News

Brazilian Photographer Bruno Cals at 1500 Gallery

May 6-July 31, 2010

NEW YORK – Horizons, a series of architectural photographs by Brazilian photographer Bruno Cals, will be on view at 1500 Gallery from May 6-July 31, 2010. The six photographs in the exhibition are part of a personal artistic project that Cals, a well-known fashion/advertising photographer based in Sao Paulo, Brazil, has been working on since 2008. There will be an opening reception at the gallery on May 13 from 6-8 pm.

The photographs in the Horizons series are suggestive of something beyond the record presented. The images of the buildings in São Paulo, Tokyo and Buenos Aires explore the limits of two-dimensionality, and articulate a radically different perspective on a commonplace visual scenario. In expressing this fresh point of view, Bruno Cals has invoked contrasting themes of possibility versus impossibility, presence versus emptiness, and search versus satisfaction.

Bruno Cals was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1967. At age 19, Cals moved to Paris and began a successful career as a fashion model. At age 26 he decided that hewanted to be a photographer and returned to Brazil where he began shooting professionally. Initially a fashion photographer, Cals worked for Vogue and Elle and Visionaire. Since then, he has become a successful advertising photographer, working for the largest advertising agencies in Brazil. He has won several awards, including three at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival.
 

I took my undergraduate photography class recently to see The Artist is Present show at Moma, the work of Marina Abramovic. As a straight photographer, and an artist who was not entirely convinced with most performance art that I had seen, I had some trouble explaining to them just what they were seeing and experiencing. It was more new to them, though, than it was new to me. I think I was a bit better equipped for some of the intensity and spectacle.

Well, it's performance art. Well, it's living sculpture. Well, it's like theatre. A diorama, a spectacular, a tableau, like the living panoramas just before the prior turn of the century. It's also a challenge, a threat. An intervention. It's entertainment?

Without coming to any conclusions, one thing I do understand is the power of images. A colleague told me about the museum's Flickr page. Remeber the person with the long lens camped out in the main area, where Abramovic was seated in her Snuggie-esque robe? The photographer was shooting every person who sat opposite the artist, and took note of the time spent staring at her, and being stared at, by her, by us. It's fascinating. Check out the people who repeat themselves, who kept coming back. You can't help but wonder about who they are, especially the man with the tears. But you also start to wonder about each and every person's reasons for being there. It's almost as intense to see the almost photo-booth-like mugshots of these museum-goer participants. They gaze off to the side, and it's unnerving. Take a look, then experience the show, which is up through the end of the month. Look, but please don't touch.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/themuseumofmodernart/

If you are in New York City, go see this current exhibition, Sweet Home Yokosuka 1976-1980, of one of Japan's best photographers, Ishiuchi Miyako at Andrew Roth Gallery, May 13 - June 25, 2010. In conjunction with the exhibition PPP Editions has published Sweet Home Yokosuka 1976-1980 - printing over 200 tri-tone photographs with a bilingual essay by the contemporary Japanese writer and filmmaker Nishikawa Miwa.

http://www.andrewroth.com/

From the Andrew Roth Gallery website: Roth gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of vintage black-and-white photographs by the Japanese artist Ishiuchi Miyako. The images on view were selected from Ishiuchi’s three earliest series published as: Apartment (1978), Yokosuka Story (1979) and Endless Nights (1981). In conjunction with the exhibition PPP Editions has published Sweet Home Yokosuka 1976-1980 printing over 200 tri-tone photographs with a bilingual essay by the contemporary Japanese writer and filmmaker Nishikawa Miwa.

Sweet Home Yokosuka revisits Ishiuchi’s three early works that in retrospect may be considered as a trilogy. Together the photographs manifest a personal document primarily of her hometown Yokosuka, a place of compromised identity, accommodating two large American Naval bases since the late 1940s.

Apartment documents both exteriors and interiors of new and old dwellings, generally focusing on the buildings themselves not their inhabitants. They are in some respects anthropomorphic portraits of the architecture: the repairs on the walls are like veins and the cracking and peeling of old paint are like the scars on aging skin. Yokosuka Story describes Ishiuchi’s wanderings in her native city, confronting locations that although changed, still hold the memories of her childhood. And Endless Nights documents the popular “love hotels,” as abandoned; the physical structure of the places themselves and their furnishings, stairways, corridors and empty beds echo the intimate stories that unfolded there.

What is most compelling about this work is not necessarily what Ishiuchi photographed or the seductive rendition of reality into black and white, but rather how she conceptualized the act of picture-taking. Ishiuchi was less interested in finding her unique vision, more comfortable “using” the medium as a means to confronting herself and her past. This methodology was reinforced by the ideas discussed among her peers from the Provoke movement, Moriyama, Takanashi and Taki Koji, who questioned whether the photographic medium was capable of capturing any version of empirical truth.

“…I sense that a numbing and mysterious pain raced through Ishiuchi with every snap of the shutter, as though she was killing something. What she was killing was the guts of our country, not just in Yokosuka but everywhere in Japan. No matter how beautiful the façade, behind it you can always find something festering and lifeless. How will Ishiuchi’s confessional poem, reverberating from within, speak to the future?” -- Nishikawa Miwa.

Ishiuchi Miyako represented Japan in the 2005 Venice Biennale. Her photographs are included in the collections of SF MoMA, MFA Houston, the Getty Museum, ICP, to name but a few.

Sunday, May 16,

4:30 pm: Aperture Presents: Time Frames: An Artist’s Talk with Jowhara AlSaud

3:00pm: Use Me, Abuse Me: at Smack Mellon Gallery

Use Me, Abuse Me begins with Kessels’ a posteriori observation that easy access to photography tools and software results in quicker, more facile modes of image production, consumption and disposal. Perhaps a condition of this state, a plethora of photographers and image-makers are experimenting with pre-existing images and using them within their own work on an unprecedented scale. Photographs are variously collected, reinterpreted, cut, copied, pasted and generally abused.

Five days Celebrating Contemporary Photography NYPH 2010
In addition to the curated pavilions, the festival offers visitors an extensive range of activities that generate dialogue and buzz among all communities of photo professionals, amateurs, students, and aficionados of art and culture, including: seminars, slide shows, book signings, photographic workshops, live performances and events, and a gallery row. The festival will also be documented online in a regularly updated and engaging online social media environment.

NYPH in 3D!

A New Amazing Book of Photographs: WHAT I KEEP, Susan Mullally, Baylor University Press, 2010, with an introduction by elin o'Hara slavick

You can pre-order this book now, due out at the end of summer. Here is the introduction I wrote for the book:

What I Keep So You Can See Me

Susan Mullally's unforgettable color photographs of people who gather together in their "Church under the Bridge of I-35" make visible something we usually choose not to see. There is a young woman holding a photograph of her sweet baby girl with whom she cannot live because she does not have a place to live. There is a picture of an African-American woman holding her Junior High School diploma. This is the first time the woman has ever shown it to anyone. There is an unemployed carpenter who collects any stuffed animal that he finds so he can give them to the children he encounters during his homeless days. Most of us do not relate to these people because we have jobs, homes, families with whom we live and a comfortable routine. If we practice a faith with others, we probably worship in a temperature controlled interior environment that provides shelter, warmth and a refreshing respite from the natural elements and a welcome and deliberate pause in our daily patterns of behavior, usually with people who fall into similar ethnic, financial and political categories. According to their website, the Church under the Bridge is “an ordinary church made holy by His presence – black, white, brown, rich and poor, educated in the streets and the university, all worshipping the living God, who makes us one.”

What we keep exceeds Mullally's frame and is thus left out. In these pictures, she is not interested in the glut of consumption, our wasteful and luxurious ways, and our individual success stories and privileged positions from which we pass judgment or remain passive. Mullally is interested in how people survive, how they form communities, how they hold onto one single thing that becomes a symbol of pride, identity, generosity, memory and faith. While I may not relate to these people, I feel as if I know more about each of them because of Mullally's images. A Vietnam Veteran's Army hat places a homeless man in a very specific history and culture, in a certain political situation – one of a broken health care system that fails even for those who almost died “serving their country”, a capitalist system that relies on the suffering of some for the pleasure and profit of others.

      Working in the tradition of August Sander, Lewis Hine, Diane Arbus and Rineke Dykstra, Mullally knows she is swimming in troubled water. Susan Sontag asks the challenging question in Regarding the Pain of Others, ""What does it mean to protest suffering, as distinct from acknowledging it?" I am not sure these photographs answer this question, but acknowledging a problem is at the very least a beginning to the solution. Mullally's photographs move us. They create a spark of recognition, of empathy. None of us can act compassionately without empathy. Unlike the aforementioned photographers, Mullally is not making an archive of archetypes; she is not aligned with a political party or working towards the passage of a specific law (although perhaps she should be); she does not consider her subjects as freaks. She is making photographs as a good citizen, as a concerned woman, as someone searching for community in the small and strange town of Waco, Texas, where Mullally teaches at Baylor University. Mullally respects her subjects, many of whose lives are constantly disrupted by serious challenges such as homelessness, incarceration, drug addiction, alcoholism, mental illness and poverty. Mullally simply asks each person what he or she keeps and why it is valued and she makes a color photograph of them holding that object of subjective value.

      Mullally participates in the Sunday service regularly. She started going when she first moved to Waco for her teaching job at Baylor. She wanted to get to know some people so she volunteered to take the black and white photographs of members for the Church’s cherished annual directory. While performing her service for the Church, Mullally had the idea for What I Keep and was able to gather willing participants for the project. It is noteworthy that this project grew organically and sincerely out of Mullally’s own spiritual and community practice and not out of a superficial art world desire. I appreciate being introduced to these anti-heroes, these survivors, my fellow citizens. We all need to be reminded, even if we are acutely aware through personal experience, of other people's struggle and difficult situations - often as a result of other people's selfish and greedy ways of life. I look in their eyes and recognize that in these bankrupt and corrupt times of recession and foreclosures, their eyes could one day be our eyes – open and pleading, reconciled and tired, searching and resolved. This is all so close to home. Indeed, many of us drive over such bridges every day – on our way to work or the grocery store. Little do we know that there are people gathering underneath us to join in worship. It is hard to imagine worshipping in such a state (both in terms of personal desperation and need and in terms of actual geographical location) but they do it and seemingly with joy. I once heard Toni Morrison speak about how if we do not take care of the poor and oppressed, they will rise up and eat us. It is easier for me to imagine people gathering together to plot their cannibalistic feast, but that is the difference between Susan Mullally's visionary spirit and mine, perhaps even yours. 

      It is dangerous to address faith in one's art. Religion, or ideology, is at the root of every war. Some of us are atheists, agnostics, Jewish, Catholic, Muslim and Baptist. Some of just don't care about religion one way or another. Somehow, even though Mullally's subjects all belong to the same church, the pictures do not feel religious, even the one of a woman holding out a crucifix. She could be holding a baby or crutch, a broom or an instrument and I suppose a crucifix can be any of these things. This church under the bridge feels more like an umbrella organization for people who need each other, who may have a whole lot to give or to receive. I wonder if they each take turns at being the minister or reverend or priest. Mullally could have just as easily chosen to photograph a group of similar people at a homeless shelter or soup kitchen, but she chose to find them in a place that they choose to go, a place where there is hope and a sense of community. 

      While the church is non-denominational, it is Christian. Having been raised in an unusual politically active Catholic family, I have always imagined the true Christian to be someone who feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, loves their enemy and gives to the poor. In the United States of America, as an inherent part of their religious beliefs, interpretations and practices, some “Christians” hate homosexuals, believe in forcing women to give birth to unwanted babies, support endless war that we all know kills more civilians than soldiers or terrorists, work towards wealth and give little to charity. Of course there are other Christians who attempt to mirror Jesus, the humble socialist carpenter, but the loudest ones are the ones we hear. I have no idea what the people in Mullally's photographs believe in politically, if they can vote and if they do, for whom? It doesn't really matter. What matters is that they are people living in our country and we should care about them. If we don't, who will? If we don't care about them how can we care about each other or ourselves? Our denial and greed lead us, involuntarily or not, to inequality, injustice and suffering, whether or not we acknowledge it. I am waiting to be devoured, but not by these people who stare out at me from Mullally's pictures. We will devour ourselves.