PhotographyWhat's NEW in NYC Photo?By Carl GunhouseTuesday, August 21, 2007Yvon Lambert New York Who is Mario Testino? Well, apparently he is a crappy fashion photographer who, as the press release notes, is an “art collector, art collaborator and tastemaker” whose pictures in the mid 1990’s “instantly” ended “the international trend” of grunge. And you had no idea that he existed. For this very special summer group show at Yvon Lambert, Mario Testino picked out each piece of art with his very own grunge-ending hands and for an installation of his own design. Joy. The result is a wall lined with props from the interior of a New Yorker cartoon interspersed with art that is best thought of as decorative, like that of Wolfgang Tillmans and Anne Collier. Through Aug. 21st Yancey Richardson Gallery Wow, I mean wow. A show at Yancey Richardson where the curating doesn’t glaringly undermine everything good about a body of work. I’m not sure who is running the ship over the summer, but Easy Rider is a great group show. It features a Christian Patterson picture that doesn’t look like it was made in the 1970’s, a Lisa Kereszi picture that is allowed to have a social context, a Jeff Brouws picture that has some life, and most shockingly a Justine Kurland picture that doesn’t suck. Even the lesser images by Lisa Sarfati and Todd Hido are well placed and blend into a sequence of stellar yet lesser known works. Like Joel Sternfeld’s picture of a football practice set in a color verison of a Robert Adams picture or a surprising William Eggelston picture of a grocery store at dusk and two outtakes from Robert Frank’s Americans series. And that doesn’t even count arguable the best pictures ever taken by Mitch Epstein and Ernst Haas. The best group show of the summer. Through Sep. 8th Peter Hay Halpert Gallery Later in life, after making a splash with risque surrealist pictures, Outerbridge spent his days doing middling magazine work, like the pictures in Laguna Beach 1950. The photographs dutifully document the doings of young beach goers, but lack any artistic flair, even for vernacular pictures of the 1950’s. Which is a shame because if MTV’s brilliant hyper-stylized reality series Laguna Beach is any indication, there were plenty of possibilities for Outerbridge’s visual libido to run amuck. Oh, how tragic the uselessness of these pictures. What could have been? Art In Our Time Through Sep. 8th Bonni Benrubi Gallery Blown-out pictures of outdoor activities; simply not worth the trip uptown. Jason Langer, Secret City Pictures that look like film noir stills, well done, but all too familiar. Through Sep. 15th Zabriskie Gallery It’s hard not to like Atget. He is after all Atget. Unfortunately, the show is a somewhat disappointing selection of pictures with a more-than-suspect print quality. Through Sep. 8th  
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