ARIZONA
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CENTER FOR CREATIVE PHOTOGRAPHY - THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
Robert Mapplethorpe: Portraits
UNTIL OCTOBER 4
Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) became known for his focus on several subjects, from portraits to still lifes, from classical sculptures to contemporary nudes, some of which made him at least temporarily notorious. His most lasting legacy, however, is his portraiture, which reflects and embodies the New York cultural milieu of the late 1970s and the 1980s. Within his roster of clients can be found many of the most significant artists, art dealers, writers, musicians, designers, and actors of the period. This exhibition of approximately one hundred portraits, principally drawn from the holdings of the Mapplethorpe Foundation, includes images of William Burroughs, Truman Capote, Marianne Faithfull, David Hockney, Grace Jones, Roy Lichtenstein, Brice Marden, Lisette Model, Alice Neel, Iggy Pop, Ed Ruscha, and Andy Warhol.
Robert Mapplethorpe, Kathy Acker, 1983. Gelatin silver print. © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation
TUSCON - http://www.creativephotography.org/
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CALIFORNIA
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ROBERT KOCH GALLERY
Jerry Burchard, Debbie Fleming Caffery and Linda Foard Roberts
UNTIL AUGUST 22
This exhibition presents artists who produce black and white images of elusive and sometimes highly intimate occurrences - shadowy portraits in Mexican brothels, evanescent streaks of light in a Moroccan nightscape, or deeply charged metonymic symbols of personal dealings with the fragility of life. The dark and often subjective imageries of these photographers describe personal landscapes that are more universal than they may initially appear.
Jerry Burchard has described his photography as the "unconscious rendering of light as advent." His blurry nocturnal images from the 1970s portray places as disparate as Bangkok, Casablanca, Agadir, San Francisco and his hometown of Rochester, NY, and share a similar notion of the photographer recording the serendipitous play of light within his camera. The surreal blurs and streaks animate the already seductive architecture and foliage of Burchard's sites, creating less a portrait of a place than the photographer's reveries within it.
Debbie Fleming Caffery's images of Mexican prostitutes at once recall E.J. Bellocq's Storyville photographs, 18th century odalisque portraits and other renderings of the "exotic" without overt fetishization or forgetting the gravity of the women's situations. This most recent collection of her images also calls on Catholic iconography - originating both in Caffery's upbringing and the daily lives of the Mexicans she photographs - and creates a tenuous navigation of belief systems and basic human desires.
Linda Foard Roberts's images explore the iconography of life's transformations using large-format negatives and antique lenses. Combined with the vignetted, oval printing, her work recalls early photographs while rendering intensely personal imagery.
Jerry Burchard, Rochester at Christmas
Debbie Fleming Caffery, Carla
Linda Foard Roberts, Ashes and
My Mother's Grace
SAN FRANCISCO - http://www.kochgallery.com/
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SF CAMERAWORK
The 2009 James D. Phelan Art Award in Photography: Doris Jew Conrath and Jim Stone
UNTIL AUGUST 22
The James D. Phelan Art Award in Photography is administered by SF Camerawork for The San Francisco Foundation, and is given in recognition of artistic achievements by California-born artists. The recipients of this year’s award are Doris Jew Conrath and Jim Stone.
Doris Jew Conrath’s panoramic images are created out of several photographs. The artist explains: “Instead of wide views of a physical space taken by pivoting from one point, I record while walking around a structure and unfold the space in a manner similar to a world map created by using a cylindrical projection method. The individual photographs are then digitally stitched together, forming a new space that shows all sides, allowing the viewer to take in multi facets at once.”
The photography of Jim Stone explores facets of America’s unusual and complex character. The artist sees his work as framing “an organized set of graphic and sociological concerns. Damage, misdirection, isolation, and failure accompany other consistent subthemes, such as obsession and its public display, the mixing of religious and military iconography in a peaceable secular society, and the ironic difference between intent and achievement.”
Doris Jew Conrath (2)
Jim Stone
SAN FRANCISCO - http://www.sfcamerawork.org/index.php
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GALLERY 291
Mary Frey: Imagining Fauna
SEPTEMBER 10 - OCTOBER 31
Mary Frey received her MFA from Yale University in 1979 and is currently a professor of photography at the Hartford Art School.
Frey has attained numerous awards for her work, most notably a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1984 and two photography fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1980 and 1992. She was the recipient of a Te Foundation Fellowship in 2004. During the 1994-95 academic year Mary Frey was the Harnish Visiting Artist at Smith College, Northampton, MA and in the spring of 2001 she completed an artists residency at the Burren College of Art, County Clare, Ireland.
Her work has been exhibited extensively and is part of many public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Chicago Art Institute and the International Polaroid Collection.
Albino Porcupine and Tarsir
SAN FRANCISCO - http://www.gallery291.net/index.cfm?action=home.display
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DRKRM GALLERY
ULTRA-ANGELES Kodachrome in 3-D: The Stereo Photography of Jack Laxer
UNTIL SEPTEMBER 6
Many notable architects including Paul Williams, William Cody, and the masters of the Modern California Coffee Shop, Armet & Davis, hired 3-D photographer Jack Laxer to document their newly completed works. Using a specially adapted Stereo Realist camera, Laxer’s lens revealed a vivid depth filled world, with a precision and artistry unseen before or since in the realm of stereo photography. Laxer's progressive subject matter perfectly embodies the spirit of modernism, both as an artistic movement as well as an everyday reality in postwar Los Angeles. His amazing views offer a full-color, 3-D glimpse into a world that no longer exists, even as we drive by it every day.
Mondo Gronk: Photographs By Gronk
SEPTEMBER 18 - OCTOBER 18
Spanning the late 1970’s though much of the 1980’s, these black and white images present a visual record of Gronk’s photographic work that includes the East L.A. avant-garde art collective, Asco (Spanish for nausea) and it’s conceptual counter-cinema movement, the NO MOVIE (making movies without the use of celluloid). This alternative cinema was forged from the refusal of Chicanos to accept their lack of access to Hollywood. They constructed single-frame idealized images of daily life, like a still from a film, that would tell a whole story. Along with Harry Gamboa, Jr., Willie Herron and Patssi Valdez, and in collaborations with Cyclona, Mundo Meza, Jerry Dreva, and Tomata DuPlenty, Gronk’s cinematic sensibilities challenged the limits of sexuality, gender norms, and taste.
Gronk was born in the barrios of East Los Angeles where he had known from an early age that he wanted to be an artist. "Drawing was as an escape for me - from poverty, from my environment. It was a way of creating new worlds for myself." He began his career as an urban muralist who had to look up the word “mural” to know whether he could paint one. Over time, he has grown into an international figure who has created grand sets for operas and computerized animation for panoramic screens. Gronk has made a lasting mark on the Chicano art movement, the punk scene, gay art, and the cultural world stage. Influenced by surrealism and German expressionism, Gronk's paintings reflect Chicano traditions while wryly commenting on themes of ethnic identity, high and pop culture, romantic love, and mortality.
Coke Bottle In The Dark (No Movie), New Mexico, 1984
David (No Movie), East Los Angeles, 1976 EAST LOS ANGELES 1976
LOS ANGELES - http://www.drkrm.com/gallery.html
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DUNCAN MILLER GALLERY
Woodstock: The 40th Anniversary
AUGUST 15 - SEPTEMBER 25
On August 15-18, 1969, Max Yasgur's 600-acre dairy farm in Bethel, NY was transformed into the Woodstock Music & Art Fair. The organizers expected 200,000 people, but in this muddy cow pasture, over 450,000 people enjoyed a three-day concert experience featuring 32 of the best-known musicians of the day. "Woodstock: The 40th Anniversary" exhibition features the work of Jim Marshall, Baron Wolman, Henry Diltz and Lisa Law. This show recreates the experience of the crowd, the ambiance and the music of the world's most famous music festival.
Jim Marshall, Woodstock, 1969
LOS ANGELES - http://www.duncanmillergallery.com/index.php
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FAHEY/KLEIN GALLERY
Dan Winters: Periodical Photographs
UNTIL SEPTEMBER 5
The exhibition consists of a selection of photographs from Winters’ first publication, Periodical Photographs. Known for the broad range of subject matter he is able to interpret, Dan Winters is widely recognized for his celebrity portraiture, scientific photography, photographic illustration and photojournalistic stories.
The presence of his stunning, classically-inspired portraits explores the complexities and idiosyncrasies of his subjects. Winters uses the lens, the lighting, and the environment to find the unique characteristics that have made his talented subjects iconic.
Fred Roger's Sweater, Pittsburgh, August 17, 1998
Sharla Lewis, Conway, Texas, March 23, 2002
Robert Coburn: The Birds - A Portrait of a Film
UNTIL SEPTEMBER 5
In 1963, Robert Coburn worked as still photographer on the set of Alfred Hitchcock’s film “The Birds”. Based on a novelette by Daphne Maurier, starring Rod Taylor and Tippi Hedren, this classic thriller employed cutting edge film techniques to portray dizzying hordes of birds violently and inexplicably attacking the residents of a small coastal town. Hitchcock enhanced the film’s unique look, by giving the moviegoer a bird’s eye view of unfolding scenes of terror and death. His film disturbed audiences by turning delicate birds into swarming, senseless, menacing creatures attacking helpless victims for no apparent reason. The film’s modern apocalyptic imagery of a world in violent chaos garnered the film an Academy Award nomination for visual effects, making the thriller an indisputable Hitchcock classic.
Robert Coburn’s still photographs from the set of “The Birds” capture the two sides of the filming of this iconic Hitchcock thriller. His photographs from set effectively document the evolution of the movie making process while dramatically portraying the creation of chaotic scenes of victims fleeing the birds’ violent attacks. The swirling mania and the onslaught of a senseless mass of birds hurtling themselves down an open chimney and into a claustrophobic living room illustrate elements of the surreal within this story.
Coburn made candid portraits of Hitchcock on the set, occasionally pictured with a wry grin, directing and joking with fellow crew members and actors. A carefully coifed Tippi Hedren, with a wire birdcage on one knee, sits and smiles jovially at the end of the dock on location. One of Robert Coburn’s most memorable publicity shots, used for the film, portrays a famously droll Hitchcock, balancing a large, menacing raven on one arm, while at the same time giving the ominous bird a stern, yet suspicious glare.
In both 1941 and 1943, Robert Coburn was awarded the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences’ Still Photography Exhibition Award.
"The Birds" (kids attacked by ravens), 1963
"The Birds," Tippi Hedren (attacked by seagull), 1963
LOS ANGELES - http://www.faheykleingallery.com/
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M + B
Lisa Jack: Barack Obama: The Freshman
UNTIL AUGUST 29
M+B is pleased to announce the inaugural exhibition BARACK OBAMA: THE FRESHMAN, black and white photographs by Lisa Jack. First featured in Time Magazine’s 2008 “Person of the Year” Issue, which chose then President-elect Barack Obama for his “rare ability to . . . organize himself and others to anticipate change and translate it into opportunity,” these photographs offer a window back in time before the posters and before the campaign, when a 20-year-old young man was caught up in just such a change that Time Magazine would later describe. Lisa Jack, then a student of photography at Occidental College, sought a striking subject for a portrait project and was tipped off about a charismatic freshman named “Barry” Obama who would make an ideal subject. After the shoot, these images would remain locked away for the next 28 years, until a dare from a friend triggered Lisa Jack to seek them out. At first worried these images could be used against President Obama, Jack realized they were not incriminating of anything other than being young and self-conscious, and that they offered a unique glimpse into how the man who made history went from being “Barry” to Barack. This exhibition marks the first time these rare photographs have ever been printed and on display.
As described in his memoir Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama’s time at “Oxy” (Occidental College) was one of confusion and self-searching. He was chided by his mother for being friends with someone who was arrested on a drug possession charge, having so-so grades and, worst of all, being undeclared. Having recently moved from his grandparents’ home in Honolulu, he searched for his place in his new environment and eventually translated a situation of uncertainty into opportunity. These images from 1980 offer a view of that young man grappling with issues that would shape him to become the 44th President of the United States. During this year at Oxy, Obama vigorously sought out peers who were politically active and would transfer a year later to Columbia in order to be part of a larger community. These photographs evidence the shift from what he described as “going through the motions” to finding a sense of self and, subsequently, purpose.
Of this session, Lisa Jack described it as initially awkward. “Barry” showed up to the shoot with a bomber jacket, flared jeans, a pack of cigarettes and a Panama hat he thought would look “cool.” Initially, he posed self-consciously, but as the shoot progressed, the personality and charisma we would all later bear witness to emerged. He began asking questions, which was unusual since normally the photographer asks questions in an effort to draw out the sitter’s personality. According to Jack, the key to Obama’s personality was his desire to understand where one comes from and how that determines one’s sense of self. Being herself a young undergrad, her interests did not lie at the time with questions of identity and selfhood, but rather she secretly hoped that “Barry” would ask her out afterward. He did not, and although pleased with the photographs, they did not maintain contact afterwards, until a random chance encounter 28 years later in Washington DC. Lisa Jack ceased photographing and went on to pursue psychology and is currently a professor of Counseling Psychology at Augsburg College. After having her one roll of film from that day sit neglected for almost thirty years, Jack now offers up these images “so that others may see a side to him [she has] yet to observe captured in the maelstrom of contemporary media”.
Barack Obama, Occidental College, No. 32, 1980
Barack Obama, Occidental College, Contact Sheet, 1980
LOS ANGELES - http://www.mbfala.com/
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Andrew Bush: Vector Portraits
SEPTEMBER 12 - OCTOBER 17
Vector Portraits is Andrew Bush’s series from 1989 to 1997, shot in and around Los Angeles using his car as a tripod and capturing Angelenos vis-à-vis their unique relationships with their automobiles.
Los Angeles, described as “72 suburbs in search of a city,” is known for its miles of freeways, surface streets and legendary traffic. Because of that time spent in cars there is an ambiguous space, neither public nor private, that is conjured up in these air-conditioned living rooms on wheels. Bush describes this twilight space of driving as the amalgamation of “the maneuvering and direction and the speed . . . [making one] feel they are untouchable, in control of their destiny, in a private world of their own”. In this series, Bush captures a cross section of the city in this illusory state.
The series began in 1989 after Bush graduated from Yale with an MFA in Photography and moved to Los Angeles. Struck by the city’s “great relationship between people and their car”, Bush attached a medium format camera to his passenger seat with a strobe light and a shutter release cable and drove the city streets and freeways. Either stopped in traffic or moving at speeds of 20 to 70 miles an hour, Bush’s method included “moving in parallel with the person next to [him], as a way of coming into their world” and then releasing the shutter.
The photographs have a uniform set up: the subjects are always the same distance and scale in each image and represent a cross section of the American public. Some of them display car pride, and others do not. Some are alone and very much in their own world, while some drivers are interacting with their fellow passengers. Likewise, the vehicle captured is every bit a part of the portrait as its driver. The essence of what makes these appealing images is that they are a prolonged version of the awkward eye contact frequently made while driving. It is undeniably voyeuristic and satisfying, and now one has the leisure to examine minutely while remaining anonymous. Bush offers up a slice of Los Angeles life at its most mundane and telling.
Man heading south at 73 mph on Interstate 5 near Buttonwillow Drive outside of Bakersfield, California, at 5:36 p.m. on a Tuesday in March 1992
Man rolling along (whistle audible?) on U.S. Route 101 at approximately 55 mph on a summer day in 1989
High School students facing north at 0 mph on Sepulveda Boulevard in Westwood, California, at 3:01 p.m. on a Saturday in February 1997
Woman racing southwest at 41 mph along 26th Street near the Riviera Country Club, Pacific Palisades, California, at 1:14 p.m. on a Tuesday in February 1997
LOS ANGELES - http://www.mbfala.com/
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GALLERY LUISOTTI
Nighttown
UNTIL SEPTEMBER 12
Deriving its title from the ‘Nighttown’ phantasmagoria of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus at the near end of Ulysses, the exhiition will include a selection of works from ten artists; Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Dike Blair, John Divola, Frank Gohlke, Shirley Irons, Michael Ormerod, Mark Ruwedel, Toshio Shibata, and Henry Wessel.
Centered around the transformations of places and objects as witnessed through delimited fields of vision, the immediate worlds of these images take on a mythopoeic figuration through what is not so immediately perceivable. Like Bloom and Dedalus’ hallucinatory transformations of places and objects as witnessed through the specter of night, the veiling darkness inherent in all of the show’s works alludes to a similar disengagement between what is rational and what appears not. There is a slightly noir character in each of the show’s works: Lewis Baltz’s disquietingly lit Mercedes in a garage in North Wall from New Industrial Parks; Robert Adams’ deadpan shot of overgrown foliage on a moonlit sidewalk from Summer Nights; the vaporous cloud at the end of the dirt road in Henry Wessel’s New Mexico, 1968; the lone figure running away from the reach of the camera flash in John Divola’s As Far as I Could Get.
The poetic strangeness of these night images are furthered by the absence of humanity within them. The paintings of Dike Blair and Shirley Irons depict night as areas of disuse or lonely travel, and Mark Ruwedel’s image of a particularly optimistic –and seemingly empty- house in the desert points toward the uncanny. The show also represents the first viewing in the United States of the work of the late British photographer Michael Ormerod, who is represented in the show by a scene depcting a drive-in theater in the background, taken in the America west of which the artist recurringly explored in his short life.
John Divola, As Far As I Could Get (10 seconds) R02F09, 1996-1997
Frank Gohlke, Minneapolis (semi-trailer 1), 1972
SANTA MONICA - http://www.artnet.com/galleries/Home.asp?gid=684&rta=http://www.artnet.com
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JOSEPH BELLOWS GALLERY
Bill Arnold: Itek Prints
SEPTEMBER 5 - OCTOBER 10
Since the 1960s Bill Arnold has pursued photography as a means of personal expression by documenting the world around him. With his camera, Arnold finds poetry in common everyday occurrences and seemingly prosaic observations. A carton of sour cream on a table, a lone Easy Chair in a field, a radiator framed in a window are all subjects Arnold has found worthy of documenting. Arnold says, " I think the job of the artist is to cheer for life in all its parts. Nothing left out. Nothing exalted. No attempt to improve. Only to show something be it tragedy, ecstasy or buffoonery. We are part of a million, million year process and the artist's job is to celebrate being part of it." His photographs are imbued with a spirit of observation and discovery and show us beauty in the everyday and mystery in the mundane.
Bill Arnold's photographs also represent a unique and creative technological innovation in the photographic printing process. In 1970 Arnold became fascinated with a microfilm reading machine manufactured by the Itek Corporation. The Itek machine was designed to view microfilm on a large desktop monitor and could also produce instant prints up to twenty-four inches wide, from microfilm, using a photographic stabilization process. As a photography teacher at the San Francisco Art Institute, Arnold saw the machine as potential teaching tool, where students could take pictures and produce prints all within one class period. In order to make prints from 35mm negatives, Arnold had to make some modifications to the Itek machine, as it was designed to print from microfilm. He eventually designed, and patented, a vacuum easel for the machine which allowed the full gray scale to be printed, producing prints similar in quality to ones that could be achieved in a traditional darkroom.
Outside of the classroom, Arnold began using the Itek machine in his personal work. Combined with a Bell & Howell 35mm half-frame camera, which produced seventy-two pictures on a thirty-six exposure roll, the Itek printer allowed Arnold a more immediate connection between the creation, evaluation, and critique of his own photographs. Equally as innovative in his use of the Itek machine was Arnold's idea about the public display of his work. In 1973, he organized The Boston Bus Show, in which he display one-thousand of his Itek prints on the interior advertising space of forty-four Boston city buses. He later organized a similar show in New York City that included his and other photographers' work.
In a 2002 interview, when asked if there are any contemporary photographers she liked, renowned photographer Helen Levitt said, "I like Bill Arnold's work very much. Bill has a great eye. He sees things I don't see, that I wouldn't see. He sees things everywhere he goes; he doesn't have to go out on the street - wherever he is, he looks carefully, and he gets the most extraordinary pictures."
Flag at Bird's, 1978, vintage gelatin silver print (Itek), 14 x 18 inches
LA JOLLA - www.josephbellows.com
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THE MUSEUM OF PHOTOGRAPHIC ARTS IN SAN DIEGO
Picturing the Process: The Photograph as Witness
UNTIL FEBRUARY 6, 2010
The fourth in a series of educational based exhibitions presented by the Education Department at MoPA, the exhibition explores the variety of ways that photographers and photographs document people, places and events throughout history. The Photograph As Witness will present a selection of approaches to the genre of documentary photography, from the image as a representation of war, photographs that focus on the human condition, and photographers who document the public and personal spheres. The exhibition will also examine the relationship between the documentary image and the concept of the photograph as reality.
Beloved Daughters: Photographs by Fazal Sheikh
OCTOBER 10 - JANUARY 31, 2010
Beloved Daughters unites two projects by photographer and activist Fazal Sheikh. The exhibition focuses on women from two specific communities in India. The first project, Moksha (Heaven), portrays the northern Indian city of Vrindavan, where dispossessed widows go to devote themselves to Krishna and seek moksha: final release from the cycle of death and rebirth. Sheikh's next project, Ladli (Beloved Daughter) portrays the lives of girls and young women in a society where, despite progressive laws, their human, civil, and economic rights are routinely suppressed.
The two projects combined in this powerful exhibition provide intimate and revealing portraits of the faces and words of the old and young -- widows of great age, mothers and their children -- that paint an eloquent picture of women's prospects in modern India, a nation of 1.1 billion people. Sheikh pairs intense camera portraits with testimony from his subjects, offering a voice to those who would otherwise remain anonymous, conveying stories that are both eye-opening and thought-provoking.
When Moksha was published in 2005, Sheikh was awarded both a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant and the Henri Cartier-Bresson International Award. He immediately returned to India and undertook the work that became Ladli. The two projects were shown for the first time at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris in the summer of 2007.
SAN DIEGO - http://www.mopa.org/index.htm
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COLORADO
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JOEL SOROKA GALLERY
Susan Bozic: The Dating Portfolio
UNTIL SEPTEMBER 30
It's said you can tell when two people are really and truly in love by the way they look at each other. Vancouver-based photographer Susan Bozic satirizes the look and existence of true love, as it's popularly understood, in her series The Dating Portfolio. She stages scenes from a perfect relationship, casting herself (like Cindy Sherman) as the perfectly content girlfriend to Carl. He's good-looking, statuesque, a bit stiff though. Carl's a mannequin. "The humour presented in this work is the first stage in reading the images and is intended to draw the viewer in," says Bozic. "The longer you look, the more psychologically complex they become." The artist frames love as just another product packaged and marketed for mass consumption. "We're constantly being sold on the ideal, whether it's projected onto people or things. The romanticized images in The Dating Portfolio are a surrender to those ideals." –Sean Flinn, The Coast
He let me pick the movie, 2005
Carl takes me to the nicest places, 2005
ASPEN - http://www.artnet.com/Galleries/Home.asp?G=&gid=117155&which=&rta=http://www.artnet.com
