i spy me tiny eye

Celebrating her 80th birthday with a show at Bruce Silverstein, the self-reflexive nature of American photographer Rosalind Solomon's images was once described thus: "It would not be wrong to assert that for Solomon, every portrait is truly a self-portrait, a test of the self against another self” (Rosenheim, Rosalind Solomon: Disconnections). Exhibited together with the mask-like Fanø headdresses photographed in Vermeer fashion over three years by Danish artist Trine Søndergaard Strude, this exhibition engenders a hot debate in one's mind together with the many other photographic shows that have just opened in New York the last week or so. Does Susan Sontag's argument of a "chronic voyeuristic relation" (On Photography, 1977) on the proliferation of photographic images still hold true? Is our voyeurism now totally numbed by the gazillions of web photos and thus in wanting to see everything in one's relatively small world we end up seeing nothing in particular? Or as Sontag wrote about our aspiration to have "the whole world in our heads - as an anthology of images"? In Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)
she writes of "our culture of spectatorship neutralizes the moral force of photographs of atrocities...Images anesthetize”.

The New York Photo Festival was founded in January 2007 to give New York a platform for younger emerging photographic talents. (Interesting about the recent AIPAD show at the Armory was that though it was much to do with the 'fineness' of photography as art, the overall effect made one realise that this work was only ever truly 'affecting' in any way if it still smelt of its grass roots.) NY Photo Fest utilises the thriving galleries of Brooklyn's new residential district DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass - the bridges looming above the pathways below as if a Godzilla movie were about to begin) in this 4-day event (May 14-18th). Last night at St. Ann’s Warehouse 12 major awards were publicly presented and 24 artists given Honorable Mention certificates. As you'd expect, the festival as a who;e is a mixed bag of treats and agendas. At the Warehouse Hidden Books, Hidden Stories is curated by musician Lou Reed (who's composed an original score for a series of projected photos) and is one of 4 main themed exhibitions in the festival. There's also an installation of Doug and Mike Starn's photographs and videos for Big Bambú now atop the Met roof.

Curator Erik Kessels’ show Use Me, Abuse Me explores several questions, including: Where will image-making take us? Will all existing photography be endlessly recycled? What is most beguiling, though, both here and in other spaces is when the work on show emanates from the personal and the soul rather than existing as an abstraction - as in the simplicity of Claudia Sola's ring binder album 1974-1999. It seems like nothing new and yet it just is. Or Chantal Rens' child-like collages.

Bodies in Question curated by Fred Ritchin is headlined by the first U.S. exhibition of Marc Garanger’s controversial 1960 portraits of Algerian women, His job as a French combat photographer was to force Algerian women to be photographed without their veils ( often for the first time) to create army identity cards. Linn Underhill in No-Man’s Land restages George Platt Lynes's portraits of writers and artists casting herself in the title role: T.S. Eliot, Joan Miro, Marsden Hartley, Tennessee Williams, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, among others. "Mimicking the glamorous style and subtle lighting of Lynes's black and white images, Underhill draws attention to the homoerotic gaze of Lynes’s photographs." And how affected are we by Michael Wolf's Google street views? Does he provoke questions that we are just too lazy or busy to ask? Robbie Cooper's Alter Ego project pairs in the same frame a reality portrait of gamers alongside their cyber avatar. Raphaël Dallaporta (Parker Stephenson's gallery - French radio interview and much more) was recent recipient of Young Photographer at this year's ICP (International Center of Photography) Infinity Awards for his eerily beautiful landmines and cluster bombs - photographing them as if they were perfume bottles. His Domestic Slavery is on show at Photo Fest in which "he depicts the affluent residences of people accused and often convicted of keeping housekeepers and nannies (typically young women immigrants) in slavery."

Elsewhere in the satellite spaces, there is Véronique Bourgoin's Magic Trick of Polaroids, and FotoVisura's Latin American Pavilion is also worth checking out with Susan Bank's B/W photos creating a memory of reality in the observer that perhaps never was but is nonetheless palpable and provoking.

Meantime over the bridges in Manhattan at Robert Mann's gallery, Laurent Millet's The Last Days of Immanuel Kant takes Kant's waning powers as the inspiration for his own explorations of phenomenological doubt. His ephemeral sculptural tableaux are made only to be photographed. Most often, remarked little Viva to the artist, photos of art work so often remain only that with no dialectic between the work, the image and the observer. Millet agreed that his work was engaged in being "only a photo but" - the but being the quiet yet dynamic meeting place of the three aforementioned positions.

Last day of Adrian Paci's Gestures at Peter Blum (a great Chris Marker show last year) with video work where one second of footage is slowed down so that it stretches to 5 minutes and 18 seconds creating a watercolour fall of memory. MoMA's Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography has 200 works by approximately 120 artists occupying the third-floor Edward Steichen Photography Galleries. Many familiar names here to those in the moderate 'know' - Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, Dorothea Lange, Lisette Model, Tina Modotti, Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Annette Messager, Kiki Smith, Hannah Wilke. But quite a few that aren't or rather who don't often get as much of an airing as this such as turn of the 20th century American photographers Frances Benjamin Johnston (her school photos of contemporary African American life) and Gertrude Käsebier. One is initially greeted to the exhibition by Yoko Ono and George Maciunas's large Fluxus Wallpaper (early 1970s) buttocks endlessly repeating (from her 1966 film). Recent acquisitions on view for the first time include Claude Cahun's self-portrait in drag (1921) (one subject in the Wellcome Institute London's Identity show) and Helen Levitt (last year's memorial tribute show at the Laurence Miller Gallery that included her rarely seen silent film, In the Street (1944). Look out too for Germaine Krull and Margaret Bourke-White.

Laurence Miller's current show is Philippe Halsman's Jump (did Vogue purloin and homage Halsman when Grace Coddington had the idea of photographing the guy behind the camera documenting her at Vogue in The September Issue?) If one needs more Kant then there's Adrian Piper's self-portrait series Food for the Spirit (1971), a meditation on transcendental being through an analysis of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
MoMA's publication of Modern Women: Women Artists at The Museum of Modern Art is available in June 2010 and there's an audio tour podcast.

At Sputnik Anton Litvin in The Shining allows photography to question the nature of using synthetic gilding in the domes of Orthodox Russian churches. He represented Russia at the Venice Biennale a few years ago and it was no surprise that he responded when asked about his 'art expo' experineces that the surface of such events often got just too much for him. The magazine/gallery Esopus currently have a show (including a a new John Baldessari work Foot and Stocking Series - this artist's photos from the '70s have never lost any of their quiet power of observation). Worth noting is Erica Allen's Untitled Gentleman - a series of fictional portraits created using anonymous faces from contemporary barbershop hairstyle posters combined with figures from discarded studio photographs. (Her blog). Online, her friend Lissa Rivera has some interesting work too.

Not photographic, but the inaugural show at Marianne Boesky's new uptown gallery closing today (over 3 floors of this old townhouse) seems almost a photo of some invisible event. There's a tingy ghostly feel to the place as if the house's occupant(s) abandoned quickly allowing the art work to quietly take up temporary residence - a continuum of Lucio Fontana with Robert Beck and Donald Moffet (Beck had a long overdue show at the Wexner in 2007).
*.*
.*.
-
--