News

An orchestrated salute, however noble, can only go so far. It is best, perhaps, to view Jackie Robinson Day as an invitation, a chance to study and understand the complexities and nuances of a man who was much more than a surface-level hero. In that spirit, here are a couple ways to do it.

Reiferson’s collection will be presented as an exhibit, “Jackie Robinson and the Color Line,” from Monday through May 24 at the Gitterman Gallery in New York. The photos and artifacts, including telegrams and letters, comprise more than Robinson’s journey and stretch back to the integrated teams of the late 1800s.

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The exhibition at Gitterman Gallery, which runs from April 15 to May 24, will tell even more forgotten stories through vintage photographs, telegrams, and other artifacts of Black players such as Roy Partlow, Johnny Wright, and Dan Bankhead—lesser-known peers of Jackie Robinson, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ player renowned for breaking the color barrier in baseball in 1947...

The thread through Reiferson’s collecting is a desire to chronicle American history. The Gitterman Gallery exhibition, for instance, aims to paint a fuller picture of baseball’s slow and difficult path to integration in the U.S., while also revealing the power and beauty of photography. 

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Gitterman Gallery proudly presents Jackie Robinson and the Color Line, an exhibition of the collection of Paul Reiferson, which uses photographs and artifacts to vividly narrate the story of baseball’s journey toward integration. The exhibition opens on Monday, April 15th in honor of Major League Baseball’s Jackie Robinson Day from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. and runs through Friday, May 24th.

Jackie Robinson, a trailblazing figure in civil rights, shattered baseball’s color line when Martin Luther King, Jr. was still in college, earning praise from King as “a sit-inner before the sit-ins, a freedom rider before freedom rides.” The exhibition frames Robinson’s odyssey within a larger one that had begun sixty years earlier, when men like Fleet and Weldy Walker, Sol White, Robert Higgins, and Javan Emory played for integrated teams in the late 19^th century.

František Drtikol and Josef Sudek, two Czech avant-garde photographers, have their works paired together for this stunning exhibition, aptly entitled Czech Avant-Garde. Here, the lights and glamor of fame and fortune are replaced for true authenticity, showcasing talent and artisanry like few photography exhibitions do. Drtikol and Sudek are to be studied as true pioneers, and this series proves that their work belongs in the pantheon of the twentieth century’s photography palette.

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The strongest of the images in this small show draw us into Meatyard’s dreamlike world, seducing us with unexpectedly strange and macabre situations. Few photographers since have

explored these spiritual netherworlds with such visual sophistication. Seeing the three series on view here is a particular treat, as they haven’t been shown or reproduced as often as many of Meatyard’s more famous projects. Placed between singular works from the 1960s and the Lucybelle Crater series of the early 1970s, they provide an important stylistic bridge, beginning to connect together a range of separate ideas into more layered narrative forms.

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It's been said that a writer only begins a book; it is the reader who completes it. This is true of writers, but it's also especially true of a photographer like Ralph Eugene Meatyard. Indeed, as one of Meatyard’s best friends, the writer Guy Davenport once observed, many of Meatyard’s photographs are like “charming short stories that have never been written.” 

...This conversation was recorded in my home in Chicago in January 2023. Khalik was wrapping up a short residency with us at Northwestern, and we were sitting by a fire with my dog, Mogu, in the mix....

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Torward a Photography of Depth

...A discussion of Frame’s artistic work requires an understanding of the multiple influences upon his creative imagination. He draws on so many streams of awareness to fuel his aesthetic: growing up in rural Mississippi, his love of film noir and Southern gothic writers (he includes Faulkner and Williams), his experiences as a gay Southerner moving north to attend Harvard, his arrival in New York and his immersion in the downtown arts scene of the 1980s, the horror of AIDS, and the loss of so many friends. He discusses his need to express himself in a range of media: photography, film and video, plays, and essays. He describes a desire to dive deeply into the “heart of darkness” of both the personal and societal unconscious...

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Roswell Angier, whose Combat Zone photos captured part of Boston history, dies at 82

Link to obituary

...Roswell was an old soul who exuded curiosity, wisdom, and all-around calmness as he photographed with a compassionate but unblinking eye...

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A poignant artistic collaboration, showing how history and mythology converge in the Navajo communities in and around Gallup, New Mexico.

Taking a fresh approach to personal documentary, Gallup combines Roswell Angier's photographs, Susan Hawley's watercolor paintings, and both of their journal entries, as they explore the time they spent in Gallup, New Mexico in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Gallup is a place where histories and myths meet, and Angier and Hawley work through diverse media to portray a place where many versions of Native and American life have flowed together. They show that Gallup is both beautiful and difficult to know, in a way that reflects the long shadow of Native American disenfranchisement.

Sober about social realities, Angier and Hawley nevertheless find lighthearted humor in the daily life of Gallup. They take us from the Navajo creation story to motels, from a rodeo to an inherited suitcase of Plains Indian artifacts. Through images, we travel from Canyon de Chelly to Chaco Canyon, from fast food joints to bars. Beyond the picturesque clichés offered by the desert, full of Airstream trailers and sunsets, we find struggles over personal and group identity at one of America's crossroads, where a billboard once read “Welcome to the Indian Capital of the World.”

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Navajo cowboys impersonating John Wayne: Roswell Angier’s best photograph

‘This was taken in the Indian Head Bar, a seedy place in Arizona. The men were fascinated by Wayne since The Hallelujah Trail was filmed around there. Yet Wayne wasn’t in it.'

Before I actually went there, I knew nothing about the town of Gallup in New Mexico. I was familiar with a Robert Frank photograph of a sombre Navajo cowboy, taken surreptitiously in a bar there in the 1950s that was published in his classic book The Americans. The picture stayed with me. The place did not. But I decided to go there because of an exchange I had with my father in 1966...

image: ‘An in-between place where people collided with each other’ … Indian Head Bar, 1980 by Roswell Angier. 

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What he saved for his family

As an artist nears the end of his or her life, in addition to working through the inevitable questions of how the estate will be managed in the future, it is often the case that the artist sets aside works for family, friends, and loved ones, so that they don’t get overlooked, inadvertently sold off, or lost in the shuffle. And in the years before he died in 2014, the British photographer Roger Mayne did just this, working with gallerist Tom Gitterman to box up a selection of the last vintage prints from some of his favorite and most noted images from the 1950s, which became known as Ann's Box (for his wife Ann Jellicoe and their family). This tightly-edited show is made up of works from that personal cache, the prints having now drifted down the generations.

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West London’s Working-Class

Roger Mayne’s pictures of London in the 1950s capture a city on the verge of change. In his images, you can see the destruction of the Second World War and the dullness of austerity mixing with the dynamism of migration and the rise of youth cultures. He shows a city that is alive, where the tarmac, the pavements, and the houses are part of a living culture that will come into full bloom in the decades to come.

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Gitterman Gallery will present a selection of vintage photographic works in the viewing room of Von Lintel Gallery from February 17th through 19th as a part of Photo Forward Los Angeles (produced by Photographic Arts Council LA). In addition we will be participating in the special event sponsored by FRIEZE Saturday, February 18th from 5–8 pm.
 
Gitterman and Von Lintel have had a long collegial relationship and share representation of several artists. We have a similar passion for both art historical and contemporary work and take great pleasure in seeing the dialogue between art from different periods and how each adds in their own distinct manner.

Strolling through North West London one weekend in 1956, British photographer Roger Mayne (1929–2014) happened upon Southam Street in the neighbourhood now known as Notting Hill. Captivated by the locals who had turned the street into their playground, Mayne found what he had been searching for – a community he could chronicle for the sheer joy of making art...  

"Because he lived in the neighbourhood, he saw many of his subjects frequently and they trusted him. The candid nature of his images comes out of his inherent honesty and decency.”...

“The photographer’s power to select…makes it possible for photography to be an art,” Mayne continued. “Whether it is good art depends on the power and truth of the artist’s statement.”

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...Mayne's photographs capture neighbourhoods still in war's shadow, but filled with the energy of the "sidewalk ballet"...

...Frame can turn a figure toward solitary contemplation, or add a layer of psychological tension or subtle romance to a passing encounter. In a sense, this control feels almost theatrical, with Frame orchestrating the scenes like stage sets; in practice, it was surely more improvisational than that, but the best of the moments feel elegantly synchronized, with action and atmosphere aligned in ways that support each other.

The more time I’ve spent looking at these photographs, the more I’ve become enthralled by their moods. Yes, this is a visual diary of sorts, with lives and friendships seen up close, but Frame hasn’t just made raw documentation for the sake of some misplaced adherence to authenticity and grit. Instead, he has allowed himself to infuse these pictures with serenity and longing, finding moments inside tumultuous young lives where something extremely subtle is taking place, and then opening up those instants into something freer. In this way, he’s made their spaces roomier and more unstable – cinematic, but also gently attentive to the things unspoken and only ephemerally visible.

Link to full review

...Still, there is a precision to these images, a sense that Frame is deliberately investigating those liminal, transient moments in our lives. It’s hard not to look at these images and consider how they would have been taken and edited today, in a world in which our every moment is captured and shared. What is wonderful about the images in Whereupon is that we don’t need to know more. We have been given an introduction to the lives of these subjects, and that feels like enough.

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I first met Darrel Ellis in 1981. I was 30 and he was almost 23. He had just broken up with the actor José Rafael Arango and we were at an East Village neighbourhood gay bar called The Bar, at 2nd Avenue and East 4th Street, half a block from José’s apartment. The Bar had been in existence just a few years and had become a popular, low- key hangout with a pool table and jukebox, notable for the actors, artists, and writers who frequented it, including Peter Hujar, John Heys, Bill Rice, Jim Neu, Frank Franca, Bob Gober, Dieter Hall, Ken Tisa, Alvin Baltrop, Stephen Barker, and many others. That night at The Bar I brought Darrel home to my fifth-floor walk-up apartment in the West Village, which I shared with my roommate, an actress from Mississippi named Butch Walker. The bathtub was still in the kitchen. Our relationship started romantically but was very short-lived and quickly changed into a friendship..

Feser has constructed works that defy our internal logic of perspective, creating apparent rhythms and movements where there are none.

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There’s a certain quality of light that refracts from a pool of water on a warm summer afternoon. With each ripple, a sunbeam dissolves into a universe of radiant sparkle; the effect can be intoxicating. Christopher Russell has leveraged this phenomenon as a window into the sublime. Each picture acts as a kind of mason jar — captured and sealed tight within the frame is something wild and untamed: sun-kissed beams of light, rendered in luminous hues of cyan and magenta, cascading across waves of wind-swept water. 

Photographs from 1981 illustrate the artist’s archival care for his community.

...For Frame, this act of archival care carries special weight, since his own creative community’s legacy was disastrously impacted by the AIDS crisis. Curator and scholar Drew Sawyer sets the context for this body of work with his opening essay, focusing on Frame’s milieu and distinct use of color photography: “Part of the pleasure of these photographs for present-day viewers might come from recognizing well-known artists such as Robert Gober or Cady Noland. What made Frame’s psychologically imbedded pictures radical at the time was his use of color and his focus on the private lives of a queer community.” The photographs capture the moment, in the 1980s in downtown New York and Brooklyn, just before there was any awareness of AIDS, how it would remain ignored for so long, and how it would rip through the lives of those pictured. As Frame reflects in the monograph, “We were full of joy and hopefulness about our lives, about what we would accomplish creatively, about our close-knit relationships.”...

Fever (Matte Editions, 2021) was selected by Vince Aletti as one of his top 10 Photobooks.

Frame’s color photographs of friends hanging out in New York and Brooklyn in 1981 inevitably recall Nan Goldin’s, but his perspective is brighter, less fraught, with darkness all but banished from these naturally lit scenes. Goldin makes a cameo appearance here, but she’s just one of a cast of artists, performers, and writers whose interactions evoke the spirit of this fragile, charged moment: a fever that broke long before the decade was done. —Vince Aletti

ICP Perspective

The SF Camerawork Benefit Auction 2021: The Roof Is on Fire will take place online with Artsy 
September 14 - 28th. 

This year’s auction will feature over 60 works by some of the world’s leading photographers and many of photography's most exciting emerging artists.

Over its 47-year history, SF Camerawork’s mission and programs have been dedicated to offering local artists early career opportunities toward the creation of their important work. This year's Benefit Auction raises crucial funds that directly support image makers, with contributing artists receiving up to 50% of the sale price for their works.

Link to bid on Artsy

Through August 24, 2021

Klea McKenna uses the photogram process to create unique gelatin silver prints that contain both vivid detail and ethereal abstraction. Unlike a photograph created with a camera, a photogram is a one-of-a-kind object that involves physical contact between a subject and the light-sensitive printing surface, representing the mark of that interaction. This exhibition is a curated selection of work from 4 different series, Rain Studies, Web Studies, Automatic Earth, and Generation.

Rain Studies are an ongoing series of unique gelatin silver photograms of rain made outdoors at night. McKenna began making these on the big Island in Hawaii, where rain is plentiful but continued them back home in California as it suffered through a period of severe drought.

Web Studies are unique gelatin silver photograms of rain caught in the webs of orb-weaver spiders. Remarkable feats of engineering built each day to catch prey, the webs are also delicate and damaged. Like the patterns found inside trees and in our own lives, the webs follow a particular form yet each is unique and exquisitely flawed.

In her series Automatic Earth, McKenna emphasizes the physicality of the photogram process and builds on it by forcing the paper to record texture as well as light. Working in near darkness she applies pressure on the center cut of a tree to physically imprint the texture into the photographic paper and then selectively exposes the paper to light creating what the artist calls a "photographic relief."

With Generation, McKenna applies this method to textiles and women's clothing from different cultures that are rich in the legacy of touch: from the labor of their making to the textures of the designs, to the marks of continual wear. For McKenna, her process "is driven by my desire for communication with women from a time and place different than my own...With each alteration, mending, and use, someone has inscribed themselves onto these textiles."

www.kmrarts.com

This Is Not a Fashion Photograph. Allen Frame

..."the pictures in Fever seem to draw upon an earlier influence: Italian postwar cinema, notably Michelangelo Antonioni. The looseness, spontaneity, and natural light in Frame’s work combines the immediacy of the snapshot with film’s wide-screen impact for a sense of emotional intimacy that’s contained but never cramped."

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A PHOTO COLLECTION THAT CAPTURES NEW YORK AT THE VERY DAWN OF AIDS

In 'FEVER,' Allen Frame's candid 1981 photos capture a time of hope and innocence—and they are all the more tragic for it

In a new book of color photographs, all shot in 1981, Allen Frame revisits a time that gave rise to an aesthetic that was distinctly New York. A circle of friends, many—though not all—gay men, made art at a specific moment in city’s history, though perhaps not what you’d expect.

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A Portrait of the New York Art Scene
Just Before the Advent of AIDS

A new book and exhibition revisit downtown New York in 1981 and capture the face of a lost generation just before the pandemic struck.

Frame’s photographs, which combine the immediacy of the snapshot with the timeless sensibilities of fine art, preserve the face of a lost generation. Here, we see a world filled with possibility and hope, the hallmarks of youth made all the more poignant by the sense that they cannot begin to imagine the terrors the future will hold.   

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In a simultaneous, in-person show at MATTE in Brooklyn, Frame is presenting a selection of images from Fever, along with a salon-style hanging of work from his collection of artists depicted in the book and recent work by some of them, including Frank Franca, Nan Goldin, Jody Guralnick, Kevin Teare, Ken Tisa, Jane Warrick, David Wilson and Zamba. Other photographs from the period by Sheyla Baykal, Robert Penner, Laurie Sagalyn, and Perry Walker are part of the salon-style presentation.


MATTE Editions HQ
1899 Fulton Street, Brooklyn, NY 11233
www.MATTEeditions.com

In my photographs there's an inherent reality that we see, real people in real situations, not actors in a film or play that I’m directing or writing. I acknowledge that reality, but of course, I shape it, with various decisions of framing, editing, sequencing. I want to acknowledge my subjectivity, too, my projections onto people and situations. What is exciting to me is the mixture of the two, the coming together of some "objective" reality and "subjective" experience. I title images with the actual subjects' names, the actual location, the actual date, but what seems to be going on in the photograph may not reflect the actual circumstances.

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Showing Us the Light

For Khalik Allah, photography is a spiritual endeavor, a conscious marriage of street and self, a quest to elevate both. It is also inherently lyrical, and like a preacher improvising a sermon, a musician in the zone, or poet freestyling off the dome, there’s something mystical and transcendent in the execution. That’s not to say it isn’t firmly grounded in this reality, in the actuality of life at 125th and Lexington in Harlem where much of his work is focused. Cycles of addiction, poverty, and suffering haunt the darkness of this nightscape but the camera is an instrument beholden to the light.

Link to the Spring 2021 issue of the magazine.

online version of the article

Close to Home: Creativity in Crisis
Curated by Corey Keller
March 6 – September 5, 2021

Close to Home: Creativity in Crisis brings together seven Bay Area artists ― Carolyn Drake, Rodney Ewing, Andres Gonzalez, James Gouldthorpe, Klea McKenna, Tucker Nichols, and Woody De Othello ― and their deeply personal responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and social upheaval of 2020. Their projects emerged from the profound curtailing of daily life that resulted from shelter in place: the disruption of routines and the inaccessibility of studios or materials, the instability in employment, and the delicate and sometimes untenable balance struck between family needs and work obligations. These challenges demanded an adaptive way of working; rather than closing off opportunities, the constraints prompted new approaches and new lines of inquiry.

Individually, the artists demonstrate a startlingly wide range of artistic, emotional, and political responses, a reminder of how this unprecedented period affects each of us differently. Taken together, their work emphasizes our shared experience in this collective crisis.

link to SFMoMA

click below to read about Klea's installtion No Feeling Is Final, 2020

Khalik Allah’s latest film "IWOW: I Walk on Water", focuses on the artist’s longtime muse Frenchie, a 60-something schizophrenic, homeless Haitian man, who he becomes increasingly intertwined with. Allah, whose previous moving image work includes 2018’s "Black Mother", also turns the camera on himself to document a turbulent romantic relationship and grapple with personal notions of spirituality and mortality – all inquiries about which he gathers advice from charismatic confidants including Fab 5 Freddy, members of the Wu-Tang Clan, and, in deeply moving exchanges, his own mother. On the motivations behind his image-making practice, Allah says “My objective hasn’t changed, it’s always been to keep it real with myself; to stay true to my vision and to have the courage to express it cinematically. "IWOW" is a sort of first-person documentary poem; a statement of my artistic integrity and my uncompromising dedication to the streets.”

link to trailer

Khalik Allah is featured in the new Spring 2021 issue of the magazine.

1981, NYC

It was a time like our own. A young man comes to New York and wants to be an artist. A president wants to make America great. A doctor sounds an alarm. A health crisis looms, like an overture in a minor key, but everyone goes to a bar called the Bar and a gallery called Fun.
 
There was a difference between uptown and downtown then. Allen Frame had grown up in Mississippi and lived in Boston, and, in 1977, when his friends were moving to New York, he moved there too. After living in a gay rooming house in Brooklyn, he found a place downtown on Perry Street in the West Village. He cleaned apartments for enough cash to get by, and he didn't need much because rent was cheap. Frame had time for friendship, for art and sex. He met other gay men who were artists and writers, and each brought references and experiences and ambition to the scene. He had his first boyfriend. "It was like heaven," he said...

get your own copy of Aperture 241 HERE and read on

November 21 – January 16

Christopher Russell's art engages historical notions of landscape yet he does so with a decidedly contemporary approach. Each work is unique and combines color photography and drawing. Based in the Pacific Northwest and inspired by Carleton Watkins' photographs of the American West, Russell's images both extend the tradition of landscape photography and challenge the viewer's perception of the medium. These images of hazy color are manipulated by the artist scratching into the surface of the print with a razor. The drawings add detail back into the consciously obscured photographic image. In some cases, he draws abstract forms made with small markings that represent the half-tone patterns of photomechanical reproduction. With others, Russell draws historical plant and floral patterns, essentially layering stylized images of nature over the original photographic image. Though he pushes conceptual and art historical boundaries, Russell remains a Romantic and his artwork invites the viewer to experience the wonder that he has found, and that continues to inspire him.

link to KMR ARTS

On following a higher power to document black life across the diaspora – an interview with the new Magnum nominee

"I think that beauty is everywhere. It depends on the decision to find it, focus on it, and accept it. Perception is always a choice. It seems that we are feeding off what our senses tell us is reality, but we choose what we see. When we look outward, we see a reflection of what we first witness inside ourselves. When you turn inward, your inner world is naturally unique. As long as I draw on that well of inspiration it’s not going to run dry."

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Magnum Photos welcomed Khalik Allah into the agency as a nominee. As an international photographic cooperative owned by its photographer-members, Magnum has a structured process for introducing new members. Photographers first join the organization as nominees, before progressing to become associates, and then finally gaining admission to the Magnum collective as full life-long members.

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© Musée Magazine

Link to video on Vimeo

This well-edited show doesn’t change any of our conclusions about the obvious intelligence in Josephson’s work, but instead acts like a welcome refrain, bringing some of Josephson’s primary innovations back to our attention for another round of savoring and recalibration. Especially as seen in some of these lesser known works, Josephson’s cleverness and thoughtfulness about photography is remarkably deep; even efforts that we may have overlooked prove to be just as perplexingly magical as some of his best known masterworks.

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It seems likely that in our current times of puzzlingly malleable truth and simmering anxiety that the Surrealist impulses of the past will have a resurgence, and that photographers like Jahan might be primed for rediscovery or at least renewed interest. This tightly edited survey reminds us of his breadth of vision, the consistent quality of his efforts, and the power of an off-kilter view of unsettled normalcy.

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KHALIK ALLAH's BLACK MOTHER selected as THE NEW YORKER Best Movies of 2019

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The documentary filmmaker Khalik Allah, whose new feature, “Black Mother,” opens on Friday, is one of the most original cinematographers of the time. The modern cinema is a photographic cinema, with its roots in the hands-on creation of personal and highly inflected images; Allah is also a notable still photographer, and he made “Black Mother” the same way that he makes stills. He filmed the movie alone in the company of his subjects, doing his own camera work (in a variety of film and video formats, in color and in black-and-white); for that matter, he also recorded the sound. But his photographic sensibility is only one element of his exemplary art. He also edited the film, and his complex sense of audiovisual composition—textural, tonal, thematic, rhythmic, philosophical—is as original and as personal as his cinematography. 

Link to the rest of Richard Brody's review from March 8

Snapshot: Pierre Jahan at the Gitterman Gallery, New York

The images showcase the late French photographer’s remarkable ability to merge reportage and Surrealism.

Taken in 1941 by the late French photographer Pierre Jahan, the photos in La mort et les statues are like something from a bad dream. Dismembered statues and gargoyles appear against an incongruous background of industrial machinery, plunging the viewer into a world of shadow and stone.

Jahan produced the prints in Nazi-occupied Paris, where sculptures had been seized from their public perches to be melted down for metals to aid Germany’s war effort. These grotesque figures seem to emit a silent expression of pain for the surrendered city.

The images showcase Jahan’s remarkable ability to merge reportage and Surrealism, a slippage he described as “a kind of drift similar to dreaming”.

In the realm of photographic abstraction, Sudre’s pictures stand out – his mix of processes and experimentation led to works that don’t look like anything else we’ve seen before (or since). Their extremes force us beyond simple admiration of their rhythms and complexities into a grasping search for analogies – their strangeness looks like something else, what exactly we can’t quite say. These are intense photographic expressions, ones whose densely packed mysteries and allusions keep us wondering.

HOW KHALIK ALLAH BENT THE RULES OF STREET PHOTOGRAPHY, AND FOUND HIS VISION

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Allen Frame: Suddenly

Two works in Allen Frame’s new show use vernacular photographs that he discovered during a recent year-long residency in Rome as the jumping off point for hybrid wall-filling installations that put the found images into dialogue with his own photographs. The open-ended mysteries of the anonymous vintage photographs offered Frame the opportunity to graft his own interpretations onto the scenes, and he then went on to expand those themes further, twisting past and present into intimately coupled meditations...

The subtle codes of human attraction that inform the two installations are generally absent from Frame’s larger color images. The pictures instead capture pauses – the in-between moments that happen just before and after something else. Ivana looks out of a widow that could be a painting of the Italian countryside, Ugo checks his phone as he walks down the repaired stairs of an older stone balcony, and Pietro sits on the edge of a swimming pool, looking to his right out of the frame. The photographs linger, and that slowness provides space for vicariously stepping into the lull.

In many ways, these pictures are all testing Frame’s ability to find a particular emotional pitch and stay there, allowing it to blossom and expand into something more complex and intricate. In each of these works/projects, he’s trying to capture invisible restlessness, and attempting to freight his understated scenes with a tiny slice of agitation. When he successfully plucks that string, his pictures shimmer with unseen vibrations.

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Fantastic Views

In his three-part exhibit “Suddenly,” Allen Frame’s photographs in Italy build narrative fantasies that draw upon foreign films, theater, southern American literature and his 2018 year-long residency in Rome. Frame starts with and improvises on found Roman photographs from the 1960’s, adding his own scenes with characters who all seem to be anticipating or searching for something. The salon-style grouping “Giuseppe,” a seeming travelogue featuring a strapping sunbather and his friends, the elegantly subdued and ornately framed B&W series “Suddenly” (referencing Tennessee Williams’ 1958 play Suddenly Last Summer) and Frame’s single color photographs of individuals in sun-drenched recreational scenes, all feature a subtle homoerotic charge. With an adroit dichotomy of restrained, often pensive characters in bright, open compositions, Frame’s narratives tease like film stills, building suspense and desire.

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Feser has carved out a defensible artistic space for herself by not only smartly leveraging the natural dissonance of the image/object dichotomy of photography but also pushing her works further toward sophisticated investigations of surface and abstraction...

As intricately hand crafted objects, Feser’s prints are undeniably impressive and remarkable, but it’s their resulting ability to make us step back, think, and reassess what we assume is happening that makes them durably intriguing...

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Interview from Praxis Interview Magazine on Yale University Radio WYBCX 

link to podcast

...If my review is as close as you’re likely to get to New York, then please consider this fair warning that there is no way to do these pieces justice online...Feser’s pieces don’t fool the eye so much as play around with it. The geometric and organic building blocks in her work are pleasingly recognizable – squares, triangles, teardrops – arranged in patterns we initially register as familiar. But soon the encounter veers into a seesaw of puzzlement and revelation. Light frolics with shadows, serendipity defies logic, and materiality flirts with illusion. 

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WILLIAM LARSON (1942-2019)  

It is with great sadness we announce the passing of William Larson.

I only met Will in 2014. By then he was already diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. He warned me that there might be times during our conversations when he would be silent and not respond. He didn't want me to worry if I said something wrong and explained, that among other effects of the disease, it sometimes prohibited him from speaking when he wanted to. I share this because Will was very interested in communicating conceptual ideas. His work explores ideas of perception and representation. He was highly aware of many existing dialogues in the history of art and consciously added to them. I know, if I had met him earlier, our conversations would have lasted for hours. I wish I had more time to learn from him. I will miss him deeply.

Our exhibition of his Fireflies series in 2015 remains a highlight in my career. This series were some of the earliest digitally generated works of art. Larson utilized a technology new to the time, a Graphic Sciences DEX 1 Teleprinter, a sophisticated early fax machine, to present a dynamic way of image making that extended the vocabulary of montage. Larson conducted the technology to produce an almost random juxtaposition of dissimilar images. The symbolic, or poetic, potential of the juxtaposition references "the imperfect operations of memory or dreams."

With Fireflies, Larson sought to move beyond the traditional notion of what a photograph can be. He was interested in representing the fluidity of time with a static work of art. He stated: “I started to work and think of photography as a system of production, supporting a bias toward the additive possibilities of the medium, and less the subtractive, descriptive, or literal.”

Larson grew up in western New York and attended the State University of New York at Buffalo. He received his Master’s Degree in 1968 from the Institute of Design, where he studied with Wynn Bullock and Aaron Siskind. Soon after receiving his Master’s degree, he established the photography program at Tyler School of Art, Temple University, where he taught for over 20 years. He was director of graduate photography and digital imaging at Maryland Institute College of Art for 18 years. Larson’s work has been collected and exhibited by numerous institutions around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Carnegie Museum of Art, The Morgan Library and the San Francisco Museum of Art.

—Tom Gitterman

ALLEN FRAME: INNAMORATO
curated by LIA GANGITANO
PRATT INSTITUTE Oct—Dec 2018

“Innamorato,” an exhibition by the writer, filmmaker, and photographer Allen Frame, was dominated by Ennio, 2018, a room-size installation made up of more than fifty found Italian Mussolini-era photographs of an air force pilot, his sister, and a handsome young man. The pictures, hung salon style, were set into a variety of secondhand frames. The subjects of the photos appeared well off, beautiful, and youthful. They could be seen with skis in the mountains and cavorting on beaches, bringing to mind the bourgeois family in Vittorio De Sica’s 1970 film The Garden of the Finzi-Continis.

Seven photographs of Ennio were printed by Frame from negatives he purchased along with the photos. Every portrait is full body, and in each one the man is ready for pleasure, be it in sun or snow. Is he an object of desire for whomever took the pictures? Is it the handsome friend and his sister who yearn for him? Or is it the artist, who rescued these people from the obscurity of a flea market? Or could it be us? Perhaps it’s all of the above. Included in the installation were hand-written passages in Italian taken from Absalom, Absalom! (1936), William Faulkner’s tale of a sibling love triangle—thus revealing the narrative that Frame projected onto the images.

Look and Feel: The Best Photography Books of 2018

Generation by Klea McKenna

What matters to Klea McKenna registers immediately when you take her book, Generation, into your hands. For her, touch is on a par with vision. Surface and image are inextricable. McKenna works in the dark, embossing light-sensitized paper through pressured contact with objects, then exposing the textured sheets to the raking beam of a flashlight. In the past, she has made such “photographic rubbings” using the cross-sections of trees; in Generation, she uses different types of handmade fabrics, from a fringed Spanish shawl to an embroidered Pakistani dress. Some of these photograms are included in the book, along with a text in which McKenna reflects on the material history and intimate use of the textiles. Also included are montages of reference photographs, old and new, ethnographic, cinematic, and vernacular. Like the fabrics, like skin, the book’s cover has a distinct life—the cover of my copy will not look or feel like the cover of yours, since a unique one has been created from the residue of the making of the work for each edition in the limited print run. In case we needed the prompt, the inside back cover is stamped with the directive: FEEL ME.

KLEA McKENNA reviewed in PHOTOGRAPH

By Michael Wilson

If the photogram is ordinarily associated with a shadowy ephemerality, San Francisco artist Klea McKenna’s approach to the form invests it with a physical heft more often linked to printmaking, or even sculpture...In her Generation series, McKenna redirects her lens toward the human realm, depicting textiles transformed by wear and tear into haunting records of women’s experiences – narratives removed from McKenna’s own by the specificities of time and place but united with it in other ways. La China Poblana (1), 2018, for example, embodies a fascinating intersection of cultural identities in its depiction of an old skirt encrusted with sequins. This traditional garment tells the story of a Rajasthani woman who, in the late 1600s, was kidnapped, sold into slavery, and taken to the Mexican city of Puebla, where she eventually married a wealthy merchant.

KLEA McKENNA reviewed in MUSÉE MAGAZINE

by Adam Ethan Berner

The photograms render their subjects in incredibly intimate detail; each stitching shines through the silvery imprint, lines and creases transforming from marks to be fixed into something ethereal and beautiful. Even a seemingly tangled scattering of 48 nylon stockings becomes a beautiful composition of fabric, a twisting and flowing set of silvery smoke that beckons the viewer to imagine what is and what could be...It reveals the life and labor that took place to create these works in the first place, highlighting the identities of those who had been rendered invisible by the unconscious assumption that objects like these just appear without the labor of actual people...Each crease, each line, each stitching, and each decoration becomes a testament to the lives of those who made these works, like the creation of a soul now passed onto the viewer.

KLEA McKENNA in COLLECTOR DAILY 

By Richard B. Woodward

Over the last 5 years, Klea McKenna has repeatedly proven herself to be a contemporary master of the photogram. A technical innovator who has nonetheless remained true to this primal act of the medium—writing on pieces of paper with light—she has created ravishing prints that incorporate nature into the process of their emanation, an artistic philosophy that reflects an unconventional upbringing in northern California.

link to full article

ALLEN FRAME: INNAMORATO
curated by LIA GANGITANO

October 3 – December 14

Opening reception Wednesday, October 3, 6–8 pm

PRATT INSTITUTE PHOTOGRAPHY GALLERY
ARC Building, Lower Level, Brooklyn, NY 11205

DIRECTIONS: If coming by subway, take the G train to the Clinton-Washington station and use the Washington Avenue exit. Walk up Washington Avenue one block to Dekalb Avenue and take a right one block to Hall Street. Enter the campus at the corner of Dekalb Avenue and Hall Street. Walk through campus to the ARC building at the end. It is a two story building with many triangular roofs.
link to more directions      link to campus map

Pratt Gallery hours: Monday–Friday, 11 AM–5 PM
link to more information

California based artists KLEA McKENNA and Aspen Mays in conversation with Joshua Chuang (Senior Curator of Photography, New York Public Library)

PENUMBRA ARTIST SERIES
Friday, September 14th, 7:00 pm

KLEA McKENNA in QUIET LUNCH

By Kurt McVey

Her work, as she sees it, though aesthetically gorgeous, sensual and mysterious, is dependent on the idea that these things, the sinewy, ghostly photograms-a physical and yet metaphysical expression of these textiles-have something to say for themselves. “They’re not just dead matter.”

KLEA McKENNA: Generation

Gitterman Gallery is proud to present an exhibition of contemporary work by Klea McKenna. The exhibition opens on Wednesday, September 12th from 6–8 p.m. and continues through Saturday, November 10th.  

This exhibition marks her first solo show in New York and the beginning of her representation by Gitterman Gallery. It is presented in association with Von Lintel Gallery in Los Angeles where McKenna will have a concurrent exhibition from September 7th through October 20th.
 
The exhibition presents McKenna's most recent work Generation alongside work from two of her previous series Automatic Earth and Web Studies. With each series, McKenna uses the photogram process innovatively to create unique gelatin silver prints that contain both vivid detail and ethereal abstraction. She pays homage to her subject's histories while re-animating them through her engagement, revealing nuance, depth and energy.

We are proud to announce the representation of KLEA McKENNA

JOSEPH SZABO in THE NEW YORKER

Three Decades of Lifeguards at New York’s Jones Beach
By Andrea DenHoed

An avid chronicler of American youth, Szabo began taking pictures at Jones Beach in 1960, and returned year after year to capture the diverse human menagerie that gathers every summer: the evolving styles of swimsuits, the near-naked bodies in their limitless variety, the jubilance and intimacy of a day at the beach. Floating above it all, in Szabo’s scenes, is the figure of the lifeguard, on a high perch, upright and vigilant amid the languid bodies and umbrellas below. Sometimes they are a taken-for-granted part of the landscape, their chairs blending into a wide-angle view of the crowd; sometimes they’re godlike, on a literal pedestal and shot from the ground.

Link to full article

JOSEPH SZABO in THE NEW YORK TIMES

‘Baywatch’ Gets Its Game Face On
By John Leland

Joseph Szabo photographed the lifeguards at Jones Beach for 25 years. He saw things that most of us never will. 

Link to full article

KHALIK ALLAH in COLLECTOR DAILY

By Loring Knoblauch

The durable power in Allah’s portraits lies in his unflinching willingness to connect, to take the risk of engaging with someone who may at first be rightfully fearful or defensive.

PICTURE FICTION:
Kenneth Josephson 
and Contemporary Photography
April 28–December 30, 2018

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, CHICAGO

KHALIK ALLAH in THE NEW YORK TIMES

10 Galleries to Visit Now on the Upper East Side
By MARTHA SCHWENDENER

The Art Deco Fuller Building at 41 East 57th Street has historically been an art gallery hive. One of its tenants is Gitterman, a gallery devoted to photography and now showing the work of Khalik Allah, a young filmmaker and photographer

KHALIK ALLAH in THE FILM STAGE 

New Directors/New Films 2018 Review by Jason Ooi

In just two films, he has developed and honed his incomparable style, providing the festival, and the documentary form itself, with one of the most memorable, intense experiences in recent memory.

KHALIK ALLAH in THE NEW YORK TIMES

BLACK MOTHER selected as one of
11 Movies You Need to Know at New Directors/New Films by A.O. Scott

Gliding from color to black and white, from digital to analog, from grim realism to spiritual ecstasy, the film offers a song of praise to the island of Jamaica and a reckoning with its painful history and hard-pressed present. Mr. Allah gathers a rich blend of voices, faces and natural wonders, a kaleidoscope in which shards of violence and poverty commingle with glimmers of dignity and resilience.

link to article

5 TOP UPPER EAST SIDE ART GALLERIES

NewYorkHotels.com

LOIS CONNER
Interviewed by George Slade in B+W MAGAZINE

What initially sends me out into the world is often a story, photograph or painting; some aspect of the world that haunts me because of its absolute unfamiliarity, its beauty or incomprehensible existence. Trying to render a visual encounter through photography is nearly impossible. Bending and twisting what the camera faithfully describes into something of fiction in order to give form and meaning to what exists in front of you. With the confluence of light, circumstance, chance and a dozen other factors I attempt to conjure up a world, one seemingly half-imagined and breathing with the life of histories.

KHALIK ALLAH in HUCK

Dark, soulful portraits of Harlem at night
Psychic x-rays

By MISS ROSEN

Khalik Allah takes to the streets of New York City, capturing the nocturnal locals of Harlem in a series of bold and beautiful images.

In the summer of 1998, Khalik Allah had come to a major crossroad after failing eighth grade. Dancing with a B-boy crew had been keeping him out late at night, and school had failed to interest him. Yet he understood the importance of educating himself. Concerned about his future, he headed up to Harlem and began to study with the Five-Percent Nation at the Allah School.

FULL ARTICLE

KHALIK ALLAH in THE NEW YORKER

A Filmmaker and Photographer’s Urgent, Personal Portraits of Harlem at Night
by Richard Brody

These images—of people, mainly black people, many of whom endure drug addiction, physical infirmities, poverty, homelessness, and harassment from the police—have an essential documentary urgency. They also have a spiritual essence, an element of passion and grace that’s revealed by Allah’s compositional grandeur and textural intimacy—but these revelations of style arise from his own experience, which he also details in the book, in an extraordinary personal essay, “Camera Ministry.” In the essay, Allah—who has an exhibition opening at New York’s Gitterman Gallery, in March—discusses his first enthusiasm for filmmaking, in the late nineteen-nineties, as a teen-ager from Long Island, at the same time that he began to frequent Harlem, to study the work of the Five Percent Nation, and to become friends with members of the Wu-Tang Clan. He discusses the happenstance of his sudden interest in photography at a time, in his early twenties, when he had put his filmmaking on hold. It’s a story that involves his family, but, above all, it involves his relationships with the people whom he photographs, as well as with other people whom he encountered on the street.

full article

KHALIK ALLAH in THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

By LUC SANTE

The result is a panorama of human emotion: sadness, passion, bewilderment, pride, suspicion, amusement, exhaustion — all the faces of the night. “Time is over, and the world has ended,” Allah writes. “Only the Light continues.”

JAMES HERBERT by Loring Knoblauch

COLLECTOR DAILY

JAMES HERBERT 

Gitterman Gallery, in New York, is currently the host of one of the most beautiful exhibition of the new season.

L'OEIL DE LA PHOTOGRAPHIE

JAMES HERBERT interview with Sarah Moroz

"I’m interested in a sort of tenderness, and even sadness," says the artist of his evocative black-and-white images.

"Desire is when you see something you like; it looks good to you. That can be a peach, or it can be a person. When artists deny that they're interested in beauty, because they have a conceptual conceit that overrides it… I'm interested in a sort of tenderness, and even sadness, in eroticism."

"Process is very meaningful to me because I don't see any other way to discover anything, except by going on the journey. I would never take a tour — I want to wander around with a backpack."

i-D VICE

STUDIO: REMEMBERING CHRIS MARKER

Adam Bartos and Colin MacCabe
with an introduction by Ben Lerner

www.orbooks.com

HYPERALLERGIC
THE VILLAGE VOICE
THE BROOKLYN RAIL

STUDIO: REMEMBERING CHRIS MARKER

Adam Bartos and Colin MacCabe
with an introduction by Ben Lerner

www.orbooks.com

ALLEN FRAME
is a recipient of the 2017-2018 ROME PRIZE
a fellowship awarded by the AMERICAN ACADEMY IN ROME

ROGER MAYNE in THE GUARDIAN

Ahead of the exhibition at The Photographer's Gallery, Kate Kellaway talks to Roger Mayne's daughter about the man who helped to shape postwar photography.

WILLIAM LARSON is included in
LIGHT PLAY: Experiments in Photography, 1970 to the Present

LACMA 

February 12, 2017 – June 18, 2017

HERBERT MATTER is included in

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM at the
GUGGENHEIM BILBAO

February 3 – June 4, 2017

JOSEF BREITENBACH is included in

BEGIN TO SEE: The Photographers of Black Mountain College at
BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE MUSEUM + ARTS CENTER
Asheville, North Carolina

January 20 – May 20, 2017

GITTERMAN GALLERY included in TRAVELMAG's Best Galleries on the Upper East Side.

Gitterman’s well-curated photographic exhibits capture realism as much as they obscure it. The thought-provoking show “Hommage à Christian Bouqueret” was a collection of the late historian, curator and collector’s vintage photographs. One particular highlight was an untitled gelatin silver print by Roger Parry that depicted, with vivid color, the dejected beauty of a young woman. Another by François Kollar superimposed images to show how two souls can occupy one body. This sense of warring duality permeated the entire exhibit. 

Read more:

L'Oeil de la Photographie

Musée Magazine

BW Gallerist

Artwell Guide 

JOSEF BREITENBACH in

THE RADICAL EYE: Modernist Photography
From the Sir Elton John Collection at the
TATE MODERN

November 10, 2016 – May 21, 2017

HENRY HOLMES SMITH exhbition revieved in THE NEW YORKER by Vince Aletti.

The little-known American photographer worked closely with László Moholy-Nagy in Chicago, in the nineteen-thirties, and was similarly drawn to the medium’s experimental fringes. 

HENRY HOLMES SMITH exhbition revieved in COLLECTOR DAILY by Richard B. Woodward.

This sample of 29 prints is therefore welcome and timely. The experimental spirit that he encouraged in his writings is more in synch with the zeitgeist than perhaps at any time since the late ‘60s-early ‘70s. Mariah Robertson and Matthew Brandt are only two of the many younger artists whose color pictures wouldn’t look out of place next to his.