Ten Great Photographs, 2009 Posted by Vince Aletti
* Roger Ballen: “Sliced” (2007), at Gagosian.
Ballen, an American-born photographer now living in South Africa, made the pictures in his latest show in collaboration with squatters at an abandoned warehouse outside of Johannesburg. The results are bizarre, alarming, and often wildly comic—drawing more from outsider art, Jean Dubuffet, and Mike Kelley than any photographic tradition. This image of a salamander with its tail freshly cut off can only begin to suggest the odd and obsessive nature of the work.
Ballen_Sliced_400.jpg© ROGER BALLEN. COURTESY GAGOSIAN GALLERY
* Tracey Baran: “Of My Dreams” (2007), at Leslie Tonkonow.
Baran was only thirty-three when she died, in 2008, but she’d been making exceptional and audaciously personal work for a decade. Much of it focussed on her immediate family, but some of her best pictures and wittiest self-portraits were about sex or, in the case of this Edenic image of a nude boyfriend, love.
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COPYRIGHT ESTATE OF TRACEY BARAN, COURTESY OF LESLIE TONKONOW ARTWORKS + PROJECTS, NEW YORK
* Alan Chin: “Taliban Prisoners, Afghanistan” (2001), at Sasha Wolf.
Chin’s exhibition, “Dispatches: 1998-2008,” included photographs from Kosovo, Iraq, China after the Sichuan earthquake, New Orleans after Katrina, and New York City on September 11, 2001. But, like all fine photojournalists, Chin is not just delivering the news, and this image of Taliban fighters in an overcrowded prison reverberates beyond the moment it was made. His frieze of faces recalls crowds in Biblical illustrations—gawkers at Gethsemane, perhaps.
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* Bruce Davidson: “Brooklyn Gang (Mike’s Tattooing)” (1959), at Bryce Wolkowitz.
Davidson, a great photographer we too often take for granted, was the subject of two New York gallery shows this season. The retrospective at Wolkowitz touched down on many of his most significant projects, from early work in the South with the Freedom Riders to the New York subways in the graffiti-bombed eighties. This image is one of the less familiar ones from a series he made in 1959, when he hung out with the Jokers, a gang of Brooklyn teenagers. A moment of intense male bonding outside a tattoo parlor, it includes almost no faces, but the hairdos are pretty damn eloquent.
BruceDavidson_MikesTattooing_opt.jpgIMAGE COURTESY MAGNUM PHOTOS
* Leonard Freed: “Black in White America, Brooklyn, New York” (1963), at Bruce Silverstein.
Among the vintage prints Silverstein exhibited from Freed’s 1968 book, “Black in White America,” was this picture of a handsomely dressed Brooklyn couple standing in a doorway. It could be a fashion photograph, but it’s one of many that Freed shot throughout the United States which attempted to provide a fuller and more nuanced picture of African American life at a time when the ghettos were exploding.
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LEONARD FREED; COURTESY BRUCE SILVERSTEIN GALLERY
* Humphrey Lloyd Hime: “The Prairie Looking West” (1858), at Hans P. Kraus, Jr.
This connoisseur’s gallery celebrated its Silver Anniversary with a group of rare and unusual photographs, many from the medium’s earliest years. This strikingly modernist image of the Canadian plain, empty save for a human skull and animal bone, was the most memorable. The prairie, scorched by a brush fire some months before, is the frontier at its most forbidding, with the skull as a warning to the unprepared.
Hime_PrarieLookingWest_opt.jpgCOURTESY HANS KRAUS GALLERY
* Justine Kurland: “Like a Black Snake” (2008), at Mitchell-Innes & Nash.
Like so much of her work, “This Train Is Bound for Glory,” Kurland’s latest series of photographs, is concerned with people who have deliberately taken themselves off the grid. In this case, they’re hobos, runaways, and free spirits who hitch rides on passing trains. But Kurland has become more and more absorbed by the landscape her subjects travel through, and many of the best pictures in her show were stunning views that recall pioneering photographs of the American West, like this one of a distant train snaking through the plains.
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COURTESY JUSTINE KURLAND AND MITCHELL-INNES & NASH NEW YORK
* Richard Learoyd: “Fish Heart” (2009), at McKee.
Learoyd, a British photographer making his New York début, showed unique, large-scale images that were among the most mesmerizing photographs I’d seen this year. Created with a new camera-obscura process he’d developed over the past few years, they have an uncanny sensation of depth. Learoyd’s human subjects (mostly young women) appear unsettlingly lifelike, but his still lifes are just as compelling. This image of a white fish heart suspended in a web of black string came back to mind at the Centre Pompidou’s knockout show of surrealism and photography, “La Subversion des Images,” where Man Ray’s 1920 image of trussed-up lumps in carpeting, “L’enigme d’Isidore Ducasse,” looked like an early inspiration.
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COURTESY MCKEE GALLERY
* Elaine Mayes: “Sweet Pam and Commune Group, Clayton Street, September 1, 1968,” at Stephen Kasher.
Mayes’s portraits of young friends and neighbors in Haight-Ashbury record a heady but transitional moment in the counterculture. Made in 1968, just after the Summer of Love and the attendant media frenzy, they’re as casual and affectionate as snapshots, but they also have a sense of history. Like August Sander, Mayes knew she was documenting a group of people who were largely unaware that they were on the cusp of change.
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COURTESY STEVEN KASHER GALLERY
* Ryan McGinley’s “Go Forth” campaign for Levi’s.
In a year with few outstanding advertising images, McGinley’s spirited pictures for Levi’s stood out. Although now in his early thirties, McGinley is still tuned into all-American youthful energy, and his campaign is spun off from the exuberant photographs he’s been bringing back from the cross-country jaunts he’s made over the past few summers with a bus-load of post-adolescents. Trippy, upbeat, and seemingly spontaneous, McGinley’s billboards and print ads stand out in an environment that’s over-polished and over-calculated.
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