A Field Guide to Photography and Media

The exhibition Taxonomies of Power: Photographic Encounters at the State Silk Museum, Tbilisi will debut at Mishkin Gallery this spring and be on view from March 22 through June 7, 2024. The exhibition has been co-curated by Alaina Claire Feldman (Director and Curator, Mishkin Gallery) and Mariam Shergelashvili (Exhibition Curator, State Silk Museum) and features a selection of black and white historic photographs from the State Silk Museum in Tbilisi, Georgia, alongside the film Raised in the Dust (2022) by Georgian artist Andro Eradze. Scientific inquiry has long relied on artists to draw evidence or produce empirical knowledge. When an early 20th century collection of microscopic glass plate negatives from the State Silk Museum (formerly known as the Caucasian Sericulture Station) was digitized in 2022, the images exposed the many ways that the Soviet Empire employed artists to extend itself into the molecular. A photography studio was set up in the attic of the science center so that artists could document the smallest living specimen that enabled the silk industry to thrive. Forty-seven of these photographs, which detail the lifecycle of the Bombyx mori (commonly known as the silk moth), are presented and re-contextualized alongside Andro Eradze’s film Raised in the Dust. The film takes the forest and its nocturnal non-human inhabitants as its central subject matter, and is heavily influenced by the Georgian writer Vazha-Pshavela’s The Snake-Eater (1901), an epic poem whose protagonist has supernatural powers allowing him to understand the language of nature. Raised in the Dust, which premiered at the 2022 Biennale di Venezia and now makes its New York debut, offers an alternative scenario to modernity’s orderly and institutionalized taxonomies. Seen here alongside the photographs, distinctions between wild vs. domestic, native vs. foreign, art vs. science, and past vs. present begin to fall apart. Coinciding with the exhibition is a publication edited by the curators and designed by Geoff Kaplan/General Working Group that includes full-page image plates and writing on this collection of photographs and the history of the State Silk Museum. Taxonomies of Power: Photographic Encounters at the State Silk Museum, Tbilisi is made possible by Friends of the Mishkin Gallery and the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences at Baruch College (CUNY). Travel research and initial introduction between the two museums was supported by CEC ArtsLink’s Art Prospect Network Residencies with funding from the Kettering Family Philanthropies and Trust for Mutual Understanding. Additional support provided by Dr. Konstantin Frank Winery. About the State Silk Museum The Caucasian Sericulture Station was a research institute and educational center of the Caucasus region established in Tbilisi, Georgia in 1887. Its founder, biologist Nikolay Shavrov, created the institution to control the silkworm population, and to promote and develop sericulture and apiculture throughout the region. The Caucasian Sericulture Station’s various collections of specimens and books played an important role in the educational activities of the institution and contributed to the public’s awareness of the field. The Caucasian Sericulture Station changed its mission and status several times, and since 2006 it has functioned as the “State Silk Museum

Joel Meyerowitz is renowned for his fundamental role in the establishment of color photography as a fine art. His work has appeared in over 350 exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world and has impacted and influenced countless artists. The Tate exhibition and the new book pair Meyerowitz’s color work with his black and white images created moments apart with two different cameras. Those pairings gave Meyerowitz the idea for his fifth exhibition at Howard Greenberg Gallery. Joel Meyerowitz: Conversations focuses on how specific color images in juxtaposition speak to each other and give added meaning for contemplation, both engaging the viewer in the act of looking and offering a challenging invitation to decipher the connections. Whether comparing and contrasting the studios of Cézanne and Morandi, the camel coats and the steam rising in New York City with the haze amidst the trees in Yosemite National Park, the summertime Americana of flags and flowers on Cape Cod, or the languid pulchritude of Florida, Meyerowitz surveys ten pairs of related photographs, pointing out relationships, sometimes subtle, that exist in subject, tone, and color. Image: Joel Meyerowitz, Smithtown, Long Island, 1968 © Joel Meyerowitz

Solas Gallery is delighted to present Conner Gordon’s After Cassandra. Cassandra was cursed to see the future, but never to be believed. We live in a world where we often see catastrophe on the horizon but, either individually or collectively, lack the conviction to act. Taking inspiration from the story of Cassandra, Gordon weaves together fragmented photographic visions, suggesting a cataclysm lingering just beyond the threshold of perception. In doing so, the project explores a myth and a moment when the apocalypse feels both intangible and close at hand. Conner Gordon is an Oregon-based photographer exploring photography as unreliable narration. His photographs have been exhibited at venues including Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, OR, The Humid in Athens, GA, Filter Space in Chicago, IL, and the Laverne Krause Gallery in Eugene, OR. He was a 2019-2020 Fulbright Research Grantee to Serbia, where he photographed the legacy of Yugoslav-era modernist architecture. He received his BA in political science from DePauw University and is currently an MFA candidate in art at the University of Oregon. Image: Untitled, from After Cassandra. © Conner Gordon

Sous Les Etoiles Gallery is pleased to present PXL CTY, a new exhibition presenting for the first time in a solo show the photographs by British artist Antony Cairns. An opening reception will be held on Thursday April 25th, 2024 from 6 to 8 PM with the artist in attendance and a book signing and walk through is scheduled Saturday April 27 from 3 to 6 PM. The gallery space is located at 16 East 71st Street, New York, NY, 10021. Antony Cairns (b. London, 1980) takes photographs at night, using the available light cast by buildings in urban centers like London, Tokyo and Los Angeles. In many cases the structures that he chooses are still under construction, little more than the skeletons of the office buildings and luxury apartments of that they are destined to become. His work is resolutely non-topographic, in the conventional sense in which photography has been used to record spaces, structures and architectural styles. There is more, however, to Cairns’ work than simply his distinctive approach to picturing the urban environment. His is a practice that accepts and embraces the photographic medium in its sophisticated entirety: from the effect use of light on analogue film, through a range of experimental darkroom processes, to an innovative and highly specialized understanding of the supports available to the photographic image in the twenty-first century. Cairns presents his work in a number of complementary but contrasting ways: from painstakingly layered and assembled artists books LDN (2010), LPT (2012), OSC (2016) to translucent films of silver gelatin applied directly to sheets of aluminium, LDN2 (2013), LDN3 (2014) to experiments with electronic ink, both in working electronic Ink readers, hacked to contain his complete work, LDN EI, (2015) and on their extracted frozen screens; strange distant descendants of the daguerreotype TYO2 (2017). Cairns has recently begun to explore the prehistory of the digital age in several related ways, by printing his works and assembling them as montages on early computer punch cards OSC Osaka Station City, (2016) and by using the screens of outmoded digital cameras and equipment to screen and project his work.

The Gallery at Leica Store San Francisco is excited to present you A Series of Small Decisions, an exhibition about a captivating journey of moving, looking, and taking pictures by Todd Hido. I move, I move a lot. People ask me how I find my pictures. I tell them I move around. I move and move and I mostly don’t find anything that is interesting to me. But then, something calls out. Something that looks sort of off or maybe an empty space. Sometimes it’s a lovely scene. Sometimes it’s just a ray of sunlight. I like that kind of stuff. So I take the photos and some are good. And so I keep moving and looking and taking pictures. — Todd Hido Image: © Todd Hido

Studio/Archive presents photography from the Tang Museum collection—many of them recent acquisitions—that explore studio portraiture and archives. Works on view range from nineteenth century daguerreotypes and vernacular photography, to contemporary portraiture and video. Together these diverse bodies of work explore themes of agency—how people shape their own identities—and visual representation as a tool for empathy and justice. Organized to complement the Tang Museum’s presentation of Lessons of the Hour by Sir Isaac Julien, this exhibition aims to extend the conversation around the power of photography to (re)frame ourselves and the world around us through the photographic lens. Studio/Archive is organized by Dayton Director Ian Berry and is supported by the Friends of the Tang.

We often measure our existence by the objects we hold, our memories, and the stories told through generations. Traces of Existence unites these three artists, each speaking to ideas of migration, history, reminiscence, family, and existence through their constructed imagery, such as collage, visual juxtapositions, and physical manipulations. Using photographs, video and installation, these visual narratives reflect the artists’ exploration of identity, their relationship with their homeland, and the socio-political issues of Latin America and the United States. The highly charged political language used to identify immigrants as others exacerbates the complexity of the already cultural, emotional and physical barriers we establish, both real and arbitrary lines of existence. The artists of Traces work to connect the physical landscape with the memory of what is left behind. Focusing on what is often unseen or overlooked, these artists tell the stories of transition, relocation, and exile. Using vernacular photography, Alejandro Cartagena‘s Foto Structures connotes the issues of anonymity and identity. Muriel Hasbun‘s Pulse: New Cultural Registers reframes the cultural legacy of El Salvador during the 1980s and ’90s by layering the earth’s seismographic movements with archival photographs of the artist’s family. Alejandro Luperca Morales shows us in real-time the transition between the US and Mexico; viewers watch a migration point on the border; with each anonymous crossing, we witness their relocation. These three distinct narratives, underscore the profoundly personal and individual nature of immigration, relocation and cultural memory of what is left behind. Image: © Alejandro Cartagena

"Orinoco - Frontera de agua -" (Water Border) is a visual and literary essay featuring various stories and voices from those who have forged a life in this stateless area near the Orinoco River border between Colombia and Venezuela. At the heart of this story are the women: indigenous women (from the Sikuani, Amorúa, Piaroa, Curripaco tribes), Venezuelan, Colombian, and Llaneras (women of the plains). Here, the border becomes a living body bearing the names of the people and places that shape the map of a nameless country: The Orinoco. Juanita Escobar, a self-taught photographer, was the winner of the Colombian National Photography Prize in 2009 with her work People – Land. She was selected for the World Press Masterclass Latin America 2015 and in 2016 won the Portfolio Review Prize from the National Geographic Society for her 9-year-long body of work, Llano. In 2017 she was selected for the World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass and in 2018 was awarded the Magnum Foundation Fund for her project Orinoco, Women’s Journal. Image: © Juanita Escobar

Featuring photographs by two of the 20th century’s most important photographers, Death of a Valley is a nearly 70-year-old story full of contemporary issues such as water policy, private property rights, land conservation and local governance vs. state and federal jurisdiction. Dorothea Lange is famous for her social realist images, including the iconic Migrant Mother which many consider THE image of the Dustbowl and Great Depression era of the 1930s. In 1956 she convinced Life magazine to commission a photo essay documenting the last year of the Berryessa Valley, including the town of Monticello, roughly 80 miles northeast of San Francisco. The entire area was due to be submerged with the opening of the Monticello Dam and the creation of Lake Berryessa to provide water for irrigation and recreational purposes. Lange then invited Ansel Adams protege Pirkle Jones to collaborate on the project. “The Berryessa Project was one of the most meaningful photographic experiences of my professional life. When Dorothea Lange, a friend, and colleague, invited me to collaborate on this project with her in 1956, I looked forward to the experience.” –Photographer Pirkle Jones. The essay proved unsettling for Life, and they declined to publish it. In 1960, the photographic journal of the Aperture Foundation published thirty of the photos as an essay entitled “Death of a Valley.” These photographs were then exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and later at the Art Institute of Chicago. Since then, the project has been largely forgotten; until now. The Booth Museum exhibition, organized with Lumière of Atlanta and the Special Collections and Archives at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Robert Yellowlees Special Collection, will include over 80 images, most having never been exhibited before.

Beginning March 22, 2024, Fotografiska New York will present the first-ever exhibition dedicated to artist Daniel Arsham’s photography practice. Best known for his sculptures and design collaborations with brands including Tiffany & Co and Hot Wheels, Arsham has taken photographs since he was 11 years old, making it an essential component of his practice that has fundamentally informed his work as a sculptor and designer. Arsham’s photographs are primarily black and white, which create a unifying aesthetic. The images take viewers on a journey alongside the artist’s travels and experiences with a focus on the juxtaposition of natural and urban environments. His images of skylines and nightscapes bring light, the passage of time, and negative space to the forefront. Visitors will encounter never before seen photographs alongside Arsham’s sculptures that together show the broad impact photography has on the artist’s full practice.

Nicola Vassell is pleased to present Ming Smith: On the Road, a selection of photographs from the artist’s archive that encapsulates the arc of her exploratory impulses as she sought and probed new subject matter and formal innovation from 1970 through 1993. Encompassing never-before-seen vintage and contemporary prints of images captured during her travels around the world, On the Road embodies the spirit of adventure and curiosity that advanced Smith’s singular entry into, and scrutiny of, the provinces of urban existence, nature’s quietude, family intimacy, popular culture, military life, and jazz milieus. In the 1970s in New York, Smith’s practice was propelled by inquiry—both through her immersion in the Kamoinge Workshop and her preoccupation with the ideas of prominent twentieth-century American and European photographers. Cultivating her own radical sensibility in early experiments, she alluded to the virtuosity of Brassaï, Roy DeCarava, Diane Arbus, and Robert Frank. These artists set a tempo upon which Smith developed her own dexterity in portraiture, landscape, and street photography—highly attuned to the textures, geometries, and thrums pulsing through every spectrum of life. She recognized the haunting allure of an oil-slicked roadside and the liquid lightning of brass instruments in musicians’ animated hands. Smith listens through her camera, sensitive to the harmony and dissonance that enliven her subjects and surroundings. At times, it is easy to forget that she works in a static medium, since each photograph transports its viewer into the energetic nucleus of the moment she captures. Through paint application, double exposure, and low shutter speed, Smith pushes photography’s form to the point of its brim and break. Like harnessing a memory, Smith underlines the evanescent—at once vivid and obscure. Image: Sunday Light Jazz Concerto #1 (Jazz Series) 1984 © © Ming Smith / Artists Right Society (ARS), New York

ROSEGALLERY is pleased to present The Luminescence of Memory, a presentation of daguerreotypes by Binh Danh. The Luminescence of Memory consists of a selection of daguerrotypes taken by Danh at various US National Parks, such as Death Valley, Joshua Tree, and Yosemite National Parks. The imagery found in Danh’s silvery daguerrotypes grounds itself in the work of Ansel Adams and Carleton Watkins, with their early images defining the grandiose beauty of the National Parks and their scenic landscapes. Danh builds upon this legacy, furthering the narrative of exploration and documentation by infusing his own personal and familial experiences. He calls to his family’s journey to the United States as refugees of the Vietnam War and their subsequent assimilation into American Society; with this assimilation echoing through the experiences of many of those who have immigrated into the United States. With this, Danh acknowledges the violent history of these spaces and of the Indigenous groups who were driven out in order to establish these lands. Danh cites a remark by environmentalist Carl Pope’s on the Ken Burns PBS series The National Parks: America’s Best Idea: “[the parks] are the meaning of home for many of us. There’re what it means to be an American and to inhabit this continent. It’s the end of the immigrant experience. And they’re what takes you and says, ‘Now, I am an American.’” In a way, these daguerrotypes visualize a new expedition into these outdoor landscapes. The solarized skies and glimpses of reflection carry an invisible aura that seems to meander through the dense history of the place. Time and dimension are synthesized into the iridescent and polished surfaces that creates more than just an image of a scenic viewpoint, but a marker of acceptance and belonging. Image: © Binh Danh, Artists Palette, Death Valley National Park, 2017