It is difficult to pick one point to start with when considering the work of Seydo Keita. The article in the Times touches on many of the issues contributing to the rise in value of his photographs as an art commodity, but asks nothing about what drives the excitement for this work. Comparing Keita’s work to Rembrant has got to be one of the most ridiculous assertions that anyone could make. It is patently obvious that the task of painting even a poor imitation of Rembrant would be far more difficult to accomplish than it would be to make most photographs. Keitas work, naive and humble was made “….outside any aesthetic discourse” but it was made inside for a specific and utilitarian objective, to make photographic likenesses of his subjects. That was his job, and he did it in a workmanlike manner, nothing more. If one were to make comparisons to an artist of the european or western culture, why not choose the work of a photographer, instead of a painter? Look at the portraiture of Arnold Newman whose work unfortunately does not figure prominently in today’s hot art market. Long acknowledged as a master (Like a Rembrant) in the history of photography( a separate precinct from the history of art ), Newman also did photography for hire. Unlike Keita, his understanding of the medium was deep and intuitive. His sensibility was consistent but inventive; each subject would be photographed in a manner that both described the sitters’ appearance, an evocation of the sitters’ personality and the vision of Arnold Newman. Keita’s work has no subtlety or invention. He presents us with nothing more than the description of the sitters and the fabrics in which they are dressed or posed against. To our first world eyes, no doubt, we perceive a quaintness and exoticism, but I can’t see Keita showed any great awareness for doing anything more than making the photograph. There is hardly any variation in the expression of the sitters. All of the poses are similar, and only the distance to the sitter was altered. He used a variety of backgrounds, but beyond that there simply is little exemplary about his photographs. Viewers find a lot to be intrigued with, not the least being the ethnographic information. But this work is far short of Rembrant or Newman.

A more apt reference to compare Keitos work is to that of a small town photography studio in America. In fact a small town American photographer, Mike Disfarmer, was “discovered” and brought to prominence. The images of Disfarmer and Keita have much in common, and seem to appeal to viewers in the same way. There is, as most people realize, a quality of nostalgia encapsulated in photographs, and as photographs get older, they become more interesting. The nature of this interest does seem to be wired into the human psyche, and anything that is older than being simply out of date becomes more appealing, and later talismanic. The flea market would be the base camp of commodification of the old, and a museum such as the Metropolitan would be the summit of value. Since, in some ways the most banal old object is redolent of some essence from the time in which it was made, we find it intrinsically interesting and evocative. Consider a 1964 Ford Falcon, an automobile, undistinguished in any way at the time of its manufacture. It was plain and basic, but no doubt loved by those for whom this was the new car that they could afford. I doubt that there were many who did not trade it in as soon as possible for a newer and better car. That car, used, would serve another owner or subsequent owners until such time as it was sold or destroyed. Yet a few of these cars survived, and when we see one on the street, in new condition, we are likely to spend at least a few minutes contemplating it as an engaging artifact. Everything about this object would resonate in our minds- whether we saw this car new in 1964 or for the first time in 2006. Now consider the 1964 Ferrari 275 P, which would represent a high point in automotive design and engineering in 1964. To our eyes in 2006, both cars are artifacts that generate interest. Are they now of equal stature and significance simply because they evoke the sensibilities of another time? While the original owner of the Ferrari, may too, have replaced it in a year or two, an appreciation for this car probably accompanied its entire existence. I imagine that the excitement generated by this car in 1964 would be comparable to the excitement that it creates today. The same could not be said about the Ford.

If the Ford contains 1964, so too does a photograph made in 1964. It contains 1964 through the encapsulation of details and specificity to be found in that year, possibly that Ford or Ferrari, or fashion particular to that time. Were we to examine two photographs (made with materials unchanged over the years), of a subject that gave no visual cues as to time, I submit that a viewer could not establish the time when either image was made. It is that detail from the past which intrigues us. Keita’s and Disfarmer’s photographs bring us the past and the exotically unfamiliar. But this kind of work brings it to us with all of the evocation of a Ford. By considering the mind, eye and sensibility inherent in a created object we can consider if the work belongs in the Met or at a Flea market. By comparing two photographs of a a timeless subject, we could make a distinction between a compelling image and a merely descriptive photograph. With photography, we must make a distinction between what is being shown and how it is being shown..

Another issue worth examining is print size and quality. Keita’s work was originally contact printed from the camera negatives, meaning that the prints were small. When introduced to the art world the work was exhibited as Jumbo sized, rich high contrast black and white prints. Any photograph can be printed in any size; it’s only a matter of cost. That scale is important in art is obvious, but to take undistinguished works, blow them up to the size of paintings and to do so with masterful tonality and range is to transform the work of Keita to simply the product of a great photography laboratory. This was a totally market driven production, and has nothing whatever to do with the vision of an artist. Collectors upset about how many prints were made are concerned only for their investment. There was nothing authentic in the decision to make the prints large, and it matters not how many are in the edition.

I happened to see for the first time, the work of Elisa Sighicelli at Cohan and Leslie which concludes this Saturday.

Sighicelli’s photographs immediately perplex: the  large format multi paneled work  appears to be at once a reflective print and a light box installation. To my mind, most gallery light box installations appear to be troublingly similar to airport advertising displays, but Sighicelli  avoids that association, Her images are mostly lit from the gallery track lighting. By selectively opaqueing the back of her images, she allows only selected transmission of the light box’s illumination through the photographic print medium.  By doing this, she has altered the expressive range of the shadows and highlights in her work. The results are highlights that truly glow.

Technique aside, her studies of conference rooms and other banal interiors show a formal sensibility and a disorienting point of view. She appears to approach an interior subject as if it were a landscape. Where the foreground of a landscape would recede from the bottom of the picture frame, receding in perspective to form the horizon at some point upon the frame, Sighicelli regards a table top in the same way. She places her camera lens  upon the table surface which in effect makes the table top the “ground” and the back edge of the table becomes the horizon. As the table tops are shiny, the the image of objects in the background  merge with their reflections within the table. Sighicelli focuses her camera at the back of the photographic space, and this, too increasingly dematerializes the photographic illusion  by rendering her foregrounds out of focus.  This artist began with inert, unprepossessing subject matter, but with intelligence and invention, she has created engaging and transformative work. Ask to see the monograph(s) of her work at the gallery counter.

At the same show, Sighicelli exhibited work based on appropriated imagery. Selecting small portions of  XV & XVI century Sienese painting, she crops out the figures and main subjects of these paintings, presenting  the edited results as a light box. The idea that within a larger pictorial composition one can find and excerpt another composition has little conceptual payoff. Doubtless, that strategy could yet again be applied to her  work, and where would the process stop? Compared to  Sighicelli’s landscape and interior works, these do little more than revisit a tired post modern conceit.

Jan Groover at Janet Borden, 560 Broadway, 212 431 0166. January.

A selection of Groover’s late 1970’s Kitchen Sink Still Life images look great in the small catalog sent by the gallery. The Show opens next week. When seeing Groover’s work in the mid 70’s I was most excited the photographs that explored the spatial interrelationships between adjacent photographs. Seeing her triptychs of architecture brought to mind many considerations about space and illusion. By placing a spatial and planar illusion contained within one photograph adjacent to the that of another two frames, Groover was able to create a push pull of space across the span of three frames.

There had been artists constructing assemblages of multiple photographs before, on one front Ray Metzker, and on the other Jan Dibbetts. Groover’s work seemed to nestle between  these two practitioners. Surprisingly, Groover seemed to retreat into her home, and produced a series of still-life photographs of plant leaves and kitchen utensils.  At the time, the images appeared to be a throwback to some of the traditional still-life images of Strand or Weston, without the rigorous formalism.  More obviously they played with reflective surfaces of silverware and the colors that could be captured within the metallic surfaces. All of these objects are cluttering the same frame, and while we should expect to  see  how the elements sit in space relative to each other, Instead, what we see happening is a complex negation of representational space. Completely filling her picture frame with  plant leaves, butter knife blades and other kitchen hardware, the compositions become collage like. There is a transcendent moment when these images exceed simple compositional exercise. Objects in the foreground appear to drop behind objects that we know to be in the background. Surfaces become depths, and depth appears to be flat.

W. Eugene Smith will be exhibited from November 3 through December 23, 2005. A reception will be held on Thursday, November 3 from 6-8pm.

I strongly encourage you all to see the Eugene Smith exhibit. Although Smith, dead since 1978, would not, under our stated objectives for the collection, be part of the purview of our photography committee, this show demonstrates, at the highest level, the potential of documentary photography. Smith photography, long established as a canon in the history of photography, is little known to the long separate and aloof interests of art museums and art galleries. That there continue to be galleries such as Robert Mann solely showing photography only points out that there has been and continues to be a separate precinct for the medium of photography. But as inroads have been made in these last decades whereby some photographers’ (so called) documentary work can now be seen in many museums and galleries, this show should be see, if only for an abject lesson as to what can be done with this medium. This exhibit assembles vintage prints of the “classics”, those famous images that would have been included in any comprehensive examination of Smiths work.

Smith worked as a photojournalist (perhaps most famously for Life Magazine), and nominally his photographs reported on human life. Perhaps his most renowned images were made in World War 2, but after the war, he did photo essays about country doctors, industrial workers, and the human struggle with environmental depredation and poverty.

The descriptive or illustrative use for photography can be seen every day in newspapers and magazines, but the photographs hanging at Mann point out that photography can, at once be both reportorial and transcendent.

With the photographic technology now accessible by virtually everyone, all manner of life is being recorded every day, and those results, as well as news photographs, could be labeled as documentary photography. When is it that documentary photographs should be hung on gallery walls as art? Every day written accounts about people or events are published, but virtually none of it would be characterized as literary works. Now and again, reporters’ accounts do become the stuff of literature. Analogously, shouldn’t there be a distinction between descriptive photographs and those that transcend description, and in doing so become art?

Smith was a photojournalist whose work consistently showed an intuitive sense of composition coupled with an awareness of the expressive qualities of photographic materials. Unlike a drawing or painting where the elements are combined and organized within the picture to construct a composition, a photographer, has at times, to instantaneously orient the camera frame in relationship to the subject. If the subject is animate, and comprises a multitude of elements, it takes a quick and instinctual eye to bring the camera to the chosen distance, angle and relationship to the subject. Like Cartier Bresson’s photographs, it is impossible to wish that the composition of his imagery were any different. In looking at Smith’s photographs, it becomes evident just how finely his sensibilities were tuned. With the exception of a few images which border on treacle, his photographs encapsulate a varied portrayal of human emotion. Photographing mostly with available light, his black and white prints have rich, dark shadows, and strong highlights. The work in this show is essential. At once it describes aspects of the human condition, and also probes the potential for artistic expression.

I am not positing the idea that contemporary photography should be carried on in the manner of Eugene Smith, but I do think that his work represents a high water mark for documentary work. When we look at documentary work today, we should ask if the work is simply reporting events (dramatic or otherwise) or do the photographs tell us about the potentials of the medium and the sensibilities of the artist. Smith’s work does both.

Hanging now are two photography shows that consider similar issues. Sonnabend Gallery is exhibiting Hiroshi Sugimoto’s series of large scale still life photographs of simple, but elegant industrial forms. At the same time, Brian Clamp Gallery is introducing the work of Ion Zupcu. This surprising show is a great counterpoint to the Sugimoto show. Where Sugimoto examines industrial forms and patent models, Zipcu presents small but engaging still life photographs, of what ordinarily is an unprepossessing subject: paper.

Sugimoto’s studies of the modeling of form, light and dark are seductive and fascinating despite the risk that. these photographs could have remained simply academic exercises in light and shade. A few of the images of reductively simple forms do call to mind traditional still life drawing classes in which students are required to render a cube, cone and sphere. Sugimoto, with complete control of black and white photographic technique, masterfully keeps his prints’ tonality within a subtle range of values. The gradations of light and shadow are so finely nuanced that the three dimensionality of the forms appears to barely emerge from a deep black background.

To my mind, Sugimoto, is most successful when he plays with the ambiguities of spatial illusion. This is most clearly accomplished with the iconic, reductive forms presented centered in black space. One series of wooden shapes readily call to mind the sculpture of Brancusi and Arp. Were the objects to be photographed for the maximum illusion of three dimensionality, the contours of his subjects would clearly separate from the background. When directional light models falls upon a subject, the side facing the light source will be modeled and shaped by how the light falls upon the topography of the object. In photography, if the aim is to fully render an illusion of three dimensional volume, it is important to provide additional light to the contours of the subject that are not exposed to the light. This would be characterized in photographic parlance as “fill light.” If no fill is used, the unlit side of the object would render as black. Sugimoto uses his fill to barely separate the shadowed side of his forms from the black background. In doing this he plays with the modeling, allowing the tonal distinction between object and background to be so small that the three dimensional rendering of the objects seems to flip back and forth, creating an illusion of both positive volume and negative space. WIth some of the prints, the object almost appears to drop behind the background, and the background appears as the picture plane, rather than a proper spatial rendering in which the 3 dimensional illusion is definitive. This kind of spatial play has long been explored in painting, but is seldom the concern of still life photography.

Ion Zupcu examines spatial illusion too, but his play with light, shade and three dimensional modeling is strikingly transformative. The objects that he photographs are nominally two dimensional, but the illusion of three dimensionality depends only on shading and focus. In each photograph, basic shapes are modeled. In one photograph a sphere is suggested and in another a triangle. Calling to mind the early 20th century photographs of Man Ray and Moholy Nagy, Zupcu works with strips of paper. He pushes his investigations towards illusionistic space rather than the more graphic arrangements of his predecessors.

In Zupcu’s photographs, shapes constructed from strips of paper are placed on white backgrounds. With surprising economy, he employs the sparest of materials and techniques to explore some of the same spatial ambiguities of Sugimoto’s work. For example, Zupcu simply makes a loop from a sheet of paper, places it on a background and photographs the assembly. By employing a very shallow depth of focus and soft light, the dimensional illusion becomes ambiguous. The image can be seen at once as a sphere, a short tunnel of paper, or as a flat sheet of paper penetrated by a glowing orb. Another image of a sheet of paper bent into an upside down “V” formation spatially reverses foreground to background and back again. Zupcu’s focuses his camera on the front edges of his paper constructions, but allows the back edges of the form to become very fuzzy and indistinct. When looking at the actual object, the eye would see a crisp delineation, but the photograph depicts the object dissolving in an edgeless glow.

Both Zupcu and Sugimoto recognize that there are issues other than description which can be explored with the medium of photography. With great command of their craft these artists are examining how their materials and technique can at once render volume and space both realistically and ambiguously.

Some thoughts about two shows I saw last week where photographers used computers to manipulate their work.

Thomas Ruff at David Zwirner. The initial impression of these extra large images is favorable. Presented in this show are jumbo framed photographic works which initially suggest some of the characteristics of painting. The images appear to be built up in a grid like arrangement of  sizable rectangles in muted colors. For a moment, the blocks begin to work abstractly, in that one block appears to move spatially back or forward relative to the adjacent blocks. Any person who has used  a digital camera and a computer will recognize that these blocks are pixels. After a few moments, by stepping back from the work, the overall image can be perceived, not unlike an impressionist painting. According to the press release, Ruff merely applied the simple technical device of  enlarging the image until the pixels themselves were each as large as a wallet sized photograph. That there was no further thought or intervention applied to these works by the artist, I found disappointing. The rubric of the gallery press release describes the artist’s motivations:

A  continuation of Ruff’s interest in the mechanical production of images and their subsequent  degeneration (as in his nudes and substrat series), these JPEGs draw attention to the abstraction that occurs  when recognizable images are digitized and distributed via the Internet. How  this degeneration affects our  understanding of and reaction to images, whether benign or visceral, beautiful or repulsive, familiar or  unrecognizable, is at the root of Ruff’s exploration. The release continues:  Visible pixel lines are embedded in the image, creating a  juxtaposition  of biomorphic and geometric shapes, suggesting the imposition of technology on the natural world.

The technical device used to produce this show in fact produces nothing more than technical gimmickry. The press release  attempts to pad out a thin concept with post modern jargon about computers, media and memory.  Ironically, I went to the gallery web site to refresh my memory of the show, and found scaled down versions of the photographs. On my computer screen the pixels disappeared and the images became nothing more than ordinary pictures.

Doug Hall at Feigen Contemporary.  These large photographs of prominent tourist attractions,  “are constructed out of multiple images of a location, often taken over several hours. As the press release describes ” Elements from the negatives are then pieced back together to form one coherent image. Therefore, while the photographs appear to document a single moment in time, this instantaneousness is an illusion, as the photographs are actually composed from a composite of many such moments.”

To further distinguish this work from ordinary travel photographs the press release continues.

“Doug Hall’s most recent series of large-scale photographs encourage us to reconsider familiar places and address how our perceptions are framed and defined by the spaces we occupy…  Hall’s detailed and color-saturated panoramas show us how these public spaces circumscribe human activity. “

It is difficult to see how any of these images, which could faithfully describe actual scenes, in broad daylight, absent any distinguishing point of view atmosphere or insight, could inspire any reconsideration.

Hall is quoted in the press release where he emphasizes,  “the role that institutions play in constructing our experiences of the world and of ourselves in it”. The release goes on to explain how Hall, “by working on the “world stage, “, demonstrates how we are participants in a grand theater that seeks to direct our understanding of the world. “His photographs are meant  ” remind us of how hierarchies are embedded in the world and how the physical and cultural constructs that we often take for granted have power over us, perhaps until we take a closer and longer look.” Can any of these points be perceived from the work itself?

Overall,  the images are utterly believable, betraying absolutely no hint of untruth or manipulation.  One image, from Yosemite National park is a particularly well composed gathering of people,  showing a complexity lacking in the other work. I wonder why go to the trouble to assemble the many components when the results produce so little affect. The results are perfectly ordinary, and interchangeable with souvenir  postcards.

In the same way Hall feels that visitors to the tourist attraction are being manipulated “to  behold the spectacle before them from specific, pre-ordained vantage points”, the visitors to the gallery are being manipulated by the gallery’s press release. . In both of these shows, The  gallery explanations asserting theoretical underpinnings of the work seem specious. No matter how intellectualized their explanations, the photographs remain mundane

Normally I like to share work that inspires me and I hope inspire others. But in these two cases, I left the galleries with the feeling that I was being manipulated.

Photographs by Aneta Grzeszykowska and Jan Smaga apply the methodology of aerial photography to interior photography. Customarily, interior photographs might be made from a high vantage point, with the position of the camera oriented from high up at the corner of the room, looking towards the opposite side,  pointed at an angle down towards the floor. Akin to satellite photographs, these images record the entire contents of an assortment of interiors taken from a vantage point directly overhead. Replete with detail, the photographs present all of the furnishings as flat planes.  Rugs, table tops, beds, a cat,  all become part of a complex formal arrangement.  The picture plane of these photographs, being parallel to the floor betrays no indication of depth, since no view of table legs, for example, can be seen. These prints are presented without mattes or frame, and the edge contours of each print is cut to conform to the room perimeters. Thus each all of the floor area of the room, and some indication of the room walls are rendered within the confines of the print. Some of the photographs include the room occupants, lying on a bed, soaking in the bath or sitting on the toilet.

For photography to transcend mere description, I believe that imagery should do more that merely describe what exists at a particular time and location. Yet these images succeed perhaps because of the obsessive attention to pure description and inhuman objectivity.  These photographs are also technically astonishing. The images are extremely clear, inviting endless scrutiny of every detail, from tooth paste tubes to nuggets of cat food spilled on the floor. Apparently the artists have used the computer to combine multiple photographic frames seamlessly into each print. Their efforts all add  up to an inventive study of quotidian life.

Another recent graduate of the Yale Masters program, and one whose work, I believe is significantly elevated beyond student work, despite her short time out of school. The obvious inspiration for her work is  Edward Ruscha’s  paintings but this work is completely photographic.

Shannon makes actual word signs and places them in landscapes. The words are constructed in the manner of the Hollywood sign, thinly cutout letters each propped up in the landscape. This work is a blend of the concerns of conceptual art traditions and some of the traditions of black and white photography. Ebner is sensitive to the expressive potentials of highlight and shadow and her prints have the rich textures of some of the best landscape photography. Most often, conceptual artists using photography have little concern for or understanding of the expressive aspects of the medium.  But her command of the materials yields images of poetic and conceptual content that are also finely made prints. Additionally, she also works with color materials with equal facility.

The conceptual foundation of this work is perhaps best summarized with the gallery press release.

“Dead Democracy Letters documents temporary landscape installations that briefly lay claim to the urban-pastoral expanses of undeveloped land in and around Los Angeles. Ebner’s Letters offer a critical investigation into social and political injustices; they employ language to address its fallibility in a time of perpetual war when words such as freedom, liberation and democracy are drained of meaning and left corrupted.”

The work on view seen on Saturday in three hours of Chelsea gallery going, was surprisingly satisfying. Oftentimes, an afternoon can be spent looking at galleries, and my reaction is little more than a shrug of the shoulders.  From this last foray, I have four shows which I can recommend.

David Maisel at Von Lintel gallery (555 W. 25th) This is a continuation of Maisel’s accomplished aerial photographic studies of damaged and abused environments. “It looks  like a painting’’  has been a cliched appraisal of many photographs. Because we seldom see the bird’s eye view, we can be seduced by the novelty of seeing the ordinary from the air. Maisel’s photographs navigate the shoals of these two aesthetic pitfalls,producing images that stimulate formally, spatially, and conceptually. Flying  over the Great Salt Lake  which has been diked and bermed in various industrial operations, Maisel fixes with his camera these ephemeral and  unintentional earthwork compositions. The palette of his subject is extraordinary, but Maisel shows particular sensitivity to drawing, line, and ambiguous space.  As in painterly illusion, that which is flat becomes spacial and volumetric. Maisel is intuitively sensitive  to the expressive potential of photography, and produces images with this technical medium that are faultlessly precise and unusually vivid.

Christian Marclay at Paula Cooper Gallery. Marclay has applied his sensibilities to photographic materials. Using 12” transparent vinyl records as “negatives” Marclay made a series of photograms by placing the record directly along with some long human hairs on the color print material, and then exposing the assembly to light, producing cobalt blue prints of the grooves of the record, now white tracings against the blue ground. Adding to the regularity of the record grooves, the hairs cross over the grooves and flow out from the circumference of the record. After much deliberation, I purchased one of these. Other photo- grams incorporate hands and record sleeves. . Another group of prints was made by putting the record in a photographic enlarger, and making a print as if the record was a negative. The resulting prints are made from approximately 1/4 of the record, the image being comprised of the radial grooves of the record. Because of the high magnification of the record, the grooves render as wavering lines drawn by an unsteady hand. This is surprising and intelligent work.

Kim Keever at Feigen Contemporary. The world of constructed photography grows more complex with each year, and Keever adds his own world view. As if seen through a porthole that has just emerged from beneath water, these very lurid fabricated images  are illusively rich and add upon the work of Thomas Demand, Oliver Boborg and Sonja Braas.

Tanyth Berkeley at Bellwether (134 10th Ave) Color Portraits made mostly of young women and adolescent girls. Berkeley approached he models on the street  and invited them to sit for a portrait. The photographer’s selection shows a particular line of investigation: that of women who are the polar opposite of the beautifully complexioned perfectly proportioned visages that are seen on TV and in magazines. Upon seeing this work, it is uncertain as to whether or not this  enterprise has been done with a somewhat cruel selective process. Berkeley has made fairly straight forward portraits in the outdoors with natural ligh and the portraits yield little affect, either of the artist’s sensibilities or of the subjects’ personalities. Viewed independently, no one photograph breaks no new ground visually or conceptually, but in aggregate, the show did stick in my mind. That the women sitting in Berkeley’s gaze are unattractive is inarguable, and she hasn’t tried to make them pretty. But it is not clear that she hasn’t collected her subjects simply to make an exploitative treatise on beauty. This notion is open to discussion. Also in her show were one irrelevant landscape and a few lack luster full figure photographs of men. Perhaps this is an artist whose work should be followed, rather than committed to at this moment.