JULIE BLACKMON – TALENT SHOW

Posted on 2020-04-27

There is a dreamlike quality to Blackmon’s imagery. Children live, play, grow bored, make up stories, act them out and play some more, as if unaware of the camera, while the artist devises a tableau of domestic entropy. Blackmon says,“I compare [my work] sometimes to fiction and literature; sometimes the greatest truth can come out of fiction.”

Drawing influence from her own family life, the Dutch master Jan Steen and French modernist painter, Balthus, Blackmon creates photographs that have an air of a past era, perhaps the 1950’s or ’60s, yet her use of 21st-century iconography, such as a perfectly placed iPhone recording a makeshift Talent Show, tells us that they are quite contemporary. Blackmon sets her scenes in familiar environments like a backyard bathing session or a fixer upper house and sometimes with multiple competing narratives at once. She focuses on children and families that are imbued with personality, yet overtaken by the haphazardness of child-rearing despite all the best-laid plans.

Opposite – Talent Show, 2019

Exhibition runs through to April 30th, 2020

Robert Mann Gallery
525 West 26th Street, Floor 2
New York
NY 10001

www.robertmann.com

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DOROTHEA LANGE – WORDS & PICTURES

Posted on 2020-04-27

In her landmark 1939 photobook An American Exodus—a central focus of the show—Lange experiments with combining words and pictures to convey the human impact of Dust Bowl migration. Conceived in collaboration with her husband, agricultural economist Paul Taylor, the book weaves together field notes, folk song lyrics, newspaper excerpts, and observations from contemporary sociologists. These are accompanied by a chorus of first-person quotations from the sharecroppers, displaced families, and migrant workers at the center of her pictures. Presenting Lange’s work in its diverse contexts—photobooks, Depression-era government reports, newspapers, magazines, poems—along with the voices of contemporary artists, writers, and thinkers, the exhibition offers a more nuanced understanding of Lange’s vocation, and new means for considering words and pictures today.

Opposite – Kern County, California, November 1938

Exhibition runs through to May 2nd, 2020

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
11 West 53 Street
New York
NY 10019

www.moma.org

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NORM DIAMOND – DOUG’S GYM

Posted on 2020-04-20

In 2017 and 2018, Norm Diamond photographed an old downtown gym in Dallas, Texas. It was an urban fixture for many decades until its recent closing.

Opposite – Cutouts 2017-2018

Exhibition runs through to April 30th, 2020

Afterimage Gallery
2613B Fairmount Street
Dallas, TX 75201

www.afterimagegallery.com

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GAYLE CHONG KWAN – KEW / PAMPLEMOUSSE

Posted on 2020-04-20

Gayle Chong Kwan’s photographic series Kew/Pamplemousse, centers on natural elements from the botanical gardens, the concepts of exploration and hierarchies merge, giving birth to very colorful, yet transparent, reflective, and partially blurred, images.
Overlapping forms, lights and synesthetic sensations from two different geographical and cultural realities, Gayle Chong Kwan invites us to a timeless journey where distance is omitted, a topic that seems of particular interest in this time of isolation.
In this series, started in 2001, the artist combines two aspects of the ‘botanical Empire’ in doubleexposed analog photographic prints that connect the botanical gardens of Kew in the UK and Pamplemousse in Mauritius, which was once one of its colonies.
Botanical gardens played an important role in the political economy of the British Empire, with Kew Gardens holding a central role as receptor of seeds, cuttings and dried flowers from the colonies. Moreover, botanical gardens were established in Europe to cultivate the specimens that were brought back from explorations, with a view to marketable profit.

Opposite – Kew/Pamplemousse 2, 2001

Exhibition runs through to April 30th, 2020

Obscura Gallery
1405 Paseo de Peralta
Santa Fe, NM 87505

www.obscuragallery.net

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DAVID MARLIN – SINGLE FIGURE

Posted on 2020-04-20

The news stories and famous faces that I photographed number in the thousands. I had a front row seat on life itself. I covered the great and near great, and the homeless eating out of dumpsters. I filmed kings and queens, presidents, and princes of the church. I recorded militants and pacifists, and great revelations in medicine. My camera and I were witness to the wise counsel of the experts of our time. I had a great passion for covering television news during the journalistically exciting period of the 50’s through the 80’s, a time that produced a constant flood of headline stories. You never knew what the next phone call would bring.

However, artists, sculptors, photographers, and other creators of art, can hold their work in their hands or stand back and behold it with their eyes. That’s not the case for a photojournalist or producer of television news. Our work is so fleeting. Unless it is a story of a very unusual news event that gets played over and over, once the film or tape runs on the news-it’s gone forever. Great effort and creativity vanishes, for the most part never to be seen again-only remembered. Knowing this motivated me, if possible, to try and capture the essence of the moment with my still camera.

Exhibition runs through to June 7th, 2020

Griffin Museum of Photography
67 Shore Road
Winchester
MA 01890

griffinmuseum.org

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