James Bidgood: Dreamlands @ CLAMP, New York + 2025 Monograph from Salzgeber + 1971 film "Pink Narcissus"

James Bidgood | Dreamlands 

CLAMP, New York

Through August 29, 2025

James Bidgood

“Richie Backstage, Sleeping Portrait,”

 mid-1960s/printed later

Digital C-print 

© Estate of James Bidgood

Courtesy of CLAMP, New York

James Bidgood, Dreamlands, Salzgeber, 2025

Book Cover Courtesy of Salzgeber

160 p., 24 × 32 cm - English / Deutsch

ISBN 978-3-95985-718-5

CLAMP presents “James Bidgood | Dreamlands,” an exhibition of photographs marking the launch of the monograph of the same title from Salzgeber, in addition to recent screenings of the artist’s cult classic film, “Pink Narcissus,” at theaters across the United States and Europe.

The book combines iconic motifs from the artist’s oeuvre with many previously unpublished images. The exhibition at CLAMP includes twelve of these new photographs selected from the estate archives, along with a large-scale print of “Pan”—the monograph’s cover image.

“Pink Narcissus,” James Bidgood’s film from 1971, described as a “kaleidoscopic fever dream of queer desire,” was recently restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, and has been playing at theaters since late 2024, including MoMA (New York), Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), BAM (New York), Metrograph (New York), and other screens in London, Bologna, San Francisco, Seattle, Provincetown, Tucson, St. Louis, etc.

James Bidgood passed away in 2022 at the age of 88. A New Yorker for over 70 years, he was adored and admired by generations of artists and cinephiles alike.

When James Bidgood first came to New York from Wisconsin in the 1950s, he worked as a drag performer and occasional set and costume designer at Club 82 in the East Village. After studying at Parsons School of Design from 1957 to 1960, James Bidgood found jobs as a window dresser and costume designer.

He then went on to work as a photographer for men’s physique publications and began creating his own personal photographs and films that greatly benefited from his talents in theater design and costume construction. It was during this period in the early 1960s that James Bidgood began working on his masterpiece—the 8mm opus “Pink Narcissus.”

In his tiny apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, he handcrafted sets using humble materials to create a theatrical dreamland in which artifice became transcendent. With hand-tailored clothing, saturated lighting, and lots of glitter, James Bidgood built a cosmos of queer belonging, populated with angelic figures of male beauty—including Cupid, Pan, and other mythological gods, along with harlequins, soldiers, firemen, hustlers, drag queens, altar boys, and more.

Bidgood’s confined domestic production speaks to both necessity and liberation—”a queer creative spirit refusing to be constrained by material limitations.” In fact, the artist and his models would eat, sleep, and frolic within the sets until it was time to tear them down and begin building the next scene.

Within this space, and in front of his lens, the homosexuals that were ostracized by larger society could be beautiful, glamorous, complex, silly, or simply themselves.

CLAMP 

247 West 29th Street, New York, NY 10001

clampart.com

James Bidgood | Dreamlands

CLAMP, New York, July 10 – August 29, 2025

Yancey Richardson Gallery, NYC, Celebrating 30 Years Anniversary

Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York

Celebrating 30 Years

July 16 – August 15, 2025

Yancey Richardson celebrates its 30 year anniversary with a milestone exhibition bringing together works by all of the gallery’s artists and estates. Titled Celebrating 30 Years and co-curated by the artists themselves, the exhibition features works that speak across decades and through varying styles and technical approaches. The show highlights the breadth and diversity of the gallery’s roster and its steadfast commitment to supporting artists working in photography and lens-based media.

Celebrating three decades as a pioneering exhibition space, one where the public has witnessed and engaged with the continued evolution of photography and artistic expression more broadly, the gallery has invited its artists to select work by their peers with whom they share creative affinities. The work on display reveals the gallery’s deep engagement with photography as both a historical and contemporary medium, with work made using classic darkroom techniques alongside multidisciplinary and experimental processes.

Celebrating 30 Years includes work by Guanyu Xu selected by David Alekhuogie, David Alekhuogie selected by Mickalene Thomas, Mickalene Thomas selected by David Alekhuogie, Olivo Barbieri selected by Lynn Saville, Jared Bark selected by Rachel Perry, Omar Barquet selected by Mary Lum, Ori Gersht selected by Terry Evans, Terry Evans selected by Victoria Sambunaris, Mary Ellen Bartley selected by Ori Gersht, Lisa Kereszi selected by Sharon Core, Sharon Core selected by Hellen van Meene, Mitch Epstein selected by Lisa Kereszi, John Divola selected by Mitch Epstein, Tania Franco Klein selected by Laura Letinsky, Carolyn Drake selected by Tania Franco Klein, Sandi Haber Fifi eld selected by Bryan Graf, Bryan Graf selected by Yamamoto Masao, Jitka Hanzlová selected by Laura Letinsky, Anthony Hernandez selected by Olivo Barbieri, David Hilliard selected by Kahn & Selesnick, Laura Letinsky selected by Carolyn Drake, Matt Lipps selected by Guanyu Xu, Mary Lum selected by Omar Barquet, Esko Mannikko selected by Sharon Core, Andrew Moore selected by David Hilliard, Zanele Muholi selected by John Divola, Rachel Perry selected by Sandi Haber Fifi eld, Victoria Sambunaris selected by Anthony Hernandez, Lynn Saville selected by Andrew Moore, Mark Steinmetz selected by Victoria Sambunaris, Kahn & Selesnick selected by Jared Bark, Larry Sultan selected by Anthony Hernandez, Tseng Kwong Chi selected by Zanele Muholi, Hellen van Meene selected by Jitka Hanzlová, Yamamoto Masao selected by Mary Ellen Bartley, Pello Irazu selected by Jared Bark and Lynn Geesaman and Sebastião Salgado selected by Yancey Richardson.

Over the past thirty years and nearly 290 exhibitions, Yancey Richardson has helped foster the careers of some of the most critically-acclaimed artists working today. The gallery opened in 1995 at 560 Broadway in SoHo with an exhibition by Sebastião Salgado. In 2000 the gallery relocated to 535 West 22nd Street in Chelsea, then a burgeoning arts neighborhood. Over the next 13 years, the gallery presented historically significant exhibitions with artists such as Lewis Baltz, William Eggleston and August Sander, along with exhibitions by artists such as Mitch Epstein, Zanele Muholi and Mickalene Thomas, who have been with the gallery ever since. In 2013 the gallery moved to 525 West 22nd Street, where it remains to this day. Since moving, the gallery has continued to grow and welcome new artists and estates to its roster, such as David Alekhougie, Omar Barquet, John Divola, Anthony Hernandez, Tania Franco Klein, Larry Sultan and Tseng Kwong Chi.

In addition to maintaining long-term representation of a wide-ranging and international group of artists, such as Olivo Barbieri, Ori Gersht, Jitka Hanzlová, Sebastião Salgado, Hellen van Meene and Yamamoto Masao, the gallery has also mounted New York debut exhibitions for many artists who have gone on to achieve critical acclaim, such as David Alekhuogie, Carolyn Drake, Paul Mpagi Sepuya and Guanyu Xu. Understanding photography as always changing and in flux, the gallery has consistently welcomed artists to its roster who engage with the medium in an expanded way, as both a technical process and a historically-informed mode of perception.

Alongside its support of emerging, mid-career and historically significant artists through exhibitions, the gallery has consistently supported the publication of monographs and photobooks as an essential expression of photography. Now representing over 40 artists and estates, Yancey Richardson continues to work tirelessly alongside museums and cultural institutions around the world to ensure that their artists reach the widest possible audience and that their achievements are promoted and their legacies safeguarded.

Yancey Richardson stated, “Since the day we opened our doors in 1995, the gallery has remained committed to supporting and embracing photography across the widest possible spectrum, from modern masters to new and contemporary expressions. Though both the medium itself and society’s understanding of it has changed dramatically over the past 30 years, I have endeavored to keep the gallery as a space where those changes—where history itself—can be seen, felt and interacted with. To the extent that this has been achieved is due in no small part to the countless individuals who have worked with me over the years. Above all else, I wish to thank the artists who have entrusted us with their legacies and whose work continues to challenge us to see and think in different ways, all while offering a constant reminder of the power of art to help us understand the times in which we live.”

YANCEY RICHARDSON 

525 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011

yanceyrichardson.com

Paolo Roversi @ Pace Gallery, NYC - "Along the Way" Focused Retrospective Exhibition (early 1990s - present)

Paolo Roversi: Along the Way

Pace Gallery, New York 

September 12 – October 25, 2025

Paolo Roversi 

Natalia, Paris, 2003

© Paolo Roversi, courtesy Pace Gallery

Pace presents an exhibition of work by photographer PAOLO ROVERSI at its 508 West 25th Street gallery in New York. Opening on September 12, during New York Fashion Week, and running through October 25, this focused retrospective will feature works produced by Paolo Roversi between the early 1990s and the present, highlighting the artist’s relationships with his many collaborators in the fashion industry.

Roversi’s upcoming exhibition with Pace in New York—his first solo show with the gallery since 2019—will present an overview of his storied career through a selection of photographs created over the past 35 years.“Every portrait is a meeting, an exchange, a mutual intimate confession,” Paolo Roversi has said of his work. The show will shed light on Roversi’s legacy as the artist behind some of the most iconic fashion images of our time.

Drawing inspiration from the work of August Sander, Robert Frank, and Diane Arbus, Paolo Roversi developed a distinctive style that is deeply influenced by the Byzantine architecture and rich cultural history of his birthplace, Ravenna, Italy. “Paolo's photography is timeless,” Sylvie Lécallier, curator Roversi’s 2024 exhibition at the Palais Galliera in Paris, said in an interview last year. “It is detached from the spirit of the times, from the ephemeral trends of fashion. It is located both at the heart of fashion and at the edge.”

Made with Polaroid film and mostly taken in his Parisian studio, Roversi's dreamlike, enigmatic images are imbued with a classical sensibility. His studio, he has said, “is a place for the chance, the dream, the imaginary to prevail. I give these forces as much space as I can.”

In addition to his collaborators in the fashion world, Polo Roversi has recently joined forces with his friend and fellow artist Sheila Hicks. For these works, which will figure in Pace’s exhibition, no discussion is had between the two artists regarding a direction for the final work, each knowing and respecting the other’s practice.

Born in Ravenna, Italy in 1947, Paolo Roversi discovered his passion for photography during a 1964 family holiday in Spain— upon his return from the trip, he built a darkroom in the basement of his home. He began his career in 1970, taking photojournalism assignments from the Associated Press. In 1973, at the invitation of photographer and ELLE art director Peter Knapp, Paolo Roversi moved to Paris, where he has lived and worked ever since. After a nine-month period assisting British photographer Lawrence Sackmann, whom he cites as an influential teacher, Paolo Roversi started shooting independently with small commissions for ELLE and the band Depeche Mode, gaining wider recognition with a Dior beauty campaign in 1980 and ultimately forging his reputation as one of the industry's leading photographers by the mid- 1980s. As model Guinevere van Seenus, who has worked with Roversi for nearly three decades, has said, “Having your portrait taken is more than just looking at the camera, [Paolo] creates the space for the person to [emerge]."

Today, Paolo Roversi’s work can be found in museum collections around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Getty Museum in Los Angeles; and the National Portrait Gallery in London. He has had major exhibitions around the world—in recent years, at the Museo d'Arte della città di Ravenna, Palazzo Reale in Milan, the Palais Galliera in Paris, the Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow, and Dallas Contemporary in Texas—and has published numerous books, including Paolo Roversi: Palais Galliera (2024), Lettres sur la lumière, with philosopher Emanuele Coccia (Gallimard, 2024), Des Oiseaux (Éditions Xavier Barral, 2023), Paolo Roversi – Studio Luce (Museo d'Arte della città di Ravenna, 2020), Natalia (Stromboli, 2018), and Nudi (Stromboli, 1999).

PACE NEW YORK

508 West 25th Street, New York City

www.pacegallery.com

Photo London 2025 - Tenth Anniversary Edition @ Somerset House, London - Art Fair Overview

PHOTO LONDON 2025

TENTH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

Somerset House, London 

15 - 18 May 2025

Idris Khan

Tower Bridge, London, 2012

© Idris Khan, Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro 

Lucia Pizzani 

Acorazada Guerrera, 2020 

© Lucia Pizzani, Courtesy Victoria Law

Chrystel Lebas

Plant Portraits or Weeds & Aliens Studies Sisymbrium 

irio L.- London Rocket 130 Yellow 130 Magenta 0 Cyan 25s, April 2017 

Courtesy Chrystel Lebas

Photo London marks its 10th anniversary in May with a special edition celebrating London and its rich traditions of photography. The Fair returns to Somerset House, from 15-18 May 2025 with previews on 14 May.

Photo London Founders Michael Benson and Fariba Farshad, said: “We are excited to be welcoming such a strong group of international galleries for our landmark tenth edition at Somerset House, including several that have participated in every Fair since the very beginning, and others returning after an absence especially to celebrate this landmark moment with us. We are set to host our largest ever number of collectors and acquisition groups from across the world, attracted by our special anniversary programme including a major exhibition celebrating London and its rich traditions of photography that platforms the city itself this year’s Master of Photography. This exhibition is a testament to all that Photo London has achieved in its first decade during which we have worked closely with the photography community to establish London as an important global hub for the medium. We also celebrate the important role of the book in the photography ecosystem through the creation of a weekend book market for independent publishers, and further expand our long tradition of support for emerging artists through the launch of the new Positions section of the Fair providing a platform for unrepresented artists supported by collectors.”

PHOTO LONDON 2025 EXHIBITORS

Photo London 2025 has confirmed a strong list of international participants featuring several galleries that have exhibited at every edition of the Fair since 2015 including: Robert Hershkowitz Ltd (Lindfield) bringing a selection of historic images of London; Purdy Hicks Gallery (London) presenting a booth dedicated to women artists; CAMERA WORK (Berlin) showing a curated selection of classic and contemporary masterpieces ranging from Irving Penn’s legendary work ‘Mouth’ to Chris Levine’s portrait of Queen Elizabeth II; and Bildhalle (Zurich) exhibiting a curated booth including rare vintage prints from the 1949 London series by avant-garde Swiss photographer René Groebli.

Several galleries are presenting solo booths, including: ROSEGALLERY (Santa Monica) returning with Tania Franco Klein, the recipient of the Photo London Emerging Photographer award in 2018; Galerie Bacqueville (Lille) showing a selection of previously unseen works by David de Beyter from his series ‘The Skeptics’; Guerin Projects (London) bringing abstract works on the theme of love by British-American Robin Hunter Blake; Polka Galerie (Paris) presenting Platinum palladium prints by Photo London’s inaugural Master of Photography Sebastião Salgado; and UP Gallery (Taiwan) graduating from Discovery to the main gallery section with a solo presentation of unique works by Taipei-based Mia Liu.

Amongst the galleries celebrating the tenth edition of Photo London with a highlights presentation of greatest hits from the last ten years is Peter Fetterman Gallery (Santa Monica), whilst Amar Gallery (London) presents work by Dora Maar, the Surrealist photographer immortalised as Pablo Picasso's ‘Weeping Woman’ and the official photographer to the Black Panther Party, Stephen Shames. The Music Photo Gallery dedicate their booth to classic images of musicians including Bob Dylan and John Lennon and Podbielski Contemporary (Milan) return with a focus on the Middle East including works by Shadi Ghadirian (Tehran), Rania Matar (Lebanon), Steve Sabella (Palestine) and Yuval Yairi (Israel) creating a dialogue between cultures, faith and current realities.

A strong Latin and South American focus is present at the fair with Bendana-Pinel (Paris) and ROLF (Buenos Aires) showcasing contemporary artists from the region while David Hill Gallery (London) will bring vintage photographs by Graciela Iturbide. Another Discovery section graduate EUQINOM Gallery (San Francisco) bring a curated booth of women artists using alternative photographic techniques including cyanotypes by Adama Delphine Fawundu and photograms by Klea McKenna, whilst first-time exhibitors Close Gallery (Somerset) showcase work by Canadian artist Carali McCall who will also do a live performance at the Fair.

2025 sees the return of the special partnership with TurkishBank UK that brings exciting galleries from the region to London including Vision Art Platform, Kairos and Simbart Projects (all Istanbul) who will bring a solo booth of Begüm Mütevellioğlu including unseen work using a gum bichromate photography technique that will allow her to merge photographic print with painting. Belmond returns to Photo London with the second instalment of its acclaimed ‘Belmond Legends’ series, which commissions evocative travel photography "As Seen By" world-renowned artists. For 2025,

Belmond presents an exclusive solo exhibition by renowned American photographer Colin Dodgson. This original collection chronicles extraordinary journeys aboard two of Belmond’s iconic sleeper trains: the Andean Explorer, which winds through the majestic high Andes of Peru, and the Eastern & Oriental Express, which meanders through the lush Malaysian jungle. The Peru series is hand-printed by the artist and an accompanying collectible art book of Colin Dodgson's Andean Explorer series, along with previously unseen images, will be published by the esteemed Parisian art house RVB Books. The book will be available through RVB Books' global distribution network, including select bookstores, galleries, and online platforms.

Photo London Director, Sophie Parker, said: “While we are a photography specific fair, the works exhibited go far beyond images hung on walls. Photography can include sculpture, painting, performance, fabric, moving image, and even sound, and at Photo London we celebrate photography as an art object in all its forms. For our tenth anniversary edition I’m incredibly excited to see such a strong group of presentations by galleries from all over the world and I look forward to welcoming a mix of old friends and new faces to Somerset House.”

PHOTO LONDON 2025: DISCOVERY

Photo London’s Discovery section is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading platforms for emerging photographers and galleries. Curated by the critic and author Charlotte Jansen, Discovery once again promises to be a highlight of the Fair featuring around 20 galleries including exciting newcomers such as Mortal Machine Gallery (New Orleans) showcasing Bee Gats, a photographer developing a reputation for his gritty, raw and unfiltered portraits of Miami's underground. Other highlights include Victoria Law (London) bringing Venezuelan-born Lucia Pizzani whose photo-based works and sculptures tells stories about colonialism and nature through her use of charged materials such as pre-Hispanic tree bark paper, Contour Gallery (Amsterdam) showcasing late career artist Margriet Smulders who creates beautiful, large-scale tableau with flowers riffing on Dutch traditions in painting, and Roman Road (London) presenting Polina Piech, who graduates from the RCA this year, and is interested in capturing the movement of natural environments, working like a painter ‘en plein air’.

Photo London Discovery section Curator, Charlotte Jansen, said: “The Discovery section at Photo London has always been, for me, the most exciting area of the Fair. As the name implies, it’s where you might find things that you’ve never seen before, which is quite a rarity these days, given our image-saturated culture. I am excited to see a sharp shift away from portraiture towards semi-abstraction and abstraction across many booths this year and to witness the ways contemporary artists are using the camera in a painterly way, like a brush, with captivating results.”

PHOTO LONDON 2025: POSITIONS

Photo London’s Positions is a unique initiative that aims to extend Photo London’s role as a champion of emerging talent. Curated by arts patron and founder of the ISelf Collection, Maria Sukkar, Positions is a distinct section within the Fair that constitutes a significant platform for unrepresented photographic artists. Positions offers a truly unique opportunity for a group of collectors and patrons of the arts to play an invaluable role to support unrepresented artists to show their work side-by-side with galleries in a traditional art fair format. Positions features an exciting group of artists including Adam Rouhana, Giulia Mangione, Tim Rudman, Roberto Conde, Bibi Setareh Manavi, Kalpesh Lathigra and Aikaterini Gegisian.

Photo London Positions Curator, Maria Sukkar, said: “I’m incredibly excited about Positions – it’s such a bold and forward-thinking initiative that feels especially needed right now. Photography, as a medium, is still burgeoning in terms of the market, and galleries are often hesitant to take on photographers until much later stages in their careers. This section fills that gap by providing a vital platform for unrepresented talent, offering them the recognition and opportunities they might not otherwise have. Ultimately, my hope is that Positions not only elevates these voices but also reshapes how collectors and curators engage with emerging photographers, solidifying its place as a catalyst for innovation within the art fair model.”

PHOTO LONDON 2025: SPECIAL EXHIBITION ‘LONDON LIVES’

Presented in both the Embankment East & West Galleries at Somerset House, the special exhibition ‘London Lives’ curated by critic and author Francis Hodgson features a dazzling array of creative responses to the City by around 30 of its leading image makers including David Bailey, James Barnor, Antony Cairns, Jamie Hawkesworth, Hannah Starkey, Joy Gregory, Nadav Kander, Idris Khan, Rut Blees Luxemburg, Christian Marclay, Mary McCartney, Simon Roberts, Mitra Tabrizian and Nick Turpin. The exhibition also includes new commissions from Heather Agyepong, Jermaine Francis and Hannah Hughes, whose work will also be published exclusively in the FT Magazine as part of Photo London’s longstanding partnership with FT Weekend. This ambitious and wide-ranging exhibition is both an ode to London and the photography it has inspired.

Curator of ‘London Lives’, Francis Hodgson, said: “For a few days in the spring of every year, Photo London has ruled over London from its great palace on the Thames. As we celebrate its tenth anniversary, we remember that is just the point. Photo London is not a virtual fair, anywhere. Its participants – photographers, publishers, galleries and the rest – come from all over the world and have turned their eyes on every part of it and all its goings-on. But it remains a London fair, anchored in its host city. So we thought for the anniversary we’d celebrate London and what people get up to there. London, like all the really great cities in the world, has something of everything, and people from everywhere. Call it a melting-pot if you want; but we simply call it ‘London Lives’. The more the merrier.”

PHOTO LONDON 2025: BOOK MARKET

For the 2025 edition of Photo London, Ben Goulder curates the Fair’s first weekend Book Market (15-17 May) championing the vibrant and diverse communities of independent publishers and showcasing their artistry and vision on a global stage. London is a hub for independent arts publishing, and this new space features a broad selection of photography and arts publishing – from larger publications to zines, pamphlets, and other ephemera—with the aim of bringing diversity and innovation to the Photo London audience.

Highlights include 'Terminating Martin' Parr by Tom Pope, a conceptual debut publication from Folium Publishing that documents a 7-hour performance where Tom Pope destroyed 17 photographs by Martin Parr, Gareth McConnell’s 'Details of Sectarian Murals' published by Sorika that turns Northern Ireland’s strident political murals into mesmerising abstractions, and 'State of Emergency' by Max Pinckers that is the result of a decade-long collaboration with Mau Mau freedom fighters and survivors of colonial violence in Kenya.

Photo London Book Market Curator, Ben Goulder, said: “This initiative aims to bring together the best in photography publishing. From experimental approaches to photo book publishing, queer zines, risography, and artist monographs, the market highlights publishers who are pushing the medium forward. It is a celebration of print as a dynamic, time-based artform that bridges disciplines and fosters connections, while also emphasising the importance of small presses and DIY approaches to making publications.”

PHOTO LONDON 2025 AWARDS

Since its inception Photo London has run an annual award for an outstanding artist. In many cases the winner of the award has gone on to achieve significant international recognition such as the 2021 winner Heather Agyepong. For each of the past five editions the award has been presented in partnership with Nikon. 

In 2025 the Photo London x Nikon Emerging Photographer of the Year Award again highlights outstanding emerging photographers with shortlisted work presented in a special display at the Nikon Gallery at the Fair.

The Photo London x Hahnemühle Student Award returns to the Fair for the third time. Working with UK universities offering photography degrees, the award highlights the most exciting early-career talent within the industry, bringing their portfolios to international attention. The shortlisted students are granted the opportunity to print 5-10 artworks on their preferred Hahnemühle papers and present them in a dedicated exhibition at Photo London 2025. The winner is further awarded with a trip to the Hahnemühle mill in Germany to produce a new body of photographic work.

PHOTO LONDON 

photolondon.org

Richard Learoyd @ Pace Gallery, NYC - "A Loathing of Clocks and Mirrors" Exhibition

Richard Learoyd

A Loathing of Clocks and Mirrors

Pace Gallery, New York

March 7 — April 26, 2025

RICHARD LEAROYD

Untitled Portrait, 2024 

© Richard Learoyd, courtesy Pace Gallery

Pace presents new and recent work by photographer RICHARD LEAROYD. The exhibition includes portraits, still lifes, and landscapes produced between 2018 and 2025.

Deeply inspired by Dutch Golden Age painting, Learoyd’s latest works take viewers on a journey through intimate moments and intricate details, examining the relationship between subject, light, and space. The photographs on display explore a range of subjects, from hauntingly evocative portraits to still-life compositions that breathe life into the simplest of objects.

Learoyd’s unique photographic processes require an immense degree of technical precision, resulting in incredibly detailed, luminous prints with a tactile richness rarely seen in contemporary photography. Reflecting on the delicate interplay between light, shadow, and form, Learoyd’s work is imbued with a surreal, auratic presence that speaks to his enduring interest in the notion of collective photographic memory—the idea that a picture can be felt and understood on a subconscious level. The artist is renowned for his masterful use of light and his ability to capture the profound depth and stillness of the human experience.

“Light and space have always been central to my work," Richard Learoyd explains. "I want to capture more than just an image; I want to convey a sense of time, intimacy, and presence—things that transcend the immediate and evoke a more timeless feeling."

Highlights in the exhibition, carefully curated by Richard Learoyd, include a photograph of clasped hands, an ode to Alfred Stieglitz’s images of Georgia O’Keeffe’s hands from the first half of the 20th century. Also on view is the artist’s most recent body of work, a series of photographs created using a new and transformative process of multiple impression printing layered with hand coated gesso on canvas. These multi-dimensional works showcase the artist’s exploration of depth, texture, time, and the relationship between photography and materiality.

In recent years, Richard Learoyd has mounted solo exhibitions at the Fundación Mapfre Casa Garriga Nogués in Barcelona, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. His presentation at Pace in New York coincides with AIPAD’s 2025 Photography Show at the Park Avenue Armory, where the gallery organizes a special program with the artist.

RICHARD LEAROYD

Richard Learoyd (b. 1966, Lancashire, United Kingdom) uses a camera obscura to create large-scale portraits, still lifes, nudes, and landscape photographs in color and black-and-white. After using large-format cameras in the early 1990s as a student at the Glasgow School of Art—studying under landscape photographer Thomas Joshua Cooper—Richard Learoyd revisited the format around 2003 amidst the increasing shift toward digital photography. In 2005, he expanded his subject matter from the quiet landscape images that occupied his practice and began to explore still lifes and portraiture. The same year, he built a camera obscura and has since constructed subsequent versions, all structures with two room-like chambers connected by a bellows with an inset lens. Working with Ilfochrome paper as film, Richard Learoyd uses the camera obscura to render a single positive, full-color image without the use of a negative transparency, resulting in a unique image. Because of restrictions inherent to working with large cameras, limitations in depth of field and color impact his choices of photographic subjects.

Richard Learoyd received a BA from The Glasgow School of Art (GSA), United Kingdom, in 1988 and an MA from GSA in 1991. Important one-artist exhibitions of his work include Richard Learoyd: Unique Photographs, McKee Gallery, New York (2009); Richard Learoyd: Dark Mirror, Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2015); Richard Learoyd: In the Studio, Getty Center (2016), which traveled to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri (2017); Richard Learoyd, Fundación MAPFRE Casa Garriga Nogués Exhibition Hall, Barcelona (2019); and Richard Learoyd, Pace Gallery, Palm Beach, Florida (2021), among others. His work is held in numerous public collections worldwide including Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Tate, London; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, among many others. Richard Learoyd lives and works in London.

PACE NEW YORK

508 West 25th Street, New York City

www.pacegallery.com

Irving Penn @ Pace Gallery, NYC - "Kinship" Exhibition Curated by Hank Willis Thomas

Irving Penn: Kinship

Curated by Hank Willis Thomas

Pace Gallery, New York

November 15 – December 21, 2024

IRVING PENN

Three Dahomey Girls (with Bowls), 1967

Photograph © The Irving Penn Foundation

IRVING PENN

Three Single Oriental Poppies, New York, 1968

Photograph © The Irving Penn Foundation

Pace is pleased to present Irving Penn: Kinship, an exhibition of work by the famed photographer IRVING PENN, curated by artist Hank Willis Thomas, at its 508 West 25th Street gallery in New York. This show spotlights works produced by Irving Penn throughout his 70-year career, including selections from his Worlds in a Small Room series, his iconic portraits of artists, actors, and writers, and other genres of his images. These photographs are exhibited within an installation designed by Hank Willis Thomas to replicate a structure that Irving Penn used to photograph many of his high-profile subjects.

Working for Vogue for nearly 70 years, Irving Penn left an indelible mark on the history of photography. His inventive fashion photographs, which transformed American image-making in the postwar era, continued to appear in the magazine up until his death in 2009. The artist was also highly accomplished and experimental in the darkroom, having engineered, among other innovations, a complex technique for making platinum-palladium prints.

A trained photographer, Hank Willis Thomas, widely known for his galvanizing public works around the US, is deeply interested in both the making and consumption of images. His investigations into subjectivity and perception inform his work in photography and other mediums, including sculpture, screenprinting, video, and installation. Penn’s Worlds in a Small Room works—for which he journeyed to Cuzco, Crete, Extremadura, Dahomey, Cameroon, San Francisco, Nepal, New Guinea, and Morocco to capture people’s portraits within a tent he used as a portable studio—have been particularly influential for Hank Willis Thomas, who was part of the artistic team behind the traveling, participatory installation In Search of the Truth (The Truth Booth), which debuted in 2011 and has since been presented around the world.

Often investigating the ways that framing and perspective can shape our experiences of the world around us, Hank Willis Thomas situates Irving Penn’s photographs within a bespoke, star-shaped structure with intersecting corners, created using a material similar to the plywood flats of the photographer’s original studio for his portraits in a corner. Displayed on the structure’s exterior walls and within its central interior space, Irving Penn’s images will invite viewers to inhabit a similarly intimate, enclosed space as the subjects of his portraits captured across the globe—through Thomas’s vision, this room becomes a new world of its own.

Showcasing the varied but interconnected motifs and ideas that Irving Penn returned to time and again over the course of his life, the images selected and paired by Hank Willis Thomas speak to a transcendent, universal quality that can be traced across the photographer’s vast oeuvre. His arrangement of Penn’s works is guided by a kind of “visual muscle memory,” which he describes as “the notion that an artist’s eye and hand retain the imprints of past works, unconsciously shaping new creations.” The diverse photographs on view, for Thomas, are marked by their stillness and dignity, their shared interest in capturing and communicating the human experience in a single frame.

“In Penn’s work, I see a profound reverence for the overlooked and the mundane,” Hank Willis Thomas writes in a curatorial statement for the show. “His fashion photography, often celebrated for its clean lines and sculptural compositions, shares a surprising kinship with his still lifes of discarded objects. By juxtaposing these images, I want to highlight how Penn’s meticulous attention to detail elevates the ordinary to the extraordinary. It’s as if each image, regardless of subject, carries an echo of his broader artistic ethos: the belief that beauty and meaning can be found in even the most unlikely places.”

Concurrent with this curated presentation in New York, Hank Willis Thomas’s solo exhibition of his work at Pace’s London gallery, Kinship of the Soul, is on view through December 21. A retrospective of Penn’s work, organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in collaboration with The Irving Penn Foundation, is on view through May 1, 2025 at The Marta Ortega Pérez (MOP) Foundation in A Coruña, Spain.

Hank Willis Thomas’s work is currently featured in the group exhibitions Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through February 18, 2025 and Grow It, Show It: A Look at Hair from Diane Arbus to TikTok at the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany, through January 12, 2025. At the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, The Gun Violence Memorial Project—a collaboration between Boston-based MASS Design Group and Songha & Company, where Thomas is Creative Director, in partnership with the gun violence prevention organization Purpose Over Pain—is on view through January 20, 2025.

PACE GALLERY NEW YORK

508 West 25th Street, New York City

pacegallery.com

Stephen Shore @ Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles

Stephen Shore
Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles 
June 19 - August 30, 2019

One of the most important and influential photographers of the last half-century, Stephen Shore has produced an expansive body of work that has to a significant degree shaped our vision of the American experience from the 1960s to today. In 1971, at age twenty-four, he was the first living photographer in forty years to receive a solo exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and he was a key figure in the recognition of color photography as an artistic medium beginning in the 1970s. Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers presents the first solo exhibition of Stephen Shore’s work in Los Angeles since 2005, when his major traveling exhibition The Biographical Landscape opened at the Hammer Museum. On view at Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles, are three of the artist’s photographic series spanning the years 1969 to the present, each of which reveal his ability to project an approachable, casual aesthetic that is infused nonetheless with subtlety, complexity, and a quiet, affecting power. 

Throughout his career, Stephen Shore has used a variety of cameras and has always been open to new technologies. The acquisition in 2017 of the revolutionary Hasselblad X1D camera has enabled the artist to make images which match and even surpass the resolution of more traditional tools. Shore’s experimentations with this new apparatus have resulted in the series Details (2017–ongoing), which serves as the cornerstone of the present exhibition. Shot in locations where the artist regularly spends time, including New York City, upstate New York, Montana and London, these photographs highlight his remarkable eye for textural contrasts and poignant compositions, even when picturing the most mundane of subjects. Natural and human-made elements come into intimate contact with one another across the series, as in bird’s eye scenes of scattered leaves on asphalt sharing space with Dunkin’ Donuts bags, cigarette butts, and bottle tops; or a frontal view of ancient murals carved onto mottled, sediment-laden rock. In these pictures, Stephen Shore manages to hold in careful balance the sense of a photograph as a transparent index of the world and, at the same time, an artful combination of light, line and color. 

Offering a lens onto the origins of Stephen Shore’s intuitive pictorial approach is another of Stephen Shore’s series, and one of his earliest: Los Angeles, California, February 4, 1969. Created almost exactly fifty years ago, and in the same city as this exhibition, it marks a moment in which Shore was testing new ways of structuring his pictures. Intrigued by both the focus on popular culture he had witnessed while spending time in Andy Warhol’s Factory (1965–68), as well as the conceptual frameworks that artists in other media were building into their work in the late 1960s, the young photographer took advantage of a trip to Los Angeles to create a new kind of photographic project. He established several constraints, including that he would shoot mainly from the back seat of a car and that he would keep every picture he took, in the order in which he took them. The result is a stream-of-consciousness view of one day in LA, presented in consecutive groupings of twelve photographs. Iconic features, such as Standard Oil stations, palm trees, and billboards, intermingle with fleeting impressions of cloud-streaked skies, pedestrians and traffic. In addition, multiple views of the same scene, set side-by-side, offer an unparalleled glimpse into the development of Shore’s snapshot aesthetic and deepening consideration of vernacular subjects. 

Finally, the exhibition includes a selection of works from the artist’s landmark series, American Surfaces (1972–73), taken as he traveled around the United States in his mid-twenties. Part visual diary, part elegy to a disappearing localized America, these photographs of commonplace objects and situations revel in textures, patterning and heavily saturated hues: green pearlescent Formica, the dimpled glass of a phone booth window, tessellated arrays of pink gradated tiles behind a man in a bright avocado-colored shirt. The “Surfaces” in the title refers literally to this textural aspect of the series, yet it also calls to mind the surface of the photograph itself, and the visual conventions and systems of thought through which we understand photographic images. 

Many of these concerns are still present, albeit in different ways, in Stephen Shore’s more recent Details. He has described his picture-making process as “a complex, ongoing, spontaneous interaction of observation, understanding, imagination, and intention” (Shore, The Nature of Photographs, p. 132), and together these series make clear his persistent focus and attention to everyday subjects that feel at once prosaic and extraordinary. Shore’s photographs urge us, in turn, to look more deeply and meaningfully at the world around us, and to find beauty among its arrangements and peculiarities. 

STEPHEN SHORE (born 1947, New York City) lives in Tivoli, New York, and since 1982 has been Director of the Photography Program at Bard College. A major retrospective of his work was on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2017-18). Further selected solo exhibitions include those at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, and C/O Berlin (2016), Les Rencontres d'Arles (2015), Fundacion Mapfre, Madrid (2014), Aspen Art Museum (2011), Der Rote Bulli: Stephen Shore and the New Düsseldorf Photography, NRW-Forum, Düsseldorf (2010), International Center of Photography, New York (2007), Sprengel Museum, Hannover (1995), Art Institute of Chicago (1984), Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (1977), and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1971). Recent group exhibitions include those at Luma Foundation, Arles (2018), Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris (2017), Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2017), Vancouver Art Gallery (2016), Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2016), George Eastman House, Rochester (2015), Tate Modern, London (2014), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2014), and Barbican Art Centre, London (2014). The recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, Stephen Shore was recently honored as the 2019 Photo London Master of Photography. 

SPRÜTH MAGERS LOS ANGELES
5900 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90036
spruethmagers.com

Herbert List @ Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles - Young Men & Still Lifes

Herbert List: Young Men & Still Lifes
Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles
June 27 – August 31, 2019

The Fahey/Klein Gallery presents Young Men & Still Lifes by German photographer, Herbert List -The first exhibition of his legendary homoerotic male nudes in Los Angeles in over 25 years. Herbert List’s playful but austere, classically arranged compositions taken in Italy and Greece have become an indelible influence in modern and contemporary photography. Diary-like images of friends and still lives with found objects gave birth to a style that half a century later would influence fashion or lifestyle photography of masters like Bruce Weber or Herb Ritts.

Herbert List (1903 - 1975) was born into a prosperous Hamburg merchant family and began an apprenticeship at a Heidelberg coffee dealer in 1921 while studying literature and art history at Heidelberg University. During travels for the coffee business between 1924-28, the young Herbert  List began to take photographs, almost without any pretensions to art.

In 1930, though, his artistic leanings and connections to the European avant-garde brought him together with the American photographer Andreas Feininger, who introduced his new friend to the Rolleiflex, a more sophisticated camera that allowed a deliberate composition of images. Under the dual influence of the surrealist movement on the one hand, and of Bauhaus artists on the other, Herbert List photographed still life and his friends, developing his style. He has described his images as “composed visions where [my] arrangements try to capture the magical essence inhabiting and animating the world of appearances.”

After leaving Germany in 1936 in response to the danger of Nazi police attention to his openly gay lifestyle and his Jewish heritage, he turned his hobby into a profession. Working in Paris and London, he met George Hoyningen-Huene, who referred him to “Harper’s Bazaar”. Dissatisfied with the challenges of fashion photography and hired models, Herbert List instead focused on composing still lifes. The images produced there would later be compared to the paintings of Max Ernst and Giorgio de Chirico, and paved the way for Herbert List’s role as the most prominent photographer of the Fotografia Metafisica style.

Greece became Herbert List’s primary interest from 1937 to 1939. After his first visit to the antique temples, sculptures and landscapes, his first solo show opened in Paris in the summer of 1937. Publications in Life, Photographie, Verve and Harper’s Bazaar followed, and Herbert List began work on his first book, Licht über Hellas, which wasn’t published until 1953.

Working in Athens, Herbert List hoped to escape the war but was forced by invading troops to return to Germany in 1941. Because of his Jewish background, he was forbidden to publish or work officially in Germany. Several works, stored in a hotel in Paris, have been lost. In 1944 Herbert List was deployed by the German Wehrmacht to Norway where he served as a map archivist.

In 1951, Herbert List met Robert Capa, who convinced him to work as a contributor to Magnum. He turned his interest towards Italy from 1950 to 1961, photographing everything from street scenes to contemplative photo-essays, from architectural views to portraits of international artists living in Italy. He discovered the 35mm camera and the telephoto lens in 1953. His work became more spontaneous and was influenced by his Magnum colleague Henri Cartier-Bresson and the Italian Neo-Realism film movement.

Herbert List’s work has been collected, exhibited, and published internationally. Herbert List’s work is held in Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, France), Fotomuseum im Münchner Stadtmuseum (Munich, Germany), The J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles, CA), ICP (New York, NY), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY) Musée de l'Elysée (Lausanne, Switzerland), The Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA,) The Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY) and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco, CA), among others.

Past publications of Herbert List’s work include The Magical in Passing (Silvana Editoriale, Milan, 2014), Herbert List: The Monograph (Ed. Max Scheler with Matthias Harder, texts by Bruce Weber Edmund White. Monacelli Press, New York, 2000), Italy (Ed. Max Scheler, Thames & Hudson, 1995), Herbert List: Junge Männer (Ed. Stephen Spender, Thames & Hudson, 1988,) Napoli e i suoi personaggi (Ed. Vittorio De Sica, Rizolli, 1968) Nigerian images: the splendor of African sculpture (Ed. William Fagg, Frederick A. Praeger, 1963), Caribia : ein photographisches Skizzenbuch von den Caribischen Inseln (Rowohlt, 1958), Licht über Hellas: Eine Symphonie in Bildern (München: G.D.W. Callwey, 1953), and more.

FAHEY/KLEIN GALLERY
148 North La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, California 90036
www.faheykleingallery.com

Lee Friedlander @ Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Lee Friedlander: Signs
Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
July 11 - August 17, 2019

LEE FRIEDLANDER 

Newark, New Jersey, 1962 

© Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Fraenkel Gallery presents LEE FRIEDLANDER: SIGNS, an exhibition examining the five-decade long obsession of this highly influential photographer. Since the early 1960s, Lee Friedlander has focused on the signs that inscribe the American landscape, from hand-lettered ads to storefront windows to massive billboards. The exhibition is accompanied by a 144-page hardcover book published by Fraenkel Gallery.

Made in New York, San Francisco, and dozens of cities and small towns in between, Lee Friedlander’s photographs record milk prices, cola ads, neon lights, road signs, graffiti, and movie marquees. Depicting these texts with precision and sly humor, Lee Friedlander’s approach to America transcribes a sort of found poetry of commerce and desire. A large majority of works in the exhibition will be shown for the first time.

Also on view will be a group of 16 early Lee Friedlander prints, made on the road in the 1970s, on travels across the United States.

LEE FRIEDLANDER (born 1934) began photographing in 1948. His work was included in the influential 1967 exhibition New Documents at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, curated by John Szarkowski. His many monographs include Self-Portrait; Cherry Blossom Time in Japan; Letters from the People; At Work; and Sticks and Stones, among others. One of the most important living photographers, Lee Friedlander’s prints are held by major collections including the Art Institute of Chicago; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others.

LEE FRIEDLANDER: SIGNS

Hardcover

120 pages, $75

Fraenkel Gallery, 2019

Opening reception with the artist: Thursday, July 11, 5:30-7:30pm
Book launch and signing with the artist: Saturday, July 13, 1-3pm

FRAENKEL GALLERY
49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108
www.fraenkelgallery.com

Steve Schapiro @ Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Steve Schapiro: Heroic Times
Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York
Through January 27, 2018

STEVE SCHAPIRO, Nico in Times Square, 1972

© Steve Schapiro, courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

An exhibition of the photography of Steve Schapiro is on view at Howard Greenberg Gallery. Heroic Times marks the inaugural exhibition of Steve Schapiro’s work at the Gallery. Steve Schapiro has witnessed key moments of American history and culture, from the Selma to Montgomery civil rights march to Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign to Andy Warhol’s Factory to the filming of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. 

Steve Schapiro: Heroic Times surveying American milestones from the photographer’s nearly six decade career, with a focus on the 1960s and ‘70s. A number of the photographs are unpublished and on public view for the first time. With assignments from Life, Time, Newsweek, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone and many other publications, he captured iconic and humanistic images of politicians, celebrities, artists, and newsmakers in action.

“I am always seeking the image that conveys the spirit of the person,” Steve Schapiro noted. “At the same time, as a photojournalist, I want to create an image so that people will understand what news is being made.”

During Robert F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign, Steve Schapiro traveled with and got to know the young U.S. senator from New York, who greatly impressed him. Also during that time, Steve Schapiro documented the civil rights movement, making photographs of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and many others who fought for social justice.

Steve Schapiro’s subjects extended beyond politics into the worlds of film, rock and roll, and art. He documented The Godfather, Taxi Driver, The Way We Were, Midnight Cowboy, and Chinatown. Among the luminaries were David Bowie, Samuel Beckett, Andy Warhol, Edie Sedgwick, Barbra Streisand, and Nico, who sang with the Velvet Underground. 

STEVE SCHAPIRO

Steve Schapiro was born in New York City in 1934. His formal education in photography began when he studied with W. Eugene Smith in the early 1960s. In 1961, Steve Schapiro began to work as a freelance photojournalist, his photographs appearing in magazines including Life, Look, Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Sports Illustrated, and People.

Steve Schapiro’s photographs have been widely reproduced in magazines and books related to American cultural history from the 1960s, civil rights, and motion pictures. Monographs of Schapiro’s work include Schapiro’s Heroes, 2007, which offers intimate profiles of ten iconic figures. Recently, Powerhouse published Bliss, 2015, about the changing hippie generation; Bowie, 2016; and Misericordia, 2016, about a facility for people with disabilities. This year,  Taschen published The Fire Next Time with text by James Baldwin and Schapiro’s civil rights photographs from 1963 to 1968. Powerhouse will publish Muhammad Ali in spring, 2018.

Museums and galleries have exhibited Steve Schapiro’s photographs worldwide. The High Museum of Art’s Road to Freedom, which traveled widely in the United States, includes numerous photographs from the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King Jr. by Schapiro. Recent solo shows have been mounted in Los Angeles, London, Santa Fe, Amsterdam, Paris, and Berlin. He has had large museum retrospective exhibitions in the United States, Spain, Russia, and Germany.

Steve Schapiro’s work is represented in many private and public collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Museum, Washington D.C.; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. In September, he received the James Joyce Award from University College in Dublin. In October he won a Lucie award for achievement in photojournalism. He lives and works in Chicago. 

HOWARD GREENBERG GALLERY
41 East 57th Street, Suite 1406, New York, NY 10022
www.howardgreenberg.com

The Immigrants @ Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York - A Group Exhibition of Works by Select Photographers

The Immigrants
A Group Exhibition of Works by Select Photographers
Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York
Through January 27, 2018

Bob Gruen, John Lennon, New York, 1974

© Bob Gruen, courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.

Issues relating to immigration have been front and center in the news, from the recent travel ban to the border wall to the uncertainty of the Dreamers. Howard Greenberg Gallery focuses on the immigrant experience – from hardship and sacrifice to pride and achievement. The Immigrants surveying the work of more than 40 photographers from the 1860s through 2015, exploring issues of labor, education, and poverty as well as discrimination, assimilation, and a sense of belonging. A portion of proceeds from the exhibition will benefit the International Rescue Committee (IRC), which supports refugee families in crisis.

More than 70 images exploring these important topics are on view by Ansel Adams, Boushra Almutawakel, Margaret Bourke-White, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Edward Burtynsky, Robert Capa, Imogen Cunningham, Bruce Davidson, Robert Frank, Ernst Haas, Lewis Hine, Dorothea Lange, Alex Majoli, Ruth Orkin, Bill Owens, Gordon Parks, Dulce Pinzón, Augustus Frederick Sherman, W. Eugene Smith, Alfred Stieglitz, Tseng Kwong Chi, and Alex Webb, among others.

Tracing the immigrant’s journey, photographs in the exhibition lead viewers through sections on otherness, growth, global issues, boundaries, work, and the history of the United States. In addition to iconic images such as Lewis Hine’s Climbing into America, 1905; Alfred Stieglitz’s The Steerage, 1907; and W. Eugene Smith’s Dream Street, 1955-56, the gallery has on display two historic works by Augustus Frederick Sherman, who documented new arrivals while working as a clerk at the Ellis Island immigration station from 1892 to 1925.

Two rarely seen Dorothea Lange photographs about the incarceration of Japanese Americans by the U.S. during WWII are also be on view in the exhibition. Withheld from the public during the war by the government, Dorothea Lange’s photographs reveal a hidden truth about a dark chapter in US’s history.

Ernst Haas’s Last Displaced Person Boat from 1951 documents that for a limited time, the U.S. authorized permanent residency for 200,000 Europeans displaced by WWII.

Immigration in Israel is depicted by Ruth Orkin in a touching 1951 portrait of three Jewish teenage refugees from Iraq, their faces pressed up against a window as they arrive in Tel Aviv. 

Among the most poignant images in the exhibition are the portraits of immigrants who told their stories to the photographers. Bill Owens’s 1976 portrait of a worker in a factory notes, “I’m a refugee from China. I sew pockets on pants. Every day I have work, and living here is easy. In China it’s hard to find a job. Someone has to recommend you. I don’t speak English and I’m too old to learn so I’ll never get a better job.” A 2005 print by Dulce Pinzón shows a young man dressed in a Superman costume riding a bike. He is Noe Reyes from the state of Puebla who works as a delivery person in Brooklyn and sends $500 home to his family each week.

About the International Rescue Committee

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) responds to the world’s worst humanitarian crises and helps people whose lives and livelihoods are shattered by conflict and disaster to survive, recover, and gain control of their future. For more information, visit www.rescue.org

HOWARD GREENBERG GALLERY
41 East 57th Street, Suite 1406, New York, NY 10022
www.howardgreenberg.com

Barbara Kasten: Partis Pris @ Bortolami Gallery, New York

Barbara Kasten: Partis Pris
Bortolami Gallery, New York
8 September - 21 October, 2017

Bortolami presents PARTI PRIS, BARBARA KASTEN’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Endlessly experimental and now in her eighth decade, Barbara Kasten presents three recent bodies of work: an extension of her colorful, large scale photographs, Collisions, and new sculptural, photographic hybrids entitled Progressions. She also presents Parallels—her first freestanding sculpture since the early 1970s. In architectural terminology, the parti pris is the chief organizing principle of a project. Barbara Kasten utilizes the structural principles of architecture and process in her new works, which can be read within the realm of architectural diagrams.

Barbara Kasten’s inventive Progressions, composed of face-mounted photographs with geometric acrylic shapes affixed to the surface, emphasize the duality of the photograph and of the relief’s sculptural forms. Transitioning from photographic representation as in the Collisions to address spatial ambiguities, Barbara Kasten incorporates concrete materiality while maintaining each element’s mysterious and elusive qualities. The image in the photograph depicts space and even recedes into the depths of implied space, while the three-dimensional components extend outward. Both features—the image and the acrylic fragments—act as a bridge between dimensions.

As photographic hybrids, the Progressions are abstract objects, and the relationship between the two components ceaselessly oscillates back and forth. With both elements of sculpture and photography, the new works become something else entirely, depending on and informing one another. The shapes and shadows that they cast are crucial; creating what Barbara Kasten deems a “temporary photogram.”

These new works conceptually relate to her AMALGAMS of the late 1970s; gelatin silver prints that fused photogram, photograph, and drawing. As photograms of transparent objects on light-sensitive prints, the AMALGAMS are three-dimensional arrangements translated into two-dimensional form. Nearly 50 years later, Kasten is now inverting this translation, turning the two-dimensional planes into three-dimensional forms.

Finally, Parallels, the large sculpture central to the exhibition, brings the transparency of form that exists in Kasten’s images fully into the viewers’ space and experience. In Parallels, she pushes the modernist, formal geometric order of these cubic constructions askew, utilizing a point of balance for its form. The fluorescent, acrylic components of Parallels are cantilevered on top of one another, each depending on the other, relying on the tension between each element and reaffirming an intuitive process.

BARBARA KASTEN was born in 1936 in Chicago, Illinois. She received her BFA from the University of Arizona in 1959 and MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1970. She currently lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. Most recently, Barbara Kasten was the subject of a retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia that travelled to the Graham Foundation in Chicago and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. Her work is featured in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, The Whitney Museum of American Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, The Centre Pompidou, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. among many others.

BORTOLAMI GALLERY
39 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013
www.bortolamigallery.com

Kati Horna @ Americas Society, NYC

Told and Untold: The Photo Stories of Kati Horna in the Illustrated Press
Americas Society Art Gallery, New York
September 13 - December 17, 2016

Kati Horna

El iluminado, 1944

Gelatin silver print

Private collection, Mexico City

© 2005 Ana María Norah Horna y Fernández

Renowned for her innovative images documenting Mexico City’s urban expansion and vibrant cultural scene, KATI HORNA (Budapest, 1912 – Mexico City, 2000) was already a widely published photographer of the Spanish Civil War when she arrived in Mexico at the end of 1939. Her prolific career will be the focus of the exhibition Told and Untold: The Photo Stories of Kati Horna in the Illustrated Press on view at the Americas Society Art Gallery from September 13 to December 17, 2016. Curated by Michel Otayek and Christina L. De León, the exhibition is the first solo show in the United States to examine Kati Horna’s influential collaboration with the illustrated press. Featuring Kati Horna’s photographs displayed alongside the newspapers and magazines that put them in circulation, the exhibition will comprise some never-before-seen materials including contact sheets, montage cuttings, and personal albums.

Born in Budapest to a wealthy Jewish family, Kati Horna (née Katalin Deutsch Blau) settled in Berlin in the early 1930s and became part of a group of activists, artists, and intellectuals close to the dissident Marxist theoretician Karl Korsch and the dramatist Bertolt Brecht. At a time in which photojournalism was emerging as a phenomenon of mass culture, Horna was able to seize upon the field’s opportunities for professional, aesthetic, and political engagement. In 1933, forced to flee Germany due to the rise of National Socialism, she briefly returned to Budapest where she studied photography with József Pécsi. She then moved to Paris, living there until she left for Barcelona a few months after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Coinciding with the 80th anniversary of the military uprising against the Spanish Republican government, the exhibition explores Kati Horna’s work as a photographer and photomonteur engaged in the construction of a forceful anarchist narrative. At age 24 she became one of the few women to photograph the frontlines of war. Her images appeared in a wide range of propaganda materials including brochures, newspapers, and wide-circulation magazines like Umbral, an anarchist weekly where she held the position of lead photographer and graphic director.

“This exhibition demonstrates that in order to grasp some of the subtleties and complexities of Horna’s mature work in Mexico it is crucial to consider the depth of her intellectual upbringing, the extent of her political radicalization as a young artist, and the true nature of her involvement with the anarchist fringe of the Spanish Civil War,” says curator Christina De León.

In 1939, following the war’s end, Kati Horna and her husband—Spanish artist José Horna—settled in Mexico City, where she began collaborating with the country’s illustrated press. Registering the city’s rapid transformation and cultural landscape in the mid-twentieth century, Horna’s photos appeared on the pages of magazines such as Nosotros, Arquitectura México, and Mujeres: Expresión Femenina. In Mexico, she was active in several artistic and intellectual circles. This included her friendships with Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, as well as her association with Mathias Goeritz, a seldom-recognized connection that proved to be one of the most fruitful partnerships of her career.

“Horna conceived much of her work as series for the illustrated press, some of them with a powerful narrative impulse,” says curator Michel Otayek. “We want to invite viewers to consider the circulation of Horna’s images in a wide range of print materials and get a sense of her intellectual sophistication, understated sense of humor, and fondness for collaborative work.”

In the 1960s, Kati Horna produced a remarkable body of deeply personal work, some of it as photo stories for magazines such as the avant-garde publication S.nob. Related to issues of gender, transience, and desire, these stories testify to Horna’s creative flourishing as a mature artist in exile. Parallel to these projects, Horna also undertook numerous assignments of architectural photography during this period. Her arresting formalist photographs of landmark modern Mexican architecture as in Ricardo Legorreta’s Automex factory in Toluca reflect Horna’s interest in pure form, a time she later remembered as the creative pinnacle of her life. In later years, Horna concentrated on her work as a teacher at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and the Universidad Iberoamericana, serving as a mentor to numerous young photographers, including Flor Garduño, Victor Monroy, Estanislao Ortíz, and Sergio Carlos Rey.

Told and Untold: The Photo Stories of Kati Horna in the Illustrated Press will be accompanied by a hardcover, fully illustrated catalogue with contributions by Miriam Margarita Basilio, Christina L. De León, Andrea Geyer, Ana María Norah Horna y Fernández, Cristóbal Andrés Jácome, Michel Otayek, Maria Antonella Pelizzari, and Gabriela Rangel.

Told and Untold: The Photo Stories of Kati Horna in the Illustrated Press is presented by Americas Society in collaboration with Archivo Privado de Fotografía y Gráfica Kati y José Horna, S.C.

The exhibition is made possible by the generous support of PHILLIPS, lead sponsor of Americas Society’s Visual Arts Program, and by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council. Additional support is provided by Genomma Lab Internacional, Mex-Am Cultural Foundation, the Smart Family Foundation, the Consulate General of Spain in New York, the David Berg Foundation, as well as AMEXCID, the Consulate General of Mexico in New York, the Mexican Cultural Institute of New York, and Aeroméxico.

Americas Society
680 Park Avenue at 68th Street
New York, NY 10065
www.as-coa.org

Irving Penn: Beyond Beauty, SAAM, Washington DC

Irving Penn: Beyond Beauty

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

October 23, 2015 – March 20, 2016

IRVING PENN

Bee, New York, 1995, printed 2001

Smithsonian American Art Museum

Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation

© The Irving Penn Foundation

IRVING PENN (1917–2009), known for his iconic fashion, portrait and still life images that appeared in Vogue magazine, ranks as one of the foremost photographers of the 20th century. “Irving Penn: Beyond Beauty,” the first retrospective of Penn’s work in nearly 20 years, will celebrate his legacy as a modern master and reveal the full expressive range of his work. The exhibition features work from all stages of Irving Penn’s career—street scenes from the late 1930s, photographs of the American South from the early 1940s, celebrity portraits, fashion photographs, still lifes and more private studio images. Irving Penn’s pictures reveal a modernist instinct for stark simplicity whether he was photographing celebrities, fashion models, still lifes or people in remote places of the world.

“Irving Penn: Beyond Beauty” is drawn entirely from the extensive holdings of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. On display will be 146 photographs from the museum’s permanent collection, including the debut of 100 photographs recently donated to the museum by The Irving Penn Foundation. The exhibition presents several previously unseen or never exhibited photographs. Also on view for the first time are Super 8 mm films of Irvin Penn in Morocco, made by his wife Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn, that add a vivid picture of the artist at work.

Merry Foresta is the guest curator; she was the museum’s curator of photography from 1983 to 1999.

“Irving Penn’s art leads to many aesthetic discoveries, transcending daily life through intense leaps of feeling and understanding,” said Betsy Broun, The Margaret and Terry Stent Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. “I am grateful to the Penn Foundation team for their generosity and for their participation at every step along our journey. They shared our excitement and encouraged us to pursue all new directions. A review of Penn’s whole career persuades me that in his last 20 years he became bolder and more daring, a turn that this exhibition begins to explore.”

In a career that spanned nearly 70 years, Penn’s aesthetic and technical skill earned him accolades in both the artistic and commercial worlds. He was a master of both black-and-white and color photography, and his revival of platinum printing in the 1960s and 1970s was a catalyst for significant change in the art world. He was one of the first photographers to cross the chasm that separated magazine and fine-art photography, narrowing the gap between art and fashion. Penn’s portraits and fashion photographs defined elegance in the 1950s, yet throughout his career he also transformed mundane objects—storefront signs, food, cigarette butts, street debris—into memorable images of unexpected, often surreal, beauty.

“From his first photographs to the ones he made in the last years of his life, Irving Penn’s consistency of artistic integrity is remarkable,” said Foresta. “He was able to elevate even crushed coffee cups and steel blocks to the realm of great art, printing his images with exacting care. But in the final analysis his work is not just about beauty, or about the potential of photography as an art form, but a combination of the two that is indivisible and unique.”

The 100 photographs announced as a donation to the museum in 2013 include rare street photographs from the late 1930s and 1940s, most of which are unpublished; images of post-war Europe; iconic portraits of figures such as Truman Capote, Salvador Dali and Leontyne Price; color photographs made for magazine editorials and commercial advertising; self-portraits; and some of Penn’s most recognizable fashion and still life photographs. All the prints were made during the artist’s lifetime and personally approved by him. In 1988, Irving Penn donated to the museum 60 photographs, spanning his career from 1944 to 1986.

IRVING PENN

Beyond Beauty

Exhibition Catalog

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog, co-published by The Irving Penn Foundation and the Smithsonian American Art Museum and distributed by Yale University Press, with an essay by Merry Foresta and an introduction by Broun. Foresta’s essay introduces Irving Penn to a younger generation and delves into his use of photography to respond to social and cultural change. 

Irving Penn: Beyond Beauty is traveling to six cities after closing at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Confirmed venues include:

Dallas Museum of Art in Dallas, Texas (April 15, 2016 – August 14, 2016)

Lunder Arts Center, Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts (September 10, 2016 – November 19, 2016)

Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tennessee (February 24, 2017 – May 29, 2017)

Frick Art & Historical Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (June 17 – September 10, 2017)

Wichita Art Museum in Wichita, Kansas (September 30, 2017 – February 4, 2018)

Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, California (September 29, 2018 – February 17, 2019)

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Updated 14.12.2020