Christopher Thomas: New York Sleeps at Fifty One Fine Art Photography in Belguim

January 22 – March 6, 2010
Christopher Thomas: New York Sleeps

Fifty One Fine Art Photography is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition of the German photographer Christopher Thomas.

The desolateness which is so profoundly present in Christopher Thomas’ images of New York has a surprising impact. These pictures are quite opposed to our expectations of this turbulent metropolis. The urban landscape may be familiar, but this is not the city that most of us know and experience. For example the image ‘Grand Central Terminal II’, once the largest train station in the world when completed in 1913, now appears totally abandoned. Thomas erases the profane and quotidian in favor of the “eternal” or timeless. This transformation of lively urban zones is particularly evident in Christopher Thomas’ photographs of Times Square, one of the icons of urban turbulence. The long exposure times erase the constantly changing lights of the advertisments, and reduces this mecca of commerce to it’s essence. The city seems to hold its breath; hectic activity is transformed into methaphysical emptiness. The lack of passers-by who usually populate the city means that our perception is no longer distracted but concentrated instead on the city’s “casing”: its architecture and streets. The city is reduced to its essential and bare architectural form. As if, at this moment when night borders day, Thomas could uncover its essence.

Born in Munich in 1961, Thomas has received many international awards for commercial photography. He has worked for magazines as Geo, Stern, Merian, and the Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin and produced numerous photo essays. As an alternative to such commissioned works, which usually have to satisfy the guidelines and expectations of his clients, the photographer begant to shoot views of cities on his own initiative in order to – as he puts it – “get back to the roots”. He started to capture the architecture in his native city, Munich. This work resulted in the series ‘Münchner Elegien’ (Munich Elegies), exhibited in 2005 at the Fotomuseum München (with publication by Schirmer/Mosel, Munich, with which he became known as an artist. Travelling back and forth between Munich and New York, Christopher Thomas began photographing this series in 2001, but made most of his images over the past two years.

The book ‘New York Sleeps’ published by Prestel Publishing, recently won the Deutschen Fotobuchpreis in Silber 2010.

FIFTY ONE FINE ART PHOTOGRAPHY

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Masters of Photography at Fifty One Fine Art Gallery in Antwerp, Belgium

MASTERS OF PHOTOGRAPHY
UNTIL JANUARY 16, 2010 at Fifty One Fine Art Gallery in Antwerp, Belgium

William Klein I Irving Penn I Frank Horvat I Robert Frank I Seydou Keita I Malick Sidibé I Hiroshi Sugimoto I Arnold Newman I Richard Avedon I Cindy Sherman I Diane Arbus I Lee Friedlander I Stephen Shore I Gary Winogrand I Duane Michals I Ray K. Metzker I Saul Leiter I Harry Callahan

We all carry a vast visual library of images engraved in our heads: one could refer to it as a ‘Musée Imaginaire’ as André Malraux called it. Thanks to photography, we are able to create a visual and virtual museum. We collect artworks from their photographic reproductions in various artbooks and magazines and visualize them in our private museum. Some artistic photographs have become iconic images in this way, carried preciously in our mind and head. These are the well-known photographs from the masters of the 20th and 21st century photography; all of them pioneering and groundbreaking photographers, the medium’s innovators and pioneers.

With the exhibition ‘Masters of Photography’, Fifty One Fine Art Photography is pleased to showcase an important selection of these significant photographers. Irving Penn, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Seydou Keita, Arnold Newman, Richard Avedon and Cindy Sherman, amongst others, are some of the masters we will honour. Our perspective and selection will be mostly personal within the realm of commonly accepted genres and highlighting names.

Masters of portraiture like Arnold Newman, Seydou Keita and Malick Sidibé will be on show next to documentary photography from William Klein and Robert Frank, and more contemporary genres as the film still photographs of Cindy Sherman.

Moreover, this celebration of photographic masters is appropiately announcing the ten-year celebration of the gallery in 2010, which will culminate in a unique birthday event during Summer 2010.

Images: Seydou Keita I DuaneMichals I Gary Winogrand I Hiroshi Sugimoto I Diane Arbus

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