In the August 15th issue, The New York Times reviewed the gallery's current 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 current 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. Check back soon for more information.
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 current 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.


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.
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 point of a traveler who never makes it off the ship or out of the hotel.

The cryptic narratives favored by Dutch masters — erotically charged music lessons, sleeping maids, people passing letters — are replaced in Ms. Deroo's unpopulated interiors by sly visual jokes and elegant formal juxtapositions. In the "Party Room," taken in Puerto Rico, there is a crudely painted mural depicting a Caribbean sunset (presumably you could witness a real one outside); a mirror in a Kansas hat store reflects the legs of the tripod and the photographer's foot.

Even Ms. Deroo's love of color feels Dutch. Her deep red rooms and a bright, multicolored Indonesian cafe update Gerrit Rietveld or Jaap Drupsteen's eye-popping designs for guilder notes.

These are intensely formalist rather than Conceptualist works, unless you consider the correspondence between images of rooms and the camera itself; the word, after all, comes from the Latin word for "chamber." And in Vermeer's day images of rooms implied the possible use of camera obscura devices. Mostly Ms. Deroo's photographs demonstrate the rewards of close looking and mining an aesthetic heritage — even one that in the abstract sounds as clichéd as Dutch interiors.
In the September 16, 2007 issue, The New York Times reviewed the Jem Southam exhibition showing at the Yale Center for British Art through December 30, 2007. The full article is reproduced here:

Capturing a Landscape That Won't Stand Still — by Benjamin Genocchio

Back in 1996, the British landscape photographer Jem Southam began photographing an unassuming pond on the edge of the village of Upton Pyne, which is near his home in Exeter, in Devon. He returned at regular intervals over the next five years, recording seasonal changes and attempts by local inhabitants to improve the surrounding, largely derelict landscape.

Twenty-one colorful, large-format photographs of the pond are showing at the Yale Center for British Art. This entrancing exhibition, assembled by Scott Wilcox, curator of prints and drawings at the center and touring nationally, represents about half of the total number of images in the series. The exhibition also celebrates the center's recent acquisition of a pair of Mr. Southam's photographs.

Mostly, though, it tells a story — about time and transformation and human impact on the environment. It is a familiar tale, echoing Henry David Thoreau's book "Walden," published in 1854, which detailed the two years he spent in a cabin on Walden Pond near his family in Concord, Mass.

While Thoreau was a natural history philosopher, social critic and early vocal environmentalist, Mr. Southam has more modest goals. He is a witness, nothing more, parachuting to a small, intimate patch of the planet at intervals and then relaying back, with a certain flourish, what he finds through his glossy color photographs.

Of course, that does not mean his photographs are just pretty pictures. Mr. Southam's serial portraits of seasonal and environmental change are infinitely more complicated than that. He gets beyond black and white in the bitter debates over human environmental stewardship, presenting nature as a dynamic, living entity that is constantly changing and adapting to different forces. A human narrative is only one piece of the story that he wishes to convey.

When Mr. Southam first chanced on the pond (basically a water-filled pit left over from mining), it was being used as a casual rubbish dump. But with permission of the landowner a local resident took it over, intending to clean and reshape it into his vision of a perfect garden.

Mr. Southam decided that he would document the transformation from dump to Arcadian realm. He liked to visit and take pictures early in the morning, when there was nobody about.

Over the six years that Mr. Southam photographed the pond, the site underwent considerable change. The first couple of images here depict a trash and weed-choked pond surrounded by an overgrown mass of trees. There are also derelict-looking buildings and pieces of rusted machinery nearby. Over all it is a fairly unappealing scene. But the more you look at these images the more you start to see. In fact, they are teeming with little details like hidden wild flowers, birds of all kinds and raking rays of light that gradually reveal to us the density and complexity wrapped up in the site.

In some ways, these early pictures of the pond in its raw state invite us to consider ideas of beauty in the landscape. Human beings have long transformed the natural landscape to fit their own notions of beautiful (formal gardens are a good example of this). But nature exists in a somewhat chaotic state, at least to human eyes. The technical virtue of these photographs is that Mr. Southam finds and records great beauty in a disregarded, neglected piece of earth.

The very early diptych "January 1997" provides staggeringly eloquent testimony to the pond's untouched natural beauty. It is winter, the trees are bare and sinuous, and a light layer of frost covers the ground. There is trash all over the place, but it dissolves into the landscape under the yellow glow of light that falls over the scene, illuminating the pond whose perfect stillness radiates a sense of a restless world finding momentary balance. It is perfectly lovely.

Over time, through the series of photographs assembled here, the trash is removed, trees and other foliage are cut back, a lush lawn is cultivated, fences are erected, buildings are restored, and the entire area begins to take shape as part of a suburban garden for the residents whose homes back onto the pond. But in this remarkable transformation, something, you can't help but feel, is also lost.
From August 28 to December 30, 2007, The Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut will be exhibiting works from the series Upton Pyne, which chronicles six years in the life of an unprepossessing pond near the photographer's home in Exeter, Devon. From 1996 to 2001, Jem Southam returned regularly to the site, recording the changing seasons and tenants' attempts to make improvements to the landscape. The exhibition includes twenty-one large format photographs from the series. Shown in the context of the British traditions of landscape representation, Southam's photographs ask us to re-examine notions of meaning and beauty in the landscape. This exhibition will then travel to The Davis Museum at Wellesley College, where it will be exhibited from March 19 to June 8, 2008.
Little, Brown & Company recently published a limited edition re-issue of the landmark Ansel Adams book Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail. The original book, published in 1938, is now an extremely rare and valuable collectors item, setting a new standard for fine photographic reproduction in book form. Published Fall 2006, this new edition is printed in an oversize folio format to exacting standards and all fifty photographs are individually tipped in, as were the plates in the original edition, and is presented in a hardcover slipcase. The book is limited to 500 copies and is expected to sell out rapidly. Robert Mann Gallery is one of the few sources from which this new limited edition book can be purchased.

Ansel Adams, at the age of 36, was commissioned to prepare a book of his photographs taken along the world-famous John Muir Trail as a tribute to Pete Starr, a young American mountaineer (and son of a Sierra Club president) killed in a climbing accident. This book is an exquisite portrait of the mountain world of the High Sierra in California, which follows the crest from Yosemite to Mount Whitney.
The Design Trust for Public Space recently awarded the fourth Photo Urbanism fellowship to Gail Albert Halaban for her project, Vanishing Views. She plans to "create a series of portraits in private spaces across the five boroughs that reveal the transformation of New York City's landscape. The view can serve several different functions throughout the series, signifying location, class, or the fleeting nature of time. I will specifically look at how the landscape of 2007 is vastly different than the landscape that preceded it, and how different the landscape will become."

Photography plays an integral role in the examination, discussion, and re-imagining of New York City's public spaces. Photo Urbanism supports this role by offering fellowships to photographers to document the city's natural and built environment. At least five distinct essays, produced sequentially and each focusing on a different aspect of New York's public realm, will catalog the city's evolving character. All work will be published collectively at the program's conclusion.