A little farce here, a little farce there…

In between a generally funny sex/New York real estate farce and an earnest play about the founders of the NAACP and their possible sexual attraction, I took in two photography shows exploring the artistic possibilities of the photograph.

The shows at MoMA and ICP were spookingly similar.  What curators are having coffee or otherwise kanoodling?  Wait!  This isn’t a sex farce!

Still, you might forget which bed, um, museum you’re in.  The ICP show has a clear focus on digital, with lots of photos mimicking abstract art movements.  Doesn’t this image by James Welling look just like a Mark Rothko?  Yawn.  I can do that on my iPhone.

Walead Beshty, Three Color Curl, 2008

 

 

To make the point, this piece is from the MoMA show.  Not that the works aren’t lovely.  Just what are they saying about “what is a photograph?”  That it can be just like a painting?  Okay…

 

 

 

 

 

How much fun are the Polaroids by Lucas Samaras from the 1970s?  So how did he do that?  He started with a selfie, a self portrait using a regular Polaroid camera.  Before the chemicals setup, he could manipulate the image.  Let the experiments begin.  Make sure you see this tiny series downstairs at ICP.

Upstairs is a better show overall, I think.  Robert Capa was well known for his black and white images of war, but he worked extensively in color, too.  Covering exotic locations for Look Magazine, taking candids on movie sets, capturing the British Queen’s coronation, and more, I was most taken by the unexpected stare, the casual twist of a body, a glance at a party.

 

 

 

 

Doesn’t this just look like Paris?

 

 

 

 

Capucine at cocktail party in Rome, photo by Robert Capa, Rome, Italy, August 1951

 

and Rome in 1951.

 

 

 

 

2014-02-08 16.46.43

 

MoMA did what MoMA does–pulls out some greatest hits mixed in with some of-the-moment contemporary. While the crowd may gather around a video or lie down on the floor to gaze at the surround-screen-experience, I like the old stuff.

 

 

 

 

Harold Edgerton always amazes me, with his slow motion studies from the 1930s.  A drop of water.  A golfer’s swing.


 

 
Who knew Berenice Abbott did these kinds of experiments?

Robert Rauschenberg worked with cyanotypes.  Beautiful!

Bill Wegman up to his ol’ tricks.

William Wegman. Dropping Milk. 1971

William Wegman. Dropping Milk. 1971

Edward Weston plays with our perception, too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Both are Edward Westin,  Nude, Mexico, 1925

Today, I was really attracted to the hard edges of Charles Sheeler, Paul Outerbridge, and even Man Ray and Robert Mapplethorpe.  Beyond beautiful.

Charles Sheeler. Cactus and Photographer's Lamp, New York. 1931

Charles Sheeler. Cactus and Photographer’s Lamp, 1931

 

Images de Deauville

Paul Outerbridge, Images de Deauville, c. 1936

 

Man Ray. <i>Laboratory of the Future</i>. 1935. Gelatin silver print, 9 1/16 x 7" (23.1 x 17.8 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of James Johnson Sweeney © 2013 Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Man Ray, World of the Future, 1935

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Robert Mapplethorpe, Hermes, 1988

A classic Nadar, two by Julia Cameron.  Irving Penn and Richard Avedon. It’s good.

Nadar, Pierrot Laughing, 1855

Julia Margaret Cameron. Madonna with Children. 1864

Julia Margaret Cameron. Madonna with Children. 1864

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Irving Penn, Ballet Theater, New York, 1947

Richard Avedon, Carl Hoefert, unemployed blackjack dealer, 1983

Richard Avedon, Carl Hoefert, unemployed blackjack dealer, 1983

 

The show is all over the place, but still worth a look.  Then maybe you can figure out how two curators got together in a Manhattan location…, no, no, that’s the making of a sex farce, with a New York real estate twist…

 

MoMA Sculpture Garden at dusk, 2-8-14

MoMA Sculpture Garden at dusk, 2-8-14

 

 

Pure Photography

For a moving, disturbing, invigorating, heart-opening experience, get over to the two downstairs exhibits at the International Center for Photography.  Not that the contemporary show of Zoe Strauss photographs isn’t interesting.  But the two historical shows are powerfully emotional, full of iconic imagery, and rich in a historical dialogue that remains crisply pertinent today.

ICP does a good job, as always, telling a comprehensive story about its featured photographer–now Lewis Hine.  Hine’s photographs raised the consciousness of modern America about the conditions of tenements in New York, the immigrant experience, and child labor.  His photographs were so compelling that they were the major reason child labor laws were passed.

Child Cotton Picker, c1913

Look at the age on this boy’s face.

A Straight photographer, Hine used his camera in a documentary fashion to let the straight, unmanipulated image tell the story.  So newsies selling pape’s at midnight at a saloon and boys settings up pins in a decrepit subway bowling alley are much more effective at swaying sentiment than the posters and flyers, also on display, for pushing and prodding the moral question.

My dad was a newsie, and Hine’s work brought some photos of a tough version of him and his brothers to mind.  Look at the impact of this Hine newsie image.

Newsboy Asleep on Steps, 1912

Gives me a sense of what my father’s childhood was like.

Hine’s famous Work series is on display, too, with dozens of images of men and women, blacks and whites.  Elegant and spare, Hine elevates the everyday to the elegiac.  These gorgeous images validate the heroic quality of work, as they celebrate the human heart in the machine.  He did as much as anyone, including Charlie Chaplin, to show the modern workplace as a hybrid experience of humanity and technology, in all its complexity.

                                Mechanic at Steam Pump, 1920
Riveters on Empire State Building, c1931

Riveters on Empire State Building, c1931

Old Time Printer at Foot Press "Joy of Work" 1905

Old Time Printer at Foot Press
“Joy of Work”
1905

His Southern poverty and Depression era images, presented so calmly and cleanly, are
show-stoppers, every one.  Unlike many of the other documentarian photographers of the period, Hine wasn’t successful at getting government work.  He died in the kind of penury he depicted throughout his career.

Georgia Cotton Mill Widow and Family
1908
She has nine children!

Tucked into a corner of the large Hine show is a one-gallery exhibit on JFK in imagery from 1963.  The show makes effective use of song and video, and the missing Zapruder frame is there, too.  Breath taking, literally.  I hadn’t seen it before. I guess I can even understand the drive to suppress it, as just too upsetting.  Conspiracy-theorists, of course, have their explanations, too.

But the Hine show is the reason to go to ICP right now.  The images and emotions they evoke are pure, heart-felt, and heart-breaking.  You’ll see photography as art, as propaganda, as truth, as sentiment, as story–all in one image.  It’s worth a linger.