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Friday, October 3, 2008

Weekend Video - Janis Joplin

YouTube never ceases to amaze me. One of my favorite Janis Joplin songs is her relatively obscure version of Rodgers and Hart’s “Little Girl Blue”. Joplin recorded the song in 1969 after the success of the track “Summertime” on the album Cheap Thrills, so the idea was to mix another re-worked show tune into her follow-up album Pearl. However, Joplin died in 1970 and the song was added to the album posthumously as a live version.

I never thought I would actually get to see film of Joplin singing the song, but a YouTube search offered up this 1969 clip taken from the singer Tom Jones’s variety show – “This is Tom Jones”. Amazing....

Thursday, October 2, 2008

Sheila Metzner

Sheila Metzner installation at The Visual Arts Museum

Three more days to catch the retrospective of Sheila Metzner’s work at the Visual Arts Museum at The School of Visual Arts.

Metzner, who began photographing in the mid-1970s, has always been resolutely her own person whether her work was in fashion or not, and thirty years on her work seems even more distinctive and personal than ever. Working not so much in the Victorian style of photography but in the Victorian, Japonais inflections of Whistler and Sargent, Metzner has mastered most every genre of photography – portraits, floral abstraction, travel, the nude, fashion, urban landscapes, still life, and family pictures – to name a few.

The show contains approximately 100 prints hung salon style and all made by the Fresson printing process - a rare method of color printing that renders characteristically diffused images with remarkable tonal range and color saturation. The process uses layered oil pigments in gelatin and requires between four to seven separate negatives, yielding luminous, glowing colors and a softened, painterly effect. With its chemistry a tightly held secret and production highly limited, Metzner is one of the few photographers in the world who has consistently used the process throughout her career.

Of particular note are the photographs from one of Metzner’s latest series “36 Views of Brooklyn Bridge”, a response to the famous woodblock prints “36 Views of Mount Fuji” by the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai. Shot in both black and white and color and from numerous vantage points, the bridge dissolves and coalesces before our eyes – as Metzner explores the infinite photographic possibilities.

The one sad note in the show is that it quietly incorporates the photographer’s own memorial to her late husband, Jeffrey, a talented artist, teacher, and art director who died unexpectedly earlier this year. Metzner’s many portraits of her husband taken throughout her photographic career comprise their own loving “Views of a Modern Man” as Jeffrey – always the prototypical New Yorker – subjects himself to his wife’s inspection. His good nature and Sheila Metzner’s complete lack of cynicism are the twin spirits of this unusual and wonderful show.

More installation shots:

And some individual images:

Wednesday, October 1, 2008

William Eggleston

Following yesterday’s reference to William Eggleston, a short report on the forthcoming sale of Eggleston works at Christies, New York. The back story is a true Hollywood tale – a notable film company executive and his wife start collecting photographs in a big way, they hire a young woman to help catalog their rapidly acquired collection, the husband starts an extra-curatorial relationship with the cataloger, and before you know it the marriage is over and the collection is on the auction block. It’s not the way an artist likes to see his work come on the market, but that's life in the fast lane.

The photographs coming up for sale present a wide cross section of Eggleston’s work – some of his best pieces and some less so. The sale lacks his most famous single work, the seminal “Red Ceiling”, but it has images from most of Eggleston’s important series and includes a full set of the Los Alamos portfolios – 75 dye transfer prints taken from 1965 to 1974 encompassing all of the artists major concerns and themes. (The set is estimated at a lowball figure of $350,000 - $550,000 but is probably worth more in the $1 million range.)

Eggleston’s story is equally colorful (no pun intended). Born in Memphis, Tennessee, and raised in Sumner, Mississippi, Eggleston was an introverted and artistic child who took up photography when a friend gave him a Leica camera. Originally influenced by the work of Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, Eggleston began experimenting with color as early as 1965 and seems to have developed his trademark aesthetic pretty much on his own. A renowned boozer, womanizer, and charmer, his earliest patrons were MoMA’s John Szarkowski and the Corcoran’s Walter Hopps and their patronage led to a teaching job at Harvard in the mid 70s.

It was at this time that he discovered dye-transfer printing. As legend has it, he was examining the price list of a photographic lab and as he later recalled: "It advertised 'from the cheapest to the ultimate print.' The ultimate print was a dye-transfer. I went straight up there to look and everything I saw was commercial work like pictures of cigarette packs or perfume bottles but the color saturation and the quality of the ink was overwhelming. I couldn't wait to see what a picture would look like with the same process. Every photograph I subsequently printed with the process seemed fantastic and each one seemed better than the previous one."

At Harvard, Eggleston prepared his first portfolio, entitled 14 Pictures (1974), which consisted of fourteen dye-transfer prints. Two years later Eggleston's became the first color photographer to have a one-person show at MOMA – an exhibition now regarded as a watershed moment in the history of photography, but which at the time sharply divided critics and photography fans alike. (Szarkowski referred to Eggleston's pictures as "perfect," to which the highly offended New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer responded, "Perfect? Perfectly banal, perhaps. Perfectly boring, certainly.")

From then on, however, Eggleston’s radically modern vision, his embrace of everyday Americana, his exploration of color, and his belief in the profundity of the ordinary, along with his cool and louche Southern lifestyle and introspective personality combined to make him an icon of cool and the dominant influence on contemporary American photography.

In November, The Whitney will mount their own major retrospective of Eggleston’s work and we will get a chance to see a more considered view of his career. In the meantime, here are a few of my favorite images from a collection whose story would surely have given the artist a good laugh in his best bar-hopping moments.