The Classic Photographs Los Angeles Show will hold its third annual event this Saturday and Sunday, January 14 and 15. Hours on Saturday are from 11 am-7 pm and on Sunday from noon-5 pm. Admission is $5.00 and is open to the general public. The location for the show is the Helms Daylight Studio, which is located in the heart of the Helms Bakery District at 3221 Hutchison Ave., #E, Los Angeles, CA 90034.

The photography fair features 16 top internationally known dealers and galleries, exhibiting 19th and 20th century European and American photography.

Exhibitors include: Joseph Bellows Gallery, Contemporary Works/Vintage Works, Michael Dawson Gallery, Etherton Gallery, Gallery 19/21, G. Gibson Gallery, Gitterman Gallery, Charles A. Hartman Fine Art, Paul M. Hertzmann, Inc., Lee Gallery, Richard Moore Photographs, Scott Nichols Gallery, William L. Schaeffer Photographs, Barry Singer Gallery, Janet Sirmon Fine Art and Andrew Smith Gallery.

Independent scholar and photography consultant Beth Gates Warren will sign copies of her new book "Artful Lives: Edward Weston, Margrethe Mather, and the Bohemians of Los Angeles" both Saturday and Sunday from 1 pm to 3 pm. Hardcover books will be available for purchase.

Classic Photographs Los Angeles is a relaxed and informal venue to purchase fine art photographs in a variety of price ranges from knowledgeable and reputable dealers in the field. The emphasis of the exhibition is on small-scale works of art representing the rich texture of photographic history.

Ample parking is available in two lots at the intersection of Venice Boulevard and Helms Avenue, as well as limited street parking. Restaurants at the Helms Bakery District include Father's Office, La Dijonaise, Let's Be Frank, Lukshone, and Café Surfas.

Visit http://www.classicphotographsla.com for more information, a map to the show and links to the websites of all dealers participating in Classic Photographs Los Angeles.

 

Charles Schwartz, Ltd. has a new special exhibit on I Photo Central: "Arthur Rothstein - At Home and Abroad". This group of Rothstein photographs has a very special provenance. They come from the personal collection of Grace Rothstein, Arthur's wife. A majority of the prints have Rothstein stamps, some are signed by Rothstein, and many have detailed captions on the verso that are written in Rothstein's hand. The subject matter ranges from Rothstein's travels throughout the United States during the 1930's and early '40s while he was photographing for the FSA, to images that he made in China in 1945-46 while he was working for the US Office of War Information. Prices range from $750 to $3,000. To view this special exhibit click on: http://www.iphotocentral.com/showcase/showcase_view.php/136/0/286/3/1 .

Schwartz has also re-displayed its special exhibit on H.C. Anderson. It is called: "African American Photographer Henry Clay Anderson" and can be found here: http://www.iphotocentral.com/showcase/showcase_view.php/24/0/131/3/1 . Wilson made a documentary about Anderson that won an award last year and Schwartz is including the video with the purchase of any H.C. Anderson photograph for a limited time: Separate, But Equal - winner of the 2011 HBO Best Documentary Film award at the Martha's Vineyard African American Film Festival (made by Shawn Wilson).

"Édouard Boubat: Going Where Life Takes Him" is another new special exhibit produced by Contemporary Works/Vintage Works. Édouard Boubat's work is in the collections of numerous major museums and institutions around the world. Boubat sought to make photographs that were a celebration of life. He once said, "A photograph gives you a deep insight into a moment, it recalls a whole world." He had a keen sense of all our humanity, and noted that "we are living photographs. Photography reveals the images within us." The exhibition can be seen here: http://www.iphotocentral.com/showcase/showcase_view.php/136/0/283/1/0 .

Contemporary Works/Vintage Works has also put up "Chicago New Bauhaus School Alumnis" as a special exhibit. The New Bauhaus, founded in 1937 in Chicago, was the immediate successor to the German Bauhaus dissolved in 1933 under National Socialist pressure. Bauhaus ideology had a strong impact throughout America, but it was only at the New Bauhaus that the complete curriculum as developed under Walter Gropius in Weimar and Dessau was adopted and further developed. The most important achievement at the Chicago Bauhaus was probably in photography, under the guidance of teachers such as György Kepes, Nathan Lerner, Arthur Siegel and Harry Callahan. You can see this special exhibit here: http://www.iphotocentral.com/showcase/showcase_view.php/136/0/282/1/0 .

"Salon International du Portrait Photographique: A Portrait of One Woman" is yet another special exhibit by Contemporary Works/Vintage Works. The first and only "Salon International du Portrait Photographique" was held April 28-May 24, 1961 at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. For this major event, 30 well-known photographers were invited to photograph just one subject, the 21-year-old Anne-Marie Edvina, who was chosen for the "rare symmetry of her face", according to a New York Herald Tribune article reporting on this important exhibition. The photographic results were exhibited at the BN and were published in the New York Herald Tribune, Life International, the Journal de Seine et Oise, EPOCA, Europeo and many other publications. The photographers ranged from surrealists Man Ray and Maurice Tabard to fashion photographer William Klein to photojournalists, such as Robert Doisneau and Edouard Boubat. You can view this exhibit here: http://www.iphotocentral.com/showcase/showcase_view.php/136/0/279/1/0 .

Here are three more special exhibits:
Food for Thought, http://www.iphotocentral.com/showcase/showcase_view.php/136/0/273/1/0 .

Brassai, the Transylvanian Parisian, http://www.iphotocentral.com/showcase/showcase_view.php/136/0/280/1/1 .

Circus Images: A Three-Ring Exhibition, http://www.iphotocentral.com/showcase/showcase_view.php/136/0/281/1/0 .

 

The Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD) will hold the 32nd edition of The AIPAD Photography Show New York, one of the world's most important annual photography events, March 29-April 1, 2012, at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City.

More than 70 of the world's leading fine art photography galleries will present a wide range of museum-quality work, including contemporary, modern, and 19th-century photographs, as well as photo-based art, video, and new media. The AIPAD Photography Show New York is the longest running and foremost exhibition of fine art photography. The Show will open with a Gala Preview on March 28, 2012, to benefit InMotion, which provides free legal services to low-income women.

AIPAD 2012 will present four new member exhibitors: David Zwirner, New York; Sasha Wolf Gallery, New York; Paul Cava Fine Art Photographs, Bala Cynwyd, PA; and 798 Photo Gallery, Beijing.

A wide range of the world's leading fine art photography galleries will exhibit at The AIPAD Photography Show New York. In addition to galleries from New York City and across the country, a number of international galleries will be featured from Germany, Great Britain, Argentina, Japan and China. An exhibitor list is available at http://www.aipad.com/photoshow .

The AIPAD Photography Show New York will offer museum-quality work from established and emerging contemporary artists to modern and 19th-century masters. Among the highlights will be a selection of extraordinary portraits.

AIPAD 2012 Panel Discussions

An ambitious schedule of five panel discussions featuring leading curators, artists, dealers, and collectors will be held on Saturday, March 31, 2012, at the Park Avenue Armory Veteran's Room. The panels are as follows:

10 a.m: A Conversation with Rineka Dijkstra
Contemporary women photographers are being feted in a number of solo exhibitions at leading museums across the country this year. Among the most widely anticipated is a retrospective of the work of Dutch artist Rineke Dijkstra. This interview with the internationally-recognized photographer will offer a rare opportunity to hear her inspirations and thoughts before her upcoming exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in June 2012.

12 p.m.: Curator's Choice: Emerging Artists in Photography
Two major exhibitions in New York City during the run of The AIPAD Photography Show New York are of note: the Whitney Biennial 2012 at the Whitney Museum and Perspectives 2012 at the International Center for Photography. To explore emerging artists in these exhibitions as well as broader trends, this panel will feature top curators and artists discussing their perceptions about new photography and video, moderated by Steven Kasher, Steven Kasher Gallery.

2 p.m.: How to Collect Photographs: What Collectors Need to Know Now
What important artists are being talked about right now? What do collectors need to know? What art fairs should be on your calendar? How has the photography market changed in recent years? AIPAD dealers and seasoned collectors will offer tips for both first-time and experienced buyers.

4 p.m.: A Celebration of Diane Arbus and Francesca Woodman
To commemorate traveling retrospectives of Diane Arbus (organized by the Jeu de Paume, Paris) and Francesca Woodman (organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), leading experts, including AIPAD dealers, will talk about the importance of this these groundbreaking artists and their enduring legacies. Robert Klein, Robert Klein Gallery, will moderate the panel.

6 p.m.: Italian Contemporary Photography
During the run of The AIPAD Photography Show New York, an important exhibition at Hunter Art Gallery. Peripheral Visions: Italian Photography, 1950s – Present will showcase the work of major Italian photographers who have explored unconventional images of Italy. Speakers will include Maria Antonella Pelizzari, exhibition curator and professor in the history of photography at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY; Sandra Phillips, senior curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and other international scholars and artists.

Tickets are $10 per panel discussion. Seating is limited, and tickets are available on a first-come, first-served basis.

Show Information

The AIPAD Photography Show New York will run from Thursday, March 29 though Sunday, April 1, 2012, at the Park Avenue Armory at 67th Street in New York City. Show hours are as follows:
Thursday, March 29, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Friday, March 30, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Saturday, March 31, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Sunday, April 1, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

The admission is $25 daily and $40 for the run-of-show. Student admission is $10 with a valid student ID. No advance purchase is required. Tickets will be available at the door. For more information, the public can call AIPAD at 202-367-1158 or visit http://www.aipad.com .

 

Photojournalist Eve Arnold died peacefully in a nursing home near her London home on January 4th, according to Magnum, the photo agency of which she was a member. She was 99.

Arnold was born in Philadelphia in 1912 to Russian immigrant parents. She began her photography career whilst working at the Stanbi Photos plant in New Jersey in 1946, and in 1948 studied photography with Alexei Brodovitch at the New School for Social Research in New York. She began to work as a commercial photographer in the late 1940s for a number of publications, including Life magazine.

She was known for her sensitive portraits and photographed many important people, including Marilyn Monroe, Joan Crawford, Elizabeth Taylor, Jacqueline Kennedy, Malcolm X and Margaret Thatcher. Some of her most famous shots include portraits of Monroe which were published in Arnold's book "Marilyn Monroe: An Appreciation."

"Themes recur again and again in my work," Arnold was quoted as saying in her book, "The Unretouched Woman." "I have been poor and I wanted to document poverty; I had lost a child and I was obsessed with birth; I was interested in politics and I wanted to know how it affected our lives; I am a woman and I wanted to know about women."

Arnold began working for the Magnum agency in 1951, becoming the first woman member in 1957, reportedly after her images of Harlem fashion shows caught the eye of photographer and Magnum founder Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Arnold settled in London in the 1962, working for the Sunday Times newspaper. In the 1970s she traveled to the United Arab Emirates, photographing and filming Dubai's ruling family for "Behind the Veil," and was one of the first American photographers to work in China. The China photos were exhibited as her first solo show at the Brooklyn Museum in 1980, and were published in the book "In China."

Arnold published over 15 monographs, including a new publication "All About Eve" (TeNeues, January 2012). Of note is her 1997 book "In Retrospect" (Alfred A. Knopf) in which she recounts her life and career in her own words. She has been exhibited widely, mostly notably her Retrospective, originated by the Barbican, London in 1996, which received 62,000 visitors and toured internationally. She was a regular editorial contributor to global newspapers and magazines, in particular The Sunday Times.

Arnold was a fellow of the Royal Photographic Society and in 1995 was named Master Photographer by New York's International Center of Photography. In 2003 she was honored by Queen Elizabeth, who made Arnold an officer of the Order of the British Empire in recognition for her services to photography.

 

Actor and humanitarian Richard Gere plans to visit the George Eastman House on Thursday, February 16, to accept the George Eastman Award. In accepting the honor, Gere joins the company of such film legends as Charles Chaplin, Cecil B. DeMille, Gary Cooper, Martin Scorsese, Joan Crawford, Isabella Rossellini, Meryl Streep, Kim Novak, and Frank Capra.

Tickets to this event, including awards ceremony and gala reception, begin at $125 and go on sale January 17. Click here for details as they become available: http://www.eastmanhouse.org/events/detail/gere-02-16-12 .

The legendary Academy Awards party returns to Eastman House on Sunday, February 26. Tickets are $55 members/$60 nonmembers, $70 day of event, and include free valet parking. Tickets may be purchased now at http://www.eastmanhouse.org , or at the museum's Lipson Welcome Center, or by calling 1-585-271-3361, ext. 444.

 

(Just a note and an apology from the Editor. By error (mine: Alex Novak), some of these reviews were lost in our email files for an excessive amount of time after they were done. We're still catching up and will catch up on others soon. These are still very important photo publications.)

By Matt Damsker

PHOTOGRAPHY AND ITALY.
By Maria Antonella Pelizzari. Reaktion Books Ltd., London, England. Paperbound; $29.95; 187 pgs., 124 images. ISBN No. 978-1-86189-769-5. Information: http://www.reaktionbooks.co.uk .

This well-written and deeply attentive overview of Italy's photographic tradition is an important contribution to our understanding of that nation's cultural development. Author Pellizzari, an associate professor of art at New York's Hunter College and CUNY, previously did much the same in her 2003 study of India's photography, and here she outlines how photography has mirrored Italy's rise from a gaggle of competing states to a unified, globally competitive country.

Pelizzari notes that the history of photography in Italy hasn't traveled well beyond its borders, while its art market has remained somewhat peripheral to other European and Asian regions--ironically so, given Italy's stature as the cradle of Western art. Yet only a handful of Italian photographers seem to have fashioned much of a global profile over the decades: Bragaglia, the Fratelli Alinari, the paparazzi, Giacomelli and several contemporaries such as Vitali, Barbieri, Basilico, Jodice, Wolf, Niedermayr, and Lambri. Pelizzari suggests that the nation's fragmentation into many sub-states from late antiquity onward may well have affected its artistic reach, emphasizing regionalism.

Whatever the reason, this compact yet thorough volume brings us close to the Italian photographic project, beginning with the medium's early days, when Daguerre's and Talbot's discoveries launched the first wave of itinerant photographers, who worked side by side with Italian artists (often opticians, Pelizzari notes) to capture the country's incomparable architectural relics and icons of antiquity, from the Colosseum, the great Arch of Janus and Temple of Vesta in Rome to the ducal palaces of Venice, the glories of Florence, and so on.

Many of the most enduring of these early images belong to the likes of non-Italians such as John Hobbs, Gustave Le Gray and Frederic Flacheron, but it isn't long before the Roman calotypist Giacomo Caneva established himself as a "painter photographer" and distributed his beautifully composed portraits and religious tableaux. By then, other European and Italian photographers were chronicling the upheavals of the Risorgimento, as heroes such as Garibaldi forged the unification of Italy. And as tourism flourished in the 1860s, so did the superb compositions of Fratelli Alinari, Pietro Dovizielli and others, whose albumen silver and salted paper prints gorgeously evoke the sights and atmospheres of Italy.

As the modern era dawns, of course, Italian photography soars with energy and innovativeness, and Pelizzari charts the rise of futurism in the machine-age images of Anon Giulio Bragaglia and, inevitably, the dynamic pro-Fascist images of Mario Castagneri and Marcello Nizzoli, championing Mussolini and his violent era. But the post-war surge of Italian popular and experimental art--in the films of Fellini, and as Italian fashion dominates the Euro landscape-- is carried by photographic masters as varied as Giuseppe Cavalli (his classic 1950 image, "Two Appointments," of a man and dog in parallel against an International Style edifice) and Fulvio Roiter, balancing the enigmatic urban stillness of De Chirico's paintings with the pastoral images of Italian country life.

Pelizzari notes the powerful tension between alienation and belonging in Italy's photographers, in the immense industrial views and modernist geometries of Gabriele Basilico, Guido Guidi, Luca Campigotto. Well into the present, she explains, this unique essence of Italian art is filtered through photos of astonishing variety and edge: the street visions of Paola Di Bello, the social portraits of Francesco Jodice, the Rothko-like immanence of Silvio Wolf's large digital c-prints, epitomizing a melding of pure image and pure abstraction. Concludes Pelizzari: "If this was, from the start, the challenge of photography in Italy--that of repetition of iconic and formulaic views, at the risk of obliterating the modern and dynamic transformation of a country in the making--this history has sought to show that it was met successfully…producing, in fact, pictures of great historical complexity and unorthodox beauty."


JOHN GUTMANN: THE PHOTOGRAPHER AT WORK.
Essays by Sally Stein, Douglas R. Nickel, Amy Rule. 2009, Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, Tucson/Yale University Press. Produced in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name at the Center for Creative Photography, through Jan. 31, 2010. ISBN No. 978-0-300-12331-9. Hardbound, 180 pages, 175 duotone plates. Information: http://www/yalebooks.com ; http://www.creativephotography.org .

Complementing the largest solo exhibition of John Gutmann's work to date, this handsome catalogue is at once a fine introduction to and codification of the late master's photographic output. As exhibit curator Sally Stein thoroughly details in her lead essay, Gutmann (1905-1998) came to the right place at the right time, emigrating from Germany to America at the end of 1933, escaping Naziism with an artistic pedigree as a top student of Expressionist painter Otto Muller, and subsequently as an art teacher in Berlin. Re-rooting happily in San Francisco, he would become a pedagogic legend at San Francisco State University, flourishing as both a photographer and a mentor to modernism.

Indeed, the Gutmann who chose to earn a living as a news photographer during the Great Depression was something of a trailblazer, touring the U.S. by bus a generation before the likes of Robert Frank, and capturing the vivid vernacular of the New World--its billboards, graffiti, roller skaters, car conveyors, and infinitely diverse humanity--often from a skewed, disorienting perspective. The great Gutmanns that haunt and delight us to this day--"Death Stalks Filmore" (1934), of a wraithlike old woman, her skull half outlined beneath her shroud-like-hat, or the merry "Aerialists" (1938)--are unfussy totems of immediacy and observational genius.

Gutmann shot from the gut, it seems, responding to the sheer spectacle of America more so than to its inequities, but he could capture its troubled narrative easily enough, as in an image of a black man standing apart from a procession of union workers after a murderous general strike in 1934, or an odd portrait of a black cowboy inexplicably sporting a swastika on his Western shirt.

Stein, in her essay, takes pains to differentiate the rhetoric of Gutmann's photography from that of, for example, another great Bay Area chronicler of the Depression, Dorothea Lange, and her points are well-taken. Gutmann's truly modernist instinct led him away from pointedly framed, polemical street photography and down a path of pure visual information, veering toward abstraction and banality, seeding the ground for Eggleston, Friedlander and others. Stein quotes Max Kozloff's 1984 essay on Gutmann: "It was his good fortune to have gotten under way as an artist in his homeland to have come of age, as a photographer, in his adopted country…acting as an instinctual broker between the visual value system of the milieu he left and the one he entered." Thus, Kozloff concludes, Gutmann's "hybrid position" led him to produce work "that deviated from what emerged by the 1970s as canonical documents as well as art of the 1930s." If anything, this catalogue depicts Gutmann as the canonical enabler of modern and postmodern photography, directly influencing countless students and leaving behind a body of work that shows much more than it tells.


IN BRIEF: Chicago's Stephen Daiter gallery's catalog, "Aaron Siskind," collects 21 of the master's vintage abstract photographs from the late 1940s through the 1960s. For many, these images of scarred, scabbed, stenciled, graffitied, paint-peeling walls and surfaces are the quintessential photo-abstractions, forcing the viewer into near-rapturous contact with sheer physical texture and the visual wonder of the close-up lens, as the pentimento of urban life presses upon us with its profoundly random energy. Information: 1-312-787-3350, or by email at info@stephendaitergallery.com .

From Charles Wood, Bookseller, of Cambridge, Mass., "Catalogue 146: Nineteenth Century Photography" describes, with many fine full-color illustrations, 161 items of great interest in the study of photography's early period. These include first editions of catalogues and albums of Thomas Annan's studies of Glasgow slums and the waters of Loch Katrine. Other notables: a first edition of Robert Hunt's 1844 history of photography (the first such history, by consensus); the first photographically illustrated medical book in the U.S. (I. N. Kerlin's "The mind unveiled; or a brief history of twenty-two imbecile children"); some of the earliest field photography (1873), by William E. Marshall, of the Todo tribe of southern India; and the first and only edition of what may be the earliest book on aerial photography, by Gaston Tissandier (1886), taken from the heights achieved by balloon over Paris. Heady stuff. Information: 1-617-868-1711; or by email at cbw@world.std.com .

On the exotic end of the contemporary photographic spectrum, Michael Philip Manheim's multiple exposures of Butoh--a performance art developed by post-World War II Japanese youth, encompassing dance and movement--are dreamlike and graceful representations, in softly contrasted black-and-white, of young bodies in purposeful motion. These nude dancers exude a primal power in their arching, aching, ritualized gestures and grapplings, and Manheim delivers the spirit and flesh of Butoh with delicacy and passion, as the blur of dance yields to the sharp-focus of an expressive face. Indeed, "In a Labyrinth: The Dance of Butoh" is a slender but highly charged volume ($35, plus shipping and handling. For more information, email: info@contemporaryworks.net , or call 1-215-822-5662; http://www.iphotocentral.com/search/detail.php/32/12502/0/12502/1 .


Matt Damsker is an author and critic, who has written about photography and the arts for the Los Angeles Times, Hartford Courant, Philadelphia Bulletin, Rolling Stone magazine and other publications. His book, "Rock Voices", was published in 1981 by St. Martin's Press. His essay in the book, "Marcus Doyle: Night Vision" was published in the fall of 2005.

(Book publishers, authors and photography galleries/dealers may send review copies to us at: I Photo Central, 258 Inverness Circle, Chalfont, PA 18914. We do not guarantee that we will review all books or catalogues that we receive. Books must be aimed at photography collecting, not how-to books for photographers.)