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Hiroshi Sugimoto has two recurring obsessions: history and time. He has described this new body of work as “architecture after the end of the world.” Sugimoto is known for taking years to work on his series of long-exposure photographs on themes ranging from museum dioramas, movie theaters, seascapes, and historical wax figures. The new architectural images run counter to the traditional sense of a photograph as capturing a moment in time.

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The architectural icons in his most recent series represent the fifth major theme that Sugimoto has explored in depth. With this series Sugimoto has essentially broken all the rules of architectural photography. Photographing great landmarks of modernist architecture around the world, Sugimoto has deliberately taken the images out of focus and at unusual angles, isolating the recognizable forms. The blurred forms evoke the passage of time, muting the architectural details and leaving the essence of the building; suggestive of the way in which our memories preserve images.

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Hiroshi Sugimoto: Architecture was recently seen at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and is accompanied by a major publication and essays by Francesco Bonami, John Yau, and Marco Di Michelis.

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“The Eye Club,” unofficially founded around 1975, was the nickname given to the loose conglomeration of pioneering individuals who found themselves among the first new collectors of photography. Operating purely on instinct and the love of seeing, these few dozen people (including Sam Wagstaff, Andre Jammes, and other now-legendary collectors) shared a distaste for established pantheons and veered instead toward the lesser-known, the anonymous, the outré, or any photograph emanating sparks of electricity. Photography was their perfect vehicle, and they were startled to find themselves in so much uncharted territory.

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The little-known images in THE EYE CLUB have been assembled in a related spirit of adventure. An elastic web of connections replaces chronological order. Many of the pictures, but by no means all, are by artists who have been central to the gallery’s history, but when images by well-known photographers appear they are rarely among their creator’s most celebrated works. The identity of several of the picture-makers remains unknown, or virtually so. Photography persists as an unruly medium, and this book and exhibition are comprised of an unruly group of photographs, brought together in the open-eyed spirit of The Eye Club to mark the gallery’s twenty-fifth year.

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This year’s highlights include a surprising and intimate portrait of his son by the photographer August Sander, entitled Eye of an Eighteen-Year-Old Man (1925); a twelve-part photo work by the British artists Gilbert & George from their 1997 series New Testamental Pictures; a group of motion studies of men wrestling and playing baseball by Eadweard Muybridge dating from 1877; and an ambitious four-part palladium print by Irving Penn from his 1972 series of cigarette still-lifes.  The span of time represented in this year’s S.E.G.R.A.P. ranges from 1858, the year Francis Frith produced his exquisite image, The Pyramids of Dahshoor, from the South to the immediate present as represented by Sol LeWitt’s recent series of work, aerial photographs of Manhattan drawn over with straight and not-straight lines.

This year’s S.E.G.R.A.P. can be seen concurrently with the exhibition, BERND AND HILLA BECHER: Industrial Landscapes.  

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Since 1959, Bernd and Hilla Becher have been photographing industrial structures in Europe and the United States.  The exhibition Industrial Landscapes introduces a new aspect to their photography.  Prior bodies of work have concentrated on isolated industrial objects: water towers, gas tanks, and blast furnaces, often organized into typologies that contrast objects of the same function. 

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The selection of images in Industrial Landscapes, made over the past forty years, presents huge industrial sites amidst their natural surroundings.  Photographed in industrial regions of Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, these images allow for a reading of social and historical aspects and enable the viewer to observe the industrial environment as part of a whole.

Following the sensibilities of early 20^th century photographers Karl Blossfeldt and August Sander, the Bechers originated and mastered a genre of photography which falls somewhere between topological documentation and conceptual art.  In recent decades, the Bechers have profoundly influenced a new generation of artists including their students Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, and Thomas Struth.

The Bechers’ photographs can be found in the collections of numerous museums around the world.  A book, Industrial Landscapes, was recently published by MIT press.  Industrial Landscapes can be seen concurrently with the exhibition Several Exceptionally Good Recently Acquired Pictures XVI.  

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Since the late 1960s, Robert Adams has photographed the changing American landscape.  Free from distortion or moral posture, Adams’s pictures are poised, earnest portraits of the land as we have come to inhabit it.  Adams’s images present an undiminished geography including both the natural and man-made and testify that an absolute beauty endures despite humanity’s intrusion.

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Made primarily in the late 1970s, the thirty-nine black and white images that comprise Summer Nights lead outward from population centers, specifically Denver, to the rural plains and Rocky mountains of Colorado, linking what remains of nature in the cities to a larger natural context.  Photographing at night in the available artificial and lunar luminescence, Adams has asked the viewer to consider with fresh vision that which might otherwise be overlooked.

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This series of night pictures is illustrated in the Aperture publication, Summer Nights, first published in 1985 and recently re-issued.  Other books of Adams’s work include The New West, From the Missouri West, Los Angeles Spring, To Make It Home, Listening to the River, West From the Columbia, What We Bought, Notes for Friends, and California.

Summer Nights is presented concurrently with the exhibition Eugène Atget: Trees.

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The current exhibition unites approximately sixteen photographs that focus on a single subject of special interest to Atget throughout his career: trees.  Eugène Atget made studies of trees in Saint-Cloud, Buttes Chaumont, and Versailles, among other places.  His arboreal portraits illustrate the distinctive ways that trees effloresce, root, and occupy space and light.  Ever eager to add a new tree to his collection, Atget would often return to a place to photograph the familiar subject in a different seasonal light.  This series of images is so integral to the understanding of Atget’s work that the Museum of Modern Art presented an entire exhibition devoted to the body of work in 1972 and a book to be titled Eugène Atget’s Trees: Newly Discovered Photographs from the Bibliotheque Nationale de France is to be published later this year.

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Eugène Atget, born in 1857, turned to photography in his late 40s in order to build a body of work which illustrated the city of Paris and its environs.  This project, comprised of 10,000 photographs, became a modern urban portrait ahead of its time. Atget received little recognition before his death in 1927, but due to the posthumous efforts of photographer Berenice Abbott, his work was preserved, promoted, and gained its rightful place in history.

Trees is exhibited in conjunction with Robert Adams: Summer Nights.

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NOT EXACTLY PHOTOGRAPHS examines twenty-nine works of twentieth-century art that are not photographs per se, but depend on elements of photographic description for their meaning.  The exhibition is comprised of one work each by John Baldessari, Hans Bellmer, Bruce Conner, Vija Celmins, Joseph Cornell, Jay de Feo, Marcel Duchamp, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Gilbert & George, Robert Gober, Hannah Hoch, Georges Hugnet, Jess, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Anselm Kiefer, Franz Kline, Sol LeWitt, Christian Marclay, Brice Marden, On Kawara, Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Gerhard Richter, Karin Sander, Kurt Schwitters, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, and Steve Wolfe.

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Several of these works are connected to photography only by the thinnest of threads, yet a single strand is sometimes enough to substantially affect a picture’s meaning.  Schwitters, Hoch, and Conner, for example, used fragments of actual photographs within their collage works to subvert linear perspective and to create new modes of meaning through the surreal combination of seemingly random elements. Johns, Kiefer, and Twombly incorporated photographs within their drawings and paintings to link the works to the “real world” in a way that could not be achieved purely by the hand.

Duchamp proposed another highly influential strategy; that a “found” object or photograph can be transformed by nothing more than a calculated shift of context.  This method has been adopted and modified by Marclay, On Kawara, and Gilbert & George who, utilizing un-altered record covers or postcards, have absorbed entire photographic objects in the service of their art.  Both Warhol and Richter understood that photographic description itself could be ripe for dissection, and approached photography as original source and primary subject.

While making no attempt to be comprehensive, the twenty-nine exemplary works in NOT EXACTLY PHOTOGRAPHS explore a key aspect of photography’s peculiar and singular conduit to reality.

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Joseph Cornell began creating collages in the 1930s and soon turned his efforts to the construction of “boxes”, for which he is better-known today.  He returned to the collage medium with a fresh enthusiasm during the last decade of his life.  The twenty-two collages and three boxes on exhibition are primarily from this time, the late 1950s and 1960s.

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The presented works contain images culled from popular and everyday sources, establishing a harmonious balance of the esoteric and commonplace.  There exists in each work evidence of Cornell’s most well known motifs, Renaissance figures, celestial and astronomical bodies, birds and animals, and references to the Romantic ballet.  By manipulating and rearranging the chosen images, he created surreal and often haunting narratives.  Cornell frequently devoted as much attention to the back of the works as he did to the visible surfaces, covering the underside of the frame and mount with various book papers and magazine clippings.

Cornell’s impact on subsequent collage artists can be seen in the works of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, both of whom have works included in the coinciding exhibition, NOT EXACTLY PHOTOGRAPHS.

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In 1969, Richard Avedon began using an eight-by-ten inch view camera on a tripod in order to yield images with extreme detail.  That same year he photographed Andy Warhol and Members of the Factory. Printed in a larger-than-life scale, 10 x 31 feet, the bold group portrait generates a visceral confrontation between the viewer and photograph. To convey the eccentric extravagance of Warhol’s studio, Avedon adopted an innovative multi-panel technique that also suggests a reading of the group as a frieze of classical figures.  In a final frame that was ultimately cut, Avedon depicted Warhol videotaping the actor Joe Dallesandro in a post-coital state. That image, as well as other works that led to the triptych’s final version, will be exhibited here for the first time.

Once he had photographed the Factory, Avedon realized that he could apply a related approach to other groups.  In the bicentennial election year of 1976, Avedon was commissioned by Rolling Stone to chronicle the campaign. Once he began, he realized that the real story extended beyond the candidates alone, and expanded his undertaking to incorporate heads of state, bankers, media moguls, union leaders – the people he understood to comprise the true power elite.  Avedon titled this body of work The Family. Like August Sander before him, Avedon aimed for emotional neutrality, and in this case preferred to let his sitters pose themselves so that the results would not be skewed by any political bias on the photographer’s part. The final structure of the work, as seen on the gallery walls, also recalls the typological approach of the Bechers, in this case applied to human physiognomy.

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Avedon’s work is currently the subject of a major survey exhibition, entitled Richard Avedon: Portraits, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City through January 5, 2003.

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