Films to Watch- Chris Marker’s “Sans Soleil” and “La Jetée”

 Art, Artists, Photographers / Photography, Video and Film
Dec 052024
 

Chris Marker’s 1983 poetic travelogue Sans Soleil brings something new with every rewatch. The film consists of footage, some stock and some of Marker’s own work, taken around the world, with a focus primarily on Japan and Guinea-Bissau. Along with these images, a narrator (Alexandra Stewart in the English version) reads from the letters she received from the fictitious cameraman. Within these letters are his thoughts on memory, history, culture, and life itself.

On this viewing it was his mention of Sei Shonagon, a lady in waiting to Princess Sadako in Japan at the beginning of the 11th century, and her lists, that stood out for me.

He says:

“Do we ever know where history is really made? Rulers ruled and used complicated strategies to fight one another. Real power was in the hands of a family of hereditary regents; the emperor’s court had become nothing more than a place of intrigues and intellectual games. But by learning to draw a sort of melancholy comfort from the contemplation of the tiniest things this small group of idlers left a mark on Japanese sensibility much deeper than the mediocre thundering of the politicians. Shonagon had a passion for lists: the list of ‘elegant things,’ ‘distressing things,’ or even of ‘things not worth doing.’ One day she got the idea of drawing up a list of ‘things that quicken the heart.’ Not a bad criterion I realize when I’m filming…”

Finding things, however small, that “quicken the heart” is a lovely criterion for life in general and this film is certainly on the list.

After watching Sans Soleil, and researching Marker, I watched one of his earlier works, the science fiction featurette  La Jetée. Constructed using still images, it contains only one brief shot made with a movie camera.

Using voice over narration, the short film takes place after World War III and tells the story of a prisoner in a post-apocalyptic Paris forces to time travel to the past and future in the hopes of saving the present. The man has a vivid memory from his childhood before the war of a woman he had seen at the airport, just before witnessing a man’s death. Through his time travel he is able to meet and develop a relationship with her as an adult. Time and memory, themes also present in Sans Soleil, were subjects Marker retained an interest in exploring in many of his films throughout the years.

La Jetée would go on to influence many artists, musicians, and filmmakers over the years. One of the most famous examples is Terry Gilliam’s movie 12 Monkeys which uses several of the film’s concepts of time travel.

Criterion Collection has released both movies together along with Marker’s six minute film Junktopia, and other extras. For more information on his filmography, Catherine Lupton has written a very informative essay on their website.

 

 

Los Angeles Art Shows- “Abstracted Light: Experimental Photography” at The Getty

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Los Angeles Art Shows, Photographers / Photography, Video and Film
Nov 202024
 

“Untitled”, 1930s-40s, Osamu Shiihara, photogram

The Getty has gathered several innovative photo works made from the 1920s to the 1950s for Abstracted Light: Experimental Photography, part of their PST ART: Art & Science Collide series. The exhibition also includes several experimental films and a room dedicated to Thomas Wilfred’s  “Lumia Instruments” that produce colorful moving abstract forms.

From the museum-

Light abstraction emerged after the First World War as a preoccupation of photographers and filmmakers in international centers of art production. Many artists began seeing light as something that could be manipulated, then photographed and filmed, like any other physical material. This exhibition offers a selection of works, dating from the 1920s onward, that reveals these artists’ fascination with the formal qualities of light as well as their innovative methods of projecting, reflecting, and refracting its rays to liberate their media from traditional modes of representation. They emphasized the novelty of their varied approaches by inventing new terms-including “Rayograph” (Man Ray), “Light Drawing” (Barbara Morgan), “Luminogramm” (Otto Steinert), “Photogenics” (Lotte Jacobi), and “Lumia” (Thomas Wilfred) -to characterize their work. “More and more artists of our generation have begun to contemplate light with the eyes of a sculptor gazing upon a block of marble,” noted Wilfred, “seeing in light a new and basic medium of expression with unlimited possibilities.”

Below are a few selections.

Edward W. Quigley, “Untitled (Light Abstraction)” 1931-39, and “Vortex”, 1933, Gelatin silver prints

Nathan Lerner, “Car Light Study #7”, 1939, and Hy Hersh, “Untitled (Abstraction)”, About 1950, Chromogenic print

Man Ray, “Untitled (Sequins)”, 1930 and “Untitled (Corkscrew and Lampshade)”, 1927

Francis Bruguiére, “Untitled (Design in Abstract Forms of Light)”, About 1927

This exhibition closes 11/24/24.

California Art Shows- Horace Poolaw at Agua Caliente Cultural Museum in Palm Springs

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, California Travel, Palm Springs, Photographers / Photography, Places to Visit
Oct 142024
 

The Agua Caliente Cultural Museum opened in 2023 in its new location in Palm Springs as part of the Agua Caliente Cultural Plaza. It consists of several exhibition areas that tell the story of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians. These include an immersive digitally animated film in a theater at the entrance, scale replicas of the Indian Canyons, and videos, historical photographs and documents. The museum also includes several artifacts including those found during excavations for the plaza that are over 7,000 years old.

The museum also has a gallery for rotating exhibitions focused on traditional and contemporary Native American art. Currently on view is For a Love of His People, the black and white photography of Horace Poolaw.

From the museum–

Horace Poolaw (Kiowa, 1906-1984) was born during a time of great change for his people—one year before Oklahoma statehood and six years after the U.S. government approved an allotment policy that ended the reservation period. A rare American Indian photographer who documented Indian subjects, he began making a visual history in the mid-1920s and continued for the next 50 years.

Poolaw photographed his friends and family, and events important to them—weddings, funerals, parades, fishing, driving cars, going on dates, going to war, playing baseball. When he sold his photos at fairs and community events, he often stamped the reverse: “A Poolaw Photo, Pictures by an Indian, Horace M. Poolaw, Anadarko, Okla.” Not simply by “an Indian,” but by a Kiowa man strongly rooted in his multi-tribal community, Poolaw’s work celebrates his subjects’ place in American life and preserves an insider’s perspective on a world few outsiders are familiar with—the Native America of the Southern Plains during the mid-20th century.

Organized around the central theme of Poolaw as a man of his community and time, For a Love of His People is based on the Poolaw Photography Project, a research initiative established by Poolaw’s daughter, Linda, in 1989 at Stanford University and carried on by Native scholars Nancy Marie Mithlo (Chiricahua Apache) and Tom Jones (Ho-Chunk) of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

For a Love of His People: The Photography of Horace Poolaw is organized by the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. The exhibition was curated by Tom Jones (Ho-chunk) and Nancy Marie Mithlo (Chiricahua Apache).

Below are a few selections from the show-

NYC Art Shows- LaToya Ruby Frazier at the Museum of Modern Art

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Photographers / Photography
Aug 212024
 

Marilyn Moore, UAW Local 1112, Women’s Committee and Retiree Executive Board, with her General Motors company retirement gold ring on her index finger, (Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co., Lear Seating Corp., 32 years in at GM Lordstown Complex, assembly plant, van plant, metal fab, trim shop), Youngstown, OH, 2019 from “The Last Cruze” 2019

Frances Turnage, UAW Local 1112, Women’s Committee, holding her 10, 15, and 20 years of service General Motors company anniversary gold bracelets in her dining room, (34 years in at GM Lordstown Complex, paint shop) Youngstown, OH, 2019  from “The Last Cruze” 2019

LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity, currently on view at MoMA, presents several of the photographer’s bodies of work. Documenting her family, her town, and the hardworking people of several communities- she is telling the important stories of people whose lives are often overlooked.

From the museum about the exhibition-

“For this reason, it is incumbent upon me to resist—one photograph at a time, one photo essay at a time, one body of work at a time, one book at a time, one workers’ monument at a time—historical erasure and historical amnesia,” says artist-activist LaToya Ruby Frazier. Born in 1982 in the steel manufacturing town of Braddock, Pennsylvania, Frazier has used photography, text, moving images, and performance to revive and preserve forgotten stories of labor, gender, and race in the postindustrial era. LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity surveys the full range of the artist’s practice, highlighting her role as a social advocate and connector of the cultural and working classes in the 21st century.

For this exhibition, Frazier has reimagined her diverse bodies of work as a sequence of original installations that she calls “monuments for workers’ thoughts,” which address the harmful effects of industrialization and deindustrialization, the healthcare inequities facing Black working-class communities in the Rust Belt, the ongoing water crisis in Flint, Michigan, and the impact of the closure of a General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio. Monuments of Solidarity celebrates the expressions of creativity, mutual support, and intergenerational collaboration that persist in light of these denials of fundamental labor, human, and civil rights. As a form of Black feminist world-building, these nontraditional “monuments” demand recognition of the crucial role that women and people of color have played and continue to play in histories of labor and the working class.

“The Last Cruze” display

About The Last Cruze from the museum-

“A monument to the working-class people in this country,” as Frazier has characterized it, The Last Cruze was created in solidarity with the United Auto Workers Locals 1112 and 1714 in Lordstown, Ohio. In 2018 General Motors decided to cease North American production of the Chevrolet Cruze, leading to the “unallocation” and shuttering of the Lordstown assembly plant. Collaborating with Locals 1112 and 1714 members, Frazier made photographs that documented union-led efforts to prevent the closure.

Here more than sixty portraits of white, Black, and Latinx workers as well as images of factory labor are paired with printed excerpts from interviews Frazier conducted. These photographs and texts are displayed on a massive cadmium-red structure that resembles both an assembly line and cathedral buttressing. Framed by walls painted in two blue hues to match General Motors’ logo colors, a film featuring photographs by autoworker and photographer Kasey King follows the very last Cruze coming off the assembly line and the employees whose livelihoods depended on the plant.

“Self-Portrait with Shea and Her Daughter Zion in the Bedroom Mirror, Newton, Mississippi”, from the series “Flint Is Family, Part II”. 2017

“John Frazier, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Andrew Carnegie”, 2010

This exhibition closes 9/7/24.

Throwback- NYC Art Shows- Terence Gower’s “El Muro Rojo (Barragán)” from Galerie Lelong’s “Color Effects”

 Architecture, Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Installation Art, New York Art Shows, Photographers / Photography
Aug 152024
 

The images above are of Terence Gower’s El Muro Rojo (Barragán), 2005, from the group exhibition Color Effects at Galerie Lelong in NYC last year.

From the artist’s website about the work-

A large black and white photograph of the roof patio of the Casa Barragán is mounted on an enormous red wall. The photograph is a copy of Armando Salas Portugal’s famous 1953 photograph (this time commissioned from architectural photographer Jorge del Olmo), and shows a corner of Luis Barragán’s roof patio with its famous coloured walls reduced to grey tones. The work separates a tonal and planar understanding of the architecture from the “emotional” encounter with colour that Barragán aspired to.

From his statement about his practice-

I work on a number of bodies of work at once, each developed over several years. In the past decade my work has focused on a critical re-reading of the modern movement and its utopian bent. A desire to reexamine the notion of progress—a term corrupted by the excesses of technological modernism—has fueled my research on the post-war period and has led to a search for models from the past that might still be relevant today.

Below is the Armando Salas Portugal color photograph referenced by Gower’s work.

Armando Salas Portugal, “Barragán House”, Mexico City, 1948. View of the roof terrace in the late 1960s. Image via Barragan Foundation

Armando Salas Portugal is known for his photographs of the Mexican countryside and the architecture of the city. He captured the work of several famous architects, in addition to Luis Barragán’s projects.

From Wikipedia about the influence of modernism on Barragán and his concept of “emotional architecture“-

Barragán visited Le Corbusier and became influenced by European modernism. The buildings he produced in the years after his return to Mexico show the typical clean lines of the Modernist movement. Nonetheless, according to Andrés Casillas (who worked with Barragán), he eventually became entirely convinced that the house should not be “a machine for living.” Opposed to functionalism, Barragán strove for an “emotional architecture” claiming that “any work of architecture which does not express serenity is a mistake.” Barragán used raw materials such as stone or wood. He combined them with an original and dramatic use of light, both natural and artificial; his preference for hidden light sources gives his interiors a particularly subtle and lyrical atmosphere.

NYC Art Shows- Ming Smith at Nicola Vassell

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Photographers / Photography
Jun 132024
 

For the exhibition  Ming Smith: On the Road at Nicola Vassell, a variety of work from the artist’s impressive career is on display throughout the space.

From the gallery-

Nicola Vassell is pleased to present Ming Smith: On the Road, a selection of photographs from the artist’s archive that encapsulates the arc of her exploratory impulses as she sought and probed new subject matter and formal innovation from 1970 through 1993. Encompassing never-before-seen vintage and contemporary prints of images captured during her travels around the world, On the Road embodies the spirit of adventure and curiosity that advanced Smith’s singular entry into, and scrutiny of, the provinces of urban existence, nature’s quietude, family intimacy, popular culture, military life, and jazz milieus.

In the 1970s in New York, Smith’s practice was propelled by inquiry—both through her immersion in the Kamoinge Workshop and her preoccupation with the ideas of prominent twentieth-century American and European photographers. Cultivating her own radical sensibility in early experiments, she alluded to the virtuosity of Brassaï, Roy DeCarava, Diane Arbus, and Robert Frank. These artists set a tempo upon which Smith developed her own dexterity in portraiture, landscape, and street photography—highly attuned to the textures, geometries, and thrums pulsing through every spectrum of life. She recognized the haunting allure of an oil-slicked roadside and the liquid lightning of brass instruments in musicians’ animated hands.

Smith listens through her camera, sensitive to the harmony and dissonance that enliven her subjects and surroundings. At times, it is easy to forget that she works in a static medium, since each photograph transports its viewer into the energetic nucleus of the moment she captures. Through paint application, double exposure, and low shutter speed, Smith pushes photography’s form to the point of its brim and break. Like harnessing a memory, Smith underlines the evanescent—at once vivid and obscure.

This exhibition closes 6/15/24.

NYC Art Shows- “Tiptoeing Through the Kitchen: Recent Photography” at Luhring Augustine

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, New York Art Shows, Photographers / Photography
Jun 072024
 

Shaun Pierson

William Eric Brown

Sophia Chai

Sheida Soleimani

Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez

Kevin Landers

Brittany Nelson

The seven artists on view at Luhring Augustine for the exhibition Tiptoeing Through the Kitchen, Recent Photography, each bring a unique vision to their practice. The artists included in this show are William Eric Brown, Sophia Chai, Kevin Landers, Brittany Nelson, Shaun Pierson, Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez, and Sheida Soleimani. Below is more detailed information on the work from the gallery.

From the press release-

“Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.”  – Diane Arbus

Materialized in varying ways, kinship and cultural inheritance are frequent touchstones for many of these artists. William Eric Brown’s works — the source images for which were taken in Antarctica in the 1950s by the artist’s father while serving in the US Navy and stationed on an icebreaker — are instilled with new significance through his manipulation and reconceptualization, which address the current reality of climate change and its effects on the arctic. Sophia Chai explores her memory of learning the Korean alphabet as a child through her work. By drawing and painting the shapes and lines of the characters on the walls and floor of her studio, Chai reimagines them in space, thereby abstracting written communication into an embodiment of the sensation of each word being formed inside the mouth.

Sheida Soleimani stages elaborately constructed tableaux to address interwoven narratives of family, politics, and caregiving that trace both personal and public histories. Her carefully fabricated scenes demonstrate her commitment to approaching her practice with measured sensitivity; rather than divorcing her subjects from their own realities, Soleimani creates a contemplative space in which each incorporated object or image conveys an intentional message. Similarly, Shaun Pierson’s work illuminates the complex dynamics in the relationship between photographer and subject. Entwining conflicting sensations of inhibition and desire, Pierson lays bare the often simultaneously transactional and vulnerable apparatus and process of making photographs. Kevin Landers’ photographs, taken on the streets of New York and across the country, are rooted firmly in the here and now. He documents a collection of seemingly unnoticed moments, paying careful attention to unexpected details that, more often than not, most people would simply walk past — ephemera such as an abandoned shopping cart or an intricately woven spider web, expanding our notion of landscape beyond simply the pastoral.

Queer desire and a longing for another space and time are explored through the re-authoring of found or archival images in the works of Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez and Brittany Nelson. Reyes Rodriguez pairs images from his own history with a series of photographs he purchased from a bookshop in Mexico City — dated between 1987 and 1993, the found snapshots evidence the personal experiences of a young, presumably queer, man known to us as “Technoir.” By combining the two archives, Reyes Rodriguez invites us to dwell in a space of merged memories, neither of which we can fully inhabit, and of the desire to know more. While at first glance Brittany Nelson’s use of archival materials is less overtly personal, her work considers themes of otherness, isolation, and the desire for connection. In one of the series on view, she perceived a sense of romantic devastation in the images taken by Opportunity, the Mars rover, which she amplifies by re-printing them using the 1920s analog bromoil photographic process, thereby infusing them with an added eerie, otherworldly quality.

Though varied in their approaches to photographic practice, what unifies these artists is their investigation of longing, care, and lineage — familial and otherwise — and the way in which they use the medium and the process of making the work as a means to engage with others, with themselves, and to challenge expectations. Generating a constellated conversation that draws upon photography’s history, yet turns toward something altogether new, the artists included in Tiptoeing Through the Kitchen, Recent Photography imbue the seemingly unknown with flashes of recognition.

This exhibition closes 6/8/24.

Florida Art Shows- “Gary Winogrand: Beautiful Women” at Tampa Museum of Art

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Books, Florida Art Shows, Photographers / Photography, Tampa
Apr 172024
 

Currently Tampa Museum of Art is showing work from Garry Winogrand’s book, Beautiful Women. The photographs are from the 1960s and 1970s and are a fascinating glimpse of this time period. His ability to find and capture these brief moments is impressive.  At the same time, some of the photos of these women feel invasive and, as said in the museum’s statement on the work below, voyeuristic.

From the museum-

Garry Winogrand was a master at photographing the unseen, extraordinary moments of everyday life. With his Leica camera, Winogrand photographed both up close and at a distance, but spontaneously as the image came together. He liked to break the rules of photography by ignoring traditional horizon lines and shooting at titled angles to create compositional allure.
Described as one of the 20th-century’s most influential street photographers, Winogrand often defied social decorum by getting into the space of his subjects – sometimes unknowingly to the person and at other times to their great annoyance. He captured life in the 1960s and 1970s in the blink of an eye, preferably with his 28mm lens which allowed more of what was in front of him to be featured in the frame. Winogrand once remarked, “I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs.”

Women are Beautiful represents of one Winogrand’s most celebrated yet controversial artworks. His magnum opus, Women are Beautiful was first published as a book in 1975 and later printed as a portfolio in 1981. Comprised of 85 photographs, the works were shot over a ten-year period between 1965 and 1975, notably at the height of second-wave feminism and the sexual revolution, the anti-war movement, and the civil rights movement. As the title suggests, women served as the inspiration for the project. Winogrand culled images from his extensive archive that emphasized the confidence, vibrancy, and individuality of the American woman. While the photographs have been lauded as artifacts of their time, the works have also been criticized as voyeuristic and invasive to women’s privacy. Both observations deserve consideration in viewing this body of work.

The presentation of Women are Beautiful in this gallery follows the format of the book, which is now out of print. Winogrand selected the images and organized the photos without reference to subject, date, and place. Apart from the first photograph in the series, the images are presented as pairs to represent Winogrand’s book spreads. This arrangement aims to highlight how the photographer viewed and read his pictures. While women anchor the photographs, Winogrand looked at the total image-such as the other people in the photo or the quietness of solitude, the surrounding landscape, and the objects featured in the frame. At quick glance, the connections between images may not appear readily visible but it is in these photographs that Winogrand invites viewers to take a longer, closer look at the pictures. Subtle gestures such as the common angle of limbs and facial profiles, or shadows, corners, and lines – even the shared shading of a hat and tree-inspired Winogrand’s paired selections. Viewed together, the photographs reveal a deliberate sequencing and pacing, like a storyboard or film. Winogrand’s Women are Beautiful offers insight into the vantage point of one the 20th-century’s most accomplished photographers.

Below are some of the pairs from the show.

This exhibition closes 4/21/24.

Ohio Art Shows- “Arbus, Sherman, Woodman: American Photography from the 1960s and 1970s” at Columbus Museum of Art

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Columbus, Films, Ohio Art Shows, Photographers / Photography
Mar 072024
 

Francesca Woodman, “Untitled (Rome), 1977-8, Gelatin silver print (image via Columbus Museum of Art)

Two of Cindy Sherman’s “Film Stills”, Gelatin silver prints from the 1970s

Four Gelatin silver prints by Diane Arbus

Francesca Woodman’s “Italy”, 1977-1978 (printed later) Gelatin silver print

Currently on view at Columbus Museum of Art is Arbus • Sherman • Woodman: American Photography from the 1960s and 1970s. Although many of these photographs by Diane Arbus, Cindy Sherman and Francesca Woodman are well known, it’s great to see the work of these three exceptional artists in person. The black and white images still captivate, even in our current image saturated world.

About the show from the museum-

This selection of monochromatic prints reflects a shared interest in capturing the world outside oneself as well as the world within. Perspective is an elemental link between each work: the images speak to how we see ourselves as individuals, how we are perceived, and how we observe others.

While Arbus was known for photographing families, children, pedestrians, performers, and celebrities, both Sherman and Woodman turned the camera on themselves. Dressing as anonymous female film characters from the 1950s and 1960s, Sherman poses in the series “Untitled Film Stills”. However, these works are not considered self-portraits, but rather carefully constructed performances of various female identities. Conversely, Woodman’s surrealist images might be called non-traditional self-portraits. By obscuring, blurring, or cropping parts of herself out of the final image, the photographs become intimate, personal snapshots that reflect a wider human fragility.

Arbus, Sherman, and Woodman are considered among the most prominent twentieth-century photographers and remain influential to contemporary artists today. By including aspects of feminism in their work and pushing the limits of the medium, these women challenged societal norms of their time while contributing to the elevation of photography as an art form.

It’s always interesting to hear artists discuss each other’s work. Included in the exhibition is this quote by Cindy Sherman about Francesca Woodman-

“She had few boundaries and made art out of nothing: empty rooms with peeling wallpaper and just her figure. No elaborate stage set-up or lights… Her process struck me more the way a painter works, making do with what’s right in front of her, rather than photographers like myself who need time to plan out what they’re going to do.”

For more on Francesca Woodman, her short life, and her artistic family, The Woodmans is an excellent documentary.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2024

 Art, Artists, Books, History, Photographers / Photography, Politics
Jan 162024
 

(photograph by Richard Avedon from The New Yorker’s website)

Above is Richard Avedon’s portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. with his father, Martin Luther King, and his son, Martin Luther King III, 1963. The image is part of the 1964 book Nothing Personal, Avedon’s collaboration with writer James Baldwin.

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