Stephen Frailey

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  previews January 2006

  “Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography”

  The more-than-two-hundred works on view include photographs, videos, installations, and performance documentation, and explore themes familiar to Western discourse: identity (through race, gender, and the body); historic trauma and representation; and political narratives in a postcolonial nation.

  A successful attempt to comprehend contemporary art practices in Africa must encompass broad geopolitical and cultural diversity. For this sweeping survey, Okwui Enwezor has chosen thirty-five artists from twelve countries on the epic continent, most of whom have never exhibited abroad. The more-than-two-hundred works on view include photographs, videos, installations, and performance documentation, and explore themes familiar to Western discourse: identity (through race, gender, and the body); historic trauma and representation; and political narratives in a postcolonial

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  previews January 2006

  Todd Eberle

  Todd Eberle is best known for his architectural photographs in stylish magazines like Vanity Fair, W, and Domus, but his new series of large-format images distills the contemporary architectural venture to found geometries and grids.

  Todd Eberle is best known for his architectural photographs in stylish magazines like Vanity Fair, W, and Domus, but his new series of large-format images distills the contemporary architectural venture to found geometries and grids. Locating the modernist schematic in the patterns of ceilings, grills, tiles, and other architectural surfaces, these photographs reference much of the history of geometric abstraction, from De Stijl to Stephen Westfall, yet ultimately remain photographic: luminous, airy, and somewhat ethereal. The thirteen prints on view—of

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  previews January 2006

  “ClickDoubleClick: The Documentary Factor”

  Although sympathetic to the documentary ideal, the roughly 150 images on view, by Taryn Simon, Larry Sultan, Jeff Wall, Luc Delahaye, and nineteen others, operate between fact and fiction. At its core, the show emphasizes photography based on the artist’s interpretation rather than fact.

  Throughout its history, the practice of documentary photography has implied a rigorous responsibility to truth—an illusive ideal that has grown increasingly problematic in the digital age. This exhibition examines the influence of digital manipulation on the documentary tradition and how technology has weakened the medium’s integrity and authenticity. Although sympathetic to the documentary ideal, the roughly 150 images on view, by Taryn Simon, Larry Sultan, Jeff Wall, Luc Delahaye, and nineteen others, operate between fact and fiction. At its core, the show emphasizes

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  previews May 2005

  Stephen Shore

  Besides almost single-handedly dismantling the distinction between high and low forms of photography, introducing the use of color film for high-brow ambitions, and reviving large-format photography, Stephen Shore forged, in the ’70s, two distinct ways of observing the colloquial American landscape. “Uncommon Places,” 1973–86, posed a silent, dense description of the present, while “American Surfaces,” 1972–73, was restless, ephemeral, and glib. This show of 120 prints from 1968 to 1993 (as well as Shore’s daily logs from 1973 and early conceptual projects)

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  print February 2005

  Ralph Eugene Meatyard

  The most significant force in photography during the past forty years has been the development of practices that accommodate subjectivity and interiority, recognizing that which is felt by the photographer as opposed to making any statement of fact. Although this approach now dominates contemporary photographic discourse, it has not always been so. In fact, the fundamental lexicon of the photographic subjective, not to mention the development of photographic narrative and the constructed image, emerged in the late ’50s and early ’60s from the unlikely precincts of Lexington, Kentucky, the

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  previews May 2004

  Sally Mann

  In her often haunting photographic series “What Remains,” Sally Mann conflates the Romantic appreciation of disintegration’s inherent beauty, the photograph’s compulsive preservation of the past, and a southern narrative that evokes both.

  In her often haunting photographic series “What Remains,” Sally Mann conflates the Romantic appreciation of disintegration’s inherent beauty, the photograph’s compulsive preservation of the past, and a southern narrative that evokes both. Through her eyes, the landscape becomes an unrelenting burial site that composts considerable psychic weight. Organized by senior curator of photography and media arts Philip Brookman and accompanied by a substantial monograph, this exhibition features more than ninety gestural and glossy wet-collodion prints that reward the viewer

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  previews January 2004

  Gary Schneider

  These exquisite prints redefine portraiture as a rendering of temperature, of body heat that becomes the emotional mapping of an individual, a ghostly afterimage that renegotiates presence and absence, past and future.

  The ethereal and luminous quality of Gary Schneider’s photographic portraits resembles the flickering of silent films. The artist rejuvenates practices from photographic history and joins them to the most advanced photographic technology—long shutter speeds, platinum printing, medical imaging. These exquisite prints redefine portraiture as a rendering of temperature, of body heat that becomes the emotional mapping of an individual, a ghostly afterimage that renegotiates presence and absence, past and future. This exhibition comprises thirty-three works from the last

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  previews January 2004

  Laura Letinsky

  Laura Letinsky scrutinizes the intimacies of the domestic in probing photographs that bring a contemporary relevance to the familiarities of genre painting.

  Laura Letinsky scrutinizes the intimacies of the domestic in probing photographs that bring a contemporary relevance to the familiarities of genre painting. This exhibition of thirty prints from the mid-’90s to the present surveys her interrogation of romanticism in emotionally complex works that are as voluptuous and elegant as they are feverish and remote. In their depictions of the remnants of shared meals, the photographs play on fragments of activity: Melon rinds, withered bouquets, and scattered bread crusts lie quietly against the geometry of the table plane and

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  print November 1993

  THIN AIR: THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF ADAM FUSS

  The trilling wire in the blood sings below inveterate scars.
  
  —T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton”

  A PHOTOGRAPH IS USUALLY described first by naming what is visible and tangible before proceeding to that which is parenthetical or ephemeral; the photograph’s mimetic capacity tends to lead it away from the fleeting and elusive, from the province of music or poetry. But Adam Fuss’ images traffic primarily in peripheral sensation. Less representational than percussive, certain photographs suggest sound—a plucked string or a minute fluttering of the vocal chords, emerging from the throat in a

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  print October 1990

  SEEING THE SCENE: KARL JOHNSON WITH “BAPTISM OF SOLITUDE,” A PROJECT FOR ARTFORUM

  In the autumn of 1989 a posse of technicians occupied the cliff district of Tangier. Leather-colored tents were erected on the beach. Wiring was dragged through the door of a cavernous house as low and chalky as the others around it. Utilities and trucks collected heat just beyond the arch that crowns the Casbah. The path leading down from it, bordered on one side by the crumbling facades and on the other by a perilous drop to the sea below, was virtually off-limits to the usual straggler.

  Instead of fabricating an earthy claustrophobic chamber with milky-green walls in a film studio, and filling