Before you enter Scope New York you may, if you wish, converse with Walt Whitman, who is sitting in a small room inside a wood packing crate. Affixed to the crate are several small fish-eye lenses, which you can peer into and see Walt speaking to you via an old-fashioned phone. This encounter sets the tone for the Scope fair: whimsical, sometimes puzzling, often tremendously engaging.
Inside are 75 international galleries, representing emerging and mid-career artists, many with an experimental approach to their medium. This is a fair with more photo-based work than straight photography, or work that mixes media, like the sculptural photo-based pieces on view at Aureus Contemporary by Michael Mapes. The artist “dissects,” as he puts it, a photograph into tiny pieces, then uses insect pins to reassemble those fragments and attach them to a background, creating multi-layered portrait that also incorporates the subject’s DNA and hair samples, among other things.
Montreal’s Art Mur showed the playful work of Diana Thorneycroft, reminiscent of the foreboding snow globe photographs of Walter Martin and Paloma Munoz. Thorneycroft’s series Group of Seven Awkward Moments explores Canadian identity with black humor and rich irony. She incorporates as backdrops to her dioramas famous paintings by the Canadian collective of painters, the Group of Seven, and her snowy tableaus are populated by figurines playing hockey or hunting or camping. Inevitably, though, one of them has fallen through the ice or lies bleeding in the snow. They’re dark but playful investigations of national identity.
And speaking of national identity, Dulce Pinzon asks us to reconsider the lives of Mexican immigrants to this county in her photographic series Superheroes. Alida Anderson Art Projects showed photographs of immigrants who work low-level jobs to send money home to their families. She photographs them doing their jobs – window washer, nanny, delivery person, cook – dressed like Spiderman, Superman, the Hulk, or Wonder Woman. She includes in the caption her subject’s name, where they’re from, and how much money they send home every week in these portraits of truly unsung heroes.
Vasantha Yogananthan: Coming of Age in New Orleans
Friendship, love, and sadness percolate through these photographs of children at play.
Helmut Newton: Fact and Fiction | MOP Foundation, A Coruña, Spain
Helmut Newton is a formidable influence in contemp...
Photo Books that delve into MoMA’s collection, a tight-knit Maryland family, and the New York City Subways
Grace Wales Bonner, Dream in the Rhythm Henry Horenstein: We Sort of People Alen MacWeeney: New York Subways 1977
Ugo Mulas: New York: The New Art Scene at Matthew Marks Gallery
This exhibition of photographs by the Italian Ugo ...
Paul Amador
Money isn’t everything. At least making more of it...
Larry Fink | Robert Mann Gallery
A small retrospective of work by a keen, compassioniate observer of class distinctions.
Joanne Dugan
Joanne Dugan has practiced some form of meditation for about a decade – she calls it “a repetitive practice of quiet sitting,” to de-emphasize the formality of certain meditation practices and highlight its accessibility.
Best of 2016
Formed in 1963 by 11 photographers who recognized the necessity of “a forum to address the underrepresentation of African Americans in their field,” the Kamoinge Workshop gave its members a sense of solidarity and support in a period when black Americans were the frequent subject of mainstream media coverage but rarely its author.
Evelyn Hofer: Eyes on the City | High Museum of Art, Atlanta
Evelyn Hofer: Eyes on the City, on view through Au...
Tracey Morgan
There are no sure things in the art world, but don...
Debi Cornwall: New-Style Documentarian
In a trilogy about the American condition, the Prix Elysée-winning photographer employs indirection, inviting viewers to consider what lies outside the frame.
Newly discovered images by Ernest Cole, Daido Moriyama’s magazine work, and Cindy Sherman’s unnerving "self-portraits"
A discovery of a large cache of negatives by Ernest Cole led to a new book, The True America.