A virtual ramble through Paris Photo 2019

John Chamberlain, Downtown, chromogenic print, 1989

I will not fool you, dear readers, into thinking I was there while in truth I'm just sitting in a room in New York and the fair opened last night without me (it runs November 7 - 10).  I can only wish.  The beauty of art fairs nowadays of course is you don't really have to go, you can just scroll through the images on your computer.  I've taken advantage of that and I'll share with you the half dozen or so that caught my eye out of perhaps a thousand on display, a ratio of significance.  For the grand majority of photographic works at such fairs will not usually have much to interest us, the non-figurative community, devoted as these fairs are to familiar camera-based tropes of haunted landscapes, glum nudes, shopworn surrealism, subjects of prurient social interest, documentation of marginal lives, typologies, and so on.  You will look in vain for work that accepts the photographic emulsion itself as the site of the artistic act.  Probably because it's so hard to comprehend, there is little attempt to create something out of nothing, of finding the resonant forms that only the most immediate and obdurate materials can provide.  No chemigram, no bleach-etch, no cliché-verre, no cyanotype has found its way into the Grand Palais this year as near as I can tell - though to be fair, and I am fair, a scant few photograms were sighted, and perhaps certain works of a hybrid or invented nature, but not many.

Grand Palais, home of Paris Photo

So, we take it for what it is and overlook what it is not.  Let us be open to surprise.  I begin with the item I like best, the C-print above by the late John Chamberlain, the artist best known, even exclusively known, for making sculptures out of twisted, wrecked, flattened automobiles.  Many of us don't realize he branched out toward the end of his career into painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, even into furniture design, bringing with him the jarring rhythms of his earlier metal-based work.   To my mind these subsets of his oeuvre have not earned the respect they deserve.  I encourage you to have another look at them.  Galerie Karsten Greve is showing him in Paris.

Klea McKenna, photographic rubbing, photogram on silver gelatin fiber paper, 2017

Klea McKenna has modified the photogram process to accommodate her fascination with the tactility of surfaces, especially where the surfaces have been part of a living organism or constitute the record of a life.  I love how she goes out at night, performs a rubbing in relief of, say, a cut tree, onto photographic paper, then shines the raking light of a flashlight over it and develops it.  She has worked with rocks, spider webs, women's garments from various cultures, rain, and other materials, both the hard and the diaphanous.  What facilitates this is her great insight, so elemental yet so decisive, that photo paper can receive and impart information simply by being physically pressed and shaped by the artist.  She's having shows this fall simultaneously at the Gitterman Gallery (New York) and the Von Lintel (Los Angeles).

László Moholy-Nagy, Fotogramm III, 1925

The Kicken Gallery of Berlin has provided us with a photogram by László Moholy-Nagy which I had not seen before, from 1925.  Anything by this great theoretician of the Bauhaus, who as much as anyone developed the ideas underpinning what we know as modern style, is worth looking at, and this is no exception.  Does anyone know what that object is, hovering over the black expanse below it?  Send us a comment.

Noboru Ueki, title unknown, hand-colored silver gelatin, date uncertain

An early experimentalist working around Kyoto during the 1940s and 1950s, Ueki was considered important but we have had difficulty finding much else about him except that he liked to hand-color his photographs, and clearly he was quite good at it.  The Mem Gallery of Tokyo included Ueki, who died in 1992, in an historical show last month of members of the Kyoto Photographic Society.

Jérémie Lenoir, Stockage, Saint-Cyr-en-Val, print on dibond, 2013

Jérémie Lenoir is interested in environmental processes and the ways in which society impacts those processes.  He spent several years photographing around the Great Salt Lake in Utah, with emphasis on the mineralization of the shores.  The picture above is apparently a reservoir, near Orléans in central France.  If it looks familiar it's probably because bears an uncanny resemblance to work by the sculptor Lee Bontecou, although the scales are altogether dissimilar.  He is represented by the Galerie Guillaume in Paris.

Edward Burtynsky, Tsaus Mountains #1, Sperrgebiet, Namibia, pigment print, 2018

The Burtynsky is the final one I'll offer you in this potpourri - for the life of me I can't find any others in the entire Grand Palais worth adding to the list.  But a Burtynsky is always prodigious and riveting, and I could never exclude it.  For me, his work extends beyond photography; it feels like we're consorting with the gods.  We last wrote about him in 2016 here.  Our words then ring true now.  He's currently at Nicholas Metivier in Toronto.

So there you have it, the 2019 edition of Paris Photo.  Six pictures.

Edward Burtynsky's new pictures: his best yet?

Burtynsky, Salt Pan #16, Little Rann of Kutch, Gujarat, India, 2016

I dropped in on Howard Greenberg the other day on my way home from Tom Gitterman's, since they'd lately been showing some alchemic things designed to add, as I imagined it, a needed chunk of spice to the usual fare of big-name conventional shows, and I wanted to see more of that.  I'm referring specifically to their alternative show of last September, curated by Jerry Spagnoli, with Adam Fuss's daguerrotypes and Sally Mann's wet-plate ambrotypes catching my eye in a great, unanticipated feast of alternative on East 57th Street.  I had no right to expect to be blessed twice in a year but that's no reason not to hope.

Burtynsky, Salt Pan #23, Little Rann of Kutch, Gujarat, India, 2016

  

detail, Salt Pan #25, 2016

Burtynsky, Salt Pan #5, Little Rann of Kutch, Gujarat, India, 2016

 

Burtynsky, Salt Pan #29, Little Rann of Kutch, Gujarat, India, 2016

 

detail, Salt Pan #25, 2016

So frankly I was blindsided by Edward Burtynsky's new pictures, the Salt Pan series, on display till the end of the year (a parallel, broader sampling of his work was running until recently at the Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery in Chelsea).

Burtynsky is an inescapable presence these days in the swankier venues and the best museums.  He has been making outsized prints of blasted, ruined landscapes for quite a while, of oil derricks, open-pit mines, iron scrapyards, effluents, slagheaps, often at herculean scales or from helicopter perspectives.  Because of this, or partly because of it, humans are nowhere to be seen - they would be dots at best - but this absence becomes both a vengeful ghostly presence and, predictably, an indictment, and is at least as striking as the marks which human appetites have left on the face of the earth.  So while these pictures, in their hi-megapixel magnificence, may be impeccably drawn and fastidiously detailed  thanks to processing at Toronto Image Works, it's their implicit form, a backstory of flat-out human degradation and greed that suggests why they convey the impact they do.  The lives of the Gujarat salt-harvesters represented here are short and brutal; that of their owners and bankers, soft and luxurious.  Some have called these eco-pictures but I would disagree and go further: behind an aesthetic mask, they are an outraged condemnation of capitalism.

Now that I've said that, let me take back what I just said even though it's also very, very true.  These pictures would be great even without being eco-pictures.  They're great, it seems to me, because they are less photographs than most of his previous work, and more akin to paintings.  There, I've said it: paintings.  With them he at last begins to liberate himself from the constraints of a reactive photography that receives signals and records them, and moves to a position where he combs the world for materials for a composition all his own and seizes upon them.  Acknowledging a debt to abstract expressionism (or his take on it anyway), he is mastering ways of using the fullness of the plane, the suggestiveness of the line, the control of an acerbic color palette.  He brings with him an idea, an abstract idea, formed of painted dreams, then looks to find ways to express it in what nature gives him as data or input, the rest falling where it may.

And to think we thought all this time he was just documenting stuff.

We're not going back to the gum-bichromates of a century ago, to pure pictorialism.  This is important.  There's no danger of that.  The moral imperative remains, the lessons, the openness.  The sheer contemporary grandeur.  But if you come to these new pictures looking for photographs, you are left grasping at nothing familiar and it's hard to understand them on those terms.  I'll give two examples that struck me on first seeing them.  Examine the white lines in the last detail from Salt Pan #25.  Notice how they stutter, then widen and billow, then resume: a highly painterly effect, uncanny in a photograph.  I thought at first they had been drawn with a white pen marker, but when I swooped in on that same salt pan with Google Earth I realized that was how salt looks raked up in little rows and piles.  Stock photos of the Gujarat salt-harvesters show the same thing:

salt-gatherers in the Little Rann of Kutch

Another example of Burtynsky's skill in making a picture is in his control of tonal range.  In salt pans elsewhere (San Francisco, Morocco) and even in the Little Rann of Kutch, bacteria and algae color the evaporating water variously according to the level of salinity in a particular pond.  Colors will range from blue to green to orange and red (dunaliella sp., archaea sp.) to, eventually, black, when the organisms have died, to white, when microbes have cleansed the salt crystals.  Seeking a muted palette for his Salt Pan series, Burtynsky waited until light conditions were favorable, the desert darkening somewhat and the boldness of some of the ponds' colors attenuating.  He may have chosen to photograph toward the end of the harvest as well, to assure a preponderance of blacks and whites.

I am reminded in looking at his results of certain works of postwar British abstraction.  Here's one from the 1960s by Roger Hilton.  Even its moody title, October, echoes Burtynsky.

Roger Hilton, October, 1965

In the past, Burtynsky's interests have swung from what could be taken as activist environmentalism, all the way to a pure geometric, almost tantric, contemplativeness.  The latter include his series on Borromini's ceiling at Sant'Ivo (1999) and his Pivot Irrigation series from the Texas Panhandle (2012), which, until he produced his Salt Pans, was one of my favorites.  But with this new work, everything has changed.

Near the end of a recent radio broadcast on the BBC, he characterized his work, perhaps all his work, as a lament.  Is there a deeper sense of life than that?