ANAP blogs (Alec Soth, Brian Ulrich, Amy Elkins, Shen Wei)

A few of the ANAP artists also keep personal blogs on photography, which I’m deeming “required reading.”

For your perusal:

Alec Soth
Brian Ulrich
Amy Elkins
Shen Wei

Stay tuned for more required reading.

Co-curators Jörg Colberg and Jen Bekman with Alec Soth at the ANAP opening

Hi there, readers. This is Shane—photographer, blogger, and short-term summer intern at jb—here to give you a bit of news about your favorite gallerist.

Though first, let me just say that if you were not at the opening for A New American Portrait you did miss quite a fantastic event—and I’m not just saying this because I feel obligated to. As already mentioned, the turnout was remarkable and the work looks especially nice “in the flesh.”

Gallerist Ed Winkleman had quite a few kind words to say about the exhibition on his blog, describing the show as “a wonderful survey of contemporary portraiture in photography.” And Padddy Johnson of the notorious Art Fag City had a bit of fun with the digital snaps that Alec took on her camera at the opening. If you’re curious, there are more pictures from opening night available online in both Jen and Jörg’s Flickr streams.

And fortunately, for those of you who weren’t able to make it on Friday, the work will be on view at the gallery until August 3.

Now back to the original point of this post, eh?

Just yesterday, Jen was on a radio show where she spoke with Eva Lake about the ANAP show, the gallery, her new 20×200 project, Hey, Hot Shot!, Personism, blogs in general, her List of Women Speakers for Your Conference, plus a whole lot more.

Basically, she talked about everything ever.

I found that the conversation was very interesting especially for those less familiar with what goes on the at the gallery. Listeners will get a good sense of Jen’s motivations as a gallerist and a bit of information about her plethora of projects.

The podcast is worth a listen if you’ve got the time.

You can download the .mp3 archive here (0:56:55).

Co-curator Jörg Colberg: tall, lanky, German. Check out the ANAP Opening Reception Set on Flickr.

Friday night’s opening for A New American Portrait lived up to all the hype. It was one of the funnest openings we’ve ever hosted and it went so smoothly which was a relief. As you might know from pictures or in person, the gallery is tiny and the pre-show buzz was huge. Packed openings are fun and all, but can be anxiety provoking – I worry about pictures being knocked askew and cops issuing open container summonses (when the festivities inevitably spill out on to Spring St.) and about running out of booze. A million little things! It’s often hard for me to relax and have a good time. There were a few tense moments on Friday, but generally speaking I had a blast. The show looks gorgeous, all but two of the artists were in attendance and the weather was stunningly perfect.

I put up a set of opening night photos compliments of the ever-excellent Joe Holmes.

It was a really special night – I’m grateful to the jb intern crew for being totally on top of stuff and allowing me to relax and have a good time. (Not to mention the fact that most of them stayed behind to clean up so I could go on to the closing party at Silverstein for the even better in person than on her blog Zoe Strauss and her totally kick-ass show.) It was wonderful to have Christine Collins, Ben Donaldson, Amy Elkins, Alec Soth, Peter Haakon Thompson, Brian Ulrich and Shen Wei come from near and far to be there for the opening. And of course, I cannot even begin to tell you how great it’s been working with Jörg, my collaborator and my friend, who is seriously terrific and smart and wonderful. I wish he and his lovely wife Karen Tozzi lived here in NYC - then we could meet for breakfast at Veselka all the time!

Thanks to everyone who made it out, and I hope to see many more of you between now and when the show closes on August 3rd. We might even throw another event into the mix between now and then. Watch this space for more on ANAP, it’s artists and etc – we’ll continue to update the blog with juicy tidbits for the duration of the show.

Pushing Mesh by Peter Haakon Thompson, from the exhibition A New American Portrait

Over on the Saatchi Your Gallery blog , Lupe Nunez-Fernandez has some thoughtful words about A New American Portrait. Here’s a particularly juicy bit:

...the show offers a variety of issues to think about, but point of view might be one of the most fascinating here. All of the works share an ambiguous, theatrical sense of detachment, a way in which the exhibition suggestively opens up a conversation on the inherently contradictory elements in contemporary portraiture.

Have a look at the entire write-up here.

We are nearly finished hanging the show, and it’s looking good. Hope to see lots of you tomorrow!

If anyone would know what makes a great portrait it would a photographer from the show A New American Portrait, right? So we simply asked them about their favourite portraits. In alphabetical order…

Christine Collins: “In thinking about how to answer your question, I realized that I love a lot of portraits and it was almost painful to leave some out. People are endlessly interesting and the way photographers choose to represent them is the stuff of magic. I’ve seen my students make some amazing portraits – brave, real, unflinching portraits and that’s been amazing to watch. To pick favorites seems as hard and arbitrary as picking favorite songs or films (questions I dread). Don’t those answers change too often to record? So in response, here are (for the moment) a few of my favorites on a list that is always changing. These are some of the images that make me catch my breath. Every time I see them.

“Andrea Modica, ‘Treadwell, New York, 2000’: Barbara, Modica’s subject and collaborator for fifteen years, passed away in 2001 with complications due to diabetes. They both knew she was fatally ill when they made this photograph. To have made this photograph (with that knowledge) feels like a gift. It is, at once, delightful and heartbreaking.

“Tina Barney, ‘Mrs. Barney’s Porch, 1982’: I do not know for a fact that this woman is Barney’s mother-in-law, but in the short story in my head she is. I love all the choices that were made in this photograph: the subject’s choice to wear her pearls with her bathrobe, the photographer’s choice to include the furniture in the foreground. Both are so telling and the divide created by those chairs seems impossible to cross.

“Richard Collins, ‘Untitled, 1971’ [see above]: My father made this photograph of my mother on their honeymoon in Maine. For me, the picture offers both a sense of the familiar and the suggestion of all those things we can never know about our parents. It’s my favorite kind of photograph, one that is perfectly descriptive and mysterious at the same time.”

Jennifer Davis: “I decided to make a top 5 list (in no particular order)...
Diane Arbus – A family on their lawn one sunday in Westchester, NY 1968
Elinor Carucci – Eran and I, 1998
William Eggleston – (Women in flower print dress on flower print couch) Jackson, Mississippi
Tina Barney – Jill and Polly in the Bathroom, 1987
Gary Winogrand – World’s Fair 1964”

Ben Donaldson: “This photograph is from Nicholas Nixon’s pictures in nursing homes.

“I had bought an 8×10 view camera in 1994, not knowing what it really was. I was studying painting, but had been taking pictures to paint portraits from. I happened to find Nick Nixon’s book “Pictures of People”and was truly shocked and profoundly changed by the forthright quality of how daring and original they were. I stopped painting at this time, and applied to the MassArt photo program (where I had been studying painting). I studied photography with Nick and a few their teachers there that used the view camera in interesting ways (Abe Morrell, Virginia Behan and Laura McPhee and others). It was the best school I could have ever imagined.

“This picture in particular convinced me that photography was an art form that could be used to make lucid statements about life in ways that I hadn’t realized before. It is a simply a picture of a hand. The particular detail derived from the large negative gives the picture specificity beyond belief, however. The stain on the table is heartbreaking in ways only something like that can be in a picture. The hand seems alert however, despite it’s age. It’s a bittersweet photograph to me. I still am moved by it, and I derive from it strength to make pictures that matter.”

Amy Elkins: “It’s hard for me to narrow down a favorite portrait photographer, and even tougher to narrow down a specific portrait. However if I had to choose a portrait photographer that inspires me greatly it would have to be Rineke Dijkstra. Her beach portraits, Spanish bullfighters, Mothers and the series on Almerisa, the young Bosnian girl. Her portraits not only speak to me of a psychological intensity within each of her sitters lives, but also the intensity of sharing a moment with her camera. Her work seems to be very much about the passing of time and the physical, emotional and psychological changes that surface with that passing. Her work was brought to my attention when somebody commented that my ‘Wallflower’ portraits reminded them of one of her Bullfighter portraits. We definitely have similar interests when making portraits of our subjects. ”

Peter Haakon Thompson: “I have lately been really fascinated with some photos that a friend, Mike Hoyt, has taken in the Norae (Song) Shanty, which is part of a project that I do besides photography!? called the Art Shanty (basically a bunch of artists re-imagining the purpose of an ice fishing shanty. Mike’s pictures of people singing karaoke in the Norae can be found here and here. He has hundreds (which I know does not really help your cause), but that is part of what makes them so cool to me, the sort of cross section of people who are willing to sing songs in public. All shot in this same small 8’x8’ space. My faves are probably in the first link.”

Todd Hido: “Even though much of my own work is pictures of places my entire collection of photographs made by other people are all portraits. I have portraits hung at my home and studio by E. J. Bellocq, August Sander, Helen Levitt, Alec Soth, Larry Sultan, and Jim Goldberg.

“I love them all very much and living with these great works has certainly seeped into my practice.

“But none has made more of an impact on me than this snapshot of my mother.

“I swiped it from our family albums. Somehow we have moments saved in there forever that you’d think a family would not want to remember?

“Probably my dad took this, because basically he’s getting her to pose like the people in those 80’s pornography magazines—like a “reader’s wives” section or stuff like that. That’s definitely where this kind of picture comes from. I remember looking at his magazines when I was a kid, and I remember seeing stuff like that.

“That maybe not what this is exactly?—even though this is a pose I never saw her in in daily life.

“What is of concern to me here is she seems to not be happy about having her picture taken. Where that comes from is when my dad would come home drunk and get her to do these things. It was pretty horrific for a boy to see. It is the root of many of my current portraits. This expression and feeling can be found throughout my pictures and that is why it is so important to me. It is a faded 4×4 gateway into my work.”

Alec Soth: “I can write about photography all day. But the best pictures, the ones that take my breath away, leave me struggling for words. There is no better example than Louis Faurer’s picture of Eddie. There is nothing else to say.” [unfortunately, the above image is the largest to be found online, and blowing it up reduces its quality too much, so I decided to keep the small size – JMC]

Brian Ulrich: “Portraits might just be the hardest photographs to make. Eternally problematic, capturing ones likeness in such high resolution equally fascinates and scares the pants off so many since the invention of photography. Power dynamics, psychological self exploration and projecting seem to be only the tip of the iceberg. In fact it seems one cannot do much to describe the act of meeting someone and asking them to ‘perform themselves’ in front of a camera. I tell students all the time, it’s frankly weird so get used to it.

“I can tell you that one of the most amazing things in the world is to watch someone from behind the camera as they sit, still and motionless in a frozen stance you may or may not have dictated for them. I myself have bad habits that contribute to this obsessiveness. I count lines in people’s face, take notes on fingernails in trains, and generally look for visual clues that might be helpful at some point for a picture, other times just curiosity.

“We’re perplexed by each other. Perpetual voyeurs and so much of our contemporary world seems about looking at each other in various states of performance and non-performance. I could go on… but Joerg asked for one picture and one stuck in my head (besides Duane Hanson) is the portrait below of Lewis Payne by Alexander Gardener. This image charged with such performance seems to show a sitter well aware of the power of the photograph. His confrontational gaze is one in which he appears all too aware will affect many generations. A last call, a fuck you, or perhaps a love letter. This would be assassin peered into that obscura box lens and may have even been focused on his reflection in such a predicament.

“Why I love this image is why I love good fiction. I can lose myself in it. And like some good writing, the character is described so well that love or hate I have no choice but to have a visceral reaction. I feel like I know this person though the image.

“Gardener who had cut his teeth photographing the civil war for Mathew Brady and later portraits of policitians described his work as: ‘It is designed to speak for itself. As mementos of the fearful struggle through which the country has just passed, it is confidently hoped that it will possess an enduring interest.’ Enduring indeed.”

Shen Wei: “After searching many of my favorite portraits, I have settled down with two of the legends. It was a class about Diane Arbus [Shen’s other pick] and a book of Nan Goldin affected me so much that I decided to become a photographer. For me, a good portrait is when I can gradually incubate a connection to the person in the photograph and start to care about the person in the photograph.”

Josh, Joelton, Tennessee 2004 by Alec Soth

Jörg has very kindly agreed to the occasional jb blog contribution in conjunction with our upcoming A New American Portrait exhibition, and I’ve promised to contribute some of my own thoughts on portraiture and the exhibition too. I’m working on it and will be posting here later this week (and throughout the show.) For some reason it’s easier for me to go on and on about, say, parking than it is for me to write about what I like and why when it comes to photography.

In the meanwhile, Alec Soth is articulate and on video talking about portraits, and the segments below are really worth a viewing. I’m especially fond of the third, The Ground Glass, where Alec describes a portrait as “A picture of the space between us.” Good stuff.

Odessa, Joelton, Tennessee, 2004 by Alec Soth

These videos were made by Mike Dust for The Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program. I’ve added some relevant links below and included two of the images referenced in the post here too. Josh, Joelton, Tennessee 2004 is a favorite of mine and was on my short list to be included in the exhibition. Odessa, Joelton, Tennessee, 2004 looks entirely different to me after watching Alec shoot the photo in the video.

In October of 2004, photographer Alec Soth went on assignment for LIFE magazine to capture weekend soldiers at an Airsoft military simulation in Joelton, Tennessee.

In anticipation of his upcoming exhibition, filmmaker Mike Dust traveled alongside Soth for this three-day excursion, interviewing and shooting alongside him as he worked to capture images for, both the magazine shoot as well as for his personal work.

A number of these photographs (Odessa, Joelton, Tennessee, 2004 and Josh, Joelton, Tennessee, 2004) became part of the exhibition Alec Soth: Portraits at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts the following spring. The video piece created during that shoot was installed in the gallery as an accompaniment to the exhibition.

The video is broken into three segments entitled On Assignment, Portraiture, and The Ground Glass.

Alec Soth: Portraits – On Assignment (2:33, segment 1 of 3), 2005, Video, 8 minutes, produced and directed by Mike Dust, © 2005 National Projects

Alec Soth: Portraits – Portraiture (2:25, segment 2 of 3), 2005, Video, 8 minutes, produced and directed by Mike Dust, © 2005 National Projects

Alec Soth: Portraits – The Ground Glass (3:06, segment 3 of 3), 2005, Video, 8 minutes, produced and directed by Mike Dust, © 2005 National Projects

With the opening of the upcoming show “A New American Portrait” approaching, this might be a good opportunity to talk about portraiture a bit. And what better way than to delve right in and to show some portraits? I did a little search online for some of the “classic” portraits that are amongst my favourites, and I managed to find most of the ones that I could think of. So here we go.

Edward Steichen’s portrait of JP Morgan is quite well known, and quite a portrait it is! This portrait was taken in 1903 – an era still very comfortable with painting, not long after photography had begun to replace painting as the popular means of creating a portrait. But then maybe this portrait will bore you – and if it does it’s worthwhile to think about why. Also have you noticed that’s not a knife in JP Morgan’s hand there?

August Sander is widely considered to be one of the godfathers of modern portraiture, and it’s not hard to see why. This is a fantastic portrait, three young farmers (yes, that’s right), proudly posing, around the time of Steichen’s portrait (I think just a few years later). It’s interesting how you wouldn’t easily get this same effect any longer even if you had all of Sander’s skills: Cameras are everywhere now, and people know how to pose. Of course, back then, people also knew how to pose, but it’s a different kind of posing, isn’t it? Look at Sander’s equally famous pastry chef:

Of course, the pose is not the only thing needed for a good portrait. One of the earlier masters of photographic composition in portraiture is Yousuf Karsh, who, unfortunately, is well known for portraits that aren’t nearly as nice as his best work. Sure, you’ve seen his Winston Churchill – really just a cliché of a photo! It’s like one of those standard portraits that painters had been painting so long. But look at this portrait:

I love how this photo conveys a sense of deep trust and understanding between the photographer and the artist, cellist Pablo Casals. It’s almost like you don’t really have to see much of Casals to still get a portrait of him – in contrast, Winston Churchill from the back would be a fat neck in a somewhat ill-fitting suit. For me, this photo of Casals says a lot about good portraiture – it is more than just photography, and it is not just the equivalent of painting.

Bill Brandt’s portrait of painter Francis Bacon is another great case of making composition work, since it violates almost every aspect of “good” photography – the subject isn’t looking at the camera, there’s that lantern that’s not quite in the center, the path leading out of the photo… but it just works so well! Needless to say, in order to get something like this to work, you really have to know what you’re doing.

The complete opposite of creating a great portrait, in which each and every commonly suggested element of good composition is violated, is Arnold Newman’s portrait of composer Igor Stravinsky:

What brilliant play of shapes – Igor Stravinsky dwarfed by the piano, whose open cover looks like a “b” (as in “b flat”)!

I had two other portraits in mind when preparing this list, one I couldn’t find. Richard Avedon’s work is widely know, and just as in the case of Yousuf Karsh, I actually prefer his lesser known work. I tried hard to find the very intimate photos he did of his ailing father, and there were nowhere to be found online. But this portrait of former President Eisenhower comes somewhat close to the quality of the photos of his father:

There’s a lot of subtle humanity in this photo, something that, perhaps not surprisingly, is even stronger in the photos of his ailing father, but that appears to be often missing in his work – despite the often convincing power of Avedon’s work.

Lastly, I like this following self-portrait done by Helmut Newton, whose work in general I’m not particularly fond of:

Self portraits often don’t allow you to read much into them, but this one does. First of all, you actually have to locate the person whose self portrait this is – you find him sandwiched between the reflection of one of his nude models (who is striking a pose) and Newton’s wife (who appears quite bored). And right in between there stands the photographer, hunched over his camera, wearing a trenchcoat. You can say what you want about Helmut Newton’s work, but this is quite a good self-portrait!

Needless to say, portraiture is a matter of taste, and you might find these photos so incredibly boring and prefer others… or not classics at all! But I think these classics do deserve to be counted among the great portraits – and I’m sure, once I post this I’ll remember other ones that I forgot.

Benno Schmidt, Portland Harbor by Spring Hot Shot Mark Marchesi

It’s been a big week at the jb. The Hey, Hot Shot! Spring Edition opening last night was a blast. You still have time to check out the exhibition: it’s on view this Friday, Saturday and Sunday from Noon-6pm.

Next up: we’ll spend the week getting ready for our big opening event on Friday June 22, for our Summer group exhibition A New American Portrait.

Here’s a round up of all the gallery related online mentions as of late:

Hey, Hot Shot! featured on the blog for Popular Photography magazine

Rob Walker interviews Jen about 20×200

Unbeige on 20×200

Josh Spear’s Heather Snodgrass on 20×200

Gallery Hopper on 20×200

Photographer Julian Thomas reconsiders 20×200

Photo-Muse on 20×200, but wait there’s more

JPG Magazine Blog on A New American Portrait

Jason Kottke on A New American Portrait

Photographer Greg Wasserstrom is really excited about A New American Portrait

Turkey Amanita – Amy Ross

It’s been a little hectic lately, and new posts have been scarce. We are sorry. We’ll try better this month.

If you haven’t seen Amy Ross’ show Anima Mundi, this is your last chance! Thursday, June 7 will be the last day to see it and it’s definitely worth dropping by. We have gotten tons of positive feedback and am happy that people love the show.

In other news, we are installing a new jen@joe show at the Joe location on 13th between University Place and Fifth Avenue on Wednesday, June 6. (Which means you get fresh art with your morning coffee on Thursday the 7th!)

Another reminder, Hey, Hot Shot, Spring ‘07 Edition is opening on Wednesday, June 13, from 6-8pm. The show will be up from June 14–17, 2007 and quite a show it promises to be! Get on down, see the work and support the winners:

Clint Baclawski
Nina Berman
Michael Julius
Karolina Karlic
Mark Marchesi
Casey Orr
Justin James Reed
Pavel Romaniko
Kelly Shimoda
Daniel Traub

But things never stay quiet as A New American Portrait, a group photography show co-curated with Jörg Colberg of Conscientious, opens soon after on Friday, June 22, which means a wild week for the jb staff.

Despite all of the upcoming craziness, we still have a moment to chat with friends. Jenni Holder, former Director of Edwynn Houk Gallery and current Hot Shot Panelist, dropped by the gallery earlier this week to say hello while she was in town. Check out her flickr (her children are very cute) and a past interview she conducted with Jen at Fotolog.

Stay tuned for more news and updates.