Art Photo Collector

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[artphotocollector]

all images by © Helen Levitt

"It would be mistaken to suppose that any of the best photography is come at by intellection; it is like all art, essentially the result of an intuitive process, drawing on all that the artist is rather than on anything he thinks, far less theorizes about."--Helen Levitt (1913-2009)

To a 21st Century audience Helen Levitt's legacy is under appreciated. While well known and admired in her day, including a solo show at age 30 at the MoMA in 1943, this new publication, Helen Levitt, from Thames & Hudson USA offers a satisfying corrective. At last we have a monograph that draws on Levitt's entire archive, including her significant contribution to color photography, which deserves our renewed attention.

Helen Levitt was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1913. The daughter of Russian-Jewish parents, Levitt grew up with progressive, left-leaning values. Drawn to the arts, Levitt left High School early to embark on a trade/career as a working photographer, first learning her technical chops at a commercial photography studio owned by family friends in the Bronx. She would later study at the famed leftist photo & film documentary collective, Photo League, where in 1935 she met Henri Cartier-Bresson, recently back from Mexico. Her friendship with Cartier-Bresson inspired her to purchase a Leica camera, and to renew her dedication to becoming an independent photographer: “And then I saw pictures of Cartier-Bresson and realized that photography could be an art – and that made me ambitious.”

Levitt's work from 1938-1942 is her most celebrated. These are her street images of life (especially children) in the Bronx, Harlem, the Lower East Side, Hell's Kitchen and Brooklyn for which she is most remembered, including her book, "A Way of Seeing." Levitt's uncanny ability to tap into the quotidian and to reflect the evanescent beauty in the everyday make her black & white images as appealing today as they were in her time. Her 1948 film, "In the Street," done in collaboration with friend and writer James Agee, reveals this egalitarian eye.

Never satisfied, in the late 1950's Levitt eschewed black & white photography to pursue color photography. Her third attempt at a Guggenheim fellowship proved fruitful. The fellowship allowed her to explore the possibilities of color photography (and dye transfer printing) long before luminaries like William Eggleston impacted our idea of color photography in the 1970’s.

With illuminating essays, especially one by master color photographer, Joel Sternfeld--who knew and photographed alongside Levitt--this new monograph brings us up to date on why Levitt's groundbreaking work still matters. Helen Levitt's intuitive approach and respect for everyday people remind us that it is not the mind, but the heart that sees.--Lane Nevares

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…it’s in the details.

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© All Images Courtesy of Thames & Hudson

"Without memory, we forget the histories that have shaped us, we forget all those things which made us."--Stuart Hall

"Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably."--Walter Benjamin

The publication of Black Chronicles: Photography, Race and Difference in Victorian Britain comes at a potent time. In our current milieu, where the conversation around race and class is polarized and charged, the arrival of a deeply researched volume containing the most extensive gathering of images of Black people in 19th Century England is a noble enterprise. Inside we can pore over 400 portraits of individuals, who came from all over the British Empire, but who have been largely forgotten about and marginalized. This important volume seeks to reclaim from a Victorian Britain a past that does not, in its collective memory, include Black subjects.

The curator Renee Mussai, who edited this volume, has included the writings, lectures, and analytical texts from a range of scholars, including the notable, Stuart Hall, whose teachings and research were foundational to this project. These individuals offer a diverse (and sometimes clamorous) array of insights into the complexities of race, representation, class and who decides how the history is written and told.

Black Chronicles is therefore not a typical photobook: it is an invitation to explore and to reengage this history. In these pages we may never know the names and the stories behind these portraits--many of which are striking--but in spending time with these images we can help retrieve the past, and perhaps remember what has shaped us. --Lane Nevares

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Selfie. The Azores.

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The desk.

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© All Images Courtesy of Thames & Hudson

"My dream is of a place and of a time where America will once again be seen as the last best hope of earth."--Abraham Lincoln

With a week to go before the 2024 US Election, we are undergoing an unprecedented time here in the United States. The idea of what it means to be an "American" and the direction of this country are being redefined. I think it is fair to say; this is an extraordinary period in our history.

Everyone has their own idea of America. We are a nation of 335 million people with individual points of view. We each see the United States through our own experience. How we identify and feel as Americans is unique. "Photography, like experience, often defies neat narrative frameworks," Peter van Agtmael writes. He, along with fellow editor Laura Wexler pored through 227,450 images in the Magnum archive while asking themselves the question: What is "America?"

Their efforts, along with leading scholars and 80 Magnum photographers are presented here in Magnum America from Thames & Hudson. Offering more than 600 images, original portfolios from their vast archive, and probing essays, this epic volume takes us decade by decade on a sweeping, visual journey through our nation's history. This is a landmark photobook, singular, and a precious contribution to our collective memory--it will become a classic.

And as we Americans face the future of an uncertain road ahead, perhaps it will also help us to dream of a place and of a time. --Lane Nevares

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© All Images: The Peter Hujar Archive, Artists Rights Society

"When one has a picture taken, the photographer says 'Perfect' Just as you are! That is death." ..."LIfe is a movie. Death is a photograph."--Susan Sontag

In 1976, Portraits in Life and Death, by the artist Peter Hujar was published. The book was not well received at that time, and Hujar, who was never commercially successful or as well known as some of his contemporaries in the downtown NYC scene (e.g. Robert Mapplethorpe), struggled to make a living. To be gay, an artist, poor and living a marginal lifestyle was possible in the NYC of the 1970's and the 1980's. Now I'm not so sure.

The original monograph published during his lifetime would go on to become posthumously, especially for photography collectors, a sought after classic. Some books do. Some work stands the test of time.

Now, Liveright Publishing/W.W. Norton & Company, nearly fifty years later, have graciously reissued Portraits in Life and Death for a 21st Century audience. With fresh digital scans from Hujar's archive, a new essay by Pulitzer Prize winning author, Benjamin Moser along with Susan Sontag's original introduction, this new publication is a fitting tribute to Peter Hujar's legacy.

Appreciating Hujar's work, today, requires intention. We are all simply overwhelmed, saturated even, with images. This monograph takes time. It must be slowly savored to respect the intimacy and the connection Hujar had with his subjects. The careful composition of the portraits. The atmosphere. The openness. The longing.

While the classical concept of memento mori shadows Hujar's work, notably with his pictures at the Capuchin monastery in Palermo. To my mind--paradoxically--it illuminates more. I imagine this is why he included these earlier images in the book. It is through the acceptance of death, that we embrace life. Peter Hujar's work remains powerful to us today because of this tension. His work, timeless and beautiful, connects us to both. --Lane Nevares

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Mother & daughter, Bridgetown, Barbados.

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Chasing bubbles…

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“For the Persian poet Rumi, each human life is analogous to a bowl floating on the surface of an infinite ocean. As it moves along, it is slowly filling with the water around it. That’s a metaphor for the acquisition of knowledge. When the water in the bowl finally reaches the same level as the water outside, there is no longer any need for the container, and it drops away as the inner water merges with the outside water. We call this the moment of death. That analogy returns to me over and over as a metaphor for ourselves.”—Bill Viola

The American artist, Bill Viola’s, most recent show, Frustrated Actions and Futile Gestures, opened last week at BlainISouthern gallery in London. For anyone remotely familiar with Viola’s work, this is an exciting opportunity to see nine new works created between 2012-2013. 

For more than 40 years, Bill Viola has transformed our ideas about art and video. He and his partner Kira Perov have truly been at the vanguard, fusing Eastern mystical and spiritual traditions into modern works that take us deeply into emotional and philosophical territory. Sometimes cathartically so. Slow down, spend three and half minutes, and watch his new work Inner Passage. Fill your bowl. –Lane Nevares

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Bill Viola, b. 25 January 1951 d. 12 July 2024, RIP

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Sunset on the Serengeti…

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Where I want to be…

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© All Images: The George Hoyningen-Huene Estate Archives

"Texture, line, simplicity--these were the things he liked--the classic truth." Katharine Hepburn

As time goes past, and the history of photography becomes deeper, photographers such as George Hoyningen-Huene (b.1900-d.1968) remind us how rich that legacy grows. What is now more than 100 years ago, Huene (hoo-Nay), while standing on the shoulders of previous giants like Edward Steichen (who encouraged a young Huene in Paris in the early 1920's to pursue fashion photography), created timeless work that has helped to shape later generations' understanding of photography, fashion, film and Beauty.

A new book--the first publication in 40 years--on Huene is now out from Thames & Hudson. It is a timely reminder for us to rediscover Huene. In many ways the arc of his life as a Baron and Russian-born aristocrat in St. Petersburg in 1900, as well as being the son of an American mother, mirror the major events of the 20th Century. From WWI, to fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution, to life in bohemian Paris in the 1920's, to Golden Age Hollywood in the 1940's--Huene was a part of it all. His collaborations with the leading artistic and celebrity lights of the day and his relationship with the photographer Horst P. Horst only make his history richer.

This new publication from Thames & Hudson provides a generous overview of his life, including unpublished correspondence, and for me, a whole new appreciation of Huene's travel photography. When we delve back into the history of photography, and see the work of Avedon, Penn, Ritts, DeMarchelier and others, we can appreciate the foundations that Huene laid earlier with elegance, simplicity and a reverence for Beauty: the classic truth. --Lane Nevares

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Have Tuk-Tuk will travel…

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“Let serendipity be your muse…”

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“…To be a human being may be a very messy thing, but to be an artist is something else entirely, because art is religion, art is sex, art is society. Art is everything.”  Lucas Samaras 

Lucas Samaras’s art has always mystified me. Although I am a late convert to his work, I recognize the passion and energy when I see it. The constant striving. The ongoing pursuit of beauty. The relentless creation.

Along with his drive, there’s a psychological depth to his work and an intense self-awareness that I find irresistibly disturbing, and often scary. Lucas Samaras is playing for keeps. 

His latest (and thirty-third) exhibit, XYZ, opened today at Pace gallery. For the uninitiated, here’s a fascinating trailer from a forthcoming documentary about his life, along with an excellent interview by his longtime friend and dealer, Arne Glimcher. –Lane Nevares

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Lucas Samaras, (1936-2024), RIP.

“…Art is everything.”

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Ellsworth Kelly, Austin

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Bushwick, Brooklyn. 3:37am

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"Photography is about being exquisitely present." --Joel Meyerowitz

Joel Meyerowitz met Robert Frank in 1962. That chance encounter, serendipity if you like, made all the difference in the life of a young art director and painter. He knew instinctively after witnessing Frank work, that he wanted to be a photographer. That was it. Meyerowitz knew nothing about cameras or photography, but as the course of his life would attest, he was always good with risk.

Thames & Hudson's Joel Meyerowitz: A Question of Color takes us back to the beginning. Along with the writer and critic, Robert Shore, Meyerowitz tells us why he started carrying two cameras in 1963: one with black & white film, one with color. Early on, he had tried to reconcile "the question of color" at a time when this question was of significance to the arts community. Today, we seamlessly glide between both worlds. Color photography now has all the importance and gravitas of black & white photography, but there was a time when that was not the case. And it was photographers like Joel Meyerowitz who helped us to question why.

Meyerowitz is one of our master street photographers. At age 85, he continues working, and has enjoyed a remarkable career as an artist and educator--having published 53 books, as well as earning numerous distinctions for his pioneering color work. This latest book from Thames & Hudson puts a fresh spin on Meyerowitz's oeuvre. The photo pairings of black & white vs. color help us feel the tension between the images. We can then answer our own "question of color." --Lane Nevares