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Volume Number 1 Issue Number 13 / December 22 - 28, 2006
Art
Ranard’s Picture Show for Chelsea Now Above, a wall of Brassai photographs from the 1933 book “Paris by Night” on view at the Alan Klotz Gallery. Below, looking through bins of photos selling for $400 and up at the gallery. Turning the banal into the sublime By John Ranard
Photography has always been the stepchild of “Art” and still struggles to come into its own, especially in the marketplace. When Edward Steichen’s 1904 photograph “The Pond-Moonlight” sold at Sotheby’s for $2.9 million last February, the news made headlines. Works by contemporary artists today sell for similar amounts without commotion. Eight years ago, New York’s master trickster alchemist, David Hammons, sold a stuffed cat as sculpture for a rumored $40,000. By contrast, the photographs on Alan Klotz’s walls sell from $6,000 to $24,000. The modern photography revolution started when Oskar Barnack, developmental manager at Leitz Camera, designed a camera device in 1914 to test exposures for 35-millmeter film used at cinemas. The hand-ground lenses made by Leitz were so superb that after World War I, Leitz introduced the Leica 1, the world’s first 35-millimeter, lightweight, handheld camera — which used film instead of plates. A new, humanistic photographic aesthetic was born, with photos taken in city streets allowing the spontaneous expression and full intuition of the photographer. In 1931, French art student Henri Cartier-Bresson picked up the Leica and took this aesthetic further by striving to take photographs based on the essence of humanity, rather than description of the subject as a collection of detail. His technique was to turn the banal into the sublime by mixing momentary poetical juxtapositions that were independent of each other in the real world. This style of working especially appealed to the surrealists excited by the photograph’s unintended, unpredictable meaning. At the same time, Brassai published “Paris by Night,” moody pictures taken in the mist and rain of Paris’s desolate nighttime streets, peopled by lonely revelers, prostitutes and anonymous strangers. Andre Kertesz, already a mature photographer by the time he immigrated to Paris from Hungary in 1924, maintained a strong influence to all with his dynamic street compositions emphasizing a changing culture. With the rise of fascism, Kertesz immigrated again to New York. The show also includes Willy Ronis’s lyrical work of the ’50s, Robert Doisneau’s witty Parisian street scenes, Edouard Boubat’s sensuous and defiant women, and Bill Brandt’s brand of gritty social documentary photographs of the English working class. In the back room are bins of historical and contemporary photographs selling for $400 and up. “European Personal Journalism,” at the Alan Klotz Gallery, 511 W. 25th St., Nov. 30 – Feb. 17.
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Alan Klotz has turned his gallery over to showcase the photographs of one collector, who over the past 30 years assembled a world-class photography collection on a comparatively shoestring budget. These photographs, taken by European photographers before and after the Second World War, have become the classic images of “art journalism.” Photographers today still use these images to gauge their own work. The photographs are as relevant today as the moment they were printed and remain the cornerstones of museum collections.
