THE ART NEWSPAPER SECTION 2 Number 284, November 2016 9
The exhibition Real American Places: Edward Weston and Leaves of Grass at The
Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California
(until 20 March 2017) features 25 images shot by the US photographer during a
cross-country trip.
Weston was commissioned in 1941 by the Limited Editions Book Club to
collaborate on a new edition of Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman’s poetry collection.
The photographer embarked on a 24,000-mile journey across the US with his wife,
Charis Wilson, but the trip ended abruptly with the bombing in Pearl Harbour in
December 1941.
The publication did not run smoothly, either. Images were printed “a sickly
green”, says Jennifer Watts, the curator of photography at the Huntington, and
“Weston’s elegant black-and-white pictures were surrounded by a mint-green
border, much to the photographer’s disgust.” The publishers also paired the photo-
graphs with speciic lines from Whitman’s text, which Weston felt “undermined his
own vision of America”, Watts says. However, Weston considered the photographs
some of his best work and included 90 prints from the project in the selection of
500 prints that he donated to the Huntington in 1944.
Gabriella AngeletiMoMA book revisits
New Documents shows
A forthcoming book to be published by the
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) titled Arbus,
Friedlander, Winogrand: New Documents, 1967,
looks at an inluential but little-known photogra-
phy exhibition at the museum.
The show was organised by John Szarkowski
in 1967 and included the work of Diane Arbus,
Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand. Their
work pointed in a then-radically new direction,
where casual street shots of everyday people
took precedent over highly choreographed work.
"It became one of those singularly important
exhibitions in the history of photography—almost
legendary—and like every legend, it's surrounded
by mystery," says Sarah Meister, the MoMA cu-
rator who is the book’s author. "The irst value of
the book is that we're documenting the 94 works
in the show," she says, noting that the original
exhibition came with no catalogue. In addition, an
essay by the critic Max Kozlo , who wrote about
the exhibition when it irst opened, will provide
deeper analysis of its impact.
Pac Pobriccritical mass
from San Francisco, Rose Gallery from
Santa Monica, and James Danziger and
Edwynn Houk from New York. Fraenkel,
who participates in FOG, is not on board.
“We are aiming for approximately
50% US and 50% international [galler-
ies], which includes Asia, Europe, the
Middle East and Latin America,” says
Alexander Montague-Sparey, the fair’s
artistic director.
He says the fair organisers were
drawn to San Francisco because of its rich
history with the medium. “Photography
and photography collecting is in the DNA
of San Francisco,” he says. “From Edward
Weston, Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunning-
ham and the founding of the F64 group
in the city to today's Pritzker Centre for
Photography at SFMoMA and Pier 24, the
city has always been very respectful and
celebratory of photography.”
As for those ever-elusive princes of
Silicon Valley and other next-genera-
tion buyers, Montague-Sparey hopes
the fair’s expansive vision of photogra-
phy—and attention to “artists working
in the medium in maverick ways”—
will help draw them in. He mentionsa curated platform, Insights, that “will
specifically explore photographers to
making unique—not editioned—prints
using 21st-century techniques”. Exam-
ples include Meghann Riepenhof, John
Chiara and Matt Lipps.
Gallery openings
This expanded vision of the field,
where photo-making overlaps with
painting, sculpture or installation and
photographers consider themselves
contemporary or conceptual artists,
is also helping to reshape the gallery
scene in town.
At the start of 2016, Fraenkel Gallery
opened a second, more experimental,
street-level space called FraenkelLAB that
keeps evening hours and goes beyond
gallery artists to show work “from any era
in any medium”. A spring show organised
by John Waters, Home Improvement,
was especially strong on sculpture and
assisted readymades from the domes-
tic sphere that shared the writer and
film-maker’s irreverence or wit.
Last year, Monique Deschaines, a
former associate director at HainesGallery and a director at SF Camerawork,
opened a gallery for “photo-based prac-
tices” called Euqinom (Monique back-
wards) in the industrial neighbourhood
known as Dogpatch. She has at present
an almost all-female roster: Janet
Delaney, Mona Kuhn, Christina Seely,
Meghann Riepenhof and Ansley West
Rivers, along with McNair Evans.
And this year has seen the opening
of two new galleries nearby: Casemore
Kirkeby gallery and Themes+Projects,
both part of the new Minnesota Street
Project gallery complex. Casemore
Kirkeby in particular has become a
regular stop for photography collectors
and curators. “I think there has been a
need for another dedicated photography
gallery, and Casemore Kirkeby has defi-
nitely filled a void,” says McCall.
Julie Casemore, who co-founded
Casemore Kirkeby in 2016 after years
of running the Stephen Wirtz gallery
downtown, describes her programme
as adventurous. One example is the
recent show New Material, featuring
eight young artists from Japan. “We
weren’t certain as to how collectorsWhen Weston shot Whitman
Overlooked photographs from the 1940s finally
enjoy recognition at the HuntingtonPier 24 demonstrates the dynamism
of San Francisco’s collector-driven
photography scene, which is supported
by strong ties with SFMoMAA detail of Sohei Nishino’s Diorama Map
San Francisco (2016)Edward Weston’s Woodlawn Plantation House, Louisiana, 1941 (1941)BAY WATCH
Photofairs San Francisco
Dates: 27-29 January
Location: Festival Pavilion, Fort Mason
Center
Insights: Organised by Alexander Mon-
tague-Sparey and Allie Haeusslein, the
section will focus on unique prints
Connected: Organised by Lindsay Howard,
the focus is on digital practices, including
video and web-based workNew Work: Sohei
Nishino at SFMoMA
Dates: 4 November-26 February 2017
Focus: Nishino makes large-scale digital
“maps” of a city by walking the streets and
taking thousands of photographs, cutting
and pasting contact prints together in a
collage, then digitally photographing and
printing that collage as a large image that
plays with perspective and scale.
Commission: The artist has just spent two
months walking the streets of San Francisco
to create a 6ft by 10ft print for SFMoMA that
compresses the already-compressed city.The Larry Sultan efect
What: Talk to curators and collectors in San
Francisco, and Larry Sultan’s name comes up
repeatedly, not just as artist but as an inluen-
tial teacher at the San Francisco Art Institute
and later the California College of the Arts
(CCA) before his death in 2009.
Where: These days, Sultan’s name is also
attached to photography programmes. Pier
24 has partnered with SFMoMA and CCA
to develop a lecture series in his name and
partnered with the Headlands Center for the
Arts to develop a Larry Sultan residency.would respond to this work, as it was
untested in market and featured brand-
new names, doing experimental works
that include video and installations,” she
says. “But the interest was really strong.”
Casemore reports selling around 40
pieces from the show, ranging in price
from $2,000 to $15,000, with museum
purchases under acquisition-commit-
tee review.
The afordability—and also accessibil-
ity—of photography compared to other
forms of contemporary art has long
been a selling point. In the catalogue for
the current Pier 24 show, Pilara tells an
amusing story about how his own col-
lecting started in 1993 when he fell for
a painting by Luc Tuymans at Art Basel
and Tuymans’s dealer blithely ofered to
add him to the list. He knew he would be
placed at the bottom. He flew home and
switched to photography instead.
Jori FinkelWESTON: EDWARD WESTON; © CENTER FOR CREATIVE PHOTOGRAPHY, ARIZONA BOARD OF REGENTS, 1981. NISHINO: © SOHEI NISHINO; COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND MICHAEL HOPPENGALLERY