Joe Deal passed away Friday, June 18, 2010 in Providence, Rhode Island following an eight year battle against cancer. Over the course of a 40-year career, he developed one of the signature bodies of work in American post-war photography. Born in Topeka, Kansas in 1947, Deal studied graphic design at the Kansas City Art Institute before moving into photography; he went on to earn advanced degrees in photography from the University of New Mexico. Deal was included in the seminal exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape at George Eastman House in 1975. In addition to having his work included in the original exhibition, Deal was a crucial advisor to curator William Jenkins in conceiving of the show and also contributed to the exhibition and catalogue designs in his capacity as Director of Exhibitions at George Eastman House. In recognition of its enduring influence on subsequent generations of artists, New Topographics has been re-created for an international exhibition currently on tour. Deal began exhibiting with Light Gallery in New York in the 1970s prior to the widespread acceptance of photography as a fine art. He presented his first exhibition there in 1973, to be followed by three additional shows by 1981. Throughout the 1980s he continued to explore the development of the arid western landscape and the expansive suburban subdivisions of Southern California. During this time Deal was commissioned to document the construction of major building projects for the Museum of Contemporary Art (1984-86) in downtown Los Angeles, and the Getty Center designed by Richard Meier (1984-1997) in Brentwood, California. In the 2000s Deal created two significant bodies of work that took him back to the prairie landscapes of his childhood on the Great Plains. These two series, West and West: Reimagining the Great Plains and Karst and Pseudokarst, each continued Deal's thoughtful examination of the basic meaning of what constitutes landscape, and the genre's broader historical and epistemological implications. West and West was first exhibited at the RISD Museum of Art in 2009 and was on view at Robert Mann Gallery earlier this year. The exhibition is currently on view at the Center for Creative Photography through August 1st, 2010. In addition to his significant artistic production, Deal was an influential educator and academic; Deal was Professor of Photography at the Rhode Island School of Design until his retirement last year, and previously held positions at Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of California at Riverside. From 1999-2005 he served as Provost at RISD, and prior to that was Dean of the School of Art (1989-1999) at Washington University. His service to the academic and fine arts community was extensive, sitting on the College Art Association board of directors, as well as on numerous committees and panels for the National Endowment for the Arts. He was the recipient of two NEA Artist's Fellowships and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Earlier this year Robert Mann Gallery placed the Joe Deal Archive with the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona; the archive includes negatives, work prints, and ephemera, as well as a complete set of master vintage prints. Deal's photographs are held in numerous public collections internationally. His sensitive approach to photographing the tensions between human effects and the natural landscape earned the admiration of many artists, curators, and critics. He will be deeply missed. The New Yorker published a review of the gallery's current exhibition in the June 8, 2010 issue: Like Thomas Demand and James Casebere, Millet makes temporary constructions in his studio and then photographs them. But in Millet's case, the sculptures are whimsical, obviously ephemeral, and seem to exist only for pleasure — both his and ours. The white-walled studio setting grounds the work but never stifles its antic wit. A seemingly endless ribbon of brightly colored plastic tape snakes around a white painted stool. In another picture, a skyscraper-like stack of clear plastic boxes on that same stool nearly disappears in the sun but is visible as a shadow on the wall. The work's Calderesque sense of play is matched by its innate sophistication. Through July 9. The Village Voice reviewed the gallery's current exhibition in the May 26 issue: French artist Laurent Millet states that the inspiration for his charmingly odd sculptures was Thomas De Quincey's 1827 pseudo-memoir about Immanuel Kant's last days, an essay based on the actual memories of the philosopher's assistant — a series of connections that may strike you as a circuitous joke. But then, consider that (1) Millet's fanciful constructions could suggest Kant's end-of-life delusions, and that (2) De Quincey's double-remove from his subject parallels the fact that Millet presents only photographs of sculptures in this show. If you still sense a bit of malarkey, it's because you're dealing with an intellectual clown, a bel esprit who likes to toy with your perception. Many of the photographed works here, assembled from the simplest of material, riff on Escher's visual tricks. In Calmez Vous Mr. Kant, squiggly lines connecting colored squares seem to be drawn on the wall, but they're actually wires tied to cubes. Elsewhere, the exquisite shading of an all-white work refines a similar illusion: A spiky paper polyhedron, resting on a table while tethered by string to the ceiling, appears to exist either in a dreamy 3-D world or in a flattened one you'd swear was painted. Unconnected to Kant, the delightful Les Vacances de Dusseldorf playfully pays homage to Bernd and Hilla Becher's images of German industrial architecture. Painting directly on photographs taken of wire that's been cleverly arranged on a wall, Millet has made it seem as if childlike drawings of homes are floating like balloons. The show will leave you feeling happily buoyant, too. Michael Kenna is currently the subject of a retrospective at the Palazzo Magnani in Reggio Emilia, Italy. Featuring 290 photographs spanning the entirety of Kenna's oeuvre, this major exhibition comes on the heels of his recent presentation in 2009 at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France. Palazzo Magnani's Seventh Day Images also includes recent photographs taken over the past four years to Reggio Emilia, as well as works from Venice. Earlier this year, Robert Mann Gallery hosted the premiere exhibition of Kenna's Venezia images. As Palazzo Magnani's exhibition curator Sandro Parmiggiani points out: "As soon as I got to know Michael's work, I immediately perceived — and loved — a sort of slow, deep breath of the world, as though silence had finally settled on the earth", hence the exhibition's title of Seventh Day Images, describing the day when the Book of Genesis tells us that God rested after he had finished creating the world, "and what we hurriedly and with precious little awareness call landscape offered itself to us with its secret spell, in its truest essence. There are no people in Kenna's photography, nor any faces or bodies to detract our attention from its pure lines, clear geometries and contrasts, alternately hard and mellow, between light and shadow, between the pristine white of snow that blankets everything and the dramatic gloominess of crags, islands, beaches and bruise-blue stretches of water." The exhibition at Palazzo Magnani is complemented by a comprehensive catalogue published by Skira, with essays in English and Italian. Seventh Day Images is on view from May 8 through July 18, 2010. Kenna will also be included in Robert Mann Gallery's summer exhibition, Epilogues 2. In the May/June issue of Photograph magazine, writer Sarah Schmerler profiles Robert Mann. The full text of the article is include here: Sputnik Day (October 4, 1957) marked the Soviet's historic first launch of a satellite into orbit around the earth. It also happens to be Chelsea photo dealer Robert Mann's birthdate. "Some people say that day changed the world," says the contemplative 52-year-old dealer from his office overlooking the Hudson River. Mann has got a clear view of life's milestones lately, and with good cause. Not only did his wife, Orly Cogan, give birth to a baby girl, Viva in late 2009, but 2010 marks his gallery's 25th anniversary. Over the years, Mann, who served on AIPAD's executive board for 12 years, has seen his stable of artists expand to include fresh practitioners under 35 even as he's retained an equal number of contemporary masters with whom he has worked from day one. "Sometimes I think: My God, I've been doing this for 33 years," Mann exclaims. "I should be burnt-out right now. But I still get jazzed by so many different aspects of this business. I love coming to work every day." Mann's career was launched, in effect, when veteran dealer Harry Lunn hired the then-20-year-old to work at his Washington, D.C., gallery after he'd answered an ad in the paper for a preparator. Up until that time Mann, the only child of German-Jewish immigrants in Manhattan's Washington Heights, had only thought of photography as a hobby. An enlarger he found in the attic one day (his father's, who was an amateur photographer) encouraged his sense of creative experimentation, as did a summer he spent in camp as a teenager, running a darkroom. But at George Washington University, Mann, who'd always had an interest in science, was pursuing a caree as a geologist, rather unhappily. "I was probably going to work for some Texas bank and look for oil," he says. Instead, Mann got a solid historical grounding in the medium with Lunn, and hands-on experience with sales. He met luminaries like Ansel Adams, Yousef Karsh, Sam Wagstaff, and Robert Mapplethorpe. "Harry was very generous with his time and experience," says Mann. "And I was at the right place at the right time." By September 1983, Mann decided to move back to New York City to take a job as the director of Light Gallery, legendary for launching the careers of such masters as Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind. The gallery was in financial straits, and Mann saw it through. "There was a lot of responsibility delegated to me," he says. "I really had to run a business." Two years later, in 1985, Mann was ready to strike out on his own. Under the shingle of fotomann, inc, he started dealing privately on East 76th Street. Practitioners like Siskind and Joe Deal, whose trust he'd earned at Light Gallery, came along. Business was good and Mann transitioned into a public space, expanded, and ultimately moved to Chelsea, where he remains today. When he originally took over 6,000 square feet on the airy tenth floor at 210 Eleventh Avenue, it was little more than raw space-one which he quickly set upon with a lavish renovation job from top to bottom. Today (after some shrewd downsizing, space-wise), he's carved out a corner office that, thanks largely to an eclectic mix of artists on its walls, exudes a kind of charged calm. There's an abstract Richard Misrach print in gradient blue and pink; a superb Ansel Adams Moonrise; a composite digital image by Mary Mattingly in which desert and water seem to seamlessly fuse. "I have no problem with beauty," says Mann, "but I also seek out work that's challenging, compelling. At the end of the day, it's all work I never get tired of." Robert Mann Gallery is pleased to announce that the Joe Deal Archive has been acquired by the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona. The Joe Deal Archive joins one of the world's most comprehensive collections of 20th century American photography including the archives of luminaries such as Ansel Adams, Richard Avedon, Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, W. Eugene Smith, Edward Weston and Garry Winogrand. Along with work prints, negatives and related material, Deal's master vintage prints will all be reconstituted in the Center's collection. The Center's archives already include more than 80,000 works by 2,000 photographers. The acquisition of the Joe Deal Archive was enabled by a number of passionate photography collectors, several of whom are particularly committed to the New Topographic movement in fine art photography. Joe Deal was included in the seminal exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape at George Eastman House in 1975. In addition to having his work included in the original exhibition, Deal was a crucial advisor to curator William Jenkins in conceiving of the show and also contributed to the exhibition and catalogue designs. New Topographics has been re-created by Dr. Alison Nordström, curator at George Eastman House, and Dr. Britt Salvesen, formerly director and chief curator at the Center for Creative Photography and now Department Head and Curator of the Wallis Annenberg Department of Photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the exhibition is currently on view at CCP through May 16th. In addition to Deal's vintage prints, a complete set of the artist's recent series, West and West: Reimagining the Great Plains has also been acquired by a private collector for the Center's collection. This body of work was first exhibited at the RISD Museum of Art and was recently on view at Robert Mann Gallery (through May 8, 2010), after which it travels to CCP where it will be on view from June 5 - August 1, 2010. A monograph of the same title published by the Center for American Studies accompanies this exhibition. (See below for recent reviews in the New Yorker, Aperture and Afterimage.) Robert Mann has been working exclusively with Joe Deal since the early 1980's, presenting three solo exhibitions of Deal's work since 2003. "I find it particularly gratifying that this project was accomplished with the Center's participation and with the help of collectors that truly appreciate the importance of this significant artist," says Mann. "The Center could not be a more appropriate and appreciative destination for Joe's archive." In addition to his artistic production, Deal has been an influential educator and academic having taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of California at Riverside. From 1999-2005 he served as Provost at RISD, and prior to that was Dean of the School of Art (1989-1999) at Washington University. Deal has also completed portfolios commissioned to document the construction of major building projects for the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Los Angeles, and the Richard Meier-designed Getty Center in Brentwood, California. Deal's photographs are held in numerous public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and George Eastman House, Rochester, New York. Born in Topeka, Kansas in 1947, Joe Deal lives in Providence, Rhode Island. For additional information please contact the Robert Mann Gallery at mail@robertmann.com. Joe Deal's current exhibition West & West: Reimagining the Great Plains can be viewed on our website. The New Yorker reviewed Robert Mann Gallery's current exhibition Joe Deal: West and West in the April 26, 2010 issue. The full text is included here: Deal, one of the influential New Topographics crew in the nineteen-seventies, continues to photograph the American landscape in his spare, understated style, balancing a sure sense of its history with a genuine concern for its future. The subject of his fine new exhibition is the Great Plains, seen in crisp black-and-white and from a discreet middle ground that recalls classic surveyors' views, with the horizon dividing the frame into land and sky. Like Sugimoto's seascapes, the resulting images suggest variations on a theme. But Deal isn't just recording weather and terrain — the gathering storm, the passing cloud, the sinkhole — he's making detailed portraits of the Plains that appreciate its complex personality. Through May 8. In the summer issue of Aperture, critic Brian Sholis reviews Joe Deal's recent exhibition New Work at the Museum of Art RISD. Part of that exhibition, featuring works from the series West and West, traveled to Robert Mann Gallery, and is on view through May 8th, after which the exhibition will travel to the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona. The full text of the Sholis's review is included here: It is not hard to see how the Great Plains might have driven early American pioneers to agoraphobic distraction. Photographer Joe Deal hails from this empty region, and after several decades cataloging the interaction of people and landscape, often in the farther American West, he has returned here for his new series West and West. At first glance these square-format black-and-white photographs, twenty-three of which were installed close together in one room of this exhibition, appear relatively characterless, their uniform horizon line encircling the space. But, like Hiroshi Sugimoto's ostensibly simple photographs of open seas, upon closer inspection Deal's images reveal a landscape full of incident. The land is threaded with streams, or is interrupted occasionally by a knotty rock formation. Small hills calve and fold. A random tree punctuates one scene like an exclamation mark. Deal has compared the camera's imposition of a frame on this environment to the mechanical act performed by surveyors. Yet early rationalist grids — such as Thomas Jefferson's proposed division of the land west of the Appalachians, or the Kansas-Nebraska Act — caused speculators to disregard the landscape's variety. Deal's camera, by contrast, lovingly catalogs its diversity. The startling incongruity from picture to picture is highlighted by a trio of images hung close to one another in the show: Wash, Red Hills (2007), in which a shallow natural depression reveals stratified layers of rock; Horizon and Night Sky, High Plains (2005), in which thin clouds hover just above a featureless black expanse; and Flint Hills (2006), which is strewn with lunar-looking rocks. The tension Deal achieves between strict regularity and variety, between grid and ground, is in large measure the source of these photographs' power. On another level, the minimalist compositions of West and West — each print is perfectly bisected by the horizon line — comment on what constitutes "landscape" to the human eye. A swipe of sky and swipe of ground: it's as simple a definition as an artist can deploy. That Deal may have such abstract questions of representation in mind is underscored by the pictures from another recent series, Karst and Pseudokarst, installed in a second room. In this project, which takes its name from the two often indistinguishable types of caves it depicts, Deal has chosen to shoot both from the inside and the outside of the caves, resulting in two very different types of prints. When he peers in, the allover compositions give the impression that the cave mouths, whether dusty and rocky or fringed with green, allow passage through the surface of the print, literalizing the cliché about representational pictures being a "window onto a world." Even more striking is the sensation, felt when looking at the images taken from within the caves' dark interiors, that one is positioned inside a camera lens as it admits the light of day. In these two series, Deal, an integral part of the New Topographics cohort, subtracts the signs of humankind's incursions into the "natural" landscape, which he is well known for recording. Yet he does not sacrifice the complexity of his meditations upon that landscape — upon not only the land itself, but also his particular means of representing it. -BRIAN SHOLIS "Joe Deal: New Work" was presented at the RISD Museum of Art, Providence, September 4, 2009 - January 3, 2010. A version of the show is on view at Robert Mann Gallery, New York, until May 8, and will then travel to the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, June 5 - August 1, 2010. Deal's West and West: Reimagining the Great Plains is published by the Center for American Places. The College of Environmental Design at the University of California - Berkeley will host an exhibition of Robbert Flick's recent San Gabriel Series from April 7 - 14. Robbert Flick's San Gabriel Series traces the San Gabriel River from its source in the mountains to the ocean. According to Flick, the river "becomes a trajectory through Los Angeles and parts of Orange County that is an amazing metaphor for what has happened here." Flick, Professor of Fine Arts of the University of Southern California, received a B.A. from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and both an M.A. and an M.F.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles. In addition to being a Getty Scholar, Flick is the recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship (2000). In 2004 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art organized his first major retrospective, Trajectories: The Photographic Work of Robbert Flick. Other exhibitions of his work have been held at the International Center for Photography, New York; National Museum of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona; and the Art Institute of Chicago. In the March 2010 issue of Artforum, Nick Stillman reviewed our recent exhibition Robert Frank. The complete text of the review is included here: Robert Frank's The Americans (1958) is arguably the twentieth century's iconic art book. Its photos, taken by Frank during a circuitous cross-country road trip in 1955 and 1956, are voyeuristic records of Americans who had sloughed off depression, won wars, and forged the world's model consumer society. The Swiss-born artist conveyed an America of bliss and ignorance, hip yet generic, its landscape and psychology both wide open. Last year was the fiftieth anniversary of Frank's book of eighty-three photographs and — incredibly — the first time the entire suite was shown in New York, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the final stop of a tour that originated at the organizing institution, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC). Contrarians and hard-core Frank fans often argue for the early-1970s documentary Cocksucker Blues as his masterpiece. The unreleased and rarely screened vérite-style film follows the Rolling Stones around the States during their Exile on Main Street tour. A wall of Frank's photographs ended up gracing the cover of that album, which is arguably among the Stones' best, steeped in the Frank-like ethic of charting, conjuring, and sometimes reveling in seamy Americana. Frank's most evocative work is indubitably charged by the psychic energy of his adopted homeland, so an exhibition at Robert Mann Gallery juxtaposing photos from The Americans with lesser known images made both earlier and later — some shot in the US, but others taken in Paris and London — was an experiment in how an artist's less familiar work holds up in the shadow of iconicity. The earliest photo on view was a New York City shot from 1948, taken shortly after Frank had moved to the US. It pictures a row of bench sitters from behind looking like a phalanx of pigeons in Washington Square Park — voyeurs spied by a fellow voyeur. Even in this pre-Americans image, there's a vaguely illicit quality that hangs about Frank's snapshots of American life that isn't communicated in his photos of Europe. Perhaps his gaze cast a different effect over midcentury Europeans than it did Americans; the Americans of The Americans feel profoundly unselfconscious — politicians preening and screaming, trannies gleefully posing, cowboys staring yonder. The images of street life in Paris and London in the Mann show depict staid cities of mist and romance; they reinforce stereotypes. A few portraits of artists taken in 1962 do the same: De Kooning grimly mugs in half-light, Giacometti broods heavily before a drawing, Kerouac sits in an unmade bed in his shirtsleeves, all manic energy. The photos Alfred Wertheimer shot of Elvis Presley in 1956, where the twenty-one-year-old King is the picture of self-absorption, would make for fascinating antidotes to Frank's wooden portraits; Wertheimer's camera eye is just another eye for Elvis to primp his hair for. The agency of The Americans photos is in their sense of invasion — certainly into the sacredness of American political ceremony, but more crucially into Americans' private space. America was founded on privacy, and here Frank's photos violate something intrinsic that his images of street life in Europe and his portrait shots simply do not. The Americans pictures American life during the decade when the country's values solidified. If they are quintessentially '50s photos, an unfamiliar photo from the Mann show titled Platte River, Tennessee, 1961, encapsulates the subsequent decade. A broad-shouldered man in a dark, ill-fitting suit dominates the foreground and calmly stares at a lonely field where a cow grazes, oblivious to the revolutions that await. Robert Mann Gallery is very pleased to announce representation of artist Julie Blackmon. Combining candid images reminiscent of Helen Levitt's photographs of children with carefully chosen sets, Blackmon creates poignant domestic landscapes. Inspired as much by Dutch master paintings as by photographic history, she interweaves fictional narratives with the unscripted moments of childhood of her own children and the many nieces, nephews and friends that surround them. The eldest of nine siblings, and a mother of three, Blackmon is uniquely sensitive to the dynamics of family life. Plying the tenuous line between imagination and reality, her tableaux depict often humorous moments in the chaos of the everyday. Blackmon strives to capture the complexity of domestic mise-en-scène, embracing both the fantastic and the quotidian. Portraying subtle vacillations between delight and boredom, her photographs bring to light the difficult balance of the demands of family and self. While playmates and siblings enact their desire for play, adult responsibilities are never too far in the background. Blackmon's work is included in numerous public collections including the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, and George Eastman House, and was included in recent exhibitions at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, the DeCordova Museum, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum. In 2008 she was recognized as American Photo's Emerging Photographer of the Year. We look forward to her first exhibition at the gallery in the coming year! For more information, including pricing and availability, please contact the gallery at mail@robertmann.com. Leo Rubinfien was recently presented with the "Artist of the Year Gold Award" at the 2009 Lianzhou International Photography Festival in China. Rubinfien presented a solo exhibition of Wounded Cities at the recent festival. A group show of highlights from the LIPF festival is currently touring China, and photographs from Wounded Cities will appear in the festival's catalogue, which is forthcoming. Rubinfien is also included in the survey exhibition Starburst: Color Photography in America, 1970-1980, opening Feb. 13th at the Cincinnati Art Museum. The corresponding catalogue, by Kevin Moore, is being published by Hatje Cantz, and includes 14 photographs and a short memoir by Rubinfien. A book launch will be held at Edwynn Houk Gallery on February 25th with several of the included photographers participating. Following the close of the exhibition on May 9 at the Cincinnati Art Museum, Starburst will travel to the Princeton University Art Museum, where it will be on view from July 10 through September 26. In April Rubinfien will also be included in a four person exhibition at the Carol Shen Gallery at the Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn. The other artists in the exhibition, opening April 15, are An-My Lê, Zeke Berman, and John Pilson. Robert Mann & Orly Cogan are pleased to announce the birth of their daughter, Viva Coganmann, on October 14, 2009. Please click here to view the birth announcement. In the December 2009 issue of ARTnews, Elizabeth Kley reviews the exhibition Robert Frank, on view through January 9. The review is included here: In 1955, Robert Frank set out on a 10,000 mile journey from New York across the United States and back. After capturing 28,000 stunningly melancholy scenes, from African American funerals to Hollywood parties, he edited the down to 83 for his book The Americans, a portrait of our country as seen with the freshness and detachment of a visitor from another planet. The complete series, which was shown first at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., is at the Met, and there is a show at Pace/Macgill Gallery through the fifth of this month. (The show will be reviewed in the January 2010 ARTnews.) A smaller gem of a show at the Robert Mann Gallery includes individual works from The Americans along with some of Frank's previous photos. The images abound with wonderful facial expressions. The gentleman on the right in City Fathers, Hoboken (1955), for example, in a row of middle-aged burghers in overcoats and hats, is executing a marvelous smirk, lips pursed, eyes closed. And Charleston, South Carolina (1955) depicts a tranquil black nurse holding a white baby with a supercilious, serious stare. And more men in hats appear in the distance in Washington Square, NYC (1948), perched on park benches like pigeons on a wire. Portraits include NYC (1955), of three young male hustlers (one wearing a skirt) showing off their tweezed eyebrows and makeup — a depiction of sexual ambiguity unusual for the time. Artists can also be seen, including Giacometti, de Kooning, Kline, Jack Kerouac, and most compellingly, Frank's wife Mary reclining with their infant son, Pablo. With one breast bare and ready to nurse, she stares at the viewer through piercing pale eyes, providing an intimate glimpse of Frank's own American life. Even the photographer's most mundane images can communicate a sense of tragic disconnection. In Men's room, railway station — Memphis, Tennessee ((1955), a white man stares into space in an empty restroom lined with urinals as a black worker bends over his foot and shines his shoe. Combining suggestions of Mary Magdalene washing Christ's feet with intimations of racism and bodily functions, this scene of abasement and service unfolds in eerie silence. In the November 18, 2009 issue of the Wall Street Journal, William Meyers reviews the exhibition Robert Frank, on view through January 9. An excerpt of the review is included here: "The Robert Mann Gallery has 24 pictures up by Robert Frank (b. 1924), a fraction of the number at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibition celebrating his book "The Americans." There is an entire, lengthy chapter in "Bystander: A History of Street Photography" in which Colin Westerbeck and Joel Meyerowitz discuss the brilliant editing of "The Americans." They analyze the way recurring visual leitmotifs and social themes provide a context in which the 83 individual pictures acquire additional meaning and impact: The images are displayed at the Met in the same sequence as in the 1959 book. The pictures at Mann are naked by comparison, and it is consequently easier to consider each of them as individual works of art... The picture one sees first on entering the Mann Gallery is from "The Americans": "Chicago, 1956," a man on the ledge of a building with upraised arms and clenched fists. He is screaming and has a campaign poster with a portrait of Estes Kefauver, who ran as the Democratic vice-presidential candidate with Adlai Stevenson, on his chest. Against the grid of the windowpanes, and above the placid classical head in the carving below the ledge, he seems either dangerous or loony. In the book (and at the Met) this picture follows two others on political themes, which makes what the man is doing seem less spontaneous, more ritualized. It is evoked later on by a picture of a tuba player wearing an Adlai sticker, by Eisenhower posters, and by other representations of political activity. But this is a very dramatic image in itself, something of a classic because of its inclusion in "The Americans," as is true of the seven other pictures from the book in the show." To view a scan of the complete article click here. Gail Albert Halaban's photographs from the series Out My Window were featured in the Thursday, November 12 Home section of The New York Times in the article "Window Watchers in a City of Strangers". Julie Scelfo writes, "The ability to observe the private lives of strangers from the windows of our homes — and the knowledge that they can often watch us, as well — has long been a staple of city life, one that was immortalized in Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 film "Rear Window." It has provided material for countless movies and books since then, most recently "The City Out My Window: 63 Views on New York," a book of drawings by Matteo Pericoli that asks well-known New Yorkers to describe what they see from their windows, and is the subject of "Out My Window NYC," a new series of photographs by Gail Albert Halaban." Click here to view the complete article. An audio slide show accompanies the online article. Robert Mann Gallery will be participating in Paris Photo 2009 at the Carrousel du Louvre from November 19-22. Following great success with their presentations at Paris Photo last year, the gallery will feature Holly Andres and Mary Mattingly, including new works by Andres being presented for the first time anywhere. Michael Kenna, currently the subject of a retrospective at the Bibliothéque Nationale, will have recent photographs on display. Silvio Wolf, whose work was included at the 2009 Venice Biennale, will feature a photograph from his latest body of work. For the first time, Wolf is printing on stainless steel mirror plates, literalizing the interaction between viewer and object that has been implicit in previous works. Rounding out our selection of contemporary photography will be selections from Jeff Brouws, Leo Rubinfien and Chip Hooper, with images from their critically acclaimed series Approaching Nowhere and Wounded Cities and New Zealand's South Pacific and Tasman Sea, respectively. A portion of the gallery's booth will also be devoted to classic photographs from modern masters such as Ansel Adams and Robert Frank. As an extension of our current gallery exhibition Robert Frank, we will include several early photographs taken by Frank from his time in Paris and London. This selection will be complimented with works by influential New York street photographer and colleague David Vestal. We hope you can visit us at Booth G-25. Michael Kenna is currently the subject of a Retrospective at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, on view through January 25, 2010. The exhibition encompasses 210 photographs across 30 years of Kenna's prolific career, with images from Calais to Hokkaido, Detroit to Dubai. Whether training his lens on the sculptural forms of nuclear power plant towers or a quiescent ridge lined with snow covered pines, or the modernist grid of New York's Midtown skyline, Kenna's haiku-like approach is always distinctive. This major exhibition offers an unparalleled opportunity to consider the entire arch of his career and varied iconography. A virtual exhibition can be perused on the Bibliothèque Nationale de France website. Robert Mann Gallery will host an exhibition of Kenna's work in January 2010, entitled Venezia. The Heaviest Flower, a two person exhibition of recent photographic work by friends Elijah Gowin and Colby Caldwell on view through November 12 at Paragraph Gallery in downtown Kansas City, Missouri. Tied together through their innovative inquiry of the materiality of photography — both artists use painstaking and elaborate processes for reaching their final images — the exhibition circles around themes of anxiety, loss, and the tenuous beauty of living. Gowin is exhibiting works from his series Of Falling & Floating, which was exhibited at Robert Mann Gallery in 2007. An 80-page, full-color catalogue is being published by Tin Roof Press in conjunction with the exhibition. The Heaviest Flower is produced by the Urban Culture Project, an initiative of the Charlotte Street Foundation. Joe Deal is currently the subject of a solo exhibition at the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence, Rhode Island. The exhibition coincides with the publication of the book West & West: Reimagining the Great Plains, published by the Center for American Places. Joe Deal: New Work introduces two new bodies of work: West & West, a study of Kansas plains in which the formal grid of the camera is brought to bear on the landscape much as the surveyor's grid in the 19th century; and Karst & Pseudokarst, where the aperture of the lens finds a reciprocal subject in the openings of lava tube caves and similar geologic phenomena. In both series we see how Deal uses the formal and conceptual tools of photography to consider the very ways in which imagination and representation speak about ideas of landscape and environment. To read a recent review of the show from the Providence Journal, click here. Joe Deal: New Work will be on view at the Museum of Art, RISD, though January 4, 2010. The exhibition will then travel to Robert Mann Gallery in the Spring, and on to the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson in the Summer. Deal is also part of the touring exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape. The presentation re-creates the seminal 1975 show at George Eastman House, and opens at it's next stop, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, on October 25. In 2010 Deal will also be featured in the exhibition The View from Here, organized by Erin O'Toole at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition is one of a series planned to celebrate the Museum's 75th Anniversary, and will be on view through June 20, 2010. Leo Rubinfien will be giving at talk on Wounded Cities on Wednesday, October 7 as part of the International Center for Photography's The Photographers: Lecture Series. Part of an ongoing course through the School at ICP's Continuing Education Program, to attend the whole series register here. However, a limited number of complimentary tickets may be available through the gallery. Interested parties can email mail@robertmann.com to inquire. We are pleased to announce that favorable circumstances have given us the opportunity to remain at our current location at 210 Eleventh Avenue in Chelsea. In doing so we are able to maintain synergy with the other art tenants in the 210 Arts Building, and we are excited to launch this latest chapter in the gallery's history. We are currently remodeling and will reopen to the public in September. Our fall exhibition will be a fabulous Robert Frank show, including iconic images from The Americans as well as earlier works from London and Paris. Check back soon for additional information. We look forward to welcoming friends new and old to our renovated gallery! Gallery artists Wijnanda Deroo and Mary Mattingly each recently received prominent coverage in The New York Times. In her review of Dutch Seen: New York Rediscovered at the Museum of the City of New York, critic Martha Schwendener singles out Deroo's new series Inside New York Eateries, an example of which was recently featured in our exhibition Right Through the Very Heart of It. Schwendener writes: "One of the most satisfying series produced for the show is Wijnanda Deroo's photographs of New York restaurant interiors. Ms. Deroo upholds the great tradition of Dutch interiors, but in her own way. She is a vivid colorist whose images of Tavern on the Green in Central Park, Milon Indian restaurant in the East Village and Papaya Dog in Midtown showcase their wild, garish décor and remind you of Dutch industrial designers who favor similar retina-burning hues." The complete review can be viewed here. Meanwhile, Mary Mattingly's Waterpod continues to entertain exuberant audiences around the five boroughs. The Waterpod was featured on the front page of the August 13th New York Times Arts & Leisure section. The main article can be viewed as a PDF here or on the web here. Writer Melena Ryzik also complimented her main article with an entry on the ArtsBeat Blog. For more information on The Waterpod and docking schedules, visit thewaterpod.org. The September issue of Harper's Magazine features Jeff Brouws's portfolio Signs Without Signification alongside the Findings section. The portfolio consists of 24 photographs of vernacular American signage structures, denuded of their original iconic content. A complete scan of the feature can be viewed by downloading the PDF here. The July/August issue of Elle Decor profiles Aerin Lauder Zinterhofer, The beautiful interior views of her homes in Manhattan and East Hampton include a stunning Chip Hooper on the walls of the Lauder Zinterhofer library in the Hamptons. To view the complete layout as a PDF click here. For more information on Chip Hooper, please contact the gallery. What: The NY-based multinational team of artists, designers, builders, civic activists, scientists, environmentalists and marine engineers, is pleased to announce the launch of the Waterpod, a free, participatory NY Citywide event that will dock in all 5 boroughs and Governors Island during the summer of 2009. The Waterpod is a sustainable, sculptural art and technology habitat, with 4 artists living on and off it, with food, water, power, and waste treatment in a contained and sustainable environment. While focusing on collaborative, innovative projects and ideas, the resident artists will work on the restriction and transformation of all forms of materials. Waterpod is structured with space for: (i) community and artistic activities; (ii) eco-initiatives including food grown with collected rainwater, and gray water recycling with energy provided from environmental and human sources; and (iii) a residence. Where: Join the Waterpod as it lands at Pier 17, South Street Seaport, for its first of eight two-week stops in all five boroughs. When: The Waterpod will be towed from GMD Shipyards at the Brooklyn Navy Yard's pier 10B, to the South Street Seaport Pier 17 on Friday, June 12, and open at noon on Saturday, June 13, 2009, by Miller's Launch. Click here for information on when and where the Waterpod will be open to the public. Why: Built from recycled and reused materials found in the New York area, the Waterpod is structured as a space for community and cultural activities, eco-initiatives, living space, and artistic endeavor. As a sustainable, navigable habitat, the Waterpod showcases the critical importance of the environment and serves as a model for new living technologies with its "you can do it yourself" approach. The Waterpod intends to inspire, motivate, educate and raise public environmental awareness. The Waterpod represents an accessible open-source manual of creative solutions as well as a platform for dialogue by all members of the New York national, and global community. Docking Schedule: June 13 - June 21: South Street Seaport, Pier 17 June 22 - July 6: Sheepshead Bay Marina July 7 - 20: Governor's Island July 21 - August 3: 125th Street, Riverside August 4 - 17: Brooklyn Bridge Park August 18 - August 31: Staten Island September 1 - September 14: Queens World's Fair Marina September 15 - September 28: Concrete Plant Park TBD: September 29 - October 12: Hudson River Park Trust Pier 54 Be sure to check out recent coverage of the Waterpod in the New York Times, Time Out New York, and Artforum.com as well as Mattingly's recent exhibition Nomadographies at Robert Mann Gallery. For more information, please visit the Waterpod website or contact Robert Mann Gallery at 212-989-7600 or mail@robertmann.com. The 501 (c) 3 fiscal sponsor of the Waterpod is Action Arts League, LLC, sponsors of Figment, an annual celebration on Governors Island. More than 20 generous non-profit, corporate, governmental, and individual sponsors, from North America, Europe, and other locations made this project possible. The Waterpod is organized with the generous help of the NYC Office of the Mayor, and the NYC Mayor's Office of Special Projects. On view this summer in Kansas City as the latest installment of Missouri Bank's Art through Architecture project, Elijah Gowin will present two west-facing images from his Of Falling & Floating series, which combine aspects of traditional photography with digital imaging technology. Each image features a single figure set against a backdrop of blue sky punctuated by wispy clouds. These ambiguous images — are the figures dropping from the sky? being lifted upward from the earth? — invite a range of associations and will offer the public an opportunity to invent their own narratives. Gowin's images might be seen as poignant meditations on personal and societal anxiety during a time of global change and crisis, as evocations of existential uncertainty, or as portraits of escape or release. The Missouri Bank Crossroads Branch, 125 Southwest Boulevard,Kansas City, is slated to debut four new large-scale commissioned images, by Kansas City based artists Elijah Gowin and Emily Sall, on its "Artboards" on Friday June 5, 2009. An Art through Architecture "Art Achievement" project, the Missouri Bank "Artboards" launched last fall, when the building's existing double-sided billboards were renovated and converted into a highly visible site for work by area artists as part of the bank's purchase and renovation of the building to house its Crossroads Branch. Works from Gowin's Of Falling and Floating series were on view at Robert Mann Gallery in 2007. Robert Mann Gallery is pleased to announce several notable exhibitions featuring gallery artists: Silvio Wolf 53rd Venice Biennale, Padiglione Italia alle Corderie, Collaudi. Curated by Beatrice Buscaroli & Luca Beatrice. June 7 — November 22. Aperture Gallery, The Edge of Vision: Abstraction in Contemporary Photography. Curated by Lyle Rexer. May 15 — July 9. Wijnanda Deroo Museum of the City of New York, Dutch Seen: New York Rediscovered. June 10 — September 13. Opening symposium, Wednesday, June 10, 5pm. Reservations required. Photographs from the exhibition were recently featured in an audio slideshow for the New York Times Magazine. Joe Deal & Henry Wessel New Topographics, George Eastman House. June 13 — September 27. Additional national and international venues to follow. An event featuring curators Britt Salvesen and Alison Nordstrom will take place on Thursday, September 24. Mary Mattingly & Gail Albert Halaban Au Feminin, Centre Culturel Calouste Gulbenkian, Paris, France. Curated by Jorge Calado. 24 June — 29 September. Jem Southam Painter's Pool, Barts Hospital, West Smithfield, England. Spring/Summer. Photography from the Collection, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, currently on view. In the June / July / August 2009 issue of Bookforum, Max Kozloff reviews Leo Rubinfien's book Wounded Cities. Robert Mann Gallery presented an exhibition of photographs from Wounded Cities earlier this year, and has signed copies of the book available for sale. Both the publication and related exhibitions of Wounded Cities have achieved widespread critical acclaim. An excerpt of the review is included here: On one level, Wounded Cities reads as a personal lament for a world supposedly at peace before September 11. On another, it is a personal inquiry into the consciousness of increased terrorism across the globe since that day. Retrospection and apprehension share an uncomfortable space in this beautiful book. Its author, Leo Rubinfien, is a middle-class New Yorker now in his mid-fifties. His family moved into an apartment only a few blocks from the World Trade Center shortly before it was attacked. At his window, he witnessed the crime while his wife was on her brief walk to her job. Throughout the book, he acknowledges that close friends and family members, as well as some people whom he meets abroad, consider him a sentimentalist. Where he needed to understand this or that side of conflict, they thought he was trying to exonerate it. In truth, he gives the motives of adversaries (such as they can be known or guessed) their due but is unsparing in his judgment of their ruinous effects. What cause, he asks, is worth crushing innocent lives, inspired by cycles of mindless retribution—an injury to all citizens who must be concerned. Though no pacifist and capable of anger, he presents himself as a rational person, utterly dismayed by the medievalism that has been spreading throughout the world over the past eight years. This attitude may seem unremarkable to those repelled by ideology, but it is lifted up by the music of Rubinfien's voice—and then there are his photographs. Click here to download a PDF of the complete review. In the May 22, 2009 issue, The New York Times reviewed the gallery's recent exhibition Mary Mattingly: Nomadographies. The review is included here: Mary Mattingly's sculptures and digitally enhanced photographs give us a frightening but not totally apocalyptic picture of the world after civilization. Humans are still in the picture, but have become roaming scavengers. These ideas aren't hers alone — see James Howard Kunstler's novel "World Made by Hand" and countless doomsday blogs — but she visualizes them in compelling ways. In her series of photographs "Nomadographies," figures carry makeshift shelters through arid and flooded landscapes. These images are cloying and chilling; their warnings of environmental and social degradation are undercut by a Romanticism straight out of Caspar David Friedrich's "Wanderer Above the Mists." They aren't great art, but they are certainly food for thought. In a related sculpture, "Everything you own (including the shirt off my back)," an unwieldy cluster of cardboard boxes trails from the back of a bicycling nomad. This particular vision of the future comes too close to present-day economic realities. Also at the gallery are five bound volumes of Ms. Mattingly's research and development, reinforcing her open-source approach. There are articles on Buckminster Fuller, Greenpeace and the photographer Edward Burtynsky, as well as e-mail messages documenting Ms. Mattingly's own peripatetic lifestyle. Three of the volumes detail Ms. Mattingly's most ambitious project to date: "Waterpod," a floating, sustainable live-and-work space that will make its debut at the South Street Seaport next month. Residents will maintain a vegetable garden and barter with local greenmarkets as the pod docks at various points along the East and Hudson Rivers. It should add a communal, utopian element to Ms. Mattingly's otherwise bleak projections. Silvio Wolf is included in Aperture Foundation's upcoming exhibition The Edge of Vision: Abstraction in Contemporary Photography, curated by Lyle Rexer. The exhibition is on view May 15 through July 9 at Aperture Gallery at 547 West 27th Street. The Edge of Vision is the first major exhibition in the United States to represent the growing interest of contemporary artists in photographic abstraction. It showcases 20 artists who are redefining the boundaries of photography and creating new forms of beauty. The core of the exhibition is a series of single-artist installations that display the stunning range of these photographers' insights. They free the photograph from its familiar social and temporal references to discover new possibilities of metaphoric suggestiveness, psychological engagement, and optical possibility. Wolf is represented by an installation of four large-scale photographs. The Edge of Vision is accompanied by a new book by Lyle Rexer. Illustrated with more than 150 images, the book sets a generous selection of contemporary works in a rich historical context dating back to the birth of photography. In addition to his photographs, the catalogue also includes Wolf's essay "Photography and Torah." Additional works by Silvio Wolf can be viewed here and here. Please contact the gallery for more information. In the May 4, 2009 issue, The New Yorker reviewed the gallery's recent exhibition Mary Mattingly: Nomadographies. The review is included here: Mattingly's color photographs are sci-fi fantasies of future in which nomadic figures in tentlike robes or protective jumpsuits wander through a brave new depopulated world. In several pictures, these faceless figures (survivors? explorers? lone visionaries?) look out over untouched vistas - a snowy mountain range, a receding glacier, a choppy sea. But there's something elegiac about the landscapes, as if they're all that's left of an environment and a civilization that have been reduce to the contents of the towering cardboard boxes that some of the nomads (and a life-size sculpture in the gallery) trundle around on their bicycles. Where do we go from here? Mattingly proposes the Waterpod, and eco-habitat arriving soon at a Manhattan pier. Through May 23. Artforum.com's Lauren O'Neill-Butler spoke with Mary Mattingly about The Waterpod and her recent exhibition Nomadographies. The full text is reproduced here: New York-based photographer and sculptor Mary Mattingly has designed The Waterpod, a floating eco-habitat that recalls the work of Buckminster Fuller, Andrea Zittel, and Constant Nieuwenhuis that will launch this May in the East River. Here she discusses the evolution of the project. Mattingly's second solo exhibition at Robert Mann Gallery in New York, titled "Nomadographies," will open on April 2. THE WATERPOD is three years in the making. Prior to this project I made wearable homes with three layers, fit for mobile people in different environmental conditions (arctic, desert/tundra, and water). I began to design these as I was traveling often, and as I became increasingly worried that government and corporate agencies were largely ignoring problems caused by pollution and climate change. I wanted to respond to the growing instability of cultures and the political unrest arising from inattention to these issues. After my first show at Robert Mann in 2006, someone asked me what I was going to do next. I responded that I wanted to create a live/work capsule in the East River, perhaps in the Newtown Creek, since at the time New York City was doing very little to prepare for rising sea levels. The Waterpod project began with preliminary sketches; it was a translucent sphere with two levels. One was a sleep and study area underwater, essentially an aquarium, a quiet and contemplative space. The top level would be for work; it would feature a garden space and would resemble a small autonomous system. An infrastructure of soil connected to a wire framework would keep the pod upright. It was interesting to learn how to create this kind of system; one that the inhabitants would not necessarily need to leave and that could exist as a mobile space. Finding sustainable solutions for living made me question the design as well as the role of community in the space. I thought about the relationship between individuals and utopian spaces and kept in mind future possibilities. The Waterpod also developed from my series of photographs of abandoned utopian spaces, titled the "Anatomy of Melancholy," and conversations I had with Eve K. Tremblay, a future Waterpod inhabitant, which forced me to consider why most attempts at utopian systems fail. I began to focus on creating a fluid space with spheres for inhabitants that draw together many different communities. I wanted it to be mutable in design, concept, integration, and autonomy. At first, I designed it as a personal space but as the idea evolved, it became clear that it needed community to be sustainable and to benefit from multiple inputs and interpretations. I became more interested in the benefits that could be gained from a diverse community living on and interacting with the pod. I started to form a group of people who were interested in the project, either from an artistic, infrastructural, or technological point of view. Artist Mira Hunter was one of the first people I approached. Mira was raised on a famous floating house in Vancouver designed by her father. Eventually, we formed a democratic group, a meritocracy, and developed a set of guidelines. Right now there are five people who will be living on The Waterpod. One guideline is that as a resident you don't need to stay on board; but while on board and off, residents are encouraged to catalog their activities, so that we can have a record of what's coming and going. Everyone will have to help out with repairs, gardening, cooking, and composting. Basically everyone will learn how to take care of everything. I think this is really important — as the first industrial and technological age in the developed world is drawing to a close, people need to relearn how to do a lot of things. Many elements of the project are currently underway. Derek Hunter and Alison Ward are building a modular superstructure in a warehouse in Long Island City while the barge platform is docked in Bayonne, New Jersey. We're in the process of finalizing insurance before we move to Pier 35 in Manhattan. Once that's ready we'll have a month to build there, and we should launch and move in by the end of May. Even though this is a project that I imagined having a very long lifespan, here in New York it's going to be abbreviated. Due to various environmental guidelines, we need to move the pod every two weeks. We also have to secure a sufficient number of piers to be able to move it and still have a long enough time to live onboard. Engineering students are building some of the technological elements. Artist Stephanie Dedes is coordinating a barter system with local greenmarkets while Carissa Carman has designed the on-board living system. Carissa is creating a greenhouse and an outdoor garden space, which is based on companion planting. Through open calls, groups and individuals in New York have started to grow specific vegetables on behalf of the project and we'll transplant them onto the barge's garden space in early May. People have been sending us pictures of the vertical gardens in their apartments; it's one of my favorite parts of the project right now. As with The Waterpod, many of the images in "Nomadographies" are about autonomous mobile systems of living that are low-tech, ad hoc, and adaptable. The Waterpod embodies these ideas and responds to their present uses while "Nomadographies" projects into the future in a performative and metaphorical way. Some of the photographs follow artist (and Waterpod inhabitant) Veronica Flores and me as we travel through Mexico toward Mexicaltitan, using bicycles piled high with boxes to carry our belongings. This journey forced me to reconsider notions of ownership, harsh climate conditions, scarcity of clean water, and conflicts between the state and warring cartels. While "Nomadographies" embodies future histories, the "Anatomy of Melancholy" revisits the past, and The Waterpod enters the present, blending fiction and autobiography with different ideologies. More information about The Waterpod can be found here. — As told to Lauren O'Neill-Butler In the March 13, 2009 issue, The New York Times reviewed the gallery's recent exhibition Gail Albert Halaban: Out My Window. The review by Ken Johnson is included here: Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window" comes readily to mind when you look at Gail Albert Halaban's large color photographs. Most depict tall New York apartment buildings viewed from a high window opposite. Initially, Ms. Halaban's pictures resemble formal studies in which architectural grids create syncopating, all-over visual rhythms. Then you notice that there are people in some of the apartments. None of them are doing anything exciting. There is no sex or violence. But there is something compelling about being able to see into the private worlds of ordinary people. The voyeuristic, slightly melancholy effect recalls certain paintings by Edward Hopper. Ms. Halaban also took pictures of people while in their apartments with them, and these have a poignant intimacy. They resemble photographs by Philip-Lorca diCorcia. One breathtaking example shows a woman wrapped in a bath towel sitting on the edge of her bathtub and gazing out through glass walls over the city. While the photographs shot from distant windows suggest a kind of surveillance, in fact Ms. Halaban collaborated with her subjects and asked them to pose and position themselves in their homes for the camera. So they are a form of portraiture. Scale is important too. Because the people are so tiny in proportion to the whole picture, there is an expansive effect. And for the same reason, there is a sense of social amplitude: so many buildings, so many people, so many stories in the big city. In the March 16, 2009 issue, The New Yorker reviewed the gallery's recent exhibition Gail Albert Halaban: Out My Window. The review is included here: Like so many New Yorkers, Halaban can't help staring into her neighbors' windows, but she's made an art of it. Most of her big color photographs are views across streets, alleyways, or airshafts into apartments. A man plays with his dog; a couple cuddle with their baby; the solitary stand in Hopperseque isolation. The fact that Halaban has stages these moments doesn't make them any less resonant of the contradictory impulses of metropolitan life: the desire to connect and the need to be left alone. Voyeurs will be frustrated by Halaban's polite scenarios, but she's playing the good neighbor. Through March 28. Exit magazine featured Holly Andres's series Sparrow Lane in their recent issue. Click here to view the series, which Robert Mann Gallery exhibited last year. A selection from the article entitled "Down The Rabbit-Hole Redux" by art historian Martha Langford follows: Adult constructions of the child coming of age are reenacted across this collection from two psychologically separated perspectives, both understood as realms of memory. Freud's analysis of screen memories (1899) builds on this distinction: field memories are experienced as though reoccurring before the eyes of the person remembering; observer memories are experienced as though the person remembering were watching himself or herself; field memories are associated with a higher degree of feeling — think of them as first-person narrations; observer memories are more detached — the self becomes an observable actor participating in events; field memories, whether recent or emotional, lend themselves to vivid narration; observer memories, which tend to be older and less intense are also more descriptive. Translating a bounded mental image into a photographic point-of-view is a snap. More complex and interesting are attempts to express the neither-here-nor-there of field and observer memories combined. Combination creates transitional moments, or liminal spaces, which artists such as Holly Andres and Ute Begrend have adopted as metaphors for that elusive concept "growing up." Andres's Sparrow Lane (2008) sites adolescence between personal and cultural memory, setting her four female protagonists on a psychological path inspired by representations of the fictional character Nancy Drew (an American girl detective) and afterimages of Alfred Hitchcock's suspense thrillers. Highly mannered, cast with pretty young things, and "styled" to fashion industry standards, Andres's tableaux are pictures about looking. The anachronistically girly models fit the Cindy Sherman Untitled mould — though stealthy in their behavior they are felt to be observed. At the same time, their poses are all about tracking, stumbling upon, peeking under, or nervously uncovering, and those who are not staring intently at some meaningful object are the designated look-outs, protecting their sneaky confederates by staring out into the unknown. An insistence on looking and being seen allows fanciful spectators to project themselves into the work, while voyeuristically standing apart. This is not an entirely enjoyable experience; one is reminded of the malevolent little sister in Ian McEwan's novel Atonement (2001) — a doer of great harms because of something she thought she saw. One can distrust and dislike Andres's sleuths as robotic little show-offs, weak sisters of the Alpha Girls that Angela Grossman's collages bring chillingly to life. In the March 7, 2009 issue, The San Francisco Chronicle reviewed Face of Our Time at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, an exhibition featuring works from Leo Rubinfien's Wounded Cities series. The review by Kenneth Baker is included here: Face of Our Time: Four connected solo exhibitions at SFMOMA by photographers Yto Barrada, Guy Tillim, Judith Joy Ross and Leo Rubinfien make up "Face of Our Time," a moving anthology of the ways history writes itself on the faces of those who make and suffer it. Among the SECA award winners, only Paglen's work can stand comparison with the sober, grown-up impression this show makes. Moroccan photographer Yto Barrada scans a human landscape under contradictory threats of development and abandonment in which social and physical facts seem to have a bizarre intimacy and interchangeability. South African Guy Tillim immerses himself in the turmoil of African political aspirations and movements, delivering pictures that compensate in expressive detail for what they cannot convey discursively of the events they describe. Judith Joy Ross' quiet portraits of anti-war protesters put before us individuals whose mien makes us imagine we might feel privileged to know them, whatever the facts of their lives. Leo Rubinfien nearly dominates the show with large street photographs of people taken in cities that have experienced terrorism. Add these arresting unposed portraits to the list of essential post-Sept. 11 artworks: essential in their expressive summing up of the feeling of a sudden change of historical weather. In the March 2009 issue, ARTnews reviewed Leo Rubinfien's Wounded Cities exhibition, on view at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. The review by Cara Ober is included here: After witnessing the attack on the World Trade center from his apartment window, Leo Rubinfien recognized his own feelings of despair in the faces of his fellow New Yorkers. He began by taking their pictures, and as the project evolved over the next seven years, he sought out other urban sites around the world where acts of terrorism had occurred, and he photographed the people there. Is the old man on the side of the road in Karachi mourning a tragic loss, or is he simply waiting for a bus? Is the schoolgirl in Seoul grumpy with hunger, or is she worried that terrorists might strike again? The viewer will never know why the subjects in these large-scale journalistic portraits look battered and uneasy, but that is the point—how the lasting psychological wounds of terrorism integrate themselves into generalized anxiety. Rubinfien employs an extremely shallow depth of field to reinforce the solitude of the individual within the crowd. Tokyo, 2002, at Shibuya Station one of three color prints in the show, features a baby-faced woman with cascading blond hair staring vacantly at the camera while a blurry throng swarms around her. For Istanbul, 2004, at Taksim Square, which portrays a pair of young men, Rubinfien cropped the image to highlight features such as furrowed brow and the intense gaze on one man's face while filling most of the frame with the blurry head of someone closer to the camera. The photos, which where published in Wounded Cities by Steidl in December, where suspended without frames from metal wires, forming an intimidating maze of peopled imagery approaching and receding from view. The unusual installation re-created the claustrophobic anxiety that Rubinfien's subjects might have felt in the city streets. Selections from this series were on view earlier this winter at Robert Mann Gallery in New York and can be seen at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through the 26th of next month. On February 26, 2009, bloomberg.com reviewed Face of Our Time at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, an exhibition featuring works from Leo Rubinfien's Wounded Cities series. A selection from the review by Stephen West is included here: George Orwell once wrote that eventually "every man has the face he deserves." That's the idea behind an intriguing photography show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. "Face of Our Time" features four contemporary photographers whose work is linked by their shared sense of the uneasiness and turmoil in the world... ...Leo Rubinfien's pictures may be the most ambitious in their scope, seeking to depict the faces — and the state of mind — of places that have suffered terrorist attacks. Conceived as a response to Sept. 11, Rubinfien surveys contemporary anxiety on city streets from London to Buenos Aires to Jakarta. Often captured with a tilted frame that gives the photos an offhand quality, his subjects are shown in ambiguous moments, rising diagonally from the bottom or corners of the pictures, sometimes blurred or partially obscured. A woman wrapped in a white shawl in Casablanca frowns at a young man who may be her companion (or may be a stranger on the street). A woman on the observation deck of the Empire State Building in New York, alone in a crowd, stares off to the left as her blond hair blows in her face. These people are clearly nervous, though we're offered little explanation why. Maybe that's the point. Robert Mann Gallery is very pleased to announce that Silvio Wolf has been invited to participate in the 53rd International Venice Biennale Art Exhibition in the new Padiglione Italia at the Arsenale. Wolf will present new work conceived for the occasion in the exhibition Collaudi, curated by Beatrice Buscaroli and Luca Beatrice. Other artists included in the Italian Pavilion include Matteo Basilé, Manfredi Beninati, Valerio Berruti, Bertozzi&Casoni, Nicola Bolla, Sandro Chia, Marco Cingolani, Giacomo Costa, Aron Demetz, Roberto Floreani, Daniele Galliano, Marco Lodola, MASBEDO, Gian Marco Montesano, Davide Nido, Luca Pignatelli, Elisa Sighicelli, Sissi, and Nicola Verlato. Silvio Wolf has presented two solo exhibitions at Robert Mann Gallery, most recently Voyager in 2008. This critically acclaimed exhibition received coverage in Art in America, ARTnews, and The New Yorker. Wolf was born in Italy in 1952 and has been exhibiting internationally for over 25 years, engaging mediums ranging from photography and film to public installations. His work was featured at Documenta 8, and is included in numerous public collections. The artist lives and works in Milan. Additional information on Wolf can be accessed through the following links to archived exhibitions and the artist's page at robertmann.com: —Silvio Wolf Artist Profile —Silvio Wolf: Voyager January 31 — March 15 2008 —Silvio Wolf: Thresholds March 2 — April 22 2006 53 International Venice Biennale Art Exhibition Private view : June 4-5-6, 2009 Public opening: June 7 to November 22, 2009 In the February 19, 2009 issue of The Guardian, Leo Benedictus interviews Jem Southam: One damp Cornish day in the late 1980s, I was out walking with my brother. We came around the corner of a very quiet, narrow lane and these three animals were sat straight in front of us. It was an astonishing sight: just these three animals in a field and nothing else. They looked as if they were posing, like when a dad picks up a camera and says: OK, I'm going to make a picture. The lamb and the pig were especially brushed up, like perfect little models of what a lamb and a piglet might be, with their own almost self-conscious sense of being alert to the fact they were being photographed. The scratchy, dark bits of hedge in the foreground added a slightly bleak frame to it all. So I just leaned over the wall and took three shots. This is the third. At first, you think how cute it is. And I partly love the picture because it reminds me of one of my favorite paintings by Brueghel, of the lion and the lamb lying down together. The photography writer Ian Jeffrey looked at the scene and said straight away that it was a "familiar" — a Victorian term for a group of domesticated animals from different species who have been brought up together and formed a peculiar bond. Young girls would sometimes be given them as pets. But the more you look into the picture, the more complex and even slightly disturbing it becomes. It cuts through that notion of a childhood wonderland, with that tethered goat and the bleakness of the light. It is highly sentimental, but, at the same time, also not. And besides, what on earth is going on? That's another reason I love the picture so much: I will never see anything else like it in my life again. Holly Andres's Sparrow Lane, now on view at DNJ Gallery in Los Angeles, was chosen as a Critic's Pick on artforum.com. The full review by Micol Hebron is included here: Holly Andres's first solo exhibition at this gallery features fifteen large LightJet prints distinguished by their luscious palette and meticulous mise-en-scènes. The images recall an unlikely combination of sources, such as Sofia Coppola, Gregory Crewdson, and Nancy Drew, and depict a quartet of girls — perhaps cousins, sisters, or BFFs — making extraordinary discoveries within a middle-class suburban home. Andres's scenes conjure plotlines and allegories from familiar fairy tales and proverbs, but they are unsentimental and not excessive in their girlishness. The protagonists appear simultaneously charming and empowered as they mischievously explore the confines of a home that is fraught with Freudian connotations. The girls peer and pry into many yonic talismans from daily life that represent the precipice of womanhood: a red purse, a sliced-open pillow, a birdcage, a locket, and a keyhole. In The Glowing Drawer, 2008, a girl kneels before an open drawer that emanates light from within as two other girls watch nervously in the foreground. In Secret Portal, 2008, three of the girls venture like Alice into two secret doorways in a hallway. The scenes are rich with the pleasure and discovery that characterizes adolescent life, when so many small things have profound and often personal significance. Andres's pictures offer a delightfully puckish complement to the patriarchal precedents of constructed narrative tableaux and are elegant successors to the feminist works of Pictorialist foremothers such as Gertrude Käsebier. The February issue of ARTnews features Elijah Gowin's new book Maggie. The complete article by Rachel Wolff is included here: "I got to know my great-aunt Maggie when I was shooting a series about the South," photographer Elijah Gowin says. He was using her house as a studio, he recalls, and "it soon became clear how curious she was, how playful. She would come down every day to see what I was making, and so slowly she became a participant in these constructed installations I would photograph. She was a very open accomplice. She could build these little narratives out of things — like this teacup— that just happened to be lying around." Later Gowin realized that the 98-year-old Maggie (a.k.a Margaret Ennis Booher Cooper), seen here in Cup (2002), had become an accidental subject of the series. His father, photographer Emmet Gowin, had taken numerous portraits of her as well. In tribute to their oldest relative, who worked for most of her life as a weaver at a Danville, Virgina, cotton mill, the Gowins have released Maggie. The book, which the Gowins are publishing themselves, compiles 24 portraits taken in the 1960s and '70s (by Emmet) and in the 1994-2004 (by Elijah). Elijah's own Tin Roof Press is distributing the title, and an accompanying exhibition is on view at the Page Bond Gallery in Richmond through the 11th of this month. Robert Mann Gallery is pleased to announce several notable exhibitions featuring gallery artists: Mary Mattingly Trouble in Paradise: Examining Discord Between Nature and Society February 28 — June 28, 2009 Group Exhibition, Tucson Museum of Art, AZ Anxious Ground: Contemporary Landscape Photography February 18 — March 25, 2009 Group Exhibition, College Art Gallery, The College of New Jersey, Ewing, NJ Laurent Millet PhotoDimensional February 13 — April 19, 2009 Group Exhibition, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, Illinois Elijah Gowin Pull of Gravity January 29 — March 28, 2009 with Emmet Gowin, Griffin Museum of Photography, Winchester, Massachusetts Maggie January 9 — February 11, 2009 with Emmet Gowin, Page Bond Gallery, Richmond, Virginia Jeff Brouws Approaching Nowhere April 23 — May 30, 2009 Solo Exhibition, Olin Art Gallery, Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio Silvio Wolf Beyond the Document: Color Field Photography January 12 — April 4, 2009 Group Exhibition, Arts Council of Princeton, Paul Robeson Center for the Arts, Princeton, New Jersey Wolf will participate in a panel about photographic abstraction on Saturday, March 7 at 2pm. Insight: Photographs and Video by Silvio Wolf February 11 — March 5, 2009 Solo Exhibition, Gallery of the Italian Cultural Institute, San Francisco, California Robbert Flick Ten: Gifts of SBMA PhotoFutures Through April 5, 2009 Group Exhibition, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California Art In America reviewed Holly Andres's exhibition Sparrow Lane at Quality Pictures in Portland, Oregon, in their December issue; Sparrow Lane was on view at Robert Mann Gallery through December 6. The full review by Sue Taylor is included here: Trained as a painter, Portland artist Holly Andres has found her true métier in photograph and film. Her new photographic series, "Sparrow Lane" (2007-08), focuses entirely on four girls, shown doggedly sleuthing in the manner of Nancy Drew and her Chums. Clad in party dresses or shirts and sweaters with white hose, these fair-haired friends explore a world of satin, lace and patterned wallpaper, pursuing obscure mysteries as they search a house upstairs and down. The 11 skillfully stages and manipulated images are eerily beautiful with vivid, saturated hues and hallucinogenic detail. What secret does the house hold? That the enigma is a sexual one we surmise from Andres's playful symbolism in Outside the Forbidden Bedroom, where two girls open a locked door with the insertion of a golden key. With this artful cliché, Andres tips us to the allegorical significance of her story, and we hunt for deeper meanings. The girls' quest, we suspect, is ultimately for self-knowledge; like all children, they probably wonder "where do I come from?" The bedroom, as the site of conception, may yield an answer to this question of origins. Once inside the chamber, a girl seated near a dressing table intently scissors open a velvet throw pillow as others look on. Curiosity about the maternal body is here metaphorically indulged, while outdoors two blondes kneel on the lawn to examine The Golden Pillow, its cottony insides exposed. The composition resembles a Nativity, in which Andres's youthful investigators ponder the miracle of birth. Pink blossoms litter the ground, hinting at the girls' waning springtime innocence. In the basement, twins discover an empty bird cage. One aims a flashlight inside it; the other glances up, searching for The Missing Bird. Two cats lurking in the shadows, possible perps, escape their notice. It is a charming image of naiveté whose latent content—given the long-standing symbolic link between an empty birdcage and the loss of virginity—might involve sexual awakening. Upstairs, the girls explore wondrous cubbyholes and drawers—read womblike spaces—sometimes leaving hallways strewn with snippets of hair and the telltale scissors. Ladders and stairs recur, evokking Freud's interpretation of staircase dreams as scenes of sexual activity. Indeed, in The Ruby Ring, an older dirl on a carpeted stairway studies the eponymous treasure, a symbol for the female genitals, while her younger sister gazes down from the landing above. Andres subtly and wittily acknowledges the possibility of such covert meanings with Behind the Old Painting, where the girls peek behind a framed portrait in the living room: similarly, beneath every manifest scene in Sparrow Lane a secret content awaits curious viewers striving to uncover it. In the November 21 issue, The Washington Post reviewed Leo Rubinfien: Wounded Cities, on view at the Corcoran Gallery through February 16. Wounded Cities is also on exhibit at Robert Mann Gallery through January 31, 2009. The review by Henry Allen is included here: Saw the flash... women, children... plate glass scaling through the air... one minute just a blue truck parking by the market, then... heard somebody screaming and it was me... saw a plane where you don't see planes... a shoe lying there with the foot still in it... the wall collapsed like it was melting... hidden under her robes... on the sidewalk like he was just sleeping... if I'd left the cafe 30 seconds later... what kind of person... Terrorism creates witnesses, onlookers, bystanders, survivors. That's the point. It terrorizes them — changes them forever, gives them dreams where they see the bicyclist again and again and they try to shout that he's going to... terrible moments for years on subways, a dead spot in their souls. It sucks the meaning out of their lives, and they'll never get all of it back. Leo Rubinfien, photographer and writer, was in his apartment two blocks from the World Trade Center when the planes hit, Sept. 11, 2001. "The plane was moving far faster than you ever saw one go so low in the sky... jagged tear in the north tower... exploded... hot and orange, the great gassy flower blew out," he writes in "Wounded Cities," a book that accompanies his photography show of the same name at the Corcoran Gallery. Unlike so many other photographers, Rubinfien never made the disaster site his subject. He reasoned that yes, there were rubble, chaos and heroism to photograph. But the terror itself lived on in the minds and hearts of its witnesses, in their recognition of a truth contrary to anything they'd imagined, as if some bedrock had given way and reality itself had betrayed them. He wanted to show this in pictures. He knew he would find it only in faces, not in wreckage or corpses. He traveled to places that had suffered terrorist attacks: Tokyo; Tel Aviv; Istanbul; Manila; Colombo, Sri Lanka; Bali, Indonesia; Buenos Aires. Unlike generations of documentary photographers recording the troubles of the world, he made no effort to reveal private truths lurking beneath public faces. Instead, he used people on the streets as unwitting actors. He had no idea what they were thinking about. They could have been fearing the suicide explosion of the taxi next to them, or "they could have been worrying about a chicken they left in the oven," he says. It didn't matter. These pictures — 5 by 6 feet, mostly black-and-white — don't tell the truth about these people as much as they tell a truth with these people, as if they were figures in a Crucifixion pageant, standing beneath the cross, astonished, frightened, their faces asking, "Did you really think this couldn't happen?" They are accidental models. The pictures look like documents, but they aren't. They're nothing but art. He has escaped the idea of the photograph as fact-in-itself, as a physical record of reality, and given us a concept instead, a fiction. It's a fiction you believe, for the moment, like all good fiction. You become complicit in Rubinfien's chicanery. Instead of seeing people worried about lost car keys, you willingly see witnesses of terror. You behold the astonished disgust of a woman in Tel Aviv, the desperate contempt of a man by a stoplight in Madrid, the sad amazement of an old woman in London who can take small comfort only in knowing that after all she has seen and learned, she still has not lost her capacity for shock. A man in Moscow sees the horror once more — he knows too much and knows that he knows it. A toddler in Mombasa, Kenya, stares with the terrible coldness of children while the mother bows her head in sorrow. A young blonde in Moscow smokes a cigarette and thinks about a new future racing toward her and wonders what she'll have to do to survive it, how demeaning it will get. Peering from corners, staring at the sky, these faces seem both appalled and relieved to note that they are bearing the unbearable, and holding up quite nicely, thank you. Or they are cynics disappointed to discover that they were right all along, that there is no such thing as cynicism, their most caustic and dismissive opinions are ordinary truth. Looked at each other with a wild surmise... changed, changed utterly... Or they're worried about the chicken they left in the oven. Walker Evans, who documented faces of the Depression, once said that he didn't think a photograph told you anything about the inner person. We don't like to think that's true. Hence the public acclaim for Richard Avedon, whose famous faces are upstairs at the Corcoran right now, with their pretense of showing you the real Eisenhower, the real Kissinger. But it was usually a photographer's trick that Avedon played to make you think you were seeing the alienation or bewilderment behind bright, wise, courageous faces. Here in a downstairs gallery, in a show curated by Philip Brookman with his usual deft clarity, Rubinfien goes beyond this conceit of insight and simply uses the people he photographs to illustrate what he himself felt, knew and would never forget after 9/11. And beyond that, he shows us a side of humanity that we all recognize thanks to the most expressive medium in the world, the human face, which sends signals with near-perfect efficiency. You see. You know. New York magazine featured Robert Mann Gallery's recent exhibition, Holly Andres: Sparrow Lane, in their November 19 issue. The feature by Emma Pearse is included here: Holly Andres might be the slightly crazy girl who always shows up to your stoop sale in search of the gaudiest objects you can't believe anyone would pay for. Andres takes these objects and transforms her own house into the sort of horror-tinged scenes that would have drawn froth from Lewis Carroll's mouth. Here, we're seeing a book jacket for a nonexistent Nancy Drew novel: The Case of the Spilled Milk. Andres's bonbon-hued photographs are up at Robert Mann Gallery through December 6. In the November 13 issue, The Guardian reviewed Leo Rubinfien's new book, Wounded Cities. Wounded Cities is on exhibit at Robert Mann Gallery through January 31, 2009. The full review by Liz Jobey is included here: It is rare that a book of writing and photographs works symbiotically, rather than the text being an introduction to, or a critical essay about the pictures. Between 2001 and 2006, as he travelled to different cities round the world, taking photographs, Leo Rubinfien's commentary must have been growing inside him; moving from initial out-and-out chaos towards the thoughtful, controlled, but still charged piece of writing that appears in Wounded Cities, the story of how he and his family and the world around him were fundamentally altered by 9/11. The book contains around 80 portraits, mostly in black and white, but occasionally in colour, taken on the streets of cities that have suffered terrorist attacks: New York, Madrid, London, Nairobi, Bombay, Tokyo, Hebron, Karachi, Jerusalem and many others. Many of them are hidden beneath the text in a series of gatefold pages you have to unfold — a convention that seems tricksy at first. Once you get used to the rhythm of the text and pictures working together, however, it proves more than a random sequence, and provides a carefully ordered visual subtext to his story. As Rubinfien admits, the expressions of ordinary people, caught in the street, tell us little about them. They might be late for work, or worried about a debt. But the truth is that most of us who live in modern cities are anxious about more than ordinary things. We are primed, somewhere inside, for the arrival of a tragedy. We have learned, either from the news, or first-hand, that death can strike out of nowhere, and we might not know from whom it came, or why. Most of us have the images of 9/11 fixed in our heads. Even though we may live thousands of miles away from America, I doubt there are many people who can watch a low-flying jet disappear behind a high-rise building without wondering, for a split second, whether it's going to come out the other side. So to have moved into a new apartment two blocks away from the World Trade Centre, as Rubinfien's family had, that September, makes you wonder how they felt when the first plane hit the north tower and how they coped with the immediate aftermath. Rubinfien's book describes all this: the day, the sights, the noise, his unwillingness to believe that what was happening was not some terrible accident. "A second plane would have meant this was an attack, and I would not let go of the world of peace." But, as he acknowledges, it has been described thousands of times, just as the towers have fallen again and again on television replays as if people still can't believe it wasn't a movie. His book, though, is less concerned with re-telling the events than with trying to understand their effects: on him, a middle-class, liberal Jewish American in his late 40s; on his wife, a Wall Street analyst; on his children, one of whom is struggling with a rare genetic mutation whose outcome is not fully understood; on his parents, who built the world he lives in now, and on the society of which they are all a part. Then, in a leap that takes him beyond New York and his immediate experience, he questions what effect terrorist attacks have had on other people, in other cities around the world, all of whom seem, spiritually, if not actually, wounded by the attacks of 9/11. The book is divided into four chapters: the first looks at 9/11 and its immediate aftermath. The second considers the age into which Rubinfien was born, examining the legacy of America's post-war hegemony — not an empire in the old colonial sense, but a controlling presence via its complex of US bases around the world — which has brought the revenge of Osama bin Laden to his door. The third section looks at Islam, and the concept of jihad, as Rubinfien tries to understand why so many young men are willing to die by their own hands and take so many innocent civilians with them. In this he includes not only the followers of al-Qaida, but Palestinian militants, and other terrorist groups, not all of them Islamic. Groups so different that, he writes, "You could hardly squeeze them into the same sentence. And yet, I'd think, marooned in gloom, the wounded cities were alike, weren't they? From the victim's point of view they were. Civilians had been punished in them all, not by accident, not as collateral damage, but because they were civilians." In his search for answers, he finds a more sobering possibility: that rather than being driven by religious zeal, militant Islam offers its followers something more pervasive and more banal: "By way of jihad, a man who felt pushed down could recover his pride." In the final chapter, as he considers the years since 2001, everywhere he finds division, not just between Muslim and Christian, but between democrats and republicans, Palestinians and Jews. In Gaza, he is reviled by a Palestinian for being an American, and for everything that stands for. This man tells Rubinfien he does not believe in suicide attacks, or terrorist bombs, but that, these days, if he heard something like that was going to happen, "I might do nothing to stop it. I might look the other way." Rubinfien and his wife spend long nights arguing about the war. "I still don't understand why we went," his wife says about Iraq, and I still don't see why we're there." He wonders if Bush and Bin Laden are codependent. Could Bin Laden have foreseen that the long-term effect of the 9/11 attacks would be to turn America against itself, and the rest of the world away? He feels the ostracism of others keenly. Like thousands of other Americans, he explains that Bush's policies were never his own. But in the end, after all the nights his wife remembers as being dark, as if it was always winter, nothing is really resolved. His family has survived. But nothing is the same. From this Rubinfien has, nevertheless, made a convincing portrait of personal and global doubt. In the November 18 issue, Telegraph reviewed Jem Southam's exhibition commissioned by The Lowry. The full review by Victoria Holman is included here: Could there be a more potent symbol of Britain's maligned and declining industries than its most notorious nuclear installation — Sellafield? For better or worse the site — of a fire in 1957, a large spill of radioactive material and the unstable uranium fuel it still contains — is inextricably bound with the Cumbrian coast's industrial heritage.Here and elsewhere along the region's desolate coast, landscape photographer Jem Southam has frozen in time snapshots of our historic industrial decline. In his latest exhibition, commissioned by The Lowry (Salford) to explore the coastal landscapes painted by LS Lowry, Southam manages to reflect this history as well as Lowry's personal dislocation. Lowry was best known for his industrial scenes — the swarms of people, like insects, rushing around in smudged grey streets — that epitomised the industrial age. But the loneliness and unsettled character that simmered beneath the surface of these works did not completely come to the fore until later in his coastal landscapes and his down and outs series. He came to acclaim in the 1950s but turned his back on the industrial scenes people knew in favour of painting the grey landscapes of coastal towns, like Maryport. As Lowry told his friend Geoffrey Bennett in a letter: "[There is] Nowhere else like it — Desolation and Decay." Those paintings captured a landscape on the cusp of industrial decline. Years later, Southam's exhibition is like a sombre and faithful retelling of the region's unfolded history and pushes Lowry's works into a new and more potent context. The exhibition is titled Clouds Descending, after a Wesleyan hymn's reference to the Second Coming of Christ, but for Southam it also refers to the low-lying ceiling of thick black clouds that bear down on Lowry's coastlines. As in much of the photographer's work, the clouds, the sea and the grass, force their way through rotten timbers and tumbling slag piles, reclaiming and destroying the unsightly traces of industry. Retracing Lowry's steps, through the Cumbrian towns of Maryport, Whitehaven, Workington, Sellafield and Barrow, Southam called on a number of experts to accompany him and contribute to the exhibition.These include Lindsay Brooks, an expert on LS Lowry; Richard Hamblyn, a popular science writer; Nick Alfrey, an art historian; Harriet Tarlo, a contemporary poet and David Chandler, curator and critic. Jem also walked with his brother Math Southam, an ornithologist, to gain further insights into the area. Their tables of birds, poems that drip over pieces of wood and concise explanations of the journey are informative but it is Southam's incredibly detailed and patiently constructed images that are the true stars of the show. He uses a large format camera to produce C-type prints from 8 x 10 inch negatives that record an extraordinarily high level of detail. When the pictures are enlarged from the negatives, under supervision at a commercial lab, they reveal an entrancing wealth of information. For me some of the most beautiful prints were those of grey waters flecked with the sharp and agitated lines of reeds, so white, grey and perfectly formed as to look more abstract than landscape. Lowry and Southam clearly found different sources of inspiration in this place. For Lowry, it was churches and people, as well as empty seas, while for Southam it is the detail of decay rather than the impression of it. But both are undoubtedly fascinated with the sombre nature of the location. And it's peculiar but captivating beauty. As Southam said: "It's desolate and wonderful." Time Out New York chose Robert Mann Gallery's recent exhibition, Holly Andres: Sparrow Lane, for their Medium Cool feature, electing the exhibit the Best in Photography for the October 30-November 5 issue: Intensely hued prints reveal a series of scenes that look part Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, part Eloise. The artist's vividly colored photographs, reminiscent of scenes directed by Alfred Hitchcock, depict their charming young female protagonists as simultaneously eager to explore the world and wary of its latent dangers. Through Dec 6. In the November 2008 issue, Art In America reviewed the gallery's recent exhibition, Silvio Wolf: Voyager. The full review by Michael Amy is included here: "Voyager," Silvio Wolf's exhibition of large-scale chromogenic dye coupler prints, aimed for mystical heights. The Milanese artist's statement tells us that the show was conceived "as a literal and metaphorical journey through the gallery space." The 14 photographs were arrange in seven groupings, which included two triptychs and two diptychs that echoed the arrangements of panels in altarpiece (though each photograph could be sold separately). First in the clockwise ordering of the installation was Red Screen (1999-2001) a photograph of the empty red velvet seats in Milan's Teatro alla Scala. Shot from above and verging on abstraction, the composition evokes a regimented audience and the theater as a place of ritual, which, in the contact of the exhibition, brought organized religion to mind. Such a reading of Red Screen was reinforced by pictures such as Chance 09 (2006-07), in which light flows through thin black drapes, thereby playing light against darkness, with the usual connotations of good versus evil, and reminding us of the iconography of revelation, as curtains may serves both to conceal and reveal. Chance 30 (2008), an abstract work that strongly suggests a landscape, and Chance 04 (Horizon 17), 2006, which is entirely nonobjective, seem to present the first acts of creation. Chance 23 (2006) shows a single distant tree — the Tree of Knowledge? — blurred by haze, while Chance 24 (2006) offers a trinity: three figures wrapped in mist and disappearing into white light. In the more abstract prints, Wolf spars with painting. Two painters who immediately come to mind when viewing certain photographs (Chance 05, Chance 08, Chance 10, Chance 03) are Rothko and Newman, whose works also address the mystical. That said, there is a physical slickness to Wolf's photographs — they are mounted between plexiglass and aluminum — which moves them from the spiritual and timeless toward a worldly, temporal realm of sensuous gratification. As many titles indicate, Wolf welcomes the accidental and the unpredictable. Shot out of focus, Chance 05 (2006-07) is a lovely Rothkoesque composition in green, black and white whose subject is uncertain. Likewise Rothkoesque, Chance 03 (Horizon 16), 2006 with its superimposed, bleeding zones of white, pink, red and black, was printed from the film leader, which was exposed to light when the camera was loaded. Like Chance 30, it may be read as a desert — in the Holy Land perhaps — with overwhelming heat bearing down upon it. Wolf's works invite a quick read. But if that temptation is resisted, one starts to notice a range of connections between his images and the wider worlds of photography (notable Pictorialism, Constructivism, color pioneers like Eggleston, the work of Wolfgang Tillmans) and painting. Wolf clearly attaches a great deal of importance to technical and formal concerns (his mastery of color and light stand out), but he's happy to wrestle meaning from abstraction. Leo Rubinfien's Wounded Cities series will be exhibited in upcoming solo exhibitions at the Corcoran Gallery of Art (October 18, 2008—February 16, 2009) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (January 31—April 26, 2009). Robert Mann Gallery will also be exhibiting Wounded Cities beginning December 11 and running through January 31. The book of the same name will be published by Steidl this fall. Wounded Cities is Leo Rubinfien's exploration of the "mental wound" that was left by the terror attacks in New York in 2001, and in cities around the world in the years before and after. Though the physical scars of the attacks were obvious, he believed that the emotional effect was more profound, and a year later he began working in cities that had been hit in similar ways, including London, Nairobi, Moscow, Buenos Aires, Istanbul, Karachi and Tokyo. Wounded Cities is Leo Rubinfien's third solo exhibition at Robert Mann Gallery. His earlier project A Map of the East appeared as a one-man exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and has been called "one of the legendary works on Asia" (Donald Richie) and "a new kind of traveling picture poem" (Maria Morris Hambourg). Rubinfien's work is in major public and private collections in America, Europe and Japan and has been exhibited around the world, while his essays on photographers of the 20th century are among the essential writings on photography. In the October 20th issue, The New Yorker reviewed the gallery's recent exhibition, Michel Szulc-Krzyzanowski: The Early Sequences 1977-1982. The full review is included here: The twenty photographic sequences in this show were made between 1977 and 1982 while the artist was living in Baja California, which may account for their combination of conceptual smarts and trippy wit. Composed of between two and seven photographs, each piece finds Szulc-Krzyzanowski on the beach, playing with our perceptions. With the sea, the sand, and the sky as his serene backdrop, he levitates a stick, eclipses his shadow with his open palms, and shrinks a sand dollar. There's nothing particularly rigorous or revelatory here, but the work is entertaining, ingratiating, and not without flashes of magic. Robbert Flick's artist's book, Parade Route: Pasadena, May 8 and May 9, 1993, will be on view as part of an upcoming exhibition at the MOCA Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles. Running from October 19, 2008 through January 18, 2009, To Illustrate and Multiply: An Open Book presents a survey of artists' books from 1965 to the present, focusing on the way that sequential ordering of information — which the MOCA curators call "a characteristic of time-based media" such as films — is translated to the medium of books. Jem Southam's exhibition, Clouds Descending, will be on view at the Lowry Museum, from November 15, 2008 through March 22, 2009. The Lowry is named for L.S. Lowry, an English artist who painted the landscapes of northern England. Southam has been re-tracing Lowry's footsteps along the Cumbrian coastline where Lowry spent a good deal of time observing and recording the industrial landscapes and harbour towns of this area. Southam's journey has resulted in a remarkable series of images, focusing on the remnants of Cumbria's long and significant industrial past. The Lowry Museum is located in Salford Quays, just outside Manchester, England. The gallery will be participating in upcoming art fairs Paris Photo and Pulse Miami. Paris Photo will take place at the Carrousel du Louvre from November 13 to 16. Robert Mann's presentation will include works by Holly Andres, Lewis Baltz, Jeff Brouws, Joe Deal, Robbert Flick, Chip Hooper, Mary Mattingly, Richard Misrach, and Henry Wessel. Pulse Miami will take place at Soho Studios in Miami's Wynwood District from Wednesday, December 3 to Sunday, December 7. The gallery will feature Gail Albert Halaban, Holly Andres, Jeff Brouws, Wijnanda Deroo, Robbert Flick, Mary Mattingly, Susan Rankaitis, Leo Rubinfien and Silvio Wolf. Congratulations to Richard Misrach, recipient of the 2008 Lucie Award in the category of Fine Art. Each year the Lucie Awards honor the photography community's finest achievements with an Advisory Board that nominates deserving individuals across a variety of categories. Along with Lucie Awards for Lifetime Achievement, Humanitarian, Visionary, and Spotlight, achievement awards are give in the areas of Advertising, Documentary, Fashion, Fine Art, Photojournalism, Portraiture, and Sports. The 6th Annual Lucie Awards will feature a Gala Awards Ceremony October 20, 2008 at Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall. Robert Mann Gallery has represented Misrach's work for over twenty years and presented his first solo exhibition in New York. Richard Misrach is one of the most significant photographers working today. His latest project, an elegiac meditation of human interaction with the ocean, and the topic of the exhibit, Richard Misrach: On the Beach, was inaugurated at the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently traveling to museums across the United States, among them the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC., and the High Museum in Atlanta, Georgia. Misrach has received numerous awards and his photographs are held in the collections of over fifty major institutions internationally, among them the Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the Musee National d'Art Moderne, Beaubourg. Gallery artists Joe Deal and Robbert Flick are included in the exhibition This Side of Paradise: Body and Landscape in L.A. Photographs at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California. The exhibition will be on view through September 15. This encyclopedic exhibition looks at 150 years of history and the ways in which the city of Los Angeles has provoked vital bodies of photographic work, exploring photographs of the city through the lenses of landscape and the human body, and the interplay between the two. Other artists in the exhibition include John Baldessari, Lewis Baltz, Imogen Cunningham, Catherine Opie, Ed Ruscha, Julius Shulman, Carleton Watkins, and Edward Weston. Thanks to funding from the Terra Foundation for American Art, the exhibition will travel to Europe, opening at the Musée de l'Elisee, Lausanne, Switzerland on January 30, 2009. In the August 15th issue, The New York Times reviewed the gallery's recent exhibition, Of The Refrain. The full review is included here: A beautiful conspiracy of rhyme and reason, "Of the Refrain" presents 53 black-and-white photographs by 16 Modernist masters in a way that seems as musical and poetic as it is visual. Organized by Phil Taylor, a young employee at the gallery, the exhibition focuses on standard genres of studio and commercial photography, viewing them as occasions for formal and technical innovation and experimentation. There is a particular emphasis on the extraordinarily lucid and stylish work of ringl+pit, two women who worked together in Berlin in the late 1920s and early '30s. Portraits, still lifes and fashion and dance photographs are distributed around the gallery at different levels like notes on a musical score. Certain motifs regularly repeat. Barbara Morgan's pictures of Martha Graham in extravagantly expressive poses and Hazel Larsen Archer's images of Merce Cunningham leaping with athletic abandon create a theme of exuberant buoyancy, while images of glassware by Berenice Abbott, Margaret Watkins, Carlotta Corpron and ringl+pit—some bordering on pure abstraction—repeat moments of crystalline luminosity. Many amusing juxtapositions occur. Man Ray, in a self-portrait, and James Joyce, in a portrait by Abbott, appear sitting on couches and resting their heads on their hands. ringl+pit's image of a woman in a sexy, lacy corset is followed by Ilse Bing's picture of a white lacy baby's dress. A ringl+pit portrait of Ringl wearing glasses with round black frames mirrors Andre Kertesz's picture of a man's hands holding similar glasses. Caught in a crossfire of echoes, reflections and affinities, these and other old photographs, including works by Josef Sudek, Dora Maar and Horst P. Horst, are vividly rejuvenated. In the August 13-19th issue, The Village Voice reviewed the gallery's recent exhibition, Of The Refrain. The full review is included here: The first image in this vibrant group photography show initially feels out of place: de Kooning sitting stiffly in a chair in his studio. But one of his lively biomorphic paintings is propped up near him, and that lithe blob from 1947 keynotes this show's parade of graceful dancers, captivating portraits, and compelling abstractions. Polio victim Hazel Larsen Archer was confined to a wheelchair, but her 1948 shot of a leaping and gyrating Merce Cunningham, his head cropped from the top of the frame, is testament to a universal desire to defy gravity. Barbara Morgan's 1940 picture of Martha Graham, tight costume straining at far-flung limbs, segues beautifully, if unexpectedly, into Berenice Abbott's 1958 study of light bouncing through a prism. Concepts and affinities carom through these 53 black-and-white images, and current Photoshop wizards could do worse than swipe ideas from the weird head-shots staged by the Depression-era duo of ringl+pit. Robert Mann is pleased to announce representation of artist Holly Andres. Her first solo show at the gallery this Fall will include photographs from her series Sparrow Lane. Andres's previous body of work, Stories from a Short Street, was exhibited earlier this year at the Missoula Art Museum and her films have been featured in numerous film festivals as well as the 2006 Oregon Biennial at the Portland Art Museum. Displaying a rich understanding of color and composition, Andres's tableaux depict young women on the threshold of adulthood, propelled by their curiosity and sense of discovery. Drawing equally upon Hitchcockian cinematic tropes and Nancy Drew dust jackets, Andres's stunning photographs plumb psychological depths that are as quixotic as they are visually seductive. Each accumulated series suggests elliptical narratives, but any resolution is elusive, and the pleasure of viewing instead draws upon their allusive and metaphorical qualities. We hope you can join us at the opening of Andres's exhibition, October 23, to get to know the work of this exciting young artist. Click here to view a selection of her work. Jeff Brouws will be a guest speaker at the University of Nottingham for the conference "Representing the Everyday in American Visual Culture." The two-day conference is hosted by the Nottingham Institute for Research in Visual Culture and will take place September 12th and 13th. Those familiar with Brouws's photographs will recognize the topic as one near and dear to the artist's practice; Brouws surveys the evolving cultural landscapes of rural, urban and suburban America, from secondary highways to strip malls to decimated industrial sites and inner city housing. Combining bleak beauty with anthropological inquiry, he seeks the significance behind the cycle of construction, decline and renewal. Brouws' photographs go beyond mere description and gather layered meaning, often functioning as antipodal metaphors or asking sociological questions. His most recent exhibition at Robert Mann Gallery was Approaching Nowhere, in 2006. For more information, visit the conference website. In the August 4th issue, The New Yorker reviewed the gallery's recent exhibition, Of The Refrain. The full review is included here: The curator Phil Taylor (who also mans the gallery's desk) installed this exhibition of primarily modernist photographs as if the works were notes on a musical score. The results are unexpected, inspired, and full of telling juxtapositions between figuration and abstraction. Dance is a recurring motif, and bodies in motion (by Barbara Morgan, Lotte Jacobi, Ellen Auerbach, and the little-known Black Mountain artist Hazel Larsen Archer) spark some of the show's most sustained passages. With terrific pictures by Berenice Abbott, Man Ray, Ilse Bing, and the team of ringl+pit, the visual music here is decidedly avant-garde—jagged, edgy, and unexpected. Robert Mann Gallery would like to congratulate Mary Mattingly, recently short-listed for the inaugural Prix Pictet, the world's premier photographic award for sustainability. In a short time, Mattingly's work has drawn critical and institutional acclaim for her timely photographic constructions of an imagined post-industrial civilization. Many of her images explore the challenges and innovations individuals face for mere survival in a not-so-distant future. Mattingly is among 18 international, well-established artists whose work addressed this year's theme of water and sustainability. The artists' work will be featured in an exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris from October 30 to November 8, with the winner of the Prix Pictet announced at a gala reception on October 30. For more information please visit the Prix Pictet website. It's difficult to imagine a better exhibition than this one to enter after the blazing summertime heat of Washington, DC's mall. Nineteen large-scale chromogenic prints of swimmers and sunbathers in Hawaii immerse viewers in crystalline turquoise water and twilight rippling over horizonless seas. Richard Misrach seems at first to provide six-foot-wide windows from the heavens into the vacation sublime below. Yet this laconic exhibition underscores the artist's long preoccupation with Edenic landscapes: beautiful but ripe with premonition of the fall. (In this sense, Misrach's September 11 reference in the wall text is less heavy-handed, although the eerie calm preceding a tsunami feels like a more fitting comparison.) Further compounding the exhibition's apocalyptic whispers is its title, "On the Beach," after Nevil Shute's 1957 nuclear-holocaust novel of the same name, in which the world's last survivors wait on a beach for the end or take poison with loved ones to hurry it along. Such a reference forces us to reconsider the photographs' figures. A man dishragging in the shore break could be a bloated, washed-up body; a couple napping back-to-back on the beach with covered heads might never wake up. Most works have only one or a few vacationers overcome in scale by so much sand or sea; water takes over entirely in three photographs hung together in their own gallery. These near monochromes relate to Misrach's sky studies, and attention to water's texture and prismatic form conjure projects by Vija Celmins, Roni Horn, and Hiroshi Sugimoto. Like vacation snapshots, Misrach's grand views deliver only part of the story. And like the figures floating through them, these photographs are suspended in a state where reality is muffled and momentarily far away. The New Yorker recently reviewed the gallery's recent exhibition, Aaron Siskind: The Egan Gallery Years 1947-1954. Following is the full review which appears in the June 30 issue: Siskind's photographs of corroded metal, torn posters, drizzled tar, and peeling paint don't imitate Abstract Expressionism—they share its restless sensibility. The thirty-five prime examples gathered here were first shown at New York's Egan Gallery between 1947 and 1954, and they capture the spirit of the era without looking old-fashioned in the least. Images of bold strokes may disguise an underlying anxiety, but there's also a genuine excitement and a sense of discovery. With this work, Siskind was speaking more and more confidently in a new language, one that put photography and painting on fertile common ground. Aaron Siskind's Romantic Notions Of Decay In his essay "Aesthetics and Judaism, Art and Revelation," Zachary Braiterman notes that, "From Plato's cave to Freud's interpretation of dreams, the verbal conventions provided by narrative and theory are required to create, identify, and make sense of visual images." In other words, when we see a picture we first try to figure out what's going on, and then try to decipher what it means. The Abstract Expressionist painters of mid-century caused such a hubbub because their works defied this way of seeing. The same was true of photographer Aaron Siskind (1903-91), a contemporary and friend of many of the Abstract Expressionists. "Aaron Siskind: The Egan Gallery Years 1947-1954," currently at the Robert Mann Gallery, presents 35 of the black-and-white images that once seemed impermissibly radical, and are now canonic. "Jerome, Arizona 21" (1949) is a well-known example of Siskind's abstract photography. From a distance the 16-by-20-inch print seems merely an assortment of random shapes; up closer it turns out to be a picture of peeling paint. If there is a narrative here, it is totally conjectural, and although a theory might be teased out of Romantic notions of decay, it would not explain Siskind's impulse in taking this picture. "Move on objects with your eye straight on," Siskind wrote in his 1945 essay "The Drama of Objects," "to the left, around to the right. Watch them grow large as you approach, group and regroup themselves as you shift your position. Relationships gradually emerge and sometimes assume themselves with finality. And that's your picture." The sense of depth in "Jerome, Arizona 21," as in nearly all the pictures at Robert Mann, is very limited; the wall is two-dimensional and although the paint curls, it is only a fraction of an inch. In lieu of perspective, the main elements of the picture are the textures of the exposed wall and of the paint, and of their reciprocal shapes. The exposed wall is a light gray, and may be either concrete or an earlier layer of paint on some other surface; the veins running through it could be tiny cracks in either possibility. The peeling paint is darker and curls as it comes away from the wall; Siskind's view camera records the delicate shifts in light that model its irregular surface. Both the wall and the paint are very real; we sense we know what they would feel like if we could touch them. And the portion of the larger wall that the photographer elected to have in his frame contains a pleasing, even elegant, shape. So although there is no story, and no more theory than what we care to construct, we have an offering of the real world to contemplate and delight in. Siskind's photography did not start here. He grew up in New York, was educated at DeWitt Clinton High School and City College, and taught English in the public school system. A friend gave him his first camera as a honeymoon present. He was a member of the Young People's Socialist League, and so fit comfortably in the milieu of the Photo League where he established the Feature Group, a documentary production unit. His "Harlem Photographs: 1932-1940" is a classic of the genre, and was republished by the Smithsonian Institute Press in 1992. But both his politics and his artistic interests changed, and there was considerable acrimony when he eventually broke with the Photo League. It was Barnett Newman, one of a group of artist friends that included Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko, who recommended him to Charles Egan, an art dealer whose gallery was devoted to contemporary art. Egan's four exhibitions of Siskind's work established the importance of his abstract photography. Fragments of walls, windows, broken windows, architectural details, stains, lost objects, and disintegrating signs and posters: These are the materials with which Siskind worked. "Chicago" (1952) is again a picture of paint peeling from a wall, but very different in its feel from "Jerome, Arizona 21." Another picture, also titled "Chicago" (1952), has two white glyphs on a background that may be a piece of wood painted black: One figure is something like an "i" or a "j" and the other is something like an outline of a drop of liquid with a "v" shape inside of it. "Chicago 206" (1953) is more complex: The physical materials are hard to identify, but against a black background there are Rothko-like masses on the right, various drippings to the left and center, some splattered white spots, and an "x" shape and a "3" shape, drawn possibly with chalk, on the left. "Chicago 30" (1949) has a black shape, like a silhouette of an element in a sculpture by Alexander Calder, painted on a white background. Maybe the black shape is the letter "R" lying on its spine. The material may be a metal sign with some screws through it, some peeling, and some sloppy painting. "Gloucester" (1944) is the muntins of a window with two broken panes. A child's hand is seen reflected in the lower left frame, and the introduction of a human element into an otherwise abstract image seems like a ghostly intrusion. In the article quoted earlier, Mr. Braiterman also wrote, "Revelation does not exist apart from order, dis-order, and reorder of creation, from the form of part, whole, mass, color, tone, touch, and taste, from individual points, lines, spots and dabs." Without meaning to impute a religious intention to him that he probably did not feel, it sounds a lot like a description of a photograph by Aaron Siskind. End Frame: England's Green & Pleasant Land Richard Billingham on Jem Southam Richard Billingham, whose landscape photography is featured in this issue, says he is big fan of the serene and beautiful landscape photography of Jem Southam. Southam maybe the most important British landscape photographer of the last 25 years. His enchanting images of the English countryside result from carefully and patiently observing changes—sometimes subtle changes—over long periods of time. Shooting color and on large format, Southam repeatedly returns to the same spot, often a water source, obsessively recording how the man-made world quietly, but inexorably, encroaches on nature. This is not the only tale in his landscape stories: he is equally interested in how the dynamic natural world changes on its own accord from season to season, year to year. It is a compelling narrative of decay and regeneration. "I eschew grandeur for the sake of it, preferring to revel in a subtler scale and history," Southam told an interviewer for the online photography maagzine Seesaw, "but there's still an epic to be told, which exists wherever humans made their homes." Born in 1950, Southam was shortlisted for the Citibank Photography Prize in 2001. He has published several books, the most famous being Landscape Stories (published in 2005 by Princeton Architectural Press), His work in some respects is comparable to the great documentary color photographers of the 1970s like William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, but with an understated, English twist. The photograph shown here was taken in East Sussex, a county in the southeast of England known for both its proximity to the coast and its rolling hills known as The Downs. It is also a region where Southam lives and works, and this image is part of his famous series on ponds. Billingham notes, "Dealing with the horizon lines or joining land and the sky together is perhaps the biggest pictorial problem to solve in photographing a relatively flat or short grassy landscape with few tress and shrubs." Of Southam's pond images, he says: "These have been photographed very carefully and very beautifully. I like the definite round shapes of the ponds and how their surfaces reflect the white light above, uniting land and sky. The grass here looks like green velvet with an oval shape cut out of it." Southam said in the same interview with Seesaw: "The English countryside is an anstonishingly complex place." Southam's images distill these complexities, As Billangham says, "They are enigmatic, and very simple." Having spent the last decade and a half exploring the English landscape, the photographer Jem Southam has crossed the Channel for his latest series, "The Rockfalls of Normandy." His pictures show the crumbling cliffs and eroding beaches along the northern coast of France, treating the landscape as a (slowly) moving target. Geologic change is best articulated in pairs of photographs, taken several months apart at the same locations. The mossy pebbles at the water's edge in "Senneville-sur-Fécamp," captured in February and April of 2006, seem to have receded in the later photograph. The same phenomenon occurs in "Vaucottes" (November 2005 and February 2006), as a thin slice of water creeps in from the right side of the frame. In several frontal shots of the cliffs, shallow pictorial space emphasizes the effects of time and gravity. The partly sheared-off face of a mottled rock formation in "St. Pierre-en-Port" (November 2005) exposes a uniformly chalky underlayer. The photographs have a soothing quality, as if Mr. Southam were smoothing over the historical scars of Normandy's beaches by calling attention to the larger forces of nature. These landscapes are haunted not by ghosts of the Allied invasion, but by English poets like Wordsworth and Matthew Arnold. Appreciating Nature Through Abstraction A cartoon yellowing on my refrigerator door is captioned, "He didn't know how to appreciate nature." It shows a middle-aged man sitting in a stuffed armchair improbably set down in an open field. There are mountains in the background, trees to the right, and an attentive rabbit to the left. A balloon above the man's head shows what he is thinking: "There's no plot." The cartoon, by Bruce Eric Kaplan, came to mind as I looked at the 13 pictures in "Jem Southam: The Rockfalls of Normandy" at the Robert Mann Gallery. What am I supposed to see in these works? Jem Southam, who was born in Bristol in 1950, is one of England's finest contemporary landscape photographers. Much of his work, including the recent "Upton Pyne," is about the effect of man on the rural countryside, although nothing made by man is visible in "The Rockfalls of Normandy." The pictures at Robert Mann are 46.5-by-55.25-inch chromogenic dye coupler prints. The large scale is appropriate here because the images encompass vast distances along the shore, immense geological features, boulders, rocks, pebbles, grains of sand, and lichen, all of which Mr. Southam wants us to see with sharp particularity. The complex processing is necessary to achieve the subtle, deep colors: ferrous oranges in the cliffs, dark seaweed greens in the tide pools, delicate pearly blue grays in the distant seacoast. The pictures have sonorous French place names — "Valleuse de Cure," "Senneville-sur-Fecamp," "Les Petites Dalles," and "St. Pierre-en-Port" — and the pristine beauty of spots that are still too difficult to access for littering tourists. Still, nature has no meaning for me. I understand the intellectual, and even some of the spiritual, beliefs that produced the transcendental Hudson River School of painters, and the impulses that sent Ansel Adams up the Sierra Nevadas, and I have hiked, camped, and climbed. Although nature may be nice to look it, I am too far from the Druids to be inspired by it. What I see in Mr. Southam's images is a meticulous use of found materials to produce complex works of abstract design. They are like the nonobjective paintings of mid-century except, of course, they are objective. Or they are like highly patterned Islamic art, except the patterns do not recur. Colors, shapes, and scale are the elements of these sophisticated compositions. Another element Mr. Southam incorporates, by way of providing a "plot," is time. One picture was taken at Senneville-sur-Fecamp in February 2006, and another was taken from the same spot in April of that year. The first was shot at a low tide that exposed the rocky shelf abutting the cliffs and gave the scene a brownish cast; the second at high tide, when a wide swath of seaweed gave it a bluish green tint. Between the picture taken at Vaucottes in November 2005 and the one taken in February 2006, the disposition of the black pebbles on the beach changed considerably. The high cliff jutting seaward in the distance seems to be the same in each, but we understand that, given eons, it, too, will go. Whatever others find to appreciate in nature or in Mr. Southam's precise renderings of it, to me the most discernible theme is those "awful notes, whose concord shall not fail" that the great Romantic poet William Wordsworth heard in nature, and wrote about in "Mutability." Robert Mann Gallery would like to congratulate Elijah Gowin, recently awarded a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship. Gowin, whose exhibition Of Falling & Floating was at Robert Mann Gallery in 2007, joins an illustrious group: previous Guggenheim Fellows include Ansel Adams, W. H. Auden, Aaron Copland, Martha Graham, Langston Hughes, Henry Kissinger, Vladimir Nabokov, Isamu Noguchi, Linus Pauling, Philip Roth, Paul Samuelson, Wendy Wasserstein, Derek Walcott, James Watson, and Eudora Welty. For more information visit the Guggenheim Fellowship website. The Boston Globe reviewed Jem Southam's Upton Pyne exhibition which is on view at The Davis Museum at Wellesley College through June 8, 2008. The full article by Mark Feeney is reproduced here: The View from Across the Water: Jem Southam's photos track the flow of time at an English pond "Jem Southam: Upton Pyne" is a pond-sized show (there are just 21 photographs) about an English pond. Its concerns are oceanic, though: the struggle - or is it alliance? - between timelessness and time. Southam is an English landscape photographer who uses an 8-by-10-inch view camera. It produces a large image of great clarity. (View cameras are also cumbersome and require long exposure times, which means few photographers use one.) From 1996 to 2001, Southam photographed at regular intervals a waste pond in the village of Upton Pyne, near where he lives, in rural Devon. Locally known as the Black Pit, the pond began as part of an 18th-century manganese mine. After the mine was abandoned, in the 19th century, the site began to fill with rainwater and runoff and became a local dumping ground. The scene sounds grim: Black Pit, abandoned mine, dumping ground. This is southwestern England, though, with its unconquerable greenery. The pond, in fact, is in the midst of Upton Pyne, and a whitewashed house overlooks it. It's clear that people don't give it a wide berth. Even the trash they leave looks rather sedate. Enhancing that effect is the soft, indirect light Southam relied on. He shot in early morning or late afternoon - not quite magic hour, but close enough. So the appearance of the site is surprisingly picturesque. (Well, usually: In a picture from December 2001 the pond surface has a thick, brown sheen with the drained look of tainted chocolate.) This relative picturesqueness meant Southam could ignore ecological and social concerns to concentrate on his real interest here: incremental change, both natural and manmade. He had photographed the pond before, but the inspiration for recording it over time was quite specific. Cycling by one day, he noticed a man working on the pond's margins. He learned that the man, who lived in the house by the pond, had decided to try and clean it up. As it happened, the man would later abandon the task - it would, in turn, be taken up by another resident - but Southam had his project. Southam has an unemphatic (one is tempted to say English) eye. This is very much to the good, as his pictures are big - 24 inches by 37 inches - and in color, thus adding a further density of detail to them. In the first picture, for instance, from July 1996, the pond shares the frame with a beached rowboat, a truck parked in the background, and a pair of rather nonchalant chickens in the foreground. Confident in the inherent interest of his subject, Southam feels no need to thrust specific elements at us. There's a leisureliness to these images that makes them all the easier to take in and ponder. It isn't so much the pond one ponders as the way it reflects (or not) the passage of time. But for the occasional glimpse of a motor vehicle or television antenna, we could be looking at a scene from Thomas Hardy's Wessex more than a century ago. The title of each photograph is the month and year Southam took it - not the day, though; that would be too urgent. Further enhancing the unhurried, timeless quality of the Upton Pyne pictures is the nature of the view camera. It records slowly, which encourages us to see slowly, too. Yet alteration, at however leisurely a pace, does come. The seasons, much more than the removal of refuse or filtering of the pond, see to that. Southam's approach may be visually austere, but that complements the fecundity of the setting. Even in winter, there is much green to be seen; and at its most polluted the pond never ceases to be a rich tangle of root and branch. It's in the unfurling of leaves and falling of branches that we find revealed most clearly the unfurling and falling of time. Four concluding photographs step back to give a sense of Upton Pyne's agricultural surroundings. We see farm equipment and plowed fields, puddles and much mud. There's also a hand-written sign off to the side in the two last photographs that reads "Slow Down Please." It nicely sums up a show to savor. Gallery artist Jem Southam will be included in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art's upcoming exhibition Nature: Recent European Landscape Photography, on view from June 28 to October 5, 2008. The exhibition will analyze how contemporary artists use photography to engage the European landscape. Other artists that have been selected include Andreas Gefeller, Massimo Vitali, and Olaf Otto Becker. From the press release: "These works explore the endlessly complex relationship between nature and the human presence, from harmonious coexistence to contentious exploitation." Southam's current exhibition, The Rockfalls of Normandy, is on view at Robert Mann Gallery through May 10. The New Yorker reviewed Silvio Wolf: Voyager, which is on view at Robert Mann Gallery through March 15, 2008. The full article is reproduced here: Some of the Italian artist's big color photographs flirt with abstraction, and others directly engage it. Two groupings depict curtains and the light that filters through and pierces them, with allusions that range from Brancusi to Wolfgang Tillmans. As with most of the images, the subject is incidental to Wolf's seductive studies in luminosity, texture, and negative space. Two pictures dispense with subject entirely, reproducing the bands and blushes of color that appear on exposed film leader, but even a photo of three human figures allows them to disappear into a lovely, white-on-white fog, more memory than presence. ArtNews recently featured Silvio Wolf: Voyager, which is on view at Robert Mann Gallery through March 15, 2008. Selections from the article by Eric Bryant are reproduced here: In pictures of ethereal specks and kaleidoscopic explosions of color, photographers are embracing abstraction... A desire to engage with the accidental motivates many of the artists whose work can be categorized as darkroom abstractions. To produce his "Chance" series, Silvio Wolf, whose show at Robert Mann Gallery will be up through the 15th of this month, uses leader — the film at the beginning of a roll that is never shot through the lens but may be exposed while loading a camera. Wolf's chromogenic dye-coupler prints, which are up to six feet tall, present intense monochromatic fields that mimic the compositions and emotional tensions of Rothko paintings. Though Wolf doesn't control the exposures, he pores over hundreds of leaders looking for a usable frame... ArtNews recently reviewed Michael Kenna: New York / New Work, which was on view at Robert Mann Gallery November 29 through January 26, 2008. The full review by Ann Landi is reproduced here: In this recent body of work, photographer Michael Kenna takes on New York City at its most remote and dazzling. These black-and-white toned silver prints present an almost otherworldly metropolis, emptied of humans and therefore of some its more unsavory aspects. Many of the well-known landmarks were here — the Chrysler Building, the Brooklyn Bridge, Central Park, and the skyline, seen as a spiky strip framed by luminous sweeps of sky and water. Kenna is not afraid to go for high drama: the top of the Chrysler Building thrusts into a turbulent sky; an aerial view of Fifth Avenue at night is a dizzying amalgam of brilliant illumination and severe geometries. Nor does Kenna have any reservations about jousting with imagery made famous by his illustrious forebears. Homage to Kertész, Gramercy Park, New York (2003) recalls the snowy vistas captured by André Kertész in the 1950s. Shots of the Flatiron Building inevitably summon up Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz. But Kenna makes the city his own by sticking to a fiercely unsentimental vision of its familiar monuments and formal majesty. Grand Central Station never looked lonelier or more elegantly austere than in the two images here of the ticket counters and a stairwell after hours. Also in the show were images of Japan, Oregon and Mont-Saint-Michel in France. Again Kenna goes for the spectacular and the solitary. His scenes of Mont-Saint-Michel in varying weather and at different times of day are ghostly evocations of medieval grandeur; trees in a Japanese landscape are a spare haiku of black branches against a snowy ground. Though small in their dimensions, Kenna's prints packed a big and memorable wallop. On December 13, The New York Sun reviewed the exhibition Michael Kenna: New York / New Work, on view through January 26, 2008. The full review by William Meyers is reproduced here: Michael Kenna takes beautiful photographs; this is not meant pejoratively. When Adam Kirsch reviewed the book "On Ugliness," edited by Umberto Eco, in last Wednesday's New York Sun, he concluded that "The frightening thing about modernity … is the way it makes … ugliness … no longer beauty's necessary negative, but the only true mirror of our age." Mr. Kenna's work as a landscape photographer over the last three decades has sought to reintroduce beauty as an acceptable aesthetic criterion. A selection of 39 of his black-and-white pictures is on exhibition at the Robert Mann Gallery in "New York/New Work." Mr. Kenna is hugely popular. The list of his honors, exhibitions, and books, etc., fills more than 13 pages, and the list of Public Collections alone runs onto two single-spaced pages. Clearly large numbers of people respond positively to his work. Some of his best-known projects include "Le Notre's Garden," a study of French formal gardens; "Night Walk," which features the nighttime pictures that are a specialty of his, and "Hokkaido," one of several ventures to Japan. These are subjects that plausibly lend themselves to being represented beautifully, but Mr. Kenna also produced "L'Impossible Oubli" ("Impossible to Forget") a book of dark, atmospheric photographs of Nazi concentration and death camps. Is beauty appropriate in pictures of the camps? There is a growing literature that discusses this vexed philosophical issue. But New York, as those of us fortunate enough to live here know, is beautiful. Or, at any rate, if you keep your eyes open and are patient, you periodically encounter vistas that take your breath away. The 20 pictures of the city at Robert Mann recapitulate many of the classic views of the city, taken with Mr. Kenna's sensitivity to light and detail. "Homage to Kertész, Gramercy Park, New York" (2003) looks down on a tree in that privileged enclave at about the same angle André Kertész looked down from his apartment at 1 Fifth Ave., on the trees of Washington Square Park. Like Kertész's, Mr. Kenna's picture was taken in the winter, so the bare trees stand out starkly against the snow. The twisted trunk and irregular branches contrast with the straight line of the path that cuts across the image, and point up the difference between the designs of man and nature. "Mary Poppins Over Midtown, New York" (2006) looks down at night on the lit skyscrapers of the city, and they seem no less magical than in Berenice Abbott's classic "New York at Night" (1934). Mr. Kenna uses a medium-format camera and his exquisite prints are all of modest size, so there is startling clarity of detail; each of the hundreds — maybe thousands — of windows is sharp. There are three pictures of the Brooklyn Bridge, studies 1, 2, and 4, (all 2006), and each recalls one of the pictures Walker Evans took in 1929 to illustrate Hart Crane's poem "The Bridge." Mr. Kenna is himself an often imitated photographer whose work has influenced a generation of students and admirers, so it is important to note that when he looks to Kertész, or Abbott, or Evans as models, he is not merely copying their work, but learning from it and building on it. "Study 2," for instance, was taken from directly under the bridge whose roadway divides the picture. But unlike the similar Evans picture, it was taken at night, the Manhattan buildings are lit, the moon shines in the upper left-hand corner, and the moving waters of the East River take up the bottom half of the image. In "Study 1," taken just north of the bridge, a parallax tilts the buildings of Lower Manhattan to the right, making the skyline seem slightly plastic and, consequently, droll. "Study 4" puts Evans's study of the walkway on a tilt, as if the Gothic arches John Roebling designed for the piers were not only transcendental, as he intended, but in motion. In each instance, Mr. Kenna has looked again, and found something more. There are three pictures of the Chrysler Building taken on three visits to New York. (Mr. Kenna was born in England in 1953, but now lives in Seattle, Wash.) The earliest, dated 1998, shows just the upper 10 floors of the building and its Art Deco metal crown projected above the horizon against a dramatic, variegated sky that takes up more than half of the frame. The second, from 2000, shows it hemmed in by boxy, graceless, generic structures from mid-century, but still as the diva building Walter P. Chrysler determined it would be: Mr. Kenna waited until all the foreground buildings were in shadow and only his subject was in glorious late-afternoon sunlight. The most recent shot, 2006, was taken at night to show off the newly illuminated spikes on its crown. As with the Brooklyn Bridge pictures, those of the Chrysler Building make manifest Mr. Kenna's dogged pursuit of beauty. They show off his ingenuity, chaste sense of design, and technical virtuosity. The 12 pictures in "New York/New Work" from Mont St. Michel, France, do likewise, especially the six along the south wall of the gallery, a bravura display of variations on a theme. Mr. Kirsch wrote in his review of "On Ugliness" that, "In today's nihilistic art world, it is almost senseless to distinguish between beauty and ugliness: All that matters is novelty." The packed crowd that came to the opening reception of Mr. Kenna's exhibition at Robert Mann, and waited patiently for him to autograph copies of his books, opted for beauty. For those who are steeped in postmodern irony and cynicism, the pleasure of his work may indeed no longer be available. In the December 2007 issue, Artforum reviewed the exhibition Wijnanda Deroo: Interiors on view at Robert Mann Gallery through October 13, 2007. The full article (by Eugenia Bell) is reproduced here: Between 1988 and 1992, Dutch photographer Wijnanda Deroo trawled New York City's Lower East Side for fragments of the not yet gentrified neighborhood's Jewish history, photographing its obscured and crumbling synagogues. In 2004, she was commissioned to document the Rijksmuseum's pre-restoration state, arriving at a sequence of desolate interiors that reflect a century of wear and tear. Considering these two projects, made more than a decade apart, simultaneously is to be struck by how unerringly Deroo has managed to invest empty spaces with emotional authority. The artist's recent exhibition showcased a set of sixteen large photographs of vacant rooms from her series 'Interiors,' 2005-, a body of work that might, given the predominance of overly designed domestic decoration in the media today, suggest a glossy take on the fashionable and illustrious. But on closer inspection, these shots are entirely consistent with the sensibility that Deroo has evinced throughout her career. 'Interiors' is likely to draw comparisons to the work of Candida Höfer, not only because the two share vaguely similar palettes, but because they also have a comparable geographic reach. Höfer's focus on cultural heritage, however, is much more strident then Deroo's which (without feeling willfully obscure) seeks out history's neglected corners. And unlike the topically similar recent work Dayanita Singh, in which the photographer's technical skill seems to leach out almost all emotional resonance, Deroo's images, shot in deeply saturated color, retain their subjects humanity. A more apt comparison might be with William Eggleston; the top half of Deroo's Brahmavihara Indonesia, Bali, 2005, could be a Southeast Asian cousin to Eggleston's Red Ceiling, 1973, in which the hot hue of the room is loudly amplified and the sharp geometry helps to define an otherwise enigmatic space. The presence of people in Deroo's pictures is implied — by the open door and pair of slippers in the green-tinged Kraton Kanoman, Cirebon, Indonesia, 2005, or the forlorn, deflating balloons in Blue Marlin Party Room, Puerto Rico, 2006 — not stated outright yet we never miss it. Each scene hints at egress — a gauzy window in Adler Hotel, Green Room, Sharon Springs, 2005, a Deco stairwell in Queen Mary, Staircase, 2006. Each implied interaction focuses the viewer's attention on the details of the space: a crookedly hung Japanese print, a stained mattress, a vacuum cleaner sitting beside a stage. Deroo is fascinated, as are many of her contemporaries, with the romance of decline. She pictures the remnants of colonial architecture in Indonesia and the slow pace of life in a cowboy hat store in rural Kansas, where a mirror reflects little but scrap wood, a broom, and some empty hat hooks. The Sharon Springs sequence is particularly poignant. Known in the nineteenth century for its hot springs and wealthy summer residents (the Vanderbilts, the Roosevelts, and Oscar Wilde among them), and for catering to affluent New York Jews in the twentieth, the village now resembles little more than pit stop on the Borscht Belt nostalgia tour. Deroo's shots of decaying ballrooms and guest chambers of the Adler and Columbia hotels belie the former glory of these grand resorts: glory long receded before their eventual closer in 2004. It is Deroo's ability to look back at something departed and find resonance in its subtle residue that captivates. Robert Mann Gallery has acquired a rare collection of extraordinary railroad photographs by Richard Steinheimer, considered to be among the greatest American railroad photographers. A pioneer in the field, he documented the railroad's transition from steam to diesel power, using elaborate lighting equipment to photograph by night and even positioning himself atop moving trains to capture them in motion. His appreciation for the the American railroad and the landscape of the American West is immediately apparent in his exceptional body of work. To view an online gallery of the photographs please click here. For more information or to make an appointment to view the work, please contact the gallery. Richard Steinheimer was born in Chicago in 1929. In 1939, when his family moved to Glendale, California, their house was located near the Southern Pacific main line. In 1945, he began photographing with a Kodak Brownie camera, and two years later began to work with a medium-format Speed Graphic camera, with which he created some of the most beautiful night photographs of railroads ever made. He attended San Francisco City College and from 1956 to 1962 worked as a photojournalist on staff of the Marin Independent Journal. In 1963, his book Backwoods Railroad of the West was published and eventually became one of the most collectible railroad books. His work has been publishedTrains Magazine, Railfan, Locomotive & Railway Preservation, Vintage Rail, and numerous books, including the recent publication of A Passion for Trains (W.W. Norton, 2005). He currently lives in Sacramento, California. In the September 7, 2007 issue, The New York Times reviewed the exhibition Wijnanda Deroo: Interiors on view at Robert Mann Gallery through October 13, 2007. The full article is reproduced here: It is dangerous to say an artist exhibits national tendencies, but Wijnanda Deroo's photographs are so Dutch the connection is inescapable. As the show's title promises, she focuses on interiors. As in Vermeer's work, one of the prominent aspects of these deeply hued, expertly composed photographs is the relationship between inside and out, highlighted by windows and doors that offer glimpses of the exterior or allow light from it to cascade in. Maps in Vermeer's paintings alluded to the world beyond the his doorstep, the one explored and colonized by the Dutch in the 17th century. Ms. Deroo's photographs record her own travels in Indonesia, the Caribbean and the United States, although from the vantage point of a traveler who never makes it off the ship or out of the hotel. The cryptic narratives favored by Dutch masters — erotically charged music lessons, sleeping maids, people passing letters — are replaced in Ms. Deroo's unpopulated interiors by sly visual jokes and elegant formal juxtapositions. In the "Party Room," taken in Puerto Rico, there is a crudely painted mural depicting a Caribbean sunset (presumably you could witness a real one outside); a mirror in a Kansas hat store reflects the legs of the tripod and the photographer's foot. Even Ms. Deroo's love of color feels Dutch. Her deep red rooms and a bright, multicolored Indonesian cafe update Gerrit Rietveld or Jaap Drupsteen's eye-popping designs for guilder notes. These are intensely formalist rather than Conceptualist works, unless you consider the correspondence between images of rooms and the camera itself; the word, after all, comes from the Latin word for "chamber." And in Vermeer's day images of rooms implied the possible use of camera obscura devices. Mostly Ms. Deroo's photographs demonstrate the rewards of close looking and mining an aesthetic heritage — even one that in the abstract sounds as clichéd as Dutch interiors. In the September 16, 2007 issue, The New York Times reviewed the Jem Southam exhibition showing at the Yale Center for British Art through December 30, 2007. The full article is reproduced here: Capturing a Landscape That Won't Stand Still — by Benjamin Genocchio Back in 1996, the British landscape photographer Jem Southam began photographing an unassuming pond on the edge of the village of Upton Pyne, which is near his home in Exeter, in Devon. He returned at regular intervals over the next five years, recording seasonal changes and attempts by local inhabitants to improve the surrounding, largely derelict landscape. Twenty-one colorful, large-format photographs of the pond are showing at the Yale Center for British Art. This entrancing exhibition, assembled by Scott Wilcox, curator of prints and drawings at the center and touring nationally, represents about half of the total number of images in the series. The exhibition also celebrates the center's recent acquisition of a pair of Mr. Southam's photographs. Mostly, though, it tells a story — about time and transformation and human impact on the environment. It is a familiar tale, echoing Henry David Thoreau's book "Walden," published in 1854, which detailed the two years he spent in a cabin on Walden Pond near his family in Concord, Mass. While Thoreau was a natural history philosopher, social critic and early vocal environmentalist, Mr. Southam has more modest goals. He is a witness, nothing more, parachuting to a small, intimate patch of the planet at intervals and then relaying back, with a certain flourish, what he finds through his glossy color photographs. Of course, that does not mean his photographs are just pretty pictures. Mr. Southam's serial portraits of seasonal and environmental change are infinitely more complicated than that. He gets beyond black and white in the bitter debates over human environmental stewardship, presenting nature as a dynamic, living entity that is constantly changing and adapting to different forces. A human narrative is only one piece of the story that he wishes to convey. When Mr. Southam first chanced on the pond (basically a water-filled pit left over from mining), it was being used as a casual rubbish dump. But with permission of the landowner a local resident took it over, intending to clean and reshape it into his vision of a perfect garden. Mr. Southam decided that he would document the transformation from dump to Arcadian realm. He liked to visit and take pictures early in the morning, when there was nobody about. Over the six years that Mr. Southam photographed the pond, the site underwent considerable change. The first couple of images here depict a trash and weed-choked pond surrounded by an overgrown mass of trees. There are also derelict-looking buildings and pieces of rusted machinery nearby. Over all it is a fairly unappealing scene. But the more you look at these images the more you start to see. In fact, they are teeming with little details like hidden wild flowers, birds of all kinds and raking rays of light that gradually reveal to us the density and complexity wrapped up in the site. In some ways, these early pictures of the pond in its raw state invite us to consider ideas of beauty in the landscape. Human beings have long transformed the natural landscape to fit their own notions of beautiful (formal gardens are a good example of this). But nature exists in a somewhat chaotic state, at least to human eyes. The technical virtue of these photographs is that Mr. Southam finds and records great beauty in a disregarded, neglected piece of earth. The very early diptych "January 1997" provides staggeringly eloquent testimony to the pond's untouched natural beauty. It is winter, the trees are bare and sinuous, and a light layer of frost covers the ground. There is trash all over the place, but it dissolves into the landscape under the yellow glow of light that falls over the scene, illuminating the pond whose perfect stillness radiates a sense of a restless world finding momentary balance. It is perfectly lovely. Over time, through the series of photographs assembled here, the trash is removed, trees and other foliage are cut back, a lush lawn is cultivated, fences are erected, buildings are restored, and the entire area begins to take shape as part of a suburban garden for the residents whose homes back onto the pond. But in this remarkable transformation, something, you can't help but feel, is also lost. From August 28 to December 30, 2007, The Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut will be exhibiting works from the series Upton Pyne, which chronicles six years in the life of an unprepossessing pond near the photographer's home in Exeter, Devon. From 1996 to 2001, Jem Southam returned regularly to the site, recording the changing seasons and tenants' attempts to make improvements to the landscape. The exhibition includes twenty-one large format photographs from the series. Shown in the context of the British traditions of landscape representation, Southam's photographs ask us to re-examine notions of meaning and beauty in the landscape. This exhibition will then travel to The Davis Museum at Wellesley College, where it will be exhibited from March 19 to June 8, 2008. Little, Brown & Company recently published a limited edition re-issue of the landmark Ansel Adams book Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail. The original book, published in 1938, is now an extremely rare and valuable collectors item, setting a new standard for fine photographic reproduction in book form. Published Fall 2006, this new edition is printed in an oversize folio format to exacting standards and all fifty photographs are individually tipped in, as were the plates in the original edition, and is presented in a hardcover slipcase. The book is limited to 500 copies and is expected to sell out rapidly. Robert Mann Gallery is one of the few sources from which this new limited edition book can be purchased. Ansel Adams, at the age of 36, was commissioned to prepare a book of his photographs taken along the world-famous John Muir Trail as a tribute to Pete Starr, a young American mountaineer (and son of a Sierra Club president) killed in a climbing accident. This book is an exquisite portrait of the mountain world of the High Sierra in California, which follows the crest from Yosemite to Mount Whitney. The Design Trust for Public Space recently awarded the fourth Photo Urbanism fellowship to Gail Albert Halaban for her project, Vanishing Views. She plans to "create a series of portraits in private spaces across the five boroughs that reveal the transformation of New York City's landscape. The view can serve several different functions throughout the series, signifying location, class, or the fleeting nature of time. I will specifically look at how the landscape of 2007 is vastly different than the landscape that preceded it, and how different the landscape will become." Photography plays an integral role in the examination, discussion, and re-imagining of New York City's public spaces. Photo Urbanism supports this role by offering fellowships to photographers to document the city's natural and built environment. At least five distinct essays, produced sequentially and each focusing on a different aspect of New York's public realm, will catalog the city's evolving character. All work will be published collectively at the program's conclusion.