Sebastiao Salgado

In Sunday's New York Times, May 31, 2009, is a nearly full-page article on Sebastiao Salgado's Genesis project. You can find it online here.

Anselm Kiefer

I like Anselm Kiefer's work. I like his work a lot. I like his work so much in fact that once upon a time, I borrowed--for the sake of art--pieces of one of his works.

He had a show at Marian Goodman's many years ago at the time he made the move from Germany to France--I think it was called "20 Years of Solitude", or at least one room was. He took everything in the studio, which is to say everything that wasn't worth much by itself (I assume) such as canvases, detritus, floor sweepings, sent it to Goodman and piled it up in a huge pile about 18 feet wide by 18 feet high. (As I write I realize we're talking: everything at a garage sale, piled on high, and sold as one piece. Very clever: you can have it all or nothing. ) From a distance, it looked like an elephant turd.

So I picked up--off the floor--a piece of straw, a piece of lead, a piece of a silver print and a piece of clay.

So what, you ask? Well, exactly. So what.

Not inclined to throw them out, I mounted them on a board and labeled it "With the Right Materials, I Too Can Become an Artist."

Sadly, it turns out not to be axiomatic.

Still, I find him one of the most inventive, creative, visually interesting artists of the last 40 years. I particularly like his use of photographs as narrative (albeit, obscure) and his book work. Jeff Ladd at 5B4 reviewed one of his books of books here and had some very insightful things to say. So...

If you have any interest in Keifer, on the Saatchi Online TV & Magazine website, there is a 4 minute video tour of Anselm Kiefer's studio at Barjac in France.

Robert Frank's The Americans

Here's a treat for fans of Robert Frank's work or for fans of just The Americans. The gallery owner James Danzinger, has posted a report from the San Francisco stop of the show, Looking In: Robert Frank’s “The Americans.” There is a map that shows the routes Frank took on his three Guggenheim trips. There are also posted eleven Frank photos from a display that reproduces the wall where Frank would pin up the photos to figure out which ones work and what the best sequence would be. I've never seen any of them before. Here.

Adam Bartos at ICP

From ICP:

Book Signing with ADAM BARTOS
Friday, May 29
6:00–7:30 pm
ICP Museum Store
1133 Avenue of the Americas at 43rd Street

Join Adam Bartos for a signing of his latest book, Yard Sale Photographs. If
you are unable to attend, please call 212.857.9753 or click the title to
reserve a signed copy. Limit of two signed copies per customer.

The yard sale is a perfect platform for bizarre juxtapositions of objects,
perhaps the only stage upon which the Compte de Lautréamont's famous "chance
meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing machine and an umbrella" might
occur of its accord. In turning his lens to the random constellations formed
by rummaging and perusing, Adam Bartos has struck gold, with an idea so
simple it seems odd nobody had thought of it before.

5B4 reviewed it here.

PhotoBook Reviews

Robert Frank and June Leaf By Eamonn McCabe

Liz Jobey is a London-based writer on photography and an associate editor of Granta, the literary book/magazine that often runs interesting photography portfolios. She has written a couple of books as well including The End of Innocence: Photographs from the Decades That Defined Pop (Scalo, 1997) and A Photographic History of the 20th Century (Pan Macmillan, 2002.) She reviews photography books for the Guardian in London. She's quite smart on the subject (not the least because she recommends 5B4 as another site to find good book reviews.) Her lastest book review was Here Comes Everybody by Chris Killip. Here's an index of her articles..

The Guardian also had a photography blog going for a while. They closed it down and lumped it all under "Art and Architecture" but the archives are still available, including a piece on a talk by Don McCullin and posts on Robert Frank, Nan Goldin and Stephen Gill.

GMB Akash

Photographs by GMB Akash

GMB Akash is a photographer from Bangladesh who shoots for the Panos Pictures photo agency in London. He's a modern-day Lewis Hines. His work is very good. You can find it here.

Ellen Von Unwerth

Von Unwerth by Steven Meisel

And I thought I was an obsessive collector...

Willam McFadden has collected an astonishingly encyclopedic collection of Ellen von Unwerth's work. The website where he presents this stuff includes links to interviews, biographies and articles about von Unwerth; photos of her as a model; images from all of her books; photos of the installation of gallery shows; advertising she shot, categorized by client and within each entry, listed by year; editorial work; and commercials, music videos and films she has made. It's a huge reservoir of imagery, much of it reproduced large. And the most amazing part of this archive is that these thousands of images were nearly all gathered from the web.

Personally, I find her work more interesting than most fashion/advertising/editorial work so this was quite the time-eater. And you never know when you might have to write a research paper about her and her work. It's all here.

Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams and Everett Ruess

Alright, so this isn't strictly about photography but famous photographers are mentioned. Better yet, it's a great story.

The New York Times issue of Friday, May 1, has a story about the disappearance of Everett Ruess in 1934 and the apparent solution to the riddle of what happened to him.

Ruess was a young poet and writer, friend of Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange and also an "Into the Wild" sort of fellow.

It's online here.

The photo above is Ruess by Lange, with a photographic superimposition of skeletal remains found in southern Utah.

Darn, now I've given away the whole story.