PhotographyWhat's NEW in NYC Photo?By Carl GunhouseTuesday, April 3, 2007Bellwether If you thought photography as it is traditionally thought of was dead, comes Tanyth Berkeley’s show at the rather hot Bellwether gallery. The show is a rambunctious photographic love letter to New York City. In her debut show at Bellwether, ‘Love Parade’ she displayed a clear eye for the city’s more eccentric characters. But the resulting pictures were head and tight full-body shots printed with a frustrating light-blue cast, making everything look like a high-end clothing catalogue. Oh, how things have changed. ‘The Muse, The Fugitive and The Frequency’ starts with a suite of portraits of women. Berkeley finally allows a degree of life into both the frame and the subject. The frames are close around the subject but now allow a distance that seems about right for closely examining a stranger on the street. The subject no longer seems as resistant to the camera as in her previous work. There is an enjoyable give and take between the two. Which leads us into the hallway, and its single row of 200 four-by-six-inch pictures of people walking at night in the natural light of Times Square. The permanent daylight allows just enough exposure for a brief, often blurry portrait to be rendered in the orangey red glow of tungsten bulbs on film. The experience is close to an actual jaunt through Times Square, with some pictures roughly defined blurs and others fantastic portraits, as composed as Berkeley’s more traditional pictures. Berkeley has clearly digested the work of William Kline and Louis Faurer and produced something contemporary and her own, traditional photography that feels new. The Times Square row leads to a group of pictures of New York’s ever present graffiti, not terrible exciting, but a nice break before a room of overwhelmingly successful portraits. Person after person who could be performers, eccentrics, or average people, or all of the above, the population that makes up an average night in Times Square corralled into a studio apartment and photographed in loving and complex fashion. If this weren’t enough, there is a rather lovely video of people roller-discoing in Central Park. Berkeley uses the camera, as it was intended, as a way for the artist to experience life and make art out of it. Through April 14th Hasted Hunt ‘Supervisions’ consists of huge “ground-scapes,” according to its press release. “Using a digital camera rigged about two meters high, Gefeller systematically records every square meter of the surface of a special terrain: a parking lot, stadium, abandoned office, racetrack, or baseball field. This information is then combined into a mosaic-like grid, which the artist transforms into a seamless plane.” It is amazing how such complex technology can produce such uninteresting images. Robots don’t dream, and technical wizardry doesn’t equal art. Through April 14th. Paula Cooper Gallery Well, it is official. No one ever has to make pictures about the truth of photographs again. The king is here, and he is Walid Raad. Raad, a.k.a. the Atlas Group, makes fake documents and collects real documents and displays them together in an artistic setting. Needless to say, one would have to take anything produced by a one-man group as highly suspect. Now that Raad has temporally disbanded the Atlas Group, is he more trustworthy? One would suspect not. The wall text and press release claim that Raad, as a young man growing up in Lebanon in the seventies, collected bullets after shoot-outs between the Lebanese militias. He then photographed the location of the bullets, spending his free time creating dots of different colors and sizes to mark the locations the bullets hit and their diameter. True or not true, it doesn’t matter. The end result of Raad’s work is a believable and attractive piece of art that conveys what childhood in a wart torn area might be like. Apparently, if Google is to be believed, children in Lebanon do collect bullets. The charts of bullets are faced by large grainy black and white photographs with traces of color interspersed in the grain. The images are of the Lebanese civil war shot from a considerable distance. The wall text and press release claim these are images that a teenaged Raad took with his first camera while accompanied by his mother. Again Raad’s point is driven home by the utterly sincere-looking evidence of a completely plausible story. If only all work about artistic theory was this intelligent and reliant on beautiful visuals. The show ended March 24th. But check it out online. Sikkema Jenkins & Co. 530 W 22nd St. Btw. 10th & 11th Aves. Mitch Epstein, American Power Well, it certainly is a good time to be a fan of photography. Mitch Epstein is now showing at Sikkema Jenkins, and someone has apparently edited his work. Gone is the clutter of attractive yet meaningless still lifes that tended to weigh down even his most successful work. American Power is hands down the best display of Epstein’s abilities ever put together. It combines the visual strength of his later work that seemed always to be on the cusp of meaning something and his earlier works that were clear and exciting but often lacked visual complexity. In this show, the simplistic metaphor ‘American Power’ refers both to socio-political forces and, more literally, to the production of energy. Both are potentially dangerous. Nuclear reactors and smoke-stakes hover ominously behind idyllic suburban milieus. Beach front properties, rural homes and oil refineries are left ravaged by unseen forces and a middle-aged woman leaves her male companion to wade into the treacherous tides of Niagara Falls. The show is a beautifully seen haiku about our own existence. It is the show that Epstein has been striving to do for the last three decades. Through April 7th. Daniel Cooney Fine Art Going to Daniel Cooney Fine Art makes you think the only way to survive as small photography dealer is to represent two artists who photograph nudes for every artist who doesn’t. Interest on small business loans or spiking Chelsea rents could surely explain the need to continue indulging Carrie Levy’s pictures of naked people looking at walls. Through April 28th. Yossi Milo Gallery Well, once again Yossi Milo has stumped me. The work is big and colorful and completely devoid of any context that might explain why we are looking at innocuous household items under an ever-present, even lighting. The press release mentions the Westernizing of Japan and the coldness rarely associated with domestic settings, but what this has to do with pictures of staplers and garden hoses, I don’t know. The objects are all brightly colored in the most dull and lifeless way possible, like the decor in a children’s hospital ward. I just don’t understand what I am supposed to get from the work besides a desire to leave the gallery. Through April 14th. Mitchell-Innes & Nash Over the last year, Justine Kurland has been driving around America in a van with her one-year-old son, corralling young hip moms to pose nude with their young children in ill-formed, often unfocused landscapes. It as if the marauding hordes of young hipster women from her earlier work all grew up had kids and crawl into ‘Minor White’ pictures. Could it be that Kurland has been cultivating a cult of female models in hipster communes everywhere, listening to hours of Arcade Fire and dissecting 1970’s blockbusters, so she could one day rise up and overtake Spencer Tunick’s nude photographic empire, making Kurland king of naturalist, metaphoric nude photography? Through April 7th. Tony Shafrazi Gallery With the possibility of undermining everything I have ever written, I would like to suggest that David LaChapelle might be the greatest outsider artist of our generation, or not. It seems that showing at Dietch Projects has confused LaChapelle into thinking that what he does is art, instead of a low level trade not much better than red carpet paparazzi photography. Emboldened by the support of yet another high powered art gallery, LaChapelle has made art about Katrina. The exhibition starts with a room of straight pictures of a flooded museum, paired with an image of models reenacting a flooded religious painting. This leads to what could be the most brilliant picture of the year, or pompous crap made by an ego run amok. In a room of giant pictures of random individuals who all look like character actors playing real people submerged under water and backlit by heaven, there is a picture that really just made my year. It is a huge panoramic of Las Vegas submerged in flood waters, as local residents, strippers with fake breasts, gay Chippendale dancers with flaccid penises and local underlings like attractive waitresses, gamblers, and retirees, scamper with out time to dress atop of the rubble to escape the approaching water from the clear and chlorinated seas that surround their American Zanadu of moral desperation and cultural depravity. To form a reference to Theodore Gericualt’s Raft of the Medusa. Or, is LaChapelle trying to make a political statement about American Culture using his signature, over-the-top stylings without a touch of irony, resulting in an image in very poor taste? I think this all hinges on whether you believe like Walid Raad, that all that counts is what ends up on the wall and what we take away from it. I am more than willing to enjoy LaChapelle as naively producing fantastically satirical art that impugns everyone involved in the process as being completely shallow and without a soul. Long live the unintentional outsider art. Through April 28th.  
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