William Larson Series: "The Cut /" from original film: Knife in the Water, 2010 Archival Pigment Print 31 x 24 inches; Edition of 5; $5,500 - $10,000

A large crowd was drawn to the November 18 opening reception, in equal measure by Larson, who is known for creating the undergraduate and graduate photography programs at the Tyler School of Art, and by Toledano, whose charisma and interest in how people define themselves inform A New Kind of Beauty. Both artists have previously shown their work at Gallery 339, Larson as part of the Philadelphia Masters series from November 2007 to March 2008, and Toledano for his series Days With My Father, from September through November 2010.

William Larson, Series: "The Cut /" from original film: The Cabinet, 2010 - 31 x 24 inches; Edition of 5; $5,500 - $10,000. Archival pigment print.

Larson has painstakingly culled the images in The Cut from industrial and feature films, including classics such as King Kong and The Day the Earth Stood Still. Each of the works was created using archival pigment print on canvas, capturing moments from the film where visual continuity is broken. Moments that are recognizable, even iconic, in the original films are shown in still-photography form to reveal surprising emotions, facial expressions and new perspectives on the source material.

William Larson, still from "Serif: A Memoir."

The artist’s skill for disrupting the momentum of a film in order to create new narrative possibilities is also evident in “Serif,” his thirteen-minute film memoir, displayed in the back room of the gallery’s first floor. All the images and clips chosen for “Serif” allude to formative experiences in his life, although the piece itself is a cipher. Images such as an antique camera being uncovered and re-covered and children in stock or found footage are key to what Larson refers to as his “biographical topography.”

Phillip Toledano Allanah, 2008 Digital C-Print 40 x 30 inches; Edition of 6; Starting at $2750 60 x 50 inches; Edition of 3; Starting at $4500

In the upstairs gallery the atmosphere is unsettling. Toledano has long been skilled at expressing the more grandiose tendencies of human nature; his CV includes projects such as Kim Jong Phil, a series featuring the photographer’s face superimposed onto portraits and sculptures of infamous dictators as a commentary on the similarity between artists and dictators. The pieces from Toledano’s A New Kind of Beauty are chiaroscuro portraits of people who have undergone major cosmetic surgery; the portraits, done on digital c-print, are each beautiful and yet disturbing. As I looked at the prints, I realized that the modifications to faces and bodies were so extensive that in many cases it was difficult to tell what the real emotions were under the surface, challenging the viewer to think deeply about what prompted the subjects’ choices. Toledano’s book, also titled A New Kind of Beauty, indicates that this was a conscious choice.

Phillip Toledano Steve, 2008 Digital C-Print 40 x 30 inches; Edition of 6; Starting at $2750 60 x 50 inches; Edition of 3; Starting at $4500

“Toledano surrounds his subjects with grace and balance yet does not offer much in the way of an empathic way in, or out, either,” writes W.M. Hunt in the book, which is available to browse in the gallery. Viewers are alienated by the images at the same time that they are drawn in by the subjects’ desire to craft bold new identities for themselves.

The two exhibitions differ vastly in subject matter and intent; the contrast of nostalgia (Larson) and displacement (Toledano) is powerful.

Phillip Toledano, "Yvette," 2008. Digital C-Print. 40 x 30 inches; Edition of 6; Starting at $2750. 60 x 50 inches; Edition of 3; Starting at $4500

Donald E. Camp Captain, Front Waiter and Back Waiter / Kisha Picore (from Dust Shaped Hearts series), 2007 Photographic Casein Monoprint

The show’s initial foray into face-ness — the first thing you see when you enter the gallery, is a wall of predominantly sober, sad and death-imbued images.  Donald Camp’s ghostly photo with casein and raw earth pigment,  ”Captain” — like all the artist’s works — resembles the “Shroud of Turin.”  The grainy, close-cropped image of a man staring up at you over the rim of his glasses looks as if it was transmitted by magic from the underworld to the surface of the paper.  Phillip Toledano’s dad, in his digital C-print “me and dad” is an elderly man who is close to death.

Neil Winokur Andy Warhol, 1982 Cibachrome Print

There’s a gaunt and haunted-looking Andy Warhol, pictured by Neil Winoker in a 1982 Cibachrome print, whose blue background is eerily evocative of the void. The wall’s anchor piece is Andrea Modica’s platinum/palladium print of a skull sitting on what looks like a corrugated cardboard table top.  The picture’s title, “Colorado Springs, CO (A15, Male, 56 years old)” implies that the skull is a specimen of some unknown and unnamed person.  And it also implies, of course, the truth that in death all skulls are pretty much the same.

Richard Renaldi Cory, 2008 Gelatin Silver Contact Print

But the large show has ups, too, as well as downs.  Even this wall has a playful image, and several that are lyrical without being mournful. A Facebook-like profile photo of “Grant,” a smiling young man by Davin Youngs is positively ebullient.  Richard Renaldi’s “Cory” almost jumps off the wall.  The small gelatin silver print of a young man in profile radiates a life lived intensely.  Paul Cava’s pigment print, “Denise (New Mexico),” and Jason Robinette’s archival pigment print, “Untitled 13,” both exude yearning and old fashioned beauty.

Caitlin Teal Price Leslie, 2010 Archival Pigment Print

There’s plenty more in the exhibit, lots of it magical.  Like Caitlin Price’s “Leslie,” an archival pigment print that captures a women in a forbidding space — a dark shadowy zone under a cloverleaf highway overpass — her face illuminated by an oval of bright light that catches only her facial features as she stares down and away. It’s a weird and cinematic portrayal, whose celestial beam of light is echoed in Modica’s “Oneonta Yankee, Kent Wallace,” a Platinum/Palladium Contact Print, another face lit by a mystery light.

George Krause Waitress, Anguila (from Sfumato series), 2003 Archival Pigment Print

Whether intended or not, the wide range of shooting styles and approaches  – from gelatin silver prints by Yuichi Hibi to screen grabs of a web project by Jen Davis — conveys the vibrancy of photography today.  It’s a tool able to flex to just about any practitioner’s needs. Liz Rideal makes Chromogenic prints from photobooth pictures.  Her two portraits, one a man, one a woman, depict the subjects’ heads peeping through slits in two vertical-striped cloths.  The element of fun that usually accompanies photobooth shots is undercut by the serious expression on the man’s face and the open-eyed innocence of the woman; both become sad clowns trapped in all the stripes.

David Graham Northern Liberties, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2006 Chromogenic Print

David Graham’s C-print portrait of Elijah Wood is not really a portrait but a street scene of two wheat-pasted posters for the movie “Everything Is Illuminated.”  Time and weather have eaten away at the posters, but like the “Picture of Dorian Gray,” Wood’s youthful looks remain intact.

Henry Horenstein Scout, 2009 Archival Pigment Print 10 x 15 inches

The show is a summer refresher—on a warm day the gallery’s cool ambiance is welcoming and the faces totally engaging.  Here’s a winning double header — pair this photo exhibit with a trip to the Art Museum’s “Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus.”  Then think about how photography has stolen portraiture – and faces — from contemporary painting.

Read this at Philly Weekly.

“About Face” to Sept. 10.  Gallery 339, 339 S. 21st St. 215 731 1530. www.gallery339.com

All images courtesy of Gallery 339.

Andrea Modica, from the Fountain series. photo courtesy of the artist and Gallery 339

Corey Armpriester- Your curiosity about how the meat on your plate got there is what inspired the “Fountain” series?
Andrea Modica- Yes. My move to Colorado in 1998 fed this curiosity. I met the Bakers in 2000, after much research and effort to find access to a slaughterhouse with my camera.

I began photographing the slaughtering process at the Bakers’ slaughterhouse with my 8X10 camera in 2000 and continued to work there until 2008. Using a large format camera demands a slow and, when working with people, collaborative effort. My final prints are hand-made platinum/palladium contact prints, a 19th century process that I favor for its beauty and richness of tone. The prints are made on vellum. I also choose this antiquated process because I love to physically make the prints, by hand, in a darkroom.

Andrea Modica, from the Fountain series. photo courtesy of the artist and Gallery 339

After a while, I began photographing the kids in the family, sometimes with animals or animal parts and sometimes without- sometimes inside the slaughterhouse, sometimes outside. I often photographed them in my house or in theirs. The last photographs, which I believe to be among the most successful, were made in their basement. The project continued until 2008, ending because I moved back to the east coast to teach at Drexel University.

CA- What is the meaning behind the title “Fountain”?
AM- Fountain is the name of the town in Colorado where the Bakers have lived and worked for generations. It’s a very hopeful name for a city and for the project; I got lucky.

Andrea Modica, from the Fountain series. photo courtesy of the artist and Gallery 339

CA- How long did you live with the Baker family?
AM- I never lived with the Bakers, but we spent a lot of time in each other’s homes. I lived in Manitou Springs, CO and the Bakers live in Fountain, CO. Fountain is about a half hour drive from Manitou Springs.

CA- Did you participate in the slaughtering of the animals?
AM- In general at the Baker slaughterhouse, the men and boys do the slaughtering and the women and girls do the butchering. I was in the back, butchering with the women and girls.

Andrea Modica, from the Fountain series. photo courtesy of the artist and Gallery 339

CA- What is your favorite meat product?
AM- I generally like it all. However, I was offered horsemeat while in Italy last week and declined.

Andrea Modica, from the Fountain series. photo courtesy of the artist and Gallery 339

CA- Did the Bakers have any opinions about vegetarianisms?
AM- We never discussed it, but I suspect that if I had asked to photograph at their slaughterhouse as a vegetarian, they might have said no. They knew from the beginning that I eat meat.

CA- Were there certain aspects of the Baker family’s life that was off limits to your camera?
AM- The family never put limits on what I photographed. However, the parents saw all the photographs over the years, as the project progressed. I never put any photograph into the world without their seeing it first.

CA- Do you still keep in-touch with the Bakers?
AM- Yes.

Andrea Modica, from the Fountain series. photo courtesy of the artist and Gallery 339

CA- Who were you closest to in the Baker family and why?
AM- I was probably closest to the teen-age girls: Brittany, Ivy and Tara, as well as their niece Katelynn. Until 2001 I traveled a great deal from Colorado to photograph in upstate New York, where I had lived for years. I was spending as much time as possible with Barbara, a girl whom I had been photographing for nearly 15 years. She was the main character of my book Treadwell, someone I had become very close to, and she was dying. Photographing the healthy girls from Fountain offered tremendous relief every time I returned from photographing Barbara.

CA- Can human beings claim to love animals if we eat and wear them?
AM- This is an ethical question that each of us has to answer for ourselves.

Andrea Modica, from the Fountain series. photo courtesy of the artist and Gallery 339

CA- Where does photojournalism end and art begin?
AM- Only in my opinion, a great photojournalist does what any great photographer will do: be completely aware of what’s in front of him/her and bring everything of his/her experience to the process of making the picture.

CA- Do you call yourself an artist or photographer?
AM- Either, I don’t spend much time thinking about things like that. Instead, I prefer to be photographing or in the darkroom, a place that brings me great joy. I also returned to drawing last year, after many years away from the medium. I don’t feel the process of drawing is very different from what I do as a photographer.

CA- What’s the best way to gain the trust of the people that you photograph?
AM- Tell the truth.

CA- In what ways do your students influence your work?
AM- When they’re truly in love with photography, and they often are, they’re awake and inventive, fearless of making mistakes, reminding me that there’s no true success in taking the safe route when being creative.

Leonard Cohen, Live in London concert

Da Corte’s video is Chelsea Hotel No. 2, and the 10 videos screen in a 38-minute loop that follows the sequence of the songs in New Skin. The project was organized by Cohen’s daughter Lorca Cohen with the Hammer Museum.

Screenings are at 4:30pm, 6:15pm and 7:30pm. Check the MoMA website for more.

40th St. A.I.R. Free studio space for a year–apply now
In exchange for sharing your talents by teaching and exhibiting, 40th Street A.I.R. is offering one year of free studio space at 40th and Chestnut Sts. Applications for the Aug. 25, 2011-Aug. 15, 2012 residencies are due Monday, May 2, 2011. Questions? Email them at 40th.AIR.app@gmail.com.

Ceilings are high (approximately 12 feet in some areas); and rooms range from 100-300 square feet. Some areas have ample natural light, while others have none at all (making them ideal as darkrooms). The studios are not furnished and are not for living.

Japanese earthquake relief at Gallery 339

Tetsugo Hyakutake, Nihonbashi #2, Tokyo, Japan, 2010 Archival Pigment Print

Tokyo artist Tetsugo Hyakutake at Gallery 339 will be selling 8 x 10 inch pigment prints of Japanese street scenes for $100 each, raising funds to help Japan after the triple threat disaster that has devastated the island country. The artist and gallery are donating 100 percent of those proceeds to relief agencies in Japan. Hyakutake’s current show on view at the gallery, Ephemeral Existence, aptly named under the circumstances, is the his first solo with 339.  Tetsugo will speak about the work at the gallery, Saturday, April 9, 1-2pm. The artist reception is Friday, April 8, 6-8 p.m.

Straight and Butch goes straight to DVD

Butch & Straight, several of the photos, like this one, emulate iconic photos by Annie Liebowitz, like this one which uses the John/Yoko pose from the photo shoot the day before John died.

Straight and Butch, the sly and often hilarious documentary that follows the making of a beefcake calendar, featuring TV host Butch Cordora, who is gay, and a lineup of game and nervous straight guys, will be released on DVD April 26 at Breaking Glass Pictures. DVD extras will include “The 13th Photo Shoot” featurette, a blooper reel and a director interview.  You can get it at Amazon April 26 as well.

And the winner is?
We’re dying to know who will win the third annual $25,000 West Prize, and you can find out before you see it on artblog if you go to the party out at SEI April 21, 6-9pm. The winner, selected from a group of 10 finalists, will be announced that day at a cocktail reception and exhibition featuring art by all the finalists, who were chosen from 2,100 international applicants. Unlike other years, these finalists were asked to submit a project proposal on what they would do with the $25,000.  The winning project wins the West Prize for the artist.  Each finalist has been awarded an acquisition grant for their work to become part of the West Collection.

The event is free and open to the public, Thurs. April 21, 6-9pm, at:
The West Collection at SEI
1 Freedom Valley Drive
Oaks, PA 19456
RSVP to lee@westcollection.org

Isa Leshko Embden Goose, Age 28, II, 2008 Archival Inkjet Print 9 x 9 inches; Edition of 15; $600 - $2500

The influence of August Sander (1876-1964) grows yearly as photographers continue to explore and classify the world by “types.”  Phillip Toledano’s portraits of men and women who have had significant levels of cosmetic surgery read like a World Book entry on artificial beauty.  The C-prints showcase each sitter in dramatic light isolated in a deep black background.  Ashley, Justin, Steve and others, dignified and unsmiling, most resemble the subjects of Edward S. Curtis‘s forlorn and iconic photos of Native Americans in the Old West.

Phillip Toledano Angel, 2009 Digital C-Print 40 x 30 inches; Edition of 6; Starting at $2750
60 x 50 inches; Edition of 3; Starting at $4500

Also taxonomic, Isa Leshko’s prints of aging farm animals are a reminder of the inevitability of senescence and death. Leshko’s black-and-white prints offer a different kind of beauty than that of most animal art, which tends to revel in the vitality of the natural. It’s impossible not to feel empathy for 11-year-old Kelly, an Irish Wolfhound who looks arthritic and perhaps blind, or Pumpkin, the beautiful horse whose ripe old age of 28 stirs up thoughts of death. As stand-ins for aging humans, these animals are a speed bump in a show that otherwise moves along straightforwardly.

Chang Kim’s chromogenic prints of buildings plastered with brightly colored advertising signs are big, bold and exotic. The shots, taken in South Korea, are of a world in which advertising has become decor, invading every inch of public space. Kim’s photos are a shock to a Western eye, with buildings resembling gigantic mahjong tile arrangements soaring into the air.

Gabriel Benaim Ayalon Highway #2, 2008 Gelatin Silver Contact Print 8x10" ed of 10. $900-1500

Gabriel Benaim’s gelatin silver prints of a depopulated Tel Aviv, on the other hand, are generic views of the built environment that have almost no emotional impact. Benaim’s shots of the curve of a highway with no cars and a beach with no people are almost chilling in their non-specificity and lack of affect. You want to doubt the generic city, yet you can’t. It’s familiar even if you haven’t been there.

Joel Lederer, 200804211518, 2009, Archival Pigment Print

Joel Lederer’s and Kyohei Abe’s digital prints both deal with the longing for a better reality. Lederer’s imagined virtual landscapes are candy-colored, Shangri-La impossibilities. There’s nothing forlorn about the natural scenes of woods and water, but in their suggestion of Candyland perfection, they are a knowing cry that something is wrong. Kyohei Abe’s inkjet prints of small game pieces set in voids of white space likewise suggest childhood and lost innocence.

It’s a solid show, and John Chervinsky’s science-referencing black-and-whites, Hannah Price’s teen portraits, Peter Ainsworth’s concrete-as-skin color prints and Dustin Ream’s tumble-down barns also deserve mention.

Gallery 339’s Martin McNamara organized In Review after seeing the artists’ works in open-call “portfolio reviews,” a nonstandard way of organizing a show in a commercial gallery (it’s more typical of juried shows in alternative galleries). But the professional quality of the work and the universal themes make this “up from the masses” show a winner.

In Review, 
Through Sept. 4.  
Gallery 339 339 S. 21st St. 
215.731.1530

Read this article at Philadelphia Weekly.

Andrea Modica, Oneonta Yankee, Nick Del Vecchio, 1992, 10 x 8 platinum/palladium contact print

In Andrea Modica: Minor League, Modica’s 18 farm team portraits are breathtaking in the physicality and vulnerability of young men, many still showing traces of boy. The photographs, contact prints of an 8×10 camera, are more than portraits. They are testimony of a subculture of athletics, competition, fierceness, and the desire to succeed.

Some of these guys broke my heart. They are men-in-waiting, yearning to get in the game. The farm teams are trials they must get beyond, opportunities that likely will not play out for most of them.  But it’s here that they learn the rules of the game. Not the game of baseball, but the game of baseball society, in which the ways to express emotion are ritualized and vetted for their macho qualities.

Andrea Modica, Oneonta Yankees, Ray Suplee and Kraig Hawkins (embrace), 1992, 8x10 inches, Platinum/Palladium Contact Print

So the more intimate images of young men embracing are shocking expressions of tenderness not allowed in the majors. What the big leagues allow are celebratory piles of bodies, rump bumps, shoulder pushes, and sideways grins.

Andrea Modica, Oneonta Yankees, Kraig Hawkins and Rich Turentine, 1992, 8x10 inches, Platinum/Palladium Contact Print

There’s a funny thing that happens to men in uniform. The uniforms may turn them into a team on the field, but up close the uniforms increased my awareness of the individuality of each body, each face, each expression.

Andrea Modica, Oneonta Yankee, Matt Luke, 1992, 10x8 inches, Platinum/Palladium Contact Print

Some of the men are scarred. One has a swollen eye. In contrast to their scarred freshness is a portrait of LA Dodger Darryl Strawberry in 1993–the most recent of the photos and the only one taken of a major leaguer–the 19th photo in the show. He looks well-worn, with streaks of sweat and an indentation line above his brow, perhaps from all these years of wearing a baseball cap. The innocence is gone and the weight of high hopes has been replaced by the weight of responsibility.

Andrea Modica, Oneonta Yankees, Sandi Santiago and Mike Buddie, 1992, 8x10 inches, Platinum/Palladium Contact Print

A photo of two men in batting cages and one young man peering out from his catcher’s mask are reminders of how entrapped everyone becomes by the paths they have chosen in life.

Andrea Modica, Darryl Strawberry, LA Dodger, 1993, 10x8 inches, Platinum/Palladium Contact Print

The quality of detail in these photos, the sense of skin and light, is marvelous. They are 8×10 platinum/palladium contact prints, and other than the Strawberry, they were all taken in 1991 and 1992.

Toshio Shibata, Kanazawahakkei, Yokohama City, Japan (N-65), 1984

In Toshio Shibata’s exhibit Expressway the human form is invisible but implied. We are looking at the works of man and the light tracks left in the wake of the cars in which he travels. These 11 works are nightscapes of highways, rest stops, and toll areas, most of them in Japan, but really places without countries. They are everywhere and nowhere at once, detached from the daily experiences of chores, responsibilities and relationships.

Toshio Shibata, Moriya Service Area, Jyoban Expressway, Japan (N-40), 1986, 20 x 24 inches

In these nightscapes (4×5-inch camera, gelative silver prints), the darkness gets absorbed into the photo paper, leaving luminous tracks and spots of glowing light. The backs of industrially shaped circles reflecting light, the lit arcades of toll areas, the isolated lit interiors of phone booths, the archway of a tunnel illuminated by headlights create Hopperesque noir moods of loneliness and detachment. But unlike in Hopper, these lit-up points suggest a spiritual destination that beckons and promises.

Toshio Shibata, Totsuka Interchange, Yokohama Yokosuka Highway, Japan (N-08), 1983, 20 x 24 inches

These rarely exhibited photographs all date to the mid 1980s, but they seem fresh. The song of the open road is captured warts and all, a Lolitaland that mixes purpose, promise and failure all at once.

The exhibit will be up through June 12.

“8×10 and Under” at Gallery 339 proves that bigger isn’t always better when it comes to art. While large photos may enfold you in their world and give you a quick hit of satisfaction, tiny images pay back viewers by forcing them to study the pieces and create stronger, more lasting relationships.

Linda Connor, Boy Bathing, Angkor Thom, Cambodia

The show features 46 tiny black-and-white works by 11 photographers. Most are haunting images of a world where the footprint of man is small and nature is vast and unknowable.

Richard Kagan, Monturque (Andalusia, Spain)

There are many outstanding pieces, including Michael Kenna’s Twenty One Fence Posts, Shirogane, Hokkaido, Japan which reduces the world to a bleak, snowy realm, a receding line of fence posts the only signs of life.

Jerry Spagnoli, Untitled (The Plaza)

Richard Kagan’s surreal Monturque (Andalusia, Spain) is a Quixotic hallucination of a shaggy hut that somehow mirrors the field around it. Linda Connor and Andrea Modica bring humanity to the foreground in works evoking the natural cycles of birth and death and the history of man living in nature. Stuart Rome’s new works on silver-leaf paper look like the surface of the moon and Jerry Spagnoli’s shiny daguerrotypes of Central Park—which shape-shift with the light—remind you of photography’s alchemical origins. These aren’t travel photos, but imaginative leaps into realms that may or may not exist.

Jill O'Bryan Untitled #10, 2008 graphite on paper 132x80"

Across town, “Very Very Large Drawings” at Gallery Joe includes a work so large the artist had to crawl on top of the paper to cover it with marks. Eight elephantine works on paper by seven artists prove large drawings can be inescapably seductive when their mark-making bewitches viewers into taking a contemplative journey.

Sabine Friesicke Metropolitan Time, 2009 gouache on paper 80x60"

Jill O’Bryan’s 11-foot untitled graphite drawing began as a rubbing of the rocky ground beneath her paper and was reworked in the studio. The piece evokes topography. Perhaps the image is the pock-marked surface of the moon. There is no repeat pattern for the eye to trace, yet the work mesmerizes, casting a spell like some kind of creature or icon on the wall.

Ani Hoover PolyChrome Daydream (Orange, Green, Yellow), 2009 Ink, acrylic and enamel spray paint on YUPO paper, 120x60"

Elsewhere, the show is full of repeat lines and patterns that also hold the power to entrance. Linn Meyers’ untitled drawing with swirls of marker lines emanating from a central core will beguile. Sabine Friesicke’s Metropolitan Time , an eye-popping checkerboard pattern that evokes an office building at night or a Matrix-like rain of squares, is hard to turn away from, while Emily Brown and Sandra Allen’s representations of trees both have deep abstract passages that invite rumination. Allyson Strafella’s two cast paper pulp drawings evoke the smoky spirituality of Mark Rothko. Ani Hoover’s ebullient and watery field of spray-painted circles and dots in Polychrome Daydream (Orange, Green, Yellow) updates Monet’s Water Lilies for the grafitti and digital generation. These extremely large drawings—like the small landscape photos—weave their spells slowly and have the power to seduce. Size does matter, but mostly it’s what you do with it.

8×10 and Under: Small Landscapes, to Jan. 23.  Gallery 339, 339 S. 21st St.  215 731 1530.

Very Very Large Drawings, to Jan. 30.  Gallery Joe, 302 Arch St.  215 592 7752.

Barkley L. Hendricks, Misc. Tyrone (Tyrone Smith), 1976. Oil and magna on linen canvas, 72 x 50 ¼ inches. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, NY.Barkley L. Hendricks, Tequila, 1978. Oil and acrylic on linen canvas, 60 ¾ x 50 ¼ inches. Collection of the Butler Institute for American Art, Youngstown, OH.

I was struck by, how in a funny reversal of expectation, Hendricks’ paintings, with their blank backgrounds and fashion focus, come out of a recent photographic tradition, while so many of the photographs in Personal Views come more directly out of the painting tradition, in which sitters pose with symbols of their worth.

Hendricks’ portraits also reference religious icons, an association that elevates his subjects to sainthood. Some of the paintings glow with an ethereal light; and some of them have iconic gilt backgrounds. Surrounded by nothing but ether, with no details of the urban environment from where they come, these subjects are well-positioned to communicate their self-worth with sartorial splendor. They come without pedigree and create their own individuality. It’s costume as self-invention. And Hendricks loves and admires them for being exactly who they are.

Barkley L. Hendricks, Icon for My Man Superman (Superman never saved any black people – Bobby Seale), 1969, Oil, acrylic, and aluminum leaf on linen canvas, 59 ½ x 48 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, NY.

This is not art as fashion design; this is art with a political subtext. The scale is confrontational, grand and powerful at the same time that the figures are non-threatening. The iconoclasm in Icon for My Man Superman, a portrait of Bobby Seale, takes both Superman and Seale off pedestals, humanizing the cartoon, humorizing the man. Barkley Hendricks loves his subjects and loves people. It comes through loud and clear. He is legitimizing, embodying, making visible. It’s a gentle approach to a social revolution.

Sarah Stolfa, Benton, MS, 2007, Archival Pigment Print, 24 x 30 inches, Edition of 10

Sarah Stolfa’s, Zoe Strauss’ and Justyna Badach’s portraits at Gallery 339 may provide environment in the tradition of Rembrandtian burghers, but their subjects are not exactly burghers. not the usual powerful or moneyed class who can afford to commission Annie Leibovitz.

Justyna Badach, Rourke, 2009, Archival Pigment Print, 23" x 30"; Edition of 3; 31" x 40"; Edition of 3

Badach’s photos of bachelors are sad, the men isolated in forlorn environments of their own choosing and creation. These photos have no lushness to them, but the question of who we are looking at and why is plenty of a draw, with or without the statements Badach displays with the photos.

Sarah Stolfa, Memphis, TN, 2007, Archival Pigment Print, 24 x 30 inches, Edition of 10

In Stolfa’s current series on view, which references Robert Frank and Alec Soth, there’s a question of intention. She lets the subjects project who they are. But she cannot cross the social divide in the same way that she did in her portraits across the bar at McGlinchey’s.  Stolfa means to disconcert her viewer. And I suspect she herself is disconcerted by the kitchen worker with the gun at her waist. In this sense, Stolfa’s portraits are less about the individuals, and more about a cultural divide between northern and southern values.

Zoe Strauss, Bunny, 2001, Archival Pigment Print, 20 x 30 inches

Not so in Strauss’s work, where the people’s faces become a roadmap away from Britney and Joan Rivers, a different vision from the media circus of what it means to be human. Strauss is the Walt Whitman of Philadelphia photographers, singing her love for an entire side of the culture otherwise ignored. But unlike the romanticizer Hendricks, Strauss keeps the hard-scrabble environment and the hard-nosed realism, be it no makeup or too much makeup.

Andrea Modica, Sicily 7, 1990, Platinum/Palladium Contact Print, 8 x 10 inches, Edition of 20

Also in the show at 339 are Andrea Modica’s sociological photographs of Italians who have been largely untouched by glamor shots and the notion of performing for the camera; Rita Bernstein’s painterly photographs that are less about portraiture than mood and light and material; Jessica Todd Harper’s portraits of middle-class comfort, which seem closest to the burgher portraits of the Dutch golden age of painting; and Nadine Rovner’s setups, which are less about the individual people and more about cinematic mise-en-scenes.

a portrait by Josh Rickards

PS: I saw Josh Rickards at BYOTY at Little Berlin while I was thinking about the photos and Hendricks, so then I gave some thought to what Rickards is doing. He, like Hendricks, takes the subject out of a real environment. Sometimes the background is a blank color, but sometimes he creates a flat, abstracted environment that represents a milieu, a time and a place. And his stylized faces, which draw from craft veneer drawing, emphasizes the deadpan ordinariness of his subject. These are not so much personal portraits; they are pictures of a lifestyle and subculture.

Personal Views: Contemporary Photographic Portraiture in Philadelphia is up through November 14, 2009 and Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool is up to January 3, 2010.

David Graham‘s Almost Paradise at Gallery 339 shows the Philadelphia photographer’s recent road trips all over the US. Almost Hell is more like it. Touching down everywhere from the post-Katrina south of New Orleans and Gulfport to places like Goodyear, Az, Omaha, NE, and Studio City CA, Graham trains his camera on the odd surreal moment and, especially, the odd bit of American advertising signage.  Graham’s deadpanning camera serves up the real world as one piece of Almost Fiction after another. It’s not really Ripley’s Believe it Or Not but sometimes it’s not too far from that either.

Graham has a particular zest for the macabre. He’s not a documentarian like WeeGee but his photos are documentation of the weird.

David Graham
Dallas, Texas, 2007
photographic c-print

Suyeon Yun
Crabmeat, Boulder CO, 2007
Archival Pigment Print

Yale’s M.F.A. program in photography is known for turning out artists who specialize in stagey, inscrutable film-noir hyper-realism focused on scenes of societal or domestic dysfunction. Gregory Crewdson, himself a perpetrator of X-Files-like drama photos, is the Yale prof who makes such a heavy imprint.

But for every rule there’s an exception. The work of this year’s Yale M.F.A. photo grads—as seen in a show at Gallery 339—is less Hollywood drama-driven than quiet and inner-fueled. The scale is modest and the ambience is sad and sweet throughout.

Included in the nine-artist show—a smaller version of the students’ M.F.A. thesis exhibit that showed previously at Yale and in New York at Danziger Projects—is born-again Philadelphian Sarah Stolfa, whose large-scale color portraits of McGlinchey’s bar customers made a big splash a few years back. It’s always interesting to see what effect schooling has on an artist, and Stolfa, who’s in the 339 stable, is showing some great landscape photos and an interior in which portraiture has expanded from the extreme close-up on facial characteristics and gestures to a more narrative approach to people and their surroundings.

Sarah Stolfa
Athens, AL, 2007
Archival Pigment Print
30 x 24 inches

Like several artists in the show, Stolfa’s works come from a road trip around the country during which she took photos of friends as well as of complete strangers. One remarkable photo of a light-filled bedroom in Athens, Ala., is a puzzle that slowly unfolds. As details add up, you realize the art-bedecked room also contains a hospital bed and medical apparatus and belongs to someone bed-ridden. The person is tucked under a blanket and all but hidden, and this “I am my room” portrait could be set in an institution and not what looks to be an ordinary bedroom in a house.

Jen Davis
Mike, New Orleans, LA, 2007
Archival Pigment Print

Jen Davis’ shots of men, boys and a cowboy—all tinged with macho posturing that feels real and unprovoked—are the artist’s chronicle of “the other.” Davis, whose self-portraits of her plus-sized body are well known (some were shown in Philadelphia in 2003 in the group show “Self-Centered” at CFEVA) also shows a self-portrait in the shower that’s a knock-out.

Jen Davis
Untitled, 2008
Archival Pigment Print

Marley White’s portraits of her father and several playful works of a cat, a sailboat and a historical reenactor are cheerfully disturbing. White’s subject is perception and the human psyche. In an untitled work that evokes Jeff Wall’s darkly weird setups, White captures her father cataloging his Tic Tac box collection. The man’s intensity is palpable as he bends to his task of organizing the empty plastic boxes. The scene in the tidy, tchotchke-filled study raises issues of obsession and family dynamics. Her photo of a gray-and-white cat licking a small porcelain figurine of a gray-and-white cat is a chuckle about what’s real.

Marley White
Untitled, 2007
Archival Pigment Print
50 x 42 inches

Suyeon Yun’s photos come from a road trip during which she focused on the effects of war on ordinary people. Crabmeat, Boulder, Colo., is an almost perfect picture of family dysfunction. A family sits around the dinner table in what looks like a comfortable suburban home, but one young girl is disaffected and reading a book while the mother is speaking to another child who’s pouting, and the father is the only one eating happily as if nothing is wrong.

Also great in a wonderful show of personally fueled works that explore the world of I, you, we and they are Sasha Rudensky, Bradley Peters, Samantha Contis, Richard Mosse and Bryan Graf.

Marley White
Untitled, 2007
Archival Pigment Print
30 x 24 inches

Stolfa, by the way, has moved back to Philadelphia and brought her classmate Marley White with her. As gallerist Martin McNamara explained, the artists figured they could have gone to New York and been waitresses and tried to be artists. But they knew if they came to Philadelphia they could be artists and try to make something happen for themselves.
“Sarah became the ultimate PR person for Philly trying to get all her classmates to come here,” McNamara said. Can’t give her any flack for that.

“Yale M.F.A. Photography 2008”
Through Sept. 6. Free.
Gallery 339
339 S. 21st St.
215.731.1530.