Art In America reviewed Holly Andres's exhibition Sparrow Lane at Quality Pictures in Portland, Oregon, in their December issue; Sparrow Lane was on view at Robert Mann Gallery through December 6. The full review by Sue Taylor is included here:

Trained as a painter, Portland artist Holly Andres has found her true métier in photograph and film. Her new photographic series, "Sparrow Lane" (2007-08), focuses entirely on four girls, shown doggedly sleuthing in the manner of Nancy Drew and her Chums. Clad in party dresses or shirts and sweaters with white hose, these fair-haired friends explore a world of satin, lace and patterned wallpaper, pursuing obscure mysteries as they search a house upstairs and down. The 11 skillfully stages and manipulated images are eerily beautiful with vivid, saturated hues and hallucinogenic detail.

What secret does the house hold? That the enigma is a sexual one we surmise from Andres's playful symbolism in Outside the Forbidden Bedroom, where two girls open a locked door with the insertion of a golden key. With this artful cliché, Andres tips us to the allegorical significance of her story, and we hunt for deeper meanings. The girls' quest, we suspect, is ultimately for self-knowledge; like all children, they probably wonder "where do I come from?"

The bedroom, as the site of conception, may yield an answer to this question of origins. Once inside the chamber, a girl seated near a dressing table intently scissors open a velvet throw pillow as others look on. Curiosity about the maternal body is here metaphorically indulged, while outdoors two blondes kneel on the lawn to examine The Golden Pillow, its cottony insides exposed. The composition resembles a Nativity, in which Andres's youthful investigators ponder the miracle of birth. Pink blossoms litter the ground, hinting at the girls' waning springtime innocence.

In the basement, twins discover an empty bird cage. One aims a flashlight inside it; the other glances up, searching for The Missing Bird. Two cats lurking in the shadows, possible perps, escape their notice. It is a charming image of naiveté whose latent content—given the long-standing symbolic link between an empty birdcage and the loss of virginity—might involve sexual awakening. Upstairs, the girls explore wondrous cubbyholes and drawers—read womblike spaces—sometimes leaving hallways strewn with snippets of hair and the telltale scissors. Ladders and stairs recur, evokking Freud's interpretation of staircase dreams as scenes of sexual activity. Indeed, in The Ruby Ring, an older dirl on a carpeted stairway studies the eponymous treasure, a symbol for the female genitals, while her younger sister gazes down from the landing above. Andres subtly and wittily acknowledges the possibility of such covert meanings with Behind the Old Painting, where the girls peek behind a framed portrait in the living room: similarly, beneath every manifest scene in Sparrow Lane a secret content awaits curious viewers striving to uncover it.
In the November 21 issue, The Washington Post reviewed Leo Rubinfien: Wounded Cities, on view at the Corcoran Gallery through February 16. Wounded Cities is also on exhibit at Robert Mann Gallery through January 31, 2009. The review by Henry Allen is included here:

Saw the flash... women, children... plate glass scaling through the air... one minute just a blue truck parking by the market, then... heard somebody screaming and it was me... saw a plane where you don't see planes... a shoe lying there with the foot still in it... the wall collapsed like it was melting... hidden under her robes... on the sidewalk like he was just sleeping... if I'd left the cafe 30 seconds later... what kind of person...

Terrorism creates witnesses, onlookers, bystanders, survivors. That's the point. It terrorizes them — changes them forever, gives them dreams where they see the bicyclist again and again and they try to shout that he's going to... terrible moments for years on subways, a dead spot in their souls. It sucks the meaning out of their lives, and they'll never get all of it back.

Leo Rubinfien, photographer and writer, was in his apartment two blocks from the World Trade Center when the planes hit, Sept. 11, 2001.

"The plane was moving far faster than you ever saw one go so low in the sky... jagged tear in the north tower... exploded... hot and orange, the great gassy flower blew out," he writes in "Wounded Cities," a book that accompanies his photography show of the same name at the Corcoran Gallery.

Unlike so many other photographers, Rubinfien never made the disaster site his subject. He reasoned that yes, there were rubble, chaos and heroism to photograph. But the terror itself lived on in the minds and hearts of its witnesses, in their recognition of a truth contrary to anything they'd imagined, as if some bedrock had given way and reality itself had betrayed them.

He wanted to show this in pictures. He knew he would find it only in faces, not in wreckage or corpses.

He traveled to places that had suffered terrorist attacks: Tokyo; Tel Aviv; Istanbul; Manila; Colombo, Sri Lanka; Bali, Indonesia; Buenos Aires.

Unlike generations of documentary photographers recording the troubles of the world, he made no effort to reveal private truths lurking beneath public faces.

Instead, he used people on the streets as unwitting actors. He had no idea what they were thinking about. They could have been fearing the suicide explosion of the taxi next to them, or "they could have been worrying about a chicken they left in the oven," he says. It didn't matter.

These pictures — 5 by 6 feet, mostly black-and-white — don't tell the truth about these people as much as they tell a truth with these people, as if they were figures in a Crucifixion pageant, standing beneath the cross, astonished, frightened, their faces asking, "Did you really think this couldn't happen?" They are accidental models. The pictures look like documents, but they aren't. They're nothing but art. He has escaped the idea of the photograph as fact-in-itself, as a physical record of reality, and given us a concept instead, a fiction.

It's a fiction you believe, for the moment, like all good fiction. You become complicit in Rubinfien's chicanery. Instead of seeing people worried about lost car keys, you willingly see witnesses of terror.

You behold the astonished disgust of a woman in Tel Aviv, the desperate contempt of a man by a stoplight in Madrid, the sad amazement of an old woman in London who can take small comfort only in knowing that after all she has seen and learned, she still has not lost her capacity for shock. A man in Moscow sees the horror once more — he knows too much and knows that he knows it. A toddler in Mombasa, Kenya, stares with the terrible coldness of children while the mother bows her head in sorrow. A young blonde in Moscow smokes a cigarette and thinks about a new future racing toward her and wonders what she'll have to do to survive it, how demeaning it will get.

Peering from corners, staring at the sky, these faces seem both appalled and relieved to note that they are bearing the unbearable, and holding up quite nicely, thank you. Or they are cynics disappointed to discover that they were right all along, that there is no such thing as cynicism, their most caustic and dismissive opinions are ordinary truth.

Looked at each other with a wild surmise... changed, changed utterly...

Or they're worried about the chicken they left in the oven.

Walker Evans, who documented faces of the Depression, once said that he didn't think a photograph told you anything about the inner person. We don't like to think that's true. Hence the public acclaim for Richard Avedon, whose famous faces are upstairs at the Corcoran right now, with their pretense of showing you the real Eisenhower, the real Kissinger. But it was usually a photographer's trick that Avedon played to make you think you were seeing the alienation or bewilderment behind bright, wise, courageous faces.

Here in a downstairs gallery, in a show curated by Philip Brookman with his usual deft clarity, Rubinfien goes beyond this conceit of insight and simply uses the people he photographs to illustrate what he himself felt, knew and would never forget after 9/11. And beyond that, he shows us a side of humanity that we all recognize thanks to the most expressive medium in the world, the human face, which sends signals with near-perfect efficiency. You see. You know.
New York magazine featured Robert Mann Gallery's recent exhibition, Holly Andres: Sparrow Lane, in their November 19 issue. The feature by Emma Pearse is included here:

Holly Andres might be the slightly crazy girl who always shows up to your stoop sale in search of the gaudiest objects you can't believe anyone would pay for. Andres takes these objects and transforms her own house into the sort of horror-tinged scenes that would have drawn froth from Lewis Carroll's mouth. Here, we're seeing a book jacket for a nonexistent Nancy Drew novel: The Case of the Spilled Milk. Andres's bonbon-hued photographs are up at Robert Mann Gallery through December 6.
In the November 13 issue, The Guardian reviewed Leo Rubinfien's new book, Wounded Cities. Wounded Cities is on exhibit at Robert Mann Gallery through January 31, 2009. The full review by Liz Jobey is included here:

It is rare that a book of writing and photographs works symbiotically, rather than the text being an introduction to, or a critical essay about the pictures. Between 2001 and 2006, as he travelled to different cities round the world, taking photographs, Leo Rubinfien's commentary must have been growing inside him; moving from initial out-and-out chaos towards the thoughtful, controlled, but still charged piece of writing that appears in Wounded Cities, the story of how he and his family and the world around him were fundamentally altered by 9/11.

The book contains around 80 portraits, mostly in black and white, but occasionally in colour, taken on the streets of cities that have suffered terrorist attacks: New York, Madrid, London, Nairobi, Bombay, Tokyo, Hebron, Karachi, Jerusalem and many others. Many of them are hidden beneath the text in a series of gatefold pages you have to unfold — a convention that seems tricksy at first. Once you get used to the rhythm of the text and pictures working together, however, it proves more than a random sequence, and provides a carefully ordered visual subtext to his story.

As Rubinfien admits, the expressions of ordinary people, caught in the street, tell us little about them. They might be late for work, or worried about a debt. But the truth is that most of us who live in modern cities are anxious about more than ordinary things. We are primed, somewhere inside, for the arrival of a tragedy. We have learned, either from the news, or first-hand, that death can strike out of nowhere, and we might not know from whom it came, or why.

Most of us have the images of 9/11 fixed in our heads. Even though we may live thousands of miles away from America, I doubt there are many people who can watch a low-flying jet disappear behind a high-rise building without wondering, for a split second, whether it's going to come out the other side. So to have moved into a new apartment two blocks away from the World Trade Centre, as Rubinfien's family had, that September, makes you wonder how they felt when the first plane hit the north tower and how they coped with the immediate aftermath.

Rubinfien's book describes all this: the day, the sights, the noise, his unwillingness to believe that what was happening was not some terrible accident. "A second plane would have meant this was an attack, and I would not let go of the world of peace." But, as he acknowledges, it has been described thousands of times, just as the towers have fallen again and again on television replays as if people still can't believe it wasn't a movie.

His book, though, is less concerned with re-telling the events than with trying to understand their effects: on him, a middle-class, liberal Jewish American in his late 40s; on his wife, a Wall Street analyst; on his children, one of whom is struggling with a rare genetic mutation whose outcome is not fully understood; on his parents, who built the world he lives in now, and on the society of which they are all a part. Then, in a leap that takes him beyond New York and his immediate experience, he questions what effect terrorist attacks have had on other people, in other cities around the world, all of whom seem, spiritually, if not actually, wounded by the attacks of 9/11.

The book is divided into four chapters: the first looks at 9/11 and its immediate aftermath. The second considers the age into which Rubinfien was born, examining the legacy of America's post-war hegemony — not an empire in the old colonial sense, but a controlling presence via its complex of US bases around the world — which has brought the revenge of Osama bin Laden to his door. The third section looks at Islam, and the concept of jihad, as Rubinfien tries to understand why so many young men are willing to die by their own hands and take so many innocent civilians with them. In this he includes not only the followers of al-Qaida, but Palestinian militants, and other terrorist groups, not all of them Islamic. Groups so different that, he writes, "You could hardly squeeze them into the same sentence. And yet, I'd think, marooned in gloom, the wounded cities were alike, weren't they? From the victim's point of view they were. Civilians had been punished in them all, not by accident, not as collateral damage, but because they were civilians." In his search for answers, he finds a more sobering possibility: that rather than being driven by religious zeal, militant Islam offers its followers something more pervasive and more banal: "By way of jihad, a man who felt pushed down could recover his pride."

In the final chapter, as he considers the years since 2001, everywhere he finds division, not just between Muslim and Christian, but between democrats and republicans, Palestinians and Jews. In Gaza, he is reviled by a Palestinian for being an American, and for everything that stands for. This man tells Rubinfien he does not believe in suicide attacks, or terrorist bombs, but that, these days, if he heard something like that was going to happen, "I might do nothing to stop it. I might look the other way."

Rubinfien and his wife spend long nights arguing about the war. "I still don't understand why we went," his wife says about Iraq, and I still don't see why we're there." He wonders if Bush and Bin Laden are codependent. Could Bin Laden have foreseen that the long-term effect of the 9/11 attacks would be to turn America against itself, and the rest of the world away? He feels the ostracism of others keenly. Like thousands of other Americans, he explains that Bush's policies were never his own. But in the end, after all the nights his wife remembers as being dark, as if it was always winter, nothing is really resolved. His family has survived. But nothing is the same. From this Rubinfien has, nevertheless, made a convincing portrait of personal and global doubt.
In the November 18 issue, Telegraph reviewed Jem Southam's exhibition commissioned by The Lowry. The full review by Victoria Holman is included here:

Could there be a more potent symbol of Britain's maligned and declining industries than its most notorious nuclear installation — Sellafield?

For better or worse the site — of a fire in 1957, a large spill of radioactive material and the unstable uranium fuel it still contains — is inextricably bound with the Cumbrian coast's industrial heritage.Here and elsewhere along the region's desolate coast, landscape photographer Jem Southam has frozen in time snapshots of our historic industrial decline.

In his latest exhibition, commissioned by The Lowry (Salford) to explore the coastal landscapes painted by LS Lowry, Southam manages to reflect this history as well as Lowry's personal dislocation.

Lowry was best known for his industrial scenes — the swarms of people, like insects, rushing around in smudged grey streets — that epitomised the industrial age.

But the loneliness and unsettled character that simmered beneath the surface of these works did not completely come to the fore until later in his coastal landscapes and his down and outs series.

He came to acclaim in the 1950s but turned his back on the industrial scenes people knew in favour of painting the grey landscapes of coastal towns, like Maryport. As Lowry told his friend Geoffrey Bennett in a letter: "[There is] Nowhere else like it — Desolation and Decay."

Those paintings captured a landscape on the cusp of industrial decline.

Years later, Southam's exhibition is like a sombre and faithful retelling of the region's unfolded history and pushes Lowry's works into a new and more potent context.

The exhibition is titled Clouds Descending, after a Wesleyan hymn's reference to the Second Coming of Christ, but for Southam it also refers to the low-lying ceiling of thick black clouds that bear down on Lowry's coastlines. As in much of the photographer's work, the clouds, the sea and the grass, force their way through rotten timbers and tumbling slag piles, reclaiming and destroying the unsightly traces of industry.

Retracing Lowry's steps, through the Cumbrian towns of Maryport, Whitehaven, Workington, Sellafield and Barrow, Southam called on a number of experts to accompany him and contribute to the exhibition.These include Lindsay Brooks, an expert on LS Lowry; Richard Hamblyn, a popular science writer; Nick Alfrey, an art historian; Harriet Tarlo, a contemporary poet and David Chandler, curator and critic. Jem also walked with his brother Math Southam, an ornithologist, to gain further insights into the area.

Their tables of birds, poems that drip over pieces of wood and concise explanations of the journey are informative but it is Southam's incredibly detailed and patiently constructed images that are the true stars of the show.

He uses a large format camera to produce C-type prints from 8 x 10 inch negatives that record an extraordinarily high level of detail. When the pictures are enlarged from the negatives, under supervision at a commercial lab, they reveal an entrancing wealth of information.

For me some of the most beautiful prints were those of grey waters flecked with the sharp and agitated lines of reeds, so white, grey and perfectly formed as to look more abstract than landscape.

Lowry and Southam clearly found different sources of inspiration in this place. For Lowry, it was churches and people, as well as empty seas, while for Southam it is the detail of decay rather than the impression of it.

But both are undoubtedly fascinated with the sombre nature of the location. And it's peculiar but captivating beauty.

As Southam said: "It's desolate and wonderful."
Time Out New York chose Robert Mann Gallery's recent exhibition, Holly Andres: Sparrow Lane, for their Medium Cool feature, electing the exhibit the Best in Photography for the October 30-November 5 issue:

Intensely hued prints reveal a series of scenes that look part Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, part Eloise.

The artist's vividly colored photographs, reminiscent of scenes directed by Alfred Hitchcock, depict their charming young female protagonists as simultaneously eager to explore the world and wary of its latent dangers. Through Dec 6.
In the November 2008 issue, Art In America reviewed the gallery's recent exhibition, Silvio Wolf: Voyager. The full review by Michael Amy is included here:

"Voyager," Silvio Wolf's exhibition of large-scale chromogenic dye coupler prints, aimed for mystical heights. The Milanese artist's statement tells us that the show was conceived "as a literal and metaphorical journey through the gallery space." The 14 photographs were arrange in seven groupings, which included two triptychs and two diptychs that echoed the arrangements of panels in altarpiece (though each photograph could be sold separately).

First in the clockwise ordering of the installation was Red Screen (1999-2001) a photograph of the empty red velvet seats in Milan's Teatro alla Scala. Shot from above and verging on abstraction, the composition evokes a regimented audience and the theater as a place of ritual, which, in the contact of the exhibition, brought organized religion to mind. Such a reading of Red Screen was reinforced by pictures such as Chance 09 (2006-07), in which light flows through thin black drapes, thereby playing light against darkness, with the usual connotations of good versus evil, and reminding us of the iconography of revelation, as curtains may serves both to conceal and reveal. Chance 30 (2008), an abstract work that strongly suggests a landscape, and Chance 04 (Horizon 17), 2006, which is entirely nonobjective, seem to present the first acts of creation. Chance 23 (2006) shows a single distant tree — the Tree of Knowledge? — blurred by haze, while Chance 24 (2006) offers a trinity: three figures wrapped in mist and disappearing into white light. In the more abstract prints, Wolf spars with painting. Two painters who immediately come to mind when viewing certain photographs (Chance 05, Chance 08, Chance 10, Chance 03) are Rothko and Newman, whose works also address the mystical. That said, there is a physical slickness to Wolf's photographs — they are mounted between plexiglass and aluminum — which moves them from the spiritual and timeless toward a worldly, temporal realm of sensuous gratification.

As many titles indicate, Wolf welcomes the accidental and the unpredictable. Shot out of focus, Chance 05 (2006-07) is a lovely Rothkoesque composition in green, black and white whose subject is uncertain. Likewise Rothkoesque, Chance 03 (Horizon 16), 2006 with its superimposed, bleeding zones of white, pink, red and black, was printed from the film leader, which was exposed to light when the camera was loaded. Like Chance 30, it may be read as a desert — in the Holy Land perhaps — with overwhelming heat bearing down upon it. Wolf's works invite a quick read. But if that temptation is resisted, one starts to notice a range of connections between his images and the wider worlds of photography (notable Pictorialism, Constructivism, color pioneers like Eggleston, the work of Wolfgang Tillmans) and painting. Wolf clearly attaches a great deal of importance to technical and formal concerns (his mastery of color and light stand out), but he's happy to wrestle meaning from abstraction.
Leo Rubinfien's Wounded Cities series will be exhibited in upcoming solo exhibitions at the Corcoran Gallery of Art (October 18, 2008—February 16, 2009) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (January 31—April 26, 2009). Robert Mann Gallery will also be exhibiting Wounded Cities beginning December 11 and running through January 31. The book of the same name will be published by Steidl this fall. Wounded Cities is Leo Rubinfien's exploration of the "mental wound" that was left by the terror attacks in New York in 2001, and in cities around the world in the years before and after. Though the physical scars of the attacks were obvious, he believed that the emotional effect was more profound, and a year later he began working in cities that had been hit in similar ways, including London, Nairobi, Moscow, Buenos Aires, Istanbul, Karachi and Tokyo.

Wounded Cities is Leo Rubinfien's third solo exhibition at Robert Mann Gallery. His earlier project A Map of the East appeared as a one-man exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and has been called "one of the legendary works on Asia" (Donald Richie) and "a new kind of traveling picture poem" (Maria Morris Hambourg). Rubinfien's work is in major public and private collections in America, Europe and Japan and has been exhibited around the world, while his essays on photographers of the 20th century are among the essential writings on photography.
In the October 20th issue, The New Yorker reviewed the gallery's recent exhibition, Michel Szulc-Krzyzanowski: The Early Sequences 1977-1982. The full review is included here:

The twenty photographic sequences in this show were made between 1977 and 1982 while the artist was living in Baja California, which may account for their combination of conceptual smarts and trippy wit. Composed of between two and seven photographs, each piece finds Szulc-Krzyzanowski on the beach, playing with our perceptions. With the sea, the sand, and the sky as his serene backdrop, he levitates a stick, eclipses his shadow with his open palms, and shrinks a sand dollar. There's nothing particularly rigorous or revelatory here, but the work is entertaining, ingratiating, and not without flashes of magic.
Robbert Flick's artist's book, Parade Route: Pasadena, May 8 and May 9, 1993, will be on view as part of an upcoming exhibition at the MOCA Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles. Running from October 19, 2008 through January 18, 2009, To Illustrate and Multiply: An Open Book presents a survey of artists' books from 1965 to the present, focusing on the way that sequential ordering of information — which the MOCA curators call "a characteristic of time-based media" such as films — is translated to the medium of books.
Jem Southam's exhibition, Clouds Descending, will be on view at the Lowry Museum, from November 15, 2008 through March 22, 2009. The Lowry is named for L.S. Lowry, an English artist who painted the landscapes of northern England. Southam has been re-tracing Lowry's footsteps along the Cumbrian coastline where Lowry spent a good deal of time observing and recording the industrial landscapes and harbour towns of this area. Southam's journey has resulted in a remarkable series of images, focusing on the remnants of Cumbria's long and significant industrial past. The Lowry Museum is located in Salford Quays, just outside Manchester, England.
The gallery will be participating in upcoming art fairs Paris Photo and Pulse Miami.

Paris Photo will take place at the Carrousel du Louvre from November 13 to 16. Robert Mann's presentation will include works by Holly Andres, Lewis Baltz, Jeff Brouws, Joe Deal, Robbert Flick, Chip Hooper, Mary Mattingly, Richard Misrach, and Henry Wessel.

Pulse Miami will take place at Soho Studios in Miami's Wynwood District from Wednesday, December 3 to Sunday, December 7. The gallery will feature Gail Albert Halaban, Holly Andres, Jeff Brouws, Wijnanda Deroo, Robbert Flick, Mary Mattingly, Susan Rankaitis, Leo Rubinfien and Silvio Wolf.
Congratulations to Richard Misrach, recipient of the 2008 Lucie Award in the category of Fine Art. Each year the Lucie Awards honor the photography community's finest achievements with an Advisory Board that nominates deserving individuals across a variety of categories. Along with Lucie Awards for Lifetime Achievement, Humanitarian, Visionary, and Spotlight, achievement awards are give in the areas of Advertising, Documentary, Fashion, Fine Art, Photojournalism, Portraiture, and Sports.

The 6th Annual Lucie Awards will feature a Gala Awards Ceremony October 20, 2008 at Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall.

Robert Mann Gallery has represented Misrach's work for over twenty years and presented his first solo exhibition in New York.

Richard Misrach is one of the most significant photographers working today. His latest project, an elegiac meditation of human interaction with the ocean, and the topic of the exhibit, Richard Misrach: On the Beach, was inaugurated at the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently traveling to museums across the United States, among them the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC., and the High Museum in Atlanta, Georgia.

Misrach has received numerous awards and his photographs are held in the collections of over fifty major institutions internationally, among them the Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the Musee National d'Art Moderne, Beaubourg.


Gallery artists Joe Deal and Robbert Flick are included in the exhibition This Side of Paradise: Body and Landscape in L.A. Photographs at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California. The exhibition will be on view through September 15. This encyclopedic exhibition looks at 150 years of history and the ways in which the city of Los Angeles has provoked vital bodies of photographic work, exploring photographs of the city through the lenses of landscape and the human body, and the interplay between the two. Other artists in the exhibition include John Baldessari, Lewis Baltz, Imogen Cunningham, Catherine Opie, Ed Ruscha, Julius Shulman, Carleton Watkins, and Edward Weston.

Thanks to funding from the Terra Foundation for American Art, the exhibition will travel to Europe, opening at the Musée de l'Elisee, Lausanne, Switzerland on January 30, 2009.
In the August 15th issue, The New York Times reviewed the gallery's recent exhibition, Of The Refrain. The full review is included here:

A beautiful conspiracy of rhyme and reason, "Of the Refrain" presents 53 black-and-white photographs by 16 Modernist masters in a way that seems as musical and poetic as it is visual. Organized by Phil Taylor, a young employee at the gallery, the exhibition focuses on standard genres of studio and commercial photography, viewing them as occasions for formal and technical innovation and experimentation. There is a particular emphasis on the extraordinarily lucid and stylish work of ringl+pit, two women who worked together in Berlin in the late 1920s and early '30s.

Portraits, still lifes and fashion and dance photographs are distributed around the gallery at different levels like notes on a musical score. Certain motifs regularly repeat. Barbara Morgan's pictures of Martha Graham in extravagantly expressive poses and Hazel Larsen Archer's images of Merce Cunningham leaping with athletic abandon create a theme of exuberant buoyancy, while images of glassware by Berenice Abbott, Margaret Watkins, Carlotta Corpron and ringl+pit—some bordering on pure abstraction—repeat moments of crystalline luminosity.

Many amusing juxtapositions occur. Man Ray, in a self-portrait, and James Joyce, in a portrait by Abbott, appear sitting on couches and resting their heads on their hands. ringl+pit's image of a woman in a sexy, lacy corset is followed by Ilse Bing's picture of a white lacy baby's dress. A ringl+pit portrait of Ringl wearing glasses with round black frames mirrors Andre Kertesz's picture of a man's hands holding similar glasses. Caught in a crossfire of echoes, reflections and affinities, these and other old photographs, including works by Josef Sudek, Dora Maar and Horst P. Horst, are vividly rejuvenated.
In the August 13-19th issue, The Village Voice reviewed the gallery's recent exhibition, Of The Refrain. The full review is included here:

The first image in this vibrant group photography show initially feels out of place: de Kooning sitting stiffly in a chair in his studio. But one of his lively biomorphic paintings is propped up near him, and that lithe blob from 1947 keynotes this show's parade of graceful dancers, captivating portraits, and compelling abstractions. Polio victim Hazel Larsen Archer was confined to a wheelchair, but her 1948 shot of a leaping and gyrating Merce Cunningham, his head cropped from the top of the frame, is testament to a universal desire to defy gravity. Barbara Morgan's 1940 picture of Martha Graham, tight costume straining at far-flung limbs, segues beautifully, if unexpectedly, into Berenice Abbott's 1958 study of light bouncing through a prism. Concepts and affinities carom through these 53 black-and-white images, and current Photoshop wizards could do worse than swipe ideas from the weird head-shots staged by the Depression-era duo of ringl+pit.
Robert Mann is pleased to announce representation of artist Holly Andres. Her first solo show at the gallery this Fall will include photographs from her series Sparrow Lane. Andres's previous body of work, Stories from a Short Street, was exhibited earlier this year at the Missoula Art Museum and her films have been featured in numerous film festivals as well as the 2006 Oregon Biennial at the Portland Art Museum.

Displaying a rich understanding of color and composition, Andres's tableaux depict young women on the threshold of adulthood, propelled by their curiosity and sense of discovery. Drawing equally upon Hitchcockian cinematic tropes and Nancy Drew dust jackets, Andres's stunning photographs plumb psychological depths that are as quixotic as they are visually seductive. Each accumulated series suggests elliptical narratives, but any resolution is elusive, and the pleasure of viewing instead draws upon their allusive and metaphorical qualities.

We hope you can join us at the opening of Andres's exhibition, October 23, to get to know the work of this exciting young artist. Click here to view a selection of her work.
Jeff Brouws will be a guest speaker at the University of Nottingham for the conference "Representing the Everyday in American Visual Culture." The two-day conference is hosted by the Nottingham Institute for Research in Visual Culture and will take place September 12th and 13th. Those familiar with Brouws's photographs will recognize the topic as one near and dear to the artist's practice; Brouws surveys the evolving cultural landscapes of rural, urban and suburban America, from secondary highways to strip malls to decimated industrial sites and inner city housing. Combining bleak beauty with anthropological inquiry, he seeks the significance behind the cycle of construction, decline and renewal. Brouws' photographs go beyond mere description and gather layered meaning, often functioning as antipodal metaphors or asking sociological questions. His most recent exhibition at Robert Mann Gallery was Approaching Nowhere, in 2006. For more information, visit the conference website.
In the August 4th issue, The New Yorker reviewed the gallery's recent exhibition, Of The Refrain. The full review is included here:

The curator Phil Taylor (who also mans the gallery's desk) installed this exhibition of primarily modernist photographs as if the works were notes on a musical score. The results are unexpected, inspired, and full of telling juxtapositions between figuration and abstraction. Dance is a recurring motif, and bodies in motion (by Barbara Morgan, Lotte Jacobi, Ellen Auerbach, and the little-known Black Mountain artist Hazel Larsen Archer) spark some of the show's most sustained passages. With terrific pictures by Berenice Abbott, Man Ray, Ilse Bing, and the team of ringl+pit, the visual music here is decidedly avant-garde—jagged, edgy, and unexpected.
Robert Mann Gallery would like to congratulate Mary Mattingly, recently short-listed for the inaugural Prix Pictet, the world's premier photographic award for sustainability. In a short time, Mattingly's work has drawn critical and institutional acclaim for her timely photographic constructions of an imagined post-industrial civilization. Many of her images explore the challenges and innovations individuals face for mere survival in a not-so-distant future. Mattingly is among 18 international, well-established artists whose work addressed this year's theme of water and sustainability. The artists' work will be featured in an exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris from October 30 to November 8, with the winner of the Prix Pictet announced at a gala reception on October 30. For more information please visit the Prix Pictet website.
It's difficult to imagine a better exhibition than this one to enter after the blazing summertime heat of Washington, DC's mall. Nineteen large-scale chromogenic prints of swimmers and sunbathers in Hawaii immerse viewers in crystalline turquoise water and twilight rippling over horizonless seas. Richard Misrach seems at first to provide six-foot-wide windows from the heavens into the vacation sublime below. Yet this laconic exhibition underscores the artist's long preoccupation with Edenic landscapes: beautiful but ripe with premonition of the fall. (In this sense, Misrach's September 11 reference in the wall text is less heavy-handed, although the eerie calm preceding a tsunami feels like a more fitting comparison.) Further compounding the exhibition's apocalyptic whispers is its title, "On the Beach," after Nevil Shute's 1957 nuclear-holocaust novel of the same name, in which the world's last survivors wait on a beach for the end or take poison with loved ones to hurry it along. Such a reference forces us to reconsider the photographs' figures. A man dishragging in the shore break could be a bloated, washed-up body; a couple napping back-to-back on the beach with covered heads might never wake up. Most works have only one or a few vacationers overcome in scale by so much sand or sea; water takes over entirely in three photographs hung together in their own gallery. These near monochromes relate to Misrach's sky studies, and attention to water's texture and prismatic form conjure projects by Vija Celmins, Roni Horn, and Hiroshi Sugimoto. Like vacation snapshots, Misrach's grand views deliver only part of the story. And like the figures floating through them, these photographs are suspended in a state where reality is muffled and momentarily far away.
The New Yorker recently reviewed the gallery's recent exhibition, Aaron Siskind: The Egan Gallery Years 1947-1954. Following is the full review which appears in the June 30 issue:

Siskind's photographs of corroded metal, torn posters, drizzled tar, and peeling paint don't imitate Abstract Expressionism—they share its restless sensibility. The thirty-five prime examples gathered here were first shown at New York's Egan Gallery between 1947 and 1954, and they capture the spirit of the era without looking old-fashioned in the least. Images of bold strokes may disguise an underlying anxiety, but there's also a genuine excitement and a sense of discovery. With this work, Siskind was speaking more and more confidently in a new language, one that put photography and painting on fertile common ground.
Aaron Siskind's Romantic Notions Of Decay

In his essay "Aesthetics and Judaism, Art and Revelation," Zachary Braiterman notes that, "From Plato's cave to Freud's interpretation of dreams, the verbal conventions provided by narrative and theory are required to create, identify, and make sense of visual images." In other words, when we see a picture we first try to figure out what's going on, and then try to decipher what it means. The Abstract Expressionist painters of mid-century caused such a hubbub because their works defied this way of seeing. The same was true of photographer Aaron Siskind (1903-91), a contemporary and friend of many of the Abstract Expressionists. "Aaron Siskind: The Egan Gallery Years 1947-1954," currently at the Robert Mann Gallery, presents 35 of the black-and-white images that once seemed impermissibly radical, and are now canonic.

"Jerome, Arizona 21" (1949) is a well-known example of Siskind's abstract photography. From a distance the 16-by-20-inch print seems merely an assortment of random shapes; up closer it turns out to be a picture of peeling paint. If there is a narrative here, it is totally conjectural, and although a theory might be teased out of Romantic notions of decay, it would not explain Siskind's impulse in taking this picture. "Move on objects with your eye straight on," Siskind wrote in his 1945 essay "The Drama of Objects," "to the left, around to the right. Watch them grow large as you approach, group and regroup themselves as you shift your position. Relationships gradually emerge and sometimes assume themselves with finality. And that's your picture."

The sense of depth in "Jerome, Arizona 21," as in nearly all the pictures at Robert Mann, is very limited; the wall is two-dimensional and although the paint curls, it is only a fraction of an inch. In lieu of perspective, the main elements of the picture are the textures of the exposed wall and of the paint, and of their reciprocal shapes. The exposed wall is a light gray, and may be either concrete or an earlier layer of paint on some other surface; the veins running through it could be tiny cracks in either possibility. The peeling paint is darker and curls as it comes away from the wall; Siskind's view camera records the delicate shifts in light that model its irregular surface. Both the wall and the paint are very real; we sense we know what they would feel like if we could touch them. And the portion of the larger wall that the photographer elected to have in his frame contains a pleasing, even elegant, shape. So although there is no story, and no more theory than what we care to construct, we have an offering of the real world to contemplate and delight in.

Siskind's photography did not start here. He grew up in New York, was educated at DeWitt Clinton High School and City College, and taught English in the public school system. A friend gave him his first camera as a honeymoon present. He was a member of the Young People's Socialist League, and so fit comfortably in the milieu of the Photo League where he established the Feature Group, a documentary production unit. His "Harlem Photographs: 1932-1940" is a classic of the genre, and was republished by the Smithsonian Institute Press in 1992. But both his politics and his artistic interests changed, and there was considerable acrimony when he eventually broke with the Photo League. It was Barnett Newman, one of a group of artist friends that included Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko, who recommended him to Charles Egan, an art dealer whose gallery was devoted to contemporary art. Egan's four exhibitions of Siskind's work established the importance of his abstract photography.

Fragments of walls, windows, broken windows, architectural details, stains, lost objects, and disintegrating signs and posters: These are the materials with which Siskind worked. "Chicago" (1952) is again a picture of paint peeling from a wall, but very different in its feel from "Jerome, Arizona 21." Another picture, also titled "Chicago" (1952), has two white glyphs on a background that may be a piece of wood painted black: One figure is something like an "i" or a "j" and the other is something like an outline of a drop of liquid with a "v" shape inside of it. "Chicago 206" (1953) is more complex: The physical materials are hard to identify, but against a black background there are Rothko-like masses on the right, various drippings to the left and center, some splattered white spots, and an "x" shape and a "3" shape, drawn possibly with chalk, on the left.

"Chicago 30" (1949) has a black shape, like a silhouette of an element in a sculpture by Alexander Calder, painted on a white background. Maybe the black shape is the letter "R" lying on its spine. The material may be a metal sign with some screws through it, some peeling, and some sloppy painting. "Gloucester" (1944) is the muntins of a window with two broken panes. A child's hand is seen reflected in the lower left frame, and the introduction of a human element into an otherwise abstract image seems like a ghostly intrusion.

In the article quoted earlier, Mr. Braiterman also wrote, "Revelation does not exist apart from order, dis-order, and reorder of creation, from the form of part, whole, mass, color, tone, touch, and taste, from individual points, lines, spots and dabs." Without meaning to impute a religious intention to him that he probably did not feel, it sounds a lot like a description of a photograph by Aaron Siskind.
End Frame: England's Green & Pleasant Land
Richard Billingham on Jem Southam

Richard Billingham, whose landscape photography is featured in this issue, says he is big fan of the serene and beautiful landscape photography of Jem Southam.

Southam maybe the most important British landscape photographer of the last 25 years. His enchanting images of the English countryside result from carefully and patiently observing changes—sometimes subtle changes—over long periods of time. Shooting color and on large format, Southam repeatedly returns to the same spot, often a water source, obsessively recording how the man-made world quietly, but inexorably, encroaches on nature. This is not the only tale in his landscape stories: he is equally interested in how the dynamic natural world changes on its own accord from season to season, year to year. It is a compelling narrative of decay and regeneration.

"I eschew grandeur for the sake of it, preferring to revel in a subtler scale and history," Southam told an interviewer for the online photography maagzine Seesaw, "but there's still an epic to be told, which exists wherever humans made their homes."

Born in 1950, Southam was shortlisted for the Citibank Photography Prize in 2001. He has published several books, the most famous being Landscape Stories (published in 2005 by Princeton Architectural Press), His work in some respects is comparable to the great documentary color photographers of the 1970s like William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, but with an understated, English twist. The photograph shown here was taken in East Sussex, a county in the southeast of England known for both its proximity to the coast and its rolling hills known as The Downs. It is also a region where Southam lives and works, and this image is part of his famous series on ponds.

Billingham notes, "Dealing with the horizon lines or joining land and the sky together is perhaps the biggest pictorial problem to solve in photographing a relatively flat or short grassy landscape with few tress and shrubs." Of Southam's pond images, he says: "These have been photographed very carefully and very beautifully. I like the definite round shapes of the ponds and how their surfaces reflect the white light above, uniting land and sky. The grass here looks like green velvet with an oval shape cut out of it."

Southam said in the same interview with Seesaw: "The English countryside is an anstonishingly complex place." Southam's images distill these complexities, As Billangham says, "They are enigmatic, and very simple."
Having spent the last decade and a half exploring the English landscape, the photographer Jem Southam has crossed the Channel for his latest series, "The Rockfalls of Normandy." His pictures show the crumbling cliffs and eroding beaches along the northern coast of France, treating the landscape as a (slowly) moving target.

Geologic change is best articulated in pairs of photographs, taken several months apart at the same locations. The mossy pebbles at the water's edge in "Senneville-sur-Fécamp," captured in February and April of 2006, seem to have receded in the later photograph. The same phenomenon occurs in "Vaucottes" (November 2005 and February 2006), as a thin slice of water creeps in from the right side of the frame.

In several frontal shots of the cliffs, shallow pictorial space emphasizes the effects of time and gravity. The partly sheared-off face of a mottled rock formation in "St. Pierre-en-Port" (November 2005) exposes a uniformly chalky underlayer.

The photographs have a soothing quality, as if Mr. Southam were smoothing over the historical scars of Normandy's beaches by calling attention to the larger forces of nature. These landscapes are haunted not by ghosts of the Allied invasion, but by English poets like Wordsworth and Matthew Arnold.
Appreciating Nature Through Abstraction

A cartoon yellowing on my refrigerator door is captioned, "He didn't know how to appreciate nature." It shows a middle-aged man sitting in a stuffed armchair improbably set down in an open field. There are mountains in the background, trees to the right, and an attentive rabbit to the left. A balloon above the man's head shows what he is thinking: "There's no plot." The cartoon, by Bruce Eric Kaplan, came to mind as I looked at the 13 pictures in "Jem Southam: The Rockfalls of Normandy" at the Robert Mann Gallery. What am I supposed to see in these works?

Jem Southam, who was born in Bristol in 1950, is one of England's finest contemporary landscape photographers. Much of his work, including the recent "Upton Pyne," is about the effect of man on the rural countryside, although nothing made by man is visible in "The Rockfalls of Normandy." The pictures at Robert Mann are 46.5-by-55.25-inch chromogenic dye coupler prints. The large scale is appropriate here because the images encompass vast distances along the shore, immense geological features, boulders, rocks, pebbles, grains of sand, and lichen, all of which Mr. Southam wants us to see with sharp particularity. The complex processing is necessary to achieve the subtle, deep colors: ferrous oranges in the cliffs, dark seaweed greens in the tide pools, delicate pearly blue grays in the distant seacoast. The pictures have sonorous French place names — "Valleuse de Cure," "Senneville-sur-Fecamp," "Les Petites Dalles," and "St. Pierre-en-Port" — and the pristine beauty of spots that are still too difficult to access for littering tourists.

Still, nature has no meaning for me. I understand the intellectual, and even some of the spiritual, beliefs that produced the transcendental Hudson River School of painters, and the impulses that sent Ansel Adams up the Sierra Nevadas, and I have hiked, camped, and climbed. Although nature may be nice to look it, I am too far from the Druids to be inspired by it. What I see in Mr. Southam's images is a meticulous use of found materials to produce complex works of abstract design. They are like the nonobjective paintings of mid-century except, of course, they are objective. Or they are like highly patterned Islamic art, except the patterns do not recur. Colors, shapes, and scale are the elements of these sophisticated compositions.

Another element Mr. Southam incorporates, by way of providing a "plot," is time. One picture was taken at Senneville-sur-Fecamp in February 2006, and another was taken from the same spot in April of that year. The first was shot at a low tide that exposed the rocky shelf abutting the cliffs and gave the scene a brownish cast; the second at high tide, when a wide swath of seaweed gave it a bluish green tint. Between the picture taken at Vaucottes in November 2005 and the one taken in February 2006, the disposition of the black pebbles on the beach changed considerably. The high cliff jutting seaward in the distance seems to be the same in each, but we understand that, given eons, it, too, will go. Whatever others find to appreciate in nature or in Mr. Southam's precise renderings of it, to me the most discernible theme is those "awful notes, whose concord shall not fail" that the great Romantic poet William Wordsworth heard in nature, and wrote about in "Mutability."
Robert Mann Gallery would like to congratulate Elijah Gowin, recently awarded a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship. Gowin, whose exhibition Of Falling & Floating was at Robert Mann Gallery in 2007, joins an illustrious group: previous Guggenheim Fellows include Ansel Adams, W. H. Auden, Aaron Copland, Martha Graham, Langston Hughes, Henry Kissinger, Vladimir Nabokov, Isamu Noguchi, Linus Pauling, Philip Roth, Paul Samuelson, Wendy Wasserstein, Derek Walcott, James Watson, and Eudora Welty. For more information visit the Guggenheim Fellowship website.
The Boston Globe reviewed Jem Southam's Upton Pyne exhibition which is on view at The Davis Museum at Wellesley College through June 8, 2008. The full article by Mark Feeney is reproduced here:

The View from Across the Water:
Jem Southam's photos track the flow of time at an English pond

"Jem Southam: Upton Pyne" is a pond-sized show (there are just 21 photographs) about an English pond. Its concerns are oceanic, though: the struggle - or is it alliance? - between timelessness and time.

Southam is an English landscape photographer who uses an 8-by-10-inch view camera. It produces a large image of great clarity. (View cameras are also cumbersome and require long exposure times, which means few photographers use one.) From 1996 to 2001, Southam photographed at regular intervals a waste pond in the village of Upton Pyne, near where he lives, in rural Devon.

Locally known as the Black Pit, the pond began as part of an 18th-century manganese mine. After the mine was abandoned, in the 19th century, the site began to fill with rainwater and runoff and became a local dumping ground.

The scene sounds grim: Black Pit, abandoned mine, dumping ground. This is southwestern England, though, with its unconquerable greenery. The pond, in fact, is in the midst of Upton Pyne, and a whitewashed house overlooks it. It's clear that people don't give it a wide berth. Even the trash they leave looks rather sedate. Enhancing that effect is the soft, indirect light Southam relied on. He shot in early morning or late afternoon - not quite magic hour, but close enough. So the appearance of the site is surprisingly picturesque. (Well, usually: In a picture from December 2001 the pond surface has a thick, brown sheen with the drained look of tainted chocolate.)

This relative picturesqueness meant Southam could ignore ecological and social concerns to concentrate on his real interest here: incremental change, both natural and manmade. He had photographed the pond before, but the inspiration for recording it over time was quite specific. Cycling by one day, he noticed a man working on the pond's margins. He learned that the man, who lived in the house by the pond, had decided to try and clean it up. As it happened, the man would later abandon the task - it would, in turn, be taken up by another resident - but Southam had his project.

Southam has an unemphatic (one is tempted to say English) eye. This is very much to the good, as his pictures are big - 24 inches by 37 inches - and in color, thus adding a further density of detail to them. In the first picture, for instance, from July 1996, the pond shares the frame with a beached rowboat, a truck parked in the background, and a pair of rather nonchalant chickens in the foreground. Confident in the inherent interest of his subject, Southam feels no need to thrust specific elements at us. There's a leisureliness to these images that makes them all the easier to take in and ponder.

It isn't so much the pond one ponders as the way it reflects (or not) the passage of time. But for the occasional glimpse of a motor vehicle or television antenna, we could be looking at a scene from Thomas Hardy's Wessex more than a century ago. The title of each photograph is the month and year Southam took it - not the day, though; that would be too urgent. Further enhancing the unhurried, timeless quality of the Upton Pyne pictures is the nature of the view camera. It records slowly, which encourages us to see slowly, too.

Yet alteration, at however leisurely a pace, does come. The seasons, much more than the removal of refuse or filtering of the pond, see to that. Southam's approach may be visually austere, but that complements the fecundity of the setting. Even in winter, there is much green to be seen; and at its most polluted the pond never ceases to be a rich tangle of root and branch. It's in the unfurling of leaves and falling of branches that we find revealed most clearly the unfurling and falling of time.

Four concluding photographs step back to give a sense of Upton Pyne's agricultural surroundings. We see farm equipment and plowed fields, puddles and much mud. There's also a hand-written sign off to the side in the two last photographs that reads "Slow Down Please." It nicely sums up a show to savor.
Gallery artist Jem Southam will be included in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art's upcoming exhibition Nature: Recent European Landscape Photography, on view from June 28 to October 5, 2008. The exhibition will analyze how contemporary artists use photography to engage the European landscape. Other artists that have been selected include Andreas Gefeller, Massimo Vitali, and Olaf Otto Becker. From the press release: "These works explore the endlessly complex relationship between nature and the human presence, from harmonious coexistence to contentious exploitation." Southam's current exhibition, The Rockfalls of Normandy, is on view at Robert Mann Gallery through May 10.
The New Yorker reviewed Silvio Wolf: Voyager, which is on view at Robert Mann Gallery through March 15, 2008. The full article is reproduced here:

Some of the Italian artist's big color photographs flirt with abstraction, and others directly engage it. Two groupings depict curtains and the light that filters through and pierces them, with allusions that range from Brancusi to Wolfgang Tillmans. As with most of the images, the subject is incidental to Wolf's seductive studies in luminosity, texture, and negative space. Two pictures dispense with subject entirely, reproducing the bands and blushes of color that appear on exposed film leader, but even a photo of three human figures allows them to disappear into a lovely, white-on-white fog, more memory than presence.
ArtNews recently featured Silvio Wolf: Voyager, which is on view at Robert Mann Gallery through March 15, 2008. Selections from the article by Eric Bryant are reproduced here:

In pictures of ethereal specks and kaleidoscopic explosions of color, photographers are embracing abstraction...

A desire to engage with the accidental motivates many of the artists whose work can be categorized as darkroom abstractions. To produce his "Chance" series, Silvio Wolf, whose show at Robert Mann Gallery will be up through the 15th of this month, uses leader — the film at the beginning of a roll that is never shot through the lens but may be exposed while loading a camera. Wolf's chromogenic dye-coupler prints, which are up to six feet tall, present intense monochromatic fields that mimic the compositions and emotional tensions of Rothko paintings.

Though Wolf doesn't control the exposures, he pores over hundreds of leaders looking for a usable frame...
ArtNews recently reviewed Michael Kenna: New York / New Work, which was on view at Robert Mann Gallery November 29 through January 26, 2008. The full review by Ann Landi is reproduced here:

In this recent body of work, photographer Michael Kenna takes on New York City at its most remote and dazzling. These black-and-white toned silver prints present an almost otherworldly metropolis, emptied of humans and therefore of some its more unsavory aspects.

Many of the well-known landmarks were here — the Chrysler Building, the Brooklyn Bridge, Central Park, and the skyline, seen as a spiky strip framed by luminous sweeps of sky and water. Kenna is not afraid to go for high drama: the top of the Chrysler Building thrusts into a turbulent sky; an aerial view of Fifth Avenue at night is a dizzying amalgam of brilliant illumination and severe geometries. Nor does Kenna have any reservations about jousting with imagery made famous by his illustrious forebears. Homage to Kertész, Gramercy Park, New York (2003) recalls the snowy vistas captured by André Kertész in the 1950s. Shots of the Flatiron Building inevitably summon up Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz. But Kenna makes the city his own by sticking to a fiercely unsentimental vision of its familiar monuments and formal majesty. Grand Central Station never looked lonelier or more elegantly austere than in the two images here of the ticket counters and a stairwell after hours.

Also in the show were images of Japan, Oregon and Mont-Saint-Michel in France. Again Kenna goes for the spectacular and the solitary. His scenes of Mont-Saint-Michel in varying weather and at different times of day are ghostly evocations of medieval grandeur; trees in a Japanese landscape are a spare haiku of black branches against a snowy ground. Though small in their dimensions, Kenna's prints packed a big and memorable wallop.
On December 13, The New York Sun reviewed the exhibition Michael Kenna: New York / New Work, on view through January 26, 2008. The full review by William Meyers is reproduced here:

Michael Kenna takes beautiful photographs; this is not meant pejoratively. When Adam Kirsch reviewed the book "On Ugliness," edited by Umberto Eco, in last Wednesday's New York Sun, he concluded that "The frightening thing about modernity … is the way it makes … ugliness … no longer beauty's necessary negative, but the only true mirror of our age." Mr. Kenna's work as a landscape photographer over the last three decades has sought to reintroduce beauty as an acceptable aesthetic criterion. A selection of 39 of his black-and-white pictures is on exhibition at the Robert Mann Gallery in "New York/New Work."

Mr. Kenna is hugely popular. The list of his honors, exhibitions, and books, etc., fills more than 13 pages, and the list of Public Collections alone runs onto two single-spaced pages. Clearly large numbers of people respond positively to his work. Some of his best-known projects include "Le Notre's Garden," a study of French formal gardens; "Night Walk," which features the nighttime pictures that are a specialty of his, and "Hokkaido," one of several ventures to Japan. These are subjects that plausibly lend themselves to being represented beautifully, but Mr. Kenna also produced "L'Impossible Oubli" ("Impossible to Forget") a book of dark, atmospheric photographs of Nazi concentration and death camps. Is beauty appropriate in pictures of the camps? There is a growing literature that discusses this vexed philosophical issue. But New York, as those of us fortunate enough to live here know, is beautiful. Or, at any rate, if you keep your eyes open and are patient, you periodically encounter vistas that take your breath away. The 20 pictures of the city at Robert Mann recapitulate many of the classic views of the city, taken with Mr. Kenna's sensitivity to light and detail. "Homage to Kertész, Gramercy Park, New York" (2003) looks down on a tree in that privileged enclave at about the same angle André Kertész looked down from his apartment at 1 Fifth Ave., on the trees of Washington Square Park. Like Kertész's, Mr. Kenna's picture was taken in the winter, so the bare trees stand out starkly against the snow. The twisted trunk and irregular branches contrast with the straight line of the path that cuts across the image, and point up the difference between the designs of man and nature.

"Mary Poppins Over Midtown, New York" (2006) looks down at night on the lit skyscrapers of the city, and they seem no less magical than in Berenice Abbott's classic "New York at Night" (1934). Mr. Kenna uses a medium-format camera and his exquisite prints are all of modest size, so there is startling clarity of detail; each of the hundreds — maybe thousands — of windows is sharp. There are three pictures of the Brooklyn Bridge, studies 1, 2, and 4, (all 2006), and each recalls one of the pictures Walker Evans took in 1929 to illustrate Hart Crane's poem "The Bridge." Mr. Kenna is himself an often imitated photographer whose work has influenced a generation of students and admirers, so it is important to note that when he looks to Kertész, or Abbott, or Evans as models, he is not merely copying their work, but learning from it and building on it.

"Study 2," for instance, was taken from directly under the bridge whose roadway divides the picture. But unlike the similar Evans picture, it was taken at night, the Manhattan buildings are lit, the moon shines in the upper left-hand corner, and the moving waters of the East River take up the bottom half of the image. In "Study 1," taken just north of the bridge, a parallax tilts the buildings of Lower Manhattan to the right, making the skyline seem slightly plastic and, consequently, droll. "Study 4" puts Evans's study of the walkway on a tilt, as if the Gothic arches John Roebling designed for the piers were not only transcendental, as he intended, but in motion. In each instance, Mr. Kenna has looked again, and found something more.

There are three pictures of the Chrysler Building taken on three visits to New York. (Mr. Kenna was born in England in 1953, but now lives in Seattle, Wash.) The earliest, dated 1998, shows just the upper 10 floors of the building and its Art Deco metal crown projected above the horizon against a dramatic, variegated sky that takes up more than half of the frame. The second, from 2000, shows it hemmed in by boxy, graceless, generic structures from mid-century, but still as the diva building Walter P. Chrysler determined it would be: Mr. Kenna waited until all the foreground buildings were in shadow and only his subject was in glorious late-afternoon sunlight. The most recent shot, 2006, was taken at night to show off the newly illuminated spikes on its crown.

As with the Brooklyn Bridge pictures, those of the Chrysler Building make manifest Mr. Kenna's dogged pursuit of beauty. They show off his ingenuity, chaste sense of design, and technical virtuosity. The 12 pictures in "New York/New Work" from Mont St. Michel, France, do likewise, especially the six along the south wall of the gallery, a bravura display of variations on a theme.

Mr. Kirsch wrote in his review of "On Ugliness" that, "In today's nihilistic art world, it is almost senseless to distinguish between beauty and ugliness: All that matters is novelty." The packed crowd that came to the opening reception of Mr. Kenna's exhibition at Robert Mann, and waited patiently for him to autograph copies of his books, opted for beauty. For those who are steeped in postmodern irony and cynicism, the pleasure of his work may indeed no longer be available.
In the December 2007 issue, Artforum reviewed the exhibition Wijnanda Deroo: Interiors on view at Robert Mann Gallery through October 13, 2007. The full article (by Eugenia Bell) is reproduced here:

Between 1988 and 1992, Dutch photographer Wijnanda Deroo trawled New York City's Lower East Side for fragments of the not yet gentrified neighborhood's Jewish history, photographing its obscured and crumbling synagogues. In 2004, she was commissioned to document the Rijksmuseum's pre-restoration state, arriving at a sequence of desolate interiors that reflect a century of wear and tear. Considering these two projects, made more than a decade apart, simultaneously is to be struck by how unerringly Deroo has managed to invest empty spaces with emotional authority. The artist's recent exhibition showcased a set of sixteen large photographs of vacant rooms from her series 'Interiors,' 2005-, a body of work that might, given the predominance of overly designed domestic decoration in the media today, suggest a glossy take on the fashionable and illustrious. But on closer inspection, these shots are entirely consistent with the sensibility that Deroo has evinced throughout her career.

'Interiors' is likely to draw comparisons to the work of Candida Höfer, not only because the two share vaguely similar palettes, but because they also have a comparable geographic reach. Höfer's focus on cultural heritage, however, is much more strident then Deroo's which (without feeling willfully obscure) seeks out history's neglected corners. And unlike the topically similar recent work Dayanita Singh, in which the photographer's technical skill seems to leach out almost all emotional resonance, Deroo's images, shot in deeply saturated color, retain their subjects humanity. A more apt comparison might be with William Eggleston; the top half of Deroo's Brahmavihara Indonesia, Bali, 2005, could be a Southeast Asian cousin to Eggleston's Red Ceiling, 1973, in which the hot hue of the room is loudly amplified and the sharp geometry helps to define an otherwise enigmatic space.

The presence of people in Deroo's pictures is implied — by the open door and pair of slippers in the green-tinged Kraton Kanoman, Cirebon, Indonesia, 2005, or the forlorn, deflating balloons in Blue Marlin Party Room, Puerto Rico, 2006 — not stated outright yet we never miss it. Each scene hints at egress — a gauzy window in Adler Hotel, Green Room, Sharon Springs, 2005, a Deco stairwell in Queen Mary, Staircase, 2006. Each implied interaction focuses the viewer's attention on the details of the space: a crookedly hung Japanese print, a stained mattress, a vacuum cleaner sitting beside a stage.

Deroo is fascinated, as are many of her contemporaries, with the romance of decline. She pictures the remnants of colonial architecture in Indonesia and the slow pace of life in a cowboy hat store in rural Kansas, where a mirror reflects little but scrap wood, a broom, and some empty hat hooks. The Sharon Springs sequence is particularly poignant. Known in the nineteenth century for its hot springs and wealthy summer residents (the Vanderbilts, the Roosevelts, and Oscar Wilde among them), and for catering to affluent New York Jews in the twentieth, the village now resembles little more than pit stop on the Borscht Belt nostalgia tour. Deroo's shots of decaying ballrooms and guest chambers of the Adler and Columbia hotels belie the former glory of these grand resorts: glory long receded before their eventual closer in 2004. It is Deroo's ability to look back at something departed and find resonance in its subtle residue that captivates.
Robert Mann Gallery has acquired a rare collection of extraordinary railroad photographs by Richard Steinheimer, considered to be among the greatest American railroad photographers. A pioneer in the field, he documented the railroad's transition from steam to diesel power, using elaborate lighting equipment to photograph by night and even positioning himself atop moving trains to capture them in motion. His appreciation for the the American railroad and the landscape of the American West is immediately apparent in his exceptional body of work. To view an online gallery of the photographs please click here. For more information or to make an appointment to view the work, please contact the gallery.

Richard Steinheimer was born in Chicago in 1929. In 1939, when his family moved to Glendale, California, their house was located near the Southern Pacific main line. In 1945, he began photographing with a Kodak Brownie camera, and two years later began to work with a medium-format Speed Graphic camera, with which he created some of the most beautiful night photographs of railroads ever made. He attended San Francisco City College and from 1956 to 1962 worked as a photojournalist on staff of the Marin Independent Journal. In 1963, his book Backwoods Railroad of the West was published and eventually became one of the most collectible railroad books. His work has been publishedTrains Magazine, Railfan, Locomotive & Railway Preservation, Vintage Rail, and numerous books, including the recent publication of A Passion for Trains (W.W. Norton, 2005). He currently lives in Sacramento, California.
In the September 7, 2007 issue, The New York Times reviewed the exhibition Wijnanda Deroo: Interiors on view at Robert Mann Gallery through October 13, 2007. The full article is reproduced here:

It is dangerous to say an artist exhibits national tendencies, but Wijnanda Deroo's photographs are so Dutch the connection is inescapable.

As the show's title promises, she focuses on interiors. As in Vermeer's work, one of the prominent aspects of these deeply hued, expertly composed photographs is the relationship between inside and out, highlighted by windows and doors that offer glimpses of the exterior or allow light from it to cascade in.

Maps in Vermeer's paintings alluded to the world beyond the his doorstep, the one explored and colonized by the Dutch in the 17th century. Ms. Deroo's photographs record her own travels in Indonesia, the Caribbean and the United States, although from the vantage