From my friend Tom Adler - a brief note: "Your Paul Octavious post last week reminded me of this video clip" and a link to the above video.
The film-maker, Dunny, described it like this :"I photographed and videoed this random soccer game in the fog as I was walking through the park. The soccer team I later learned was the Ghana World Cup Soccer Team.. who would have thought?"
You’re all invited to the opening of our next show – an exhibition by the renowned German photographer Matthias Schaller. What these pictures are all about, and how the show came to be is an interesting story. (I hope.)
This past December I was having dinner in Miami with two curators from the Victoria and Albert Museum who were in town to work on their forthcoming Horst show. One of the curators, Susannah Brown, mentioned that Gert Elfering – the owner of the Horst archive – had an interesting group of pictures hanging in his house. The pictures, she explained, were photographs of some of the masterpieces of fashion and editorial photography shot in the viewing rooms of Christies in 2005 prior to being sold in what was to become the first of three enormously successful sales of works from The Elfering Collection. These installation shots (so to speak) were commissioned by Elfering to have as both a high-class souvenir and as works of art in their own right, as Schaller's work is all to do with creating a person-less portrait.
This description immediately intrigued me and I was dying to see the pictures, but getting to Elfering is not easy. He doesn’t take phone calls or respond to e-mails! However, with the help of Philippe Garner of Christie’s and Andy Cowan, the former owner of London’s Hamilton’s Gallery who now lives in Bogota but flies in and out of Miami to help Elfering with various projects, a meeting was finally set up.
Patronage and commissions can be a tricky thing, but these pictures were a home run, and the minute I saw them on Elfering’s wall I knew I wanted to show them. Elfering liked the idea and passed it on to Andy Cowan. Cowan said Elfering had to work it out with Schaller. Elfering said Cowan would arrange it. And so it went for several months. With about three weeks left to the proposed opening date on what was literally the last day before I would have had to go with a different show, I finally got the go-ahead! Fortunately there was a complete extra set of the pictures in Miami so all I had to do was fly down to select the works I needed for the show and work out the shipping.
This is all a long way of saying that if all goes according to plan you can see these photographs in person at our opening on April 15. 6 to 8 p.m. And bring friends. There’s nothing we love more than a crowded opening.
If not here are a small selection of the pictures - and below those, a more formal press release. But trust me - it was all worth it.
Press Release:
Matthias Schaller
“Elfering – 1642”
April 16 – May 22
Matthias Schaller was born in Dillingen, Germany, in 1965. Over the last decade he has been widely exhibited and published in Europe but “Elfering -1642” will be his first U.S. gallery show.
Beginning in 2000 with his photographic study of Andreas Gursky’s studio, Schaller has focused almost exclusively on people-less interiors. Whether photographing photographers’ and architects’ studios (series Werkbildnis I and II), Cardinals’ desks of the Roman Curia in the Vatican (Purple Desk), Venetian interiors on the Grand Canal (Controfacciata), 150 Italian opera houses (Fratelli d’Italia), artists’ palettes (Das Meisterstück), original astronaut suits (Disportraits), or the architecture of Oscar Niemeyer (As Curvas), Schaller’s series or sequences engage with the spirit of objects and place and convey the notion that the marks we leave, the objects used, or the environment inhabited says as much about the selected individual as their physical presence. All his different works follow this strategy of indirect portraiture.
The title “Elfering – 1642” refers to the famous German collector, Gert Elfering, and the number allocated by Christie’s to Elfering’s single owner sale in October of 2005. The auction comprised 135 works that Elfering had defined as the distillation of his interests, and featured the most famous pictures by the masters of fashion and editorial photography – Irving Penn, Helmut Newton, Richard Avedon - as well as works by Man Ray, Thomas Struth, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Robert Mapplethorpe. The sale fetched over $7 million and its success signaled the ascension of the editorial/fashion genre to the highest levels of price and desirability in photography.
A longtime admirer of Schaller’s work, it occurred to Elfering that before parting with the masterpieces in his collection he should commission Schaller to photograph the work in Christie’s New York showrooms. In this way he would have an original new body of work as well as a unique souvenir. The idea resonated with Schaller who observing the work laid out on the floor prior to hanging saw this rather than the actual wall hanging as the singular metaphor for the event.
In this way and as a completed series, Schaller’s photographs encompass the many complexities and ironies of the concept while at the same time incorporating the power of the objects about to be sold into their own luminous interiors. The finished works – beautiful, compelling, and intriguing pictures in their own right - stand as a remarkable example of enlightened patronage while remaining resolutely true to Schaller’s own vision of creating a portrait of both a collection and a collector.
My thanks to Edward Mapplethorpe for introducing me to the work of Clark Little, a surfer from Oahu who started photographing just three years ago and in that short time has pretty much become to waves what Atget was to Paris! That's Little below, showing how he does it. (If you click on the picture you will see a hand holding a camera.)
Little's photographic career began when his wife asked him for a picture of the ocean to decorate a bedroom wall, and with the confidence of an experienced surfer, Clark jumped in the ocean, and started snapping away. (He has since upgraded to more advanced equipment.) His photographs are almost too beautiful, but they record the power of Hawaiian waves from the inside out. It's a view few people could ever get, and yes - it is as dangerous as appears.
Ricky Gervais on David Letterman this past Tuesday. I love his energy, his sense of enjoyment, and what seems to be his totally spontaneous and unscripted delivery. Here he is riffing on fat people. For the full interview click here.
An interesting and culturally timely show coming up - Richard Renaldi will be exhibiting photographs from his new series "Touching Strangers" at The Gallery at Hermès, 691 Madison Avenue, New York, starting April 9.
In Renaldi's words:
Touching Strangers is an ongoing photographic project stemming from my interest in the dynamics of group portraiture. The premise of this work is simple. I meet two or more people on the street who are strangers to each other and to me. I ask them if they will pose for a photograph together with the stipulation that they must touch each other in some manner...
My objective was to introduce an unpredictable variable in a very traditional photographic formula: to create a spontaneous and fleeting relationship between complete strangers in front of my 8 x 10 view camera.
Though these situations involve orchestrated collaborations between subject and photographer, the emotions captured are both genuine and honest. Touching Strangers encourages viewers to think about how we relate physically to one another, and to entertain the possibility that there is unlimited potential for new relationships with almost everybody passing by.
So often when people are observing the change of seasons we get the same sky/horizon/ground composition with the straight line of the horizon dissecting the picture plane. Paul Octavious, however, had the originality to see that the curve of a hill had a novel and dynamic effect, and so in his series "Same Hill, Different Day" we are treated to a refreshing sight. As Octavious explains on his website:
For the past 2 years I have visited a beautiful mound of earth that I have come to call "the hill." Each time I have come to the hill a new story is told to me as if the hill is my stage and the locals are the actors in this daily play.
Nice job!
Likewise - James Reeve, who is one of the exhibitors in the forthcoming Hyeres Photo Festival, has refreshed the night landscape genre by covering so many different locales. I haven't seen the prints yet, but the j-pegs look beautiful. More by Reeve can be seen here and below.
La Rouviere, Marseille
Las Vegas
Beirut
Gulf of Thailand
Albert Bridge, London
