Vince Aletti

• previews January 2005

  Martin Munkácsi

  “All great photographs today are snapshots,” Martin Munkácsi (1896–1963) announced in 1935, and he had plenty of convincing evidence right at hand. For more than a decade, the self-taught Hungarian photographer had been enlivening newspapers and magazines in Budapest and Berlin with pictures that combined modernist innovation, graphic sophistication, and the punch of a knockout sports photo. When he followed other Jewish exile artists to New York in 1934, Munkácsi brought the same anything-goes exuberance and spontaneity

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  previews May 2004

  Robert Mapplethorpe

  The photographer whose 1990 retrospective resulted in obscenity charges against Cincinnati's Contemporary Art Center was also a flaming neoclassicist. This show examines the artist's debt to the Mannerists, juxtaposing 125 of his photos of classical busts and artfully truncated nudes with Renaissance statuary, woodcuts, and engravings.

  The photographer whose 1990 retrospective resulted in obscenity charges against Cincinnati’s Contemporary Art Center was also a flaming neoclassicist. Throughouth his career, Robert Mapplethorpe seesawed between the decadent and the decorative. Focusing on the latter, this show examines the artist’s debt to the Mannerists, juxtaposing 125 of his photos of classical busts and artfully truncated nudes with Renaissance statuary, woodcuts, and engravings. While Mapplethorpe’s early investigations of the homoerotic underground remain an important counterbalance to his later exercises in chilly

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  previews January 2004

  Fashioning Fiction in Photography Since 1990

  MoMA’s curators have selected nearly one hundred photographs by a dozen “crossover” artists like Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Tina Barney, Steven Meisel, Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman, and Larry Sultan to examine the disintegrating line between art and commerce over the past decade.

  Although MoMA has included its collection of fashion work by Steichen, Beaton, Penn, and Avedon in various themed shows, “Fashioning Fiction” is its first exhibition devoted to fashion photography. As such, it makes no attempt to recapitulate the genre’s history, focusing instead on recent, often self-consciously cinematic developments. MoMA’s curators have selected nearly one hundred photographs by a dozen “crossover” artists like Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Tina Barney, Steven Meisel, Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman, and Larry Sultan to examine the disintegrating

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  previews September 2003

  ICP Triennial of Photography and Video

  Angling for some high-profile attention, ICP puts itself on the overcrowded international-survey calendar with the launch of its photo and video triennial.

  Angling for some high-profile attention, ICP puts itself on the overcrowded international-survey calendar with the launch of its photo and video triennial, the first of which, titled “Strangers,” rounds up some forty new and established artists, including Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, Luc Delahaye, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Collier Schorr, and Susan Meiselas. Brian Wallis, chief of ICP’s four staff curators, says the show’s theme emerged from the work itself, much of which involves crossing cultural and political borders. Though photojournalism accounts for only a fraction of the mix, its

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  previews May 2003

  Cindy Sherman

  Serpentine chief curator Rochelle Steiner’s Cindy Sherman overview focuses on staged portraiture, which allows the artist to hide in plain sight as a shape-shifting Everywoman: starlet, frump, Madonna, ogre, aging trophy wife.

  Serpentine chief curator Rochelle Steiner’s Cindy Sherman overview focuses on staged portraiture, which allows the artist to hide in plain sight as a shape-shifting Everywoman: starlet, frump, Madonna, ogre, aging trophy wife. With some forty photographs from the “Untitled Film Stills” and more recent pieces that continue the artist’s 2000 series skewering anxious, oblivious career girls, the show investigates Sherman’s mix of satire and sympathy. “I want that choked-up feeling in your throat which may come from despair or teary-eyed sentimentality,” she wrote early on, before burying all traces

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  print March 2003

  1982: Bruce Weber for Calvin Klein

  Sometimes an athlete or actor thinks he’s so much more beautiful than the way I see him. But it might have been his nose that I was in love with.
  —Bruce Weber in Bruce Weber (Knopf, 1989)
  

  WHEN HIS PHOTOGRAPH of a muscular young man in nothing but white briefs appeared on a Times Square billboard in August 1982, Bruce Weber was nearly as unknown as his model, a pole-vaulter named Tom Hintnaus, who took a break from training for the Olympics to help launch Calvin Klein’s new line of men’s underwear. Weber had set Hintnaus against a whitewashed wall and photographed him from such a low angle that

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  print December 2002

  Vince Aletti

  VINCE ALETTI

  1 “Winogrand 1964” (International Center of Photography, New York) Working in the shadows of Robert Frank and the Kennedy assassination, Garry Winogrand spent the better part of the summer and early fall of 1964 driving cross-country, photographing the Americans. He printed only a fraction of the twenty thousand pictures he shot and showed very few of those in his lifetime. Choosing from the one thousand black-and-white images the photographer himself had culled as well as a largely unedited and never-before-exhibited archive of color slides taken on the same road trip, curator Trudy

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  print May 2002

  First Break

  Vince Aletti looks back at Larry Clark’s checkered youth and the events that led to the publication of Tulsa in 1971.

  As a teenager, Larry Clark spent three humiliating years pressed into the family business: going door-to-door in Tulsa, Oklahoma, taking baby pictures. So when he enrolled in the photography program at Milwaukee’s Layton School of Art and Design in 1961, it was mostly to get far away from home. But it was there he discovered Life magazine, W. Eugene Smith’s photo essays, and the narrative possibilities of a medium he’d always taken for granted. “I had these urges to be a storyteller,

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  print February 2002

  PORTFOLIO: SAUL FLETCHER

  SAUL FLETCHER SHOT THE AUSTERE LANDSCAPES on the following pages at the end of a frustrating three weeks last February. “I'd been thinking about these pictures for three or four years,'' he says in his soft North Country burr. ”I used to work in those fields picking potatoes. I knew there were pictures to be done there, but it never felt right.“ Determined to capture a place that had left a strong imprint on him, Fletcher, thirty-four, left London, where he lives with his wife and children, and returned to his family home in Lincolnshire, in northeastern England. His parents still live in the

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  previews January 2002

  Chic Clicks: Creativity and Commerce in Contemporary Fashion Photography

  Fashion photography is the love child of art and commerce, alternately spoiled and spurned, so many of its most successful auteurs (including Corinne Day, Terry Richardson, and Matthias Vriens) feel the need to establish their independence from even the field’s most unconventional conventions.

  Fashion photography is the love child of art and commerce, alternately spoiled and spurned, so many of its most successful auteurs (including Corinne Day, Terry Richardson, and Matthias Vriens) feel the need to establish their independence from even the field’s most unconventional conventions. Other photographers (Cindy Sherman, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Larry Sultan, and Collier Schorr) dip into fashion, if only to bend its conventions to their will. Curator Ulrich Lehmann brings these and thirty-three others together in an ambitious show. With more than 240 images on

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  previews January 2002

  Taken by Design: Photographs from the Institute of Design, 1937–1971

  Though far too individualistic to be labeled the Chicago School, Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, and others at the Institute of Design made the city a driving force in avant-garde American photography.

  Though far too individualistic to be labeled the Chicago School, Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, and others at the Institute of Design made the city a driving force in avant-garde American photography. Key to that influence was László Moholy-Nagy, who founded ID as the New Bauhaus in 1937, bringing his idealistic “new vision” for the integration of art and technology with him from Dessau. This show of 200 images, organized by the Art Institute’s David Travis and Elizabeth Siegel, includes work by Moholy-Nagy, Callahan, and Siskind, as well as acolytes Gyorgy Kepes, Ray K. Metzker, Kenneth Josephson,

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  print December 2001

  Vince Aletti

  VINCE ALETTI

  1 Philip-Lorca diCorcia (PaceWildenstein, New York) Because the subjects of diCorcia’s larger-than-life head shots are unaware that their pictures are being taken, they exist in a weird state of grace. Hyperalert urban radar temporarily down, these pedestrians look touchingly vulnerable: alone and adrift. The photographer “cringes” at the idea that his work is humanistic and insists he’s “not the slightest bit sympathetic” toward his subjects, yet he never thwarts our sympathy for them. DiCorcia’s people are ordinary citizens of the twenty-first century, and that’s exactly why they’re