Amy Stein, Cage, digital c-print, 20 x 16”, 2005

Join Us Tonight, Monday, November 7, 2011, 6 – 8pm

Location:
25CPW
25 Central Park West (at 62nd Street)

Preview Works Here

Featuring work by emerging and established photographers, including :
Mariette Pathy Allen / Rachel Barrett / Jacqueline Bates / Matthew Baum / Michael Berkowitz / Per Billgren / Anita Blank / Timothy Briner / Jesse Burke / Eric William Carroll / Sean Carroll / James Casebere / Lindsey Castillo / Jesse Chan / Vincent Cianni / Annabel Clark / Margarida Correia / Megan Cump / Pradeep Dalal / Bobby Davidson / Allison Davies / Isaac Diggs / Maureen Drennan / Emile Hyperion Dubuisson / Mark Fernandes / Larry Fink / Lauren Fleishman / Martine Fougeron / Jona Frank / Fryd Frydendahl / Theresa Ganz / Anders Goldfarb / Curtis Hamilton / Jason Hanasik / Daniel Handal / Kara Hayden / Jeanne Hilary / Francine Hofstee / Henry Horenstein / Michi Jigarjian / Erica Leone / Sze Tsung Leong / David Levinthal / Sam Levinthal / Wayne Liu / Feng Lu / Ryan MacFarland / Jerome Mallmann / Chris McCaw / Jo Meer / Dana Miller / Azikiwe Mohammed / Paolo Morales / Keren Moscovitch / Laurel Nakadate / Katherine Newbegin / Lori Nix / Heather O’Brien / Brayden Olson / Alice O’Malley / Cara Phillips / Libby Pratt / Richard Renaldi / Mauro Restiffe / Saul Robbins / Caren Rosenblatt / Michael Schmelling / Tina Schula / Manjari Sharma / Aline Smithson / John Stanley / Chad States / Amy Stein / Joni Sternbach / Motohiro Takeda / Maureen Testa / Sally Tosti / William Wegman / Randy West / Grant Willing / Jessica Yatrofsky / Rona Yefman / Pinar Yolaçan / Arin Yoon

Benefit Committee:
Mariette Pathy Allen, Paul Amador, Brian Paul Clamp, Daniel Cooney, Michael Foley, Martine Fougeron, Susan Fulwiler, Françoise Girard, Tom Gitterman, Peter Hay Halpert, Henry Horenstein, David Knott, Michael Mazzeo, Lizanne Merrill, L. Parker Stephenson, Spencer Throckmorton, Sasha Wolf, and Alice Sachs Zimet.

$20 admission.
All proceeds go to The Camera Club of New York (CCNY), a non-profit 501(c)3 arts organization that has been nurturing talented photographers since 1884.

Catering provided by Moustache.

To see the donated works, please go to CCNY’s online auction preview.

CCNY wishes to thank 25CPW Gallery for their generosity in hosting this year’s auction.

For further inquires, contact CCNY at info@cameraclubny.org or by phone: 212-260-9927

Please visit us at www.cameraclubny.org

Simen Johan, Untitled #159, From the series Until the Kingdom Comes, C-Print, 2010. Opening at Yossi Milo Gallery on Thursday, Nov. 3.

Tuesday, November 1

Performance: Jen DeNike “The Hostess Never Lies” curated by Anne Apparu
Vogt Gallery
526 W 26 street, suite 911, 11am-6pm

Lecture: “Surfland: Joni Sternbach”
Center for Alternative Photography
36 East 30th Street
RSVP to info@capworkshops.org, 7-8:30pm

Photography: Peter Hujar “Influential Friends”
John McWhinnie @ Glenn Horowitz Bookseller
50 1/2 E 64 street, 6-8pm

Wednesday, November 2

Inge Morath “Bal D’Hiver”
Esopus Space
64 W 3 street, suite 210, 6-8pm

Gilles Larrain “Idols”
Steven Kasher Gallery
521 W 23 street, 6-8pm

Thursday, November 3

Performance: Matthew Stone “Anatomy of Immaterial Worlds”
The Hole
312 Bowery, 9pm

Heather Goodchild, Mike Bayne “Walking the Pattern (Goodchild) / Kingston Spring and Muffler (Bayne)” curated by Katharine Mulherin
Mulherin + Pollard
187 Chrystie street, 6-9pm

Chris Johanson, Haim Steinbach, Lawrence Weiner, Matthew Brannon, Odilon Redon, Todd Eberle, Will Cotton, William Wegman “Pop-Up Shop”
RxArt
208 Forsyth Street, 6-8pm

“Cory Arcangel vs. Pierre Bismuth”
Cristina Lei Rodriguez “Through Excess and Ruin”
Team Gallery
83 Grand street, b/w wooster & greene, 6-8pm

Benefit: “Question Bridge: Black Males” a project by Chris Johnson and Hank Willis Thomas in collaboration with Bayeté Ross Smith and Kamal Sinclair
Jack Shainman Gallery
513 W 20 street, RSVP to rsvp@questionbridge.com, 6-8pm

Claire Fontaine “Working Together”
Metro Pictures
519 W 24 street, 6-8pm

Jon Kessler, Mika Rottenberg “Seven”
Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery (Project)
534 West 24th st, Tenth avenue, 6-8pm

Zachari Logan “Tramua and Other Stories”
Daniel Cooney Fine Art
511 W 25 street, floor 5

Photography: Simen Johan
Yossi Milo Gallery
525 W 25 street, 6-8pm

Photography: Erwin Blumenfeld “Vintage Fashion”
Edwynn Houk Gallery
745 Fifth avenue, at w 57 street, 6-8pm

“The Mask and The Mirror” curated by Shirin Neshat
Leila Heller Gallery
39 East 78th street, floor 3, 6-8pm

Photography: Lori Waselchuk “Grace Before Dying”
Umbrage
Brooklyn, 111 Front street, floor 2, 6-8pm

Friday, November 4

Brock Enright
Kate Werble Gallery
83 Vandam street, at hudson street, 6-8pm

Eva Rothschild
303 Gallery
547 W 21 street, 6-8pm

Photography: “Incomparable Women of Style: Selections from the Rose Hartman Photography Archives, 1977 – 2011″
FIT – Fashion Institute of Technology
West 27 street at 7th avenue, Gladys Marcus Library

Panel Discussion: “Osteobiographies” with Eric Stover, the Monument Group, Thomas Keenan, and Eyal Weizman
Cabinet
Brooklyn, 300 Nevins street, 6-8pm

Saturday, November 5

“Lady Pink”
Woodward Gallery
133 Eldridge street, b/w broome & delancey, floor 5, 6-8pm

Performance: Joan Jonas, Rachel Mason, Shana Moulton “The Hostess Never Lies” curated by Anne Apparu
Vogt Gallery
526 W 26 street, suite 911, 4-6pm

Workshop: Daido Moriyama “Printing Show- TKY”
Aperture Foundation
547 W 27 street, floor 4, $75, noon-3pm & 5- 8pm

Sunday, November 6

Photography: Lucas Blalock “xyz”
Ramiken Crucible
389 Grand street, 6-9pm

Performance: Agathe Snow “The Hostess Never Lies” curated by Anne Apparu
Vogt Gallery
526 W 26 street, suite 911, 4:30pm

One of the first pieces I ran across was a clipped article by Theodore Dreiser on the Camera Club from Ainslee’s Magazine.

Ainslee's Magazine, Vol. 4, No. 3, October 1899

One of this images in the article is this one by Camera Club of NY member and the Club’s Vice President, Alfred Stieglitz.

Alfred Stieglitz, The Letter Box 1894

The article describes an early account of a photography critique (circa 1899)—not dissimilar to those of today. I love the details and the phrasing:

Very few photos are perfect, and the critical zeal of the camera masters is exacting far beyond the pale of humble human accomplishment.

And yet it occasionally serves to make an humble student of a self-opinionated and self-exaggerated individuality. A case in point is a now distinguished member who came from Brooklyn.

“I was fine in Brooklyn,” he remarked one time. “My experience there gave me a good opinion of my work. I began to make lantern slides and exercised my individual taste, with the result that my work was admired. Gradually I began to exhibit it more and more. I joined a local club whose fad was lantern slides and became a star member. Finally I gained such repute that I decided to come to New York and astonish them. I decided that I would quietly enter my plates for exhibition, and, in the vernacular, ‘sweep ‘em off their feet.’”

“Well?” I inquired as he mused reflectively.

“Oh, I exhibited. They walked on me. One of my pictures made them laugh, and it was intended to be sad. There were twenty-seven objections made to another. My best one came off easy with three criticisms, and all valid. Oh, lord! I thought I would never get out alive.”

“Were they fair?”

“Yes; that was the bitter thing. I could realize that it was all kindly said and meant, and was good for me. After it was all over, one gentleman, who noted my crest-fallen state, came up and told me that my work was not bad. It was only the high standard of the club that laid it open to so much criticism. This was too much, and I went home in despair.”

“And yet you profited by it.”

“It was the best thing that could have happened. I began studying in earnest after that, merely to blot out my terrible defeat. In another year I exhibited again, and the whole set passed the ‘test’ audience with only a few suggestions.”

Below is a photograph from this article and possibly the room that this critique took place.

An Exhibition At the Camera Club.

Here are some pictures from some more recent critiques:

Ansel Adams – Conducting A Critique Session, Courtesy the Ansel Adams Gallery.

A recent critique at the Yale School of Art’s Photography Department. The panel: John Pilson making a point on the left, Lisa Kereszi, Shirin Neshat and Richard Prince. Image from this post by Photographer Davin Ellicson.

Alessandro Zuek Simonetti, Andrea Sonnenberg, Dave Potes, Lele Saveri, Lisa Weiss, Patrick Griffin, Yuri Shibuya
“The Inferno” curated by Hamburger Eyes + Ed. Varie
Ed. Varie
208 East 7th street, 7-10pm

Bill Jacobson

Bill Jacobson, ”Into the Loving Nowhere (1989 till now)”
Julie Saul Gallery
535 West 22nd street, 6-8pm

Yvonne Venegas

Artist Talk: Yvonne Veneg at Camera Club of New York Lecture Series
SVA (Eastside Gallery)
209 East 23rd street, $5, 7-9pm

Saturday, October 22

Elinor Carucci, Emmanuelle having her hair cut, 2007

Chris Verene "Candi, Cody and Caity" 2005, Type-C Archival print, ed. of 6, with handwritten caption in oil by the artist.

Gillian Laub, Grandpa Helping Grandma Out, Mamaroneck, NY (2000) chromogenic print

Panel Discussion: “Family Matters” Elinor Carucci, Gillian Laub and Chris Verene moderated by Susan Bright
Aperture Foundation
547 West 27th street, floor 4, 4pm

Sunday, October 23

Walead Beshty, 'Travel Picture Sunset' (2006-08) Chromogenic print, 87 x 49 in.

Artist Talk: “Walead Beshty And Peter Eleey in conversation”
White Columns
320 West 13th street, 6pm

Anna Atkins, 1843

Louis S. Davidson, 1940s

In two current shows in New York, Still Life, curated by Jon Feinstein, at the Camera Club, November 5 – December 19, and Surface Tension: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection, curated by Mia Fineman, at the Metropolitan Museum, I am struck by the insertion of historical work placed in proximity to contemporary images.

The title Still Life is a pun: still life as an artistic term is meant to be arrangements of things, often humble and domestic, such as Dutch 17th century painted floral studies or tabletop displays. The French term, nature morte, is even more explicit in a tacit understanding of that which is viewed being wrenched from the world of the living to a static collection of some sort. In Jon Feinstein’s show, the work is all portraiture, which in conventional terms is the antithesis of the still life: the portraits are presented as a series of masks, as formal, technological constructions. The title “Still Life” also alludes to the stilling of life, which reminds me of the panic of the portraitist in the Edgar Allan Poe story “The Oval Portrait” in which the finished portrait enacts an occult death of the model, to the horror of the artist. Or, as Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in 1859, about the stereograph, “Form is henceforth divorced from matter. In fact, matter as a visible object is of no great use any longer, except as the mould on which form is shaped. Give us a few negatives of a thing worth seeing, taken from different points of view, and that is all we want of it.” There is also a Barthesian sadness to the title, as it alludes to the morbidity of the photograph – all we see in a photograph no longer exists as such.

Still Life includes studio work by two former members of the Camera Club, Louis S. Davidson and John Hutchins. Davidson was also a former president of the CCNY. Hutchins was also a dramatic coach who had worked with Cary Grant, Genger Rogers, Tallulah Bankhead and Lauren Bacall. He also lectured on photography through the US.

Working with models and elaborate studio lighting represented refined skill sets and photographic knowledge at its acme when these images were made in the 1940s. In hindsight, what we see now are images of great plasticity but adrift from any context beyond their surfaces. Sixty-some years does not necessarily represent much on a time line but in terms of the contexts we need to sustain meaning in photographs, it is apparent how simple and easy it is for such armature to disappear. What we are left with is the aesthetic experience of a mask, as a cipher to what had been.

A sense of future archaeological inquiry informs the selection of the contemporary work, of the portrait as a mysterious other, which can be confirmed in its formal arrangements, but otherwise evades our prying eyes.

At the Metropolitan, the show Surface Tension brings together mostly contemporary photographic artistic work which explores the “thingness” of the photograph, it’s intersections with that which it records or traces. This can include a 1:1 replica, such as a digitally stitched image of pavement (by Matthew Coolidge), physical actions upon the photographic paper by hand (Marco Breuer) or light (photograms by Adam Fuss), or light leaks which disturb a conventional image but which make it a unique thing (Wolfgang Tillmans). The show makes a case for looking at some contemporary practices, with their meta-consciousness of forms, as echoes of earlier photographic forms.

This is done with a remarkable vitrine in which there is a copy of the first photographic book, Anna Atkins’ Photographs of British Algae – Cyanotype Impressions, self-published in 1843, which predates William Henry Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature, published in 1844. Atkins’ images are all photograms – the algae specimens are identified by their forms, which are seen in negative on the blue field of the treated paper. The images circulated loosely & were bound by their recipients. There are less than 20 known copies of the book. What I find so resourceful & simple to the book is that the images constitute the pages. Atkins was a botanist and amateur photographer – such an elegant solution to bookmaking.

Also in the show is a remarkable salt print facsimile of a medieval religious text, by Roger Fenton. Both Atkins & Fenton used “originals” to trace something which then be reproduced. One can’t help but see this as an aspect to a lost “golden age” (or perhaps more appropriately “silver”) of photography when it existed as a new technology and as such could be used in a remarkably fluid manner.