Photographer Larry Sultan copyright by Kelly Sultan

Conversation through Kitchen Window, from Pictures from Home, 1992 copyright by Larry Sultan

Larry Sultan, a highly influential California photographer whose 1977 collaboration, “Evidence” — a book made up solely of pictures culled from vast industrial and government archives — became a watershed in the history of art photography, died on Sunday at his home in Greenbrae, Calif. He was 63

The cause was cancer, said his wife, Katherine, who is known as Kelly.

In the mid 1970s using a grant and a letter of introduction from the National Endowment for the Arts, Mr. Sultan and Mike Mandel, who had met as students at the San Francisco Art Institute, somehow managed to persuade several large companies, agencies and research institutions like the Bechtel Corporation, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the San Jose Police Department and the United States Department of the Interior to let them rummage through their documentary photo files.

Highly influenced by the West Coast brand of Conceptualism then percolating out of places like the California Institute of the Arts, both men were interested, as Mr. Mandel later said, in exploring photography as “more than just the modernist practice of fine-tuning your style and way of seeing.” The pictures they chose from the archives, out of the hundreds of thousands they examined, were a strange, stark, sometimes disturbing vision of a late-industrial world: a space-suited figure sprawled face down on a carpeted floor; a car consumed in flames; a man holding up a tangle of weeds like a trophy; a shaved monkey being held down by a gloved hand.

Some of the images seemed to have been picked for their uncanny resemblance to installation art being made at the time. But the 59 photos published, with no captions to explain what they showed or where they came from, pursued a much broader, Duchampian agenda of harnessing found photographs for the purposes of art while using them as a way to examine the society that produced them. The critic Kenneth Baker of The San Francisco Chronicle wrote that the project demonstrated brilliantly the degree to which “we have no calculus to unravel relations between what a picture shows and what it explains.”

Along with other artwork using vernacular photographs, like that of Michael Lesy in his book “Wisconsin Death Trip” and of Richard Prince, the project, first shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, opened broad new avenues for photography that have since been explored by major museums and by artists like Christian Boltanski and Carrie Mae Weems.

Born in Brooklyn, Mr. Sultan was raised mostly in Los Angeles, where his family moved when he was an infant and where his father worked as a traveling salesman and later as a vice president for the Schick Safety Razor Company.

Not initially interested in photography, Mr. Sultan studied political science at the University of California at Santa Barbara and later earned a master’s degree in fine arts from the San Francisco Art Institute. Before he and Mr. Mandel began working on “Evidence,” they collaborated on another project in which they bought space on billboards around Los Angeles and posted traffic-slowing Dada-esque messages. One bore the announcement “Oranges on Fire,” and showed two cartoonish arms holding a bunch of flaming oranges.

For more than a decade beginning in the early 1980s, Mr. Sultan, who became a professor at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, worked on a project about his mother and his father, who had been forced into early retirement. Using stills from home movies along with lush, colored-saturated pictures he took of his parents, the resulting book, “Pictures From Home,” was a deeply personal document but one that continued Mr. Sultan’s lifelong mission of exploring photography’s fictions.

Mr. Sultan’s father, Irving, speaking of a picture of himself in a suit sitting on the edge of a bed with a vacant stare on his face, related how his son had instructed him not to smile and had created a portrait that the elder Mr. Sultan felt was much more about the photographer than the photographed.

“ ‘Any time you show that picture,’ ” Mr. Sultan said his father told him, “‘you tell people that that’s not me sitting on the bed looking all dressed up and nowhere to go, depressed. That’s you sitting on the bed, and I am happy to help you with the project, but let’s get things straight here.’ ” His parents died not long after the work was completed.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Sultan is survived by two sons, Max and Will, both of Greenbrae; and two brothers, Michael, of Pacific Palisades, Calif., and Kenneth, of Santa Barbara.

In the 1990s, Mr. Sultan began to photograph in the San Fernando Valley, near when he went to high school, shooting suburban homes that were being rented as sets for pornographic movies. Sandra S. Phillips, the photography curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, said that while the work, called “The Valley,” was “nominally about the industry of adult sexual fantasy, the true subject of Sultan’s pictures is how photography is used in the construction of that fantasy.”

Writing in LA Weekly about the work in 2004, Mr. Sultan observed of one particular set: “The furnishings and objects in the house, which have been carefully arranged, become estranged from their intended function. The roll of paper towels on the coffee table, the bed linens in a pile by the door, the shoes under the bed are transformed into props or the residue of unseen but very imaginable actions. Even the piece of half-eaten pie on the kitchen counter arouses suspicion.”

By Jim McKinniss

Photograph copyright by Chirs McCaw

Photographer Chris McCaw has released a new series of original work, based on paper negatives, long exposures, and the sun burning its way across the image.

The show runs December 15, 2009 through January 9, 2010.

Opening reception for artist, Tuesday, December 15, 2009, 7-9 pm.

This series is titled P.O.P., and is made using an arcane photographic paper that was popular in the early 1900’s. The paper’s common name is “Printing Out Paper.” This paper produces beautiful, ethereal prints with a range of colors from deep magenta, violet or brownish tint.

The subtle color hues in each piece are quite different in each piece as a result of the paper, the hand processing and the gold toning of each image during processing.

Due to the scarcity of this paper, this series is currently limited to 14 pieces. As each piece is the actual negative that was placed in the camera, they are one-of-a-kind and cannot be reproduced.

The gallery has a concurrent exhibition, Frank Paulin “Color Works”, in our North and East galleries.

HOURS
Thursday through Saturday
11am – 6pm and by appointment

CONTACT US
Tel: 310 838 2440
Email: info@duncanmillergallery.com

ADDRESS: 10959 Venice Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90034

By Jim McKinniss

NOTE: McCaw’s 2008 photobook “Sunburn”, was recently reviewed on The PhotoBook, which can be found here.

Sebastopol Center for the Arts is hosting a juried photography exhibit in February 2010. All manners of photography are accepted. Digital, alternative, traditional, experimental, mixed media, and more. The juror is Drew Johnson, Curator of Photography, Oakland Museum of California. There is a $200 best of show award as well as smaller awards. Entries are accepted in CD form or hand delivered. The deadline is January 25, 2010. Complete details can be found at SCA: 707 829-4797, email to: saltrip@sonic.net, or at their website: www.sebarts.org

by Gina Genis

"Giant" - photograph copyright by Matthew Porter

 

"Empire on the Platte" - photograph copyright by Matthew Porter

"Summer Reading" - photograph copyright by Matthew Porter

M+B is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Matthew Porter titled High Lonesome, running from December 12, 2009 to January 23, 2010.

 The exhibition contains 18 photographs, varying in size and sometimes clustered together in a seemingly inchoate mass. But two themes persist: the American West and the Hindenburg. The show is an attempt at historical mash-up, bringing together romantic imagery of cowboys and zeppelins. Both subjects are iconic, yet their reputations have been soured by facts, as history overtakes myth. The Hindenburg, which began its life as the fountainhead of German creative and entrepreneurial vision, ended in a fiery death under the dark shroud of Nazi propaganda. As a romantic symbol it has been spoiled, much like the history of the American West—you can’t watch The Searchers without being aware of the racism.

While not a direct narrative, the fictional meeting of a cowboy and the Hindenburg after peripatetic wanderings through the desert has the familiar ring of cheap science fiction. Dinosaurs didn’t share the planet with cavemen, but their fictional conflict has been featured in a variety of media. This absurd collision is represented in the cornerstone piece Farewell, Promised Land, a photograph of a few shelves in a personal library; the shelf containing WWII nonfiction bleeds into the shelf containing Western history, while the entire rack is peppered with fiction. Matthew Porter was born in State College, Pennsylvania in 1975. He graduated from Bard College in 1998 and received his MFA from the ICP/Bard Program for Advanced Photographic Studies in New York in 2006 and now resides in Brooklyn. His work has recently been exhibited in New York, Miami and Dallas and featured in the New York Times Magazine, Modern Painters, VMan, and Exit. This is Porter’s first exhibition in Los Angeles and with M+B. 

 Matthew Porter was born in State College, Pennsylvania in 1975.  He graduated from Bard College in 1998 and received his MFA from the ICP/Bard Program for Advanced Photographic Studies in New York in 2006 and now resides in Brooklyn.  His work has recently been exhibited in New York, Miami and Dallas and featured in the New York Times Magazine, Modern Painters, VMan, and Exit.  This is Porter’s first exhibition in Los Angeles and with M+B.

M+B Gallery is located at 612 North Almont Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90069

 High LonesomeExhibition Dates:   December 12, 2009 – January 23, 2010

Artist’s Reception:   Saturday, December 12, 7 – 9 pm

Gallery Hours:  Tuesday – Saturday, 10 am – 6 pm, and by appt.

For more info, please contact Shannon Richardson at M+B at (310) 550 – 0050 or shannon@mbfala.com

By Jim McKinniss

Photo copyright by Gil Garcetti

Gallery 478 is pleased to present EXCERPTS: [FROZEN MUSIC] & IRON, The Photographs of Gil Garcetti.  The show runs December 3, 2009 – February 27, 2010

An Artist’s Reception will be held Saturday, December 5, from 4 – 7 PM.

Rare it is when a high profile ex-politico makes his or her mark anywhere other than as the subject of tabloid pages or as a defendant in criminal court. As of this writing, Gil Garcetti has avoided such pratfalls. Quite to the contrary, Garcetti has quietly built himself a reputation as a photographer of considerable merit. The works in the exhibition reveal a documentarian with a discernable aesthetic working in the best tradition of the genre. EXCERPTS … provides the viewer with a sampling from his first two photo books.

IRON: ERECTING THE WALT DISNEY CONCERT HALL, records the assembly of the skeletal guts of Frank Gehry’s eccentric, complex architecture.

Capturing the near magical accomplishment of skilled union ironworkers, their relationship to the work and to one another, IRON renders transparent the hidden truth of all architectures – that it’s built from the inside out. The quiet drama of these populated images are treated to the same eye that so skillfully celebrates the lyrical dynamism of the concert hall’s finished skin celebrated in [FROZEN MUSIC]. 

 Gil Garcetti’s work has been widely exhibited in the United States and abroad, including the United Nations, NYC, Millennium Art Museum, Beijing, China, UCLA Fowler Museum, Peter Fetterman Gallery, and G. Ray Hawkins Gallery, Los Angeles, among others.

For images or additional information, please call 310-732-2150.

Gallery 478 is located at 478 W. Seventh St.

San Pedro, CA 90731

By Jim McKinniss

ROSEGALLERY is pleased to present an exhibition of photographs by Asako Narahashi. This presentation unites three bodies of her work: her most recent works of a somber and partially-gutted Dubai, her hauntingly beautiful water shots along Japan’s coastline, and her earliest black and white street photography, which is being shown in the west for the first time.

The exhibition is titled “Coming Closer and Getting Further Away”.   

Dates of the show are 14 Novemer 2009 – 30 January 2010

The artist will join us for a reception and book signing Saturday 23 January 2010, 6 to 8 pm

Asako Narahashi began experimenting with photography as a member of Daido Moriyama’s group Photo session in the mid-1980s, photographing street scenes of her native Japan.  She established the private gallery 03FOTOS to display her work in 1990 and then published her first book, NU-E, in 1997, followed by FUNICULI FUNICULA in 2003.  These early photographs reflect her roots as a member of Moriyama’s photography group, yet they hint at the unique sense of distance and the unnerving acknowledgment of human frailty that her later work expands upon. Haziness and shadows spill over these images like liquid, and the rare human subject is partially obscured, blurred, or tiny and insignificant in the distance.

In 2007, Nazraeli Press published Asako Narahashi’s half awake and half asleep in the water, a series of photographs of the Japanese coastline. In this series, she inverts the composition of the traditional, harmonious coastal shot by capturing the images from offshore, while partially submerged in the water. Suspended between enchantment and unease, this jarring perspective suggests that we are either clinging to the back of a sea creature or drowning, struggling for one final, desperate glimpse of land.  All indications of civilization are minute and inconsequential in the distance, hopelessly far away and dangerously close to being engulfed by water. With a murky palette of blues, grays, and browns, Narahashi intensifies the disquieting uncertainty conveyed by this fragile balance between the remote signs of earth and the inescapable waves looming in the foreground.

Narahashi’s photographs of Dubai similarly convey a foreboding sense of ambiguity.  Again, we are confronted with a chilling acknowledgment of man’s inability to create permanence when faced with the vast and powerful forces of the natural world.  In her disorienting images of construction sites, it is difficult to discern whether the buildings are being demolished or built, but it is clear that their brief life span is inconsequential to the vast expanse of arid soil beneath them, which – like the ocean – existed long before us and will continue to exist long after we are gone. 

Narahashi’s work is currently being exhibited as part of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Photography Now: China, Korea, Japan.  She was also included in the 2008 exhibition at the International Center for Photography in New York, Heavy Light: Recent Photography and Video from Japan. Her work is held in such permanent collections as the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, The Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She was the 2008 recipient of the Higashikawa Photography “Domestic Photographer” Award.

Asako Narahashi Coming Closer and Getting Further Away will be on view from 14 Novemer 2009 through 30 January 2010. ROSEGALLERY is located in the Bergamot Station Arts Center at 2525 Michigan Avenue, Gallery G-5, Santa Monica, CA 90404.  Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10am to 6pm. 

For more information, please contact us at 310.264.8440 or

info@rosegallery.net

 www.rosegallery.net

By Jim McKinniss

Photograph copyright of Jim Mckinniss 2009

The 2010 B&W Single Image contest issue is now on the magazine racks of most news-stands, and Jim Mckinnis, member of the Photographers Exchange and a contributor to this blog, had one photograph selected for a  Merit award and recognition in the Animal category.

By Douglas Stockdale

Image copyright by ArtLA

Image copyright by ArtLA

ArtLA.com was built and conceived by art gallery owners that have been in business in Los Angeles for over 20 years.  ArtLA is the most advanced, contemporary art site for research and acquisition of highly established artists, as well as newly emerging artists.  It serves dealers and art collectors with a professional and comprehensive database of artists, their bios, galleries and collections.

It offers timely, innovative features, including an interactive Virtual Gallery, video interviews, extensive Artist Profile pages, specialized services, and the latest news about the Los Angeles art market.  Also, ArtLA is a highly effective advertising tool, as well as a key platform service connecting artists around the globe with galleries, dealers, art advisors, collectors, curators and museum directors.

ArtLA membership is open to artists working in multiple fields from traditional oil painting to photography.

For more information, please contact us at (310) 315-0282 or email contact@artla.com.  

By Jim McKinniss

Photographs copyright of Janos Lanyi

Janos Lanyi will be represented along with 14 other photographers in the December issue of LensWork, issue number 85,  in the 2009 Year End Gallery. LensWork magazine is noted for its high technical & printing standards as well as the breadth & aesthetic excellence of the black & white photography that it publishes.

posted by Douglas Stockdale

The Orange County Center for Contemporary Art is offering an open call invitation to exhibit your work. OCCCA has a fabulous space, and its openings are very well attended. Up to 1,200 people come through in a single night. The exhibit is called By The Running Foot, a reference to the cost per size of the work to enter the show. You can find details on OCCCA’s website (link below). Scroll down to By The Running Foot.

http://www.occca.org/exhibitions.html

By Gina Genis