PhotographyWhat's NEW in NYC Photo?By Carl GunhouseTuesday, July 10, 2007Elizabeth Dee Gallery Hmmm. What to make of Eric Baudelaire? You might remember his large digitally collaged photograph of American soldiers in the aftermath of a battle in a Middle Eastern courtyard, which showed at Elizabeth Dee in December. Well, he is back and musing philosophically on the after effects of September 11th. The press release mentions time’s ability to contract and expand, “a suffering that is either repressed or expressed but is devoid of images,” and events “where hatred loses its objects as it multiplies.” Which seems smart in an abstract, philosophical kind of way but how this makes sense of pictures of French buildings shown behind glass with gratified phrases is beyond me. And Pierre Bismuth’s show in March at Mary Boone on 57th Street, featured similar pictures of innocuous European buildings displayed behind glass with graffiti on it. Through Jul. 27th Tanya Bonakdor Gallery Ah, summer and the never-ending parade of group shows. Let the preposterous ramblings of curatorial press releases begin. Agitation and Response abstractly addresses all the ills of society with a collection of works, which, “sometimes . . . subtly,” “involve degrees of agitation,” agitation, of course, over all the ills of society. The show involves some forgettable painting and sculpture and one wondrous yet tragically flawed video by Holly Zausner called Unseen. The video features the artist, an unassuming middle-aged woman wandering through Berlin with a life-sized rubber sculpture of a person. The entire video is shot on 16mm film and starts with a woman walking by an exploding store front window, and descending into a modernist public transit system, which leads to a visually-stunning trip through factories, an abandoned amusement park, a sculpture garden with a live tiger and, finally a lovely museum. The entire thing is a pleasure to watch, and would be brilliant if only the artist didn’t insist on running through the frame carrying a large rubber person. Once again, artistic intent kills some pretty amazing art. Through Aug. 17th Casey Kaplan In the name of full disclosure, I once got into a heated argument with Bruce Hainley in a graduate-school critique after he said that you could put a Thomas Struth, a National Geographic photograph and a Jay Maisel in front of him and he wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Despite Hainley’s lack of ability to understand photography as an artistic medium, he has chosen to include Jeff Burton in his group show at Casey Kaplan, and you can’t go wrong with Burton’s pictures from porn sets. His work has gone from images of sweaty handprints and gaudy bed spreads to what could be the most beautiful picture of one man licking another man’s asshole ever made. It is unfortunate that Larry Sultan’s safer pictures from porn sets have gained more acclaim than Burton’s grittier and more photographically inventive work. So hats off to Bruce Hanley, who shouldn’t be allowed to talk in public about photography, for including the under-appreciated Jeff Burton. Through Jul. 31st 303 Gallery I would love to conduct a Dateline-like study on the effects on one’s intelligence of repeated exposure to gallery press releases. Three for Society “considers how interior and exterior spaces affect the manner and content of human expression.” My guess is, one’s more airy than the other. The show features an incomprehensibly formal picture of a chair by Collier Schorr and other forgettable art that need not be mentioned. The saving grace is the inclusion of Robert Boyd’s brilliant video, Heaven’s Little Helper, a montage of archival footage of utopian cults, which devolves into chaos and bloodshed, edited and cut as a video for Britney Spears’s song,_ Everytime_ .The song unfolds as the cult members revel in inclusion only to end up in a large bloody mass. Spears’s lyrics becomes the unwitting voice for the cult/pop princess’s followers who are lured by a need to find somewhere to belong, to be relieved of their day-to-day suffering. There are some things that can only be explained by the lyrics of contemporary pop music. Through Jul. 27th Marianne Boesky Gallery Giant lightboxes of blown-out pictures of flowers, better than James Welling’s flower pictures, but still nothing more than very expensive décor that will eventually end up in the background of a Tina Barney picture. The flower photographs are paired with the more contemporary (in the worst sense of the word) pictures of flower farms. As is the trend with popular mainstream art photography, Flechtner uses a large-format camera to make large prints of indifferently-lit scenes rendered in a formally meticulous fashion, together creating an image only a corpse would mistake as lively. He is yet another vampire sucking the life out of everything he comes across. Through Aug. 17th  
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