Taryn Simon, Chapter I, A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I-XVIII

Taryn Simon has spent her career to date investigating documentary and archival aspects of photography. She took photographs of items seized by customs agents over four days at JFK airport for her 2009 series Contraband. The Innocents documented people who served time in prison for violent crimes they did not commit, questioning the idea of the photograph as eyewitness and credible evidence. (For a different – and doggedly detailed– investigation of this topic, dip into filmmaker Errol Morris’s book Believing is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography.)

In A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, at the Museum of Modern Art through September 3, Simon uses a combination of portraiture, photographs and other ephemera (what she calls the footnote section), and text to explore identity by tracing the bloodlines of 18 different groups (nine are on view at MoMA). These include a family whose members were victims of genocide in Bosnia, a healer in Kenya with nine wives, four members of the same family in Uttar Pradesh, India, who discovered that they had been declared dead in the local land registry (the chapter from which the project takes its title), and rabbits intentionally infected with a lethal virus in Australia to control the rabbit population. There is a lot that’s compelling, both visually and conceptually, about the project, but it doesn't err on the side of accessibility. The grid of rabbits looks great on the wall, but it strikes an odd note in a project that seems to be about the messy mix of biology, history and autonomy that shapes people as individuals.

                 Taryn Simon, Excert from Chapter VII, A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters

“For me,” Simon told the New York Times when the series was on view at the Tate in London last year, “it’s about those areas that are less speakable in a way. It’s not about forming an equation that arrives at an answer, but lots of questions, and disorientation.” There are, maybe, a few too many unanswered questions, but Simon is nothing if not ambitious in her exploration of the how photographs function, not just on the white walls of museums and galleries.

Having said that, she was also quite specific about how the work was installed in the museum: very white walls and very bright lights. Nothing soft or atmospheric, but rather a spare and lab-like atmosphere that highlighted the fact that the photographs on view are part of a taxonomy. The subjects all sit in nearly identical poses, in front of a plain, cream-colored background (the “non-place,” as Simon has called it).  Nobody smiles, or displays any other emotion. The photographs, which are displayed in a gird, call to mind official documents – I.D. cards or mug shots – and like her Innocents series, they question the idea of a photograph as a reliable marker of identity.

               Taryn Simon, Excerpt from Chapter III, A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters

Alongside the portraits are texts identifying each person and giving a brief description of each family, or bloodline. The other visual elements – which range from photographs of the interior of an orphanage, to maps, to an image of a bit of graffiti – amplify our understanding only partially, and I imagine that’s intentional. Simon is not out to provide answers. Like a number of thoughtful, ambitious contemporary photographers– Doug Rickard or Zhang Dali, for example, who were in New Photography 2011 at MoMA – she explores the porous boundaries between documentary and fine art photography. It’s a fertile place to work, but the results can sometimes be more puzzling than persuasive. 

By Jean Dykstra

Anthony Bannon, the longest-serving director of the George Eastman House, had intended to retire this spring after 16 years in the post. When he announced that plan a year ago, though, he began getting offers and inquiries from institutions hoping to coax him away from retirement and into a new job. And that’s how it happens that he officially leaves the George Eastman House at the end of this week, on May 12, and takes on a new role at Buffalo State College on May 14. 

Bannon will work with the president of the college on community service and volunteerism, and he will also serve as executive director of the school’s Burchfield-Penney Art Center, where he was director from 1985 until 1996. He will have executive oversight at the museum but he will also find and mentor the next director.  “This is a great time to get my hands dirty, and I’m really excited about this opportunity,” said Bannon, speaking by phone en route to Buffalo from Rochester. 

Asked to reflect on the highlights of his 16-year tenure, Bannon said, quite reasonably, that it’s difficult to single out specific accomplishments. "A director's job," he said, "is to take the logs out of the road for the curator.” But he did add, “I pushed hard on digital, back in the ‘90s when digital wasn’t popular,” and now the Eastman House has an award-winning social media space, Web site, and podcasts, and the museum was one of six founding members of flickr commons and it now has some 200,000 images on the site. 

There are countless other achievements – the formation of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation, in cooperation with the University of Rochester; the acquisition of the Technicolor Corporate Archive and the Merchant Ivory Productions Archive; the museum's collection of Edward Steichen Autochromes, among many others -- but Bannon said that there are less concrete accomplishments that are also significant. He is particularly proud, he said, of "the relationship that I’ve been able to nurture between the board and the staff."

On the evening of May 12, the museum is sending him off with "An Evening in Technicolor:  A Farewell Gala for Tony Bannon." 

by Jean Dykstra

                                                                                                              Courtesy Mark Robbins

The International Center of Photography has named Mark Robbins its new executive director, replacing Willis E. “Buzz” Hartshorn. 

Robbins, dean of the School of Architecture at Syracuse University, previously served as curator of architecture at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, and as director of design for the National Endowment for the Arts. He is also a photographer whose work is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Art as well as a number of private collections. His series and book Households (Monacelli Press, 2006) explores the flip side of interior design magazines, documenting people in real built environments and commenting on contemporary life and community. Recent bodies of work include  Student-Teacher (2011), taken in Kigali, Rwanda, and Guest / Host (2011) in Bangkok.

The search for a new director began last year, when Hartshorn announced that he would be stepping down as executive director; he will focus on special projects at the ICP as senior deputy director.

Robbins will assume his new post on July 1.

                                        Place (Series) #277 (2008). Courtesy James Kelly Contemporary

Looking at a selection from Bill Jacobson’s ongoing portfolio titled Place (Series) – on view at James Kelly Contemporary in Santa Fe through May 12 – you end up either completely confounded or forced into a state of contemplation. Or maybe both, which isn’t a bad thing. Art should engage the viewer and Jacobson’s current series effectively compels you to take pause and consider the larger content over the specific subject matter.

Indeed, what do crystal-clear photographs of small rectangular cutouts -- measuring approximately 4 X 3 feet -- painted in solid or multiple colors and propped up in the natural environment or leaning against walls mean? In #277 (2008) and #425 (2010), the panels – one white, the other black – stand front-and-center and unexplained amid park-like settings of woods and water. Are they schisms within the natural landscape? Are they portals through which we enter another dimension? Or are we being presented with juxtapositions of manmade constructs and those manifested by nature? Jacobson’s numbered titles leave little to go by. But the manipulation of color and spatial relationships – the push and pull of flat, chromatic panels set within different color spaces – suggests Joseph Albers’s Homage to the Square series begun in 1949.

                              Song of Sentient Beings #208 (1995). Courtesy James Kelly Contemporary

A sampling of Jacobson’s previous work rounds out this exhibit of 14 pieces, including one from Song of Sentient Beings (1995), two from A Series of Human Decisions (2005, 2006), and a couple from Some Planes (2007, 2008). Image #208 from Song of Sentient Beings is a soft-focused, apparition-like head-and-shoulders shot of a nude figure with head turned down that seems to suggest a state of becoming or disappearing. Some Planes #601 (2008) is a stark desert scene comprised of a black sand dune that arcs across a white sky and recalls the hard-edge, minimalist aesthetic of Ellsworth Kelly.

By Douglas Fairfield  

                                        Lauren Simonutti, Mad Eyes, 2007. Courtesy Catherine Edelman Gallery

Baltimore photographer Lauren Simonutti passed away earlier this month, from complications of her illness: rapid cycling, mixed state bipolar with schizoaffective disorder. That is the medical term for a draining mental illness that kept her in self-imposed isolation in her Baltimore house. 

Her work was a haunting and almost frighteningly honest exploration of her troubled interior life. Simonutti created elaborate, detailed worlds, mainly in one small room of her house, often involving mirrors, curtains, stacks of books and her own writing, with herself at the center of them. 

                                          Lauren Simonutti, The Eye Detector, 2007. Courtesy Catherine Edelman Gallery

“When I saw the work on her blog,” says Chicago dealer Catherine Edelman, who represented Simonutti and gave her a solo show in January of 2010, “I almost fell off my chair. It was storytelling, but you had no idea what the story was. You could make up your own story, until you realized there was some real trouble being explored. She made art because she had to, to deal with the demons inside her, and I have real respect for people who are that honest.” 

                       Lauren Simonutti, Mirror Between Two Windows, 2008. Courtesy Catherine Edelman Gallery

"I am also a sucker for good, old-fashioned gelatin silver, well-created photographs," adds Edelman, and on Simonutti's blog, called “The Madness is the Method,” she made it a point to note that all of her work was “digital free.” The extensive manipulation in her black-and-white photographs was done in the darkroom or the camera.  

The title of her show at Edelman's gallery was called “8 rooms, 7 mirrors, 6 clocks, 2 minds and 199 panes of glass,” because those are the things that defined her world for that last six years of her life.  “I figure it could go one of two ways,” wrote Simonutti. “I will either capture my ascension from madness to as much a level of sanity for which one of my compositions could hope, or I will leave a document of it all, in the case that I should lose.” 

In the end, she did lose, but she also succeeded in leaving a moving document of it all. 

by Jean Dykstra

                                     Anton Hammerl working in Brega, April 1, 2010. Photo by Unai Aranzadi

This has been a devastating year for photojournalists, with the loss of Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros in Libya, Remi Ochlik in Syria, Lucas Mebrouk Dolega in Tunisia, and Anton Hammerl, who was killed in April 2011, also in Libya. Hammerl left behind his wife, Penny Sukhraj, and three young children, and a group of supporters, Friends of Anton, has organized a benefit auction for his family. On May 15, Christie’s is hosting a sale of contemporary photojournalism prints, donated by fellow photojournalists in honor of Hammerl’s memory and to help support his family.

On April 5, 2011, Hammerl, a South African freelance photographer, went missing after coming under fire from Gaddafi Loyalists. For 44 days, his family was told that he was alive, though he had been shot and killed. The 41-year-old photographer was a former picture editor and chief photographer for The Saturday Star in Johannesburg who had become a freelance photojournalist.

Signed prints by such photographers as Sebastiao Salgado, Alec Soth, Larry Fink, Susan Meiselas, Joao Silva (who was himself severely injured in October of 2010 when a landmine exploded under him) Bruce Davidson and Vincent Laforet will be auctioned by Lydia Fenet, senior vice president at Christie’s.

                                                                            Burning House, July, Sunset, 2011

Home is where we enact our rituals of comfort, safety, and happiness, so it is fertile ground for artistic intervention. For Burning House, her second solo exhibition at Monique Meloche Gallery (on view through May 12), Carrie Schneider ritualistically immolated 15 house-structures on a remote island in a Midwestern pond, and she presents the documentation in one photograph per house as well as a compilation video. Schneider built and burned the homes over a span of more than two years, from September 2009 to November 2011. In the photographs, the surrounding landscape performs its own quiet drama of seasonal and diurnal effects, as sunsets accept the smoke and rains mute the blaze. The world tends to go on. 

Burning House contains all the trappings of a good, potent myth. Schneider journeyed to Wisconsin from Brooklyn to light these small fires. She built the eight-by-six-foot houses and ferried them individually to the island in a rowboat. She tested the disposition of fire against various atmospheric conditions. One phthalo-blue twilight (September, nightfall, 2010) is saturated with impossibly luminous energy; the night scenes flash like warnings; and sometimes the smoke trail is black as defeat. In each sacrificial offering, the house effigy was released of its archetypal form and significance, only to be restored when Schneider returned to Wisconsin to build a new house. 

                                                                 Burning House, October, Twilight, 2011

Schneider’s repetitions are not the enactment of a self-destructive compulsion. Rather, she has invented a new ritual of self-habituation. Her photographs assert that a house is a persistent archetype whose form—a rectangle topped by a triangle—is overcrowded by normative domestic values crammed into the most personal place of all. Sometimes it cries for release. Schneider proposes that, as you leave old homes to memory and practice future ones, you create the most intense housewarming possible.

by Jason Foumberg

                                                                                    Jerry Uelsmann, Untitled

In the 1960s, while street photography by Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus reigned supreme, Jerry Uelsmann was busy in his darkroom combining negatives into an imagined intuitive reality. Building on 19th-century techniques pioneered by Oscar Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson, Uelsmann was the first to use multiple enlargers (as many as seven) to seamlessly expose separate elements into a single photograph. Looking closely at a Uelsmann print, it is hard not to be smitten by his craft. 

                                                                                        Jerry Uelsmann, Untitled

A rare opportunity to scrutinize a broad range of his work is on view at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, through July 15. Curated by Phillip Prodger, the first full-time Curator of Photography at the Peabody, the show begins with straight portraits from Uelsmann’s formative years as a graduate student at Indiana University (he studied with experimental photographer Henry Holmes Smith) and candid street documents picturing the racial segregation he encountered when he moved to Gainesville to begin teaching at the University of Florida in 1960. It was while teaching in Florida that Uelsmann began using multiple enlargers to build his signature composite images one element at a time. His visual vocabulary is easily recognizable: a pair of hands, water, clouds, birds, trees, floating rocks, a solitary figure and the deep rich blacks used to montage everything together. Most of the photographs are untitled, allowing viewers to create their own metaphoric meaning. Uelsmann has always been keen to expand ideas about what a photograph can and should be. A short video offers an intimate glimpse of Uelsmann working in the darkroom, revealing how a composite photograph is created. What emerges above all is a palpable sense of the magic that sustains his craft.

by Edie Bresler

Robert Adams, New development on a former citrus-growing estate, Highland, California, 1983. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, Matthew Marks Gallery

Some artists stand out as individuals, regardless of how tied up they become in the trajectory of history. Picasso will always be Picasso, bold and balding, in a studio with a cigarette between his fingers. Willem De Kooning, Louise Bourgeois, or Diane Arbus are like that too, individuals with personae first and foremost. Then there are artists who seem to serve something bigger. They’re of a moment, of a movement, or devoid of a distracting persona. Robert Adams falls into this latter camp, and I imagine he would be gratified, though not at all surprised, to hear it.

A traveling Robert Adams retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through June 3 has an all-embracing, almost utopic title: "The Place We Live." The “place” it refers to is the American West that Adams began photographing in the late 1960s, making stripped-down images of post-war tract homes, the very existence of which angered him. He worked like an artist-messenger, bent on showing people what industry and suburbia looked like when they spread into places they didn’t belong. 

Robert Adams, Frame for a tract house, Colorado Springs, Colorado, 1969. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, Matthew Marks Gallery

The show progresses chronologically, starting with 1960s photographs of small town Colorado. In one image, you can see from the front window of a single-story rancher through the back window, and the light is so severe that it seems the house’s mere existence angers the sun. As you weave through the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s, Adams becomes more interested in just capturing the land’s beauty, photographing cottonwood trees and the ocean’s surface. This shift toward the sublime would be fine, if image groups weren’t marked by wall labels, often the same as Adams's book titles, so sentimental they soften the imagery’s sparseness -- The Plains, Summer Nights, Along Some Rivers, Sea Stories. These labels give precedence to the Adams who said he’d feel bad for you “if you haven’t loved a tree” over the more compelling Adams who made pictures because he was distressed by “inhumanity and greed” but still “swept away by the grandeur of the light” he saw in the landscape he loved. 

By Catherine Wagley

                                                                      Erik Madigan Heck, from The Surrealist Ideal

At its most imaginative, fashion photography is an invitation to visit a new and often startling world, one that the photographer and designer have conspired to create for our enchantment. The clothes are only the starting point, or at least they are in “The Surrealist Ideal,” a new series by fashion photographer Erik Madigan Heck in collaboration with much-raved-about young designer Mary Katrantzou. Bizarre, provocative, and deliciously hued, these 14 works reference “early Parisian Surrealist painters, Catholic iconography, and Greek mythology,” according to Heck. 

Based in New York, Heck is not yet 30 but has already collaborated with a host of A-list fashion designers, and earlier this year, Forbes magazine named the 28-year-old to its prestigious 30 Under 30 list in Art & Design. “The Surrealist Ideal” marks his third consecutive collaboration with Katrantzou. Together, these two artists test the boundaries of fashion photography, and part of the enjoyment of viewing “The Surrealist Ideal” is knowing that Heck and Katrantzou are testing their own limits too. “The Surrealist Ideal” is on view at Heck’s site, maisondesprit.com, and will also be published on the Website of fashion and culture journal A Magazine.

                                                                                Photo by John Milisenda

Has there ever been a better time to appreciate good street photography? Reality TV, the proliferation of cellphone cameras, and social media like Facebook and Twitter have turned us into a highly self-regarding culture. We just can’t look away from ourselves, nor can we do anything without documenting it. But there was a time, not that long ago, when the only people walking around taking pictures of everyday life were dedicated photographers. Because I live in New York City, where it’s typical to see people snapping iPhone photos of even their meals before they eat them, I think about this a lot. So when I came across a posting on John Milisenda at the Lightbox tumblr, curated by the photo editors of Time magazine, I couldn’t resist including his work here. “The photographs,” noted Milisenda, “are a candid portrait of everyday life experience, balanced between romanticism and mean streets.”

                                                                                          Photo by John Milisenda

I appreciate these images for the photography itself and, of course, for the fashion, but also for their authenticity. The realness of the moments and of the people, the lack of self-consciousness. Sometimes I miss those days. Milisenda’s photographs from the Lower East Side are on view at the Grand Central Library through June 20.

by Kristina Feliciano

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