Carolyn Marks Blackwood: WATER, WATER, EVERYWHERE

Peter Knapp was born on June 5th, 1931, in Bäretswil, Switzerland. He studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich, where he was influenced by the thinking and aesthetics of the Bauhaus movement. He learned about the beauty of function and modernity, which he came to expertly demonstrate in his typography, logo work, catalogue and poster design, and scenography. This led him to work, in the 1950s, as art director for the magazine Nouveau Fémina and the Groupe Galeries Lafayette. He subsequently won a competition to design the pavilions for the Brussels World’s Fair in 1956 alongside the Russian designer Slavik. In 1959, the legendary magazine creator Hélène Lazareff recruited Knapp to art direct ELLE, which was then an insurgent, iconoclastic publication on the fashion-magazine scene. Knapp served there until 1966 and then again from 1974 until 1977. During the same years, Knapp also became a photographer in his own right, grafting the Bauhaus tenet of applied art onto the practice of fashion photography in his elegant, expertly composed, and subtly challenging photographs. Fashion photography, when considered an applied art, has interesting links to older forms of expression such as genre painting in Western Europe by artists like Pieter Bruegel and Johannes Vermeer, and Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints or paintings. In Japan, these things are considered fuzoku, which refers to customs and manners of daily life (including food, clothing, and housing) that are characteristic of a certain period, society, region, or class. And just as ukiyo-e in Japan and genre paintings in Western Europe are now considered critically important art movements, we should also consider applied fashion photography as a new form of art, and Peter Knapp as one of its foundational practitioners. Image: Stern, 1978, Taroudant, Morocco © Peter Knapp

As part of the slate of programs in honor of the 75th anniversary of the public opening of the George Eastman Museum, New Directions: Recent Acquisitions features work acquired by the museum over the past five years and showcases significant developments in photographic practice. The exhibition title echoes New Acquisitions/New Directions/New Work, 1981–1989, organized by curator Robert Sobieszek on what was the museum’s 40th anniversary. Throughout New Directions, the photographic image figures as a tool to fortify—but also unsettle—ideas about history and identity. Performances staged for the camera enable artists to explore and break with the conventions of gender, making the home or studio an experimental theater for engaging the world at large. While some of the artists embrace photography as a documentary medium, others develop strategies to destabilize the authority of the image. Some work to explicitly make visible the myriad ways that the past shapes the present. As instruments of power, archives become platforms to be challenged, subject to reinterpretation and reconfiguration. Found and appropriated materials offer practical, but also critical, approaches to reflecting on contemporary life and the status of images in the digital era. Likewise, recent approaches to the natural environment and the human landscape register the legacies of modern warfare, industrial pollution, and social inequity. Alongside photographs made in the past decade, the exhibition includes works by artists who were often overlooked or marginalized in the past, but whose contributions are touchstones for contemporary art. New Directions also features a selection of photobooks from the museum’s Richard and Ronay Menschel Library. In addition to prints intended for gallery walls, photobooks are a vital way for artists to share their work. In the printed book, an artist can combine and sequence a series of photographs to offer a visual narrative, or they can experiment with printing, layout, or texture. The featured publications take many forms, from traditionally bound pages to more sculptural or even puzzle-like constructions. Photographers and artists in the exhibition include Aaron R. Turner, An-My Lê, Annie Hsiao-Ching Wang, Antony Cairns, Baldwin Lee, Brad Temkin, Curran Hatleberg, David Alekhuogie, Eileen Quinlan, Ephraim Asili, Erica Baum, Frida Orupabo, Ilse Cardoen, Janice Guy, Joan Lyons, Justine Kurland, Keith Smith, Ken Gonzales-Day, Lola Flash, Meghann Riepenhoff, Motoyuki Shitamichi, Penelope Umbrico, Sasha Phyars-Burgess, Sophie Calle, Steffani Jemison, Wyatt Naoki Conlon, and Zanele Muholi. Curated by Phil Taylor and Louis Chavez, Department of Photography.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Dinh Q. Lê: Survey 1998-2023. This is the artist’s eighth solo exhibition with the gallery, and the gallery’s first posthumous showing of Lê’s work. Survey 1998-2023 serves as a memorial exhibition celebrating Dinh’s life and legacy. The exhibition will be on view August 27th through October 11th. Survey 1998-2023 traces the arc of Lê’s career, beginning with works shown in 1998 at the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies and concluding with the artist’s most recent and final works from the Cambodia-Reamker series. Bringing together work from Lê’s series: From Vietnam to Hollywood, Persistence of Memory, A Quagmire This Time, Empire, and Cambodia Reamker, the exhibition foregrounds the artist’s investigations into memory and homeland. It also honors the relationship Dinh had with Shoshana Wayne Gallery, presenting previously exhibited works alongside pieces never shown by the gallery. The main exhibition space features a selection of photo-weaving works by Lê, exemplifying the work he was known for. Inspired by a traditional Vietnamese matmaking technique taught to the artist by his aunt, Lê’s woven works exposed contradictions between American depictions and memories of the Vietnam War, and the lived realities of those who experienced it. By uniting disparate images, Dinh exposed western audiences to the reality of the war (called the American War by the Vietnamese people) and the long shadow it cast over his homeland. Hollywood productions, victims of the Khmer Rouge, and archival images of war are some of the many images Lê mined to force viewers to confront these truths. Survey 1998-2023 is the first exhibition of Lê’s work following his death in April 2024, and it showcases a decades-long relationships between the gallery and the artist. This relationship was cultivated by trips to Vietnam over the years, where Lê shared the beauty and culture of his home country, and a mutual collaboration to found San Art. Dinh was not only an incredible artist, but also an incredible human being. His absence is felt by everyone who had the privilege of knowing him. Dinh Q. Lê has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally at prestigious venues including: Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan; Mori Art Museum, Japan; dOCUMENTA (13), Kassell, Germany; and the Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy. Solo exhibitions include: Projects 93: Dinh Q. Lê (MoMA, New York), True Journey Is Return (San Jose Museum of Art, California), Photographing the thread of memory (Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, France), and Memory for Tomorrow (Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan). His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Fukuoka Asian Art and the Mori Museum in Japan; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Los Angeles County Museum of Art amongst many others. Lê has been the recipient of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Residency Award and the Prince Claus Fund for Cultural and Development amongst others.

This exhibition, juried by Aline Smithson, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Lenscratch, is an open-themed showcase that celebrates the diverse world of fine art photography, encompassing a wide range of subjects, cultures, and the global landscape. In the selection process, our juror considered how the images worked in conversation with one another. She worked through 634 images submitted by 125 artists to choose 50 for Aline Smithson Selects 2024. This is the second year for the APG/Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Purchase Award, a $3,000 prize which is made possible through a generous grant from Edwin Robinson and Julin Maloof, in honor of Gloria and Ted Maloof. This is a great opportunity for artists to premier photography gallery in Atlanta and the Southeast, and to be considered by Lisa Volpe, Curator of Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston for the museum purchase award. Aline Smithson is an interdisciplinary artist, editor, filmmaker, and educator based in Los Angeles, California. Best known for her conceptual portraiture and a practice that uses humor and pathos to explore the performative potential of photography. Growing up in the shadow of Hollywood, her work is influenced by the elevated unreal. She received a BA in Art from the University of California at Santa Barbara and was accepted into the College of Creative Studies, studying under artists such as William Wegman, Allen Rupersburg, and Charles Garabedian. After a career as a New York Fashion Editor working alongside some the greats of fashion photography, Smithson returned to Los Angeles and her own artistic practice. She has exhibited widely including over 40 solo shows at institutions such as the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Fort Collins Museum of Contemporary Art, the Shanghai, Lishui, and Pingyqo Festivals in China, The Rayko Photo Center in San Francisco, the Center of Fine Art Photography in Colorado, the Tagomago Gallery in Barcelona and Paris, and the Arnika Dawkins Gallery in Atlanta. In addition, her work has been featured in numerous publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, PDN (cover), the PDN Photo Annual, Communication Arts Photo Annual, Harper’s, Eyemazing, Soura, Visura, Shots, Pozytyw, and Silvershotz magazines. Smithson is the Founder and Editor- in-Chief of Lenscratch, a daily journal on photography. She has been an educator at the Los Angeles Center of Photography since 2001 and her teaching spans the globe. In 2012, Smithson received the Rising Star Award through the Griffin Museum of Photography for her contributions to the photographic community and also she received the prestigious Excellence in Teaching Award from CENTER. In 2014 and 2019, Smithson’s work was selected for the Critical Mass Top 50. Her work is held in significant public collections including the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Crocker Art Museum, and the Santa Barbara Art Museum. In 2015, the Magenta Foundation published her first significant monograph, Self & Others: Portrait as Autobiography. In 2016, the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum commissioned Smithson to create a series of portraits for the upcoming Faces of Our Planet Exhibition. In the Fall of 2018 and again in 2019, her work was selected as a finalist in the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize and exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London. In 2019, Kris Graves Projects commissioned her to create the book LOST II: Los Angeles that is now sold out. Peanut Press Books published her monograph, Fugue State, in Fall 2021. Her books are in the collections of the Getty Museum, the Los Angeles Contemporary Art Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Metropolitan Museum, the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art, among others. In 2022, she was honored to be a Hasselblad Heroine. With the exception of her cell phone, she only shoots film. Image: © Linda Plaisted

The enigmatic subject of Kuhn’s series is an imagined, ethereal figure inspired by a letter from the famed architect R.M. Schindler to a mysterious lover. Shot in the 1920s modernist house designed and built by Schindler on Kings Road in West Hollywood, each portrait is solarized, a technique favored by master surrealists in the 1920s, including Lee Miller and Man Ray. The resulting impressionistic images question the very nature of lyrical fiction and photography as a record, capturing the physical presence of this mysterious woman even as it appears to dematerialize

Sheila Pree Bright, Liesa Cole, Hank Willis Thomas, Karen Graffeo, Spider Martin From the Collection of Doug McCraw This exhibition explores the complexities of human existence through the interplay of myths, secrets, lies, and truths through the lens of five brilliant artists from Doug McCraw's collection. Hank Willis Thomas, Spider Martin, Sheila Pree Bright, Liesa Cole, and Karen Graffeo capture moments that transcend the ordinary, reveal truths, and explore how myths shape our perceptions, how secrets veil the truth, and how lies distort our beliefs. Hank Willis Thomas' Unbranded is a series depicting years of advertisements created by white ad executives for the Black consumer market that are full of myth, disrespect, disinformation, and, in some cases, outright racism. Spider Martin's iconic photographs from the 1965 Selma to Montgomery March documented protests by African Americans demanding the right to vote. Martin enlarged the three photos featured in the exhibition to express the drama of this critical historical moment. They are part of a series of enlarged photographs titled Selma Is Now. Sheila Pree Bright presents works from her powerful Young Americans series in which she photographed her subjects posing with the American flag while recording what they say the flag means to them. Liesa Cole’s photographs, projections, and installation are about those who share secrets and those who keep them. Most people are uncomfortable sharing secrets unless they know they can trust someone to keep their confidence. In the exhibition, visitors will hear anonymous people telling secrets that can be funny, tragic, ridiculous, surprising, or raw and visceral. Karen Graffeo’s Cuba series is part of an ongoing project expressing the beauty and inventiveness of a culture experiencing many challenges, hardships, and poverty. She photographs moments of everyday life in Cuba with an eye to the vibrant designs, colors, patterns, and textures that reflect the unique spirit and aesthetics of the island nation. In 2013 she was awarded a Fulbright Senior Scholar appointment in Romania and in 2014 she received a Tanne Foundation award for her humanitarian work. Myths, Secrets, Lies, and Truths is a thought-provoking and transformative exhibition that challenges and inspires us to seek deeper truths in our world.. Image: Miss. Anita, 2019 © Liesa Cole

In Dark Waters, a tour de force of Southern Gothic Noir, Kristine Potter reinvents a centuries-old genre with coolness and clarity. With this recent collection of seductive and darkly brooding photographs, Potter reflects on the Southern Gothic mythos found in the popular imagination of “murder ballads”— traditional songs from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that often end in death and despair. Her richly detailed black-and-white images channel the setting and characters of these songs, capturing the landscape of the American South and creating portraits that stand in for the oft-unnamed women at the center of their stories. In doing so, she both evokes and exorcizes the ambient sense of threat that women often grapple with as they move through the world.

Koslov Larsen is pleased to present a group show for the commencement of the fall art gallery season. Earthly Delights walks us down a path of fantasy and fiction, through the winding walkways of the mind and out into the sun of a world crafted by imagination. This exhibition largely centers on the Fantastical Feasts by Claire Rosen, a series of whimsical panoramic photographs depicting animals reveling around elaborate banquet tables, visually inspired by the Dutch Masters and Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. From honeybees to hedgehogs to elephants, photographed across the world in collaboration with nature preserves and animal rescues, the images communicate a sense of humanity intrinsic in nature, a peculiar and yet profound kinship. “The feasts invite the viewers to reflect on the nature of society, our relationship and responsibility to the creatures we share the planet with.” Each staged image captures a magical moment which, while rooted firmly in reality, transports us directly into the realm of imagination. Rosen’s Fantastical Feasts series was exhibited earlier this year at AIPAD’s The Photography Show in New York City where it captured the attention of critics and collectors alike to much acclaim. The works were concurrently curated into the second edition of AIPAD’s Monumental exhibition. Also included in Earthly Delights is the work of Amanda Marchand, Torrie Groening, Margeaux Walter, and Kelda Van Patten. Marchand breaks nature down into its most abstracted forms through constructed lumen prints, exploring the relationship between endangered flora and fauna and humanity’s mark on time. Margeaux Walter’s playful trompe l’œil engages the viewer in staged, site-specific installations in the environment which toe the line between what is real and what is constructed and sensationalized, echoing a similar dissonance found in our current political and social landscape. Van Patten’s constructed photographs take us through layers of time and intervention, occupying a liminal space between artifice and truth as we delve through the many stages of physical and digital processing to arrive at a “final” image in a permanent state of suspense. Groening creates scenes of self-contradiction, bite-sized worlds which compel questioning and inspire fantasy. Throughout the exhibition, we find tension between that which is apparent and that which lies below the surface, scratching at the edges of our comprehension and animating limitless possibilities. Earthly Delights beckons us into a world which we will surely emerge from changed. Image: Cumulus © Margeaux Walter

NICOLE COHEN: SUPER VISION features videos and photo-collages that explore perception as viewed through interior spaces and architectural environments. Cohen’s work often overlays past and present imagery, including vintage magazine pages, domestic interiors, period rooms, historical paintings and iconic architectural spaces, to comment on socially constructed space. Using video to transform and alter interior spaces, she delves into ideas of perception, surveillance and the physical experience of immersion. Her work is positioned at the crossroads of contemporary reality, personal fantasy and altered spaces. SUPER VISION presents work from major projects over the last 20 years including: Contemporary Art Books & New York Public LIbrary, Time Lapse, five small video projections, a group of photographs from the Vintage Project series, several Vintage Collage works, a selection of Intervention videos and a new installation piece. Nicole Cohen is an internationally-renowned installation artist who works with video and new media. Cohen received her BA from Hampshire College and her MFA from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She has exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Los Angeles County of Art, Williams College Museum of Art, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Shoshana Wayne Gallery, La B.A.N.K Galerie, Paris, the Autostadt, Wolfsburg, Schloss Britz in Berlin, Germany, American University Museum at Katzen Art Center in Washington D.C., Wave Hill in the Bronx, and The Museum of the Moving Image. Her work is in the permanent collections of U.S. Art in Embassies Collection, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Williams College Museum, The Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood, CA, Cedar Sinai Hospital, and others. Image: Amazon Woman, 2022 © Nicole Cohen

In conjunction with the 2024 Filter Photo Festival, Filter Photo is pleased to present, On the Shelf, a photo book exhibition, juried by Clint Woodside—photographer, curator and founder of Deadbeat Club. Featured Artists Jaime Alvarez Trent Davis Bailey Julia Boytsova & Lina Nieminen Simon Chang Maureen Drennan Jess Dugan Matt Eich Morten Eriksen Rich-Joseph Facun Nick Gervin Conner Gordon Shane Hallinan Samuel Huryn Tetsuo Kashiwada Tommy Keith Claudio Majorana Aspen Mays Christian Nicolas Patrick D. Pagnano Wendy Ploger Jared Ragland & Sara J. Winston Benjamin Rasmussen Joshua Simpson Daria Sinaiskaia Laidric Stevenson Jamey Stillings Brandon Tauszik Angie Terrell Ryan Thompson Paul Turounet About the Juror Clint Woodside is a photographer, curator, and founder of Deadbeat Club, an acclaimed independent publishing house rooted in contemporary photography. Based in Los Angeles, Woodside works with artists around the world with the expectation of close collaboration and long standing partnership. With thoughtful design, innovative editing and meticulous print quality, each title is one Deadbeat Club is proud to share with its community. Woodside has curated shows and exhibited work extensively throughout Europe, Asia, Australia and the US.

Mitch Epstein’s newest series of photographs, Old Growth, continues the artist’s career-long exploration of American culture and the nation’s fraught relationship with the natural world. The exhibition will be on view at Yancey Richardson from September 5 through October 19, 2024. An opening reception will be held on September 12, from 6 – 8pm, with an artist walkthrough at 5:30pm. Following the exhibition at Yancey Richardson, Old Growth will be on view in a solo show at Gallerie d’Italia in Turin, Italy from October 16 through March 2. Steidl will publish a monograph of the series, due to be released in August 2024. From 2017–2024, Epstein traveled across America, photographing some of the country’s most ancient trees, among them bigleaf maples, eastern white pines, moss-covered cedars, sequoias, bristlecone pines, and bald cypresses. Old growth forests are crucial for human survival in our fight against climate change, as they hold significantly more carbon than replanted saplings. Yet humans have destroyed more than 95 percent of America’s irreplaceable original forests. Using a large format camera to describe the exquisite details of our arboreal ancestors, Epstein brings the forest to the gallery, creating an immersive environment that enables the viewer to absorb the sculptural beauty of trees and the multiple dimensions of biosystems that have flourished in the wild for centuries or millennia. These photographs evoke an other-worldly mystery. In the one photograph that contains a human figure, Congress Trail, Sequoia National Park, California, 2021, we gain some sense of the epic proportions of these life-giving trees. This series is also an inquiry into the concept of time. Old Growth underscores the tension between the medium of photography – the camera can record its subject in a split-second – and the forests depicted, which have potentially infinite lifespans. This oscillation between the instant and the ancient, between human mortality and cosmic perpetuity, resonates through the exhibition. Old Growth articulates the forest’s resilience and fragility, highlighting the need for us to act now to realign our relationship to these precious natural resources. “It is not about how we can save trees,” says Epstein, borrowing from ecologist Suzanne Simard; “It is about how the trees might save us.” Forest Waves, a new multi-channel video and sound installation by Epstein, will premiere in the project gallery. The piece takes viewers through four seasons in the Berkshires forests in Massachusetts. Epstein uses careful juxtapositions of visual and sonic rhythms and formal compositions to propel and disorient as we venture deep into the woods of his childhood. Through image and sound, we engage with a complex ecological network that, left to itself, can endure for millennia. How, the work asks, might this vibrant infinitude help us understand the relatively short timeframe of human life? Sound is integral to this piece. Epstein brought tonal musicians Mike Tamburo and Samer Ghadry into these same woods, where he filmed and recorded them improvising in response to the wilderness that surrounds them. Less performance than sonic communion, their music seems to emerge from the forest rather than impose itself upon it. Through its kinetic depiction of flora and fauna, and its mix of instrumental and ambient sound, Forest Waves engulfs the audience, offering a visceral, awe-inducing connection to wilderness. Born in 1952 in Holyoke, Massachusetts, Epstein lives and works in New York City. His work has been collected by major museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Tate Modern, London; and The Victoria and Albert Museum, London. He has worked as a director, cinematographer, and production designer on several films, including Dad, Salaam Bombay!, and Mississippi Masala. Epstein has won numerous awards including the Cooper Union Alumni Association Augustus Saint-Gaudens Award (2023); the Prix Pictet Photography Prize (2010); the Berlin Prize in Arts and Letters (2008); and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2003). Epstein’s seventeen books, most published by Steidl Verlag, include Recreation (2022); Property Rights (2021); In India (2021); Rocks and Clouds (2017); New York Arbor (2013); Berlin (Steidl/The American Academy in Berlin 2011); American Power (2009); and Family Business (2003), winner of the 2004 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award. Image: Lynn Saville, Plymouth Water Tower, 2019. © Lynn Saville

Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to present Elisheva Biernoff: Smashed Up House After the Storm, an exhibition of 13 recent works tracing the artist’s expanding approach. Biernoff makes delicate paintings that meticulously recreate found, anonymous photographs—astonishingly faithful renderings on thin sheets of wood that match the intimate scale and detail of the originals. Severed from their original role as personal memories, the enigmatic photographs Biernoff selects evoke an element of ambiguity. By paying close, sustained attention to these objects, Biernoff brings their buried mysteries and emotions to the surface. Recent work has incorporated multiple images and non-photographic objects from sources such as nature or architecture, using these to make larger, more complex arrangements. This will be Biernoff’s third solo exhibition at the gallery since 2017. In several new works, Biernoff’s focus has widened to include fragments of the walls on which they exist, emphasizing the sculptural quality of these pieces. Fragment, 2024, recreates a section of knotty pine paneling that has changed color over time with exposure to light, leaving discolored shapes where pictures were once pinned. Beyond Our, 2023, measuring more than five feet tall, presents a photograph of a Sunday school interior and poster showing the earth from space, both hung on a painted rendition of a wooden wall. Together, the elements suggest questions about the larger forces that exist beyond the frame. Biernoff often plays with doubling, finding connections inside the frame and out. Strike, 2021, the work that lends the show its title, depicts a splintered tree trunk and house with a mangled porch. In looping blue cursive on the verso, also carefully painted by Biernoff, a note describes the scene: “Smashed up house after the storm, July 1970.” Like the house, the photograph itself shows signs of damage—a column of yellow and pink discoloration disturbs the right side of the image, perhaps caused by water. In other works, mirrors highlight the limits of what the camera could record—a reflected flash becomes a white haze, obscuring the picture-taker in Gathering, 2022. In Likeness, 2022, a man’s face is framed in a mirror on a crowded dresser, surrounded by snapshots and mementos. Installed on a small mirrored shelf, the reflections in the piece pile up, “creating a display that integrates with the painting rather than receding,” Biernoff writes. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring all 12 paintings the artist has completed since mid-2021. Many of the works are reproduced to exact scale and, consistent with the previous publications, all paintings are reproduced recto and verso. Image: Strike, 2021 © Elisheva Biernoff