"Chester has always been a man on a spiritual mission, striving to find the humanity, the dignity and the grace in everyone," said Berger who worked with Higgins over the course of 30 years. "Just look at the photos of Joyce Dinkins adjusting her husband's tie before his inauguration as mayor or Amiri Baraka jitterbugging with Maya Angelou at Harlem's Schomburg Center. Higgins, he said, "viewed his job as a calling and the taking of photographs as a sacrament."

Over the past 85 years, Adger Cowans has not only born witness to history — he has helped shape it. The first Black photographer admitted into the International Photographers and Motion Picture Union, Local 600, in 1969, Cowans was the on-set photographer for landmark films including Claudine, Eyes of Laura Mars, Gloria, Dirty Dancing, Boomerang, and Juice.

Adger Cowans is an 85-year-old photographer and visual artist in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He worked with Gordon Parks and photographed jazz greats, movie stars and Hollywood sets — and bore witness to several eras of American history through the lens of his camera. In this video, he reflects on his life’s work, the racism he faced working in a predominantly white industry and what motivates him to make art.

The exhibit, entitled “13 Ways of Looking at Landscape: Larry Silver’s Connecticut Photographs” will be shown in the museum’s Walsh Gallery from March 25 to June 18, and features more than 80 landscape-based works shot in Connecticut over the last four decades.

Bruce Silverstein Gallery presents Adger Cowans: Footsteps, an exhibition of the artist’s photographs from 1955 to today.  Featuring over thirty vintage and modern prints, Footsteps is the artist’s first solo New York gallery exhibition since 1985.

Since 1973, when he relocated to Westport, Connecticut, from Greater New York, Larry Silver has been photographing and documenting his home state, in what he calls, “A lifelong project.” Highlights from that work will be on view in “13 Ways of Looking at Landscape: Larry Silver’s Connecticut Photographs,” which will be on view from March 25 through June 18 at the Fairfield University Art Museum.

Despite his artistic ability and global appeal, M.C. Escher rarely got the shine he deserved at major art institutions. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) seeks to change that through a new retrospective exhibition on the late-Dutch master. “Virtual Realities: the Art of M.C. Escher from the Michael S. Sachs Collection” showcases an extensive collection of rarely seen work, including 200 prints, 100 drawings and interactive auxiliary rooms.

Deborah Willis, PhD joins photographer Adger Cowans to discuss the artist’s work, in a conversation moderated by Halima Taha, curator of Adger Cowans: Sense and Sensibility at the Fairfield University Art Museum.

The art they have created distills the agony and ecstasy of being human, and that is ultimately the emotional template that can help us all to transcend our prejudices and create a more just and equitable society. 

The Huber Arts Center is set to present a new photography exhibit, ‘Signature of the Spirit’ by Chester Higgins, in The Kauffman Gallery on Wednesday, Jan. 26. 

Higgins, a photographer and author portrays the “dignity of the African American and African diasporic communities” in stunning black and white photographs.

For Ahmet Ertug, “many of these marvelous volumes that my photography records have been returned to the public through photography or painting for centuries; there is nothing new. But what I bring which is new is the singular relationship of a man to these extraordinary spaces, relying on a photograph equipped for a dialogue with the monumental.

REWIND is a physical experience of artists young and old, contemporary, and established. It is just as immersive and, in my opinion, will set the tone for many photographic exhibitions in 2022.

The “disembodied shadows of human beings,” as the press release refers to them, that haunted the great outdoors in Brea Souders’s “Vistas,” the photographer’s solo exhibition here, epitomized the self-alienation of capitalist technological society. The figures were anonymous, but their darkness suggested a melancholic—or even apocalyptic—sort of import, for they evoked a canceled reality, a denaturalized nature. -Donald Kuspit

Curator of 'M.C. Escher: Prints, Drawings, Watercolors and Textiles', Dr. David Steel, speaks on M.C. Escher

Bruce Silverstein is presenting M.C. Escher: Prints, Drawings, Watercolors and Textiles, an exhibition curated by Dr. David Steel, curator of the blockbuster exhibition The Worlds of M. C. Escher: Nature, Science, and Imagination at the North Carolina Museum of Art. Escher’s math-inspired, mind-bending, and multidimensional “impossible constructions” bridge the boundaries between art and science.

Celebrating American photographer Bill Cunningham’s life and work through a must-see immersive journey, chronicling growth as a documentarian, fashion historian, and culture-maker through a series of multi-sensory exhibits.

All along the way, his eye is trained on moments of calm, locating an inherent grace, style, and sublime beauty in the Black everyday.

What will be left for us to probe? What ‘aesthetic entrances’ will be used? Alex Merola on Brea Souders’ weaving of pixels and pigments that offer intricate yet epic articulations of the natural world, continuing long traditions of American landscape photography.

With the publication of Eleven Years by Saint Lucy Books, Brea Souders’ restless interrogation of the photographic medium and its materials is celebrated. Her inventiveness eschews signature style thus risking what conventional wisdom casually dictates, and gives license to perform an inquiry without formula and reliance upon the habitual. 

A recent exhibition on the Kamoinge Workshop tells the story of a group of photographers who explored the artistic and political potential of the medium to its fullest.

Born in 1960s Harlem, the Kamoinge collective was influential in Black photography but ignored by the mainstream until recently. This exhibition should change that.

Working Together is an unprecedented exhibition that chronicles the formative years of the Kamoinge Workshop, a collective of Black photographers established in New York City in 1963. “Kamoinge” comes from the language of the Kikuyu people of Kenya, meaning “a group of people acting together,” and reflects the ideal that animated the collective. In the early years, at a time of dramatic social upheaval, members met regularly to show and discuss each other’s work and to share their critical perspectives, technical and professional experience, and friendship. Although each artist had his or her own sensibility and developed an independent career, the members of Kamoinge were deeply committed to photography's power and status as an independent art form. They boldly and inventively depicted their communities as they saw and participated in them, rather than as they were often portrayed. 

Brea Souders | The Trump administration has weakened our environmental protections, and now our waterways are threatened by pesticides, fertilizers and other pollutants. I responded to this threat by subjecting a photograph I had taken of a healthy aquatic ecosystem to corrosive chemicals. They cascaded down, altering and destroying everything they touched.

For generations of fashionable New Yorkers, Bill Cunningham was nothing short of a legend. The long time fashion photographer for the New York Times (who died in 2016) was a fixture in the city’s most fashionable circles, relentlessly shooting at society galas, evening events of all kinds, runway shows, and most memorably, out on the streets right in the thick of the passing pedestrians. In his signature blue work coat and traveling around on his bicycle, he was constantly looking, and his “On the Street” column was a testament to his voracious eye. Each week, out of the whirling chaos of the streets, he picked out trends, patterns, and visual themes that others had overlooked or missed, and having your picture included in one of his densely clustered spreads was a quiet mark of honor.

Bill Cunningham’s columns “On the Street” and “Evening Hours” in the NEW YORK TIMES presented the true New York. He photographed stars, at gala events, and the style of the street from his bike. The New York icon, who died in 2016 at the age of 87, didn’t considered himself so much a trend scout but rather a collector and archivist. The Bruce Silverstein Gallery in Manhattan is now showing more than 80 vintage prints in a glamorous exhibition of the inhabitants of New York from five decades.

Adger Cowans, who helped found the Kamoinge Workshop, reflects on his mentor and legendary photographer Gordon Parks, and imbuing his art with feeling.

From the social elite to regular people on the streets, Bill Cunningham portrayed some of the most stylish and truly fashionable people for decades. Usually dressed in his recognizable vivid blue jacket, which many industry professionals wore to pay him an homage when he passed away back in 2016, he could be seen grazing the streets of any fashion city with a keen eye for detail, looking to capture the most interesting and unique looks he came across. Opening on September 26th, Bruce Silverstein gallery in NYC is opening the exhibition Bill Cunningham | New York, New York, featuring over eighty unique vintage photographs spanning five decades.

Bill Cunningham, the photographer who died in 2016 aged 87, was the the father of street photography and rode his bicycle around town from the late 1960s, shooting stylish passersby until his death.  His "On the Street" photospread in The New York Times each week captured Manhattan style.

Still to come is Marjan Teeuwen's participation in Kyotographie, the international photography festival in Kyoto, Japan.  Postponed due to COVID-19, Teeuwen was nearly finsihed with her latest project, Destroyed House Kyoto, in April when she had to travel back to Amsterdam.  Plans are in the works to complete the project as soon as possible.

In order to voyage through Brea Souders’ Vistas, we must first understand how her pictures were made. The artist culls anonymous shadow selfies from 360-degree photographs of U.S. national parks found on Google. The image-stitching algorithms, as magnificent a technology as they are, have difficulty in knowing how to handle the shadows left on the ground by camera operators, leaving fragmented artifacts of human presence amid their techno-mediated views of the natural world. Souders takes these views, prints them, and applies watercolors to form resemblances of hand-colored travel postcards of an older time.

Through the juxtaposition of nineteenth-century and contemporary works, the exhibition further considers the longstanding metaphorical relationship between clouds and photography. Conceptions of both are dependent on oppositions, such as transience versus fixity, reflection versus projection, and nature versus culture.

In 1963, Louis Draper set up a group of African American photographers dedicated to documenting black experiences. It was called the Kamoinge Workshop, meaning ‘people working together’. Now the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts have gathered 180 pictures from its first 20 years.

As part of the celebration of Bertel Thorvaldsens 250th birthday in 2020, we celebrate the immersive qualities of the sculpture with a new large exhibition about Thorvaldsens sculptural portraits.

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond (VMFA) has received a gift of more than eight-thousand photographs by Aaron Siskind (1903–1991) from the artist’s New York–based foundation. Established in 1984 to protect Siskind’s legacy, the organization recently decided to cease its operations and transfer its holdings to an art museum that would care for its collection and administer its annual fellowship prize.

Inspired by the archive of Richmond native Louis Draper, VMFA has organized an unprecedented exhibition that chronicles the first twenty years of the Kamoinge Workshop, a group of African American photographers he helped to found in 1963.

Is a home a sanctuary? Throughout history, we have built shelters to protect from the elements, intruders, and animals of prey, but at a certain point, people wanted more than just a hideout or shelter. Issues such as privacy, family needs, and personal comforts began to influence the types of residences that were built and lived in. 

Paradise Lost explores human conditions in the Anthropocene and questions the changes of cityscapes along with humanity and the development of capitalism, as well as the explosions of wars.

Containing 97 unique images made from the same photographic negative, Danish visual artist Nicolai Howalt has created a mesmerising artist’s book like no other. It’s a book about the oldest living organism known to man and a book about the instability of the photographic image and the enigmatic intertwinement of time, reality and perception.

Yaddo is a retreat for artists located on a 400-acre estate in Saratoga Springs, New York. Its mission is to nurture the creative process by providing an opportunity for artists to work without interruption in a supportive environment.

Civilization: The Way We Live Now is an international photography exhibition of monumental scale, featuring the work of over 100 contemporary photographers from Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia and Europe with over 200 original photographs being exhibited.

My installations are a form of farewell to buildings scheduled to be destroyed.

Penelope Umbrico, whose work is also included in the exhibition at The Met, use space photography—specifically amateur images of the sun and the moon appropriated from Flickr and assembled together in large scale grids—to understand universal themes that unite people around the world.

Tiger Strikes Asteroid New York is pleased to announce GO, an installation of photographs created by the collaborative duo known as CORAMU, curated by Yael Eban. CORAMU is comprised of NewYork based artists Ina Jang and Brea Souders, who have invented a competitive photographic dialogue inspired by the ancient Chinese board game “Go,” a game of metaphysical elegance with close connections to politics, economics, and the laws of nature.

Dutch artist Marjan Teeuwen’s photographs require a monumental effort to pull off. Teeuwen creates large-scale architectural installations inside soon-to-be-demolished buildings, using the rubble from the wreckage. The result is beautifully composed images that capture construction and dereliction, and somehow recall Dutch Golden Age paintings. She is showing some of these inside a derelict building in Arles where she has made a new installation for the festival.

As we prepare for the opening of a new MoMA in October, we invited artists Rosalind Fox Solomon and Sara Cwynar to capture this moment through their eyes. Solomon has been photographing people who work at the Museum with her medium-format Hasselblad camera, which she has been using since 1976.

On 21 July 1969, at 2.56 UTC, Neil Alden Armstrong was the first person to ever set foot on the moon. 50 years later, the exhibition MAAN/MOON takes you on a photographic odyssey to our closest celestial neighbour and back. The object of dreams and fantasies, but also the catalyst for a global space race, the moon leaves no one unmoved.

Published in 2018 by RVB Books (here). Soft plastic slipcase containing 50 unbound off-set printed pages. Includes 2 polarizing films from disassembled laptop screens, a list of image titles, and 3 technical data sheets for the printing presses used. In an edition of 100 copies, each unique.

Rosalind Fox Solomon travels the world to find her subjects. She enters closed circles and takes risks in terms of personal experience and artistic practice. Her unflinching gaze at human vulnerability provokes strong emotions. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Lucie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Portraiture, and grants from the American Institute of Indian Studies from 1981 to 1984.

The photographer’s images of Washington Square Park revealed, with affection and longing, a Hungarian émigré who was an outsider in his adopted land.

The exhibition presents two series of photographs where the eye is confronted with the nostalgia of a past time. Trine Søndergaard presents us with images imbued with silence, which do not give answers but incite the spectator to wonder about what he sees. The title Still has no literal equivalent in French, it combines the notions of calm and silence.

The Hasselblad Foundation is pleased to announce that Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama is the recipient of the 2019 Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography.  The award ceremony will take place in Gothenburg, Sweden on October 13, 2019. A symposium will be held on October 14, followed by the opening of an exhibition of Moriyama’s work at the Hasselblad Center, and the release of a new book about the artist, published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König.

The International Center of Photography (ICP) has announced that Rosalind Fox Solomon will be honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 35th annual ICP Infinity Awards on the evening of Tuesday, April 2nd. Rosalind Fox Solomon travels the world to find her subjects. She enters closed circles and takes risks in terms of personal experience and artistic practice. Her unflinching gaze at human vulnerability provokes strong emotions. Her work is non-linear, flowing back and forth between the personal and the universal. Whether she is journeying in the American South, or abroad, her photographs reveal notions of power, survival, faith, and human behavior. The artist’s obsessions and anxieties travel with her as she interprets and photographs social elements wherever she finds herself. 

Rosalind Fox Solomon’s (born in 1930) unconventional beginnings has nevertheless led to a wide ranging career as a Photographer; with bodies of work that include(s) documenting the AIDS crisis in the 80’s with photographs and audio recordings from the sick, to Israel and the West Bank in 2010-2011. Growing up in the American South, Solomon led a fairly conventional life as a wife and mother until her interest in photography grew exponentially. As a student of the legendary Lisette Model, Solomon first started photographing dolls and mannequins to practice her portraiture, and eventually graduated to portraits of those in her local community. Liberty Theater, while comprised of 61 photographs, seems to have our nations history of race relations baked within every frame. 

Bruce Silverstein Gallery is honored to announce the representation of world-renowned contemporary artist Daido Moriyama.  One of the few living modern masters of photography from Japan, Moriyama's work has been exhibited internationally for the last half-century, leaving a lasting impression on countless generations of artists and the medium as a whole. 

Neumann (b. 1949, Saarbruck, Germany) is a fitting choice since, like Hilbig, the painter eerily depicts a particular kind of limbo inhabited by the postwar German generation sometimes referred to as the “fatherless” one.

Nathan Lyons worked outside mainstream aesthetics, eschewing pomposity, while capturing wonderment amid everyday banality.

In photo after photo, Rosalind Fox Solomon (b. 1930) captures a reality that few even observe. How does she do it? Her practice has taken her to many countries, but “Liberty Theater,” her latest book, focuses her roving, unsentimental eye firmly on the United States. The photos, like Diane Arbus’s, are discomfiting. But while Arbus sought out odd people or situations, Fox Solomon’s oddities are elsewhere: in her special ability to register tiny interstitial moments. Her crisp, precise photos — some of them are portraits, others seem to be caught on the fly — pin her subjects in situations of inadvertency, when their faces and bodies are between one attitude and another. This tonal ambiguity sets fire to the putatively binary content before us: black or white, young or old, rich or poor, sick or healthy. She somehow catches everyone in between. Here is the flawed nation, one strange facial expression at a time, without a trace of smugness or parody.

Five types of system ceiling plate, four types of plasterboard, kitchen cabinets, sills, plinths, steps and chipboard: almost 12 tons of demolition material is processed in Heerlen to 10 meters high pillars. The metamorphosis from waste to artwork is amazing: the columns look almost like travertine, the Italian limestone that gives the National Monument on the Dam, the Sacré-Cœur and the Colosseum their characteristic color.

Rosalind Fox Solomon’s vision of the American South pulls whiteness from its position as infinite and invisible “background,” as Zora Neale Hurston once wrote, to instead examine the white body as a site of difference. This by no means translates to capturing only white subjects, as the system haunts any and all who have lived within its nightmarish logic. 

Umbrico has two important projects on display simultaneously in New York. Her wall installation in the exhibition Anna Atkins Refracted is part of the New York Public Library’s 175th-year celebration of the English cyanotypist (through January 6).  Her installation Monument, a collection of, among other elements, disassembled television screens, is featured at BRIC Media House, the Brooklyn art and performance space (November 29-January 20).

For 30 years, at no small risk to himself, Ryan Weideman drove a cab in New York City, drawn to the night shift. For this real life “Taxi Driver,” the inside of his vehicle served as a photo studio, while he captured with his camera more stories of the Naked City than he could count.

Bruce Silverstein Gallery displayed a wall-sized installation of images from Rosalind Fox Solomon’s Liberty Theater series. Spanning the 1970s-1990s, the photographs explore race, class and segregation in the American South. The 88-year-old Solomon has spent the past 40 years documenting social issues, including her remarkable Portraits in the Time of AIDS series.

Todd Hido is one of the most acclaimed photographers working today. His work is characterized by a dreamy, moody aesthetic that is also highly cinematic. Hido is probably best known for his books featuring the American suburbs: “House Hunting,” “Outskirts” and “Roaming.”

Penelope Umbrico’s inordinately slow-moving video piece, 171 Clouds from the V&A online collection, inaugurates the newly constructed Light Wall. Umbrico has extracted details of clouds from the V&A’s archive of paintings, digitally stitching them together to make a vertical “art sky”.

Artists Mel Chin, Chris Drury, Alfred Leslie, Don Nice, Morgan O’Hara, and Masami Teraoka are this year’s recipients of the Lee Krasner Award, which is given in recognition of a lifetime artistic achievement.

“What strikes me is the relevance today of these visual poems that do not offer comfort,” says Rosalind Fox Solomon, of the images from the 1970s, 80s, and 90s collected together in her new book.

The artist Alfred Leslie is 90, but he acts decades younger. A recent conversation in his East Village studio had to wait while he finished fiddling with an image on his computer for a new project.

A passion for an object – wanting to do something with your life – makes it easier to get out of bed. But not every morning. ‘I feel that photography is my mission,’ US photographer Rosalind Solomon told me. In 1968, she was living in Japan, bought an Instamatic, and it began.

The exhibition explores Adams’ legacy by including works of contemporary photographers who investigate Adams’ legacy and his photographic ideals. Contemporary works from Abelardo Morell, Penelope Umbrico, David Benjamin Sherry, David Emitt Adams, Florian Maier-Aichen, Mille Tubbs and Christa Blackwood.

Nontraditional technologies and materials aimed at re-imagining the category of landscape photography are one of the many strengths of the exhibition New Territory: Landscape Photography Today at the Denver Art Museum.

“Photograph from your guts,” Model advised her students, an injunction to harness instinct, to channel, through the camera, anything—everything—with its pains and its triumphs. The camera was a conduit, a channel connecting the heart to the stomach to the brain and then short circuiting the whole setup. The camera was also, Model said, a detection device. “We are the subject” makes a compelling argument for the camera as Geiger counter, picking up and making visible the atmosphere’s radioactivity, the nuclear fields we carry around and travel through in our banal daily lives, the toxicities that make us human in the first place.

The World to Come: Art in the Age of the Anthropocene chronicles an era of rapid, radical and irrevocable ecological change through works of art by more than 45 contemporary international artists.

Muscle Beach, an exclusive online exhibition of Larry Silver’s iconic body of work is on display at Bruce Silverstein Gallery. The photography exhibition shows a passion of Larry Silver while he was in Los Angeles, California. Silver arrived at the Art Center School in Los Angeles after earning a full scholarship in 1953, and after winning first prize in the Scholastic-Ansco Photography Awards during his senior year at High School of Industrial Art in New York City.

Do not attempt to speed read Book 91. Authored by the artist Keith A. Smith, the book won't tie you up with complicated language or intricate plotting. But if you try to turn the pages too quickly, your fingers will get tangled in string.

Artists' books occupy a creative space between traditional books and contemporary works of art, challenging what a book can be. This highly visual and experiential presentation of some of the most lively and surprising works from the Research Institute's extensive collections focuses on artists' books that can be unpacked, unfolded, unfurled, or disassembled. They are made to be displayed on the wall or deployed as sculptures or installations. The exhibition seeks to provoke new inquiry into the nature of art and to highlight the essential role that books play in contemporary culture.

Sculptures by the Romanian master artist are on display at a ‘focused presentation’ at the Museum of Modern Art, along with his little-known and amazing films.

The Jewish Museum announced today that it has received a major gift from The Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation, established in 1996 by Annalee Newman, the artist's widow. The gift includes over 30 artworks that belonged to Barnett and Annalee Newman. Their personal collection includes works by artists such as Adolph Gottlieb, John Graham, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, Camille Pissarro, Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Rothko, Aaron Siskind, Saul Steinberg, Frank Stella, and Clyfford Still, as well as by Newman himself.

New Territory: Landscape Photography Today is a survey of contemporary landscape photography from around the world. The exhibition of more than 100 photographs will explore how artists stretch the boundaries of traditional landscape photography to reflect the environmental attitudes, perceptions, and values of our time.

An influential figure in mid-twentieth century photography, Lisette Model redefined documentary photography through her direct, honest portrayal of the human character.

The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Inc. was established in 1985 for the sole purpose of providing financial assistance to individual working visual artists of established ability through the generosity of the late Lee Krasner, one of the leading abstract expressionist painters and the widow of Jackson Pollock. The Pollock-Krasner Foundation’s mission is to aid, internationally, those individuals who have worked as artists over a significant period of time. The Foundation’s dual criteria for grants are recognizable artistic merit and financial need, whether professional, personal or both. The Lee Krasner Award is a tribute to and recognition of artists with long and distinguished careers.

Long before the ubiquity of digital technologies transformed the book, artist Keith Smith was engaged in prescient redefinition and innovation. 

Within Mutations / Creations, Code the world presents a state of contemporary digital creation in different disciplines. Returning to the history of the digital code and the way in which artists have seized it since the advent of the computer in the 1960s, the exhibition reveals a common aesthetic and critical universe that questions our daily life entirely irrigated by digital logics. Articulated around six timelines, the exhibition reveals multiple correspondences in the logic of creation and offers a global readability of what constitutes a culture of digital.

A new exhibition at the Turner Contemporary examines how humans depict animals, and our relationship with them.

Merging elements of past and present, Trine Søndergaard's images bring a continuity to juxtaposed vintage and contemporary aesthetics. 

Belgian painter René Magritte’s dreamlike aesthetic and evocative symbols (bowler hats, cloudy dreamscapes) ensure his enduring legacy, widespread appeal, and multimillion-dollar auction prices.Yet these simple associations belie the complexity of the artist’s vision, political engagements, and important connections to major 20th-century art movements.

Photographers have long turned their cameras on the city, often framing its architecture and residents from new vantage points and unexpected perspectives. Soaring skyscrapers, factory laborers, and serendipitous moments on busy streets serve as subject for many photographers in their quest to document the surrounding urban environment. 

Street photographer Ryan Weideman drove a New York City cab for decades. With one eye on the road and a camera in his hand, every passenger became a story, every trip a wild ride.

Though a more elusive artist than some of her students, photography teacher Lisette Model’s own work had a voice. “Their audacity, their humanity and humor are what make her images live on into our time. I believe these qualities were also some of the strengths she brought to her teaching — ‘shoot from the gut’ and so on,” Ann Thomas, senior curator of photography at the Canadian Photography Institute, who also wrote an extensive biography about Model, told In Sight.

Recognized as an icon of 20th-century photography for her ability to transform seemingly average subjects into compelling art, Lisette Model continues to resonate with new audiences long after her death in 1983.

My work deals with the polarity between the constructive and the destructive forces of mankind. People are very good at building up the world. We can build cities, we can go to the moon, but at the same time, we risk destroying our world. 

The Dutch artist Marjan Teeuwen is a specialist in architectural intervention. Taking her cues from Gordon Matta-Clark and others who have sliced and diced abandoned buildings, Teeuwen uses the underlying framework of a building as the guiding structure for her elaborate sculptural installations, where scavenged plywood, drywall, and broken concrete become the raw materials for her expansive artistic thinking.

For the last decade, Marjan Teeuwen has sought out enigmatic settings for her ongoing Destroyed House series, which is currently on display at Bruce Silverstein Gallery. The buildings that house her labyrinthian structures were once actual homes. Teeuwen’s work begins where their conventional purposes end. No longer domains for ordinary people, she transforms their interiors into vast networks of assemblage.

Dutch artist Marjan Teeuwen loves a challenge. Her chosen canvases are entire buildings, which she methodically dismantles and reconfigures to create mesmerizing, massive installations. For the past decade, Teeuwen has transformed dilapidated, soon-to-be-destroyed structures into highly ordered, ephemeral artworks.

A major new exhibition at Tate Modern will reveal the intertwined stories of photography and abstract art. Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art will be the first show of this scale to explore photography in relation to the development of abstraction, from the early experiments of the 1910s to the digital innovations of the 21st century. Abstractions from the human body associated with surrealism will include André Kertesz’s Distortions. The exhibition will also acknowledge the impact of MoMA’s landmark photography exhibition of 1960, The Sense of Abstraction, including important works by Aaron Siskind and Edward Weston originally featured in this seminal exhibition.  

Belgian surrealist René Magritte is primarily known for his paintings, including his famous 1928 work The Treachery of Images, featuring “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” French for “This is not a pipe,” below the image. After a resurgence in popularity in the ’60s, the artist’s photographs and films were discovered in the 1970s and brought to light another side of Magritte.

"In one of the most striking images in this closet-size but museum-quality show of Magritte’s little known photography, Georgette poses against a black background, her arms crossed high in front of her chest, a bird perched on each hand."

The discovery of these gem-like treasures has led to a deeper understanding of the close relationship Magritte maintained with photography. They reveal how he used these tools to experiment and play with his ideas, while providing rare access to an informal side of the artist and those whom he surrounded himself with.

The series of unusual encounters, dealing with sometimes moving, strange, melancholic or simply photogenic characters inspired him.

Neumann’s “Pictures and paper works of the 80s and 90s” turns the human figure into an abstract symbol, reducing his compositions to their pure essence. The artist is best known for using faceless heads and bodies. It is a subject that carries tremendous weight even though they do spare detail and placement in a rootless space. The artist has drawn inspiration from recollections reduced to the outline, shape and shadows of the originals to put together these works.

Perfect Brightness features photographs from the Permanent Collection and is based in so-called "straight" photography or practices that attempt to depict a scene or subject in sharp focus and detail, commensurate with the qualities that distinguish photography as a discipline from other visual media, particularly painting. As the subtitle suggests, the works included in this exhibition elicit ideas of travel, sending us on a journey around the world.

The Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize exhibition includes In Focus, an annual showcase of new work by an internationally-renowned photographer. We are delighted to announce that the In Focus artist for the 2017 Prize is the American photographer Todd Hido, who is known for juxtaposing mysterious and cinematic ruminations on the American landscape alongside portraits of women, which together speak of a fragmented and personal memory of the past. A selection of new work by Hido will be exhibited as part of the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2017 from 16 November through 18 February 2018.

On a low note, conceptual artist Mishka Henner's 2017 work titled "Trompe l'œil" (which translates from French to "deceive the eye") sustained damage while on display during the fair. Exhibited by New York dealer Bruce Silverstein, the work featured Trump's eyes peering through a white acrylic case. A vandal "scratched the eyes out," according to Silverstein. Fair organisers are reviewing camera footage to identify the culprit.

One of the most expensive works on show at the Grand Palais is 'Chez Mondrian' (1926), by André Kertész at Bruce Silverstein from New York. With an asking price of $1.2mn, it was taken a year after Kertész moved from his native Hungary to Paris and was invited by Mondrian, the Dutch abstract painter, to photograph his studio. 

The gallery is pleased to announce its representation of international artist Marjan Teeuwen. In her aptly titled body of work, Destroyed House, Teeuwen reclaims the wreckage of abandoned buildings assembling each fragment in painstakingly detailed installations, set within the original structures. Her images illuminate the precarious balance between the power of destruction and the constructive implications of order and function. Her debut exhibition at the gallery will open in February 2018.

It was remarkable to see the Alaskan Kodiak Madonna (dating to 500-200 BCE), in such close proximity to Brancusi's black and white photograph of a similar-looking Cycladic-inspired sculpture, The First Step (c. 1914); as was the case when walking from Donald Ellis Gallery, where some 2000 years of Inuit art was on display, to Bruce Silverstein's booth, where a selection of Man Ray photographs were on show for the first time.

The exhibition comprises of his early work made in Hungary, his homeland, to Paris, where between 1925 and 1936 he was one of the leading figures in avant-garde photography, to New York, where he lived for nearly fifty years. The exhibition pays tribute to a photographer whom Henri Cartier-Bresson regarded as one of his masters, and reveals, despite an apparent diversity of periods and situations, themes and styles, the coherence of Kertész’s poetic approach. 

Todd Hido’s suburban photographs juxtapose his signature, moody landscapes, shrouded by the filmic glances he depicts in his portraits, creating a series of cinematic moments which compel the viewer into his own universe of memory and intimacy.

Penelope Umbrico will talk about her multi-disciplinary photo-based works that explore the ever-changing technologies of image making and the ever-increasing production and consumption of images on the web. She repurposes and re-cast these images, putting them to work to question what they mean, why they are shared, where the investment is, and what this points to.

From iPhones to electronic billboards, screens saturate nearly every aspect of our daily lives. Screens: Virtual Material focuses on the increased presence of screens within contemporary sculpture and installation. The exhibition features work by artists who address how our vision, behavior, and beliefs are shaped by the ubiquitous nature of screens.

Embracing the wealth of images available on social media, contemporary artist Penelope Umbrico draws from the millions of images shared on Craigslist, Flickr, and other social media sites and uses them as source material for her installations. She selects popular subjects such as sunsets and televisions and creates large-scale installations that present contemporary society’s collective photographic habits and their intent and results. Screen Light features and contrasts two of Umbrico’s photo-based installations: Sunset Portraits from Flickr and TVs from Craigslist.

A Walk through Astoria and Other Places in Queens opens with an introductory poem by Denby, invoking “this backyard of exploitation and refuse,” followed by a sequence of images by Burckhardt of the rail yards that separate Sunnyside from Astoria. A filmmaker as well as a photographer, Burckhardt preferred the transience of film to the monumental aspect of photography.

The exhibition presents a body of collaborative works by Swiss-American filmmaker/photographer Rudolph Burckhardt (1914-1999) and his friend and American poet Edwin Denby (1903-1983). Known for his candid portraits of his abstract expressionist friends like Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, as well as his everyday photographs of memorable New York landmarks and street scenes, Burckhardt’s photographs of hand-painted billboards are considered as magnanimous contributions to the New York art scene during the 1940s and 1950s. 

Cosindas made photographs of such potency that they seem magical, dependent on something beyond mere sleight of hand for their mesmerizing effects and unified mood, so that the experience of looking at a selection of them is like watching a single sentence unfurl over several pages, driven along by an invisible inner consistency...

Throughout the 1950s, Frank Paulin captured the streets of New York City through his lens. From Central Park to the Staten Island Ferry, the renowned photographer put the city on display.

Jonas and the entire team of The Eye of Photography have repeated it all week: the Rencontres this year are exceptional. We talked about two of the masterpieces, Annie Leibovitz and Roger Ballen. The third one was missing: Michael Wolf. Go to the website of his gallery and judge for yourself!

Michael Wolf’s Life in the Cities was the highpoint for me, in every sense. The camera zooms in from huge, beautifully detailed images of tower blocks in Hong Kong and Chicago to invade the privacy of those who live and work there. The show charts Wolf’s development from his early intimate images of life in a small German coalmining town to the alienation of the modern city - a journey in which the viewer progresses from involvement to surveillance and which ends, logically enough, with Google Street View. Some truly beautiful images of the rooftops of Paris are thrown in along the way, together with a huge installation of toys "made in China" surrounding images of the workers who made them.

Ryan Weideman skillfully transformed his taxi into a highly functional art studio.The moving nature of his situation (being able to immerse himself in the action) allowed him to capture the spirit of the times in his own fluid style.

Michael Wolf's series "The Transparent City" focused on the ever-growing architectural landscape of Chicago and the lives that went on inside the new buildings. His series will soon be featured at the annual Les Rencontres d'Arles festival in France from July 3 to August 27, 2017. 

The phrase “street photography” comes loaded with expectations—which is what makes Michael Wolf’s always-original bodies of work an important reminder of why the world’s streets continue to captivate our attention.

Michael Wolf began documenting the crush of the Tokyo subway in 2010. Now, as the final edition of his series is published, the German photographer talks to Fiona Macdonald about images that have regularly gone viral over the past seven years.

Marie Cosindas was barely four-foot-eleven up on her tiptoes, if that. She may have weighed 100 pounds as long as she was lugging her big old Linhof wooden-box portrait camera and her tripod and stacks of four-by-five-inch film slides around in her duffel bag. She was so soft-spoken that if you were eating a potato chip or even a Stoned Wheat Thin, you couldn’t make out a word she said. And inside all that delicate wrapping was an iron rod.

Wynn Bullock was drawn to photography’s ability to evoke the invisible through the visible—for instance, the way that long exposures could suggest the time-space continuum, or that a fog-filled landscape could suggest the fullness and volume of space. The artists included in this exhibition, the collaborative team Julie Anand and Damon Sauer, Mishka Henner, and Richard Mosse, have used various techniques to make complex and invisible concepts visible in their photographs. Bullock used photography to respond to the scientific discoveries of his day, exploring the place of human beings within the natural world, and, indeed, within the universe. Mosse, Henner, and Anand and Sauer have all chosen to investigate our increasingly entangled geopolitical reality, and the role of photography within it.

During a family vacation to New Mexico in 1944, the daughter of Edwin H. Land asked her father a good question: Why couldn't she see the photographs now?

Land said later that, within an hour, he had visualized a camera, film and chemistry system to help make his little girl's wish a reality.

Thus was born the Polaroid camera, which, long before the iPhone, gave us instant-gratification photography.

Trained as a painter, Ms. Cosindas used color Polaroid film to pioneer a new approach to photography in the 1960s. Using a variety of lens filters and her keen sense of lighting, she created portraits and still-lifes that straddled the divide between photography and painting. Arrestingly warm, lush, and intimate at a time when black-and-white art photography could be chilly and minimalist, her work stood alone in its heyday.

Nearly forgotten for many years when she was hobbled by multiple back surgeries, Ms. Cosindas resurfaced with a retrospective in Texas and a lifetime achievement award in Boston, both in 2013, and a 2014 show at the Bruce Silverstein Gallery in New York. She died May 25 in Brigham and Women’s Hospital of complications from pneumonia. Ms. Cosindas was 93 and had lived in a Prudential Center apartment for decades.

Artists In Residence Television covered the exhibition "In My Taxi" by the American photographer Ryan Weideman, invited to exhibit three decades of pictures of the backseat of his taxi in New York City.

John Wood’s work is often referred to as “quiet protest” and a plea for his viewers’ awareness. Known as a master of process, Wood challenged traditional photography and incorporated a variety of mediums into his work.

WARSAW, Poland — The National Museum in Warsaw is staging a new exhibition featuring the works of Hungarian photographers, who were among the most prominent practitioners of the genre internationally in the 20th century.

"The Way They See It: An Overview of Hungarian Photography," includes works by over 100 artists, among them Andre Kertesz, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Martin Munkacsi. It is to run June 13 to Sept. 10, and is part of a year of Hungarian culture being observed in Poland.

Leading international photographer and artist Mishka Henner is the latest high-profile guest to visit Furness as part of the new digital arts programme Lost Stations.

Marie Cosindas, an early pioneer of color photography whose work blurred the line between could be produced by a paintbrush and what could be accomplished using a camera, has died. She was 93.

Before William Eggleston revolutionized the field by introducing hues that had rarely ever been seen before, Cosindas had become among the first photographers to experiment with color. Featuring a wide variety of subjects, from an arrangement of dolls to a portrait of Andy Warhol wearing sunglasses, her work had a painterly quality to it, and her style was praised for its softness.

The Whole World Including the Poet: A re-installation by Eileen Neff

Bruce Silverstein is saddened to announce the death of beloved artist Marie Cosindas. Her life and work was instrumental in the recognition of color photography as an accepted artistic medium in an era where it had been relegated to commercial pursuits.  She was recognized for her warm, intimate portraits as their flattering and smartly directed nature enabled her to draw out her sitters' style and éclat. Her richly-layered studio arrangements of florals and borrowed treasures recall a by-gone era that pay tribute to her predilection for Old World kitsch. She will be dearly remembered.

The Polaroid Project surveys the history of the innovative photographic company Polaroid and its intersection with art, science, and technology during the second-half of the twentieth century. Featuring a wide-ranging group of artists (including Marie Cosindas and André Kertész), the exhibition showcases the diversity of works produced over several decades.

Now, 25 years after going off the air, Twin Peaks is back in the form of an 18-part limited series from original creators David Lynch and Mark Frost, set to air on Showtime beginning May 21. To mark the show’s return, TIME commissioned photographer and artist Todd Hido to revisit the forests of Washington state for a photo essay inspired by the locations used in the original pilot.

Anyone who visited the Bruce Silverstein booth at Frieze New York 2017 was offered a rare treat: a selection of realistic paintings by Alfred Leslie spanning from the late 1960s, when he first changed his focus to figuration, to today. The central piece on display was a monumental, three-part masterwork Leslie painted in 1978, titled Americans, Youngstown, Ohio.

Alfred Leslie at Bruce Silverstein

Leslie has proven himself to be a versatile and experimental artist, Kamps says. Early in his career, he painted in an Abstract Expressionist style and was included in an exhibition organised by Clement Greenberg and Meyer Schapiro at the Samuel Kootz gallery in 1950. In the 1960s, Leslie began to make films and publish magazines with poets such as Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery. Around the same time, he shifted his painting into a more realist style, which continues to be his focus. Yet the 89-year-old artist continues to evolve: his most recent portraits, which he calls Pixel Scores, are made using a computer.

In Uncertain Times, Galleries at Frieze New York Dig for Market Gold

Amid an unsteady market, dealers and collectors turn to under-recognized names from the 1960s and '70s.

BRUCE SILVERSTEIN GALLERY In the “Spotlight” section, showcasing a single artist in each booth, Bruce Silverstein is exhibiting three spectacular canvases from the 1970s by Alfred Leslie, a painter who started off as an Abstract Expressionist and later turned to figurative realism. “Americans, Youngstown, Ohio” (1977-78) is three conjoined canvases with figures dressed in everyday clothes and lit from below, while “A Death in the Family” (1976) features a corpse, but also a plate of eggs with a cigarette butt. Odes to banal America, the paintings feel like Caravaggio or Georges de La Tour for the ’70s recession era.

How can we tell a work of art from an ordinary object? When we visit museums, we expect to see important artworks and potent displays of cultural and social inquiry. But who ultimately decides the value and meaning of an artwork? This eclectic selection from the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum Collection accompanies the exhibition The Transported Man and contributes to conversations around the role of belief in the framing and experience of art.

‘The back alleys of the city are my canvas. Look behind any building and you’ll find something strange’

Postcards don’t usually say much: On the front, there may be a picture from the museum or country your friend is visiting; on the back, a few lines that convey some small affection. This delicacy is what makes postcards special. They carry feeling but not the freight of too much personality—they delight and ask for nothing in return. Or at least that’s what I felt about Keith Smith’s postcards, which the artisan bookmaker has been sending to friends for five decades now, a number of which have been brought together for this exhibition.

Mishka Henner is among a new generation of artists redefining the role of photography in the internet age. Much of his work navigates through this vast digital terrain to focus on key subjects of cultural and geo-political interest. In this presentation, he'll focus on the diversity of his influences and practice, and on controversies surrounding his projects.

Through a selection of unique work, the exhibition By looking down I see up. By looking up I see down. presents the viewer an almost intimate iconography of human existence at its most basic level. Resonating far beyond ordinary conventions of photographic representation, these powerful and beautiful images embrace the transitory and unexpected.

Capturing invisible rays of light, ashes from human cremation, and the volatile reactions of primary elements on metal plates, melding aesthetic interests with natural science, this exhibition offers visitors a rare insight into the artist’s most recent explorations of exposure, fragility and change.

Keith A. Smith may be best known for his psychedelically illustrated and collaged books, but with this exhibition he’ll show an even smaller-format part of his oeuvre: postcards. Since 1965, when he was in college, Smith has made these 5-by-7-inch works, which he sees as being about communication. “Traditional prints can say some things, books can speak through movement, and postcards have their unique abilities to reach people as well,” Smith has said. “I don’t think of any of these as ‘art’ but as my voice.” This show is the first survey of Smith’s postcards, which take their cues from mail artist Ray Johnson.

Mishka Henner, born in 1976, explores, uncovers and reveals the human relationship to the earth and to each other with the internet, street scenes and Google map function as its tools. His photographs bear traces of the monitoring carried out by governments around the world.

With the ubiquity of the digital revolution, a moment arose where it seemed photographs were bound to be stored as digital files rather than printed. In the wake of this tectonic shift, there has been an even more pressing return to photographic sculpture and a play with photography’s medium specificity as a physical object.

"What does it say the most powerfully uncomfortable photobook of 2016 was authored by a wildly underrated 86-year-old woman? Rosalind Fox Solomon should be the next White House photographer.” - Alec Soth

The inside of a New York taxicab is a place where the public realm blurs with the private, especially on the overnight shift. People fight, make love, eat takeout, throw up, fall asleep, concoct plans for world domination or a good night’s sleep. Many act as if the driver is not there. Ryan Weideman, a photographer who drove a taxi shift to make ends meet, decided to let them know that he was.

September 24, 2016 - January 2, 2017

Exploring an unparalleled period in American art, this long-awaited exhibition reveals the full breadth of a movement that will forever be associated with the boundless creative energy of 1950s New York.

Who is watching you? In the 21st century, it is hard to escape the camera’s all-seeing eye. With every movement recorded by cameras, it is difficult to remember that surveillance is not a modern construct. This exhibition examines photography’s role in secretive looking from the 1860s to today.

Nathan Lyons, who died on Aug. 31 at age 86, was another in this line of artist-curators, and probably one of the last. A prolific writer and photographer, and a revered teacher, he was primarily engaged in each endeavor with the slippery nature of images—how various combinations and contexts might elicit unsuspected meanings. The world and photography are in ceaseless dialogue, he argued, and no dogma should try to limit the conversation.

In the 1920s, along with Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, and his chief rival, Edward Steichen, Outerbridge was among the most acclaimed of avant-garde photographers.

In celebration of the publication of Judith E. Stein’s Eye of the Sixties, Richard Bellamy and the Transformation of Modern Art, the first-ever biography of one of the twentieth century’s most influential and enigmatic art dealers, and of Miles Bellamy’s Serious Bidness, a selection of his dad’s hitherto unpublished letters, artists Mark di Suvero, Alfred Leslie,  Richard Nonas and Rosalyn Drexler join the authors in a conversation about the legacy of Dick Bellamy.

Penelope Umbrico is fascinated by what she calls “the digital torrent”—the billions of photographs that flood the Internet every day. To make her work, she combs photo-sharing websites, online classified ads, and stock photography sites to collect samples of the most common images, then combines them to make colorful, mural-sized arrays that speak to photography’s place in contemporary life.

September 8, 2016

7-8:30pm

Nathan Lyons, a photographer who helped elevate contemporary photography to its current status as a major branch of the fine arts and an important field of study through his work as curator, teacher, writer and editor, died on Wednesday in Rochester. He was 86.

June 22, 2016 – October, 3 2016

Centre Pompidou, Paris

 

This exhibition demonstrates the photographic medium’s ability to encompass a dizzying range of reactions to social change, political unrest, new technologies, and cultural confusion and upheaval.

History can be an unreliable narrator. Paul Outerbridge was once a major force in photography, straddling the worlds of commerce and art. He shared European assignments for Vogue with Edward Steichen, and in 1929 became the second photographer to have his work acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But he died in obscurity in 1958, at the age of sixty-one. In 2009, the Getty Museum reintroduced Outerbridge to Los Angeles with a major retrospective. Now a fine show at the Bruce Silverstein Gallery gives New Yorkers a turn.

July, 1 2016 – December, 4 2016

New York Historical Society

This survey is certainly among the best gallery shows of vintage photography we are going to see in New York this year. With just once glance through this deep selection of works, it’s easy to see how Outerbridge’s trailblazing stylistic influence has percolated through the medium, from encouraging artists like Robert Mapplethorpe and Helmut Newton to sparking more recent explorers of the borderlands between commercial and fine art imagery like Roe Ethridge and Elad Lassry.

André Kertész, Barbara Morgan, and Man Ray

Where: J. Paul Getty Museum

When: Through August 28, 2016

This summer The Bronx Museum of the Arts will present Art AIDS America, the first exhibition to examine the deep and ongoing influence of the AIDS crisis on American art and culture. The exhibition will feature more than 125 works in a wide range of media dating from 1981

Field by Mishka Henner consists of an assemblage of high definition satellite photographs, which are freely available on the Internet. The image stretches over 42-ft in length and appears at first glance to be an abstract, geometric painting; yet on looking more closely, you realise that these are oilfields.

Belgian artist Mishka Henner made “Astronomical,” a scale model of the solar system in the form of a 12-volume, 6,000-page artist book. With the sun on Page 1 and Pluto on Page 6,000, and the width of each page equivalent to a million kilometers in space, the work, completed in 2011, contains page after page of blackness.

“She kept saying to me, the more specific you are, the more general it’ll be.”

- Diane Arbus on her mentor, Lisette Model

Penelope Umbrico artist lecture at the Photographic Center Northwest

May 20, 2016

6:30 - 8:30pm

The Milwaukee Art Museum is showing “Penelope Umbrico: Future Perfect,”. It features over 30 photographic installations as well as individual photographs, books and video installations that demonstrate the range of Umbrico’s exploration of how images traffic through digital networks. The exhibition was curated by Lisa Sutcliffe and will be on view through August 7. 

Keith A. Smith is widely recognized as one of the few great living masters of the book as artwork with nearly 300 bookworks created to date. This selection focuses on his representation of women in classical painting such as his large fold book, Ladies First, and Frida Kahlo.

Future Perfect (opening May 5, 2016) features over thirty photo-based installations—comprising nearly 5,000 individual images along with photographs, videos and books that trace Umbrico’s obsessive systems of inquiry and online research since 2006.  The exhibition will also feature new work made specifically for Milwaukee, alongside the artist’s most acclaimed projects from the past decade.

Collected brings together photographs from the Pilara Foundation and other Bay Area collections. Nine collectors were invited to select works from their holdings that reflect their interests in the medium. The exhibition offers a lens on various collecting approaches, with some collectors focusing on the work of particular artists or on specific art historical movements or themes, and others developing their own criteria, whether deliberately or unconsciously

Rosalind Fox Solomon is the only one who takes in the human topography of Israel in all its 21st-century diversity. She registers the country’s full panoply of faces, and her portraits are justly set off in a room of their own. Instead of a two-way conflict between Arabs and Jews, she sees a fluid churn: Christian pilgrims in the old city of Jerusalem, African immigrants in Tel Aviv, ordinary eccentrics, beach-going exhibitionists, the lonely, the poor, the angry, and the deluded — all people whose struggles have little to do with politics.

Lotte Jacobi, Lisette Model: Urban Camera runs through Sept. 11 at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum. The show consists of 34 black-and-white photographs by Jacobi and Model.

This body of work is an excellent example of photographs that are richly informed by the female gaze – I can’t list too many male photographers who would be as finely attuned to the nuances of body language and facial expression, and what they imply about the lives of her sitters, as Solomon is here.

The Hillman-Jackson Gallery at Bard College at Simon’s Rock is pleased to present Entry Point, a four-person exhibition showcasing the work of New York-based artists, Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Matthew Porter, Brea Souders and Chris Wiley. The exhibition was curated by Anastasia Samoylova, assistant professor of photography at Bard College at Simon’s Rock. The exhibition runs from Friday, April 1 through Wednesday, May 4. Closing reception and gallery talk will be held on May 4th at 5pm.

Soldier, Spectre, Shaman, a noteworthy and all too rare exhibition on view on the museum’s third floor, offers a vital corrective to the gospel of abstract art. Most of the 30 or so artists here are European, and stand outside the museum’s tenacious master narrative. While their American counterparts were paring down painting, sculpture and other media to their essences, these artists insisted on the primacy of the figure, and conceived a new, more downhearted humanism for an inhuman age.

Telling a story 500 years in the making, Botticelli Reimagined will be the largest Botticelli exhibition in Britain since 1930. Including painting, fashion, film, drawing, photography, tapestry, sculpture and print, the exhibition will explore the ways that artists and designers have reinterpreted Botticelli

This exhibition explores the history of the medium as a lucid, literate—but not always literal—tool of persuasion. A collaboration with the George Eastman Museum, the show features more than eighty works from the 1840s to the present and reveals the many ways the camera can transmit not only the outward appearance of its subject but also narratives, arguments, and ideas.

Eileen Neff states that, “Having formally studied painting before photography, and poetry before painting, I consider the ideas and boundaries between disciplines to be more fluid than not.” While in Kentucky, Eileen will set out on field studies to explore the flora of the region. She has numerous museum and gallery exhibitions, and has taught many university courses. She has an M.F.A. in painting from Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, PA, a B.F.A. in Painting, Philadelphia College of Art, Philadelphia, PA and a B.A. English Literature, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA.

This is A Photograph, curated by artist-educator Dan Estabrook, considers the fascinating subject of chemical and physical photography in the digital age and how we might now define a photograph. Handmade images created through the complex alchemy of light and chemistry are the common ground of the artists including Brea Souders, Adam Fuss, Sally Mann among others invited by Estabrook for this exhibition.

Barbara Morgan and Martha Graham met in 1935 and it took six years for the former (“a terror” in the studio, according to Graham) to produce the 16 photographs in this collection. In her determination to get at the core of the dance, to what she called “its spiritual energy”, Morgan had Graham perform the same movements over and over again, allowing her to lie down when she was tired, but always insisting that she remove her costume in case it got dirty. The sessions were endurance tests for both women, but Morgan, with her favourite Speed Graphic camera “pressed to cheekbone and eye socket” as she recalled, produced some of the greatest dance photographs ever made.

Although he started his career as a documentary photographer, Aaron Siskind (American, 1903–1991) quickly became known for his abstract photographs. Socially and professionally close with many of the Abstract Expressionist painters in his native New York, Siskind created photographs in dialogue with painting, attempting to find a new language for photographic depiction that could transform an object into an image, a description into an idea. Across a decades-long career, his work explored what he called “the drama of objects,” imbuing forms with animism and rhythm. 

For the last two decades, German-born photographer Michael Wolf has captured the essence of Hong Kong's unique density. He also recently published a visual encyclopedia of Hong Kong's ever-changing urban ecosystem. Reuters correspondent Pak Yiu has a look into what draws him to the city’s urban culture.

Rosalind Fox Solomon, whose photographs are currently on view as part of the exhibition Greater New York at MoMA PS1, packs emotion and mystery into her images. Her subjects are more quotidian than Diane Arbus’s, but the pictures achieve the same unnerving vibe. Though her photos appear staged or posed, according to her the scenes are “just encountered.” Solomon’s photographs mine the surreal embedded in the ordinary; what makes them remarkable is that she captured these liminal instances.

Organized by Helen Molesworth and Ruth Erickson, “Look Before You Leap” presented some two hundred works by one hundred artists. The show captured the impossibility of capturing the essence of those years in that place, given the multifariousness of the activities and artistic practices that flowered there. With neither a doctrine nor a thoroughgoing prescription for learning, Black Mountain was more like an intellectual and aesthetic kiln. There are as many styles covered by the label “Black Mountain” as there were artists who spent time there. The names connected to the school are dizzying in their subsequent stature as well as their plenitude: Cy Twombly, Aaron Siskind, Jacqueline Gourevitch, David Tudor, Charles Olson, Elizabeth Jennerjahn, Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence, Stan VanDerBeek, Hazel Larsen Archer, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Xanti Schawinsky, Merce Cunningham, M. C. Richards, Ben Shahn, Buckminster Fuller—the list goes on and on.

The International Center of Photography (ICP) is collaborating with artist Mishka Henner on an installation at ICP’s new museum space, opening this summer at 250 Bowery. The installation on the building’s construction shed will feature Henner’s “Photography Is” work beginning February 19 until the museum opens.

The exhibition, Performing for the Camera (until 12 June), arguably plays around with three media rather than two: photography, live art and sculpture. The latter point is indicated in the opening room by two photographs from 1973 by the artist Charles Ray, best known for his figurative sculptures. In Plank Piece I-II, the artist is photographed balancing between a plank and a wall in an apparently stable, sculptural pose that must, in fact, have barely lasted seconds.

The Open Road considers the photographic road trip, from Robert Frank—whose 1955 road trip resulted in The Americans (1958)—to present day, as a genre in and of itself. This is the first exhibition and book to explore the story of the American photographic road trip—one of the most distinct, important, and appealing themes of the medium.

Over 600 of the images Umbrico found on Flickr last November constitute the largest work on view, “Everyone’s Photos Any License (654 of 1,146,034 Full Moons on Flickr, November 2015)” (2015), and it immediately relays the moon’s unfailing ability to captivate us. Shown at different scales, some moons are vividly colored, suggesting they were captured at an especially special point of the star’s orbit; still, none seem particularly unique. Umbrico, though, treats them as such: she has printed and taped each one individually as part of a sprawling collage that spans the majority of one wall

Informal Solutions - the title refers to coping mechanisms devised by the residents of Hong Kong to deal with high-density living - is a collection of pictures the German photographer has taken in our back alleys - or "scavenger lanes" - since he arrived in the city, in 1994.

AUSTIN, TX.- The Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin, presents the exhibition "Look Inside: New Photography Acquisitions" Feb. 9 to May 29, 2016. Introducing nearly 200 of the Ransom Center's newest acquisitions, "Look Inside" traces photography from its post-war expansion to its central position in contemporary art. 

This exhibition will introduce the work of sixteen artists whose ideas and concepts are manifest in film based media. The individual works for the exhibition were each chosen to focus on the singular contributions of each respective artist. Each artist approaches creating a single image or composite film or video in a different way. The artist may construct a fiction involving a person or individuals, objects in a setting, a location and/or a narrative. The artist may realize a concept through an invention or reinvention of a person, place or narrative. In each example the artist has been challenged to address purely formal issues as well, creating an invented image not seen before.

Why she has not crossed over into the wider art world and remains an artist more exhibited in photography galleries is a mystery, not least, one can be sure, to Umbrico herself. Her ideas about our image culture are as complex and subtle as Richard Prince’s and Sherrie Levine’s.

Bruce Silverstein 

535 West 24th Street

Saturday, February 6th at 3:30pm

Fifteen archival prints of photographs of sunlight streaming into Grand Central Station, watermarked with their sources—sites such as Art.com, Easy Art, Picasso.com—greet visitors to Penelope Umbrico’s latest exhibition, playfully drawing attention to her process of appropriation while offering the prosaic material a more profound afterlife.

Double Doors: a site-specific installation by Silvio Wolf

Tuesday, January 19, 2016

6:00 – 7:30 p.m.

The Jewish Theological Seminary

Registration at:  www.jtsa.edu/TraversingTradition

INSCRIBED has been extended through January 23rd. On view at 529 W 20th by appointment, this intimate exhibition showcases photographs transformed into unique artworks by the artist's annotations or inscriptions.

The exhibit, titled “Four Rays of Sunlight in Grand Central,” was installed in lightboxes in the terminal’s East Dining Concourse. These photographs, which were produced exclusively for this exhibit, are related to Umbrico’s work for the centennial’s time-themed exhibit titled “On Time/Grand Central at 100.” That show in 2013 was curated by MTA Arts & Design at the New York Transit Museum Gallery.

Part memoir and part fiction, Got To Go presents a collection of photographs from across Rosalind Fox Solomon’s life, contrasting a narrative of her own early years with other, urgent images that reveal a wider vision of the world, one outside of the rigid boundaries imposed by society and the home. If biography is a net cast upon us by family and shaped by social codes, Fox Solomon lays bare the limits of the net, as she negotiates the cusp between lived life and her imagination. Describing the work as a “tragicomedy”, full of both humour and pathos, Fox Solomon probes the limits we impose on ourselves, not only social codes but also the inherited tenets which are so difficult to escape.

Penelope Umbrico's work is represented in museum collections including the Guggenheim Museum, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Perez Art Museum Miami, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA,  Berkley Museum of Art, CA.

She is the recipient of a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship; a John Gutmann Photography Fellowship Award, a Deutsche Bank Fellow/New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship, a Peter S Reed Grant; an Anonymous Was A Woman Award; a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship; and an Aaron Siskind Individual Photographer’s Fellowship.

Rosalind Fox Solomon’s series documenting the lives of those affected by the AIDS crisis was first shown in 1988. This week, a selection of her powerful images will be on display as part of Paris Photo’s new “PRISMES” section, which features serial works from an international selection of remarkable photographers. In the Salon d’Honneur, visitors can also see “Sleeping Portraits” by Paul Graham, Bae Bien-U’s desert still lifes and Daido Moriyama’s unsettling street portraits of Japan.

The biggest structural change is the creation of a new section, Prisms, in the Salon d’Honneur on the first floor, where nine galleries will show ambitious works in series. “Many photographic works are often displayed as solo objects even though they are part of a series,” Wiesner says, “which together makes them a large-scale work.” Are they harder to sell? Perhaps, to your average collector, “but they are very good for institutions, and don’t forget that there are some very strong private collections out there,” he says.

 

Highlights from this section, which is supported by Giorgio Armani, include a collaborative project between Akio Nagasawa and Jean-Kenta Gauthier galleries, which have assembled the definitive set of photographs from the Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama’s influential photo-book Farewell Photography (1972). The display will feature 50 prints from rediscovered negatives that were not published in the book. 

 

The Bruce Silverstein gallery, meanwhile, will show Portraits in the Times of Aids, a selection of works by the American Rosalind Solomon that shocked a largely uneducated and unprepared public when they were originally exhibited (and underappreciated) in New York in 1988, at the height of the Aids crisis. 

Astronomical by Mishka Henner is on view in MoMA's New Photography exhibition. This year’s edition explores contemporary photo-based culture, specifically focusing on connectivity, the circulation of images, information networks, and communication models. Ocean of Images is organized by Quentin Bajac, the Joel and Anne Ehrenkranz Chief Curator of Photography, Roxana Marcoci, Senior Curator, and Lucy Gallun, Assistant Curator, Department of Photography, MoMA.

Taken in the homes of people with Aids, Rosalind Fox Solomon’s provocative pictures from the late 80s challenged the ‘victim culture’ that surrounded the illness. She showed it could affect anyone – from women who’d had transfusions to the children of infected mothers.

The series will be shown at the Bruce Silverstein Gallery, New York, during Paris Photo the Salon d’Honneur, a space dedicated to photography of historic importance.

How does one measure emptiness and can it be measured? Images that are devoid of people give us a taste of what we leave behind when we take a step away: an abandoned bowling alley, a stark prison cell, or an empty desk. They imply a sense of absence, but they are far from empty and the human presence is visible and felt. Featuring works from the GW Permanent Collection and various lenders, this exhibition explores the traces of human presence left behind in 'unpeopled' photographs of interiors and other spaces, whether temporarily empty, permanently abandoned, or made to appear so by the photographer's viewpoint or photographic processes.

A visually arresting collection of new works by emerging artists and celebrated names, united around a simple premise. The first in an exciting new series, Feelings: Soft Art is an intimate exploration of contemporary art today. Focused on material qualities and the feelings evoked by a work, this thematic approach returns to the basic pleasure of experiencing art. An easy, evocative look at artists and their projects, this heavily illustrated publication features hands-on insight from within the art world and without. Drawing on hundreds of new paintings, sculptures, photographs, and other practices, extended essays develop common threads. Brief texts and interviews reveal the making of soft works and artists’ relationships with the materials they use.

PERCEPTIONS: Man and Woman in the History of Photography

Perceptions explores through photography evolved concepts of masculinity and felinity and their role in society and aesthetics since the mid-nineteenth century to the present.

Exhibition: November 6, 2015 - March 13, 2016.

The Norton Museum of Art is the first U.S. venue to host This Place, an international photo exhibition that explores the complexity of Israel and the West Bank. 

While acknowledging and paying heed to the region’s conflicts, This Place asks that we look beyond this — that we widen and multiply our lens. It unveils a dozen contemporary photographic viewpoints of Israel and the West Bank, created primarily between 2009 and 2012 by Frédéric Brenner (France), Wendy Ewald (United States), Martin Kollar (Slovakia), Josef Koudelka (Czech Republic), Jungjin Lee (S. Korea), Gilles Peress (France), Fazal Sheikh (United States), Stephen Shore (United States), Rosalind Fox Solomon (United States), Thomas Struth (Germany), Jeff Wall (Canada) and Nick Waplington (United Kingdom). The combination of these individual photographic sensibilities and approaches act as a heterogeneous narrative and produce not a single, monolithic vision, but rather a diverse and fragmented portrait of this important and much contested space.

Modern classics at Bruce Silverstein Gallery

If you want fun fair style excitement, like you experienced as a kid in front of the confectionary stall at the county fair, there’s only one place to go: the Bruce Silverstein Gallery stand at Frieze Masters. This booth has the rarest of treats in the form of modern photographic masterpieces. Every year, I stare and ogle at the mouth-watering goods on display, which this year include the cotton candy of photographs: the Portrait of Dorothy Normanby Alfred Stieglitz (1931), the candied apples of photographic collages: an early Robert Mapplethorpe self-portrait, Untitled (1971) as well as my favorite: the luscious lollipop of an image: The Necklace, Lee Miller (1965) by Man Ray, a gelatin silver print of a sensuous, strained neck, with a remarkable necklace made from coiled string.

Images by Rosalind Fox Solomon, who is 85 this year, show all kinds of New Yorkers out and about in the city, including two young black boys eyeing guns at a police museum as two white mannequins loom over them eerily. The feminist art collective fierce pussy also provides a marker of enduring trauma. Founded in 1991 to combat AIDS, it has wall installation and takeaway newspaper print that memorializes the countless unnamed victims of the disease.

This exhibition, whose title derives from a 1923 poem by William Carlos Williams, assumes the form of a running dialogue between photographic images—past and present—that take as their subject the accumulated byproducts of an American way of life.

The Museum of Modern Art has one of the greatest collections of twentieth-century photography in the world. As one of three volumes dedicated to a new history of photography published by the Museum, this publication comprises a comprehensive catalogue of the collection post-1960s and brings a much-needed new critical perspective on the most prominent artists who have worked with the photographic medium over the last half-century. At a moment when photography is undergoing fast-paced changes and artists are seeking to redefine its boundaries in new and exciting ways, Photography at MoMA serves as an excellent resource for understanding this expanded field.

Following in the tradition of street photography, Weegee, W.Eugene Smith and Henri Cartier Bresson, Larry Silver (b. 1934) began documenting moments of everyday life on the streets and subways of New York City in 1949 at the age of 15. While studying photography at the High School of Industrial Art (1949-53), he soon came under the influence of New York’s Photo League, a group of photographers who combined personal expression and social activism to expose the political and social issues of the day. While still in high school, Silver was awarded a scholarship to attend the Art Center School in Los Angeles (1954-56) and soon began photographing the local weightlifters, body builders, and acrobats who flocked to the Santa Monica Beach. This celebrated series, Muscle Beach (1954), was the subject of a solo exhibition at the International Center of Photography in 1985, and again in 1999 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Considering the “greater” aspect of its title in terms of both geography and time, Greater New York begins roughly with the moment when MoMA PS1 was founded in 1976 as an alternative venue that took advantage of disused real estate, reaching back to artists who engaged the margins of the city. Together, the works in the exhibition employ a heterogeneous range of aesthetic strategies, often emphatically representing the city’s inhabitants through forms of bold figuration, and foregrounding New York itself as a location of conflict and possibility.

Bringing together emerging and more established artists, the exhibition occupies MoMA PS1’s entire building with over 400 works by 157 artists, including programs of film and performance. Greater New York is co-organized by a team led by Peter Eleey, Curator and Associate Director of Exhibitions and Programs, MoMA PS1; and including art historian Douglas Crimp, University of Rochester; Thomas J. Lax, Associate Curator, Department of Media and Performance Art, MoMA; and Mia Locks, Assistant Curator, MoMA PS1.

Mishka Henner, a new media artist based in Manchester, UK (with a current solo show in NYC), has been gathering these satellite images of feedlots. Referred to as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations in the business, feedlots are where thousands of livestock are kept and fed grains for the few months preceding their slaughter. Noxious miles of land packed full of cows, which are fattened up before they’re killed. 

The BMA kicks-off a new series of exhibitions drawn from the more than 3,000 gifts of art acquired during the In a New Light campaign that concluded during the museum’s 100th anniversary in fall 2014. This exhibition features approximately 18 color and black-and-white photographs that were part of a major gift from Baltimore collectors Tom and Nancy O’Neil, who have collected 20th- and 21st-century photography for more than two decades.

Works by contemporary masters and new talents such as Dawoud Bey, Richard Misrach, and Abelardo Morell demonstrate the O’Neil’s interest in images that speak to today’s landscape and environmental issues, as well as portraits that offer sensitive studies of the human experience.

Curated by

Curator of Contemporary Art Kristen Hileman

“By considering contemporary photographic practices through the lens of magic, this book has a particular take on the current state of photography’s material presence — its status as a cultural material — within art.” - Charlotte Cotton

Hido regularly scans and uploads unfiltered Instamatic photos to his Instagram feed (adding a #nofilter tag, of course) supporting that happy hybrid merger between the different formats that young amateur photographers cherish so much. Many of them have expressed an appreciation that goes beyond the retro look of the blurry prints. Notably, they find the overall approach – the lengthy, thoughtful pace that film photography compels them to adopt – appealing.

Mr. Wolf specializes in images that frame Hong Kong’s fearful symmetry. In his series “Architecture of Density,” he removes the sky and ground to fill the image with vertical strings of thousands of windows that ripple together across residential tower after tower, a sheer wall of eye-holed concrete that blends together like the canvas of an abstract painting.

“There’s an absurdity to living in an age when everything is photographed,” Mishka Henner, a Belgian-born artist, said recently from his home in Manchester, England, emphasizing, in particular, that every square inch of the earth seems to have been photographed and all of it is accessible online — including some of the world’s most secret places.

After graduating from art academies in the Dutch cities of Tilburg and Breda (Fontys and St Joost, respectively), Marjan Teeuwen painted for 12 years before changing direction. ‘I’m not painter,’ she says. ‘I’m a builder.’ A series of one-room installations (2000 to 2005) followed, and in 2008 (surely not coincidentally at the outbreak of the financial crisis) she embarked on a sequence called Verwoest Huizen (English title: Destroyed Houses). With these, she reworks derelict buildings into temporary ruined monuments, removing floors, walls and ceilings and filling them with the stacked detritus of the lives formerly lived there.

The photographic work "Light Breakfast" by Danish artist Nicolai Howalt dedicated to this tension. This reconstructed Howalt initially the complex history of the Danish physician Niels Ryberg Finsen, the 1903, on the human psyche and physique as a pioneer of medical therapeutics the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in recognition of his findings on the beneficial effect of light rays.

Howalt attacks the scientific test arrangements with original equipment Finsens on as the starting point of his own artistic study and repeated the experiments of the physician. Instead of the act to be treated at the Howalt led light rays, however, on a photographic paper support a on which they take effect. In keeping with Talbots can Howalt the light to distinguish itself, guided and refracted by the lenses and filters Finsens. When making the invisible visible, the human eye is not directly perceptible light spectrum, the resulting abstract photographs fix an endless variety of colors, shades and hues. As vibrant swatches these photographs remind addition to the Color Field painting of the 1950s and avant-garde compositional schemes. The photographic sheets this produce a strong meditative power, as was characteristic for example, for Rothko room installation picturesque Swatches; Howalts photographs confirm that even today Finsens thesis of the therapeutic effect of light in aesthetic form.

For all of its mediated fictions, photography is also intensely immediate and sensual, bringing us into electrifying contact with bodies, emotions, and social realities. Artists such as William E. Parker and Paul Cava explore the medium’s expressive, even erotic potential, sometimes combining photography with paint and ink. Others, including Dawoud Bey and David Goldblatt, use the camera to document and reveal alternative histories of overlooked or marginalized subjects. And artists such as An-My Lê harness a deep awareness of history and popular culture to confront the complexities of contemporary life.

Mined from the collection of the California Museum of Photography, Aaron Siskind: Pleasures and Terrorsdraws from six decades of the seminal artist’s career. Siskind’s photographic beginnings took place in the 1930s as a member of the New York-based Film and Photo League, a socially and politically conscious organization that sought to document urban life in New York in the wake of the Great Depression. Within a decade he would migrate toward a photographic sensibility simultaneously defined as radically abstract and concretely representational. Frequently taking on closed in shots of hand painted signage, politically-fueled graffiti, and weathered urban surfaces as his subject matter, Siskind is most known for his mythic compositions that at times bear a striking resemblance to the work of important twentieth century Abstract Expressionist painters. 

Opens September 10 and will run through October 18, 2015

The NYU Tisch School of the Arts Department of Photography & Imaging, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the founding of the School of the Arts at NYU, will mount an exhibition of some of its greatest treasures by some of the most profound photographers and artists of our time. Entitled “In the Collection: Treasures from Photography & Imaging” will feature a wide range of perspectives and media, including but not limited to traditional black-and-white and color photographs,,including Harold “Doc” Edgerton’s (1903–1990), “Cranberry Juice Dropping into Milk Drop,” 1963; “Cityscape ca. 1930s” by Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) and Mary Ellen Mark’s (1940-2015) “Tunica, Mississippi (alternate title Two Boys Praying in the Road)”, 1990.

In conjunction with a solo exhibition of work specifically made for MASS MoCA, Liz Deschenes has curated a group exhibition featuring six artists whose work expands the field of photography. Dana Hoey, Miranda Lichtenstein, Craig Kalpakjian, Josh Tonsfeldt, Sara VanDerBeek, and Randy West will be represented with a combination of new and existing work (chosen by the artists themselves) that demonstrates their wide-ranging approaches to their art. Several of the featured artists make work that is considered photographic but is camera-less, while, for others, photography has laid the groundwork for the moving image or functions as a jumping-off point for sculptural investigations. With this small but diverse selection of artists, the exhibition will provoke an open-ended dialogue on the state of photography as an increasingly diversified medium that intersects and informs other fields of art making.

Staged

Akron Museum of Art, Ohio

May 2 - September 27, 2015

Belfast Exposed is pleased to present Michael Wolf’s iconic photo series Tokyo Compression which depicts the daily commute in Tokyo. 

The series is made up of portraits of people in the subway constrained between glass, steel and fellow travelers. The work is a fascinating study in the psychology of the modern commuter and the techniques people use to cope with the difficulty of this daily necessity.

Tokyo Compression speaks of the alienation of the working masses. It queries ideas of community, enforced or otherwise, and the increasing importance and precariousness of trust in our society and our systems – social, political and economic. Tokyo Compression speaks of the pressure of time and the burden of waiting; about mobility, the drive to succeed, and the fear and anxiety of failure. It also speaks poignantly of sadness and loneliness.

Frederick Sommer (1905–1999) is most famous for his photographs from the 1940s that combine Surrealism’s uncanniness with taut formalism: abstracted horizonless, pictures of the American desert; studies of animal carcasses; portraits of his neighbors (including Max Ernst) in Prescott, Arizona; and arrangements of chicken entrails or found objects. But he also worked in other mediums, including drawing, painting and “cameraless” photography

Sommer’s small-scale drawings, made with colored glue on black paper, date mostly from the 1950s and roam from calligraphic to cartoonish to biomorphic. Many echo his earlier photographs. A collection of meandering lines and watery blobs recall his still lifes of poultry parts. A grouping of brown, gray and gold amoeba-like shapes, sprouting limblike protrusions, resemble pictures of dead coyotes desiccated by the sun.

Rounding out the show are examples of Sommer’s later set-up photographs. Employing cut paper and accordion-folded reproductions of Durer engravings, they anticipate the work of such contemporary artists as Eileen Quinlan. Neither they nor the glue drawings have the force and finish of Sommer’s greatest photographs. But they’re wonderfully of apiece with them and with the artist’s singular, consistent and encompassing vision.

New Photography, MoMA’s longstanding exhibition series of recent work in photography, returns this fall in an expanded, biannual format. On the occasion of its 30th anniversary, New Photography is expanding to 19 artists and artist collectives from 14 countries, and includes works made specifically for this exhibition.

Probing the effects of an image-based post-Internet reality, Ocean of Images examines various ways of experiencing the world: through images that are born digitally, made with scanners or lenses in the studio or the real world, presented as still or moving pictures, distributed as zines, morphed into three-dimensional objects, or remixed online. The exhibition’s title refers to the Internet as a vortex of images, a site of piracy, and a system of networks. Ocean of Images presents bodies of work that critically redefine photography as a field of experimentation and intellectual inquiry, where digital and analog, virtual and real dimensions cross over. These artists explore contemporary photo-based culture, specifically focusing on connectivity, the circulation of images, information networks, and communication models. 

This exhibition celebrates a recent gift by one of the leading American photography collectors of the 1970s and 1980s, Harvey S. Shipley Miller. The diverse works on view include rare early pictures, major examples of the Pictorialist art movement by figures such as Peter Henry Emerson and George Seeley, and a broad range of twentieth-century art and vernacular photographs.

Shipley Miller formed the collection with his then partner, J. Randall Plummer, in the 1970s, when they were among a handful of serious photography collectors in the United States. They approached the subject enthusiastically, expressing both a scholarly interest in the history of the medium and a personal desire to acquire images they loved. Remarkable for its quality and breadth, the collection includes both masterworks of modern art and ephemera as well as curious images from the fields of science, journalism, and fashion. The gift of more than four hundred photographs encompasses delightful pictures from every aspect of photographic production. The selection on view in the exhibition offers a unique perspective on the evolution of photography, and is a wonderful testament to the pleasures and possibilities of collecting.

In the second decade of the 20th century, as the population of New York surpassed that of London, images of street life became an increasingly appealing form of documentary and artistic interpretation among American photographers. This new subject matter was most certainly influenced by contemporary painters like John Sloan and Robert Henri, who found excitement in the physically teeming and visually cacophonous streets of New York. In addition, while photographers had been drawn to urban spaces since the medium’s beginnings, new technological advances encouraged spontaneity and easier movement through congested spaces and rushing crowds. Offering a wide cast of characters and vast variety of experiences on which to focus, the city street took firm hold of photographers’ imaginations, giving birth to a rich genre that developed throughout the 20th century and still continues today. 

Featuring photographs by such artist as Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Lisette Model, Walker Evans, Helen Levitt, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, and Dawoud Bey, this exhibition explores the myriad ways artists have approached the subject of bustling city scenes over time. Capturing the chaotic energy, chance juxtapositions, and fleeting encounters of everyday life in images that are by turns confrontational and tender, somber and witty, gritty and beautiful, each of these masters distills decisive moments into universal images of humanity.

From April 23 through November 16, 2015 the Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents Jackson Pollock’s ‘Mural’: Energy Made Visible. The exhibition is curated by David Anfam, Senior Consulting Curator, Clyfford Still Museum, Denver, and a preeminent authority on Abstract Expressionism. This touring exhibition focuses on Jackson Pollock’s Mural (1943, University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City), following its 18-month campaign of conservation and cleaning at the Getty Conservation Institute, Los Angeles. The immensely dynamic Mural is the largest painting Pollock created and it has exerted a seismic impact on American art down to the present day. Commissioned in the summer of 1943 by Peggy Guggenheim for her New York townhouse, Muralestablished a new sense of scale and audacity for the Abstract Expressionist movement, anticipating the classic ‘poured’ abstractions that Pollock would begin four years later. Setting Muralinto context, the selection includes Pollock’s newly-restored Alchemy, as well as works by the artist’s wife Lee Krasner, David Smith and Robert Motherwell. Crucially, it also sheds new light on Pollock’s relationship to such photographers of action and energy as Herbert Matter, Barbara Morgan, Aaron Siskind and Gjon Mili. The exhibition travels to the Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle, Berlin and then to the Museo Picasso, Málaga. Jackson Pollock’s ‘Mural’: Energy Made Visible is organized by The University of Iowa Museum of Art.



A fully-illustrated book by David Anfam, published by Thames & Hudson, accompanies the exhibition.

Even more so than the finished artworks themselves, this show is just brimming with photographic ideas. The weaving of cloth images and paper ones, the interlayering of quilt patterns, the flattening and reassembly of scanning/photocopying, the intentional management of distortion, the extension of collage into three dimensions of surface and texture – Smith was testing each one, trying to figure out how photography might fit in. This show should be on the required syllabus of every young photographer bent on demolishing the limits of the medium, not because they should acknowledge that Smith got there first (which he did), but because he deserves to be a mentor and inspiration to those following in his footsteps.

Even more so than the finished artworks themselves, this show is just brimming with photographic ideas. The weaving of cloth images and paper ones, the interlayering of quilt patterns, the flattening and reassembly of scanning/photocopying, the intentional management of distortion, the extension of collage into three dimensions of surface and texture – Smith was testing each one, trying to figure out how photography might fit in. This show should be on the required syllabus of every young photographer bent on demolishing the limits of the medium, not because they should acknowledge that Smith got there first (which he did), but because he deserves to be a mentor and inspiration to those following in his footsteps.

Over the last two decades, artists have sought to question humankind’s relation to the animal world, reworking categories of representation in order to rethink human-animal relations as well as the nature of creative practice itself. Beastly/Tierisch explores these issues in recent photography and video by Sammy Baloji, Marcus Coates, Revital Cohen und Tuur Van Balen, Charlotte Dumas, Peter Hujar, Simen Johan, Erik Kessels, Elad Lassry, Jochen Lempert, Katja Novitskova, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Moussa Sarr, Carolee Schneemann, Xiaoxiao Xu and many more, revealing how the traditionally anthropocentric nature of vision has been overturned. The exhibition examines the way in which animals become embroiled in human processes and passions, whether caged, consumed or otherwise caught up in a very human animal-industrial complex. It also explores how the animal appears in art as a figure of critique, either in the form of political allegory or through aesthetic transformation. In recent practice, a more ‘beastly’ position begins to emerge, pursued by those who seek a bio-centric perspective. In such work, artists attempt to think the animal creatively in its own terms, forging worlds of fantasy freed from humankind.

Finally, Beastly/Tierisch includes an innovative installation of vernacular photography and film, including books, posters and postcards, as well as a host of recent internet images, a veritable virtual zoo. How is animality reconfigured today through everyday photographic practice?

The exhibition is curated by Fotomuseum Winterthur. It is accompanied by a catalogue with many illustrations and essays by Heather Davis, Duncan Forbes, Ana Teixeira Pinto and Slavoj Žižek which will be published by Spector Books, Leipzig.

Beastly/Tierisch is curated by Fotomuseum Winterthur (Duncan Forbes, Matthias Gabi and Daniela Janser).

WESTPORT -- An exhibit of Sherwood Island photos taken by Westport photographer Larry Silver over a 40-year period has opened at the Westport Library. 

"Sherwood Island, 1975-2015" will be on display in the library's Great Hall through June 24. 

Silver has returned to Sherwood Island repeatedly over the last four decades in different seasons, library officials said, and the exhibit documents the changing lifestyles of the state park's visitors through the years.

The show includes 40 photographs, many of them black-and-white images shot on film, and the more recent ones are color digital images, according to a release.

Silver's work is held in more than 29 museum collections, among them the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Jewish Museum in New York City and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art. His "Sunset at Sherwood Island State Park" is in the Smithsonian collection.

In 1990 the National Gallery launched an initiative to acquire the finest examples of the art of photography and to mount photography exhibitions of the highest quality, accompanied by scholarly publications and programs. In the years since, the Gallery’s collection of photographs has grown to nearly 15,000 works encompassing the history of the medium from its beginnings in 1839 to the present, featuring in-depth holdings of work by many of the masters of the art form. The Gallery’s program of exhibitions and publications is now considered among the best in the world. Commemorating the 25th anniversary of this initiative, the Gallery will present three major exhibitions in 2015 exemplifying the vitality, breadth, and history of its photography holdings.

In the Light of the Past: Twenty-five Years of Photography (May 3–July 26, 2015) will honor the 25th anniversary of the Gallery’s photography collection by demonstrating how our exemplary holdings reveal the evolution of the art of photography. Drawn primarily from works acquired in the past 25 years, the exhibition features rare, exquisite 19th-century and turn-of-the-century works; exceptional examples of international modernism of the 1920s and 1930s and seminal mid-20th-century American photography; as well as photographs exploring new directions in color and conceptual art in the 1960s and 1970s. The exhibition demonstrates the richness of the National Gallery’s photography collection and showcases the strength of the medium as an art form from its birth through the late 20th century.

DEADRINGER projects is pleased to welcome American photographer and installation artist Zoe Strauss for a presentation of “Gelatin” a 35mm slide show installation created at the Meat Sciences Lab during her yearlong tenure as Dodd Chair at the University of Georgia’s Lamar Dodd School of Art (Athens, GA).

“Gelatin has been used in the production of photographic products for over 100 years. The gelatin used in photographic products comes from the bones and hides of pigs and cattle.” - KODAK

A community-based artist, the majority of photographer Zoe Strauss’ work is inspired by her hometown of Philadelphia. Influenced by documentary photographers such as Walker Evans, William Eggleston, and Nan Goldin, Strauss’ portraits, documentation of signage, mundane objects and urban sprawl focus on the allure of overlooked realities. She recently completed “Under I-95,” a 10-year project resulting in a photography installation of those photographed under a section of Interstate 95 in Philadelphia.

21 contemporary Danish artists present contemporary works inspired by the same issues that occupied the Skagen painters in the past.

Women with flowing dresses in sunset, fishermen with southwest and surging seas are all images that we associate with Skagen. The familiar motifs appear today as kitsch on everything from postcards to coasters, and there is even made films about them. They are, in other words become iconic of Skagen and a time when Skagen was the central gathering point for artists from all over Scandinavia. Skagen painters' art was especially natural images, ie Images of nature and everyday tasks, but also life and death and especially fishermen hard and dangerous life. Skagensmalerne described the common life as they saw it, and was an essential part of the modern breakthrough in the late 1800s, in particular, put the social order to the debate with a new freedom in relation to sexuality, marriage, religion and science.

The Skagen painters were creating debate is perhaps not the first thing you think of today when you look at the paintings of the evocative scenarios. The thoughts are enough for most of the virtuoso brushwork, enthrallment of Skagen's special light and beautiful colors. But the painters were part of the international avant-garde and set the agenda for contemporary art not only in Denmark but throughout the Nordic region. Skagen painters have so left a legacy that has left its mark through Danish art history, and is also relevant today. 

The exhibition DEJAVU shows 21 Danish artists  in line with the painters. But where the painters were primarily painters, we find the DEJAVU designs in new and sometimes surprising media and expression. Classic themes such as "light", "interior", "sea", "raw nature" or "human nature" and "portrait" interpreted by artists in the exhibition in addition to paintings, in installation art, video, sculpture, drawing, photography and ceramics . 

Bruce Silverstein is pleased to announce that Brea Souders has been awarded a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Souders is one of the first photographers to be awarded a grant.

Now entering its thirtieth year of grant making, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Inc. has reaffirmed its mission of supporting individual visual artists worldwide. The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, grants support the artists' personal and/or professional expenses for one year. Since its inception in 1985, the Foundation has awarded over 61 million dollars to artists in 76 countries.

Pollock-Krasner grants have enabled artists to create new work, purchase needed materials and pay for studio rent, as well as their personal and medical expenses. Past recipients of Pollock-Krasner grants acknowledge their critical impact in allowing concentrated time for studio work, and in preparing for exhibitions and other professional opportunities such as accepting a residency.

The Pollock-Krasner Foundation was established in 1985 to assist individual working artists of merit with financial need through the generosity of Lee Krasner (1908-1984), a leading abstract expressionist painter and widow of Jackson Pollock.

The introduction of photography in 1839 coincided with major social and economic changes spurred by the Industrial Revolution and a burgeoning culture of leisure. In addition to documenting historic events, this new medium was used to record the everyday, including the many ways people spent their free time. With the advent of faster film and handheld cameras, dancing and carousing were captured with the same enthusiasm as moments of respite and quiet contemplation. This exhibition traces the development of play as a photographic subject through the works of artists such as Roger Fenton, Lauren Greenfield, Bill Owens, and Larry Sultan among others.

When the Whitney Museum of American Art opens its new Renzo Piano-designed home in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District on May 1, 2015, the first exhibition on view will be an unprecedented selection of works from the Museum’s renowned permanent collection. Setting forth a distinctly new narrative, America Is Hard to See presents fresh perspectives on the Whitney’s collection and reflects upon art in the United States with over 600 works by some 400 artists, spanning the period from about 1900 to the present. The exhibition—its title is taken from a poem by Robert Frost and also used by the filmmaker Emile de Antonio for one of his political documentaries—is the most ambitious display to date of the Whitney’s collection.

Delving deep into the Whitney’s holdings, America Is Hard to See examines the themes, ideas, beliefs, visions, and passions that have preoccupied and galvanized American artists over the past one hundred and fifteen years. Reflecting the way artists think and work, all mediums are presented together without hierarchy. Numerous pieces that have rarely, if ever, been shown before will appear alongside familiar icons, in a conscious effort to challenge assumptions about the American art canon. 

This Place is the creation of photographer Frédéric Brenner. Inspired by his own visits to Israel and the visual and photographic potential held there and in the West Bank, began to build a project that would commission twelve photographers to go to the region and make their own work. Brenner’s vision was to encourage artists to Israel and the West Bank and open their eyes to a place many would normally be apprehensive to shoot. The result is an epic project including twelve books, a touring exhibition, in-depth catalogue and digital archive. All the photographers involved are big names including some titans of the observational documentary aesthetic like Joel Meyerowitz, Stephen Shore and Thomas Struth. The project was initiated in 2008 and began with all participating artists making a trip to Israel as a group and meeting researchers, guides and figures from the region and given exploratory trips and assistants to produce work.

The majority of the work was finished in 2012 and in 2014 the first of the books were released and the first site of the exhibition, Dox Gallery in Prague, opened its doors to visitors in October 2014. I was immediately interested in how and why so many photographers were convinced to make work which is apolitical, in an area which is often instantly polarised and everyone seemingly has an opinion on.

Rosalind Solomon’s newest book Them (MACK, 2014) is one of the 12 books published as part of the This Place project. Solomon has traveled the world, often photographing in areas of crisis such as the South African Apartheid and the eruption of AIDS in New York during the 80s. Them is a collection of portraits spread over Israel and the West Bank; Rosalind’s first commission in over 60 years of making photographs. Through her book we gain an idea of what the people who make up the region look like. We are always the outsider, the direct gaze and the use of a flash give a blunt feel to the book. Her subjects stare back at you; you are made aware you are looking, forced to deal with your objectification and your distance from their lives.

Art is in Souders’s genes. Her mother, grandparents, aunt, and cousin were all painters. From an early age she learned how to paint and draw, and went to her mother's gallery shows. A book on Man Ray inspired a love for photography’s technical outer limits and the Surrealist’s inward focus, and she began shooting in black and white. Souders’s father was a physicist, and she was raised with elaborate chemistry sets, so it’s not surprising that she reveled in darkroom operations and came to approach her studio as a lab in which to experiment with mechanical and natural process, and optical phenomena. Much like a scientist, she isolates primary building blocks from wide-ranging sources and conceives recombinant forms for them. She calls herself a tinkerer, and quite often her raw material is the residue of past experiments.

With a collagist’s puzzle-part invention, Souders has fashioned a personal poetics, both quirky and sublime, around the objects and residual photographic effects she coaxes into her work. A born scavenger, she finds rich meaning in the most ephemeral or mundane stuff around her. Her gift for minimalist design and idiosyncratic color saves her from chaos and results in a blithe balancing act of chance and intention. Her approach is that of a conceptual artist, hammering out delicate frameworks for chasing ideas down rabbit holes into her own cerebral wonderland.

Because her images steer clear of the “real” observed-as-is world, Souders often fields questions about her proper definition: artist who uses photography, photographer who embraces art process, or other qualifying labels. It’s sufficient, says Souders, to call her a photographer, period. She is about the alchemy of turning life thoughtfully into art using photographic means, and that’s credential enough. She juggles pregnant visual cues to freeze time and retrieve it at will, best achieved by building an intimate language of triggers and allusions. Some of these cues are wrested from art history, as in Colors of Napoleon (2010), which features daubs of pigment on an iconic portrait of the emperor. More often, her ties to the past are encoded rather than obvious, and refer to her own life in diaristic playback.

The idea for “Sitter,” a photo-portrait exhibit featuring the work of 26 artists, started forming in co-curator Michael Goodson’s mind when he met photographer Michael Wolf in Hong Kong in 2011.

Wolf had just published a book of photographs of riders on “the pathologically packed morning trains in Tokyo,” Goodson said.

The journalist had been in the Japanese city covering the sarin gas attacks on the train system and began snapping photos of the early-morning commuters, using the subway-train windows as frames.

Pressed, stressed faces on the condensation-covered windows made for powerfully unsettling images.

The series, “Tokyo Compression,” is one of many jaw-dropping sets of contemporary photos in “ Sitter” at the Columbus College of Art & Design.

“What drives the show, in part, is that the idea of the portrait has been adopted by photography, in various ways, more than any other medium, although using many different methods, ideas and strategies,” said Goodson, who organized the exhibit with Shannon Benine, assistant professor of photography and graduate studies at CCAD.

For Valentine’s Day this year, we asked a group of photographers to choose images from their own lives that capture a feeling of desire or love. Here they share their thoughts on what the images mean to them.

"My marriage was on the rocks when I photographed this heart of stone shrouded in mist. When I returned another day, the rock was there, but I could not find the shape of a heart.” — Rosalind Solomon

Digital technologies have long been an integral part of our lives. Professional and private activities are now inconceivable without the Internet and its countless possibilities. Computer technology is one of our society’s greatest agents of change. Every year in the spring, the world looks to the CeBIT trade fair in Hannover in order to find out what innovations information technology has in store for us. What will everyday life look like in the future—what will dominate it? One should of course assume that the human being and his (present-day or future) needs make up the starting point for the development of new technologies, but it is debateable to what extent the technologies conceived for him impact his thinking, his perception and also his corporeality.

On the occasion of the opening of CeBIT 2015, the group exhibition “Digital Conditions” focuses on the interaction between digital technology and art, featuring works that examine digitality as a structural characteristic of present-day social reality or employed as a technical means of production. In what ways do artists appropriate digital technologies, what influence does the use of 3D graphic and animation programs or web services like Google Map and Google Earth for example have on such media as photography, film and sculpture? How are the media-based characteristics of digital images made visible and questioned in the age of rapid image production and their mass distribution? What impact does the digital age have on our everyday lives and how is it reflected artistically?

Against the backdrop of these questions, the group exhibition presents pieces by artists who have grown up with the Internet as well as those produced by an older generation and brings together works that explore, unclose and question pictorial worlds in addition to ultimately creating individual original works with the tools of the digital cosmos.

Artists include Lee Friedlander, Mishka Henner, Camille Henrot, Yngve Holen, Pierre Huyghe, Lorna Mills, Katja Novitskova, Julien Prévieux, Jon Rafman, Thomas Ruff, Avery K Singer, Hito Steyerl, and Michael Wolf

In Sea Change, celebrated Philadelphia photographer Zoe Strauss traces the landscape of post-climate change America. In photographs, vinyl prints, and projected images, Strauss treads the extended aftermath of three ecological disasters: Hurricane Katrina in the Mississippi Gulf Coast (2005); the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in Southern Louisiana (2010); and Hurricane Sandy in Toms River, NJ and Staten Island, NY (2012). Lush and leveled landscapes; graffiti pleas and words of encouragement—Strauss’ camera captures lives decimated and dusting off: the fast and slow tragedies of global warming, the damage we can repair, and the damage we can’t.

The creative possibilities explored through photography were never richer or more varied than in the years between the First and Second World Wars, when photographers approached figuration, abstraction, and architecture with unmatched imaginative fervor. This vital moment is dramatically captured in the more than 300 photographs that constitute the Thomas Walther Collection at The Museum of Modern Art. This remarkable group of objects is presented together for the first time to coincide with the culmination of the Thomas Walther Collection Project—a four-year collaboration between the Museum’s curatorial and conservation staff, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which has transformed our understanding of the medium’s material history from this era. Made on the street and in the studio, intended for avant-garde exhibitions or the printed page, these objects provide unique insight into the radical intentions of their creators.

The Museum acquired more than 300 photographs from Thomas Walther’s private collection in 2001. Featuring iconic works by such towering figures as Berenice Abbott, Karl Blossfeldt, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Claude Cahun, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Florence Henri, André Kertész, Germaine Krull, El Lissitzky, Lucia Moholy, László Moholy-Nagy, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Maurice Tabard Umbo, and Edward Weston, along with lesser-known treasures by more than 100 other practitioners, this exhibition presents the exhilarating story of this key moment in photography’s history, allowing both experts and those less familiar with the medium to understand these photographs in new ways.

A major Aaron Siskind retrospective "Aaron Siskind - L’Autre Réalité Photographique" is on view at Pavillon Populaire in Montpellier, France through February 23, 2015.

British artist Mishka Henner carefully stitched together satellite images to create these striking aerial photos of oil fields and feedlots in the United States. Huge pools of waste feature prominently in the photos of Texas cattle farms, while landscapes dotted with dozens of drill sites show just how much impact the oil and gas industry can leave.

“Things occur,” Nathan Lyons said, referring to how he starts making photographs, which has not changed for 60 years. “I simply collect images that I respond to, there’s no script to what I’m doing, it’s really based on my interaction with the things that I see that intrigue me or interest me or question me.”

But, what about things after they occur?

That’s when he arranges most of his photographs into diptychs, either on a wall or in a book. Suddenly two images take on a third meaning.

For “Return Your Mind to Its Upright Position,” a book and exhibition at the Bruce Silverstein Gallery in Manhattan, he placed an image of a rocking chair trapped inside a wire plant guard next to one of a city wall layered with scribbles: “ADHD” sprayed in large bubble letters and a smaller silk-screened message to “Reclaim your Life.” Suddenly, this trapped rocking chair framed alongside these messages takes on new meaning as metaphor.

“In metaphor, you are really taking two different elements and bringing them together to form a third,” said Mr. Lyons, 84. “It’s like Dylan Thomas, his use of the word ‘green’ in one of his poems, where he places it changes the implications of the color.”

This idea comes from his education as a poet. Born in Jamaica, Queens, to a family of mirror manufacturers, Mr. Lyons was expected to enter the family business. Rather than follow the path of expected courses at Alfred State University’s Technical College, however, he gravitated to summer classes in philosophy and creative writing.

When the poet Galway Kinnell asked students in his creative writing course at Alfred to complete the semester by submitting a poem, Mr. Lyons did not like this either. He walked to a bar miles away, drank whiskey, and wrote his way back through the thickets in a notepad, submitting it as his final poem.

He has been hooked on metaphors ever since.

MIAMI — The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse (founded and operated by collector Martin Z. Margulies) is located in a 45,000-square-foot building that butts up against a highway and sits just across the street from a discount clothing store in Wynwood, the city’s graffiti-splattered hipster enclave. Miami police patrol the neighborhood by car, on horse, and from the air, as well as situating temporary lookout towers that rise up over the streets on lifts. All of which seems excessive, given that the greatest danger in the neighborhood is either succumbing to the fumes generated by dozens of artists spraying paint or being injured by the cops themselves.

The collection and its display are something of an oddity. For starters, the sprawling warehouse is vastly underlit, and the work displayed takes on the shadowy patina of a late winter afternoon. The effect is somewhat striking given the amount of deluxe sunniness available just outside. The basement/bunker impression is reinforced by the overall layout, which can run you from dimly lit corridor to dimly lit corridor.

The art on view is interesting but idiosyncratically chosen, a sort of very personal greatest hits record that mashes up individual artists in such a generic mix that ultimately the groove is lost. Too be fair, though, the collection is an astounding tribute to a driven collector and reflects that rather than the broader, more academic ambitions a museum might have. And despite the currently murky distinctions between a collection and a museum, the roster of artists on view at the Margulies is first rate. Art world brand names represented include Dan Flavin, Jason Rhodes, Joan Miró, and Isamu Noguchi, to name a few. Notably, the permanent collection is dominated by male artists, which is hardly shocking given the macho jockeying that’s needed to stay apace in the top tiers of the market. There’s also currently an exhibition of quite important Brancusi photographs — 29 rare gelatin silver prints, presented by Bruce Silverstein Gallery — and a compelling series of photographs exploring the interactions between elephants and humans in Indian society by South Florida photographer Annette Bonnier.

Visible Spectrum is a subscription series comprised of nine artist books published in conjunction with the Spectre // Spectrum issue of Conveyor magazine. Each book represents a color within the visible spectrum—as well as black and white. The participating artists — each featured in the pages of the magazine — were given a cloth color for the cover in addition to parameters for size, paper stock choices, and binding and asked to create a book to suit.

Artists included: Artist: Penelope Umbrico, Hannah Whitaker, Brea Souders, Andrey Bogush, Robert Canali, Inka & Niclas, Dillon DeWaters, Nicholas Gottlund, with essay by Mark Alice Durant

Although the art in his Miami Warehouse has changed over 15 years of exhibitions, the educational mission of Martin Margulies’s collection is as strong as ever. The creation of the space in 1999 was “an extension of our experience of sharing the collection with the public that goes way back to the early 1980s”, says Katherine Hinds, the curator who has worked with Margulies for more than three decades. The evolution in programming—from photography-based displays to large-scale installations and sculptures, video and now 21st-century painting—has been “a response to what we were seeing at art fairs and galleries but also to our audience of young students”.

The new acquisitions installed in the 45,000 sq. ft galleries for 2014-15 include a 65ft-long neon Fibonacci sequence by Mario Merz, which joins Arte Povera pieces by Pier Paolo Calzolari, Jannis Kounellis and Michelangelo Pistoletto, and new paintings by Gregor Hildebrandt, Jeff Elrod and Thomas Fougeirol. Three stone circles by Richard Long are paired with a video of the artist’s journeys in the Sahara Desert, “so our students can see his process”, Hinds says.

Students and visitors have the chance to walk through Do-Ho Suh’s translucent recreation of a Manhattan apartment corridor in pink nylon, 348 West 22nd St, Apt A, New York, NY 10011 USA, 2001—a hit with the public when it was last shown in 2003. “Many people have asked about it over the years,” Hinds says.

True to the roots of the collection, the special exhibitions are dedicated to photography, new and old. The Miami-based documentary photographer Annette Bonnier is presenting the series “India’s Elephants” in the Auxiliary Gallery, with sales contributing to the Asian Nature Conservation Foundation. Meanwhile, a show co-organised with the Bruce Silverstein Gallery in New York brings the sculpture of Constantin Brancusi—as seen through the lens of the artist himself—to Miami for the first time. “Many students here have yet to travel to see art, so it is exciting to think that they will encounter a master of 20th-century abstraction in our space,” Hinds says.

Taken in the street or in other informal settings, these portraits by Lisette Model and Paz Errázuriz capture a range of striking individuals in distinctive social environments.

Lisette Model’s photographs ‘record a relentless probing and searching into realities among people, their foibles, senselessness, sufferings, and on occasion, their greatness’, wrote the photographer Edward Steichen. ‘The resulting pictures are often camera equivalents of bitter tongue-lashings. She strikes swift, hard and sharp, then comes to a dead stop, for her work is devoid of all extraneous devices or exaggerations.’

Carefully selected by Model for a portfolio spanning her career, the photographs shown here include some of her best-known images from the 1930s and 1940s. Model’s close-up views of people on the streets of Paris, New Yorkand the French Riviera were often taken without the subjects’ awareness or permission, while the old or destitute people that she captured in New York Cityseem not to care about the presence of the photographer. 

Henner was awarded the ICP Infinity Award for Art in 2013 and shortlisted for the 2014 Prix Prictet and the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2013. He was the recipient of the Kleine Hans award in 2011. Henner's works are in the collections of the Tate Modern, Victoria & Albert Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The New York Public Library, the Centre Pompidou, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Portland Museum of Art, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Henner has been exhibited internationally in numerous group shows and surveys. He is a member of the ABC Artists’ Books Cooperative and lives and works in Manchester, UK.

This Place is a monumental artistic endeavor initiated by photographer Frédéric Brenner, who believes that only through the eyes of great artists can we begin to understand the complexities of Israel – its history, its geography, its inhabitants, its daily life – and the resonance it has for people around the world.

Inspired by historical models that gathered artists to ask essential questions about culture, society and individuals, including the Mission Héliographique in 19th-century France and the Farm Security Administration in the United States, Brenner first conceived the idea for the project in 2006. After seeking the advice of a group of international curators, he invited eleven acclaimed photographers to join him in exploring Israel and the West Bank as both place and metaphor.

The 12 photographers participating in This Place are Wendy Ewald, Martin Kollar, Josef Koudelka, Jungjin Lee, Gilles Peress, Fazal Sheikh, Stephen Shore, Rosalind Solomon, Thomas Struth, Jeff Wall, Nick Waplington, and Frédéric Brenner himself. Together, this group represents one of the most original and distinguished collections of artists to ever collaborate on a project, and it is certainly the most acclaimed group of photographers to ever turn their attention to Israel and the West Bank.

Each photographer spent approximately six months in residence, pursuing his or her own artistic interests. Through these residencies, which stretched over four years (2009 to 2013), thousands of original art works were created. These images combine to create not a single, monolithic vision, but rather a diverse and fragmented portrait, alive with all the rifts and paradoxes of this important and highly contested place.

Frieze is one of the world’s leading contemporary art fair franchises, and its London incarnation is arguably the best in Europe now — if you count the degree to which it energizes its host metropolis. For over a week in mid-October, London effervesces with art shows and events, packed parties, and cruising collectors. Frieze is actually a couple, a mother and daughter really. Frieze London is the rambunctious ingenue flaunting her newly matured visual powers — artists straining against conventions and showing off for the crowds in ever-louder tones. On the opposite side of Regent’s Park, Frieze Masters is the older dame (pre-2ooo is the official cut-off point in time), comfortable in her conquests and oft-celebrated virtues. There one strolls more serenely through aisles of ancient-to-late modern objets that are palpably rich with historical gravitas, and the price-tags to prove it.

Photography has in recent times insinuated itself seamlessly into the larger international art world. Although it has been a fertile tool for painters that goes back to the Renaissance as camera obscura, it is now as assimilated and pervasive as video and laptops. For Photographer Spotlight we’ve decided this year to focus on older photographers found in the Masters section: F. Holland Day (1864 – 1933), Heinz Hajek-Halke (1898 – 1983), Sherrie Levine (born 1947) channeling Alexander Rodchenko (1891 – 1956), and Lionel Wendt (1900 – 1944). Their respective art dealers — Bruce Silverstein, Alex Anthony for Eric Franck Fine Art, Stephen Henry for Paula Cooper, and Amrita Jhaveri — offer us fascinating glimpses of photographic pioneers we haven’t encountered in this series normally devoted to living artists. These innovators, and their fellow fathers of the medium, opened doors that many contemporary photographers have since walked through. Frieze wisely affords them a respectfully away-from-the-din showcase.

Photographer Maria Antonietta Mameli (featured in TIME Magazine) presents a new series, Grand Central Station, Continued, inspired by the recent 100th anniversary of Grand Central Terminal. The artist had already completed a photographic series set in Grand Central in 2008, but news in 2012 of the impending centennial celebrations galvanized her into a second foray of “capturing on camera the very busy New Yorkers and tourists, who every day have the good fortune to cross this amazing space full of light and energy.”

For years Mameli’s work has focused on New Yorkers in motion. Her figures, generally seen from a distance, have often been shown as black silhouettes on a flat, white ground from which natural surroundings have been digitally removed. In Grand Central Station, Continued, Mameli’s tiny figures are lit as if by a centrally placed light source, illuminating some features of her subjects and obscuring others. The surrounding inky darkness suggests the vast stretches of moody commuter tunnels and passageways emanating through and beyond Grand Central. “One of the artist’s hallmarks” writes curator Renato Miracco “is her ability to give voice to silence, to barely lit faces, to emptiness and our urban surroundings.” The photographs evoke the experience of watching a theatrical performance—or of the equally theatrical effects of observing human figures as they move through the darkness and light of a medieval European church. “These photos are not fiction”, writes Miracco, “nor are they romanticized tales. They are historical documents because the people, the events and emotions they depict are real and tell true stories.” Miracco suggests that the photos have a neorealist “gaze” that “isn’t passive or mimetic, nor is it neutral. On the contrary, it is an inclusive and comprehensive gaze which aims at embracing the chosen spot in its fullness and at the same time, creating a world where one can almost sense a parallel reality where daylight is precious and nights are dark and shrouded in mystery.”

Eyes on the Street reimagines the genre of street photography and demonstrates how cameras shape our perceptions of cities. It features ten internationally renowned artists who work in photography, film, and video, each of whom deliberatively uses the camera’s technical capabilities to reveal new aspects of the urban environment. Through high-speed and high-definition lenses, multiple or simultaneous exposures, “impossible” film shots, and appropriated surveillance-camera footage, these artists breathe new life into the genre and remind us that urban public places are sites of creative and imaginative encounters.  

The exhibition title comes from influential urban theorist Jane Jacobs, who wrote, in her classic treatise The Death and Life of Great American Cities, of “eyes on the street” being crucial to urban neighborhoods’ vitality—and their ability to accommodate different people and activities. Today, discussion of cameras in public spaces often revolves around surveillance tactics or battles over first-amendment rights. Eyes on the Street reflects the diversity of urban experience and shows us how cameras can help us comprehend the complex urban environment.

In 2010, the New York-based photographer Rosalind Solomon travelled with eleven other acclaimed photographers to Israel and the West Bank to participate in Frédéric Brenner’s collective project “This Place.” By asking each photographer to complete an independent series in the region, “This Place” was intended to “help us grasp the unbearable complexity of this place and its voices,” Brenner writes on the project’s Web site.

Solomon, who is eighty-four years old, was interested in the religious diversity of the region, and she photographed Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Her days were guided by circumstance, and she often spent hours with her subjects. “I like to get emotionally connected when I photograph people,” Solomon said in a recent conversation with Charlotte Cotton, the curator of an upcoming exhibition of the group’s work.  “If I can’t get to that stage, it isn’t an interesting picture to me.”

A book of Solomon’s photographs from the project, entitled “Them,” was published this summer by MACK and will be exhibited at the NY Art Book Fair, which opens at MOMA PS1 this Thursday.

From the nearly 500 photographic works acquired by the Ackland in the last ten years, over 150 have been selected for PhotoVision. Organized by evocative groupings, the chosen works will present the myriad intents behind and effects of this powerful medium. Thematic sections will include Photography and Multiplicity, Sacred Spaces, Process and Product, and Staging the Image.

A substantial section will be devoted to a “daisy chain” of photography: approximately 50 photographs spanning a wide range of periods, techniques, subjects, and styles forming a continuous sequence, each one linked to its neighbor by a different visual association―a detail, a formal echo, a surprising parallel.

A dozen additional photographs will be on view in the Ackland’s eight permanent collection galleries, juxtaposed in thought-provoking ways with African, Asian, and Western paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts.

By reducing all elements in his composition to their essential geometries and treating light as a palpable presence, Edward Hopper imbued his images of everyday life with what the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson called an “alienated majesty.” One of two permanent collection displays on the Museum’s fifth-floor mezzanine, Edward Hopper and Photography pairs Hopper paintings from the Whitney’s permanent collection with the work of contemporary photographers who share an interest in elevating everyday subject matter by manipulating light. The six photographers represented in this presentation, Gregory Crewdson, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, William Eggleston, Steve Fitch, Todd Hido, and Stephen Shore, record mundane subjects but endow their photographs with emotional poignancy and mystery similar to that in Hopper’s art.

Edward Hopper and Photography is organized by Barbara Haskell, Curator.

2 Wheelers is an exhibition about bikes opening during HRM Bike Week and closing in September. It brings together works by artists of all ages and practices that explore the playful, functional and political role of the bicycle.

Bikuben explores Danish contemporary art as a framework for understanding how the present may, albeit paradoxically, inform the past. Focusing on themes revolving around the intertwined nature of truth and fiction, history and memory, and the personal versus the communal, this exhibition investigates how relationships across cultural and generational divides have the potential to reveal the complexity of identity, displacement, appropriation, and collective consciousness.

The title, Bikuben, was inspired by the history that has informed the research for this exhibition. Between 1876 and 1935, Bikuben was a newspaper published in Utah for the Danish immigrants as a way to foster cultural connectivity and a sense of community. For this exhibition, the word bikuben (meaning beehive) is reimagined as a way to highlight the many fascinating ties between Denmark and Utah in terms of ideas regarding progress, industry, and utopia.

What is described at the Mart is certainly no Eden, and nor a new artistic genre, but instead a passionate and heartfelt look at the world, which necessarily reveals its most dramatic and contradictory corners.

In the catalogue, Gerardo Mosquera writes that the significance of the term “landscape” simultaneously defines “both the perception of a given place, and its depiction”, making object and subject, environment and inhabitant inseparable. Today, in the conception of landscape of our time, the degree of subjectivity of perception involves the active protagonists of the transformations of a territory: those structures and individuals who intervene upon it and define its very notion, now broadened to include everything surrounding us, from motorways to forests, cities to rural settings.

This smart show exposes the parallel conceptual framework that underlies the work of Sander and the Bechers, and it does so with a visual economy that clarifies the proof being made. It’s structural thinking at its most powerfully refined, an exacting exercise in selecting a theorem and outlining the evidence for its applicability.

The exhibition featured 34 images by 14 photographers culled from the Gallery’s extensive photography collection.  Bad Boys will showcase the rebellious nature of some of the most famous photographers with a focus on extreme methods of process, subject matter and persona. The exhibition roster includes such 20-21st century luminaries as: Robert Beckmann, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Harry Callahan, Larry Clark, Thomas A. Daniel, Bruce Davidson, Elliot Erwitt, Robert Frank, Thomas Florschuetz, Danny Lyon, Roger Mertin, John Pfahl, Stephen Shore, Aaron Siskind, and Garry Winogrand.

Bad Boys features some of the best examples of artists breaking the traditional rules of photography. Each used defiant means to push the preverbal envelope of the ever-shifting medium of photography.  Exhibited photographers, such as Stephen Shore and Aaron Siskind, made images as a reaction to a visual challenge. For Aaron Siskind, who was closely aligned with the Abstract Expressionist School of painting, used his camera as a “paintbrush” and his skill as a master photographer forever changed how we look at everyday objects. The exhibited photographs are from a series that Siskind dedicated to his friend the Abstract expressionist painter, Franz Kline.

Complementing the concurrent exhibition of photographs by Joan Myers, this selection of landscape photographs from the museum’s collection examines, literally, the ground beneath our feet. This approach to landscape photography highlights an essential but usually overlooked subject, resulting in some extreme and minimalist images. Works include Lee Friedlander’s shadow self-portrait at Canyon de Chelly, Aaron Siskind’s close-up of lava, Eliot Porter’s view of The Black Place, and other gems. The show also premiers several examples from a recent body of work on unmarked graves, loaned to the museum by Santa Fe artist Richard Baron.

Photographers working in Europe during the period between the two World Wars made some of the most memorable images in the medium’s history. Their goal was to infuse their medium with a fresh and distinctly “modern” style. Influenced by Cubism, Constructivism, Dadaism, and Surrealism, and reflecting the effects that technology, urbanization, and cinema were having on their time, European photographers adopted unconventional and innovative approaches to their image making. Characteristics of their visions include rigorous objectivity, surprising camera angles, and darkroom experimentation. “Photo Eye: Avant-Garde Photography in Europe” charts this shift through the work of artists such as Constantin Brancusi, Ilse Bing, André Kertész, Man Ray, László Moholy-Nagy, and Josef Sudek. Their contributions and those of their peers were central to a transformation in photographic expression in the 20th century.

Light Break is based on the light therapy developed by doctor and Nobel laureate Niels Ryberg Finsen ​​in the late 1800s. Artist Nicolai Howalt was inspired by this part of medical history to work with the sun in his photographic practice. In a series of unique photographic work he examines and makes visible the invisible part of sun light, both its life-giving and destructive rays.

Light Break is an evidential and aesthetic clash between photography, science and art. The exhibition reflects Nicolai Howalt ‘s fundamental interest in light as a material. In his studies Howalt uses scientific methods and apparatus from the 1800s. For example, he borrowed a number of Finsen’s lenses from Medical Museion. Inspired by Finsen’s method Howalt uses colored filters to absorb part of the sun’s rays and let the remaining parts of the electromagnetic spectrum pass through the original rock crystal lenses. The light rays are then captured on light-sensitive photographic paper (C -print) and the resulting photograms are uniquely direct images of the sun’s rays. An almost motif-less universe of sun and light takes shape in the exhibition’s large collection of images.

The primary goal of the surrealist movement was to liberate the modern mind by demonstrating how deep psychological impulses could be explored, depicted, and fused with everyday reality. Despite the perception that photography presented the most direct depiction of surface reality, or perhaps because of it, the medium presented an ideal arena for surrealist artists to explode the traditional bounds of visual representation in ways that continue to influence artists today. Surrealists experimented with unprecedented technical manipulations, both before the camera and in the darkroom, turning the so-called realist medium of photography into a vehicle for depicting the fantastical. Even their most “straightforward” images make the familiar strange and reveal the psychological depths that underlie surface reality. It is this constant tension between surface and depth that gives surrealist photography its distinctive impact, which this exhibition will demonstrate with highlights from the Bowdoin College Museum of Art’s rich collection of surrealist photography, supplemented with prestigious loans from public and private collections.

At Musée des Beaux-Arts de Liège – BAL, the BIP2014 programm will complement the Museum’s permanent collections. Classical and modern paintings, figurative and abstract art, contemporary pieces, treasures of the Wallonia–Brussels Federation and the Graindorge collection will be reorganized to fit the BIP2014 selected theme of ways of distancing, reflecting and resonating. The broad issue of artistic representation, its scope and its impact on the meaning man has given the world throughout the ages will be questioned through photography and video. The pictorial will be replaced by the mechanical image and vice versa through subtle multiplier effects and reversals. The accepted categories of art history, consecrations and achievements will be viewed through the small end of the telescope.

The photographs by Aaron Siskind in this exhibition belong to one of the most important visual records of Harlem during the Great Depression. Siskind (1903‒1991) graduated from City College in 1926 and taught in New York’s public school system between 1926 and 1949. He turned to photography around 1930 and joined the Photo League in 1932. The League’s members were socially engaged photographers and filmmakers who drew attention to urban problems, especially in light of the Depression. In 1936 Siskind founded the League’s Feature Group, which documented New York City, focusing especially on Harlem.

By 1941 the project was dropped as the country entered WWII. Siskind also had left the League and began to turn to abstraction. It was only in 1981 that a collection of fifty-seven photographs from the series were published as a book, along with excerpts from the Federal Writers’ Project’s oral history of Harlem and a foreword by writer and filmmaker Gordon Parks, who grew up in Harlem. Subjects range from intimate domestic interiors to lively street scenes. There are powerful depictions of churchgoers and arresting ones of performers and Harlem’s nightlife, but the images of children are especially moving. While these photographs vary in tone, one senses not only Siskind’s artistry, but his intense humanity and exquisite sensitivity in representing his subject. These are qualities not always found in documentary photography, and ones that demand universal celebration.

Rosso, Brancusi and Man Ray were decisive for the development of modern sculpture. Together with Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), Medardo Rosso is seen as the artist who introduced the Impressionist style to sculpture. Brancusi is known as the founder of modern sculpture with his highly abstracted forms in polished bronze and marble. Man Ray, who is best known as a photographer and painter, played an important role in Dada and Surrealism. He combined everyday items to create new objects, comparable to the ‘readymades’ of Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). He also developed his own photographic technique, which he called ‘rayography’.

A World of Its Own: Photographic Practices in the Studio examines the ways in which photographers and other artists using photography have worked and experimented within their studios, from photography’s inception to the present. Featuring both new acquisitions and works from the Museum’s collection that have not been on view in recent years, A World of Its Own brings together photographs, films, and videos by artists such as Berenice Abbott, Uta Barth, Zeke Berman, Karl Blossfeldt, Constantin Brancusi, Geta Brătescu, Harry Callahan, Robert Frank, Jan Groover, Barbara Kasten, Man Ray, Bruce Nauman, Paul Outerbridge, Irving Penn, Adrian Piper, Edward Steichen, William Wegman, and Edward Weston.

Depending on the period, the cultural or political context, and the commercial, artistic, or scientific motivations of the artist, the studio might be a haven, a stage, a laboratory, or a playground. For more than a century, photographers have dealt with the spaces of their studios in strikingly diverse and inventive ways: from using composed theatrical tableaux (in photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron or Cindy Sherman) to putting their subjects against neutral backdrops (Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe); from the construction of architectural sets within the studio (Francis Bruguière, Thomas Demand) to chemical procedures conducted within the darkroom (Walead Beshty, Christian Marclay); and from precise recordings of motion (Eadweard Muybridge, Harold Edgerton) to playful, amateurish experimentation (Roman Signer, Peter Fischli and David Weiss). A World of Its Own offers another history of photography—a photography created within the walls of the studio, and yet as innovative as its more extroverted counterpart, street photography.

Todd Hido is best known for his moody exterior views of suburban homes at night. People are not shown in this work but their presence is suggested through the glow of interior light visible through windows. The brooding quality of these works extends into a recent semi-auto biographical body of work Hido created titled Silver Meadows, which is the name of the neighborhood where he grew up in Kent, Ohio. This film-noir like work blends past and present, real and imagined and includes images of women, domestic spaces, ephemera and the landscape.

Wide Angle: American Photographs is an exploration of the Art Museum’s collection of more than 1,300 photographs. Organized by Museum Curator Janie Welker, it offers an opportunity to see this diverse group of work in the context of some of the major themes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century photography in this country. Among them are portraiture and the portrayal of gender; the transition from traditional photography to constructed landscapes and an examination of the manmade environment; and the conventions of documentary photography, street photography, and images manipulated for psychological effect.

American photographer Barbara Morgan (1900–1992) is most well known for her photographs of luminaries in American modern dance in the 1940s and 1950s such as choreographers Martha Graham, Pearl Primus, and Charles Weidman. She captured modern dance’s sense of dramatic action characteristic of the time period through her intimate portraits of choreographers and dancers. Her use of shadow and curvilinear lines distilled American modern dance as expressing a youthful, exuberant spirit reflective of national attitudes.

While producing photographs of icons of American modern dance, she also produced a series of photomontages. In the 1940s, photomontage was an uncommon practice in American fine art photography. Aligned with Dada and Surrealism art movements, photomontages are composite images produced by layering several images on top of each other. She layered images of city buildings, parks, human bodies, and natural objects to make surreal, singular images.

This exhibition proposes aesthetic and conceptual relationships between Morgan’s photomontages and dance photography. They synthesize movement, bodies, curving lines, and contrasting forms into expressive portraits of energetic action. Morgan abstracts the content of her images in both her photomontages and dance photography, so dynamic motion surfaces. Thus, Morgan’s portrayal of repeating lines and abstract forms prefigures Minimalism in dance and visual arts.

Loneliness is a major contemporary phenomenon, gaining more and more impact on people’s lives. The exacting urban environment, in the face of social and technological changes, never leaves the individual in peace – it forever urges him, stimulates his nerves and attacks his senses in an endless sequence of fleeting perceptions and random impressions.

Many amongst us seek simulations of life that seem more exciting than life itself. We fear a reality which is not mediated by computers. Thousands of text messages sent daily by people all over the world, who spend endless hours in social networks, have created a new reality of social alienation, unparalleled in its dimensions compared to past generations. Thus we become victims of the illusion of virtual friendships on the web, where we collect thousands of friends whom we imagine to be human relationships that only lead us to further loneliness. The more technology advances, the more our mental lives retreat.

Loneliness and solitude are seemingly similar but are in fact very different scenarios, in which the individual is alone. Loneliness is a state of segregation of the individual, while solitude is a voluntary state in which the individual is independent and can appreciate the space surrounding him, and where perhaps, he might find the best possible company.

In his book "Between Man and Man" Martin Buber writes: “We have seen how in the history of the human spirit man again and again becomes solitary… that is, he seeks a divine form of being with which, solitary as he is, he can communicate ;he stretches his hands out beyond the world to meet this form. But we have also seen that there is a way leading from one edge of solitude to the next, that is, that each solitude is colder and stricter than the preceding, and salvation from it more difficult. But finally man reached a condition where he can no longer stretch his hands out from his solitude to meet a divine form. That is at the basis of Nietzsche’s saying, ‘God is dead’. Apparently, nothing more remains now to the solitary man but to seek an intimate communication with himself.”

Los Angeles residents Marjorie and Leonard Vernon began to collect photography in 1975, eventually building a collection of some 3,600 photographs spanning the entire history of the medium. In 2008 LACMA acquired the complete collection, making it possible for the museum to represent photography’s full range and its centrality in modern visual culture. This exhibition of 220 photographs from the Vernon Collection takes a historical perspective, identifying parallels between photography and vision science over time. The earliest commentaries on photography, published at the moment of its invention in the late 1830s, positioned the medium between art and science. As a scientific instrument, the camera operates as an infallible eye, augmenting physiological vision; as an artistic tool, it channels the imagination, recording creative vision. Much of photography’s authority and fascination resides in its interdisciplinary grounding. Whether we analyze it as a science or admire it as an art, photography’s power may never be fully explained, but it will always offer revelations about vision, perception, and cognition.

In Part II of Light My Fire: Some Propositions about Portraits and Photography – a show that Toronto Star art critic Murray Whyte called “utterly beguiling” – discover a fresh selection of more than 120 portraits from the AGO's permanent collection, along with select loans from local private collections. Organized under two new propositions, these works showcase the descriptive power of the medium but also its malleability.

“We are Not Ourselves” highlights the ways artists have manipulated photographic materials to create or reveal strange states of being. Through collage, long exposure, darkroom doubling and retouching, among other techniques, each of these photographs lead us from the realm of the familiar and recognizable to other more mysterious planes of existence.

The artists included in “We are Always Ourselves”, in contrast, work through direct observation to exploit the descriptive power of the medium in their photographs. Moving through the public realm – streets, the subway, shops – some of these photographers are attuned to spontaneous encounters between passersby, from the flirtatious or the aggressive to moments of reverie or introspection. In so doing, each aims to communicate their perspective on the human condition. Others work in relatively controlled interior environments, from private homes or personal workspaces to professional photography studios. The act of sitting for a photograph, here, meets the act of making a photograph head on, as photographer and sitter work together to stage a portrait.

Erwin Blumenfeld’s life and work impressively document the socio-political context of artistic development between the two World Wars, while highlighting the individual consequences of emigration. The exhibition devoted to Erwin Blumenfeld’s multi-layered œuvre brings together over 300 works and documents from the late 1910s to the 1960s, and encompasses the various media explored by the artist throughout his career: drawings, photographs, montages and collages.

This exhibition traces his visual creativity and encompasses the early drawings, the collages and montages, which mostly stem from the early 1920s, the beginnings of his portrait art in Holland, the first black and white fashion photographs of the Paris period, the masterful colour photography created in New York and the urban photos taken toward the end of his life.

The retrospective also showcases his drawings, many of which have never been shown before, as well as his early collages and photomontages, shedding fascinating light on the evolution of his photographic oeuvre and revealing the full extent of his creative genius. The now classic motifs of his experimental black-and-white photographs can be seen alongside his numerous selfportraits and portraits of famous and little-known people, as well as his fashion and advertising work.

For a decade between 2001 and 2010, Philadelphia photographer Zoe Strauss (b. 1970) showed her photographic works once a year in a public space beneath an I-95 highway overpass in South Philadelphia. In these annual one-day exhibitions, Strauss mounted her color photographs to the concrete bridge supports and viewers could buy photocopies for five dollars. Through portraits and documents of houses and signage, Strauss looked unflinchingly at the economic struggles and hardscrabble lives of residents in her own community and other parts of the United States. She describes her work as "an epic narrative about the beauty and struggle of everyday life." Strauss, a self-taught photographer and political activist, sees her work as a type of social intervention, and she has often used billboards and public meetings as venues. This exhibition is a mid-career retrospective and the first critical assessment of her decade-long project.

In a tribute to the beauty and unpredictability of the art of ink painting, New York based Japanese artist Shinichi Maruyama (b. 1968) developed KUSHO, a series of photographs of momentary collisions between ink and water in mid-air named for a Japanese term for “writing in the sky.” This series freezes the microsecond in which the two liquids approach and intersect with each other. The images produced are documentary and scientific, as well as beautiful abstract compositions in black, white, and gray.

“Not knowing what you are going to get impresses me strongly,” Maruyama observes of the KUSHO pictures. “We do not know what we have until we look at the actual photograph. If these images are fundamentally graphic, even painterly, they are also a meditation on the material properties of photography. In its spatial illusionism and meticulous detail, the photograph inevitably points to a world outside of itself, a world of visual forms and sensations, always reminding us of its origin in it.”

In this series, the underlying subject is the principle of energetic interaction between forms. It is no wonder, then, that KUSHO became the basis of collaboration between Maruyama and Jessica Lang Dance, a New York based dance company. In their repertory piece entitled i.n.k