Vince Aletti

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  books Summer 2013

  Vivian Maier: Out of the Shadows

  VIVIAN MAIER died on April 21, 2009, at eighty-three; she’d slipped and fallen on a patch of ice some months earlier and never quite recovered. She had spent much of her life as a governess with families in the Chicago suburbs, and one of those families arranged for her cremation and a brief obituary in the Chicago Tribune, which described her as “a free and kindred spirit who magically touched the lives of all who knew her.” By all accounts, Maier was not very warm and friendly; she was strict with her charges and kept to herself. In fact, she touched few lives in her lifetime, even fewer

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  previews May 2013

  Philip-Lorca DiCorcia

  More than most photographers, Philip-Lorca diCorcia has quite deliberately operated between fiction and fact, between the staged moment and the spontaneous one. As the title of his remarkably sustained and tantalizingly personal project “A Storybook Life” suggests, even pictures of family and friends can slip into make-believe. With some 120 images dating from the mid-1970s through the present, this survey gathers material from that and other key series; on view will be portraits of Hollywood hustlers, chaotic urban street scenes, and dramatically lit head shots of

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  print December 2012

  Vince Aletti

  1 Paul Graham (Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York) The British photographer has been looking closely at the American social landscape for some time now, always alert to its funk and flux—its drifters, strangers, and loners. For “The Pres­ent,” he stalked the streets of New York, inviting comparison to precedents from Strand to Winogrand to diCorcia but staking his own solid claim. Printed from big to huge and hung as diptychs and triptychs, the work focuses on pedestrians passing through a location just seconds apart, incorporating time and incident but stopping to observe ordinary moments with

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  previews September 2011

  “More American Photographs”

  Adopting the sturdy New Deal model of the Farm Security Administration project that put Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, and others to work recording the impact of the Great Depression, the Wattis Institute has asked twelve contemporary photographers to fan out across the US and bring back images of America in its current period of economic uncertainty. Count on Walead Beshty, Larry Clark, Roe Ethridge, Katy Grannan, William E. Jones, Sharon Lockhart, Catherine Opie, Martha Rosler, Collier Schorr, Stephen Shore, Alec Soth, and Hank Willis Thomas—a truly

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  previews September 2010

  From Here to There: Alec Soth’s America

  The title of this midcareer survey connects Alec Soth’s peripatetic process to his ambition: Like Walker Evans and Robert Frank, he hits the road in search of America and Americans.

  The title of this midcareer survey connects Alec Soth’s peripatetic process to his ambition: Like Walker Evans and Robert Frank, he hits the road in search of America and Americans. The material from his first book, Sleeping by the Mississippi, landed him in the 2004 Whitney Biennial and placed him in the company of pioneers of color photography such as William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, and Joel Sternfeld. With more than one hundred photographs, this exhibition showcases Soth’s trademark mix of portraits, landscapes, and interiors from his books and ongoing projects as

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  previews September 2010

  André Kertész

  André Kertész has hardly lacked for intelligent attention in recent years.

  André Kertész has hardly lacked for intelligent attention in recent years. (A wide-ranging retrospective toured in 2005.) But as his career was nearly as long and eventful as his life (he died at ninety-one in 1985), this exhibition of some three hundred photographs— from early work shot while he was serving in the Austro-Hungarian Army to his late New York Polaroids—nonetheless promises both new material and new perspectives. Organized chronologically and punctuated by self-portraits, the show follows Kertész’s parallel lives as a witty, poetic avant-gardist

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  previews May 2010

  Thomas Struth: Photographs 1979-2010

  Asked to pinpoint the essence of photography, Thomas Struth said it was “a communicative and analytical medium,” and his work is a prime example of that rigorous, intellectual approach.

  Asked to pinpoint the essence of photography, Thomas Struth said it was “a communicative and analytical medium,” and his work is a prime example of that rigorous, intellectual approach. One of the most successful graduates of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s Düsseldorf School, Struth is also one of the strictest adherents to its influential version of Neue Sachlichkeit. This three-decade survey rounds up nearly one hundred works, from his earliest, modestly scaled and unpopulated black-and-white streetscapes to the massive color views of

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  previews January 2010

  “Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change”

  This retrospective, the first devoted to the full range of Eadweard Muybridge’s work, focuses new attention on his pioneering western landscapes as well as the devices Muybridge invented to capture and project motion.

  Eadweard Muybridge’s fame rests largely on the 1887 publication and popular dissemination of Animal Locomotion, in which marvelously matter-of-fact images of men, women, children, horses, elephants, birds, and anything else he could wrangle into his studio are arranged in 781 sequential grids like frames in a film. That project has nearly eclipsed a career of experimentation and innovation that began in San Francisco twenty years earlier and involved virtually every sort of photographic subject, process, and format. This retrospective, the first devoted to the full

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  print December 2009

  Vince Aletti

  VINCE ALETTI

  1 Irving Penn (1917–2009) Penn’s death ends one of the most brilliant, productive, and celebrated careers of any magazine photographer. But even if there will be no more new Penns in Vogue, the Getty Museum publication and show of his “Small Trades” photographs from the early 1950s (curated by Virginia Heckert and Anne Lacoste) suggest there is extraordinary material in the archives still to be revealed. The two-hundred-plus photographs in the project are more than twice the number previously published or exhibited. It’s a generous parting gift: Penn at an early peak, combining

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  previews May 2005

  Lee Friedlander

  It’s fitting, if inevitable, that a Lee Friedlander retrospective should originate at the Museum of Modern Art, an institution that championed his work early on (John Szarkowski put him in the historic 1967 “New Documents” show with Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand) and has collected it in depth ever since. With some five hundred prints drawn from throughout Friedlander’s insanely prolific fifty-year career, the show is likely to be as unruly and unconventional as the work, which includes genre-busting portraiture, self-portraiture, landscapes, still lifes, and architectural

• previews May 2005

  Shōji Ueda

  This retrospective of Shōji Ueda’s work, the first outside Japan, gathers 151 black-and-white photographs made in the course of a seven-decade career that began in 1932, when Ueda opened a studio on a remote coast of the Sea of Japan whose sand dunes would provide a favorite setting. The artful images he staged there—including a series of witty tableaux featuring his family in the early ’50s—ran counter to the dark mood and aggressive experimentation that characterized photography in postwar Japan. But Ueda’s stylized modernism was never reactionary,

• previews May 2005

  David Goldblatt

  A self-described “white South African English-speaking Jew,” David Goldblatt has always practiced photography as “a political act”—a way of “squaring one’s conscience with being a white in this country.” Active since the ’50s, he’s been a remarkably restrained and reliable witness to the awful subtleties of everyday inequity. But Goldblatt has also proven himself a master of the deceptively casual street scene, focusing on the cross section of social and commercial activity at busy intersections. This show, his first exclusively in color, features some