Brodovitch. In his Design Laboratory classes, Brodovitch imparted a philosophy that affected an entire generation of leading photographers and designers. Among these students were photographers Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Art Kane and Hiro, as well as art directors Bob Gage, Helmut Krone and Steve Frankfurt. The notoriously harsh critic described Paulin’s Ferry Boat, 1957, an image of silhouetted figures flanked by the Statue of Liberty through geometric reflections of glass, in one word: Monumental. One can only imagine Brodovitch’s joy if he had lived to see Paulin’s Paris, 1992, depicting the cold stare of an embraced lover again through geometric reflections.
In 1957, Paulin had his first single artist exhibition at the pioneering gallery, Limelight --- then the only gallery for art photography in New York. In spite of the fact that this exhibition predated serious photography interest, admiring reviews appeared in the New York Times and the Village Voice, which praised his "humor and compassion" and his uncanny ability to perceive paradox and record "poetic accidents." Today, almost a half a century later, Frank Paulin continues to roam the New York City streets shooting with humor and compassion.
