Photography (11)

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Nature’s Poetry

The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! —William Wordsworth, The world is too much with us   No time to turn at Beauty’s glance, And watch her…

Waterline

The installation of renowned English artist Francis Cape’s piece Waterline (2006) in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, featured seventeen framed photographs hung above a wainscot of ochre-painted paneling. The photographs were taken in New Orleans on November 6th, 2005, two months after Hurricane Katrina, in the towns of Gentilly and St. Roch in central New Orleans. Cape…

Add-Verse

Allan Graham and Gloria Graham created Add-Verse in collaboration with 25 poets, many close friends of the couple, between 2003 and 2005. Comprising visual and audio material, great care was taken in paying homage to the many well-known people they worked with. A two-hour video loop filmed by Allan Graham documents approximately three to five…

Venice, Las Vegas: Spectacle and Similarity

For nearly 30 years, the husband and wife photographic duo Andrea Robbins and Max Becher have investigated the cultural collisions that arise from our vast appetites for both the dislocated and the decontextualized. In their artist statement, they have described their work as documenting the “transportation of place,” a theory readily demonstrated in bodies of…

A Kind of Rapture

In a dimly lit cubicle on the third floor of Industry City’s mammoth warehouse, six masterpieces of modern photography stare out across a room; still, serious, and open, waiting for a viewer to wander in. Of the six, four are portraits, ever so slightly larger than life and very direct—no titles, no names, no context,…

Recovery Time City Evermore

Darren Jones exhibited four works hung side-by-side. Although they were made between 2012 and 2013 and are each composed of individual intentions, because of their proximity and significance they were, contextually speaking, separate, but acting as a collective and almost singular work. Hanging on the far left was Duct: a piece of brown paper with…

Oden Junior; Oden Senior

At first, from a distance, they appear to be maps. They come more into focus. Large patches of grass and weeds surround the grey concrete rectangles at the center of each image. There is exposed piping for plumbing or heat. Two images that only a moment ago were observed in the way one glances at…

Untitled (Unique Color Polaroids)

There is a tragic element, as despite all the attempts at engendering an image that matches a mental picture, the woman underneath the clothes and behind the skin remains a mystery to us and to herself. The perfect projection of the internal imagined self, if it exists, only does so for the duration of the…

Women of Allah

Shirin Neshat is split within by the barrier without: as an exile from Iran living in the U.S. she is caught between two worlds, simultaneously of both, and also of neither. To be exiled is to be divided not only from a homeland, but also from oneself. Although it is rarely directly addressed in her…

Photo-Sculptural Objects

As the son of artist Rob Ryman and art critic Lucy Lippard, Ethan Ryman (New York, 1964) was exposed to visual art at a young age. However, like his father—who originally moved to New York to become a jazz saxophonist, only to become a painter instead—he first had a successful career in music as a…

Untitled (Cobblestone Constellation)

We hold our monuments to impossible standards. They are to be classical yet contemporary: elegant and consumable. They are to be mythologizing and didactic, telling an inclusive, rousing story. And undoubtedly, they must be grandiose yet meditative, inspiring feelings of both sublime patriotism and inner illumination. There is something of this impossibility in Barney Kulok’s…