PETER LINDBERGH

Posted on 2014-10-20

Over the course of his career, Lindbergh has taken inspiration for his photography from modern dance, early German and East European cinema and photography, as well as his own personal history, resulting in a bold, elemental photographic language. With a minimum of artifice, spare styling, and openness to improvisation, he allows the innate character and natural beauty of his female subjects to emerge.

In his editorial photographs for Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Interview, and many other international magazines, Lindbergh replaced stagy, calculated glamour with a raw vérité approach, enhanced by his use of high-contrast black and white. Set in both rural and industrial landscapes, the women in his photographs are distinguished by beauty that is purposeful, self-possessed, and uninhibited. “I don’t think real beauty can exist without truth,” Lindbergh has said. “This idea disqualifies today’s excessive retouching.”

The exhibition includes the pivotal “Wild at Heart” feature inspired by biker culture and shot on the streets of Brooklyn for Vogue in 1991; the gritty image of Kate Moss shot for Harper’s Bazaar in 1994 that was inspired by Walker Evans’ iconic New Deal photographs; austerely beautiful depictions of women in motion that allude to modern dance; and editorial portraits of models including Kristen McMenamy and Uschi Obermaier, in which the subjects’ clothing and setting are secondary to their expressiveness and movement. Breaking with the idea of classical chic, in 1988 he photographed six emerging models, Karen Alexander, Linda Evangelista, Estelle Lefébure, Tatjana Patitz, Christy Turlington, and Rachel Williams—in identical men’s white shirts on a Los Angeles beach.

Opposite – Mathilde, Eiffel Tower, 1989

Exhibition runs through to November 22nd, 2014

Gagosian Gallery Paris
Project Space
4 Rue De Ponthieu
75008 Paris

www.gagosian.com

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BRYAN GRAF – PRISMATIC TRACKS

Posted on 2014-10-20

As with his previous exhibitions – Wildlife Analysis, Field Recordings and Broken Lattice – Graf’s new works explore the tensions between control and chance. All of the works in Prismatic Tracks were produced as unique, camera-less photograms, a process by which the artist can exert certain constraints while purposefully leaving other elements beyond his control. Throughout the body of work, Graf employs mesh as a metaphor for structure, order, and systems, and light as a variable element. As Graf describes:

“A track is a recording. A track is a path made by physical activity. Prismatic Tracks is an optical research into kinetic photograms made with light, mesh screen & photosensitive paper. Perspective is everything. Light is exposed onto the paper from various angles, with multiple colors, to create these images. Paths of light cross one another on the sheet of paper – being filtered, refracted, warped and bent as they travel through the screens onto paper. Multiple paths are made and the light generates new forms as the exposures of light from various angles blend together.
These prints are the results of physically moving around a sheet of light sensitive paper with a flash at different angles, primary-colored filters stuffed in my pockets, and folding mesh screen to generate the forms on paper. This work has nothing to do with abstraction or the preconditioned and specious history of an abstract movement. It has everything to do with being obsessed and consumed with light and the primal and necessary manifestations it conjures in our imaginations.”

Opposite – Prismatic Tracks, Midnight Drive I, 2014

Exhibition runs through to December 6th, 2014

Yancey Richardson
525 West 22nd Street
New York
NY 10011

www.yanceyrichardson.com

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